Human Connection and the Pattern of Life in Netflix’s “Maniac”

Is there any reason we should expect not to be alone?

Netflix’s “Maniac” (with Emma Stone and Jonah Hill) seems all about that question.

Human’s crave connection. We’ll do anything for it or an artificial form of it. Give us online video-games, and we will talk with strangers all over the world. Give us a good book and we will get connected with fictional characters. Construct a coffee-shop and we will go to it to sit near people even when we damn well know we can make our own coffee at home. At our core is a desire to be with and among people (yes even us introverts).

But what if this connection is illogical?

If the origin of the universe is chaos, should we expect to discover a pattern that may lead us to connection? Or what if as Owen (Hill) insists “our brains are just computers that make our life stories make sense”? Should we expect to find meaning in connection?

“You were the only one who knew all my stories. You are the only one who knew about mom.”

Every significant character in this show has faced grievous relational loss. Death, severance, romantic falling outs, abuse… all have felt the weight of a disrupt or deformity of relationship. And all the main character’s in “Maniac” have felt what it is to lose someone.

“Sometimes people leave and we don’t know why.”

The better part of half the show is watching these characters face life while trying to stuff that enigma in their back-pocket. All of them cope with something, with drugs, with despair, with masturbation, with their life’s work. Some want a fix, and some have conceded hopelessly to there not being a fix able to take their pain away.

But this show is eccentric. It has a whimsical humor to it that seems okay to exist alongside its profound melancholy.

“The pattern is the pattern.”

There are plenty of explanations for certain occurrences in the show, but at the same time, explanations aren’t good enough. Just because we can explain why something has occurred does not mean that we can give that something meaning. While two wires getting soldered together may explain why two people’s consciences temporarily interacted with each other’s, it does not tell those two what they are now to do given what has occurred… or why these two so coincidentally, so fortunately, so perfectly managed to have this happen to them.

An experiment started in the hopes of curing people’s pain once and for all, but no pain was cured. Yet in the process, connection was found for several of these lost and lonely people.  Connection doesn’t cure pain, but it does make it easier to live with. In a strange sort of way, the experiment worked, but not in the way that was intended.

Loss can make everything feel random and meaningless. Loneliness can compound our despair and make life seem fundamentally incoherent. But in “Maniac,” and in reality, human connection and re-connection is a critical part of the pattern.

We need people to know our losses. We need people to fight for us. We need people to help us cultivate hope. We need friends to help us make sense of all this.

“Annie, why are you here?” “Because I’m your friend. And that’s what friends do.”

A Disease Worse Than Death: A Review of “It Comes at Night”

The modern horror genre often does not leave much up to the imagination when it comes to stirring up fear in its viewers. Whether it be a crazed killer with a machete, a grotesque demonic figure, or a flesh-craving alien, most pop-horror films leave you only a short amount of time until you can see in vivid detail what is wrong and who or what is committing that wrong. Unlike most of these films, Trey Edward Shults’ “It Comes at Night” leaves almost everything up to the imagination, and it is every bit as terrifying  as most pop-horror films without relying on jump-scares to rattle its audience.

The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic world with a disease which is left intentionally vague besides a few details: it is spread through touch and it comes at night. The opening sequences involve the main protagonists—a husband and wife and their son—preparing to euthanize the plagued grandfather of their family. We are told there are probably only a handful of people left in the world, and that those remaining have turned violent and desperate for survival. This family does not take any extra risks of their own survival as evidenced by there only being one way in and out of their carefully boarded-up home. It’s not long before there’s a bump in the night, and something is found lurking in their house. It turns out to be a reasonable and likable man trying to find water for his family. The intruder tells them that his family is 50 miles away and in desperate need of food and water, but something still seems off. Something always seems off in this film—just *off* enough to get under your skin.

From the very beginning til the very end of the film, the fear of the unknown is at the center. There are no ghosts or demons to buffer this fundamentally human fear instead we are left to experience each aching moment of paranoia that these protagonists must deal with in their frightening world.

Many techniques are utilized throughout the film to help produce an atmosphere just haunting enough to leave you emotionally shaken and deeply confused: eerie lighting, visual illusions, maddening dream sequences, oddly-paced dialogue, and claustrophobic, alternating aspect ratios . This is not your normal pop-horror film. You do not get jump-scares—you get dread. You do not get a wholly evil villain—you get people like yourself. You do not get a disturbing answer as much as you get a horrifying silence.

This fear of the unknown is everywhere in this film and in so much of our world today: in strangers, in the dark, in the disease, and in death. There is a real threat though, and it is not a film that pretends there is an easy solution. Distrust, fear, anxiety, and paranoia are understandable responses to the worlds in which we and these protagonists live, but this horror film does not let you naively assume that “survival of the fittest” is an easy pill to swallow. Instead it makes you slowly choke on it. You can board up your house and live in defensive isolation hoping for the extinction of everyone else, but what happens when those inside start to show signs of not only an external disease but of an internal and even more heinous disease?

Self-preservation may get you an extra day or month or year in a diseased world, but it is hard to imagine a life without hospitality, trust, vulnerability, or friendship—however costly these things may be. Is it the length or quality of our lives that matter? “It Comes at Night” simultaneously rejects a sentimental altruism or a glorified egoism. Each character’s decisions come at the expense of their physical life or their own soul. Hospitality may bring a disease inside your home, but Xenophobia may reveal an even more serious disease emerging from within your own house.

There is very little redemption within the universe of this film. In a diseased world, everything dies, and that darkness is coming for each and every one of us. Thankfully from a Christian perspective, the disease doesn’t have the final say. The words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew have been ringing in my head since I watched the film’s sober ending, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” I realize this must bear eternity in mind with the temporal, yet this film has no sense of eternity or afterlife. All that is is what will be and nothing else. Bodies are burned, and no funerals are given.  Death is the end of all things in this film, and it’s everywhere. Without a promise of a resurrection or a world fully restored in the life to come, open doors, open tables, or even open hearts are a risk many may deem not worthy of being taken in light of death’s creeping imminence. 

This film doesn’t pull any punches in revealing the deep fear and anxiety many of us have in making the most of our fragile, little lives especially as it is expressed through humanity’s neurotic control-issues and distrust of the unknown. But in turning in on ourselves and turning toward our own individual survival, we see that these characters are perhaps just as sick as those outside their house despite having much more than most in their world. Ironically, in pursuit of a full life, they had been losing theirs all along. 

“It Comes at Night” is a despairing film but uses that despair to tell us something. Its observations on humanity, survival, and inhospitality hit deeply. And seems to pound its audience with a question repeatedly from beginning til end and even on the car ride home:

Is avoiding what is in the darkness for more life and less love better than embracing what is in the darkness for more love and less life?

 

Where Our Fears Reside

It’s Halloween again. A holiday with a lot of baggage, yet a holiday that allows us to all get together and experience fear together without being frowned upon.

There are few things that I love more than getting together with a couple friends and watching a horror film or wandering through a haunted attraction. There is something to experiencing a common fear with them and processing it together after the fact. Sometimes we need to be able to point at something common and say out-loud, “That scared the hell out of me.” Too often are we left to process our fears in the isolating darkness of our own hearts and minds.

Ever since I was in middle-school, I have always been drawn towards darker films and books. I could not have placed a finger on why at the time, besides maybe just experiencing something curious. But if I would have to guess now, I think I enjoyed them because I found an ironic solace in the darkness of these stories. Stephen King once wrote that, “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” And for me, knowing someone has experienced something painful enough to want to put it into story, is actually surprisingly consoling.  It makes me feel connected. It reminds me that I am not alone in my own particular terrors.

It is no surprise that Mr. King often uses the scary clowns, vicious dogs, demonic shopkeepers, and reanimated corpses as means to really discuss the true horrors. In almost all of King’s books are characters with deeply human stories that often involve trauma, abuse, loneliness, and other human afflictions, and to be honest, these characters’ stories are far scarier a thing than the more tangible nightmares. And one of King’s best gifts is helping his readers enter into these character’s stories while simultaneously not letting them avoid their own stories in the process. King forces me to deal with my own horrors if I am to really understand the horrors of his characters.

I do not think it is any surprise that when I have talked to many of my friends who have been hiding secrets their whole lives to discover that often they have some connection to the horror genre. For many of us, including myself, the horror genre has been a way to help alleviate the anxieties of being alone with our fears. Watching Sigourney Weaver’s character alone in space with a terrifying Xenomorph in “Alien” let me understand that isolation and the fear of never getting help is a real and legitimate fear. Watching “The Babadook” let me understand (to a certain degree) the horror of losing someone you love and having to deal with a sadness that may never go away in this life (whatever the sadness may have originated from). And reading Stephen King’s “It” reminded me that the horrors in our past and present are in need of being addressed together in community.

The horror genre surely has a lot of garbage within it, no doubt, but horror done right can be a great gift to its viewers. And for many of us, it has allowed our own private fears to escape the festering context of our own hearts and minds. Like a loud lament inviting others to bring their own laments with them, good horror can invite us to bring your own fears to the surface and to hopefully enter them into a larger, more communal context.