[Pride 2020] A Life Changing Excision

Everyone has that one movie they discover in high school that changes their life, whether they realize it or not. The kind that redefines how they view the world and themselves. Some people say Sixteen Candles. Others say Clerks.

Well, mine was Excision.

I don't know exactly what combo of mental illnesses or disabilities I have. I've been going to therapy for as long as I can remember and I've heard just about every term out there: Schizophrenia, PTSD, Autism, BPD, Bipolar, Manic Depressive - the list just goes on and on. But the main two I have heard most are Manic Depression and BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder); recently Aspergers was added to that list. Safe to say, I've had a difficult time fitting in ever since pre-school.

From grades 1-8 I was kicked out of at least 4 different schools - if I remember correctly - for lashing out, being bullied, fighting my bullies instead of confiding in an adult, cursing like crazy and just being generally unstable. On top of that, my home life was just an abusive, incredibly toxic mess. Right around 8th grade, after a stint in a group home, my dad finally got custody of me from my mother.

So after barely getting my footing in a completely new environment, I was also enrolled into a school that was a mishmash of a school for troubled kids and an upper class, conservative Christian academy. I'm just gonna be blunt: everyone there was a fuck-up of some kind. Fights, drama, drug use and pulling the fire alarms were regular events…yet it was an unspoken rule to not act like a fuck-up. We were expected to fit into nice, neat boxes. And that, of course, meant you couldn't be out and proud. I didn't come out until I was 18 because of conversion therapy fears.

How does this relate to Richard Bates Jr.'s pitch-black, coming-of-age movie? I first watched Excision a few weeks before summer break in 2013. My last summer break before graduating the next year was looming and I was in kind of a downward spiral of anxieties as to what I wanted to do with my life. So I did what I typically do when I'm stressing: watch a movie. I had recently picked up Excision and, for some stupid reason, had been putting off watching it…but something was telling me I should take it out of the plastic and pop it in.

About an hour and a half later, I was sitting in front of my computer in stunned silence, tears running down my cheeks. Nothing has ever resonated with me more than this movie, and I couldn't quite figure out why until recently. At first I thought it was just because it's a damn good movie, but then I realized that I saw myself completely in Annalynne McCord's captivating performance as Pauline.

Pauline is the definition of a misfit. Greasy hair, an acne covered face, poor posture and the tendency to ask strange questions in Sex-Ed class make all of her classmates look at her in disdain. But like a typical rebellious character in movies, she doesn't give a single fuck what others think of her. Her home life isn't much better. She regularly butts heads with her domineering, conservative mother (Traci Lords in a brilliant performance), her pushover father (Roger Bart) and her ailing sister, Grace (Ariel Winter).

She also aspires to be a surgeon. But she is in no way a model student. She is frequently instigating conflict just for amusement, harassing teachers and students. She has no friends and her "therapy" sessions are with her local priest (played by John-fuckin’-Waters of all people).

She is also midway through puberty, dealing with sexual feelings and all the confusion that comes with that. She wants to lose her virginity to the popular guy in school, but unlike the typical sexual scenario, she wants something as clinical as possible. Her target is nothing more than a walking dick. Obviously, her fantasies don't involve rose petals and soft music; for Pauline, her fantasies involve dangerous quantities of blood and gore, nude corpses and surgical equipment.

There's a lot more to the movie, but I want to focus on two things: Pauline's relationship with her mother, Phyllis, and Pauline's growing confidence throughout the movie. Pauline and Phyllis couldn't be any more different. Phyllis embodies the word “housewife”: blonde, conservative, prim and proper, wants her daughters to take cotillion classes, etc. Pauline, meanwhile, is vulgar, rude, standoffish, sarcastic and disturbed. Yet Pauline still takes steps to try to win her mother's approval - kind of like how I would try my absolute best to stay on my mom's good side, even on days where there was no good side at all. That craving of parental approval is such a hard thing to let go of, even if you hate your parents.

Throughout Excision, it wouldn't be hard to believe that this mother and daughter hate each other. Vicious arguments and cynical jabs fly across the room like bullets in a gunfight. Midway through the movie, though, there's a scene where Pauline hears Phyllis talking to her father about just how impossible it is to love her, and her confident facade cracks. She breaks down weeping at her mother's words and you can feel just how desperately she wanted her approval. And so she escalates her attempts to do so, which culminates in a heartbreaking ending that left me breathless.

Throughout Excision, there are brief, highly symbolic scenes that showcase exactly what fantasies Pauline has. Ranging from putting a fetus in an oven to crawling through a sea of corpses into a bathtub of blood, they are surreal, disturbing and fascinating. And with each one of these self-realization sequences, Pauline's confidence grows. While it's nowhere near the same thing, I saw my confidence in my sexuality and who I am growing with every passing month. Hell, by the last few months of senior year, I was wearing a small rainbow bracelet.

It wasn't much, but in the environment I was in, it was the equivalent of showing up in drag. My school wanted us to be perfect even though we all had our issues. If Pauline was in my school, she'd likely call a teacher a cunt and projectile vomit on them thanks to some handy ipecac syrup. Weirdly enough, she's kind of inspired me to just be myself and accept myself, mental illness and all.

A few years ago, I reached out to Richard Bates Jr, explaining to him just how much Excision meant to me and asked him to sign my copy. He did, along with sending me autographed Trash Fire posters, Suburban Gothic pins, a Blu-ray copy of Excision, a DVD of the short film and a handwritten note that I will treasure forever.

Please Consider Donating