| Finn Odum |
Natural Enemies plays at the Trylon Cinema on Monday, June 9th, as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
“It’s Bleak”
The 1970 Peter Boyle film Joe is not part of our Bleak Week programming—though you’d be forgiven if you thought it was.
Joe, which we programmed to kick off our Cantankerous Peter Boyle series, follows a wealthy advertising executive (Dennis Patrick) after he murders his daughter’s drug-dealing boyfriend. About twentyish minutes in, he meets Boyle’s titular Joe, a slur-spewing, hippie-hating factory worker who spends his evenings intoxicated and angry. The men have little in common, but bond when Bill accidentally admits to murder in front of Joe. Their relationship pushes Bill’s life further out of control, as Joe takes it upon himself to help him find his missing daughter. A slow first two acts filled with anti-counter culture rhetoric and class inequality lead to an explosive final twenty minutes, where Joe and Bill murder a commune of hippies. Joe isn’t the best feature in the world (and certainly not in the Boyle series), but in the words of fellow Trylon volunteer Akim, the ending is one of the bleakest we’ve shown this year.1
Joe encapsulates the decade that would follow it. Filmmaking and film culture exploded in the 1970s. It was reactionary, honest, and ugly. The “counterculture” that Joe hated so much was borne out of social action; both the Civil Rights Movement and Stonewall occurred in the late 1960s, bringing America to the forefront of calls for justice and equality. Vietnam War protests pitted college students against the police. These movements bucked against the traditional, patriarchal American dream. Social tensions were high, and MPAA president Jack Valenti had just designed a movie rating system that expanded how directors could depict sex and violence on the silver screen.
That electric energy funneled into a decade of explicit filmmaking. Films that were unafraid to confront the conflicts riddling the American public. They were a cultural wildfire, and headed straight for the White Picket Fence, Traditionally Valued, American Family Dream.
Death in the Family
One of the reasons I enjoyed Joe is that it touches on one of my bleaker cinematic interests: the deconstruction of the “traditional” family. These are movies where you’re forced to confront the meaning of the word, through either an internal or external force that perverts, subverts, or rejects “family” values.2 Family Decon, as I refer to it, is not confined by traditional genre rules; it can be a horror, thriller, or drama, and doesn’t have to involve a family dying in the end.
Instead of defining by genre, I sort Decon movies into two categories: Family is Evil, and Society is Evil. Family is Evil is the easy, arguably more common category to define. Think 1970s classics such as The Exorcist and The Omen or more modern features like We Need to Talk About Kevin and Dogtooth. Family is Evil movies internalize themes like religion, trauma, or fascism, isolating them into a specific member and how they impact the unit.
Society is Evil films force those themes upon a family through a major, external confrontation. Joe counts here, as it forces a wealthy father to confront poverty, drug use, and violence in a quest to “save” his daughter. But most of the more well-known Society is Evil movies externalize via another family or a stranger. Look at Killing of a Sacred Deer and both versions of Speak No Evil. Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q. and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, technically.
The 1970s were a particularly gnarly (and foundational) time for Family Decon movies. The Last House on the Left, for example, was both Wes Craven’s debut feature and also an early member of the “good family versus bad family” subcategory. Despite being a messier interpretation of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, The Last House on the Left predates the violent families of Texas Chainsaw and House of 1,000 Corpses, and includes one of the most iconic castration scenes of the decade.
Many of these films were a product of the social tensions that had begun to boil over. Americans were questioning the dream they’d been sold for so long. Movies like A Woman Under the Influence brought up the long taboo subject of addiction and mental illness within the family. Hardcore,3 with its infamous, “Oh my god. That’s my daughter!”, dropped Midwestern fathers into their worst nightmare (California), where they had to confront the reality of sex, pornography, and the effects it had on younger generations.
Then, there’s Natural Enemies.
It’s a Mean One
I would recommend the Trylon’s showing of Natural Enemies to people interested in bleak filmmaking for two reasons: one, it has a fascinating place in the 1970s era film canon, and two, it is unceremoniously difficult to find outside of the Fun City Editions restorative Blu-ray I bought online.4 The film takes inspiration from the 1975 novel of the same name, as well as fellow Bleak Week auteur Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage.5 Director Jeff Kanew described it as “Kind of successful as a piece of art but not from a commercial perspective.” I would describe it as an intersection of Deconstruction, one where society and family are equal evils, caused by and feeding into one another.
From the start, Paul Steward tells us he’s going to kill his family. Our introduction to Paul is when he sexually assaults his wife in her sleep, an action he explains is an agreed-upon arrangement between him and Miriam. Hal Holbrook’s harrowing narration as Paul tells us that he’s estranged from his wife, and that they don’t sleep in the same bed anymore. We’re told about his kids: his two sons, whom he hates, and his daughter, whose future he resents. When addressing his youngest child, Paul says, “He’s 11. He’ll be no older.”
Is Paul evil? His every move certainly oozes with apathy and violence. Throughout the film, we’re treated to flashes of how he imagined he’d kill his family. He spends the day asking everyone who will listen about familicide, with a singular friend voicing concern about Paul’s intentions. Under the cover of a writer “investigating what makes men cheat”—REAL believable, champ—Paul hires and sleeps with five sex workers, spending most of their time together telling them about how distant his wife has become. He meets with Miriam and, despite her pleas for forgiveness and starting over, kills her, their kids, and himself.
When the murder comes, we don’t see it. It’s a radio announcement, played over a black screen.
Paul accomplishes the ultimate evil. But I don’t think it’s because he’s evil, not entirely. In most Family is Evil movies, the internal danger has always been like that. Possessed, or morally evil, or importantly, never depicted as having a heart. In Natural Enemies, Paul opens up to us about his past—where he wept over Miriam when she overdosed, when he got into a physical altercation with the doctor trying to give his wife shock treatments. When he describes his children, he says that he resents the world that his daughter is going to grow up in—one he can’t protect her from. He’s the father, the provider, but he barely saved his wife from suicide. Throughout the film, Paul discusses familicide with his writers. One, his closest and only on-screen friend, tells him that sometimes men think they have no other options, and that death is the ultimate way to protect their families. They can no longer live up to what society asks them to be—strong, stoic, protective, emotionless—and their overly masculine anger has driven them to the absolute last resort.
It’s neither family nor society but a little bit of both. It’s the culture and the structures of masculinity that Paul is supposed to adhere to. It’s the aftermath of how his wife was treated, where the mentally ill are discarded or treated with violence. It’s how all his writers want to talk about is loneliness, isolation, and death. But it’s also Paul, who admits he should’ve separated from Miriam long before her suicide attempt. Paul, who chooses to cheat on her, who willingly seeks out stories about family annihilation. Paul, who, no matter what his wife says, is going to kill her and their kids when the screen cuts to black.
Societal pressures feed his anger, and Paul is the one who loads the gun.
No One’s Ever Really Captured on Paper the Meaning of Feeling Alive
There’s an early scene in Natural Enemies where a hopeful writer describes to Paul the experience of going to space and realizing he’s truly alone. That the world is so small in comparison to the galaxy. Paul tells the young astronaut that he’ll never have an experience like that again. You can never capture in text the experience of living.
I don’t think you can capture the nature of evil in words, either. Nor can you catch it on camera, though both artistic mediums bring to mind the importance of fiction. It gives us room to explore violence and anger, to capture tragedy, to tell our stories to those who have never experienced that kind of pain. Joe showed us the result of unchecked anger and how weaponized patriarchy can lead to the destruction of the vulnerable. Natural Enemies takes that anger further, demonstrating how untreated mental health crises and masculinity can push an otherwise nonviolent person over the edge. It is harder, both morally and objectively, to extend that same conversation to real-life violence. Through fiction, we can work through the tough questions and face tragedy.
That is, perhaps, why I seek out bleak themes in art. I know loneliness well, and with that experience comes a desire to understand. I want to see stories that I, my family, and my friends have gone through, depicted with a nasty edge designed to shock those who have had far more comfortable lives. I want to know how the rest of the world has met with disaster. How they try to use the silver screen to capture the meaning of feeling alive. Of evil. Of family.
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My full list of Family Deconstruction films was compiled with support from the Trylon Volunteer email list. The list is subject to evaluation (and I welcome any submissions in the comments).
Notes:
- Finn’s unofficial, 2025 Trylon Screenings that are pre-Bleak Week but Still Bleak Ranking, is as follows: Dogville, Trouble Every Day, Joe, Magnolia, Fires on the Plain, Hardcore, Beau Travail, and just scraping the bottom, Star 80. ↩︎
- Fun party game, take a shot of Canadian Club every time I use the word Family in this essay! ↩︎
- For more about religion and the family, I highly recommend Sophie Durbin’s essay on Calvinism in Hardcore. ↩︎
- My Fun City edition will be sitting in my physical media collection alongside my few other Blu-rays: Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, a Face/Off and Snake Eyes double feature, and the first three Spy Kids movies. ↩︎
- To quote my local amateur softpitch softball player, “Two Bergman mentions in one conversation?!” It’s more likely than you’d think! ↩︎
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon