"A Quiet Place," A Troubling Metaphor

​"Equal and Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay
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"A Quiet Place," A Troubling Metaphor

    Last week I saw "A Quiet Place,"

...a really good movie, I thought, delightfully cribbing elements from the original (and still the greatest, in my book) alien invasion movie, the 1953 flick "War of the Worlds,"

...then multiplying that movie's  jump-out-of-your-seat moments,

​...which are all the jumpier in this movie because most of the film transpires in silence,

...as, per the plot line, the humanivore alien invaders are blind but have ears as sharp as their teeth, and one false noise will bring down a lightening-strike chomp upon the unfortunate, helpless noise-maker.

    Thus the humans in the movie have learned to live in silence, to be ever on guard against any inadvertent move that may bring on the  monsters, or at least the terror that the monsters might be on their way. It's a stressful existence for the movie characters and, by extension, for the audience while they're watching these characters.

      Still, for most of us "A Quiet Place" is just a movie, the fear and anxiety it produces really nothing more than a few quick thrills of adrenaline that dissipate shortly after the theater lights come back up.               

      But during a conversation with my daughter about the movie she offered me a deeper - and rather troubling - insight into "A Quiet Place.".

    "You know," said my daughter, a psychology major, "anyone who's been in an abusive  relationship with a person with an anger disorder should not see this film. It could bring up some bad upsetting emotions."
         ​      I could, in fact, understand how the movie could be an emotional  trigger for anyone  who'd ever lived in a state of subliminal anxiety, who'd ever been conditioned to watch every step so as not to suddenly arouse the inner monster lurking within some close and inescapable relationship.

      I could understand how "A Quiet Place" could be an all-too-personal metaphor for an abusive relationship.
      In fact, since that conversation with my daughter about the movie I've been thinking about a book by Allen Long that I read and subsequently blogged about a few months ago called "Less Than Human" (See post from 10/16/2017),

...in which the author recounts his childhood in a wealthy suburb at the hands of his socially respected parents who beat him and his brother at the slightest infraction, real or imagined, during an era when corporal punishment was considered such standard operating procedure in the raising of children that an adult's emotional distress and inner rage could be taken out on one's children in the name of love and with society's blessing.
      Hence as children Long and his brother lived what seemed to them a normal existence regularly spiked with moments of terror and physical assault, sometimes the terror being worse than the assault.
       I recommend reading "Less Than Human."
       I also recommend seeing "A Quiet Place."
       They're really the same story.