The kids are alright—try telling that to the parents
One of the things that comes so piercingly apparent to young people growing up in America is that America hates you. In the ideology of the ruling class, children have no rights their parents are bound to respect. You realize that on some level you are your parents’ property. When you are a teenager, you are more an object onto which the anxieties of the political class are projected, and are banned from many public accommodations where teenagers could reasonably be otherwise. Any emotions you have are called ‘drama’ or ‘overreacting,’ any affection you may feel is a ‘sweet nothing.’ Your interests are ‘fads’ or ‘phases’ or otherwise degraded as ‘unserious.’ Your schooling is less about educating you and more about turning you into a taker of tests. If you are bookish enough, you may learn that the United States is the only member of the United Nations to not have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. You will learn that basically any civil society organization in America that advocates for parents as parents is usually an Evangelical front that seeks to turn children into the wretched property of their parents. In the eyes of the people who have total power over you, you are less a person and more an annoying rodent.
On its face, Clown in a Cornfield is a rote example of a very common sort of schlocky horror movie, the sort where stupid teenagers encounter something that wants to kill them. In these films and in others (the more recent Jumanji entries being an example), Hollywood makes its protagonists teenagers because Americans have (or, more accurately, like to think they have) all experienced a certain idealized version of ‘youth.’ America usually thinks of teenagers as monsters, and this carries its way into film; what Clown in a Cornfield asks is how much of that is on the kids, and how much of that is the world that their parents made.
Quinn Maybrook (played by Katie Douglas) is a high schooler who has moved away from her friends in Philadelphia to the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, with her father Glenn Maybrook (Aaron Abrams), after her mother died of cancer and Glenn found a new job as the town’s resident doctor. Very tellingly for the rest of the film, they are introduced in the car with Glenn blasting 80s hip hop and expecting it to be relatable to his daughter, who points out that such music is as distant from her as the 40s were from his youth (he is visibly taken aback by this).
Quinn’s arrival in Kettle Springs reveals this little Missouri town to have seen better days, and none of the adults will hesitate to tell you that. Kettle Springs lives in the omnipresent shadow of a beloved corn syrup factory that was the lynchpin of its economy back in the 20th century; the factory recently burned down (which was blamed on teenagers), and it has a rather unnerving clown mascot named Frendo. She also, by virtue of being her age, is now consigned by the town elders to be an opprobrium, a scapegoat for the town’s ills no matter her actual culpability. She is not believed when she tells her father that one of her teachers is singling her out for no reason, and she is not allowed the emotional space to spend time with other teenagers without the presumption of foul play afoot. She arrives in the leadup to the town’s Founders Day, an unabashed orgy of nostalgia that is primarily an opportunity for the town’s adults to celebrate themselves.
Quinn realizes soon enough that that clown shows up in places where it probably shouldn’t be, culminating in a teenage barn party the night of Founder’s Day being massacred by heavily armed clowns, and Kettle Springs rapidly dedicates itself to making the lives of its teenagers nasty, brutish and short. The slasher movie comes into its own here, with as much blood and guts and brutal violence as fans of that genre have come to expect.
I’m going to do something I don’t usually do here and spoil the film’s big twist, as it is that twist that provides the film with its thematic depth. The clowns are, to nobody’s surprise, the parents of the town, blaming all the ills of this century on their young people instead of looking into themselves. Admittedly, I figured out this twist early on, maybe a half-hour in, as the film just didn’t leave enough space in its narrative for it to be anyone else (I would suspect attentive readers of this very review would have been able to figure that out too).
In making the parents the enemy, the film takes its critical aim at reactionary nostalgia. Most of the adults in the film take up arms in the name of defending an idealized version of America that existed during an idealized version of their youths. They are mortally offended by the inexorable march of history, and by the notion that their children are people and not vessels through which they can live vicariously. So many little details of this film are organized around this theme, such as one particular plot point revolving around the obsolescence of rotary phones (another involves cars with stick shifts). This film is therefore a very good example of why narrative works should have themes, not for didactic reasons but because a well-conceived theme serves as a sturdy architecture holding up the story. Themes make stories feel more deliberate, less like combinations of random ideas thrown together, more like coherent statements of intent. This film does that well.
It is telling that this film is set in a fictional town in Missouri, a state that has voted for Republicans every year since 1996 (the year of my birth). While never naming the man or the party (and being filmed in Winnipeg, for that matter), the film is a direct attack on the ideology behind the Republican Party under the nigh-absolute authority of a certain Donald Trump. The MAGA movement, and many other far-right parties throughout the developed world, are based on reactionary nostalgia. The parents in this film are without question the sort who would be thrown into existential terror upon learning that their children are transgender or autistic, and will make their children’s lives living hell in order to make them ‘normal,’ to recreate a time when such children allegedly did not exist. These parents would have absolutely loved Moms for Liberty and gone feral upon seeing books in the local library that they deemed too ‘woke.’ They want a town and a nation that is whiter, straighter, manlier, and more conforming, and will literally kill to see that about, because that is what they remember. There is some queer representation in this movie that is both quite touching in and of itself, as well as demonstrating this point very well and explaining in retrospect some odd behavior.
Where this particular line of critique fumbles is in its depictions of race. I could not help but note that the two prominent Black characters die relatively early, not in terms of the runtime per se, but in terms of their context. Each Black character is part of a group of characters and they die early on when those characters’ heads are on the chopping block. From there, the role of race in American reactionary nostalgia is not interrogated at all, when the opportunity was there the whole time. There is no doubt in my mind that, a hundred years before the events of this film, Kettle Springs must have been a sundown town, the sort of place that would have lynchings as a community event, and have enough social cohesion for all the town whites to say nothing to any reporters who pass through. More recently, Missouri was the site of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and in 2017 the NAACP issued a travel warning for Black people who may pass through the state. On this subject, the film missed an opportunity to be even more cutting.
Where Clown in a Cornfield succeeds, it’s because it’s unafraid to directly attack one of the near-uncontested orthodoxies of American civic life: that young people are evil and that parents always know best. Here, the kids are alright, and see clearly what their parents are simply too blinkered to perceive (even better, one of the adults learns to see the light, a rarity when it comes to younger characters). This film knows intimately that the world’s children are the world’s hope, if only adults are willing to listen to them and let them live.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
