Mike Hoolboom | Eternity / 1996/2008 [Panic Bodies, Part 3]

going into the light

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Chomont (writer), Mike Hoolboom (director) Eternity / 1996/2008 

 

Originally made in 1996, recut—with additional visual layers and new sound—in 2018, Mike Hoolboom’s third section of Panic Bodies, Eternity.

    This work features a soundtrack based on a family journey to Disneyland, with images from the Disney park, sexual intercourse, animals, natural disasters, water, swimming, and cellular microscopic slides, while centering the focus this time on a letter from his underground cinema friend Tom Chomont, writing of his vision of the white light after death perceived by several individuals who have briefly died and been brought back to life. The letter also contains comments about the drug pentamidine, used to help prevent severe pneumonia primarily in HIV patients, and a long section about his brother’s death in a New York emergency ward as he lay dying of AIDS. That letter begins:

 

“Dear Ed,

Hoped I would hear from you but then,

I said I would call if you didn’t,

so I probably will.

You sounded a little tired and said

you had been ‘up and down’,

so I worry that you’ve had

fluctuating health.

You had written about starting

pentamadine treatments

and I remember Ken

(who had them from early on after his diagnosis)

told me that the infusion was unpleasant

and often followed by nausea.

He did say there was

less of a reaction after the first month.

My own nausea-producing medicine

(sinemet) has been altered

to a time-release prescription

which is less irritating

because not as much enters my system

at one time,

however, it is not always 100% effective

until the next dose”

     Most of Chomont’s words roll across the screen in what sounds almost like a kind of confessional poem, particularly when he moves to issues surround the white light, which draws one in, but also perhaps represents the end of life, making the light both alluring and somewhat terrifying:

 

“I felt some apprehension because

entering fully into it seemed like dying

or leaving the world forever.

Then just at the last,

concern for someone I knew

pulled me back

and I wondered if it were possible to go into the light

and still be in the world.”

 

    Chomont also speaks of creating a similar sensation while meditating, moving in and out of shapes and light. But it is the last moments with his brother unconscious on his deathbed, after doctors have invited, against usual protocol several friends and family members into the room to speak to him that the work moves into a touching memoir of death and the dying, representing voices of hope and sorrow mingling as Chomont, in particular, both gives allowance for his brother to enter the light and holds out the possibility that he can return, swimming back to his loved ones into life. The quiet profundity of these last lines are a testament both to the family love of the dying brother and friend, and the recognition that they have no longer any control over the changes of the body as it moves mysteriously into a world that will transform it from living matter into something else.

 

      I quote a long passage near the end of film:

 

"I told him many things

but then began to remind him of our talks

about the light.

I asked him if he could see the light

and told him he could go into it.

 

I told him he could swim back to the shore

where I was

and Howard and Andy and Andy’s friend Peter

(who came to show Ken

his new green-dyed mohawk haircut)

I told him I wanted to show him

some old photographs from when we were children

but I told him that if he felt too tired to swim back

he could let himself drift into the light.

I stroked his arm while I spoke.

His pulse raised once

while I was stroking his arm.

But later I was told that he had been

administered a stimulant to start his pulse up again

and that when it only perked momentarily

the doctors knew he was probably going to slip away.

 

Everything in this world is constantly changing.

Eventually everything is gone or not what it was.

 

Our attachment to it causes pain and joy

satisfaction and frustration.

The light and the sound have a feeling of eternity

but they may just be the dot on the tv screen

when it’s turned off

fading away.

 

Practicing at non-attachment

is a preparation to deal

with the gradual loss of everything.

I write this as one who cried

and wailed with grief

at the death of my cat Spider.

I am writing these thoughts because they

relate to that moment in my kitchen

when we speak, and what happens to us.

Hope to talk with you soon

and that you’re feeling a bit better.

 

All my love,

Tom"

 

   It is the alteration between the desire to bring the brother back to life and the need for both him and family and friends to accept the inevitable that dominates this work, expressed so movingly in the writer’s momentary belief that his touch has resulted in his brother’s stronger pulse dashed by the fact that the doctors themselves had administered a drug to do just that, to raise a pulse which even the drug cannot finally fully restore.

      Hope and despair, agency and ineffectiveness, the beneficial and the dangerous become intertwined in this deeply felt Kaddish, a prayer of both life and death, about family, loved ones, memory, and dying.

 

Los Angeles, August 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Katie Smith | Crossroads / 2015

more than a friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katie Smith (screenwriter and director) Crossroads / 2015 [20 minutes]

 

Crossroads, British director Katie Smith’s 2015 film about a father-son relationship gone sour, is truly representative of how homophobia effects so many LGBTQ beings.

      The film begins with Rex (Laim Hallinan) waking early, having dreamt of his dead mother’s perfume. When he see him soon after in the kitchen of their Broadstairs flat making coffee for his permanently depressed father, we begin to perceive how the relationship between the two men is fraught with tension, his father Adrian (Paul Dewdney) asking after his son concerning his lateness, his answer being simply, “I was out with a friend.” “A girl,” asks his father, clueing us immediately in to the fact that he is somewhat worried about his son’s single status; but Rex answers again by sloughing the question off, “No just a friend.” When he reports that he will be out late that night as well, again meeting with a “friend,” we suspect that there is something he cannot or will not tell his father; and his father, we notice once the son has left, is worried, deep in depression, evidently triggered by his wife’s death.

      But this is a contemporary drama. Rex works as a graphic designer in a computer studio with several others such as Jaime (Chris Clynes), sitting only a row or two away. But when Jaime calls, obviously from another phone, to ask Rex to join him, we know something is up. The two meet in a stairwell on another floor of the building, intensely kissing one another. It appears that the two are in a healthy gay relationship and, at their age, are fairly safe from the effects of homophobia.

     Yet, at the same moment, we sense Rex’s fears. Might someone catch them in their furtive stairwell romance? Do his long evenings together with Jaime where they wander the town, from a light-hearted drinking session to a local game room, simply have fun together fulfill they desires? No gay bars or intense sexual sessions are involved. Presumably they do have regular sex, but that’s not part of dynamics of this movie.

       When Rex returns home, moreover, he finds his bedroom floor littered with torn and intact pictures that were obviously taken during other such joyful outings with the two friends. Clearly, his father had discovered his sexuality and has left in a furor. And when he returns drunk, he quickly damns his son, while Rex attempts to explain that he had long attempted to find a way to tell him. “Tell him what?” Adrian intones in a roar, “that my son is queer?” There is clearly no room in his homophobic fit for explanation. And Rex quickly leaves the house with a bottle of vodka in hand.

       Jaime calls soon after to relate his pleasure for their evening together, but senses immediately that something is wrong given his lover’s lack of response. By early morning, Rex, lying by the edge of the Strait of Dover, has finished his vodka and calls Jaime to tell his father he is sorry for what he is about to happen, immediately clicking off.

       Having observed a body bobbing on ocean waves in the opening scenes of the movie, we recognize what is about to happen, and so, apparently, does Jaime who immediately runs out to try to find and save his friend. Apparently, he know precisely where to look and, observing the same body with which the viewer had been previously tantalized, bravely swims out to retrieve the body, which looks bereft of life. But after several pumps of his chest, Rex spits up water and survives.

      Frankly the film loses a great deal of credibility—even if one has accepted the fact that a grown young man would have attempted suicide over his dad’s predictable reaction—when the hero Jaime immediately insists they call his father and clear up the issue. Before you can even wonder if Rex has caught his full breath, Jaime has made the call, told Adrian that there’s been an accident and he has pulled his son from the sea. Only when they arrive at his house door, does Jaime ask if Rex is up for the encounter.

      What happens next makes little sense if one wishes to believe that Rex’s father was such an incurable homophobe that his son had no choice but to sacrifice his life. But Adrian seems now broken and appalled at his son’s act, ready not only to completely accept his sexuality but to admit that since his mother died that he hasn’t been much of a father to the boy, so worried has he been about how they might carry on.

        It’s a nice ending if you want to believe in fantasies, that all you really need to do to bring out the love of a homophobic father is to threaten to do yourself in. But I’m, sorry to say, not convinced; I’ve seen too many fathers and mothers be perfectly happy to have their faggot sons and lesbo daughters go missing. And far too many parents, as we shall see in a later film under review here, are all too ready to put their “loved ones” into the hands of the uninformed and often barbarous conversion therapists or even relatives who insist they how to make a “man” or a “lady” out of their nonconforming kids.

       But the real issue in this film does not so much concern Rex’s father as it does the young man himself, who having been raised in a household of unspoken homophobia, as himself come to hate who he is. His happiness with Jaime doesn’t fully counter his own self-hate, which his constant fear of discovery by others intimates. It’s fine that his father has suddenly redeemed himself, coming round to except a situation which was previously unimaginable to him. But Rex will have to work hard, as must all self-haters, to allow the healing love of someone like Jaime truly pull him out of what John Bunyan called the “slough of despond,” not just the ocean waters. Over time he even may come to realize that Jaime is more than “just a friend.”

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).

 

Keith Hodder | Rift / 2013

caught

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keith Hodder (screenwriter and director) Rift / 2013 [6 minutes]

 

Keith Hodders’s short film Rift (2013) might almost be said to represent that 1940s, early 50s world I have described throughout these pages, when young men were expected to be married without even the thought of possibly exploring anything else in their lives.

     Colton (Ari Blinder) comes out to the small front porch of his small suburban home for a cigarette smoke; we can hear the sound of children in the background, silenced by the closing of the door.

     Indeed the movie might almost be described as a silent film as he sits in the sunny morning light enjoying his cig, looking out onto the empty streets and the snug little homes across.

    Suddenly a man appears on the sidewalk and stops, looking directly at our married hero, clearly someone whom he know but dare not go any further. In full public view the two stare down one another, Colton now breaking into a kind of beautiful half-reluctant smile, while the other, according to the credits named Ridley (Zach Sale) begins to not-so-subtly diddle himself. Colton’s smile becomes wider and the two continue staring at one another in what is clearly looks of lust.

    Why his apparently gay lover and has shown up on this particular day is never explained, but when Ridley hears the wife’s voice in the house, evidently trying to quiet down her “boys,” the smile disappears for a moment as he suddenly seems intent upon moving up the front lawn sidewalk to join his friend, Colton shaking his head in a regretful expression of “no, you can’t.”

      The smile has also disappeared from his face, as he momentarily closes his eyes in an expression of clear pain for being unable to obtain what he wants. His wife’s voice, as she calls out to him almost brings him to tears and he looks up to see his friend has walked off.

      A deeply forlorn look transforms his face, as his wife suddenly appears, wondering what he is doing “out there,” he replying with the usual excuse, “I just wanted to get some air.” She hugs and tells him she loves him, turning to go in, as he says, long after the immediate response she might have expected, “I love you too.” But tears of deep regret almost do well up in his eyes as he thinks obviously of the love he cannot share—at least that morning—and which he has to hide for his entire life.

     We generally do not think of gay or bisexual married man as victims of homophobia, in part, because they have been cowards in not accepting their sexual identity and in pretending that they are exclusively heterosexual. But if we can forgive them for their own destruction and other’s lives, we must recognize them also as fellow sufferers doomed by the societal and religious practices that locks them into a marriage until death do them part.

      And the pain they suffer and bring upon their wives when they are discovered or finally tire of their own deceptions is somehow incommensurate with their crimes, as they, as well they are often torn between the love of their wives and children and their own innate sexual desires. Very little room is given them for redemption. Nor for the wife who discovers she prefers the company of other women. The societal institution that marriage defines is often brutal in its claims.

      The rift to which the title refers is not necessarily between husband and wife, but husband or wife against him or herself, between the societal conventions and those who accepted their delimitations.

      It is not accidental that at least two short films about this subject are titled Caught (one in 2008 and the other in 2011).

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).

Evan Randall Green | Der Brief (The Letter) / 2008

epistolary consequences

by Douglas Messerli

 

Evan Randall Green (screenplay), Evan Randall Green (director) Der Brief (The Letter) / 2008 [8 minutes]

 

     The story of Australian director Randall Green’s short, 8-minute film, such as it is, appears to take place in a rural community in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The more popular of the two boys Adrian (Dominic Cocciolone) who obviously have been having gay sexual intercourse, has sent a letter to his sexual partner, Patrick (Jake West), already perceived as a town freak for his obvious homosexual behavior.

     The letter has made Patrick, for the first time feel as if his love for the other boys was “normal” and that he is not the only one who feels the way he does. Accordingly, he has shared the letter with friends at school, much to the shock of Adrian.

     The brief encounter between the two of them centers not only on how Adrian will now be shunned by his community and his father, but will himself be labelled as Patrick has been as a queer.

       Since this film appears to have been shot in German, the first time I saw this film I suspected that the boys might be part of a religious community such as the Mennonites or the Amish. But there is no evidence of that, and the boys discuss gay sexuality in terms that do not at all seem antiquated, the outsider accusing Adrian of being a coward, not being able to accept his own feelings, and, finally, being no different from all the others, which leads him, finally, to tear up the beloved epistle and walk away at film’s end.

       Certainly, there are no signs of official community punishment or ostracization. And the problems the writer of the letter will have to face seem to be primarily of the run-of-the-mill homophobia shared by most people in such small rural communities.

       We cannot make light of the effects, however, of this shared community sentiment, for it has cost both of them their friendship and perhaps the only love they might find that satisfies their sexual desires. And a tell-tale sign of the anger Adrian will meet at home is revealed when Patrick notes that he is walking in the other direction from his home. We can only imagine Adrian later marrying a woman leading to years of dissatisfaction for both of them, with utter frustration and disappointment for the male, and a possible divorce of the couple. Or, even worse, perhaps he will be forced to leave the community and fend, as a young man, for himself.

      I only wish that his short, with an excellent musical score, might have better explored the sources of the homosexual hysteria that will alter both of their lives.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blot (March 2022).