“Now what was that all about?”
–Overheard in a movie theater at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey; ca. 1970
Which was more or less my reaction to 2001 until, several weeks later, a friend explained the film to me and I understood that it not only made sense but was intellectually provocative, perhaps even profound. That was 50 years ago; and although in the interim my beard (then a kind of reddish brown) has turned white, my capacity for being baffled by edgy movies has not diminished in the slightest.
So if I’m being unfair to the critically acclaimed “The Vast of Night” just because I didn’t get it, please forgive me and post a comment to set me straight. (Oh, that’s what was going on …) But my reaction is that the film is mostly confusing and, beneath all the action and the cleverness, there’s not much there.
The movie begins–SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT–by zooming in on what appears to be a TV screen from the beginning of the 1950s, black-and-white images flickering and indistinct. A portentous voice, evocative of Rod Serling on “The Twilight Zone” but accompanied by the theme music from “Dragnet,” welcomes the viewer to something called “Paradox Theater.” “Tonight’s episode: The Vast of Night.” And we’re drawn into the screen; and we understand–and are from time to time reminded–that although color cinema soon replaces the blurry old-time TV images, what follows is a 1950s melodrama.
The point, I suppose, is that the following story is not only set in the 50s but being told in the 50s–the late 50s, actually, since the characters make reference to the 1957 Soviet satellite Sputnik. What follows does have a very 50s-ish feel, an impression heightened by the archaic slang that bubbles from the characters’ mouth, which may or may not be authentic–I don’t recognize any of it, although maybe I would if I’d been a cool-cat teenager at the time and not a little boy–but that probably doesn’t matter, since it sounds like it’s the way those people ought to have talked. Part of the pleasure of the movie, then, is its nostalgia. So far, so good.
Two characters emerge as central, both of them extraordinarily likable. There’s Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick), a bundle-of-energy 16-year-old bobby-soxer who works nights as a telephone operator; and there’s Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz), several years older than Fay, a disk jockey who’s about the coolest cat that can be imagined and who needs at times to restrain Fay’s ingrained eagerness always to do what her elders would approve. (Not quite Mulder and Scully.) There’s a strong erotic chemistry between the two, which the movie never follows up on. Good for screenwriters Craig Sanger and James Montague; good for director Andrew Patterson. It was a wise restraint.
So far, I can find hardly anything but praise for the film. It’s when we get into the story that I start having my doubts.
The story: that on this one night, while nearly everyone in the fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico, are at a high school basketball game, there are mysterious interruptions of both telephone connections and radio transmission. These interruptions are connected with a peculiar audio frequency, which Everett plays on the air and asks any of his listeners who can recognize it to phone in. One of them can and does.
His name is Billy (Bruce Davis). He remembers the strange, not quite musical sounds in connection with an experience he had during his military service, of being part of an elaborate operation involving the retrieval and transport of a crashed disk. Not that Billy knew or understood what he was doing; “everybody,” he says memorably, “only knows pieces in the military.” Would we understand, if we didn’t already know what happened at Roswell? (The name is never mentioned, but Billy speaks of “Walker Base,” as Roswell Army Air Field was renamed in 1948.) I’m not sure.
After some hesitation, Billy makes a confession: he’s black. All the men involved in the cleanup and coverup operation were black or Mexican, chosen for the task because “no one listens to us.” From his experience, Billy knows what’s going on with the strange signal. “Something’s up there now. And they don’t stay for long.”
Billy’s one of the two elder witnesses who can reveal to the young investigators what’s happening. The other is an old woman, Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer), whom Fay and Everett visit in her home. She sits in near-darkness (which is how most of the film is shot). “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this,” she tells them, meaning, an opportunity to tell her story. Of her baby, who in the cradle spoke words of a secret language and at age 9 walked out of the house in the middle of the night to be abducted. He was caught up into the sky, his footprints in the dirt ending abruptly. She never saw him again.
“They take people up,” says Mabel; and they do a lot of other things, mostly unpleasant. “They play with people’s minds.” They make us do bad things, like overeating or going to war. “Free will is impossible with them up there.” And they are up there. A recurrent line in the second half of the movie: “There’s something in the sky.”
Eventually, out in the desert at the climax of an action sequence that I found mostly bewildering, Fay and Everett encounter that “something” close up. It’s an immense, illuminated structure like a carousel, very reminiscent of the mothership grandly depicted in the climactic scenes of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
I’m reminded, as I watch it, how much “The Vast of Night” owes to “Close Encounters.” In “Close Encounters” also, the UFO beings communicate using musical notes; in “Close Encounters” also, they kidnap a small child. But the “Close Encounters” ETs are benevolent: the little boy and his mother are happily reunited at the end. Not so “The Vast of Night,” which has the mysterious visitors pursuing ends which, although never defined, are purely sinister
Meanwhile, what has become of Fay and Everett? After their UFO encounter, we never see them again. The crowd at the basketball game drifts out of the high school gym into the parking lot. The radio station is now without Everett. In the dark nighttime desert, a tape recorder lies half buried in the sands. And the screen, turned black and white, announces we’ve been watching The Scandelion Television Hour, Paradox Theater, The Vast of Night.
The End.
Now, what was that all about?
A post on the Digital Spy website, headlined “The Vast of Night star opens up about Amazon movie’s ambiguous ending,“ purports to explain. It says nothing, however; and I think the reason is that there’s nothing there to be explained.
Instead, Jake Horowitz trots out a string of clever in-jokes. Everett’s radio station is WOTW, which “obviously” stands for War of the Worlds. (Why? The movie bears no resemblance to H. G. Wells’ story of Martian invasion.) The action takes place in Cayuga, New Mexico, referring to “The Twilight Zone’s” production company, Cayuga Productions. “It was all part of Andrew Patterson’s plan,” says Horowitz. “We wanted to lean into the fact that it’s a plot that we know all too well from other movies in the genre.”
And the point of all the cleverness?
“At the heart of the movie is the idea of the unknown and accepting that we don’t know everything. At the beginning, Everett thinks he knows it all, and by the end we really don’t know what’s out there or [what might happen] tomorrow.”
(Did you really think, three months into COVID-19, that we know what’s out there or what might happen tomorrow?)
I’d put it less charitably: the movie pursues mystification as an end in itself, leading nowhere. This is not the mystery that brings an enlightenment that can’t be captured in rational discourse, the paradox that leads into a deeper way of seeing. You can’t explain its point because there is no point, other than to convey, with a superior smirk, that of course there isn’t any point and you were pretty dumb to have expected one.
It’s that smirk that irritates me most deeply. Not just the movie’s incoherence–Billy’s story and Mabel’s shed no light on each other, have nothing to do with one another, suggest no occult pattern that can be discerned, however dimly. Nor that it is so derivative, a lot of it taken straight from “Close Encounters.” But that it’s empty, and congratulates itself on its emptiness–that’s what I truly dislike about it.
And why I wish it had put its two winsome leads to more intelligent use.
Is there anything that can be learned from “The Vast of Night”?
I think there is. Not from the movie itself, however, but from the circumstances of its release and reception.
According to Wikipedia, it premiered in January 2019 at the Slamdance Film Festival, where “it won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature.” It picked up additional awards, or nominations for awards, at other film festivals in the course of 2019. But it was only in the past month that it rocketed to stardom, when “Amazon Studios acquired distribution rights to the film and released it on May 29, 2020, including drive-in theaters in the United States and via video-on-demand on Prime Video.”
Since then, critics have raved about it. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “a small-scale movie that flexes plenty of filmmaking muscle.” “Gives you hope for sci-fi,” enthused Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. Grant the film’s virtues, recognized by the festivals’ judges; was there some special reason that Amazon Studios plucked it out from among its many competitors to give it star billing? That the critics were prepared to look upon it with their kindest eyes?
I think there was. And I think the reason is COVID-19.
Since the pandemic broke upon us, public fascination with UFOs has soared. I’ve posted on this remarkable development and speculated on the reasons for it; I’ve done a video interview on it with my friend Martin Brossman. When Martin and I had our conversation, the Pentagon hadn’t yet formally released the Navy UFO videos. When it did, and these videos made headlines all around the world, I took it as confirmation of what I’d been predicting.
“I expect the UFO myth, the UFO experience, to take on new shapes in the months to come,” I wrote nearly two months ago. “What will those shapes be? Let’s watch and see.” “The Vast of Night,” and the accolades and attention it’s garnered in the wake of the coronavirus, is one of those shapes.
by David Halperin
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Hi David,
You’ve made some good points, but I do believe this is one of those deceptively “empty” or shallow movies that require more than one viewing. There’s a lot more to this film than meets the eye. For instance, I’d bet just about anything that baby Maddy is actually 16-year-old Fay’s illegitimate daughter and not her little sister (or niece, as some people have said). Fay, for all her bubbly, bobby-soxer personality, seems to be somewhat of an outsider. And in one scene, when she talks to Everett about escaping this small town, she adds, “after Maddy is older, of course.” Why say that if Maddy is her sister? Then we find out what happened to Mabel’s illegitimate son, and…hmm… And don’t forget we’re watching the Scandelion Television Hour (scandal?). You mentioned that Billy’s and Mabel’s stories don’t have anything to do with each other. Maybe not, but they do both reflect 1950s views on non-white people and babies born out of wedlock–maybe this, and not aliens, is the whole point.
This was a fascinating move, and beautifully made. I’ve watched it three times, and each viewing provides more insight.
Christine, thank you for this very thoughtful comment!
I seem to remember Fay telling Everett at one point that she doesn’t smoke; and then we’re shown her taking a break, stepping outside and lighting up with the ease and confidence of a practiced smoker. I had written this off as the movie’s pointlessly subverting itself, telling the viewer that we’re not really to believe what it says about its characters. But perhaps this fits in with your idea that Fay is less of an innocent than she comes across. Thoughts on this?
And do you have any thoughts on the final (or almost final) scene where the crowds are shown leaving the basketball game, not exactly zombie-like, but in a quiet and subdued manner that contrasts with their earlier enthusiasm?
Yes! I did notice Fay’s smoking and wondered about it—great point that perhaps it’s meant to show her as not quite so innocent as she appears, and that she’s putting on a little façade for Everett. (In my previous post, I pointed out the “scandal” part of “Scandelion.” Maybe “lion” means “lying”?) And speaking of Everett, I agree there’s some chemistry between the two of them, but I also found it curious that Fay made a point of seeking him out—and then I further wondered if she got that tape recorder as a means of connecting with him. He’s obviously older, and while Fay mentions her mother several times, there doesn’t appear to be a father in the picture—so maybe she’s looking for a substitute, something which adds credence to her being an unwed teen mother. We often see the 1950s as a kind of utopia, but there was a lot lurking underneath, wasn’t there.
I too wondered about the subdued basketball fans at the end. I had thought maybe their team lost, but it could also be that there’s not much excitement in small towns, and now they have to wait a week until the next game before they can come alive again. But your mention of them being not quite zombie-like makes me think there could be something else going on…
Finally, in the article you linked to, there was mention of the pile of dust (or ash) at the end being a “clue.” I was reminded of the saying that we’re all dust and “into dust we shall return.” So it’s possible the three humans turned back “into dust” and all that was left was the tape recorder. And then there’s the way we often sweep dust under the rug so no one sees it. I feel something niggling at my subconscious but can’t quite reach it.
Really, this movie fascinates me more than any other has in quite a while. I do believe that we, as individuals, get what we’re meant to get out of art, and that’s the true beauty of it—it’s different for everyone.
Thank you, Christine! I still don’t care much for the movie, but you’ve opened my eyes to the possibility there’s more there than I noticed.