There’s a bit of discourse on generosity in reading that my mind often comes back to when I don’t like something; the basic upshot is, “what if this is doing what it does on purpose, to satisfy an audience of people who like that kind of thing?” And the follow-on, “what if this is doing what it does on purpose, to evoke the thoughts you’re thinking right now, which are actually a waypoint in where this is going and not the final destination?”
That latter one is the tricky one; any given creator might be smarter than any given reader, but you can’t bet on that 100% of the time. But let the record show that it could be true of Parker Finn and SMILE, even though I’m gonna run my mouth anyway.
The basic premise is IT FOLLOWS, but make it murder; an invisible predator is “transferred” from victim to victim through showy suicides, appearing as a horribly smiling person in between (for reasons that aren’t 100% clear). One such victim, Rose Cotter, is a psychiatrist who sees this happen to a patient, becoming hunted herself. The predator seems to have unlimited influence over the current victim’s perceptions, so it tricks Rose into a terrible stunt at her nephew’s birthday that turns her fiancé and sister against her. With the help of her ex, a cop named Joel, she traces the line of victims far back enough to convince him this is actually happening, and find the one survivor of the predator, who reveals that you can transfer it via murder as well as suicide… but that’s it. If you won’t kill, you’re gonna die. Rose finally has the belated brain wave that if she isolates herself, it won’t have another victim, and goes back to the house where she watched her mother die to “face it.” There’s a predictably false showdown at the house—no, you can’t kill the inexorable supernatural predator by smashing it with a lantern—and then…
… we’ll get to then. Let me briefly talk about Chuck Tingle.
Chuck Tingle has a great book
called BURY YOUR GAYS. One of the plot beats in BURY YOUR GAYS is that Misha, a screenwriter, is targeted by his own characters, in particular a monster called The Smoker who kills you in five days if you refuse to give him a light. Like SMILE’s predator, he’ll haunt you every so often to remind you of your doom. There’s a period of denial, but of course by day 4 Misha understands this is really happening… and so when The Smoker shows up to do a haunting, Misha’s through being scared, he’s just fed up; and since he’s still got a day on the clock, fuck it! He punches The Smoker in the face. This throws the both of them for a loop, and the Smoker just awkwardly disappears, because what else is it gonna do?
It’s a great moment for a number of reasons, some of which have to do with the very meta sorts of games you basically have to play in a story like BURY YOUR GAYS… but some of which are really just common sense. The speed at which scares move from menacing to tedious in these “ticking clock” scenarios is amazingly high; once you know the rules, you know when you can’t be killed, and the scares turn into background noise. Tingle’s Misha literally berates The Smoker with this complaint: “This is why I don’t write ghost stories any more!”
Contrariwise, Finn’s Rose, after she has learned the rules, is visited by her psychiatrist, who turns out to be the predator in disguise. And the predator puts on its creepy smile and backs her down into a corner, its mouth drooling…
… and then we cut hard to another scene! Because the predator can’t kill Rose now, because she’s alone in the house! And this would be fine, actually, if the penny had dropped… but the plot can’t let her have that realization then, when it makes sense, because she hasn’t yet grappled with the thought of murdering someone to save herself, and because it needs an APB on her car.
Which I guess brings us to talking about the end.
Rose has her false showdown. After she hallucinates killing the predator, she hallucinates driving to Joel’s and asking to crash. Joel says yes, then goes creepy; she runs, turns out she never left the house, she’s now out on the front lawn.
And the real Joel—the one other character who understands the rules, who’s traced the pattern back 20 victims—rolls up for no particular reason, having caught the APB on Rose’s car.
You’ve already written the rest. She tries to lock him out, the predator takes her, he breaks in, she kills herself before his eyes. The cycle of violence continues. Fade to black.
There’s a more economical version of this ending where the drive to Joel’s isn’t a hallucination, where her complacency is actually load-bearing instead of just another cruel dream—maybe one, even, where Joel is reluctant to let her in because he understands the rules and realizes it’s not safe. Maybe I’ll write it, just for grins. But maybe it’s more interesting, here, to come back to where I began:
On generosity in reading, and what it means if the things you don’t like were on purpose
I have not, myself, experienced mental illness. I don’t want to make pronouncements about what it’s like. But to someone naive to the first-person experience of mental illness, the idea that that experience might actually conform to certain widely deprecated horror movie tropes seems at least cromulent. The predator’s pointless malevolence (if it wants people around Rose when she dies, why is it manipulating her into driving her family away?), Rose’s persistent obtuseness about the rules, her persistent credulity about her own experiences even long after she knows to doubt them… these don’t work well when you consider the story from a rational standpoint. But maybe they work a little better as a rendition of a psychological breakdown—not caused by the monster, but represented by it.
I’m not sure I’m sold, to be honest. But I do feel like the effort to read generously was worth it. And maybe it’s that reading that makes the predator’s signature feature make sense. We smile to show love and friendship and enjoyment; it’s a gesture of comfort, of setting at ease. Pervert the gesture and you strip away the comfort, the ease. You can’t trust people any more. Even when people are around—especially when—you’re alone.
Currently reading: THE ELEMENT OF FIRE, by Martha Wells.