Yes, there are spoilers to the movie Barbarian that follow.
I’m just like you. I watch Netflix on the weekend.
Well, sometimes it’s Netflix. Sometimes it’s Disney. Sometimes it’s Amazog Prime. Sometimes it’s the Australian service, Stan. We used to have Apple TV too. I’m sure there are others.
Despite this, I rarely watch good movies.
These days, with kids, I have to split a two hour movie over two nights. You don’t have time for crap, and yet crap is what they serve us.
That’s why I was pleasantly surprised with Barbarian.
That’s not quite right. It wasn’t really a surprise as I knew I had chosen well. Bret Easton Ellis raved about it, and reviews in general were positive. Life is not long enough to ignore good taste.
Barbarian is directed by Zach Cregger who incidentally was one of the creators of The Whitest Kids You Know, a show I enjoyed as a teen. It’s interesting how horror (the ultimate form of tragedy) and comedy are so intertwined, how talent in one translates to the other. Shakespeare proved this (see how sophisticated I am?). His plays are a combination of both and you are stuck between laughing and crying. Is Hamlet not a ridiculous figure? There’s a particular scare towards the end of Barbarian that is - were it not so horrific - a perfectly timed bit of slapstick.
Tess: How do you know she can't get in here?
Andre: Shit, I've been living in this place for fifteen years, and she ain't never came in this motherfucker.
[the Mother bursts in and attacks Andre]
Specifically, the Monster/Mother bursts through a wall, rips off Andre’s arm and hits him with the wet end. It’s perfect.
Heck, the movie even starts with what feels like a RomCom set-up (woman goes to her Air BnB only to find it already occupied by a man - the company mixed up bookings! Doh!), it’s just that the punchline is a gut punch rather than a relationship.
Anyway, it’s about ‘stuff’.
I feel like reviewers maybe missed the deeper reading. Yeah, it’s kinda about toxic masculinity, but not really, apart from the fact that that phrase is meaningless. Yeah, it’s sort of about gentrification or something, but it’s a bit darker than that.
Here’s a joke: A barbarian in the modern sense is a person destitute of culture; a Philistine. That’s you, dear viewer/reviewer.
Classically a barbarian is merely an outsider, in the original Roman usage. A non-Roman. With parallels to how Roman civilization collapsed due to negligence and a failing of its citizenry to keep the barbarians out, the movie Barbarian explores the consequences of men giving up on modern society.
There are three men in the movie. The first male character, Keith, is a ‘nice guy’ and yet Tess (our protagonist, our shining Knightess) does not trust him when he appears at the door of the Airbnb house. The second is AJ, who we discover owns the Airbnb and is also being sued/losing his career over a rape allegation. He appears in Detroit in order to sell the house, and definitely makes things worse. The third character is Frank. He is the original owner of the house and the one who creates the literal rape dungeon and spawn-of-endless-incest Mother/Monster. There is a distinct degeneration from Frank through to Keith, and we are asked to decide which is the barbarian.
I’m not sure it’s any of them.
I had trouble working out which of the men I identify more with. Is it Keith, with my modern sensibilities, smooth wit and broken heart? Is it AJ for my bro-self, my love of hard liquor and a constant need to lie? Or is it Frank, with my underlying loathing of females and yet a barely concealed rape fantasy? I am some combination of all three.
As I said though, this does not make me a barbarian. It makes me something worse: a coward. All three of these men are cowards. First, Frank, who we first see choosing a victim even as he shops for his first rape-baby. When he returns home, a neighbour comes up to him:
Doug: We're moving, Frank. Yeah. I hate to do it. You know? But the wife thinks if we don't do it now we may not be able to get out this time next year, because, you know, neighborhood's going to hell, Frank. You plan on staying?
Frank: I'm not going anywhere
Notice that it is the wife insisting to the husband they abandon their post. Notice that the neighbourhood that Doug is discussing is pristine, and would not be out of place on a Trad’s timeline. Notice that Frank is the cause of despair but no one knows it. Oh, Frank stays because he is the architect of Hell.
He is the one who unleashes the Mother/Monster, a female abortion with life. By his abuse and subservience to his desires he unleashes The Unholy Feminine on the world. He’s such a coward that at the end of the movie, his crimes exposed, he shoots himself.
AJ is the most obvious coward. He is a perpetual liar, and you just know that he did rape that woman, even if he insists he didn’t. He lives in our world, which is to say a world that Believes Women (the world Frank created), so even with his lies he’s only hurting himself. He is only out to save himself, as when he (correctly) uses Tess as bait to distract the Mother/Monster. Unfortunately for AJ women do look after each other, and for his sins, and the Mother/Monster gouges out AJ’s eyes (as an aside, I’m sure this is an homage to Jeepers Creepers, one of my childhood classics).
It’s basically douche bags like AJ that give men like Keith a bad name.
But is Keith so good? He is another coward reveling in the collapse of Detroit/civilization. Where Frank is the cause of collapse and AJ makes bank off the collapse, Keith makes art from the collapse. Just like the women in the film. Keith is a Sensitive New Age Guy (bet you haven’t heard that term in a while) and as such he provides no protection to Tess whatsoever. Heck, even AJ provides for Tess. Keith is so cowardly that he is the first to die. He turned to his feminine side, and the Mother/Monster does not approve.
Most reviews of the film have centered on Tess (female, black, strong), but while she is an effective focus point in the movie and one of the most well-rounded horror sirens I can think of in recent years, there is actually a lot more going on in the film than any commentary on sexism, racism or gentrification. It isn’t about her. She is, simply, the barbarian at the heart of it. She is the outside that stumbles in, literally, and through her typical female nosiness, unleashes the horror, on herself and on Keith (remember, the man who she felt threatened by, unsure of his motives).
Through each of the male characters, Barbarian depicts a world where men have foregone their responsibilities in various ways, left the world to women, and allowed horrors to ensue as a result. The parallel between the collapse of Detroit and the ever less/more barbaric male characters is a powerful metaphor for the collapse of traditional masculinity and the rise of a new type of masculinity. It is not a move about powerful women struggling against male oppression, but in fact about what happens when good men do nothing.
P.S. The Mother/Monster is played by a man, make of that what you will. I think it reinforces my interpretation; never get a woman to do a man’s job.