The Hidden Gem in the film MA 2019

richardmurray · November 5, 2024

I admit, I am not a fan of slasher films; their stories extremely rarely , I will not say never, hold up for me; and their stories are not meant to. The goal of a slasher film is to get the audience to jump scare as much as possible, and that is fine. Ma from 2019 is a slasher film. It is meant to get you to jump scare.
But the best part of the movie is the tiniest bit, and I have thought about it coinciding with my thoughts on fantasy films en large and how they rarely involve the historic usa.

The best comparison to visualize my point is taking the flashback scenes in MA 2019 and the character of Rose Rita, played by vanessa anne williams, in A House With a Clock in its walls 2018.
In the original book, Rose Rita is white and to be blunt, a tomboy of the purest type, think red haired peppermint patty with sneakers and no sandals. In the film Rose Rita is a colored child of the 1950s USA, one of few non white children, no not the only one, and dresses in the most cutest pink outfits of all the girls in the school.
What is my point? I am a fan of the book or the film House with a clock in its walls. But the film has a fantasy 1950s usa.
In Ma 2019, the flashbacks of the title character are honest. She is the only black child in the school in the 1960s, and she is having a lonely miserable time. Which is historically accurate. Many people of all phenotypes love to parade the moment the black kids went into the all white schools but few admit that this was a horror for most of the kids. I recall one of them, who is on the schoolboard in new orleans, she voted against integrated schools as an adult, and she is in photo being one of the kids used to force integration in the schools of the same area in the past. So, I like how MA 2019 through the flashbacks shows three layers of negative mental energy. The first layer is historical, pure truth, integration don't work on the ground. It works in laws and works in historical revisions but in historical honesty it is usually a nightmare for the minority individuals involved in it. Now the flashbacks do good to add two more layers. The second is mandatory for the slasher. Ma when a child is the shortest female, the roundest female, the female with the thickest glasses. So, she the only black student in the school and she has all the aspects of the mythological wall flower girl. The third layer completes the psychosis, the lead jock boy in the school has noticed her quiet noticing of him and sets her up for a humiliation, yes Carrie. In Ma's case he invites her to a few hangouts, she even says she goes to parties a lot which shows she is very proud. And after some comfortability invites her to meet him in a closet. A white girl in the school gives her advice on giving blowjobs and Young MA enters the dark closet. She performs fellatio to the boy in the closet she think the head jock, saying some mentally disturbing things like will you talk to me after this, and after she is finished, she exist sthe closet and the jock boy has all the students of the school present to humiliate young MA, asking the boy she didn't know, who is the white male nerd character, how was it? and the nerd boy says, it was great. and young Ma runs off and her mental state is now complete from the films telling. Though I say they missed a trick not showing her come home and be asked by her parents , how was school and telling her to toughen up for this great opportunity, which to me makes the mental breakdown complete, but to each writer their own.
In house with a clock on its walls 2018 you wouldn't realize 1950s usa the way it was. In MA 2019 you realize 1960s usa. And I love that, I am tired of producers or writers themselves demanding stories that fit the way they want the populace in the usa to work, instead of how it is, and it was never and is not united.

I know the flashback is seven minutes maximum but that is the best part of the movie for me.
Why?
It takes an honest USA scenario, the most common scenario in the usa historically with integration. That of the black alone amongst many whites , totally isolated, totally frustrated, and trying to find something positive. It adds the common slasher film device of male or female child outcast through her physicality, and the moment of great humiliation which is the cause of all the slashing of course.
It doesn't deny the drama while it is true to the history + reality of modern usa. The usa isn't the government or populace under a government people want it to be, the usa is the government or populace under a government that it is. And that should be embraced.
Yes in the film, times have changed, group up Ma deals with a set of kids who are in a far more integrated school and who don't seem to have any inclinations for such humiliations. But, the damage is true and can not be fled from, has to be lived through.

As for the slashing well, I argue, the scenes of group up Ma enslaving her daughter to a life, the same way ma was enslaved, or the eroticisms of Ma to the jock boy when a man or his son are themselves stunning alongside the slasher violence. But the slashing is nothing beyond what hasn't been shown overall in the slasher film library.

But the origin, yes the flashbacks, that is great cinema. I share this video cause it only displays the flashback, what say you?

One last thing, like Ready Player One, while young Ma, played by Kyanna Simone Simpson is the shortest or roundest, with thickest glasses in the school, she is still very pretty. Hollywood doesn't still know how to get a female thespian who has a physicality that will make her chosen last usually. To be blunt, yung MA looks like a black daphne from scooby doo which, if you see how many women or girls dress as daphne today well... not exaclty, the most undesired physique.