Maybe 15 or 20 minutes into the documentary Boys State (available to stream on AppleTV+ on August 14), I texted a colleague saying, “So this is a horror movie?” What I’d seen so far of Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s film—an award-winning hit at Sundance back in January—dredged up a lot of frightening stuff, from past and present.
Perhaps most viscerally evoked were slightly traumatic memories from my brief time at sleepaway camp as a teenager. It’s the specific terror of being not only surrounded by but stuck with a bunch of teenage boys who seem to have collectively decided to enact the chest-thumping and rutting that is too often cast as straight male culture’s purest, most primal realization. As a not-yet-out, decidedly unathletic, painfully shy gay teenager in late-1990s Massachusetts, that was an overwhelmingly alienating thing to behold, and to be made subject to.
It’s no less so in Boys State, which documents thousands of 16- and 17-year-old Texan boys as they participate in the American Legion’s 2018 Boys State camp, a project meant to teach young people about the civics of the democratic process—chiefly, elections. (There is a Girls State program somewhere out there, too.) In the early stretches of the film, there’s a lot of hooting and roaring as the boys (not all, but many) amp themselves up for a weekend of playing not only little adults, but little masters of the universe. To some viewers, this may be warmingly familiar. For others, it will evoke nothing but bad flashbacks to the moments when the great gyre of aggro-hetero male energy once blew through their lives.
What will be inescapable for almost all people who watch the film is its second, more enduring horror—one that’s inextricably linked with the first, but maybe even more pervasive in its reach. Boys State is a grim lesson—a painful allegory—in the realities of American politics, in who so often wins campaigns by running platforms built on red-meat shibboleths while ignoring or barely addressing the pertinent ills of the country. (Gun fanaticism and attacks on women’s reproductive rights are popular among the kids in the film.) At Boys State, the campers are divided into two imagined political parties, Federalists and Nationalists, and are tasked with forming local governments on their way to nominating a gubernatorial candidate who could go on to, essentially, win the camp. Many someday statesmen have passed through this program—Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney among them, albeit not in Texas—and in Boys State we see how such totalizing ambition is, perhaps, first rewarded.
So what’s the value in it? The way the campers so easily tether aggressive masculinity to political strength doesn’t seem to be anything but harmful to civic progress. Several of the prominently featured campers’ chief takeaway—that politics is by its nature an unscrupulous game of cynicism—would seem only to cultivate the kind of winner-take-all sociopathy that is currently running Washington, as well as many state and local governments. One starts to wonder why Boys State exists anymore (though we know why), and more pressingly, why Boys State the film does.
Gradually, though, McBaine and Moss begin a gentle rounding out of their film. That one boy who initially seems so awful—so brash, so struttingly entitled—well, he’s actually not as bad as we thought. A nasty campaign ploy seems to backfire. And a great hope arrives in the form of a kid named Steven, the son of a Mexican immigrant who, though dogged by his association with the March for Our Lives movement against gun violence, becomes the lead candidate for the Nationalist party (such terrible irony). In Steven, McBaine and Moss find a stand-in for the many people around the country—many of them people of color, many of them young—who have run for, and in plenty of cases won, prominent positions in government in the fight against the nasty revanchism of the post-Obama years.
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Review: Boys State Is a Hopeful and Frightening Look at Teenage Politics - Vanity Fair
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