In one scene of Cam Archer's hypnotic feature-length debut, Wild Tigers I Have Known, thirteen-year-old Logan (Malcolm Stumpf) sits alone in the schoolyard eating his lunch, a sandwich. He sets it down and tries to open a container of applesauce, dumping it on his crotch in the process. So he laps up the mess with the bread, using the sandwich to try to clear the sauce from his groin. Then he takes a bite, and looks down. The camera zooms in. We knew it was coming — fuck — he has an erection. Outfitted in a sweater, gooey apple compote dressing his boner, his awkwardness is heartbreaking. He can't win, but Archer ultimately does with a film that is both visually seductive and ideologically rich.
Produced by Gus Van Sant, Wild Tigers is at times less a film and more an incandescent montage of eerie, psychedelic jerk-off sessions. Logan's pouty-lipped innocence could bring out the Humbert Humbert in anyone, but the movie manages to evoke more than lust. Though the film is thematically sophomoric (we are brow-beaten with an analogy of the boy as mountain lion, feared and vilified by ignorant townfolk), its images stand out: pubic hairs clinging to a bar of green soap; the bloody, bronzed hand with which Logan shields his face after a locker room beat-down.
Whenever the film comes close to an eroticized candy-land trance, we are hit with an image that encapsulates the stark awkwardness of youth — more specifically, the stark awkwardness of Logan's ardor for Rodeo (Patrick White), a modern-day Jordan Catalano. Rodeo is an older boy at school, and also a loner, unnervingly good-looking and carelessly cruel, and the two become friends on a venture into the woods in search of the notorious mountain lions. Here is Welcome To the Dollhouse, if the protagonist was accidentally hip, relentlessly likeable and unspeakably angelic. Certain details are questionable, it's true; that this lonely thirteen-year-old dandy-lite would feel comfortable showing up to school in a mesh muscle tee is hard to swallow. Make sure to take this homoerotic suburban fantasy with a grain of salt, and no matter what your persuasion, you're in for quite the ride. — Katie Liederman