Closet Monster: What’s that on your nails?
Where I grew up, there weren’t many hate crimes on the news. Not because people were okay with it, we just didn’t talk about it. Being raised to be a fellow acceptable individual, denying anything but that was considered ideal. Of course, when you encountered with a flamboyant boy, you’d hear concerned whispers, indirect warnings about him. Burying their identities, their nature, their joy and making such effort on making them the ideal heterosexual were how it was, instead of dealing with the reality of different sexualities. Should I be grateful for not witnessing a psychical violence and get along with the past? Which curse is worse?
First full-length feature of critically acclaimed Canadian director, Stephen Dunn, Closet Monster is a coming of age movie about a teen who is facing his fears to accept himself and most importantly his existence in the world. Growing up as a flamboyant kid, we first see him on cloud nine, and the happiness in his little face, which will only be dimmed by a huge burden put on Oscar Madly. (smoothly played by Jack Fulton and after affectingly embodied by Connor Jessup) He lives with his dominant father after his parents’ divorce. Glimpses of memories in which he is truly happy and not aware of the future pass through as the film welcomes its audience. Then Oscar plays with his father by pretending to stab him with a wooden stake and listens to a bedtime story from his father which somehow ends up with sexy ladies while his father’s deflating a balloon on his head as a way of injecting the feel of safety and heterosexuality at the same time. His father (with such multi-layered performance by Aaron Abrams) is not your usual homophobic dad you’d see in movies, his fear of the unknown because of the circumstances he lives in is so subtle that it’s mostly implanted in advises he gives to his son. The way he’s fathering Oscar is so unsatisfactory that you can clearly see the lack of self-fulfillment and hear echoes of fragility there. And the bricks he put building Oscar’s personality cause Oscar to have a huge rage towards the annihilating reality to cope with internalized homophobia.
Oscar (whose last name Madly might be a reference to Oscar Wilde or Oscillate Wildly, or both?) looks like a casual guy from outside, but couldn’t be more off-beat inside. Only at the age of nine, he sees a teen being bullied by some guys and goes for help. Unfortunately, he cannot help the teen from getting hurt, and he witnesses an extreme level of hate crime done with a piece of steel that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Like I’ve said, I didn’t witness anything remotely close to that nor do I have a physical trauma, but psychological bullying was so constant that it had been a part of my life until high school. Still haunts me to this day in my nightmares and relationships in daily life, but you know, you learn to live with what’s happened and try to, I don’t know, outgrow it? To outgrow the fear of monsters, Oscar starts making sculptures of monsters, gets a passion for horror makeup, and befriends a hamster whom he speaks with. His hamster, Buffy is played by none other than Isabella Rossellini. I’m saying ‘played’ because that’s how the filmmaker Dunn and the lead actor Jessup calls it which is totally right. Rossellini not only gives her voice, she gives a dorky personality to the hamster, to an extent that she steals every scene she is in. Buffy is a projection to Oscar’s inner self with being wacky, unapologetically sly, but trapped in a cage. Buffy is not the only one in life that keeps Oscar sane. His best friend Gemma (zestfully played by Sofia Banzhaf, and honestly her character deserves her own movie) gives Oscar a piece of her mind by not holding back whenever he becomes surprisingly rude to her because of toxic masculinity he is surrounded while raised. Gemma might seem like Manic Pixie Girl at first, but as the film goes on, she seamlessly goes beyond that and gets the respect as she deserves. She helps Oscar on his portfolio for applying the university, and Oscar helps her with her future acting career. I wish we could see her and her passion for acting more in the movie, just as how I wish we could see more of Oscar’s mother and her journey to freedom out of abusive relationship, but it respectfully is all Oscar’s point of view.
Oscar’s mother, Brin Madly (genuinely played by Joanne Kelly who deserved more screen time!) is a woman who fell heir to divorce to have a better life for herself. The first time I saw this film was when I was in the university and just started reading feminist theory, so I was confused about taking on any side or if there’s a side to take on in the first place. Was she right to leave? Was it fair to Oscar? As he points out in the movie, ‘She abandoned him and now he’s all fucked up.’ They never talk about his sexuality or demons he carries within, but deep down she knows he never has it easy and maybe never will, but if he’s forced to walk through shit, then he might as well grow a thick skin as she did. Because you know, mothers know. They’ve always been known. I wanted to write about Closet Monster the first time I’ve seen it, but couldn’t put myself together because I knew how traumatic it would be. It’s different for everyone, but what seems similar to the most is that you never know how your parents are going to react when you came out to them. You try to hope for the best and hold onto the memories that make you feel home. Like Oscar’s keeping the fur hat which belongs to his mother, I keep some of my mother’s shit just to feel safe. All right, back to the film, speaking of the fur hat, Oscar decides to wear it to the costume party his crush, Wilder (dreamily played by Aliocha Schenieder, who is a part of French Skarsgård family if you will.) invited him. He is also the one who causes Oscar to feel the pain in his stomach which has been there since he witnessed the hate crime. Wilder saves Oscar’s hamster, Buffy, when Buffy goes inside his vehicle audio. He is also the one who tells Oscar that Buffy is a male hamster, which is a metaphor for him pushing Oscar to come to terms with his sexuality and accept himself.
Closet Monster is not only a movie about a coming out story, but also one about fear and to me more importantly, rage. I eagerly want to specify the word ‘rage’ here, because that’s what I feel watching this movie. We talk about depression, anxiety, dissociated aspects of the self when we talk about psychological issues of being in the closet, but we don’t talk enough about rage which seeds are put the day we are born. Rage that is built upon toxic masculinity and the fucking box we are put into raising up. Box here is the closet and it is the one Oscar kicks his father into when his father tells him to take off the fur hat and the clothes that belong to his mother. Oscar wears them on the way of the costume party angrily, but at the same time, kind of unconsciously, with full of pride. He even gets a makeover scene at the party, which is my favorite part of the film, though I don’t know why, maybe because Oscar is a makeup artist, and he lets other people do his makeup the way he wouldn’t do but wish to do? His crush, Wilder is not really the guy whom he has a crush on. To Oscar, he looks like the ideal, the cool guy of French descent, but from hearsay information, we get to learn, he is a real person with vulnerability and has his own problems just like everybody else does. In order to find out if he is gay, Oscar asks him ‘What’s that on your nails?’ which was asked Oscar by a couple of girls when he was a kid. So, they say when boys check their nails, they’re supposed to hold their hand in a claw, but if they do it like from behind, it means they’re probably going to grow up to be gay. Strangely, it works. Try it at home! Or don’t, because it might be a disappointing experience. And Wilder holds his hand in a claw, that makes Oscar feel like whole world collapsed around his ears, and he ends up making an attempt to hook up the first guy who desires him, but fails miserably because of the pain in his stomach that has been holding him from being his true self, and faints. Wilder finds him, gets him out of the party house, and they go to Oscar’s tree house. Only when he is kissed by Wilder, Oscar feels like waves crashing on the rocks, and he lets loose probably for the first time. He is a stranger to the feeling of safe, undisclosed desires he has not explored yet, therefore cannot describe how he feels.
Pushing boundaries beyond reality, the director Dunn forces us to acknowledge what’s happening through magic realism with a spellbinding soundtrack. Cinematographer Bobby Shore’s part in it and the ambiance he created with Dunn should not be overlooked with the choices they must have made in the process of making this film come to life. Visual plays a big part in Closet Monster since most of the film is through the lens of how Oscar experiences the skin-crawling strange world around him. As queer kids, we grow up thinking that monsters in the closet are scary and needed to be kept aloof from, while at the same time, we are raised in the closet and taught to be the monsters in life. By looking inward, getting rid of culpability that is not the issue at all, we might end up finding ourselves in blossoming and remembering good times we’ve had with our parents even if they are so few as a step for forgiving them like Oscar does in the end.
