Being the age I am and having consumed as much pop culture junk as I have, I’ve come to a point in which I have near-zero interest in "escapist" entertainment.
Of course, there’s less and less of that to be found as the entertainment industry reaches its terminal point of ideologically-aided mass goodbye (a process kicked off in the C-suites following the panic instilled by the Occupy movements) but that’s a story for another time.
I’m also at a point now where I have close to zero interest in any narrative that doesn’t ask the big, cosmic-type questions and/or doesn’t have an explicit small-S spiritualist or consciousness orientation.
This, of course, relegates me to most consuming obscure, independent and/or “flop” content, as I wrote in the “My Favorite Flops” section in The Endless American Midnight. And given what the masses consume— and the almost-total creative graveyard mainstream culture has become — I’m OK with that.
Which brings us to Midnight Special.
Note: there are going to be spoilers like you wouldn’t believe, so if you want to go watch it on Netflix first, please do so.
I was aware of Midnight Special when it was initially released, and had watched the trailer and a few clips at the time. I’m not sure if it was how the material was being presented (the trailer was cut to favor the CGI eye candy at the film’s climax) or my general mindset, but it looked like another of those boring superhero-kids-without-costumes movies we were seeing so much of back then.
Boy, was I wrong.
Midnight Special is practically a sizzle reel of Secret Sun obsessions, folding in Magonian, Gnostic and extracanonical Biblical themes like the Watchers and the Nephilim. There’s all kinds of metatext woven into the narrative, often slyly roasting the aforementioned superhero-kids-without-costumes movies.
Better still, writer/director Jeff Nichols bears down on hard on the Southern Noir and social-realist themes and techniques, ensuring that the viewer is placed explicitly in the downscale permanent midnight of a contemporary rural America under the onslaught of the totalizing power of the military-corporate-intelligence axis, which brooks absolutely no dissent or opting out from the Neo-Feudalist agenda bearing down on us like a hammer.
Click here to read more about this flat-out Synchromystic masterpiece, which gets the Secret Sun's "Highest Possible" recommendation.
