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Tello's Approved Movie Reviews 9/12/23

Lately I've been lusting for camp and wilderness. There's something very homoerotic and romantic about Boys At Summer Camp, roughing it, toughing it, Experiencing Nature Together As Boys.... There's also a lot of fun in playing with forest mystery and horror stories. The Journey Through The Woods Is a Journey Through The Self. Maybe I will rewatch Twin Peaks, I've tried to twice but I just can't get past the second season.

But yeah, in my quest for camping boys I've watched all of Camp Lazlo, which was very fun. I've also started watching Rooster Teeth's Camp Camp, which is also fun and Max is hot. I've started doodling a little comic strip too, we shall see if that pans out. I also ended up watching this movie, Moonrise Kingdom, with a friend. If you don't want to read more, I will say "it was pretty good* (asterisk)". If you like Wes Anderson's style and can bear his self-indulgence, and you like boy scout aesthetic and troubled kids trying to escape from authority on a remote island, it's pretty good. Not Bad. Fine. Etc.

From here on there will be intermittent spoilers, and I will talk a lot about child sexuality and autonomy and our society that heavily oppresses and erases such things.

Moonrise Kingdom is about the small community of the fictional island New Penzance reacting to the disappearance of a girl and a boy and their attempts at independence. The main duo is a couple that is largely ostracized from their community: Sam Shakusky, 12-year old Khaki Scout and orphan boy who has been bounced around foster families, and Suzy Bishop, a lonely 12-year old girl who lives with a dysfunctional family on the edge of the island. The two meet at a church play of a Noah's Ark story and begin a correspondence that brings them closer together, sharing their experiences of being alienated by their peers and families. Eventually, this culminates in the two of them running away together into the island's wilderness. Shocked by their actions, the rest of the island begins a manhunt for them, and we gain more insight into the various interpersonal relationships on the island as they attempt to track the couple down.

I was dismissive of the movie at first mostly because it is very het. Boring! Ugh! Where are my gay boys!? I find cishet couple romance stories very unrelatable and annoying most of the time, for obvious reasons. Growing up a gay trans kid in an abusive household with a dad who has remarried several times has mondo disillusioned me to any and all merits of heteronormative love and marriage, so stories that focus on how amazing and beautiful such things are usually end up being very boring and unrealistic to me. Victims of hegemony. Queer theory! Ugh!

And, of course, this is Wes Anderson, and a mainstream movie, so the most provocative it can get is "omg two straight kids run away and have sex! adults think they know best! aaah! social commentary!!" But still, there is value to that in the end. It seems many conservatives got upset at the portrayal of child sexuality in the movie, so that's a plus. Disrupting the narrative that children are sexless mindless golems owned by their parents is a good effort, even if said effort is still heteronormative. Not good, but still fine.

Sam and Suzy's tryst is cute enough; they settle down in a remote inlet, have an awkward make-out session, and dance to records on the beach before spending the night together. The whole time I was pretending Suzy was a trans boy or something. The way women and especially young girls are hoarded by society is evident in full force here, I think. In contrast to Sam, Suzy has a family, but has very little freedom and mobility. Her safety is more prized by the island and by her family, and her autonomy is never once considered. She was "kidnapped" by the "uncontrollable scout", her assault on another boy with scissors is attributed to Sam several times, and her parents are quick to tear her away from Sam's embrace and assert their control over her body by later bathing her and attempting to empathize with her. Sam, however, has no family; his current foster family has disowned him, and his fellow Khaki Scouts regard him as a freak and the few adults that care about him are mostly powerless or ill-equipped to be a parent. His learned independence is shown several times throughout the movie: his scout knowledge helps him and Suzy survive the wilderness, he carries her things and helps her through dangerous situations, and takes initiative wherever he can to provide for her. They both unwittingly fulfill very stereotypical roles, but at the same time these are the only roles they've ever been given. However, this independence can only go so far. As a minor, Sam is still ultimately under the thumb of law and of adults, and this is one of the central conflicts of the movie. There is no way for Sam and Suzy to truly be independent, especially on a remote island with a small, tight-knit community. Adults have all the power in this society, and they will find you sooner or later.

This is where the emotions of the film began to hit me. I stopped rolling my eyes at Suzy's sexualization after the action began to pick up. After their tryst on the beach, the two are immediately discovered by Sam's scout troop, Suzy's parents, and the police. They are broken up and taken away, with Suzy put under lockdown by her parents and Sam's fate left up to question as the adults wait for Social Services to come take him to juvie. Sam connects with the police captain, who is the only adult capable of taking care of him until Social Services arrives. Suzy has a difficult conversation with her mother, and here we see the hypocrisy of adulthood displayed through Captain Sharp proselytizing about the ignorance of kids and keeping kids safe from mistakes while giving Sam beer and Suzy's mother trying to empathize with her and be emotionally present when she is in fact embroiled in an affair and isn't present for anyone.

Realizing they have been unfair to Sam and that he has better game than the rest of them, the other scout troop boys plan to help Sam and Suzy escape once again so he doesn't have to face prison. The boys and Suzy escape to the mainland and enlist the help of one scout's older cousin at a larger Khaki Scout camp to help smuggle Sam and Suzy away to independence. Here, Sam and Suzy are symbolically married by the older scout and prepare to leave, but are ultimately discovered by authority and flee the camp while a brewing hurricane starts wreaking havoc on everything. Everyone ends up in the church where Sam and Suzy first met, the designated storm safehouse, and Social Services and the police arrive to deal with Sam. Sam and Suzy, with nowhere left to go, flee to the church rooftop and plan to jump from the steeple after accepting they might not escape from this situation alive. The adults all argue about Sam's fate before pursuing the couple, and ultimately the night resolves with Captain Sharp both adopting Sam to save him from prison and saving the couple from death when lightning strikes the church steeple.

The movie ends with Sam and Suzy having recovered from the storm and still secretly seeing each other. Sam is painting an image of the beach where they slept together, "Moonrise Kingdom", which has since been washed away and destroyed by the hurricane. Sam, now Sharp's foster child and a junior police officer (SIGH), bids Suzy farewell as she leaves to have dinner with her family. Yay happy ending, the children's relationship is now protected due to their subservience and succumbing to authority.

What made me emotional is the reality of the inescapable grasp of adults over kids, how crushing it is to be a kid and for adult superiority and dominance over you to never be questioned. You are always wrong, you have no freedom, you have no control over yourself and your body, you're the property of your parents. All you have is your thoughts, until you turn 18 and are expected to be just like your parents and become an obedient, stable cog in the machine. Sam and Suzy, neglected and ostracized by society, attempt to flee it but are chased by it and its insatiable desire for control and obedience. Atop that church steeple, their only options are risking death to escape or returning back to the control of adults under a new framework that only just permits them to exist. Their autonomy and their love are questioned and belittled at every turn, but they still try their hardest to escape together. It's sad and it sucks. The ending is also bittersweet due to Sam's becoming a cop and Suzy, of course, having no real change at all and still being a Listless Girl. Being a kid sucked, and being an adult sucks more. Society is geared towards making sure kids grow up to be as useful to capital as possible, and so all other considerations are secondary. We could get into the whole ethics of the modern family dynamic later, though.

So yeah, it's a fun movie with undertones and implications that are probably far greater than anyone in it actually envisioned. The style is impeccable, I really enjoyed the green and tans and the costume design of the Khaki Scouts, the set design, all the old props and funny book covers, the wilderness exploration, the records and tapes and technology, etc. It's set in the '60s, Cool. And, perhaps because of the time period and "small American island community", the entire cast appears to be white... I guess it's a given, but it's still extremely noticeable. There's also a certain film grain or something going on that I liked, I am reading about how it was shot on Super 16 and whatnot. In terms of giving me Camp Juice, I'd say it succeeded. I'm ready to go camping RIGHT NOW. I also enjoy Anderson's diorama-like style a lot, though it got a little excruciating at times in this one. I've not seen many of his movies, but I've liked what I've seen so far. I think the movie would unfortunately be completely different if it were homogay; part of what drives the search is Suzy's status as a girl and Sam's status as a boy, and girls being overly protected property of their fathers in American society. If the couple had been two boys, I highly doubt the search would've gone on as long as it did and been as emotional or involved. The movie might have gotten more flack too, being too provocative or something. The gay agenda. They might have even gotten away and succeeded in escaping the island, who knows. There's a certain tragedy in that, too.

I don't know, I just can't even pretend to be outraged at sexualized girls in movies. It's the most normal boring shit in all of existence, years of sexual hierarchy enforced and thrust upon us. Consent and agency and autonomy are a kind of paradox, I think. No one truly understands or wants to understand how it works, and ultimately all progressive views on sex that fail to recognize child autonomy will fall prey to reinforcing hegemony in the end. "Child sexuality bad!! Children don't have sexuality!! Anyone who sexualizes them is a demon!!" Like, yawn, we get it, you don't want to think for yourself and don't want to be labelled Bad, so you spout what the state wants you to say and pretend it's original and progressive and Good, when in reality it's rhetoric that reinforces a child's position in society as a peon being groomed for future labor wage slavery. Sexual liberation must include all beings and eliminate all biopolitics. It's not actually liberation if it's only for a select group of people and based on bigotry or fear that reinforces certain narratives (like the narrative I mentioned above, that children are sexless mindless golems that are property of their parents). Sexual liberation doesn't mean everyone gets raped and it's some kind of Purge goonfuck free-for-all, it means recognizing that no one person or authority or law should have any say over what consenting individuals do with their bodies, and no one person or authority or law should have any say over which individuals get to consent and which don't, especially based on arbitrary social constructs like age and intelligence. These sorts of things could be mitigated by comprehensive and empathetic sex education and awareness, greater acceptance and understanding of queerness and sexuality, capitalism being abolished, and countless other things. But these things will never happen, so we have to deal with the American mass generational-trauma psychopathy being inflicted on countless generations of people throughout all time and space, and we have to deal with the broken dynamics of sex and law we've come up with to justify how and why our entire society should work and should keep pulling the wheels of capital forward with each dying gasp.

A lot to say, for sure, but I mean, these topics are kind of unavoidable when discussing a movie literally about these topics. The movie itself doesn't exactly meaningfully discuss them, but honestly I think it works out. It feels very realistic. Two kids try to escape, they fuck in the woods, they get caught, they try to escape again, and get caught again. Feels like something dumb kids in love would do. I've done it myself, after all. There's no way to meaningfully discuss these issues without being labelled a pedophile and a rapist, which prevents the discussion from even happening by shutting it down immediately. So, the movie just presents life as it is, and you draw your own conclusions about Sam and Suzy's relationship based on your own experiences and opinions. I've discussed my sexuality and my past sexual experiences a few times with some of you, so I'm sure you already know how I feel about such things. I resent the adults in my life who failed me and oppressed me for being gay and trans, and I resent this society that doesn't leave any room for anything that doesn't serve the status quo. Blah blah blah. It's important to think about these things. If it makes you uncomfortable, imagine how uncomfortable I was when I had no one to turn to for help after my assault at 13. Cry about it!

That's all for this Tello's Approved Movie Reviews. This movie? Good, Not Bad, and remember... Never Watch Bad Things, Ever!!! Thanks for your time, xoxo. I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning, campers.