Five ways of looking at A Quiet Place
Once upon a time, I minored in film studies and taught film courses. Heck, I even watched movies sometimes. That was before I had kids, entered middle age, and became perpetually tired and short on leisure time. And what’s up with all the crappy kids’ movies, anyway? Princess this, superhero that! GAH!
Thusly, the magic of cinema got rather lost in the shuffle. But something happened when “A Quiet Place” came out; one night, I grabbed my 13-year-old and we went to the movies, just like that. I’m so glad we did.
Films always reflect what’s going on in society during their time of production, but some capture the zeitgeist so brilliantly, with such rich layers of meaning, that they make film nerds like me positively giddy. “A Quiet Place,” about a family that evades hungry murderous aliens by staying almost entirely silent, is one of those films.
Tech and Dis/ability
In “A Quiet Place,” the eldest daughter in the family is deaf, but this isn’t a weakness: her family’s knowledge of sign language is one of the main reasons they’ve survived for so long, and in the end, she uses her cochlear implant to figure out how to defeat the aliens. Her father’s slavish devotion to researching the device and tinkering with its broken parts reflects the kind of hope and faith we (for better or worse) have in tech innovations. The arrival of voice-activated robot speakers like Amazon’s Echo, for example, has revolutionized life for the blind, who are now able to navigate the internet on their own at a reasonable (rather than agonizingly glacial) pace. Since the arrival of iPads, more and more stories are emerging about the astounding change the devices can bring about in communication for the autistic. The fight to level the playing field is moving faster.
#MeToo
While “A Quiet Place” is about a nuclear family (mum, dad, daughter,
son), and the father is a pillar of strength throughout, the film belongs to the mother and daughter. It is they who survive the silence and then blow things open with screams and gunshots and screeching feedback slammed into a microphone turned up as far as it can go. The final shot is them, weapons in hand, ready to finally win the battle.
Climate change
The film’s postapocalyptic landscape is an uncomfortable reminder that we’re killing our habitat, and fast approaching a time when there will be few of us left. Faced with this kind of bleak and dangerous world, the mother asks the father, “Who are we if we can’t protect them?” It’s a question the film is also asking us: who are we if we can’t protect our children? What kind of world are we leaving them? The father realizes that he must sacrifice himself to save his kids, while we recoil at the slightest sacrifice for sustainability.
Digital distraction
The meteoric rise of Netflix is challenging the dominance of big screen movies. And why not? Who wants to leave the house and pay through the nose to see something on the big screen when we can stay home and watch hundreds of movies for 12 bucks a month? Why bother? “A Quiet Place” answers this question in its title alone: sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers, we’re listening so hard to the slightest sounds in this space — this quiet place — and we are paying attention. Netflix is enmeshed with real life — the phone ringing, the dishwasher being loaded, the kids
getting out of bed — and we’re addicted to all manner of distracting stimuli through our phones, but film theatres are reserved for singular, uninterrupted focus, which is the only way to really get the most out of anything. And God, it feels good. Who would have thought that one of the best arguments for the ongoing importance of quality, big-screen film would be that it forces us to sit still and focus on one thing for 90 minutes?
Surveillance culture
At one point in the movie, the son flinches over a small sound and agonizes, “They’re listening! They’ll hear us!” The family fights a losing battle, trying to remain undetected by the aliens for hundreds of days on end; silence is the only safety, but it’s so hard to maintain. It’s a dark parallel to draw, but it’s there: Facebook sold our data to a company that undermines democratic elections. Corporations are making billions by listening to our online lives (Facebook is only one example), but how do we avoid digital surveillance when modern life necessitates going online? What happens to Western culture when democracy can be so easily high jacked?
Don’t let the scary alien monsters fool you: this is a movie about our lives right now.