Andrew Blubaugh's Scaredycat Puts a Fresh POV on an Old Fear

"I don't remember you saying exactly what you were afraid of, but you had those fears."

Andrew Blubaugh's 2007 independent documentary short, Scaredycat, is a poignant look at fear, trauma, and violence from the filmmaker's perspective. I have watched this film about ten times trying to make sense of my overall attitude toward it. It is well-thought out with stunning sensory stimuli that makes his fear palpable. This is a part of its brilliance. 

What I like about the doc is how clean the shots are. The symmetry matches his admitted compulsions. My three favorite shots of the entire film: 1). 2:45; his workplace/cubicle shot. In this shot, everything is neat and seems to have its place, with Blubaugh right in the center of the shot (actually he is off-center by the slightest margin, but the negative space between him and his desk makes the shot. In the scene he is moving, but after securing everything in the right spot in just the right way, he becomes motionless and the scene turns into a still shot. 2). 3:05 the film cuts to a scene that focuses on a bank of five church windows as a centerpiece. Two cars are parallel parked with an empty space between them as if to support the symmetry of the windows. The visual could almost pass as a single shot, then Blubaugh enters the scene from the left riding his biking. The motion is a nice contrast to the still life around it. 3). 3:25 the shot of Portland's Steel Bridge is perfect. The geometric configuration of the bridge naturally does most of the work, and the symmetrical placement within the shot is dead center. What I also love about this scene is the transition from this shot into the animated reenactment of his attack. It was seamless.

At the same time, there are underlying themes that made me uncomfortable as I watched and tried to pinpoint the distinctions between exactly what this film was saying and what it might be inferring. This discomfort, which I also attribute to the brilliance of the film, is a reaction I presume Blubaugh expects of his audience (perhaps even a reaction he needs to galvanize from his audience in order to make the film "work"), however, something still feels awry.

Blubaugh labels himself a "worrier" at the beginning of the film in a scene with his father as he expresses the origin of his need, as early as six, to perform compulsory "rituals" in order to take control of his perceived safety. Control then becomes a central theme of the documentary as Blubaugh demonstrates how he controls the chaos and randomness of society within his own world. Straightening paper left as trash in public places and walking along the edges of floorboards or the paved concrete lines of streets is initially enough to reconcile the dissonance between society's having "eliminated immediate danger from our lives" yet still feeling the pressure of fear. "Maybe it's built in," is a woman's voiced over response before the film transitions to Blubaugh's trauma.

What I do not like about the doc are the parallels it draws between violence, trauma and Black men. Unpacking why this is problematic for me was by far the most difficult portion of the reflection. The film begins with a constant piercing tone as images of Black men flash on the screen while Blubaugh talks about fear. A shot of a computer screen shows a single question; "are you OK?" The viewer is exposed to these audio-visual elements before Blubaugh's attack is even mentioned. By the time the story unfolds, the viewer has been given a myriad subtle racial queues. Once the attack is outlined, Blubaugh vocalizes how he started to look at Black men differently. The shots then transition to scenes with Blubaugh and various Black men sharing public spaces. Blubaugh's anxiety is evident, even though these men's presences are happenstance. 

Full disclosure, I am trying really hard not to make it all about race. Honestly, the film makes it about race. This documentary could have been about violence and trauma and Blubaugh's personal experience with the two, and race did not have to be prominent at all... but it is. He admits himself in the film that his fears toward Black men are "stupid" because all of his attackers weren't even Black, although he thought they were. As an artist, I understand that what you experience through art in any medium (this does not include interpretation) is exactly what the artist wants you to experience. Nothing happens in a novel or on a screen that someone did not mean to be there. Every single thing we see in this film not only did Blubaugh intend for us to see, I believe he meticulously placed them for us to see. 

So my question is, why take the racial route? These fears, both spoken and unspoken, are already the bedrock of racial anxiety that plagues, not only the United States, but the world at large. Why emphasize feelings that you know are wrong in a film that brings no closure to the issue it addresses? This is the crux of my problem with this documentary. His cavalier handling of such a delicate matter juxtaposed with a traumatic experience--an assault with universal humanistic appeal--is dangerous if the contrast isn't teased out far enough to make sure conflation of the two doesn't occur. My fear is, especially considering who may make up Blubaugh's prime audience demographic, that not enough is done to demarcate the difference between the vulnerability of trauma, something that any person regardless of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnic or religious background, etc. can relate with and racial profiling itself. I searched for reviews, but found nothing more than various synopses.