Desperate Pictures | US | 99 mins
Mysterious Skin is a film that will leave viewers in a state of disgust and confusion. While it is shocking and disturbing, which is probably an understatement, peeling back the layers of shock that saturate every frame will reveal one of the most poignant and brutally honest accounts of the lifelong effects of sexual abuse on children. A film so raw and intense that you’ll begin to feel uneasy and think of yourself more a voyeur on someone’s insanely twisted life than tucked safely in your average home with your seemingly uneventful life. Reality will blur to the point you won’t be able to tell if you’re incredibly disgusted or incredibly interested and you will just be still — still to the raw story telling of Gregg Araki and locked into the haunting performance of Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
There have been several films in recent history that have attacked the topic of pedophilia. While all (L.I.E., Deliver Us From Evil, Happiness, etc.) have been equally disturbing, there’s one aspect to those films to find solace in: the pedophiles are evil and that was the root and focus of the film. (see The Woodsman and Little Children, both feature sympathetic pedophiles) Viewers are able to justify watching such atrocities due to the fact that the film is pointing out the evil and exposing it as evil, but what if the victim wanted it to happen? What if he had been anticipating it and maybe even enjoyed it? Usually a victim is repulsed by what they have been through and their lives are forever changed. Neil (Gordon-Levitt) embraced his situation. Araki opens it up to the audience to decide if Neil would have found himself in the same situation if it weren’t for that one summer in 1981 — leaving the viewer in a gray area balancing on a thin line between compassion and disgust.
Mysterious Skin immediately confronts you with a young boy who is sexually attracted, whether he knows it or not, to his new baseball coach. There are two accounts of abuse portrayed, with Neil taking center stage in both. While Neil enjoys his situation and idolizes his “Coach” as a father figure, Brian (Brady Corbet) has no memory of what happened to him. He only feels the emotional effects that the abuse imprinted on him. “The summer I was 8 years old five hours disappeared from my life,” says Brian in the narration that begins the film. Those five hours would haunt and confuse Brian for the next decade. Constantly waking up from horrible nightmares and randomly getting nose bleeds, Brian is completely clueless as to why he is how he is. The film establishes the type of effects you can expect from a life trauma like sexual abuse. Brian had no idea what happened to him but it still sharply molded the type of person he became, and the person he became is a vastly different from the person Neil grew up to be. Two small town Kansas boys, one traumatic experience while they were 8-years-old and yet two completely different life experiences result. Araki giving us these two paralleled perspectives in unison makes the details of each stand out far greater than any one could on its own.
In addition to directing, Araki wrote the film based on a novel by Scott Heim, a personable and touching account of child abuse in film – the most off-putting and haunting account as well. The duel function theme is a core concept to the film. Viewers want to be disgusted by Neil and want to forgive everything he’s done for what he has had to endure in life in the same moment – the conflict reaches out and grabs those watching; torn between deciding if Neil had control over the person he became, a male prostitute with an inexplicable compulsion for older men or if he was completely powerless to an immutable chain of events. Was Neil’s entire future decided in the summer of 1981 by his little league baseball coach? Would Neil have been a homosexual prostitute without his childhood abuse? Araki creates such a dynamic character that the film gives no indication. The decision is left open to torment the audience and the viewers will find themselves constantly stepping the line of free will and determinism.
The experiences that Neil endures in his childhood and adolescence are harsh, cruel and very depressing. In addition to the pure reality of the story itself, Araki adds in such raw and brutal realism through his filmmaking that it is at times hard to watch. In the early 1990s, Neil moves in with his friend and proclaimed “soul-mate” Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg) in New York. Continuing his lifestyle in New York is vastly different than continuing it in small town rural Kansas. He first learns about AIDS and the risks he takes with his lifestyle after moving in with Wendy — He quickly discovers he’s not in Kansas anymore. He is even hired by a dying victim of AIDS who only requests a backrub and just longs to feel the touch of another person. Moments like these are where Araki’s mixture of realism and shock are solidly executed for the viewer.
This is a landmark career film for Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He executes the character with such ease that the audience can easily believe that Neil could exist in real life. Wendy sums up Neil in a short bit of advice to Neil’s closest friend Eric (Jeffrey Licon) by saying, “Where normal people have a heart, Neil McCormick has a bottomless black hole.” Gordon-Levitt perfectly personifies a “bottomless black hole” in a way that I think few actors could compete. He owns the character and comfortably lives in its world. Gordon-Levitt’s superb acting and Araki’s voyeuristic and raw directing bring the story into a realm that it all feels plausible — whether we want to believe it is or not.
Mysterious Skin is deeply complex, very troubling and possibly scarring to the audience. It is not easy to swallow. Instead of focusing on the child abuse itself it focuses on the aftermath. Much like throwing a rock into a body of water will produce ripples that will affect the entire body of water, it shows that events as traumatic as child abuse and pedophilia will stay with the victim for the rest of their life. The effects will constantly be felt and discovered. The full depth of the film cannot be reached in only one viewing. Viewers will initially find themselves shocked and disturbed and must return to it to find the true depth of emotion and realism in order to be able to fully appreciate the harsh study of humanity at its worst. Exploring how some people are peering into the world from a place that they don’t really understand, while learning how to live inside their own skin and discover that, more often than not, how we came to be the people we are today is a mystery even to ourselves. Mysterious Skin is about just that – self-discovery. Sadly, you won’t always like what you find.
9 out of 10
Can you enjoy a film that deeply disturbs you?