Coming of Age

By Jon Frosch, AlterNet. Posted May 6, 2005.

Gregg Araki has always been the most predictable of American independent filmmakers. Despite their punk rock aura and stories of sexual experimentation, his films have felt strangely tame. They've invariably featured attractively grungy L.A. hipsters, hooking up in every possible combination and philosophizing about the emptiness of life. They've been filled with drugs and threesomes, candy-colored visual schemes and jargon-filled banter, references to American religiosity and sudden bursts of gun violence. The openly gay, Asian-American, Southern California-bred Araki is fascinated by youthful hedonism and marginalized sexual tendencies, yet he's never been able to fully wrap himself around these provocative themes. The director has been so intent on shocking us with his portraits of subversive lifestyles that he's never taken the time to say anything original about them.

Indeed Araki's films have routinely tackled bold subjects with a frustrating lack of depth. The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) deal with teenage sexual chaos, but they're so excessively laced with Araki's trademark cheekiness that we never take the characters seriously. Both movies boast some trashily entertaining moments but are completely vacuous. Splendor (1999), with its more subdued portrayal of a three-way relationship, was undoubtedly Araki's stab at more mature filmmaking. The result was a blandly watchable but one-dimensional comedy that tiptoed around its audacious topic. Only in two of Araki's earlier films, The Living End (1992), a road movie about two HIV-positive nihilists, and Totally F***ed Up (1993), centered around a group of gay and lesbian teens, do we find genuine strokes of humor and poignancy. Unfortunately, both films are marred by a lack of rhythm and amateurish writing and acting.

Given Araki's penchant for taboo subject matter, it's hardly surprising that his new film, Mysterious Skin (in limited release May 6), deals with child molestation. What is surprising, given the thinness of his previous work, is how much of a knockout the film is. Mysterious Skin is both unflinching and deeply felt. The first striking thing about Araki's new film is how serious it is. The director has been on a 5-year hiatus, and gone are all the customary tics of jumpy editing, campy dialogue, and endless winks at the audience. Right from the start, Araki's shots are carefully composed and the tone is sober. The film has moments of sharp satirical humor--especially in its portrait of middle-American culture--but the director approaches his film's thorny central theme with startling sincerity. It's as if Araki finally understands the gravity of his subject and treats it accordingly, without his usual crutch of irony. And for the first time in his career, Araki does his subject justice. Mysterious Skin is a disturbing, but exceptionally tender exploration of adolescent male sexuality and the delusions we indulge in order to shield ourselves from our most damaging memories.

The narrative complexity of Araki's new film is another indication of the artistic leap Mysterious Skin represents for the filmmaker. This is the first of Araki's films drawn from a source other than the director's own imagination; the movie is an adaptation of Scott Heim's 1995 novel, and Heim himself shares the writing credit. It is perhaps no coincidence therefore that Mysterious Skin has an attention to storytelling conspicuously missing from Araki's other work. The film spans 10 years in the lives of two boys from the same Kansas town, deftly alternating their very different stories. The film begins in 1981, when the boys are eight years old, and Araki takes us through the formative childhood experiences that will haunt them as they grow older. One boy, the blond, runty Brian (George Webster) experiences a blackout followed by recurrent nightmares and bed-wetting, and becomes convinced that he was abducted by aliens. The other, dark-haired, sparkly-eyed Neil (Chase Ellison) is lured into a sexual relationship with his Little League coach (Bill Sage, terrific in an excruciatingly tricky role) while his distracted mother (a nice supporting turn by Elisabeth Shue) shacks up with various boyfriends. Araki shows Coach's seduction of Neil in languorous before-and-after moments that are charged with a queasy dread yet never veer towards sensationalism, while Brian's visions have a dreamlike, Lynchian quality. The director skillfully contrasts these key scenes with the banal, sitcom-ish family lives of the boys to suggest the singular, almost otherworldly impact of traumatic childhood experiences.

Brian's possible brush with aliens and Neil's erotic encounters with Coach indeed become the focal points of these boys' lives as they grow into adolescence. Sullen, handsome Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) prostitutes himself to older men and mourns the loss of his relationship with Coach, while the bookish Brian tracks down a fellow alien abductee (Mary Lynn Rajskub) in order to better understand what happened to him. When Brian's inquiries finally lead him to Neil's house, Neil has already left for New York to hustle in a bigger pond. Sex is the unifying theme of Araki's filmography, but never before has the director portrayed it with such intelligence and urgency. In one particularly witty scene, an incredulous client has to teach Neil how to use a condom; Araki pointedly hints at the illusory difference between small town and big city promiscuity. In another scene, a sad-eyed john (Billy Drago) hesitantly takes off his shirt to reveal a body covered by the spots that represent the risk Neil so recklessly ignores. In that one quiet moment, Araki captures the loneliness and danger of anonymous sex more potently than any other filmmaker I can think of. Mysterious Skin is the film in which Araki finally says something about the theme he's been dealing with--yet glossing over--throughout his whole career.

Jon Frosch is a freelance journalist and film critic based in Paris since September 2002. His work has appeared in The Pasadena Weekly, The Paris Voice, and Pariscope.