The empty horror of “Ready or Not”
The first to go is one of the maids, Clara, who takes a bullet to the face. This is an accident: the bullet was intended for the bride, only the sister who fired it, Emilie, isn’t so handy with a gun, and also she’s been snorting cocaine all night. Also, it’s pretty dark in the mansion and her gun is an authentic relic of the 19th century—a treasured family heirloom, just like all the weapons with which the hapless members of Le Domas family have armed themselves. It’s quickly noted by one of them (an in-law, naturally) that they might all be more effective killers if only they could use weapons of a more contemporary design, but alas, ‘tis tradition: “We always play the games as they would have played them in great-grandfather’s time,” Tony Le Domas, the family patriarch, has already explained.
Tradition, inheritance, and the attendant compulsory debts we owe our families are some of the themes Ready or Not, from last year, offers up for interrogation, to mixed results. Directed jointly and with true though intermittent flair by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet, it’s a brisk, cynical, blood-soaked horror-comedy about a wealthy American family, the Le Domases, and the horrifying lengths to which they’ll go to protect their riches. The Le Domas fortune comes ostensibly from their namesake game company, but it is soon revealed that, if you can believe it, an ancestor entered into a blood pact with the literal devil in the form of a man they call Mr. Le Bail. The pact was simple: in exchange for the profound generational wealth Mr. Le Bail could ensure, the family must observe a certain tradition which entails that whenever a family member gets married, they must all play a game on the wedding night. According to tradition, the game is chosen by the new addition, bride or groom, who selects a card from an enchanted box which tells them what game to play. This is all in good fun and completely harmless, of course—unless the card you draw is Hide and Seek. Sadly (for everyone involved), Hide and Seek is the card Grace draws, on the night she marries Alex—“the one bad card,” he observes a little later on, which is a bit of an understatement considering it means they have to make a living sacrifice of her, when the alternative could have been, for instance, a rousing round of chess. Grace doesn’t know this right away, of course—it isn’t until she watches the maid bleed out on the floor that she realizes this is no game—although she immediately perceives that a situation where she hides and they all seek her out has her at a disadvantage. “So there’s like no way I can win this, is there?” she says, before they begin. “Well, you could stay hidden until dawn,” her new father-in-law replies. “Um, no thank you,” cracks Grace: it is her wedding night, after all. Let the games begin.
No one will argue that Ready or Not is a great film, or even especially remarkable as horror movies go. Its central conceit is more winky than clever—it’s Get Out, where race has been substituted for the American family, and dissected with less precision, and less focus. Like Get Out, which exploded the already allegorical nature of horror movies and wrung true cinematic terror from American anti-Black racism, Ready or Not attempts something similar, mining a few authentic jump scares, a good amount of gore, and some humor (if not quite pathos) from a quintessential experience of modern romance: meeting the in-laws. If Ready or Not lacks the punch of Get Out, it is largely because it has vastly different aims: its primary ambition is to have fun. (In this way, it has more in common with 2011’s shlocky, if not unenjoyable, You’re Next.)
Unfortunately, its comedic sensibility is a little muddled, gamboling from broad to referential to slapstick to, frankly, cheap, often within individual scenes, in ways that do not always cohere. It gets the most mileage out of the family’s clumsy and ineffectual attempts to capture Grace, which are thwarted by chance (another maid, leaning out of a dumbwaiter and trying to alert the family to Grace’s location, is crushed to death when she accidentally triggers the dumbwaiter into operation), silly errors (Emilie again, who fires a crossbow by accident just as the third maid is entering with news of Grace’s hiding spot, catching the arrow in her open mouth), or Grace’s own cunning. Sometimes, their antique weapons malfunction or prove otherwise ineffectual, such as when Charity tries to wound Grace by firing a spear gun across the lawn, which arcs through the air so slowly Grace is long gone before it descends. Other times, Grace escapes by virtue of the characters’ own hubris or ineptitude: the Le Domases are not trained killers, after all. Indeed, they don’t always play Hide and Seek; sometimes the game is much more innocuous (“I got Old Maid,” Fitch, Emilie’s husband, informs Grace just before she draws her card). It’s both fun and funny to watch them flail and fail until (too soon) it is not, at which point the gag becomes tiresome, and too convenient.
Ready or Not is strongest when it posits affluence itself as a kind of evil. That the Le Domas’s prosperity has its genus in Satanism and is fostered by the occasional human sacrifice seems less like horror and more like plausible reality in light of contemporary discourses around income inequality and economic disparity in the United States. That I watched the film in the middle of a pandemic that has only amplified those disparities necessarily influences my take: not since I was a Christian have uttered the phrase “Love of money is the root of all evil” with more abandon than I have over the last five months and, at this writing, the last 169,000 deaths.
The film (released pre-COVID, of course) wants to contribute to these conversations, or seems to, angling for either irony or satire in its presentation of characters like Emilie, dim-witted, drug-addled, and still siphoning sympathy from her parents well into adulthood—a child in woman’s clothes, a poor-little-rich-girl—or the perpetually scowling Helene, the stereotypical old maid aunt (every wealthy family seems to have one). Helene, more than any of the other characters, remains single-mindedly committed to their mission, even though her own husband was murdered the last time the family played this game, on her own wedding night.
Like the children in the movie (Emilie’s young son, Georgie, or, in the film’s flashback prologue, Daniel as a boy), Emilie and Helene and most of the other characters, however ill-equipped, are almost unquestioningly willing to end Grace’s life in the name of family. They react with sociopathic calm when Emilie accidentally murders the maids, and when they need to move bodies, they flip a coin to see who gets to carry it by the legs. The movie is at its best in moments like these, when it looks unblinkingly at the abhorrent behavior the love of money has prompted in the members of the Le Domas clan and the lengths to which they’ll go to protect it, suggesting that evil is often as inheritable as cash or property, and maybe even requisite. A few late-stage plot twists, not wholly unexpected, reinforce this suggestion, and the critique is pushed further vis-a-vis Charity, wife of Daniel, the eldest Le Domas son. Like Grace, Charity grew up in a far different tax bracket than the Le Domases. “You know where I came from, and what my life was like before,” she hisses at her husband, when he expresses reservations about killing Grace. “I would rather be dead than lose all of this,” she tells him, and she means it. When evil is money, you can be born or married into it.
The gestalt of the film, though, fails to sustain this critical vision, veering (or retreating) into less tricky territory where not money but in-laws are the horror—Meet the Parents as bloodbath. The analogy—or is it just a joke?—is stretched to its breaking point, culminating in a literal show-down with the mother-in-law (here, literally evil) and the film’s final gag, which I won’t spoil. This is unfortunate, not least because it relieves the film of the responsibility of tying up whatever argument it might have been making, or might have made, about class, inherited wealth, and the unequal distribution of assets in America. The material is there, certainly; for instance, Grace, who grew up in a series of foster homes, is particularly attuned to the ways in which the Le Domas lifestyle is at experiential odds with that of the average American. When she’s instructed to meet “in the music room,” she notes dryly that it’s “a totally normal room to have in a house,” and has a similar reaction to the disclosure that the estate is equipped with a “servants’ corridor,” an interior network of secret passages that run through the home. (That the servants’ corridor becomes a primary aide in Grace’s early evasions is another site where the film’s underlying class consciousness can’t help but bubble to the surface, although as a discursive element it is quickly suppressed.)
It’s hardly serious criticism to fault a movie for not being what you wanted it to be, and I wouldn’t, if I didn’t think the movie would have benefitted from a more coherent grasp on its own politics. Instead, it dangles class criticism before the audience like a juicy steak, and its refusal to allow us a taste is particularly glaring, and a wasted opportunity.
Elisa Gabbert’s mystifying timeliness
Reading The Unreality of Memory, the new collection of essays from poet and critic Elisa Gabbert, one would be forgiven for assuming that the author is psychic, or at least in possession of a crystal ball by which she discerns the future. How else to describe the uncanny timeliness of these essays, which, among a plethora of other subjects, finds Gabbert considering societal responses to natural and man-made disasters, the limits of human empathy, and the unique susceptibility of our modern societies to pandemic viruses? The book feels oracular; one thinks of Moses, in the Old Testament, stumbling down Mount Sinai, bearing slabs of stone carved with God’s penmanship. Gabbert is a writer of uncommon precision, generosity, and grace, wise but never preachy, knowing but without a fleck of arrogance; and though her essays are as shrewd and perceptive as any you are likely to encounter today, she never shies away from or attempts to obfuscate the limits of her own knowledge. The sheer heft of their research (the bibliography runs six pages, and is only “selected”) belies these essays’ inquisitive nature; they ask at least as many questions as they answer, reminding us that knowledge, even truth, is less an end point than a pursuit. In this way, too, The Unreality of Memory, though it deals in subjects that strike sometimes uncomfortably close to home, is surprisingly comforting: how lucky we are to have Gabbert’s expert, delicate hand to guide us through these harrowing, indelicate times. If she doesn’t so much “make sense” of the gross madness of moment, it is because she recognizes the impossibility of a such a task. What she’s done instead is organize some of its gigantic and profuse moving parts into something more manageable and less daunting.
One particularly riveting essay in the book is “The Great Mortality,” which finds Gabbert considering the nature of a variety of viruses and humankind’s ultimate helplessness in the face of pandemics. (That “The Great Mortality” was originally published in Real Life in September of 2018 is but further proof of Gabbert’s clairvoyance—even if her essay stands as its own argument that we didn’t need a psychic to foresee our current calamity.)
She begins anecdotally, with a story of a relatively harmless virus she suspects she acquired that affected her sense of taste; the flavor of first water, then other liquids, became more profound, and better. Her brother had something similar once, and it’s likely that her husband catches it as well, but it passes in a few weeks. “Box wine tasted cheap again,” she writes. From here, she moves into a discussion of the lancet liver fluke, a parasite that infects ants and makes them want to crawl to the tops of blades of grass, where they are more likely to be eaten by cows, which is the parasite’s true destination. “This mechanism is called parasitic mind control,” Gabbert writes: the parasite alters the ants behavior in service of its own interests, and at the ant’s peril. Could there be anything more disturbing?
Well, yes, actually. Gabbert continues: “Both parasites and microparasites (viruses and bacteria) can hijack our minds; they can make us act weird.” As an example of this she presents the results of a 2010 study which “found that people became more sociable in the forty-eight hours after they were exposed to the flu virus, the period when they are contagious but not symptomatic. The infected hosts, researchers noted, were significantly ‘more likely to head out out to bars and parties’.” Reading this, I thought of the people I had seen queued up outside of bars and restaurants this past March, decked out in Leprechaun costumes and green Mardi Gras beads to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, chugging from shared flasks and passing around vaporizers. Such images from that weekend would proliferate in the news and on social media over the next few days and, in Chicago, would incur the wrath of both the mayor and the governor, who would respond by issuing a mandatory shelter-in-place order. I had seen the crowds for myself, walking three and a half miles across town after work because I was too freaked out by the escalating infections rates to take the bus. I couldn’t believe the crowds; I gawked at them, both enraged and baffled by what already seemed to me like brazen recklessness, a haughty but ineffectual fist raised in the face of death.
At the time, I couldn’t make sense of that sort of behavior, that abandon. The COVID-19 virus had already brought China to heel and was ravaging much of Europe, with New York City poised to go the same way; who would risk being put on a ventilator (if you could get one; that was the stage of worry we were in at the time) just to go out and party? Now I wonder if many of them hadn’t already contracted the virus, and it was making them want to to go out. This is purely speculative, I know, but I keep coming up against the fact that we still know ultimately very little about COVID-19, and what we do know seems to be forever in flux. In my darker moments with regard to coronavirus, I imagine it as an especially insidious and clever virus, not unlike the symbiote that infects Peter Parker and eventually becomes Venom in Spider-man 3, frighteningly adaptable and attuned only to its own wants. Who knows what it is capable of? In what ways could the COVID-19 virus similarly “hijack our minds,” and in what ways encourage us to imperil ourselves as a means to its own ends? “Viruses,” Gabbert reminds us, “are not even alive, yet they, too, have desires.” But beyond infecting as many hosts as possible, how do you gauge what those desires might be? By the time she’s detailing the differences between outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, outlining “global trends” that are known to exacerbate the likelihood of pandemics (“climate change, disruption of animal habits, increased air travel, crowding and megacities, and overuse and misuse of antibiotics”), and noting that “many experts think the most likely culprit of a future pandemic is some version of the flu,”’ she has the reader of 2020 sweating in their seats.
Even when it isn’t speaking quite as explicitly to pandemic-era unease, The Unreality of Memory remains thoroughly transfixed by modernity, and especially by its increasingly illusory essence. The title essay considers the ways in which our minds both conceal and reveal certain aspects of and events in our past, resulting, oftentimes, in startling inaccuracies, like a door in a room of her Grandmother’s house that she doesn’t remember until her mother does. In place of the door, Gabbert simply remembers a wall; “My mind simply wallpapered over it,” she writes.
A room in your grandmother’s house is one thing, but what are the ramifications of this unreliability of memory on a macro level? Masterfully, Gabbert connects her own error in memory to broader phenomena, like the Mandela Effect, a term used to describe the theory that many people having the same “memory” of an event that on record never happened is proof of the existence of parallel universes converging, named for those who believe that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s and not much later, in 2013, as he actually did. (More recent examples of this are people who on Reddit and elsewhere have claimed to remember a movie from the 1990s called Shazam that allegedly starred the comedian Sinbad as a genie who befriends a young boy, although there is no proof such a movie was ever made, never mind released; or an even more populous group who claim to have vivid memories of The Berenstain Bears, a popular series of children’s books, as being spelled Beren-stein.) “What happens to collective memory when the referent is real and verifiable…is no less mystifying,” Gabbert writes, suggesting that such phenomena—online conspiracies like The Mandela Effect that seem minor or immaterial, or her own false memory of her grandmother’s house—are on principle not so distant from one another, or even from graver, more problematic theories such as Holocaust denial. “However established the facts, simply questioning history seems to alter collective perception of history. So we must constantly reestablish the facts,” she writes—as pertinent a message as any at a time when the nature of “fact” itself is so regularly under attack.
“When I try to keep up the work of an informed citizen, I, too, feel that my emotional endurance is being tested,” Gabbert writes, in an essay titled “I’m So Tired,” and it may or may not be of service to anyone who has felt similarly at any point over the past five months (to say nothing of the last few years) to know that such feelings are not only entirely common, but also a point of medical discourse. That emotionally vacant, absent feeling you get when you scroll past another disastrous headline—the urge you get to turn away from it, pretend you don’t know—is called “compassion fatigue,” “the idea that overexposure to horrific images, from news reports in particular, [can] cause viewers to shut down emotionally, rejecting information instead of responding to it,” as Gabbert notes.
I thought of this essay only yesterday, as news outlets began reporting that Post Master General Louis DeJoy had agreed to testify before Congress following widespread outrage and condemnation over his recent decisions to alter, disrupt, or delay mail service in various parts of the country—predominately in blue-leaning areas of red and swing states. Critics have accused DeJoy, who has publicly allied himself with Donald Trump and made donations to the President’s political interests, of intentionally sabotaging the postal service in advance of the upcoming general election, which is already setting records nationally for the number of voters applying for mail-in ballots owing to on-going COVID-19 concerns. For his part, Trump has repeatedly attacked both the United States Postal Service and mail-in voting in general, complaining in the case of the former of its operating for years at a “yuge” financial loss and in the latter casting aspersions as to the legitimacy of our vote-by-mail system.
As far as the Postal Service’s financial solvency is concerned, it is unscrupulous at best and at worst obstructionist to suggest that a constitutionally mandated public service ought to be profitable; indeed, to my mind, profitability would necessarily suggest that the service isn’t working for everyone. Look far enough down the line (though certainly, one needn’t look too far) and you’re bound to start seeing people who can’t afford it. (In some regards, this is already the case with our mail system.) With regard to mail-in-voting, Trump is not merely wrong; he’s lying. There is no evidence that mail-in voting is at all linked to greater incidents of voter fraud and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Indeed, many states, according to NPR and a hundred other sources, already conduct their elections almost exclusively by mail, and have been doing so for years. But online, I was not surprised to see that there were those who believed what the President was saying. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the President’s base—in most cases, I’m sure, people who had never before in their lives given the issue a single thought—had, predictably, fallen in line, decrying mail-in voting as the ultimate threat to our electoral process and democracy writ large.
It struck me as the sort of lie—provably false, inarguably untrue—which Donald Trump has proven particularly adept at telling, and the sort of response—fired-up, single-minded rage masquerading as passion masquerading as patriotism—he is uniquely capable of inspiring in not only his supporters but his detractors as well. Those of us who believe the President capable of any imaginable corruption will view “Mailgate” as an obvious attempt by the President and his adherents to interfere with the upcoming election and will seize it, however rightfully, as another opportunity to thwart him. And however far it is from my responsibility to argue on their behalf, I’m sure those who disagree will have their own excuses. I, of course, am resolutely in that former group, but even as I watched on Twitter videos of mail boxes being collected and sorting machines removed from post offices, I confess I had trouble mustering true anger or rage. Instead, a momentary fury passed through me, and a rancor I’ve become frighteningly accustomed to feeling these days. But I could only feel it intellectually; there was no blood behind it, and soon, the anger gave way to a basic numbness that is increasingly becoming, I’m afraid, my baseline emotional state. I was “shutting down emotionally, rejecting information instead of responding to it.” Here was but more evidence of the President’s despotic aspirations, his tyrannic aims; I received it as merely another example of how terrible—and terrifying—things can still get. It’s August, and I’m tired.
“Worry, like attention, is a limited resource; we can’t worry about everything at once,” Gabbert writes, in another essay. Choose your battles, as my mother would say, but part of what makes “the Trump Era” so emotionally draining is, I think, the pertinence one feels to always be fighting, to be always on guard. When it is a war of ideas, the battles are ceaseless. When a President so openly flaunts the system of checks and balances that are designed to curtail abuse of the position, we are obliged to call attention to each infraction—to devote ourselves to the work of being informed citizens. We must be constantly “reestablishing the facts” he so willfully and insidiously assails. But as fashionable as it is these days to have some fluency in politics, it takes real commitment to remain fully abreast of everything all the time. It might be one thing if we had only the President’s nonsense to contend with, but you don’t need me to tell you how far that is from the case. Gabbert wonders about the fraught intersection of our responsibility to “do the work of an informed citizen” and our responsibility to ourselves, to our own health and well-being. She is circumspect about Internet-age admonitions regarding “self-care” even as she indulges them: when she feels overwhelmed, she writes, “I take breaks and try to reduce my stress.” Still, she is not precious about the ramifications of looking away: “My breaks are getting longer. They feel dangerously close to avoidance,” she confesses.
Don’t look away is a slogan I remember seeing on social media in the very early days of Donald Trump’s presidency: one tactic of totalitarianism, we were frequently warned, is to overwhelm the citizenry with information or “news” until they no longer know what’s actually important, want to pay attention to. Gabbert expertly contextualizes the anxiety posed by the impossibly delicate balance of remaining vigilant against autocratic takeover and accountable to our own wellness which, when we look back, might be—like late-aughts nostalgia for mid-20th century aesthetics, or cocaine in the 80s—one of the identifying trends of our time. Take The Unreality of Memory—supple, conversant, and deeply knowledgable—as something of an elixir against that anxiety.