Barbarian: A Film About the Same Thing, Over and Over
There's a rope dangling out of the wall of Zach Cregger's breakout monster-slasher. Once you start tugging it, all kinds of morbid symptoms start crawling out.
(Spoiler alert, naturally. – GF)
Barbarian, the Zach Cregger-directed breakout film of this year’s spooky season, is the latest in a series of critically-praised horror pictures in which an otherwise quotidian, modern scenario is slowly peeled back to reveal subterranean realms (literal or metaphorical) of exploitation, violence, and brutality that sustain it – and how characters on higher ground elide, conceal, or work to uphold this dynamic, whether they know it or not.
Which makes it interesting that Cregger’s film appears not to have attracted the same degree of insightful, critical analysis as similar works by Jordan Peele or Bong Joon-ho. Perhaps this is because Jordan Peele has rarely made the overall thrust of his directorial project a mystery, even if he leaves subjective interpretation up to the viewer. As for Parasite, the subtext to Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning picture became much clearer once he stepped right out and told us (it’s about capitalism, dummy). And yet, Barbarian seems mostly to have been received as an expertly-executed but ultimately typical monster-slasher flick.
Apparently, few commentators noticed the rope Cregger left dangling out of Barbarian’s wall – which is a shame, because once you start tugging on it, all manner of morbid symptoms start crawling up from below.
Barbarian is a film about bad people. Or good people who do bad things; or maybe good people who do things they don’t know might be bad; or perhaps bad people who insist they’re good in spite of the bad things they do; or people who might not have any conception of good and bad at all. It’s this uneasy interplay between vice and virtue that turns the film’s title into a riddle. Who, or what, is the audience supposed to identify as the eponymous barbarian?
Like many other monsters from horror’s cinematic and literary canon, Barbarian’s monster, the ‘Mother’ (Matthew Patrick Davis) is a deceivingly complex figure. Deformed, unclothed, brutally violent, unfathomably strong, and almost entirely non-verbal, she is barbaric in the most literal sense, and thus the title’s most immediate referent. But when we learn how she was conceived, the end product of generations of brutal, incestuous rape, raised in total darkness, and entirely unsocialised save for an instructional VHS cassette tape for new mothers, a more complicated picture emerges. We are confronted with the question of whether what is truly barbaric about this film resides elsewhere, in someone (or something) else.
Keith (Bill Skarsgård), the unintended and undesired co-tenant, is an early suspect. Having finally allowed Tess (Georgina Campbell) into the house following some uneasy doorstep interrogations, the tension between the two subsides. At least until Keith makes some uncomfortable overtures, like asking a clearly shaken woman he’s just met if she’d like to share a bottle of wine with him during this co-habitation arrangement she did not choose, and with which she is clearly not entirely comfortable.
Keith is a nice guy. Which is kind of the problem. What seem to him like harmless gestures strike the observer as somewhat creepy, perhaps even predatory. It’s not that any one action is explicitly bad, per se, just that the way he goes about them, in this context, is a little tone-deaf.
Fortunately, we learn that he’s actually associated with a hip creative community that’s the subject of a documentary Tess is in town to potentially work on. He’s a trendy urban transplant who moved to Detroit to take advantage of the rock-bottom rents and abandoned real estate left in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, an exemplar of post-2008 pioneer spirit. In fact, he ended up in the same house as Tess on this night because he’s on a scouting mission, looking for the next part of town to ‘settle’.
What to one observer looks like an economically-gutted suburb that was once home to dozens of families and a thriving community, to Keith is a potential base for the next quasi-communitarian art scene folly – which, reality informs us, will almost certainly serve as the nucleus for other ‘community redevelopment’ projects; a coffee shop here, a fashion boutique there, some real estate speculation, and then, the predictable denouement: a block of luxury apartments.
See, it’s not that anything Keith and his friends are doing is explicitly bad, per se, just that these things don’t normally develop according to the same intentions with which they began. He’s just one individual caught up in the same thing as the rest of us, both subject of and subjected to the coercive flows of market forces. It’s the kind of exculpatory self-rationalisation anyone might use, whether a poorly-paid professional seeking affordable rents in a tight housing market, a buy-to-let landlord supplementing their lifestyle with some easy passive income, or a multi-national asset management firm like Blackrock buying up foreclosed properties to flip or rent out en-masse. It’s not them, you see, it’s the system.
AJ Gilbride (Justin Long) is more cut-and-dried. From the moment we first encounter him driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, convertible top lowered, singing along to an insufferable novelty hippy rock number, the subtext is clear: AJ is an asshole. An asshole who’s about to have his sitcom canceled after a female co-star accuses him of sexual assault. AJ, of course, strenuously denies these allegations, and vows to both clear his name and destroy his accuser’s. (Later, a drunken conversation with an old friend at a bar reveals there’s more truth to the allegations than he first conceded to his agents; that, deep down, he knows he’s guilty. But not really. He can’t be. He’s a ‘good fucking person’ too.)
Thrown into financial straits, AJ’s wealth manager advises him to tighten his belt and secure immediate short-term income. Maybe sell some of his properties that he lists on short-term rental apps like airbnb, like the one in Detroit that Tess and Keith double-booked and are currently trapped in the basement of, their fates (or one of theirs, at least) unclear. Perhaps AJ was responsible for ensuring the safety of the patrons who make use of his properties, but he’s halfway across the country and too busy for dreary administrative chores. Besides, that’s what he pays the local property management company for. (Apparently, they don’t do much either, but that’s hardly his fault. He just owns the place.)
Now back in that same Brightmoor house, AJ tries to make sense of the unmade beds, strewn-around luggage, and general sense of intermediacy pervading the scene. Eventually, he notices the propped-open door to the basement, its lights left on, and discovers the same concealed torture chamber that traumatised Tess and piqued the curiosity that sealed Keith’s fate. So, naturally, he does what any decent human being landlord would do: breaks out his tape measure and starts sizing up the floor space, imagining the home’s steadily upward-ticking sale price with each step further into the abyss. Ask not for what the square footage is used; ask only what the square footage is.
It’s a hilarious scene that knowingly plays on the fine line separating the abhorrent and the absurd. Like other comedic talents who’ve made surprisingly effective transitions into darker subject matter like Jordan Peele and Todd Phillips, Cregger understands how turning a tasteless joke into a perfect punchline is sometimes a matter of timing. Build a solid set-up, let it simmer in the audience’s heads, then crank it all the way up. In the same way that Keith seems blissfully ignorant of the socioeconomic factors that created his crew’s creative playgrounds, AJ looks past the tiny, smeared, bloody handprint on the dungeon’s wall, and jumps straight to speculating on how this horrific discovery might benefit his bottom line. What on Earth would make someone’s brain operate this way? To quote Mike Davis (RIP), “mental geographies betray class prejudice.”
It’s when the audience is introduced to Frank (Richard Brake), the house’s erstwhile owner, by way of a flashback sequence, that the basement’s grim, suspected function is confirmed. We open on him exiting the house and driving his car down Barbary Street. On the radio, a news broadcaster can be heard warning of the recently-inaugurated Reagan administration’s impending economic adjustments. From this, we can infer that it is early 1981 and that then-Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s infamous ‘shock’ raising of interest rates the previous year has taken effect, triggering knock-on budgetary constrictions for employers and consumers alike, with resultant worker layoffs, rising unemployment, and reduced spending across the board. Later, Frank’s neighbour approaches him to announce that their family is moving away; this area, with its immaculate lawns and children playing in the street, is in decline. Frank, unmoved, replies that he isn’t going anywhere.
We learn that Frank is a methodical serial killer who preys upon vulnerable, unaccompanied women in the local area, kidnapping and imprisoning them in his basement where he rapes, tortures, and murders them, capturing his acts on film for his own indulgence. Like the household name killers of that era of whom he is a composite, Frank anthropomorphises the popular anxieties that pervaded Middle America during the economic downturns of the late-1970s. He is the human face of the indescribable but ever-present sense of peril that stalked the idyllic neighbourhoods of the post-war era as the good times began to fade and decline kicked in; the unseen killer lurking behind the white picket fence. All the more ominous that when we see Frank stalking a prospective victim, he shows up at her house disguised as a municipal worker, just dropping by to check the water: He’s from the government, and he’s here to help.
Of course, the making-reality of this American Dream during previous decades had always relied upon violence being performed elsewhere. Extractive economies in the Middle East and Africa; a war-machine humming in South-East Asia; potential socialist revolutions on America’s doorstep safely put back in the bottle with a bullet or twelve. Only now, that violence was in your own neighbourhood. Or perhaps it was always, already there. You just didn’t notice until it felt like the threat might be lurching toward your own door.
Back to the present. Having descended into the basement with his tape measure, AJ is captured by the Mother and thrown into a pit with Tess, who has been surviving, for how long is unclear, on the Mother’s breast milk, served in a baby’s bottle.
The Mother, it must be said, is barbaric. She is also precisely what her name suggests: a Mother, acting on a maternal instinct, however warped her conception of that might be. It is not clear whether anyone other than Frank’s own victims have been trapped in this dungeon before Tess and AJ. But it is telling that Tess, the most sympathetic and empathetic of the film’s characters, recognises this maternal dynamic, and entertains it enough to sustain herself under brutal conditions. It is equally telling that AJ is unable to contain his disgust and go along with the game (on Tess’s instruction), even when his own life is at stake. He refuses the bottle, so instead, he gets the bosom. Unyielding self-interest only makes things worse, even in this dungeon.
Barbarian has received criticism for its deployment of incest as a narrative shorthand for something to be reviled or abhorred. This is not the first time in recent years that incest (and consequently, mental and physical disability) has been used by a director to conjure monstrous figures in the grounded, real-world settings popular in modern horror – Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar makes use of similar tropes to different ends, and was critiqued on the same terms. That being said, thematic flashes throughout the film, such as those outlined above, suggest a deeper message that can be gleaned from Barbarian, for which the act of inbreeding, and its degenerative effects, are a potent metaphor.
As mentioned, the film begins chronologically at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a period that also marked the widespread popularisation of ‘trickle-down’ economics. In essence, this theory argues that by cutting taxes and allowing the wealthy to keep more of their income, they will invest more in their own businesses, producing organic economic growth which will lead to higher rates of employment and improved economic prosperity all around, without any need for state intervention.
Known both admiringly and derisively as ‘Reaganomics’, trickle-down was controversial even at its outset. Critics noted how lower tax revenues would inevitably lead to calls for public services and welfare programmes to be slashed in order to balance budgets. Society’s poor and vulnerable were having the rug yanked from beneath them to facilitate larger transfers of cash to the already wealthy, all while being told it was for their own benefit. But after a decade in which liberal and conservative governments on both sides of the Atlantic had struggled to tackle the dual beast of skyrocketing inflation and foundering economic growth – a phenomenon known as ‘stagflation’ that was inconceivable to the predominant Keynesian economic theories of the time – the vanguard cadre of intellectuals, economists, think tanks and politicians now known as the ‘neoliberals’ were the only ones who had any new ideas at all.
Consequently, neoliberalism entered its ascendancy and governments across the developed world set about slashing corporate taxes, gutting social safety nets, privatising national industries, and handing ever larger portions of the state’s mandate over to private interests. In the US, what was started by Reagan was continued by subsequent administrations (both Democratic and Republican) with only occasional, tactical adjustments. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher was eventually succeeded by Tony Blair, the staunchly neoliberal Labour PM whose ‘Cool Britannia’ veneer masked a political-economic programme that was essentially Thatcherism on steroids, further reducing provision of public housing, selling off the state through the backdoor via ‘Public Private Partnerships’, and gutting the UK’s once world-leading welfare state in favour of tough-on-crime social policies, justified through rhetoric that laid the blame for social and economic deprivation at the feet of those experiencing it the hardest, or otherwise blamed immigrants.
By the time the Global Financial Crisis struck in 2008, neoliberalism had become so hegemonic – such clear common sense to policymakers and voters alike – that the impending response from both the incoming liberal Obama administration and the Conservative-led coalition government in the UK was obvious: Austerity, i.e. slashing public services and cutting corporate tax rates. Not unlike the socialist and communist projects of the previous century that neoliberal advocates regularly pillory, neoliberalism cannot fail, it can only be failed, and if your neoliberal policies produce negative outcomes, that’s because they either weren’t true neoliberalism, or you didn’t do neoliberalism hard enough.
Recent events offer signs (however meagre) that this self-reproducing cycle might finally be coming to an end. Following the publication of a twenty-year economic study that characterised trickle-down economics as a dishonest myth, the Joe Biden administration has signaled a desire to get out from under the heel of neoliberal dogma. Though Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better Act was ultimately betrayed by fiscal hawks in his own party, the bipartisan infrastructure bill that accompanied it (before being decoupled as a show of good faith to aforementioned fiscal hawks, only to be predictably passed sans-BBB) demonstrated some degree of renewed support for state investment in the public good. In a somewhat ironic turn, the recently passed into law Inflation Reduction Act succeeded where Build Back Better failed through an act of rhetorical subterfuge more regularly deployed by neoliberal policymakers. By assuming a moniker that spoke directly to one of the neoliberal dogmatists’ primary bugbears, the IRA was able to pass into law while allocating vital funding for projects like national clean energy production and environmental conservation.
As always, the devil is in the details, and there is plenty in both bills to criticise, but it remains significant that a politician as emblematic of neoliberal governmentality as Joe Biden might be the one to finally call it quits on cutting your way to prosperity. It is also equally troubling that in recent weeks, Biden’s own Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has set his heart on doing a Volcker Shock redux, insisting at every opportunity that the only way out of present economic woes, whether national or global in origin, is hiking interest rates, throwing thousands out of work, and heralding the cleansing fire of a deliberately-induced recession. One can hardly blame him for following the economic principles established by the generation before, and the generation before, and the generation before…
Eventually, Tess escapes the basement and scours the neighborhood in search of help. At first, she appeals to a duo of geared-up cops in a glossy SUV, only to surmise that they would sooner arrest her for being a public nuisance than rescue a man allegedly being tortured in a basement. (Don’t they know he’s a property-owner, nay, a landlord?)
Faced with no other choice, Tess re-enters the basement, rescues AJ, and the two are shepherded to safety by Andre (Jaymes Butler), a homeless man who has learned to survive amidst Brightmoor’s ruins. Ironically, Andre tried to warn Tess against entering the house earlier in the film, only for her to ignore him and run into the house for safety – because he’s a homeless man, and it’s not like anyone rents a cheap airbnb in a poor neighbourhood with the intention of interacting with the local population.
Andre’s initial appearance in the film is so brief that, like Tess, we scarcely consider him until he reappears to rescue Tess and AJ. Like Tess, we disregard him until he demonstrates his value by rescuing her. It’s a double-irony, indicting both Tess and audience, because it is Andre who, in a single utterance, provides us with the key to what Barbarian is really about.
Having taken shelter in a battered industrial warehouse nearby, Andre explains to Tess and AJ who, or what, the Mother is; how she is the endpoint of a brutal, violent process of self-reproduction that has gone on so long, and become so degenerated, that its product scarcely even resembles anything human anymore: “You make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you end up with something like that.”
Andre has also been here long enough, or is at least familiar enough with the neighbourhood’s lore, to know that Frank and the Mother have lived and persisted there far longer than anyone else; that, as he informs AJ, it’s their house, no matter what any deed or legal document says.
Andre’s personal history is never clarified. We do not learn, for instance, whether he once owned a house in the area and lost it in the wake of 2008, or whether he ended up in Brightmoor due to other circumstances. But he’s someone who knows how to live in the wreckage that others have long since abandoned, and who understands that Frank and the Mother, or what they represent, have always been there. He has survived and endured because he possesses an instinctive understanding of the forces he is up against – and then the Mother bursts through a wall and rips him to shreds as quickly as she smashed Keith’s skull into paste against a wall.
When we meet Frank in the present day, he’s a bedridden husk, living in his own filth in a cavernous room at the end of the tunnels, with nothing but videotapes of his past acts to keep him company. To us, they are evidence of unspeakable crimes. To him, they are trophies of his greatest achievements.
By the time another human being has the opportunity to confront Frank, it’s already too late. He’s too old, too weak, and too decrepit to face any justice that might have been satisfying. The gun goes off, and we understand he’s taken the easy way out. No great catharsis. No lessons learned. Frank is dead, but his morbid progeny lives on, a quasi-mythical being stalking a once prosperous neighbourhood in search of victims who don’t even live there anymore; a copy of a copy of a copy who can’t differentiate between caring and cruelty.
She doesn’t necessarily want to kill anyone. She just wants to be someone’s mother. Tess understands this. Tess also understands that what the Mother desires runs counter to what she does; that if you let her try to achieve what she wants through the behaviours she instinctively expresses, she’ll only end up killing you. Recognising this contradiction, Tess does the only thing she can if she wants to continue living, and cuts down this deformed, wretched maternal – and with her, a cycle that could only have created another one of her.
Frank is the embodiment of a genre of violence from a particular moment in history, one that continues to haunt the American psyche. It’s acute, concentrated, bloody, and only visible when it rises up from its subterranean environs and pierces the veil of the idyllic (and inherently political) spaces that house it, whether the other inhabitants realise it or not. Sunny, suburban utopias, subtended by the pretence that certain types of social (or socialised) violence don’t exist. Or that if they do, they happen elsewhere, somewhere far away. Not here.
Thankfully, Frank’s violence has now largely vanished, reduced to fodder for sexed-up true crime podcasts and sordid Netflix television series. But has it really vanished? Or has it simply transmuted into different forms; become more ambient, more distributed, more diffuse? Frank told you he wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t even have to climb out of that basement for his offspring to continue wreaking havoc upon the world.
Which of these is more violent: A house like any other on a sunny suburban street that happens to house a serial killer, or an entire row of boarded-up houses that were once a thriving neighbourhood, remnants of so many lives and livelihoods whose tattered outlines we can only trace and ponder? Or, among this wreckage, a single home, discomfitingly burnished, a picture-perfect simulacrum of a blissful domesticity of yesteryear – save for the fact that no one actually lives there anymore, except maybe for a night or two at a time?
Now, remember that the people who produced these conditions did so out of a steadfast commitment to common sense. They did it to promote entrepreneurialism, and to encourage the kind of human flourishing that can only come from the rationality of the market. They insist that they do it for your own good. That they do it because they care about you. Like a mother cares for her children.
Barbarian takes place on a little road in Brightmoor, Detroit named Barbary Street. It’s a title that at first glance is denotive, but turns out to be descriptive. Which is to say, Barbarian is not a noun, but an adjective; not a person, but a place.
What is barbarian?
Look around you. You’re living in it.