[Fantasia 2020 Review] Survival Skills Surprises as a Socio-Political Satire

Welcome to Middletown, USA. The population rests around 34,000 and it’s a “typical American town”: 89% white with a median income of 70,000. In the recent 1988 election, the town overwhelmingly voted for Reagan… “despite the fact he was not running for reelection.” In this small town in the middle of the country, there’s someone I’d like to introduce you to. His name is Jim (Vayu O’Donnell) and he is your manufactured training dummy; a Jurassic Park-style Mr. DNA created by a faceless Hammond-esqe narrator called, well, The Narrator (Stacy Keach) to teach Middletown Police recruits. 

Jim is formed, limb by limb, on a CRT TV and Jim responds to The Narrator’s questions with a sort of 50s-era sense of golly gee: “Sure!” “You bet!”, a grin plastered across his face. This creation is given a two bedroom home in Middletown and an equally empty vessel of a girlfriend named Jenny (Tyra Colar), who loves making jam and...well, that’s actually it. She only comes to life when Jim is on camera, like a Stepford Wife, offering empty platitudes and copious amounts of jam. 

On his first day of the job, he takes his trusty police car toy with him and sets it on the dash of the actual police car. As he rubs the dash and the roof with a loving, excited caress and plays with the sirens and police radio, his rugged, rough around the edges partner watches with annoyance. Her name is Allison (Ericka Kreutz) and not only did she not request Jim, she specifically requested “Not You” as her partner. As The Narrator breaks in to tell us the first call can be tricky, he spins a wheel and it lands on “Domestic Violence,” sandwiched neatly between “Drugs” and “Precious Metal Theft.” 

“Oh…” the narrator says, disappointed. “Well cadets, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops out there.” 

Survival Skills then follows the first year in the life of Jim, a composite of an every(white)man new recruit and the film starts like a satire of 80s-style, VHS Police Training videos. And for awhile, it can keep up the charade of tongue-in-cheek metaness. For instance, when a speeding ticket goes wrong and Jim ends up beaten by the person he pulled over, he bemoans to Jenny that everyone will see his face and know what happened. So Jenny smears jam around her eyes and forehead, mimicking his bruises. “There,” she says with a Cheshire grin plastered on her face. “Now we are the same.

But Jim’s first case, the domestic violence one, keeps lingering in his mind. No matter how much The Narrator desperately wants to pull him away from it--rewinding segments and fast-forwarding them to additional complications to keep his mind busy--Jim keeps obsessing over the case.  Interjected between the Shot on Video quality footage, with VHS tracking lines and static aplenty are scenes of intense emotion. 

An older police officer talking through his first bad call and the dead bodies he saw afterwards, on repeat until the film goes black and his voice eventually trails off. Or an interview between Jim and Lauren (Madelin Anderson), the daughter of the domestic abuse case who tells him about the push/pull of her abusive father. How he’d buy her a camera and go on photo adventures one day and frank discussions of the abuse she’d suffer by his hands: “He threatens to kill me a lot.” It’s numbing and sobering in its frankness and is followed by a scene of Jim bawling in the corner. “I think we’ve gotten off track here,” The Narrator says as he tries to refocus. But we can’t. Because life isn’t a series of binary choices. It’s messy. And as his partner says, “People are just a nightmare.”

Some might worry that Survival Skills is a “sympathy for the devil” kind of film that might feel weirdly out of touch with everything going on culturally right now. I actually went into it feeling the same way, but what I found is a much more complicated film. Through a lens of familial abuse, it examines the way the institutions created to keep us safe spectacularly fail us, time and time again. 

I think back to the two scenes that feel completely out of place in the film. The way that Jim isn’t prepared or equipped to deal with the emotional trauma of an abused daughter. Or the older cop who was frustrated that he thought he did everything he could in a domestic case, but it still ended poorly. How we keep throwing these hammers at a situation that requires a different tool. It’s just two situations in a myriad of others that feel like pushing a square through a circular hole.

It doesn’t always fit.