Wrik Mead | Fruit Machine / 1998

the mounties’ frankenstein

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (director) Fruit Machine / 1998

 

In what Canadian critic Tom Waugh has described as an “uncharacteristic” film, the always creative genius, Wrik Mead, explores a terrifyingly absurdist moment in Canadian LGBTQ history, when during the Cold War the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (CMP and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) hired the Carleton University psychologist, Dr. Frank Robert Wake to create a program that might determine whether or not the working men in public service were gay.

    Subjects were required to view erotic images and were tested on their responses to “homosexual words” and what were thought to be standard homosexual responses to different aspects of behavior. The fruit machine itself was a device, and early form of a lie detector which measure perspiration, pulse, and eye dilation in response to erotic images and words.

     Thousands of Canadians lost their jobs or resigned, some even dying by suicide.

     Eventually the entire program was found to be based on faulty concepts and innate problems with the machines, and the project was cancelled in the late 1960s. However, the RCMP research continued and over 9,000 individuals lost their jobs.

    As the Wikipedia article on this machine notes: “The functional mechanism of the ‘fruit machine’ was pseudo-scientific and its results inaccurate. First, the pupillary response test was based on fatally flawed assumptions: That the chosen visual stimuli would produce a specific involuntary reaction that could be measured scientifically with 1960s technology; that homosexuals and heterosexuals would respond to these stimuli differently with enough frequency and specificity to sort them; and that there were only two types of sexuality.”

     The second major series of problems concerned presumptions of the veracity of the machine and its results: “One physiological problem with the method was that the researchers failed to take into account the varying sizes of the pupils and the differing distances between the eyes. Other problems that existed were that the pictures of the subjects' eyes had to be taken from an angle, as the camera would have blocked the subjects' view of the photographs if it were placed directly in front. Also, the amount of light coming from the photographs changed with each slide, causing the subjects' pupils to dilate in a way that was unrelated to their interest in the picture. Finally, the dilation of the pupils was also exceedingly difficult to measure, as the change was often smaller than one millimeter.”

     In Mead’s satire we see Dr. Wake simultaneously reading out a series of “yes” and “no” questions at lightning speed, while at the same time a male individual sits at the machine reacting presumably to what he sees on the slides.

    When the work day finishes, Wake packs up his briefcase, very carefully handling it as he almost sneaks out the door of his research location, looking carefully both ways before proceeding. He carefully shirks others and as makes his way down the street before stopping by an ice-skating rink, where, after putting on skates, he glides across the ice, briefcase in hand.

     At home, he slinks through the doorway, sits down on his couch, and pours out two stiff drinks of Canadian Club whiskey. He takes a sip, opens his briefcase, and pulls out a gay man dressed on in leather, falling to his knees as if ready to perform fellatio.

     The suggestion is that the vast amount of material his has collected has actually gone into creating the perfect gay Frankenstein-like companion for Blake.

    The true-or-false questions that Mead proposes are loaded with crack-pot notions of what might define gay sexuality, such as “I would like to be a florist,” “I like dramatics,” “I think I would like to work as a dress designer,” “I have often wished I were a girl,” “There was never a time in my life when I didn’t like to play with dolls,” creating a hilarious perception of what gay men represent.

     Yet strangely, for all of its absurd narrative fabulation, this tale is not nearly as puzzling nor as funny as many other Mead works. Certainly any gay man of Mead’s age in Canada would have felt more anger and outrage than satiric satisfaction, and that, I believe, comes through in this director’s work. Wake, in this work is being revealed has having other more personal interests than research of any informational “truth” about male sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).