Mike Hoolboom | Eternity / 1996/2008 [Panic Bodies, Part 3]

going into the light

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Chomont (writer), Mike Hoolboom (director) Eternity / 1996/2008 

 

Originally made in 1996, recut—with additional visual layers and new sound—in 2018, Mike Hoolboom’s third section of Panic Bodies, Eternity.

    This work features a soundtrack based on a family journey to Disneyland, with images from the Disney park, sexual intercourse, animals, natural disasters, water, swimming, and cellular microscopic slides, while centering the focus this time on a letter from his underground cinema friend Tom Chomont, writing of his vision of the white light after death perceived by several individuals who have briefly died and been brought back to life. The letter also contains comments about the drug pentamidine, used to help prevent severe pneumonia primarily in HIV patients, and a long section about his brother’s death in a New York emergency ward as he lay dying of AIDS. That letter begins:

 

“Dear Ed,

Hoped I would hear from you but then,

I said I would call if you didn’t,

so I probably will.

You sounded a little tired and said

you had been ‘up and down’,

so I worry that you’ve had

fluctuating health.

You had written about starting

pentamadine treatments

and I remember Ken

(who had them from early on after his diagnosis)

told me that the infusion was unpleasant

and often followed by nausea.

He did say there was

less of a reaction after the first month.

My own nausea-producing medicine

(sinemet) has been altered

to a time-release prescription

which is less irritating

because not as much enters my system

at one time,

however, it is not always 100% effective

until the next dose”

     Most of Chomont’s words roll across the screen in what sounds almost like a kind of confessional poem, particularly when he moves to issues surround the white light, which draws one in, but also perhaps represents the end of life, making the light both alluring and somewhat terrifying:

 

“I felt some apprehension because

entering fully into it seemed like dying

or leaving the world forever.

Then just at the last,

concern for someone I knew

pulled me back

and I wondered if it were possible to go into the light

and still be in the world.”

 

    Chomont also speaks of creating a similar sensation while meditating, moving in and out of shapes and light. But it is the last moments with his brother unconscious on his deathbed, after doctors have invited, against usual protocol several friends and family members into the room to speak to him that the work moves into a touching memoir of death and the dying, representing voices of hope and sorrow mingling as Chomont, in particular, both gives allowance for his brother to enter the light and holds out the possibility that he can return, swimming back to his loved ones into life. The quiet profundity of these last lines are a testament both to the family love of the dying brother and friend, and the recognition that they have no longer any control over the changes of the body as it moves mysteriously into a world that will transform it from living matter into something else.

 

      I quote a long passage near the end of film:

 

"I told him many things

but then began to remind him of our talks

about the light.

I asked him if he could see the light

and told him he could go into it.

 

I told him he could swim back to the shore

where I was

and Howard and Andy and Andy’s friend Peter

(who came to show Ken

his new green-dyed mohawk haircut)

I told him I wanted to show him

some old photographs from when we were children

but I told him that if he felt too tired to swim back

he could let himself drift into the light.

I stroked his arm while I spoke.

His pulse raised once

while I was stroking his arm.

But later I was told that he had been

administered a stimulant to start his pulse up again

and that when it only perked momentarily

the doctors knew he was probably going to slip away.

 

Everything in this world is constantly changing.

Eventually everything is gone or not what it was.

 

Our attachment to it causes pain and joy

satisfaction and frustration.

The light and the sound have a feeling of eternity

but they may just be the dot on the tv screen

when it’s turned off

fading away.

 

Practicing at non-attachment

is a preparation to deal

with the gradual loss of everything.

I write this as one who cried

and wailed with grief

at the death of my cat Spider.

I am writing these thoughts because they

relate to that moment in my kitchen

when we speak, and what happens to us.

Hope to talk with you soon

and that you’re feeling a bit better.

 

All my love,

Tom"

 

   It is the alteration between the desire to bring the brother back to life and the need for both him and family and friends to accept the inevitable that dominates this work, expressed so movingly in the writer’s momentary belief that his touch has resulted in his brother’s stronger pulse dashed by the fact that the doctors themselves had administered a drug to do just that, to raise a pulse which even the drug cannot finally fully restore.

      Hope and despair, agency and ineffectiveness, the beneficial and the dangerous become intertwined in this deeply felt Kaddish, a prayer of both life and death, about family, loved ones, memory, and dying.

 

Los Angeles, August 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).