As a lobster scales the dark ocean floor, a camera hones in on its rock-like shell as it wanders aimlessly. Sedimentary with a blue and orange coloration, the shell protects it from harm.
The crustacean molts out of its shell frequently in its youth, but as it ages, the process becomes more difficult. When it does molt, it reveals a tender inside, exhibiting that it can change.
“Bucks Harbor,” a film directed by Pete Muller, explores the complexities of personal growth and the lasting impact that parenthood has on young boys.
The film rotates between a quartet of lobstermen working at Bucks Harbor, a rural port in Machiasport, Maine. Survival in the town revolves around lobster fishing and the toughness it takes to succeed at it.
In their upbringing, each of the men were hammered by an age-old question driven by generational standards: Are you man enough?
In the film, Muller created a space for the men to reflect on this question through intimate interviews.
One of the men, Mark, was raised primarily by his mother, as his father was in the Coast Guard. The viewer meets Mark as the camera peers over his shoulder, staring at a decades-old photograph. The audience laughed at what they thought was a joke, crafted by Mark’s mother and angering his father tremendously: one-year-old Mark sitting on the couch in a dress and high heels.
40 years later, an innocent recreation of the joke molts into a piece of his identity. Mark dressed in drag to prank his father, and in the process, discovered that drag was something he enjoyed and felt comfortable in. Eventually, Mark’s father became accepting of his son’s self-discovery too. The exhibitions of non-traditional manhood were essential to show the intrapersonal definitions of what it means to be a man.
In the post-film Q&A on Saturday, Muller expressed his intentional curation of each subject’s story — Muller cut roughly 698 hours of raw footage of 14 subjects, but included both the arcs of Mark and his father.
The audience also meets Wayne, the oldest of the featured men. His father physically abused him in childhood, which manifests later in life through his struggle with violent alcoholism.
Wayne speaks with a gravely, sailor-accented voice that carried the weight of decades of labor and remained steady no matter the subject — nothing fazed him. He once proclaimed himself as a tough guy that crushed a policeman’s testicles with his hands. But after two days spent in solitary confinement, strapped naked to a chair in the dark, the emotional impact of his actions finally surfaced.
Upon his release, Wayne made peace with the imprint his father left on him. His relationship with alcohol and prison were still at the core of his identity, only now, avoiding the two became his guiding principle.
Toward the end of the film, Muller cut back to the lobster, finally molting its shell.
Was the metaphor on the nose? Yes. But Muller couldn’t have picked a better subject to depict the tangled definition of manhood than Bucks Harbor.
People are their upbringing. They are their parents. They are the words that are embedded into their brains, the fists landing on their bodies and the emotions tied to their hearts.
But they don’t have to stay that way — they can allow themselves to be soft, have a change of heart and molt their shell.
You can keep up with the rest of The Maneater’s True/False coverage here.
