Jonah crawls beneath the crowded bed he shares with his brothers, his flashlight suspended between the pages of a journal. His legs splay half into the room as the camera flickers over the scrawl of his pencil beginning to draw. A blank page envelops the screen like a promise.
In director Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals, a vivid and restless queer coming-of-age film in theaters August 17, the raw feelings that Jonah spills onto the page aren’t the sort he’s able to articulate aloud. In fact, Jonah (played by Evan Rosado) hardly says much at all as a 10-year-old growing up in a small, volatile home with two older brothers and combative parents. Based on Justin Torres’ semi-autobiographical novel about his childhood in upstate New York, the film plunges into the mind of its young protagonist through his frenetic and expressive drawings.
It’s more than a stunning visual technique; Jonah’s escape into the blank pages of his journal illustrates the particular value of artistic expression for queer youth. “Art assists with identity formation,” says Daniel Blausey, PhD, a practicing art psychotherapist in New York City. “It is a safe place free from social judgement.” Jonah’s empty journal offers freedom from external rules and expectations that attempt to set limits on who he might imagine himself to be. If self-determination outside of social strictures is the basic liberty that all queerness demands, We the Animals demonstrates that sometimes, art can be one’s only means to achieve it.
“Using art therapeutically helps break his isolation and gives him a way to communicate with another language,” Blausey says of Jonah’s drawings in the film. “Especially at 10 years old, he’s probably experiencing a lot of his feelings nonverbally, so having the journal is a way to understand what he’s going through.” For Jonah and his brothers, that includes an alternately violent and affectionate father (Raúl Castillo), who hits their mother and abandons their family for days before returning home. Drawing is also a way for kids to “separate the behavior from the parent,” Blausey says.
In cases of domestic violence, siblings can at times consider themselves a kind of unit, Blausey explains. Though the three start out moving through life as a pack — “Look at us when we were brothers,” Jonah tells us at the outset, “Us three, us brothers, us kings” — Jonah’s point of view shifts to that of an outsider. “Look at me watching them; flying, fearless,” his voiceover says as his brothers leap and dive into a river while he sits on the bank with his ma (Sheila Vand).
That day on the water, his father paddles Jonah and his mother out to the middle of the current then leaves them to sink or learn to swim, setting off Jonah’s recurring fear of drowning. As his parents fight in the next room later that night, Jonah retreats under the bed, and we see his first drawing: scribbles of himself underwater, rising quickly to the surface until he’s flying up through the air. It’s the first instance of many in which we watch Jonah work through painful moments of his life on the page, rescripting his story in a way that allows him to seize authority and often express rage, reaching toward what Blausey calls “empowerment and mastery” of a situation through its externalization in art.
While all three brothers witness their parents’ abusive relationship, Jonah’s journal functions as his only real confidant as he processes the trauma of his adolescence — especially as his sexual identity begins to take shape. When his parents embrace, Jonah locks eyes with his mother, as though imagining himself in her shoes; when a neighboring boy shows them a porno tape in his basement, Jonah is transfixed by a scene of two men while the others snicker. Eroticized images of his father (who has just walked out on them and hasn’t yet returned) flash through his mind as he lays under the stars with his brothers. Soon, scribbles of his father copulating merge onto that basement TV, and the whole room is submerged in water as Jonah looks longingly over at the the silken-blond boy next door.
A fantasy that finds Jonah underwater playing out a sexual awakening that traces back to his father might invite psychoanalytic interpretation. In a therapeutic context, though, “it’s about the process over the product,” Blausey says. Drawings like Jonah’s function as keys to unlock how someone understands their own experience, and are best interpreted by their makers. Art constitutes a “meeting of the inner and outer world,” as Blausey explains, a locus for reconciling what’s in our minds with what’s going on around us.
“Through art there’s a lot of projection,” Blausey says, describing it as “a way to try on an identity” — particularly one that might feel stigmatized, like attraction to the same gender. “It’s a way to witness it, versus experience it internally.” For most of the film, Jonah’s only sexualized drawings involve his parents tangled up together (in Freudian terms, what’s called the ‘primal scene’). But when his sheaf of sketches is finally discovered and scattered across the living room floor, we see he’s drawn more anatomically explicit scenes between men. By now, he’s kissed the boy next door, too.
Jonah understandably wails at the violation, biting his father’s arm as he holds down his son like a feral animal. His brothers peer at him with mild contempt, but his mother’s face is soft, and his father tries to calm him. Soon, everyone is peacefully asleep. With his jacket on, Jonah fishes his drawings out of the trash can, smoothing them with his hand, lingering on a sketch of him and his brothers. He tucks them under his arm and trudges out into a snowy clearing. His gaze turns up over the barren tree tops, searching for the horizon. Whatever direction he decides to turn next, a pencil is the only tool he needs to forge his own path.
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