David Robert Mitchell, 2014
#15, 2015 Skandies
The premise of It Follows is that a young woman in Michigan has been cursed, and not just by having to live in Michigan. The curse has made her the target of an entity with superhuman strength, intent on killing her. To her, the entity appears as a random person, different from moment to moment, sometimes known to her, usually not, and often in a state of mild decomposition. To the uncursed, the entity is invisible. The chief gimmick of the movie is that the pursuing entity is actually easy to get away from. It moves at a walk, never deviating from its steady pace, so a quick jog is all it takes for the young woman to put some distance between the entity and herself. But she can never relax, because no matter where she goes, it isn’t long before the entity is back, shuffling toward her.
Reviews of It Follows tended to praise the film as cinema, particularly in the way that it puts viewers in the same mental space at the protagonist: constantly scanning the frame to see if someone off in the distance is heading this way. They also tended to express confusion at what it’s all supposed to mean. See, there’s another twist that keeps this from being just another zombie movie: the curse is passed from one person to another through sex. (It is left unclear what constitutes “sex” for this purpose: does it have to be full heterosexual intercourse without contraception? We never find out. This is very much not a Pattern 14 movie.) This second twist naturally suggests that we’re looking at a metaphor for sexually transmitted disease; if this had come out a generation earlier, it would pretty clearly be an AIDS movie. What perplexed the authors of the reviews I read was that, unlike a sexually transmitted disease, in It Follows passing the curse to someone else puts the original victim in the clear, at least for a while: if A passes the curse to B via sex, the entity will turn its attention to B, but if it succeeds in killing B, then it goes right back to targeting A. So A has to tell B how the curse works so that B will fuck C before getting killed, and hope that C will fuck D, and D will fuck E, etc., putting enough intermediate targets in the way that the entity will never make it back to A. It’s sex as the cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems.
It is therefore easy to see why those expecting a message might come away confused. (“That’s all well and good for Sterling Heights, but what are we to do?”) Some say that, ultimately, It Follows is still a story about a girl who has sex and consequently has horrible things happen to her. True love waits, kids! Others contend that the film is not judgmental in the least about the protagonist’s sexual choices and, if anything, endorses promiscuity as the optimal strategy in this scenario. I dunno. I have always taught my students to distinguish between thematic content (ideas the author has consciously woven into the text) and ideology (the fundamental belief system underpinning the text that the author takes for granted and may not even be aware of). I am skeptical that this film is trying to make a thematic statement about sex (or anything else, really). But its ideology, even if only through acquiescence to a larger cultural ideology, is quite clear. The protagonist has sex with three guys over the course of the film’s 100-minute running time. All three times, she remains clothed! Now, even a movie with a single writer/director is ultimately a collaborative effort, and so any ideology that comes through in the final product has to be ascribed to the collective “implied author” rather than to any individual person. But regardless of who was responsible for this choice, it reflects the notion that naked bodies are shocking and horrific. Naked zombies in every other scene? Fine. Getting undressed before having sex? Gasp! That would be n‑n‑naughty! So, to whatever extent It Follows was intended to subvert the horror movie trope in which the sexually active girls all fall prey to the monster while the virginal Final Girl survives, it fails. Semiotics often trumps literal content, and no matter how much sex she is supposedly having, so long as It Follows uses the language of cinema to code its protagonist as a demure Final Girl, it isn’t really subverting anything.
Fabian Casas and Lisandro Alonso, 2014
#16, 2015 Skandies
I don’t know why I watched this. I guess that when I was putting this list together, back during the Obama administration, I saw that it was set in colonial Argentina and thought that sounded interesting. But the Skandies voting system rewards the passionate few: since there’s no way to award negative points, a handful of voters can vault a movie into the top twenty even if the consensus is that the movie sucks. The Skandies web site also offers a chart of how the results would have looked if they were based on average rankings rather than on votes, and it turns out that Jauja would have dropped from #16 to #70. I am used to writing “Too slow, gave up” and then seeing the cinéastes’ reviews declaring that my reaction is that of a philistine. So it was an interesting change of pace to try to find out what the cinéastes liked about this movie, only to discover that most of them had written “Too slow, gave up.”
Michael Lewis, Charles Randolph, and Adam McKay, 2015
#29, 2015 Skandies
This is one of those movies that uses a gonzo cinematic style in order to paper over the fact that its subject is not particularly cinematic. But “not cinematic” is not the same as “not interesting”, and it was plenty interesting to follow the stories of an assortment of hedge fund types who predicted and profited from the bursting of the 2000s housing bubble and the ensuing financial collapse. Though many have called it a comedy, and the director is known for such movies as Anchorman and Talladega Nights, The Big Short is actually a grim, pessimistic movie, as befits a tale in which several people who had thought that they were cynics find out that they haven’t been nearly cynical enough. They start off believing that markets crash periodically due to investors’ blind spots, such as underestimating the likelihood of unlikely events (“A ten percent chance? Oh, man, that’ll never happen!”); they end up discovering that markets crash periodically because the economy is controlled top to bottom by stupid, greedy, venal fraudsters who believe that they can fuck up the world with impunity and are proven right in this belief. However, the movie cleverly uses the formula of optimism to deliver its pessimism: it’s about a handful of mavericks who hit upon an idea they think will deliver them a fortune, continue to believe in themselves even when events seem to turn against them and the fuddy-duddies are howling that they’re crazy, and eventually receive sweet vindication… though, in this case, that vindication takes the shape of a catastrophic recession.
And, of course, just as those who attempt to draw attention to the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions were dismissed as alarmists when in fact their warnings understated the rate at which the climate has been breaking down, events after 2015 would demonstrate that The Big Short is itself not nearly pessimistic enough: the film evinces no inkling that, the year after it was released, a contingent of even stupider, greedier, more venal fraudsters would take over the government. In the aftermath of the 2012 election, I wrote an article about how, even as the polling aggregation sites were giving Barack Obama a 99% chance of re-election, my pessimism had me braced for a Romney win. But even as I mused about how the optimists had won the day, events would prove that my own pessimism was also insufficient, as in dodging plutocratic governance we had actually started on a course that threatens to lead us to the end of American democracy. Yes, the Democrats won in 2020, but as they fritter away this respite, those mopping their brows over a crisis averted seem to me increasingly like Roman pagans during the reign of Julian, relieved that the rise of Christianity had been held at bay.
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