How Stupid Would Odin Be?
Green Room and Solving the Realism/Myth Problem
Slashers are about people doing stupid things.
The most canonical stupid thing people do in slashers is split up. What better way to explore a forbiddingly dark forest or the basement of a moldering cabin? Gotta go it alone. This was so well understood as a stupid thing to do that I remember it being frequent banter when my parents were watching X-Files circa 1997. At least one entire generation has come of age knowing that you never split up, while watching characters on screen continue to do so. I guess that means there’s a chance Zoomers will decide that splitting up is the smart thing to do, just to spite Millennials and Gen-Xers.
There are other stupid choices that presage the splitting up, of course. You decided to go to that ominous cabin to have premarital sex, to smoke a joint, to make fun of rednecks. You decided to go because you wear your college sweater all the time and the world is yours and nothing bad could happen. You were callous, you were arrogant, you were stupid.
In the past decade, some very sharp spoofs of the rural slasher genre have either inverted some of this moralizing (Cabin in the Woods), or underlined the failings of the obnoxious bougie young people who often end up as victims (Tucker and Dale vs. Evil). Both movies understand that what comes before the violence is often the real story.
All the handwringing about “senseless violence” on screen in the Nineties got it exactly wrong; narrative violence always has to have its reasons, even in a pulpy genre. Horror as a whole and slashers in particular tend to be especially invested in showing the moral calculus of violence. Mostly that’s because the terror is deeper when you deserve what’s coming. It might be scary to consider that you could be fatally bonked on the head by a meteorite for no reason other than bad luck, but it’s horrifying to think a witch could curse you with being struck by a meteorite because you dragged her in a quote-tweet.
Green Room is my favorite slasher in part because of how it handles this calculus of deserving. Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 film is about a punk band from DC whose dirtbag national tour has taken them to the far reaches of the rural Pacific Northwest. After a disappointingly underpaid show at a small-town bar, they accept a gig out in the hinterlands. It’s well paid, but there’s one problem; the venue is a haven for organized, violent Neo-Nazis.
What follows is grim and gory, but also full of unexpected delights. Patrick Stewart turns out to be a superb villain—I really wish he would play more bad guys. The denouement, which I won’t spoil, is clever and cathartic. And all throughout, the grit and grime of both a punk rock lifestyle and a highly realistic slashfest are lovingly displayed.
That “highly realistic” part is where it gets interesting. I had one parent tap out the other night, after I convinced them to watch it with me for what would be my second time. What did it was the infamous “door scene,” which I again won’t spoil, but rest assured it’s uh gross. There are several other nauseating scenes which get a lot of their visceral force from the seriousness with which Saulnier takes the mechanics of violence.
Yet what most interests Saulnier, as far as I can tell, is asking what ordinary people would do in such a baroquely distressing situation. There’s some rising to the occasion in Green Room, mostly in the form of impromptu bravery, but there’s a lot more flailing. [Spoilers follow.] Early on, trapped in the green room of the remote bar, the punk band surrenders some of their only leverage when they hand over a gun they’d managed to take from one of the Neo-Nazi goons. That leads to the gruesome Door Scene, and it leaves them decisively worse off than before. They do it because sweet-talking Patrick Stewart made it seem like there was a way out, when in fact the whole problem was that there was never a way out that would solve the initial problem of the band having become witnesses to a murder.
Giving up your weapon is usually a very stupid thing to do. Which is to say, it’s exactly the kind of thing you do when you’re a character in the first two acts of a slasher. These characters should never have come to this bar in the first place, and now they have to pay the price for many things, but above all for their stupidity.
By the end, however, once most of their comrades have fallen in bloody ways, the last two green roomers standing—one surviving band member and a former Neo-Nazi girl who’s been rapidly rehabilitated by the night’s events—find a way past their stupidity. They turn the whole thing into a game. It’s something you really have to see for yourself, and I encourage you to go do so if you haven’t (it’s on Netflix). What I find interesting about it is how quickly these two characters become smart, as well as brave and ruthless enough to take on a whole gang of Neo-Nazis armed with blades, guns, and killer dogs. They go from cautionary tales to aspirational heroes.
What we like to slipperily call “realism” often exists in a dialectic with what we might call the aspirational, “mythic” aspect of storytelling. If you and I and a few of our friends were trapped without weapons at a remote bar by a group of armed Neo-Nazis, we’d almost certainly be toast. Saulnier is interested in that stone-cold fact and how it fits with his take on the slasher genre. But to tell his story, he has to let his characters become something other than mere avatars for you and me. They have to become what we’d want to be in their situation. Achieving this mythic aspiration comes at the price of having paid for their hubris and foolishness, but they get there all the same. Saulnier even adds in a nice nod to literal myths when the surviving band member greets some stunned Neo-Nazis by saying he’s “Odin himself.”
I don’t have a good coda to this other than to say I’ve struggled with this problem a lot as a storyteller in the last few years. I revert too easily to the mythic, and I struggle to care whether my characters act like “real people.” One reason I decided to do a vampire story is so one of my main characters could act like a vampire, rather than a laboriously believable human being. Green Room shows us another solution to this realism/mythos problem: Let the realism do its bloody work, and then let the myths win the day.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
I was trying to think of situations where Calvin found himself trapped, or was otherwise maneuvering against a very real enemy in physical space. That led me to Rosalyn:
When you’re a kid first encountering Calvin and Hobbes, Rosalyn seems like an unholy terror. She has an abysmally low opinion of Calvin—albeit for good reasons—and she’s an apparently selfish tyrant when his parents depart and she gets to rule the roost. She’s also probably about 15 or 16 years old, but that only makes her all the more menacing in the eyes of an eight-year-old reader.
In the end, Rosalyn becomes yet another sympathetic authority figure in Calvin’s world. (Is there a truly unsympathetic adult in Calvin’s rogues gallery? Maybe the completely undeveloped school principal, whom we only meet a couple of times, but I digress.) She’s just trying to keep a little rascal safe, in spite of himself, for the few hours his parents are away. She may not always be nice about it, but it’s not like Calvin would reward niceness anyway.
This time around, though, I’m on Calvin’s side. This is the second strip in a brief series in which Rosalyn shows up, implies her dislike of Calvin, locks him in the garage, and leaves. Come on! Sometimes an antagonist is just that, and Calvin is in the right. He didn’t even have a chance to do anything stupid.
Other fun things
—David Roth is always worth your time, and here’s him on the topic du jour
—My buddy Matthew has put together a VERY detailed model of Covid hotspots around the country, and overall trends. He’s a statistician who knows his trade, so if you want a deep dive, go here
—Haven’t linked to YouTube yet, so here’s a fun foray into history from a Twitter fellow traveller
A poem