I finally got to see Boy Erased after having missed it when it was playing in a few regional theatres.
Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges) has one of the stormiest coming-of-age and coming-out experiences: he's in college and [CONTENT WARNING / spoiler alert] gets raped by another religiously inclined boy, Henry (Joe Alwyn), who, like so many rapists, doesn't appear to see rape itself as a fundamental moral failure; instead, Henry is focused on the wickedness of same sex erotic behavior and whimpers to Jared afterwards about his remorse for the bad things he's done. When Jared, to Henry's apparent surprise, isn't particularly warm and friendly to him subsequently, Henry becomes worries that Jared will inform on him, so he preempts that by outing Jared to his parents and to people on campus.
You can be excused for wondering why being outed as a rape victim would cause anyone to reach any meaningful conclusion about the victim's sexual orientation, but Henry doesn't allude to his own involvement or factor in the violence involved; he simply tells everyone that Jared has been engaging in homosexual activities.
As it turns out, Jared has indeed been aware of sexual feelings towards males, and when confronted and accused decides to be honest about that.
That sets the stage for Jared's father Marshall (Russell Crowe), a socially conservative clergyman in a southern Alabama church, to arrange for Jared to attend a gay-to-straight conversion program, "Love in Action", a Christian-centric day facility operated by Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton).
"Love in Action" is a total institution in the classic Erving Goffman sense; Sykes and his staff evaluate the program participants not only on their own behaviors and attitudes but on what opinions and feedback they provide to the others attending. That means they control all of the approval and disapproval that anyone can receive within the program. Denying that you have any problem, any worrisome attitude or unhealthy compensation mechanism, is itself always a symptom, proof that you aren't dealing with your issues, so no one can disagree or differ from anything that they are accused of. And of course this way of treating you is defined as therapeutic, as something you're being subjected to for your own good. It is, after all, love in action.
There is a considerable amount of internalized self-hatred and self-rejection in Boy Erased, and it is convincingly portrayed. Michael (David Joseph Craig) is a rule-worshipping martinet, bristling with disgust and contempt for Jared and the other sinful wicked people brought to the program; Henry the rapist is clearly tied up in revulsion for his own attractions and urges; Jared himself spends much of the movie accepting that he belongs here, worrying that God will condemn him to hell for being this way. There is a scene where Brandon (a camp counselor brought in to give masculinity lessons, played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) first berates Jared for going into the toilet unaccompanied and accuses him of going in there to masturbate, and then stands behind him commenting lasciviously on how Jared pees. And from the top, Victor Sykes, an "ex-gay" convert himself, gets a discernable amount of prurient delight from hearing the confessions of his fallen guilty charges; he doesn't believe Jared when Jared details his homosexual sins as consisting in their entirety of laying down next to another guy (Xavier, by Theodore Pellerin) for a spate of platonic hugging. Sykes wants to hear more juicy morsels to pass judgment on.
The scenes where Brandon gives lessons in how to be manly men, instructing the boys on how to stand and what positions to hold their wrists in, etc, are campy and silly and reminiscent of Kevin Kline's sendup in In and Out. But given how silly it actually is to aspire to this thing called masculinity by mindlessly emulation, that's probably not easily avoided.
Boy Erased subtly underscores a fundamentally Christian problem with a homophobic agenda: having already gone on record as disapproving of heterosexual sexual activity except when restricted to marriage, the conservative Christian churches have painted themselves into a bit of a corner; they can't simply run camps like "Love in Action" as boot camps for enthusiastically heterosexual activities without contradicting a lot of what they stand for. As a consequence, throughout this movie we see a somewhat anachronistic approach to the condemnation of gay sexual activity, treating it as an unpicky, polymorphously perverse way of being entirely too interested in sex in general, rather than a failure to lust sufficiently for the opposite sex.
Nicole Kidman plays the mom, Nancy, who is largely ignored and bypassed by her husband in his rush to handle the crisis of his son having gay sexual feelings. She never joins in the judgmental condemnation and later comes to Jared's rescue and stands up to husband Marshall in the process. This is consistent with conservative men being more hostile to gay males than women from the same culture are.
The most important point, though, is that "Love in Action" does not function as a straightening clinic. It's a recloseting clinic. The clients who attend are not reshaped into heterosexual people and there's very little pretense that this is happening. Instead they are told to "fake it until you make it", to go through the motions, to study what passes as normative heterosexual and gender-appropriate and exhibit those characteristics. The camp's pressure on the participants is to go along with the program, to appear to agree more than to understand and be truly motivated by it. Appearances are all. Other boys in the program advise Jared to say what will give the counselors the impression that he is making progress. It's how you get out of here.
Boy Erased is based on Garrard Conley's book Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment