Everything is a Weapon if You Hold it Right: On Weapons

 

The titles of Zach Cregger's films are more riddles and interpretations than descriptions. One could conclude that the "barbarian" of the first film's title refers to the character of the mother, after all she is the one that smashes heads, but, as I said earlier, I think that misses the point that the film is a far deeper reflection on barbarians and civilization. In a similar way, we could conclude that the word "weapons" in the title of the recent film refers to the weaponization of the hypnotized individuals, as is stated in the dialogue.  (Oh, yeah, spoiler alert)

The term "weaponize" is a curious word. Apparently it was first coined in 1957, during the the cold war, referring to the overlap between the space race and the arms race. It seems me that the term really took off later, during the war on terror, when everything from viruses (both living and computer) and chemical reactions could be weaponized. Chemical fertilizers could become a car bomb, power plants could become weapons of mass destruction. The term always suggest that there is the potential for harm, for violence, underlying the most mundane chemical and biological processes. To weaponize is to take advantage of a potential for destruction and death that is already there, waiting.

I am tempted to read Weapons through this hermeneutic of latent danger, and ask the question not what physical objects are being weaponized, although we do see what happens when a vegetable peeler is used on human flesh, but what social relations and institutions are turned into weapons, and how this might reveal something of the social conflicts and tensions. I have to admit that when I first saw Weapons I thought it had less of the social criticism that I immediately saw in Barbarian, and saw it more as a conventional horror movie with even a more conventional monster, but the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about the question of weapons and weaponization the more my perspective changed. 

The film  concerns a small town somewhere in Pennsylvania. One Wednesday night at 2:17 in the morning, seventeen kids, all but one of one third grade class, got out of bed, walked out of their houses, and disappeared into the night. The action of the film really begins a month later when the school reopens and the town struggles to return to normal. The story is told through five intersecting perspectives: one from the teacher of the class of missing children, Justine (Julia Garner); one from a cop in the town, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich); one from a father of one of the missing children, Archer (Josh Brolin); one from James (Austin Abrams), a homeless man at the margins of the community; one from the school's principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong); and one from Alex (Cary Christopher), the one boy from the third grade class who did not disappear that night.

These are not so much Rashomon-esque perspectives, with radically irreconcilable perspectives on what happened, just partial and fragmentary perspectives, each with different insights and different limitations. In watching the film I was reminded of Franck Fischbach's assertion that in a capitalist society, a society defined by isolation, fragmentation, and class hierarchy, that knowledge, including our knowledge of society, can only fragmented as well. As Fischbach writes, "It is not that consciousness expresses social being or that consciousness is determined by social being: it is that social being and consciousness are two expressions, two figures of the same reality." 

In watching the different perspectives and point of view, I kept thinking of this assertion, the way in which the order and connection of knowledge was the same as the order and connection of social relations. First, only a few of the characters are actively seeking knowledge about what really happened. Justine, the teacher, is trying to find out what happened that night, however, she is limited by not only the fact that she is under a cloud of suspicion, many parents think that she must have something to do with the kids in her classroom disappearing, but also because of a hierarchy which places parents above teachers. We learn that she has crossed the line in the past, hugging a student, and offering another a ride home. Archer, the father of one of the kids, is also trying to find out what happened, but he is hampered less by external constraints than by his own obsession with Justine as the source of what happened. 

Each works with the fragment of knowledge they have, Justine is convinced that Alex must know something. When she is forbidden to speak with him, or continue teaching, she tries to get Marcus, the principal to pursue her inquiry. The fragmentary nature of Archer's knowledge is more literal. Thanks to the omnipresence of Ring home surveillance he has video of his son leaving the house showing the direction he is headed in. The video is only one point, one line actually, and he needs more data to be able to figure out where all of the kids are going. (Zach Cregger has made two horror films and both involve extended scenes of people using tape measurers--I honestly do not know what to make of that) He eventually gets access to video from another home showing the trajectory of another kid, and two lines converge on a point, but it is not until he talks to Justine, gives up his distrust, that he begins to understand the significance of the point where the lines converge. Knowledge is a relation, and it depends on a relation, to know is to escape the limitations of one's perspective. 

The limitations also affect the people who know, or come to find out, what really happened. James stumbles upon the truth when he breaks into Alex's house and finds Alex parents, and the kids all in some kind of catatonic hypnotized state. He eventually figures out that this entitles him to the fifty thousand dollar reward of any information leading up to finding the kids. Collecting the reward involves going to the police and, thanks to a previous interaction with Paul the cop, and not to mention the fact that he is homeless and struggling with addiction, he is not welcome there. Nor would they believe him. It should be mentioned that Paul, the cop, is not seeking the truth. He is, as he says, "not a detective." He spends his time harassing the homeless. The person who first knows what is going on is a homeless person, but being without a home, without property, means that what he knows  (This is another plot point that connects Cregger's two films). 

Alex is the only one who knows exactly what happens. His Aunt Gladys has come to live with his mother because she is sick (or so we are told). There is a great deal we do not know about Aunt Gladys. Is she really even his Aunt, really even related to her mother, or is she something that is masquerading as a relative. What we do know is that she is the reason the kids all disappeared that night. She is, for lack of a better word, a witch. She is capable of putting people under her spell with a lock of hair or a personal item. She has moved into his house, hypnotized his parents, and kidnapped his classroom, all supposedly to help her get better. Alex knows what has happened, but he dare not tell anyone.

This is the real point where Cregger's two films converge, on the home. What goes on behind closed doors is nobody's business. The police make a brief visit to Alex's home, but Glady's is able to spirit the children away, and as long as the house is clean, and makeup is used to cover the wounds on Alex's parents faces, the cops are satisfied. Barbarian focused on the power over physical space, to own a home is to be able build as many sub-basements as you needed to conceal the horrors going on there, but Weapons focuses on the psychic space, on the ability to weaponize your kids with any belief you impose on them. 

One of the most enigmatic images of the film occurs during Archer's dream. He sees the floating image of a gun, an AR-15, the weapon of choice of mass shooters. The gun has the clock numbers 2:17 on it. Some online have come up with a theory connecting the film to a bill to ban assault rifles. That is interesting, but I am wary of such a search for easter eggs, especially when the thematic points are already there. What is ultimately weaponized is the absolute authority parents, (and an occasional visiting aunt), have over children. Throughout the film people try to enter Alex's house, peering through the windows, but what keeps them out is not a witch's spell. They are kept out by the power of property and the authority of parents. This point is driven home in the final scenes of the film. The children are freed from Gladys' spell, or put under a new spell, sent to avenge themselves on the witch who held them captive. As they chase Gladys they break through windows and doors, traversing living rooms and yards, breaking apart the private homes that are castles for some, prisons for others, violently forcing a community founded on separation and isolation to confront what such isolation makes possible.