The Boy (2016)
I mentioned to a digi-friend the other day that I'd watched this film, and he said he had too, but that the twist was obvious.
I get irrationally angry at people who think that that is an appropriate critique. It's a film. Of course it's obvious. What was he expecting? So I told him that if you want unexpected, your best bet is real life.
And then I thought about what made me upset. I enjoyed watching the film. I actually looked up the plot on Wikipedia so I knew what to expect. I like films better when they're spoiled for me. And while I understand that lots of people are not that way at all, I wonder if, when we complain that we saw something coming, what we mean is that the film bored us so much that our minds skittered ahead to fill in the blanks. For filmmakers, the ramifications of that possibility are that their burden is to keep the viewer's mind engaged in the present: interested in what is on screen rather than trying to create suspense with emptiness.
I mean, Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) had some of the most frustratingly suspenseless scenes ever, and yet it played with expectation in sometimes very uncomfortable ways. We had ten minute stretches without any change at all, and through every moment, I was always wondering how long it could possibly last, and what would happen afterwards. Because of Tarr's genre, I had no way of knowing.
But while horror, as a loosely bound collection of genres, has the luxury of ending well or badly, at the director's whim, it is narrowly restricted in its cliches and expectations. And here I wonder my second wonder. How closely are our expectations tied to the film's subgenre, sometimes only visible in the final scenes?
For instance, The Boy begins very uncannily, with aging parents who seem to be raising a doll, and whose actions are strictly confined, figuratively chained to the doll. They hire a nanny so they can finally go on vacation. The film makes the suggestion of a supernatural presence immediate, and on the surface, and much of the early creepiness relies on the simple fact that neither the character nor the viewers understands the forces which cause some of the events.
But the film does a thing which undermines this careful gap between what we know and what is really happening. It reveals everything inside the gap, and what is there is actually quite mundane. And while this jives with my experience of reality, more or less, it betrays the audience's expectation. We had been primed to expect the supernatural, and when the answer is mundane we cannot help but be disappointed to find that we have not been watching what we thought.
Some of us like a good ghost story because it contains, next to the terror, a sense of wonder. It is next-door to the Romantic sublime - the terror of mortality and the beauty of forces against which we understand our insignificance and helplessness. Like Woman in Black (2012).
We understand killers. We understand violence. We understand Hollywood romance, and a good number of its perversions and variations. So I think it was the disappointment/predictability of seeing the mundane beneath the uncanny that undoes the hard work and fun that went into making this totally acceptable film.
I get irrationally angry at people who think that that is an appropriate critique. It's a film. Of course it's obvious. What was he expecting? So I told him that if you want unexpected, your best bet is real life.
And then I thought about what made me upset. I enjoyed watching the film. I actually looked up the plot on Wikipedia so I knew what to expect. I like films better when they're spoiled for me. And while I understand that lots of people are not that way at all, I wonder if, when we complain that we saw something coming, what we mean is that the film bored us so much that our minds skittered ahead to fill in the blanks. For filmmakers, the ramifications of that possibility are that their burden is to keep the viewer's mind engaged in the present: interested in what is on screen rather than trying to create suspense with emptiness.
I mean, Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) had some of the most frustratingly suspenseless scenes ever, and yet it played with expectation in sometimes very uncomfortable ways. We had ten minute stretches without any change at all, and through every moment, I was always wondering how long it could possibly last, and what would happen afterwards. Because of Tarr's genre, I had no way of knowing.
But while horror, as a loosely bound collection of genres, has the luxury of ending well or badly, at the director's whim, it is narrowly restricted in its cliches and expectations. And here I wonder my second wonder. How closely are our expectations tied to the film's subgenre, sometimes only visible in the final scenes?
For instance, The Boy begins very uncannily, with aging parents who seem to be raising a doll, and whose actions are strictly confined, figuratively chained to the doll. They hire a nanny so they can finally go on vacation. The film makes the suggestion of a supernatural presence immediate, and on the surface, and much of the early creepiness relies on the simple fact that neither the character nor the viewers understands the forces which cause some of the events.
But the film does a thing which undermines this careful gap between what we know and what is really happening. It reveals everything inside the gap, and what is there is actually quite mundane. And while this jives with my experience of reality, more or less, it betrays the audience's expectation. We had been primed to expect the supernatural, and when the answer is mundane we cannot help but be disappointed to find that we have not been watching what we thought.
Some of us like a good ghost story because it contains, next to the terror, a sense of wonder. It is next-door to the Romantic sublime - the terror of mortality and the beauty of forces against which we understand our insignificance and helplessness. Like Woman in Black (2012).
We understand killers. We understand violence. We understand Hollywood romance, and a good number of its perversions and variations. So I think it was the disappointment/predictability of seeing the mundane beneath the uncanny that undoes the hard work and fun that went into making this totally acceptable film.
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