Mudged

A few months back we ditched cable. No more Saturday morning cartoon bonanzas for our children. Aside from the initial tantrums that gave way to grumbling before entirely dissipating, the benefits have been profound. One is that neither of our older children has been bombarding us with dozens of demands of branded plastic contraptions for Christmas this year because they saw it on a commercial. Another is they aren't fighting over shows and turns and so forth. Because I've largely conceded Netflix to children's shows, I've been taking what I can get off of the DVD shelf at the public library.
Yesterday I grabbed The Mudge Boy. Not a title that beckons, but some of my friends in NY worked on it and I remembered that alone. I remember one friend that had worked on it recommended I meet Tommy Guiry for Original Glory. Then when I sat down to watch it last night I saw that Emile Hirsch was in it. Funny that back in 2003 Guiry was the future "star" of that cast. Both performances were very good. Too effective in some ways, at least for my discomfort with reckless homosexuality and the tensions leading up to it. I'm not a fan of watching male-male sex. I accept it when it's romantic. When it's a result of wanton lonely lust, serving as some sort of substitute for hetero desires and intimacy, like Deliverance, prison stuff and especially abused adolescents, I get really, really uncomfortable.
And this entire film was filled with that tension. With no transcendence, no hope, nothing. Just plain cruelty and pain and suffering. There wasn't even any humor. If there's one thing that I know firsthand about being human is that no matter how awful things are, we find a way to distract ourselves, usually through humor. This was just grim.
And to make matters worse, the ugliest bits were sanitized in such a way that rang false and irresponsible. The kid that gets raped is wearing his dead mother's wedding gown. That alone is enough to let you know how depraved things are in The Mudge Boy. The rapist had spoken a lot about how well-endowed he was earlier in the film. One would think that a fourteen year old would bleed when sodomized no matter the size of his rapist. The kid's dad walks in right after it's over. The kid has to ask for help to get the wedding dress off. I'm thinking the dad is going to see some evidence of the rape on the wedding dress. Nope, it's totally pristine and the kid walks away as if nothing has happened to him physically. It would have been almost impossible for the kid to not have been injured and in a lot of physical pain after such an experience.
I checked Imdb to see if the writer-director got a career going from his Mudge Boy debut. Not so far. It was a very competent film both technically and artistically. And it received very favorable reviews for its "gutsy portrayal of rural life".
All I know is, I felt awful after seeing this film.

Left Cold,
Signore Direttore