Nothing Is Scarier Than an Unmarried Woman

The Atlantic

3 days ago

At the beginning of Zach Cregger's new horror film, Weapons, a spooky suburban fairy tale about the disappearance of 17 children, all blame is directed at the unmarried schoolteacher Justine (played by Julia Garner). She's the prime suspect—the one unifying factor in an otherwise unexplainable event. Each of the 17 children appears to have voluntarily fled their home at 2:17 in the morning, running into the night with their arms stretched backwards like the wings of a paper airplane. Home-surveillance cameras captured their flight, attesting to the fact that no one forced them to flee—but why were they all members of Justine's classroom? What was that woman doing to those children?
Over the years, movies such as Fatal Attraction and Single White Female, to name just a couple, have depicted chronic singledom as a condition that can make women obsessive, deranged, desperate to fill the void created by their unwantedness. But in these portrayals, it's not just that solitude seems to warp the mind: These ladies appear to disturb some kind of natural order—and be more likely to crack. Today, a growing number of Americans are romantically uninvolved. Yet pop culture continues to fixate on these single women, with horror movies in particular framing them as duplicitous and unstable—threats to the public good.
As he demonstrated in his previous feature, Barbarian, Cregger is interested in the dark forces rumbling under the surface of ordinary American lives. Weapons is set in a fictional Pennsylvania town, where the disappearance of the children sends the community reeling. School shuts down for a month, before resuming with no resolution. The police aren't much help. Everyone seems to be processing the tragedy in different ways, which is matched by the film's multi-perspectival structure. Townspeople such as Archer (Josh Brolin), the distraught father of one of the missing children, and Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a lowly cop, are so fixated on their personal problems that they hinder the kind of collaborative action needed to save the children.
It's easier to villainize Justine, who is one of the only single women in the community. Archer, who displays vigilante tendencies, directs his rage toward Justine by digging up unsavory details from her past, such as a DUI charge, and nagging the police to further investigate her. An unseen stranger, heavily implied to be Archer, harasses Justine in her home, knocking on her front door and writing the word witch on the side of her car in stubborn red paint, forcing her to zoom around town branded with crimson letters. Grief-stricken parents and angry community members also revolt against her, pressuring the school's genial principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong), to do something about her.
Most people believe that Justine has done something wrong, though what, exactly, they can't explain. Women like her have been accused of being witches since the 13th century, perhaps because they deviate from maternal norms. In Weapons, Justine's lack of a family reaffirms her culpability. Elementary-school teachers are educators, but they're also parental figures. Across pop culture and in real life, mothers are supposed to do everything for their kids—even give their lives. Justine, who is as confused as anyone about what happened to those kids, seems most guilty to her neighbors because she's still alive.
Depressed and paranoid after all this harassment, Justine succumbs to a bad drinking habit, going about her purgatorial days with a tumbler full of vodka. She also hits up Paul for a one-night stand—and when Paul's fiancée finds out, she comes charging after Justine at the liquor store. To the fiancée, Justine must seem like a total succubus. But for Justine, the hookup is a bid for some much-needed intimacy during a period of intense alienation. (Paul had also told her that his relationship was on the rocks.)
Weapons balances this grim reality—the black-and-white way the world sees Justine, who in turn is trying to keep afloat—with a dry sense of humor and Justine's plucky resilience. She may be losing it, but she still takes it upon herself to play the sleuth, seeking out Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the one child in her class who didn't go missing. When she confronts him on the street, Alex runs off in a panic, but the exchange is genuinely motivated by Justine's concern. Because of the film's multiple points of view and Garner's protean performance, we're able to see how easily Justine takes on, or is foisted into, a variety of roles: nosy teacher, disgraced woman, forsaken lover.
Funnily enough, there is one other single lady in town, a recent transplant and a stranger to most: Alex's Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), a kooky spinster who wears bright, splotchy makeup. She knows no one and has nowhere to go before Alex's parents take her in—a kind of nightmare scenario for down-on-love bachelorettes everywhere terrified of dying alone. Cregger has previously tapped into the unsettling power of old dames: In Barbarian, a monstrous old woman who is obsessed with children is a key villain. Other recent films such as The Substance and The Front Room have used similar figures to communicate female madness and explore insecurities about aging in a culture that glorifies physical youth.
Gladys, despite her perturbing getup, doesn't arouse as much suspicion as Justine, because she steps into a maternal role as Alex's caretaker. Justine, meanwhile, continues to be a perfect scapegoat. Still, she emerges as the film's primary heroine, doggedly pursuing the truth of what happened to the kids. It's a brave choice; nobody would blame her for leaving town. But feared as she is for being a modern woman, she's brimming with personas and possibilities—some of which prove useful for unraveling awful secrets.