Gregg Araki | Mysterious Skin / 2004, 2005 US

confusing love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregg Araki (screenwriter, based on a work by Scott Heim, and director) Mysterious Skin / 2004, 2005 US

 

A perfect double bill of the gay cinema of abuse might be Marcel Gisler’s 1998 work Fögi Is a Bastard and Araki’s Mysterious Skin, very similar in some ways, except that the early work is about an older boy who willingly enters into an abusive gay relationship perceiving it as a kind of love, while the New Queer Cinema director Araki focuses on pre-adolescent boys, in particular, Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing the older version and Chase Ellison playing the younger boy) who also sees it as wanted attention and love instead of abuse. In both cases the affects our similar, both the young boy in Gisler’s work and Neil becoming teenage prostitutes whose future as adults seems unsure and confused. Both boys survive and realize their misunderstandings, although in a strange way still remaining vaguely in love with their abusers.

    The second figure in Araki’s film, Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) is far more tortured, unable to even remember the one evening of abuse he suffered when Neil introduced him to the Little League baseball coach, which resulted in him being found under a home crawl space, his nose bleeding. Unlike Neil, who immediately identified as a homosexual, Brian seems to have no sexual identity, left with only the feeling that at sometime he has been abducted, perhaps, even by aliens. For all the difficulties of Neil’s life, a few of which I will later recount, at least he is fully cognizant of what has happened to him, and able to even know how he was involved, even if he cannot escape the vortex into which those experiences have thrown him. Brian, whose parents are most neglectful, his father finally leaving the relationship, remembers only a vague rainy afternoon when, after no one picked him up, he awoke in the crawl space, with no memory of the intervening five hours.

    Although there is no question of the abusiveness of Fögi in Gisler’s film, his relationship with the younger boy can still be seen as a kind of confused attempt at love turned dangerous with his use of alcohol and drugs. In Araki’s version the coach is a textbook case of an adult pedophile whose selfish involvement of these young boys in his sexual activities basically destroys their lives, even if Neil confuses the feelings with love.

    In Neil’s case, the boy living with an irresponsible mother whose love of her son almost borders, at times, on the incestual, the coach simply encouraged a young boy’s own sexual confusions, providing him with an older friend living in a house filled with foods and candies loved by children—one might almost say like the witch in Hansel and Gretel—and someone perfectly willing to play child-like games, even tape recording him shouting obscenities. After a ridiculous event of emptying, in a child-like fury, entire boxes of rainbow-colored Fruit Loops over their heads, he engages in sex like it were simply a natural part of childish misbehavior. For Neil it feels good, with him finally at the center of someone’s attention, unlike his father who shows his disappointment with both his son and wife as he scowls away from the house. Neil’s later involvement with prostitution with older men leads almost naturally from his short involvement with the coach before the man leaves town, now clearly fearful that word might get out about his dangerous activities.

    Fortunately, for Neil, he has very early on bonded with a fellow student, Wendy Peterson (Michelle Trachtenberg as the adult and Riley McGuire as the child), almost as wild as he is, to whom he can tell the truth and share his sense of alienation.

     When she moves to New York City, he eventually follows, she having found a job and trying finally to ween him away from the big city horrors of male prostitution. Two events, one in which he is severely beaten by a john and another in which he meets up with a man dying of AIDS who simply hires him to touch him, no sex involved finally bring Neil to his senses, as he finds a job in a subway shop and begins his slow climb back into some normalcy, with Wendy’s help.

    Brian has no such possibility, since he experiences only a void, a strange hole in time that he somehow knows is crucial in comprehending who and what he is. Reading about individuals who claim to have been abducted by aliens, often with a strange blue light and a total loss of memory, he increasingly believes he may have suffered a similar experience, and contacts a young woman, Avalyn Friesen (Mary Lynn Rajskub) who claims just such an abduction.

    She writes him back, inviting her to come visit her not so far away in a nearby Kansas town. From what we see of her isolated conditions and the appearance of her almost mad-looking father, not at all appreciative of his daughter having visitors, she may have been abused by her dad, veiling the experience with the alien story. Araki, however, is not interested in pursuing her experiences, and his film makes no such assumptions. What is important is that Brian finally finds his version of Neil’s Wendy Peterson, and the two bond; she invites him back to witness a dead cow she has discovered, believing that it too is the product of alien acts. Strangely, she encourages him to feel up into its severed intestines which Neil does with a great sense of fascination.

    But when Avalyn suddenly shows up at his doorstep with the secret intentions of making love to him, he is horrified. What the childhood experience has left him, perhaps, is a kind of horror of sex, particularly with a female.

    Brian has also been encouraged to reach into his dreams, in which a young boy in a baseball uniform often appears. Through a bit of research, he is able to find a picture of the baseball team, spotting a boy who looks vaguely like the one in his dream, Neil McCormick.

     Coincidentally, Neil has promised to his mother to return home for Christmas, and does so, just after the incident I mention above, when he is beaten by a client. He tells his mother that he has been beaten and robbed at the airport.

   And finally, when the two boys meet up, Brian begging Neil to help him remember what has happened, the slightly older boy takes him to the house, now owned by others, where the coach once lived. Since the family is out, it being the Christmas season, the boys break in a back way, and Neil shows him the room where everything happened. With Neil’s help Brian is able to restore his memory, how the boys visited the coach together, where encouraged to have sex with one another, and finally were asked to fistfuck the coach, which explains Brian’s fascination with innards of the cow. Finally, he realizes the awful truth, laying his head down in tears on Neil’s lap as carolers, hearing people within the house, begin to sing “Silent Night.”

     If Gisler’s work allows some equivocation regarding Fögi’s behavior, Araki makes it perfectly clear how the abusing coach has helped to destroy these young boys’ early lives. We can only hope that they can now begin to heal themselves. But the crime is just that, childhood abuse that can effect children far beyond their formative years. And what isn't brought up again in the story, is another scene in which Neil equally abused Brian on Halloween by setting off fireworks held in the boy's mouth; the abused often go on to abuse others as well.

    The director was also careful to let all his audiences know that the younger child actors were not present in any of the scenes with suggested abuse or spoke of the adult themes of the cinema. What he did was create two scripts, one completely innocent with daily proofs approved by the children’s parents. Their actions, however, often accorded with the ones he used in the different context of the film itself and were slipped into the more complex adult story, without any direct interchange with the actual dialogue.

     Critics praised the film for its brilliant handling of such difficult scenes, and psychologists such as Richard Gartner proclaimed it as an accurate portrayal of the long-term effects of abused boys.      

     To me the work appeared just a little too ploddingly obvious in its inevitable spin into where the abuse left these children as their grew into young men. Of the two, I found Neil’s trajectory to be far more interesting and intelligent than Brian’s whose current sexuality is left vague, and whose character left me a bit confused of how the void in time and his recurring nose bleeds could play such a dominating role in his youthful life. Perhaps Araki could have given him a bit more complexity instead of letting him simply wander off into the land of hoaxes.

     It still, however, remains a strong piece of film-making daring to engage a subject most directors would not dare. Once more, I encourage the double viewing with Gisler’s film which brings even a clearer focus of the variances of abuse.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).