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

Sexuality & Culture (2014) 18:710718 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

Published online: 14 May 2014 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 lm 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 lms 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 skins 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, Brazile-mail: [email protected]

M. Lopes

Research Group in Culture and Sexuality, Center for Multidisciplinary Studies in Culture, Federal University of Bahia, Bahia, Brazile-mail: [email protected]

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becomes inseparable from life itself, transforming it into an expression of the skin and giving...