Mysterious Skin | How Gregg Araki Explores Trauma

|Spoilers for Mysterious Skin| 

It would be unfair of me to not warn people of the above as, as all of us who have seen it know, once you’ve seen Mysterious Skin there is no coming back, it’s the kind of films that revelations are so heart-aching and gut wrenching that to spoil them would be a disservice to anyone even vaguely interested in the film I am about to discuss. 

Mysterious Skin, adapted from the novel by Scott Heim, is largely considered to be Director Gregg Araki’s best work, it’s a truly brilliant, dark and unique film that just so happens to be one of cinema's best explorations of trauma. Araki’s film opens as a dream - slow motion abstraction. The opening credits on an out of focus white background, broken only by an increasing blur of colour that streaks down the frame. The moment is almost angelic, the title song (Slowdrive’s cover of Syd Barrett's “Golden Hair”) an almost ethereal mix of electric and airy, heavenly vocals - both beautiful and eerie. The camera pans slowly down, pulling the colour into focus - hoops of multicoloured cereal that rain from the sky - as it topples onto a young boy's hair, an anointing almost, a moment as absurd as it is spiritual. The opening would be beautiful were it not for the disconcerting lack of context, as ethereal as it is something feels off. 

This dreamlike opening stands in stark contrast to the themes and tone of the film. It’s a film about sexual abuse and the ways in which its survivors deal with their trauma. Exploring through two entirely different but equally engrossing characters the damaging impact of such abuse and the lies those affected tell themselves to find comfort in a life that has been marred by such early trauma. Arakki choses to open the film, however, in a way so emblematic of the state of blissful ignorance in which the film begins, a state in which childhood fantasies and delusion mask a horrible truth. Though Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon Levitt) understands entirely the abuse he suffered, its true damage on his soul remains hidden to him: as an adult he becomes an empty shell of a man, but keeps living as if all is okay - because, to him, everything is. He does not escape into grand delusions of alien abduction and conspiracy like Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet), he lives a lie less obvious but a lie he still lives. He romanticises his abuser (his coach he once had a crush on), makes their relationship out to be special, it’s shocking in his opening narration how little he condemns the acts that damaged him to his core.

Brian, on the other hand, knows nothing of his abuse at the coach's hand. He buried it down deep and cloaked it in an obsession - believing he was abducted by aliens as a child. Unlike Neil he’s lived a life of innocence, he’s never truly grown up, never truly desired to leave his home, Neil becomes a male prostitute of sorts whilst Brian’s experiences lend him a crippling fear of intimacy that he cannot work out. As the film delves deeper into these truths, as Brian’s trauma is slowly uncovered and Neils reaches a horrifically violent reckoning they are both forced to return to the site of their abuse and confront, together, the truth of their childhood. 

It is in the counterpoint between opening and closing that Mysterious Skins true descent into tragedy can be measured. The contrast of light to dark. Dream to nightmare. The film that opens with a dreamlike scene of innocence ends with an encroaching darkness. The films final shot is one of the all time greatest, as an angelic chorus begins the camera pulls away from Brian and Neil they grow smaller and smaller, a darkness growing around them as they sit all alone in the world, their lives will never be the same, they can never go back, never undo the past but they find comfort in knowing that at least now they share the darkness with each other. 

“I wished with all my heart that we could just leave this world behind. Rise like two angels in the night and magically... disappear.”

Written by Jonah Prisk | IG: @jonahprisk