There's Eyes Behind The Mirrors In Empty Places

DVD Rental Recommendation:
Billy The Kid

Billy The Kid documents a teenage kid in small town Maine, and it's a film that more exactingly demonstrates the awesomeness and anguish of adolescence than anything I've seen. Freaks and Geeks included.

There's clearly something off about Billy, something he recognizes in himself at one point when he describes himself as "different in the brain." There's some minor but vital lack of social skills that makes Billy lack self-consciousness before the camera, so we teenage angst and teenage yearning that is entirelly un-mediated. This is a fairly normal late boyhood, it seems to me, and yet there are parts that are as cringe-inducing as any BBC Office episode, parts that are genuinely touching, and several parts that reach beyond the film's own frame.

I don't want to say too much about what actually occurs in the movie, but here's one particular moment: after somewhat clumsily approaching a girl he likes in a local restaurant, Billy ducks into the bathroom to deride himself, his whispering caught by the open microphone he wears. He repeats what he'd said to the girl, and then whispers: "Death..."