Bird shit

Bird Box (d. Susanne Bier)

Instead of asking what the movie is about, why not venture to ask why does this movie exist? This is a story movie. The characters don’t matter as much. Why this rather nifty story, though not quite original since we’ve got A Quiet Place this year, except here they need to cover their eyes. Well, it’s being willfully blind and ignorant about the things in our world, things like racism; environmental catastrophe; rising fascism; etc. Actually, it has the same weird post-racial sensibility in Annihilation, which is really about fears of assimilation from alien, non-white bodies. Note also the choice of the house where these Crash survivors live. It’s set in L.A. with people from all walks of life crashing into a posh and expansive 626 arts and crafts house. So from the get-go we are to believe in the existence of a post-racial world EXCEPT it still follows the logic of our current racist world and Hollywood template of what constitutes race and diversity. How so? Note the order and choice of the people who get killed AND those who don’t get killed. People have been pointing this out about horror movies that by now, surely Hollywood should have gotten the message. First victim is the Asian guy who happens to be gay. WAIT, the Asian man, already a near-extinct species in Hollywood representation, has to be gay!?! Not that anything is wrong with being gay BUT this is clearly in line with Asian men as being emasculated. (He’s a bottom, you could almost hear. And the unseen husband, he’s white, you could hear that too.) Next, the conspiracy theory black dude gets killed. The two young white pretty things bone each other and then poof, they’re gone. I think she is supposed to be a Latina, light-skinned and phenotypically white enough. She and the white dude get the best kind of representation because we don’t see or hear them being killed, unlike the central couple, an idealized post-racial paring, where the black partner dies. It’s almost as if the movie can’t stand the fact that this interracial coupling exists at all. (Also problematic is the figure of not the heavy set white woman. Why does she have to be a bit crazy?) And you know those WHITE kids won’t die–that’s Hollywood taboo. So we end up in yet another post racial utopia which looks like images from those Mormon magazines where people of all stripes get along laughing, smiling, which doesn’t make sense because the world as they used to know it is dead and the monsters are still lurking outside. The plaque says it’s a school for the blind, but more like school for fools.