For Mean Girls bravura encounter session scene, Fey pulls off a superb double bluff whereby her hitherto relatively minor character (Math teacher Ms Norbury) takes charge of the movie to push her pro-female message while simultaneously lampooning Fey’s earnestness. By this time, Cady and Regina’s battle to win Aaron has seen Cady take over Regina’s life, manipulate her into getting fat, find out that Regina started a rumour that Janis was a lesbian, provoke Regina into striking back by distributing her ‘Burn Book’ in which everyone in school’s reputation and self-esteem is destroyed (including Ms Norbury, who is accused of pushing drugs), which starts an uproarious girl riot, which is then blamed on Cady.
The strange self-perpetuating misogyny that runs rife in this school has taken over everything, and something has to be done.
Handsome black Principal Mr Duvall (the superbly deadpan Meadows) orders every girl to convene in the gym, but realises he’s out of his depth when a student responds to his request to talk about ‘lady problems’ by declaring: ‘Somebody wrote in that book that I’m lying about being a virgin because I use super-jumbo Tampons. But I can’t help it if I have a heavy flow and a wide-set vagina!’ Ms Norbury takes over and puts the girls through various therapeutic bonding exercises. It’s all going well. ‘I wish we could bake a cake made out of rainbows and smiles,’ sobs one mousy girl we’ve never met. Turns out she doesn’t go to this school. ‘I just have a lot of feelings,’ she sniffs.
Until Janis reveals the details of her and Cady’s conspiracy against Regina and, instead of being punished, is raised high on the shoulders of a vengeful student body. Regina runs out into the street, Cady follows her, and, just as Regina is going into detail about where Cady can stick her apology . . . remember the bus? The truth hurts.
The final act is a whole bunch of amusing feelgoodery involving Cady’s redemption, the Spring Fling dance, a math competition, reunion with the outsiders, getting the guy, the end of The Plastics, a girl who can predict the weather by feeling her boobs and even some form of peace pact with Regina. ‘Finally, Girl World is at peace,’ sighs Cady’s voiceover. It sounds more like a wish than a pay-off line.
Mean Girls was a well-deserved major commercial and critical hit. It established Tina Fey as the funniest screenwriter of her generation and hammered another nail in the coffin of the myth that women just aren’t funny, a point proved weekly on Fey’s TV sitcom, 30 Rock. The only sad thing about watching Mean Girls is that Lindsay Lohan, who is just so adorable and accomplished here, has become far more infamous as a celebrity wild child than a talented actress. But then, doesn’t that just make Tina Fey’s point, because how much of that is Lohan’s fault, and how much of it is down to women’s addiction to gossiping about the sexuality of other women and calling them nasty names?
At one point in the gym scene, Fey’s Ms Norbury asks the girls to stop calling each other sluts and whores because it makes it easier for boys to call them sluts and whores. It’s probably the least clever bit of dialogue I’ve quoted anywhere in this book. Don’t mean the bitch ain’t right, though.
MYSTERIOUS SKIN
2004
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Michelle Trachtenberg, Bill Sage, Chase Ellison, George Webster, Elizabeth Shue
Dir.: Gregg Araki
Plot: Live through this.
Key line(s): Brian: ‘You were the best player on the team, weren’t you?’
Neil: ‘Yeah. That’s what he always told me.’
It is 1981, and an image emerges from the frosty sonic drizzle of ‘Golden Hair’ by Slowdive. It is a small, blissfully happy boy. He appears to be getting showered by breakfast cereal. A narrator says: ‘When I was 8 years old, five hours disappeared from my life . . .’
As the voiceover continues, the camera moves slowly down a wall to reveal a bespectacled blond boy, round blank eyes behind glasses framed by a baseball cap, blood dripping from his nose.
The boy’s family don’t ask the right questions to learn why their boy is bleeding and hiding in the cellar. But who thinks about the unthinkable: that your decision to send your kid off to play Little League baseball has led your baby into horrors unimaginable. Instead, the boy, his mom and his sister watch in awe as a spaceship flies over their house. A place to escape to. The beginning of a mystery.
Based on a 1996 novel by Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin is about two 18-year-old men who were both sexually abused by the same baseball coach when they were 8 years old. The trauma has taken their lives in opposite directions. Brian (Brady Corbet), the bespectacled blond, has become an insular, lonely nerd. He has blocked out the memory of what happened to him and replaced it with fantasies of UFO abductions. Neil has gone from gay promiscuity to rent boy. He remembers some of what happened, but his sordid life has been shaped by shame, because his experience was his introduction to the truth of his sexuality, and he was in love with his abuser.
When Brian finds a photo of his old Little League team, and spots the boy that he has dreamt about as his companion when abducted by aliens, he tracks Neil down. The two piece together the exact details of their ordeal, giving both the opportunity to move onwards and upwards.
Much of the early part of the film is taken up with the seduction of Neil (played as an 8-year-old by the excellent Chase Ellison) by the coach (Bill Sage). Sage’s performance is one of the most memorably unusual depictions of a monster in cinema, and these early scenes set the terms, as he befriends Neil by inhabiting a little boy’s world. His flat is full of computer games and sweet food and gadgets, like the Polaroid camera he uses to take photos of his prey. These are not pornographic photos, at least, not to anyone sane. They are innocent pictures of a kid making funny faces and larking about, made sinister by the viewer’s knowledge of what Coach (he is not given a name) does with them.
One of the major points of the movie is that most paedophiles are not the hideous, mono-browed Quasimodos of our nightmares. They are handsome, wholesome charmers who work with or near children and who work hard to seduce a child and throw other adults off their scent. They can therefore convince themselves that they are not rapists.
One thing you begin to notice is that the scenes where Coach abuses or reveals his motives to young Neil and Brian (George Webster) do not involve the actors interacting. Araki uses subjective camerawork, whereby Sage, Webster and Ellison speak their dialogue straight to camera. Not only does this increase the intimacy and intensity of the scenes, but it also protected the child actors from the implications of their roles. The boys were given scripts which only included their dialogue and white lies were told to them about what their scenes were about. In the light of this, Sage’s performance stands as one of the most extraordinary in this book, as he has to balance being a little boy’s best friend, and then subtly shift to abuser, while often acting straight down the lens of a camera. It’s a selfless, chilling portrayal of the low cunning involved in base depravity, yet the guy had no one to play against while successfully making you feel that you have regressed to childhood and that you are his next victim. There is a moment where Sage’s eyes soften, and then harden, and then he says to us, ‘Here we go’, which sucks the air out of you. I don’t know if there’s an award for that. But it should be created so Sage can win it from a shortlist of one.
I’m sure I don’t need to say this, but . . . there are, of course, no explicit scenes of child abuse in Mysterious Skin. Again, the actors played their scenes separately. Apparently, a group called the Australian Family Association wanted the film banned because paedophiles might use it as porn. A perfect example, yet again, of how conservatives see porn where normal people see life.
As more details unfold of how the boys have been affected by their trauma – blackouts and constant fear for Brian, sado-masochistic abuse of other children for Neil – Araki’s choice of music adds to the increasing sense of loss and heartbreak. The glistening ‘shoegazing’ drones of Ride, the Cocteau Twins and an incidental score by Cocteaus’ guitarist Robin Gu
thrie and ambient composer Harold Budd place every terrible thing into the context of sadness and sympathy. When Neil abuses others – often in front of his shocked but complicit best friend Wendy (played as a teen by Buffy star Michelle Trachtenberg) – you understand that these kids are also being abused by Coach, who doesn’t need to be anywhere near these boys to have control over their lives and the lives of those they meet.
Eventually, we meet Brian and Neil as young adults, played by Corbet and the outstanding Gordon-Levitt. Keeping much of the subjective camerawork, we follow Neil’s life of amoral cynicism, which seems to suit him until he is raped by a john in a brutal and horribly believable scene.
This scene produces very different emotions to the shock-horror teen sex scenes in Larry Clark movies (see Kids, here, and Bully, here). While Clark seems fascinated by the idea of outraging the viewer, Araki’s unflinching gaze and deliberate editing puts you in the place of the victim. You can almost feel the director crying for everyone who has been shaped by the brutality of others, and understanding that memories of trauma consist of objects in the room, the smells and sounds, the details you would fixate on to survive the moment. It’s the hardest scene to watch in this book, and I only resisted the temptation to fast-forward because it isn’t part of my current job description to look away. I will watch this movie many times in the future but I doubt if I’ll watch this scene again. It really does have a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God power, even to a nonbeliever.
It is the final straw that forces Neil to come to terms with his past. When Brian tracks him down, the pair break into Coach’s now-empty house, and Neil leads Brian back into his nightmares, until all of his amnesiac fixations and fevered dreams make sense. Part of the truth and tragedy is that Neil is still fiercely protective of his status as Coach’s favourite.
It is a scene that proves something about art. The triumphant ending is not getting the girl or killing the baddies or winning the big game. It’s facing up to the darkest events, and coming to terms, and surviving and moving on to a life. And that this, too, is rendered superficial by sentimental TV movies or chat shows where you entertain the world with your agonies and get a whoop and a round of applause for giving the bored and nosey a cheap thrill. You have to find someone to trust who can hold these truths and feel their importance. And then you have to transcend what they did to you. And you become a hero, no matter what else it is that someone had forced you to be.
I was going to conclude with something about how wrong a world is that hard sells The Inbetweeners Movie but buries a movie like this. But as I cried buckets – again – at the profound truths of this film, I realised that just wasn’t the point at all. You can’t show this movie to a child to teach them how to stay safe – it’s just too graphic and disturbing. It is a film that makes something very beautiful out of an ugly subject, but isn’t a film you’d watch for fun on a Sunday afternoon. It is one of the most accomplished writing and directing achievements of recent years, but it never had a hope of being a mainstream money-spinner.
But its determination to portray the psychological survival mechanisms of the victim, and its truly uplifting solving of private psychological mystery could be useful, I suspect, to anyone who has been sexually, physically or mentally abused, at any age, by anyone. It feels like a letting go of rage, moving way past the gut reaction of wanting revenge against abusers to the far more important subject of how a victim escapes the control an abuser can exercise over the rest of their life.
Araki is one of the most high-profile and committed out gay directors, and showed great courage in facing up to the accusation that most diehard homophobes like to throw at gay men . . . that their sexual preference is a perversion, and perverts are naturally paedophiles. Araki successfully destroys that myth by showing that a man who violates little boys is not a homosexual. He is something else . . . something that I don’t feel qualified to sum up in a couple of words because using the usual insults to deny the humanity of paedophiles is so against the spirit of this movie, because it doesn’t take us any closer to understanding child abuse and stopping it.
But Mysterious Skin is not bleak and grim and unwatchable nor dull and worthy. It is a profoundly moving piece of accomplished aesthetically gorgeous cinema. And, if you haven’t seen it, I urge you to. You will feel different afterwards. Dehydration through extreme weeping may well be involved.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
2004
Starring: Jon Heder, Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell, Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino
Dir.: Jared Hess
Plot: Numb and number.
Key line(s): Napoleon: ‘I don’t even have any good skills!’
Pedro: ‘What do you mean?’
Napoleon: ‘You know, like, numchuck skills, bow-hunting skills, computer-hacking skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!’
Attempting to describe the appeal of Napoleon Dynamite is like reviewing Fall records. You know this is good shit. You can’t explain why. Why is a man throwing a steak at a man on a bike funny?
Napoleon Dynamite concerns the daily lives and surreal mannerisms of a dysfunctional family who live in some Godforsaken rural town somewhere in America, which could be Salt Lake City, Utah, because that’s where husband-and-wife directing-writing team Jared and Jerusha Hess live. The Hesses are both members of the Church Of The Latter-Day Saints, whose adherents are better known as Mormons. Their first movie resolutely ignores religious references and messages, but it does resemble what might happen if you asked people who had had no contact with the modern world since The Osmonds were big to make a teen comedy. It is also the least smutty teen comedy in existence, unless you count accidental testicular injury and breast enhancement as smut, neither of which is here. At least, not exactly.
The movie essentially revolves around Jon Heder’s extraordinary performance as the titular character . . . who, incidentally, the Hesses insisted was not named after a pseudonym used by Elvis Costello intermittently throughout the 1980s, because Napoleon and Dynamite are two words that any person might coincidentally pick out of a hat and slam together as a stupid name, right?
Watching Heder’s Napoleon first time around, it honestly felt like some film-makers had found this weird guy with learning difficulties and just made a movie around him. Gangly but also kind of woman-shaped, with shoulders too narrow for his wide-hipped body and blonde curly hair, it was the way his hooded, drugged eyes never focused or made eye contact that convinced you the guy wasn’t acting. He was, though, and thereby created one of the most unique and slightly disturbing comedy characters in movie history. Heder is also a Mormon, and a scoutmaster!
Napoleon lives with his brother Kip (Ruell) and (possibly lesbian) mother in a house by a field. Kip dresses like a mix between a scoutmaster, a member of The Famous Five, and Ron Mael from Sparks. He spends all his time on the internet and trying to learn self-defence by being beaten up by a TV self-defence guru.
Napoleon goes to high school on a yellow bus but, like most of the pupils in this school, he looks 27, which Heder was at the time. He has no social skills and is bullied and despised. Napoleon Dynamite is a movie where that’s just funny.
New people come into Napoleon’s life. Mom goes away and leaves the ‘boys’ in the care of Uncle Rico (Gries), who looks like an early ’70s porn star, lives in a van, obsesses so much about his high school football glory years that he makes videos of himself throwing footballs to no one, and earns a living selling dodgy products to lonely housewives. Napoleon also meets a schoolgirl, Deb (Majorino), who moonlights as a glamour photographer. Not that kind of glamour photographer. And then there’s Pedro (Ramirez), the new Mexican boy at school who has a moustache and a rad bike, but also looks 35, stares blankly into space and talks like a robot Speedy Gonzales. There is instant chemistry.
The Napoleon Dynamite world is like the rural flipside to the parallel universe of Ghost World (see here). Nothing logical happens here. The self-defence maestro is married to a
hulking transvestite. Men disappoint their wives by trying to snap Tupperware with their bare hands and failing. Thin white man-children marry beautiful black urbanites they met on the net. The film is often lumped into the geek teen comedy category, but I don’t think Napoleon or any of its other characters are geeks. They are surreal comic characters in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges. Like those ancient comedy teams, they inhabit an anarchic fourth dimension built entirely on delusions so stupid they defy any attempt to compare them to people you’ve met. The 21st-century update comes from the internet and the kind of viral YouTube comedy hit that consists of an idiot trying to do something they plainly can’t and looking ridiculous, or that one where one boy tempts another to walk across a creek on a log, and then shakes the log, and the poor kid falls in in a way that couldn’t be contrived by a comic or stuntman. It’s the comedy of the everyday dumbass, magnified by brilliant comic acting and a deadpan, static camera that refuses to laugh.
These characters don’t exist to say anything about teens coming of age, high school, the difficulties of being unpopular or even that, no matter how weird and funny-looking you are, you too can achieve your dreams if you just believe. They are there to run with their arms by their sides, look comical while playing swing ball and hitting each other, and make you wonder what the fuck they’ll do next. If you see Dumb And Dumber as a work of enduring comic genius (Guilty!), then you’ll love Napoleon Dynamite. If you think it’s the most puerile waste of time you’ve ever seen, then milk-tasting competitions (‘The defect in this one is bleach . . . Yessss!’) and boys who look like crazy men electrocuting themselves in the balls with time machines they bought online ain’t gonna do it for you.
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