Shut Up and Dance is the third episode of the third season of the show Black Mirror. On the surface, it explores themes such as cybercrime, privacy, internet anonymity, and vigilante justice. No Country for Old Men is an American movie released in 2007 directed by the Coen brothers as a cinematic adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. While both works are stunning examples of post-modern horror and share striking similarities, they have quite the different approach to what will be addressed as ‘generating fear’—that is, the two works provide opposite, but equally effective reasons for the viewer to feel fear. This short study will first provide a brief plot summary of both works, examine the tone and pacing, and finally discuss how this affects the generation of fear for each. I will argue that while Shut Up and Dance generates fear by depriving the viewer of contextual knowledge, No Country for Old Men achieves the same end by providing it. Finally, I will argue that these two methods each demonstrate how effective the other is as a representation of two extremes of a spectrum, and the resulting implications of these conclusions on storytelling.
Shut Up and Dance tells the story of a Kenny, a young adult whose laptop is hacked to record a video of him while masturbating. Using this video as leverage, the hackers responsible for this send Kenny instructions to obey their will via text. Throughout the course of the day, he meets people who are not the hacker but also apparent fellow victims, presumably with some similar stake in performing to the satisfaction of the hackers. Kenny eventually runs into Hector, who fears divorce and losing custody of his children due to an extramarital affair. The text messages instruct the two of them to rob a bank using a gun that another victim delivered to them. Kenny successfully holds up the store, and the two later receive instructions to go separate ways. In a dramatic scene where the hackers order Kenny and yet another victim to fight to the death, it is revealed that both had been in possession of child pornography. Kenny first attempts suicide and then later is seen bloodied, presumably having murdered the other man. Despite all of the victims’ strict adherence to the hacker’s instructions, every single hacking victim suffers from an information dump, and each are apprehended appropriately for their wrongdoings. The classic traits of postmodern horror are present: fear, violence, and a transgression of violence (Pinedo, 1996).
No Country for Old Men (2007) is quite different in tone. When the Texan protagonist Llewelyn Moss finds a briefcase of money from a drug deal gone bad, he becomes wanted by the Mexican drug cartel. A hitman named Anton Chigurh threatens to kill his wife Carla Jean if Moss does not comply and surrender the money. Llewelyn then orders a reluctant Carla to go into hiding as he flees with the briefcase. After several close encounters between Moss and Chigurh resulting in both being injured, Carla seeks protection from the local sheriff, Bell. Unfortunately, this conversation unknowingly reveals Moss’s location to the Mexican cartel, and he is later found dead, killed off-screen. Chigurh later finds Carla at her home, and the film strongly implies that he kills her. Sheriff Bell plans to retire as he feels overwhelmed with the increasing violence of the neighborhood, noting that Terrell Country is “no country for old men.”
While Shut Up and Dance might also be described as a ‘thriller’, this is certainly not the case of No Country for Old Men. While there are shootouts and action (actually even more so than Shut Up), No Country takes on an excruciatingly slow, intensely unnerving tone and pace. The horror is exacerbated not by gore or violence, but the threat of violence. Take, for example, a scene in which Moss and Chigurh confront each other:
A scene involving two very resourceful characters. Moss is a Vietnam veteran and knows his way around a gun. However, he is clearly outmatched, and watching Chigurh’s mind work is arguably more terrifying than the actual firefight itself. This will be touched on later as well!
There is no soundtrack to warn of an impending clash. The viewer hears exclusively diegetic sounds throughout the film, and the effects are apparent in this scene. What would Moss hear as he prepared for Chigurh’s assault? Nothing. So the viewer gets nothing as well, and is forced to endure the agonizing wait. When the wait ends, the release is not nearly as exhilarating or cathartic as one would hope. Some stray shots are fired, but both parties escape. And this is what at its core makes No Country such a novel post-modern horror film—the horror is generated entirely by the viewer’s wish for a traditional confrontation which never occurs. The predator/prey interactions never result in a conclusive finish, and each iteration piles increasing amounts of fear of the next one. Of course, when Moss when is killed by the Mexican cartel, it is an infuriatingly unceremonious, off-screen death. There is no closure, only continued fear and terror of Anton Chigurh. These classic postmodern traits indicate that two wildly different forms can accomplish the same effects through different methods.
Shut Up and Dance chooses to keep the viewer in the dark about a sinister secret that the protagonist guards, choosing to reveal this at the last minute as a plot twist. However, before this dramatic moment the viewer is forced to endure the humiliating power that the hackers hold over Kenny. Part of what makes the hackers so scary to both Kenny and the viewer is that so little is revealed about them. The only interaction that is witnessed throughout the course of the episode are text messages, and the remnants of the instructions received by other victims.
Because so little is known about the hacker, its nature becomes ambiguous. It is unclear what exactly the hacker is capable of doing. The writers of Shut Up and Dance play this angle appropriately by making the first of the text-message instructions relatively innocuous, and slowly ramping up the danger involved. Throughout the course of the day, Kenny delivers a cake, goes for a joyride, and robs a bank at gunpoint, and murders a man with his bare hands. The reason the viewer feels fear is because the intentions of the hacker are only revealed incrementally via the instructions, which undergo a drastic transformation throughout the episode. When the big plot twist is revealed (Kenny’s computer is filled with child pornography!), the viewer is left in even more confusion. The entirety of the episode draws on post-modern horror effects by inducing fear of the unknown without ever explaining these unknowns.
This leads to the fundamental differences in the approach to post-modern horror taken by No Country and Shut Up. Shut Up chooses to keep the viewer in the same boat as Kenny. The hacker then comes to represent a fear and a complete loss of rationality because so little is known about them. When Kenny first discovers that his computer has been compromised, he becomes absolutely hysterical, crying and screaming at his phone. This irrational behavior partially stems from the fact that he has no idea who to even blame—his overlord is merely a nameless figure with a seemingly infinite presence. Of course, the final twist is that Kenny was guilty of some heinous crimes, and that he knew that he was from beginning. However, this does not detract from the powerful sympathy the viewer feels towards Kenny. In this way, Shut Up and Dance fulfills its own post-modern criteria–the viewer had been rooting for a pedophile the entire time! This gross perversion of the narrator-viewer relationship serves to deprive the viewer of neither the victory nor defeat of a traditional ending.
On the other hand, No Country opts to give the viewer full knowledge of the situation that Llewelyn finds himself in. From the first scene, the film demonstrates the full extent to which Chigurh will go to achieve what he will do. In stark contrast to generating fear by creating a mysterious antagonist, the film chooses to generate fear by exposing the viewer to the terrifying, unstoppable force that relentlessly pursues the protagonist. Instead of wondering what Chigurh is capable of, the viewer feels fear for the Moss’s rapidly declining odds against the murderous sociopath. Twice in the film he allows victims to wager their life on a coin toss, and he plays God in that moment for whoever calls heads or tails. This unfeeling, unsympathetic, and merciless God who simply offers the chance because it amuses him embodies what the viewers learn to fear (Cagle, 2014).
Anton Chigurh, one of cinema’s most iconic antagonists, is a perfect medium through which No Country achieves this effect. The film goes out of its way to demonstrate Chigurh’s thought process. In one scene, he prepares for a gunfight against Mexican cartels that he knows to be sheltered in a small motel:
Chigurh’s silence and brutal efficiency is honestly chilling. But what is really unsettling is how deliberately he practices the motions needed to secure a job well done, showing that he is a rational human that is capable of premeditated actions.
In order to ensure that he has the upper hand, Chigurh rents out a room in the motel as well. He studies the room layout and checks walls for potential penetrating shot opportunities. Then he practices the motions of abruptly throwing the door open and flipping the switch. This practice results in three dead cartel members, and an unscathed hitman. This scene is so scary not because of the action (which is scant) but the fact that Chigurh smart (Cagle, 2014). This is one of the best examples of the film that stand out to demonstrate the value in giving the viewers everything.
As the film continues to characterize Moss and reveal his backstory, no further information is given on Chigurh. But the knowledge of the inevitable results in a continued, indirect dehumanization of Chigurh (Bayless and Redmon, 2013). While Bayless and Redmon primarily discuss differences between the film and the original McCarthy novel, they raise many interesting points. For example, they remind the viewer that the Coen brothers take very deliberate steps towards humanizing Chigurh to some extent. The scene in which the now iconic captive bolt pistol is explained, they argue, serves to “push the audience to align Chigurh with humans rather than animals. He is clearly the one holding the air-gun and not the one on which it is being used. This reminder forces audiences to acknowledge Chigurh’s humanity and the specifically human agency behind the horrific actions this character performs” (Bayless and Redmin, 2013). Again, this reinforces the argument that full disclosure in No Country is effective in inducing horror in an indirect way. In this case, the viewer is left horrified by the possibility of a human being’s capacity to kill mercilessly, or to see others as animals. Without the scene in which the weapon is explained, Chigurh becomes an embodiment, rather than somebody that you might simply spot in a crowd. The possibility of an actual living Chigurh out in the real world is legitimately frightening.
A similar, representative moment in Shut Up is when the cake that Kenny received from another victim is revealed to contain a handgun. This is the first indication that the hacker has very, very sinister intentions, and both Kenny, Hector, and the viewer immediately have the same reaction—how many victims are there? For each victim to have completed a small role, how many unknowing hands did this handgun pass through? How many more will touch? The possibilities are endless, highlighting the strength of this style of horror.
Upon seeing the handgun, the viewer is instantly compelled to think about its recent history. How many iterations of the same hack and instruct protocol were conducted to get this gun in a car with two people in front of bank? Maybe countless.
The effectiveness of both of No Country for Old Men and Shut Up and Dance suggests that these two approaches to generating fear are both viable methods. Juxtaposing these two works together tells us that in order to scare an audience, there are no half measures: give full disclosure of a genuinely horrific phenomenon, or give away nothing and let the imagination run wild.
These assertions have multiple implications for the art of storytelling. The storyteller, whether it is an author, director, or an actor, must make a deliberate decision as to how much context the audience will receive. Both examples given above suggests that the either end of the spectrum may prove sufficient. But each method of storytelling requires a different set of narrative criteria. In providing little to no context such as in Shut Up and Dance, the underlying sinister nature of the source of fear must be incrementally exposed, so as to build continuous tension and fear throughout the entirety of the story, and prevent shock value from wearing off early into the story. On the other hand, choosing to present the audience with full disclosure of impending doom requires characterization alongside this overwhelming force to refresh the fear that the viewer feels for the characters. In addition, the nature of this force must be absolutely horrifying such that it is clear that the victim is outmatched. This foundation provides the basis for the generation of sufficient fear as the inevitable loss draws nearer towards the end of the story. T
he final, and perhaps the most important supporting criteria, is that there must be no cathartic solution. I think that this is what distinguishes a ‘thriller’ type film from a postmodern horror one, and Cagle (2014) would agree. A central aspect of postmodernism is the lack of conclusive ending, and No Country is a flawless example of such. While the ending gives the slightest hint of change regarding Chigurh’s character, the rest of the film is frustrating in that not much is resolved. His argument that No Country “refuses to develop toward a proper resolution between opposing forces” (Cagle, 2014) is indicative of the continued rise in tension I described earlier, with no final crescendo, leaving the viewer in the uncomfortable, on-edge mood.
Shut Up and Dance and No Country for Old Men achieve the same postmodern horror effect on their viewers, but through different methods respectively. While both are effective, each requires a unique set of skills to tell a good story. Both of the works examined above do this almost flawlessly, and the result is a masterful depiction of postmodern horror.
Bibliography
Isabel Pinedo. “Recreational terror: postmodern elements of the contemporary horror film.” Journal of film and video, Vol 48, No. 1/2, 1996, 17-31.
Jeremey Cagle. “”I hope it has a good endin’ “: rewriting postmodern play in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.” The Cormac McCarthy journal, Vol 12, 2014, 1-19.
Ryan S. Bayless and Allen H. Redmon. “”Just call it”: identifying competing narratives in the Coens’ ‘No Country for Old Men.'” Literature/Film quarterly, Vol 41, No. 1, 2013, 6-18.