A Dangerous Son · Florida Man · The Act
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From The DV-Archive: A Dangerous Son. …“From The DVR-chive”? There’s material on my office machine that goes back to late winter of 2018, is m’point, so if you have any thoughts on hacking that name, I’m here for them. You should be here for A Dangerous Son, an HBO documentary that dropped in May of last year that I’ve finally gotten around to watching, and while it’s not “true crime” as we might ordinarily classify these things, or an easy one to sit through, it speaks many truths: about how we treat, in both senses of the word, mental illness in this country; about the hideous tangle that is the intersection of mental illness, crime, and the incarceration complex; about the butterfly wing of cut funding for halfway houses and occupational therapies that ends in a typhoon.
Enough grand abstractions: A Dangerous Son, per the IMDB’s summary, follows “three families each coping with a child affected by serious emotional and mental illness. The families explore treatment opportunities and grapple with the struggle of living with their child’s condition.” This is accurate, but at the same time doesn’t quite get at it. Ten-year-old Ethan has a list of diagnoses -- oppositional defiant disorder, ADHD, and anxiety just a few of them -- and when we first meet him and his family, he’s having a scary meltdown in the car that his mother, Stacy, isn’t really able to control (you can see snippets in the trailer linked above). Barely a minute in, my heart rate had already spiked: Ethan’s on medication, but it isn’t effective; he and the whole family need the reset provided by his going into residential treatment, but there isn’t a bed; his younger sister, Elexa, often gets the brunt of his wrath, and the household is simply subsumed by dealing with Ethan’s issues...and he’s on the brink of puberty. You can see how exponentially much more difficult it’s about to become to keep Ethan and those around him safe. In fact, a point is put on that future by a fellow subject, Vontae, who’s 11, but a very tall, 15-years-old-looking 11; Vontae likes to steal the toy guns he’s not allowed to play with, and Vontae is black. An actual 15-year-old, William, becomes unmanageably distressed when told that a residential bed has opened up for him, because he wants to stay home. His parents, who are no longer married but must continue co-parenting him as a unified front if only to maintain some semblance of physical control over William, are obliged to call the police to help them defuse the situation. It isn’t the first time, and the childlike begging and wailing coming from William’s grown-size body is brutal to watch...not to mention the echoes of incidents in which police involvement in contact with the emotionally ill ends quite a bit less happily, and more permanently.
A Dangerous Son is...well, I don’t know how to put it. “Quietly done,” let’s say, given the subject matter; director Liz Garbus (of the extraordinary There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane and Girlhood, among many others) lets us get to know these families quickly, then creates real, terrible tension about deadly outcomes as we watch them struggle to integrate their sons into society...or just to get to sundown with everyone in one piece. Larger references -- about deinstitutionalizing, mass shootings, the state of U.S. healthcare, and the online thunderdome of judgment that greets even the tiniest parenting decisions, never mind these -- come up, but aren’t asterisked. Exhaustiong and the struggle to retain hope are felt in every frame. When author Liza Long’s son, Eric, notes that in his firsthand experience, 70 percent of the children in juvenile detention are “severely mentally ill,” it isn’t surprising; none of what A Dangerous Son tells us is, really. But it does give pause, and that pause does stay with you.