Shortly after watching Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018) one of my homies angrily texted me: “Why did Tom (Trevante Rhodes) have to die? And why did Malorie (Sandra Bullock) get to live?” While I knew exactly why he was so mad, I didn’t share his sense of surprise. Early on, after recognizing that the film alternated between the apocalyptic past and the post-apocalyptic present, and that Malorie was all alone with those children on that raft, my first thought was, “How many characters in this story will need to die to earn this white woman the empathy she should already have?”
This might seem like a cynical or reductive question from an admittedly jaded, black horror fan, but the implicit demand for Malorie’s salvation calls it forth. As I watched Bird Box with my family and they began to speculate about which of the characters might live, particularly the black ones, I felt sad already knowing that no one else in Malorie’s group (save the kids) would get out alive: I knew that making Malorie into someone capable of empathy was a call for blood.
Check out the trailer for Bird Box:
I’m hardly psychic. I’ve fallen for some of the most telegraphed movie twists in history. The Sixth Sense anyone? But my understanding that these other characters’ fates were already sealed didn’t require my being an astute viewer so much as having a familiarity with how black characters are frequently called upon to perform particular kinds of labor, both for their white counterparts within the story and for the audience. Sadly, the “magical negro” figure still persists in popular American cinema, but the more subtle and arguably more pernicious trope of contemporary black representation lies in the insistence that black characters (magical or not) dedicate their energies to helping white ones realize their humanity. Or, even worse, that black characters will quite literally be asked to give up their own lives so that white characters may live more fully. Bird Box, like Annabelle (2014), Logan (2017), or countless other films that operate firmly within and adjacent to the horror genre, make sacrifices of their black characters in ways that suggest the performance of some greater ideological service. Over and over again, black death animates white redemption. It is a kind of labor for which black bodies seem especially suited.
Trevante Rhodes as Tom
I don’t know, for example, whether Trevante Rhodes’ “Tom” or Lil Rel Howery’s “Charlie” were written as black in the script or in the original novel, but the casting of black actors in the roles of knowledge-givers and eventually as objects of noble sacrifice seems more than mere coincidence. Charlie offers the group some of the only viable explanations for the otherwise mysterious, civilization-destroying phenomena based on his familiarity with ancient mythologies. Just as in Get Out, Howery’s character’s folk wisdom isn’t given its just due in Bird Box until it’s too late. Tom, even more tellingly, is tasked with nothing less than teaching Malorie how to be a full-fledged emotional being capable of caring for her children. Rhodes is a talented enough actor to do a convincing job of this and it’s through their relationship that Malorie becomes something other than the cold, disconnected figure that we see in the early scenes. Tom’s power to evoke her emotions, however, should come as little surprise: his name connects him directly with the legacy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great American archetype of black sympathy.
Tom (Trevante Rhodes) with the white child, like the archetypal Tom from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
That both Charlie and Tom unnecessarily give over their lives to save others for reasons that don’t even make sense within the narrative speaks to how we have normalized black sacrifice in support of white feeling. Why otherwise does Charlie throw his entire body at an intruder who threatens to break through a door instead of just helping the others close it? Why not run in the other direction to save himself? And why, after years of surviving together as a family, does Tom, as the first and apparently only option, offer to sacrifice himself so that Malorie and the children can escape without him?
These choices would be problematic enough on their own to warrant skepticism about Bird Box‘s racial politics, but when coupled with the film’s refusal to visualize either the monsters themselves or the horrific sight they bestow upon their victims, the disposability with which the film treats black life begins to feel more deliberate. On the one hand, I totally get it. Never truly showing the monsters or what the characters see after coming into contact with them was probably more the product of budget restrictions than anything else. Yet the idea that the malevolent forces which might drive us to destroy ourselves remain invisible, unnameable, and unknowable seems like a version of the apocalypse that could only have sprung from the imaginations of white folks.
A moment that expresses visually Charlie’s (Lil Rel Howery’s) supporting role
I am reminded of a discussion at the fifty-year retrospective on Night of the Living Dead at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2018 Annual Conference. A well-known white horror scholar argued that Jordan Peele’s Get Out “let audiences off the hook” by allowing its hero Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) to escape and survive – a move which he argued stood in contrast to George A. Romero’s supposedly more confrontational portrait of the abject, lynched body of Ben (Duane Jones). Then as now, I’m inclined to ask: What work does the abject black body continue to do that lends it such pride of place in horror cinema? Why is a dead black body so much more useful and even noble than a live one that resists?
A final word to those who are trying to tell stories, especially stories about survival: If the only way that you can imagine black folks in the story you want to tell is as emotional cannon fodder for the salvation of white characters, then it’s okay to exclude us. No one needs this particular brand of “diversity.” Black folks have other stuff to do aside from teach you how to be human.
Mikal J. Gaines is an Assistant Professor of English at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston, MA. His research focuses on primarily on Black film, media, and cultural studies as well as spectatorship. His work can be found in Fight the Power: The Spike Lee Reader, Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema, and in other forthcoming anthologies including, The Spaces and Places Horror and Approaching Get Out.
Related post: Check out Laura Kremmel’s review of Josh Malerman’s Bird Box.
You can buy Malerman’s Bird Box on Amazon:
Well I read another article that mentioned why they did not show the monster and part of it was because it looked like a person with a baby face. It was supposed to be seen by one of the characters who ended up laughing every time and they decided not to show it.