Benjy Ferree: "Fear"

At this point in film and television history, it’s become cliché to expect child stars to end up spending their later teen years becoming less cute and more involved in drugs, cheap sex, and downward career arcs. Way before Macaulay Culkin, there was Song of the South and Peter Pan star Bobby Driscoll, who went from being Disney’s golden boy to a teenager with many pimples and few acting prospects to death at 31 after an unhinged adult life. Driscoll is the subject of Come Back to the Five and Dime Bobby Dee Bobby Dee, the latest release from Benjy Ferree.

“Fear” suggests the paralyzing situation of being a young actor who views his oncoming adolescence as a ticking time bomb. Everything, from the postman to the passage of another day, reminds the protagonist that his career is only as strong as his delayed puberty. Somewhere between glam rock and doo-wop, “Fear” betrays an appropriate theatricality, as though the perpetually stressed child actor has folded his sanity and now can’t help but see life as yet another stage show.

What’s most attractive, and also oddly unsettling about “Fear,” is that Ferree sounds gleeful as he describes the downfall of the protagonist. It’s a kind of absurdist take on reality that I can imagine appearing in the final scene of a biopic about Driscoll directed by a dream team of David Lynch, John Cameron Mitchell, and Todd Haynes, as Driscoll’s ghost celebrates the black comedy of his doomed existence with an elegantly choreographed number. Perhaps Ferree is channeling Driscoll, laughing from beyond the grave at the shit hand he ended up with. At the very least, it’s some dynamite dramatic pop.