Mysterious Skin

Mysterious Skin

This be some heavy shit, right here.

Mysterious Skin is a film about paedophilia & child abuse, but unlike a couple of controversial recent movies that have had a somewhat sympathetic paedophile as the protagonist in an artistic attempt to understand this disturbing vulgarity (I’m looking at you The Woodsman), Skin is, quite rightly, all about the victims, in this case, two little league players sexually molested by their coach.

As the two boys grow up one of them is defined by what has happened to him – a delinquent teen turned prostitute, he almost fondly recalls the “affection” he received, and indeed as a child he, disturbingly but innocently, seemed a very willing participant. Yet we see how hard his life is, or how hard he makes it, and we know that on some level he is just deluding himself, not wanting to admit to being a victim. The other boy can’t recall quite what happened, and has grown up convincing himself that the period of missing time he suffered years ago that troubles him in his dreams can only be explained by an alien abduction.

Let’s stop for a moment.

There is a whole genre of biographies out there that I like to call ‘grief porn’, in which an author recounts a terrible childhood, usually filled with rape, brutality or abuse, or all three. Now these kinds of books started off meaning well enough – the author triumphed over adversity, left us with a positive message, and could serve to help people who had been in similar unfortunate situations. However as the years have ticked by the books have seemed to focus more and more on the actual horrific tales of abuse rather than the plight to overcome it – the more detailed the better it seems. One book I flicked through the other day contained little more than a series of disturbingly detailed recollection of rapes one author was forced to endure at the hands of her stepfather. The way she had written them made them sound like a Penthouse Forum letter. What purpose is this serving? And more importantly, why do these books get furiously snapped up exclusively by middle-aged middle-class women, who profess they read it “just to have a good cry”?

There are times in Mystery Skin when it crosses the line, in my opinion, into grief porn. There are quite a few disturbing and shockingly confronting scenes both of the paedophilic crimes, and of the sexual encounters one character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, outstanding here) has in the world of male hustling – and although they are never explicit in what you see, they are nightmarish when you consider what is happening just barely out-of-frame. Now I am not by any stretch of the imagination suggesting this film is advocating paedophilia, but the scenes are done in such a way that you really wouldn’t want the wrong person watching them, if you know what I mean.

If the hustler’s tale wasn’t balanced out by the story of the other boy, tracking down what he thinks are fellow UFO abductees, it would almost be too hard a film to watch. Not that his story is light and frothy - especially since we know what happened to him, and he does not, his entire story is drenched in sadness - but his rustic small-town setting maintains a hint of innocence in comparison to the grimy New York we see the other boy hustling in.

Mysterious Skin is not easy to watch, mainly because of the aforementioned grief-porn scenes, but also because there are no clear answers here, no happy endings. The characters are confused and complicated and tinged with darkness. It would be hard for someone to really say you liked, or enjoyed this picture, the same way you can’t really say you enjoyed watching Requiem for a Dream (despite its brilliance) but it would be a mistake to ignore the film because of these reasons. Just because it isn’t easy to stomach doesn’t mean the story should be swept under the carpet. This subject needs to be discussed, and I guess this kind of thing should be difficult to watch, shouldn’t it?

Even though I did not always agree with how it presented this story, Mysterious Skin is not just all about bleakness for the sake of being bleak. I was left with the strong feeling that it was an important film that deserves an audience. Let’s just hope it finds the right one.