Whenever a piece of media tackles a dark and difficult topic--from genocide to pedophilia--it runs the risk of crossing the line from statement--"Here is the issue; here are the conditions"--to glorification. Mysterious Skin with Joseph Gordon-Levitt is, unfortunately, a good example of crossing the line.
Sometimes, the push across the line is obvious. The Dirty Dozen appears to run over the line entirely on purpose in a deliberate attempt to shock and provoke--and is an entirely disturbing movie. Unfortunately, Mysterious Skin's crossing of the line seems to mostly be the act of an entirely oblivious editor.
The story focuses on the sexual abuse of two boys by their Little League coach. When grown, the boys continue to suffer fall-out from the abuse. The one boy, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, becomes a teen hustler, full of conflicted feelings that range from self-hatred to a pathetic desire to please. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is, naturally, astonishing.
The second boy, played by Brady Corbet, grows up believing that as a child, he was abducted by aliens. Some reviewers point out, rather caustically, that trauma does not occur in this way. Despite purveyors of fugue states and amnesia as plot, people don't actually forget their pasts. I agree. But I think the movie does a tolerable job showing that the young man does remember--he is trying desperately to distract himself with an alternative narrative.
The story comes to a climax when the second boy tracks down the first to get some kind of closure. Plot-wise and character-wise this works since Gordon-Levitt's character has experienced his own arc and is ready to share.
Unfortunately, this is also where the movie, already teetering on the line, crosses it.
The movie intelligently avoids any direct closure--the pedophile has moved away and the boys are never able to confront him directly. This is smart since the movie is about their internal troubles, not a mystery about what happened (we can easily guess). Except--
Suddenly, the movie isn't about them anymore. At all. It is about the pedophile's motivations. Hmmm, what needs was he satisfying?
And the yuck factor grows.
I'm not a huge fan of The Lovely Bones, but I do consider the end of that book to be more genuine. The ghost sees her abuser/killer as a pathetic, wretched old man living a kind of hole-in-the-ground existence.
If the director/editor of Mysterious Skin couldn't stand the idea of being, good heavens, so upbeat, the camera still could have stayed with the Joseph Gordon-Levitt character.
And, to be honest (which the end of the movie isn't), a lack of upbeatness is not something to strut about. People do survive abuse. I realize we belong to a society that insists that nobody ever gets over anything because we are Freud's children and think the universe centers around our pain. But actually, it doesn't, and people do. Again, the editing here would have been quite simple: at the end, show the boys leaving the house and climbing into the car with their friend Eric (played by the astonishing Jeffrey Licon--see The Closer, "Junk in the Trunk") and driving away. No dialog. Just movement.
The lack of such a simple scene pushes the movie--despite strong acting and, if one cares about this sort of thing, a strong message--into a glorification of horrific behavior.
And it could so easily have been prevented with decent editing.
In sum: the line from explanation to glorification occurs when the director and editor take their eye off the ball--the thesis is lost. Instead of staying with the point or point of view or topic or characters, the director and editor get distracted into showing off: Here's all this other stuff I could talk about/show you! The focus is lost. And the glorification begins.
Note: This isn't a romance post, obviously. However, I posted here since I encountered this movie as a recommendation if one also watched Yossi & Jagger. This, unfortunately, is what I mean by the director/film editor/audience being very confused.
