Wrik Mead | Deviate / 1992

real family hugs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (director) Deviate / 1992

 

Made the same year as his short films Haven and Warm, Deviate is a very different kind of film from the usual Mead work filled with puns and other forms of wit. This work, shot in Super 8 film, made for the Memorial Project, concerns one of his dearest friends, Dan Moyen, who died of AIDS in 1990.

    In this case, we have a work quite specifically described by the filmmaker himself in an interview with Mike Hoolboom. Mead describes attending, with others of Moyen’s close friends, the funeral, arranged by the gay boy’s devout Catholic parents.

“The priest at the service made many fatal errors in describing Dan, saying a young man in his thirties shouldn’t be deprived of his life. He was twenty-six! We all looked at one another. He said something about being a practicing Christian. Dan studied Buddhism. His parents were devout Catholics, but he was one of the great experimental thinkers at art school. I was shocked that he wasn’t kicking the grave open. If anything was going to make him come back, this service would have. But to make his parents feel better, we all had to hear these lies. They invited people Dan hated, like childhood friends who would beat him up for being a faggot. He didn’t like his parents, never saw them. We were his family, but because he didn’t have a written will, the decisions were left to them. It broke our hearts. We knew he would’ve been horrified to learn he’d ended up in a devout Catholic cemetery out in the middle of nowhere with electric towers all around. It just hurt so much to deal with all of that.”

 

      Although Mead had grown rather close to his parents due to the time he spent with them in the hospital where Moyen lay dying, he and several of Moyen’s friend, defining themselves as the boy’s real family, visited the cemetery where their friend was buried long after the funeral. Mead explains what happened during the visit of which also included Claire Lawlor, Dave Surman, Donna Evans, Kevin Mean, and John Walsh:

 

“We’d been talking about going up to the grave, and the film gave us a reason to go. I decided not to cry, but to celebrate our lives and our memory of Dan. We even poured a little champagne onto the soil so he might get a little drink if he was thirsty. We were looking for flowers or something to take to him and it happened to be Halloween time. I don’t know whether you can see it in the film, but there’s a pop-up skeleton head, a toy skeleton on a spring. We took him a bouquet of flowers with this little skeleton head sticking out and left it there. Apparently his parents came soon after and were horrified at something so satanic and evil, and I was sickened, I have done an evil thing, I’ve hurt two people who’ve suffered enough. Later I talked to my friends and told them we’d really hurt the family. They laughed and said we had a wonderful afternoon, it was so difficult to go out there, that was our ceremony. We were his family, the ones who really loved him, and we hadn’t called them and told them how hurt we were by their Catholic rituals. If you said the word “shit” in front of them, they’d dismiss you forever, so don’t be upset. We had a wonderful day. We sat on his headstone and talked about Dan, and I brought a tape recorder along. I wanted the real Dan, not all this phony priest shit about how great he was. He was a pain in the butt. He was the most beautiful human being on earth — that’s who he really was.”

 

     The film does not show us the cemetery plot but a “bedside tableau,” with a framed picture of Moyen, flowers, and a watch—objects which Moyen collected—as we hear friends tell stories of Dan including one woman friend describing her introduction to Dan of her female lover, who was rather tall, just as Dan was, while he pretended to stretch down to hug her, attempting perhaps to bring her down to the size of most of his other, far shorter friends like herself.

    A different friend tells of him wearing beautiful “gay boy” makeup and wanting to do the makeup of all the other friends.     

    Another speaker tells of a dream where Dan kept asking over and again, “What time it was.” But what he was really asking, so the dreamer realizes, is the date. This appears to have been some time after his death, so the dreamer knows, metaphorically speaking, “What time it is.” “I knew what was going to happen, and I gave him a really big hug.” She is so happy that she hugged him because it felt like a physical hug that she remembered even after she woke up.

    These may seem like almost meaningless comments to an outsider, but it is clear for those close to the young man now gone, the act of hugging, of coming into contact with his body meant everything to them.

    When Hoolboom asks why Mead called the work “Deviate,” the director answered:

 

 “Because the film was about Dan. He was the thorn in normal people’s sides. He thought differently and was aggressive about it. He would tell you you were stupid for being straight, you’re just following the norm, you’re not really straight. He was really into extreme thinking — he would pick his nose because he knew it was socially unacceptable, he would tell you the graphic things he’d do while masturbating because he knew it would make you uncomfortable. That’s the kind of guy he was, very aggressive and the sweetest friend you could ever have. He left us in a way no one could have guessed. He was such a life force. That’s why I called it Deviate.”

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).