Gregg Araki got an early reputation as a leading light of the wave of queer cinema that began to emerge in the late 1980s, flowering in the early 1990s. What makes a movie and its concerns queer as opposed to simply gay is related to a number of things, but one of those would include a totally unapologetic tone — no asking the straight people to be nice to us, no trying to prove how harmless we are. By contrast, more mainstream attempts to portray gay people and their lives often become squishy with their own good-heartedness; see Philadelphia and In and Out.
Queer cinema is prepared to portray gay people as dangerous and aggressive. Witness the scene in Araki’s excellent 1992 movie The Living End, in which a gay man turns a gun on a bunch of gay-bashers: one could only cheer.
Perversity for its own sake is another feature of queer cinema. It asks unanswerable questions about sex and sexuality, muddling the whole area of sexual orientation into a polymorphous orgy of confused sexuality. Sometimes such things are made harder for audiences to process by the distinctly postmodern lack of character information and/or development. (In The Doom Generation, the characters’ surnames were all colours — White, Red, Blue.)
It is obvious, then, that Araki’s new film, Mysterious Skin, is a departure. Some have called it more “mature”, with the implication that he has put behind him his days of being the queer provocateur. What they are really saying, I think, is that this movie has fuller, deeper character development than in his other movies.
Mysterious Skin is also Araki’s first adaptation of someone else’s work, in this case Scott Heim’s celebrated 1995 novel. But it’s not possible to ascribe the new feel and tone entirely to Heim rather than Araki, mainly because in this is just such an Araki movie (and, I think, in some ways he improves on Heim’s novel). It may lack the sense of nihilism often present in his earlier films, but it’s about youthful sexuality and abuse and how different people deal with such things. It is prepared to be ambivalent in the best queer tradition.
The story unfolds loosely, moving back and forth in time, to fill us in, and the emotional punch is considerable. Its characters are deeply compelling — Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the boy who had a childhood affair with his baseball coach; Brian (Brady Corbet) is convinced he was abducted by aliens. Both actors are superb in their roles, as is Elizabeth Shue as Neil’s mom.
And now I see I’m out of space, which is okay, because all I really want to say about this beautiful, haunting movie is: See it.