[a revisit and revision of a review I wrote last year]
Swiss Army Man is a hard movie to condense into a snappy synopsis without feeling like you’re missing the forest for the trees. “A hopeless man stranded on a deserted island befriends a dead body, and together they go on a surreal journey to get home,” isn’t wrong and neither is it wrong to describe the movie as an “absurdist black comedy”, and while the popular descriptor of “a movie about a farting corpse, it’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry” is also not wrong, it does somewhat comes across as a refusal to engage with the movie on any serious level because it’s so much more than just that and I want to take a deeper dive into the world of Swiss Army Man.
The movie opens with a pathetically comical failed attempt at suicide. Hank – our protagonist – stands with a noose around his neck, humming a song to himself about to step off the cooler he’s standing on, when he spots a body washing up on the beach he’s been stranded on for a while now, he tries to step forward and inadvertently hangs himself only for the rope to snap some long seconds later leaving him prone and coughing in the sand. He rushes over to the body only to find that it’s a corpse. In vague terms he talks to the corpse about how dissatisfied he is with his life and how he thought for just a moment that this might have happened for a reason, and that’s when the corpse starts farting.
Hank and Manny – the corpse – strike up an odd friendship borne from necessity and utility. Manny’s amazing special bodily abilities help Hank survive and navigate his way through the forest, while Hank helps Manny remember what it means to be alive in a hilarious and darkly stark twist of the ‘born sexy yesterday’ trope. They build the kind of intense and intensely silly relationship that children often develop. There’s a lot of creativity and imagination between them, acceptance of the weird and ridiculous that we tend to lose as we grow up, a true freedom of expression that our restrictive society tends to dissuade and oppress.
Manny is everything that Hank has ever been afraid of being. He’s painfully earnest, haltingly honest, often gross and unashamedly weird. And Hank can’t stand it because he’s grown up believing that “weird is when you do stuff that no one else does and they make fun of you for it.” Throughout the film he has to unlearn and challenge all his preconceived notions about what being weird and different means in order to help his friend and himself, and Manny shows him through the wonderful abilities of his body and their growing friendship that there’s nothing wrong with being different and weird.
There’s something inherently queer about this movie. We – queer people – tend to find ourselves in the monstrous in stories throughout all time, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to The Little Mermaid’s Ursula, because of our otherness and our rejection from society is mirrored in these characters. And there’s something transgressive about taking the repulsive and monstrous and turning it into something positive as Swiss Army Man does with Manny.
And in the pursuit of something false, they create something real.
Through some awkward misunderstanding and in order to teach Manny about love, Hank finds himself cross-dressing and roleplaying as a woman. He takes on the persona of a woman he’s only ever seen on the bus and social media, adopts a feminine affect and allows Manny to flirt with him in an odd reflection of the man he thinks he wants to be. They have several staged dates, and learn more about each other as they have the most fun they’ve had throughout the entire film, and through these refractions and reflections they both learn that they’re capable of love and being loved.
That queerness extends to Hank and Manny’s relationship, even beyond the roleplay. After their ‘dates’, they have to make a treacherous crossing over a river and while Hank is trying to concentrate, Manny has a thought that he feels compelled to talk about. Manny says that he feels like there’s something between them and he knows neither of them are going to talk about it, but he doesn’t know how to talk about it anyway because he doesn’t understand it. And that sounds like, if not falling in love then the beginnings of it. Directly after Hank brushes these feelings off, they find themselves dangling over the water and Manny says something that could almost be a confession: “I think if I die, I might really miss you.” And Hank, who obviously doesn’t want to confront his feelings, says “oh you’re the worst” just before they plummet into the water.
They crash into the water, and Hank watches as Manny sinks down toward the bottom. He swims toward him and kisses him. His reasoning is unclear, maybe it’s because he thinks they might die, maybe it’s an apology, and maybe it’s a goodbye? As they kiss, memories and things that could have been flash across the screen, and though it’s not clear who’s thinking, there’s a moment from the night before where they almost kissed as themselves but this time in the water they do kiss.
And as he’s kissing Manny, Hank realises that Manny’s breathing air into his mouth, and isn’t there something so inherently queer in the notion of a man kissing another man and breathing air?
There’s also a queerness in Hank’s infatuation with Sarah, the woman from the bus. He never seems like he’s truly attracted to her, he appears to realise that he doesn’t want to be with her and maybe he never did, maybe he wanted to be her, he wanted to be as happy as she seemed. When she asks him why he has a picture of her on his phone, Hank says “You just seemed really happy, and I wasn’t.”
When they reach civilisation and Sarah’s home, neither of them are able to talk, Hank regresses to who he was before he got lost and Manny returns to a corpse. But when Hank shakes off the shackles of polite society, in his devotion to and compassion for Manny, he allows himself to break out of this stupor in order to show everyone that it’s okay to be different and weird.
Swiss Army Man explores loneliness, depression, isolation, ostracisation, weirdness, otherness, creativity, friendship, queerness, self-acceptance, how society is often hostile toward nonconformity and how we have to work together to create a society that accommodates everyone without prejudice. In an early scene, Hank and Manny find a lot of things in the woods, things that people have left behind because they’re broken, empty, dirty, smelly, useless and old, because they’re trash. Hank and Manny are the trash that has been left behind by the world. But together, Hank and Manny find freedom and purpose through their mutual strangeness. And while it’s true that Swiss Army Man is silly and absurd and dark, it’s also heartbreakingly sad and earnest in that vulnerable way those truths that have the ability to deeply hurt us are. Maybe we could all do with being a bit more like Hank and Manny, by embracing our weirdness and encouraging those around us to do the same. We should stop hiding and let ourselves be weird because life is short, and no one deserves to ride the bus alone.
Hank : “Because I’m just a scared, ugly, useless person.”
Manny : “But maybe everyone’s a little bit ugly. And maybe we’re all just ugly, dying sacks of shit, and maybe all it’ll take is one person to just be okay with that, and then the whole world will be dancing and singing and farting, and everyone will feel a little bit less alone.”
Hank : “Manny, you have no idea how nice that sounds.”
The Captive Returns 