Vox Lux (2018)

I met a teacher in Colorado who had led the survivors out through Columbine High School after SWAT and Littleton PD had cleared them to exit. She didn't describe it to me this way, but I remember the photos they published in the 90s and the horror I felt. I didn't even know what sensationalized meant yet, but it was horrific and brutal. I remember my brain doing the work for me, imagining the trauma and horror the survivors must have felt as they walked out through the carnage. I thought about - and still do - the horror I would endure if that were to happen to my child, or maybe even worse if my child were responsible. 

They put up a memorial to the two kids that shot up the white suburban affluent high school outside Littleton, Colorado. And people went berserk. Or so my wife who didn't go to CHS but was in high school in Denver when this happened. And the people in Littleton didn't mince words - they took out their anger and grief by putting the blame squarely on inner-city kids: "this should have happened to you" white Coloradans would say to my wife, an intercity person of color. But it didn't happen to the high school with cops doing random backpack checks and a metal detector at every entrance. It happened to the suburban white kids who went to school in the shadow of Lockheed/Martin, itself an institution in the business of mass murder. And because the bad behavior and the insolence, the arrogance in the face of inequality... perhaps because of this and a society that at-large does not favor mental health and leaves its citizens to rot in their own misery - the chickens always come home. 

Lox/Vux distances the viewer from the brutality with careful construction, shielding the audience and providing minimal blood squirts. A disembodied narrator provides some insight - and cloaked in a familiar voice (Willem? Is that you?) it guides us through the voyeur following Celeste and her sister. The parents are absent: not even the face of Celeste's father is shown in his solitary scene and her mother is only mentioned. Interesting that the movie forecasts some of these traits in Celeste's behavior as a parent too. Director Brady Corbet takes it a step further by casting [...] as both young teen Celeste and her teen daughter, a move that manages to feel organic but is disorienting anyway. But after the tragedy experienced in the prologue it is shown how Celeste never herself is allowed to deal with her grief and trauma. When she is forced to confront it, we see her impossibly describing her feelings surrounding The Event to a half-conscious drugged-up rocker who shows empathy but is too stuporous to relate, much less the fact that the pair are hours from meeting for the first time. Celeste as an adult is faced with a mass shooting that seems to allude to her backround, and as she comes down from her morning pick-up she begs for more from her lascivious manager she claims that she can't stop seeing those people who were shot. Whether she's referring to the shooting at her school as a child or the one at the resort in Croatia, it is not clear.

The narrators voice manifests finally at the end to deliver a chilling detail about Celeste's extra-sensory experience after being gunned down by her classmate. I am not sure how effective this is on what the movie seems to be saying, which is purportedly an examination of how trauma is packaged and sold to an all-consuming society that does not leave room for recovery. So the revelation that Celeste's success as a pop star can be attributed to an encounter with a supernatural being presents the viewer with a choice: believe what happened is true which changes - in fact, adds meaning to all the events of her life. Or believe that it is choas, dumb luck, and that her status as a pop icon is merely a vapid and undue function of a consumption society.