Analyzing 'It Follows'

[briankoontz]

Slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s feature post-sexual revolution happily promiscuous teenagers suffering a usually immediate brutal death penalty for their promiscuity, while unhappy parents of their own teenagers in the audience looked on with some degree of satisfaction - these movies would help them raise their own children by "putting the fear into them" regarding any sexual promiscuity they might engage in.

These movies ended when those very sexually promiscuous children became parents themselves, and no longer desired to send such messages to their own children.

The movie "It Follows" employs a 1970s/1980s aesthetic in fashion and set design combined with modern technology to tell us that we have not resolved the issues that those slasher movies highlighted - the guilt and anxiety producing and resulting from sexual promiscuity have not gone away.

It Follows takes a more compassionate but arguably more torturous approach with it's teenagers - the punishers sent to exact justice upon them for their immoral actions won't immediately brutally murder them, but rather stalk them and only if they lack vigilance will kill (or maybe rape) them. This distancing allows the characters to learn from their "errors" and find the path of love in the end. A very "tainted love", to put it in Ed Cobb's words.

It Follows reminds us that neither side won back in those earlier decades - the "Age of Aquarius" is today viewed as an unfortunate outcome of modern anxiety while the "moral guardians" who back Jason Vorhees and his compatriots have been committed to the fringe of society, if not outright condemned as fascists.

 

[gorfias]

It Follows reminds us that neither side won back in those earlier decades - the "Age of Aquarius" is today viewed as an unfortunate outcome of modern anxiety while the "moral guardians" who back Jason Vorhees and his compatriots have been committed to the fringe of society, if not outright condemned as fascists.

Troubling film. Did anyone "win" the sexual revolution? There are freedoms and liberties won, but new anxieties and social problems caused. Take the marriage rate. I hear of societies that still practice arranged marriages that seem more stable and happy.

Still, there is something campy about the whole "kill the horny teen theme" as particularly skewered in Jason X: these are holographic teens: Jason, too his frustration, cannot even really hurt them. To the initiated, hilarious.

 

[briankoontz]

An understanding of the end of the world (climate science demonstrating catastrophic global warming) and embracing the desire to have sex with anyone holding mutual consent as the only social requirement occurred at the same time, and was centered in the same cultural area (the industrialized countries). So the cause of our deepest anxieties (much deeper than the previous anxiety of nuclear armageddon, which was (and still is) never more than a possibility) produced the effect that we turned to sexuality to release ourselves from those anxieties.

We decided as a culture that sexuality would always be allowed to help us deal with our reality, at the precise time that our reality became otherwise too much to bear. In modern times as our anxieties have grown deeper yet, as we've done very little to avoid our approaching doom, we've embraced pornography as a further deepening of our sexual connection.

All of this is centered in the industrialized countries not just because the wealth of those countries allows for it, but because those are the places primarily causing, and benefiting from, it. So where the guilt and anxiety are strongest is where sexual "liberation", and pornography, find their strongest footholds.

Every disease needs a cure. When we're not willing to actually cure the disease because it's too expensive to do so and we're too scared of that unknown future we make sure our libidos are always prepared to distract us.

How can we possibly claim that the sexual revolution and pornography are immoral? If not them, then how should we deal with modern anxiety?

How can we possibly claim that the sexual morality of past times applies to the modern age, when we developed our modern views on sexuality specifically for modern reasons?

Jason Vorhees and the like long for a time long past, and the protagonist of It Follows seems to eventually throw off her anxieties to embrace love, but throughout all of this the disease remains, and the genre deals not with curing it, but whether or not to distract ourselves from it in this manner.