When I heard that there was to be an assignment on a queer-themed movie, I quickly checked the list for one of my favorite movies, Mysterious Skin. Its a film about alienation, about anger, about personality and adjustment. It is a film that evokes the strongest of feelings from me, even though I hold so little in common with the main characters. The story follows two mid-western boys in their attempts to assimilate and recover from childhood molestation. It is not a movie about being gay, but it is a movie about being secretly lost within oneself.
I always look towards the title of a film for guidance towards the meaning of the movie. The words “Mysterious Skin” don't ever appear in the dialogue of the film. This means that the screenwriter decided on those words, separate and apart from just pulling them from the dialogue, so they are an additional clue. When we understand what the words mean, we understand more about what the film means.
We all have a “mysterious skin”. It is the skin we have. The existentialists called the concept “absurdity”, the pointlessness and guidelessness of life. There is no compass to our self-definition, our essence, and in fact, in the wanderings, we define ourself in trying. Further, there is no way to define ourselves correctly, except as exposed in our living. Worse, our essence cannot be completely known until our life is complete. This is the human plight, trying to make sense of our selves and life, having no guide and no conclusion.
The movie opens with a very confusing image. A smiling, cute, dark-haired little boy, perhaps 7 or 8 years old, is surrounded by falling, colorful objects, which eventually focus enough for us to see that they are fruit loops. This is an alien, strange image, and even worse, it blinks away once we see the boys face fully. He is smiling, his eyes are closed, he is lost in the sensation of the fruit loops falling onto and bouncing off of his face. The meaning of this image is not at all clear. The audience is lost and confused by it.
Words flash across the screen, “Brian Lackey Summer 1981”. Unfortunately, we gain no clues about our smiling, dark-haired hero because another boy comes on the screen, this one blonde and not smiling. Brian, narrating as a young man, starts telling a story about time he lost as an 8 year old. He refers to 5 hours between a little league game and being found in his cellar which he cannot recall. He is lost. He doesn't know where that part of his self went. We learn that he begins to have blackouts and nosebleeds, that he starts to wet the bed. Whatever he lost, it is causing him great stress. He sees a UFO that summer too, and pairs it with the lost time as the powerful, mysterious experiences he has that summer.
Life is stressful. Every child, every person has anxieties and confusion related to their self-identity. It is a result of the absurdity of life. There are points in life where we recognize that all our decisions occur as degrees of certainty, and that every decision we make has some elements of guess work to it. Some decisions are entirely arbitary guesses. We are confused and unsure about this, and sometimes blame our feelings on experiences that aren't actually related. Brian links the lost time and the UFO as events in the same time frame, but can never be sure that they are any more or less related than that.
The next scene in the movie, we meet our first boy again, but this time he is not smiling, and his face is obscured by the shadows of window blinds. The text overlay that precedes the scene informs us that our boys name is Neil McCormack, and that he is talking from the same summer as Brian, 1981. The narration even starts a parallel. They both begin with the words, “The summer that I was 8 years old...” Brian talks about his lost time, but Neil goes on to say “...I came for the first time.” Neil, also as an older version of himself, is narrating the story of his first orgasm, watching his mother and her boyfriend have sex in his back yard, on a swing set.
The viewer is jarred by the blunt, rough, and vulgar nature of the voice, contrasted with the image of this seemingly innocent young boy. Even more jarring is the confession that he is referring to his mother's boyfriend, Alfred, as “all marlboro man, dumb as a fucking rock, what I would years later call to call 'my type.” Our experience with Neil is getting stranger and stranger, and stranger still is the superimposition of another man, in a different place, with better lighting and a different mustache, with similar orgasmic faces. The superimposition occurs where we are looking through Neil's point of view, so we must believe that he has seen this view, of this man, before. This scene ends with the disturbing and strange words “...When I came, I couldn't wait to tell Coach.”
Neil directs us back to the beginning of the story, where we meet Coach. He is, in fact, the same man we have seen, mirrored by Alfred. The story told goes to a private meeting between Coach and Neil, and a private trip back to Coaches house, which is loaded with toys, video games, and soda. It is clear to the viewer that Coach is a pedophile and Neil is unaware. The exposition of the abuse continues in a romantic story arch, ending in a scene in the kitchen. Neil accidentally spills some cereal on the floor, and Coach makes it fun by throwing his cereal on the floor, too. When all of the cereal is tossed, Coach lowers Neil onto the floor and kisses him.
This is the loss of identity that Neil suffers. Where Brian lost time, Neil lost his innocence. He compares the spilt cereal on the floor to a shattered Kaleidoscope, hinting at his own feelings inside. Neil says “...the taste of coaches tongue seared my mouth.” Afterwards, Coach tries to convince him that he liked it, and that liking it is ok, and that everything will be ok.
Neil is confused. He acted with shame and confusion during the scene on the floor, whimpering with fear. Afterwards, he is looking at the floor until he slowly makes eye contact with Coach, as Coach assures him that everything will be alright. He has found a compass. He trusts Coach, so despite his own inner turmoil, he will believe Coach. We all have had these false guides. We have all placed our faith on people who failed us, on ideals that that we have left behind, on bands or trends that we have outgrown. The confusion of life gives us anxiety, and we seek certainty where ever we can find it, even if that certainty is misguided or wrong.
In the next scenes, we discover Neil to have grown into a destructive and angry boy. On Halloween, he forces another boy to hold lit fireworks in his mouth, and then masturbates him after they go off, to make him feel better. A cut-scene later, Neil is 15 and turning tricks with older men at a cruising park. His tricks aren't concerned about using protection because of his age and the size of the town, and he is proud to be turning tricks. He even shows his best friend, Wendy, bruises on his penis from one of them. After that conversation, they talk about a movie of their lives being played on a drive-in theatre screen and the voice of God coming through one of the speakers in the parking lot. Neil says “I hear him.” It is a rare moment for him, soft and escapist, juxtaposed to the harsh and dismissive norm we expect from him.
On that same Halloween night in 1981, Brian gets lost outside of a haunted house and is approached by a strange figure. He passes out again, and wakes up an hour later with a nosebleed, just like the first time. Another cut-scene, and we find Brian is watching a TV special on aliens. He believes his lost time is due to alien abductions. He spends time learning about his abductions and memories about them, recording a dream journal and drawing what he can recall of the aliens. This has become his compass, his map to understanding himself.
The boys grow older, into 19. The first clue of how these boys are involved with each other comes when Brian remembers that he is wearing a little league uniform in one of his dreams. He looks at a photo and roster, and identifies N. McCormick as a boy that was in one of his dreams. Brian starts to become friends with Neil's friends, waiting for him to return from New York so they can discuss the dreams and lost time, to better understand what happened.
Neil is in New York City, turning tricks and learning about safe sex. He meets a john with lesions and is asked, instead of sex, to simply rub his back. This is jarring for the boy, being valued for his touch, not his sex. He is disturbed by it, and talks to Wendy about how important to his identity the abuse was. Coach made him feel loved and special. He says, “I was his one true love.”
Christmas comes. Neil comes back from New York, to meet Brian. They have a very telling line of dialogue. Neil says “We have a lot in common, don't we?” and Brian replies, “I think so.” Both is certain that they know what they are talking about, but both are misguided. In the vagueness and the confusion, they have both invented stories to serve as guides. Neil, as lover, Brian, as abductee, to replace their shared history as victim.
As the boys talk, Brian becomes more and more clear about what happened to them. Neil leads into the story with “I was his favorite,” trying to preserve his fiction. They share their stories, it becomes clear to Brian that the blackouts came to repress the memories of coach abusing him. They find their own histories in this sharing. They find that the guideposts, the compass they found for themselves, failed under the weight of the truth. Neil will never again feel like the trophy that Coach made him feel like. Brian will never again be able to deny and repress his abuse. They are back to confusion and absurdity, but they at least understand themselves in a way that is more based on truth. We are lost victims, and life is something like a compromise between comfort and truth
