(no subject)

But did I like It Follows?

I think even if the contexts in which it was recommended to me hadn't clued me I'd have realized where it was going, anyway broadly, by like seven minutes in. It's just too close to active narrative interests of mine to have been watched with fresh eyes, which I assume horror movie-makers prefer. I enjoyed thinking about what it was doing, but nothing it was doing was done to me.

Almost nothing. I think it was pretty great with the kenoma. Not the Detroit aspect, which was a weird and probably objectionable way to go, though thought-provoking, but its handling of suburbia. Ghost World doesn't attack nonhuman nature, either because of having its hands full enough or because fertility and corporatization aren't teased apart - one might have trapped the other. Another world might therefore be a real possibility, though clearly a dead one. Blue Velvet's nature is both in us and out of us, which is creepy too, but not in quite the same way. It Follows treats its protagonist like she's now utterly unimplicated in what she'd previously been. Which of course makes the "It" realer, since nothing about the world functions as womb anymore. There's just her, it, and the human shields she can create. There's some questionable aspects to the handling of the latter two, and her Ericksonian peer gang, but something close to tonal perfection in her testings out of her isolation. I think the scene-settings and not just the idea content of Cure and Upstream Color must have been studied carefully, and maybe it's the importation of the two sorts of opaque environment into each other that gets the note right.

There's a trope of nearly literal reality-testing, a sort of tasting by touch, that I guess comes from Andrei Rublev - and is handled maybe even more magnificently in Stalker. Its mispurposing in the early minutes of Gladiator made me immediately hate Gladiator, but the ear in Blue Velvet had demonstrated it could be adapted to secular use in a good way. Maclachlan simultaneously lesrns that an ear can be severed and thrown into a field and that a field can contain a severed ear, which is both parts of the equation right there. It changes everything, even if he's not yet aware it has. We're certainly aware. It's there among blades of grass, crumbs, flecks, ants. It's a fake, a prop, but close enough that we know the real thing would fit just as well. It is an instant "cure of the ground" for diseases we'd generally like to retain. Obviously the ear branches off and becomes a trope of its own - Reservoir Dogs, Hannibal, to say nothing of the cousin branch involving severed and/or half-buried digits - but the moment of slowing, focus, and the bringing of the hand into contact with this sort of field (mediated by a stick in BV, IIRC?) is picked up here sans oreille. The man at the beginning of Cure idly pokes at things. His randomness is what scares you at the time, but in hindsight we know he's not purposeless, since he wishes his conclusions to be disproved. His actions are flickers of hope, when they happen. Flickerings-out, but still. It is the ant, the grass blades, the trees above the swing from which the It follows. The repeated (and initial) image is of a head emerging from a pool - consciousness from out of womb-like, suspended fullness. But the emergence isn't really from water, but from one kind of air into another, from pastoral landscape into one gone just one tiny but infinite step into rot, silence, absence. Where life, nature are suddenly not for or about you, or about anything in any meaningful rather than bluntly obsessive sense. All the different blades are same enough. The first thing you see is that ants are not anyone's friends (a choice of the film's - and a makeable one, since horror is fear of the worst). The initial immersion is a waterslide - to wade back in after one's out, has been dipped in thingness, is to drown. No exit.

Almost like a rejoinder to The Little Mermaid. Well, absolutely one, but almost like on purpose.

So that part worked on me.