transgression’s
solution
by Douglas Messerli
David
Hoyle and Asley Ryder (improvisation)
David Hoyle, Gary Reich, and Mike Nicholls (director) Uncle David / 2010
More than a two years ago I bought a copy from
the British Film Institute of David Hoyle, Gary Reich, and Mike Nicholls’ 2010
film Uncle David. I watched the film a day after I received it, so taken
aback by its subject and the implications of its message that I simply could
not immediately write about it. At the time I had just begun my research for My
Queer Cinema and I was simply unable to contextualize this film within the
100-some LGBTQ films I’d watched over the years. As of yet I had no language with which to
discuss this seemingly purposefully vapid shocker. Basically I agreed with
critic Damien Ryan who wrote on his So So Gay website that it reminded
him of "the very worst attempt of a first-year film student," and
questioning its self-description as a “black comedy,” argued that it wasn’t at
all “funny.”
Several thousand queer films later, I am finally able to put this film
into better perspective. Certainly, I still would not at all characterize it as
“black comedy” in the manner its best practitioners such Harold Pinter or Joe
Orton, very different kinds of writers but who both pack a wallop in forcing us
to see the ridiculous in the seemingly most serious of matters regarding
important issues such as love, marriage, and death.
There is most certainly death in Uncle David—indeed, arguably it
is the work’s central subject—and there may, in fact, be some love between the
film’s two major figures, a young handsome man with the mind of an
impressionable 10-year-old (British porn star Ashley Ryder) and his Uncle David
(drag artist and monologist David Hoyle), and they may even be a kind of deep
relationship between them that if one could define as a marriage might be
described at least as a kind intense meeting of the minds, such as they are.
For, in many respects, the pedophilic Uncle David is himself a spoiled
infantile who believes that all of society is corrupt and rotten because it
cannot accept the kinds of love and eccentric attitudes towards life that he
espouses. And I can believe that Hoyle, his fellow directors, and his
co-collaborator Ryder did in fact perceive themselves in their mostly
improvisational transgressive work as presenting such an exaggerated and
impossible view of what is perhaps the most common form of gay incest outside
of fraternal sex that they imagined it to be outrageously funny.
Presumably, they felt like they were creating extravagant figures that
were as outsized as those of John Waters’ Divine. But something went wrong. In
most of Hoyle’s previous live performances he had been, according to The
Guardian, “something of a legend” on the British 1990s cabaret circuit. His
character The Divine David as described as an “anti-drag queen” who combined
“lacerating social commentary with breathtaking instances of self-recrimination
and even self-harm.” On television he produced two shows, The Divine David
Presents (1999) and The Divine David Heals (2000), before he killed
off his character in a farewell show at Streatham Ice Arena near London, in a
show titled The Divine David on Ice.
Evidently he was unheard for about five years before he began to perform
live once more under his own name, continuing to create bitter satire, dressed
in bravura costumes, while relying on his perfect timing and compelling
charisma. But as some have pointed out, Uncle David, which followed is
almost a monologue, this time presenting himself as a character that he has
evidently retrieved from the boy’s abusive mother (she has apparently been
putting out her cigarette stubs on the back of her son’s hand) whisks him away
to a trailer park, in real life the wastelands caravan community on the Isle of
Sheppey.
Tamping down what apparently were his previous wild audience induced
interactions with truth and absurdity, Hoyle approaches the fairly dim-witted
but amazingly buff nephew a bit like Tom Ewell might attempt to seduce Marilyn
Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, so in awe of what has landed at his
doorstep (although we suspect the two may have toyed with their sexual
affection
previously), gently bathing him while telling
him pernicious bed-time stories about the failure of the nuclear family, the
next morning serving up breakfast and gentle kisses as they tour the area,
David filling his nephew’s ears with praises for his newly displayed sense of
independence, his beauty, and his “purity,” by disparaging all aspects of
normative society and dismissing normative conceptions of sexual and social
behavior.
Against the backdrop of the ugly and almost intentionally perverted
ordinary folk of Sheppey and their caravan environs, and if the boy’s mother is
the monster that he makes her out to be, it is hardly difficult to convince the
naïve boy that in relationship to everyone else Ashley and his uncle’s love is
something so special that it hardly deserves to survive in the totally corrupt
world about. And again, we have to believe that this is not the first time he
has argued some of this tripe. It is, after all, a standard way of grooming a
young child into believing that the sexual encounter the elder is offering is
something so exquisite and special that others cannot comprehend it and
accordingly condemn and outlaw their sacred love.
I
can imagine that just thinking about recording that set of circumstances on
celluloid must itself have seemed something right out of Ronald Tavel’s and
Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater. But having determined to play it more like
John Waters, as straight-faced as possible, and given the actual sexual
potential of Hoyle’s only slightly mincing character and the beautiful bodied
Ryder, who had already had significant experience at seducing his audience of
mostly elder watchers of his porn tapes. That, along with the verisimilitude
that all film brings to any narrative and set of images it records and the
low-key acting style at odds with Hoyle’s previously audience-engaged
conceptions, turned what might on the surface seem patently absurd into a sort
of realist-like drama, which suddenly seems to switch into pure drama when the
young Ashley, fully convinced by his seducer’s views of the denigrated world,
determines that he seriously wants to commit suicide.
Any truly loving “uncle” would immediately work to rid the young boy of
such intentions. But we can only imagine that David, knowing that eventually we
must pay for his sexual actions, may posit the idea that at least in this way
he won’t have someone to testify against him, even if the boy’s body is found,
drugs will be discovered as the cause and not the uncle’s molestation or abuse.
Even if no such concept existed in the creators’ minds, the fact that we begin
to create explanations for their behavior demonstrates just how realism has
taken over what began as a comedy of transgression.
Circling around each other, nephew and uncle gradually begin to engage
in fulfilling sexual actions, at first lovingly but with the introduction of
cocaine and other drugs gradually involving more brutal anal sex, sexual
strangulation, and the application of make-up and masking. In this case the
real world of the actors interweaves with the fantasy story of film, as the
drag-queen Hoyle shows Ryder how to make-up for drag and they dance together
while watching Ryder’s actual porno tapes.
As the two culminate their acts in a kind of wild sexual release, David
assures his nephew that he is, indeed, “too nice for this Earth” and it will be
necessary to escape from the problems of the world—meaning, of course, his
problem in having to face up to his transgressions of societal restrictions.
In
fact, a case could be argued—although given today’s hysterical attitude about
older/younger sex, particularly involving homosexual love and even worse when
it implies incest it would certainly go unheard—that there is no real harm of a
willingly sexually active gay boy of Ashley’s age and physical development to
have sex with a blood-related male since it involves no issues of the gene pool
or child-bearing. But in this instance,
all of that is beside the point since David has used his power as an elder to
convince the youth of something far more horrifying than sex.
The next morning the film reiterates the mental level of David’s nephew
as we find him playing in the sand, building sand-castles like a child. But at
the same time, he seems even convinced of the wisdom of leaving a world that
does not allow what two have experienced that night. And David has apparently
purchased a concoction of powerful drugs to make Ashley’s wish come true. Even
more perversely Uncle David lies to the boy’s mother when she telephones
demanding to know his whereabouts, insisting he is not at Sheepey but in
Manchester.
The last few scenes, accordingly, are nearly unbearable for anyone with
moral conscience, as we realize that this so-called “black comedy” will surely
end as a kind of simulacrum of a snuff-film. Taking the boy to an abandoned
military bunker, David injects the mysterious substance into his nephew’s veins
as they kiss, Ashley falling into another state consciousness, as David guides
him back to the trailer park where they smoke marijuana.
As David injects the boy with the second dose, they stare out to sea,
the boy babbling about his love of being set free into the ocean and other
nonsense. As the sun sets, David places his now nearly catatonic nephew in a
dog bed, handing him a book titled Is Britain Great? But the lame satire
by this point has no meaning, as the two profess their love, and Ashley dies,
David dragging him out to lie in a shallow dugout in the sand, and tearfully
kissing the boy goodbye as his body is gradually swept out to sea.
There is what I might describe as a gap here between desire and
apprehension, between on one level the boy and uncle’s desire for one another
and the fears of what that means in society or even in their own lives after.
There is in any such relationship a deep reason, no matter how powerful the
desire spreads through the mind and body, for anxiety, fear, and alarm in what
the enactment of that desire will bring about. And in this case both parties
have almost insured themselves for their fears by making certain the very worst
happens to them as a result to such desires: self-death and a form of
murder.
While such a story might certainly be described as quite unplausible,
perhaps even unimaginable, it is nonetheless not at all comic, but fully
tragic. For in a sense this condition of being in the gap is created by all of
us, by the society itself which cannot imagine and will not imagine that the
desire in any such instance might ever be resolved in love.
It’s too bad that Hoyle, Ryder, and the filmmakers didn’t treat their
narrative and acting as seriously as the evidence of their enactment of the
myth did.
Los Angeles, January 14, 2022
