A Quiet Place Is Stalked by Ableism

The alien invasion is defeated by eugenics.

There are almost infinite Hollywood variations on H.G. Wells’ reverse colonial fever dream War of the Worlds, in which we imagine, and reimagine, and re-reimagine what would happen if someone or something invaded and exterminated us the way we have, traditionally, invaded and exterminated other people over there. Director John Krasinski’s 2018 critical and popular hit A Quiet Place doesn’t exactly break the mold—but it does highlight, in unusual ways, how important disability was to Wells’ original novella, and how ideas about which bodies are able, and which are not, have long been central to colonial narratives and ideologies.

Like The War of the Worlds, A Quiet Place is set in a near future in which advanced aliens have invaded Earth and largely eliminated the human population. The clever high concept variation here is that the aliens are armored, invulnerable, and possessed of acute hearing, but blind. Some scattered humans survive by making no loud noises. Our heroes, the Abbotts, speak almost entirely in ASL, which they presumably learned pre invasion because their daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is deaf.

The high, silent concept gives the film a unique aura of suspense—you, like the characters, are constantly flinching at every small noise. It also gives the actors a chance to project emotion without dialogue, which they all clearly relish—not least Simmonds, a deaf actor who just about steals the film from the putative stars playing her parents Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and Lee (Krasinski.)

The performances and the clever utilization of silence and noise nearly make you forget how by the numbers the action is. One strong reminder, though, is a white board Lee keeps in the basement, which lists crucial expository information (like the fact that the aliens are heavily armored). It also has the large word “WEAKNESS?” drawn inside an emphatic rectangle. Brave, bearded dad is aware of the genre tropes, and therefore knows that your typical War of the Worlds invader has some crucial Achille’s Heel; the humans just need to figure out how to exploit it.

In The War of the Worlds, the weakness is germs; hyper evolved Martians have become all brain and no virility, and their immune systems therefore have no defense against Earth’s pathogens. A Quiet Place riffs on the same ideas; it turns out that the hyper-hearing monsters are sensitive to, and disabled by, high-pitched noises. Regan’s jerry-rigged cochlear implant (made for her by her dad) emits feedback when the aliens come near, and she eventually figures out how to weaponize the shriek. The alien has what is essentially an epileptic fit, its faceplate armor opens, and Evelyn shoots it in the head, killing it. The family is prepared now, the movie suggests, to go and exterminate the invaders once and for all.

The focus on disability and disease in Well’s story is linked closely to his eugenic ideas. The Martians (like the Eloi in Wells’ The Time Machine) essentially devolved into decadence and weakness. The human triumph is a Darwinian survival of the fittest—a conclusion that, in the context of an invasion narrative, can’t help but justify European conquest, which was often effectively facilitated by devastating epidemics. Those who suffer from disability and disease are inevitably defeated, and the righteousness of human victory is assured by their germ resistance, which triumphs even when technological superiority does not.

A Quiet Place is a slightly more complicated, but mostly faithful reproduction of Wells’ eugenic dynamics. Regan’s disability, and the technology to partially correct it, turn out to be a secret weapon; the humans are stronger because of disability and diversity. And yet, it remains the case that the aliens are themselves defined by their disabilities—first blindness, then epilepsy. And the film ends with a promise that the surprisingly weak, disabled aliens will be exterminated by able-bodied humans in what (with Well’s prototype in mind) sure looks like a eugenic genocide.

Wells via Krasinski, then, demonstrates the close connection between colonial logic and ableism. European imperialism post-Darwin (and in many respects pre-Darwin) was based on ideas of fitness and health as a hierarchy; Europeans deserved to rule because they were purer, more vigorous, more able. Krasinski (following Wells) creates tension and drama by making us (Westerners, Brits, Americans) the invaded, and, crucially, by making us (humans) less fit and less able, destroyed by those with superior mental and physical traits. The end of both narratives, however, reflips the script, so that they are once again disabled and weak, and therefore they are, once again, ripe for extermination, genocide, and conquest.

What would a non-ableist alien invasion narrative look like? Some examples might be Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series or Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis books—both stories in which invasion leads not to triumphant extermination of the weak, but to hybridization and a reconstitution of bodies such that eugenic health and vigor disappear under swarms of tentacles and erogenous fleshy weirdness.

A Quiet Place, for all its smarts, plays it too straight, in various senses, for such subversions. Krasinski is obviously influenced not just by alien invasion movies, but by Westerns in which the brave father protector defends his white nuclear family from the nonwhite hordes. Evelyn, pregnant with her fourth child, is an icon of fertility in a disordered world, her healthy baby’s cries pointing to a normative future in which disability is a (tolerated, even embraced) aberration, rather than a new normal. It’s enjoyably innovative to have a film that speaks in whispers. But what A Quiet Place has to say, we’ve mostly heard before.