We return to Horror Madness and to the political horror movie, as we finally decide for good which is a bigger problem: racism or sexism.
I’m kidding.
Acknowledged modern classic, Jordan Peele’s Get Out faces Mitchell Lichtenstein’s smart cult film Teeth.
See the introduction and full slate here http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
These films are about going through the world in a desired body.
These films are about how powerful people will tell you that really you’re the one with power over them, because they want to possess you, and that any attempt by them to subdue you is just an expression of their powerlessness.
These films are about how that was always a lie, and the powerful people knew it was, too.
These films are about turning your vulnerability into strength.
These films are, one explicitly and the other more subtly, about sexual violence.
These films are very funny.
These films are about how easily we can end up participating in our own oppression and marginalization, in our own capture.
These films are about not listening to warnings. They’re about listening to friends. They’re about the terrifying loneliness of being the only one like you around, and how the desire to end that loneliness can lead you to trust people you shouldn’t. They’re about how the desire to trust, to love, the most human desire there is, can be so easily exploited.
These films are both really good, is the thing, and picking a better one is tough. It’s not impossible, and I doubt the victor will surprise, but it was hard.
Teeth is a good, smart, compassionate film anchored by a fine performance. It captures, better than a lot of media, the lonely terror of being a young girl, the person who is simultaneously the most and least significant thing in the world. All attention paid to your body and behavior, but none to your inner state. At once a public spectacle deserving of public comment, and something to be rigidly policed and covered over, kept private and secret. The protagonist in Teeth, beautifully played by Jess Weixler, is so alienated from her own body that she makes it to young adulthood without knowing her vagina has teeth inside it, and that alienation is so encouraged that she can’t even see a picture of what a vulva looks like in a science textbook. Dawn’s body is a vehicle she moves around in, something to be preserved or given or stolen away, but it’s never hers. It’s never her.
Every man she meets wants something from her and it’s always the same thing, and she’s so ignorant she barely knows whether she wants to give it or not. Her own body’s ability to feel pleasure is used against her, used to lower her defenses and slow her response. It’s hard not to feel satisfaction when her body protects her from invasion. It’s hard not to root for Dawn when she understands the full weight of that power and starts using it deliberately.
Chris, the protagonist of Get Out, is similar in that his social position makes him an object of desire for the more powerful people around him. He’s at once wanted and despised by those people, who hate the lack in themselves that they could fill with him even as they insist on their right to so fill it. Hypervisibility can look like power to people who haven’t experienced it; I’d certainly never say that invisibility is a picnic. But that power, as Chris and Dawn could both tell you, is ephemeral - the power comes from others’ fear of it, which means those others might do anything at all to diminish it. The antagonists in Get Out would say that they love Black people, love them so much they want to be surrounded by them. Really they love Black people the way spiders love flies, or the way children love their dolls.
I don’t have answers to these problems; if I did I wouldn’t be blogging probably. Neither Get Out nor Teeth offer any either, which is as it should be. Both films make you sit uncomfortably in reality, and to paraphrase horror master Shirley Jackson, it is in conditions of absolute reality where horror happens. The human mind is, simply, too weak to contemplate it directly.
Which makes this a tough decision. Get Out was rightly lauded when it premiered and is on its way to being a classic; Peele is rightly recognized as a new horror auteur. Teeth got initial attention but has faded some; it shouldn’t have. It’s really quite good. But it doesn’t have the self-assured polish or the sophistication of Get Out; it’s messier, sloppier. It wants to say so much that it sometimes loses track of itself, which Get Out never does. Get Out has to win it.