can you survive bird box

I watched Bird Box, the new Netflix thriller starring Sandra Bullock and a bird box, immediately after watching Springsteen on Broadway over the holiday weekend. I was left with several questions, like, why did my family start another feature-length movie at 10 p.m.? Why was it okay for Bird Box to, uh, make people with mental illness the villainous human agents of the sky monster? And why weren’t there any dogs or cats? Huh? Do dogs and cats not exist in the world of Bird Box? (I found out from Wikipedia there was a dog in the book [control+F “dog”], but it was not immune to the sky monster. RIP.)

But after Bird Box ended I had one persistent thought, which is: If I were in Bird Box, I would just look at the thing.

I’ll explain the movie to you. There is a monster outside. Seeing the monster makes people spontaneously kill themselves, unless they were mentally ill in before-monster time, in which case they are immune; now those people hunt down the people who are not immune and force them to look. Trevante Rhodes is in it, and he is hot; birds are in it, and they are immune. Sandra Bullock keeps birds in a box because they chirp when the bad thing is close. Gwyneth Paltrow also kept a bird in a box in Country Strong, but it was for a different reason.

So, blah blah, everyone Sandra Bullock hid from the monster with at the beginning dies, except for two kids — her own, and another one. They travel down a dangerous river to a colony of other survivors whom they were able to contact via radio. Once they get there it’s revealed that the colony is situated in a former school for the blind. This reveal happens in the sort of way the Twilight Zone would always reveal its heavy-handed moral, but it is unclear what the moral is supposed to be. Blind people are helpful members of society? Okay. I did not doubt this previously.

Anyway, all of the surviving-during-Bird-Box-times seems extremely difficult, for not much reward. If it were me, I think I would just look at the thing. Everyone else I had known would be dead, yes? Earth would be under the forever rule of a very scary monster. Elon Musk’s Mars colony seems to be nonexistent in Bird Box, so there is no hope there, and would the monster be on Mars, too? I don’t know. Yes, staying inside is one of my favorite activities, but it would be hard to enjoy knowing how many dead bodies were decomposing just on the street outside.

Do you agree? The resilience of characters like Sandra Bullock in Bird Box and Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place and any of the people on Walking Dead, or whatever, is, I think, just not something I possess personally. Why scavenge for food and weapons when there are zombies around, and you still have to have your period, and there is no hope for obtaining new contacts if your old contacts get fucked up? There are zombies! Why have a baby in the Quiet Place, where you can’t even scream during labor or else some scary everywhere monster will come and kill you? (Also, why didn’t they bring Emily Blunt to the waterfall to have the baby? They should have moved to the waterfall a few months before she was scheduled to give birth. Why did John Krasinski know to go to the waterfall to have a talk with his son but not know to bring his wife there in preparation for labor? Why didn’t they just have a house near the waterfall?)

Another thing, to go back to Bird Box, is that I would be curious about what the sky monster looked like. Does it look different for everyone, and is it handsome? We’re lucky that Bird Box decided not to show us the monster, though, because it almost did show us, and apparently the monster was not very cool. Here is what Sandra Bullock said about it in an interview with Bloody Disgusting:

Imagine you sacrificed your life to look at the thing, and then it was just a long fat baby. Damn. For me, if it was supposed to be tempting, I think it would look like Domhnall Gleeson telling me we could be together in the afterlife. Or, if it was supposed to be scary, it would look like coffee with an acquaintance.

Would I keep my eyes closed around the thing for a week in order to spend time indoors with Trevante Rhodes? Of course. I would spend a week with Trevante Rhodes and then I would go outside and look at the thing. Would I let my children look at the thing, if I had them? I am not going to answer this question. Would I be afraid my dog would look at the thing if I were not there to tell him not to? Yes, but chances are my dog is gonna look at the thing even if I’m there. You can only control an animal so much.

I think it is perhaps not socially acceptable to say it, or it’s at least macabre, but I do not have the survival instinct to “not look at the thing” in whatever sort of form it takes in horror movies. I would just look at the thing.

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Theory two: Another religious/folkloric one – prayer and exorcism. According to a YouTube video I saw about the film, the monsters are supposed to be demonic creatures sent to punish people for having too little faith. They also symbolize a perverted kind of faith, which is the belief in something without being able to see it or directly interact with it. Thus, we summon leaders of all the world’s recognized religions to come and, while wearing blindfolds, perform a blessing, prayer, or exorcism in the area between the airlock doors. We see how the monster reacts.

Now that we have proven that they are tangible and able to be touched, we can proceed to assume that they can also become trapped or possibly even injured. Since no one ever invites the BirdBoxers inside, I’m saying that they don’t follow the same rule as many other supernatural creatures, who can’t pass through walls, closed doors, or even thin glass windows unless someone else opens them for them. Therefore, in theory, we could apprehend one of them in a closed area. However, in order to do this, we would need to be able to see it and determine how big the space should be.

Theory five: Bright, focused light. This is the second weakest theory; theory three is by far the most clumsy. Gary depicts the monsters as eerie beings with a variety of body forms that are always dark. What gets rid of shadows? Light. If this was the case, it would have been evident early in the investigation when we observed the monster’s shadow using the bright lights. And no, this wouldn’t make it harder for them to move around outside; the only way they could get hurt would be if they were struck by extremely bright light.

Next, we would need some bait. The creatures are obviously drawn to human presence because they follow our survivors as they drive through the city and because they find and pursue Mallory and her children in the forest, which is quite a distance from the city, so they probably had to travel there. In other words, they appear to be aware of the locations of living humans and hunt them down. At first, I believed that we could use a death row inmate as our bait, but then I realized that sociopathic people frequently develop into insane worshippers of monsters, which is definitely not helpful for our investigation. Rather, I believe that the bravest people in our nation would need to volunteer. We have a military volunteer because the military is trained to be able to dedicate their lives to a cause, and what better cause than potentially saving the entire human race? We fasten the soldier’s arms, legs, neck, and head with tight straps to an upright gurney (imagine Hannibal Lecter). There is no way that soldier is killing themselves; two guards will stand on either side with blindfolds on. Alright, so we position the soldier in the room with his back to the door and have a bright source of light coming from a nearby wall. This means that when the monster enters the building, it will cast a shadow, allowing us to determine when it is completely inside the room before we shut the door. The soldier is currently facing one of the two doors that will be present in the space, one on each side. We are now turning the gurney around so that the soldier can see the monster because it is trapped in the room. The soldier will obviously experience suicidal thoughts, but they won’t be able to end their own life. We now wheel the soldier through the second door, which is actually part of a double door system, much like a cleanroom airlock, being very careful to prevent the creature from following it. We accomplish this by putting one of the same light sources in the narrow gap between these two doors, which allows us to watch the creature’s movements without getting hurt. This will allow us to determine whether the monster has pursued the test subject.

Here, we can make out that the monsters are fairly large animals and speculate as to what kind of tree they may be passing through. I started by researching the location of the movie’s filming, which was Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park (1). After that, I made an educated guess as to what kind of tree we are seeing being pushed by the creatures in this scene. Based on how it appears in the movie and some useful details from the park’s official website, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s most likely a Port Orford Cedar (2). These trees range in height from 150 to 200 feet (3), so the monsters must be at least that tall. We could say that the monsters are at least 175 feet tall if we take the middle value of that range because that is probably the value that is closest to the truth. This is obviously the minimum height for the monster in that scene; presumably, the monsters would need to be smaller in order to be able to pass under lampposts and other structures with ease, as they do in the first outbreak scene. Given their supernatural origins, it stands to reason that they could shapeshift. The only thing we know from my earlier research is a height they claim to be at one point in the film, but this is still useful because I doubt they grow much taller. You know why I believe this: there are two conspicuous absences from the suicidal chaos in the first outbreak scene:

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