Russell: Yeah
Mark: of of what a um a gay bathhouse was I imagined um older um ah wrinkly um masseurs um brutalising young chaps with
I.i.14:00
um ah towels wrapped around them by brutalising I mean you know with massage Russell: Yeah
Mark: and sort of you know sweaty vinyl benches and um and the whole thing being much more sort of locker room rah rah um jolly hockey sticks and you know men
standing around naked in a in a swimming pool tossing a ball between them and nonsense like that
Russell: Right
I.i.14:30 but that’s not what you found Mark: No no no it was um
Russell: Is it fair to say that everything you’ve just listed is something that was absent Mark: No the sweaty vinyl benches were there the locker rooms were there the swimming pool the swimming pool was there there wasn’t any ball tossing there well there was but of a different variety
Russell: Yeah Mark: Um no it all
I.i.15:00
just seemed a lot more um er reduced in scale and suburban and rather tacky than I’d imagined but I suppose also I’d been reared on the um the grandeur of of Roman baths and the the mysteries of the hamam and and I had a romanticised view of what um a an aquatic
I.i.15:30
Russell: When you say you’d been reared on those can you just give me a bit more information about that how did those um
Mark: Oh they’re osmotic myths I think they sort of percolate through classical literature and um
Russell: Is this stuff you were exposed to at school Mark: I think so yes and I always thought it had
I.i.16:00 a bit of a sexy edge to it
Mark, like many others in this project, describes the contrast between what he imagined and what he found when he first visited a sauna at the age of twenty or twenty-one, maybe three or four years out of school. Mark’s school, a school with a “junior boarding house” [I.i.59:00], seems to have provided him with an image repertoire out of which or with which to imagine firstly the intergenerational aspect of the sauna, in this case, older wrinkly masseurs brutalising young chaps in towels. It takes little effort to discern the pedagogic image in phantasmatic form here. I also note the British public school emphasis on games, “sort of locker room rah rah um jolly hockey sticks”, and the “nonsense” of naked men standing around in a swimming pool “tossing” (not throwing) a ball between them. Mark also speaks of being “reared on the um the grandeur of of Roman baths”. If Mark had been a boarder, then school may well have been a place in which he was “reared” in such a sense, and when I ask him if school was a place where he was introduced to Roman Baths, he responds “I think so yes”.
But Mark also tells me that he was “reared” on “the mysteries of the hamam”, a phrase he uses that suggests to me something post-dating his schooling in the seventies, for “the mysteries of the hamam” is also an English subtitle that occurs in a crucial and memorable scene from an Italian/Turkish feature film made in the nineties: Hamam, also known as The Turkish Bath (Ozpetek, 1997). The scene in question is one where a Turkish youth and an Italian architect in his thirties are sitting alone in the hot room of a hamam talking. They are clad in towels and while they talk they heavily perspire. Their conversation is about a woman who for each of them has been a kind of benefactor. She was the architect’s aunt, and her death brought him to Istanbul to claim his inheritance, the hamam she used to own and operate. For the youth, the dead woman was a benefactor of a different kind. She imparted knowledge to him with the aim of cultivating him, bringing him to a state of complex maturity. The two men talk about this woman, or rather, the architect inquires and the youth tells, and it emerges that one of the most important things the woman gave to the youth, clearly, and it is registered in the simple gravity with which he utters it, his eyes fixed on something he sees in his mind’s eye (I immerse myself totally at this moment in the phantasmagoric pleasures afforded by fiction) while the architect gazes in turn directly at him (and we gaze at them as they perspire near naked in the hamam’s heat), ... that
important legacy she imparted to him was knowledge of “the mysteries of the hamam”. Soon after, we witness the architect and the youth locked in a sexual embrace. Hamam screened at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival in the late 1990s, and has been widely available in Melbourne on VHS and DVD formats ever since. And the central figure in the film, like Mark [I.i.23:00], is an architect. It is, however, not the architect’s but the youth’s words that Mark echoes, “the mysteries of the hamam”, a concept he was most unlikely to have been “reared” on at either junior or senior boarding school, or, indeed, in the family home. It is as the Turkish youth that Mark momentarily performs in the fleeting instant of our conversation, whether he intends to or not, and the knowledge of the mysteries of the hamam, which he in fact never knew as a youth himself, poignantly slips into his image repertoire and grants him retrospectively a rearing he never had. But then he never claims any of this for sure:
I.i.15:30
Russell: Is this stuff you were exposed to at school Mark: I think so yes
“I think so yes” is accurate enough.
panto
In his second interview, Edward and I discuss the dark part of the steam room at Volcano:
Edward: There’s um II.i.20:30
in the steam room there’s I know there’s another room that I have not been and will not go into I don’t know what it is but there’s something in me that just says don’t go there do not go in there
He confirms he’s never gone in and I point out that I have:
II.i.21:00 Russell: I have been in Edward: Have you Russell: to the right
Edward: Oh good you can tell me what’s in there
Russell: have you asked anyone Edward:
II.i.22:30 Nn nn no
Russell: So what’s stopped you from asking anyone
Edward: I don’t know cos there are definitely um people I could ask but I don’t know I think I suppose if it was that interesting
Russell: Would you
Edward: If I was that interested I’d go in
Russell: So like for instance you you said a moment ago oh good you can tell me about it but do you actually want me to
Edward: Mm no it doesn’t really worry me that much Russell: Yeah yeah I had
II.i.23:00 I wondered about that
So much for setting the scene.
There’s a quality of panto or camp masquerade shaping much of Edward’s performance in his interviews, a conscious level of entertainment he deploys: “Oh good you can tell me what’s in there”. A parodic excess, which is parodic, ultimately, by being excessive, by expressing a hyperbolic magnification of interest and enthusiasm played as or with excessive force, possibly in order to entertain me with its nimble wit (which it does). It’s not that there isn’t a gulf between what other witnesses report and what they have “actually” done. It’s just that with Edward, the gulf, the space between the mask and the face, is
discernible much of the time. Nor is it the case that Edward’s “no it doesn’t really worry me that much”, which seems more authentic, is suddenly less of a
performance or is not a performance at all. Rather, the style is, to put it the long way round, simply less non-naturalistic. After all, absolute authenticity is never possible when one works with words that are always already borrowed and cited for the occasion, even and especially the word “me”.