Heroism Reviews Alpha: A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place was a movie that illustrates that while poor communication can kill, talk is cheap when it comes to Love.

We could A Quiet Place, John Krasinski's directoral debut, "Patriarchy: The Movie"

Much like M. Night Shyamalan's Signs (a film much improved by the "It's Demons, Not UFOs" fan threory) the story is less (or not at all) about some alien invasion, but about a family dealing with a crisis in stressful times. Of course this also means, that the more you're trying to figure out a apocalypse of blind aliens who track people by sound, the less you're paying attention to the wrong things.

Speaking of wrong things that want you to pay attention to them, the narcissitsic Queens of Not Understanding a Damned Thing over at The Mary Sue ("Putting the Dumb in Fandom!") tried to make this about of all things, illegal immigration in a cheap play for reaping undeserved pathos, cleaning like a clickbait remora to a recent film.

Ooh, scared of violence at the hands in your home country as it's invaded by aliens* who degrade the technology level wherever they go? ... Notice how my reversal of who doesn't belong in rural Pennsylvania works as the better analogy than your "Drumpf's America"? I'm just gonna... leave that piping hot take on the windowsill to cool a bit.

And now that technology (and population) are reduced to minimums, we have the core of the family as it's appeared since... the Ice Age. A man, a patriarch, guiding and protecting his mate and children.

Amid the hardscrabble agrarian life in silence, Lee Abbot (Krasinski) mourns the loss of his youngest, prepares for the arrival of a new child, and tries to guide his son & daughter in their roles in the family. He maintains the little machinery left. He struggles to repair his deaf daughter's hearing aid. He monitors communications for signs of life. He shows his son a waterfall where the ambient natural noise is enough to confuse the predators.

Wife Evelyn ((huh. Eve) Emily Blunt) is now literally barefoot & pregnant, both parent's taking on the ur-examples of their roles in a primital, isolated nuclear family. Men gather resources, women process. And there's little variance in that theme around the world.

Speaking of which, here's "People unclear on the concept: Part Deux"

Within the framework of the film, you'd had an extinction-level event. You've removed 90% of (at least the American) population and nobody else seems intent on claiming the territory. There's no wlfare state or Roujin Z-style robots to take care of people who will, inevitably, age and tire. Resources must be gathered & processed, or that pesky little thing called 'starvation' happens.

Key to doing that is having access to labor, in the form of new little humans called children that (if they don't play with noisy toy space shuttles) eventually become large, strong adults who can gather & process even more recources. Fascinating how that works, doesn't it, kids? You eventually multiply them into an entire thing we call a "community"; I suggest starting with "bands" then moving up to "tribes".

The Father explicitly tells his son Marcus (Noah Jupe (Well, signs it. It's almost all ASL in this film.)) it's his duty to protect and care for his Mother when he's gone. The parents are doing their best to prepare their children for a harsh real world that won't be staved off by going to college for 7 years.

Daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) blames herself for the death of her youngest brother and remains convinced that her father no longer loves her. In failing at the film's opening scene as what was essentially another symbolic role, that of babysitter, she's also set up for an allegorical theme of pubescent alienation as well.

And yet her father pressures her to make use of the cochlear implant hearing aids he's repairing. She fails (as women often do) in understanding that for men, love is expressed not so often through sweet nothings (which often enough, mean just thhat, nothing) or overpriced cards, but through the daily actions of dedicating oneself to the daily grind. There's a reason why we say "Labor of Love". And that love is truer in the way men fix, women clean.

And this is also reflected in the love you show yourself by working and cleaning and controlling the chaos around you.

At the film's intense climax, full of children in peril, mothers giving birth and snarling aliens on the prowl, a wounded Lee signs to his daughter that he never stopped loving her, just as he prepares to make the ultimate fatherly sacrifice. But even in doing so, he's secured the key to his tribe's survival.

A Quiet Place is an intense protrayal of that vulnerable, primevil family that first tamed the hostile land around it, and as such a protrayal, reminds us of not just how, but why the family unit works.

*And the Aliens are brown. Stick that postmodernist deconsrtuction in your Film Theory and smoke it.