Michael Shanks' Together

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Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

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CELEBRATE last week’s winner: Cindy E., Shawshank Redemption.

The category was favorite movies. The winner has earned one ticket in the annual mystery prize lottery.

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VOTE this week’s category: movies that weren’t what you expected.

Check out this week’s watchlist brought to you by the tnmn community and vote your favorite entries.

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SUBMIT for next week’s category: good movie, bad title.

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A spoiler-free description of the movie.

Tim and Millie struggle through their codependent relationship and things get sticky.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Bare skin and body horror. That Together’s intimacy-oriented body horror didn’t gross me out that much is probably a me problem — but it wasn’t as gross as recent genre peers (e.g. The Ugly Stepsister, The Substance).

→ Camp, cheese, corn. Together gradually transitions from a grounded grief horror film to something far more heightened and campy.

→ Fun with muscle relaxers. Don’t worry if the dialogue feels clunky or you see the ending coming. Just enjoy watching Alison Brie and Dave Franco frantically snorting muscle relaxers, dammit!

What I liked about it.

Writer-director Michael Shanks' Together is popcorn horror, and I'm quite partial to films like this that know how to have a little fun with their central themes.

Alison Brie and Dave Franco both turn in wry performances to bring to life Shanks’ script, an admirably simple-but-twisted parable about love and complacency and codependency. Particularly impressive is Shanks’ use of practical prosthetics, which make some of the more gruesome horror set pieces feel more grounded.

Oh, and if you’re anything like me, expect to spend a non-trivial portion of the film’s runtime wondering what Alison Brie and Dave Franco would look like if they were mashed together into one person.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

→ Adult toys were used to shoot a particularly painful sex scene. Director Shanks: “It just so happened that my partner was working for a sex toy company at the time. So she had access to extremely realistic genitalia, and I was like, ‘We can get that for free? Great! Give it to the prosthetics guy.’”

→ Franco and Brie are married in real life. The film was shot in a tight 21 days and the mutual prosthetics often used required Franco and Brie to be conjoined for hours. They often took bathroom breaks together. For these reasons, Shanks doesn’t think he could have made this movie without a real couple.

Thoughts mostly unrelated to this week’s film.

The disappearance of spooky kids.

There was a group of kids in middle and high school who wore pale makeup and baggy clothing and frequented Hot Topic and generally inhabited a persona one might describe as pure apathy. Some may be keen to amend the first descriptor to cool apathy, though your author will take no stance on the matter. These kids were collectively known as the goths (i.e. spooky kids). I’d imagine some tnmn readers were or are currently goths. I was not, nor am I now.

Think to yourself when the last time you actually saw a goth was. It’s been a long time, right? I’ve been wondering — where did the goths go?

The simplest answer is that many of them grew up and assimilated into mainstream culture, aside from a few free spirits who were willing to cling to the subculture like a box of stale Cheerios long beyond its expiration date.

But perhaps goths do still sullenly roam the earth with their over-ear headphones and Walkmans and chains rattling around like clinically depressed maracas. There may well be a traceable lineage that charts goths transformation into the burgeoning BDSM or cosplay communities. I beg you to also consider my leading hypothesis that every single goth now resides in Portland, Oregon. Have you visited? No matter: any of these landing places would explain why I don’t see them anymore.

A friend of mine went as far to suggest that the goths didn’t go anywhere, and that they just became the emo kids and eventually well-adjusted adults. When I questioned him on how he knew if emo kids and goths were even the same people, he didn’t have an adequate response. The fact is we cannot be certain.

Traditional goth subculture was born in the early 1980’s in the United Kingdom. The latest iteration in the ever-revolving door of counterculture, it was predicated on fashion (dark clothes, dark makeup, dark hair, many piercings), music (British post-punk like The Cure and The Banshees eventually gave way to something called gothic rock), and members of the goth subculture actually met in-person. Your author will refrain at the moment from making a shallow joke about whatever would be discussed in a large-scale convention of goths for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

In the late 1990’s and 2000’s, mall goths started turning up in schools and, of course, congregating at malls. These are the goths that I grew up with, and the ones that traditional goths sometimes took issue with because mall goths apparently were not real goths — they only dressed like them (i.e. the same uninteresting poseur storyline that turns up in most subcultures if they have any staying power).

The goth subculture (in your author’s opinion) obviously wasn’t as pervasive or probably alluring as, say, the Beat Generation’s rejection of materialism in the 1940/50s or the sexual and anti-war revolution of the 1960’s. But damn it, not enough of us realize that being a goth really meant something.

The goth community long rejected traditional gender and sexual norms, and oft-celebrated what were considered in the 1970’s to be deviant or bizarre sexual practices. Men dressed androgynously and women took an active seat in their sexuality, often dressing in fishnet stockings and corsets, rather than merely being an object of male pursuit. Being queer or having a kink was something to be celebrated rather than shamed. Unsurprisingly, by the late 2000’s, many members of the goth subculture claimed “overlapping memberships with queer, polyamorous, bondage-discipline/sadomasochism, and pagan” communities.

I’ll state what you probably already know, that this is what countercultures are supposed to do. Sometimes they unironically listen to Korn and Evanescence but they also encourage us to see previously “unacceptable” things in a new light. The goth subculture certainly, like any other, wasn’t perfect. But this is an admirable role to play in society.

As a kid, your author dramatically under-examined, and perhaps entirely wrote off, the goth subculture because to me it looked so lonely and uninviting and frankly sad. You couldn’t blame me given that the aesthetics of the subculture were meant to convey such things (i.e. despondence, darkness, isolation, excommunication, death). The aesthetics of the goth no doubt intimidated or repelled classmates from engaging with them and, despite the stated values of the community, were isolating. It appeared to me an unwelcoming, lonely, sad place to exist.

The irony here is so tragic and stupid it is practically watering crops with electrolytes. The goth’s choice of wear wasn’t my and many others proverbial cup of tea and so a subculture that is largely about sexual empowerment, choice, acceptance, and inclusion didn’t appeal to society en masse.

You might presume that goths had a hard time making connections. Here, I’ll remind you that for every one goth, there were seemingly ten, twenty, thirty members of other school subcultures (e.g. jocks, preps, mathletes, Thespians, etc.). So retrospectively you might be able to appreciate that the depth of the connection for goths was of blood oath proportions, because finding a kindred spirit was fewer and further between.

Though many subcultures (so long as they aren’t a veneer for an incoherently angry or hateful or moronic worldview) share this dichotomy between isolationist and inclusionary and building deep, meaningful connections — I submit there is no better example of it than the goth subculture. A subculture factory-made to look uninviting, cold, demonic and one that is also centered on values of liberation and choice and inclusion for those that are different.

I’d venture to say that if I joined one of those in-person goth meetings wearing Abercrombie and Fitch and letting my inner Glen Powell out, the goths would have kicked me out despite this act of exclusion contradicting with their stated values. The same way a hippie in the 60’s, in my imagination at least, would call me a NARC and say “get outta here maaaaaaaaaaaaaan” with that exaggerated California-esque dialect if I were to stroll into a drum circle wearing a suit and tie.

This is, I’m afraid, the reality of the most potent subcultures. To be inclusive, you have to exclude. You have to be vigilante, because if you include everybody, you might include people that are exclusionary and hateful — thereby ruining the group and alienating its original intent. Style and garb is one filtering mechanism but it isn’t perfect, as outlined by the advent of mall goths dressing the right way but being perceptibly divorced from the subculture’s values when put to the test with a real goth. We won’t dive into other methods of subculture filtration today because we are in your inbox and this is not a novel, but rest assured there are others (e.g. dialect, gait, wealth and where you live, etc.).

As the millennium marches on, goths seem to have dissipated into thin air like a puff of pale powdered makeup. In my quest to identify subcultures in which the goths may be assimilating into, I stumbled far down into a Quora thread answering the question “What's the weirdest subculture/community you know of?”

It was here that I came across a man named Jay. His post caught my attention despite the fact that it was garden-variety discussion board fodder and I couldn’t figure out why. In it, he expresses his lack of understanding of the furry subculture (i.e. people that dress like mammals).

Not very open-minded, are you, Jay. That’s when I noticed Jay’s profile headline, which read: “Been a Goth for 20 years.” Your author was surprised to see a goth so viscerally reject another because of a sexual kink.

Then, I did some math and based on the timing, it checks out that Jay was likely a mall goth. I made earlier mention of it, but this is someone that a traditional goth may have scoffed at, in this case rightfully so, for dressing like a goth but not acting in accordance with their values.

For a brief moment, I decided ignore this fact. I took a moment celebrate: I’d thought I’d found the goths. They were on Quora this whole time.