Monday, 29 June 2020

Butt Boy (2020) - Movie Review



I cherish films like this that make their way to my radar. The kind that, were I not someone who actively looked for out-of-the-box releases, I likely never would’ve come across otherwise. And no, this isn’t me reviewing porn again; it’s actually a crime thriller closer to something like Michael Mann or Denis Villeneuve’s pre-sci-fi days. Believe this, it’s only going to get weirder from here, so strap in.

Thrillers of this kind rely on being able to work with a straight face, treating the main premise as dead-serious as possible, in spite of how patently bizarre it is at face-value. Here, said premise is that, after a fateful rectal examination, office worker Chip (played by the film’s director/co-writer Tyler Cornack) develops a fixation on sticking things up his bum. Things like bars of soap, a remote control, the neighbourhood dog, and even a few children. On his tail is detective Russell (Tyler Rice), who has not only been assigned to the case involving said missing children, but the main suspect in his eyes is also his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor: Chip.

From the glitchy soundtrack to the murky colour palette to the methodical pacing, this plays out like your average procedural drama, focusing equally on both sides of the case in question. It gets immediate weird credits for how well everyone involved does at working with this material in such deadpan fashion, although even with the obvious straight-man aesthetic going on here (beyond this basically being Straights Are Weird: The Movie), it wouldn’t have hurt if there was at least a little levity.

In the process of taking what is usually the right approach for a comedic thriller, it winds up feeling a little too self-serious to really vibe with as much. It’s a bit of a frustrating situation where I wish it wasn’t quite as intense, but I also get the reason why it’s presented like this.

Here’s where I need to get into a bit of film theory to pre-empt the best explanation I can come up with as to why this film is the way it is, specifically to do with sex on film. Or, at the very least, kink-adjacent activity on film. In the golden age of Hollywood, when censors were far more stringent than they are nowadays (mileage may vary, of course), sex couldn’t be explicitly depicted, going instead for symbolic actions to represent. The best example of this would be the ending to North By Northwest, basically the standard of this in action, with a train going through a tunnel as placeholder for the good old genital IKEA instructions.

Nowadays, particularly in the realm of independent cinema, it’s essentially the exact opposite. There are fewer hang-ups in showing sex as part of cinematic storytelling, except it tends to get used in a symbolic fashion in its own right. Basically, sex stands in for just about anything else other than the act itself.

Where that plays into this film is how the anal Bag of Holding plays into the main narrative besides it, to do with Chip and Russell’s respective times in AA. Chip’s behaviour is treated as a compulsion, an addiction no different to his past relationship with alcohol, both of which end up serving as examples of coping mechanisms for issues in their own lives. It can’t be a coincidence that both Chip and Russell’s compulsive habits are connected in some way to their places as fathers of children.

So, with that in mind, this turns out to be a Spectrevision-esque visualisation (yeah, it seriously gets into that kind of weirdness, particularly during the final act) of what it feels like to deal with these kinds of compulsive behaviours, whether attached to recognisable addictions or otherwise. You keep pushing that vice further and further down inside yourself, unable to deal with the reality of what you’re actually doing, and hoping that it just never resurfaces. But everything has its breaking point, and the human capacity to deceive itself is no different, and as things reach a fever pitch, we see that these things need to be absolved. Not just for our sakes, but for everyone in our support circles as well.

As you can imagine from how heavy that last sentence got, this is a weird frickin’ movie. It’s honestly another example of a film that’s more interesting to think about after the fact than it is to watch in real-time, as it can get a little too dry to be truly effective. But for a film where my only real reference points are films like Killer Condom and Water Power, all mixed with plenty of old-school Michael Mann worship, it’s kind of impossible for me not to appreciate this as a thing that exists in this world.

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