According to Jess, Z. (2019) anyone with a Netflix subscription (or with any internet contact whatsoever) is likely familiar with Bird Box, a harrowing post-apocalyptic horror/thriller film recently released through the video streaming service. But many horror and thriller fans were already familiar with the book that preceded it, authored by the fascinating and prolific multidisciplinary creative Josh Malerman.
Josh Malerman said, "In 2006 I was renting the top floor of an old mansion in Detroit. The place was amazing, and the woman who owned (still owns) the house read the few rough drafts I’d done before Bird Box. I’d just wrapped a long story in a book of novellas—the book is called Goblin and the story “A Mix-Up at the Zoo”—and in that story there were long italicized dream sequences experienced by the story’s main character. I knew I wanted to write an entire novel that way, italicized, present tense, alternating timelines. All those factors together made “A Mix-Up at the Zoo” nightmarish to me, and I wanted a whole book like that. So when the idea of a mother and two kids, blindfolded, navigating a river, came to mind, I wrote it in the same way I wrote that novella. The rough draft was insane—a madman’s draft. No indentations, no quotation marks, the whole thing was italicized (every word). It was twice as long as what the book is today, and there were 14 housemates instead of the seven or eight that we’ve got now. I started Bird Box on Oct. 5, 2006, and wrapped it twenty-six days later on Halloween. We threw a party that night. It was incredible. At one point, the girl I was dating at the time, she got up and announced to the room that I’d finished a book that day. We all cheered and another friend got up and did a stand-up routine for us all. Two friends fell in love that night and are married today. It was magic. From there, I didn’t shop the book. Just like I hadn’t shopped the few that came before it. Instead, I got on the road with my band mates and wrote the next one, and the one after that. Years later, around 2010, I’d signed on with a manager, Ryan Lewis, and I rewrote Bird Box with the intention of Ryan sending it to an agent. He sent it to Kristin Nelson, who picked it and me up, and she shopped it to many houses and in the end we went with ECCO HarperCollins.
In this story there is something is out there, something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from. Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it's time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat—blindfolded—with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children's trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. It turns out everyone was right to be afraid. There is something out there. If you see it, you go insane. It goes through the world population like a pestilent storm. We have windows in our dwellings, in our work buildings, and in our schools because we WATCH the world. It only takes a moment, a need that can’t be ignored, one parting of a curtain, for us to see one of these creatures, and become deranged. We do violent things to ourselves. The lizard inside us meant to fight when flight is not an option turns inward. To live, we must reside in darkness, shrouded by blindfolds, tucked in dwellings behind blanketed windows. It is maddening to have our world reduced to so little. The story also talks about a mother’s destiny. It is every mother’s sacrifice for her children, pushed to the extreme, because, sometimes, being a mother means to make the deadliest sacrifices and to make the most dangerous decisions in order to keep your children safe. Everything is constructed around Malorie’s destiny, past, present and future. Everything seems to concentrate on her like the Universe put its own faith on her shoulders. Malorie seems like is somehow "punished" to live in a world where you are warned about the danger, you know there is danger, but you are not able to see the danger. And this makes things difficult because the sight is the most dominant sense of a living creature, the one a living creature depends on the most. Without it, the adaption to life is just so much harder. Just think of a world in which you are constantly threatened and you have to learn how to defend yourself without seeing what you are fighting. Now, take that and add two four-year-olds. Even a more profound danger and fear than before. A desire to live, but also to die. And this is what Malorie has to face. To save herself and her two four-years-old children from something that they can’t name, but they know it is there. Survival, but next level.
According to Teodora, (2019) I am going to begin with a fact: this book scared the shit out of me sometimes. It is this kind of book that uses that extra-sensorial capacity of yours of feeling something creepy breathing down your neck. Hell, it is an apocalyptic dystopian book after all, what was I expecting? Nothing but the best, right? The way the novel is composed is a bit frustrating, because, unlike other novels, the lack of details at the beginning is present throughout the narration, details being revealed later, as the plot moves on. The chapters are quite short (for which I am very grateful!) and succeed each other in a race of past and present, in a time interval of almost 5 years. It shows the evolution of the fate of humanity and also, an evolution of a particular person: Malorie.
That's why according to Kevin, B. (2019) Bird Box can be viewed as one of the most intelligent movies in the current climate. It is a cleverly disguised science fiction film where art imitates life. The viewer is brought along a metaphorical path submerged into the depths of ignorance as forced behavior. Bird Box sensitively tackles the question of mental health in society. It delves into how it is perceived from those directly affected, to those who view it and how those attitudes are communicated. The movie suggests a split in society, an ‘us and them’ situation. And one wonders whether the film would have been such a roaring success if these themes had been addressed more directly within its narrative. Through clever symbolism, director Susanne Bier (The Night Manager) subtly gets her point across. In Bird Box, we are told an unseen force has the power to cause people who stare towards it to become unbalanced and overwhelmed with the suggestion of suicide. This in turn leads to the protagonist and main characters of the story wearing blindfolds in public to remain unaffected.
Actually a school for the blind, the safe haven the family reach symbolizes within the story a perfect society. Within it, all the inhabitants have their eyes open but are unaffected. They are not afraid to confront the ‘aliens’, shedding the blindfolds representative of ignorance. The birds Malorie had kept within a box to serve as a warning of danger – suggestive of the stigma society carries – are let free when they are no longer needed. As the finale reveals the movies’ intention fully, the questions raised remain simply that. No answer is fully given as to the monster’s true form. Instead, what’s truly important is the protagonist’s changing attitude. She is no longer scared to look, to speak. Ultimately, any answers we search for exist solely in our own ability to be accepting of others. Only through this, can we let go of our judgments and our blindfolds.
REFERENCES
Jess, Z. (January 17, 2019). Imagination Unchained: BIRD BOX Author Josh Malerman on Film Adaptations, Theatrical Book Readings and More. Retrieved from: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/imagination-unchained-bird-box-author-josh-malerman-on-film-adaptations-theatrical-book-readings-and-more.
Kevin, B. (January 16, 2019). The Meaning Of Bird Box | A Reflection Of Modern Society. Retrieved from: https://www.headstuff.org/entertainment/film/film-features/bird-box-meaning/
Teodora, (March 03, 2019). Bird Box by Josh Malerma (Goodreads Author). Retrieved from: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18498558-bird-box.
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