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ACF Middlebrow #8: A Quiet Place
The podcast’s back with something new. There’s a horror movie atop the American box office; it’s made more than $100 million. What’s rarer still is that it’s for adults. Rarest of all, it dramatizes American middle class parents’ terror of the uncertainty surrounding their kids’ lives and futures. John Krasinski stars and also directed this remarkable success; Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote the screenplay (with him) and produced; and Emily Blunt gives the kind of performance that wins Oscars, if the Academy had any judgment. So my friend Pete and I are here to show how the movie reflects on American society and the good that art can do, if but people pay attention to it!
We talk about the movie, without spoiling the surprises that make horror a pleasure, even if the experience isn’t simply pleasurable…
We also talk about parenting and how fears give rise to isolation, less socialization, less community help, and thus more need for control. Individualism is forever rising. The movie very deftly moves from this to a sacrifice-protection mode of discussing the ideals of parenthood that gives dignity even to helicopter parenting.
We also talk about the social consequences of lacking the art to address the matter publicly. People either claim they’re doing fine or they turn their fears into safety hysterias that never address the fundamental attitude to life, children, and community.
We also talk about the reasonable attitude in-between nostalgia and Progress, counting the things that have gotten better and those that have gotten worse and try to find some path to moderation.
Published in Podcasts
Youtube this morning popped up this video of Krasinski and Blunt on Graham Norton’s amusing talk show talking about the movie. He describes it as “basically a love letter to my kids. It’s about what would you do, as a parent, what extremes would you go to, to protect your kids.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmSTHI1UiBU
Good husband, it looks like-
Of my six children, four were born at home. Only the youngest has not watched me nursing siblings and giving them sustenance.
My older daughter was present and watching when her little sister was born.
Perhaps we Toders are just too weird as social outliers to make anything of this. Perhaps we are not, and your judgement is too broad and assertive to be entirely correct?
Regarding Bishop Barron’s commentary, I think that the important thing is not the silence but the sound. The family has to become monks and silent in order to be safe, but that safety is false, because life is not quiet and safe. Instead, “It’s sound!” The answer to the problem is Sound, not Silence.
Sound, really really loud loud sound is the answer. It makes you a target, vulnerable, and possibly dead, but it is also the only way to overcome the fearsome enemy.
Surely, a vast majority of births in America don’t happen at home, to say nothing else…
As for the silence issue, you’re of course right. The Bishop goes too far with his details, which are themselves noteworthy.