One of the more oft-repeated phrases about the nature of comedy is that it is more-or-less a matter of ‘tragedy + time’. After enough time has passed since an awful event, that is when it is possible to see the more humourous side of something that, in the moment, would’ve been too shocking to exhume such mirth from. But I’m not sure that is really the case, at least nowadays. We collectively have so much access to visual and auditory information, and have subsequently learnt to digest it at such a rate, that we have surpassed the idea that the passing of time has anything to do with the ability to make light of tragic events. I first got that impression when I heard my first joke about Michael Jackson’s death, which was on the same day it broke the news cycle; unless the bracket of time is measured in mere minutes or hours, that doesn’t appear to be accurate anymore.
Instead, I’d argue that it’s a matter of distance rather than time. Temporal distance can be a part of that, sure, but as far as turning something horrible into the kind of material that someone would willingly indulge in, it can be a cinch when there’s enough distance between the subject and the observer. If it happened to a stranger, or someone you know more by reputation than through any personal contact, making light of it is far easier to do than if, say, it happened to someone you know more personally or, more pointedly, if it happened to you.
Now, why am I bringing this up when talking about this film in particular? Am I making the same mistake that the Golden Globes made back in 2017? Well, hopefully not. Rather, I’m getting into this for two other reasons. One, because whenever I get to discussing Peele’s films, my writing turns out a lot denser than usual, so I’m just setting the tone as best I can. And two, because what truly makes this film horrifying is in how it examines that subject/observer relationship, both when it comes to our entertainment and our everyday lives.
Distance is something that stayed in my mind for the bulk of watching this film, as it is up there with Dune Part 1 in terms of making the cinema screen feel gigantic in scale. DOP Hoyte van Hoytema has experience in making the most of the camera frame through his work on space operas like Interstellar and Ad Astra, and he flexes those creative muscles here in his depiction of the Haywood family horse ranch, which the main story centres around. It’s ostensibly just a stretch of California countryside, like something that escaped an old-school Western, but even as just a small glimpse of the size of our planet, it makes the story feel as large as the visuals. So when a UFO drifts into view, and begins to snatch those horses off of the ground, its own size feels that much grander because the land below is already so spacious.
The inclusion of an unidentified flying object as the main narrative threat shows Peele once again tipping his hat to classic science-fiction, much as he did with Get Out and Us. However, where those two films treated horror in a more socialised regard, with a lot of the terror coming from the interactions between characters, the terror here… well, yeah, it’s a big-ass alien creature in the sky. It’s still quite absurdist, with its title pulled from older stand-up routines about how Black characters would react to events in horror movies, not to mention the subplot involving an ape going murder-crazy on the set of a TV sitcom. But rather than aiming for Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, this is more Spielbergian. A bit of Jaws in how we don’t actually see that much of the creature in question most of the time, a bit of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, naturally, and maybe some Poltergeist in how it frames this otherworldly horror against a working-class family (right down to a variation of “they’re here” in the dialogue).
Where that kind of comparison gets interesting is in how it juxtaposes a Black filmmaker taking artistic cues from an older White filmmaker… and highlighting how cinema history itself began with the reversal of that. The opening credits build up to a shot of Plate 626 ‘Gallop; thoroughbred bay mare Annie G.’, a series of fifteen photographs taken as part of Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion series back in the 1880s. It shows a Black jockey riding a horse and, when the photos are put to motion, it became one of the first historical examples of what we now call moving pictures.
The Haywood family themselves, made up of OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald (Keke Palmer), and Otis Sr. (Keith David), tout being the descendants of that jockey as they try and make their own ways through Hollywood. Along with continuing the imagery of Black Americans being as disregarded as animals in White society (same with the ‘Run Rabbit’ opening of Get Out, or the black rabbit opening of Us), it’s also the first major example of that subject-observer disconnect within the film. A Black man being part of a crucial opening salvo for cinematic history… whose name and identity have been lost to time, while the White man who captured his image is a focal point in the teaching of that history.
If this were merely a statement on Black cinema and the mainstream understanding of it, that would already be a fitting raison d’etre for a film by someone like Peele, who has made his mark through scathing observations about these kinds of cultural divides. But instead, the ambition being put into the visuals has likewise been poured into the story, as it takes aim at how films of this nature build on very real anxieties on our side of the screen… and then proceeds to ask why such art is even necessary anymore.
At its most basic level, the story is about OJ and Emerald trying to get photo evidence of the UFO, so as to sell the proof to a news outlet for a tidy profit. Capturing the impossible, to borrow the film’s own vernacular, which itself is a quite poignant description of what filmmaking is. The act of filming is to preserve images, preserve moments, whether they be real or fictional in nature. But in an age where so many people carry around pocket-sized cameras with them everywhere they go, where capturing those images is as easy to pressing a finger to a wafer-thin sheet of glass, that preservation has become so second-nature as to be an afterthought. And with the kind of events that have been regularly taking place in the world, especially since 2016, what is being preserved isn’t the wondrous; it is the traumatic. It is the freakshows, the disasters, the travesties, that get circulated on the network that connects all those cameras together. The story of the first man on camera gets left out, while stories of startled animals attacking and killing people, or UFOs pulling animals and humans into the sky and making it rain blood on the Earth in its wake, are what grab attention. The horror of the world is turned into spectacle, pulped and sifted into pop culture detritus made to distract from the reality of the threat.
In the moment, this film inspires more awe than terror. Seeing that giant cyclopean eye in the sky, as it sucks everything into its oculus, left me quite dumbstruck at the size of it all. The design for the creature feels appropriately alien, especially when it takes its final form that resembles a cross between a jellyfish and a shredded balloon that somehow stayed airborne. It even looks like it’s made out of the same material as a projector screen, stretching out in all directions while that singular eye pulls images into its body.
But as I thought back on it afterwards, my mind started creating its own little whirlwind in considering how… normal all of this is. How our innate reaction to what scares us, what makes us despair, isn’t to look away but to stare deeper into it. The cyclical nature in which we engage with the horrifying as a mundane aspect of our lives, willingly inflicting trauma on ourselves because some part of the lizard brain finds enjoyment in such things. In regards to blockbuster cinema as a form of entertainment, the kind that Spielberg essentially birthed into being through films like Jaws, it’s a hell of a statement; I’ve made similar observations about natural disaster films post-Roland Emmerich. In regards to Black cinema, where stories of brutality tied into racial discrimination and the echoes of slavery garner more attention than works that celebrate why Black Lives Matter, it’s an even bigger statement.
And for as much as I feel like I put my foot in my mouth whenever trying to comment on Black America and how it is reflected in cinema… this time around, I have sources much closer to home that get me to relate to what this film is saying. My taste in films frequently ventures into the realms of edgelord entertainment: Where The Dead Go To Die, Kuzo, Joker, Una, The Butterfly Effect, the works of Andrew Kevin Walker, even the latest big-screen version of Batman. The kind of films where characters go through increasingly horrific and grotesque events, suffer trauma as a result, and that I find myself enjoying because of how much discomfort they engender in me. I’ve mentioned more than a few times that WTDGTD is one of my favourite films because… well, I’m convinced that my first time watching it was a traumatic experience, given how visceral my reaction to it was. Hell, bringing things closer to the realms of reality, I’m pretty sure the only real reason why I still use Twitter nowadays is because it puts me face-to-face with ideas and opinions that I can just spend the next several hours stewing on how much disdain I have for them. It’s not healthy to engage with the world on those terms.
Fuck it, I’ll go one step further: I’ve willingly taken part in having my own trauma turned into public spectacle, as part of my involvement in Employable Me. The episode I featured in contains a moment where, over shots of me just bumbling around my house, my mother recalls the story of when, at around 9 or 10 years old, I attempted suicide at school by jumping off a second-story balcony. Well, that’s how my mother recalls it, at least; it was more like a raised brick wall about the size of my bookshelf, and even at the time, I felt a bit silly thinking that a drop of just a few feet would’ve been enough to do it.
I should mention at this point that I’m not bringing this up as an example of me being exploited by taking part in such a production. While I find myself struggling at times with where I stand in the larger conversation regarding ‘inspiration porn’, I maintain that I did the right thing by putting my story out there in that fashion, and I am grateful that they gave me the opportunity to do so. I am simply bringing up that, while thinking over this film, it got me to consider an instance where that observer/subject effect applied to myself.
And it is through that experience that I understand what this film is driving at, especially when it gets to Steven Yeun’s Jupe Park and how his trauma affects his own participation in that dichotomy. Our engagement with it regularly gets dressed up in notions that we do so to exercise our empathy for others, essentially taking moments to feel better about ourselves because we look at such things and go “I feel so sad for them” or “Yay, they overcome something or other”. Or sometimes, it’s done under the guise that our knowledge of such events ensures that they won’t be forgotten, and are given a platform so that they can’t be ignored either, like when the George Floyd video went viral. But then, that wording on its own illustrates the problem: Footage of a man’s death shouldn’t be on the same level as a photo of a cat wanting a cheeseburger.
Okay, that was quite the large diversion from talking about the film, but this is what I meant in terms of what actually made this horrifying for me: It’s the kind of film that left me thinking about a lot after I thought I was done with it. Admittedly, it can basically be boiled down to being a much darker (and yet equally humourous) variation on the Treehouse Of Horror segment Attack Of The 50-Foot Eyesores, but with how wide it casts its net in the application of that approach to the spectacle (pop culture legends, real-world tragedies, the entertainment we ostensibly use to get away from real-world tragedies), it’s really damn effective as cultural and societal commentary. Even for how much I latch onto my own experiences as prisms to view films through, this dug its claws deep into my mind, and, as I just got done explaining in my usual TMI fashion, I tend to like films that give me that kind of intense reaction.
I mean, it’s a big-screen blockbuster being what a big-screen blockbuster should be as an artistic ideal, but there’s levels to this shit as well.
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