‘Just Understand Me’ Message Behind Reality-Altered Fantasy Takes A Dark Turn When Larger Scene Is Considered
Sometimes life doesn’t just imitate art, it transforms it. With the revelation of “Powder” director Victor Salva’s child-molestation conviction, we have yet another movie rewritten by a sex scandal that preceded it.
Just this summer, “Nine Months” was remade by real-world events from a light comedy about love and commitment into a light comedy about love and commitment starring a guy (Hugh Grant) who had just been arrested with a prostitute. Now, “Powder” has gone from a movie about a strange and spooky loner to a movie about a strange and spooky loner made by a convicted child molester.
The title character is a supremely talented young man with unnaturally pale skin who hides behind designer sunglasses and a fedora. While this is a description of the character played by “Powder’s” star, Sean Patrick Flanery, it’s also an instantly recognizable thumbnail sketch of Michael Jackson.
Even without the Salva controversy, the Jackson parallels would be unmistakable - in another context, “Powder’s” doppelganger qualities might have seemed a deliberate strategy, a comment on the alienating distortions imposed by celebrity life. But in light of the controversy, and given the film’s general lack of sophistication, “Powder’s” Michael Jackson homage seems downright bizarre and more than a little creepy.
But then, creepy is a word you keep coming back to in “Powder’s” reality-altered fantasy. Movies about beautiful outsiders are hardly novel, but the message of this genre - about the things we lose and the cruelty we inflict through our fear of those different from us - takes, in this instance, a decidedly darker turn.
Like “Edward Scissorhands,” “Powder” is an unreal creation - his supernatural powers seem limitless. Because of this, he exists not so much as a literal figure as a symbolic one. And by the end of the movie, the intended symbolism is clear: “I may be scary, I may seem dangerous, but if you could just understand me, you would see I’m beautiful.” It is a message that inspires one set of feelings when delivered by an eccentric artist and quite another when coming from a convicted child molester.
Throughout “Powder,” disturbing resonances flare, from the sheriff’s observation, upon discovering Powder in his grandparents’ cellar, that “they kept him down there like some kind of family secret,” to Powder’s hushed confession to the youth counselor who befriends him that “I’m not like other people.” More disturbing still is the movie’s eroticized treatment of certain scenes and the young men in them.
Salva’s script and direction reiterate that Powder is hairless (just like a little boy), a recurrence that peaks in the film’s most troubling scene.
Having strayed into the gym of the children’s home where he has been staying, Powder briefly watches a group of boys playing basketball before spying through the bathroom doorway a muscled young man standing before a sink. Powder (and the camera) takes a lingering look as the junior Atlas peels off his shirt and languidly splashes his torso with water - the film almost seems to go into slow motion.
From there, the scene devolves into sexual taunting that backhandedly treats child molestation (incestuous, no less) as typical adolescent male banter. Before the scene is over, Powder has been stripped naked so the boys can exclaim over his hairlessness and watch his ever-so-white bum bob around in a mud puddle.
You can’t help but wonder what Disney executives were thinking as they sat in the screening room. In yet another instance of life dealing in ironies too gaudy for even the pulpiest of fiction, the Walt Disney Co., which made its name as our culture’s repository of childhood fantasy, is now the corporation coldly defending its relationship with a convicted child molester. It’s Victor Salva as Disney’s Mark Fuhrman.
But judging by the movie’s successful debut (earning $7.1 million to finish No. 2 in its opening weekend), there’s been no Fuhrman-esque backlash. A cynic might even see the controversy as a windfall, believing that at least some of those big opening numbers were generated by people drawn by the controversy.
Then again, maybe people turned out in spite of the controversy, refusing to be dictated to by the latest media scandal. Perhaps in today’s tabloid marketplace, scandals have lost their particularity, one fading into another until no one bothers to notice which one we are walking through today.
As people debate the gray area between crime and punishment, our reactions seem randomly cast in black and white. In the wake of the “Showgirls” outcry and the backlash against a Calvin Klein ad campaign featuring young models in sexually charged settings, many pundits predicted “Powder’s” box-office death. And yet …
In those cases, the public reacted vehemently to fantasy images that were held to be offensive, but in the case of “Powder,” involving real actions, the vote at the ticket counter has been supportive. It makes you wonder about the distinctions being made (or lost) between reality and fantasy in a world where it is getting harder and harder to tell the difference.