More Musings on A Quiet Place
/Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 42 seconds
A few more thoughts on the movie A Quiet Place, which I have been thinking about quite a lot since I saw it a few weeks ago.
It is pretty striking that A Quiet Place came out almost exactly a year after Get Out. Get Out was a film about Black racial anxiety and A Quiet Place is about White racial anxiety. Even look at the film posters for each film, Get Out features a close up of a Black man crying in speechless horror/fear and A Quiet Place shows a White woman doing the exact same thing. The films are in many ways flip sides of the same coin.
One difference between the two films though is that at last years Oscars Get Out was nominated for best picture, best director, best actor and won for best screenplay…and it wasn't anywhere close to being worthy of any of those accolades, while A Quiet Place will probably get none of those accolades, and yet, in my opinion, is a vastly superior film in every conceivable way.
I recently read a negative review of A Quiet Place in The Ringer by K. Austin Collins titled "A Quiet Place is a Horror Movie That is Sillier Than it Would Like To Admit", where he belittled the film and claimed it was a big joke. Collins, who is Black, was as vociferous a lover of Get Out as any critic I read last year. To Collins, if The Godfather and Citizen Kane had a socially conscious baby, it would be Get Out.
I had a very different view of the cinematic virtues of Get Out than Collins, and maybe that is because I am White and from my White perspective I thought the film as a whole and the portrayal of White characters in particular, was cartoonish at best. And maybe Collins' inability to see the social relevance in A Quiet Place is akin to my racial perspective regarding Get Out, and because he is Black he thinks the theme of White traditionalist fears of being silenced are absurd to the point of ridiculous. This is a discussion and debate worth having, but the problem is that Collins refuses to have that discussion in his review. Collins never even mentions A Quiet Place's politics, either feigning ignorance or actually being truly ignorant to them. Oddly, Collins does make his personal politics a part of his review as he makes a bizarre plea for abortion in his essay, so maybe he knew the film's politics but was intentionally not stating them, only surreptitiously taking shots at them.
If I were to appropriate the language of Identity liberals, I would say that Collins appears to have some "implicit bias" towards White traditionalists, and therefore he unconsciously refuses to accept A Quiet Place and its premise, and so he belittles it and refuses to acknowledge it instead of actually engaging it. Of course, the same argument could be made of me and Get Out or any other "Black" film I suppose…such is the mindless joy of implicit bias. My counter argument to that charge would be that I actually agreed with the sub-textual politics (but not the surface politics) of Get Out and its insightful evisceration of "woke" White liberals, but I found the film to be poorly written, acted and executed.
What I find so interesting about the dynamic between Get Out and A Quiet Place is the respect given to Get Out because of its racial politics and the outright ignoring or loathing of A Quiet Place for its more subtle, unstated politics.
By all metrics, A Quiet Place is nearly equal to or better than Get Out. In terms of box office, the film has made $312 million worldwide in just under two months of release, whereas Get Out made $255 million during its entire theatrical run. At Rotten Tomatoes, A Quiet Place has a critical score of 95 and an audience score of 84, compared to Get Out's critical score of 99 and audience score of 86.
And yet, A Quiet Place is not celebrated as Get Out was, and, not surprisingly, does not receive the incessant Oscar buzz that Get Out did last year because it doesn't push the politically correct, culturally approved buttons. The reason A Quiet Place is ignored in Oscar conversations is the same reason that the film is resonating with audiences and with the collective unconscious….namely that Get Out was only considered an Oscar worthy film because it was "Black", and A Quiet Place is not because it is "White". That sort of double standard is the unconscious fuel that propels audiences connection to A Quiet Place.
I never read reviews before I see a film and rarely do after I see one, and in the case of A Quiet Place I read nothing about the film before or after seeing it. I then wrote my review and commentary and thought I was such a genius for observing the political and cultural underbelly of the movie, and then I stumbled across a review in The New Yorker by Richard Brody, who saw many of the same things I did but labelled the movie as "regressive", and gave it a bad review because of them.
It is funny to me that I may disagree with some of the politics of A Quiet Place (and I think they are unintentional politics born out of the cultural unconscious and not the artists conscious mind) and yet am still able to appreciate it for all its cinematic brilliance. Richard Brody thinks little of A Quiet Place and calls it "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 counter myth."
Brody's vapid and myopic take on A Quiet Place contrasted with his unabashed adoration of the extended sketch comedy of Get Out, says more about Brody than it does about either film, and is a glaring example of why A Quiet Place is such a poignant picture for our time.
Unlike Collins who feigns ignorance of the film's politics, Brody openly despises the traditionalism at the heart of A Quiet Place, and loathes traditionalists who are anxious over our rapidly changing world. Brody is not reviewing A Quiet Place so much as preening about his moral superiority and admonishing anyone who dare think differently than he, just like he wasn't reviewing Get Out so much as virtue signaling his right thinking to his fellow morally superior liberal travelers, who unbeknownst to Brody, and ironically enough, were the ones Jordan Peele was condemning in Get Out. The thinking and behavior Brody displays in his review of A Quiet Place is EXACTLY how Trump became president.
Identity Democrats can blame racists or rednecks or whomever they want for Trump, but until they realize that it is the Richard Brody types, who hate churches, but ironically enough have made themselves Cardinals in the church of Establishment Neo-Liberalism, which just like the Christian churches has its own hierarchy, its in groups and out groups, its orthodoxy and its heretics, who have turned the working class (including the White working class) against their cause, resulting in election ineffectiveness for generations to come.
Brody, with his impotent review of A Quiet Place and his comically myopic, liberal White-guilt inspired orgasmic response to Get Out, is a study in self-satire. He and his "woke" kind are the jet fuel that will either propel the rocket which will be the escape vehicle for traditionalists from his insipid, insidious and ultimately self-destructive world view, or will launch the missile that is destined to destroy them all.
Richard Brody and his "woke" ilk are creatures who hungrily crave a cry in the dark so that they can hunt down the heretic and gorge themselves in rage on their heresy and moral wrongness. These people don't yearn for a quiet place, they yearn for a place filled with the cacophonous sound of their own voices, and of the voices of those who are wise and morally upstanding enough to incessantly and unquestioningly agree with them.
The Richard Brody types tell you that "we need to have an honest discussion about race", but what they really mean is they want to pontificate and morally preen and have you agree with them or they will decry you as a racist. Brody and his kind are echo chamber adherents who reflexive lash out at anyone or anything that challenges their unthinking, emotionalist cosmology.
Richard Brody's response to A Quiet Place is not remarkable, it is just a sign of the times. A Quiet Place is the story of our time because we live in an age where challenges to establishment liberal orthodoxy and identity dogma will not be tolerated, heretics are devoured and those who dare speak their mind are exiled or annihilated.
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