The day before yesterday, I went to see a new US movie The End of Oak Street. It is a horror movie in which an ordinary, middle-class suburban neighborhood is suddenly transported hundreds of millions of years into the past, leaving its residents to be chased by dinosaurs. The film was directed by David Robert Mitchell, born in 1974.
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I came across a Japanese review that said, essentially, “I don’t understand what this movie is trying to say.”
But anyone who has been watching what is happening in American society today may feel that its meaning comes through loud and clear……
About thirty years ago, an American woman I knew, a specialist on Japan, said something to me that has stayed in my mind ever since.
“American society is becoming frightening. There are more and more fanatics, whether over religion or politics. You begin to wonder what someone might say—or even do to you—if you express the wrong opinion. It feels as though your neighbors are somehow becoming different people.”
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That was thirty years ago. Since then, America has become increasingly polarized between Republicans and Democrats, while political and religious fanaticism has grown more intense. The Trump administration, to my mind, represents a concentrated form of this trend. In its language, attitudes, and approach to power, America sometimes seems to be retreating into something rougher and more primitive—a world of imperialism and pre-modern power politics.
I thought The End of Oak Street was an expression of precisely this fear.
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So I asked ChatGPT to look at how American and other Western critics were interpreting the movie. Here is what it found:
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—–The movie has only just been released, but reviews are already appearing.
One of the most interesting is Justin Chang’s review in The New Yorker. Rather than treating it simply as a dinosaur movie, Chang reads it in the context of a theme that has run through David Robert Mitchell’s work: alienation.
On the surface, the residents of Oak Street make up an ordinary American middle-class community. In reality, however, they are isolated from one another, and even their families are coming apart. The film goes so far as to suggest that, under some circumstances, the human beings may be more brutal than the dinosaurs.
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The English-language edition of Le Monde comes even closer to my own interpretation. It sees the movie as a critique of the “sanitized myths of American suburbia,” with the dinosaurs representing a kind of primordial chaos that shatters the illusion of middle-class stability. More broadly, it interprets the film as dealing with the collapse of the cultural narratives on which contemporary America has long relied.
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From this, I (ChatGPT) would read the movie less as a film criticizing Trump personally than as a film about modern America moving backward into its own past.
In an ordinary dinosaur movie, the dinosaurs come into the modern world.
In this movie, it is Oak Street that is sent back into the past.
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Old attitudes concerning race, religion, sex, and immigration—values that many Americans believed they had already overcome—are returning. In international politics, too, nineteenth-century concepts such as spheres of influence, territorial acquisition, tariffs, empire, and deals among great powers are making a comeback.
And ordinary people suddenly find themselves having to survive according to the rules of this resurrected “primitive world.”
(The above is considerably shortened from ChatGPT’s original answer.)…….
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One other thing struck me. One of the film’s main characters, the father of the family, was fired from his company a year earlier. Yet he simply cannot bring himself to tell his family. Instead, he delivers pizzas to keep the household going.
That, too, seems to me an image of America today.
And that one hit me as a jobless rather close to home.
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