McConaugheMay Day 13: My Boyfriend's Back

Surprise! A good, interesting film here in the dregs of my completionist sprint through McConaughey’s lesser-known films. One must dug deep into the muck to find the most precious treasures.

A weirdly timely watch, as I'd just watched the Jill Sprecher film Thirteen Conversations Around One Thing which starred Mcconaughey and then I watched this Bob Balaban-directed McConaugheMay entry just an hour before watching the Jill Sprecher-directed film Clockwatchers starring Bob Balaban. There all is aching.

There all is aching.

While this film is rarely discussed in modern film circles, there’s a real joy to Bob Balaban’s directing, allowing the film to sit as a perfectly pleasant artifact. The plot follows Johnny Dingle (Andrew Lowery), a hapless teenager deeply in love with a girl way out of his league. After a prank to save her from a fake convenience store robbery ends up with him shot to death by a real convenience store robber, Johnny’s shocked to find that he’s returned as a zombie, a fact that the townspeople accept with shocking speed. It seems that in this world. this is simply a thing that happens occasionally in their town, which is just one of the delightful textures found in the film.

My Boyfriend’s Back ends up offering quite a few interesting aspects in this vein; a series of pulpy horror comic book pages serve as the opening credits and the film’s tone is a delightful skewering of ‘50s-era pop culture. Phillip Seymour Hoffman once again proves himself as an unstoppable machine of pure charisma when he’s somehow able to steal the whole movie in just a few scenes as a ruthless and thinly-sketched bully to Johnny. This is a movie useful as a litmus test for the value of these strange monthly challenges I do. There is value in digging in the bin. I've known too many people written off by society at large to ever truly disregard the value of random discovery. Not to be cringe on main, but it is the mundane moments of connection in the world that make me weep, and film is the same way. I really do, truly and without irony, believe that there is raw emotion and truth to be found in these small moments. I believe that art matters in some small way even if, especially if, it doesn't really.

McConaughey is in this for one line as Guy #2, but his presence brought me to this film. Isn't that beautiful in its own way? One must imagine Sisyphus happy, not because he pushed the rock up the hill, but because his example, his choices, precluded anyone else from having the exact punishment and mindset. If Sisyphus must exist, let him be happy that he is him, that he has no equal, that his exact pain is shared with no one else, and that he may serve as an example against the circumstances that brought him to this peak.