The Reflecting Skin (1990)

Oddly enough, The Reflecting Skin was not as weird as one of Philip Ridley's plays. But make no mistake, this is a very, very weird movie in which a young boy's friends and family all begin to die very mysteriously. First his friend is found dead, drowned in the family's well, and then his father lights himself on fire after fellating a gas pump. More deaths ensue. The script is actually pretty good, but it's directed (by Ridley) with almost total ineptness. One really has almost no idea what is going on, and the twist of the film is never really communicated to the audience, even at the very end. It's a strange, strange picture.

The Apocalypse

I read Philip Ridley's play Mercury Fur today. For fun (ha ha). And I'm wondering. I don't think I much dig visions of the apocalypse.

Maybe I have trouble imagining dystopias. Or maybe I just don't buy them. I believe I had a similar reaction to José Rivera's Marisol (which I think is kinda boring.)

Mercury Fur is a dystopian vision where everyone is young. There is a lone female character (whom the boys all call the "Duchess") and she is their mother, around thirty-eight years old. Everyone else in the play is younger, the oldest being twenty-three and the youngest ten. The sexuality in the play is strange (could it be anything other than strange in a world populated only by young men?) but the play's content is—in a word—horrific. The young men are throwing a party where the young boy will be eviscerated by a paying customer and a meat hook.

The play is good, and I found it emotionally wrenching, but... I don't know why I need to qualify it. The thing is, I loved Children of Men, certainly an apocalyptic vision of the world, but one that seems possible to me. Or maybe it's that Children of Men is a movie, and I can believe it more easily because I can easily see it. For some reason, I find the apocalypse on stage to be something I can't quite embrace fully. I dunno.

P.S. Any ideas what the title Mercury Fur refers to? I can't figure it out. And Google isn't being much help.