Tyler Cornack
Butt Boy

Some of you may remember why in the gray outskirts of a generic, putrid Belgium, Dries got off the custom bike in the clearing in front of the prefabricated mansion of an old literature classmate, one Big Dick. Big Dick was the frontman of the Harry Mulisch: Harry Mulisch, after the greatest Dutch writer. Dries was the most famous living Belgian writer, nevertheless, the drummer of The Feminist, the garage punk band of deviant handicapped individuals.
It wasn't a courtesy visit that Dries had gone out of his way for. At the battle of the bands for ambitious local punk heroes, The Feminist and the Harry Mulisch would bring their horses, two tracks both coincidentally titled Deep Fish. Dries claimed the exclusive rights to the title for his own, driven by that bourgeois desire for appropriation that had already plunged him into the most cynical voyeuristic dissolution.
Unforgettable remains the digression about Big Dick's nickname, relieving the tension of the negotiation at Big Dick's table. Feeling pressured, Big Dick called on his concubine, a bony drug addict, from the corner where she was hiding, and urged her to lift her dress to show the guest the merit of such widespread fame. The following scene, when one would have expected a subjective view from Dries, took us with Dries and Big Dick to a dripping, soft quarry of pink trachyte, where the miner proudly and solemnly declared, with echoes: «I did this. With my dick».

Sometimes I've joked that this sequence from Ex Drummer (by Koen Mortier, 2008) was my favorite in the history of cinema, when, more realistically, it's only my favorite of the last twenty years. Today, I find a similar vision of crevices in Butt Boy, written, directed, and starred by Tyler Cornack.
The framework is that of an archetypal police thriller, with due insights into the opposing stories of detective Russell and the criminal maniac Chip, connected by the vice of alcohol. Chip is the archetype of the unsuspecting, flat-life IT worker, with a wife and child in a small home. Russell is the archetype of the rockstar detective with a dogged demeanor; the loss of a young child, mysteriously disappeared a few years earlier, has torn him apart, and now we see him as an outcast spying through the windows at his ex-partner's new life. Cornack's gaze impassively captures the squalor in essential traits.
Due to the tricks fate doesn't hesitate to play in small communities, Chip and Russell will have the chance to enter each other's lives, become confidants, leave each other, and meet again in the headlines.
In Chip's office, it's the day for employees' children to visit. A hide-and-seek game is organized, and a child is no longer found.
Leading the investigation is Russell, evidently emotionally involved. His suspicions soon focus on Chip, but the hypothesis about the crime's dynamic turns out to be absurd, or rather, paranormal. There is no hint of Dylan Dog's charm, set in a world where the paranormal is normal, behind the tenacity with which Russell follows the trail of the impossible into its most vibrant and malodorous cavity. Russell's United States are the real ones, where biology works as it should. Instead, there's the pragmatism of someone who would feel equally crazy contemplating the idea that something or someone could disappear in a puff into nothingness, whether it's a remote control, an award plaque, the suggestively shaped piece of a board game, a Yorkshire terrier, or a child.

It is the reality of Chip/Cornack and certain indie cinema that Russell is forced to explore the most hidden orifices. Crevices can then take on the proportions of dens for postmodern landfills.
Chip has chosen to embrace the status of a pathetic loser with a masochism that Freud would call an anal-retentive character, taking it to the extreme, with the manic lust for defeat. Cornack has chosen to make it not a metaphor, but an allegory: thus bringing on a literal level, in defiance of realism, the two involved terms. The success is, as grotesque as it may be, more effective than one would expect, aided by the skill of the actors, as seasoned character artists. Thus, the explosion of Chip/Cornack takes on the paradigm character of his cinema, in which the authorship too often must succumb for lack of means to the canonical genre, embodied in Russell; in a panorama where the Industry, which has millions of resources, seeks metaphors as appreciated as they are openly declared (the Oscar triumph of Parasite last year is proof enough), or loses itself in sterile yet costly reworks of genre cinema.

With this declaration of surrender, which indeed would not look out of place for quality (certainly not Hollywood-style) compared to some slapdash Netflix roster creations, Cornack has crafted his modest jewel, his Someone Flew up the Butthole.