After a summer of protests and with the electoral chaos looming in the horizon, it’s hard not to see in each new pop cultural release a contribution to the conversation about the current political moment. With its flashes of police brutality and sense of helpless defiance against the corruption and racism of institutional power, this is certainly the case with Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, a pacy, witty courtroom drama based on the infamous trial that followed the 1968 riots involving activists against the Vietnam War (although, sadly, there is no cameo by the great comic book editor Mike Gold, who was closely involved with the trial). As far as more outlandish genre entries go, though, the most fascinating viewing experience has got to be Gerard Bush’s and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum, which starts off as a deeply flawed thriller before totally redeeming itself in the final stretch (sure, it helped that I hadn’t watched the trailer and didn’t know anything about the premise other than the fact that it concerned slavery…), ultimately doing for Trump era race relations what Get Out did for the Obama zeitgeist.
The first third of Antebellum is just dreadful: the stunning cinematography apes the recent wave of prestige-looking horror projects (The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, the Suspiria remake…) in a jarringly exploitative way, aestheticizing the violence against black bodies to a point that could make Tarantino blush; the script is ultra-heavy-handed and historically cartoonish, with its purely sadistic, moustache-twirling 19th century villains immersed in anachronistic imagery that riffs on the Holocaust and Charlottesville while trying way too hard to counter the idealized Lost Cause of Gone with the Wind. The second third goes in a more interesting direction, even if it still feels like it’s spoon-feeding us a ham-fisted lecture on intersectionality… And then something incredible happens. I won’t spoil the twist, but the payoff won me over – not only because it reframed the previous grotesqueries in a satirical light, but also because it ramped up the absurdity into a series of gonzo set pieces. Although awkwardly uneven and often eye-rolling, Antebellum manages to capture the lunatic excess of the current politics of memory in a way that only a schlocky horror movie could!
Speaking of horror, since Halloween is right around the corner, this week’s reminder that comics can be awesome is extra-sized, with twenty awesomely horrific covers:
