The Thinking Machine #87

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.

In M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap (2024), a garage door opens onto the street, and the villain sitting inside his car looks out and gravely remarks: “Never let the two lives touch”. 42 years previously, the American literary-cultural-political theorist Fredric Jameson (who passed away in September 2024) pondered the typical garage door of San Francisco for the way this modern, remote-controlled gadget mediated “two kinds of space: the street and the interior”. Jameson was very fond of Alfred Hitchcock’s final work, Family Plot (1976), for showing exactly this dynamic. So are we, as well as (we suspect) Shyamalan.