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Mysterious SkinA first viewing of Mysterious Skin leaves you numb, so complete is screenwriter and director Gregg Araki's disregard for the comforting boundaries of taste and taboo. However, unlike Araki's earlier efforts (The Living End; The Doom Generation; Nowhere), this more mature work hums with profound emotional resonance beneath its surface shock effects.
The influences that guided Araki to notoriety as a brash proponent of the early 1990s New Queer Cinema - B-movie bad taste courtesy of John Waters, glam nihilism straight from Bret Easton Ellis, dreamy atmospherics informed by David Lynch - are still to the fore. But where The Doom Generation chewed up and spat out its sexy rebel dropouts to no clear purpose, and Nowhere went - well - precisely nowhere, Mysterious Skin has a good deal more to offer than petulant behind-the-bike sheds amorality. Though subtlety is sometimes lacking, the film's haphazard mix of black humour, wistful sentiment, violence and eroticism finally amounts to one of the most affecting of many recent cinematic studies of childhood sexuality and its exploitation.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Neil McCormick, a smalltown gay hustler who gets his kicks and his income seducing the local macho men, whilst basking in the unrequited adoration of various punked-up acolytes. Neil's contemporary and former Little League team-mate Brian (Corbet) possesses no such precocious savoir-faire - he's a meek, bespectacled mama's boy whose main interest in life is the study of UFOs. Brian's obsession stems from an enigmatic childhood incident which he chooses to attribute to an alien abduction. Neil, meanwhile, remains defined by the first great love of his life - his baseball coach, who seduced him when he was nine years old. There's no reason for the two boys' paths to cross again - until Brian, through a meeting with a fellow UFO enthusiast, becomes determined to fill the gap in his childhood memories. Neil, it transpires, can help with that.
Sexually traumatised adult characters are no novelty, of course; nor are explicit sex scenes between adult characters in any gender combination. Where Araki forces us far beyond our comfort zone is in his use of his child characters - and child actors. Though the flashbacks to Neil and Brian's childhood experiences with 'Coach' (Sage) aren't physically explicit, they do tread a horrifyingly fine line. Indeed, one's suspension of disbelief is frequently ruptured by the troubling question of what exactly child actors George Webster and Chase Elliot thought they were doing and saying.
That said, this risky approach lends the film's sexual content a devastating immediacy that could not have been achieved through mere allusion and metaphor. The film's boldest and most valuable argument - realised through the characterisation of the young Neil - is that a child's sexuality can be active without being up for grabs. Our society has considerable difficulty with the notion that sexual curiosity and innocence are not mutually exclusive - that sexual abuse can be complicated by an element of naive collusion, and an abuser can come in the guise of a love object. Araki's film is one of few to confront that taboo without lapsing into titillation or thoughtless outrage.
As the older Neil and Brian, Gordon-Levitt and Corbet embody with grace and empathy two textbook responses to childhood trauma - the former a hardened sexual predator who has taken his power back by exploiting his own body, the latter a bumbling innocent protected by denial. (The actors' own histories inform their work: Gordon-Levitt is known for the cute kid role in the sitcom 'Third Rock From the Sun', while Corbet played the teen lead in Thunderbirds. Neil's friend Wendy, meanwhile, is played by Buffy veteran Michelle Trachtenberg.)
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