Mike Kuchar | The Secret of Wendel Samson / 1966

up, up, and away!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Kuchar (screenwriter and director) The Secret of Wendel Samson / 1966 [33 minutes]

 

By 1966 the gay “coming out” movie (version “A”) had become enough of an underground film trope that pop / camp film maker Mike Kuchar felt free to create a satire of the genre.

     The often banned and rarely seen films of this sort, beginning with Willard Maas’ Image in the Snow (filmed 1943-48, released 1952), Curtis Harrington’s Fragment of Seeking (1946) and Picnic (1948), Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Jacques Demy’s Dead Horizons (1951), and John Schmitz’s Voices (1953), reappeared briefly on the 60s horizon with Gregory J. Markopoulos’ Twice a Man (1963), and just a year before the Kuchar movie, A. J. Rose’s Penis, itself almost a satire of the cinematic expressions of gay despair of coming to terms with sexuality.

     In The Secret of Wendel Samson, we see the same situation of a man, Wendel (perfectly cast by Pop artist Red Grooms) having to face up with his bifurcated life, particularly when continually approached by his girlfriend for intimate sex. Rather than the vague woman in the shadows of most of these cinematic representations of heterosexuality, Kuchar’s Margret (Mimi Gross) is a forceful exaggeration of female desire demanding to have sex as the terrified Wendel attempts to escape her.

     Instead of simply suggesting his gay life with conversations with other gay men, Kuchar puts his hero into a full relationship with a gay lover busily jabbering on about their vacation escape at the very moment when Wendel is attempting to get up the nerve to break off their relationship.

     This angst-ridden gay man also does something that none of the other “coming out” figures before would have dared to do, picking up a man on the street and joining him “for a cup of coffee” in bed.

      But here too is the narrow bed to which the gay hero is entrapped in his attempt to come to terms with his dilemma. Indeed, Kuchar hilariously exaggerates the narrowness of his choices when Margret demands sex, seating Wendel upon a chair wedged in between the bed and the wall.

      As in all the other such films, when Wendel cannot accept her sexual advances, which in this version are played out in a humorous tussle in that bed, he is subject to societal punishment.

       In Kuchar’s version, however, the religious iconography is replaced by camp versions of James Bond-like spies, female and male, gangsters, medical figures, and a blonde symbol of female virality à la Marilyn Monroe (Floraine Connors) who attempts to fuck Wendel back into male normality somewhat in the manner of Anthony Burgess’ character Alex in the A Clockwork Orange (the fiction appeared in book form in 1962).

       When even those methods fail, they stand him against the wall with his back to them, take out their handguns, rifles, and tommy guns and shoot in the back, representing, as Annie Choi noted in her 2022 review of this film in Bleeding Skull, “the society that once supported him, but no longer does.”

         But unlike the previous manifestations of such a figure, Wendel discovers that their bullets are useless ending the barrage still alive, and escaping to the radio reference of Superman’s cry “Up, up and away!”

        But like all the other works of the genre, once Wendel has risen from the depths of his self-imprisonment, he faces only the empty streets, with no one to whom he might shout out his celebratory emotions. As I have repeatedly mentioned about the earlier films, even in 1966 there was still no one to “come out to.” Much as in Rose’s Penis the boy and his former girlfriend meet up only to exchange their sorrow (although in Penis she gives him back his penis).

       Throughout Kuchar’s deft handling of the story with its images of endless wanderings of cold, circuitously winding streets, the film’s voiceover narrative with its bits and pieces of TV and other popular images all return us to the world of Maas’ Image in the Snow and Demy’s Dead Horizons.

       Yet, in the last scene of the film there are the morning bells coming a church tower, and the image we are left with in Kuchar’s comic version of this world is of Wendel struggling in a giant spider’s web, from which he has obviously freed himself to wander those streets by film’s end. Kuchar accordingly leaves us with far more positive feelings. If Wendel has been unable to shout his new-found freedom to the rooftops, as in all the other such works he has most definitely shared it with the film’s audience through his art.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).