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Mysterious Skin

Article  in  Sexuality & Culture · September 2014

DOI: 10.1007/s12119-014-9232-7

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Sexuality & Culture
DOI 10.1007/s12119-014-9232-7

FILM REVIEW

Mysterious Skin
Gregg Araki (Director and Script Writer); Scott Heim (Novelist).
Tartan Films, USA/Netherlands, 2004, 99 min.

Phillip Villani • Maycon Lopes

 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Epidermis

The difference in the paths taken by the lives of Neil McCormack and Brian Lackey,
two boys who suffer sexual abuse at the hands of the same little league baseball
coach in a small American town, is more or less the subject of Mysterious Skin, a
film dealing with repression and self-knowledge (Tziallas 2008). It is highly
probable that both boys have been dramatically shaped by the abuse experienced in
childhood but this does not imply that their life experiences are convergent. The
presentation of this event and its sublimated persistence in their lives becomes an
investigation of what could be called, thought of ontologically, as a form of being.
But what is this idea implied in the film’s title? Why is skin mysterious? We know
that it is the largest organ of the human body; that it functions as a point of exchange
between us and our world, involving us irrevocably with the very mode of being of
the world (Merleau-Ponty 1968), alternating between being our betrayer and our
accomplice, at times in a painful manner and at others in a pleasurable way. How do
we go then from skin’s self-evident visibility on one hand to its sublime
mysteriousness on the other? To this end, we can start with a thesis in respect to
skin: that it is the locale of reversibility. The skin situates the liminal and manifests
the sublime. Through it will emerge an idea of consequence as an echo, that is to
say, as skin as that which binds us, inexorably unfolding to the extent that it
involves us in the world. This force, beyond convoking the continuation of life,

P. Villani (&)
Center for Studies into Social Sciences, Environment and Health, Federal University of Bahia,
Bahia, Brazil
e-mail: phillipvillani@gmail.com

M. Lopes
Research Group in Culture and Sexuality, Center for Multidisciplinary Studies in Culture, Federal
University of Bahia, Bahia, Brazil
e-mail: mayconslopes@gmail.com

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becomes inseparable from life itself, transforming it into an expression of the skin
and giving life its own irreversibility (Merleau-Ponty 1964). In this manner, the film
also asks us to reflect on another question: where is the will, and the self located in
this confluence of forces and amidst that which is written on the skin; an
irreversibility which comes to occupy the body at the indivisible and incommu-
nicable level of experience? Or would it reside in a current which seemingly escapes
from the events of life, the invisible force of the skin in its potential to absorb
inscriptions and through this inscription become a visible event, course of life, or
life as a whole event informed by invisible flows? (Deleuze 1993)

… As Much Face as a Film

So as to understand the affective content of various moments of the film, it is

necessary to follow the trails left by the faces of the main characters. In Mysterious
Skin, a point of focus in the unfolding of many of the scenes is the face that calls to
the viewer, irrupting as the site where the characters’ epiphanies occur (Levinas
1961). It is the existence of a face or facade that counteracts the obscurity of the
material (Ibid.), and more so in the particular instance of this film, narrated as it is
via the expressions of the face, by its revelation as marking the primary alterity
between each character. According to Levinas the dimensions that the face
inaugurated in its sensible appearance, attest to a certain significance which
produces the commencement of intelligibility, being this presentation, this
amplification, that puts me in relation with the being of the person from the event
of the ‘‘face in its facial nudity’’ (Ibid.:190).
Already in the beginning of the film, the viewer is confronted by the face of Neil,
which, still very youthful, feels itself absorbed amidst a rain of multi-coloured
cereal that falls over it. Reverberating with the music, the ecstasy that is there
presented is deprived however of any context, be it narrative or sexual; being
instead simply an affective presentation. The scene is abruptly interrupted by
Brian’s narration which retrospectively relates the memory of an episode, fateful
and mysterious, that culminated in the forgetting of this primordial event in his life.
The next image that we see, visually following the darkness that ends the first scene,
is nothing other than a face, slowly and intimately revealed via the same camera
movement employed in the initial scene. This repeated manner of presentation
attributes at one and the same time, a bond between the two characters and
continuity to the story. However, contrary to Neil’s face, that of Brian does not
appear elevated, but rather vacant, terrorized, and distant. The technique employed
by the camera introduces the formal structuring of the film, establishing a
relationship still unknown by the viewer, between the two characters; a relationship
simultaneously convergent as demonstrated by the technique of presentation, and
divergent as demonstrated by the affective content of the two faces. Here we find a
continual process of approach and distancing between the two—a process that will
be the guiding thread of the film, where it will fall to the face to manifest this
process.

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This role of the face as excessive signal has two prominent examples: in the
scene in which Neil, as a rent-boy, is involved with a client who has AIDS, and in
the following scene in a conversation between him and his friend Wendy Peterson.
To the contrary with his other professional encounters, in this one Neil’s client
requests nothing more than a back-rub. Neil, visibly disturbed while massaging,
hypnotically regards a reproduction of the famous work by the Dutch painter
Vermeer of the ‘‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’’ hanging on the wall of his client’s
bedroom. The face presented in the image, whose eyes seemingly question or
interrogate, are echoed by Neil’s own eyes in the following scene. The face of the
painting will notably become a point of exchange. The figure in the image appears
frozen in response to some unknown call, constituting itself as its materialized echo.
Located in a liminal space, it turns in response to the call, both in a condition of
openness to the one who calls, while at the same time interrogating them in an act of
self affirmation. In this moment it is Neil that is captivated by this face which
situates itself between interrogator and interrogated, irreducibly active and passive
and involving the face in this manner in a multidirectional and ambivalent
condition. Here, in this state of openness, Neil encounters the melancholy words of
his client (‘‘make me happy, make me happy…’’) resonating within his mind almost
as an expression of his own unconscious, echoing like a delirium. This passage is
central in Neil’s narrative, since it seems to us that the disturbance provoked by this
encounter fissures the path inaugurated by the experience between Neil and his
baseball coach, which as he will reveal in the following scene makes up a large part
of him. We consider this a central scene because in a certain sense it is this
experience or this (re)opening instigated by this encounter that will permit a
possible reversibility in his life, a resolution of unresolved questions.
In the scene that follows between Neil and his friend, he confesses that this is the
first time that he has left a client in a disturbed state. It is interesting to note that,
without there being any apparent clear relation between the two episodes, Neil
begins to reminisce about his relationship with his baseball coach. It is also worth
noting that this subject which suddenly emerges requires no contextualization on the
part of Neil to be immediately understood by Wendy. When Neil begins to say ‘‘you
are the only person who I have told…’’ she already knows to what he is referring: to
this secret so central in his life. Neil reveals though without much security, with a
face imploring confirmation from a second party his most intimate (and also
precarious) understanding of his relationship with his coach, for him a relationship
of ‘‘true love.’’
The uncomfortably intimate framing of Neil’s face presented in the scene,
coincides with the indefinite state of his comprehension regarding his relationship
with his coach. His face, like the face in the painting from the previous scene
materializes in its questioning openness, the possibility the event being re-signified
in his life or of having its sense fractured and reopened. In this way, as he inquires to
his best friend, his face non-verbally reflects the question he is putting regarding the
most significant events of his life. The moment of communion in the prior scene
with the face in Vermeer’s picture creates this space in which it is possible not
exactly to remake the past, but to reinterpret it through its being reopened. In this
way, the disturbance experienced by Neil is the fruit of his biography, or better, of

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his memory which reopens his personal history such that the past would no longer
simply be entombed in another time, incapable of being re-signified but rather to the
extent that it is the vigour of having been (Heidegger 1963), the manner of being of
the past becomes coexistent with the present.
In this scene, Neil’s friend rules him out from making any clear judgement in
respect to the affective significance of that event for himself owing to the fact that at
the time of this relationship Neil was ‘‘only’’ 8 years of age. In this way, and in
another sense the voice of the child becomes a suppressed current resting in a
supposed incapacity to securely access the sense or create a sense for their
experiences in general, but in particular, sexual. This might reflect that the child is
frequently not viewed as a social actor but as an incomplete person, a passive
receptacle of culture (Cohn 2005)—placing them irremediably in a position of
vulnerability. It is necessary to underline that, in the film, if on one side the
relationship of abuse and violence which establishes itself between the coach and
Brian is very clear, on the other side, it does not appear so well defined when
looking at Neil and his relationship with the same coach. This is because in the
second case, the abuse is more complex when we take into account that the
experience lived by Neil appears to be permeated by pleasure. From the first time he
sees his coach Neil desires him as a realization of his precociously self-avowed
fetish for mature, masculine men. A mere exterior perspective, working from the
concealed presupposition that a prepubescent child is devoid of sexual agency (Jay
2009), could infer that in this case as in the first instance we are unambiguously and
purely dealing with a situation of abuse. However, what Gregg Araki shows us is
that the very notion of abuse can become ambivalent in certain contexts (Tziallas
2008), principally in those in which violence comes accompanied with pleasure,
which does not however neutralise the effects of this violence. In the case of the
relationship between Neil and the coach the ambiguity in which the abuse is
circumscribed only undoes itself in a clear way at the conclusion of the film, in
which the negative repercussions of this event in Neil’s life become unambiguously
clear. Scott Heim (the author of the book which is the film’s namesake) and Aaraki,
in place of a sexual morality, put an ethics of consequences. In place of a denial of
the existence of childhood sexuality, via the construction of the figure of the
innocent child or the child devoid of sexuality, is put the significance of
consequences actual and potential flowing from being. The metaphysics of morality
is replaced by an ethics of corporality, and in a parallel fashion, the absence of the
perpetrator for the painfully prolonged presence of the consequences of the acts
perpetrated by him. Ambivalent, the capacity to experience pleasure opens us up to
the possibility of being wounded, and simultaneously by introducing an obscure
element, the clarity of our moral presuppositions are brought into question. Situated
in the skin, the potential for the experience of enjoyment acts as the site of a
possible reversion where, submersed we are rendered ambiguous and our secure
identities disintegrate.
While the scenes previously referred to reveal the dialogical function of the face,
the absence of this openness implies a commensurate solipsism. The section in
which Neil encounters his last client of the film is marked by a dramatic
representation of this condition. In relational terms, this scene stands at the polar

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opposite to that in which Neil is interpolated by (and interpolates) the image of

Vermeer. The character of the client who becomes the rapist, is a closed being,
intransigent, who does not concede even a minimal openness to Neil’s face. This
openness, in its own turn is here substituted by a fantasy—that of ‘‘slut’’—imposed
in a radical fashion on the body itself. According to Levinas (1961), the face is a
fundamental path for the expression of being, and also a form of its imposition as a
call by the Other to me. Now, if the infinity of the face, the infinity of the Other is
resistance or the refusal of possession and of my power (Ibid.), it is Neil’s rapist
who ignores Neil’s face and to the extent that he does so does not admit of its
expression. An absolute distance from the Other is created in this process of
projecting a fantasy which moves as quickly as thought itself. In this manner sex
and violence mutually reflect one another in an inextricable bond within which sex
occurs violently, and violence sexually, such that the interposition of violence will
guarantee that sex is never contact or openness. Through this union between
aggression and coitus, sex transforms itself into a way in which you can only
involve the other at a distance. In this manner the process replicates itself: proximity
becomes simultaneously impossible, owing to the construction of the mode of
contact as a mode of violent subjugation. In a space in which the only thing that
exits is the inertia of the fantasy without the friction of the Other the event happens
at a speed which grows exponentially—the precipitous violence of the scene
testifies to this. While in the scene with the picture there is an expansion of sensible
possibilities the character of the rapist suspends alternative horizons, embodying in
an extreme fashion the common irreversible current in the lives of the boys. It is
finally the vicious battering to which the rapist subjects Brian’s face which seems to
realise the ultimate logic of this process in its negation of the face.

Abduction as Metaphor

While Neil is familiar with sexual desire—which includes in his performance as the
‘‘masturbatory child’’ near the start of the film (Foucault 2004), a fetish for older
men and masculine stereotypes, in the instance of Brian, his sexuality is not
thematized and his life is obscured by the episode which befell him in his youth and
which still resonates up till now. If the life of Neil is occupied by his sexual and
childhood adventures, the part of Brian’s life to which we have access is
circumscribed by the mystery which he will work toward uncovering. Brian
becomes a kind of detective of himself and considers the reconstitution of this tale
which forms him as fundamental, and as such it is a tale which echoes in the present,
materializing itself for example in the convulsions, like a ‘‘physical reaction and
visual manifestation of his emotional trauma’’ (Tziallas 2008:30) which have
determined him since this mysterious event wounded him.
Not knowing what the phenomenon he is dealing with is, Brian encounters points
of intersection with his mystery in the narratives of people who were abducted by
aliens. In this way, measured by the identification with the dramas lived by this
group, he interprets, associates, and recreates his own experience as an experience
of abduction. It is from this point that he undertakes to reveal his past to unveil

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finally what this experience was which marked him but which left only dislocated
and cryptic traces in place of intelligible ones. His life has become, as an expression
of this narrative of abduction, an alienated labour as he feels himself compelled to
follow this investigation to its end. It is the irresolution of this mystery as a
restrictive force, disabling him from exploring other paths in his life, with the result
that it remains bound to this single and final aim.
It does not seem mere accident that Scott Heim has chosen the theme of
abduction to draw the character of Brian. The idea of abduction presupposes an
abductor with potentials, at least physically, superior to those of his victims enabling
him to dominate them. There is in the subtext in Mysterious Skin an analogy
between childhood sexual abuse and abduction. While encountering his friend
Avalyn and narrating the images that little by little are emerging in his dreams—
memories which, according to her remain stored in the unconscious of the victim—
Brian relives the scenario in which his baseball training was happening and tells
how beyond the presence of a boy of his size who appeared to be the key to
‘‘everything’’ (this boy whose name he will learn later) there was also a ‘‘tall
extraterrestrial.’’ Later on in the story, through a drawing which he scribbles, Brian
shows the supposed extraterrestrial to his friend Eric who quickly remarks its
hybridity, pointing out that the alien presented to him has human legs, the
musculature of which, he says in passing, is typical of an athlete’s, even including a
pair of sneakers.
Avalyn, found by Brian after watching a documentary in which she testifies about
her experience of abduction, tells him that ‘‘there exist many like us’’ and that ‘‘all
of us have a desire to know what happened’’. It is in this way that she orients Brian
and motivates his investigation, which takes him to Eric Preston, a friend of Neil’s,
and subsequently Brian’s too. In a segment of the film where Avalyn presents Brian
the carcass of a cow that was allegedly attacked by aliens, she says that ‘‘they do
experiments with cows because the poor things are defenceless’’ and that ‘‘with us,
to the contrary, they can’t kill us. The just leave behind the memory of what they
did, which, in a certain way, is even worse’’. Originating in an insupportable event,
this memory can become invisible, incongruent, almost uncommunicable. It is
worth pointing out that it was such an unsupportable event that made of Brian an
‘‘introvert obsessed by UFOS’’ (Tziallas 2008:27), to the extent that returning to
himself ceaselessly as an object of investigation, as an interiorized mystery, he
sought to give coherence to his rarefied memories through the belief in
extraterrestrials.
Returning to the scene of the mutilated cow, Avalyn, in a sexually malicious
tone, guides one of Brian’s hands into the cow’s carcass with the aim of showing
(according to her) the absence of the sexual organs of the animal, as proof of the
molestation carried out by supposed aliens. This detail correlates itself to Brian’s
behaviour, not manifesting as he does any sexual desire or interest throughout the
film. When he writes a letter to Neil describing his new friend to Brian, Eric
points out that ‘‘his vibe is strangely asexual’’. Especially in respect of the scene
with the cow, the script suggests that his (a)sexuality could have been produced
by the sexual abuse. The introduction of the wrist into the carcass replicates (as
will be discovered by Brian and also the viewer at the end of the film) the

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experience of fist fucking which happened between Brian and his baseball coach,
replaying in this way his own trauma. The scene shows how rooted in his own
body, the current of the past continues to irrigate his actual life and sensible
experiences. In his flashes of memory, Brian appears always lying down, in the
position of a patient, having his face stroked by the hands of an ‘‘experimenter,’’
who transfigures itself now as an extraterrestrial, now as a human. It is revealed in
this way, the precariousness of the fantasy itself. Here as far as the hand of Brian
penetrates the cow and as such invokes the past abuse, the dreamlike nature of the
hand vacillates between human and alien. The two examples illustrate the
ambivalence and the dialogicality inherent to the body: its capacity to dislocate
definite representations, to traffic between the past and the present, fantasy and
reality which reveals in the final instance, the contingent body as the very
mysterious skin itself.
If in the case of Brian, the suggestion put forward by the film is that his condition
of asexuality derived itself from the abuse suffered, in the case of Neil it is the lack
of emotional engagement in his affective and sexual relations (McCulloch 2008)
that occupies this place. In a certain moment of the film, when Wendy perceives that
Eric feels himself drawn to Neil, she advises him that ‘‘where other normal people
have a heart, Neil McCormick has a bottomless black hole. And if you aren’t
carefully, you can fall in this hole and you will be lost forever’’. However this scene,
underscored by sombre music, comes before the presentation of one of Brian’s
dreams in which he, once again lying down, is touched by an alien hand,
corroborating the parallelism between the stories which encounter in the image of
the ‘‘black hole’’ the most perverse effect left by the abductor or paedophile.
For Wendy’s part, at various moments during the film in intimate chats between
her and Neil, she displays a maternal preoccupation with him owing to the
insecurity intrinsic to his profession. He even agrees with Wendy that he should
head for less risky pathways, but it seems that the force exercised by this current
which carries him, drives him to remain following such a course. In the final account
Neil ‘‘permits and needs his body to be devoured’’ (McCulloch 2008:254). Or, in the
words of another scholar,
The boy who felt loved by the baseball coach (…) turns into a teenage hustler
with repressed emotions but a violent desire for control, who (for some time)
feels power in making older men pay for sex with him, even as the price he is
paying in the flesh for his violent life escalates (Michlin 2008:274).
The extract summarizes in a general way a certain form of life followed by Neil:
his liking of being desired by older men as a reprise although dislocated, of an
affective relationship and of the empowerment felt by him when the baseball coach
considered him his ‘‘first prize.’’

Hypodermis

‘‘Suddenly, precisely where they combine together, we no longer encounter

two separate spirits, each closed in themselves and alienated from the other.

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 P. Villani, M. Lopes

We discover that, striking one into the other, each one wounds themselves. It
is no longer a question of an individual fight, but of a tension in the (…) world
between essence and existence’’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973:94).
As we have seen previously, the fantasy extends the theme of blindness or the
incapacity of seeing. In the case of the rape, Neil loses his relevance through the
imposition of the role of ‘‘slut’’, of ‘thing’. A similar effect takes place via the
narrative of alien abduction in which we also perceive the creation of an obscuring
image. The rape, in the blindness of its ‘‘fantastic’’ narrative gains a precipitate
force, unfolding itself at a terrifying speed and in a similar way, the fantasy of
abduction or better the blindness precipitated by it and the necessity of its
reproduction as a way of repressing the truth of trauma motivates Brian’s life. He is
led to follow this narrative until the discovery of the truth that it hides, having as
such his existential horizon reduced to this search. The persistence of the fantasy,
implied in this obstinate search for resolution, demands such a labour. In this way,
Brian’s biography is appropriated by the abuse, transforming itself into its true
existential manifestation and demanding this alienated labour of investigation from
him. Owing to the fantasy, testifying to the past becomes difficult given that it (the
fantasy) consists in a way of seeing that makes apparent only what it has put in place
of the concealed history. However, as complete as it may appear to be, the fantasy
will never be totally so, it always carries inconsistencies, simply by virtue of the
proposed hermeneutic mode by which it covers and detaches the authenticity of the
fact itself. It is through these inconsistencies, the lacunas that even the most creative
fantasy cannot give an account of that Brian arrives to Neil. As such, by way of the
projection by the rapist of the fantasy of ‘‘slut,’’ the victim is obliged to fulfil this
role without it being possible even to be seen, with the same occurring in the case of
Brian where his trauma will be assimilated to the fantastic narrative and his own
past will be hidden from him. Finally, one always runs the risk with a fantasy of
obscuring what can be evident, with the result that the capacity to escape from its
pre-constructed destiny also becomes problematic.
In this manner, the abuse installs itself in these lives, continuing to resonate, like
the echo of a note struck, producing a disharmony in search of resolution. In fact,
Brian and Neil are characters whose lives are radically different on their surface,
while invested by a shared force, sublimated and unresolved, and irresolvable as far
as sublimated. In Neil’s case the solution resides in the discovery of the sense of the
event, in the affective content that could constitute it, while for Brian it resides in
confronting the true reality itself of the abuse as the origin of his pain (McCulloch
2008). The event interlaces itself in these lives and repeats itself. Both become
predominately an expression of this event under the force of its formative intensity
which in a profound way binds them. It is because of this that Neil has reason to say
‘‘we have a lot in common’’ despite the evident differences. They share an
existential force of the singular event that came to constitute their paths, even while
at the same moment the mode of this reproduction and repetition implied different
trajectories. Through this repetition the abuse renders these lives inert, its force
manifesting as an existential gravity. In this sense, Neil’s final soliloquy
encapsulates the tragedy of the abuse in the lives of the boys:

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And while we were seated there, listening to the Christmas carols, I wanted to
say to Brian that everything had finished and that everything was going to be
okay. But that was a lie, because I couldn’t speak anyway. I wanted there to be
a way to go back to the past and change it. But there wasn’t, and there wasn’t
anything we could do in this way. And because of this, I just stayed quite and
tried to tell him telepathically how sorry I was, about everything that had
happened. When I think about all the pain, and sadness and fucked up shit that
exists in the world, I want to escape. I wanted with all my heart that we could
leave this world behind, and rise like two angels in the night and, as if by
magic….disappear.
Immersed in this atmosphere of tenderness and reconciliation, ‘‘the two
protagonists encounter each other and together unlock hidden doorways in their
embryonic selves, within which the own potential were frozen and deprived of the
right to live’’ (McCulloch 2008:255). In this manner, the image of the angel, in its
lightness and in the possibility to take off, seems like a counter-current to all the
forces of gravity that were subjecting them to destiny. The angle softens pain and
possibly grants wings which could restore to them horizons or at least an opening or
skin without a determined direction.

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