Living in the Real World: Dystopian Films and Straight, White Anxiety
Close to 100 dystopian or post-apocalyptic films have been released since 2001, depicting near-futures where malign forces like environmental disaster, totalitarian governments, untethered technology, or alien entities cause the dehumanization and extermination of the inhabitants of Earth. This varied group of action/adventure movies ranges from sci-fi (Bladerunner 2049, The Matrix Reloaded) and zombie horror (28 Days Later, I Am Legend) to teen lit (Hunger Games) and animation (WALL-E), to romance (The Lobster, Never Let Me Go) and road film (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Road). Some of the films garnered critical acclaim and others enjoyed box office success. All of them fascinated millions with primal themes of survival in the face of daunting odds, establishing dystopia as a solid sub-genre of its own.
In the past few years, there has been no shortage in dystopic outputs, as numerous releases captivated audiences with violent thrills and ever more depressing subject matter rooted in many of the dark themes dominating our headlines today. In what seems like a subtle quid pro quo, mainstream press mostly served up reviews that evaluated the films solely in terms of how inventive or breathtaking they might be as action/adventure stories. These critiques tended to take the films at face value as unambiguous reflections of generalized anxiety about existential threats, such as environmental collapse, or the threatening rise of extremist governments or artificial intelligence.
However, another critique from the margins views the films’ themes of threatened human extinction as barely concealed apprehension over a perceived eclipse of the white, heterosexual family and the white supremacist state that supports it. The threats are tied to the social and demographic shifts currently occurring in the United States, which are of course aggravated by watershed events like the COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing economic crisis, mass migration, climate change, and the movement to dismantle police brutality against the African American community.
Three films from 2018 provide potent means for framing big screen dystopias as willful flights from confronting and dismantling the oppressive forces of racism, patriarchy and heterosexism. John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place and Susanne Bier’s Bird Box present scenarios where the white nuclear family, threatened by murderous monsters, survives only by refashioning itself into a quasi-feminist (but still straight and white) version of itself. Finally, Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” explores both the white savior complex and spiritual transcendence as potential options for survival in a realm where violence, corruption and environmental degradation have eviscerated white liberal faith in the family, the state and its institutions. Lots of spoilers ahead.
In the post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror A Quiet Place, a white married couple (John Krasinski and Emily Blunt as Lee and Evelyn Abbott) with three children — two boys and one girl, who is deaf — live in a catalogue-perfect rural home (in Catskill, New York) engulfed by violent extraterrestrials who roam the countryside and use their extremely sensitive sense of hearing to locate and mutilate any human in the vicinity. After the youngest boy is killed, the rest of the film centers on the nuclear family as they struggle to survive various attacks and Evelyn concentrates on safely delivering a new baby.
A crucial, concurrent plotline involves daughter Regan’s (Millicent Simmonds) cochlear implant, which Lee repeatedly labors on, trying to restore her hearing, without success. Near the film’s end, Lee is gored while trying to protect his kids, but not before he leaves behind a tweaked implant capable of emitting high frequency tones that disturb the creatures. With this handy piece of dad work at hand, Regan incapacitates one of the creatures so Evelyn can kill it with a shotgun, giving the newly matriarchal family a fighting chance at survival.
Evelyn taking over as head of the family could be construed as an emergence of feminist power, but it is more plausibly read as the post-feminist re-assimilation of women into a repackaged, very white, still patriarchal heteronormativity. A strong and intelligent female character who is not only deaf but also androgynous, Regan reads as the queer attendant to Evelyn, a fertile, traditionally attractive woman who is also replete with phallic potency as she shoots to death the creatures that threaten her born and unborn children. It is telling that the legibly queer daughter, unable to overcome her otherness (being androgynous and deaf), settles for using her father’s technological savvy to sustain the straight, white family that created her. Not only does her prosthesis serve to eliminate the alien creatures that are presumably decimating humanity, it also makes it possible for reproduction to take place, thus restoring the heterosexual order.
Bird Box takes the prioritization of the white heterosexual family a step further by actually erasing existing “minority” characters as the film’s plot progresses. The narrative immerses the audience in a quasi-supernatural apocalypse in which otherworldly, cloudlike entities, when seen by unknowing victims, cause them to go insane and kill themselves (how or why is never explained). Sandra Bullock’s character, Malorie Hayes, is a single, pregnant, conventionally attractive white woman who sees her sister Jessica (played by out lesbian actress Sarah Paulson) commit suicide by stepping in front of a moving truck after one of the dark, nebulous forms approaches her. Malory takes refuge in a mansion with a group of strangers, most of whom are members of minority communities: African American, Asian American, gay, obese, elderly, or mentally disabled. One by one, the housemates get killed off, leaving Mallory to embark on a treacherous journey to transport her son and a young girl, both white, to a location that is rumored to be safe.
Aside from the opportune elimination of any character that does not fit the straight, white heterosexual paradigm, other plot elements of Bird Box vigorously reify the erasure of “others” that A Quiet Place suggests. The character most deeply established, besides Malorie, is Tom (Trevante Rhodes), a handsome African American man who becomes Malorie’s lover and a father figure to the two children. While we never learn much about Tom — except that he is totally devoted to Malorie — he serves as a short-term husband/dad who helps the impromptu family outsmart its attackers for five years. Predictably, Tom eventually sacrifices himself to one of the murderous creatures so the three white characters can make their way to a permanent place of safety and survival.
Again, a straight, white woman assumes the leadership of the nuclear family, but this time the male partner who is disposed of is Black. The “progressive” read of Malorie’s succession is that of an assertive woman claiming the traditionally male role of familial defense. But since that change-up occurs at the expense of a Black man’s life, it is actually another superficial modification of the hetero/white supremacist hierarchy that keeps ethnic minorities and others outside of the dominant power structure, i.e., the traditional family.
In addition, since the surviving characters must remain blindfolded so they cannot lay eyes on the exterminating black clouds, blindness, not unlike deafness in A Quiet Place, becomes a metaphor for the willful inability to witness the humanity of marginalized individuals who do not fit into the demographic prioritized for survival.
Paul Schrader’s First Reformed draws on real-world scenarios to paint a grey dystopia where the hegemony of the white, Christian family is convulsed by the comingled nightmares of environmental disaster, suicide and the moral exposure of the imperial war machine.
Ethan Hawke is the brooding, alcoholic Reverend Toller slowly dying from stomach cancer as he presides over the sparsely attended, 250-year-old Dutch Reformed Church. Again, we are in upstate New York, but the more wintry, lonely environs outside of Albany. The church claims a righteous past as a stop for escaped slaves traveling the Underground Railroad but is now being eclipsed by the Abundant Life megachurch, a corporate-controlled sister parish that is predominantly Black and shepherded by the savvy, entrepreneurial Reverend Jeffers (Cedric Antonio Kyle).
Toller counsels a parishioner, Michael (Philip Ettinger), who is so distressed about pollution, climate change, and all its attendant horrors that he seriously doubts the wisdom of bringing a child into the world, even as his wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) is several months pregnant. Toller tells him that raising a child in this world can’t equal the despair of taking one from it, then adds, perhaps disingenuously, that “courage is the solution to despair.” It turns out Toller used to be a military chaplain who encouraged his son to serve in the Iraq War — a “war with no moral justification” — where he was killed in action. Toller then left the military, divorced, and began to drink himself to death. As the plot progresses, it becomes clear that since the sacrifice of his son, Toller has lost faith in all the traditional American institutions, including the Protestant church, the nuclear family, the military and the state.
Mary discovers a vest that her husband Michael has equipped with explosives, presumably to be used in an act of eco-terrorism; soon after, Michael shoots his head off in a nearby park, leaving Toller to discover his body. The violent suicide, echoing his son’s willing slaughter, ignites Toller’s disillusionment with his church and with society, sending him on the path to radicalization. He spends a lot of time alone journaling and drinking, becoming increasingly outspoken against Abundant Life for taking money and political cues from an environmentally destructive corporation. This leads Rev. Jeffers to tell him, “You don’t live in the real world.”
Despite its compromised position on taking “dirty money,” Jeffers’ Abundant Life serves a largely Black community and boasts vibrant choral groups, while Toller’s Dutch Reformed is home to only a handful of white parishioners and houses a broken organ. It’s not existing in the “real world.” When Toller lectures a group of racially mixed grade school students on his church’s history as a stop on the Underground Railroad, he focuses on the unshakable faith of the escaped slaves who once hid in the church’s basement. The implication is that the aggrieved and disillusioned Toller can only acknowledge the church’s white liberal past, where people of color were deferential and happy to be alive. He is blind to the potential of new social justice movements that are led by people of color and grounded in more complicated 21st century circumstances.
First Reformed moves into a mystical realm as Toller becomes both progressively ecstatic in his religious practice and more radical in his eco-political beliefs. On the day of the Church’s re-consecration, Mary (the mother of Jesus?) shows up and thwarts his plan to detonate Michael’s discarded suicide vest amidst the congregation, so instead he straps on barbed wire from the garden, literally layering himself in Christlike martyr metaphors. Bleeding like an injured jihadi, he is about to drink Drano when Mary magically appears in his home and embraces him in a climactic soul kiss. Perhaps Toller has died and gone to heaven in a moment of useless self-annihilation. Or in the style of transcendental symbolism that Schrader embraces, this tableau of divine deliverance is a bid for eschewing violence, death and despair and instead embracing hope and courage, despite the chaos of life. Is Toller finally “living in the real world?” Schrader might be dramatizing the death of the white, God-fearing and imperialist American myth, or he might be proclaiming it.
Cover image courtesy of Jim Forest|Flickr and A24
