MYSTERIOUS SKIN:
a
brief analysis
of
the year's best film
The closing scene of Gregg Araki’s new film Mysterious Skin can rightfully be included among the more emotionally devastating moments in recent American cinema. How curious, too, that it should also provide such an unexpected uplift of hope and possibility, tucked so firmly as it is in the bleakest of all dark corners.
Huddled in a stranger’s shadowy living room on Christmas Eve, teenage hustler Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon Levitt, in a spastically fascinating performance) numbly rattles off to Bryan (Brady Corbet) the sinister details of a once shared and fateful night of horror. It is a scenario that amply feeds a sense in the viewer that he or she may have somehow overstepped the private boundaries of what is understood (but certainly not felt) to be a set of purely “fictional” characters. Such a thing is a rare and highly ambiguous feeling in movies, an incredibly vital and overwhelming gift that Araki has constructed in this, his most important and mature work to date.
Based on Scott Heim’s powerful novel of the same name, the film version of Mysterious Skin is an anomaly in the way it juxtaposes the two most prevalent coping mechanisms employed by survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The first, embodied in the hyper-sexualized character of Neil, is a type that seems to readily embrace his or her own loss of innocence, mythologizing both the past traumatic event as well as its manipulative perpetrator (in this case, Neil and Bryan’s Little League coach, played with great care by Bill Sage). Neil’s choice of profession is a subtle cue to this idea, as he consciously seeks (through dodgy meetings with a series of older “johns”) a kind of off-kilter sexual dynamic comparable to the type he first experienced as a child. It’s pretty clear how he survives, by injecting both his past and its demons with a heavy jolt of eroticism.
Quite a different tactic altogether is used by fellow wounded soul, Bryan Lackey, Neil’s naive but no less troubled foil. Bryan, who attributes the “blackouts” he experienced as a child to possible alien abduction, is a textbook case of psychological denial and repression. In the film, he embarks on a quest to unlock the mysteries of a summer in which he suspects things went terribly wrong for him. Unlike Neil, though, who has managed to at least remain somewhat cognizant of his own corruption, Bryan has been so emotionally and sexually stunted in the subsequent years that both his appearance and mindset are pretty much that of the small child he was only briefly allowed to be. Araki makes a conscious effort in the film to highlight this immaturity, and even has another character refer to Bryan once as “kind of asexual,” a signpost that connects him to Neil (although obviously from the opposite side of the spectrum).
When Neil and Bryan finally do come together at the film’s end, it is a watershed moment set in the very location of the boys’ mutual nightmare. As Neil recounts to Bryan the sickening details of their coach’s transgressions, Bryan is finally forced to replace his alien abduction fantasies with that of a much harsher reality. In return, Bryan’s flowing tears at this haunting revelation finally provide Neil a channel through which he may feel his own pain. As an angelic group of carolers suddenly converge outside the darkened house, their ethereal take on “Silent Night” balanced cautiously in the quiet evening, both young men are sufficiently floored by the roundabout way in which hope has found them again… broken, together, and shivering in the night.
* The above review originally appeared in the July 2005 issue of NATHAN, JR.
