Memories and Fears
Life is scary. Somehow or other, the sum of our memories and experiences have come to shape the person we are today. Like it or not, everything goes in. The good times spent with friends and family. The embarrassments and awkwardness of adolescence. The loss of people you loved and people you knew. And for some of us, the traumas of the past, the ghosts of the dead.
I've had some fucked-up shit happen to me before, and I guess trauma might be more common than we think (and please, don't try to guess at my past, even if you were part of it. There are parts of me you don't know, and will probably never know. But isn't the same with everyone?). But what's different is how these experience shape our lives and guide it down its eventual path. I can't honestly say with certainty that the path I'm following is the best one, and who knows what will happen in the future? But I know I'm gonna try my hardest to be the kind of person I want to be, and not something predetermined by fate or experience. Except sometimes they might turn out to be more difficult to run away from than anyone thought.
Take the protagonists in Mysterious Skin, for example.
Neil and Brian have something in common - one day in the summer of their eight year-old lives that they were sexually abused as a pair by their baseball coach. Neil was the boy-slut who half-seduces the man, Brian the innocent who was induced into their sex games by sheer bad luck (or fate, if you want). Jump forward ten years: Neil is now a teenage prostitute, turning tricks for both kicks and money, and Brian a too-serious student convinced he was abducted by aliens during the time of the incident.
The film takes these painfully flawed, hideously scarred individuals and examines them with a tenderness often bereft from other similarly-themed films. We're not looking at freaks here. We're looking at two basically decent people trying to come to terms with their lives. There's an emptiness in Neil, a black hole that sucks affection and feeling from the people that care for him. But he can never give anything back. The cockiness and recklessness is the facade he hides behind, even though he's completely certain that it's who he really is. He doesn't realize it, but he is incapable of sympathizing with, much less loving, anyone else. Then there's Brian. Sweet, gentle, earnest Brian, whose battered psyche has created an alternate reality to protect himself from what he cannot hope to understand, a boy-man who is basically living a lie. But the funny thing about lies is that we always try to get to the bottom of them, even if we are the unconscious perpetrators of these very lies.
Both their pain is expressed physically. Neil in fucking and being fucked by strangers, and Brian in the seizures he still experiences when he tries to remember what happened. But through the physical, they will eventually confront the emotional. Neil needs a brutal rape to make him run home, and Brian, through specific physical triggers, pieces together his path to Neil step by step. Finally, as they come full circle in the coach's old house, Neil holds Brian and comforts him, really connecting with another person for what is probably the first time in his life. Physicality and the emotion finally come together for the both of them - Neil finds the beginning of his path towards some semblance of humanity, and Brian confronts the demons he hid away within himself.
But it's not only the boys that are looking for redemption and humanity. Even one of Neil's johns, an old man coming on to him one night, is as well. As he takes off his shirt in his clinical-looking bedroom, his torso displays all the signs of Kaposi's sarcoma. And all he wants is to be touched. Not sex. Just the touch of a fellow human being. Shunned by all of society, he just wants to be treated like anyone else. A simple back rub is all it takes to bring him to sobbing ecstacy. How unbearably sad that scene was.
I think I kind of lost my train of thought somewhere in the middle of writing about the movie. Oh well.
The best movies make us look within ourselves and re-examine who we are fundamentally. This Crash does, at least for me.
The racist white cop with an ailing father, who bullies yet displays great humanity within the same day.
His upright young partner who slips into the most primal of fears in crisis.
The old Arab shopkeeper, despised by many and driven to irrational, horrifying revenge.
The politician who plays race cards for his own benefit.
His minority-hating wife who finds kindness where she least expects it.
The black detective who can't decide where his allegiance lies.
The black youths who ironically perpetuate the exact stereotypes they're fighting against.
The Asians who complain about being treated like shit, yet possess such cruelty towards their own kind.
And more.
Yes, it is really convenient, how most of the characters have life-changing epiphanies and role reversals. But at the heart of it all is this: Race matters. Like it or not, it matters. But what can we do to make it better for everyone?
It makes you take a good hard look at yourself. How often have you perpetuated stereotypes? How would you behave in a situation like this? Can you honestly say that you will be colorblind in a crisis? Can you force yourself not to react the way you've been taught since childhood?
It's true that children are born colorblind. They learn racism from those around them. And it's much harder to unlearn that once they realize they were wrong. You may claim to be the most unbiased person in the world. But when it's the dead of night and someone from an "unfriendly" race is walking behind you, don't you quicken your step? What if he approaches you? Will you immediately react with hostility?
I asked myself if I would react the same way if I was in the young cop's situation. And my honest answer is: I don't know.
I don't know if my rationality will win over my primal fears - irrational fears which were taught me at a young, impressionable age. But I certainly hope I'll be able to do the right thing.
And as the freak snow falls over the nighttime Los Angeles landscape over the end credits, you get the feeling that somehow, there might just be that tiny glimmer of hope. If we all try hard enough.
End Note:
For those of you who don't like essays, here's a more conventional review.
Mysterious Skin is a stunning heartbreaker that never lapses into bad melodrama. Fine, fine performances, especially from Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Crash, even though things might be a little too nicely wrapped-up, is extremely tightly-written. It's also got fine, fine performances, and more than a few heartbreaking moments.
I love them both. Now leave me alone.
I've had some fucked-up shit happen to me before, and I guess trauma might be more common than we think (and please, don't try to guess at my past, even if you were part of it. There are parts of me you don't know, and will probably never know. But isn't the same with everyone?). But what's different is how these experience shape our lives and guide it down its eventual path. I can't honestly say with certainty that the path I'm following is the best one, and who knows what will happen in the future? But I know I'm gonna try my hardest to be the kind of person I want to be, and not something predetermined by fate or experience. Except sometimes they might turn out to be more difficult to run away from than anyone thought.
Take the protagonists in Mysterious Skin, for example.
Neil and Brian have something in common - one day in the summer of their eight year-old lives that they were sexually abused as a pair by their baseball coach. Neil was the boy-slut who half-seduces the man, Brian the innocent who was induced into their sex games by sheer bad luck (or fate, if you want). Jump forward ten years: Neil is now a teenage prostitute, turning tricks for both kicks and money, and Brian a too-serious student convinced he was abducted by aliens during the time of the incident.
The film takes these painfully flawed, hideously scarred individuals and examines them with a tenderness often bereft from other similarly-themed films. We're not looking at freaks here. We're looking at two basically decent people trying to come to terms with their lives. There's an emptiness in Neil, a black hole that sucks affection and feeling from the people that care for him. But he can never give anything back. The cockiness and recklessness is the facade he hides behind, even though he's completely certain that it's who he really is. He doesn't realize it, but he is incapable of sympathizing with, much less loving, anyone else. Then there's Brian. Sweet, gentle, earnest Brian, whose battered psyche has created an alternate reality to protect himself from what he cannot hope to understand, a boy-man who is basically living a lie. But the funny thing about lies is that we always try to get to the bottom of them, even if we are the unconscious perpetrators of these very lies.
Both their pain is expressed physically. Neil in fucking and being fucked by strangers, and Brian in the seizures he still experiences when he tries to remember what happened. But through the physical, they will eventually confront the emotional. Neil needs a brutal rape to make him run home, and Brian, through specific physical triggers, pieces together his path to Neil step by step. Finally, as they come full circle in the coach's old house, Neil holds Brian and comforts him, really connecting with another person for what is probably the first time in his life. Physicality and the emotion finally come together for the both of them - Neil finds the beginning of his path towards some semblance of humanity, and Brian confronts the demons he hid away within himself.
But it's not only the boys that are looking for redemption and humanity. Even one of Neil's johns, an old man coming on to him one night, is as well. As he takes off his shirt in his clinical-looking bedroom, his torso displays all the signs of Kaposi's sarcoma. And all he wants is to be touched. Not sex. Just the touch of a fellow human being. Shunned by all of society, he just wants to be treated like anyone else. A simple back rub is all it takes to bring him to sobbing ecstacy. How unbearably sad that scene was.
I think I kind of lost my train of thought somewhere in the middle of writing about the movie. Oh well.
The best movies make us look within ourselves and re-examine who we are fundamentally. This Crash does, at least for me.
The racist white cop with an ailing father, who bullies yet displays great humanity within the same day.
His upright young partner who slips into the most primal of fears in crisis.
The old Arab shopkeeper, despised by many and driven to irrational, horrifying revenge.
The politician who plays race cards for his own benefit.
His minority-hating wife who finds kindness where she least expects it.
The black detective who can't decide where his allegiance lies.
The black youths who ironically perpetuate the exact stereotypes they're fighting against.
The Asians who complain about being treated like shit, yet possess such cruelty towards their own kind.
And more.
Yes, it is really convenient, how most of the characters have life-changing epiphanies and role reversals. But at the heart of it all is this: Race matters. Like it or not, it matters. But what can we do to make it better for everyone?
It makes you take a good hard look at yourself. How often have you perpetuated stereotypes? How would you behave in a situation like this? Can you honestly say that you will be colorblind in a crisis? Can you force yourself not to react the way you've been taught since childhood?
It's true that children are born colorblind. They learn racism from those around them. And it's much harder to unlearn that once they realize they were wrong. You may claim to be the most unbiased person in the world. But when it's the dead of night and someone from an "unfriendly" race is walking behind you, don't you quicken your step? What if he approaches you? Will you immediately react with hostility?
I asked myself if I would react the same way if I was in the young cop's situation. And my honest answer is: I don't know.
I don't know if my rationality will win over my primal fears - irrational fears which were taught me at a young, impressionable age. But I certainly hope I'll be able to do the right thing.
And as the freak snow falls over the nighttime Los Angeles landscape over the end credits, you get the feeling that somehow, there might just be that tiny glimmer of hope. If we all try hard enough.
End Note:
For those of you who don't like essays, here's a more conventional review.
Mysterious Skin is a stunning heartbreaker that never lapses into bad melodrama. Fine, fine performances, especially from Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Crash, even though things might be a little too nicely wrapped-up, is extremely tightly-written. It's also got fine, fine performances, and more than a few heartbreaking moments.
I love them both. Now leave me alone.
posted by cinewhore @ 4:30 AM
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gimme some mindfuckery
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