To Gaze, or Not To Gaze

Rating: 8/10 (22 April 2020)

Seeing "Bird Box" a second time now, I appreciate it more. Perhaps, upon first viewing, it appeared too akin to "A Quiet Place," but primarily based on sight instead of sound, and made worse by its naturey suicides similarity to "The Happening" (2008). Maybe its popular and social-media appeal at the time, or those nitpicking plot holes and improbabilities, blinded me to what the picture does fundamentally well. I still find the sisters' first conversation as they largely and ridiculously ignore incredible TV reports to be laughable. Regardless, that we're now, as of this writing, living during a real-world pandemic may focus the mind and draw some parallels with the fictional narrative--blindfolds instead of masks. As a horror movie, "Bird Box" is solidly Lovecraftian, of the fear of an unknown and better unseen monster that attacks the very essence of cinema, to look.
Two elements in the movie reflexively point to this symmetry and paradoxical dichotomy, between the spectator (i.e. us, the audience) of the movie intended to fear the horror picture on the screen in front of them, as they presumably sit in comfort before the Netflix streaming (or, you know, a theatre, for those who still and may someday again go to the movies), and the surrogate viewers within the movie whose very lives as characters depend on looking away and running away in terror. Either way, it's the act of looking that matters. How apt, then, that the protagonist, Malorie (Sandra Bullock) is a painter in the pre-apocalyptic world--creating art to be gazed upon. The other reflexive element here involves video-as-surveillance. Greg (BD Wong) is closest to being our in-film surrogate spectator, as he positions himself seated to view a screen of the recorded monster. We never quite share his exact position, however, during the presumably full exposure of the cosmic, monstrous force. To do otherwise, it seems, would drive one mad over its reported beauty or kill the effect.
This core understanding of the importance of the cinematic gaze is enough for me to appreciate "Bird Box." That gaze, moreover, is further reinforced as character driven by the association of the camera's view (for which the spectator strongly associates, as what the camera sees is what we see in a movie, after all) with the sight of the characters, or their lack thereof, as obscured by blindfolds, closed eyes or otherwise looking away from the unseen menace. Rather the inverse of "The Invisible Man" movies, by the way, whereby we try to see what can't or doesn't want to be seen, as, instead, here, we try not to see what wants a look. In addition to looking, though, "Bird Box" isn't bad, either, as a mother-children adventure to an almost-Biblical Garden of Eden, with one boy and one girl, to boot. Speaking of which, this was an odd movie for me to review after also having recently reviewed "Blindness" (2008). Both are apocalyptic and involve not looking, but for contrary reasons, and the depictions of the blind are starkly different. In their own ways, however, they both employ sight as parables and, more importantly, demonstrate and play with the essence of cinema as a visual art form.