A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .

THE BOY'S GROWING UP : on THE MUDGE BOY (2003)

FROM THE MGM STABLE

THE MUDGE BOY (2003)

CAST: EMILE HIRSCH, RICHARD JENKINS, TOM GUIRY.

DIRECTOR : MICHAEL BURKE.

**

This is one post that I have been wanting to write since many months. Like most of my earlier writings, I had initially preserved it in my notebook after watching THE MUDGE BOY on the precious MGM channel on television few years ago and even used it for my dissertation on teenagers and children in cinema and literature for my MASTERS IN ENGLISH degree .

The film’s impact, owing to its realism and heart-rending ethos, was something that will forever stay with me and in an era where we talk about representation, compassion and empathy, THE MUDGE BOY continues to haunt me owing to its encapsulation of all these and the hard truths about growing up it addresses.

It has forever made me aware of the kind of transcendental work ethic of EMILE HIRSCH, who with this performance, set the stage for a career that has only flourished with various unconventional choices( like INTO THE WILD, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD) and independently funded films just like this breakthrough.
***

Looking at childhood and its ritualized aura of coming of age tropes can always make one touch low points of stereotypical categorization, overlooking the fabric of real conflicts and hardly is there an internalized tilt towards pushing the envelope further. Teenage sexuality is often a taboo topic but I guess by writing about it, we gradually break that mould. A movie that touches on those frayed nerves in singularly uncompromising tones is THE MUDGE BOY (2003)

The movie, which focuses on Duncan Mudge (Emile Hirsch), marks a departure from the adult world for him as in the very first scene we are witness to his mother’s untimely death. A world sans motherly love, compassion and fortitude is a barren, sterile foliage and a moral dump yard for us ; it is equally so for Duncan. It is the space where the fourteen year old farm boy finds himself placed, in a man’s menagerie alien to his soft and sombre demeanours ( how I hate it when the term ‘soft’ is peddled as a bad trait or one equated with weakness in the context of males because it makes no sense; the film hence tries to look at the very stereotypes attached with notions of boyhood starting from that point. I use it because it is a normal trait for both genders, as normal as inherent compassion and capacity for imagination)