Stories by Eve Tushnet

YOU WILL GO DOWN IN DARKNESS BEFORE YOU DIE: Wow, I loved The Descent. It is one of the scariest modern movies I can name. So here are comments. Spoilers.

First, caving is one of the very, very few sports about which I have positive memories. As a dyke, I make a very good fag! But no... I've canoed Class Four [ETA: or maybe three?] rapids, and also spelunked (in the John Brown caves, if memory serves), so the whole setup of this movie really worked for me. I was amazed at how perfectly this movie captured dialogue between women friends. The tensions, ambiguities, spikes--this is how girls talk.

Similarly, the caves I've been in are all in Dixie. This movie was so startling because it highlighted the Southern angle, and even brought a few Southern-horror cliches into play, without ever feeling fake. The Scottish cast made Appalachia foreign without the usual creepy class-based superiority.

The jump scares are perfect. I've seen the initial jump scare four times now, and I still cringe and cover my mouth.

I'm... conflicted about the basic idea of the movie, which we find out something like an hour into the flick. On the one hand, it makes the idea of being trapped in the caves vastly more frightening than it would be if the only danger were death. On the other hand, it's filmed as sf-horror, where the cavedwellers are the Other. And that isn't vastly interesting to me.

ETA: No, thinking it over the next day, actually I think the cavedwellers work really well. The shift from horror primarily about being trapped in the cave to horror primarily about being trapped in the cave with these things is seamless. (And a nice parallel to the Sarah vs. Juno horror of being trapped in a cave with a woman you deeply mistrust, or one whom you've betrayed, attempted to make amends to [I think Sarah's very harsh assessment of Juno's motives isn't accurate], and managed to betray yet again.) Not sure why I was vaguely negative about this aspect of the movie when I went to write it up last night.

In a related note, the women are all incredible. They're real and distinctive. Why not push even harder on the possibility that, as the cavedwellers evolved to meet the cave conditions, these women might be forced to become the next generation of cavewomen?

But yeah... this movie is so beautifully-paced, so full of rich characterization, so loving of its girls... and so relentless in their destruction. I remember wriggling through wormhole caves in total darkness, being able to do that without too much terror. I remember saying, "Hey no, I won't actually go on a zipline over a huge freaking chasm, I may be 13 but I know by now that my palms won't stay dry for the whole time needed to keep me from actually dying here, in the dark, in a cave." I sat beside a camp counselor for the next few hours and told her stories. I never forgot that feeling of self-protection and failure. The Descent is about the girls who would never have feared the way I feared. You could argue that it's about a kind of person I admire, yet could never be.

The Descent is about the total destruction of that brave personality. Nothing helps; nothing wins.

JUST A SLOWER WALK WITH THEE: I watched Night of the Living Dead in high school and really got nothing from it. In retrospect I used it to confirm my self-image as someone who likes old-school, Haitian-themed zombie flicks, rather than the modern kind.

Watched it again. Now I understand why it revived (...) and reshaped a genre.

Thoughts, in roughly chronological order: #1: I assume everyone but me already gets that the intro to the movie of The Shining is based on this movie.

#2: Part of the shivery fun of Shaun of the Dead was the fact that we all get why he didn't understand his predicament immediately. Contemporary urban life is dissociated enough that we could all be walking among zombies for a while before we realize it!

And NOTLD does the same thing; except that the very first zombie is camouflaged not in deracinated-modernity, but in grief. He is shambling through a cemetery, as I'd think almost all of us have shambled through our shocking griefs.

In fact--this is imported from later in the movie--Barbara's traumatized reaction makes her as devastated as the first zombie at first appears to be. His murderous intent hides within his trauma.

And--now looking at the movie overall--in fact it seems like what makes the new-style zombies here especially frightening, the reason they can't be replaced by other monsters even though they're not the villains, is that they exaggerate the guilt which often comes with grief. The guilt and shame of the ones who died "on our watch," whether or not we really could have prevented it (cf. Nietzsche on witches), gets impacted and infected and creates a special kind of miserable horror. And for all my bubbitzing about the superiority of old-school Haitian-zombie flicks, when I actually came to write about zombies myself, I too used them as expressions of the guilt which comes with grief.

This is maybe why the two zombies we actually know by name are family members of the living characters. The daughter is an especially acute victim/killer, since children are so inevitably the source of parents' guilt and grief.

#3: Barbara isn't allowed to look as lovely as Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, but she gets the same Heideggerian "thrownness," the same absolutely-elsewhere look. She's the workhorse version of Hilligoss's displaced and wondering deer. She gets feral.

I also note that although this movie does pass the "Bechdel Test" (do two women talk about something other than their relationship with a man?), just barely, it also points out one major inadequacy in that test: Dialogue is not the only way of talking. Helen and Barbara, in their first scene together--when Helen lights her cigarette, and then snuffs her match to relieve Barbara's distress--communicate far more before Helen speaks than after. They connect in looks and actions, not in words.

#4: The wrongness of the zombies' walk = everything I didn't get from Paranormal Activity. They are flamboyantly other. The only moments in which PA achieved the same effect, for me, were the moments when Katie stood enraptured by the bed, jerking in the speed-motion camera.

I'm wondering if movement doesn't make this kind of unearthly horror work, more than sound. We talk as if sound is what breaks in from the other world, and I think that might be backed up by the Scriptural metaphors of hearing; but in horror movies, from Regan's spiderwalk through Samara's crawl through the zombie shamble, it's physical movement which brings horror home.

#5: Really liking the interaction between Ben and Barbara--he's come through his horror to the survival side, and he knows she hasn't, and he's just trying to talk her over to his side of the Styx.

Actually Ben is pretty amazing in general... which is counterbalanced by the big flaw in the movie, aka Cooper. You just cannot have your villain (and Cooper is the only villain available--the zombies are no more villain than a flood would be, as the dialogue underlines) be the worst actor among the main cast.

#6: "They're coming to get you, Barbara." Twice, and worse the second time. Sometimes things are iconic for a reason.

#7: A presidential meeting "behind closed doors" is announced as we see Ben has boarded up every door and window--heartbreakingly ramshackle, heartbreakingly human, but no more so than in a host of inner-city neighborhood blocks in the decade after this movie was filmed. "An epidemic of murder." You don't say. "Ordinary-looking people."

#8: Why does this movie strike a chord? Old-school zombie flicks rest on the otherness of the conquered world--and the otherness of God, or the gods. Haiti is religion, and God's unintelligible power; Haiti is rapture; and yet Haiti is woman, left helpless against her terrifying exploitation. Metaphors interlace and shake like gauze curtains in a hurricane.

In this movie we begin with religion--or at least church-on-Sunday normalcy--but the otherness is basically non-religious. Why do the dead want to kill us? Not for any religious reason; solely because they are the monsters. They are the Them.

I... can't help but think that the Them are less scary than the You; the need for survival is less frightening than the need for meaning. In this movie our worst enemies are our unintelligible, yet inevitably survivalist, selves.

On the other hand, see above re: guilt-impacted grief. This movie, like Stephen King's best novel (Pet Sematary), taps into deep-rooted miseries. On the third hand, or tentacle, viewing our beholden dead as mindlessly, pointlessly alien seems to detract from our responsibility toward them. The metaphor doesn't quite go through. We participate somehow in Johnny's death, in Helen's child's death, in the way that we participate somehow in Adam's sin (and his happiness, cf. Augustine); but there's still a kind of absolution in our knowledge that Barbara would never want Johnny to die, or Helen her child. We're actually let off the hook a bit here in the narrative, though not in the symbolic alphabet of the movie.

Intriguingly, those who can kill zombies without emotional trauma are suspect here (cf. the coda, which was unexpected and yet inevitable, like the opposite of Hitchcock's definition of suspense), but those who can't kill ex-beloved zombies at all are also suspect. In a way, that seems to be the tension which animates post-Romero zombie flicks.

#10: Oh, the tree-lined flamey confrontation toward the end suggests the Southern Gothic moonlight-and-magnolias subgenre. Given the movie's racial politics, it's a really nice touch: The black man wields the torch.

And then.

WHY AREN'T YOU IN THE HOUSE ALONE?: A series of points about Paranormal Activity, in no order I can quite discern.

1) I really liked the dynamic between the lead actors--they reflected two different kinds of awful interaction I've seen in real couples, so their arguments felt totally relatable. First there's the hysteria narrative, where the woman has actual concerns but they're dismissed by the man because he assumes she's hormonal. I was initially shocked, but on reflection not even surprised, by the degree to which Katie has to beg for her boyfriend to take her seriously. (The "take a pill" line got a perfect reaction from the actress, humiliatingly understated and raw... and also a strong reaction from the ladies in the audience when I saw the film.) And it's pretty clear that this hetero-dynamic is driving the film, from Katie's careful nonreaction to the boyfriend's line about how they're "engaged to be engaged" all the way to the end.

Then there's the philosophical/theological issue: What most people consider to be "rational" is defined by their culture. So how on earth can you formulate a culturally-rational response to a culturally-irrational experience?

2) I liked that the film let these two dynamics interact without conflating them: Mika, the boyfriend, isn't positioned as either the rational male or the patriarch oppressing women's deeper knowledge... but rather as a regular guy, in a frequently misogynist culture, who's placed in a position where his territorial, rationalist, and sexist instincts conflict with his genuine love of and tenderness for his girl. The film wouldn't work at all if Mika didn't seem to look up to Katie in some ways, even as he simultaneously looks down on her in others.

He has a very familiar heterosexual reverence for her physical beauty, for example. This is well-exploited by the director by having her get more haggard as he basically stays quite good-looking--he comes across as the kind of guy who will pet your sweat-soaked hair while you're shaking and stinking with fever and still think you're beautiful. (I may be influenced by the fact that I thought Mika's actor was more attractive than Katie's actress from the get-go, but they're both shot in ways which make them look pretty but not stunning.) But the movie also completely captures how unsatisfying this physical protectiveness is for actual women, who want to be listened to and loved as individuals rather than (or at least, in addition to!) icons. The astonished gratitude straight men bring to their relationships is real, and I liked how this movie conveyed it without ever glossing over the gross parts where a) he thinks his worldview is normative and hers is suspect, and relatedly b) He tries to prove himself as a champion of She even against her wishes and her greater understanding of the world.

3) Now to what didn't work for me. I think this is where you should definitely stop reading if you're avoiding spoilers. This movie did not scare me. I mean... it almost didn't scare me at all.

I will note that approximately 90% of the audience seemed much more scared than I was. They'd gasp, they'd exclaim, and I'd be completely all, "...Is that it?"

I honestly don't know why. The audience seemed truly freaked out. And I was... is the horror equivalent of "left cold," "left warm"? I was left lukewarm.

I totally agree with Kindertrauma's comments about really wanting to get scared by this movie. (And his later comments, in the... boxes for the commenting of the comments.) In terms of personal psychoanalysis, I agree with some of his points and not others: I startle like crazy at small noises. I jump and gasp when a car horn honks. I've woken up the Rattus in the middle of the night due to my shock at, like, a venetian-blind cord thwacking against a window or some such, and never even remembered it in the morning.

But I'm really hard to scare at the movies, if you distinguish "frighten" from "chill." I'm chilled by all kinds of flicks, left traumatized and pondering them for a long time. But the only two movies I can remember which specifically kept me up at night or gave me nightmares are Misery (I know--I think it was Sean Collins who pinpointed the way Kathy Bates's character is completely dehumanized here, and though I can't find the link now I agree with the criticism--but it's scary!) and Ringu.

And with Ringu, the specific thing which kept me up was, I think, the soundtrack. I watched the movie, and went to bed... and every time a moth batted against the window, or a car rushed by on 16th Street, I'd gasp and shudder and turn on the light.

So you can guess that I was hugely intrigued to read that the big draw for Paranormal was its soundtrack. But... what? What is so scary about what happens here?

OKAY NO REALLY STOP READING HERE IF YOU'RE AVOIDING SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING.

4) I think part of my problem is that it's all one storyline. There are exactly zero subplots. So it's really boy meets girl... girl has ghoul... boy wants to taunt ghoul... girl says no... boy taunts anyway... they die.

There's some suspense in that. When Mika promises not to "buy" the Ouija board, I knew he'd borrow one... but that act was so deeply embedded in his character, as he'd been portrayed up to that point, that I totally bought it and just wanted to see how this action of girlfriend-betrayal would ultimately lead to their doom. The movie does keep to Hitchcock's distinction between shock and suspense, where suspense is when you know more than the characters know, you know what will and must happen, and so you're even more thoroughly on tenterhooks waiting to see if it will really happen or be headed off at the pass, and how the characters will respond.

The weird thing is that this movie is suspense without any shocks! It tells you what it will do, and then does it. Which... I honestly think maybe I could be terrified by, in a movie more firmly embedded in naturalistic horror. Seven might be an example of that?--although even there, of course there are final twists. But I'm pretty sure that I can be horrified by "I'm going to kill you--I'm killing you--I've killed you."

But in a supernatural horror movie, even though I in fact believe that demons exist, I think I need more complexity.

Partly, maybe this is because I think that God moves in more mysterious ways than this movie does, so why shouldn't the Adversary?? I'm not sure. For whatever reason, this felt overly straightforward. Maybe, in fact, because I've heard people discuss what they perceive to be encounters with the demonic, and it sounds a lot scarier than thumping floorboards--and, even, a lot scarier than murder! Maybe part of my problem here is that I didn't think Paranormal Activity made... paranormal activity... any more frightening or "other" or even flatly inhuman than gang violence. I was vastly more scared by the penultimate episode of s2 of The Wire, which I watched the same night, is what I'm saying. There was (for me) no sense of the eldritch or the uncanny, the out-of-time.

5) And that impression might be reinforced by the fact that the past really plays no role in this movie. There is no real detective element--that's a red herring. The burnt photograph is a ploy at best. I had no sense that old actions are alive, still wreaking vengeance. I had only the sense that some critter was still out and about and doing harm.

6) I'll also note, although this isn't a criticism, that the religious elements of this movie are... sketched but never committed to. This film is engaged to be engaged to Christ. Its metaphysics never reach the incoherence of (for example) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that's basically because Christianity is merely alluded to and then swiftly shied away from.

I was totally okay with that, actually, since I think horror movies should get to more or less make their own rules. But after the movie I was walking behind a couple where the woman, at least, seemed to think that Katie and Mika's reluctance to just try exorcism was the supernatural-horror equivalent of the slasher-flick "Let's split up and look for the killer ourselves!"--a level of stupidity which makes it hard for the audience to identify with the characters. I hope my first couple points make it clear that I don't share her perspective... but I did find it interesting.

7) All that said... I should reiterate that while I saw this movie with a very small audience, almost everyone else seemed more scared by it than I was. And I certainly didn't regret seeing it... though I guess I wish I'd been able to pay matinee prices. B-, you know?

HALFLIFE (now, with links!): When I walked out of Watchmen the first time I saw it--“First We Take Manhattan” still ringing in my ears, and thank you, movie!--I was on a high. They did it, I was thinking. They filmed “Watchmen.”

On the way home, I started questioning. My most immediate problem--the lack of existentialist detective-story--is addressed in the NRO review, so I won’t rehash. But when I got home, I started reading reviews of the movie, via Sean Collins’s incredibly helpful round-ups. EDITED TO ADD LINKS: here and here.

And my emotional trajectory became clear. Every review defending the movie rang a bit hollow to me, even when I agreed with individual points (Sean is totally right about that My Chemical Romance cover! And yes, I’m saying that out loud!). But almost every criticism of the movie seemed accurate to me. You’ll notice that my review borrowed heavily from those criticisms, EDITED: e.g. the stuff about depiction of violence in the movie vs. the comic here and here.

So I know my NRO review is ultimately pretty negative. But keep in mind that the initial reaction is also real. The review is about the elements I thought it was most important to highlight; but there are important things the movie got right, too.

SILENT RUNNING: If you complain about everything left out of an almost three-hour movie, as I did, I think it’s obvious to ask what on earth you would have cut! So here are my candidates--which include some scenes I really liked.

#1. Cheesecore. So Dan and Laurie have costumed softcore music-video sex--and yes, the “music video” aspect is at least as dumb to me as the “softcore” aspect. I’ve read a few defenses of this scene which argue that it’s intentionally cheesy.

What I want to know is, Why is that a defense? I already know, because of every single other scene between Dan and Laurie already, that they can only connect with one another and be intimate and vulnerable within the disclaimers of their costumes. What does this scene actually add to the movie, besides fifteen minutes (ok, it only felt that long) and Malin Akerman’s nipple? The humor is cheap (Owlship ejaculating fire) and this movie is already very long.

(I’ll also say, while we’re here, that I’m unimpressed by any film-crit arguments which rely on calling one’s interlocutors sex-hating Puritans. This is a charge which neither can be refuted [because it is really about the internal mental states you perceive in/project onto me] nor should be--I shouldn’t have to trot out all the cinematic sex scenes I did appreciate in order for you to give me a hearing about this one.)

There’s an equally music-video, and equally stupid, shot toward the very end, where Dan and Laurie look toward the camera in synch before heading out into the Antarctic wastes. It’s hilarious in a bad way, and makes me wonder what Mozart ever did to superhero directors, that they so persistently abuse his Requiem Mass.

...Actually I think you can differentiate three types of “obvious” shots in this movie. There are the genuinely dumb obvious shots, which make the movie stupider. I’d also add the “Last Supper” shot from the opening credits, literally the only moment of those credits I found anything other than perfect--what is the parallel here? How is Sally Jupiter’s retirement anything like the Last Supper? What is added to the movie by doing this, other than a cheap recognition-of-image gag?

There’s the Apocalypse Now quickie parody scene with Doctor Manhattan and Richard Wagner. I think this is the only “in-between” scene for me, where I get what they were doing with the pop-culture parallel but still found it cheap for reasons I find hard to articulate. ...Possibly the use of the staticky radio playing “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” when Adrian confronts the execs would also fall into this category--I really got a kick out of that, but I accept that it might be a misstep.

And then there’s the awesome, Alan-Moore-ish on-the-nose stuff, like “99 Luftballons” and “All Along the Watchtower” and Silhouette kissing the nurse. Those elements not only fit completely with the comic’s aesthetic--they also added a depth of atmosphere, a pop-realism of place and time, a cultural sensibility. Plus they were fun.

#2. The alley fight. Making Dan and Laurie just as bats crazy as Rorschach is a valid directorial choice. It's a pretty obvious take on the comic’s interrogation of vigilantism. So my real problems with the alley fight are a) if you do the alley fight this way, the prison riot has to be a lot more bloody than it is in the movie; b) I don’t think you can do the alley fight this way and keep the fun dialogue about how Rorschach dropped the masochist pseudo-villain down an elevator shaft, since that joke requires you to believe that he is ultra-bats and they are less-bats; and c) I think if you want to make the “even sweet little Laurie is driven into cruelty because that’s what violent response to crime does to people” you can do it by intensifying the prison riot, so this scene isn’t really necessary if we have to cut things.

#3. The Comedian’s funeral. I liked this scene. But all it actually needs is Moloch and Kovacs--it’s important for Moloch’s character and for the plot, but those moments take up about 1/15 of the actual screentime of this scene. And “Sounds of Silence” isn’t an insightful enough score choice to justify the time it takes.

...That’s all I can think of. After that, I can only suggest, helplessly, perhaps an intermission?

AN ANGEL WITH A FLAMING SWORD--AND AN INKBLOT MASK: Barbara Nicolosi at Church of the Masses really hated this movie, and walked out. In her comments box, she explained that the scene where she decided she couldn’t take it anymore and shouldn’t have to was the moment when Rorschach discovers the child-killer’s dogs tugging at a little girl’s shattered leg.

Let me try to explain why this isn’t my reaction to that scene--and why I think the Watchmen story, in comics or on film, really needs that moment.

First, I am not arguing that Barbara’s reaction is wrong. If you can't film Watchmen without that scene, maybe it's just unfilmable. I am pretty well convinced that Barbara is aware of the scope of human evil, you know? I see her point that the scene could be viewed as what she’s sometimes called “assaultive” of the audience--rubbing our noses in it, a kind of sadomasochist experience in which wallowing in gore is confused with real repentance, real existential questioning and horror, or some other lasting shift in the audience’s soul.

Also, for me, the most horrifying moment in that scene is Rorschach’s discovery of the girl’s bloodied underwear. The specificity of that moment--the bunching of the elastic waistband--that’s basically unbearable. I’m not sure I can explain why that moment hits me so much harder than the gore, but even now, I can picture the scene with the dogs and view it clinically in the mind’s eye, whereas the underwear still makes my throat clench. I don’t argue that this response is “better,” and I get why it might make you more skeptical of my defense of the dog scene--maybe I just don’t get why this scene is assaultive because I respond more strongly to other kinds of horror.

But here’s why I think the dogs are important. The dogs show that the killer has corrupted every element of his world. He has not solely destroyed the life of an innocent child; that would be more than bad enough. But he’s also taken (presumably) “innocent,” amoral animals--the natural world--and turned them into horrific weapons. He has broken the natural world.

This makes his corruption more thorough. His ability to distort and destroy now extends not just to his immediate victim but to every element of our world. (Cf. my Inside Catholic piece on torture.)

I hope you guys see how this horrific transformation of the natural world a) resonates with my take on Watchmen the comic, and b) resonates with me as a Catholic, a person who believes that human sin is what turned our world against us. When we fell we pulled the whole world down on top of us; and this perspective engages directly with the comic’s anguished question of whether the world’s chaos hides some real pattern, some real meaning, or whether all apparent patterns are simply the projections of the devastatingly violent human will.

SO LONG MOM, I’M OFF TO DROP THE BOMB: Completely random notes.

• Actually, Laurie is “Laurie Juspeczyk” for approximately .23 seconds in the movie: That’s the name shown when she looks at her own hand through Nite Owl II’s goggles.

• Although the acting and dialogue are both subpar, every moment Laurie and Doctor Manhattan were on Mars I found myself thinking, “This is the kind of movie I thought people would watch in the future.” Like, when you see Soylent Green, or Logan’s Run--aren’t those colors and shapes and humanity-as-alien images what you thought the characters would watch at the movies?

• Related: I thought about opening my NRO review with the line, “Zack Snyder has made the very best movie of 1986.” I decided that was unnecessarily snarky; but the point does remain that the sensibility of this movie is intensely ‘80s. It’s a movie from the decade that brought you Liquid Sky and “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables,” Jim Bakker and “Land of Confusion” and Gran Fury.

• Does that make Watchmen irrelevant now? Its justice-vs.-peace, or law vs. necessity, plots might be Toons for Our Torturing Times; but the Cold War context is so heavy that even those elements feel really remote from contemporary discourse. (This isn’t helped by the Nixon caricature. In the comic, I seem to recall Nixon being oddly restrained--am I misremembering? You could possibly push that even further to get a Nixon-as-Obama, someone who accepts the horrific context into which he has been elected while still trying to extend peaceful gestures and avoid nuclear war. The movie chose the opposite path, and failed even to make it funny--any Nixon-related humor exists solely in the Strangelove references--so I found all those scenes painfully dated, even though I’d been absolutely thrilled when I heard we’d get lots of Nixon in this. I want the politics, you guys. I just don’t want the politics to be dumb.)

• Anyway, I think Watchmen’s existential and theological themes make it the kind of thing that never goes out of style--who now recalls the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, when reading Dante? But yeah, Snyder didn’t exactly make the argument for Watchmen’s relevance.