Come for a bite of big lizard action, stay for the biting social commentary
You’d think that dinos going nom nom on people is a sure winning formula that should be impossible to flunk, but then you look at the lamentable state of the Jurassic franchise and notice how easily it’s put to shame by The End of Oak Street. Its simple premise of an entire neighborhood mysteriously snatched in time and transported to prehistoric Earth allows for plenty of cool monster action in assorted combinations that maintain a heightened level of tension throughout. The ending, however, feels abrupt and incongruously happy after all the terror that precedes it. If you can excuse a less than elegant resolution, this movie rewards with abundant people-munching gore. And if you take a look beneath the surface narrative, you’ll realize this is a far smarter movie than its primeval beasts would suggest.
The story is set in a suburb of Detroit in 1982, a very difficult time that writer/director David Robert Mitchell experienced personally in his childhood. The deterioration of the American carmaker sector resulted in waves of closed factories and thousands of newly unemployed. This crisis coincided with the start of Reaganomics and its devastating effect on the income gap, and with the cultural shift toward a conservative moral agenda anchored in the past. In the film, Ewan McGregor’s character is shown to be struggling to provide for his family after being fired, while his wife, played by Anne Hathaway, is stuck in the position of desperate housewife with unfulfilled professional aspirations. When they’re thrown into prehistoric Earth, her husband reacts with the same naïve optimism that characterized the average 1980s American patriarch, complete with purely performative religiosity. Even before they’re faced with the task of surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs, this family is already in the middle of the epic quest to survive Reaganism.
And if the historic parallels aren’t enough by this point, please look up General Motors Poletown and the depressing tale of how, in a desperate attempt to revive the past glories of the car industry, an entire neighborhood of Detroit was demolished in the 1980s to clear up space for a new car factory, displacing hundreds of families in the process. This is a movie about what happens when the past comes uninvited to tear your house down and wreck your everyday life. At the symbolic level, surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs is surviving Reaganism.
Put yourself in the shoes of a kid growing up in 1980s Detroit. There’s a spiraling crime wave, a crack epidemic, deadly gang wars, a dwindling job market, and a perverse new hobby of setting houses on fire. That’s the city in utter chaos that inspired The Crow and Robocop. That’s the Detroit where Mitchell grew up, and the anxiety that he expresses in this movie is not a fantasy scenario. The movie translates that feeling into thrilling action with dinosaurs, but the numerous scenes of abandoned houses crumbling to pieces, of background characters being randomly killed all over the neighborhood in broad daylight, and the protagonists’ dread that the same violence could target their family at any moment, is precisely what it felt like to grow up in 1980s Detroit.
And Mitchell has very specific points to make about society’s response to those changes. The 1980s provided mass culture with a limited repertoire of role models. The protagonists’ son likes to play with a bow and arrow, à la John Rambo, but once the dinosaurs show up, that weapon proves useless. Pay close attention to a couple of scenes in the first act: first, during a family meal, the daughter remarks on her brother’s annoying boys-will-be-boys attitude, and a joke is made about a massive load of poop that he once made as a baby; the morning after, the next-door neighbor, a guy previously established as a gun-happy jerk, shows up to complain that he’s found a man-sized pile of poop on his backyard, and blames the protagonists. To defuse the situation, the father decides that it will be the son’s responsibility to clean it up. The audience knows that it’s actually dinosaur poop, in a clear allusion to Jurassic Park, but hidden there is also a clever commentary on the role that gun violence plays in constructing the 1980s macho archetype (which Mitchell evidently judges to amount to a big load of poop) and the responsibility that falls onto young men to help dismantle it.
Am I stretching my interpretation too far? Consider a later scene, which I think makes the point even more obviously: a Titanoboa enters undetected through the parents’ bedroom window and sneaks past each kid’s bedroom, even though the doors are open and its presence should be obvious if only they bothered to look. It finds the mother and prepares for the fatal bite, but the son injures it with one of his arrows, giving his mother a snap-instant opening to fight back. Note that (a) this is the only time in the movie that the protagonists are attacked inside their house, and (b) this is the only time in the movie that the son’s weapon is good for something. This scene is a metaphor for sexual violence. The real Titanoboa was a snake, but in the movie it’s portrayed with a smooth, off-white skin that makes it look like a gigantic penis. When it’s about to attack the mother and opens its mouth, its tongue looks nothing like a snake’s tongue; it looks unmistakably like female genitalia. The point here is that sexual violence can go on undetected inside your own house (starting in the parents’ bedroom and spreading from there), even when it should be obvious, and women shouldn’t have to fight it alone without the help of male power.
It would be irresponsible and pointless to try to speculate on which of these horrific social scourges were specifically part of Mitchell’s lfe, and in the movie itself he takes pains to let us know as much: the mother has been writing a novel in her free time, in which she describes an unhappy housewife who plans to abandon her family, but she makes it clear that her urge to explore those feelings through her art doesn’t mean she’s describing herself. The End of Oak Street is 1980s Detroit as Mitchell saw it, and it’s there to make us feel like it felt for him. The fact that our heroes escape the prehistoric Earth through a shiny spherical bubble, like in the Terminator movies, gives us the last key for interpretation: whatever his personal hell, science fiction presented him with a way out. Just like it was for so many of us who grew up in the tumultuous 1980s, science fiction was how he escaped.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
