It’s harder to write about It Follows then, say, Gymkata or Alien Predator. This is new territory for me and I don’t feel especially well-equipped to tackle it, but I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.
This post will discuss themes of sexual assault. Please don’t read further if that’s going to make you uncomfortable, and consider this a trigger warning for It Follows itself if you haven’t seen it.
Readings
The film supports a number of readings. Watching it, the one I found most persuasive is that it’s about sexual assault. This isn’t a new idea; Brendan Morrow wrote an essay on this topic for Bloody Disgusting back in 2016, and Leslie A. Hahner and Scott J. Varda from Baylor published an article (“It Follows and Rape Culture: Critical Response as Disavowal”) on this topic in Women’s Studies in Communication in 2017.
For me, the key scene comes after Jay is released from the hospital (for the first time). Her personality has changed–she’s withdrawn, depressed. She stands in front of the mirror in the bathroom and looks at her body. This is the reaction of someone was violated, traumatized. I would push back at reviewers (for example, Natalie Wilson at Ms.) who characterize the sex between Jay and Hugh as consensual. I don’t think the film supports that reading. Hugh knew that by having sex he was inflicting emotional violence on Jay. That he told her immediately afterwards (after abducting her!) doesn’t make it better. His doing so cannot be separated from his own self-interest: his physical safety is somewhat dependent on Jay staying alive. I don’t see how you call this anything other than sexual assault.
Whether Hugh should also be read as a sexual assault survivor is an interesting question. He’s also paranoid. His life is changed forever. In an early scene in the movie theater, Hugh expresses a desire to be a child, with his whole life in front of him. Morrow draws attention to Hugh, Jay, and Jay’s friends all sitting around in a circle, like a support group. Is that significant? My impression of It Follows is that it was made carefully with attention to detail.
Jay has sex with at least two and as many as five other people in the course of the movie: her neighbor Greg, her friend Paul, and the three men on the boat. Greg played the friend, but never believes her story and says what he needs in order to sleep with her. If this is a movie about sexual assault, Greg is the person who doubts a rape victim’s story and disbelieves their experience. Greg’s subsequent on-screen death (one of two in the movie) is gruesome. That the entity takes on the image of his own mother, naked, I will leave to someone else to unpack.
Paul is different. It’s clear from early on that he has an unrequited love for Jay. He comes to believe her story, especially after a physical encounter with the entity at the lake house. He shows a curious insensitivity, coming on to Jay during a vulnerable moment (I forget exactly when this happens, but after the death of Greg). Their eventual sex is at least in part about Paul coming to share Jay’s experience and vulnerability.
What I’m still not sure about is the three guys on the boat. After Greg’s death, Jay drives up north and finds herself on a beach, similar to one that she was at earlier with her friends. Not far offshore is a boat with three young men on it. She strips down to her underwear and enters the water. The scene ends at this point, leaving ambiguous what happened. Did Jay seek an emotionally-empty hookup? Did the abused become the abuser? Did nothing happen at all?
I think part of the answer lies in the film’s frame of reference. We don’t ever really see adults–parents, teachers, police, doctors. It reminded me of Brick in that way. Scenes generally play with Jay and her immediate friends. The camera approaches other people indirectly. It would also be difficult to approach that scene without exploiting Jay, and the film is at pains (as many reviewers have noted) to not do that and to not blame her for what happened to her.
The ending doesn’t strike me as a cop out. Plenty of horror movies use the trope of the monster rising from its grave at the end, but this isn’t that. The “death” in the municipal pool is ambiguous. To the extent that we’re reading the entity as a living metaphor for abuse, emotional/physical/sexual abuse isn’t something that you just conquer in one day, after which you go forth in triumph. That’s not how any of that works. I don’t know what happens when the figure behind Jay and Paul reaches them.
Postscript: Michigan
I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about the setting. Director David Robert Mitchell is from the Detroit area and the film is shot and set there. The locations are used to great effect: the semi-suburbanness of Sterling Heights contrasts sharply with the run-down neighborhoods in Detroit proper. The magnificent High Lift Building at the old Water Works Park serves as the pool exterior as a thunderstorm rages outside. When the characters flee the city, they drive “up north” to somewhere on Lake Huron. I lived in Michigan for 30 years and the details just washed over me. Everything rang right, including interior set dressings to give a late 90s/early 00s feeling.