In co-writer/director Dana Ben-Ari’s The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong, Gary Shteyngart reveals the horror of a bad circumcision. The subject, captured in black and brilliance, almost feels like a character from a Woody Allen movie. Shteyngart is a best-selling author, humorist, and absurdist. He is the Soviet-born, American-raised writer of six novels, including The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story, and a memoir. He’s also a gifted satirist who, like all great comedic voices, is the product of a tumultuous and turbulent upbringing. But this short documentary, co-written by Joanne Nerenberg and Kate Novack, isn’t about Shteyngart’s writing; it’s about his penis.
See, not long after landing in the good old U.S. of A, Shteyngart’s parents were informed by the Jewish community that it was acceptable to have all males circumcised. Not a big deal, right? Circumcisions are normal and usually turn out well, right? Well, no. Turns out botched circumcisions are more common than you’d think. In this case, what would appear to be a deformed skin-bridge, if you will, left by a sloppy chop from a mohel when Shteyngart was seven, would become a tuning fork of terror that would shower his existence with agonizing pain. The pain from the wrong cut left for forty years before it returned, and they informed Shteyngart that his skin-bridge, like the support girders of an actual bridge, would have collapsed, and therefore should be removed.
“…a deformed skin-bridge, if you will, left by a sloppy chop from a mohel when Shteyngart was seven, would become a tuning fork of terror…”
What followed was a nightmare which saw Shteyngart’s penis dressed in an object similar to an Elizabethan collar, employed to prevent anything from touching his penis and sending pain like a lightning bolt through his body. The depression and the side effects of the drugs used to manage his situation nearly saw Shteyngart take a long walk off a short pier. After all, if there’s one thing a man has to live with for the rest of his life, it is his penis, and Shteyngart has spent an enormous amount of agony and anguish over his faithful sidekick’s well-being. In the end, he brainstorms an ode to his poor, butchered schlong, whom he never wanted to hurt, and laments allowing others to treat others wrong.
By the time The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong was over, I wished it were part of an anthology feature, a collection of 20-minute shorts of its kind from The New Yorker. And for those of you dear readers familiar with the literature, past and present, that the magazine has published, it could work as a companion piece to Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.
The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong could be a New Yorker-style story, captured in a Woody Allen kinda way, part of a collective of such works featuring the lives of interesting characters. But instead of focusing on what makes them a success, it spotlights the bad apple in the barrel, the peccadillo that, like it or not, they have to live with.
"…I wished it were part of an anthology feature..."
