Green Room's Normalization Of Horror And Ideological Terror Is What Makes It Feel So Real
The Viciously Intense Thriller Reveals An Uncomfortable Glimpse Into The Inner Workings Of Not Just White Supremacy, But What Ideology Can And Can’t Do For Us
Tristan Young @talltristan
Punk music, for all its defiant proclivities, has run the gamut of the ideological spectrum yielding everything from inspiring to problematic results. It’s occupied the orbits or been a centre of gravity for everything from disaffected yet unapologetically fierce progressivism, to militant neo fascism. Its variable and incendiary nature has proven compatible with all manner of passions ranging from morally righteous to reprehensible. Conversely, fascist theorem, as clumsily welded by nazis of the neophyte or traditional markers, white supremacists, or skin heads, has attempted a great deal of metamorphosis in the name of self preservation and relevancy. The prodigious thinking that was once isolated to despotic autocrats or foreign battlefields has slithered its way into the more decorous arenas of talking head punditry and even our legislatures. These two concepts, as an organization of and vectors for virtues, have at times been unrecognizably separate and at others near synchronous in their over lap. What happens when you short circuit and circumvent these distinctions? Render the two ideas as polar opposites but force them to cohabitate, however briefly, in the same physical space? It gets catastrophically messy is what happens. Green Room is what happens.
Jeremy Saulnier wrote and directed Green Room, released in 2015, after critical interest began to accumulate around his 2013 indie revenge flick Blue Ruin (Saulnier assures us not to spend too much time reading into the color schemes behind his film titles). With more institutional and commercial success becoming a possible advent for him, Saulnier recognized his opportunity to bring his film idea about a group of punk rockers’ disastrous encounter with neo nazis- not exactly a concept that shouts accessibility or box office gold- to fruition was narrowing; thusly he got on it right away. The story draws on his own experiences and indiscretions in the punk rock scene in his youth. Crashing into a cornfield, a ruinous paint ball analogy, a demoralizing diner gig- all scenes that are in the film that Saulnier insists occurred in his past (but not the felonious siphoning gas part, he promises). He would incorporate all of these elements into a narrative that challenges not so much what we believe, but why we feel required to take such moralistic positions at all.
Green Room is a tight, Spartan affair. Its minimalist approach is utilized to maximise its budget in short concentrated bursts of momentous terror or gorgeous cinematography. Within such a wide tonal schism is a story that builds horror through its apparent plausibility. DIY yourself punk rockers Pat (Anton Yelchin), Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner), going by the Aint Rights, a band name that perfectly intersects pretentious and obnoxious, are on the last legs of their flailing tour. No gas, no money, no energy, no gigs- well one gig that netted them about $6 a piece. As they are about to call it quits and head back to Arlington, Virginia in defeat, they are offered one last gig at a remote bar/compound in the backwoods of Oregon. The money is good- better than they are used to at least. They are warned not to get too political as the occupants and those that frequent the spot have rather extreme political leanings and are not lacking in temerity to boast about it. Upon arriving they find an encampment adorned in confederate flags, swastikas and other vestigial nazi paraphernalia.
After some awkward introductions, playing a set that involved a cover of Nazi Punks Fuck Off that somehow didn’t cause them to get their asses kicked, Pat accidently discovers the bloody aftermath of a horrific murder. From that point our decidedly unlikely heroes become witnesses, then hostages, and then far worse. The emphasis on a song titled Meat Grinder by another band at the bar should not be lost on anyone looking for not so subtle foreshadowing. Pat and his friends find themselves alternating between being trapped in or retreating into the titular green room, desperately trying to devise ersatz plans out of their perilous situation but for the most part utterly failing. On the other side of the door they are locked or hiding behind is Darcy (Patrick Stewart), the owner of the compound and leader of this local white supremacist movement, scheming up his own machinations to cover up the catalytic murder and deal with the terrified witnesses. To say things go poorly for everyone in this pressure cooker of a situation is an understatement of deleterious proportions.
Genres can be slippery and nebulous descriptors at times. For a stretch it’s not exactly clear if Green Room occupies a space on the spectrum of thriller or horror, or to what extent the markers of such genres intersect here. Violence does not necessarily imply horror even if it is the most predominant in its visual lexicon. Unrelenting tension is paramount to a suspense thriller and often relegated to an afterthought in horror films, the inferior ones at least. Despite the obvious adjacency between these genres and their sub genre appendices Green Room is nevertheless a uniquely recombinant interpretation of where and how these genres interact with each other, making for a vividly jarring experience. The violence in the film is equal parts sparse and agonizingly potent. Not a lot in the way of blood shed happens for much of the film. It draws on, in its own extrapolated way, the lessons of Jaws that less is more. These long uninterrupted sojourns into simply talking, in exacerbated tones sure, compels us to wonder for a time what exactly kind of movie this is.
When the violence does occur however it is severely specific, shockingly blunt, but also highly truncated in its depictions. When poor Pat’s arm is cut to shreds, his hand nearly dismembered, it all happens off screen through some intuitive scene blocking. We only, briefly, see the grizzly after effects. As the more cynical and brazen Amber (Imogen Poots), the left behind member of the other punk band that started this whole mess, turns a box cutter on a subdued would be assailant, we’re not quite sure what her intentions are. The camera focuses more on her glassine stare then of her splitting a man open and peeling back his layers of tissue. The rest of the group are frozen in their traumatized glare while we are left with little more than the visceral implications, asking ourselves did that just actually happen? Dimly lit shots of a vacated and dormant concert hall obscure our view of person viciously mauled by a dog; instead we infer the severity of the situation as we observe the glint in a smear of liquid oozing from his neck. As the story shifts its focus via a third act revelation, a character, Daniel (Mark Webber), is suddenly endowed with more depth and intrigue just as quickly as half of his face is atomized in one of the most unceremonious depictions of demise via shot gun you’ll ever see. As if prophesizing his own end and the stylistic brutalism of the film he responds to suggestion of conspiracy with, “No, just a clusterfuck”. It’s down right surreal in how disorienting the incident is and the remaining characters articulate the abject terror that comes with that disorientation perfectly.
It’s that disorientation, that stress that is key to Green Room’s terror. Not so much in the eviscerating ringer that this film puts our ostensible heroes through (although there is that), but in that these kids are just not equipped to handle any of this. Horror film clichés are derided for the idiocy in which they depict their main or supplemental characters for operating within. Don’t split it up, don’t go into the basement, don’t open that door. Yet in most films that draw from these traduced tropes, the errant characters are depicted as otherwise rational actors, erroneously making one foolish choice that was easily avoidable and under circumstances that have not yet escalated out of control. The killer or monster only pops up after you open the door. In Green Room our characters are afforded none of these apparent cinematic luxuries. Every choice they make, go left or right, this room or that, split up or not, open the door, must be made under extreme duress and constantly morphing and escalating conditions. Whatever logical or rationale observances they try to base their decisions on keep deteriorating under the ever-shifting situation. It’s so easy to yell at a foolish character for opening the door and exposing oneself to a titular slasher. What about when there are killers on both sides of the door and the door is the only way out? How rational can one expect the decisions of kids who can’t even keep a full tank of gas to be under situations like this? We don’t get frustrated at them for screwing things up because of course they did, who wouldn’t? Instead we are instinctually motivated to sympathize with their plight due to the not so subliminal admission that we would be just as fucked. That increases our own proximity as viewers to the fictional situation, intensifying the subjugating terror of it all.
In designing its discomfort this way, the film also neatly obviates the need for any meaningful character development. While this is often a deficit of many horror movies, it’s more problematic in other films than here. We know little about Pat and his friends beyond their puritan, even rigidly dogmatic adherence to the crucibles of punk music. Sam is the level-headed slightly bureaucratic one, Reece is a wild card, Tiger is a bit spastic and hysterical. Pat becomes a defacto leader if only though surviving enough cycles of attempts on their lives to become at least partly cognizant of the skinheads’ plans for them and draft some inchoate ideas as to how to act accordingly. Amber is standoffish to a fault, but in a way that occasionally, perversely, borders on charming (this should absolutely be credited to Poots’ remarkable work in the film). Not a ton to go on for any of them. Yet we understand them all too well as they flounder just as pathetically as the rest of us would in a distinctly no win situation. With that situational incompetence shown in such sympathetic terms, we connect with them not through their growth, but through them filling the rolls of avatars for our own hypothetical misfortunes.
These connective tissues are fragile and could easily be sundered into a suspense breaking schism by all of the usual expository rationales required to kick a horror film into action. A monster emerging within our dreams or from a misty lake. A demonic possession forcing characters to contend with something that in no way requires us to really studiously consider how we would handle it. The long game plan of a satanic cult slowly but surely appropriating the body of a family member is not a likely thing, and therefore not the kind of thought exercise in which we are compelled to consider what decisions we would take at which juncture. Green Room distils its relentless agony down to the simplest of mistakes or decisions that they could hardly be admonished as such; in same cases it’s mere muscle memory or contemporary etiquette that leads them disastrously astray. Simply pulling into the parking lot to play the set instead of bailing at the first sign of a confederate flag. Accidently forgetting a phone in the room, and then stumbling onto a horrific murder. Agonizing back and forth on the pros and cons of surrendering a gun over to Darcy and his fellow goons. Despite their clear incompetence, it’s never spectacularly bad planning that sinks them but death by a thousand cuts in the form of all the small ambient ways life can play out for the worse. It creates a haunting certitude of the eventual demise of so many characters, beautifully foreshadowed in the starkly uncommon cascade of green lights clearing their path through the city to the compound. It metaphorically and literally signals the inescapable inevitability of the path they are on.
The attrition that wears our characters down is further exacerbated in having to deal with the subtly devilish Darcy. It’s wildly unnerving to see global treasure and all around wonderful human being Patrick Stewart play such a virulent and duplicitous racist but his work is excellent here. In his multiple scenes negotiating with Pat and his friends as they are situated on opposite sides of the green room door, we can see the fear and unease he is exerting over his hostages, even if he won’t directly acknowledge it. Instead he is calm and didactic, measured and a touch taciturn even. He weaponizes the logical and probabilistic realities of their quagmire against them. His ad hoc calculations out manoeuvre that of the hostages and through simply spelling out the reality of the situation he inflicts so much stress and terror on them. You can see their cognitive capabilities being atrophied in real time when going up against the sinister intellect of Darcy, and the viewer is similarly handicapped by for the most part only getting to understand the captives’ sense of the situation.
It’s this manipulation on Darcy’s part that provides some key insights into how his neo nazis operate, and the larger movement of modern day white supremacy as a whole. In doing so, Green Room provides an invective repudiation against them and reveals the fallacy behind their so-called truths. The story kicks into gear when a nazi kills a fellow band member and Pat accidentally discovers the aftermath. From that point the film depicts Darcy and his cohorts continuously manipulating not so much the events themselves but the appearance of them. As Pat and his band mates cower in the green room with a gun and another nazi they are keeping at bay, Darcy suggests he could tell the police that it is them who are taking hostages and he is simply trying to secure the release of his friend. When the cops do come, they are completely side tracked by the staging of another (mostly fake) stabbing to coincide with the brief comments Pat managed to squeeze out in his 911 call. Darcy’s scheme to launder the whole mess and inoculate themselves from liability is to falsify the impression that Pat and the band were trespassing on his property for unknown but no doubt nefarious intents, and he was merely defending himself.
All of these actions are a microcosm for the broader, coalescing movements of white supremacy and neo nazism. The world, simply put, is not the way they say it is. Their ideological and cultural narratives are rife with them being victimized and in their rights of defense, despite their ranks being comprised almost exclusively of the most privileged and historically un-persecuted racial classes in history, modern or otherwise. As such they lean into imagined grievances, bad faith declarations of victimization and erasure. Cancel culture. Embellishments of things that were never really happening motivates and animates their following so the leaders of the movement can secure positions of power and relevance, be it in the military, private life, or public sector. The scene in which second in command to Darcy, Gabe (Macon Blair, who is a long time friend of Saulnier and stared in Blue Ruin) stipulates his need for a ‘true believer’ is instructive. In order to bypass the scrutiny of the police upon being called, he has two young and eager zealots stab each other to approximate the vague conditions of the emergency that was called in. With an earnest and bizarre sense of commitment they take turns piercing each other’s abdomens. A look of solidarity is traded between the two as they are assured what they are doing serves a greater purpose.
The manipulation of those freshly recruited into the errant cause is contrasted by the bureaucratic normalcy of how Darcy’s organization actually operates. Bookkeeping, accounting, and the verisimilitude of non-culpability occupy their concerns at least as much as furthering the cause. Meanwhile, furthering the cause is the only thing on the minds of the red lace enforcers and the neophyte hanger-ons. The parallels between this and the normalized, at times only slightly less extreme rhetoric of elected leaders & media and their brain washed partisans is undeniable. Incendiary vitriol is fed to the foot soldiers of a movement on a steady diet to keep them angry, agitated, and aggrieved, while the leaders bask in influence and an influx of cash. Gabe’s character interestingly is situated at an uncomfortable nexus between these two dissonant ends of the spectrum. Not quite trusted in the upper circles of the organization, but trusted with the administration and wrangling of all the minions, Gabe observes first hand the feverish delusions of the true believers and the bureaucratic machinery behind the movement itself. This dissonance begins to dull his passion for either end of the ladder he is navigating. As things spiral more and more out of control by the end, the intrinsic tension of the movement proves untenable and finally, defeated, he wants out. You can see it in the apprehension in his eyes upon being promoted, and more explicitly when he admits that at this point he would rather just go to jail.
While the derisive fallacy of white supremacy is rendered in explicit terms, is Green Room articulating similar sentiments about our motley group of punk rockers? In more subtle terms there is evidence to suggest this is the case. Their band, Aint Rights, comes across as a little too on the nose early on in the film. They don’t believe in social media because it takes their fans out of the moment. They don’t make any money because being successful is anathema to true rock and roll. In an interview, Tiger says he doesn’t expect to make it to 70. Putting aside the unintentional acuity of his claim, it all reeks of performance. This veil of true punk authenticity, one so distinctly motivated by anti capitalist Marxism is revealed to be little more that just that- a veil. When the situation gets serious, their hardened exteriors melt away to show scared people in need of support and guidance. When initially asked what their all time desert island bands would be, they rattle off significantly credible hard core groups like Misfits or Slayer. Yet with death’s door figuratively and literally upon them Reece says, “Fuck it, Prince”.
It’s worth coupling these revelations with an earlier line; seemingly throw away at first but central to much of the film’s thematic reasoning. When being briefed on their upcoming gig, Sam inquires as to why they should err on the apolitical side. Their acquaintance, Tad (David W. Thompson), elucidates on the people that will soon be hosting them. “Right wing, uhh technically ultra left”. It seems benign but that nonchalant utterance foreshadows the symmetry in terms of optics between punk rock leftism and far right white supremacy. Lean so far into one kind of ideology, and eventually you’ll circle back into its polar opposite. The genocidal mania of Hitler’s Third Reich; the savage brutality of Stalin’s Five Year Plans- politically distinct yet similar results. Eventually they overlap despite their ideological gulfs. Ideology is a closed loop that we run along. If we feel motivated to move so far in one direction, we may circle back into the other if we are not careful. If that potential exists, then how much of the distinctions between the most extreme ideological passions are performative window dressing? Green Room would argue more than you think.
Saulnier contrasts this increasingly codified artifice with at times truly beautiful pastoral ambience, or at least moments of serene respite. Conjuring the opening of The Shining, but un-ironically excising the shots of such foreboding, Green Room has multiple stunning overhead shots of the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. An endless sea of vivid and soothing green forests, accentuated even further by the Verde color grading of the whole film. Iridescent and soothing green lights illuminate the background of a scene in which the band mates enjoy a brief moment of contentment while camping at night. The subdued and somnolent minimalist score of the film often counters the narratively useful punk rock soundtrack. The juxtaposition is maximised amid a sprawl of thrashing pugilist skinheads moshing, set to hypnotic and relaxing slow motion and cozy tonal vibes. It seems downright therapeutic.
All of this scenic catharsis is happening in and around a scene of unrelenting trauma and pain. Green Room articulates just how unnecessary this trauma is. It argues how aggressively we contort and malign our inner nature to squeeze into these ideological pathways that do little for us. The extremes we will go to manipulate ourselves beyond the natural cadence of our conscience in the name of belonging to something that doesn’t need to exist to begin with; so much of this is to our detriment. Saulnier isn’t saying we need to say to hell with modernity or opinions on how social organization needs to be administered, but that so much of what we need spiritually, mentally, and even physically, has always been there. We don’t need much of the rest. Music is amazing but so much of any genre’s optics is gratuitous and yields diminishing returns. Politics are important in any society but to let such things motivate you to hate your fellow men and women that much is incompatible with the natural splendour of a world we all share. Of course the two points are not in any way symmetrical, but it doesn’t change that we ignore what we can naturally get out of life by looking elsewhere. None of what happened in Green Room needed to happen, but it did, and it does; it will again in one shape or another. Until the ideological wheel is broken the risk of wading into its dark side remains. From there it doesn’t matter if we are inside our outside the green room, nor can the theatrical tropes of horror films be circumvented- the door has to open.