Better get Into What you Gotta Get Into: Misogyny and Institutional Failure in Barbarian (2022)

Barbarian (2022) is a frothy film of themes like intergenerational trauma, incest, and urban blight.

The line on Barbarian is that it’s best experienced when you go in blind, and I think that’s right. The plot goes in some genuinely surprising directions, and much of its pleasure and intelligence is in those twists and turns.

With that in mind, I wouldn’t recommend reading a blog post about the film if you haven’t already seen it, but here’s a quick summary if you prefer Cliff’s Notes to roller coaster rides:

A woman, Tess (a fantastic Georgina Campbell), arrives at an AirBnB in a dangerous, largely abandoned neighborhood in Detroit (Brightmoor) in the middle of the night. As it turns out, the AirBnB has been double-booked. Tess is initially suspicious of Keith (Bill Skarsgard shining), the other guest, but as it turns out, he’s well-intentioned. Less well-intentioned is the monster (Matthew Patrick Davis) lurking in the basement. The monster is shown to be the product of generations of incest by a serial rapist and murderer, Frank (Richard Brake), who owned the home prior to the neighborhood’s decline. Meanwhile, in the present day, the home is visited by its current owner, AJ (Justin Long), a disgraced Hollywood actor now facing a rape allegation. While AJ hopes to sell the home to scrape up money for his legal defense, his fate comes to overlap with Tess’s as they both attempt to escape the monster.

Light viewing (which I mean both seriously and in jest).

Commentators have rightly pointed out that the film investigates different forms of misogyny. It nicely unpacks how misogynistic abuse can lead to successive generations of trauma (admittedly the plot mechanics of having multiple inbred generations that result in hyper-strong mutant monster offspring take shape across 30 years requires a little suspension of disbelief, but, hey, being cavalier about literal accuracy is one of the appealing features of popcorn sociologizing). It captures the heartbreakingly obsessive, smothering form of love that an abusive relationship can foster in its victims. It sets up Frank and AJ as corollaries while underscoring the “monsters” that their hatred and violence produce as a result of them being monsters themselves.

In this regard, as absurd as this sentence is about to sound, the final scene of the monster’s death is touching and is effectively juxtaposed with Frank’s death: while both die from a gunshot to the head, Frank’s is done selfishly when he realizes he has finally been caught while the monster’s acceptance of its death is an act of mercy to set Tess free.

I wouldn’t call it a subtle film per se, but it’s suggestive in a number of ways. For example, it stood out to me that when we are first introduced to AJ, he’s shown singing the lyrics to Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi”:

Everybody who read the Jungle Book
Will know that Riki Tiki Tavi is a mongoose who kills snakes
When I was a young man, I was led to believe there were organizations
To kill my snakes for me
i.e., the church, i.e., the government, i.e., school
But when I got a little older, I learned I had to kill them myself

I said, Riki Tiki Tavi mongoose is gone
Riki Tiki Tavi mongoose is gone
Won't be coming around for to kill your snakes no more, my love
Riki Tiki Tavi mongoose is gone

It’s a great song and is superb musical accompaniment to AJ driving in his retro convertible along the California coast.

Beyond that, the lyrics are arguably less subtle than the film: our institutions have failed us, and we have to solve our problems ourselves. No Riki Tiki Tavi working on our behalf. I imagine this was a more striking sentiment when the song was released in 1970. Now, more than half a century later, our institutional cynicism is (rightly) so thick that the song can seem almost quaint.

The link between the song and the film’s thematic content is obvious: Barbarian is pretty clear that institutional failure has contributed to the utter desolation of Brightmoor (and, by extension, a sizable part of American society). Perhaps the most overt illustration of this is the police officers’ blasé and bemused responses to the heavily traumatized Tess after she has escaped the monster and is begging for help. Spoiler alert: the officers don’t help.

In that sense, the Donovan song was an interesting choice to introduce us to AJ. If you think about it, AJ’s situation might reflect the only case in the entire film of our institutions at least kind of working. AJ is guilty of the rape, and he’s paying a price for it: his pilot has been canceled, he’s facing bankruptcy, his family seems skeptical if not horrified, and his lawyer remarks on a “high probability” that he’s about to be arrested.

Of course, this isn’t to say that all is well or that our institutions will carry through at the end of the day, but his case is markedly different from Frank’s, who is never formally held accountable for his years of rape and murder. In the end, AJ is dealt with via street justice on the part of the monster, though his life was trending downward because of his self-delusion and entitlement well before the monster finally gets around to crushing his head.

What to make of that? It could be a statement on social class—AJ’s victim was a Hollywood actress, while Frank’s multiple victims seem to have been working-class people. That would certainly fall in line with the film’s approach to gentrification and urban neglect. Another way to come at it would be to see it as nuancing the film’s treatment of institutional failure: we have occasional pockets of high-profile success in reining in our wildly unchecked social problems while leaving the majority of cases unaddressed. A third of many potential interpretations might give us more of a psychoanalytic account of the monstrous impulses locked away in the metaphorical basement (Frank), which are generally tolerated barring an occasional over-reach into polite society (AJ).   

That’s just a start. The film is suggestive enough that we could take it a number of directions while being vague enough to not point us toward much of a resolution here. And that’s fine. The questions are enough. Director Zach Cregger might not be Riki Tiki Tavi, but in these desperate days, maybe popcorn horror can help guard the garden. Someone has to.