Bird Box - Surviving the Social Media Apocalypse

I joined Facebook back in 2009. It was a simpler time - Facebook didn't have a news feed then. It was only implemented a few months after I joined. We were excited. My news feed consisted entirely of my friends' pictures, wacky text posts and Farmville requests. FB was a place where we went to unwind, laugh at/with each other, secretly stalk our crush, and in general - escape from being an adult. Social media was this weird and wonderful thing that wasn't yet in a corporeal form (borrowing the term from JKR). Everything was fine until "the basket of deplorables" found out about the infinite possibilities of social media.

It is now difficult to scroll through your news feed in FB without taking an anti-depressant. Conspiracy theories about political figures being mind-controlled by aliens, running a brothel out of a pizzeria and political dynasties ruining democracy plagues the internet. Close friendships are ruined over heated Whatsapp battles. Even relatives start to look like one of those people whom you block in Twitter. This constant assault of hate and malice makes you want to flush your phone down the toilet and buy a Nokia 1100. This entire situation and the mental anguish faced by the general public is metaphorized into a single movie called Bird Box.

Released in late December in Netflix, Bird Box gathered immediate attention due its fresh new take on post-apocalyptic fiction and the social media phenomenon - The Bird Box Challenge. From a story perspective, Bird Box follows a conventional thread where the protagonists face a global breakout which leads to the majority of the population being wiped out. The rest of the movie is about their survival and their journey to a safe location and a group of survivors. What makes Bird Box significant is the dual-timeline script structure, the ambiguous and yet unique monster that plagues the population which opens up the audience's mind for further interpretation.

Mal Hayes (Sandra Bullock) is a to-be single mother returning from the hospital with her sister, when an unknown entity starts making people go on a violent suicidal streak. Apparently this invisible entity makes people see their most intimate fears which causes them to lose all will to live and end their life immediately. This invisible entity is shown in the film as unnatural wind and gravitational anomalies. The only way to survive these monsters is to stay indoors and use blindfolds while going outside. Once you see them, the only way out is suicide.

The film unfolds in a dual-timeline where the first timeline follows Mal and a group of people trying to survive the initial outbreak and forming bonds with each other. In the second timeline, we see that Mal and two children are the only survivors and they try to reach a safe-house which can be reached by three days of journey along a river. They are constantly beset by a group of individuals who are immune to this invisible entity and perceive it as a messianic deity. They round up survivors and make them remove their blindfolds and look at the monster which leads to their suicide.

The relevance of this movie, in my opinion, should be read together with the social media experience in the post-Trump era. Spending 30 seconds on social media can have drastic effects on a person's day. Like the monster, one glance at your social media feed is enough to trigger depression. Meanwhile, individuals who have immersed themselves in this issue often try to incite or pull unwilling participants into a debate and trap them with rhetoric - much like the acolytes of the unseen monster. Bird Box echoes with the emotions of people trying desperately to avoid the toxic environment of today's social media. It is quite interesting to note that the safe haven which Mal discovers happens to be a school for blind children, where they teach survivors to lead a happy life in the dark. Bird Box is a decent movie which, when considered beyond the memes and internet challenges, offers the viewer an opportunity of interpretation and contemplation.