Sordid Blog

For some reason, the recent death of Renfro has really affected me. He hadn’t done a movie in a long time, or at least nothing of note, but I so clearly remember his debut in The Client and thinking, he really has some potential. Maybe I remember him so much because D. & I both liked his work, and watching movies, back then, was something we did in excess.  And those early films were sweet, weren’t they?  I think, often, of the The Cure (with little Joseph Mazzello, fresh out of Jurassic Park) and remember it as a sweet story of friendship and trail, the story of a young boy (Mazzello) infected with AIDS and his attempts to forge friendship in a country where fear and paranoia reigned.  It had this nice Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn quality, particularly when the boys were rafting on the river. Then, Renfro went on to other, much darker psychological films.

I had no idea that Ian McKellen kept a blog, but his recent post on the passing of Renfro is really quite touching and beautifully written. McKellen was the very creepy “former” Nazi in Apt Pupil (trailer), a harrowing tale of a young boy’s fascination with the Third Reich and his trip deeper and deeper into the genocidal delusions of this older man. I remember thinking the movie was smart, and somewhat accurately reflected an emotional moment in the 1990s that should have us worried, that moment when past ideologies of hate and disaffection would merge with millennial frustrations, particularly in young white males, and produce another generation of youth not for peace and love, but for the culmination of Reganomics and “greed is good” anti-ethics. And those swastikas next to Renfro’s “A” on his schoolwork … just eerie and frightening … because, of course, fascism is not the province of the ignorant.

Maybe we should have been a bit concerned, particularly as Renfro began to take on darker and darker roles. As though Apt Pupil were not enough, he followed it with Larry Clark’s dark, homo-phob-erotic Bully in 2001. Bully (trailer) disturbed me when I watched it, not least of which because of the mix of homoeroticism in these young men’s lives is always laced with a Fight Club hostility and aggression, one which seems to continue in the adolescent male movie as genre, if Alpha Dog is any indication. Bully definitely had the perfect millennial cast in Michael Pitt, Nick Stahl, and Renfro … poor little working-class white boys. Amazing how dangerous they are and no one watching …

I suppose I’ll spend some time over the next few weeks revisiting Apt Pupil and Bully; I suppose I’ll add them to the Netflix queue and my copies of both are VHS and my VCRs are in the attic and my videos are still in boxes. Maybe one or both of these movies would be useful when I teach my “Angstolescence” course … I should probably be keeping better track of texts for that course …