In Which They Were Kissing Cousins

Nuclear Summer

by MAXWELL NEELY-COHEN

How I Live Now
dir. Kevin Macdonald
101 Minutes

Proto- or almost- or pseudo-incest pops up in film way more than actual incest does. For every truly hardcore incestuous subtext, every Luke/Leia, there’s a Cher/Josh and a Kathryn/Sebastien and a Margot/Richie and a Naomi Watts/Robin Wright banging each other’s fictional dreamy surfer sons in an Australian paradise.

Likewise, almost nuclear war (or after nuclear war) comes up in film way more often than actual nuclear war does. Pre- and post-apocalypse get all the glory, and seeing the bombs fall and the mushroom clouds hover is mostly the provenance of montages at a beginning or end. The actual number of fully depicted and realized nuclear strikes on the silver screen is so low that the youtube videos that attempt to compile them run so short they cannot be properly choreographed to a full Nine Inch Nails song.

How I Live Now begins not with mushroom clouds, but with snippets of voices that sound like a mixture of internal monologue, mean girl Facebook statuses, and random sentences from Wikipedia. A teenage girl listens to loud punk on an airplane. She moves through passport control. An even younger British boy meets her in a terminal.

“No one calls me Elizabeth,” she tells him when he shows her the sign with her name, “except my dad, and he’s an asshole. Call me Daisy.”

Foul-mouthed American Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) is sent away for the summer to live in the English countryside with her aunt and her three cousins, Piper (Harley Bird), Isaac (Tom Holland), and Edmond (George MacKay). But while Daisy’s aunt is away two things happen: She falls in love with Edmond, and a nuclear weapon is detonated in London.

The children are not just forced to endure, but make a conscious decision to survive as a family unit. They encounter fear, separation, existential ambiguity, and the changing battle lines of grownups, all without any clear goal save staying together. We never are told what is happening in the world, who is attacking whom, or why. There are not even delineated sides aside from the haphazard household they’ve formed. And this in a sense is better and scarier than any Hunger Games-ish exposition on how it all went wrong. The immediacy is palpable.

The movie never forgets to let you know there’s a war on. Airports are guarded well past any TSA wet dream, jets roll thunder across the sky and make eardrums bleed with sonic booms, and every adult, in our few glimpses of them, is visibly frightened. Every glancing shot of rain or ash or smoke feels like it could be establishing radioactive death.

And equally, the film never forgets to let you know that even in war there are sometimes sunny days spent on lakes in innertubes and warm nights spent dancing around bonfires.

From the very second the conflict begins it is unapologetic in its speed and sound. That first moment of detonation is an exercise in what real disaster feels like. The violence is swift and serious, but without gratuity or style. Gunshot wounds and corpses are gruesomely undramatized unhollywood realities. Combat is short and unchoreographed. Bullets fly faster than a camera could track them. And they tend to hit and kill things.

“I am a fucking curse,” Daisy tells you. “Everywhere I go, bad shit happens.” She wears a grim reaper t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Her eye shadow creates filters of dark void sucking time and space away from her blondest possible hair. And despite her angst, her fear, her yearning for Edmund, sometimes you’re left to wonder if that shirt is not a signifier of the times, but rather an indication that she’s the one doing the reaping.

The most daring thing about How I Live Now is not the unapologetic endorsement of consensual cousin incest, but the extent to which it feels completely comfortable leaving adults out of large swaths of the movie. Even before the war, it never tries to overexplain why it’s the kids who are taking care of everything- why the inmates are running the asylum- the parents are all absent and that’s just the reality. Adults are afterthoughts. Cheap props.

But even with that, it is totally unclear what How I Live Now is trying to do, or even if it is trying to do anything. The script festers in a constant state of tension, a slow build without release, a crescendo that never gives way to drums or bass or breakdown. It lacks the fairy tale fire and style of Hanna, Ronan’s other masterwork of teen girl violence. It is not a slick 111 minute Chemical Brothers music video punctuated with Ronan hunting Cate Blanchett through a myriad of Grimms’ folk tales.

How I Live Now holds no cohesive message within its fantasy, no sense that it is trying even to be a fantasy at all. Teenage dystopia, even violent teenage dystopia, is almost always predicated on a twisted sense of wish fulfillment- that Katniss Everdeen’s life, despite all the death and misery, is much more interesting and worthwhile if you are a bored first world child.

There is not even an attempt to make the romance itself a dramatic soap opera worthy of Team Edward-level attention. There is no triangle. No unspeakably hot other boy or girl from the other side of the tracks magically shows up one day to up the stakes.

The love between Edmund and Daisy, despite its taboo, is formless. While we are given enough insight to suppose why Daisy likes Edmund- that he mitigates and medicates her serious bouts with crippling anxiety and OCD, not to mention his hunky penchant for survivalism being particularly useful in the face of current events- we are never allowed a glimpse into his inner life, never given any notion of what he might see in his cousin, other than a chance to play strong silent rural guardian angel to an American blonde, played by an Irish actress.

There are definite moments of ‘what the fuck is really going on here’, but that uncertainty is never embraced, that question never intentionally becomes the point. The uncanny drifts in and out of relevancy almost like it’s flirting with a Pynchon or DeLillo or Danielewski rewrite but is unwilling to commit that far.

But director Kevin Macdonald’s willingness to even entertain visions bordering on such deconstructive nihilism suggests that maybe he should maybe become our collective alternate history pick who could have turned the final Harry Potter movies into genuine works of apocalyptic art as opposed to heartless Hollywood cashgrabs.

When it’s all said and done, Daisy does develop an evocative toughness to her that holds meaning onto itself, an evolving ruthlessness wholly different from what Ronan gave to Hanna. Despite not having a childhood of arctic combat training courtesy of ex-CIA dad Eric Bana, not being a genetically engineered trained assassin from birth, Daisy might be the more terrifying of Ronan’s young assassin performances. Daisy’s killing does not feel like a video game. It has emotion and grit. When it comes, you flinch.

Over the course of the movie, her weaknesses become her strengths without any overwrought growth or learning curve. There is no survivalism training montage. No archery range. It is almost as if her inability to thrive in the former world was predicated on its relative peace and functionality, that only once the shit hit the fan could she come of age. And in giving a female character that- a construct usually reserved for a pampered modern male bemoaning a lack of suitable manly endeavors- there may be a subtle brilliance despite all other imperfections.

Except for the whole kissing cousins thing. That’s gross.

Maxwell Neely-Cohen is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York City. He last wrote in these pages about Paul Walker. You can find his twitter here and his website here.

"The Day The World Went Away" - Nine Inch Nails (mp3)

"Hanna's Theme" - The Chemical Brothers (mp3)