[Pride 2021] "God as Real as Girlhood": Gothic Romance in Knives and Skin

Pretty much anything you read that attempts to describe Jennifer Reeder’s 2019 feature, Knives and Skin will first address the sort of conundrum the film poses to/for mass marketing, and how we tend to think about genre (if not necessarily in those terms). It stars teens but isn’t condescending to teens; it’s intensely critical of parents and parenthood and adult figures, mostly without judgment; it feels like a horror film and doesn’t for its dream-pop atmosphere. Gives acapella musical sequences of ‘80’s hits and truly iconic fashion choices and what I used to think of as ‘neon noire’ but I guess is now called ‘bisexual lighting.’ All of which has led many critics to review the film as an illustration of “style over substance.”

These critics couldn’t be more wrong. 

I think of Knives and Skin as the Midwest’s answer to Twin Peaks, but a version reimagined to privilege the feminine gaze; as though Reeder crawled inside Sarah Palmer and Donna Hayward’s (Grace Zabriskie and Lara Flynn Boyle) grief, looked around, and said, let’s make a movie in here. Television supports a use of the gothic that mimics the nineteenth century serial and thus incentivizes a certain type of narrative sprawl. Reeder’s feature, by contrast, maintains a clear and steady focus on the intensely gothic nature of parenthood, teen-hood, and girlhood as planes of existence, accomplished through embrace of the feminine grotesque, which is to say, the feminine divine.  

Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley) isn’t a prom queen (her band uniform is the sole outfit we see her in for the film’s duration), but she is white and blonde, traditionally beautiful, her mother involved with the school, so when she goes to a football game and never comes back, it means something to her community. It’s their grief- for her, for what she symbolizes, for reasons that have nothing to do with her- that the film follows, and it’s precisely this grief that lends itself to the elements of horror and surrealism that permeate the storytelling. As anyone who has experienced profound loss can confirm, absurdity is one of its primary features. 

Weird shit happens in this movie.

Not like someone wears black and gets a piercing or has some minorly kinky sex or whatever. Real life weird and otherworldly weird. Some would call pathological weird. Can only be explained in vague Star Wars reference-type weird. The kind of weird that can sometimes be repellant to audiences more comfortable with clear-cut “good guys” and “bad guys” who don’t know what to make of the sight of a woman (or several) behaving in a completely unhinged manner onscreen, even as their treatment adamantly refuses to reduce them to villains or monsters. 

This is one of the qualities that makes Knives and Skin so valuable to me as an art piece. Its surrealism and horror elements function to allow more space for the actuality of an experience than what presents itself as realism. It’s also one of the only times I’ve ever felt truly “represented” onscreen—or rather, seen a story that reflects what something I’ve experienced may have looked or seemed like from the outside in. 

There are two sides to this. One is concerned with how unbelievably rare it is to see Black and brown girls presented as goth/punk/alternative/whatever language you want to use to describe the absolute revelation that is Afra’s (Haley Bolithon) safety-pin adorned hijab, or Charlotte’s (Ireon Roach) love of pink; this softest texture of femininity often denied to Black girls through expectations of strength, resiliency, and toughness. The type of projection and expectation that, in the minds of those who do not recognize our humanity, becomes permission to mistreat us. That she is given a proper love story in which dude has to work to rise to her level was one of my favorite things about this movie. 

The other side concerns a separate romantic subplot, this one between Colleen (Emma Ladji)—Afra and Charlotte’s bandmate—and Laurel (Kayla Carter), a cheerleader “officially” in a relationship with a white boy on the football team we (the audience) know to be a turd. The hiddenness of their relationship is indicated through the fact that it goes almost entirely unspoken in the film’s actual dialogue. They speak to each other (scantly), but never of each other, so their story is narrated mainly in visual language, song, and suggestion: long stares across various rooms, stolen brushes of fingertips, vagina drawings, and- who could ever forget- swapping notes hidden in each other’s pussies. 

And not just notes—objects. Small figurines. A clown, a cat, a teacup, a bottled sailboat, several crystals, a pink flamingo, a seashell coated in glisten. Tiny treasures absent signification to anyone else which nevertheless ground the romance in reality. Their intensity and the strangeness of its expression completely brought me back to what it was to be that age and in love with a girl for the first time—and another Black biracial girl at that. Someone like me, who saw me in ways others never could. 

The moment their relationship attempts to be articulated in the film is a significant one. Laurel kisses Colleen in front of her mother who doesn’t notice, focused as she is on the bottle of vodka she chugs through a purple straw. When Laurel adamantly rejects her mother’s behavior, it brings them into a moment of mutual struggle, transparency, and honesty that also finally allows Carolyn to reveal herself. Laurel shouts, “give me some skin!” a call for something protective; something encasing to close over her, her mother’s, and Carolyn’s figurative wounds. 

Knives and Skin is a film about the endless task of becoming: the bloody fucking mess of it. But it’s also about the songs and the poetry and the love. So much love, so many different expressions of it. Lasagna and garlic bread; a pink dress; a bass guitar; a specific nail color; a T-shirt; a mix tape; an ice cream cake; a pair of glasses. The ephemera of our being—the romance that horror creates. 

Since the film ends on a few points of poesy, it only seems appropriate to conclude with a poem that meditates on similar themes. From Safiya Sinclair’s, “Sophia the Robot Contemplates Beauty,” 

“This beauty I am eager to hoard
comes slippery on ordinary days,

comes not at all, comes never.

Yet I am a pure-shelled thing. Glistening 
manmade against the wall where one
then two fingers entered

the first time,
terror dazzling the uncertainty
of pleasure. Its God as real as girlhood.” 

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