Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin

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Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Requiem for a Dream. Also brilliant and eye-opening and affecting and frequently cited by people as a film they “will never watch again” because it is simply too painful. Mysterious Skin is in a small circle of very-good films that you will never watch twice.

→ Depressed narrators. The narrators sound very, very sad and it reminded me of I Saw the TV Glow, which apparently took some stylistic inspiration from Mysterious Skin some twenty years later.

→ Painful and unforgettable imagery. There are a few compositions from this film that will probably be with me forever and (you’ll understand this once you watch) those kid-sized cereal boxes are now ruined for me.

Writer-director Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin is not an easy watch, but it’s a brilliant and visceral piece that you’ll never want to see again; much in the same way that Requiem for a Dream pulled no punches depicting the harms of drug addiction and so meaningfully devastated audiences that it spawned a millennial army of very big fans who, despite loving the film, refused to ever watch it again.

Giving a powerful and unvarnished performance is the film’s star, a teenage Joseph Gordon-Levitt; a role that is, to put it mildly, a bit more than a hop, skip, and a jump away from his role in Angels in the Outfield. Alongside him is a quietly haunting performance from Brady Corbet and the great Elisabeth Shue, doing the overwhelmed-and-maybe-actually-negligent-and-irresponsible mom thing.

Mysterious Skin unfolds mostly as a series of vignettes and what makes it so undeniably powerful is the imagery and vibration of it all. Most clear is that this is one of those rare films where there is a perfect marriage between sound and performance and composition and perspective and cinematography; a marriage that reflects quite favorably on the director and results in categorically unforgettable movies.

All this to say, it’s a shame it was such a moving piece because fuck if I’ll ever put myself through watching it again.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

Thoughts completely unrelated to this week’s film.

A LITTLE LOW IN THE CENTER.

There are two types of people in this world and you and I and everyone else with a functional cerebrum know it: (1) People who appreciate balloon arches, and (2) people who don’t care about or actively dislike balloon arches.

I. PEOPLE WHO APPRECIATE BALLOON ARCHES.    Imagine you walk into a party and the very first thing you see is a bright and colorful and oh-so bountiful balloon arch. It’s tasteful and monochromatic and whatever else balloon arches need to be in order to charm the senses. 

You stop for a moment before walking past the exquisitely soft arch. Do you gather the group you entered the party with to take a picture in front of it? Do you even for a moment think about who built it and the love and labor that were required to complete the job? Or do you simply smile to yourself, admiring the arch’s bosoms impossibly tied together in a preordained shape? If your answer is yes to any of the above questions, you are a person who appreciates balloon arches. And I want you to know that it is going to be okay because appreciating balloon arches is probably better than the alternative (more on that later).

Balloon arches are the most needlessly decorative element of the modern celebration because in almost all other circumstances decor is used to (1) elevate ordinary furniture or (2) replace utilitarian things with more-fun alternatives —

EXAMPLES.    Fancy linen and floral tablescapes and extravagant settings transform normal tables into lush green wondergardens. Uplighting adds a pop of color and dimension to the perimeter of a room. Cutesy relevant-to-the-theme signage replaces the obviously bland alternative, like (for the retirement party of long-haul truck operator) signs toward the bathroom that say [UNLOADING ZONE →] and toward the dance floor that say [ ← GET YOUR CDL (COMMERCIAL DANCING LICENSE].

— but balloon arches do neither. My wife recently pointed out to me that part of the balloon arch’s function is to provide a place for guests to take pictures (she loves talking to me before we fall asleep because this is the time for which I reserve these sorts of invigorating discussions). My answer: have you ever been to a good party where guests are constantly taking pictures? A party is not made better when guests take selfies (i.e. apply Kant’s Categorical Imperative philosophy). To anyone who disagrees with this, I’d like to visit a handy rule I use to evaluate my own behavior in cloudier circumstances. If everyone in X situation were doing Y, would the situation be more or less tenable? It’s a blunt instrument, but imagine yourself at a party where pretty much everyone is taking selfies with their respective groups. Is the conversation flowing? Are groovy dances being had and every perfectly balanced bite of finger foods being savored? The answer is an obvious no because you’re just standing in a big room with a bunch of phones and people actually looking at themselves. The point here is that any argument that balloon arches provide a useful function to a party and that the function is “to provide a place to take pictures” is misinformed because this is not the stuff of a good party. And any argument that they are good because they are decorative misses the point that the very best decorations elevate what’s already there and don’t just get clumsily plopped into the most accommodating corner of a room. None of this is meant to disparage those among us who appreciate balloon arches. 

An argument: Appreciating balloon arches says something about you. Even if a thing has no utility and arguably no real decorative value, you still appreciate it. You find the person that made it and compliment them on their hard work. You tell them it is beautiful because you believe it and you tell them it is additive to the experience of the party because you believe it and their heart opens up a smidge and everyone’s day is a little brighter. This is the good and necessary work that in some way we all need to do to build real community. The thankless work of appreciation is not made less valuable because the thing being appreciated might be a little trivial. Society needs people like this, even if for no other reason than to serve as a perpetual counterweight and anti-bummer compared to those who don’t care about or actively dislike balloon arches.

II. PEOPLE WHO DON’T CARE ABOUT OR ACTIVELY DISLIKE BALLOON ARCHES.    Let’s say that you stroll into the aforementioned hypothetical party and see a balloon arch and either think nothing of it or are repulsed by the arch which you consider an all-out hostile assault on the senses (ocular, mostly, but the texture and sound bothers you too). Maybe you roll your eyes at the small line of people waiting to snap a selfie under the arch and equally so at those uploading the same picture to their preferred social media platform(s). Things that are for certain: (1) you don’t seek out the builder of the balloon arch and commend them for their work and (2) you don’t derive joy from seeing the arch itself. 

If you happen to meet the person who did the hard work of blowing up balloons and maneuvering the tied ends through the endless line of plastic clips, you try your best to pretend you appreciate it; but it’s important to know that as sure as gravity eventually makes saggy skin, you cannot fake it. Because if you really don’t appreciate the balloon arch, nobody is more in tune with this fact than the person who made it. 

Though sometimes it is hired out, crafting the basic balloon arch is the perfect sort of skill-less trade that most often is delegated to a Fellow Party Guest. The FPG is a usually nice person who for some reason had recently been caught making an arch for some other gathering. Another attendee and future host of a different party tracked the arch maker down and politely asked if they’d do the same for their upcoming soiree. The FPG is kind-hearted enough to accept the task without pay and thus is at the start of a cycle of the most vicious kind — a never-ending chain in which every time they complete a balloon arch and show it off at a party inevitably another guest will ask them to make another one at a different party that hasn’t happened yet — until they unplug their portable inflation device and call it quits. 

My wife has been an FPG who was very politely duped into balloon arch artistry and she was caught up in the cycle for ten or so gatherings over the course of a few years; that is until rather recently, when she plain old grew tired of the uninteresting work and realized balloon arches were sort of a non-entity in the same way that Kiefer Sutherland is ever since 24 stopped airing. One of the situations that, by my estimate, incited her eventual abandonment of the balloon arch —

— has actually emboldened my perspective that there are few paths that lead faster to the feeling of being under-appreciated than being the volunteer balloon arch maker at a party. There’s just an especially notable incongruence between (1) how much work they are to make (a lot), (2) how many people appreciate them with their words or actions (not a lot), and (3) how legible fake-appreciation is at the function you’ve built it for (very).

It’s one of those facts of life that it’s hard to fake authentic appreciation. I submit that the comedy inherent to constructing a high-effort balloon apparatus and the balloon arches’ utter lack of interest and importance and utility and that partygoers who don’t care about or actively dislike arches fail so hard to fake their appreciation — it’s all actively discouraging people from making the arches in the first place. This all makes the people who don’t care about or actively dislike balloon arches sound really bad. 

An argument: actively disliking balloon arches says something about you, just the same as flailing around in the very-tacky opposite category. The world needs people to look at things and then ingloriously and unceremoniously proclaim “meh” because the world benefits from discernment and judgement no matter how unpleasant. The value of this sort of reaction even if it lacks detailed and constructive criticism is that it makes people want to make and do better things. Perhaps this value is even worth the cost of the flaccid energy that these Negative Nancies so often bring to otherwise perfectly great social situations.

III. WHO CARES?   The sky is blue and unprotected sex sometimes makes babies and obviously your author doesn’t like balloon arches. I’m not sure exactly what compels me to dislike balloon arches so fervently that I feel it necessary to say so in front of the balloon arch maker (more as a way to make conversation but it never seems to go well). But I do and if you ask people close to me what I think about balloon arches they will have the answer.

Though when your author reflects on it all I realize the real truth is that this is just another one of those examples of the universe sort of balancing itself out.

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