Send Help And The Joy of Power Reversals

Hierarchy is so much fun that no one wants to leave

Sam Raimi’s Send Help crosses the power reversals of the slasher with the power reversals of reverse colonization narratives. The result is a gloriously mean-spirited demonstration of the ways in which hierarchies of gender, class, and race are all intertwined with the same paranoid fears of rebellion and catastrophic status collapse. Revenge fantasies and terror of meeting one’s comeuppance are, it turns out, the same story seen from a slightly different terra firma.

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The hero/villain of the parable is Linda Liddle, played by a joyfully mercurial Rachel McAdams. Linda is a mousy, brilliant, poorly groomed strategist at a financial management company, and she has been promised a life-changing promotion. Before said promotion can go through, though, the CEO dies, and his hot, vapid son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) gives the job to a frat buddy. As a sort of consolation he brings Linda along on a business trip—only for the jet to crash into the ocean somewhere in Southeast Asia

Linda and Bradley are the only ones who make it to a deserted tropical island—which is fine with Linda, who is a survivalist enthusiast. She cares for the injured Bradley, builds a shelter, and generally seems to be having a great time. So much so that when Bradley pushes to get them off the island, she starts to get bossy in a rather terrifying manner herself.

The fun of the narrative is in part about the comeuppance. As in 9 to 5, the sympathetic office underdog gets her revenge on the patriarchal asshole boss who doesn’t appreciate her or respect her. When injured Bradley tells Linda on the island that she’s being disrespectful and he’s going to fire her, she just laughs and walks away, leaving him unable to get water or food for hours. It’s cruel—but is it that much crueler than Bradley ruining her life to give a perk to a golf buddy?

In a moment of introspection Bradley calls himself a monster, and he’s not wrong. The dynamic here is similar to that in slashers, where the ugly daddy-thing murders his way through a couple hours of corpses until the final girl takes the ax away and inflicts some damage and some women’s lib. Turnabout is fair play, and who doesn’t enjoy seeing a little vindictive Marxism/feminism on screen?

Eventually of course it becomes obvious that the vindictive Marxism/feminism on display is not well characterized as “little.” Linda escalates past simply absenting herself and on into true nightmare boss territory—including sexual harassment, murder, and literal castration. Bradley gets his own back to some extent as he tries to poison her, but Linda is clearly much more suited to the environment they find themselves in. Her ecstatic slaughter of a wild boar, complete with gouts of blood and triumphant howl, positions her as a primal force of destruction. Bradley, despite his biceps and his golf game, lacks her atavistic oomph.

That oomph associates Linda with tropes around colonized people, and the movie with the reverse colonization genre. Reverse colonization stories, like The War of the Worlds or Red Dawn imagine a world in which they do to us what we’ve always done to them—invasion, genocide, slavery, torture, inflicted by the periphery on the center, rather than the other way around.

Linda—making fire, catching fish, hunting that boar—is a kind of Tarzan, adapting herself to jungle ways. Bradley is associated not just with patriarchal and class hierarchies, but with the “civilized” colonizers. Linda’s transformation into a lying, murdering, enslaving psychopath is a paranoid Great Replacement nightmare, in which those who should be at the bottom of the hierarchy—women, subordinates, colonized people—take up the fire and incinerate their (supposed) betters.

Reverse colonization stories may sometimes look like anti-colonial stories; they ask viewers to identify with the victims of imperialism, after all. But identifying with the colonized in this way doesn’t necessarily mean you end up opposing colonialism. Sometimes it can mean that you decide you really don’t want to be in the footwear of the colonized, and that you’d better keep oppressing those people over there lest they gain enough power to turn the tables on you.

Send Help plays with that ambiguity. Early on you root for Linda because Bradley is an entitled sexist ass who is treating her like shit. But as the body count mounts—and as Rachel McAdams morphs from awkward social misfit to gleefully cackling sadist—you have to start to sympathize at least a bit with Bradley, whose sins, however unpleasant, don’t include a single murder. And even those sins, in retrospect, start to look justified; as we get to know Linda, it becomes pretty clear that you would not, in fact, want to make her a vice-president, even if she is good with numbers. Bradley’s apparently sexist intuition that she is a creep is, yes, still sexist, but also kind of on the money.

That’s not to say that the film is a reactionary screed against upturning hierarchies. Nor is it to argue that it’s a chronicle of feminist or anti-colonial triumph. Rather, the movie is playing with the crossover between those two possibilities, shuffling your sympathies and allegiances between characters and between politicized hierarchical perspectives. Resentment of the injustice of being on the bottom and the terror of losing one’s position on the top mirror each other, which means that they are both opposed and the same. Raimi encourages you to enter each emotion in turn and simultaneously, luxuriating in hate, fear, vengeance, vaunting power and terrifying castration. Linda’s dead-eyed stare at the end of the film, when she has fully inhabited and usurped Bradley’s position of wealth and status and golf, is both threat and promise, the sex and dread of unearned power, wielded with casual violence and/or clawed down from its perch.

One of the films many twisty reveals is that Linda and Bradley were never really stranded; rescue was just over the outcropping the whole time, and Linda knew it. This illustrates Linda’s duplicitousness and her evil abuse of power. But it also puts her in the position of the director, and/or of the film; she has staged an unnecessary conflict for her own amusement, just as Raimi has staged this movie for you. The violent fantasies of hierarchy (bullying, revolution, justified sadism, unjustified sadism) are pleasurable and self-validating. Patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism—no help for them is coming, Send Help suggests, not because no help is possible, but because, like Linda, we like it here.