Brendon McDonall | The Dam / 2016

living the never

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brendon McDonall (screenwriter and director) The Dam / 2016 [16 minutes]

 

Australian director Brendon McDonall’s short film, The Dam, is an elegy to the lost love of now two elderly men, Jack (Chris Haywood) and John (Martin Vaughan) who as young men helped to build a dam in Australia, swam in its waters, and clearly fell in love.

     For 10 years John, who has remained in Australia, has not even seen Jack, and before that time, as he later makes quite clear, Jack has left him “in the lurch” again and again for 50 years. John, come now from Cape Town, South Africa, cannot even fully explain his inability to maintain a relationship, describing it merely as being “unsure of his feelings.”

     John is dying of lung cancer with about a year to live, and Jack who has heard of his condition from a relative Pippa—sister, ex-wife, or daughter—we do not know, of his condition, and has returned to “help” him out of blue, shocking John who doesn’t at all know what to make of the situation.

     He does offer the “stranger” a bed and scrubs up the best he can, but the years, all those years when apparently he still loved the man of his youth, have slightly embittered him.

     Jack is still in fairly good health. We see him swimming in the damn waters in the first scene, robust, as he recalls one of their earlier loving encounters.

     And the next morning he is eager to take his friend, now on a respirator, back to the dam for a look. But once there, John becomes angry, stating quite bolding “I don’t want to be here,” blaming his friend for all his betrayals, even though we don’t quite know what they consisted of.

     What do you want, why are you here? are his major questions, Jack simply answering again, I want to help. He says he will stay another day, fix him breakfast. We have all the time in the world.

      It’s clear he’s returned to stay, but he has missed out of their life altogether. They clearly do not have a long time at this point in their lives. He has missed out simply because, apparently, of his unsurety about their gay relationship.

      This film quietly depicts what has happened in so many men’s lives of their generation; fear, doubt, the inability to except their sexuality deprives them of a full life. Who, except for Edith Wharton and Henry James could even imagine such resistance to a relationship if he had been a straight man attracted to a woman?  At this point, John is not even bitter, disappointed surely, unsure of what possible relationship they can now offer one another, and more than anything saddened by what might have been when the young Jack (Felix Haywood) and the young John (Blake Bowden) were beautiful boys in love with one another and their lives.

      What might their lives have been like? How very different their lives might have been if they were together for all those 50 years. I speak from experience: as difficult as any gay relationship might be, living together with someone else, as I have for now 56 years, provides a sense of deep joy and peace even as we both see one another aging. Does the phrase “better late than never” even mean anything to those who have already lived the never?

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).