Brian is the "typical" geek type character, someone who is bad at baseball, has huge glasses, who's mother coddles him to a fault, and who in general doesn't seem to be able to fit in socially. His narration of events revolves around explaining these experiences of "time-loss." He gets the first one when he's 8, and every time he has this experience, his nose bleeds. The summer of 1981 includes not merely these time-loss and bloody nose episodes, but an "actual" space-ship over their house. Clearly his memory has faded into fantasy.
As he grows older, this fantasy becomes more and more a part of his daily experience. His dream world - the return of the repressed, no doubt a Lacanian would say - gets filled with visions of aliens and exam tables, and eventually he watches a T.V. show that talks of alien abductions. He finds another person with a similar tale (an excellent Mary Lynn Rajskub), and together they commiserate about their numerous abductions. Through this fantasy world, Brian attempts to explain something un-explainable in his past, something that left him so vacant and empty (as Neil says later on), that Brian fills this gap with an account that appeals to something transcendent or beyond, an other world. This is not so different from various accusations against religion, by the likes of Marx, or Nietzsche. Nietzsche of course says this type of appeal is the ultimate nihilism, for it refuses to affirm life here and now.
Yet this affirmation is just what Neil's character provides. Instead of throwing himself into some explanation of an unknowable, traumatic event, he is fully aware of his relationship with his coach, and fully aware that it's "fucked up," as he puts it. At the same time, the way he deals with is almost an immersion in its materiality, in its physicality. This immersion partly means he becomes a call boy, and is fills the needs of various men in the town of Hutchinson, Kansas. We see various experiences in this vein, like when he's 15, and when he goes after the one guy he never had. Later, when he moves to NYC, there are other, more disturbing scenes: his first time in NYC (and his first experience with a condom); a moving and ultimately life-alter encounter with a man with AIDS; and finally, the one event the brings this destructive and disastrous life to a head, an experience of being raped. Throughout all of these experiences, Neil maintains this deep and moving distance, partly because we often see his moment of orgasm, and the indifference that lead him to these actions at the same time. This cognitive dissonance is enough to see how this immersion in sensuality almost destroys him.
The final scene is the most fascinating in light of the story. Brian and Neil meet, and Neil takes him to "coaches" house (now inhabited by someone else). They sneak in, and sit in the room where it all happened to Brian and Neil. Neil remembers everything, and as he narrates the entire event, Brian leans on him, and eventually lays in his lap, and his nose starts to bleed. Outside (it is Christmas Eve) a coral group starts signing "Silent Night," and the camera moves to an over-head shot. The voice-over has Neil talking about how sorry he was this stuff happened, and how he wondered if there was any escape from this world. He wonders (as the camera moves upward, and the only illuminated space is Brian and Neil on the coach) whether they might become two angels, who leave their bodies, and disappear.
As I reflected on this, I realized that this film does a wonderful job of contextualizing two possible responses (although extreme) to intense suffering, and how these two responses ultimately lead to something of a "gnostic" answer. What I mean by this is the basic answer that "gnosticism" gives to suffering and the world: denigration and flight. For gnosticism (whether the gospel of Thomas, or the gospel of Judas, or any other of the various modern forms) the body is the problem, and situations like sexual abuse just point this out all the more. Gnosticism is both an other-worldly flight, because of it's ultimate goal of the release from this present body, and a gross materialism, which can conceive of matter and the body merely as decay and something to be spent.
For Brian, it was a matter of spiritualizing the experience (not so different from many Christians who emphasizes dying and going to heaven, although this is not the orthodox Christian position), and in this spiritualization becomes something of an a-sexual person who is visibly uncomfortable with himself. His body becomes a problem for him, or rather the problem, since it seems to him that the encounter with something alien has completely altered his life. Brian denigrates his body precisely because it becomes something alien to him, understood only in its relation to his fantasy world (again, there are some very interesting parallels to many strains in contemporary Christianity).
For Neil, it was a matter of complete immersion in the "materiality" of his body. This is completely different from Brian's response, but ends up being similar in that Neil clearly distances himself from his body in order to endure these experiences. In submitting to the bodies of others, Neil similarly denigrates his body, but the difference is that he also uses his body as a tool, and in some sense, practically disrespects it even more than Brian did.
These I am calling "gnostic" responses, and in my view, they are ultimately inadequate (which also seems to be the view that Araki takes with that last scene - the escapism Neil advocates is clearly a dream). What would be adequate? This is for another post, but at this point I would say from a theological prospective this is why Jesus' resurrection and the language of "new creation" is so important. The entire idea of the resurrection of the body is that it affirms the body - against the "other-worldy" response of Brian and gnosticism - and opposes the dualism of material/spirit. On the other hand, the idea of new creation argues that this new creation is firmly planted within the old, and that creation is thus understood from the perspective of the possibility of renewal - against the gross materialism of Neil and gnosticism.
