In my ongoing effort to perform the duties assigned to me as this magazine’s movie critic, I suffer for you. I see things you would not wish to see and tell you not to see them. Don’t bother to thank me, even though you should. It’s all part of the deal, the compact between us, forged over many years.
But as I have told you on several occasions over the years, there are some aspects of these duties I find increasingly impossible to perform, and they involve the feelings invoked in me by fatherhood. Now there are two movies nominated for the best-picture Oscar I cannot see. One is Lion, in which a 5-year-old boy gets separated from his family on a train . . . permanently. The other is Moonlight, in which another little boy is mistreated and must take dribs and drabs of love from a nice drug dealer.
Perhaps you feel it is my duty to see these highly-praised films and tell you what I think and whether you should spend your money on them. Tough luck, bucko. I ain’t doing it. I’d think of my own beloved 6-year-old son (who is so adorable you wouldn’t believe, and I mean that, you really can’t even imagine how adorable he is) and just cry and feel sick and walk out. I still haven’t recovered from the kids who get it in Manchester by the Sea, also nominated for an Oscar; I didn’t know it happened before I saw it so that was really a delightful surprise. So I’m leaving it up to you to go in for what would for me be the equivalent of waterboarding.
As a kid, I felt that way not about movies in which children were threatened or killed or made miserable but about being afraid. I walked out of The Exorcist after an hour. I didn’t sleep for a week after the final scene of Carrie, in which the title character’s hand pops up from a grave. Then, at the age of 18, I went to see Alien and couldn’t make it through. I was there with friends from college and was humiliated by my cowardice. And I became determined to rise above my childhood and teenage squeamishness. I embarked on a personal desensitization program in Chicago’s Loop.
I would travel there, alone, after I completed afternoon classes at the University of Chicago—examinations of Plato’s Meno or Machiavelli’s obscure play The Mandragora or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, often sitting rapt as I listened to an obscure political-philosophy professor named Allan Bloom stutter and chain smoke and then utter complete paragraphs of unrivaled brilliance. I would then jump on the commuter train that ran beside Lake Shore Drive from Hyde Park to Randolph Street and duck into the State-Lake or the Woods or the McVickers and lower myself from Paradiso to Purgatorio as I suffered through Motel Hell or I Spit on Your Grave or The Lift. (That one was terrible but had a great ad line: “The stairs! Take the stairs! For God’s sake, take the stairs!“) It worked. I no longer minded.
Why, you might ask, would I have bothered to compel myself to grow a thick skin when it came to a throwaway genre like horror? The answer is that I didn’t like the thought of the medium’s having that kind of negative power over me. So I’m far less likely to be scared by a horror movie than I was as a kid. But if a horror movie doesn’t scare you, is it any good? That’s the question raised by the enormous hit Split, which has revived the sinking career of its writer-director M. Night Shyamalan. It’s a pale shadow of The Sixth Sense, which remains a singular triumph, but it’s not bad. Split is a horror movie, since it concerns a man with multiple personalities who locks three girls in a dungeon and terrifies them with talk of a “beast” who will come and eat them. But it’s never really scary. Oh, it’s creepy. It’s a little unnerving. And when it takes a turn to the supernatural, its plot turns gruesome.
But in a brilliant stroke, Shyamalan doesn’t really show you the gruesome stuff. You hear it a little. You see some blood. But he deliberately doesn’t provide the money shot of the “beast” in action that would provoke screams and give rise to a hundred op-eds about its exploitative nature. And that, I think, explains the gigantic box-office Split is enjoying—and, by the way, explains the reason the Netflix miniseries Stranger Things was such a phenomenon last summer. They’re horror, but for some reason they don’t get at your deepest fears. They’re like a Szechuan food chain restaurant in a mall; just enough heat to the food for you to say, “Man, that’s spicy,” without really feeling the burn.
Wait a minute. Come to think of it, you should thank me for all I’ve done for you. Why don’t you thank me more? What, are you ungrateful? Think of all the hours of pain I’ve spared you! Who has spared you more hours of pain than I have over the decades? Maybe your physical therapist. But when you’re at PT, it hurts. When you read me . . . nothing but bliss. Am I right?
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
