Wrik Mead | Haven / 1992

gay rorschach

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (director) Haven / 1992

 

Canadian director Wrik Mead’s Haven begins with what seems to be a statement regarding an experiment to determine whether or not scientists might determine whether a person is homosexual or heterosexual. In comic satire of such actual studies, the narrator describes an individual peering into an opening of a huge box in which images from a magazine were shown. A camera recorded the size of the pupil during the viewing of each image. The doctors determined there was a difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals. The eyes of the homosexuals lingered on the genital areas and pictures of males. Reading a list of homosexual words including “purpose, zeitgeist, wine, camp, sew, aunt, restaurant,” supposedly while holding a mesh bag of crystals, gay men would begin to sweat.

     Mead's extensive interview with fellow filmmaker Michael Hoolboom in 1996 contextualizes the strange beginning of this work. When asked about Haven, Mead comments:

“Haven was a reaction to the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] witchhunt of gays in the 1950s. They invented this thing called the fruit machine, which was a box where you looked at lewd images of gay men while holding a bag of crystals, and if you started to sweat, the crystals reacted and set off an alarm. The RCMP also read lists of words while you held the crystals, and certain words showed you were gay: circus, dyke, grass, trees, bagpipe. All civil servants who were suspected of being gay were made to take the test, and if you sweated, you were fired. This experiment was hushed up until 1992 when I made the film; no one had ever heard of it. On the soundtrack I asked my brother to read the newspaper report on the experiments, including the long list of words that would show you’re gay — camp, sew — and as he says these words, the two cartoon characters are getting turned on, you know, like “camp,” that’s a real homo word, that’ll get you going every time. …They just get right into it as soon as they hear those words.”

     Mead follows this ridiculously absurd first scene with two cartoon collaged figures, each with hugely large penises who join each other on the bed and as comic cut-outs proceed to maneuver themselves into anal sex. Running a piece of thread through the magazine cut-outs, he could move the collages into different positions, but when they actually begin to have sex, the film shifts suddenly an extremely blurry view of what he describes as “pornography stuff, it’s the nasty, close-ups of anal sex and blow jobs and stuff like that.”

      However, the blurs look also like clouds which often can remind one of anything they want to see, and even we can imagine we are observing sexual intercourse, we certainly cannot any longer determine the participants’ gender.

       The shift from the recognizable cartoon world to the abstraction of pornography—or perhaps simply a joke, depending upon how you read it, forces us to ask if only homosexuals see two men having sex in these vague shapes? Why do these abstract shapes seem more realistic than the recognizable collages. Would heterosexual men even perceive the collaged paper figures as gay men having sex, or would they ever bother to watch with interest, as certainly I did, such an absurd depiction of sexual activity? Would straight me see male sex in the blurred images? In a sense, Mead turns the RCMP tests around, forcing heterosexuals viewing the film to take the test as well.

 

Perhaps what gay men see as buttocks are really breasts. What if the two figures looked more like women, would the gay men turn away? Would they still imagine male figures in the cloud-like formations that follow?

       Throughout the film, we hear the sound of birds chirping as if the couple were beginning their morning with sex, enjoying themselves before rising. Would heterosexual males even notice this? Would such a crude imitation of sexual activity between two beings seem to them, as it might to some of the gay viewers, as a kind of “haven,” a port, a refuge, a shelter. Do gay men take refuge in their genitals? If words can be queer or straight, how do arrive at mutual meaning? Is it even possible?

       As in so much of his work, Mead manipulates his odd images into situations that ask more questions than a feature movie filled with veristic images.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).