Movie Topic Index

This autobiographical story of a working class teen chronically abused by his stepfather, shows him living out his mother's fascination with the upper crust by impersonating the son of a wealthy employer after being taken under her wing but then humiliated by her son. The boy, like the film-maker he represents, ends up in prison. This is one of the few films I've seen on DVD in which the commentary of the filmmaker is almost more of an event than the film itself, which in itself is a masterful study in the overlap of classism and abuse.

Antwone Fisher (2002)

The Boys of St. Vincent (1993)

A 2-part documentary drama made for Canadian TV based on the true story about the sexual abuse of boys at an orphanage in Newfoundland. The first parts follows the abuse experiences of the boys; the second part follows the criminal prosecution of the offenders a decade and a half later. A powerful, responsible, yet sensitive look at the experience of both survivors and offenders. A precursor to the similar American film, Sleepers.

Bugcrush (2006)

This short film which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in '06 is in the horror genre but uses it to amazingly uncomfortable psychological effect.

The Celebration (Festen) (1998) Thomas Vinterberg

The showcase film of the Dogma 95 film group. The film takes place over the course of the 60th birthday celebration of a Danish patriarch whose children gradually reveal the family's history of incest. The treatment of denial and dissociation related to incest is so disturbingly faithful that the film's just outcome may seem optimistic. Christian, he initiator of the 'incest intervention,' is a Hamlet figure, visited by the ghost of his recently suicide twin sister (an on-going suicide victim), and appearing increasingly mad as he pursues his disclosure plot. The three surviving siblings represent the split off faculties (head, heart, muscle) of the sexual abuse survivor.

A Chorus Line (1985)

Class (1983)

Deliverance

For a Lost Soldier (1994) Roeland Kerbosch

An uncomfortably idealized portrayal of the brief affair between Walt, a young 'liberating' Canadian soldier, and Jerouen, a 14 year-old boy exiled to strangers in the countryside from his native Amsterdam during WWII. The imagery of a downed Canadian fighter plane lying belly-up in shallow waters, to which Jerouen is almost hypnotically drawn, carries the undramatized traumatic underside of the boy's experience.

The Hanging Garden (1996) Thom Fitzgerald

An independent Canadian film about family dysfunction that fosters the abusive sexual initiation of a 15 year-old boy in a misguided homophobic reaction to the boy's budding homosexuality. Draws from magic realism to blend past and present in the portrayal of family dynamics.

Happiness (1999) Todd Solondz

A uniquely disturbing look at the psycho-sexual disasters lurking beneath an ideal suburban surface in the lives of three young adult New Jersey(?) sisters. Dylan Baker's portrayal of a mild-mannered pedophilic psychotherapist, married to one of them, is so troubling that it took me a second viewing just to register him as a therapist. The film is both difficult and masterful in the way it sets elements of the film experience (setting, music, dialogue, action) against each other to represent dissociative processes. The film, whose title captures its pervasive irony, is often simultaneously chilling and funny. This film is graphic --but not gratuituously so-- in its story of two boys abused by their baseball coach, as perverse as he is handsome, each personifying opposite extremes of response to sexual abuse --promiscuity and sexual anorexia-- and about their search for each other as each other's missing half.

JoJo Dancer, Your Life is Calling (1986) Richard Prior

L.I.E. (2001) Michael Cuesta

After the death of his mother in a car crash of the Long Island Expressway, 15-y.o. Howie Blitzer is cast adrift, his father in crisis, denial, and unavailable. The boy falls under the radar of an ex-marine pedophile brilliantly played by Brian Cox. Why Howie does not fall victim to this man is at the heart of this movie and what makes it an exceptionally complex treatment of the psychology of sexual abuse, an exception to the typical polarizations of victim and victimizer.

Little Boy Blue (1997) Antonio Tibaldi

An incest drama that symptomatically draws the viewer into a web of deceits and displacements that mirror the sadism of a wounded Vietnam Vet.

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Murmur of the Heart (1971)

A disturbingly light-hearted French comedy about 'innocent' mother-son incest.

Mysterious Skin (2004) Gregg Araki

This film is graphic --but not gratuituously so-- in its story of two boys abused by their baseball coach, as perverse as he is handsome, each boy personifying opposite extremes of response to sexual abuse --promiscuity and sexual anorexia-- and about their search for each other as each other's missing half.

Mystic River (2003)

My Life as a Dog (1985)

The sibling sexual abuse in this film appears early, as a prank, and is left incidental to the development of the boy protagonist.

Prince of Tides (1991)

Sleepers (1996) Barry Levinson

The American Hollywood counterpart to the earlier Canadian film, The Boy's of St. Vincent. Four boys incarcerated in a youth facility for a prank gone wrong, are sadistically abused by their wardens, and later each pursue revenge in emblematically diverse ways. The film polarizes victims and victimizers in ways that spare the viewer the challenge taken on by the earlier film.
A subtext that begins in the stickball game scene, early in the movie (DVD ch.8), indicts the boys' community as setting them up for their later abuse by humiliating Michael for his empathy toward a young, verbally abusive amputee.

Spanking the Monkey (1994)

A movie of incestuous maternal intrapment which focuses on the complex experience of the trapped son.

"People ask if this film is autobiographical, and many of the circumstances in it are but I've pushed them farther than they really went. It's personal, but not completely autobiographical. It was common in my home and my friends' homes to see no fathers around - and even when they were around they weren't really around. It wasn't just that they were so busy working hard for the family to afford living there, but they became estranged from the family and it was too hard for them to come back into the fold, I think. There were lots of lonely mothers who got overinvested in their sons' lives...The weird thing about this very common situation is that nobody much talks about it."

- David O. Russell, writer/director of Spanking the Monkey

Suddenly Last Summer (1942)

Summer of '42 (1971)

The Unsaid (2001) Tom McLoughlin / Andy Garcia

Although accurately billed as a psychological thriller and prone to the excesses of characterization (abuse survivor blurring into psychopathic criminal) that psychologically mar similar movies such as Fatal Attraction and Primal Fear, The Unsaid, has some powerful moments, especially the early fate of the son whose molest we discover only much later in the story. The movie went almost unnoticed, registering without reviews on rottentomatoes.com and suspiciously garnering either extremely positive or extremely negative popular reviews at sites like IMDb.

It follows a psychologist father's loss of his own son through his later attempts to rescue another, institutionalized boy who is also struggling with sexual abuse. Like most dramatic therapist films (e.g., Good Will Hunting), the patient is only helped by the therapist's coming to terms with his own personal unfinished business, accompanied by all the usual boundary violations that would cost any of us real professionals our licenses. But this film does face the issue of male sexual victimization head on.

Revised: August 11, 2006.