On its release 20 years ago, Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin generated critical raves but reached only modest cultural saturation. That audiences were initially squeamish isn’t all that shocking – this was a film that explored the torturous aftermath of child sexual abuse. Since then, driven mostly by word-of-mouth praise in the online world, the film has gradually snowballed in prestige into a kind of touchstone for a daring phase of indie cinema that is now a bygone era.
Mysterious Skin is now broadly admired for its incisive look at the psychic displacements and coping mechanisms activated by trauma. But to rewatch it today, in the present age of social fragmentation and cultural polarization, is to see something new. Araki’s film explored abuses of power in ways that were not just deeply personal but deeply political – and in astonishingly prescient ways.
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Beginning in Hutchinson, Kansas, in the summer of 1981, Mysterious Skin centers on two eight-year-old boys, Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey, who are preyed on by a Little League baseball coach (Bill Sage). Years later, on the other side of adolescence, the survivors cope in dramatically different ways. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has become an emotionally hollow hustler, turning tricks in a self-destructive quest for intimacy. Meanwhile, Brian (Brady Corbet) has cordoned off those traumatic hours and latched onto a conspiracy theory – that he was abducted by aliens – to deflect the unbearable reality of the horror he endured.
With parents hamstrung by negligence and denial, Neil and Brady must instead rely on their peers: Neil’s soulmate, Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg), who sees that Neil has a “bottomless blackhole” where his heart should be; Eric (Jeffrey Licon), whose tenderness Neil can’t reciprocate; and Avalyn (Mary Lynn Rajskub), whose obsession with UFO abduction theories shakes loose Brian’s repressed memories. Both boys have all but forgotten that they knew each other, but what they still share is a volatile rage that constantly threatens to erupt. But where to direct it? That eludes them.
Araki, who adapted, produced, and directed the film, had already established himself as a pivotal figure in launching what came to be known as the New Queer Cinema movement in the 1990s, where he’d shown a talent for zeroing in on emotionally fraught moments within larger scenes of social upheaval. That talent is again evident, for example, in one of Mysterious Skin’s most heartbreaking scenes, where Neil looks on in bewilderment as one of his johns unbuttons his shirt to reveal brown skin lesions from an immune system ravaged by AIDS.
Queer themes aside, Mysterious Skin upped the ante with a daring risk: there would be no upfront narrative framing that would condemn the abuser as an evil scumbag. Instead, the audience experiences events through Neil’s boyhood eyes. Confined within this blinkered perspective, viewers experience the coach’s charm and magnetism and Neil’s infectious glee as he romps through a kid-geared paradise of sugar cereals, pinball machines, video games, and bean bag chairs.
This approach marked a watershed moment in how movies depicted the perpetrators of child sexual abuse. Hollywood had until this point treated abusers as dysfunctional creeps. The 1993 adaptation of Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne, for example, represents the incestuous child abuser at the heart of the story as a sloppy alcoholic, deadbeat dad, and mercurial wife-beater – an instantly legible villain. But doing so distorted an unsettling reality: perpetrators are most often integrated into and esteemed by their social networks and communities. Araki, a survivor of abuse himself, was determined to shatter the myth that child predators are maladjusted outcasts.
Bill Sage, who portrayed the coach, told Little White Lies that, some two decades later, he’s only seen the film once, at its Sundance screening in 2005, where he was confronted by audience members who felt shaken and offended by his performance. What they didn’t know was that he was portraying an act of predation – child sexual abuse – that he’d experienced himself.
“This happened to me in the 70s, when there was still a shroud of silence over these types of crimes,” Sage said. “My dad was nearing the end of his career in the Navy, and my parents split. Everything went awry in my family, and I felt totally lost. That made me a target. The guy who abused me was an eighth-grade teacher, a coach, married, and well-respected by everyone. It felt like another twist of the knife that he was seen as a pillar of the community.”
Years later, in his early 30s, Sage returned to Staten Island to confront his abuser, who tried to gaslight him with denials. “I just remember shouting, feeling this outpouring of rage, but even in that moment, I could see the recognition in his eyes,” Sage said. “It felt liberating to finally turn the tables on him by taking away the control he thought he had over me.”
Sage’s experience primed him to discard the trope of the child molester as a vile pariah in favor of something more like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“I was determined to make this character likeable and disarming,” he said. “I know that rattled some people, but it was necessary to show how normal abusers can appear, and how exploitation can be twisted to seem like an expression of love.”
Sage worked only six days on the project, in part because it was shot on a shoestring budget of $1 million and at a breakneck pace over just three weeks, including guerilla shots in the New York subway. After an initial screening in Venice in September 2004, TLA Releasing debuted the film unrated in 19 theaters, ultimately pulling in a worldwide gross of $2.1 million. Along the way, it was buffeted by hysterical demands for censorship, as when representatives of the Australian Family Association, without viewing the film, claimed it would gratify pedophiles and double as a how-to guide for grooming children. (The effort failed.)
Joseph Gordon Levitt photographed by Scott Heim on July 3, 2003. The photograph was taken in the park in Hutchinson, Kansas, which is referenced in Mysterious Skin. According to Heim, Gregg Araki liked the photo so much that he re-shot the pose in the picture as a scene in the film (pictured below).
Now, almost 30 years since completing the novel at the age of 25, Scott Heim told Little White Lies it originated in two unrelated stories that he braided together once he perceived the parallels in how victims remember alien abduction experiences and sexual abuse. Even before the book was published, Beat Poet and UFO enthusiast William S. Burroughs got wind of the novel’s originality and, bowled over by an early copy of the manuscript, blurbed an ecstatic endorsement.
What has gone largely unremarked since the film’s release two decades ago, however, is its underlying diagnosis of social dysfunction. Neil’s mother, Ellen McCormick (Elisabeth Shue), stumbles around in a drunken stupor as she cycles through low-paying, dead-end jobs. Her absenteeism as a mother is just one part of the fog of stagnation, malaise, and negligence that hangs over the families of Hutchinson.
Heim wrote the novel in the early 1990s as the economic boom times of the Clinton era were kicking into gear. Yet Heim was seeing something very different in rural and suburban Kansas. Corporations were shuttering plants across the Midwest. Unions were atrophying as they shed members in droves. Industrial plants were being offshored as markets globalized. Meanwhile, a neoliberal consensus in Washington poured salt on these wounds by shrinking the social safety net. In Heim’s deft telling, parental negligence is actually a byproduct of political and economic developments that shortchanged communities in middle America.
Eight years later, as pre-production was ramping up, Heim and Joseph Gordon Levitt travelled to Kansas and spent four days meandering around spaces that inspired the novel’s events, such as the baseball diamond and the world’s largest grain elevator. But they also saw flagrant signs of accelerating economic decline that Araki ended up translating to the screen. Around this same time, in 2004, political analyst Thomas Frank released a highly influential analysis, centered on Kansas, that examined how the state’s once-radical working class had been shafted by exploitative economic policies and swindled by social conservatism.
Mysterious Skin had a truly prescient grasp of the eroding economic power of the working class across the Midwest – and the tragic, maladaptive responses that could emerge from this chronic neglect. In a sense, it predicted the rise of the populist right in America – and in an uncanny way, it anticipated the key dynamics of how chronically neglected people would glom onto a false idol.
Specifically, Mysterious Skin showed that exploitation relied on two tactics: treating the endurance of cruelty as a test of allegiance and repackaging cruelty as deliriously fun. Decades later, Donald Trump would himself impose self-abasing loyalty tests, from his sycophantic Cabinet all the way down to rank-and-file MAGA supporters, who were duped into emptying their bank accounts to buy cratering Truth Social stocks. And Trump was even more effective in making a festival out of degradation. He egged on his supporters to “knock the crap out” of protestors, pantomimed the disability of a reporter, and even proposed making migrants combatants in a UFC-style tournament, as if literalizing cruelty as spectacle sport, like the Colosseum of ancient Rome. The bullying and debasing tactics that worked on Neil McCormick worked in real life and on a grand political scale.
In a final stunning parallel, Trump weaponized conspiracy theories to sow chaos, fuel resentment, and even mobilize mobs. As a result, genuinely disoriented and traumatized people not unlike Brian Lackey grabbed hold of conspiracy theories – Pizzagate, QAnon, the plandemic, and the Stop the Steal movement, to name only a few – that propelled profoundly self-sabotaging behavior, as many of those sitting in prison for storming the US Capitol Building on January 6 can attest.
For his part, Heim is loath to take too much credit for prophesizing political dysfunction.
“There’s absolutely no way I could have predicted all of these social and political outcomes in a granular way 30 years ago,” Heim said. “But I did see that conspiracy theories thrive in an atmosphere of distrust and social alienation and that trauma and negligence can make people easy prey for exploitation. Frankly, I just never thought it would get this bad on this vast a scale. But I feel proud, in retrospect, that Mysterious Skin was an early warning flare.”
