I’m kidding. I’m kidding. John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place Part II, originally slated to open on 3.10.20 before being bumped into oblivion by the worldwide pandemic, is now, after two previous delays, set to open theatrically on 9.17.21 — seven months hence.
Maybe, I should say. Be honest — who believes that theatres will be up and running and packing them in next September when tens of millions of idiots are refusing to take the jab? That’s why I joked about a ’22 opening. Because I don’t think we’ll be truly free of this gloomy, narcotized, walking-dead lifestyle until the spring or summer of ’22. I wish it were otherwise. I fear it may not be.
But honestly? I lost all interest in the sequel when Krasinki rejected Richard Brody‘s 4.1.18 riff on what A Quiet Place was about deep down — i.e., the social undercurrent element. Key passage from his New Yorker piece, titled “The Silently Regressive Politics of A Quiet Place”: “In their enforced silence, these characters are a metaphorical silent white majority, one that doesn’t dare to speak freely for fear of being heard by the super-sensitive ears of the dark others.”
Almost two years later I happened upon a similar notion. In an HE essay called “Eureka — A Quiet Place Metaphor,” I wrote that “all you have to do is change ‘don’t make a sound’ to ‘don’t make the wrong sound’ or more precisely ‘don’t say the wrong thing.’ Then it all fits. The big brown monsters are fanatical wokesters who rush in like the wind and destroy your life and livelihood if you mutter the wrong phrase or use incorrect terminology or happen to like Real Time with Bill Maher or late-period Woody Allen films or if you posted the wrong thing in 2009, etc.”
Earlier this year Krasinki dismissed these interpretations — insights that lend metaphorical heft to the 2016 original. “That narrative is certainly not the narrative I intended to put out there,” he told Esquire‘s Matt Miller last February. “I never saw it that way or ever thought of it until it was presented to me in that way. It wasn’t about being, you know, silent and political…if anything it was about, you know, going into the dark and, and taking a chance when all hope looked lost, you take, you know, you fight for what’s most important to you. Again, my whole metaphor was solely about parenthood.”
My spirit sank into a heap when I read the words “solely about parenthood.” That was it — Krasinki, I realized, will never be any kind of deep, thoughtful fellow. He only deals with the obvious. To him, undercurrents and metaphors are oddities, foreign concepts, exotic elements.
