Headship Authority manifested through the frailty of the flesh.

Readership: All
Theme: Honoring Fathers
Author’s Note: Written on 2023/6/27.
Length: 550 words
Reading Time: 2.5 minutes + 2 minute video

A Quiet Place is a 2018 science fiction horror film written by, directed by, and starring John Krasinski.  Krasinski plays Lee Abbot, whose wife, Evelyn (Krasinski’s real-life wife, Emily Blunt) and three children are among the few human survivors of an alien invasion.  The aliens are blind, but they have extremely acute hearing, and are so heavily armored that they’re nearly indestructible.  They’re also fast, their front limbs are essentially scythes, and they behave like relatively intelligent predatory animals.  At the beginning of the story, most of humanity has been presumably eaten, and the Abbots are eking out an existence on an abandoned farm.

Contrary to most fictional dads of the last 35 years, Lee is brave, competent, resourceful, highly intelligent, selfless, and unabashedly masculine.  He’s not an action hero.  He’s not trying to fight the monsters, he’s trying to hide his family from them.  He’s an ordinary man trying to raise a family under nightmarish circumstances.  The circumstances are a fantasy, but imagine an ordinary father trying to raise his family during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, or as the black plague ravaged Europe, or during the Congolese Civil War.  (Which one?  Any of them.)  It’s that kind of vibe.

The themes I see are love, competence, and selflessness.

In most modern movies, Evelyn would be a girl boss constantly rolling her eyes at her oafish, cowardly husband before single-handedly saving the family from her husband’s incompetence.  Not here.

Another movie trope that irritates me like beach sand in my shorts is the badass post-apocalyptic feminist.  The most egregious example is the biker grandmas from Mad Max: Fury Road.  Not here, which is refreshing, because there are no feminists in collapsed civilizations.  There are many feminists in pre-collapsed civilizations, but given their girth, they’re usually the first to be eaten post-collapse.  The rest quickly find their inner damsel in distress.

Again, contrasting with most female characters of the last 35 years, Evelyn is feminine, loving, caring, and nurturing.  She even wears a dress.  She’s strong, but she’s the kind of strong that gives birth alone, in a bathtub, sans epidural, while struggling to remain quiet.

Whether they meant to or not, the movie demonstrates where “gender roles” came from, and it isn’t the oppressive, wh!te suprәm@c!st, heteronormative patriarchy.  It’s biology.  In the state of nature, pregnancy, child birth, and caring for infants (they have the feed bags, after all) incapacitates women for years.  That leaves dads to provide for and protect the family from monsters, be they saber tooth cats, the Mongol Horde, or indestructible aliens who arrived in an asteroid.

Finally, there’s the “I’ve always loved you” scene.  That’s all I’m going to say about that.

A Quiet Place is a rare gem these days. I highly recommend it, even if you’re not a fan of the genre.  You can find it streaming on various platforms, but you’ll have to pay for it.  The sequel is good, but not as good as the original, and the theme of honoring fathers is not as strong in the sequel.

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