Electrick Children is a movie about a fifteen year old girl who gets pregnant after listening to a cover of Jack Lee’s Hanging on a Telephone. It’s directed by Rebecca Thomas. Credits suggest Kickstarter funding. Here’s how it works: we get a little drunk and watch a movie then later provide one another with cues for writing 500 words.
Jon’s cue for Chris: faith and the suspension of disbelief
Chris’ response:
Rebecca Thomas’ directorial debut Electrick Children offers viewers, haunting imagery, stark contrasts, but most of all asks of us to willingly give in to experience – or take everything offered on faith.
Wow. That sounds pretty heady.
Truth be told, I haven’t written, blogged or pontificated on film much in the last 10 years. Maybe it was burn out from film school, constant editing on drafts to find “the perfect voice”, or just maybe it was that conventional, modern day cinema generally is a cesspool of marketing and ad placement trying to goad us into buying the next super awesome product! or car that is likely to fall apart or turn into a robot from the far reaches of space. I digress.
What I actually likely had was a crisis of faith when it came to film. Wasn’t being challenged enough. Or moreso, I wasn’t looking for anything to challenge me. Electrick Children is a film that does that well. It asks you to buckle like a belt to the notion of blind and simplistic faith. Maybe that’s too simple though. Our lead, Rachel, is not “simple” by any stretch of the means, even though her fundamentalist Mormon family life might suggest that she is a step out of time. No, she’s brimming with questions and wide eyed wonder, and when she sneaks a peak behind her father’s curtain of evangelical tapings, she is met with MUSIC. Something that, while not foreign to her, roots deeply in her immediately. Thomas may be trying to suggest that youth or ascension into adulthood is when we become “pregnant” with desire to seek out that which we don’t have a full understanding of by making Rachel’s religious experience with “Hanging on the Telephone” to be one that plants the literal seed inside her.
Rachel’s search of the father of her unborn music child leads her from one group of followers of doctrines, to another….skaters and slackers. Thomas smartly doesn’t try to make one more appealing than the other, or to snidely thumb her nose at either, but to offer the idea that family can be anywhere you look for it, you just have to have faith that it’s there and embrace the idea. Rachel is drawn to two members of this roaming band of nomads, Clyde and Johnny. Johnny sings in a band that Rachel is convinced provided the music to her pregnancy, while Clyde just is there. Existing, and the proverbial blank slate. Clyde almost mirrored exactly how I was taken in by the film, slowly bears witness and then burns his life doctrine down to embrace everything that is Rachel. Is it love for Clyde? No, it’s faith in Rachel and what she represents. Something to believe in and lose yourself in.
It’s nice to be lost in something, blindly accepting and being willing to accept anything related to that something. Innocence regained? Have I regained my faith in film? Perhaps. My faith in Blondie, never ever dwindled.
Chris’ cue for Jon: redemption
Jon’s response:
TW: I am going to talk about rape.
I have seen a lot of rapes depicted on the screen. I have seen a lot of different kinds of depictions of rape on the screen. Most of them are designed to function like this: man watches film depicting woman being raped (is his girlfriend there? the moviemakers probably don’t care,) depiction has sleazy titillating gaze, man gets to feel outraged and aroused at the same time. It’s a real win win. As a man you get to see some skin and also feel superior to the man doing the raping. Mileage will vary on the arousal part. Feeling empathy for the woman in those depictions is most definitely a tertiary concern. I have no idea what it’s like to watch those depictions as a woman. There’s a lot of writing about it though, go ahead and read some.
Sometimes the depiction of the rape is done in a way that removes the titillation and leaves only the violence (I’m looking at you Irreversible, also fuck you Irreversible.)
Sometimes the depiction is a snappy, slightly abstracted, redemption narrative featuring dislocated Las Vegas youth and mormons. Electrick Children falls into this category. I sort of feel like if this film had been directed by a man, I would have said: pretty lame to use the rape of a fifteen year old girl to make a movie about men’s redemption, but it wasn’t and so let me say this: Thomas never once shames her protagonist for being raped and the preservation of the young girl’s dignity and wonder forces the men of the film to find forgiveness and redemption.
Chris’ response regarding the demands Thomas makes on the viewers own faith and belief is well articulated. She keeps the film grounded though, and despite its flirtations with magic realism, Thomas manages to avoid pretension and never once gets bogged down by symbol. The truth about Rachel’s pregnancy comes later in the film, and the ultimate unveiling of the rape is accomplished only in the mind of the viewer. The film portrays Rachel becoming stronger as she recovers and resolves what happened to her. Her film final act of telling the truth (hint: she wasn’t really made pregnant by her dad’s crappy cover of Hanging on a Telephone) belongs to her and we as the viewer are shut out and left with the sights and sounds of ocean waves. This device is both infuriating and pitch perfect. Rachel’s story is never exploited for art or titillation.
What I like so much about the film was the way it places the burden of change and redemption squarely on the shoulders of the men in the film. As Chris pointed out, it was the men who had to undergo the most transformation in order to be redeemed. Electrick Children catches you off guard in this respect. The film feels light-hearted at first, but eventually the darkness is revealed and Thomas makes sure we know precisely who owns that darkness.
Related articles
- Interview: Electrick Children Director Rebecca Thomas (shockya.com)
Daylight Losing Time 