Something that I have gleaned from watching a lot of movies is that human beings have nostalgia for the culture of their youth. It is an entirely normal thing to be convinced that the movies that came out, the music that was around, and the games that were played were some of the best. It has dawned on me that I am an exception to this rule. Indeed, looking back at American culture over a long period of time, I’m pretty sure my teenage years 1996-2006 were the nadir of American culture. It was a time of turnover in the culture, when the last taboos of obscenity and language were being violated in ever increasing numbers, when alternative music devolved into emo/grunge/nu metal, when pop music corporatized itself into boy bands. When my parents were teenagers, they had The Beatles. I had Eminem. (I suppose I could have felt different if I had HBO back then, but I didn’t). The worst part though is what happened to the horror genre in movies. The breakdown of standards concerning violence in movies (thx Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tarantino’s Kill Bill) led to a free for all that culminated in what was being called “torture porn.” It seemed like all the creativity in the genre was focused on finding new and excruciating ways to mutilate, dismember, and (hopefully) kill characters.
Enough time has passed that we can perhaps look back at that time as a time of puberty, when you drank way too much just so you could know what it was like, but now that you are older, and have already done it, you don’t need to do it again. The horror genre in the last decade has revitalized itself. Since all the taboos as to violence have been broken many times over, creators of good horror films have needed to become creative once again as to how to scare us. And step up they have, none more so than the writer/director Ari Aster. His previous movies include Hereditary and Midsommar. And now here is Beau is Afraid. It is a three hour long odyssey and I spent a majority of its time traumatized.
There is a fundamental difference between the films of Ari Aster and the awful horror movies of my youth. I am convinced that the only way one can watch Saw or its many sequels is to detach themselves from the movie and consider it without any empathy or sympathy, much like someone would watch a geek show at the circus (a thing where a homeless man would bite the heads off of chickens, or so I’m told). In contrast, although Ari Aster’s films have strong horror elements (there is some type of witch’s coven in Hereditary and a forest cult in Midsommar), it is impossible to not be drawn into the story and the characters. Watching Hereditary, the most memorable scene takes place at the dinner table and involves Toni Collete yelling at her son. Toni Collette isn’t possessed in this scene. It’s all raw earned emotion. In Midsommar, there is a scene that may well be placed in the dictionary as the ultimate example of catharsis. A young woman discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her. The other women in the community help her get it all out. The scene ends with them all screaming together in a barn.
The screening I attended of Beau if Afraid involved a question and answer session with Ari Aster. In this session, our writer/director described Beau is Afraid as a comedy. If it is a comedy, it is much like the “comedies” of Martin Scorsese. I'm thinking particularly of After Hours. Scorsese’s notion of humor was to fling as many terrible things as possible upon an entirely innocent man (it’s a great movie, I recommend it). Beau is Afraid is like that, but the things that happen to Beau are much worse.
Beau is played by Joaquin Phoenix. He lives in a nightmare city, on a block full of urban terror. The neighbors accuse him of playing loud music when he is not playing any music. Grotesque graffiti lines the walls. Crazy, half-deranged people, some of them presently being violent, inhabit his street. And they are not going away. They inhabit his street. When Beau ventures out of his home to the corner deli, this horde of deranged people take the opportunity to break into Beau’s apartment where they party all night long and destroy the place.
This is in the first twenty minutes of the movie. What is extraordinary about Beau is Afraid is that the preceding paragraph is not a dream. That is, at no point does Beau wake up and realize that some of the above did not happen. Nor does the above seem to be some sort of psychological condition within Beau, wherein the crazy people are the delusions of a schizophrenic or agoraphobic. There is no point in the story where someone shakes Beau and tells him that he’s imagining all of this crazy shit. It is happening. There really is a serial killer known as the naked stabber, a deranged man that runs around town naked stabbing people. He stabs Beau. He does. That is why Beau is walking around with bandages for the next two thirds of the movie. And the bathtub scene. Apparently that too is real.
Ari Aster brings a technical mastery to what is being shown. The movie is composed of long shots with incredible framing of background detail and extras. The sound design is doing funky things too. All of it combines into this phantasmagorical hellscape. The scary things aren’t vampires or zombies. They are things that are familiar to you: your mother, the police, drugs, sex, your therapist, teenage girls. In a flashback, Beau’s mother tells him that he inherited a particular thing from his father which is arguably the worst possible thing a mother could say to a son. Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this movie. Martin Scorsese wrote the forward for the Midsommar DVD box set. If nothing else can be said, Ari Aster is an excellent filmmaker.
It must take an extraordinary amount of confidence/resolve for a movie to show what it is showing and not blink. To not, at some point say, okay I’m drawing the line here, and that last part was just for fun. But as far as I can tell, this happens just once and it happens only to make things worse, not better, and that is in the last twenty minutes of the movie. If I had one qualm about the movie is that I would take away that one blink and see where the movie goes without it. This is a movie like Under the Silver Lake that I felt was within reach of being perfect if only it could have reworked some of its scenes.
At the screening I asked Ari Aster the following questions.
What did you mother think of this movie?
Did she think it was funny?
Once you see it, ask me how he responded.
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