Don’t Breathe (2016): or Subjective Morality is not a Good Reality

2016 must have been the year of horror having to do with blind people. I already posted, much earlier this summer, about horror the brilliant and abjectly terrifying home-invasion horror film Hush (2016), in which a sadistic, serial killing misogynist traps a blind woman in her home and attempts to kill her. In the same year, Don’t Breathe was released. Don’t Breathe is another home-invasion horror film featuring a blind person, but, in it, all the dynamics are different. One difference—a big one—is that the blind person is both the victim of the home invasion and the clear, misogynist, psychotic, sadistic monster in the film. Another is that the film doesn’t give us an easy affective point of attachment. That is, we don’t really like any of the characters much, so we don’t know, for much of the film, where exactly to put our empathic alignments. There are even numerous moments—early on in the film—where our sympathies align much more with the blind victim of the break-in than with any of the teens who have broken into his house. Finally, and most saliently, it’s nowhere near as terrifying as Hush, and I want to spend this post thinking about why. Directed by Fede Alvarez and produced by Sam Raimi, this film had every possibility of being genuinely, deeply terrifying. But I don’t think that’s quite what the creators were going for. They, I believe, were going for discomfort and disgust.

Ok, so let me give a real quick tour of the plot, because it—unlike the empathic alignments in the film—is easy. Three teens break into houses to steal stuff and make money. They get a tip on a job at the home of a blind man who’s daughter was killed in a vehicular homicide years before. They believe he has all the settlement money stored in his ramshackle house (they are right), and that it will be relatively easy to steal it, because he is blind (they are wrong). One of the teens is couched pretty clearly as a criminal; his name is Money (Daniel Zovatto). The other two are more empathogenic than Money, and are named Rocky (a girl played by Jane Levy) and Alex (Dylan Minette).

There is a racial dynamic here that I didn’t care for, which is that the one teen of color is both more “criminal” and less “empathetic” than the white teens, and he’s also killed off much, much sooner. But that’s a topic for another post.

So, Money, Rocky, and Alex break into this old, blind, grieving man’s house, to steal his settlement money. It’s wrong to rob a blind man, as Alex flags for us, but Rocky is hell-bent on the heist, because she wants to escape her abusive mother, taking her baby sister with her, so she needs the money, badly. Money just wants coin.

Once they break in, things go wrong very, very quickly. Money is shot and killed by the blind man (whose name we never learn.) Nothing about that scene makes us particularly inclined to be sad about Money’s death, nor to see the blind man—yet—as a villain. As the film goes on, however, and Alex and Rocky find themselves increasingly trapped and endangered by the old man, more elements of his own psychosis are revealed. Chiefly, he’s been keeping a young woman—the one who unintentionally killed his daughter with her car—prisoner in his basement as a baby-incubator for some period of time. He has impregnated her with his semen. She’s bound, gagged, atrophied, and malnourished when Alex and Rocky find her.

So, just like that the ostensible victim becomes the perpetrator; the person maybe we’d been rooting for—even if only a little bit—has become someone we’re decisively rooting against. Alex and Rocky, on the other hand, become saviors, and heroes—by the film’s logic—reassuring the captive young woman that they will help her escape. And they do try, but the blind man accidentally shoots and kills her, leading to a renewal of his intense grief; in his mind, he just killed his growing grandchild, whom he saw as a replacement for his dead daughter. We watch him hold the dead body and rock her, saying, “My baby! My baby!” but at this point, we feel no compassion for him. Nor, I don’t think, do we feel particularly afraid.

Like I said: the film is more discomforting and disgusting than terrifying.

Defying all odds (and logic), the blind man manages to capture Rocky and harness her into the dead girl’s pregnancy chamber. There is a truly outrageously revolting scene in which the old man, claiming ludicrously “I’m no rapist,” reveals that he impregnated his daughter’s unwilling slayer using a turkey baster full of his semen, not by inserting his penis into her. I know I don’t need to explain to anyone who reads this substack that this man absolutely is a rapist, despite his protestation to the contrary, as well as a reproductive abuser. But what’s interesting in this scene (which I found impossible to watch in one sitting, because it made me so intensely uncomfortable) is that the blind man clearly thinks there are gradations of evil, wrongdoing, and depravity, and that he’s still in a gray area. This, of course, is exactly what the thieving teenagers also think about their serial heists. What they’re doing is wrong, but they have enough need to do it, that it’s warranted.

As the blind man prepares to inseminate Rocky now, approaching her exposed (to him, not to the camera) genitals with a semen-filled turkey baster, he says something truly astonishing, which I believe to be at the epicenter of this film’s logic. He says, “There is nothing a man cannot do, once he accepts the fact that there is no God.” His view, then, is that absent a powerful mechanism for enforcing morality, morality becomes entirely subjective. We’re meant to understand that he used to believe in God, but lost his faith when his daughter died. One he lost the one person he truly loved, he decided to rewrite the rules of the moral universe in his own image.

A very, very interesting position for the film to take.

First, because it’s a terrifying reminder that no one wants to live in a world of totally subjective morality. Even though, increasingly, it appears that that’s exactly the world we live in, where the richest, most powerful, and best positioned people get to decide what’s allowable because they themselves are the gods of the 21^st century, in their own minds. Then they do horrible, brutal, often sexually violent things, and they get away with it.

Second, because of course, in the long sweep of Western history, the idea that there is a God has routinely been given as a justification of violence, particularly when that violence is perpetrated against women. God has been used as a pretext for the subordination of women under patriarchy. God has been used as a pretext for restricting women’s freedom of movement outside the domestic sphere. God has been used as a pretext for justifying physical and psychological violence in the home, where the man was seeking ostensibly to “correct” a misbehaving woman, a woman whose conduct didn’t befit God’s judgment, nor her husband’s. And of course, God has been used as a pretext for denying women autonomous control over their own bodies, control over reproduction and pregnancy.

Now I want to be clear here, I’m not saying that God is a justification for any of these things. All of these ostensibly holy misogynies emanate from misreadings of Scripture, or from how Scripture has been improperly translated into human law. But the fact remains that God is used as an excuse for misogyny by a whole lot of people.

So for this man, on the brink of raping and impregnating a young woman in a harness, whom he’s just beaten the living shit out of, to assert that he is going to go ahead and do this because there is no God is actually pretty surprising. Pretty weird.

What I take away from it is that Alvarez and Raimi are making a statement here—and throughout the film—about the dangerousness of total moral opportunism. That is why we don’t really like any of the main teenaged characters, and why their moral choice-making is shown to be so problematic from the start. Alex is someone who routinely lies to and defrauds his own father, to impress a girl. Rocky is someone who accedes eagerly to grand theft and larceny, to help herself and her sister. Even though each of them has a “reason” to do what they’re doing, the film is pretty clear that it’s still not ok. Robbing a grieving blind man is actually not an ok thing to do. It’s much less grotesque, vile, and dehumanizing than imprisoning and impregnating a woman against her will, but it’s still wrong. These kids are in the wrong. So is the blind man. And the film makes us feel all of that.

Because the real horror in this film isn’t the home invasion part. Nor the cat-and-mouse part. Nor even the reproductive violence part. The real horror this film asks us to think about is the idea of living in a world of total moral opportunism. There are no clear rules of right and wrong, no clear mechanism of enforcement. Indeed, in the end, Rocky does escape, along with her baby sister and $1 million of the blind man’s money. Not because she’s a better person, and not because she’s shown any remorse, nor even because she went through the worst of what the blind man had to offer. Alex dies, shot in the back by the blind man. Not because he deserved it, but because the blind man got “lucky.” And the blind man, whom Rocky leaves for dead when she escapes his house, winds up surviving: she sees footage about him on the news, and he’s lying in a hospital bed, recovering. He asserts, moreover, that his home was invaded only by the two young men he killed in self-defense. There was no one else; nothing was stolen. Evidently, he’s letting her go. There will be no vengeance, no prosecution. There is no consequence for her.

Nor, of course, for him, beyond his having been seriously roughed up in the last altercation between him and Rocky.

She will no more prosecute him for attempted rape and impregnation, nor for the kidnapping of the other young woman, nor for killing two people. She will not be punished. He will not be punished. In all probability, he’ll get out of the hospital and go right back to kidnapping and impregnating young women, in the interest of resurrecting his patriarchal line.

So in the end of the film, what I think we feel, as I said at the outset, isn’t fear. There’s no sense that the blind man will come find Rocky or her sister. How could he? He doesn’t even know her last name. She really has gotten away with stealing $1 million. There’s also no sense that Rocky will someday prosecute the blind man. How could she? She’s wind up in prison herself, for felony theft. We don’t end up feeling fear. We end up, I think, feeling grossed out. Sickened. Revolted. Disgust and discomfort. No one should want to live in a universe where all moral choices are justifiable, according to the lights of the person who commits them. That would be bad.

The film drives that home even more powerfully and trenchantly in one very subtle final dynamic. There’s no mention made in the news report of the dead woman who inadvertently killed the blind man’s daughter. She, along with untold hundreds of thousands of women in history, has been entrapped, assaulted, raped, impregnated, and now murdered by a man who felt he owned her. And she, in the end, is utterly, completely forgotten.