Bird Box (Netflix original released December 21, 2018)

This is another one of those posts that started as a few small comments on Face Book when sharing a link to a review article of Bird Box.

The review article is here, and it basically has the monsters being social media. My few comments that turned into lengthy post basically wind up, by the end, comparing and contrasting that with a reading of the monsters as racism, including addressing a monsters-as-racism reading to which this article links.

So, the following is my unedited comments (I don't really have time to break things down into shorter paragraphs or tighten down and polish up the language and presentation).:

Interesting take on it. I definitely agree up to a point. There is definitely a strong point made about the conversation about the painting in the beginning and the death through the security monitor (thinking social media is only words on a screen, just like they assumed Riddle's diary was just words in a book). The "fake news" and "over there" and "invasion" thing with the news cast is also definitely a strong piece of evidence in favor of the social media reading.

This author and I might disagree on how prevalent race is or is not in the film (I think it's in the mix for both of us, it's just a question of at what level in comparison to the social media theme). I don't think it is the whole of the film but I do think it is central (although I read the piece mentioned on the Root and thought the person was a bit of an ass ... and I think that painting Bullock *only* as a privileged white and so starkly as such and the blindfold *only* as sticking one's head in the sand turns out a bit naive, for one by leaving you with no real place from which to agree or disagree; when Get Out ends with a black man saying "consider this shit handled," we can take the film makers to be saying that it is a good thing that the whites who have been taking over black bodies are all dead, we can safely assume a stage-affirmative stance toward "this shit being handled"; if Bird Box is about only Bullock as privileged and the blindfold as willing denial, where does that leave the resolution of the film as far as a stage-affirmative or stage-pejorative stance, which impact whether you think the film is good or bad. I think the author of the Root piece could find it good only if it could be said that the movie is really completely critical of Malorie and Tom and the people in the sanctuary, no sympathy for them at all based in any other type of meaning as characters ... What I mean when I say it is naive is that that author uses rhetoric that implies that you COULD have a story in which people thoroughly get beyond racism, but with that view of even the white people who AREN'T the ever-rabids, it basically means the white people dying, which really isn't getting beyond racism ... It would be like Get Out having not only the white body snatchers killed, but all white people who are complicit even unwillingly, which in our culture is every white adult, including myself ... I agree with a lot of points the Root author makes, but I don't think anybody is getting beyond racism in the way he tries to portray as possible, not even in art ... once race became so organically interwoven with other socio-economic factors like labor competition, it's not going away simply by "opening your eyes to it" ... opening your eyes to the reality of how pervasively it is woven into American structure really can lead you to the despair of suicide ... and I don't agree that other characteristics of humanity cannot function meaningfully in a world in which racism has not yet been fully vanquished, which is where the Root author seems to me to wind up).

In the end, I think that if Bird Box is about social media it is about social media as emblematic of something further back than social media itself, a negative potential in human behavior/nature that social media distinctly exacerbates (or a neutral one that social media distinctly helps to go in a negative direction), and I would say that racism is the older effect of that potentional (or the older versino of it being taken in a negative direction). I think the "family tree" is probably more like there is an original coin with two sides, xenophobia and "friend"-o-philia. While the latter is the conceptually more original drive based in insecurity (once we develop a concept of good-vs-bad and a concept of self, and one's own group by extension, we begin to worry about whether we are "good"), racism is the historically older sibling who emphasizes the xenophobic side as a first line of defense of identity ("of course we are good, look at how we are not them," which of course, requires a them; while the Augustine and other medievals conceived of good as having a positive existence beyond the opposition to evil, which has no positive existence, just perverting good, when it comes to racism, the white race NEEDS a black race to be over against) and social media is the younger sibling who helps the older through facilitating the "friend"-o-philia as the positive side that actually lets in newer forms of xenophobic violence and actual conquest (cyber-bullying is a real thing).

 The core connective tissue thematically between the racism and the social media themes is "construction of identity." Racism takes a few sparse facts like skin pigment and geo-origin and constructs this thing called your "race" (as I have said elsewhere, race and ethnicity are not the same thing; race is what you get when you apply a capitalist social hierarchy to ethnicity). Social Media is the construction of digital identity, like the residual digital self image in the Matrix. There is a sage piece of advice that those who have tried online dating sites pass on to others: meet face-to-face sooner rather than later. The issue is that, in digital formats like email and profiles, the construction of identity presentation controls a lot more of the perception of the other person. We always construct and put together an identity as a front face, even in face-to-face conversations. But the difference is that, in fact-to-face, you can't hide your foibles; they slip through the cracks. And maybe some of what slips through the cracks is something the other person has too big of a problem with (although it might show up as "just not clicking" with your real face the way they thought the clicked with your digital face) and better to know sooner, because the person on the other end of the digital construction is also constructing a picture of you out of what you have selected to put on the page and the kind of person they are hoping to meet. Nobody is "lying" in the simplistic definitions offered by so many self-proclaimed moral experts on both sides of the conservative-liberal divide; both are trying to meet somebody and genuinely interact. But we simply construct; it's our epistemological MO. To borrow John LeCarre's language, building legends is what we do. We can't stop doing that, nor should we try; what we should do, whether in face-to-face or in digital, is allow the legends to be challenged and modified by real interaction with the other. But the challenging is easier in person and more difficult in digital (I remember seeing an FB add in front of some movie while I was in NYC that scared me because it seemed to actually advocate the digital construction as a completely safe and trustworthy, completely unproblematic, place from which to start a real-world friendship, with all the assumptions that what was seen online is accurate and adequate).

I disagree with this writer about the place of Malkovich's Douglas character, and particularly because of this reviewer's portrayal assuming basically just one basic type of "Trumper." In addition to the ever-rabids (those like Gary forcing people to look and either kill themselves or reveal themselves to be among the ever-rabids), who are the truly malignant, there are also the merely sickly, those who know there is something wrong going on, and they will speak against it if it comes out in big bold letters, but if not, they actually have a kind of morbid fascination with the minor forms, the kinds who were not "fans" of The Apprentice, but did find it interesting in some "wry" sort of way. They won't get sucked in by full-blown Trumperism (the most recent example I heard of is from a third party about a second party whom I stopped following on FB over 5 years ago because I found it simply pointless, a party 2 who voted against Trump in the primary, but joined the Trump bandwagon once he won the nomination, becoming one of those "let bygones be bygones" supporters who sees any criticism of the GOP candidate as pragmatically dangerous, and the recent example party 3 told me about was party 2 posting on FB of people on the left being inconsistent in criticizing Trump for not calling Mattis personally to fire him, since Obama did the same kind of proxy-fire, which is basically a straw man argument when taken in the scope of the whole never-Trump debate, picking up little minor inconsistencies and claiming to have given the never-Trumpers a good dose of humility, when in fact all they did was divert attention from the real issue, which is whether we should be scared shitless now that the adults have left Trump's room). But they are xenphobic and isolationist: Malkovich wants his wife not to try to help, and he is willing to leave pregnant Olympia in the house to starve. He's not the overt racist, the guys like Gary forcing things, but he also won't help others if he can help it. The middle Trumpers will be sure to let you know they voted against him in the primary, but that is really about all they have ever done to combat it (other than that, like party 3 above, they have been known to find Trump's "you're fired" show interesting back before his candidacy, even though, of course, they weren't, like, a "fan" who made sure to tune in every week or something like that ... they have a bit more "sophistication" than that, of course).
While Malkovich/Douglas is not a hardcore Trumplodyte, he winds up in the garage (and then ...) for a reason, which is that he was acting like a crazy xenophobic asshole. His *caution* was actually a good thing, and had he not been being a crazy xenophobic asshole, he might have thought of a way to discern the situation: "ok, we want to be charitable and help, but you have to show us EVERYTHING you are bringing in with you; you say there are crazies who can look, how do we know you're not one, let us see what you have in the case"; and then they would have seen what was in the case, and that would have been pretty suspicious. But he had to be one of these stupid "apostolate of the asshole" shits who realizes direct racism is wrong (although they're quite too stupid to be able to even begin to get their head around a concept like systemic racism) but they still have this drive to be an asshole and so they try to make it into some "virtue" that can actually be helpful in the good fight, yada yada yada, so they're tolerant of Trump and "forgiving" of the ways his supporters actively combat peace while (the middle Trumpers) being careful never to actually put a confederate flag on their own lawn. That's Douglas (Malkovich).

There are other things that can cross over or be shared by the two themes: what is mentioned here as the entities appealing to sound through mimicking the voices of people we know can be social media's reproduction of FB friends, but it can also be, at the same time, a confederacy-sympathizer's claim to speak for the "heritage" of America etc., the voices of those gone by, those whom we should respect ("if you challenge this, you're saying your dearly departed father was evil" etc.). That was one of the things that actually caught my attention most in the first viewing: manipulation of knowledge/experience of the "past" in the form of appeals to things like "heritage."