It Follows

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🎙️ EPISODE 361: 07.16.2020 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚊 𝚓𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚝 (𝚙𝚘𝚍𝚌𝚊𝚜𝚝+𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚗) 𝚛𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚠 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚋𝚘𝚝𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙼𝚢𝚝𝚑 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙰𝚖𝚎𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚂𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚛 I got the impetus to do this episode after rewatching Under the Silver Lake. What I took away in the end was that it is a true masterpiece, a stone cold 10 out of 10 classic, and I owed it to myself to give his earlier work a try. (I'd seen It Follows once before but not Myth.) I now feel like there is a clear continuation working in this trilogy of movies that all relates back to sex and growing up on some level. He's working in three distinct genres here: the coming-of-age teen melodrama, the horror film, and the mystery noir. Now, Under the Silver Lake does SO much more, it would be reductive to ONLY put in this particular box. It's also clearly commenting on Hollywood, celebrity, money, homelessness, how we process all media and entertainment – huge multifaceted ideas. But for the purposes of this review, I only want to examine Sam (played by Andrew Garfield) and his relationship to sex as a guy in his early to mid 30s.

So, hear me out. My theory goes like this...

The Myth of the American Sleepover = BEFORE SEX
It Follows = SEX
Under the Silver Lake = AFTER SEX

Interestingly enough, DRM's rumored fourth movie, titled Heroes & Villains, is apparently a superhero movie. So maybe he's turning a corner and going back to childhood, which – again, also – is a big-time recurring theme in all three movies, especially these first two. Let me expound on how the concept of sex functions in each film, starting at the end and working backwards.

♡ AFTER SEX ♡ This is clearly not a literal interpretation, as Andrew Garfield has a bunch of sex and is extremely horned up throughout the entire film. But there is a clear joylessness in his pursuits outside that of his longing for mystery girl Sarah. Sarah (played by Riley Keough) represents an unattainable ideal. After a decade plus of casual sex and endless porn and and genuine heartbreak, he realizes there isn't all that much there. He's left with a void which he seeks to fill with a deeper meaning, an understanding, because simply feeling isn't enough. And, more importantly, he's WILLING to search everywhere and anywhere for these answers even if the answers he seeks, and eventually finds, were never really there to begin with.

And if Under the Silver Lake is about life when SEX isn't enough or stops being the focal point, then It Follows is about ♡ SEX ♡– having sex in the moment, what that means for your friendships, your family life, and – sure – it takes this on from the most negative and fear-driven angle imaginable, but... that's a part of it. I mean, this movie is about an STD only the STD is literally an evil spirit taking the form of, oh I don't know, maybe your dad (gulp!), and it will slowly track you down and murder you in some sicko fashion UNLESS you have sex with someone else and pass it on, but even then, if that person doesn't have sex and pass it on, it will simply kill that person and start hunting you down AGAIN, and so on and so on and, yes, you're never really safe. It Follows is a fucking bleak movie, man. You never get to stop worrying about the vile evils that SEX can bring. It's really no wonder Andrew Garfield is stuck in a loop of meaningless, casual sex and the only––Jesus Christ, I can't stop thinking about that movie. It's... a problem.

That brings us back to film numero uno, 2010's The Myth of the American Sleepover. A decidedly quaint, by comparison, movie, an ensemble piece about a dozen or so characters ranging in age from 8th grade going into high school to college student pining for the glory of days of high school. The stress here is on the virgin's viewpoint, for the most part. Hence: ♡ BEFORE SEX ♡

About midway through Under the Silver Lake, Andrew Garfield goes to an outside movie in a cemetery and what movie is playing but David Robert Mitchell's very own The Myth of the American Sleepover, only except two of the characters have been digitally replaced by new actors, characters in the UTSL universe. It's an incredibly meta, highly rewarding little easter egg I suppose, but maybe it's nothing more than a comment on navel gazing. Either way, it's the kind of thing 90% of the viewers won't pick up. And that is a good summation of what DRM's movies are trying to accomplish, in a sense.

The segment which rolls in Under the Silver Lake is actually from two distinct different scenes, both two of the more successful ones. Here's the first...


I really like dialogue here: the "he said, she said" two different versions of the same event; it felt truly real to me, and I especially like how even though the boy is clearly lying, they still both process the memory as a positive one. It's just a lovely and understated glimpse at a very innocent time in these kids' lives. The second cut, which involves the replaced actors, is about bumming a cigarette from an older boy. Here's the original version and the Silver Lake version back-to-back...


Speaking of cigarettes, there's a scene early on in It Follows where the main character, Jay (played by Maika Monroe) is walking with her younger sister as she blasts a cig. It's a wholly inconsequential exchange as far as the plot goes – her smoking habit doesn't come up again – but it feels so goddam real. You believe these are sisters, you believe this is a real family...


So, like I mentioned earlier, these two films couldn't be any more different on the surface. Myth is an ensemble piece, reminiscent of Dazed and Confused, not in terms of tone, but in how the story unfolds over the course of one day into one night into the next day, featuring a bunch of different characters who intersect, who weave in and out of each other's storylines. While It Follows, in addition to being a straight-up horror film, is a much more contained, singular story, with only a handful of characters and one clear protagonist. However, despite being a true ensemble feature, Myth is bookended by one specific character who seems to be its thematic focus: an incoming freshman girl named Maggie (played by the actress Claire Sloma, who – you guessed it – is the only talent carryover from the first to second film). For the purposes of this review, I'm pretty much only gonna focus on her. Because, listen: the truth of it is The Myth of the American Sleepover isn't a great movie. It was made for somewhere between 30 and 50,000 bucks and not many of its of actors went on to do too much in the biz. It's honestly a bit amazing it's as good as it is, and that's clearly a testament to the talent of DRM, especially as a screenwriter. He's 3 for 3 writing damn good scripts, folks. And while it looks and feels amazing when you consider the constraints, it pails in comparison to his following work, which is just off-the-charts good.

Myth begins with Maggie sitting at the town pool with her friend, played by an actress who looks about ten years old, which – that's a whole 'other can of worms that I won't be cracking into! She's clearly bored, conflicted that she didn't have enough fun the summer before she starts high school. It's a relatable feeling. Fun: what constitutes it, how much of it is enough, when is enough too much, and on and on. It's weirdly stressful sometimes, and he captures that feeling perfectly here. So they're sitting at the pool and she decides to steal a couple of beers from someone's cooler nearby and – wait a second – the It Follows crew had a pretty similar experience it turns out...


I love this about his movies. Both these two films are set in the Detroit suburbs and there is a direct through-line working. I'm not saying there's a literal connection (this isn't fucking Marvel), nor should there be or need to be. But these little allusions are beautiful and they reward the rewatch and those seeking deeper meaning.

It Follows, on the other hand, opens with a bang, a stunning sequence involving an unnamed character, a girl, a porto-victim infected with the STD evil spirit disease, who bolts from her upper middle-class house and is eventually hunted down on the shores of either Lake Eerie or Lake Huron – if any Great Lakes Heads are listening, hit me up – and she is twisted up like a pretzel and all of the cuts and shots are glorious, as is the musical score...


The score was done by a guy who goes by the name Disasterpeace. He would go onto write Under the Silver Lake's near perfect soundtrack. And both of these are amazing. It Follows is definitely in line with that very ubiquitous droning 2010s era horror and/or thriller vibe, but it's certainly a cut above. It's very good. And, again, not to keep harping on UTSL but holy shit that OST is perhaps one of the Top 5 movie scores of all time? It's so fucking original: a full orchestral work that somehow both pays homage to both classic Hollywood AND video games.

After that opening we're introduced to our protagonist Jay in an extremely specific and highly thought-out manner: the camera starts in the litter-filled gutter of a street in a definitely less-nice neighborhood than before (STDs don't care about your tax bracket, fam), the camera pans over some sidewalk chalk art and a homemade hopscotch board into a backyard with an above-ground pool. Both movies start in a pooooool–Jay is in this pool, going for a dip. She sees a squirrel on a power line above her (perhaps a nod to the dying animatronic squirrel which falls at the foot of Andrew Garfield at the beginning of Silver Lake? Look at his T-shirt as well) and finds an ant crawling on her forearm. She lowers her forearm into the water and the ants floats. Not killing the ant. The water will kill the ant. But she didn't save the ant. The ant wasn't going to live a long time anyway. Goddam does David Robert Mitchell know how to start a movie. It's a voyeuristic sequence which says so much in so little time...


We then see Jay's main gang, hanging out and looking pretty bored and depressed: her smoker sister, and their two mutual friends, who basically live with them: a boy, played by Keir Gilchrist, who is not so secretly in love with Jay – he of Toni Collette's son from the Showtime series United States of Tara fame (where my United States of Tara-Heads at? make some noise!?), and another friend, a girl who is constantly reading an ebook of Dostoevsky's The Idiot on a clam-shaped e-reader, like a seashell, of some sort, I do not know if this is real technology folks, and... which, allow me now to promote a video I haven't made yet where I'll try to look into these things, in addition to the wide array of real and fake media utilized in the back and foregrounds throughout all the films. (I just couldn't neatly fit that stuff into this review.)


There's a real sense of friendship in both of these movies, which is suspiciously absent in Under the Silver Lake. I mean, shit, Andrew Garfield doesn't seem to like the few friends that he has, but here it's a driving force, really the glue holding things together. Look, DRM has clearly gotten more ambitious and, in many ways, ambiguous in his progression. In Myth, he pushes his thematic intentions to the foreground, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Maggie links up with a guy who works at the town pool and they jump in a, you guessed it, a Lake (there's a Lake thing here too obviously, a large landlocked body of water fetish or maybe phobia, it's anyone's best guess), these two swim out to one of those wooden lake stands in the middle of lakes, what do you call those things? anyway, they have a nice little convo. It's not the best acted scene I've ever witnessed but it does offer a partial title drop in addition to revealing the entire point of the movie...


These kids don't know the half of it! If you think high school is the time for weeping over innocence lost, then what is college, your early 20s years? I suppose that's when you even give into the harsh realities of being an adult or fall under the crushing weight of them...


Jay's new boyfriend is only in it for the sex. Specifically, in this case, to get the cursed demon off his tail, but what's a good metaphor that isn't mixed. He's at least nice enough to bring her to a secluded, dilapidated building, lightly drug her afterwards, tie her to a wheelchair so she can see that the STD demon is real, before dropping her off a total hot mess back at her house. It turns out, he fabricated his entire identity and address so she couldn't come find him after he got in her pants. A tale as old as time. Guys will literally do anything to –

PARENTS! Let's talk about parents. It's not just that they don't understand, it's that they're... gone. There is a complete – and what has to be purposeful – lack of anything by way of a capable, functioning parental presence in either of these two movies. They are completely absent in Myth and only briefly featured in It Follows...


That is literally the only time we see Jay's mom (her father is dead) and she's not even really scene on camera; we only catch a glimpse at the side of her head. It's funny and extremely fitting that Andrew Garfield's mom (via phone conversation) is a much bigger character/presence in UTSL than in these works. There's a lot here to unpack, even if this angle is never directly explored that thoroughly.

We eventually meet a second mom, though. It's the mom of shitty boyfriend (real name Jeff, no relation to MovieJeff.com, though – please stop saying that!) and she gives these nice midwestern kids soda pop and they have a lil powwow on Jeff's front lawn where he lays out some more exposition re the rules of how the Sex Ghoul works...


Look, if there's one complaint I have about It Follows, and it's a real tiny one, it's that the Horror Movie Rules™ – because you know horror fans and how they freak out about THE RULES – are a tad half-baked here. Like how the first girl dies by way of being twisted into a pretzel and later we see a guy die because a sex ghost version of his mom fucks the life out him? And how the monster seems un-killable but also how it sometimes turns into a giant blob of blood if you attempt to electrocute it in a public pool? I think this is a nearly perfect movie, so I'm grasping for straws in a sense; I could just see some classic horror freaks taking issues with some of these points. I honestly don't care because I feel like there's a thematic answer for each of these potential "Questions" even if there isn't a good logistical or practical one.

Naturally, The Myth of the American Sleepover doesn't have these issues. Not that it's the main reason, but you literally can't become haunted by a sex demon if you don't have any sex. And there's basically no sex in Myth. Just a lot of kissing and/or almost kissing and/or not kissing. Our main girl Maggie gets a sweet peck on her hand and it feels as big and as important as "you know what." In that moment in time, in her life, it does, sure it does. Another character, a horned-up incoming freshman guy, finally finds the dream girl he'd been chasing the entire movie and right before locking lips, he notices the names and phone numbers of two other dudes written in ink on her arm (shoutout to Livet and Covy, IDK the handwriting is really hard to read)...


Uh, well, that's a Dealbreaker! Even dudes want special things, dear readers. Even dudes want special things.

The film ends – in classic coming-of-age drama fashion – the very next morning, with a small town parade. Lady Arm Ink is the Apple Princess or whatever, naturally, riding in a convertible, waving at the crowd, forever the object of desire for so many. It's a false ideal, just like Sarah of Silver Lake. The action pans out and we see our first and only couple having sex in the back of a Jeep Cherokee with a U of M sticker on the back window (a setting for one of the film's subplots I didn't mention). We see the bare foot of a girl with a toe ring sticking out of the window and the camera stops on it. Do we know this girl? Does it matter? (Look, I tried to figure out if these are characters from earlier in the movie but I didn't get anywhere so I if any astute followers know for sure, drop me a line. )

And that's that. The movie ends with Maggie in the back of a pickup truck looking happy, but pensive. The future was wide open...


But that's not the case for our friends in It Follows, sadly. While Jeff is right that it is "easy for a girl," the Intercourse Devil is a persistent beast and swimming out to a screw a bro or a bunch of bros (sad face) on the lake only delays the inevitable. The film's climax is a delirious sequence at a city pool outside of their town limits. On their way, DRM drops an exchange which focuses on the concept of good vs. bad neighborhoods....


At first, I thought this was an out of place conversation, but I now think it works, especially if you look at the trio of films as a continuation. When you're real young and coming into and through adolescence, class is an abstract idea, to many at least, especially in the suburbs. It becomes real in a variety of different ways during your late teens and 20s (that would be the exchange above about staying away from 8 Mile), and finally later in life, it become perhaps THE driving force one has to reckon with, as we see throughout Andrew Garfield's plight in Under the Silver Lake. And it's connection to sex isn't invisible either, as we'll see in just moment here.

The STD demon, or you know what's a good name for this thing is just ST-Demon, I probably should have just stuck with that from the start but I kinda enjoyed coming up with a different name for it each time, honestly. The ST-DEMON arrives at the pool in the form of Jay's dead father, which is fucking weird and gross, and totally in line with some more Freudian type shit I'll leave you to think about on your own time. The gang has drawn up the kookiest most harebrained scheme imaginable to "Kill" this thing. It's honestly hilarious. It's the idea a child might come up with, which, in many ways... these kids still are. They round up a bunch of electronic devices – we're talking super random shit: old appliances, a hair dryer, TVs and radios, I think there was a typewriter maybe? anyway, you could probably do an essay on just what all of these items represent – they plug this stuff in all around the pool and Jay hops in. Nathan Fielder voice: "The plan?" Have Jay lure the ST-Demon into the pool, then hop out of the pool and then electrocute said demon by throwing the plugged-in electronics into the pool. Watch the profits roll in.

Well, the plan goes to total shit pretty much from the get-go as the ST-Demon is a little bit smarter than the gang anticipates. He actually tried to electrocute Jay by chucking the electronics into the pool himself which, then somebody in the group comments "Ah shit it didn't work anyway" since Jay does instantly die via electrocution, and that was pretty funny. Why they thought this thing could be killed to begin with is another story. They manage to lure the thing into the water and shoot it and try to electrocute it and all that and somehow their efforts turn it into a gigantic red blob of blood and underwater sex demon smoke; I don't know but it looks fucking cool as shit. It's a great scene. Don't worry about whether or not it "makes sense." Look at this...

They know they're not fully out of the woods yet though, and the denouement involves the kid from the United States of Tara (I'm sorry to keep calling you that, I don't even think it's a very good reference lol why did I watch that entire show??) sleeping with Jay and then driving back towards the city, back towards them bad parts, and it is implied he has sex with a hooker, which: CLASS, STATUS, PRIVILEGE. And doing so certainly should buy them both a good amount of time. Who knows how much?

The film ends with them holding hands walking down the sidewalk, a lone person perhaps following them, perhaps not. They've joined the club now. They're adults! They pass by a couple kids playing with a ball before we roll to credits with some huge bass-heavy synth drops and the backend title card...



I am hung up on those children playing because we also see kids playing with a ball in the pool outside of Andrew Garfield's apartment in Under the Silver Lake just before that film ends as well. And if SEX, and specifically all the stressful and sometimes painful aspects inherent with it, is indeed a driving thematic force between this trio of movies, then what else is the antithesis of that but the true innocence of childhood?

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 361A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 362 ⫸

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