The Queer Thing About the Johnson's: a film still in the cocoon

Queer: strange, odd, unusually different, mentally unbalanced...deranged. I'm sure you thought I was going to do a complete gay review of Ari Aster's short film "The Strange Thing About the Johnson's" but that would just be too easy and this film is complicated, stirring, creepy, and unnerving.  I liken my reaction to the film like the net phenomenon 2 Girls, 1 Cup but what was more popular were the reaction videos that were Internet comic gold, especially Questlove of The Roots and, most famously, Grandma Marlene's impulse to shun the image from her psyche. Yeah, I embedded it below...


The film opens with the gruff, methodic rumphling of the youngest Johnson under his quilted covers doing what young johnsons do best. In pops the bright eyed, bubbly, reassuring poet and father.  What is strange is not the advice he gives to his son, but the strange foreboding carress upon the cheek he gives his son. Dad exits. Camera moves to the left to focus on the picture the son has been masturbating too. 2 Girls, 1 Cup had nothing on this.  In the real world, we try to move past people's fetishes and just say, "Eh, they like it, I love it." This is beyond fetish. This is beyond the Oedipus complex. This is the Oedipus complex turned upon it's head and riddled with gun shots and covered in that gelatinous strawberry gel in the produce section. We ask ourselves why. We feel the need to pray after this grave revealing of the son being an incestuous succubus in this primped, proper, and polite high society Black family.  Can we please find the real Johnsons who have the usual family conflicts we can digest a bit easier?

The Strange Thing About the Johnsons pushes our limit on what we can accept about the perverse nature of families when the doors are closed and the curtains are drawn. We want to like the Johnsons because their drapes are of the finest linen, their parties are filled with champagne and polite guffaws at the latest polite jibe.  But what lurks behind the holes in our fences is not the best picture.  The things that go on at the Johnsons...it makes you clutch your pearls and compels the desire to burn sage in your child's bedroom.
*SPOILER ALERT*

When I first watched The Johnsons, I felt myself pushing back in my chair as if a monster were to jump off the screen. I wanted to yell out my repulsion or just give out an "eeeewww" to console myself.  The film is filled with blows of a child who's development went wrong somewhere.  I kept asking myself, how could a boy be sexually attracted to his father? Is this a strange twist of nature vs. nurture?  Was the mother that much of a "cold heartless bitch" as the son later recalls - or could we even trust his poignant reproof of his mother?  Young boys love their mothers first and clichely ask to marry her at some point in his childhood...right?  The film left me questioning what is normal when a child goes wrong.  But how do we come to absolve the father as a victim who simply takes his son's fellatio with a look of still horror, shame, and guilt?  Perhaps it's the Oprah effect on us all to know the body deceives victims of sexual abuse but HOW does the father become a victim! That's not a question.

As our film club sat in horror watching the film pan out and end in one bloody mess, we are filled with more questions all beginning with WHY, WHY, WHY?

• Why didn't the father correct his son's twisted behavior and advances early on?
• Why did the son hate his mother so much?
• Why did the father longingly gaze while his son went the distance with that New Year's kiss to his awkward and silenced wife?
• Why didn't the mother get up off that bed?!!!!

Ari Aster has shied away from any press for the film and via email told the fine folks at Shadow & Act blog that the film is merely a "What Would Happen" as it relates to liberal parenting...that answer falls flat to the floor like the plot's potential setup. Are we lead to believe that the mother's fixation on outward appearances and the dad's obvious androgynous presence can create such a monster?  Spoiled, entitled kids have tantrums over ice cream; they don't rape their father to make that point.

Our good friend Chandra Kamaria, founder of Harkins House Productions and host of the JetSet podcast believes The Strange Thing About the Johnsons represents a dangerous direction in Black film in which troubling storylines and wicked perversions are giving birth to the new Black archetype. Has the Hollyweird creations of Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels taken it's toll on film students or does race even matter in this short? Aster does not think race plays a part, and merely convenient since his good friend played wicked son of Johnson.

I wanted to like the film for intellectual reasons because I wanted to unravel this yarn and analyze the struggles of a father who is sexually repressed and silenced by his son AND wife.  I wanted to understand the man within the cocoon he had built around himself, not the one the audience believes was placed onto him.  He is not a victim of circumstance.  Once I got past my repulsion, I wanted to dig deeper and understand why. Maybe why! What Aster offers us are butterflies for dinner. We are hungry, but we are reminded that we are not a pouncing cat.  He has to offer up some type of explanation...maybe in a cup.
/ 5 Black stars