my own lost futures: Honey Boy's hauntology

What does it mean to be invigorated by pain? Those who grew up with parental hardship may have some idea of this type of pain; less inflicted than grown up into us, such a part of the essence of love, language, and family it is also essential to identity. Our parents, even our lost or absent or adoptive parents, are the bestowers of the idea of pain.

If hauntology is the haunting of lost futures on our present, there is a haunting on our present of a lost future self, an imaginary Pain-less future that sits below the sheen of reality to remind us of what person we never may have been. As we embark on the unraveling of trauma, looking to the events of our lives and then back to the events of our parents' lives, this never-may-have-been spectre taunts us with the impossible ideal of a life without the need for the mental unraveling, of healing. What if everything that made us into our decrepit inept adult selves hadn't happened? Wouldn't we then live without pain? But wouldn't we then also live without invigoration? This impossibility even in hypotheticals would be a deflated soulless entity without past or future, nothing to change with nothing to change.

Shia LeBeouf's screenplay Honey Boy (2019) details his own childhood growing up a young actor alongside his violent father, a once (and always always always) rodeo clown, alcoholic, drug addict, and sex offender. James lives with young Otis under his employ as a "chaperone" in a motel where he runs lines with him and imparts his The Business wissdom. LeBeouf acts in the film as his own father, with Noah Jupe as young Otis and Lucas Hedges as post-arrest post-adolescent post-Transformers era Shia deep in the trenches of rehab hell writing the screenplay in question. 

As the film opens on a fractured montage of Shia's tumbles through alcoholism, blurred sexual encounters, and vehicular violence on and off of movie sets -- blood of ambiguous origin shown more than once -- the watcher realizes there is no veil here. There is no feigned differentiation between the Real and the re-imagined. We are told to keep in the front of our mind that this is not a fiction. This comes again at the end of the film, where black and white photographs of Shia and his father overlay the rolling credits one after the other: remember? remember? did you remember to remember this is really famous actor Shia LeBeouf's childhood? Without the veil it seems it would be hard to engage a set of actors playing out this drama, but the acting is executed well enough on all three major counts (Jupe, Hedges, LeBeouf) that the reality and the drama are held simultaneously without the seasickening wavering of similar not-fictionalized-but-fictionalized biographical narratives. The first question we might ask is, isn't it fucked up for Shia to play his own abusive father? To the question of how writing the script affected his rehabilitation, Shia remarks: "It is strange to fetishize your pain and make a product out of it and feel guilty about that. It felt very selfish. This whole thing felt very selfish. I never went into this thinking, 'Oh, I am going to fucking help people.' That wasn't my goal. I was falling apart."

It is exactly this acknowledgement of the painfulness of the making of this content that both separates it from other tortured biography movies and neutralizes the perversity of Shia's role in the film. Pain necessitates this casting, not by design but by logic after the fact. The production process itself necessitates it be as painful as possible. The sense that the birth and execution of this project was a harrowing bloodbath for Shia LeBeouf is one of the only reasons I was able to sit through it. Pain here is simulated but we can feel that it is as closely as possible, like drawing a straight line in pencil next to a printed line.

The idea of lost futures plays out in a dramatic chain of character: young Otis becomes old Otis is born from old Shia born of young Shia. Current Shia is James who bore him and Otis. (And so on.)

The parallels between young Otis and older Otis's experiences is shown at several critical moments: as young Otis smashes bricks into car windows and crows like Pan (or Peter Pan) on top of a car, rehab Otis screams as loud as he can into the forest. Two breakdowns rendered simultaneously, the first and the last that we see.

The most poignant Painful scene comes as young Otis involuntarily yet with impressive and somewhat enthusiastic comic bravado mediates a phone conversation between his never-seen mother and his angered father, speaking to his father in a high-pitched accusatory Wife voice and back into the phone at his mother in a clearly perfected low-toned exasperated Dad drawl. Neither parent speaks directly to Otis as himself after the charade is initiated, only to him as each other. For them clearly there is no real difference. Otis, while frustrated and trapped, does the voices with the measured effort of a performer who both knows his critic is watching and cares deeply about the authenticity (ugh) of his own execution. In this moment we see clearly how this type of Pain can perhaps only, necessarily, be worked through in dramatic simulation. How many times would a child subjected to this experience play it out word for word in his head, and how cathartic would it be to perform it, as it originally was?

This is also the moment that reminded me of the intense Reality of this experience as it must have been for Shia, because it transported me to similar moments in my own life: the ones where I would bet my life I know every word to the drama like a movie I watch over in my mind, imprinted. I can hear the crack and the tone in my thirteen-year-old voice yelling "Fuck you, then" to my father over the balcony of my house, and feel the fear in my arms clutching the rails dissipate as he turns to my mother instead of I the Speaker of the Fuck and says: "Look what you've done to her now." I know. This isn't my drama, and never was. It's a conversation my mother and father could never stop having until they shared their last words.

Children are caught forever in the crossfire of a million arguments of parents -- between themselves, each other, the world. You see now how this Pain is not always inflicted as we imagine, but shot across us, through us, bouncing off the walls around us, be-coming into us.

I would never be in the business of competing over hardship or assigning value to them, especially those so integral to core identity. But those of us who share these parental afflictions -- those who are the children of hurting, grieving, addicted, or abusive adults -- share an understanding of a certain kind of hardship. Even after twelve years without my father, when James stung Otis with the mighty slap I felt it like my own was yesterday. But when Otis imagined his father saying that he loved him, his mental begging for his father to act like a dad, I felt that too. For all the hate, for all the adult logic I've acquired telling me that parents who threaten children ought to stay lost and trapped in the spectral past, still all I want is for my father to say "I love you honey" to my child self and mean it. My never-may-have-been reality essential to my selfhood and the lord I thank for my primal pain, like Otis's and Shia's, is the paternally-reigned-down pain of a father who only ever saw a reflection of himself in me, and hated and used me for it. And, of course, the hate of his own father towards him shone in his eyes.

There is, however, a special kind of invigoration that comes from it. It's mentioned in the film when adult Otis remarks that all his father left to him was this pain, and that he cannot let it go or get rid of it because it is him -- it is what he uses for his acting, to make a living, to perform. In that way it is his father's gift. Here and in other scenes (often with his therapist), it is striking how the closeup shots on both characters (but tight and direct on Otis and obscured on the therapist) resemble the scenes with Otis and James. They are tight, claustrophobic, the very air thick with the dynamic space between the two people.

To his therapist again Otis remarks that all he does is act. How should she know the difference, and how is it helping him? He asks to her as he does to his father, against them but in service of them, to reject them and to please them. Actually naming his therapist herself as an object in the grounding exercise she asks him to do to combat his anger, Otis identifies the way in which he's been taught to view and react to other people: as sounding-boards, as reflections, as critics: How am I doing? How was that? And the only way out, really, is to please them. For his father, to appease his need to "get" the scene. For the therapist, to convince her to write down a good score to show the courts Otis's improvement. Performing well is the way out. We can only imagine this is the primary mental affliction of the child prodigy actor, the objectifying of people until all the people in the world become objects they're just knocking over. Conquering the others. Unable to connect to anyone else, the only person in the world Otis ever finds real connection to is the one who taught him this.

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Our own lost futures are the ones that slip away bit by bit from under us as we grow up, the illusions we are forced to let go of. The fiftieth time a child sees their father slap their mother they may realize nothing, but there will come a day they're walking along and suddenly realize that whatever reality in which they easily understand functional romantic-social dynamics has always already been erased. What we do now is rebuilding, Re-Parenting, re-paining.

Otis's anxiety about letting go of his pain is real. Without it, who might I have been? The saving grace of this logic is that damage once done is already done, and healing doesn't ever mean the pain will one day be gone. Trauma work is acknowledging the lost personal futures as always already lost, not a loss but part of a constellation of ideals that only serve the healing when acknowledged as such. Not strived for nor tossed aside, but held near to us as reminders that those selves are walking with us.

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There is metallic melancholy pang about childhood memories wherein we fantasize of other (better) realities. I can ache remembering the fervent child's belief that I'd wake up with the Lost Boys, my real life banished to the fiction, a logical inversion. These past-future-fantasies shimmer like mirages everywhere in adulthood, behind everything a glow something like what we once always wanted just out of reach. Walking in the rain on purpose I can kind of smell it like blood (Childhood had a lot more blood). Dreams are taunting replaying pre-adolescent daydreams never fulfilled. In all the years of kissing, so much more and stranger than we know before we know, I never do get to lay his head in my lap as I bandage an injury incurred in the rainforest expedition.