Beauty In The Beast

In A Violent Nature has been described as an “ambient horror film” because, I assume, the makers wanted it to fail. Terrence Malick, this is not. If it were, this movie would have sea turtles, and those sea turtles would have chainsaws. Some movies are afraid of their own greatness.

It does have a Bill Brysonsque jaunt through the Ontario woods, following (mostly) behind an awakened hulk of the Jason Voorhees ilk named Johnny. This “slow” killer seeks something taken from him and will go through every camper’s internal organs to get it back. It’s a tale as old as time.
Mayhem ensues, punctuated by sigh-inducing birdsong and the rustle of soon-to-be blood-splattered underbush. It gets particularly gnarly for the yoga practitioner. I won’t ruin it because I myself am not a monster, but that scene provided something I had never seen before, and I’ve seen a fair amount of horror movies. So, good on them. This movie is the bold act that brings people together, the tattooed and turtlenecked alike.

Here’s the thing: this is a great idea, executed with care and a love of slow cinema and entrails. That’s an exciting combination worth exploring, but I never got the sense the filmmakers had a handle on their point. Was this a deconstruction of ’70s & ’80s slasher films, where awkward pacing resulting from threadbare plotting and characterization is interrupted by sex and violence? Putting aside Malick, was it more a tribute to Ozu’s pillow shots — those languid moments of trees and sun demarcating tumultuous lives — except extrapolated to uncomfortable length, to such a degree the couple next to me kept asking to speed things up? Or is it a Herzogian contemplation of an environment we think belongs to us but whose true purpose is to steamroll us out of existence?

OR Is it finally the facially different villain’s moment in the sun, one where the connection disability and horror share as strange bedfellows can be meaningfully dissected as a scalpel to a thickened heart?

By placing us in the POV of the murderer who, it is conveyed, was mentally challenged, bullied, and ultimately killed for being simply alive, we get a crumb of this, and the film gives over the lion’s share of its running time to our gnawing on this crumb. Crumbs, by the by, are the hallmark of disability representation in the modern age (well, all the ages, but that essay would surpass Proustian reading lengths). If going down this thorny path wasn’t the filmmaker’s intention, that’s all good. I don’t need my childhood (or my adolescence, or adulthood, for that matter) politicized in art to be happy. Sometimes, exploding heads suffice.
It was brought up, though, so hold onto your squibs. Think of it as my vengeance for those bullied brains by the summer camp of misguided movies.

A character mentions ableism around a campfire, making me sit in my comfy AMC recliner. However, that character’s point about the misuse of language gets rejected, which, to my mind, does the same thing the world did to Johnny. No wonder these slashers slash; they can’t cut it with today’s Diversity and Inclusion watchdogs.

Who can blame Johnny for taking an electric wood splitter to someone’s skull? Life is unforgiving without accessibility, camaraderie, and, above all, fundamental human rights, don’t you know?

Yes, vengeance is ours, even if we tell ourselves it’s only a movie.

Then I stop myself because it’s never “only a movie.”.

I want to be better than this — not the movie, but the person who wants others to suffer because I feel alienated and desire them to hurt my hurts. My parents raised me better, and my teachers succeeded in exorcising that demon when I was in high school. My blood became clean of its Columbine levels of rage, replaced by an inner serenity. I have to be reminded it’s there, sometimes, but that it is there at all is a miracle of education, of nurture over nature. It’s as though Johnny from In A Violent Nature went out the back door while I went out the front.

In the final analysis, no one should use art as revenge. Still, there is a conflict there with horror because its deepest pleasure is experiencing the sublimely hideous but getting away with our souls and bodies intact. Safe escape when the theater lights go up is especially poignant for those who have experienced exclusion through disability — and I speak from experience — because the universe troubles us with taking the horror we survived daily home with us. I wondered about Johnny’s silent pain during our stroll, but the movie never dared let him speak for himself. That’s a disturbing idea, but, as happens time and again, the voiceless never get a word in and let their violent actions do the talking.

Victor Miller, the writer of the original Friday the 13th, balked at the notion that Jason Voorhees would return from the dead in the sequels to wreak havoc on sexy campers. Jason, at the bottom of Crystal Lake, was a victim. His objection was overruled, film after film, and the franchise entered into legend as an extended exercise in watching the villain “triumph” by offing kids creatively (see: part seven’s classic moment involving a sleeping bag and a tree trunk for the most excellent evidence). The paying audience would cheer this on, and I admit it gave me vicarious satisfaction to run with the pack. It quieted the reptilian brain stem’s primordial reach for power and bloodletting. Of course, I would awaken the next day fresh as a daisy with no desire to kill or be killed. That is the great therapeutic magic trick the movies have pulled for over a century. Life on the screen is us, but it isn’t, and that distance provides decompression valve. We’d be much happier if only we could embrace this. Too many actual “sleeping bag with a scared person being slammed against a tree” scenes dominate our fractured reality.

This may be In A Violent Year’s raison d’être, even if the waters are too bloodied by detached pretension to see it. We need demons to remind us of our better angels. There is no peaceful walk in the woods without the woods offering up an occasional sacrifice. Some may say, “I’m glad it isn’t me,” but it is. We are the killer and the killed, though if I’ve learned anything from being painfully alive, we‘re the monster, but we can transcend it.