58: When the Metaphor Is The Only Point
Most of the reviews I've been seeing for Disney/Pixar's newest movie Elemental have been closely aligned with each other: the movie is beautiful, but its plot is lacking. Elemental worked on me, in that it made me emotional despite the fact that I could see the resolutions for each plot thread and character arc coming from half a movie away. The film expresses itself beautifully, though none of those expressions are particularly surprising, at least in terms of plot or themes. The film is a series of metaphors, each one embodied by different expressions of the four basic ("classical") elements of air, fire, water, and earth. Those metaphors are intuitively easy ("fire and water don't mix!"), but once they've been expressed, there's not much else for the movie to do, other than to string along additional metaphors in the hopes that they'll build a more substantial story.
I suspect that it's easier to pitch a movie when it has a Powerful Theme included in the hook. If you can tie the story to a metaphor, you've got a reason to tell the story in the first place. The audience will know that the story is about something. It gives critics like me something to talk about; hell, I'm doing it here. The metaphor "elevates" the story, which is why so many "elevated" horror movies[1] are "about" something else (Get Out is about racism, The Babadook is about postpartum depression and grief, It Follows is about learning to live with one's own mortality, and so on).
I'm not saying that all movies that make use of metaphor are bad. But the ones that take a back seat to their own central metaphors leave me wondering why the filmmakers chose to express the metaphor using a movie in the first place. Last year's Don't Worry Darling was the perfect example of this; the moment the metaphor was revealed, the entire story snapped into place, and also immediately became extraneous to itself. This year's Skinamarink suffers from the same problems. When the metaphor is the entire point, there's nowhere for the story–or the characters–to go. Everything just sits trapped and inert on the screen, illustrations for a sermon that never needed to be preached in the first place.
No self-respecting critic I know uses the term "elevated horror" any more, but it's the term that stuck for horror movies that are plainly about something other than just the events on screen, so I'm stuck with it here. ↩︎
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What I talked about:
For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed The Blackening, which we saw in the theater with a very rowdy crowd–if you want a good time at the movies, this is the way to do it. We paired it with Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room, which I did not have a good time watching, but which I thought was an incredible movie.
What I'm reading:
Infinite Jest Procrastination Watch: Currently not procrastinating! I've picked up the book again! I'm no longer a failure as a reader!
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