Come for the Aliens, Stay for the...???

 

While it seems like some people in the class enjoyed Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, the rest were thoroughly disturbed and wondered why we were watching a film like that for an academic course. Personally, I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I probably wouldn't watch this movie again, yet it was hard for me to look away the whole time it was playing. 

The film's flashback sequences and even some of the more intimate present-day scenes made me feel like I was intruding on the characters' lives and seeing things that should be private, despite the fact that the story was fictional. There's an inherent voyeurism in viewing any sort of film or video, but I think the taboo topics of pedophilia and prostitution in Mysterious Skin made it especially weird to watch. Still, like I said earlier, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. This is probably partly due to the film's nostalgic feel, showing us both the 80s and the late 90s in small town America. I was also very intrigued by the sexual dichotomy between Neil and Brian. While Neil was completely aware of what the coach did to him when he was a child and turned out to be a hypersexual young adult, Brian blocked out the memories and even went as far as believing aliens were responsible.

To sum up, Mysterious Skin probably isn't a movie I'll be revisiting, but the experience of seeing it definitely gave me a lot to think about. The way that it tracked the development of the two main characters from boyhood to adulthood was reminiscent of many coming-of-age stories, but this one harnessed nostalgia and Americana to explore sexual assault and its effects in a way that captured my full attention.

A Trip Down Gay Memory Lane

 

This week I'd like to do something a little different on here. Since Mosquita y Mari hit so close to home for me, I'm going to talk a bit about how it impacted me to watch a friendship like this depicted on the big screen. This film took me back to my early high school days, back when I was in a very similar situation with a female friend.

Seeing Yoli and Mari doing schoolwork, hanging out at the car garage, and sharing their hopes and dreams with each other made me almost nostalgic for my old friendship that I adamantly insisted was strictly platonic for the longest time. In class, someone had mentioned that physical affection is much more accepted in female friendships vs male ones, and this definitely opens up space for young queer girls to explore their sexual and romantic feelings for other girls. Yoli and Mari touched each other and got close to each other but never in an explicitly sexual way, which was something I appreciated. In high school, my friend and I showed similar forms of physical affection towards each other, although sometimes we pushed a little further than the characters in this film. We never actually had sex and didn't even kiss, but I still consider her an integral part of my sexual awakening.

The scene that really got me was when Yoli and Mari were cuddling on the couch. Almost the exact same moment had happened to me one day when my friend came over after school. Instead of the couch, we were hanging out in my room on my bed, and somehow we found ourselves in the same position as the girls in the film. The only difference was that no one burst into the room unexpectedly like the parents who caused Yoli and Mari to jump to opposite sides of the sofa. I can't really remember what else happened that day, but the feeling of lying there next to my friend has been seared permanently into my memory. Interestingly, I don't think we ever discussed the event after the fact just as we never had the talk about what exactly our relationship was. Hopefully I haven't overshared; I just wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on my own past based on the memories this film brought back.

I Spy With My Little Eye

 

Jennifer Reeder's Signature Move was definitely not a fan favorite in our class, and for good reason. For example, the dialogue and acting felt forced in many scenes, the leads didn't have much chemistry, and there was an overall lack of character development. Still, even though there were many things about Signature Move that didn't work for me, I think it's worth taking the time to consider the role of looking in this film, especially as it relates to Zaynab's mother, Parveen. 

Parveen lives to look, whether she's watching her Pakistani soap operas or gazing out at the people on the street through the binoculars permanently hanging around her neck. I think her desire to engage with the world as an onlooker rather than an active participant for most of the film may be partly due to her knee pain which makes her mostly chair bound as well as the pain from dealing with the loss of her husband. For her, trauma and disability combine to make looking be her primary activity. 

It's interesting that there were so many shots of people outside from her point of view through the binoculars, but we never get to see what she sees on the TV. Maybe that's just because the director thought the 'film within a film' would draw too much attention away from the main storyline between Zaynab and Alma, but it could also have to do with the fact that the main impact of the soap operas comes from what we hear rather than what we see. The sound on the TV is most crucial when Alma, Zaynab, and Parveen all watch a telenovela and Parveen tells Zaynab that she doesn't need to understand Spanish to know that the two characters are in love. As corny as the scene and the metaphor are, the interplay between sound, visuals, and meaning stood out to me.

Anything Boys Can Do, Lesbians Can Do Better

 

In Dee Rees' queer coming of age story, Pariah, we get to see someone rarely depicted on the big screen: the Black, masculine presenting lesbian. It was fascinating to watch Lee and Laura borrow from traditional masculine norms in their dress, language, and behavior. The two friends refer to each other as 'man' and wear baseball caps, baggy shirts, and boxer shorts. Not a single word of dialogue would have had to change in the scene outside the club when they talk about how many girls' numbers Lee scored that night had the characters been male. That, along with the shots of Laura dancing with the women in the club challenged what it means to be a Black woman in every way possible. 

The brief dance clips actually reminded me a little bit of the way Mario was depicted in Pelo Malo. The camera doesn't really sexualize either of them but captures their cool, confident masculinity in a way that almost makes us want to be like them. There's a similar technique used in Tomboy directed by Celine Sciamma, another film I watched recently. There, the neighborhood boys are shown in their full masculine glory taking their shirts off for a soccer game, spitting on the ground, and wrestling by the lake. These kinds of characters, although they come from different films and different countries, give us a sense of what it means to be masculine. 

When women embody traits so deeply associated with men, we're forced to separate masculinity from maleness, like Halberstam writes in Female Masculinity. Watching Laura dance under the strobe lights with several women is obviously different than watching a man do the same thing. A man in that position would be reinforcing every conventional notion of being a 'real' man, from wearing baggy clothes to getting girls. A woman like Laura, however, particularly as a Black woman, defies every societal expectation. She's not sassy, she's hard; she's not going steady with some guy, she's in the club with multiple women. In moments like the club scenes, Black female masculinity is not something to hide or be ashamed of. It's something that's truly magnificent.