Boys Keep Swinging

What's the big deal about boys now? What, they're suddenly underprivileged, there's new horrors in store for them? Well, maybe there is, as they seem to be breaking out in violence, whether comic or horrific, real or make-believe, or all of the above.

Take, for instance, the groups of teenage boys - scruffy, doubtlessly smelly - who enact wrestling rituals in improvised rings across suburban America. Backyard wrestling has become theatre for the underprivileged, as boys gesticulate and grapple in front of appreciative audiences of three to seven people. Backyard wrestling is a phenomenon replete with title matches, countless amateur web-sites and videos for sale - the latter shaky, full of home-made bravado and a far cry from the hyperbole of pro wrestling that they imitate. Cameron Jamie, whose current project documents backyard wrestling, takes elision of reality further in another body of work, where he films himself wrestling and is, for instance, badly pummelled by an ex-con cook. La Baguette (1997) oscillates between being funny and scary, as the two protagonists clumsily maul each other then repeatedly fall, without pyrotechnics, into dazed and damaged stupor. Like the teenagers, Jamie wrestles in costume and attempts to appropriate not only the moves but also the identities of the putatively more grown-up pro wrestlers. These projects make a literal fight out of the normal struggle for identity and are, like puberty itself, abrupt and brooding, farcical and pathetic, mingling the fantasy of big-time wrestling with the unkempt and fierce hopes of those attempting manhood. But here the wrestling is real, the outcome uncertain, the injuries unscripted.

The trajectory of wrestling verité gets even weirder when we go from Jamie to Harmony Korine, who has delivered some of the grittiest fights on film, including the fights between brothers in both Gummo (1997) and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999). The inherent violence occasionally vented in earlier films comprises the entire content of Fight (unfinished), as Korine lets loose Julien's intra-family violence on himself. The film consists of Korine taunting a series of large and/or incitable men until they beat him up. Period. Korine talks about how he wanted to make the 'the funniest film ever made', a cross between a Buster Keaton film and a snuff film - a funny snuff film? Casting himself as comic victim raises the stakes, as genius and purity of vision bump up to grimy tragedy. This combination of extreme self-consciousness, undirected aggression, actual masochism and overweening narcissism is overwhelming. Fight plays out like an obscene case of arrested development and adolescent sensibility run amok.

In the context of the killing sprees at schools in Springfield, Littleton, Jonesboro, etc. one can't help but wonder if boys aren't just monsters in the making. Meanest demographic on the planet: adolescent boys. One fallout from the schoolyard massacres has been an identification with the killers, particularly by the outcast and alienated, highlighting the many minor to harrowing humiliations inflicted upon those found lacking. The killings have only encouraged the recent hand-wringing over confused young males in crisis (some current titles: Raising Cain, Real Boys and Lost Boys). Pundits point to boys' emotional isolation, their natural propensity for violence and the confusing amalgam of macho cultural expectations in a supposedly post-feminist landscape. In terms of the pubescent issues of impulse control and fantasy enactment, Korine and Jamie's fights are less deadly, more socialised versions of the violence inwardly and outwardly directed by the schoolyard killers. Wrestling for boys can be seen as a condensed version of the threats and violence of which their worlds are presumedly comprised. It's not merely a recreational cruelty, but one upon which self-definition hinges, as adolescence is distilled into a two- or ten-minute struggle. Korine and Jamie relive adolescent rituals not to get them 'right', not even with a point or a moral in mind, but to revisit (in the most physical and painful way) the struggles that take place to make a boy a man. However, there is no conclusion, no denouement; the fight ends, Korine gets beaten to a pulp, but delivers no moral lesson, no swelling soundtrack of conclusion. These engagements are precisely antithetical to the transmission of meaning or closure: alienation and pointlessness are a condition of adolescence.

But what about the enviable aspect of an adolescent's otherwise pitiful confusion, which is that of sweet youth embodying infinite possibilities. For instance, Collier Schorr's photographs of young wrestlers remind us that for her subjects, life has only just begun: cue the Carpenters. As she covetously records the seismic shifts of adolescence, Schorr, seemingly not staging but only transcribing adolescence, is as involved and invested in adolescence as Korine and Jamie, but in her work we get a glimmer of the hope that is so fiercely absent in the others. Maybe the difference lies in the artist merely identifying with male adolescence, whereas Korine and Jamie actually relive their own, each to gain an approximation of masculinity. Schorr's photographs are not so much intimate as extimate, a proximity that only brings home the distance between you and the depicted boys, enticing in their raw, sharp-angled way.

Like all teenagers, the wrestlers in Schorr's photos, the boys in Jamie's film and Korine himself, adopt poses like identities. Adolescence is so transparently and pervasively performative, it can be painful to watch. We are each veterans of our own adolescence, variously scarred and decorated. But like Korine and Jamie's fights, these performed identities are not faked - staged yes, but not faked. The authenticity of adolescence lies in its performance, as self-portrayal and self-staging is what is real in the process of identity formation. Adolescence is where the real and the staged, the authentic and the performed, glide one into the other, while the struggle for selfhood slips into a literal struggle against others. The emulation of steroidal heroes as templates for selfhood collapses, in the hands of Korine and Jamie, into a quest for identity that is only a re-enactment of defeat. At a further extreme, where the struggle seems about to be lost, masochism and self-destruction become schoolyard massacres, a slaughter of the not-so-innocent.