Scaredycat: Summary

Scaredycat: Summary

The film Scaredycat is a documentary directed by Andy Blubaugh, exploring his state of mind after a group of young men attacked him in 2005. Scaredycat begins with a minimalistic title card, then transitions into several shots of Blubaugh and another man. Blubaugh surmises the film centers around “fear; specifically, [Blubaugh’s] fear”. Music replaces the ambiance when the film transitions to a shot of Andy Blubaugh’s day, interspersed with conversation snippets between either a woman or man. With the man, Blubaugh recalls his childhood habit of aligning feet, papers, magazines. The documentary emphasizes Blubaugh’s recollection by demonstrating him performing these habits as he walks outside.

While Blubaugh sits in the train, the documentary intermittently cuts to a conversation between Blubaugh and the woman. He elaborates his mentality justifying his compulsions, then comparing its tangibility to prayer. As Blubaugh leaves the train and enters a building, more of the conversation filters over the scene. He notes the security of his modern society, which the woman echoes, but she also notes that fear is “built in”. The conversation cuts out, and the camera focuses on Blubaugh adjusting paper on his desk. The music ends, and Blubaugh stares as his computer screen.

Scaredycat revolves around Blubaugh and his reaction to a violent crime, so the film switches over to a breakdown. Kirsten Snowden, the deputy district attorney of Multnomah County, Oregon, describes the case in an interview. In an act of “relatively senseless” violence, a group of young men launch an assault on several passersby, Blubaugh being one of them. The film portrays Blubaugh’s recollection of the crime by transitioning to puppet animation. This scene begins with a shot of a steel bridge and Blubaugh riding his bike. A monotone ringing noise acts as ambience, along with a recording of a phone call to the police. The caller reports a group of men attacking and robbing Blubaugh. Played out through the animation, one of the men knocks Blubaugh off his bike, and the rest crowd over him. They start kicking him, relenting once Blubaugh offers them money. The scene ends with him staring down one of the men, a young African-American, before he is left alone on the steel bridge.

Blubaugh returns to his life in his apartment after the incident. Jan Hawking, a clinical psychologist, voices over the psychological tendencies of people in the aftermath of violence. She states that victims reach one of two conclusions: either they accept the violence and move on, or they arrive to a more “punitive” approach. While Hawking gives her analysis, Blubaugh makes coffee, then lies on his couch as a segment of the attack replays.  

Blubaugh describes a series of conditions he believed he must adhere to avoid violence. Whether it be adjusting his feet on with sidewalk cracks or fleeing young African-American men, Blubaugh justifies his paranoia from the position of a victim of violence. He clarifies that while he recognized his approach as inherently racist, he still felt compelled to follow his ritual. Hawking describes this as “one-trial learning”, or an “overgeneralization” made by victims. To underline Blubaugh’s overgeneralization, Scaredycat plays a scene of Blubaugh sitting in the train, once more across an African-American man. As Blubaugh stares at him, the film cuts to the animation of one of Blubaugh’s attackers, and Blubaugh abruptly exits the train and returns home. He returns to his computer to compose an email to a man named Michael. Within the first sentence, he reveals Michael as one of his attackers, and Blubaugh reaches out to him for an interview.

 Receiving a letter in response, Blubaugh calls the man and asks him about the beating and the man’s life. The man recollects feeling no significant emotion during the incident, nor violence beforehand, though Blubaugh notes the violence of the man’s early fistfights with his stepfather. Hawking and Snowden return to voice their knowledge pertaining to the incident. Hawking describes the gratification of victims to see their persecutors punished, believing fulfilling this desire is both void and detrimental to the victim. While Snowden makes no opinion, she does detail the nature of the men’s punishment under Measure Eleven. This act mandated that prisoners serve their incarceration fully, a law which, according to Blubaugh’s attacker, is “unfair”. He reasons that all his time in prison will leave him unable to acclimatize to society once released, eliciting a sympathetic comment from Blubaugh. However, Blubaugh asserts that the punishment is fitting, an assertion which the man, in turn, finds “totally understandable”.

Scaredycat concludes with another play of Blubaugh leaving his house and entering a train. Once more, he sits across a young African-American man. He affirms the importance of stricter punishments, and, in another snippet of his conversation with the woman, notes that people “are as afraid as [they’ve] ever been”. Hawking takes the final words of the film, noting that the ones who are most afraid are also the ones more likely to realize that fear is usually unwarranted. The final shot of the documentary shows Blubaugh still sitting across the other man, but now, he refrains from adjusting a nearby paper. The film gives a wide shot of Blubaugh, the man, and the other passengers, then cuts to credits (Scaredycat).