It Always Returns, It Just Wear A Different Mask ("It Follows" Review)

No, you're the monster

**This is not a literal movie review, just a vehicle for my own fascination with concepts.

This is a movie about existentialism. Pretty easy to figure out when someone is literally reading Dostoyevsky all throughout the movie. This is a movie about trauma--the essence of trauma. You see, existence precedes essence, yes, but that doesn’t mean that essences can be thrown out the window. Essences exist in relation. A relationship that no one else can see (read: sense) but you. It terrorizes no one else; you just terrorize your friends. Said another way: Jay is the monster of the movie, ‘It Follows.’ But she didn’t start out a monster. So what happened while those sweet ass 80s synths were playing?

The essence of what? Of whom? Wrong questions, Plato.

What does an essence do? Backtrack to Occam’s Razor; why have I posited something we don’t need? Precisely because there’s something other than your neural signals terrorizing you, and if you don’t think there is, I’m gonna go ahead and assume that you have a very naive concept of how “drugs” and endogenous chemicals are related. If you’re Sam Harris and think that MRIs of people praying is somehow contributing to any type of understanding about people’s beliefs, then Freud has already whopped dat ass.

Here’s the thing you can’t explain, ever: things last despite all evidence to the contrary. In other words, “It Follows.”

Let’s let Lacan have a go at it: Das Thing, the Thing. What is “The Thing?” You say: another horror movie, duh. Calm down there, super literal guy. Lacan views it as “the absolute Other of the subject, a prehistoric Other that is impossible to forget, this nothing, this emptiness, this hole, this originary trauma--remains as that aspect of the Real that can be said and imagined...that thing in the Real which suffers from the signifier.” (Malabou, 2012). Paradoxically, we are soldered together with an aspect of the Real that remains a double, a phantasm, of which is filled with a superfluous vitality that always seeks us. So we always have to run from it, wherever it is, whomever it is, like the lumbering robozombie that it is.

In order to say anything interesting about horror movies, or surreal movies, we have to look at a world that is beyond a basic sense of realism: go back to essences, go back to the essential.

And what do we find? Every line is a cut. Every mask is covering the traumatic. The mask could be a 7 foot giant from Twin Peaks wearing eyeliner or some squirter in your kitchen. Appearance is not the point as long as appearance is taken as an identity that was synonymous with the past. Hyper-vigilance can keep the slow crawl of dread at bay, but dread senses you because you define it asymmetrically--violence is asymmetric, non-local, everywhere, and especially (essentially) inside of you.

To end on a happy note, you can get rid of “it:” just inflict the curse on someone else and pass it on. Actually, here’s an interesting moment in the movie: when “it” grabs Jay by the hair and her friend belts it with a chair. There’s something to that, but I’ll leave it up to you to piece together.

That’s ethics, after all.