The Real Message of 'Bird Box' is -- Listen to Donald Trump!

In Bird Box, John Malkovich wants to make the end of the world great again. Photo courtesy of the IMDb.

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Caution: Spoilers galore!

Bird Box (2018) an original film by Netflix that's directed by Susanne Bier, is the company’s latest critical and popular hit. Netflix says that an astounding 45 million people watched it the first week it dropped. The hoi poloi buzz on Twitter and other social media is heavy right now, and Bird Box memes are already flying thick and fast in cyberworld.

Based on a novel by Josh Malerman, Bird Box is a post-apocalyptic thriller set in a world that is besieged by invisible monsters, the origin of which is unknown. Humans go insane and commit suicide in brutal, violent ways whenever they look at the creatures. Society breaks down as most people kill themselves. The few survivors learn to avoid the creatures by staying inside of blacked-out shelters and wearing blindfolds whenever they have to go outside. Life is harsh. (The title comes from the small pet birds that the main character carries around with her in a covered box; the birds become agitated whenever the creatures are near.)

Of course, Bird Box is already being compared to A Quiet Place, the recent hit film directed by John Krasinski, in which post-apocalyptic survivors face instant death from lurking alien creatures if they make too much noise. It also resembles The Road (2009), the excellent John Hillcoat film based on the famous Cormac McCarthy novel; the 2008 film Blindness starring Julianne Moore; the M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening(also from 2008), and even the original Night of the Living Dead, from way back in 1968.

The action starts in the present time with Malorie, a single woman in her early 40s (played by Sandra Bullock, a bit long in the tooth for the part at 54, but basically looking okay), lecturing two small children about a dangerous trip they must take to find a compound of survivors who've built a refuge from the creatures. She explains that they must make the trip by row boat down a wild and dangerous river, and that they must make the trip while blindfolded.

As the trio embark on the trip, the film backs up to five years in the past, to the day when the aliens arrive in the U.S., causing massive chaos and societal breakdown. Malorie is heavily pregnant at the time, and she loses her beloved sister, Jessica (Sarah Paulson), to suicide caused by the aliens.

Malorie takes refuge in a large house where an assortment of diverse strangers have gathered to escape the surrounding suicidal chaos. The others include Greg (BD Wong), a gay, middle-aged Asian guy who owns the house; a couple of young singletons, Felix and Lucy; an older white woman named Cheryl; a strong, silent-type black man about Malorie’s age named Tom (Trevante Rhodes); a younger working class black guy named Charlie, and Douglas (John Malkovich), a cranky, mean-spirited, old white man who is a neighbor of Greg’s.

The film then cuts back and forth between the events that occur in the big house, and the things that happen to Malorie and the two small kids rowing down the river in the present time, until the two timelines intersect.

Douglas is the Asshole Who's Always Right

In the past timeline, it is Douglas who is by far the most interesting character in the big house. Douglas is a huge asshole, which he even admits to Malorie later on, when he says that “assholes and dead people” are the only types of people left in the world since the invasion. He has a habit of speaking brutal truths that the others don’t want to face; truths which he delivers in such an insulting and nasty manner that no one listens to him or takes him seriously. In short, Douglas is Donald Trump.

This is even made explicit by the script, in a scene where Douglas offers Malorie a toast of bracing whiskey, telling her “let's make the end of the world great again.” All that’s missing from the scene is Malkovich in a red MAGA hat.

Unfortunately, for the occupants of the big house, Douglas’s “mean words” and “mean predictions” are almost always right. For example, early on, Greg wants to test a theory that he can safely watch the creatures from a computer monitor hooked up to his sophisticated video surveillance system. Douglas tells him it's a bad idea, but Greg doesn't listen, and then Greg becomes the first in the house to die.

Then, the survivors allow a sweet, heavily pregnant woman named Olympia into the house over Douglas’s objections. “She’s just another mouth to feed,” he sneers hatefully, while the others hiss and boo. Later on, sweet, dopey Olympia becomes the unwitting conduit of doom for most of the house’s occupants.

Again, with food supplies dwindling, some of the survivors make a hazardous trip to a deserted, well-stocked supermarket in a blacked-out SUV, guided only by the car’s GPS system (one of the film’s best scenes.) As they reach the supermarket and pile shopping carts high with food, Douglas points out that they would be much safer living in the supermarket instead of the house; then, there would be no need for repeated, hazardous car trips to get food. The others in the foraging party scream that Douglas is an asshole for wanting to desert the folks left in the house, and they all go back.

When they get back to the house, Lucy and Felix, who didn’t go on the foraging trip, steal the SUV and disappear, leaving the survivors with no means of getting to the supermarket.

Douglas is right again! (Actually this development sets up a false dichotomy that I found annoying. There was a third choice besides either staying in the supermarket or going back; a couple of the foragers could have gone back for the others and transported them to safety in the supermarket. Food troubles would be over, at least for the next year or so.)

After Lucy and Felix steal the SUV, a pitiful character named Gary knocks on the door of the house, begging to be let in. Sweet, dopey Olympia falls for his sob story, and lets him in. When Douglas finds out what she’s done, he goes apeshit. He screams that Gary is untrustworthy, and must leave. He then grabs a gun and tries to make Gary leave at gunpoint, but is thwarted when Cheryl sneaks up behind him and knocks him out with a heavy vase.

The survivors then lock Douglas in the garage to protect Gary. (Again, another false dichotomy that I found annoying. As was the case with the supermarket, there was a third choice that was ignored: the survivors could have locked Gary in the garage until they determined that he was safe.)

Eventually, Douglas is, of course, proved right once again. Gary is a crazy person, a rare breed of human who isn’t affected by seeing the creatures, presumably because he is already insane. While Douglas watches helplessly from a window in the garage, Gary kills most of the people in the house by forcing them to look at the creatures; his victims include Olympia and Cheryl, who thought they were saving Gary’s life.

At the end of the carnage, the only people in the house who survive are Malorie, Tom, Malorie’s newborn baby, and Olympia’s newborn baby. Tom and Malorie fall in love, and the quartet survive in the house for five years as a loving family, until events force Malorie to take the dangerous trip down the river with the kids. In order to survive, Tom and Malorie become highly suspicious of strangers, just like Douglas.

By drawing a parallel between Douglas and Trump, the film hints at a crude analogy that could be drawn from crazy Gary to current events: Douglas is Trump; the house is America; the locked door is the border; Gary is a dangerous illegal immigrant; and Cheryl and Olympia are naive, Kumbaya-singing white liberals who put other people in danger because they just want everybody to get along.

Now, I don’t think for one moment that the scriptwriter and director intended for that to be one of the main messages of Bird Box. The thought process in the story conference probably went like this: “Douglas is an ass; Trump is an ass—let’s link Douglas to Trump!” However, this idea backfired, because they didn’t think through the implications enough to realize that their ultimate message is: “Trump is always right! Listen to Trump!”

Which brings me to my thoughts about why these types of films have struck a strong chord with audiences of today: IMHO, they are coded protests against the stifling political correctness that’s currently suffocating the Western world. All that matters in these post-apocalyptic worlds is brute survival, and naive, Kumbaya-singing platitudes about “humanity” fall brutally away in every instance.

For example, in Bird Box, A Quiet Place and The Road, strong, silent-type men fight with all they have to protect their families; all three eventually sacrifice their own lives so that their families can live. The current zeitgeist that strong fathers are not needed to maintain successful families is turned starkly on its head.

These films all speak other unpopular truths that are currently “controversial” to say out loud today: men are generally stronger than women; families survive better with a strong father figure; strangers can be dangerous; locked doors (borders) are sometimes essential; "diversity" is not a strength if it means living with people (like Gary) who are trying to kill you.

In Blindness, directed by Fernando Mireilles, there's an even more uncomfortable truth that emerges from the story: we as people only have the “human rights” that we are willing to fight for.

This sadly underrated film is about a virus that overtakes an unspecified Latin American country, which renders nearly everyone blind. In the ensuing chaos, those people who’ve been naturally blind for years can get along much better than the newly blind. A group of the naturally blind then uses their new advantages to rape, steal from, and torture the helpless, newly blind. Subsequently, the newly blind only regain their rights when a woman who’s immune from the virus (played by Julianne Moore) uses her advantage as a sighted person to fight back against the abusers. It's a pretty stark lesson that viewers learn from this film.

Inevitably, the success of Bird Box and A Quiet Place means that a slew of imitations are probably already in the Hollywood pipeline. (One online wag suggested the next film will be about people who are instantly killed when they smell invading aliens.) I suspect that these films will continue to remain popular as long as the reign of excessive political correctness rages on.