Movie Review – Mysterious Skin

Mysterious Skin (2004)
Written by Scott Heim and Gregg Arakai
Directed by Gregg Araki

Growing up in the late 1980s/early 90s, I watched a lot of television. I have vivid memories of certain shows. Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by Robert Stack, was a frequent point of childhood terror that seems silly from the hindsight of an adult. America’s Most Wanted was not as consistently creepy, but a particular type of case terrified me as a child. When AWM would do a story on a child molester and/or murderer who was on the run, it scared the shit out of me. Being only 8/9 years old and homeschooled, I didn’t wholly understand what sex was, but I definitely understood that being touched inappropriately was bad. Pair this with the rampant homophobia in the culture, which was intensified even more through the lens of right-wing propaganda. I was served up in my homeschooling curriculum, and my view of gay men at this time was one of fear. I can’t say when it shifted, but by the time I was in college, I angrily defended gay people in arguments with some of my classmates at a private Christian college.

The link between child molestation and homosexuality is not the link the right wing likes to sell it as. Boys being molested does not “turn them gay.” Instead, child molesters can tell if a child is different in some way by the way their peers treat them or a complete lack of friends in the child’s life. If a child is showing that they are queer, then a child molester knows they can more easily groom them than a child who is more in line with the “acceptable” standards of society. The abused child growing up to be gay is not gay because they were abused; they were abused because the culture they live in believes it can change them by ostracizing them. Predators look for the ones who can’t keep up with the pack.

In “Mysterious Skin,” two young men share a moment in their past that neither can fully remember. In fact, they have forgotten the other person exists. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has grown up an outsider in his small Kansas hometown. He’s a sex worker who frequents a local park where grown men solicit him. Brian (Brady Corbett) is a shy, introverted young man who suffers from a strange malady where he has spontaneous nosebleeds and suffers from sudden blackouts. Brian is convinced that he was abducted and experimented on by aliens. He has flashes of memories with bright lights and floating ships in the sky, a figure standing over him as Brian lay supine on a hard surface. What links these two men is their time playing on the same Little League baseball team in 1981. They were both insecure and felt like they never belonged. Their coach (Bill Sage) was a predator who could see this and took full advantage of it.

Gregg Araki’s movies are not my favorite stories, but I always credit him for creating such interesting, evocative images. His worlds always feel heightened through their look and the characters’ behavior. While Mysterious Skin is probably his most grounded film, it still feels like an Araki picture with its unashamed sexual fluidity and focuses on young people finding themselves in a harsh, violent world. He’s one of those directors where I wonder what their life would have been like if they had leaned into cinematography over direction. Seeing them bring their distinct visual style to another filmmaker’s project would be interesting. I put Steven Spielberg in this camp as well. I don’t think his movies are that incredible, but damn if the man doesn’t know how to frame/block a shot and move a camera. 

What is most palpable in Mysterious Skin is the sense of innocence lost. Our two leads feel so utterly adrift in the world without understanding why until the film’s final scene. There’s a weird nostalgia painted over everything which works. People want to remember their childhoods with fondness; even one colored by abuse is not consumed by that. Children aren’t defined by the abuse adults do to them, but they can have parts of themselves altered by it. The small town setting helps significantly as Neil and Brian push against the physical and social boundaries of where they live. A place like this is not large enough to contain them though it tries hard to crush them.

The way Araki handles the sexual abuse is done incredibly well & with sensitivity. He manages to be explicit through implication rather than showing everything on screen. Behind the scenes, the child actors were only given partial scripts, so they were never aware of the full context of these moments. I think that works because they exude the naivety you would expect from a kid that ends up in this kind of situation. They are awkward and confused but still trying to be polite because that’s what the grown-ups have always drilled into them. 

Araki is able to frame Neil’s burgeoning sexuality and coming out as a gay man as being complicated by his abuse, not caused by it. Neil misinterprets his sexuality because of his coach, so as a teenager, he is dangerously promiscuous, just as the AIDS epidemic is rearing its head. There’s a touching moment midway through the film when Neil living in NYC with his best friend Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg). He’s decided to return to hustling to make money and goes home with an older client named Zeke (Billy Drago). Zeke turns out to have HIV manifested in horrendous open wounds along his back and arms. He doesn’t want sex with Neil; he just wants to feel a hand touch his back for a while, to have a sense of human contact. It’s a pivotal moment for Neil in moving through the fallout of his abuse, redefining intimacy from what his coach framed it and what it actually means for human connection.

Brian ends up contacting Avalyn (Mary-Lynn Rajskub), a woman he sees on a program about alien abductions. She lives a few hours away from him, and they eventually meet to share notes about what they believe happened to them. There’s a wariness from her silent father when Brian comes around, which, when you reflect on the movie, leads me to believe Avalyn has replaced sexual abuse memories with a more comforting fantasy of a threat from far away. Eventually, she becomes sexually inappropriate, with Brian reminding us of the typical abuse cycles. The person that acts as a predator, more often than not, was someone else’s prey at one time; they take on the attributes of their abuser to feel a sense of power. In Avalyn’s case, she is more innocent than this; like Neil, she misunderstands intimacy and appropriate sexual contact. Another result of abuse.

Mysterious Skin has a rough ending though it’s almost entirely played out through dialogue, our two leads recalling what happened to them as children one night long ago. The words do not hold back, and they shouldn’t. I think it is a testament to the writing that hearing these young men say out loud what was done to them is such a visceral experience. I felt the emotional pain of it, and it is a powerful thing to openly verbalize such a horrendous violation done to you. We try not to force abuse victims to testify in court if they don’t want to. There’s a horrible assault done on adult Neil near the end of the third act, which is the pinnacle of how explicit the film will get. It’s one of the most shocking rape scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie, but I completely understand why it is here. 

This is a film that makes for a tough watch. While some aspects of Araki’s filmmaking style do not click with me, I think this is a movie well worth watching if you can handle discussions and scenes of sexual abuse. It does a fantastic job of showing the line between being gay and being abused and that the latter is not a pipeline to the former. This isn’t one of the happier queer films like But I’m a Cheerleader, but there needs to be both light & dark. Queer people get abused because our society is more than happy to push them to the fringes, where the predators wait. By embracing queer children, loving them fully, and allowing them to express their identities, we keep them safer from abuse than what so many communities in America are doing currently.