The Invisible Counterpoint

In "You Were Never Really Here," we're ostensibly being given a film that is sensitive to all those who've experienced terrific traumatic experiences in their lives. We have a sense of fidelity to the traumatic experience, that this is a film which really cared to explore how it affects the mind/future behaviour, and so to perhaps be trusted as almost instructive for the rest of us. Watching this film, we become sensitive to how ostensibly fragmented the mental state of someone experiencing PTSD can be; how intrusive past-horrifying memories can be; how they can't be repressed, are always free-floating; how it regularly brings one to thoughts past that of sadomasochism towards self-extinction, as a means of total escape.  Yet while the film leans us this way, towards seeing it as "awoke," a participant in our blossoming expansion of sensitivity and respect for others, what brought them to become the ostensibly less-than-pleasant people we see b...

Richard Brody  shared a  link . Moderator  ·  April 10 at 4:13pm It's a peculiar phenomenon, the success of A Quiet Place. I confess that I didn't love it; I found it to have the substance of a twenty-minute Oscar-nominated live-action short subject, but that was far from the worst part of the experience. Above all, I had the sense that John Krasinski, as director, didn't see what he was doing—didn't see the implications, the metaphors, the symbols, that arose from the seemingly innocuous and merely entertaining story. They're ugly and regressive, and I suspect that they weren't at all intended—but that they play a significant role in the movie's success nonetheless: https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-silently-regressive-politic… NEWYORKER.COM The Silently Regressive Politics of “A Quiet Place” In their enforced silence, the film’s main characters are a metaphorical silent—white—majority, one that doesn...