Tom Rhoads [Luther Price] | Green / 1988

poisoned

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Rhoads [Luther Price] Green / 1988

 

This 36-minute film was inspired by the suicide of his mother’s sister Sally, which, as I mention above, occurred the day he was born. As he grew up, accordingly, he came to believe that he was the reincarnation of his own aunt. And like many a young adult, he imagined he would die early, at the age of 23, joining her just as he was joined to her spiritually since birth.

     In a highly poetic fragmentary narrative, the director describes the film in a preface on Light Cone’s site:

 

“Filled with poison, all the veins infested … Question of time … The image of the ghost haunts my breath, gnaws my mind. I see her beautiful face and wonder if she was my mother. I loved her and she can see me. I thought she was really in me. I thought I was her. My life would end at twenty-three and we would be together. There would be no sadness. Everyone would know that she was coming for me. But I lived. I was not supposed to die at that time. It was his way of telling me to stop joining my mother. Now they are together and I am the ghost. 37 years old, there is something about this number. I will die then and I will remember this necklace of green emeralds at my mother’s funeral. And that’s when I’ll realize why I lived.

     The images that haunt my memories roam the life next to me, brushing my breathing body, veiling my vision, slowing down my pace, devouring my thoughts. I am never alone. In fusion, I prevent myself from loneliness and all rest, living for two, becoming the other. Am I real?”

     Making the film in 1988, moreover, the director could not have but been thinking of the AIDS

epidemic, and throughout the film he not only focuses on the young male of this film, his face covered with pustules, but flashes from time-to-time to various pathological slides of what appear to be skin lesions similar to Kaposi sarcoma.

     Death, in fact, is clearly the subject of this work and appears in various forms, beginning with the first image of the film, a dead starling laid out on the pavement as we hear a vinyl record playing “Let There Be Love,” sung in a scratchy rendition by Pearl Bailey, followed by various radio performances and local broadcasts from the past. We see what appears to be his mother dressed in green—a highly intuitive scene since after his mother died years later, she asked to be buried in the same color of a dress. Her image is lovely and endearing.

      But other women, versions of her performed by the director in drag are not so charming, one with a huge and not very lovely overbite who seems frozen in time as the ice cream cone melts in her hands without her being able to move. Another woman, with a purple-green wig seems caught in smile of rictus, unable to close her mouth. In short none of these women seem able to provide help or even vocal support to the young man who appears sometimes walking alone, at other times, wearing glasses pondering his fate, and who finally appears to take up the center of the work by swallowing, one by one, a vast number of pills spread out across a table with a flask of gin, a can of beer, and a glass of water to help him get them down.

     When he finally finishes the last pill, even seeking for more hiding among the table’s objects, the images fall out of focus, as we observe him briefly in fading white light, first sitting on and then climbing into a bed. Momentarily images appear in full focus, the mother in a green emerald necklace or holding out a birthday cake before they again blur and disappear as the screen is transformed into a series of moths smashing themselves against the frames of the film itself, signifying the decay of the picture itself as evidence of the young man’s death by suicide, occasioned evidently because he has been affected by the disease, if not AIDS, an infection just as deadly.

      One might describe this film as a horrifying fantasy tied up with the women of his childhood whom he loved but who could not fully help him any longer as he grew into a gay man, separating himself from their world.

      In this work, everyone is indeed “poisoned,” unable to behave in the manner that he remembers his mother in her glorious youth, filled with smiling beauty. The reincarnations of her, performed by himself, are cruel reminders that his mother can no longer serve him as she did when he was a child.

     As critic Gary Morris observes in his Bright Lights Film Journal essay, the images are “at once campy and poignant,” the toothful harridan attempting to represent the past, transfixed by that past itself so fully that she’s unable to even lick at the pleasures of the long-ago ice cream cone as it melts over her fingers. The open smile of the face of the other woman is not of joy but is frozen there in time, becoming something of horror instead of delight.

     Reality for this storyteller can only exist when can rid himself of his overwhelming mother-dominated history.

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023).