(Mysterious Skin)
Decrying “exploitation” may only be as useful as your exploited’s state-of-being. ‘Cos if you will it hard enough, the boundaries of taste reveal themselves to be surprisingly permeable. That’s why porn-rap’s fantasy theatre gets the green card as soon as it’s flounced with a fratboy deus ex like “Naw I'm jus playin' less ya say I can/And I'm known to be a real nasty man”; that’s why real porn as surface-level-applied feminism is a brick wall. Children, on the other hand, remain something of a no-man’s-land (as long as you’re living anywhere that currently isn’t France).

Not sure what it says about border crossings, or nationalism for that matter, but Greg Araki’s Mysterious Skin depicts a 10-year old boy unwillingly participating in the sex act, and (get this) expressing a clearly ambiguous sentiment about it, courtesy of some dude roughly four times his age. Araki is no draw-card exhibitionist though; hit ground floor and this is essentially about the difference between an initial experience of sex[ual abuse] as absorbed vs. repressed, splayed across the twin personalities of a gay hustler (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Neil) and all-American geek (Brady Corbet, as Brian). There’s something almost self-consciously arch about parts of it – Neil’s dynamic with his two best friends plays out like a queer-eye Lizzie McGuire – but Araki manages to generally key into what it’s like to have to negotiate sexual identity in the cereal&baseball climate of American suburbia, befitting the most literal – and likely – of the title’s possible permutations, i.e. coming to terms w/ one’s own skin (fisting a cow’s stomach comes in at a close second). As preening object of desire, Neil gets to Have All the Fun, watching power relations unexpectedly alter across the surface of his pants; meanwhile, Brian’s trajectory is more of a footnote, climaxing logically within his stunted personality, though also laying significant groundwork for a much-anticipated NAMBLA/X-Files crossover.—DL

» mysteriousskinthemovie.com