After the events of the last few weeks…oh, who are we kidding, the last four years, I find myself thinking about a lot of things. This week, I’m looking at the savagery that so often attends white supremacy, the distinct gap between its lofty rhetoric and its reality, and the use of white supremacists as monsters.
White supremacists do a good line as villains. I mean, there’s absolutely a reason for that, as a viewing of Night And Fog will vividly demonstrate. But I think over time there’s a tendency to reduce them to ciphers, to a placeholder for “evil” in the absence of actual characterization. There’s any number of horror films that feature Nazi experiments gone awry as monsters, or that make human villains white supremacists as a way to amp up their menace. Some time back, I wrote up the film Frontiere(s) and gave it a lot of shit (rightfully so, I think) for making its antagonists not just cannibals, but Nazi cannibals, as if that would somehow compensate for the film’s shortcomings in other areas. Another case of thinking that a signifier replaces actual writing or story or themes.
What this threatens to do over time is reduce white supremacists, like serial killers are reduced, to monsters devoid of any real recognition of the harm they actually do and have done to real living people. Like I said, a viewing of Night And Fog will demonstrate the folly of doing that.
Green Room - a grim, relentlessly tense film, devoid of sentimentality - doesn’t reduce its villains. In fact, it is their humanity that makes them so unsettling.
We open up on a van, run off the road into a cornfield. It’s not violence, it’s a band on tour. Long hours on the road, the driver’s fallen asleep. They’re the Ain’t Rights, a hardcore punk band from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., on a coast-to-coast tour. They’re in the Pacific Northwest, a long way from home, and after…acquiring…some fuel, they meet up with the promoter for their next gig. As it turns out, he lost access to the venue while they were already en route. And this is an occupational hazard for touring bands in the punk scene. You aren’t represented by a management company, you don’t have a bus, you aren’t playing arenas, or even clubs sometimes. Sometimes the gigs are at coffee shops, or abandoned warehouses, or in someone’s basement. The promoters aren’t professionals, often they’re just fans themselves, flying by the seat of their pants.
So gigs fall through. But the Ain’t Rights - Reece, Tiger, Pat, and Sam - are indeed a long way from home, and they needed that gig money to keep going. They’re going to have to end the tour and limp back to D.C. on one tank of gas and whatever they can siphon out of SUVs in parking lots along the way. The promoter says he can line something up - it’s a little out of the way, in rural Oregon, outside of Portland. It’s a matinee, two other bands, $350.00 guarantee. Considering their last gig netted them about 28 bucks, this is what they need to get back home. One slight catch. As the promoter puts it, it’s mostly a boots and braces crowd down there. Skinheads.
“Play your older stuff,” he says. “Don’t talk politics.”
Here’s the thing about the Pacific Northwest: Once you get outside the big (diverse, progressive) cities like Portland and Seattle, things get very white and very mean very fast. As it turns out, they’re not playing at a bar so much as they are at a compound - a bunch of buildings way out in the woods, far away from prying eyes. Lots of Confederate flags, National Front logos, White Pride World Wide stickers. It’s pretty clear what the politics are.
But, to their credit, the ones running the venue are consummate professionals - they get the band loaded in, tell them the schedule, and put them in the green room to hang out until soundcheck. Tiger, the group’s hotheaded vocalist, decides they’re going to open their set with a Dead Kennedys cover - “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” It does not go over well. But that’s not the problem - once they launch into their own material, the pit opens up and everyone has a good time. They play a solid set, collect their pay as promised, and start loading out. But Sam realizes she left her phone in the green room, and so Pat goes to grab it…
…and walks in on four people sitting around a very dead young woman.
Pat’s seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. Something, for that matter, that wasn’t even supposed to happen. The last thing these folks want is police attention, and now they have to make the problem go away. And the Ain’t Rights are now part of that problem.
So this is a siege film. The Ain’t Rights are locked in the green room with a couple of skinheads, and they’re pretty sure that they don’t have long to live. They’re out in the middle of nowhere and a very long way from home. And in walks Darcy Banker, the owner of the venue. He’s older, calm, measured. He doesn’t raise his voice. He’s a working man, with a number of different business interests and a passion for “racial advocacy.” As he reminds the crowd, “remember - it’s a movement, not a party.” If the crowd is the people there for the party, then Darcy brings in the people there for the movement, the loyal soldiers, the “true believers,” ready to do what they’re told, ready to make their bones, to earn their red laces. He issues orders like a man who has handled situations like this before. His eye for detail and icy pragmatism are even more chilling, somehow, because they’re so methodical and detached. There’s no yelling, no ranting, just cool appraisal of the situation and consideration of all the factors. Banker isn’t just a committed white supremacist, he’s also a businessman, and he can’t afford having the cops come around his place for reasons that have nothing to do with the murder. He and his loyal soldiers know the law, know how the law thinks, know the limits of the law. And so the Ain’t Rights, a bunch of 20-something musicians, have to figure out how to outwit a building full of people wholly comfortable with violence, a strong motivation to make this whole thing go away as quickly as possible, and a pretty good idea of how to do so.
The result is a tense, claustrophobic film that avoids a lot of easy clichés. First, it gets the setting exactly right, and that setting brings with it its own dread. It’s easy for film and television to get subcultures wrong, usually in ways that only members of that particular subculture will notice. This is a film about a hardcore punk band trying to tour, and what happens to them when they get in way, way over their heads. And it rarely, if ever, strikes a false note on that front. The shows attended by eight people, crashing in people’s houses, siphoning gas, falling asleep at the wheel, it’s all true to life. You’re hurtling across the country basically on the goodwill of others, and sometimes they come through, sometimes they let you down. I was a punk rock kid too, and went to shows in cruddy DIY venues where the soundproofing was mattresses shoved up against the windows, shows ended early when the cops showed up to shut it down, shows where people in
KKK and neo-Nazi t-shirts mingled freely with the rest of the crowd, shows where some of those people put other people in the hospital after the show. In some parts of the country, it just comes with the territory - you go out to see bands and the faint hum of imminent violence is just always there. Culture at the margins attracts people at the margins, and things get gritty. The setting, then, rings instantly true. It’s pretty clear to any audience that the protagonists are among a rough crowd, but if you’re especially familiar with the milieu you’ll get the same empty feeling in the pit of your stomach I did as soon as they pulled up to the club, because you
know this situation. You’ve probably
been in this situation. In this subculture, you learn how to read the room, and you know when bad shit is brewing. It’s absolutely true to life.
Next, it gets the characters right and affords them a great deal of humanity. The Ain’t Rights aren’t action heroes, but they’re not entirely helpless either. Touring coast-to-coast out of a van breeds a certain amount of resourcefulness and tenacity, and they’re not about to let themselves get slaughtered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There aren’t any hysterics, any breakdowns, they keep their wits about them, which makes everything that happens that much worse in a way. They’re doing the best they can, they’re just wildly overmatched, and their best isn’t necessarily going to be enough. And the skinheads are people too. It’s not unusual for film and television to turn white supremacists, especially white-power skinheads, into two-dimensional fanatics, constantly rabbiting on about purity and the master race and all that. But that’s rarely how people talk or act. Even Nazis have lives and conversations about things other than being Nazis, and so the antagonists don’t go around throwing up
Roman salutes or engaging in gratuitous sadism. There’s no leering, no monologuing. They’re not especially happy about the situation either, but it’s happened, and they have to take care of it. Some of the younger members of the crew are eager to prove themselves and welcome the prospect of doing so with bro-ish enthusiasm, while the older members are all business. They’re not looking forward to this, but they aren’t backing down either, and they have no problem taking lives. So this is not a film populated by caricatures. It isn’t a character study, but you get a good sense of who people are from how they carry themselves, how they talk, how they act, and they’re largely real.
So we have people who feel real in a place that feels real, and what happens also feels very real, and this is where the horror really is. This is a violent film, but it isn’t the gratuitous, tossed-off violence of the slasher film. People cry and moan and bleed out, and the damage is visceral. It’s a desperate struggle to stay alive, things happen quickly and without buildup or fanfare as often as not. Someone’s alive one second, then they’re not. It doesn’t revel in gore, a lot happens just off-camera or is cut away from quickly, with a few graphic depictions of violence providing excruciating punctuation. It’s broken glass and box cutters and shotguns and machetes and attack dogs and choking people out until they turn purple and just…stop. It’s hard to watch. It’s supposed to be. The violence matters here in a way that often isn’t true in horror films and vividly illustrates the stakes.
Which isn’t to say that it’s wall-to-wall ultraviolence, there’s a real sense of mood here as well. It’s leavened by a dark sense of humor throughout - the protagonists are acutely aware that they’re outmatched and don’t respond with steely resolve as much as bewilderment and a sense that they’re sort of making it up as they go, and the utter arbitrariness of their situation - four people just trying to get back home, in the wrong place at the wrong time, the difference between life and death a matter of a cell phone and a door that should have been locked - gives the final act a real sense of tragedy and melancholy. All of this could have been avoided, none of this had to happen, but it did, and it cost lives.
For all their rhetoric about preserving their culture and heritage, white supremacists are ultimately bullies who hurt others to feel better about themselves. It always ends up there, no matter how polite the front they present. But they aren’t monsters, just like serial killers aren’t monsters. Monsters aren’t real, and people like this are. They’re weak, damaged, and their need to make themselves feel strong only causes needless suffering and anguish. As Darcy says at the beginning, “however this ends, it won’t end well.” And it doesn’t. Good people die for no good reason at all. That’s what this film says, and it’s haunted me since the credits rolled.
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