elias isquith

@eliasisquith.blog

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a guy with a poodle and a blog. philly sports fan. jew-ish. https://www.necessaryfictions.blog/ / https://letterboxd.com/eisquith

António de Oliveira Salazar
the spanish team celebrates their world cup victory in the center while president trump awkwardly stands on the right side of the scrum smiling at the camera
And if you really listen, the way Wyck is begging Tom to, you can hear the show’s entire argument hiding inside Wyck’s monster story. The thing that has turned Widow’s Bay into a clearinghouse of sea hags and killer clowns and satanic rites isn’t a curse or a demon. It’s guilt.
In the show’s moments of comic relief, Tom rails against his community’s fatalism, complacency, and self-pity — he’s not wrong. (He’s just an asshole.) This is the show’s sharpest and least fashionable idea. The conventional version of this story — the inherited-trauma register that ran prestige TV for a decade — would locate its wisdom in the naming: surface the buried wound, feel the repressed guilt, sit in that for a moment. But Widow’s Bay complicates this admonition. In ways they’ll joke about and in deeper ways that shape their entire lives, the people of Widow’s Bay know they’re the beneficiaries of an absurdly long history of atrocity and injustice. But that hasn’t brought wisdom. And it hasn’t brought healing, either.
To quote specifically: “The officer who is called to act on this superior ground, does indeed risk himself on the justice of the controlling powers of the Constitution, and his station makes it his duty to incur the risk.” “It is incumbent on those only who accept of great charges, to risk themselves on great occasions, when the safety of the nation, or some of its very high interests are at stake.” “[T]he good officer is bound to draw it at his own peril, and throw himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.”
Yet even if this “Darwinian” interpretation of life is the engine of the film, I think it’s merely the beginning — and not the endpoint — of the conversation Cronenberg wants to inspire. Yes, life is red in tooth and claw; and all those who survive today are the descendants, however distant, of people who did things in the past for their own survival that would make their genetic inheritors blush. To Cronenberg, that’s a given. What’s more interesting to him is how we, as individuals and as societies, take that stubborn and ugly truth about survival and either repress it or transmute it into something we find more palatable. What happens when the facts before us are so severe, so ugly, and so undeniable that they threaten to overwhelm our capacity to rationalize and accept? What happens when the product of the “survival of the fittest” isn’t an abstraction but a real-life man, covered in the blood of those he’s just maimed and pulverized, standing before us and asking again for the love and comfort we once gave so freely? That’s the question that has Edie praying over her meatloaf in the film’s final scene. It’s a question that, ultimately, only she can answer. But it’s a question that, in some form or another, and whether we want to admit it or not, structures the life of anyone lucky enough to be born into comfort and peace.
“There is no document of civilization,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The good coffee and the front-page hero and the sleeping child who has been promised there are no monsters all sit on top of the barbarism that keeps them safe, and the price of keeping the document intact is that you never turn it over. But what happened at the diner, and the revelations that followed, did not just turn that document over; it made that hideous underside the only thing Edie could see. During the film’s final scene, as she readies herself to make eye contact with Tom one more time, one wonders who is more terrified of what she’ll find: Edie, Tom, or the audience. That, of course, is when Cronenberg cuts to black.