3 things: "Mysterious Skin" (trigger warning!!!); last week of Moral Tales; hair dye

[edenfalling]

1. I am a creature of serial enthusiasms (and/or obsessions). I always have been. My most recent one is Inception, and following tangentially from that, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose filmography I am slowly piecing my way through. Thus far, I have watched Brick (which is perhaps best described as a high-school AU of the entire film noir genre -- and also awesome, so don't let the description put you off), and, as of last night, Mysterious Skin.

Which broke me. Completely and utterly. I thought I was doing fairly well at... remembering that it was a story, maybe? Keeping a bit of emotional breathing space? And then the last scene and Neil McCormick's final voiceover monologue just ripped away that illusion and I could not stop crying.

Mysterious Skin is a beautifully written, directed, and acted film. It is deeply empathetic toward its characters. It is as restrained and tasteful as I think it is possible to be, given the subject matter.

But, you see, it's the story of two boys who are sexually abused by their Little League coach, and how the repercussions of that play out in their lives over the next ten years... and it also includes teenage prostitution and a fairly graphic rape scene later on.

There is no way on earth for it not to be upsetting.

I think I am going to watch 10 Things I Hate About You next. I need something cheerful and relatively mindless to balance me out.

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2. Today was the last day of regular RE classes untill fall. As such, we had no lesson plan and were provided with apple juice and popcorn in order to hold a class party. Also, when I was doing the teacher scheduling last fall, I wrote all four of us in for today, since I figured it would be nice to get everyone together at the end of the year.

Since a party is a somewhat dangerously unstructured way of filling an hour, we opened in the usual fashion -- chalice lighting, pass the squeeze, joys & sorrows, gems of goodness, chalice extinguishing -- and then handed out food and drink. We then spent five to ten minutes prompting the kids to reminisce about stuff we've done this year, after which I stepped up to tell a story.

My go-to book in these situations is (and probably always will be) Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, because they are a joy to read aloud and also reliably entertaining for kids ranging in age from five to ten. Today I read "The Beginning of Armadillos," with occasional pauses for interactivity and also a brief interruption when the DRE came by to hand out decorative buttons to the teachers. (Which was a nice thought, but rather awkward timing.)

All in all, it has been a good year. But next year I'd like to get back to teaching first grade instead of second or third.

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3. Having cut my hair, it occurred to me that I have always harbored a vague urge to dye it some ridiculous color, just for the hell of it. And since I figure that that sort of temporary insanity is best done before one turns thirty (if you are dyeing your hair on a regular basis, age limits of course cease to apply, but I am classing this impulse as "youthful folly" and working from there), I had better hurry and get it done before next February. (Also, since my hair is now very, very short, the dyed bits will grow out in a couple months so I will not be saddled with the color very long should I end up hating the results.)

MS has offered to look into hair dye options for me. \o/

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ETA: WARNING for discussion of potentially triggery subjects in the comments on the LJ version of this post.

Comments

[leahnari.livejournal.com]

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, huh :3 For his early stuff, check out 3rd Rock from the Sun. It was a sitcom about 4 aliens who come to study Earth and pose as a human family - he's the Information Officer posing as the son, and he's utterly adorable.

He also had a minor role in Latter Days, a cute indie gay love story. And I'd swear he did some voice acting too, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

Good luck with the hair dying :)

[edenfalling]

Yeah, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. *hands* I don't know either. My celebrity crushes are usually very transient and more on the level of "Wow you're hot" (Eliza Dushku, for example) and/or "Wow, you're good in this particular thing I'm watching" (...pretty much everyone in Inception, actually) than "Wow, you're awesome and I must watch everything you've ever acted in." This kind of celebrity enthusiasm is something I associate with my mother, who had a years-long obsession with Colin Firth that resulted in me seeing pretty much everything Firth had acted in up to the late 90s, whether I had any personal interest in it or not. (Like the one where he's a theater owner in Argentina and ends up murdering his roommate. That film was just odd.)

Anyway! 3rd Rock is kind of a long time-investment, but I will probably get around to watching at least a few episodes sooner or later. :-) As for voice acting, I know JGL voiced the main character in Treasure Planet, but I'm not sure if he did anything else. I should check IMDB sometime.

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

JGL is awesome. I never watched 3rd Rock much but I've loved pretty much everything he's done as an adult. Haven't seen Mysterious Skin, but definitely agree about BRICK. Inception - eeeee! If you haven't seen him in (500) Days of Summer and/or The Lookout, definitely check those out.

[edenfalling]

He is indeed awesome. Also adorable. :-) 500 Days of Summer and The Lookout are currently sitting up high on my Netflix queue.

Mysterious Skin is an amazing movie, but, because of the subject matter, obviously not for everyone. And you know, after I'd managed to stop crying near the end of the credits, a half hour later it occurred to me that the characters were the exact same age as my RE kids this year, at least at the start of the story when everything goes wrong. And then I broke down again for a bit.

I am glad I saw it, but it was very difficult to watch in places. :-/

[sour-idealist.livejournal.com]

Dropping by a little bit late to the party to say oh my God, Mysterious Skin broke me more than any other movie - or anything else - has ever done. Just remembering that last scene kills me every single time. I mean, I completely agree that it's a fantastic film, which is actually why it's so upsetting, but hell. Yikes.

[edenfalling]

Yeah. It's beautifully done, but ouch.

Actually, I discovered that my local library had a copy of Scott Heim's novel, and read it for... partly just to torture myself, I guess, but partly to see if the story was more or less disturbing in a different medium. And I think the movie does the story better. Which is an odd thing for me to say -- I almost always prefer books to the films made from them -- but there are a number of reasons.

First, I find the book overwritten; the narrative voice distracts from the story instead of serving it. Second, while the book explains a lot of background details about the boys' families, they're mostly tangential to the main story; the movie is more streamlined and has a much harder emotional wallop. Third, I like that in the film Wendy and Eric get to interact; in the book they never meet. Fourth, while Brian is less passive in the book, I think the scale of his damage in the movie balances better with Neil's damage. Fifth, the movie has better dialogue, even in the voiceover narration; Heim often has a tin ear for natural speech rhythms. Plus, you know, the movie has amazing performances.

The book is still massively upsetting, though. :-(

[sour-idealist.livejournal.com]

Like you pointed out, there isn't really any way for this story not to be upsetting. And I usually prefer the book versions of things too, but this was a really great movie and it worked really well as a movie, which is great.

And wow, the idea of Eric and Wendy never getting a chance to interact just... doesn't compute, for me. I kind of assumed they had a sort of informal and exceedingly limited take-care-of-Neal-as-much-as-we-can conspiracy going on. Also, dialing down Brian's damage? Bwuh?

And yeah, killer performances.

[edenfalling]

In the book, Wendy is a year older than Neil and leaves for NYC immediately after graduating high school. Eric arrives in Hutchinson that summer (after his parents' deaths) and meets Neil in September at school. There is kind of a vague continuity in that Neil has a third friend, Chris (who remains almost entirely offscreen and seems to have drug problems), who presumably knows both Eric and Wendy, but Wendy and Eric themselves never meet. Since I saw the movie first, that felt like a huge missed opportunity to me -- I'd assumed, as you did, that they had a conspiracy to look after Neil as much as possible. And I think that they were very grateful to have each other to lean on, because caring for Neil must have been exhausting and painful.

As for Brian, well, in the movie, he feels like he put his life on hold when he was eight and was largely drifting (or dreaming) through the years until he began looking for Neil. In the book he is still drifting and dreaming, but... hmmm. Well, in the movie his actor (Brady Corbet) is reasonably good-looking and projects boyish friendliness, so it seems that the incident with Coach is the overriding reason for his oddness and discomfort with people. In the book, Brian is an outcast for other reasons as well -- acne, family troubles, etc. -- which for me downplayed the degree to which his life was dominated by the abuse. Also, in the book he has already started to realize that his missing hours were probably NOT because of a UFO before he meets Eric; he just doesn't want to admit his knowledge to himself. He goes to Neil less for truth and more for confirmation.

So book!Brian is still very damaged, but he felt much more together than Neil. Which makes sense, in a way, since he was only abused twice (once that summer, once a couple years later on Halloween), whereas Neil was abused all summer long and to a much deeper degree (since he was made to participate in the abuse of other boys) but it kind of unbalanced the story for me.

[sour-idealist.livejournal.com]

Huh. The movie made it seem like Neil and Eric had known each other for a little longer than a few months, which I think I like better (or possibly that wasn't the movie, just me missing a few details). And they definitely would've had to support each other as much as they could, as well, because even if they didn't see anything wrong with prostitution on its own that's still a lot to deal with for them. I don't even feel capable of writing fic about this movie, but if I did I'd totally want to explore that.

And I see, yeah, that sounds like a better handling on the movie's part. (And I definitely got the sense in the movie that by the time he actually talked to Neil he was at the 'aware this is not a UFO thing but hiding from the knowledge' point, but it probably had much more of an impact to see him actually reach that point.)

And I just... given how differently people are wired and respond to things, I hate the idea of ranking different levels of abuse or trying to portray 'proportional' damage to a certain degree of abuse. What happened to the two of them is different, and Neil's recovery is going to be a whole lot more complicated (if he doesn't try to bury everything or ignore it or just go on with his life - which, between the rape and Brian and the guilt that's hitting him like a freight rain, is unlikely to be possible) but any degree of COMPLETELY FUCKING AWFUL is still, well, completely awful. So I'm glad the movie didn't try to set things up as Brian being relatively undamaged.

[edenfalling]

And I definitely got the sense in the movie that by the time he actually talked to Neil he was at the 'aware this is not a UFO thing but hiding from the knowledge' point, but it probably had much more of an impact to see him actually reach that point.

I think it's the difference between watching Brian realize he's wrong about the UFO theory -- without him ever really verbalizing his growing suspicions -- and reading rather overblown prose in which he tells you about realizing he's wrong. The first pulled me along with him; the second left me weirdly frustrated. Some things are more powerful left unverbalized.

any degree of COMPLETELY FUCKING AWFUL is still, well, completely awful

Exactly. And I think... because the story sets Neil and Brian up as parallels, I liked the way the movie made them feel more equal to me. The relative weight of the various storylines in the book was subtly different, which may also have had something to do with which secondary characters got POV chapters and who was narrating what events. For instance, some of Brian's life is shown from his sister's POV. She is resolutely normal and also largely ignorant of his issues, whereas Wendy knows the details of Neil's abuse and Eric gets talked into shoplifting sprees with Neil, so there's a greater sense of wrongness in Neil's half of the book than in Brian's. That may be for artistic effect -- showing the different ways people and families react to horrible things -- but as I said, it unbalanced things for me.

[sour-idealist.livejournal.com]

Some things are more powerful left unverbalized.

YES. And I think this is why I got the sense that this one would work much more as a movie; because it is such a difficult process to leave things unverbalized in a book - because, y'know, book - and there's kind of a limit, but in a movie with the right actors and the right production - which this had - there's a lot more freedom to get a point across without saying it. Especially since in the movie it doesn't feel like he actually articulates the fact that he's wrong, even to himself, until the end, and it would take an incredibly deft hand to manage that in a book (especially first-person).

And I didn't realize that other characters got to narrate in the book. I'm kind of torn about the general idea, to be honest, because it does sound like it would kind of splinter the focus and dull the impact - especially if some of it's from people who have no idea - so taking them out of the main story sounds like it would be write, but the same part of my brain that likes fanfic is going "Wendy gets to talk? Eric gets to talk? His sister gets to talk? GIMMEGIMMEGIMMEWANT.

It also sounds like they didn't explore whether a dysfunctional but supportive group of friends is better than isolation in a fairly normal family, which is something that looks like it could be set up pretty easily in there.