With Wakanda Mania subsiding, and Get Out a distant memory, the #TooManyWhitePeople hive-mind is pivoting towards direct anti-white hatred. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes on ‘The Silently Regressive Politics of “A Quiet Place”’:
The noise of “A Quiet Place” is the whitest since the release of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”; as horror films go, it’s the antithesis of “Get Out,” inasmuch as its symbolic realm is both apparently unconscious and conspicuously regressive.
“A Quiet Place” is the story of a white family living in rustic isolation that’s reduced to silence…
The one sole avowed identity of the Abbott parents is as their children’s defenders; their more obvious public identity is as a white rural family. The only other people in the film, who are more vulnerable to the marauding creatures, are white as well. In their enforced silence, these characters are a metaphorical silent—white—majority, one that doesn’t dare to speak freely for fear of being heard by the super-sensitive ears of the dark others. It’s significant that when characters—two white men—commit suicide-by-noisemaking, they do so by howling as if with rage, rather than by screeching or singing or shouting words of love to their families. (Those death bellows are the wordless equivalent of “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”) Whether the Abbotts’ insular, armed way of life might put them into conflict with other American families of other identities is the unacknowledged question hanging over “A Quiet Place,” the silent horror to which the movie doesn’t give voice.
Or, perhaps the metaphorical silence of “A Quiet Place” simply alludes to the difference between the Sunday afternoon tranquility of The Hamptons vs. the not-so-silent Sunday raucous of the South Bronx.
Lastly, with respect to the question of whether “A Quiet Place” is implicitly racist or not, Taylor Swift’s silence on the matter is deafening.
