Review of Mysterious Skin (2005) by Derek K — 08 May 2011

3.5 Stars out of 4.

Gregg Araki's films are known to be personal endeavours. Though Mysterious Skin is based on the 1996 novel by Scott Heim, Araki directs it with familiarity. Yes the movie is surreal but it is conventionally drawn where characters tie together, clash, recollect, and act as if they've known each other for eons. They are constantly thinking about dreams of the past, and the uncanny effect it envelops in their lives. It is important to note these are haunted dreams. It's a pretty beautiful film. But also a tough one.

Most of the familiarity is thanks to Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He plays Neil McCormick, an adolescent male prostitute living in Kansas. His insecurity is his greatest flaw, which is the reason why he avoids forming more rigid relationships with Eric (Jeff Licon), Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg), and his mother (Elisabeth Shue). He is afraid to love these characters because love is scary and deep. He spends his time flaunting about how many men he has turned tricks with, treating sex as a quantity not a quality.

But keep in mind there are two stories. The other concerns Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet), a more self-effaced, awkward and shy boy who is obsessed with alien abduction. This fascination implies a deeper, psychological realism to Brian. The aliens represent something lingering in his mind from the past. He goes on a mission to find it.

Araki has made a film with very dark themes but a lyrical aesthetic. Araki is a lover of music and loves to imbue rhythm in his art. The soundtrack has much significance in this effective drama, playing in the background hypnotically as the camera dissolves from the one story to the other. Like a shift in dreams. What this director is so good at is changing the patterns of the film's aesthete with different colours and atmosphere. Araki is not being self-indulgent but showing the dimensions of the mind and the various moods of dreams.

What needs to be mentioned is the film centres on child abuse. That is its key theme though Mysterious Skin is not an annoyingly thematic but a work of atmosphere, tension, and psychological realism. The narrative alternates from the present and the past, mostly recollecting on the harrowing moment when Neil's baseball coach (Bill Sage) - who is never named making him a creature of memory - sexually abused him but with tender care. He would tell Neil how everything is all right and that what he did was normal. Neil, as a young boy, believed that and since then finds sex to be frivolous.

Araki astutely detaches us from the characters. More from their trauma than emotion. Araki creates stone-faced characters in lieu of melodrama, in order to avoid obviousness and objectifications in their psychologies. This detachment could better be known as "grief". Araki does not expect his characters to convey much other than dead glimpses. I understood their angst by understanding their past memories and present reactions. Such a complex choice.

But I'm leaving an important detail out. Mysterious Skin is not just a simple story of lives crossing paths. It does not believe in coincidence but progression. Events naturally occur not to only move the story forward but to also discover an emotional core - enigmatic but arresting. The two subplots are at first separated where Neil's story is the more literal tale and Brian's more metaphorical. Brian's obsessions with aliens is not just a quirky character trait. It's the most important emphasis in the film.

What alien abduction suggests is child abuse. Both are hard to understand, leave a traumatic mark, physical marks, and when it is happening you never feel quite there. You are lost in yourself, as if huddling under the blanket of your soul. Now, I've never experienced either alien abduction or sexual abuse but Araki's emotional resonance made me understand what it would be like. The use of alien abduction puts the central theme neither in euphemism or cacophony. Just a separate reality (or dream?).

Brian's story, however, is give or take. This is because Corbet just does not match the stoicism of Gordon-Levitt. This is one of the latter's greatest performances. Araki expects so much - perhaps too much - of Gordon-Levitt. His character is haunted by his past, platonic around his friends, and subtly incestuous towards his mother. All this while playing it cold. He's so complex but Gordon-Levitt has to reject his inner dimensions. He is the best part of the film.

I wanted more with Michelle Trachtenberg. She is a charming actress who has a way with ironic wit. I felt Araki misused her character, because she only finds time to be interesting when in the presence of Gordon-Levitt's Neil. She has no mind of her own. She only plays off Neil's story. Araki does better with Neil's other friend Eric who likes Neil as a friend, but admires him as a celebrity. Neil can be a strange piece of envy.

Mysterious Skin features a lot of sex. Araki, who has wrongfully been criticized for gratuitousness in his previous films like Nowhere and The Doom Generation, uses sex in Mysterious Skin like an unemotional connection between two bodies. The actual sex and penetration is not shown, and only barely implied. It suggests something else is going on here. Not just pure sex. The sex acts like an abduction, a body using another body for one-sided pleasure. It looks like a cruel experiment is being done on Neil, like an alien abduction. Just maybe.

The ending provides answers to Brian and Neil's parallel lives but their complexities keep humming with mystery. When their connection is shown, everything does not make sense for narrative but it helps us understand these characters on a personal level. When it ends, there is no tragedy or sense of rescue. The film just stops and mystery remains.

Footnote: I will mention there is one flaw in Mysterious Skin's metaphor: alien abduction is a phenomenon and child abuse isn't. It is a proven issue. That is a problem because the two are - on a literal level - apples and oranges and not exactly rational comparisons. Nevertheless, I think Araki sees them both as dreams in an unpredictable and irrational world. I'll leave it there.