The Trap Trap

Thoughts on Trap (2024) and contrarianism in the age of slop

I saw Trap, M. Night Shyamalan’s father-daughter serial killer vehicle after being delighted by its trailer. The premise, as introduced in the clinical, delightful, and momentarily inescapable preview, is straightforward: a father takes his tween daughter to the equivalent of an Ariana Grande stadium show only to learn that the concert has been staged as an elaborate Philadelphia Police Department sting to ensnare a brutal serial killer. The catch? The father is the serial killer. For a filmmaker whose oeuvre has come to be synonymous with the plot twist, Shyamalan’s in-trailer reveal is a winking invitation. Walking into the theater, my expectations were perfectly calibrated: I expected silly slop, and silly slop I got. To paraphrase a recent tweet about the Bob Dylan biopic teaser that I can, to my detriment, no longer find: it was the most Entourage trailer and film I’ve ever seen.

Trap is, as its trailer makes clear, a fundamentally goofy genre flick. Its myriad flaws—Shyamalan’s distractingly clunky dialogue, the almost pagan amount of dei ex machina, the uninspired music of Shyamalan’s real-life daughter as in-film popstar—are eminently excusable; depending on your level of generosity, they can even be recontextualized as strengths. Trap takes a bit too long to get going, mired as it is in stilted, expositional dialogue, but when it begins to hum, it is momentarily delightful. Josh Hartnett plays the killer-cum-father as a sort of chuckling schemer both in denial and control. His initially constrained performance implies his character is at least equally as worried about being caught as he is upsetting his daughter; throughout the extended concert sandbox sequence, one gets the sense that he attempts to escape less to survive than to avoid embarrassing his innocent, vulnerable daughter.

When Trap commits to the bit, it works. So, too, do its concert-based moments invite analysis, if you’re into that sort of thing. Many have fairly read the movie as an autobiographical mat upon which Shyamalan wrestles with a lifelong, seemingly zero-sum game between nurturing his craft and his family, a reading made more potent by his decision to showcase his actual daughter in the girl-dad thriller. You could get darker, if you’d like, and view the film as Shyamalan sketching out a portrait of the uber-cuck: the father whose masculinity is so repressed that he must enact it through secret, gruesome violence while trapped listening to awful pop music during his waking hours. But Trap resists intellectualizing the moment it abandons its sandbox conceit and moves from the stadium to the suburbs. The plot unspools, we start to talk about trauma; things take a turn. The film unravels from silly fun to total unwieldiness, then ends about twenty minutes too late. In a sense, Trap’s messy disintegration doubles as the film reasserting itself: you are reminded that you came to sit in an air conditioned room with friends for two hours, not to grapple seriously with art. You laugh in the theater, you laugh in the parking lot, and then the experience ends.

The sense of frivolous pleasure with which I left the theater and re-entered the scorching New Orleans heat was totally incompatible with the way I observed people talking about Trap. Scrolling the Twitter search results for “Trap,” after sifting through tedious inter-generational debates about rap music, inspired in me the same sort of alienating dread that once inspired me to write a polemic against Letterboxd. In the past, my grievance with the group of people broadly categorizable as “Film Twitter” was largely located in their insistence upon turning everything they touched, in a sort of dril-as-Midas routine, into stale memes. The Trap discussion illuminated a different pathology: people, it seems, can’t just enjoy slop anymore.

Trap has inspired, among the online opinion class, an odd sort of contrarian consensus. Everyone, it seems, identifies as a “Trap truther,” pronouncing bravely that they actually enjoyed the unwieldy third act; more, that the third act transforms the film into a borderline masterpiece. This opinion, in and of itself, is fine. It’s not one I share—who cares? The level of defensiveness with which people share it, though, is made noteworthy for the fact that almost nobody seems to be articulating the presumed consensus point from which they’re rebelling. The Trap conversation is composed almost entirely of people jockeying to appear brave truth-tellers; everyone agrees with one another, yet appears invested in convincing themselves that they are among the brave few.

The take economy reframes the way that its participants think. The online content class is locked into a low-return hamster wheel that turns every experience into a potential take and threatens every scandalous angle with the prospect of immediately becoming dated. You know what they say: opinions are like assholes—if you keep at it, someone might pay to see yours on the internet. The Trap response, though, feels indicative of a separate and distinct undercurrent: that people, in the era of ephemera and slop, desperately want their experiences to feel important. For a cohort that equates experience with opinion, this means that people invest in their opinions a great, performative importance. It’s a pathology that’s beginning to proliferate across the internet. Take, for instance, the spate of “hangout” memes, in which people photoshop pictures of plastic lounge chairs and Marlboro Golds so as to invest the otherwise exceptionally normal act of bullshitting on a summer night with an irredeemably cringe significance. Things move fast and feel insignificant—people stopped caring about the fact that Trump was shot within, what, the week? Perhaps the online take class attempts, in its own way, to assert the significance of their time and the reality of their experience by formulating strong opinions about things culture writ large intends to remember for a week at most.

People want to feel a part of something. I get it—I do too. But the impulse to stand against the imagined crowd and invest everything with significance robs one of a basic pleasure: the right to enjoy slop, on its own terms, in a theater full of people who don’t look at their phones all that much. Summer movies are allowed to be stupid. Often, definitionally, they are. They need not be burdened with the weight of masterpiece or great significance. Your life is no less important because the silly movie with the fun trailer turned out to be ill-conceived, and you do not need to prove to the disembodied internet audience that your time was not wasted for having seen and enjoyed that silly movie. Things can be, and often are, good without being great. If that fact proves to be insubstantial fodder for opinions on the internet, then perhaps it can at least free people from the impulse to mine life for prospective content rather than live it on its own terms.