October 2022

Barbarian

I really do feel like movies are miracles—it’s a miracle they get made, never mind if they are any good. I have a healthy amount of skepticism toward a lot of things but I am willing to accept something into my life if it earns my admiration, flaws and all. I used to think I would be a fiction writer, and in school I took every workshop I could. I fell into writing about music after graduation. Ten years later, I don’t view any of my writing as incongruous to my identity. I sense my desire to create was based on an “invisible vocation,” to conjure an idea theorized by Proust. I wait for an “authentic” subject. This seems obvious, but: I like to write criticism because I like figuring out what I want from life.

Some view culture as a sport, where there are winners and losers and things that jockey for position as “best ever” or “worst ever” or “let’s rank [x],” and that has a place, I love a good list. I don’t view it as a sport or politics: I think of culture as the most prominent means of expression writ-large, and I ponder the “self” as it relates to a broader history of expression and “selves.” I find meaning nested there, where art and culture reflect something about their creators, the times, etc. This is usually not the text of anything (most good art does not wrestle with these concepts openly, it kills fun—unless you’re Jordan Peele) but if you dig you’ll find resonance in most things. I hate meta-criticism in the sense of “here’s the discourse” so I take things as they are and feel where they strike me and how I can presume they’ll infiltrate the larger population. I didn’t like Don’t Worry Darling, but I did like Barbarian, but what does either movie have to say about life in 2022 America?

If the “trauma plot” has become the horror genre’s foundational canvas of the past ten years, there are ways to interrogate Smile, a movie that was neither too dumb to dismiss nor good enough to take seriously: there are good ideas in it about mental illness, generational trauma cycles, and how they are all damaging. It doesn’t build toward a climax, because it also wants to be a monster movie, so it awkwardly creeps right to the precipice of resolving before morphing into a trailer for Smile 2 in its final minutes. (For a good horror-adjacent movie, see Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, an unshakeable thriller centered on what would now be called a trauma plot but isn’t For Dummies.) Barbarian is good because it sidesteps a lot of things that riddle the best “elevated” horror movies of recent years (starting, for one, it doesn’t want to elevate)—the trauma plot, the reverence to the horror glory years of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the bespoke self-aware film that collects the right tropes and harnesses a few scares but elicits no deeper emotional response. It’s also good because it’s funny.

We don’t give enough credit to things for being funny. I was driving and Jens Lekman’s “A Man Walks Into a Bar” came up on shuffle. He can’t remember the punchline to a joke, which becomes a metaphor about the small remembrances he holds for people before they fade. It’s shattering. The climax is Jens singing, “laughter is the only way into my heart.” Writer-director Zach Cregger doesn’t have a ton of insight regarding gentrification, Freud, white flight, #MeToo, etc, but he used the connotations of these heavy-handed ideas to make an entertaining, scary, and suspenseful movie that contains at least two big transformative laughs.

X/Pearl

Horror movies are tied to a specific emotion in a way other genres are not—even comedies need a second register to be more than a joke reel, and most gesture at emotions other than laffs. Horror embodies film as experience, a quality underappreciated within the stiff standards of middle-brow prestige. Take Saint Maud: an auteur’s vision under the all-important A24 banner, with a soberly religious premise centered on a caretaker receiving spiritual messages from a holy entity. It’s austere, lovingly framed and composed, and ends with an instantly iconic image that signifies this is a horror film one just watched. Yet I struggled to maintain interest—it moved so slowly it could not drum up any suspense, and did not deliver on a terrifying demonic experience, a rich text about faith, or any nuanced wrangling with promiscuity or homophobia (particularly as it relates to the Catholic Church). Jennifer’s Body has more to say about sexuality and morality with the bonus of making me laugh a few times. Saint Maud has nothing in common with schlock like The Houses October Built, which ultimately is the better movie. Gore and exploitation are decidedly Not My Thing but that movie works to build an unsettling atmosphere, gins up good scares that play on subtly funny friend-group dynamics, rhapsodizes about absurd commercial haunted houses, and demonstrates command of the all-important monumental horror-image.

Ti West remains a compelling filmmaker on the strength of his earliest features: the 2009 throwback House of the Devil, which boasts an irresistible “mumblecore horror” elevator pitch, and 2011’s The Innkeepers, which wasn’t horror movie-scary but accurately dramatized the dull yet tense feeling of running out the clock at a job you hate. X is a curio from the spring, a movie I kept telling myself I’d watch, but it wasn’t until the Pearl trailer dropped over the summer and struck a nerve I committed. X is good, not great, effective in its Texas Chainsaw-indebted thrills and simple plot of things going awry on a farm outside Houston. I kept waiting for the pivot away from a typical last-woman-standing slasher movie into something deeper—the heightened reality of West’s earliest films stuck with me long after I’d forgotten what the scary scenes are. It never came.

There are scares even if the movie’s attempt at a monumental horror-image is two old people having sex. I went into Pearl with real expectations and came away impressed but not moved. Mia Goth is incredible and West (who handles nearly everything behind the scenes) is prodigiously talented at all elements of filmmaking. But I wanted something weirder. X’s low stakes are a mirror of pulpy ’70s/‘80s horror, mirroring not only content but form as well. Pearl does the same thing—it’s a slow, meditative, painstaking drama with only elements of horror and violence, reflecting in form the patient Technicolor spectacles of early Hollywood (an anachronism considering the movie takes place sometime between 1919 and 1920, at the height of the Spanish Flu pandemic).

It’s a plodding, weird, only partially effective movie but a tremendous piece of filmmaking that held the crowded theater in its grasp. Even when I was bored there was something nice to look at. The movie builds to a monologue you can see coming and climaxes on a note everyone starts to expect halfway through, but it’s still shocking before the movie ends on a monumental grotesque-image. I walked away wanting more but suffered a horrible nightmare the same night (as did Martin Scorsese), so West did something right.

Every now and then there is a Pearl, a mid movie that transcends its own mid-ness by honing in on something people didn't know they wanted and mostly works through its iconography if nothing else (see also both Kill Bills). I enjoy it when done well, and I enjoy thinking about why I like it, but to what end? i can’t remember the last time someone put they phone down, looked me in the eyes and asked my current insight on the time