As I write this, many of my friends are suffering in Texas and other parts of the States. An epic storm has left them with no electricity. Pipes are bursting. Warming centers are scarce. Some people are dying, and others are in grave danger.
It’s a horrifying and despiriting moment — and a good reminder of the fact that climate change can and does result in more extreme weather, not that many people are yet willing to admit it. It feeds perfectly into the anxiety of the times we find ourselves in.
Watching horror movies in anxious times may sound counterintuitive, but I personally find it helpful, and I’m not the only one. So it’s a funny kind of coincidence that I recently sat down and watched Bryan Bertino’s critically acclaimed new film, The Dark and the Wicked. Bertino is from Texas, and the chilling story that he tells here is also set in Texas — rural Texas, to be precise, where the land is bereft of neighbors for miles and supposedly extinct wolves howl at night.
Much like David Lynch, Bryan Bertino, who debuted with 2008’s terrifying “The Strangers,” is carrying on his own cultural dialogue with American society and the malevolent beings that haunt it.
And while “The Dark and the Wicked” is a departure from the likes of “The Strangers” due to the former’s reliance on supernatural events to drive the plot along, both movies share a profound similarity, because they are focused on the random nature of monsters. In both films, the evil that stalks the victims conceals its purpose, or else has no use for a purpose to begin with. It contains no grand soliloquy. It simply is.
Bertino is also focused on isolation, on wide open spaces, places on the map where help won’t find you in time, assuming it ever came looking. This strikes at general societal atomization — aided greatly by people prioritizing online interactions and social media, speeded up by the pandemic — not to mention the dismantling of our old social contracts. As we grow more distant from each other and from the institutions we’re used to rallying around, we grow more vulnerable. Rugged individualism can only take us so far. In fact, it can take us straight toward a dead end, if we don’t learn to balance it out against other forces that drive us.
The cinematic language of Bertino is, perhaps, not very comforting in today’s climate — and I mean that both literally and figuratively — but it’s also a good jumping-off point to taking serious action against the things that ail us. We can’t afford to be picked off one by one by our own demons. We need new social contracts and stronger horizontal bonds in our communities. And we need to manage our anxieties about each other and this nation as a whole.
As someone who was privileged and lucky enough to become American by choice, I have always been fascinated by his country’s dialogue with itself and the many political and artistic forms it takes. How it can be cold and nihilist, but also tender and profound. And while Bertino’s films are dark and unforgiving, the reason they work has to do with his tenderness toward his characters, making the viewer care about their fate.
You don’t always win against the monster, certainly not in every round. But you can be brave, and you can go out trying. There is always going to be redemption in that, especially in the off-kilter times we find ourselves living in.
Image credit: NOAA
