The Bye Bye Man (2017)
*contains spoilers* *this blog ALWAYS contains spoilers*
This movie wishes it were The Babadook (2014). The mysterious figure that haunts anyone who knows his name. . . But the Babadook was a symbol of depression (or homosexuality, if you read it like many a tumblrite), and that's just too. . . surreal for Stacy Title, director, or Jonathan Penner, who wrote the screenplay, (and whose names are a bit on-the-nose, really). Emotional logic is still logic.
I think the strongest thing this movie has going for it is the postmodern resistance against making sense of things. We never hear any explanation for the coins or the train imagery or the finger scratches in the stone. I mean, Elliot, the main character, asks, but Mrs. Redmon (Faye Dunaway) either never answers, or we don't hear it through Elliot's hallucinations. And the film consistently insists that the murder perpetrators "aren't mad," which is a nice gesture for those of us forced to protest the stigma against those who struggle with mental health issues every time there's another school shooting. I really did appreciate it, but Sasha, Elliot's girlfriend, does point out correctly early in the film that just because something is in your head doesn't mean it isn't real. And so we're left not knowing what the thing is that makes people kill. Sound familiar? How very apropos of our times.
The Bye Bye Man himself is a frightening figure, but is given no motivation other than malice. His bloody "hound" munches on the faces of the dead. That's a horrifying detail. In that way, he resembles many a slasher villain - I'm thinking specifically of Mike Myers from Halloween (1978), before we started desperately trying to make sense of mass murder - simply killing as a raison d'etre, with the addition of the old sixties ad gimmick "don't think of pink elephants" which, though obnoxiously difficult, is completely possible. We're more frightened of slasher villains in our subconscious/dreams, for the obvious psychological reason that we don't control our subconscious, we only influence it - nudging the id here and there, or setting boundaries.
As for the theory that anyone who hears about the Bye Bye Man is cursed. . . I haven't run into anyone super keen on talking about him anyway, so I think the world is pretty safe from him. Shootings, however, continue to take lives on a disturbingly regular basis.
This movie wishes it were The Babadook (2014). The mysterious figure that haunts anyone who knows his name. . . But the Babadook was a symbol of depression (or homosexuality, if you read it like many a tumblrite), and that's just too. . . surreal for Stacy Title, director, or Jonathan Penner, who wrote the screenplay, (and whose names are a bit on-the-nose, really). Emotional logic is still logic.
I think the strongest thing this movie has going for it is the postmodern resistance against making sense of things. We never hear any explanation for the coins or the train imagery or the finger scratches in the stone. I mean, Elliot, the main character, asks, but Mrs. Redmon (Faye Dunaway) either never answers, or we don't hear it through Elliot's hallucinations. And the film consistently insists that the murder perpetrators "aren't mad," which is a nice gesture for those of us forced to protest the stigma against those who struggle with mental health issues every time there's another school shooting. I really did appreciate it, but Sasha, Elliot's girlfriend, does point out correctly early in the film that just because something is in your head doesn't mean it isn't real. And so we're left not knowing what the thing is that makes people kill. Sound familiar? How very apropos of our times.
The Bye Bye Man himself is a frightening figure, but is given no motivation other than malice. His bloody "hound" munches on the faces of the dead. That's a horrifying detail. In that way, he resembles many a slasher villain - I'm thinking specifically of Mike Myers from Halloween (1978), before we started desperately trying to make sense of mass murder - simply killing as a raison d'etre, with the addition of the old sixties ad gimmick "don't think of pink elephants" which, though obnoxiously difficult, is completely possible. We're more frightened of slasher villains in our subconscious/dreams, for the obvious psychological reason that we don't control our subconscious, we only influence it - nudging the id here and there, or setting boundaries.
As for the theory that anyone who hears about the Bye Bye Man is cursed. . . I haven't run into anyone super keen on talking about him anyway, so I think the world is pretty safe from him. Shootings, however, continue to take lives on a disturbingly regular basis.
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