Casey Affleck, 2019 #32, 2019 Skandies
spoils the premise,ironically enough
People often ask me why I use the Skandies results to determine what movies I watch, and part of my answer is perfectly illustrated by my experience with this one. It starts in a tent, with a dad launching into a bedtime story for a short-haired child of ten or so who evinces little patience for this exercise. A minute into their conversation we learn that the child is a girl. The bedtime story turns out to be fairly short as stories go, but the back and forth between the two characters is extraordinarily long as movie scenes go: for twelve straight minutes the camera is trained just on these two characters talking. And it is only in that twelfth minute that we learn they’re not just a dad and a daughter out on a camping trip, as the girl mentions that she’s never seen another girl before, and it becomes clear that, ulp, this is a post-apocalyptic story à la Z for Zachariah and there aren’t many people left. In the twenty-fourth minute we get a flashback including flames on a TV screen whose chyron speaks of “panic” and “rioting”; in the same flashback we meet a woman (clearly the girl’s mom) with a huge lesion blossoming on her side. Then, back in the present, the girl, sick from eating some poorly chosen mushrooms, worries that she’s dying of “the plague”. But it is only in the thirty-fifth minute that she finds a newspaper in an abandoned house that spells out the premise for us: ten years ago a disease wiped out very close to the entirety of the female population. The girl’s short hair isn’t just meant to signal that she’s a tomboy; when an old man happens across their camp and he spots her, her dad refers to her as his son not just because girls are inherently more vulnerable to the depredations of post-apocalyptic marauders, but because her survival is close to miraculous, and if word spreads about her, every gang in the region will be coming to steal her away. Clearly, these revelations were meant to come as an escalating string of surprises. And that’s how they worked for me. But let’s say you’re poking around for something to watch and find this movie on a streaming service. What does the capsule say? “Set in a post-apocalyptic world, a father and daughter journey through the outskirts of society after a deadly virus has wiped out nearly all the female population.” All those carefully calibrated revelations have just been short-circuited before the viewer even clicks “play”! And this is not an artifact of the streaming era: even Back In My Day, people generally selected movies to watch by reading reviews or being lured in by commercials or just looking at the back of the box at the video store, any of which almost certainly meant having the premise explained in advance. Only on someone as spoiler-averse as me, with the option to grab the Skandies list and just dive in blindly knowing nothing other than the title, can the filmmakers’ narrative engineering actually work. So why do so many films work this way—slowly reveal the premise by degrees to viewers who already know what’s coming? Why even try to surprise an audience incapable of being surprised?
Anyway, this is pretty familiar territory. As a kid I read a Frank Herbert book called The White Plague that, on the macro level, had the exact same premise: the world is swept by a disease that kills only women. But on the micro level—a father and daughter living in the northwestern wilderness, with the daughter wheedling to escape the tent for a few days into an abandoned house they happen across, and the two of them making furtive forays into town? I saw that less than a year ago in Leave No Trace. A father and child traversing a post-apocalyptic landscape, trying to keep out of the clutches of men turned feral? Not too far from The Road, right? And the fact that the girl thinks she might be the last girl on Earth calls to mind a sex-swapped version of Y: The Last Man—though, as Philip Wylie suggests in The Disappearance, you can’t just do a sex swap on this premise. In Wylie’s book, the universe diverges such that each sex finds that the other has disappeared: one branch of the timeline holds an all-male Earth, while the parallel Earth is entirely female. In both worlds, society collapses. Wylie posits that men and women are like the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. Without women to glue them together into a civilized society, the men of the all-male world slide into savagery and the world becomes a violent hellscape. Meanwhile, while war is not a huge problem for the women of the all-female world, famine and pestilence are, because it’s 1951 and almost none of them have been taught how to do things like run a power plant or a sewer system. But turn to Y: The Last Man half a century later, and the outlook is a lot better. Yes, the world goes through a rough patch with the death of three and a half billion men… but within a couple of generations, the world has recovered. In the 21st century there are plenty of female scientists to solve the problem of human cloning, and life goes on. In Light of My Life, on the other hand, the talk of scientists perpetuating the species with lab-grown babies rings false to the dad, who explains to the girl that solving cloning is one thing but the critical shortage of wombs in which a cloned embryo can develop is quite another. Even if rumor is correct and there are a few women surviving in bunkers—one in New York, one in Vancouver—a population crash is on the way. But Light of My Life doesn’t really seem to be about this. I once taught Meek’s Cutoff to my sophomores, asking them to consider the question of why the movie ends when it does, before we know whether the protagonists will live or die. My answer is that it goes to show that the movie isn’t about whether they live or die—it’s about a transfer of power from the male lead to the female lead. I think the same sort of thing is going on here. Once again, we don’t know whether the protagonists, or their society, will live or die. But the movie ends when it does because its climax is a transfer of power from the male lead to the female lead. For ten years the dad has been his daughter’s protector. Going forward, they will have more of an equal partnership. This seems like a narrative built into the relationship between parents and children irrespective of whether or not they are living through an apocalypse.
| Jean-Pol Fargeau, Geoff Cox, Andrew Litvack, and Claire Denis, 2018 | #30, 2019 Skandies |
Nope. This movie violates Pattern 40: it makes the fatal mistake of making the viewer wonder not what will happen next but what is happening now. I gave it half an hour for its disjointed images to cohere into something I could follow. They did not. When I have been asked in interviews (mostly many years ago) what advice I would give to interactive fiction authors, one of my usual answers has been that one of an author’s top priorities must be to motivate the player to type something other than >QUIT. A movie doesn’t require the audience to actively enter commands to continue, but after any given sequence, viewers must decide, consciously or not, whether they will continue to pay attention. Filmmakers must give them a reason to do so. Sure, you get an initial buy-in to do some setup. That buy-in doesn’t last half an hour.
I read some reviews to see whether the movie ever coheres into anything, and was somewhat surprised to discover that, apparently, right after the moment when I turned it off, it finally goes into flashback mode and starts filling in the backstory that gives context to the salvo of cryptic shots with which it opens. However, while the critics were mostly appeased, regular viewers seem not to have found the result particularly rewarding. “Would rather have eaten sawdust for two hours than watched this.” “I mean it when I say it: this is the worst movie I have ever seen.” “Vile. Disgusting. Stupid.” “Woof, what a sleepy pile of unpleasantness.” “This movie should be thrown into the deepest part of the abyss and never see the light of day ever again.” Out of curiosity, I clicked through some of the remaining hour-plus and saw nothing that would make me side with the critics over the viewers here. I’ll give it a one instead of a zero because the font on the computer displays evoked some pleasant nostalgia for me.
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |
|||