Mysterious Skin (TW)

 TRIGGER WARNING: This movie was triggering for me and I'm going to talk a bit about sexual assault (SA), but not too graphically, mostly about my thoughts and experience watching it from a survivor's perspective. I wanted to give you a heads up in case that will be difficult for you. Take care of yourself! 

   

    So I have a bit of a history of thinking I can handle possibly triggering things because of my desire to heal and learn and then not being able to handle them well at all. Although another kid did get me into a weird semi-consensual sexual experience when I was a kid (sort of like the stuff Neil did to/with other boys but not quite as intense and nonconsensual?), most of my trauma comes from assault as a teenager, so I thought this movie about childhood SA would not be as bad for me. Long story short, I was wrong, and I had a really horrible afternoon/evening/night after finishing it! So here are my thoughts. 

    To start, I deeply appreciated and enjoyed our discussion about trauma porn in class. I liked how we thought about the nuances and complications with trying to represent trauma without romanticizing it, and how to represent trauma in a way that is productive and not just gratuitous and pornographic. I also liked how it was intersectional, how we thought about the trauma of racism and the trauma of SA, and discussed depictions of both in media. Because I'm a white SA survivor, I'm going to talk about this movie from that perspective, but there is a lot in the movie and in our conversations to contribute to the other side as well. 

    My experience of this movie was not all horrible. The beginning was difficult and seemed very gratuitous. It made me realize that my ideal movie about trauma would depict it in the form of flashbacks and not just opening the movie with super intense depictions of the traumatic incident. After that, I was okay for a while. The middle/main part of the movie between the initial incidents and the final violent SA of Neil I thought had some pretty powerful depictions of trauma that made me feel seen. I thought the editing of the flashbacks and the nightmares, with the atmospheric, dream-like music that faded in and cut abruptly after the sequence, and the stark, strange lighting captured well the dreamlike feel of trauma coming back to haunt you years after an experience. So I was fine and even starting to enjoy the movie until that violent assault scene with Neil the night before he comes home for Christmas. I don't understand why they had to include that. Did he have to be brutalized to be more sensitive to Brian when he came home? Because that would send a horrible message. Was it supposed to be a lesson/cautionary tale against prostitution? Because that's also a horrible message. So anyway that was horrible and retraumatizing and I hated it. 

    That on top of the beginning just about ruined this movie for me, but there was one last thing I appreciated. In the ending scene, when Neil gently walks Brian through the night he couldn't remember when he was 8, I thought that was an honest attempt at depicting the healing process after trauma. It was maybe a little cheesy, but quite honestly I really needed that semi-happy ending after the stuff with Neil. It made me think of a lot of conversations I've had with friends and therapists and myself during my healing process and got me emotional in a much more productive way than the scene with neal which was just triggering. I guess I wish there were more conversations like that and more attempts at healing throughout the movie. While Brian searching for answers is part of the healing process, it was dramatized and romanticized and made Neil telling him what happened the entire happy ending. I'm not totally sure what I would want as an ending instead. Maybe this would have worked better for me if it had had more of an up-and-down struggle beforehand instead of just a build-up to one moment. There is no one moment that has been a turning point in my healing. It has been constant conversations, flashbacks, nightmares, going back to my therapist, hiding it, finally telling someone, getting triggered, coping, then getting triggered again. Neil hints at this in his closing voiceover, but that's super weak. It's just proof that this movie was not made with the interest of survivors at heart. 

    Where I'm at now is that movies about trauma/depictions of trauma in media have to be productive for them to be worth a survivor's time. I think this could apply to the trauma of racism as well, although I cannot speak for that as a white person, I can only speak to the trauma of assault as a white survivor. You can't just make a movie with a black person getting pulled over by the cops or a white girl graphically telling someone about her own or someone else's SA and call it inclusion and visibility. For one, you leave the survivor retraumatized and having to try to cope all over again after viewing. For another thing, that sends a fucking horrible message to people who aren't survivors. It makes trauma isolated to the traumatizing incident alone and does not depict the months or years afterward of backbreaking work to get to a point where you can take care of yourself again. That is what I want from a good movie about trauma.

Thanks for reading,

Madeleine