A Quiet Place for me

In a recent post  I commented and pointed to three articles about the movie "A Quiet Place" (Bishop Barron, White, and  Scalia).

Since then I have seen the movie, and want to write a few paragraphs about it in light of these other writers.

Bishop Barron, in addition to his previously linked article has a podcast discussing the movie (it runs about 1/2 hr).

White says of a Quiet Place:

there’s an Internet meme positing that the unexceptional horror movie might just be significant

Bishop Barron refers to it as:

 John Krasinski’s new thriller

And Scalia echoes the view of Barron, that the movie is a thriller and not a horror film.  I go with Scalia and Barron on this, and oppose White's take that it is a horror film.

Scalia sees in Barron's write up an allegory involving the silencing of speech.

White writes:

This is especially sad in the case of A Quiet Place, which merely updates the crude manipulation of The Blair Witch Project and never asks audiences to consider the narrative’s themes of procreation and self-defense.

This film has much more in common with World War Z, I am Legend and Warm Bodies, than it has with The Blair Witch Project.

It is a movie about a family living in horrifying and dire times.

Scalia begins with Zuckerberg's testimony about suppressing wrong and unapproved speech (or more accurately, suppressing written words) before it is published.  She then writes:

Preventing hateful speech before it is uttered (or published) creates an illusion of comity—we don’t see the hate anymore, so it must not exist! It still does, though, and—as with our hidden sun—each time it comes out of hiding, the hatred will seem that much more vivid and febrile.

But more importantly than the hate remaining and being very real is the very real possibility that normal speech will be classified as hate speech.

Before the USA passed the hate-crimes legislation, a Catholic Priest in Canada was arrested and charged with hate speech for reading aloud from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  That should have been a warning to the USA of the dangerous path it was going down, but that warning went unheeded.

The movie, A Quiet Place, shows a family who remains alive, loving and growing in the presence of terrible forces by keeping silent.

This is similar to some descriptions of the Church in times past in this country where Catholics strove to blend in, to be accepted.

My dad taught me to never make the sign of the cross at public gatherings.  I'm pretty sure he learned this while in the army during WWII.  But in our home, and in other family homes we always made the sign of the cross whenever we prayed.

Silence in the face of terrible forces is also the motif in WorldWarZ,  where after only a few seconds following being bitten by a zombie, a person becomes another zombie and starts a crazed assault on healthy non-zombies.

This is very similar to the gay marriage conversion observed all over the western world in the last decade or so.  It is exemplified by the exchange between Sen Booker of NJ and Mike Pompeo at his confirmation hearing for Secretary of State.

Sen Booker is the zombie in a crazed assault on a healthy man trying to get him, and label his speech and attitude as one of hate.  This is what Zuckerberg was talking of suppressing through AI.

The dire and terrible times are upon us.

A Quiet Place is a very good movie and you should see it.