Mysterious Skin

Yey, chris: I think I might have run long and hard after him too – I assume he was HOT…

Well, what I really came to write was my shock at Rimmer recycling 18-month-old material here. I’m also a bit shocked at how willing he was to buy into this piece of anti-paedo propaganda. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is positively mouthwatering, it is hard to do anything but drool at the thought of being connected in some practical way with his smooth gorgeousness, and the film has plenty of food for thought here: as hinted at by the reviewer from Urban Cinefile, it’s pulsing with veracity and a bitter sweet naturalism which make the nekkid scenes far more erotic than a mere porno movie.

No, of course, the fundamental problem is its complete bungling of what sex is all about. It’s not that I would expect any better of what is, after all, a relatively mainstream movie – it even got as far as my local video library, which is saying something. No, my disappointment is that somebody I respect as much as Rimmer should be so pleased with it. He criticizes only that the scenes of abuse are unerotic, and the coach ugly, but surely the rot is far deeper than that.

Received opinion on the mysterious attraction between males is that it’s grossly unnatural, and that the taste for it is one passed on, like some disease, from one generation to the next. ‘Normal’ gay men, of the sort that get married and have a pet poodle, may nowadays claim that their condition is a genetic one, but devotees of intergenerational sex are still expected make do with being victims of abuse, sorry on that one.

Certainly the coach, the abuser, is portrayed as an ogre, a ‘groomer’, the very worst kind of exploiter – in particular note how he uses young Neil not only as a sex toy, but also as a sidekick helping him to seduce other boys: every mother’s worst nightmare. No wonder Neil’s life was screwed if he imagined that this poisonous charade had anything to do with love and affection.

Paul here celebrates the fact that Neil is attracted to older men, specifically preferring to have sex with them, and turning this preference to commercial advantage in his hustling activities. There are boys, and young men, who are turned on by baldness and by pot-bellies: they are, however, relatively few and far between, and most of us would consider them to be slightly strange: Neil is not like us, and we would not expect, or imagine, or hope, our children to be like him. We might fantasize about meeting him at a swimming pool, we might have a friend who met a boy like that once, there may even be one or two of us who were such a boy, but he is generally something out-of-the-ordinary, he is Different From Us: not even born weird, he was traumatized into it by being made to fist-fuck the person he most respected in the world, and who wouldn’t be?

Why am I carping like this? Because sex isn’t out-of-the-ordinary, and it happens to people just like us, to people just like everybody else. For boys approaching, reaching, just past puberty, for much of their waking and sleeping lives, they are ruled by a titanic force located in their underpants. This will often overrule anything and everything their brain, parents, friends, school tells them, and take them on a scary and thrilling roller-coaster ride, inducing them to do all sorts of things that they might have difficulty explaining in a court of law, or even to themselves. Sex with available girls, boys, women, men, animals, trees, anything that comes to hand. Past 16, the force subsides, though for many men the roller-coaster continues, sometimes openly, but usually secretly, but for most men, the memory fades, just as so many memories of childhood fade, to be replaced by denial. In this respect, Brian, the ugly one, the boy who forgot his boyhood sexual encounters, represents normality: most middle-aged men will have completely forgotten circle jerks and all the other ’stuff’ they did as boys, won’t they? Certainly, any suggestion that they’d had sex with a man and enjoyed it would seem just as outrageous as claiming they’d been abducted by aliens, wouldn’t it?

Steve – thanks for clarifying the matter of distribution: it would seem that the film got widely distributed because it appealed to relatively mainstream audiences, rather than the reverse. I wouldn’t deny that it’s a likable film: not a dry Kleenex in the house.

I don’t have a problem with films portraying unusual situations – let’s face it, a film about a typical working day in my life would not be worth going to see. But then, very few films are made about intergenerational sex at all – even to tell lies about it is bad karma. Of the few that are made, only a small minority show any sensitivity or empathy at all with man or boy – the only one most people seem to be able to think of is For a Lost Soldier, though obviously there are others. In general, public morals demand the reinforcement of stereotypes, and clear, black-and-white portrayals of demonic offenders and hapless victims, which is pretty much what Mysterious Skin delivers, albeit in a very sophisticated way.

The coach is a cartoon ogre: it would be interesting to know from real life police records how many paedophiles have ever been convicted, or even accused, of getting a boy to fist-fuck them. Those of us who weep for Neil in his lifelong loneliness will, like him, curse the truly despicable coach for exploiting it, and/or for making him that way. Sports coaches, and others who might wish to pull back their own curtain of amnesia, should welcome this film as much as turkeys should welcome Christmas.