His Type
Warning: the following essay will completely spoil the 2019 film Black Conflux. Please stream it on Plex, Tubi - or better yet, buy it!
He was the type of person who kept to himself, meeting his co-worker’s questions with quiet hostility. He was the type of person whose blank stare after you said that he was weird only made him seem weirder. He was the type of person who danced, but only in secret, at places where no one knew him or his sister. He was the type of person who remembered the shade of your hair, the purse of your lip, but not the clothes you were wearing. Perhaps more accurately, he was the type of person who intentionally removed your actual clothes in his mind and replaced them with long, modest gowns made of rough, sensible fabric, always floral patterns. He was the type of person who drove alone on dark roads at odd hours. He was the type of person who rarely picked up hitchhikers. He was the type of person who lived in someone’s basement, slept in a room where no light streamed in, encased himself in blank walls. He was the type of person who reluctantly offers a ride to a young girl, too aware of his hands, too aware of his size. He was the type of person who parks his car in a clearing on a cold, grey morning, using more words than he feels comfortable confessing. He is the type of person whose rural Canadian surroundings, encircled by two midnight blue rushing rivers that could carry any secret away, didn’t suit who he was – but would suit who he might become.
Human beings are obsessed with the inevitable tragedy of True Crime. Ever since the term “serial killer” was coined, there has been a prurient fascination with these so-called psychos and what makes them tick. Is it nature or nurture? Was there a point of no return? What led to that first kill?
Nicole Dorsey’s 2019 film Black Conflux appears poised to explore these questions. The film follows bruised-but-sweet teenager Jackie (Ella Ballentine) and severely awkward thirtysomething Dennis (Ryan McDonald), who simmers with unarticulated rage. Jackie and Dennis’ stories run on parallel tracks, each a prisoner in the same small town. They haunt the same sorry gas stations and drag themselves along the same back roads, but they don’t meet until the very end.
Jackie is fifteen, stretched like taffy between childhood and the heady world of sex her friends faux-confidently brag about. She bears the burden of fairly developed breasts, which brings an attention that tingles the skin in an exciting way one moment and activates a fight or flight response the next. Abandoned by her parents—at least one of whom is in jail—she is nominally under the care of an alcoholic aunt. All she wants to do is sing in choir, but craving connection, she drops out to follow her friends to ragers. As teenagers often do, she plugs her deep wound of loneliness with peer pressure.
If Jackie’s loneliness is a wound, Dennis’ loneliness is a tumor, already metastasized. It doesn’t help that Dennis appears happiest when beset with visions of anonymous women with vacant expressions, placed ominously inside the back of a truck. Are these women exes? Obsessions? Victims?
A confluence is the point where two or more flowing bodies of water join to form one channel, also known as a conflux. By using the latter term—a slant homophone of conflict—in her title, director and screenwriter Dorsey suggests an inevitable danger when Jackie and Dennis share the screen. A tragic heroine running afoul of the local serial killer.
There’s precedence for this. In Lifetime Movie Network’s miniseries, The Capture of the Green River Killer, a docudrama about the crimes of real-life serial killer Gary Ridgeway, the narrative is split between the real detective Dave Reichert (Tom Cavanagh) and the fictional teenage sex worker Helen Remus (Amy Davidson). The audience gets to know Helen and sympathize with her motives for running away from an abusive home. When Helen inevitably becomes one of Ridgeway’s victims, it’s devastating because we’ve seen her full of life.
When Jackie hitches a ride and Dennis stops to pick her up, we’re primed to expect a similar inevitability. Unlike Helen, Jackie might be the first kill. Dorsey clues us into this in an earlier scene with Dennis. The anonymous women in Dennis’ hallucinations occasionally pop up in his car, sometimes giving voice to a violent fantasy, sometimes insulting him. The last time this happens, we recognize the women – they are people we’ve seen Dennis interact with throughout the film, people who are still alive.
Dennis pulls off into a clearing. Jackie looks at him, more puzzled than scared. He speaks first:
Dennis: I used to want to be a part of it.
Jackie: Part of what?
Dennis: The world. But I don’t want to anymore.
She considers the implications. Then:
Jackie: Can I tell you something? I’m not sure if anyone ever really knows where they’re going. You just find yourself, ending up someplace, not quite sure how it happened. It’s cruel, but that’s the way it is. I guess it’s what you do next that really matters.
Now it’s his turn to be confused:
Dennis: Are you real?
Jackie: I hope so.
The camera cuts to a shot outside of the car. A few moments pass. Jackie opens the passenger door and leaves. End of film.
Black Conflux subverts expectations with the opposite of “shock value”. We’re prepared for a double tragedy. The tragedy of Jackie getting into the car of that man we know has bad vibes, becoming a black and white school photograph flashing on the nightly news. The tragedy of Dennis becoming untethered from society, even with a sister and parents who seem to love him, by giving into his violent urges.
Instead, they attempt to connect. This is the only moment in the film where Dennis tries to explain how he feels to someone. I think Jackie senses the danger (girls often do) but also the pain, a pain she shares. She validates his feelings but emphasizes personal responsibility. They’ve all been dealt a lousy hand – Jackie, Dennis, Jackie’s family – but they all have a choice in how they cope. Dennis, who isn’t used to being spoken to so directly, wants to know if Jackie is real. Is there really someone who sees him?
I am wary of the impulse in me to empathize with lost and violent men. Men, who are always given the benefit of the doubt. Men, whose comfort is always prioritized above a woman’s safety. But a film like Black Conflux invites that empathy, and that might be more radical than dismissing Dennis as a boogeyman. In Sarah Marshall’s excellent essay for The Believer, “The End of Evil”, she writes about identifying with serial killer Ted Bundy’s words:
“I didn’t know what made things tick,” Bundy told [Stephen Michaud, author of Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer]. “I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what made people attractive to one another. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.”
The first time I read these words—still a teenager, still meant to identify with the murdered girl and no one else—I recognized them as my own. (link here)
Marshall’s thesis is a challenge to the Ted Bundy/serial killer/psychopath orthodoxy – people like this are not born bad, are not doomed to commit crimes. This othering, of men like Bundy and Dennis, is the system abdicating responsibility for male violence and the conditions that create it. She indicts the narrative that blood needs to be spilt before something can be done:
…I’m tired of being told there’s no point in searching for answers that might lead to solutions, tired of living in a world where some people are just born bad, and all we can do is wait to catch and destroy them, and where catching and destroying a monster means waiting until they start killing women and girls.
I would be remiss to not mention the scene where I most identify with Dennis. After another night of driving around, angry and sulking, he stops at a bar. Inside, a few people are dancing, while Gowan’s dreamy pop track “Moonlight Desires” fills the room. He approaches the dance floor, slowly at first. Dennis, who hasn’t been anything close to animated the entire film, starts losing himself in the music. Whipping off his jacket, he dances alone, un-self-conscious. Like Dennis, I’m quiet and reserved around my co-workers and anyone I don’t know very well. None of those people would expect me to cut loose dancing – but when the right song comes on, oh man.
Then Dennis does something I would never do. A woman approaches, grabbing hold of his shoulder, an invitation. Dennis responds by spinning her around – aggressively. He pulls her in close, and for a moment this is exciting, sensual. But then he dips her far too roughly, and while the woman seems to enjoy it, Dennis stops and goes to get his jacket.
We don’t know what happens to Dennis after the credits roll. When two rivers meet at a confluence, their different compositions—murky with sediment, clear as a pane of glass—come together to create a new image. There could be a new Dennis that emerges from the clearing. Or he could resist, forking out to carve the same dark and muddy path.
Goddamn, Maddie. This was tremendous. Never heard of this picture but you've put in on my radar. Very raw and honest assessment. So deeply personal. Solidarity in trying to see the best in hurt people.