Sprung

This will be my last post here. I've been on and off this blog for a while and am moving on to a larger project (with more structure). I'm going to be editing a magazine blog called The Chaotic Neutral. we have a small staff already churning out prose and I'm really excited for what we may accomplish over there. I hope you'll follow me over. We'll have reviews, book discussions, fiction, pop-culture commentary.

The site will be launching at the beginning of June so subscribe and visit.

Updates to roll out on Facebook and Twitter.

     

---

There should be a way to capture that smell when Spring first gains traction in the weather. There are warm days and there are cool days but it's palpable when Spring takes hold. There's that aforementioned smell that isn't quite cut grass and more complex than the crass perfume of flowers. It's a compound that's much more entangled and knotted, much more intricate. The scent is everything in Spring, from pollen to animals, but it's much more. Its gestalt is something unique, belonging not to the presence of particular scents but to the process of the season bringing them about. The smell of a newborn baby does nothing to me but the smell of a newly arrived season takes me over. Perhaps it's more akin to a wine, a scent that is living things simply being alive. The chemicals sometimes competing, sometimes bonding, always layering and entwining. This vintage only lasts moments in the context of the year. There are only a handful of days before it settles into something pleasant but simpler. Common.

And there's the sound. In nature there are many different types of sound. There's the sudden silence that follows as insects and birds become alerted to a presence, a quiet that brings disquiet. There's the claustrophobic boxing of noise that comes along with low clouds a dense fog. And then there's Spring's Silence, when the sounds of wind, traffic, animals, all periodically fade away. Like a vacuum it is a pulling silence; it reaches into you and pulls you out of yourself to fill the space around you. The insistence of the Silence of Spring brings with it an urgency. It is an aggressive peace that forces its tone on those who hear it. It's like a drug that way, imposing itself on you and making its desire your own. Zen is too balanced a word for this silence and calm. Spring Silence runs its fingers down the back of your neck, eliciting a shudder of nostalgia - but rather than making you long for the past, you crave to make the current moment linger. Have you ever tried to force a moment to stay? It's a losing battle. That act of turning the moment into a battle is what makes it lost.

All of this comes at a cost. Fall is by far my favorite season. Fall wields a brush and palette and comes prepared for war. Fall is the beauty in decomposition. Spring is the transition of life and therefore inherently mawkish. I am drawn into Spring despite myself, never truly embracing it until made to. As children Summer is the default season of choice, more due to living in the perpetually immature machine that is school. Schedules are doled out, freedoms strictly boxed in. Summer is the time of release. Even if you prefer the cold and hate the heat, the Summer is still your season of freedom. But once free of these childhood shackles, you may explore other seasons. Summer no longer has to be the season of freedom. And Summer does not make the best lover. Summer has a cruel streak, a meanness to its love. Summer will claw at you while smiling, making you grimace and sweat. Summer will scratch you, both with a wicked humor and with rage. Often you cannot tell which is which until the burns and exhaustion arrive the following day. Summer sounds wonderful as an idea but can be too demanding a season. Spring's forceful hand is the attitudinal change of a high, not Summer's crash of living with the consequences. Spring makes you enjoy thin, yet exuberant music outside of your comfort zone. Summer is enduring it with the awareness of what that music is and isn't. Where Fall allows you to pull the crunch and colors of the world into you, Spring cuts you open and hangs your soul on trees and across fields. Fall lets you eat the world, Spring is when the world reclaims your being and makes a feast of you instead.

So today was that day of Spring for me. While Spring may have shown its hand yesterday there is something to the idea that it doesn't exist until it is experienced. Not in the holistic, faux-quantum manner of those that sell woo and bank on you understanding the words they sell even less than they do, but in the same way that it is a beautiful day somewhere but if you're not in that climate then it is not your day. Sometimes that climate is time zones away. Sometimes it is on the other side of a window. But what is clear is whether that climate is here or there. Today that weather was here for me and I went outside and walked through it. Spring spread its fingers like a spider's web across my path. I saw it and approached. I walked through those fingers and they dug into my body. Summer's fingers have nails but Spring's become ephemeral upon penetration. Those fingers raked through me and a different person came back.

It Follows review

It Follows is a strange and dense horror film. While I wouldn’t necessarily call it scary I would say that it’s terrifying. The plot is this: Jay and Hugh are dating and end up sleeping together. Jay is then knocked out by Hugh and when she comes to is tied to a chair where she’s told the concept of the movie. That is there is a creature. It knows where you are at all times and can look like anyone. It is always walking toward you and when it gets to you it will kill you. You can make it target someone else by sleeping with them but if it kills them before they pass it on it will go back to the previous target. Oh, and it’s invisible (but corporeal) to anyone who has not been a target. So on the surface you get a sexually transmitted slasher film. But there’s so much more to it.

Right away there is a reason given for a very common horror trope: that a killer is coming after teenagers and the virgin will be the one to survive. That alone is nice but there’s a lot more genre deconstruction happening in this film. On a surface level the production is a spot on homage to 70s and 80s slasher movies. The soundtrack is a nearly painful orchestration of simple synth music. The killer is often seen slowly plodding through the suburbs en route to its current victim. If you’re getting a strong Halloween vibe you would not be wrong. But I hate Halloween and really respect this movie.

That is because I find early slasher films exercises in form with nothing to offer in terms of content. They're more explorations on how to make movies in a different way than good films unto themselves. What It Follows does is picks up the construction of Halloween and the like and spends its creativity on deconstruction and metaphor. Like Babadook and depression, It Follows is an exploration of the emotional impact of rape. While Jay does consent to sex with Hugh (and tells the police and therefore the audience this explicitly in an interview) the metaphor still holds. While she consented to sex she didn’t consent to the entire situation that Hugh was forcing on her. She never agreed to be stalked by a killer, have her privacy taken away, and be constantly paranoid about how people she recognizes may hurt her at any moment. The sexual act that Hugh does to her is clearly something done to turn her into a victim.

As the movie goes on the It of the title appears in a number of guises and is often nude. It’s strange how infrequently nudity is used as non-titillating in horror films. Even in another horror deconstruction, Cabin in the Woods, the nudity is sexy and done as a nod to the juxtaposition of sex and gore. In It Follows the nudity itself is disquieting. The creature is not often a teen so the naked body is usually that of someone in their 40s. It’s also not the main victim. Jay isn’t topless during her sex scene so the sex act and the nudity are actually separated. Often times the nudity is used to make It seem more out of place and surreal. Sex is also used for similar purposes to make the viewer uncomfortable. We are aware that whomever she sleeps with will most likely die and therefore sex becomes a bargaining chip for time to think rather than an expression of affection or even pleasure. There’s a particularly disturbing scene in which Jay is on the run and desperate for time and distance from the creature. She comes out of some woods to a beach and sees three men on a boat just off shore. She strips down to her underwear and begins to swim out. The next shot is of her driving home, soaking wet. It was at that moment I felt what the movie had accomplished. It made me cringe at the thought of sex. What would normally be the sexist scene in a film, a bunch of attractive teenagers or 20-somethings having sex at the beach, became the point of anxiety and disgust. Instead of seeing sex and then being made to cringe at the slaughter ensuing after. It Follows made me cringe at the sex itself. Suddenly I realized how much in the head of Jay I was.

And that was incredible. At no point in Halloween have I ever felt like Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis). I doubt people feel like the main girl at most horror movies. People roll their eyes as the characters ignore red flags, people shout at the screen for the characters not to do things and how dumb they are. But in It Follows I was cringing and trying to look away during sex. I felt anxiety over how Jay was going to cope with the aftermath of her night with Hugh. I felt pissed off when Jay’s friend Paul keeps mooning over her even as she’s trying to put herself back together each day after not being able to sleep or trust people. That’s the amazing thing that It Follows did to me and why I love it as a movie. It takes a throwback slasher film, breaks it down into its constituent pieces, and puts it together with enough logic to make the pieces fit. But then it keeps going. It slows the killer and makes the threat long lasting to give the emotions more impact on the characters. It’s not about finally believing towards the end and then running for your life. It’s knowing the truth early on and dealing with convincing your friends why you’re different and why you can’t just go back to the way things were. It’s having the titular It always escapable but always there. Death is avoidable but inescapable. It looms by taking its time.

And it’s cruel. When first showing Jay the creature, now her creature, he says that it’s slow but not dumb. At first it seems to be dumb. It approaches in broad daylight from in front. It doesn’t hide and it doesn’t sneak. But it doesn’t have to. Over the course of the movie other behaviors emerge. Rather than always appearing as family members in order to walk right up it reserves these visages for moments when it seems sure that this will be a final kill. It scares the victim with strangers but in an act that I can only interpret as cruelty it aims to hurt you the most while wearing the face of people you trust. And its method of murder makes this all the more horrific when it’s finally revealed. So not only is the killing blow as awful as possible but in the interim it makes the victim wary of even the most well-meaning of friends and family.

The movie ends with Jay and Paul sharing the burden of the creature. Both can now see it and both can watch out for the other. But both also know that it is always coming, right behind them and in no rush to end their torment. They just have to find ways to deal with life while evading it.

On a scale of -5 to 5 I rate It Follows a 4.5