Whose Eye Is Behind the Camera? Adam Wingard’s Onslaught and the Brown Optic

The A24 one-sheet puts Celeste and Daisy at the center of the frame, the pose, gun, and bandaged eye already doing its work to represent a badass Latina.

With Adam Wingard at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, before the first public screening of Onslaught anywhere.

Packed house at the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse, and a great vibe in the room. Adam Wingard came out before the lights went down and told us we were the first audience anywhere to see Onslaught. He said the two Godzilla pictures had been a means to an end, a way to get enough money and enough standing to return to what he called crazy irresponsible cinema. This time he had final cut. Nobody to tell him no. He said we might not be able to make eye contact with him afterward, and then he said let’s do this.

Adria Arjona as Celeste lining up a shot in the New Mexico scrub. Out of the gate, Wingard establishes a kick-ass Latina.

Then the film opens out in the arid New Mexico light, on a fence line of jack-o’-lanterns getting blasted off one by one. The target practice with the holiday's pumpkin monsters exploding into pulp introduce the fierce Latina, we immediately recognize Adria Arjona.

I want to use this film to work through something I keep circling in my scholarship, which is the difference between a white-optic story and a Brown-optic one, and why that difference has almost nothing to do with the pigment of the person calling action.

The white optic is the default operating system of mainstream cinema. Its central trick is that whiteness has no properties. It is the unmarked term, the neutral vantage, the thing the camera looks with rather than at. Brownness under that optic gets marked, and marked things are decorative, threatening, comic, or dead. The Latina is the maid, the mourner, the sway of hips in the background of somebody else’s establishing shot. She carries local color. She rarely carries the story’s consciousness.

The Brown optic reorganizes the whole apparatus. It relocates perception, interiority, and will. It hands the shaping intelligence of the film over to a brown subject, and in doing so it turns the lens back around and makes whiteness visible, specific, and strange.

The white optic’s central trick is that whiteness has no properties. Wingard gives it properties, and every one of them is grotesque.

Start with how Celeste enters. She is competent before she is threatened, and there is no man in the frame to authorize her. Wingard told us that Adria Arjona was A24’s suggestion, that the only film of hers he had seen was Hit Man, and that he could not picture her in the part until they had lunch and she rolled up in a 1970s orange pickup and started showing him videos of herself shooting. His line was that nobody had given her that opportunity. Arjona was born in San Juan and raised in Mexico City until she was twelve, and what Wingard did was hand her the position in the frame that Hollywood reserves for Kurt Russell.

Then look at who carries interiority. Celeste is a veteran with PTSD, and the film gives her flashbacks, gives her the disordered subjective time that signals a mind we are inside of. This matters more than it might seem. In the standard American war picture the traumatized soldier is white and the brown world is the terrain where the trauma happened to him. The brown body is scenery for white injury. Wingard inverts the arrangement, and he does it structurally, with an opening credits montage that runs American war after American war, the Second World War through Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Iraq, all of it cut as horror, all of it now anchored to her body. That montage is an argument. It says the century of imperial violence lands here, on this woman, in this trailer park.

Daisy, played by Blake Kennedy. The film keeps returning to her face, and the returning is what makes the stakes legible.

And then Daisy. The mother-daughter dyad becomes the moral center of the storyworld, set against everything the adult world in this film is doing. Celeste takes an eye injury and wraps it, and the bandage gives her an iconography closer to a warrior’s than to a comic-book eyepatch. Her line lands where you expect and it still lands: You fucked with the wrong mom. Consider how rarely a Latina mother’s rage gets licensed as heroic rather than pathologized as hysteria or sanctified into suffering. Here it is the engine of the entire third act.

A Latina mother’s rage, licensed as heroic rather than pathologized as hysteria or sanctified into suffering.

Now the reversal. Hans Kammler, played by Dan Stevens, is a third-generation Operation Paperclip Nazi scientist in a bald cap and a cape that the production modeled on an actual cape Hitler wore. Wingard described him as living inside a breakaway civilization and cosplaying what he imagines he is supposed to be. His first scene is him licking Rebecca Hall’s feet. Hall’s Hanna gets the line that organizes the villainy: the work must survive. Not the man, the work. Institutional whiteness announcing that it outlives its individual hosts.

One of the three engineered soldiers. Wingard shoots them as apocalypse, three horsemen loosed inside the United States rather than somewhere overseas.

The name is not decoration. The real Hans Kammler was an SS-Obergruppenführer who oversaw construction of the camp system, including Auschwitz, then ran the V-2 rocket program on slave labor, then vanished in May 1945 into an ambiguity that has fed conspiracy literature ever since. Wingard even named one of his production companies Breakaway Civilization. So the film’s monster is not invented evil. It is documented evil, laundered through a real American program, still drawing a salary.

Even the state’s cleanup man is marked. Cyrus, the agent brought in to contain the situation, gets pulled out of a fetish party and spends the film rolling on MDMA. Wingard and Simon Barrett shot that sequence in an Albuquerque castle built by a rich eccentric, stripped of its turquoise and redressed as Eyes Wide Shut, because, as Wingard put it, the movie takes place in a post-Epstein degenerate reality. Not one unmarked, normal, neutral white man of authority anywhere in the film.

Wingard Q&A with Film Critic Richard Whittaker Austin Chronicle

I asked him, during the Q&A, about genre as a way of smuggling meaning, and about the three super soldiers reading to me as horsemen of the apocalypse. His answer went two places. First to Robert Rodriguez, whose Rebel Without a Crew he read in middle school and credits with the existence of his entire career. Second to a single exchange in the film. Celeste asks the thing hunting her who it is, and it answers, we’re your government. He said that is what the movie is, at the end of the day.

Celeste asks the thing hunting her who it is. It answers: we’re your government.

Which brings me to the mechanism. What makes an optic is will to style, the totality of shaping decisions through which a director geometrizes a storyworld and makes us feel the showing of it. Wingard shot this in thirty-five days, roughly what it took Rodriguez to shoot El Mariachi. He lifted the countdown structure from John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and said so cheerfully. He had Matt Pusti score it in a Carpenter and Brad Fiedel register, including a cue originally written as a Mechagodzilla theme, now repurposed for the moment the killers are unchained. He cast Alex Pereira as the Butcher and Michael Biehn as Baylor. He built the Windy Oasis trailer park out of outcasts of every ethnicity and put Reginald VelJohnson at the heart of it, in a part first written for Keith David, since They Live is Wingard’s second-favorite film. Genre is functioning here as a space-clearing device. It opens room for a worldview no respectable drama would be permitted to carry: that the science is in the wrong hands, that the military-industrial machine turns on its own people, and that the monster and the government are the same entity.

The trilogy claim he made from the stage matters here too. He sees You’re Next, The Guest, and Onslaught as one reality, the same New Mexico, the same rot under the same institutions. The third film is where he finally puts a brown woman at the center of that world and lets her survive it.

So the lineage runs like this. A kid in small-town Alabama reads a Chicano filmmaker’s DIY manual, learns from it that a career can be made out of nothing, works his way to final cut, and uses it to build a film organized around a Latina veteran and her daughter, with whiteness rendered as pathology.

The optic is not a birthright. It is a way of shaping.

I will name the open question honestly. Celeste’s Latinidad is never thematized. Nobody discusses it. You could call that an evasion. I read it the other way. The Brown optic here operates through structure rather than announcement, which is to say a Latina gets to occupy the unmarked, universal position that the white optic has been hoarding for a century.

The optic is not a birthright. It is a way of shaping. Brown directors make white-optic films all the time. And every so often a white kid from Alabama, formed by Rebel Without a Crew, puts the camera exactly where it needs to be.