The Vast of Night (2019)
ALEX
The most important aspects of cinema are on wonderful display here: camera work, script, and acting. The only possible critique, that the story is ultimately a bit sad, inconclusive even, is consciously accounted for by presenting The Vast of Night as a Twilight Zone episode. The one “shortcoming” then is committed to completely, and forms the recurring visual motif of the flickering old television, and forms the mood of the entire story.
I think of Under The Skin, a movie that suffered from not honestly facing the small, vignette-style scope of its story. It had a Twilight Zone episode’s amount of material, but stretched it out into a feature film-sized presentation that made a gripping thriller quite boring to behold. By properly accounting for the limited scope of the story, by using this limit as a positive input of inspiration, The Vast of Night was able to intelligently present every one of its parts in harmony with each other.
JADE
Perfectly executing a 1950s stylization for the whole film allows the end reveal of the alien spaceships to hit the audience with a sense of profound beauty and wonder, even though the ships themselves are straight out of a comic book, not especially imaginative. In this moment it is not so much the revelation of the spaceships as the revelation of a director's entire universe of which the audience sits in awe.
The real time narrative structure contributes to this beautifully. You don’t necessarily realize the story is being told in real time, until you see the town flooding out of the stadium, and the fullness of the universe that has been shoved into two hours hits you all at once.
ALEX
The town itself is one of the three main characters of the film, and I think the long interlude shot that travels from the call station, to the radio station, to the basketball gymnasium works together with the real time narrative to give you the intimate knowledge of this “character” that would normally come across in an actor’s performance. This third “character” is what grounds Fay’s and Everett’s adventure and makes it meaningful.
JADE
It’s so fun to watch Everett on the screen, for the same reason it’s fun to watch John Hamm’s performance in Mad Men. It’s rare to see a man that is so convincingly self interested. I like to watch a self interested woman dance her way through a bar any day of the week, but it’s rare and refreshing to find an attractively self interested man, in real life or cinema. He compels you to follow. From the beginning of the film, the moment he steps out of the car, the camera is dead on him and we are breathlessly running at his side like little siblings enamored with an older brother.
ALEX
Everett’s magic is possible partly because we’re allowed to have fun watching him; his arrogance could be overbearing if the camerawork didn’t back up the feeling, literally following close behind Everett’s figure for long periods, like the enamored sibling. There’s no apologizing, on the part of the filmmakers, for focusing positively on a white male. This is instead the correct type of protagonist to further immerse the viewer in 50s Americana, and the worldview that came with it. Another example of achieving victory by total commitment: the obvious shortcomings of a 50s Americana worldview will later form a crucial piece of the film’s unfurling mystery.
Today’s media norms permit the portrayal of a white male only if he is deconstructed and belittled. In The Vast of Night, there’s a basic respect here for Everett’s place in the story, and so his deconstruction happens along the lines of an ennobling hero’s journey. His illusions of grandeur are tempered as he delves further into this night’s inexplicable depths, he realizes he needs Fay quite as much as she needs him, and he ends the film as an even more magnetic character than at his beginning.
JADE
Framing this story as a Twilight Zone episode tells us from the beginning that this story will be one of liminality. From the very start, this story is an elaborate and well constructed doorway to what lies beyond. The small town makes an ideal setting, because a small town in the cinematic imagination is always a place to escape from–a doorway to the unknown.
(The name of the town echoes this spirit of alienation–“Cayuga” is an old native word for one of the first five nations European settlers encountered in the New World. Fay and Everett’s classic 50s Americana life rests on the bones of the people who lived there before them, and whispers of a time when the white people were the aliens.)
The specter of extraterrestrial encounter is often conceived as a unifying force upon all earthlings. But what does it do to the earthlings it abducts? Fay and Everett spend all their lives dreaming of going away. Once beamed off of Earth though, I imagine all they can hope for is to return.
ALEX
Vignettes like this best describe symbols, archetypes and feelings, more than conclusive statements of the human condition, thus is Fay and Everett’s tragic ending a triumph, at least symbolically. They have escaped their small town by answering the archetypal call to adventure.
JADE
How do they answer this call to adventure? Its voice here is subtle, and would be easy to miss. But Fay is sensitive to the call and uniquely poised to respond to it. From the start of the film to the end, her dialogue is quick, precise, exacting, and overflowing with information; she is never fatigued by it; she maintains intense focus; she’s a good listener. Everett is teaching her the skills of an interviewer, i.e. teaching her to inquire. Fay is a musician, sensitive to tone and musicality–Everett might not even be on this journey at all if Fay had not brought the sound to his attention. To be interested in sound is to be interested in experience. As you note, she’s so sincere, so intensely interested in her projects that she doesn’t notice her own glow: in fact she has an enchantment all her own. Finally, it is Fay’s emotional response, fleeing the car after the undeniable supernatural experience, that leads Everett to the place where they see the UFOs at last.
Elementally, they are both working with air from the beginning, on the sound board and the radio respectively. And something ethereal (i.e. related to ether) is at work upon the plot. “People in the sky” are ethereal by nature and are responding to an empyreal call.
ALEX
Did you just make our write-up evaporate into space???
JADE
I can only stay earthbound for so long.
ALEX
Everett’s basic mistake keeping him earthbound, or rather, stuck in his hometown, is an overabundance of individuality. The overwhelming nature of the story breaks down his illusions of man-as-an-island. Ultimately accepting the invitation of love for and alliance with Fay gives them both the necessary “launch platform” for escaping Cayuga.
Is it aliens abducting them, or the power of Love itself???
JADE
Love is always an alien abduction! You experience something life altering: The Other. And then you can’t stop talking about it. At the grocery store, in cafes, even at work maybe. Everyone around you starts to get uncomfortable, wants to distance themselves from the crazy person talking about the messages they’re getting from some other being.
You can make art and write poems about it, but who can really understand them? When you encounter an alien, you become a sort of alien yourself. In this way love feels like doom: something rich and strange that separates you in some unnameable way from your everyday friends and neighbors. Love poems, like the tape left behind at the end of The Vast of Night, are these untranslatable artifacts of experience. To understand them at all, the audience must go through the same experience, which makes the audience alien as well. This is why tales of the supernatural were always unattractive to me before. In its untranslatability it loses my attention. The same thing happens for me with bad love poems.
ALEX
Being a love-abductee myself, I completely understand.
The same untranslatability is true for religion–Its arguments for the existence of a transcendent Deity are utterly unconvincing for skeptics. Religious thought is really only for people who’ve already been “beamed up” into a transcendent experience, and no convincing is necessary for such individuals.
The tape which Fay and Everett left behind will be garbled, fragmented; it will be pointed to in their world as physical proof of alien contact, but will convince no one. It’s only the individuals like Billy, and Blanche Gabel, who have had contact themselves, who will recognize these garbled pieces as an artifact of something real.