We Need to Talk About Kid Cudi’s Cameo in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap
TheMovieReport.com / Warner Bros. Pictures
This article contains spoilers for director M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap.
It took me a long time to become an M. Night Shyamalan fan. In 1999, The Sixth Sense floored me with its gutting twist ending, but then I spent years thinking he was a one-trick pony, and the lows of Lady in the Water and The Last Airbender didn’t help. But in 2015, the director returned to his horror roots with the giddily fun found-footage film The Visit and brought me back into the fold.
As far as I’m concerned, his films have been appointment viewing ever since. A movie about a beach that makes you old? No further questions. Gay dads having to make an impossible choice to stave off the apocalypse? I’m buying tickets. And when I saw the trailer for Trap, about a serial killer played by Josh Hartnett trying to escape the police at an indoor arena concert for a pop girlie named Lady Raven (played by M. Night’s daughter Saleka), I needed the movie to come out tomorrow. Fewer concepts have hooked me more than that one. Say what you will about Shyamalan’s supposedly “stilted” dialogue, the man knows how to lens a film, and in an era of bland direction, his big swings alway inspires discussion.
Of course, the first thing I wanted to do after seeing Trap was talk about it with someone — specifically a gay person. It’s not just the overt representation of Knock at the Cabin that has cemented Shyamalan as a sort of unofficial mascot for terminally online gay cinephiles. As contributor Abby Monteil and I discuss below, there’s something about the combination of earnestness and morbid humor in his work that has a kind of queer tinge to it. And in Trap, that queerness takes human shape in the form of The Thinker, a rapper played by Kid Cudi in a remarkably memorable cameo appearance. Wearing a long blonde wig and yelling about kombucha to his assistants backstage, The Thinker even makes a brief pass at Josh Hartnett’s serial killer character, known as “the Butcher.” It’s perhaps a winking acknowledgment of Shyamalan’s growing queer fanbase, and one of many wild moments in a film full of them.
Below, Monteil and I talk about Kid Cudi’s cameo, why queer audiences have come to love Shyamalan, and whether Lady Raven would play All Things Go. — Samantha Allen
Samantha Allen: Abby, I have to start off by asking you a very important question: Do gay people disproportionately like M. Night Shyamalan, or are queer people who like to go to the movies just overrepresented in my friend group?
Abby Monteil: Look, I firmly believe that Mid-Sized Sedan of “beach that makes you old” fame is an ally! Apart from queer people being purveyors of culture, I think there’s an earnest genre bent to Shyamalan’s work that immediately makes it feel, inherently, a bit queer regardless of the content of any given film. Establishing your own language and placing trust in the wisdom of young protagonists who might feel at odds with the family members and authority figures around them? Sounds pretty gay to me.
S.A.: You hit the nail on the head. Knock at the Cabin might be his only overtly LGBTQ+ movie, but that combination of heart, humor, and horror feels close enough to a queer perspective on the world to have merited him a fandom of gay cinephiles.
Trap felt in ways like the converse of Knock: It’s about a parent put in an impossible situation with their child, except this time the parent is a hot serial killer played by Josh Hartnett. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was Kid Cudi to make a cameo as a gay rapper named “The Thinker” who yells about kombucha backstage and undresses the Butcher with his eyes. Did you have any advance Cudi warning? What was your reaction to Trap’s Exclusively Gay Moment?
A.M.: Admittedly, I was spoiled for Kid Cudi’s appearance before seeing the movie, since I made the mistake of scrolling X during the millionth round of “Is M. Night Shyamalan a good writer?” discourse.
The Atlantic editor Jeremy Gordon chose to weigh in on the “Is M. Night intentionally funny?” subsection of the discourse in a viral tweet. As he noted, the filmmaker casting Cudi as “influential elder rapper” The Thinker, who makes eyes at Hartnett and has strong feelings about kombucha feels like a pretty good answer to that question.
Is Cudi’s character intentionally ridiculous? Yes! I’m a staunch six on the Kinsey Scale, but I’ve seen how many Trap viewers left the theater raving about just how mesmerizing they found a climactic scene of a shirtless Hartnett eating pie. We’re talking about an aggressively conventionally attractive DILF who realistically would have been noticed by way more people at the Lady Raven concert. I get where The Thinker is coming from!
The character is very much in line with Shyamalan’s vested interest in poking fun at pop stardom stereotypes, from a lucky concertgoer who gets called onstage to bask in her idol’s attention to the benevolent industry mentor who isn’t quite so benevolent behind closed doors. Cudi is a fun bit of meta casting, but his appearance also ties into a meatier topic that the director is clearly pondering himself: balancing his dual identities as a working artist and as a family man. Like Lady Raven and The Thinker, the Butcher also presents two wildly different personas depending on what situation he finds himself in. But even if those two sides barely touch, how do they seep into each other?
“Establishing your own language and placing trust in the wisdom of young protagonists who might feel at odds with the family members and authority figures around them? Sounds pretty gay to me.”
S.A.: Whether you’re a filmmaker, a serial killer, or someone who generates content for the little gay people on your phone, I think that theme you pointed out of “never letting the two sides touch,” as the Butcher says aloud at one point, is what gives the movie a deeper resonance beyond its wildly entertaining B-movie trappings.
Maybe this is too vulnerable to admit in the venue of a quick, breezy discussion about Trap, but there’s something not exactly healthy about what we do, right? It’s not murdering people and chopping them up into little pieces, but there’s something perhaps a little compulsive and fucked-up about needing to create things to feel happy, and that’s a feeling a lot of artists and hobby-obsessed queer people know well.
A.M.: Absolutely. Shyamalan’s most recent “comeback” stage of his career has largely constituted a return to horror. In Trap, he seems to be reckoning with how he can be this regular Philly dad who also really enjoys fucking with people’s heads onscreen roughly every 18 business months. As unintentional as it may be, that feels very resonant as a queer person. We have historically found solace in the monsters and body horror of genre films, which have given us a space to process our identities, often long before we have the words to describe them ourselves.
I think that love of especially genre storytelling, in turn, can encourage us to link our sense of inner purpose to creating and reporting on those same kinds of stories as adults. At the same time, none of us are one thing, and navigating that balance, whether you’re a serial killer dad or a queer nerd, can be a tall task.
Before we go, though, I’d like to briefly shift the discussion toward another queer fan-favorite pop culture staple: Pop stars. Given Lady Raven’s heroism in Trap’s second act, do you think she and famed Washington, D.C. investigator Lady Gaga could’ve truly gotten to the bottom of January 6? I think so.
*Them* contributors hand-picked their favorite queer horror films.
S.A.: If there are 100 people in a room, and 99 of them don’t believe in Lady Raven, but one of them does, that’s all she needs. I’m not super into Saleka’s genre but I am so, so, so impressed with the talent in the Shyamalan family. I would like to go back in time and be raised in his Philadelphia compound.
I think my question for you in return is where Lady Raven would fall on the All Things Go festival lineup? Line three? Would she be having a Brat summer or does she still need to work it out on the remix with Charli?
A.M.: First of all, none of those words are in the Bible! I know we’re meant to understand Lady Raven as a Dua Lipa-esque pop star who most people off the street would know, even if she’s not selling out stadiums just yet.
If All Things Go were longer, I could definitely see her being an in-universe Thursday headliner out of a four-day festival. But if we’re judging her according to All Things Go — which the internet has preemptively dubbed Burlington/Berkeley/Cambridge Spotify Sound Town queers’ festival of choice — I’d say line three is a safe bet. Maybe her and Sabrina Carpenter could do a cute “Please Please Please” remix! Whether we’re talking serial killers or Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan, these men need to stop embarrassing our pop girls.
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