Ian Wolfley | Bug Chaser / 2012

risk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ian Wolfley (screenwriter and director) Bug Chaser / 2012 [20 minutes]

 

This little 2012 “horror film,” I must admit, originally made me quite angry! The story of a young gay couple arriving at an “expensive condo” (one of the characters brags about just how expensive his condo is) to engage in sultry gay sex is certainly an “attractive” beginning. The new boys, Nathan (Brenden Gregory) and Ryan (James M. Arthur) seem a good match, ready for a hot night in bed. But then, as they begin ripping clothes off of each other’s body, Nathan observes something unusual: a spot on Ryan’s pants; asking “What’s this?” his friend replying that it must be “cum.” But Nathan it doesn’t look like cum, “It looks kind of like a butterfly.” Both ignore it, however, as the smallest and most insignificant of signs; besides it’s on Ryan’s pants, not his cock.

     Soon after, however, Ryan discovers a far greater problem when he goes to fuck Nathan, a significant growth in his anus, which Nathan, after quickly inspecting it, has never before noticed. All sexual contract is immediately suspended as Nathan returns back to his ramshackle apartment, attempting to get a better look at his growth, which seems to be expanding by the moment. First, he attempts to lance it, without success. He reads up about such growths on the internet: possibly a wart. He drinks heavily, attempts to sleep. He awakens in a sweat and quickly grows physically ill, whether from the alcohol he’s been consuming or the growth, we can’t tell.

      If nothing else, one has to give high praise for actor Gregory’s commitment to the role, which keeps him mostly naked with deep inspection in a varied-colored growth in his ass, to which Wolfley’s camera serves as endless voyeur.

      Finally, Nathan calls up Ian (played by Wolfley himself) who works as a nurse and obviously is ready to stop over and have sex with Nathan anytime he’s invited. But Nathan obviously wants only to have him take a look at the growth, the likes of which Ian has never before witnessed. He suggests his friend immediately visit the emergency room or that he make an appointment with a doctor. When Nathan admits that he hasn’t any insurance and little cash, Ian even offers to pay for it. Nathan inexplicably rejects the offer and Ian leaves, as Nathan, taking up a scissors, begins the horrific process of attempting to cut it away by himself.

      Surely this is a kind of horror film, a real-life imposter film ripped out of the pages of the last three decades of the 20th century. Men with AIDS found revealing signs crop up daily across their bodies, and had to determine how to approach them. Doctors, particularly, in the early years were not as helpful or benign as one might hope. And of the course the death sentence of doctoral pronouncement was not something many young men, in the prime of their lives, easily sought out.

      So almost until the very end of the film, I was fairly impressed, eager to discover what happens when one imagines, fruitlessly, that one can take care of such things by themselves.

      Flashback to the couple in bed, the spot on Ryan’s pants, as the couple resume their sexual intercourse with a giggle over their momentary fears.

      I was angry! No one of my generation could possibly have made light of such a horrific situation. No one younger than 23 could have suggested, well I’m glad that’s over, as this movie seemed to imply.

      I quickly discovered, however, that my peeve was misplaced. Wolfley, in a 2013 interview on the internet blog HorrorNews.Net recounts that he made this movie after working closely with a group of filmmakers who called themselves the “HIV Story Project,” working on a series of shorts about HIV and AIDS:

      

“I’ve been making short movies for about ten years now. When I moved to San Francisco I got lucky and I met a group of film makers that called themselves the HIV Story Project and their goal was to make a feature length film comprised of a series of shorts where we got different directors and got them together with someone who had HIV or AIDS or was a caregiver with a compelling story to tell. Then they would collaborate on a short film together. I was actually volunteering for them but I convinced the producer that he should let me help them and I became an associate producer on that project.”

 

The interviewer also describes that his daughter clued him in to what the title really meant, at least in urban parlance: “a person attempting to acquire HIV, regularly having sex with unprotected partners.” And that definition obviously changes everything. The horror of the scene we’ve just experienced is an overstated possibility of what Nathan and/or Ryan are perhaps personally allowing to occur to their own bodies.

      Wolfley suggests as much in his comments in that 2013 interview:

 

“IW: That makes total sense & I totally hear where you’re coming from. I called it Bug Chaser and it seems that most people think it’s literally about a person who’s chasing bugs around. My intention was for the title to be much more allegorical; the rationale of these people is that it’s going to happen anyway so they just want to get it over with. What I was trying to do is play with the idea of risk. Nathan has this horrible fantasy trip & at the end he has the opportunity to continue doing what he’s going to do or as we see it’s possible that it can end very badly. So the question becomes “Is he going to do it or not”? And he still decides to do it. It’s more about the times that we do things that we know are going to end up badly and do it anyway.”

 

     One commentator from The Bay Area Reporter suggested that he had laughed his way through the heart of the movie, and expected his viewers would do the same. But not I. And I don’t think that was Wolfley’s intent. It was not some paranoid fantasy that Nathan was having in an age where we now recognize that AIDS can be controlled if not cured. It was a real horror story, a very frightening one to which the risk he takes might have truly taken him.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2022).