In Mysterious Skin two 8-year-old boys in a small Kansas town in the early 1980s are sexually molested by their little league coach. Neil, the best player on the team, is coach's pet for the whole season and loves the attention from the man he idolizes. Brian, the worst player on the team, and a runty disappointment to his father, is brought in on coach's "games" with Neil only once but feels so violated he immediately blocks out all recollection of what happened. From that day on, however, Brian suffers from "hysterical" symptoms, such as nosebleeds, and knows that exactly five hours of his life are missing from memory; by his teens he suspects he must have been abducted by aliens. By his teens Neil has become a hustler whose identity is entirely bound up with the effect he has on the older men he picks up, as if trying (hopelessly) to recreate the way coach made him feel that "golden" summer.
Most of the movie follows the grown-up boys for several years around the age of 20 when Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) begins to tire of the hustling life and when Brian (Brady Corbet) breaks through his amnesia and investigates what really happened to him. The Neil half of the movie is considerably more interesting; the Brian half is the latest in a line of naïvely earnest yet overwrought movies, including Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) and Marnie (1964), and the female star-turn vehicles The Snake Pit (1948), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), and Sybil (1976), that fashion the discredited theory of recovered memory into psychosexual detective stories.
The theory of recovered memory hypothesizes that some childhood events, such as sexual abuse, are so shattering the mind defensively blocks "explicit" memory of them from conscious retrieval. The memory of the event nevertheless lives on in coded "implicit" forms, in dreams and idiosyncratic, uncontrollable responses to objects and situations (e.g., parallel lines in Spellbound, the date May 12th in The Snake Pit, the color red in Marnie). The implicit memory is taken as evidence that the trauma occurred, and by decoding the implicit memory the explicit memory of the traumatic event can be restored to conscious recall. The restoration of the explicit memory also functions as therapy - by identifying the true source of the coded memories, the sufferer is supposedly released from the effects of the trauma.
In the past 20 years or so, this theory has been used in notorious prosecutions based on hallucinatorily unbelievable accusations of repeated, communal torture-rape, sometimes relying on "memories" "recovered" during hypnosis. The documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003) examines such a case, in which the counts are so numerous and preposterous you'd think the judge would dismiss the case; instead she says that she never doubted the accused were guilty. The far more judicious comments of the investigative journalist Debbie Nathan about the quality of the evidence against the Friedmans, and the handling of the matter by the police and the judicial system, serve as a model of sanity. (Click here for Nathan's 12 January 1990 Village Voice article "The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax." Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology and law at the University of Washington, has also written extensively on the suggestibility of memory, in and out of a legal context.)
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Article comments
1 - Temple Stark
Alan did you try and e-mail me? Eric?
2 - claire
I found this film ridiculous. Never has the subject of sexual abuse been tackled in such a ridiculous manner. The heavy and disturbing abuse scenes were obviously put in to try and shadow the dreadful acting (minus Neil he took a good shot at it) I was nauseated throughout and felt that the film totally depended on shock value.
3 - Alan Dale
Hey Claire,
Thanks for the comment. The abuse scenes were odd to me b/c their purpose escaped Araki's control. They seemed dreamily erotic, which might make sense for Neil but not Brian. The addition of the recovered-memory detective story turned it all to cheese.
4 - B79
Apparently you don't realize how this works. I was abused from age 4-6 by my neighbor and had 20 years of repressed memory... saw 7 psychologists and I thought all my problems were becasue of my parent's divorce when I was 8. Even the short memories I did have pointed to but never showed proof that anything happened. I lied to myself without realizing I was lying, that the abuse ever happened. But looking back now, I know it did. I was laying on a bed with a camera ponted at me... I was told my the man that if I said anything that my parents wouldn't want me... these things I occasionally remembered in the 20 years but discarded them as just memories with no meaning. Repressed memory DOES HAPPEN. I thought I had a happy childhood. In my teens I was depressed everyday but didn't know why.
As for the movie... that's what happens in real life. I'm sorry that you can't handle the scenes but that's real life. You know that a child might go through when he/she says they were abused and how they can be affected... but do you REALLY know what they went through? These scenes hint to it. A child that young can not mentally process that event... not enough life experience so the mind pushes it away as a defense mechanism. Please be more open-minded about this movie. I basically lived this movie because there was the man's son (my age) with me too.
These "graphic" scenes which really are just implied scenes puts you in the place of the child. If you can't handle it, think of how the child must have felt.
5 - anne
I absolutely agree with the last posting stated. I wrote a paper on this for a graduate level class on the effects of trauma on children--it was assigned by the professor. You don't seem to understand trauma at a basic level and it shows in your review. As for the uneasiness, again, as stated above, these are events that happen to real people. As a society we must come to understand our fellow people's experiences.
6 - Peter
I was abused, and the film is so resonant, I'm still off balance a few days after viewing it twice. The writing of the view is thorough, exceptionally well written, and engaging for as long as it is, but as someone just overwhelmed with watching the movie, I have to tell you memories do get pushed away due to childhood trauma. I was sexually abused, but for many years didn't label it molestation because I was just like Neil, craving male physical contact, and still cannot remember the first incident that led to a year long inappropriate sexual relationship at age 5-6 with my babysitter. The AIDS safe sex stuff bangs you over the head, but I'm fascinated with how many reviews and comments find the mutual seduction either implausible or titillating. Trust me, it's real.
7 - alan
there's a mistake in the title; it should say "unfuckingbelievable".