You Were So Scary in the Dark
A few words about 'Green Room'
A few months back, I walked down College St. to the Carlton, the local cheap theatre. Every week, the Carlton cycles in a new crop of rep titles. Tickets: $5. I was heading there to do a double-feature. The Constant Gardener followed by Green Room. You might remember The Constant Gardener, you might not. It’s the movie that got Rachel Weisz her Best Supporting Actress Oscar, adapted from a 2001 John le Carré novel, with Ralph Fiennes in the lead. It’s a decent movie. Extremely Bush Era. It was even cool to see it in a theatre again, for no reason I could surmise, except maybe an attempt by the cinema to do a Conclave tie-in. Certainly not a movie I ever expected to see doing the rep rounds, at least outside of a le Carré series (filing that one away as a “good idea.”) When it was over, I killed a bit of time in the area and went back in for Green Room.
I’d somehow missed Green Room when it first came out. It was one of those movies I kept meaning to get to, but then kept putting off. Seeing that it was playing at the Carlton was my chance to correct that, and it was the whole reason for the double-feature in the first place. I got myself properly high for the experience, despite what I’d heard about the film’s intensity. Actually, I got high because of that warning. Some years ago, I got stupidly high and put on Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale. Anyone who’s seen that movie will understand why that sounds inadvisable. I found it the opposite. I was so totally pulled in by the terrifying intensity of Kent’s movie that it’s one of the rare home viewings about which my memories are as fond as my best theatrical screenings. So, Green Room being a trip and a half by all reports, that was an enticement to get in an open headspace and really lock in.
About 90 minutes later I stumbled out of the theatre, shellshocked. For a good chunk of the time before that, I was white-knuckled, digging into my seat, teeth grinding, the whole shebang. Green Room is the third feature by Jeremy Saulnier, his first after the indie breakout that was Blue Ruin, and almost a decade before his Netflix hit Rebel Ridge. It stars Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, and Joe Cole as members of a barely known punk band touring the Northwest, who agree to play a gig at what they soon discover is a skinhead bar. Their goal becomes to play the gig and get the fuck out, but that simple plan goes haywire when they go back to the green room to discover a girl stabbed to death by skinheads. As the movie plays out, they ally with the dead girl’s friend, played by Imogen Poots, and attempt to escape from the clutches of the skinheads and their leader, a scarily calm Patrick Stewart. What starts as desperate negotiation turns into stomach-wrenching violence and a feeling that the walls are only ever closing in. The movie had me literally cowering and hyperventilating. At one point I found myself clutching my head, my leg shaking. It was, to put it mildly, one of the best cinematic experiences I’ve had. Ever.
After seeing the movie back then—this was early January—I intended to write about it. I had an idea in my mind about the movie’s depiction of neo-Nazism and how it related to the present moment. That moment being the incoming second presidency of Donald Trump. I never ended up writing it, and in fact, this post is written in that same draft, saved all those months ago. I didn’t write it because nothing had really happened yet, and though my concerns about the future were correct—now demonstrably so—I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was working myself into hysterics. That I was seeing what I wanted to see.
A couple hours ago, ICE detained New York Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, who had been at immigration court escorting an undocumented person. As of writing this, he is still detained. Video of the event shows a chaotic scene in which plainclothes thugs without any kind of warrant manhandle and drag Lander away. A sickening sight. I’d been working on another post for the blog, but I put it aside—it’ll come later this week—because I remember this saved draft. Specifically, I remembered the title: You Were So Scary in the Dark.
That line, “You were so scary in the dark,” is what (SPOILER ALERT!) Anton Yelchin says to Patrick Stewart at the end, right before killing him. Throughout the movie, Stewart imposes a massive shadow. His cool, collected evil acting as a front for the extreme violence he has his underlings perpetrate. When he controlled the space the band members were in, when he dictated the terms of their situation, he seemed next to invincible. Like an overwhelming force. But there at the end, in the daylight, caught unawares, he’s just an old guy with little to back him up.
Green Room is an interesting kind of political movie. It doesn’t do much to explore ideology. The Nazis don’t even express all that much racism. It’s not really about that. Instead, the movie operates on an experiential level, communicating its ideas through viscera and visceral filmmaking. The movie is about the violence, and about being trapped, and about the fear these people can inspire. It’s also a movie about these people still being just people, flesh and blood like anyone else, which means they can be beaten like anyone else. What it takes is recognizing the reality: sunlight is these people’s worst enemy. It defangs them; turns them to dust.
I thought of that when I saw Lander being hauled away by some modern Gestapo goons. These assholes, above the law, disappearing ordinary people in the streets of New York and Los Angeles and many other cities in the United States. They’re scary, properly so, because look at the damage they do, the horrors they do. But then you watch the video and what you see are just thuggish meatheads, a whole group of roided up fuckfaces struggling to take down one city comptroller who did nothing wrong. All plain to see. And they’ll try to spin it, but the more this stuff is seen and exposed, the more people will understand the stakes, but also that it doesn’t take much to make them look like scared, desperate fools themselves.
In February, when Elon Musk had DOGE in full swing, destroying the American federal government any way it could, a number of Democrats made a show of attempting to stand in the way of those unelected teenage psychopaths entering federal buildings. At a packed town hall for New York representative Paul Tonko, one man, a teacher, stood up to address him. He praised Tonko for his stand, but challenged him to be an even stronger leader to a base ready for action.
"I know what John Lewis would have done. He would have gotten arrested that day. Make them outlaw you. We will stand behind you. I will get arrested with you,” he said.
There are so many pitch perfect things about that statement, but the one I’m thinking about right now is the teacher saying, “Make them outlaw you.” Such a potent idea. His is a call inspired by so much effective nonviolent resistance across history. It was a kind of resistance that took determination, intention, stamina, and courage. Nonviolent protesters in all kinds of struggles were beaten and even killed. Setting aside any argument over the virtues of nonviolent resistance against violent action, the reason such movements succeed, like the one Ghandi led, or MLK, is that they heighten the contradictions of oppressive policy. In effect, they made those scary men with weapons “outlaw” them, which could be dismissed and dismissed, but only up to a point. Eventually, the absurdity of what was being done to them was too great to ignore. The horror of the violence made plain, along with the fact that its reasoning is inhuman, and its perpetrators merely a bunch of snivelling freaks who could, of course, be pushed back, into a corner.
I don’t know that Lander was there, escorting people at immigration court week after week because he knew his arrest was a possibility, but it’s not hard to imagine he was aware of the risks. Judges have been arrested, too, after all. Putting himself, his body, and even his legal status on the line for ordinary people under threat by fascists is just about the most valiant thing an elected official can do. That ICE put him in cuffs, on camera, makes his valour into a public statement, one that paints a picture, plain as day, of the authoritarian takeover being attempted in America. It takes these people out of the dark. How scary are they, really?