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Mysterious Skin
Directed by Greg Araki
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Soon-to-be-released on video, Gregg Araki's new film Mysterious Skin-- adapted from Scott Heim's eponymous1995 novel-- is the latest instance of intelligence-failure in the way pop-culture-- even the gayish variety-- fails to address the sex lives of gay youth. Araki-- the film's director, writer, and editor-- demonizes gay sex, gay cruising, gay men, and inter-age sex with the latter presented as leading to sexlessness or erotic depravity. Where's the safe, believable, and fun middle-ground?

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Skin set out from edgy and promising beginning but ends up dragging viewers over ground that's been mined with clichéd plot-points, and characters who turn out uncomplicated and implausible.

The lives of two boys growing up in small town Kansas during the 1980s take widely divergent turns after they share a life-altering night with their baseball coach. Eight-year-old Neil McCormick grows up with his ineffectual, alcoholic mother, while his teammate Brian Lackey lives with a distanced father and a dangerously- doting mom. Neil is forever emotionally unsatisfied and takes to cruising men in the local park for a quick buck and a reassuring touch. Brian has no social life, thinks he was abducted by aliens (when he was actually performing oral sex and fist-fucking his coach), and is on an all-consuming quest to find out what really happened to him "that night."

Neil moves to New York City at 18, while Brian becomes increasingly obsessed with contacting Neil once his memory is triggered to remember the presence of another boy at his "abduction." When Neil returns at Christmas, both young men finally revisit the house of their coach and connect on a previously untapped level of understanding.

The film pulls no surprises since it's obvious from the beginning that the two boys were sexually involved with Coach together and will reconnect at the film's close. Along the way, there are scenes that rely on shock and vilification. Neil lights firecrackers in the mouth of a fellow youth as he give him head in the bushes on a Halloween night. Neil's dick is one constant open sore after being gnawed by a man in a motel room and infested with crabs after another public-park encounter. These alarming distractions simultaneously demonize the film's characters-- and the viewers who may have initially identified with them.

The film is grounded on the single-minded presumption that Neil likes older men because he was programmed that way: after all, wasn't he molested by one when he was young? Araki shamelessly exploits the stereotype that man-boy sex is necessarily and horribly life-changing. In doing so, it violates one of Mysterious Skin's chunkier implications that Coach, flawed though he be, truly loved Neill and remains maybe the only man who could fully satisfy Neil emotionally and sexually.

Sin city

Skin-the movie teaches young gay males that gay sex with older men is assuredly risky, so don't have it. Indeed, the safest sexual encounter in the film is between Neil and a man with Kaposi's sarcoma, even if the film ruins the moment. The scene has elements that admittedly are sweet and sentimental, but the man with KS is played as an unappealing, mysterious and threatening enigma. Neil seems not to know what to think, but feels most uncomfortable. But the man only wants a backrub. What if he wanted to have fucked Neil with a condom? Would Neil or the audience have been let off the hook so easily? Skin plays its part in continuing the notion that sexual contact with infected bodies is nothing but a gamble with death. Young gay men who know little about how HIV is actually spread will view this scene, unconsciously or not, as a confirmation that they themselves are inexorably implicated in a web of disease. And if Neil doesn't talk about it, why should they?

Some viewers will praise Mysterious Skin for its willingness to "go there," to be extremely bold. If Neil is not getting his dick chewed up or miserably negotiating safe sex, he is being raped. The film is seemingly unafraid to talk about sex but serves only to reinforce some of the most unquestioned codes of contemporary sexual repression.

Author Profile:  Michael Amico

Michael Amico is a junior at Dartmouth College