It's None of My Business.

Hey, Team.

I get the feeling that Zach Cregger is anxious about where we are as a society. Anxious that the more we embrace the surveillance state, the quicker community as a concept withers. At some point, we stop caring about how our neighbors are doing and start concerning ourselves with what our neighbors are Up To.

One reason (among many) that will deny me entry to heaven is my being a neighborhood lead on Nextdoor. This means I, and a dozen or so others selected by some unknown rubric, review flagged posts and comments and vote whether or not to delete the offending content. From what I’ve observed, there is no one my neighbors hate more than the people who live in this neighborhood. Public shaming is against community rules, and something my neighbors love to flout. Photos and video footage of strangers existing in a way they don’t like flood my notifications. Panicked links to the citizen app and comments telling someone who said calling the cops can be dangerous they need to be raped.³ Frequent demands to halt any motion for affordable housing, the arguments on this one are always built around a confusing refusal to be “chased out” but also not wanting their house’s value to drop, something I would assume you’d only care about if you wanted to leave. They’re obsessed with watching each other and utterly repulsed by the idea of knowing each other, let alone caring about each other. If there is a local emergency, the impulse is never to reach out and try to form a little group of support, it is instead a laser focused need to find The Culprit. The person to place all the blame. A council member, the cyclists, a man who sells fresh fruit on the corner, the list is broad-ranging but the sentiment is the same: Me vs. The Rest of You. I wonder what they’d make of a third grade classroom vanishing. I wonder if they’d seek out the teacher of this class and under the cover of night, paint WITCH on her car? 

Something has happened. In predominantly white spaces choosing to ignore and hope it goes away is a time-honored tradition. But then we invented the camera and started turning it on ourselves. We can see, in video after video, white entitlement foaming at the mouth in rage, shocking only because it’s never been recorded before. And once we started excusing it as content, it turned into just another reason to look away. When it’s all for show, how can we possibly be expected to determine when it’s real? When it’s all so dazzling, how can we be expected to notice the mundane?

Characters cannot wait to get Gladys out of their sight. A deliberately jarring figure, her caked and smeared makeup blurring her features into a garish conglomerate stone of color and sound. Intentionally too loud, too bright, too invasive, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS is practically etched into the broad brow beneath her lurid micro bangs. She’s a spectacle we are desperate to ignore; she makes us uncomfortable, she makes us want to avert our gaze. She’s perfectly designed to ensure no one looks too close. Her ostentatious performance relies upon the politeness of those around her, prods at their discomfort to manipulate them into meeting her ends. There’s something so overtly, garishly wrong with her that the only polite thing to do is pretend not to notice. Everyone quickly turns away from the jewel-toned pageant of Gladys, too embarrassed to admit they saw her.

Children vanishing all at once is astounding, horrifying, something so incomprehensible in its bizarreness, naturally all resources must turn to finding out What Happened. Communal anguish, individual obsession, a goal to Save the Children. It would be preferred by everyone to forget James is even there. If the suddenly lost children are the dazzle, he is the mundane. A homeless addict is an overt personification of the people who slip through the cracks. There are no resources available to him, he and those around him write him off as a lost cause. The impulse upon sighting him is to either pretend he doesn’t exist or to pulverize and punish him. How the world interacts with James shows how the world truly feels. He’s the type of person my neighbors imagine sprawling on the sidewalk outside of an affordable housing unit, willfully ignorant to the fact that:

But it’s too hard, too involved, too boring to invest the time and resources into protecting and preventing people like James. James, who is in a way just as much a vanished child as Justine’s classroom. But there’s no spectacle to someone like James. So we’d rather someone like him just die in the woods, die in an abandoned house, doesn’t matter how, just so long as we don’t have to see it. 

When faced with a threat, the instinct to protect oneself manifests based on the context of the threat and the context of the person threatened. In Weapons it seems to manifest in either one of two ways: closing ranks or grasping for solidarity. As I see it, one is overtly the result of a personality that has accepted its surveillance (for better or for worse), the other is one who rejects it. Archer, Marcus, and Alex close ranks; they accept their surveillance. Paul and Justine grasp for solidarity; they reject their surveillance.

Within the panopticon we so diligently maintain, it’s a favorite sport to identify someone who is not Doing It Right. There’s always someone who isn’t doing enough, who hasn’t read the right books, who doesn’t know the right words, who doesn’t leave the digital sphere and therefore isn’t a “real” activist. There’s always someone whose deal we can’t possibly know but we can project an infinite spectrum of imagined sins upon, willfully forgetting that some people are poor, are disabled, are unable to access fucking JSTOR, are for whatever reason unable to directly interact with social groups different from their own. There will always be someone who is Doing It Wrong, but the thrill is in catching them fucking up, not understanding why. So someone who can only act in desperation will get lumped in with someone acting out of cowardice. If I can invent a guy to be mad at for a second here, I’m sure there’s some purity test asshole out there saying Alex is just as bad as Paul. Alex, the kid terrorized into silence by the bullies around him and the bully at home, is the same as Paul, the physical embodiment of every person who cowers away from implementing any real change and opts to uphold societal violence because it’s easier (for them). Now this is just a guy I invented to be mad at, so I’ll opt to imagine this opinion doesn’t actually exist out there.

But let’s talk about Paul for a second. I listed him as someone who grasps for solidarity when faced with a threat. And boy does he! He scrambles to find someone just slightly bigger than him to protect him from accountability. Him being a cop makes his archetype more blatant,² but even if he weren’t a cop, even if he were just a regular citizen, his spineless existence is the exact sort of thing that keeps the machinery going. He’ll never speak up, he’ll always look the other way. When the chips are down, he’ll only lash out to protect himself and even then he’ll hide from the consequences. He’ll hide behind his half a dozen friends and acquaintances insisting he’s a good guy, he’ll point to his support group as evidence that surely something positive is within him, he’ll always find solidarity to obfuscate his inability to do anything that isn’t just for himself. He’s the so-called nice guys slouching and smiling their way across the earth, leaving destruction in their wake. Somehow, they’re the victim, actually. Look away, look away quickly, he begs the universe as he unplugs his dashcam.

I saw a facetious letterboxd review for Weapons that wondered how no one thought it was weird this kid was buying so much soup. To kill the buzz, of course people thought it was weird, it’s just that no one cared. Or if they cared, they argued themselves out of acting on it because of a fear of overstepping some boundary they can’t even be sure exists. This is a culture that punishes teachers for comforting a weeping student. An underpaid bag boy is going to defensively glaze over as they hand over a plastic sac of two dozen soup cans to a third grader whose trauma has become local legend.

There’s an unspoken rule to not care too much, to refrain from being earnest. To open your heart is to welcome punishment. Comforting a crying child, driving a kid home, all of this is inappropriate and suspect, there’s only so much a person can do before their kindness becomes a red letter. “I never liked them” is the refrain online. Someone gets caught in a lie, someone is caught being a creep, someone is less than perfect and wouldn’t you know it, we always got a bad vibe from them. “So glad we can finally talk about; I’ve been waiting to spill the tea about; I just knew there was something off about…” This flashy new pariah offers the perfect opportunity to abandon whatever it was they once represented. Leftist policy, feminist objectives, trans inclusion, racial equality, you name it. There will be someone in one of those spaces with a large platform who did something bad, and the fervor to demolish them, coincidentally, also crumbles the goodwill surrounding those spaces. The children vanish and the consensus becomes it must be something Justine was teaching. The children vanish and the town determines the problem is teachers who become invested in the wellbeing of their students. The children vanish and the designated adults must now studiously ignore the children.

Presently, we have a weakness for black and white thinking. It’s extremely hard to hold two truths at once in our minds. Justine manages to hold two truths in her paradoxical self-serving selflessness. She genuinely is trying to help because she genuinely doesn’t want others to be hurt, she is also genuinely trying to protect herself above all else. She seeks out Alex from a genuine concern for his wellbeing, it’s obvious that he’s hurting and needs someone safe to talk to, but she is also operating under the goal of essentially therapizing a child. She needs to talk to him because she needs to talk to someone who feels the same way she does. She needs to talk to him to prove she’s not actually harming him. Don’t look away, please don’t look away, is Justine’s plea to the universe. She’s doing something kind to make herself feel better, Kant would shit his pants. The internet would shit their pants. She’d be identified as manipulative, maybe even abusive, she’s prime material for TikTok to Do It’s Thing. Archer does this, digging up her personal records to find any and all incriminating evidence against her, proof that he’s right to have always gotten a bad vibe from her.

It’s pain management, the drive to find The Culprit. We live in a world dominated by figures who never experience actual consequences, it's as if once a bank account hits a certain number of zero’s, the law of man ceases to apply. We believe we can’t fucking touch these parasites, so we turn on each other, much to their benefit. We eat each other alive, demanding accountability, demanding evidence, demanding constant documentation of Doing It Right. And so we condition ourselves to do everything possible to not be The Culprit. Marcus is an educator and a gay man. He’s in a double bind to not be The Culprit. With every firm instruction to Justine to keep her distance, there’s a vibrating tension beneath. Justine may get generally disciplined for her actions, but Marcus would risk utter ruin if he were to act the same. He absolutely could not hug a child, he absolutely could not drive a child home, we live in a culture that increasingly equates queerness with predation. With how hostile the parents became against Justine, a young, straight, white woman, Marcus closing ranks is perfectly reasonable. Nothing to see here, he projects. He dutifully interfaces with the police, attempts to sweep Justine away from view as humanely as possible, dances around the threat of CPS visiting the Lilly household. He is not rewarded. Maybe there’s something here about assimilation as a type of self harm or suicide, maybe there isn’t. But let me just reiterate something I’ve talked about before. There comes a point where we must face the facts. Endless concessions don't protect us from the heteronormative hegemony. No; they can’t wait for the day they no longer have to look at us. They’re expecting us to give up so many little pieces of ourselves we vanish altogether. But I digress.

While the ones actually responsible for All of This rent out the entire city of Venice so his wife can wear the ugliest fucking dress in the entire history of nuptials, we scramble for satisfaction. Willingly metamorphosing into heat seeking missiles, hunting down the one responsible and making no effort to consider who else might be hurt. There’s no time for nuance, no room for context, it’s Me vs. The Rest of You. My son has vanished and only I can find him, whether or not the rest of the kids are found is beyond my scope of interest. Archer feigns true empathy for the pain of a pair of parents whose daughter vanished, muscling his way into their home to get more evidence that might help him find his son. He offers no real comfort and in turn expects none. At his worksite, the site manager behaves in a way that suggests he either doesn’t know Archer’s son is missing, or he does know but doesn’t care. Neither seems to particularly perturb Archer, he’s a man that lives in a world only for the individual. Truly, even when he encounters all of the children in one space, he pushes through them to find Matthew. He rescues only Matthew, abandoning this gaggle of prepubescents covered in viscera to stand idly in a stranger’s yard. He did his own research, you know.

My interpretation of the story is it’s a school shooting that happened in the wrong order. The groundwork is being laid for Alex Lilly to warp into the type of person who gets their hands on a rifle and wipes out the people he’s known since elementary school. Ostracized by his classmates, incapable of asking for help from adults, and those adults themselves are incapable of giving the help this kid would need. Wellness checks on his suddenly troubled home garner no results; they’re just a box to be ticked and moved on from. Backed in a corner, he gives up his classmates to Gladys, stealing them from their families in a desperate bargain. The safeguards kids need don’t exist and the ones that do are not effectively implemented. Six or seven years from now, the vanishing of all but Alex in a classroom would only get a moment’s note on a news channel. Our children killing each other is routine, it’s just that these kids vanished six or seven years earlier than expected. And our police are like, so embarrassed about it.