Hello! After a short and much needed hiatus, Everything But Bone is back. Today I’m directing the column in a different direction, writing about a movie I don’t like. And to be honest, I wanted to like Jeremy Saulnier’s horror thriller Green Room (2015), but I just can’t.
Green Room was released by A24 back in 2015, which doesn’t feel like that long ago, but it unfortunately has aged poorly. Many of our pop cultural touchstones don’t work anymore due to the violently changing political landscape, particularly in the United States. The one that I’ll be talking about here is having the bad guys be Nazis.
It used to work, cause white supremacists were just some evil little fringe group, and the Allies kicked their asses in World War Two. And they’re great to have heroes completely wreck cause Nazis are terrible.
But Nazis and white supremacists, those absolute fucking bastards, are more visible now than they’ve been in years. Among the multitude of terrible effects their growing presence has, a very small one is that it makes you reconsider how they are used in media. To be perfectly honest, one of the reasons this article was delayed was because I thought it was completely inappropriate to write it after the tragic Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting.
Enter Green Room. At its most basic level, it’s the story about a punk band that gets trapped inside the green room of a skinhead club after they see something they’re not meant to. It’s easy for the Ain’t Rights to get inside, but it’s practically impossible to escape.
Sounds like a tense film, and on the surface it is. Once the cast gets inside the plot turns into the most dangerous bottle episode. After playing a show at a Skinhead club, Pat (Anton Yelchin) returns to the green room to get a forgotten phone only to end up seeing the aftermath of a murder. Knowing their lives are now in jeopardy, the band and the best friend of the victim barricade themselves inside and hope to survive.
I will say that the casting for Green Room is my favorite part of the film. Sam in the original draft is a man, and the lovely Alia Shawkat makes the band less of a sausage fest. Anton Yelchin is strong here as Pat, the band’s frontman, and it’s with sadness I remember this was one of the last roles to be released in his lifetime. While Yelchin gives his best, that is nothing compared to Patrick Stewart as the skinhead leader Darcy. I don’t know about you, but Patrick Stewart is forever embedded in my mind as heroes Captain Picard and Professor X. Stewart plays heavily against type here and it chills you straight to the bone.
Now imagine this interaction with Stewart talking:
Besides the fact that he’s an amazing actor, Stewart is great as villain because he’s traditionally cast as a good guy. Audiences are immediately uncomfortable with those words coming out of Darcy’s mouth because it is Stewart.
One of the terrible things about being an American these days is knowing that if I wanted to watch a bunch of people being antagonized by Nazis, I could turn on the news. Seeing the band get brutalized is difficult to watch knowing white supremacists are murdering innocents on the national stage. Sure, Pat survives and Darcy and some of the other skinheads are dead, but when you think about it, they win in the long run. There are plenty more of them to keep running the club. And I’m sure some of those assholes will be waving tiki torches in the future.
I believe I would think more favorably of Green Room if it took itself a little less seriously. A movie about punks killing Nazis in a spectacular fashion would be fun. Would Die Hard be as memorable or as good if we were subjected to hyper realistic depictions of a violent hostage situation? No, John McClane would be dead before the third act, and Hans Gruber would’ve blown everyone to hell.
The biggest problem of Green Room is that it’s hard to find sympathy for our protagonists. They knowingly play for skinheads, thinking that they’ll be okay due to their whiteness. Sam’s joke about threatening to tell the audience Pat’s Jewish is in the absolute poorest tastes. What happens to Emily is horrible, but she was dating a bunch of Nazis so… As for Amber, she’s a fellow traveler with TERF bangs, and mercifully a line “justifying” her racism was cut in the final draft.
There are too many moments where the audience is meant to feel bad for the skinheads. Emily’s death via domestic violence, Daniel’s grief for her, Gabe’s gradual disillusionment, and the end scene where Clark’s dying dog curls up next to his dead body. Sure, making the villains well rounded is better storytelling, but they’re fucking Nazis! Any sane person doesn’t want to feel that.
I’m a big believer in the power of stories, and now more than ever we need both empowerment and escape from them. Green Room is not one of them. It’s not writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s fault, it wasn’t made with these intentions. For me and other viewers, the real world implications of Green Room irreparably break the experience. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but the more I think about the more the faults rise to the surface.
In the end, Green Room’s structure is great, but the contents fail to work.
