‘Mysterious Skin’: the two sides of the same PTSD coin

“Two boys. One can’t remember. The other can’t forget.”—isn’t that exactly it? When trauma hits, the brain picks a side; you don’t get to choose which one you land on.

"Mysterious Skin" is a movie best approached blind, if you can handle it. I’d say I’m a pretty steely viewer. Not much shakes me; I rarely cry at movies, and I’m rarely left feeling rattled. But for a solid 80 percent of Gregg Araki’s effort, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It’s so visceral it makes you want to clutch your stomach as it turns over and over. It left my chest aching, dragging me along with the runtime.

As trauma is caused and then endured in two very different ways on screen, the film somehow pulls your body into survival mode right alongside it. Brady Corbett plays Brian Lackey, the one who can’t remember. Growing up with this horrendous feeling that something happened but the memory of it is missing, his scenes leave you feeling haunted, aching, and deeply unsatisfied in a conflicting way. Like the character, you’re left feeling terrified by what the memory might be and equally terrified by what it would be like to find it again.

When your body enters survival mode during trauma, the hippocampus—the part of your brain responsible for memory—can shut down completely. For some people with PTSD, it never fully switches back on. While many still associate PTSD with vivid flashbacks, like a soldier reliving war, the reality is often the opposite.

The war is wiped from your memory, but your body still believes it’s fighting. Dissociation, brain fog, and forgetting the trauma entirely are just as much a part of PTSD as remembering. It leaves people feeling exactly like Brian does: cut off, confused, and trapped in a life that seems safe and normal, while the mind remains stuck in a battle it can’t see but can still feel.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Neil McCormick, the one who can’t forget. Neil lives his life fully and completely within his trauma, so much so that he doesn’t even register it as that. For some, PTSD is an insidious and quiet thing that rumbles deep within them; for others, it is a complete and utter rearrangement, something that touches the skin and the bones and trickles down to the very guts of a person. Neil embodies that. Not only is he completely aware of his trauma, he is shaped by it. He behaves exactly like his abuser and continues to perpetrate the abuse he faced against others, but mostly against himself, well into his teenage years.

But again, the character is tackling nuanced misconceptions about trauma responses. The stereotype is that trauma makes a person scared, and so they will spend their lifetime running and avoiding what scared them. It’s assumed that no one wants to be reminded of the bad thing that happened, so they naturally become completely averse to it, but that’s not true.

There are several newer films that handle this beautifully, like Poor Things or Nosferatu, which both pick apart the nuanced connection between trauma and hypersexuality or people’s tendency to run towards their trauma. This is because PTSD can make that ugly situation feel oddly comforting due to its familiarity. But in this 2004 portrayal, or even the original 1995 book, the way it’s handled is quite novel for its time. Just as how Brian’s scenes leave you feeling his disorientation, you also end up feeling Neil’s emotional extremes in his scenes.

His story arc makes you feel utterly manic, in moments completely thrilled and giddy as he runs around in a storm of sexual chaos, but then, when it splinters, the fear in those scenes is both utterly overwhelming and masterfully numbing. Like the brain going quiet in freeze mode, a typical third option to fight or flight, Araki once again pushes his viewer directly into the experience of a trauma response.

Even as both sides converge, when the two boys meet, and the memory of their shared trauma is made known to both, neither can offer a resolution. The film ends as gut-wrenchingly as it began, as the commitment to depicting PTSD endures with a suitably tricky ending, staying as a reminder that no disorder is ever neatly packaged. The rewiring of the brain that trauma causes can’t be solved with a happy ending, if at all.