- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Language:
- Length:
- 83 minutes: Uncut
- Review Format:
- DVD
- Year:
- 2011
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Thriller
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- Married couple are secretly videotaped as cracks in their relationship surface. The wife vanishes but, has she left him, been kidnapped or is she dead?
- Themes:
- Alienation | Curative | Destiny | Emotional repression | Family | Identity | Individualism | Loneliness | Materialism | Narcissism | Nostalgia | Personal | Political | Political Correctness | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Solipsism | White culture | White privilege | White supremacy
- Similar to:
- Unknown
Who can we blame?
Summary: Caucasians watching each other for signs of humanity.
Movie about a White couple unaware that a fly-on-the-wall documentary is being made of their lives - a double reference to the fact that a narrative movie is being made and watched - simultaneously; making this a film about the process of movie-making, itself. (Interestingly, one gets the impression that this couple would watch a reality-tv show, but be horrified to actually be part of one.)
Essentially a horror-thriller about the emotional
repression and the mediated relationships pretending to be
personal ones that such repression inevitably engenders.
No-one can be trusted here and this is the ultimate horror
of White culture: Never knowing who others really are (or who
oneself really is) allied with the hope that the fact Whites rely on shared skin-pigmentation as
the essential criteria of friendship, rather than picking ones friends
rather more carefully.
But confusing the Personal with the Political, in liking what you know
and knowing what you like (& being fearful of stepping outside ones
limited social circle), always leads to the
emotional dissatisfaction and the resultant playing of vindictive mind-games (as here) - along with the paranoia of wanting to find someone else to blame for ones own problems.
A culture that is both “Safe” - because
risk-free - but unhappy because there is no
“Security” nor “Reliability” in friendships
based on political correctness instead of shared values.
This all comes from having so little effective grasp of
objective reality that living becomes dull and monotonous since
nothing much can ever be achieved by reality-evasion that
could form the basis of a worthwhile self-identity - apart
from miming the attitudes and behaviors of parents who were
similarly afflicted. A world Whites are too scared to leave and
too scared to live with: A gilded cage within which Whites feel
safe so long as they do not think rationally, possess emotions nor
experience sensations.
Such a world is all-too-easy to destroy - from within and
from without - because it is built on the quicksand of
White supremacy; leading Whites to believe there is no other way
of living - a literal kind of political snow-blindness. The strange,
zombie-like behavior of Whites in real-life
is mirrored here as they pursue each other for signs of such
thoughtcrimes as racial treason (& of
possessing emotions, generally); living in permanent fear of not being
accepted as White by those they believe already are (who, themselves,
try to intimidate other Whites because they live with the same dread).
White Identity, then, is determined by Appearance rather than Essence; by people acting the part of being accepted as their only means of feeling accepted.
It is hardly surprising Whites make such paranoiac dramas as this when they lack a deep inner life; forcing them to focus upon externalities and superficies - with few psychological resources to effectively prevent this from ever happening to themselves or their inevitably-unfledged offspring.
Ultimately, this is a movie about a White social norm: Rigid
social conformity to White supremacy. There is little character arcing because when we first meet
them, the characters are already solipsistic and indifferent to their
own suffering; preferring to use it, instead, as the existential basis
of their existence. There is no change from Sanity to Madness, but from implicit White norms to
explicit madness. The leading character was odd to begin with (as
was Jack Nicholson in The Shining); meaning Whites
conflate Normal with Sane and poker faces as the basis of effective personal relationships.
Because there is no real story here, the plot needs to be good - and it
is - but there is no dramatic analysis as to why events happen: The
audience is simply required to accept what happens. Why the
marriage at the center of this movie is falling apart is not addressed,
nor is the fact that Whites so often feel they are married to
strangers; hence, their exorbitantly-high
divorce rates. And why, politically, these facts would make Whites so easy to exploit in the way that the White psychopath does here.
An underwritten drama, with weak characterization that the
very good actors cannot completely overcome. However, the film is
nicely-understated and visually restrained, with the
occasional and welcome flash of macabre humor.
No comments:
Post a Comment