Wednesday, March 05, 2008

MYSTERIOUS SKIN: A Review

Roger Larson: What I Know Now - A beautiful novel intended for young adults which also qualifies as one of the best books this old adult has read. It has warmth, wit, wholesome eroticism, and a way of teaching us how to lovingly guide children through their pain and toward freedom. A fine book and a fine writer. I couldn't put it down ... and I'm off to buy copies to share with the children, adults, and libraries in my life. A boy falling in love with a man anyone would fall in love with. A man who can nurture and guide a boy, with love, and safety, and the boy's emotional well-being always primary. (This review is from a website called "Review Centre.")

When I was an animal control officer in Portland, Roger Larson was the foreman of Laurelhurst Park. When I joined the First Unitarian Church, he was the father of a young girl and seemed to be happily married. In a few years he surfaced again as the “out of the closet” author of “What I Know Now.” I agree with the reviewer quoted above. When I preached for a new Unitarian congregation that rented a graceful old neighborhood building from the Metropolitan Community Church, there was Roger again with his partner Andy. With beards and tummies, they were “teddy bear gays,” avuncular, protective, non-threatening. They had succeeded in being gay without accepting the outside-society, wicked, dangerous image that attracts some men whom I suspect are not so much gay as craving or justifying rejection.

Mysterious Skin” is a movie that I would very much like to discuss with Roger and Andy. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0370986/ I rented the DVD from Netflix.) It is the story of two boys who were molested in childhood -- yes, by the coach -- and their very different reactions. The movie follows the consequences into their young adulthood, when they find each other and have at least that comfort. One doesn’t know whether this will amount to the first steps towards recovery. Nor does one really know whether the two boys are gay. Nor does the movie necessarily suggest that if they are gay it is the consequence of abuse.

Nothing in the movie is explicit -- actual contact is always just outside the camera frame. There are two characters who accept and try to protect both boys. They are classmate “phreaks” or punks (I don’t have the terms technically correct)-- pierced, painted, chained, and with extraordinary hair. They have set themselves outside society and yet in contact with it enough to have jobs and cope with life. They are like “shamans” who have been to the land of the dead, survived, and now qualify as guides. (How about a movie explaining how they got to this place?) Both the boy and girl punks relate earliest to Neil, the older, more charismatic and defiant of the boys, whose response to the coach is positive -- in fact, he chooses hustling as a lifestyle. His mother has done something similar, except that she doesn’t ask for money -- she’s simply promiscuous. A boy hustler, however, can ask for a lot of money and Neil is prosperous.

Brian, who was very young at the time of his abuse, interprets the whole thing as a visitation from a flying saucer. In fact, he finds a girl who also proposes this to be a persuasive explanation of something she represses. Not hard to figure out what or by whom. But she only frightens Brian.

This is far from being a defense of abuse. Even Neil, who thinks he can handle anything, gets pushed way out on the edge where he is nearly killed. In the end he seems to understand that there’s something to worry about after all. Not the loss of innocence -- we don’t value innocence much in our culture except that we are always interested in how it is lost. But that he’s out of control, at the mercy of some very strange men. At least one has overt AIDS, another is full of homicidal rage. Yet the coach is movie-star handsome and attractive in a “het” way. Hard to give him up.

This is a nearly schematicly plotted movie, drawn from a book which I haven’t read. I don’t even know where the title comes from, though I’ve always told kids (appalling my principals when they found out by accident) that humans' two most important sexual organs are their skin and their brain. Neil has a childish drifting mother (no sign of any father) and Brian has a law enforcement controlling mother and a runaway father. Maybe because of this, in the right sort of context it’s excellent for discussion .

DVD’s are great for their extras and this one is no exception. Quite simply, since the book starts with a chapter about Brian and then a chapter about Neil, the actors read “their” chapters from the book in someone’s back yard with airplanes overhead and traffic going by. They are just themselves, not the characters, and we suddenly see two ordinary kids -- not very polished readers -- stumbling along in front of a single unblinking camera. They are entirely lovable, nonthreatening, even run-of-the-mill. We realize that they were ACTING, which helps pull us back to ordinary life.

The child actors who play these two characters as small children are not present and evidently were shielded from what it was they were portraying. But I wonder about the wisdom of always shielding kids from everything. Just enough scrappy and “hot” information gets through to them to make them curious and therefore vulnerable. Most of all, like all kids, they think everything is all about them in the sense that if things go wrong, it’s their fault. This is not helpful. They might not have parrot-colored and jingling punk friends to explain what it all means. Anyway, it seems to me that Neil was exceptionally lucky to have attracted these two. They may be more an author’s need for dialogue partners than realistic portrayals of who’s out there.

Is it so impossible for a sympathetic and sensible mom or dad or uncle or aunt to give a little advice to a kid as flaunting as Neil or as suppressed as Brian? Maybe it IS too risky for an adult, since the public most often suspects that the helper is really another molester. Certainly school authorities were always terrified when I identified a student I thought could use some help. We are so ambivalent about the idea that the truth shall set us free. Or do we just reject the truth?

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