The Null Device

Mysterious Skin

I went to see Mysterious Skin tonight. It's a recent American art-house film about two boys who had been sexually molested by a baseball coach in a small town; ten years on, one boy is a somewhat callous, promiscuous gay hustler (who looks a bit like a hipster Mr. Spock), while the other blocked out details of the experience, believing instead that he had been abducted by aliens, and is trying to figure out what really happened during those lost hours.

The posters on the Tube advertised it as "slinky-hipped and sleazy-poetic", which makes it sound like the next album from The Killers or something, though the impression is misleading; this is a thoughtful and often beautifully shot film, at times explicit and harrowing, though not gratuitously so. The soundtrack really added to it; it was by Robin Guthrie (from the Cocteau Twins) and Harold Budd, and also featured songs by Slowdive, Curve and Sigur Rós, and not an overhyped NME New Wave Revival band in earshot.

I wonder whether there was any connection between the Slowdive songs in the soundtrack and the other UFO contactee being named Avalyn.

There are 4 comments on "Mysterious Skin":

Posted by: videlicet http:// Tue May 31 03:23:04 2005

if you liked alex cox's repo man then you'd probably also appreciate gregg araki's doom generation and nowhere (which has a special connection with donnie darko)

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Tue May 31 08:22:15 2005

Haven't seen Repo Man yet. OTOH, I didn't think much of Donnie Darko; to me, it seemed like a sophomoric attempt to imitate David Lynch, with extra servings of teen-angst.

Posted by: videlicet http:// Wed Jun 1 00:44:42 2005

oy, nevermind then :D nowhere especially's got heaps upon steamin' heaps o'teen "alienation!"

Posted by: videlicet http:// Wed Jun 1 04:02:46 2005

<a href="http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/41955">speaking</a> of <a href="http://www.davidlynch.com/dailyreport/">lynch</a> :D

cheers!

Want to say something? Do so here.

Post pseudonymously

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot, please enter the text in the image into the field below it.

Your Comment:

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.