I don’t know if this was a made for Netflix movie, but I suspected it was when the protagonist in this movie about the death of a white boy and absent father at war and a lonely blonde mother, was a black man, incongruently cast as a wolf expert. Sure enough, the blonde woman climbs naked into bed with the old black man while her husband is gunning down the enemy in Iraq, right away and it seems like another typical Netflix movie about the blanket superiority of black men and inferiority of white men as judged by blonde women. After watching five weekend news casts, which all featured a black man and blonde white woman paired as news anchors, I was about ready to shake my head in dismay and turn the TV off. But it seems that the makers of the movie predicted that this was exactly when the censors would decide that the film had high cultural values and would stop looking for a reason to suppress it and permit the story to be told.

But I kept watching and was sure glad I did.

Not only is the well-cast [in terms of acting and even the age and race of the introductory masculine character] and the black actor not only not a magic negro, but he is not even the protagonist, and furthermore, a well-positioned perspective character who ads to the movie in much the same way as the Scatman Cruthers character in the movie The Shining. Someone slid this buy the Netflix censors by making sure the blonde woman and the black man ended up naked in bed together early on.

Then what happened?

Basically what happened was Reverent Chandler, my novella about Nordic Caucasians and Amerindians fusing culture and warrior values in an arctic setting, informed with a totemic belief that civilization is evil. The protagonist turns out to be the father of the boy and if you despise civilization and the armed goons that enforce its sick norms as much as I do you will really like Hold the Dark, the best movie set in Alaska since Thirty Days of Night.

For a better review of the movie, check out Nick from Myth of the 20th Century below, which we both, quite by coincidence, wrote at about the same time.

Sympathy for the Wolf

Posted by NICK MASON on OCTOBER 3, 2018

Review of Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark