It Follows

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3704438&pagenumber=13&#post448458807

This is like the most misinterpreted movie of the year - partly because it's hugely marred by bullshit plot exposition. Everything the characters say is wrong.

The curse was never passed on through sex. It was created through the act of strapping the heroine to a wheelchair. She was thereby forced into a variation on the 'trading places' game, being made to trade places with (what turns out to be) the boy's nude mother. Jay never figures out that the boy was simply using this weird ritual as a means of 'safely' acting out his incestuous fantasies - essentially strapping the devouring-mother itself to a wheelchair. But this standard Oedipal mother stuff was successfully displaced onto Jay, allowing the boy to maintain a comfortable domestic life with mommy.

In a subsequent mirror-image encounter, Jay imagines herself as an exaggeratedly battered rape victim - because that's how everyone has been treating her. This is the logic across the film: 'it' is always an unbearable realization of Jay's latest fantasies, be they fantasies of herself or of her prospective sexual partners.

Greg's death is treated elliptically because he didn't actually die. Jay simply perceives him as a useless mother-fucker, sucked dry of his Lifeforce. Did Jay herself break the window? Signs point to yes.

People have complained about the beach scene for showing too much, but it is showing exactly enough for us to call bullshit on it. Explicitly showing what everyone believes happened makes it all the clearer that Jay simply scratched Paul's abdomen while she was flailing around. That's not to say that "it's all a dream", but it is absolutely a doofy shared fiction that explodes the instant the older, skeptical Greg turns his back.

This is all to say that the film is a fairly boring story of a girl who secretly wants to fuck her dad. The actually-interesting content is in the depiction of the other side of 8-Mile as a 'dark world', where they break into an apocalyptic future version of their own home - stripped bare and dilapidated. And even then, it's just expressing the rudimentary idea that suburbanites are insulated from 'the harsh reality outside'. I didn't like it.