Christopher Bradley | The Violation / 2013

male fetishes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Bradley (screenwriter and director) The Violation / 2013 [10 minutes]

 

For a film about teenagers, Christopher Bradley’s The Violation begins with as a strange of scene as one might wish, wherein we watch the neighborhood 17-year-old boy Oscar Heim (Shayne Topp) laying in his bed as he fetishizes a bikini bathing suit strapped to his pillow. To rachet up the oddness of the scene significantly, director Bradley’s camera pulls back to reveal that we are watching this scene through a telescope belonging to 15-year-old Mickey Dougherty (Slade Pearce), who is spying from the house next door on his crush, Oscar. Meanwhile, Mickey’s sister Tina (Chelsea Ricketts) finds that her swimming suit is missing and wonders whether her mother has forgotten it on the clothes line.

     The next morning, as Mickey empties his compost bag at the border of the Heim’s lawn, he notices Oscar burning the bikini pieces on his barbecue. As critic Hal C. F. Astell comments in his review of the film, “This is the sort of thing that's joked about in every frat house movie ever made, but watching it feels a little more freaky.”

     Bradley’s film is a bit odder in other ways as well. Despite Mickey’s hopeless love of Oscar, it is clear that the older boy wants nothing to do with him, not only because of the age difference, but as we quickly discover, the class difference between the two neighboring families. The Heims, with a swimming pool in their backyard, are obviously rather wealthy. Whereas, the Dougherty home inside looks more like a cheap boarding house.

     And we soon discover that the reason Mickey is even in their yard is that he works as a lawnboy for the Heim family. As he announces the completion of his tasks, Mrs. Heim (Beth Grant) wonders if in a few days when she and her family will be attending her daughter’s wedding, whether he, Tina, and his mother might not wish to watch the house for them, since, as she puts it, burglars often read wedding notices in the paper and know who won’t be home. He and his family could use their pool and watch their satellite-dish TV which plays on a largest screen available.

      Who could turn such an offer down? Well, Tina for one, who’s offended that they couldn’t ask them to the wedding but find them suitable only to care for their house. As for Oscar, she corrects her mother, he didn’t ask her out on a date, but is a party drunk and asked her if she wanted to make out. But Mrs. Dougherty (Elaine Hendrix) has no intention of missing out on the special broadcasts from the satellite-dish and Mickey is obviously fascinated by the opportunity to see the house from the inside where the object of his desire lives.

      The condescension continues when they arrive as Mrs. Heim describes the guest bathroom, the television and the pool, suggesting that everything they might want exists “right here in this little section of the house,” making it quite clear that the private living room and bedrooms of her home are to be unoccupied territory.

       Before they even leave, Janice Dougherty is busy watching a football game on their television, while soon after Mickey tries out their pool and, when coming upon Oscar’s sandals sitting at pool’s edge, caresses them as carefully as Oscar had his sister’s bikini. By the time he reenters the house with the sandals on his feet, his mother is fast asleep, and he cannot resist creeping up to Oscar’s bedroom, opening up his closet, and pulling out a pair of his pants and a pair of boots.

       In Oscar’s bathroom, he stuffs the pants with tissues, sits it on the closed bathroom stool and rubs his hands slowly up and down the pant legs in a far more graphic representation of his loved one than Oscar could have imagined from Tina’s pillow-bound bikini.

       A loud noise comes from downstairs, and when he rushes down, he discovers his mother, who has evidently had far too much to eat and drink from the friendly fridge, has thrown up. He hurriedly cleans it up, fixes the lamp she broke, and gives her a hug. But it is too late to retrieve his waist-down shrine to the male form from the upstairs bathroom before the Heims return. Mrs. Heim enters, inspecting the place, as Mickey apologizes for the broken lamp. His mother has obviously gone back home. Before he leaves, however, he rushes upstairs to take care of the pants only to discover Oscar already standing in the bathroom stunned by what sits before him.

       The next day, Mickey observes Oscar burning the boots into which the pants were stuffed. “Just because I touched them?” he asks in utter disbelief. “You did it to her.”

       Oscar’s only line in the movie says everything about him and the society in which we live, “It’s not the same thing.”

        But the 15-year-old Mickey has the most profound line of the film, “Why not?”

        All Oscar can do is turn in his direction, stare dreadfully into his face, and stalk off.

      Both boys have violated another person and both are equally culpable for their acts. But society seems to suggest that one is an innocent teenage prank of sexual desire, while the other is a horrible perversion against the human race.

       This film would be perfect on a short bill with the somewhat lighter films I review above in this volume, Evan Roberts’ 33 Teeth (2011) and Mathilde Bayle’s Le maillot de bain (The Swimming Trunks) (2013).

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).