They / Them (pronounced They Slash Them): a Review

If peak Woke has yet to be reached, this wretched fare got as close to that summit as any “horror” movie ever made.

Plenty can and has been written about the death of art, often by prominent artists or critics reacting to changes in their fields, for good or ill: with a wry wink, Twain famously indicted James Fenimore Cooper for literary offenses; Matthew Arnold asserted that Chaucer lacked “seriousness”; Picasso’s work was met early on by critics with labels such as “odd,” “degenerate,” or the product of “diseased nerves.”

So it is unsurprising when contemporary filmmakers or critics react to movies in much the same way, be it Martin Scorsese’s “controversial” classification of superhero fare as more theme park than cinema; current rumblings about art being replaced by exercises in self-congratulatory diversity; the insistence on “authenticity” in portrayals, which replaces excellence in acting with essentialist identity as a prerequisite to filling roles; or a kind of Social Justice didacticism — propaganda, in many cases — that turns scripts into barely disguised sermons, often at the expense of important narrative staples such as, eg., character development, pacing, plot, nuance, and entertainment value.

The Peacock original They / Them hardly needs such a lofty context into which to place it for the purposes of this amateur review. But then, it’s important to differentiate between the stylistic conflicts between, say, Poe and his contemporaries, and the State-sanctioned direction and / or censorship of Soviet art. They / Them is an example of the latter.

Written by John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator, Skyfall, Penny Dreadful, Alien Covenant), who makes his directorial debut here, the cast features Kevin Bacon, Anna Chlumsky, and a host of actors I’ve never heard of. The foil to Bacon’s villainous Owen, for instance, is played by Theo Germaine, whose character Jordan becomes the story’s reluctant hero.

Germaine — who jokes that his first memories at 3- years old were of The Lion King and gender dysphoria — was nominated for a Queerty Award in 2019. Which, ok. I confess to missing that ceremony. Here, though, his character of Jordan tests the actor’s range: sure, Germaine, himself (“themselves”?) a self-identified non-binary who answers to they / them in his real life, plays a non-binary character who early in the film protests binary bunkhouses at a purported gay conversion camp as unaccepting of “they’s” exceptional status. And while you may be thinking this isn’t much of an artistic stretch — or even that Germaine may have been cast because “they” fulfill the idea that non-binary characters must be played by non-binary people in this new era of enforced casting similitude— the counter argument is just as strong: Germaine is indeed like the character of Jordan in many important ways. But whereas Germaine is non-binary, he’s nevertheless an actor. Whereas Jordan is non-binary, but is attending a gay conversion camp terrorized by a serial murderer.

And there’s nothing in Germaine’s biography that I can find pointing to his having ever been party to a killing spree at a gay conversion camp.

So. Range.

Let’s see Miss Hillary Swank try that!

I’m not going to bother noting spoiler alerts, nor will I spend much time on the plot, such as it is. The movie doesn’t respect its audience, so there’s no reason I should respect the film’s (very obvious) “secrets.”

In a nutshell, the story begins as a middle-aged women — not identified until the denouement, when the script gracelessly and desperately tries to find some post hoc anchor — is killed by a hatchet-wielding killer in a mask and black robes who’s disabled her car on a remote forest road. Imagine the Ghost Faced Killer from the Scream franchise, only with a mask that presents a face stitched back together — a tortured, once-broken murderer split into two, re-invigorated and made vengeful now as one. And yes, that’s the height of the film’s symbolic power: a hamfisted metaphor molded into a custom mask that somehow turns Anna fucking Chlumsky of My Girl fame into a powerful killer strong enough to beat a grown man to death by slamming his face repeatedly into a CCTV screen. She is similarly well-versed in axe play, electro-shock therapy, knife fighting, stealth human tracking and hunting, and whatever other ways she may have offed her victims. I watched this yesterday and can’t even remember how each “villain” died: the kills are uninspiring and will likely disappoint fans of the slasher genre; likewise, those targeted, after the opening sequence, make it clear exactly what is happening in the story, and why. Which leaves you as a viewer with the realization that you aren’t watching a horror film; you’re watching a morality play — and the moral core of the story may not match your own. Worse, the suspense, never very heightened to begin with, is entirely gone. The conclusion is as transparent as it is forced.

This moral tension between the story and some viewers isn’t the real problem, though. Many of the greatest pieces of cinema have forced us to grapple with our own inveterate beliefs.

Instead, the problem is the wretched preaching disguised as dialogue, which not only mars the last two-thirds of the film, but renders it risible. It is bad. Really bad. Really, really bad. And it’s made even worse by wooden acting, dubious casting, poor pacing, and a desire to turn a Woke clarion call into a compelling story that is unsuccessful on every single level.

To wit: following the murder of the unnamed woman on the road, we find ourselves at the orientation for Whistler, a gay conversion camp in a wooded setting where cell phone service and Wi-Fi are unavailable. Owen (Kevin Bacon), runs the camp along with his wife (Carrie Preston), a nurse (Anna Chlumsky), an activities director (Hayley Griffith), an athletic director (Boone Platt), and a shy, creepy groundskeeper (Mark Ashworth).

At the orientation — which in addition to introducing staff and allowing Owen to show a non-judgmental pose to the campers, seems to exist solely so Germaine’s character, Jordan, can self-righteously object to the boy / girl cabins while explaining that “they” are non-binary (and really, how dare a gay conversion camp not have a shack for the “they / thems” who are evidently legion, yet who are represented by a single camper!) — we also meet the other campers, though they are fleshed out in the following scene where they’re each made to give Owen (and viewers) their backstory. What we get are the mini-maudlin biographies of victims who’ve been ground down by a society of homophobes, religious bigots, school bullies, and unenlightened parents too dumb and uncaring to surrender their teen children to a life of trendy identitarianism — though in the script, such a road is presented as unwaveringly good, manifestly empowering, and undeniably authentic. And this must be true because in the history of ever, no teen has even once made a poor choice, or rebelled, or tried to find a group in which they’ll be readily accepted simply by adopting a certain pose.

The film teaches us — or rather, demands of us — that we as viewers accept the validity of emotional appeals from fully realized teens; to deny their feelings is to deny their humanity. And only bigots — and sadistic homophobes who run a week-long gay conversion camp in the woods — deny that humanity.

In fact, the whole point of the film, though it will try to carve out a middle road against “hate,” is to elevate the campers and their authentic queer / non-binary / trans selves over those who not only fail to understand such beatific self-love, but who actively seek to destroy it in ways so given to caricature that it insults any viewer not already a true believer, an advocate, or an “ally” to the LGBTQI+ cause.

But this doesn’t happen without a shit ton of performative irony: the campers represent the spectrum of the rainbow coalition, and they are as plastic and cartoonish as we’re supposed to believe the camp’s staff is. What we get is a Breakfast Club approach to gender issues and homosexuality: the all-American athlete who just wants to join his dad’s fraternity; the wholesome girl who goes to church, bakes, and lives in a sheltered, conventional suburban space where homosexuals other than she don’t exist; a combative Asian lesbian who (we find later) is perfectly fine with her sexuality, but who is attending the one week camp as an assignment for her college paper — presumably to uncover hate! and expose it to the world; a cross-dressing black teen hiding his sex under sun dresses and sun hats; and a flamboyant black teen who likes Broadway musicals, vintage clothing, and seems to be modeled on a liberated Lamar from Revenge of the Nerds.

And then there’s Jordan, the enigmatic non-binary willing to ask the tough questions. At least, that’s the character’s purpose. But rather than come off as brave and self-assured, “they” comes across as rude, entitled, self-righteous, and arrogant. For the movie to work at all, we have to care about these characters. And we don’t. When the campers suddenly break into a Pink song in the boy’s bunkhouse, my cringe level reached critical mass and I punched one of my dogs. I knew that wouldn’t make the singing stop. But I’d hoped the yelping would distract me.

Similarly, we are meant to despise the camp staff. To push us in this direction, the script presents implausible scenarios with outlandish dialogue attributed to secret sadistic homophobes. It is they who presume fixed gender roles — women bake pies in order to serve men; men do the hunting to preserve the health of the breeders, etc — an inversion of our current social moment where children or teens who deviate from gender norms are said to have been born into the wrong bodies and are eligible for “affirming care” consisting of body mutilation, chemical castration, and reinforcement from the medical community of a need for such radical biological change.

That is to say, what gay conversion therapists are doing by trying to help children and teens find their sexual identities is evil, because it purportedly denies the spoken desires of young people too often driven by social contagion and fad to declare a permanent life choice.

— whereas gender affirming care is beneficent and virtuous in its attempt to help children and teens find their sexual identities, because it accepts as authentic those deviations, and uses hormones, chemicals, and surgery to cater to the desires of young people — the presumption being that there exists no social contagion, no fad, and that children as young as two can be trans, something we can tell by their favorite colors, or by whether they like sports or dolls.

Up is down. Black is white. John Cafferty is the Beaver Brown Band.

Given the ostentatious sexual politics of the film, the plot becomes predictable and formulaic: the robed killer begins killing off the camp staff. Once through, she is given the unenviable task of explaining what’s happened: she’s not the real nurse — she’d killed the real nurse out on the road in the opening scene and taken her place — but is instead an ex-camper nobody recognized who had been previously tortured by the camp and its sadists who tried to convert the gay out of her.

Does that backstory justify killing the real nurse, who presumably would have been familiar to the camp staff had she been part of the conversion sadism? Or did she kill an innocent woman whose only crime was being written into this awful script?

Having killed off all the staff — and with police somehow magically on the way — the killer replacement nurse pleads with Jordan to join her, to avenge the torture of gays and trans and non-binary peoples, presumably by embarking on a yearly summer murder tour of gay conversion therapists.

But Jordan, ever the self-assigned moral voice of all things gender dysphoric, declines. Because Jordan, you see, is better than the killer. More enlightened. More progressive. The killer avenges torture with the sword. Whereas Jordan? Will defend the tortured with emotive speeches, social media bans, hate crimes laws, and screenplays that pretend “they” hold some sort of moral high ground by virtue of having cast off a binary identity and embraced the gender collective.

Because what else is “they / them” but the move to justify the individual as both more and less than an individual? “They” are multiple individuals, free to join whatever group that advantages them going forward. And they are to be praised for doing so. This makes them more than. Which also makes them less than. They are what they claim.

Nice gig if you can get it.

Kevin Bacon famously won’t attend fan gatherings for Friday the 13th, in which he appeared as an original cast member, killed off with a spear through the throat. Presumably he is embarrassed about his part in what came to be seen as an exploitation genre: randy teens, casual sex, lots of bare breasts, and a killer with a machete settling perceived scores in graphic and gory fashion.

And yet he accepted the starring role here— where the only two sexual scenes in the movie are girl on girl and boy on boy.

Apparently, heterosexual sex in a presumptive slasher film is vulgar and exploitive. Whereas gay sex is the highest form of love — unafraid to break free of norms and present itself in its purest iterations: ass fucking and cunnalingus.

In the end, this is less a movie than it is a Social Justice manifesto. It’s a Rousseauvian fantasy, a romanticized remake of the noble savage trope that has long plagued us by providing the roadmap for liberal paternalism. It affords both false virtue and easy grace.

What had clearly hoped to demonize homophobic / transphobic straw men only served to highlight the self-righteous arrogance and ignorance of those it tried to beatify.

Most of us humanize others on our own, without such insulting didacticism to guide us.

The real horror was that this movie not only got made, but that it was released.

As it stands, it’s an object lesson in why Hollywood is being held up mostly by fantasy movies — and as those, too, become infected with checkbox tokenism and preachy arrogance, those, too, will die off.

And we’ll all be better for it.