Richard Brody

The Silently Regressive Politics of “A Quiet Place”

By Richard Brody April 10, 2018

The success of “A Quiet Place,” the new horror thriller directed by John Krasinski, is a sign of viewers craving emptiness, of a yearning for some cinematic white noise to drown out troubling thoughts and observations with a potently simple and high-impact countermyth. The noise of “A Quiet Place” is the whitest since the release of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”; as horror films go, it’s the antithesis of “Get Out,” inasmuch as its symbolic realm is both apparently unconscious and conspicuously regressive.

“A Quiet Place” is the story of a white family living in rustic isolation that’s reduced to silence because a bunch of big, dark, stealthy, predatory creatures who can hear their every noise are marauding in the woods and, at any conspicuous sound, will emerge as if from nowhere and instantly maul them to death. I won’t spoil the plot twists, but Krasinski ultimately delivers a pair of exemplary images, a lone bearded man (whom he himself plays) with a rifle, and a lone woman (played by his real-life wife, Emily Blunt) aiming a rifle into the camera.

The movie is a fantasy of survivalism that starts eighty-nine days into the rampage. The Abbotts, a family of five—mother, Evelyn; father, Lee; Regan, a daughter of about eleven (Millicent Simmonds); Marcus, a son of about eight (Noah Jupe), and a small boy of about four named Beau (Cade Woodward)—are trawling a ghost city for supplies, wandering through a pharmacy and gathering medicine. (The characters’ first names are given on IMDb, though, to the best of my recollection, they’re not mentioned in the film itself.) The Abbotts are the only people making their way through town, across an old wooden bridge, and to their remote country farmhouse amid a series of other farms. If they’ve survived so far—and most of the action takes place later, more than a year into the invasion—it’s due in part to one circumstance: Regan is deaf (as Simmonds is in real life), and, as a result, the family is skilled in sign language, which enables them to communicate and strategize while eluding the monsters.

Except for its blaring music, “A Quiet Place” is in fact mostly a very quiet movie (with one clever, if obvious, element of sound design—shots suggesting Regan’s point of view remove all background sound and are delivered silent, to reproduce her deafness on the soundtrack and contrast it with the hearing of other characters and the enforced speechlessness of their environment). The farmhouse, however, has been the site of relentless labors—both the daily domestic work on which physical subsistence depends (the action suggests that Evelyn does most of that) and some high-tech wizardry that turns the family’s basement into an elaborate video-surveillance module, with cameras scattered throughout the wide property, more video screens at work than in the back room of a shopping mall, and strings of red lights that wind through the farmland and can be lit at the flip of a switch. (Scenes of Lee at work with wire and solder suggest that the electronics workshop is solely his domain.)

The Abbotts have to maintain their quiet (though Lee has discovered that, when there’s a big and steady sound nearby, such as the rush of a waterfall, it’s safe to speak, since the voices don’t escape it), and so, there’s almost no verbal dialogue in the film (there’s more dialogue in sign language, which is subtitled). The near-wordless soundtrack is a directorial choice on Krasinski’s part—as silent as its characters may be, “A Quiet Place” could easily have been transformed into a voluble movie, in which the characters’ thoughts and experiences would be delivered on the soundtrack, as interior monologues, even if they’re compelled not to express them aloud to each other. But Krasinski (who wrote the script with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck) chose to keep his characters blank and undefined, their memories and musings out of bounds. What dialogue there is (whether spoken or signed) is confined to the demands of the action (with one twist of psychology involving an element of guilt that figures only trivially in the plot).

The only moment of authentic inner expression, the acknowledgment of any identity at all, arises when, under siege from the creatures, Evelyn challenges Lee when their children are in danger: “Who are we? Who are we if we can’t protect them?” In that moment, “A Quiet Place” disgorges its entire stifled and impacted ideological content. The movie’s survivalist horror-fantasy offers the argument for turning a rustic farmhouse into a virtual fortress, for the video surveillance and the emergency lighting and, above all, the stash of firearms that (along with a bit of high-tech trickery that it’s too good to spoil) is the ultimate game changer, the ultimate and decisive defense against home intruders.

In effect, “A Quiet Place” is an oblivious, unself-conscious version of Clint Eastwood’s recent movies, such as “The 15:17 to Paris,” which bring to the fore the idealistic elements of gun culture while dramatizing the tragic implications that inevitably shadow that idealism. The one sole avowed identity of the Abbott parents is as their children’s defenders; their more obvious public identity is as a white rural family. The only other people in the film, who are more vulnerable to the marauding creatures, are white as well. In their enforced silence, these characters are a metaphorical silent—white—majority, one that doesn’t dare to speak freely for fear of being heard by the super-sensitive ears of the dark others. It’s significant that when characters—two white men—commit suicide-by-noisemaking, they do so by howling as if with rage, rather than by screeching or singing or shouting words of love to their families. (Those death bellows are the wordless equivalent of “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”) Whether the Abbotts’ insular, armed way of life might put them into conflict with other American families of other identities is the unacknowledged question hanging over “A Quiet Place,” the silent horror to which the movie doesn’t give voice.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.”Read more »

More:MoviesHorror MoviesFilmEmily Blunt

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(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35857829)

https://imgur.com/a/42LjC

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35857854)

I'd add another line box after "Moves Out"/"Moves In":

"Doesn't Move"--> "Reinforces existing hierarchies" --> Racism.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35857887)

White character: Exists.

New Yorker: Dat raciss.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35857877)

American film critic

Image result for richard brody

Richard Brody is an American film critic who has written for The New Yorker since 1999. He attended Princeton University, receiving an B.A. in Comparative Literature in 1980. Wikipedia

Born: March 14, 1948 (age 70 years), New York

Alma mater: Princeton University

Movies: Liability Crisis

Books: Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard, MORE

Nominations: National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35859882)

Fuck libs

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35857996)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/star-wars-the-last-jedi-reviewed

Richard Brody

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” Reviewed

By Richard BrodyDecember 12, 2017

Daisy Ridley in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”Photograph by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Lucasfilm Ltd. / Everett

There’s a scene in the middle of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” that’s so mysterious, inspired, rich in overtones, and tenuously attached to the movie surrounding it that it virtually shouts its presence as the writer and director Rian Johnson’s embedded showreel, his flourish of personal purpose and creative power amid the two and a half wearying hours that serve as its frame. It’s part of a sequence that takes place in a neo-medieval island hideout where Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has long been sulking (shades of Achilles in the Iliad). Rey (Daisy Ridley), one of the new generation of heroes introduced in “The Force Awakens,” in 2015, goes to that forbidding, rocky, windswept retreat in the hope of persuading Luke to come back and join her and the other heroes in the Resistance to the First Order—to which the son of Han and Leia, Ben Solo, now known as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has sworn fealty.

While visiting Luke, Rey drops out of his sight for a moment and enters a hidden place in which she faces a vast subterranean mirrored curtain. She beholds her own reflection, reaches out to it, and sees it multiply. Suddenly, there’s a dozen or more identical Reys, all moving in unison, but then moving not in unison but in sequence, as if choreographed as a one-woman crowd in a Busby Berkeley production number, snapping her fingers and chanting a line or two, echoing outward toward an endless chorus line of Reys that seemingly recedes to infinity.

The sequence is a major inspiration, a moment of conscience and solitude, which wrenches itself out of the Star Wars cinematic universe to become a symbolic experience of independent power. That’s the good news. Yes, the question of Rey’s identity, of her own sense of it, is ultimately applied to the movie’s plot. The bad news is that it’s stuck onto it, inconsequentially, to add a nub of psychological conflict; like so much else in the movie, it’s a conspicuously crafted, compulsory detail to stoke a preprogrammed response in viewers. Like most of the movie’s twists and details, it provokes the feeling of subjection to stimuli like a movie-theatre lab rat.

The rest of the story (which I won’t spoil) involves the attempt by the Resistance, led by General Leia (the late Carrie Fisher, in her last role) to survive and escape an onslaught by the First Order that’s led by the haughty General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and its Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). It also involves matters of strategy as it meshes with temperament—and with gender difference—in the intrepid combat of the pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). Two other Resistance fighters, Finn (John Boyega) and Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), are also in the forefront of battle, as is another officer (Laura Dern). The movie brings back beloved characters; it features a varied array of excellent actors, even some of the best of the time.

Johnson is an auteur of sorts, one whose talent is ready-made for a generation of critics desperate to have one who works in popular genres and achieves popular successes, for fear that their enthusiasm for individual inspiration will isolate them from the celebrity circus of mass-market movies. He’s like Christopher Nolan but better, the other side of Nolan’s showily dour Janus-face. Unlike Nolan, Johnson has an authentically enticing virtuosity, joining a sense of vision to a sense of glee. But “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” yokes Johnson’s formidable cinematic intelligence to an elaborate feat of fan service that feels, above all, like the rhetorical and dramatic gratification of a religious sect. And what’s all the more disturbing about the experience is that—unlike inspired preachers whose own sense of fervor and possession threatens to run away with them, puts them into a public state of exaltation that they communicate to their flock—Johnson remains stolid, intelligent, in deft command. He leads, in “The Last Jedi,” not by example but from behind the curtain.

In particular, he lets his writing—or, rather, his plotting—take control of him. It doesn’t run away with him (as in his 2012 movie, “Looper”), but, rather, it dominates him, both technically and emotionally. Throughout “The Last Jedi,” twist after twist, touch after touch, line after line has the feel of the compulsory, of homework done elaborately, with extreme labor. Johnson’s sense of fun flicks out only in a few moments when heroic feats come off with a quick gleam and a quiet awe, when a tossed-off line of dialogue tweaks a tense situation with only mildly forced humor. Even the extraordinary cast members have less room here than in “The Force Awakens” to let their personalities show; the movie’s cinematic fabric is cut too tight, the frame is too constraining, the story lines hold them stiff and still like so many guy wires. (Fisher, however, manages to stand out and apart, like James Mason in Joseph Mankiewicz’s “Julius Caesar,” merely by talking.)

Despite a few stunning decorative touches (most of which involve the color red) and that brief central sequence of multiple Reys, the movie comes off as a work that’s ironed out, flattened down, appallingly purified. Above all, it delivers a terrifyingly calculated consensus storytelling, an artificial universality that is achieved, in part, through express religious references. (I won’t give away the Biblical ones, but they’re conspicuous, including an Abrahamic one, a New Testament one, and some skillfully placed crosses.) I desperately miss the pseudo-Shakespearean dialectical wrangles and the exhilarating sense of C.G.I. discoveries that mark George Lucas’s last forays into the franchise—their sense of renewed personal investment in a cinematic universe that seemed to be growing ever more complex before its creator’s eyes, their sense that its creator was personally wrestling with a world that was escaping his own control and taking on a life of its own.

Now, in “The Last Jedi,” that world has been tamed, tamped down, boxed in, neatly packaged, to a chilling extreme. It fixes its heroes in an abstemious, militarized world of twenty-four-hour-a-day work for mere survival, in which no personal life remains outside the realm of official function, a de-mentalized world that the movie presents, moreover, as appealing. If there’s any artistic unconscious or second level to “The Last Jedi,” it’s in a recurring plot point involving the very notion of mind control. And if there’s a sense of ego built into the movie, it’s with the built-in certainty that its maker and its viewers are on the right side of things. Lockstep consensus is cultivated not with chewily carnivorous troglodytes flaunting wanton violence and cruel spews of gore but with purpose and virtue, devotion and tradition, in the unimpeachable and unexceptionable name of liberation. “The Last Jedi” is a story about the Resistance, but the film itself is a cinematic masterwork of the First Order.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35858208)

So many words, yet so little substance.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35858304)

this type of thing is just silly and intended to succeed by frustrating any sensible response, which is then taken for acquiescence.

that's the jewish method, as described in Meing Kampf. the "10 dollars? What do you need with 5 dollars?" routine of pouring rubber cement into the gears of rational discourse.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35859976)

Only some are good.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3951456&forum_id=2#35860024)