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Netflix’s horror series Chambers explors the terror of white people
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516...alyra-rose
Netflix’s horror series Chambers follows Get Out in exploring the terror of white people
Quote:As the recent documentary Horror Noire lays out, most early American horror films featuring black characters play very different for black audiences than for white ones. Traditionally, in American horror stories, people of color have been associated with a monstrous, vengeful, often magical Other that threatens white purity. As POC creators have entered the horror field to add new perspectives, though, innovative new narratives have flipped those tropes. In more recent stories, affluent white people are the sinister nightmare power that seeks to possess, corrupt, and control everyone else by stealing their bodies and maybe their souls.
Most famously, that’s the plot of Jordan Peele’s hugely successful 2017 film Get Out. The same broad description also covers Netflix’s new 10-episode horror series Chambers, which debuts on April 26th in the US. But while Chambers certainly owes a number of debts to Get Out’s success, it isn’t derivative. Instead, it shows how Peele has enabled other creators to rethink what the future of the horror genre could look like, which people are considered terrifying, and how real social dynamics can add more resonance to speculative horror.
Chambers is set in Arizona, near a Diné reservation, and many of the main characters are indigenous people. The protagonist, Sasha Yazzie (Sivan Alyra Rose) is a high-school student who lives with her uncle, fish store owner Big Frank Yazzie (Marcus LaVoi). As the series opens, Sasha suffers a devastating, freak heart attack while trying to lose her virginity with her (very sweet) boyfriend, TJ (Griffin Powell-Arcand). She receives an emergency heart transplant from a rich white girl named Becky Lefevre (Lilliya Reid), who died in an accident the same night.
Becky isn’t as dead as she should be, though. Sasha winds up remembering things the other girl did and having visions of things Becky saw. Eventually, she even finds herself growing blonde hair and watching her hand turn pale. Haunted by Becky’s ghost, Sasha starts to investigate the girl’s death, becoming more and involved with Becky’s life and more estranged from her own.
In Get Out, white people plot to steal and subsume black people’s bodies in a clear metaphor for slavery and exploitation. Chambers approaches similar issues from a different direction. The story isn’t about slavery, it’s about assimilation. Sasha is worried that her new heart is turning her into a white person. She experiences a double consciousness as the other girl enters her world. It’s a frightening experience because losing herself is ugly and painful. But it’s also scary because, to her, white people are the unknowable other, a different culture and way of being than her own.
Sasha deals with white people other than her ghost. After her heart transplant, Becky’s parents, Ben (Tony Goldwyn) and Nancy (Uma Thurman), want to be a part of the life of the girl their daughter saved. The Lefevres invite Sasha to dinner, then offer her a scholarship to Becky’s expensive private school where every student is assigned a life coach and a laptop.
Sasha thinks her new school is ridiculous. She nods in obvious disbelief as she’s shown the school’s meditation room, filled with napping rich kids de-stressing. But she’s also disturbed and disoriented by her insertion into an alien world. At the beginning of the show, when she’s with her friends or family, she’s carefree and bubbly. But being forced out of her comfort zone turns her into a drawn, angular, morose teen. Thanks in part to sleeplessness — Sasha has to get up in the wee hours to catch a bus to the new district — school turns into a kind of waking anxiety dream. She doesn’t know anyone. She isn’t prepared for the schoolwork. She shows up and wanders through someone else’s day, disjointed and alone.
It’s bad enough when Sasha simply doesn’t like her fellow students or doesn’t know the material in her courses, but it’s worse when she suddenly starts acing statistics pop quizzes or putting on virtuoso swordsmanship displays in fencing. Narratively, that’s Becky inside her, a ghost who is usurping her soul. But Sasha losing herself also seems like a clear reference to the history of Indian boarding schools, tasked with “killing the Indian to save the man” (or the woman, in this case).
Schools and scholarships are supposed to provide opportunities. But from Sasha’s perspective, those opportunities start to look like a magic ritual intended to tear out her heart and change her into Becky. Becky’s parents are unusual sources for malign magic: in most past horror stories, people of color tap into superstition and mysterious otherworldly powers that “civilized” whites don’t understand. Native people are the vengeful spirits in Poltergeist or the founders of that nightmare graveyard in Pet Sematary.
But in Chambers, the indigenous people are the ones rejecting tradition and superstition in favor of rationality. Sasha’s uncle forcefully rejects his family’s religion and leaves his reservation in part to escape it. Becky’s grandfather, who stays on the reservation, tells her, “Everything is important. There is no magic.” The Lefevres, though, believe in seemingly everything. The “******* weird-ass Lefevre bull****,” as Big Frank calls it, includes crystals, diets, therapy, and even, in Ben’s case, some sort of bodily mortification ritual. All the spirituality centers on a New Age religious movement called the Annex, which looks less benign as the series goes on. There are strange, ugly gods at work, but they aren’t haunting native burial grounds. They’re lurking in the suburbs and dripping from the ceiling of that meditation room — cold, white, awkward, and hungry.
Part of what made Get Out great was its singleness of purpose. Peele’s film is a juggernaut, with every detail racing toward its apocalyptic revelations of conspiracy and hate. Inevitably for a 10-episode series, Chambers is more meandering. Racism and endemic societal problems sometimes come into focus, as when one of the characters is arrested. But more often, they shimmer like the heat on the wide Arizona landscape, omnipresent but hard to see clearly.
Some viewers might find Chambers’ hesitations and vacillations frustrating. Becky takes her own sweet time in possessing Sasha, and while there are many disturbing and even gory sequences, it takes a long time for the plot to build up any real suspense. Even the ending, and the final confrontation with Becky, is a study in anticlimax.
Sivan Alyra Rose as Sasha is mesmerizing; by turns, she is determined and vulnerable, terrified of herself and comfortable in her skin. The measured pace gives the show a chance to sketch in its supporting characters, situating Sasha in a network of relationships whose strength is more affecting because of the way they creep up on viewers. Get Out opened the door to a whole new world of horror. Chambers takes its time exploring that bleak landscape with a strong vision and a great deal of heart.
It's amazing how much the left bases everything on skin color...
It's scary that the MLK's comments are considered racist now.
![[Image: i-have-a-dream-quotes.jpg]](http://www.goodmorningimagesforlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/i-have-a-dream-quotes.jpg)
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[NEWS] Netflix’s horror series Chambers explors the terror of white people
