Even if you’ve never heard of Arch Oboler, you may know the plot of one of his many radio plays if you’re familiar with Bill Cosby’s stand-up comedy. Cosby made the Lights Out episode “Chicken Heart” famous to generations who had never really listened to fiction on radio. I understand that as a consequence some people believe that Cosby made up the story. Either way, many of those who know about it now remember “Chicken Heart” as an example of how something absurd can be frightening to children or exciting to those who experience it in suitable surroundings. Few seem to remember it as twenty-minute rebuke of pacifism framed as a science fiction horror story.
It is not for nothing that the subject of the experiment that drives Oboler’s story was a chicken heart and not, for instance, the kidney of a bear or the stomach of a lion. The story’s protagonist is a scientist filling the role of the unheeded prophet, insisting that the chicken heart, which grows with every pulse and consumes everything around it, must be destroyed with firepower and brute force. But everyone who is in a position to combat the thing insists upon searching for a more delicate solution, refusing to declare war upon the thing until it is too large and too powerful to be stopped.
This sort of conservative metaphor is typical of Arch Oboler’s horror plays. Also typically, they were the some of the best examples of horror on radio. His story titled “Neanderthal Man” conveys the same ideas as “Chicken Heart,” but with an even broader focus and more didactic presentation. Three characters slip into a time that predates civilization and find themselves confronted by an ancestor of human beings. The two men argue about how to deal with the threat. One has a gun and wants to shoot the Neanderthal dead at the first opportunity, while the other abhors guns and wants to try to communicate with it and reason with it. The latter is killed by the pre-human creature, and as he lies dying he acknowledges that it was foolish to think that one could reason with an uncivilized enemy.
Lights Out has another episode, titled “The Dream,” which stars Boris Karloff as a man who is compelled to kill by a vision of a spectral woman, who continues to haunt him throughout his arrest, trial, and conviction, prompting him to insist that he die as a consequence of his crime. The entire episode is clearly devoted to arguing in favor of a broad application of the death penalty. The theme is not just conservative, but boldly conservative, with Karloff’s character making it very clear that his death is necessary not because it will dissuade other murders, or give peace to his soul, but just because the social convention ought to be that if you take a life, you ought to give your own. And between Karloff’s exquisite voice acting and Oboler’s excellent horror sensibilities, it is a frightening tale just on its surface.
“Revolt of the Worms” is a marvelously effective horror story, and I read it as a self-righteous defense of the bourgeoisie. The metaphor is less obvious than some of his others, but it seems to be on some level an attempt to instill fear in the wealthy, educated, or successful about the possibility of being attacked and overrun by those who have been empowered by the efforts of that higher class. The stories theme is one that I am especially likely to take issue with. It is also one of my very favorite radio horror stories.
Also among my favorites is “The Thing on the Fourbile Board,” an episode of Quiet, Please, which was written and directed by Wyllis Cooper, who actually created Lights Out before passing it off to Oboler. “The Thing on the Fourbile Board” is generally a favorite horror tale for anyone who is familiar with old time radio. Spoiler alert in case anyone is interested in listening to it: It tells the story of an invisible creature uncovered from deep in the earth by an oil drilling operation. The character that we initially see as the protagonist tells the story in retrospect, culminating in a climactic confrontation with the creature, wherein he dumps paint on it to make it visible. Advancing to the present, we learn that he took pity on the monster, and actually married it, resolving to take care of it by feeding it a steady supply of human victims.
What’s interesting about the creature in this story is that it is a neat little package of sexual transgressions. It has the face of a little girl, but the body of a spider, and when the narrator introduces it to the audience he says that she likes to be called Mike. By being married to and presumably sleeping with it, the narrator is dipping a finger into the trifecta of bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality. Add to that the fact that the first evidence of the creature is a severed finger bearing a ring and the perceived transgressions seemingly expand to include adultery or divorce. No doubt there is also meaning in the fact that the creature is ordinarily invisible, and that we are initially led to trust the narrator. The implication is clearly that these discomforting elements of society and the human psyche were buried and invisible unless brought into focus, but that they were there, and that your own neighbor might be a practitioner of bestiality, a pedophile, and adulterer, or – no doubt frightening in 1948 – a homosexual. So as I see it, put simply, one of the best horror stories ever written for radio is about the conservative values of mistrust and a blanket terror of social taboos.
I am an extraordinarily analytical consumer of fiction. Even when it comes to horror, I want the story to mean something, even though I recognize that that may not be typical of horror. So I give a close reading to the story and its themes whenever I can, to such an extent that most others would quickly grow bored and frustrated with me. In my necessarily solitary viewing I have tended to get the impression that the horror stories that are not only the most fun to analyze are quite conservative in their message, and that the same are often the most frightening.
Of course, that correlation is only natural. What is typically most frightening to us is the unfamiliar, and the outcome of current social change is always unfamiliar, as well as being the usual enemy of conservative thinking. So thoughtful horror tends to uphold existing taboos, painting social mores as either that which is being threatened or that which will defend the protagonists against the veiled evil that is stalking them. For my generation, there is no more obvious example of this than the rules of slasher films. By and large, nothing is more dangerous to the killer’s potential victims than being a sexually active adolescent. Drug use will also tend to get you in trouble.
Yet thinking much farther back than that, many familiar horror archetypes used in classic films and reused through the decades represent the dangers of failing to respect existing social boundaries. The once-commonplace mad scientist tended to be someone who brought about destruction and his own violent downfall because he tampered in areas that were seen as God’s domain. There is also no shortage of stories in which the thing that begins the horror is a transgression against traditional religion by way of experimenting with the occult.
Vampires are avowedly godless creatures, as well as being sexually provocative and often tempting women to adultery. As the archetype developed it came to more frequently represent homosexuality at the same time that homosexuality in American culture was becoming more visible while still being far from mainstream acceptance. The Lost Boys remains perhaps the most famous example of vampirism/wizardry as gay/AIDS metaphor, if you watch it closely.
From the same era, the film Fright Night contains several scenes that transparently depict the vampire as a sexual predator. He pursues an underage boy and girl to a nightclub in one scene and engages in a sexual dance with the girl, hypnotizing her with his eyes so that she goes to him of her own accord before breaking away and falling to her knees while crying in what could just as well be a show of shame as fear. Later he similarly draws in a young adolescent boy, softly reassuring him that he’ll be happy as a vampire before embracing him beneath the cover of his cape and calling to mind the often repeated image of the vampire bite as sexual penetration. The victim then becomes transformed into someone who dresses differently and takes pleasure in destruction and crime.
The monster in Fright Night is thus a man who corrupts the youth, which would not necessarily be conservative were it not for certain other indicators. The first thing that arouses suspicion about the antagonist is that when he moves into the neighborhood, he is unmarried and lives with another man. Pederasty aside, the aspects of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity in the character are evidently not incidental, but part of what is supposed to make him psychologically threatening. Also of note is the fact that one of the protagonists is a much older, solitary man who develops a bizarrely close relationship with the main protagonist, another young, male teenager. This suggests to me the flawed message that an older, desexualized, presumably more conservative male character is implicitly more trustworthy than the one who is viscerally alluring.
Werewolves, of course, are a way of presenting the more broadly-conceived threat of unrestrained impulses. This also does not specifically need to be conservative, although the more conservative person will be more likely to utilize that archetype, by virtue of attaching a greater sense of value to sexual and social stability, to civilization as directly opposed to nature, and to property rights.
That latter consideration calls to mind the observation that certain films do not utilize archetypes that have any inherent socio-political meaning, but still deliver a conservative message. The Changeling, for instance, is an exceptionally well-executed haunted house film, and ultimately turns out to be one long statement about the importance of inheritance rights.
The original Saw I take to be liberal film, on some level. The killer’s motivation is to see that his victims glimpse the starkest possible reality of their own vices, which somewhat plays into my earlier essay about the role of horror and the possible link between liberalism and appreciation of the genre. However, Jigsaw evidently isn’t interested in getting those who play his games to recognize unpleasant truths out in the rest of society; he only makes them confront their own flaws. That makes it seem like he’s horrifically advancing the old conservative talking point of “personal responsibility,” demanding that these people overcome their shortcomings by sheer force of will.
Of course, one can never assume that a writer agrees with the views of his characters, so it could just as well be that Jigsaw is meant to represent the horror of overzealous commitment to enforcing the personal responsibility of others. However, the scene featuring the woman who survived one of his earlier games suggests otherwise, in that she herself insists that Jigsaw helped her to overcome her drug addiction. Though nobody in their right mind would approve of his methods, it may be that the audience is meant to come away from the film thinking highly of the idea behind them, which is evidently that social supports don’t work and that those who can’t fix their problems on their own deserve to be consumed by them.
Of course, a sense of justification pervades an awful lot of horror. The audience is frequently offered the suggestion that the victims somehow deserve their fate. Though the awfulness of their deaths is beyond the pale, it is often suggested that the protagonists have done something wrong and that the events of the film constitute a trial by fire for them. This plays into what may be at once the subtlest and most significant conservative horror trope: a sense of cosmic leveling.
This too is natural. It’s hard to write or expect an audience to relate to something that’s so bleak as to deliver a gruesome death to an educated, down-on-her luck, virginal charity volunteer. We want to believe that there’s at least something that causes another person’s death or pain to make a little bit of sense. Nobody wants bad things to happen to good people for no reason, but in my estimation one difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals lament that that such things do happen, and conservatives steadfastly believe that they don’t. From a certain staunchly conservative point of view, if you’re poor, it’s probably because you didn’t work hard enough; if you’re sad, it’s probably because you don’t go to church; if you get hacked up by the campus psycho killer, it’s probably because you had sex out of wedlock.
In this sense, even horror films with didactic liberal messages, like Cannibal Holocaust, have a conservative philosophical bent, insofar as they identify completely internal causes for many of the terrors that people are forced to face. I would expect a more distinctly liberal horror film to allow terrible things to happen to its characters without excessively rationalizing them. I have great respect for films that are bold enough to allow bad things to happen to good people, because that it what happens in reality. Indeed, that is the worst of what happens in reality, and representing and bringing people face-to-face with that should be the highest aspiration of horror.
Still, I absolutely love some horror stories that have distinctly conservative themes. In addition to just being scary or generally well-structured, they often put on display the kernel of truth that lies behind some conservative thinking. And that in itself can be quite scary.
Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Friday, October 28, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
In Defense of William Castle
I’ve had to spend an unusual amount of time with my mother lately. Yesterday, when we were driving together back towards my home, my mind frequently returning to the thought that it’s almost Halloween, I asked her if she remembered any particularly noteworthy horror films from her generation that I might have missed.
I have no idea what it will be like to try to remember childhood when I’m fifty-six years old. She sort of struggled to drag some old memories to the surface and did a bit of free association. She mentioned The Pit and the Pendulum, and got to wondering about the entire arc of Vincent Price’s career. I mentioned that lately when I think of Vincent Price one of the first films that comes to mind is The Tingler. Mentioning the title evidently opened up a flood of memories for her, and though she didn’t give much detail she seemed to vividly recall having watched the film in her youth.
The Tingler came out in 1959, so either my mother is manufacturing the memory, or she saw it in some sort of re-release, or else her older sister took a four-year old child to an interactive horror movie, but my mother claims to have seen The Tingler in a theater complete with the William Castle promotional gimmick.
If true, I am delighted to know that my mother got to have that experience, which must have been exquisite fun – at least for people older than four. I recall, perhaps a year ago, tormenting myself by reading the events list in the New Yorker and seeing that an East Village cinema was going to be having a showing of The Tingler which restored the gimmick, installing joy buzzers in selected seats and, presumably, planting professional screamers in the audience. Oh God how things like that make me desperate to be in New York again. I would have loved to be part of such a wildly interactive cinematic experience. No one promotes or executes anything with such originality.
Am I the only one who genuinely admires William Castle? He seems to be widely laughed at by people who are knowledgeable about the history of film, horror or otherwise. From everything I’ve seen, his promotional gimmicks are remembered as little more than cheap stunts aimed at practically tricking the audience into buying a ticket. But to say the least, I don’t understand why his cheap stunts don’t stand up in most people’s minds against modern studios’ cheap stunts of peddling the same garbage to their customers over and over again.
I don’t think that William Castle had any illusions that he was the next Orson Welles. He wasn’t out to create cinematic masterworks; he directed horror films. And his aim in so doing was seemingly to offer the audience a unique thrill and an hour or so of escapist excitement. Towards that end he was marvelously original, and frankly I wish the popular cinema had taken its cues from him going forward.
Castle directed several 3-D western films for Columbia Pictures in the fifties when 3-D was all the rage. He must have been impressed with the notion of having the film interact with the audience, because he adopted his own various takes on the idea in his horror films later on. The studios had made bank on a fad, and as far as I know only Castle had the personal conviction to take the underlying impulse and adapt it in fresh and creative ways.
Considering the recent surge of new 3-D movies, and my sense that it belies the creativity of film studios and suggests a myopic devotion to fads and groupthink, I believe the film industry would benefit greatly from a new William Castle. As a horror fan, I, for one, would much rather go to see a film and see a hearse parked in front of the theater, as was part of Castle’s first effort, than go there knowing that some of the images are going to pop out of the screen at me. Neither may be particularly scary, but the more original alternative at least aspires to establish an atmosphere that reaches past the space between the screen and my eyes, and gives me a reason to believe that I’ll remember not just the content of the film but the actual experience of going to see it.
In an era of cheap, ubiquitous DVDs, studios ought to be interested in advertising new reasons why people should be interested in going to see a movie in theaters. And in an era of increasingly diminished interpersonal relations, a few gimmicks might accomplish that aim and have a positive social effect as well. When I imagine what a thoughtful promotional gimmick might look like today, I think that it would have the potential to make an original film into the sort of shared experience of fandom that is usually reserved for huge franchises like Star Wars. When I was between the ages of twelve and eighteen, I went to midnight showings of each of the Star Wars prequels. What was especially exciting about that was not so much the films themselves (obviously), but the tail gate party in the parking lot, the sense of community, the unusual awareness that everyone was going into that theater to expand upon an experience that had already begun for each of us.
If a modern horror film had a physical skeleton swinging over the audience, or allowed different members of the audience to see different things on screen depending on which glasses they were wearing, or let the viewers choose how the film ends while still watching it, as were all William Castle gimmicks, those in attendance would be aware of their relationship with audience as well as with the movie, and that might give them a reason to not wait for the movie to come out on Netflix.
William Castle single-handedly made movies more than just pictures on (and sometimes leaping off) a screen. Why do we make fun of that? Why did we decide that it was an idea not worth revisiting for forty-six years and counting?
I have no idea what it will be like to try to remember childhood when I’m fifty-six years old. She sort of struggled to drag some old memories to the surface and did a bit of free association. She mentioned The Pit and the Pendulum, and got to wondering about the entire arc of Vincent Price’s career. I mentioned that lately when I think of Vincent Price one of the first films that comes to mind is The Tingler. Mentioning the title evidently opened up a flood of memories for her, and though she didn’t give much detail she seemed to vividly recall having watched the film in her youth.
The Tingler came out in 1959, so either my mother is manufacturing the memory, or she saw it in some sort of re-release, or else her older sister took a four-year old child to an interactive horror movie, but my mother claims to have seen The Tingler in a theater complete with the William Castle promotional gimmick.
If true, I am delighted to know that my mother got to have that experience, which must have been exquisite fun – at least for people older than four. I recall, perhaps a year ago, tormenting myself by reading the events list in the New Yorker and seeing that an East Village cinema was going to be having a showing of The Tingler which restored the gimmick, installing joy buzzers in selected seats and, presumably, planting professional screamers in the audience. Oh God how things like that make me desperate to be in New York again. I would have loved to be part of such a wildly interactive cinematic experience. No one promotes or executes anything with such originality.
Am I the only one who genuinely admires William Castle? He seems to be widely laughed at by people who are knowledgeable about the history of film, horror or otherwise. From everything I’ve seen, his promotional gimmicks are remembered as little more than cheap stunts aimed at practically tricking the audience into buying a ticket. But to say the least, I don’t understand why his cheap stunts don’t stand up in most people’s minds against modern studios’ cheap stunts of peddling the same garbage to their customers over and over again.
I don’t think that William Castle had any illusions that he was the next Orson Welles. He wasn’t out to create cinematic masterworks; he directed horror films. And his aim in so doing was seemingly to offer the audience a unique thrill and an hour or so of escapist excitement. Towards that end he was marvelously original, and frankly I wish the popular cinema had taken its cues from him going forward.
Castle directed several 3-D western films for Columbia Pictures in the fifties when 3-D was all the rage. He must have been impressed with the notion of having the film interact with the audience, because he adopted his own various takes on the idea in his horror films later on. The studios had made bank on a fad, and as far as I know only Castle had the personal conviction to take the underlying impulse and adapt it in fresh and creative ways.
Considering the recent surge of new 3-D movies, and my sense that it belies the creativity of film studios and suggests a myopic devotion to fads and groupthink, I believe the film industry would benefit greatly from a new William Castle. As a horror fan, I, for one, would much rather go to see a film and see a hearse parked in front of the theater, as was part of Castle’s first effort, than go there knowing that some of the images are going to pop out of the screen at me. Neither may be particularly scary, but the more original alternative at least aspires to establish an atmosphere that reaches past the space between the screen and my eyes, and gives me a reason to believe that I’ll remember not just the content of the film but the actual experience of going to see it.
In an era of cheap, ubiquitous DVDs, studios ought to be interested in advertising new reasons why people should be interested in going to see a movie in theaters. And in an era of increasingly diminished interpersonal relations, a few gimmicks might accomplish that aim and have a positive social effect as well. When I imagine what a thoughtful promotional gimmick might look like today, I think that it would have the potential to make an original film into the sort of shared experience of fandom that is usually reserved for huge franchises like Star Wars. When I was between the ages of twelve and eighteen, I went to midnight showings of each of the Star Wars prequels. What was especially exciting about that was not so much the films themselves (obviously), but the tail gate party in the parking lot, the sense of community, the unusual awareness that everyone was going into that theater to expand upon an experience that had already begun for each of us.
If a modern horror film had a physical skeleton swinging over the audience, or allowed different members of the audience to see different things on screen depending on which glasses they were wearing, or let the viewers choose how the film ends while still watching it, as were all William Castle gimmicks, those in attendance would be aware of their relationship with audience as well as with the movie, and that might give them a reason to not wait for the movie to come out on Netflix.
William Castle single-handedly made movies more than just pictures on (and sometimes leaping off) a screen. Why do we make fun of that? Why did we decide that it was an idea not worth revisiting for forty-six years and counting?
Monday, October 17, 2011
Blood and Guts on AMC
It is quite amazing to recognize the cultural changes that one misses in absence of television. As much potential detriment as there is in the medium, there is no denying that it keeps a person terrifically connected to the world around them. The pattern of my life thus far seems to indicate longer and longer periods of time effectively divorced from that window into pop culture, the current one being something like three years and counting. I know that if I ever have cable hooked up again it will be like witnessing the creation of a new and alien world.
I visited with my mother last night. Doing so gives me an opportunity to have a fleeting glimpse of that creation, so I scrolled through the program guide while she was in another room. The funny thing about being online but unhooked from the more structured media is that you get very incomplete, selective exposure to certain examples of what is on television and in theaters. You see the things that are being marketed to internet audiences in particular, that are just being marketed heavily, or that are tailored to your search results and browsing history. I’m not sure why I was aware of AMC’s The Walking Dead, but it had come to my attention from time to time. I’m not sure whether the marketing was why I decided to flick it on when I saw that AMC was running a marathon in advance of the second season premiere.
I am an extraordinary fan of the Romero Dead films, and I appreciate the zombie apocalypse genre in general, although that is apparently extremely commonplace in my generation. So I was curious to see what the series was like, especially since I thought it odd that the idea of a television series in that genre had been conceived, green lit, and widely promoted. It might seem tactless to use my fifty-six year-old mother’s television to investigate that curiosity, and that certainly was on my mind as I tuned the cable box to AMC, but I really just wanted to catch a glimpse of the show until my mother and I shared a meal and found something more suitable to keep in the background as we talked. Imagine my surprise, then, when after I returned the remote control to her we spent three and a half hours watching The Walking Dead together.
So the resolution of my curiosity was that the show is quite good. Most significantly, I was impressed that a television show inspired by the popularity of the zombie apocalypse story wasn’t simply all zombies all the time. Considering that the show has started a second season, I am pleased to know that the audience for it is sufficiently interested in the human drama that takes place within the setting. That in concert with the action and violence keeps the show genuinely engaging, and at least broad enough in appeal to draw in my fifty-six year-old mother. Nevertheless, I’m sure that most of the committed viewers are tuning in for the fast-paced bits and the bloodshed, and boy are they getting what they came for.
And that brings me to the subject of what I found surprising about reconnecting in this way to a landscape of television media with which I had lost most contact. I was acutely shocked by the amount of graphic gore was depicted right on screen. When did they start allowing buckets of blood and human entrails on basic cable? The television programing that I remember from my childhood and adolescence was subject to pretty rigorous censorship boards. Did they all disband in the mid-2000s, and I just missed the press release?
I’m not exactly complaining. I was never shocked by gore, although I don’t see any appeal when it’s used for no further purpose. And obviously I’m not paranoid enough to think that the sight of fake blood will make children who are watching the wrong channel before bed turn into animal-mangling sociopaths. Still, the element of society that does believe such things had been strong for quite some time. Isn’t there tremendous backlash from them against such uninhibited violence on American television screens?
I think the censorship of the effects of violence is silly at best, and perhaps even counter-productive to the cause of improving society’s sensibilities, but America has always been bizarrely Puritan. Without having been able to adeptly track the changes over the past several years, this seems to me like a pretty dramatic cultural shift. I own several seasons of Tales from the Crypt, which was originally broadcast on HBO, and I am having a hard time thinking of anything from that series that came close to the amount of blood that I saw when, for instance, two characters cut open the abdomen of a zombie they’d just killed on The Walking Dead. By the new standards that I’m suddenly coming aware of, even the edgy, uncensored premium channels were coddling us in the 90s and the earlier 2000s.
All I want to know is when did that stop, and how did I miss this significant breaking point in the American media’s tolerance for graphic public displays of blood and carnage? It seems powerfully abrupt to me since I’m looking at still pictures rather than movies, but such a thing could never have been especially subtle, right?
I visited with my mother last night. Doing so gives me an opportunity to have a fleeting glimpse of that creation, so I scrolled through the program guide while she was in another room. The funny thing about being online but unhooked from the more structured media is that you get very incomplete, selective exposure to certain examples of what is on television and in theaters. You see the things that are being marketed to internet audiences in particular, that are just being marketed heavily, or that are tailored to your search results and browsing history. I’m not sure why I was aware of AMC’s The Walking Dead, but it had come to my attention from time to time. I’m not sure whether the marketing was why I decided to flick it on when I saw that AMC was running a marathon in advance of the second season premiere.
I am an extraordinary fan of the Romero Dead films, and I appreciate the zombie apocalypse genre in general, although that is apparently extremely commonplace in my generation. So I was curious to see what the series was like, especially since I thought it odd that the idea of a television series in that genre had been conceived, green lit, and widely promoted. It might seem tactless to use my fifty-six year-old mother’s television to investigate that curiosity, and that certainly was on my mind as I tuned the cable box to AMC, but I really just wanted to catch a glimpse of the show until my mother and I shared a meal and found something more suitable to keep in the background as we talked. Imagine my surprise, then, when after I returned the remote control to her we spent three and a half hours watching The Walking Dead together.
So the resolution of my curiosity was that the show is quite good. Most significantly, I was impressed that a television show inspired by the popularity of the zombie apocalypse story wasn’t simply all zombies all the time. Considering that the show has started a second season, I am pleased to know that the audience for it is sufficiently interested in the human drama that takes place within the setting. That in concert with the action and violence keeps the show genuinely engaging, and at least broad enough in appeal to draw in my fifty-six year-old mother. Nevertheless, I’m sure that most of the committed viewers are tuning in for the fast-paced bits and the bloodshed, and boy are they getting what they came for.
And that brings me to the subject of what I found surprising about reconnecting in this way to a landscape of television media with which I had lost most contact. I was acutely shocked by the amount of graphic gore was depicted right on screen. When did they start allowing buckets of blood and human entrails on basic cable? The television programing that I remember from my childhood and adolescence was subject to pretty rigorous censorship boards. Did they all disband in the mid-2000s, and I just missed the press release?
I’m not exactly complaining. I was never shocked by gore, although I don’t see any appeal when it’s used for no further purpose. And obviously I’m not paranoid enough to think that the sight of fake blood will make children who are watching the wrong channel before bed turn into animal-mangling sociopaths. Still, the element of society that does believe such things had been strong for quite some time. Isn’t there tremendous backlash from them against such uninhibited violence on American television screens?
I think the censorship of the effects of violence is silly at best, and perhaps even counter-productive to the cause of improving society’s sensibilities, but America has always been bizarrely Puritan. Without having been able to adeptly track the changes over the past several years, this seems to me like a pretty dramatic cultural shift. I own several seasons of Tales from the Crypt, which was originally broadcast on HBO, and I am having a hard time thinking of anything from that series that came close to the amount of blood that I saw when, for instance, two characters cut open the abdomen of a zombie they’d just killed on The Walking Dead. By the new standards that I’m suddenly coming aware of, even the edgy, uncensored premium channels were coddling us in the 90s and the earlier 2000s.
All I want to know is when did that stop, and how did I miss this significant breaking point in the American media’s tolerance for graphic public displays of blood and carnage? It seems powerfully abrupt to me since I’m looking at still pictures rather than movies, but such a thing could never have been especially subtle, right?
Friday, October 14, 2011
October Horror Post #2
I've let almost two weeks lapse since making the first in what was supposed to be a series of posts throughout the month related to the topic of horror. I really need to start getting into the Halloween spirit now.
I am continuing my way through 2008’s Fear Itself television series, and most recently watched the episode “Skin and Bones,” which is by far the best of those that I have now watched. It’s strength rested largely on the makeup effects, as applied to creating an antagonist that was frightful in initially subtle ways. The story is a familiar one, and apparently an increasingly popular one. It is essentially the same as the charmingly bizarre 1999 film, Ravenous, though “Skin and Bones” is executed in a quite different way.
I believe that a part of the latter’s appeal may be attributable to the earnestness of its director, Larry Fessenden. Each episode of Fear Itself has a special feature consisting of interviews with that episode’s director and actors. While several directors thus far have had something interesting to say about horror, its role, and its appeal, Fessenden’s initial commentary is far and away the most striking to me. He says:
“I love horror because it really is just part of my psyche. I think it’s the way my brain in wired. When I walk down the street and I see a fence post, I imagine someone impaled on it. I see life through this filter of real despair and have always had an awareness of death and of the fragility of life. I really think horror is a psychological genre, and people who are drawn to it, I think, have some sort of existential experience with life.”
That notion of imagining horror in mundane contexts is powerfully familiar to me, but I had never really connected it to an affinity for horror as a genre of film or literature. I have, however, considered how it may relate to my strong sense of empathy, my philosophical and spiritual tendencies towards stoicism and asceticism, and my experiential curiosity.
The wiring of my brain may be a bit different from that of Fessenden’s. I don’t have a particularly common tendency to imagine horrible outcomes from a third-person perspective. Rather, there are situations in which I cannot suppress thoughts about the terrible things that could happen to me, and what that would be like. It’s usually associated with the perils of the modern world, though the sight of wild animals may prompt me to imagine, and almost fantasize about being mauled or maimed by them. If I see a hydraulic lift, I immediately and vividly imagine having an arm trapped in it as it lowers. Many such things primarily impress me with the damage they can do, and their practical use is only an afterthought.
Often, my psychological focus almost rises to the level of impulse. I visited my former employer recently, and he showed me a bowl cutter that he had recently gotten running. It is an extremely old item and has no safety catch, so the blades can be turned when the lid is raised and they are completely exposed. He gleefully demonstrated its operation, and I stared at the whirring blades and felt as though I was willfully denying the impulse to reach out towards them. I actually have a certain sense of fear when I use dangerous hardware, because I worry that I might injure myself intentionally should my conscious mind forget to safeguard me against my id, or whatever it is that acts against the basic instinct for self-preservation.
I’m not sure why my mind works this way. I know I am not alone in it, given Fessenden’s comments and given the fact that my ex-girlfriend, for one, attested to the same tendencies. But I’m equally certain that it is not common enough to be called ordinary. But maybe those who do have such vividly dark imaginations have other things in common as well. Maybe an appreciation of the artistic depiction of such unsavory fantasies is one of them.
Something that actually frustrates me about modern horror fandom is that audiences seem to have a distinct lack of empathy. So much of the most popular horror is better identified as “torture porn,” and the people who love it seem to be indulging in pure, base voyeurism. I worry that a lot of theater-goers are more prone to put themselves in the position of the perpetrator or horror, rather than the victim. I may be misjudging them, though. It may be that they still find the things on screen to be genuinely disturbing, but that that registers and is expressed differently.
Ultimately, I can only speak for myself, and what I’d say to defend my interest in material that is shocking or just psychologically or thematically dark is that I want to be disturbed by what I’m seeing. I want to vicariously put myself in the place of someone who is fleeing for his life, suffering torments, going insane, and so on. The fact is that horrible things really do happen every day. And I hate the feeling of being insulated from them, of being trapped in my personal fantasy world of relative comfort and pleasure.
When the real world as I experience it is such a fantasy, I compensate by seeking out the fantasies that stretch to the opposite extreme and depict extraordinary fear and hardship. In one case that may be watching a scary movie, and in another it may be simply imagining what it would be like if my hand got caught in the meat grinder. And in other cases, it might be having a long conversation with a person suffering from multiple personality disorder, or pausing to give a little money to a homeless person, or volunteering, or fasting. There is real horror in the world, and I believe that by keeping myself distant from it, I would be keeping myself distant from a vast segment of reality, as well as from an awareness of the suffering that maybe, someday I will be able to alleviate.
That last consideration raises what could be an interesting question: I wonder if anybody has every analyzed the political leanings of movie-going audiences. It seems like there could be some basis for believing that people who are more interested in observing horror, or reading about it, might also be more inclined to be politically liberal. A basic difference between liberalism and conservatism, as I see it, is that liberalism focuses on the improvements that are still needed in the world, while conservatism sees only the improvements that are already behind us, and disregards the possibility of negative consequences or ongoing mistakes. Put more simply, liberalism is acutely aware of the horror in the world, and conservatism denies it. It would make sense if people who have a psychological impulse to observe or imagine personal horrors also have a social interest in collective horrors.
Although, that would make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that so much of the horror that I consider to be the best has such decidedly conservative themes. And I think that may make a good topic for my next post on the general subject of horror.
I am continuing my way through 2008’s Fear Itself television series, and most recently watched the episode “Skin and Bones,” which is by far the best of those that I have now watched. It’s strength rested largely on the makeup effects, as applied to creating an antagonist that was frightful in initially subtle ways. The story is a familiar one, and apparently an increasingly popular one. It is essentially the same as the charmingly bizarre 1999 film, Ravenous, though “Skin and Bones” is executed in a quite different way.
I believe that a part of the latter’s appeal may be attributable to the earnestness of its director, Larry Fessenden. Each episode of Fear Itself has a special feature consisting of interviews with that episode’s director and actors. While several directors thus far have had something interesting to say about horror, its role, and its appeal, Fessenden’s initial commentary is far and away the most striking to me. He says:
“I love horror because it really is just part of my psyche. I think it’s the way my brain in wired. When I walk down the street and I see a fence post, I imagine someone impaled on it. I see life through this filter of real despair and have always had an awareness of death and of the fragility of life. I really think horror is a psychological genre, and people who are drawn to it, I think, have some sort of existential experience with life.”
That notion of imagining horror in mundane contexts is powerfully familiar to me, but I had never really connected it to an affinity for horror as a genre of film or literature. I have, however, considered how it may relate to my strong sense of empathy, my philosophical and spiritual tendencies towards stoicism and asceticism, and my experiential curiosity.
The wiring of my brain may be a bit different from that of Fessenden’s. I don’t have a particularly common tendency to imagine horrible outcomes from a third-person perspective. Rather, there are situations in which I cannot suppress thoughts about the terrible things that could happen to me, and what that would be like. It’s usually associated with the perils of the modern world, though the sight of wild animals may prompt me to imagine, and almost fantasize about being mauled or maimed by them. If I see a hydraulic lift, I immediately and vividly imagine having an arm trapped in it as it lowers. Many such things primarily impress me with the damage they can do, and their practical use is only an afterthought.
Often, my psychological focus almost rises to the level of impulse. I visited my former employer recently, and he showed me a bowl cutter that he had recently gotten running. It is an extremely old item and has no safety catch, so the blades can be turned when the lid is raised and they are completely exposed. He gleefully demonstrated its operation, and I stared at the whirring blades and felt as though I was willfully denying the impulse to reach out towards them. I actually have a certain sense of fear when I use dangerous hardware, because I worry that I might injure myself intentionally should my conscious mind forget to safeguard me against my id, or whatever it is that acts against the basic instinct for self-preservation.
I’m not sure why my mind works this way. I know I am not alone in it, given Fessenden’s comments and given the fact that my ex-girlfriend, for one, attested to the same tendencies. But I’m equally certain that it is not common enough to be called ordinary. But maybe those who do have such vividly dark imaginations have other things in common as well. Maybe an appreciation of the artistic depiction of such unsavory fantasies is one of them.
Something that actually frustrates me about modern horror fandom is that audiences seem to have a distinct lack of empathy. So much of the most popular horror is better identified as “torture porn,” and the people who love it seem to be indulging in pure, base voyeurism. I worry that a lot of theater-goers are more prone to put themselves in the position of the perpetrator or horror, rather than the victim. I may be misjudging them, though. It may be that they still find the things on screen to be genuinely disturbing, but that that registers and is expressed differently.
Ultimately, I can only speak for myself, and what I’d say to defend my interest in material that is shocking or just psychologically or thematically dark is that I want to be disturbed by what I’m seeing. I want to vicariously put myself in the place of someone who is fleeing for his life, suffering torments, going insane, and so on. The fact is that horrible things really do happen every day. And I hate the feeling of being insulated from them, of being trapped in my personal fantasy world of relative comfort and pleasure.
When the real world as I experience it is such a fantasy, I compensate by seeking out the fantasies that stretch to the opposite extreme and depict extraordinary fear and hardship. In one case that may be watching a scary movie, and in another it may be simply imagining what it would be like if my hand got caught in the meat grinder. And in other cases, it might be having a long conversation with a person suffering from multiple personality disorder, or pausing to give a little money to a homeless person, or volunteering, or fasting. There is real horror in the world, and I believe that by keeping myself distant from it, I would be keeping myself distant from a vast segment of reality, as well as from an awareness of the suffering that maybe, someday I will be able to alleviate.
That last consideration raises what could be an interesting question: I wonder if anybody has every analyzed the political leanings of movie-going audiences. It seems like there could be some basis for believing that people who are more interested in observing horror, or reading about it, might also be more inclined to be politically liberal. A basic difference between liberalism and conservatism, as I see it, is that liberalism focuses on the improvements that are still needed in the world, while conservatism sees only the improvements that are already behind us, and disregards the possibility of negative consequences or ongoing mistakes. Put more simply, liberalism is acutely aware of the horror in the world, and conservatism denies it. It would make sense if people who have a psychological impulse to observe or imagine personal horrors also have a social interest in collective horrors.
Although, that would make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that so much of the horror that I consider to be the best has such decidedly conservative themes. And I think that may make a good topic for my next post on the general subject of horror.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Happy October!
It’s October, and thus my favorite holiday season. I put up my Halloween decorations today, and I’d already made sure to move exclusively horror to the top of my Netflix queue. (Yes, I’m keeping Netflix for now.) I intend to make at least a few posts over the course of the month analyzing horror and horror fandom. I had watched something from the genre the other night when it occurred to me that there is a lot I still don’t understand about the topic.
I’ve never thought that horror was just about a voyeuristic impulse to watch people die and to revel in things that are supposed to disturb. I usually tend to feel that the best horror is that which twists the fabric of reality. I am sort of haughty in my appreciation of horror film, radio, and literature, despite the fact that horror is presumably viewed as the genre that broadly requires the least amount of sophistication from its fans. Perhaps my pretension is actually exacerbated by that fact, and by my efforts to place myself in contrast to the riff-raff. I appreciate horror because it prompts the audience to confront things that it finds uncomfortable. Most times, I would say that this particular taste in film that I have stands in contrast to most of my other tastes and behavior. But when I think about it as I am now, I realize that it fits with who I am as perfectly as anything could. It is one of my most dearly held beliefs, perhaps part of my creed, that people should be willing to face up to unpleasant things that that could otherwise turn away from. I enjoy frightening material because you look at despite your impulse to recoil, and that’s training that people could do well to undertake.
But in writing like this, I give the impression that I have a complete account in mind of what the role of horror in society is, and certainly of what appeal and effect it has with me. Yet I realize that I understand these things still less than I thought I understood them. Of course, I believe that what I’ve said above is true. I’ll have more to say about it in coming days, and much to say about other ideas I’ve already considered on the broad topic of horror and perceptions of it. Still, the visceral way in which I respond to the genre sometimes defies my understanding.
After watching a horror film the other night, I took my recycling out to the curb and joyfully absorbed the assault of autumn air. It felt like Halloween-time outside. The sensation of autumn is in some respects very much death-like. And it is one of my favorite sensations in the world. That is a difficult thing to make sense of, even more so than the question of what’s enjoyable about being frightened and watching people in peril, or dying, or at the edge of sanity. Between the feeling of clammy cold in the air outside and the lingering images of ghosts and bloodshed in mind from my evening viewing, there was a bizarre sense of peace about me, and trying to make sense of it afterwards, all I could think was that it might be rather like the peace of death after a terrified struggle against it.
The point is that despite all my tendencies to analyze and critique, I wonder whether people like me who enjoy horror are drawn to it in some part because of a raw psychological desire to stare down our own mortality and find the counter-intuitive pleasure buried in the constant, overwhelming presence of death. There is, after all, and insight into life that is to be gained only by staring straight past it sometimes.
I’ve never thought that horror was just about a voyeuristic impulse to watch people die and to revel in things that are supposed to disturb. I usually tend to feel that the best horror is that which twists the fabric of reality. I am sort of haughty in my appreciation of horror film, radio, and literature, despite the fact that horror is presumably viewed as the genre that broadly requires the least amount of sophistication from its fans. Perhaps my pretension is actually exacerbated by that fact, and by my efforts to place myself in contrast to the riff-raff. I appreciate horror because it prompts the audience to confront things that it finds uncomfortable. Most times, I would say that this particular taste in film that I have stands in contrast to most of my other tastes and behavior. But when I think about it as I am now, I realize that it fits with who I am as perfectly as anything could. It is one of my most dearly held beliefs, perhaps part of my creed, that people should be willing to face up to unpleasant things that that could otherwise turn away from. I enjoy frightening material because you look at despite your impulse to recoil, and that’s training that people could do well to undertake.
But in writing like this, I give the impression that I have a complete account in mind of what the role of horror in society is, and certainly of what appeal and effect it has with me. Yet I realize that I understand these things still less than I thought I understood them. Of course, I believe that what I’ve said above is true. I’ll have more to say about it in coming days, and much to say about other ideas I’ve already considered on the broad topic of horror and perceptions of it. Still, the visceral way in which I respond to the genre sometimes defies my understanding.
After watching a horror film the other night, I took my recycling out to the curb and joyfully absorbed the assault of autumn air. It felt like Halloween-time outside. The sensation of autumn is in some respects very much death-like. And it is one of my favorite sensations in the world. That is a difficult thing to make sense of, even more so than the question of what’s enjoyable about being frightened and watching people in peril, or dying, or at the edge of sanity. Between the feeling of clammy cold in the air outside and the lingering images of ghosts and bloodshed in mind from my evening viewing, there was a bizarre sense of peace about me, and trying to make sense of it afterwards, all I could think was that it might be rather like the peace of death after a terrified struggle against it.
The point is that despite all my tendencies to analyze and critique, I wonder whether people like me who enjoy horror are drawn to it in some part because of a raw psychological desire to stare down our own mortality and find the counter-intuitive pleasure buried in the constant, overwhelming presence of death. There is, after all, and insight into life that is to be gained only by staring straight past it sometimes.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Analysis: Current Film Trailers and Franchises
I tend to be behind the times with respect to pop culture. Given my interests and my aspirations, that probably isn’t good. I took some time to indulge curiosity and watch a few movie trailers for coming attractions today. I confess that I had no idea what was slated for release, so forgive me if I’m talking about old news as if it’s current. But then, doing so is perfectly in keeping with Hollywood’s model for movie making.
Several weeks ago, I was walking by a local movie theater with a friend, and I stopped in my tracks and dragged her in front of the marquee and asked her to look down the list and take note of the pattern. At that time, every movie that was showing save one was a sequel, remake, or part of an existing franchise. And that one exception was just a romantic comedy that in all likelihood followed the exact formula of all of its predecessors. Even the things that don’t carry familiar names sometime appear to build on a franchise.
Observing this week’s trailers, I find that in some instances, film makers succeed in building new appeal into arguably trite concepts, but all too often they attach a dollar amount to something unoriginal and go no further than that.
Paranormal Activity 3
As I said, I have no idea what’s forthcoming on the pop culture scene, so I managed to be surprised to see this trailer on the current list. I thought the first sequel was a silly effort at capitalizing on a title that the studio didn’t believe in in the first place, but made an unexpectedly huge profit on, yet I found the film entertaining on its own merits. It demonstrated a capability for bringing a moderately larger budget to bear on elaborating on the mode of presentation that made the original film so effective. It was by no means as good as that low budget, high-concept original, but it was somewhat visually and atmospherically impressive, as I basically expected of it. What I did not expect, because apparently I am still as naive as a child, was a storyline that leveraged in small roles by the characters from the original, and established an unnecessary and ultimately detrimental prequel to the first film. Somehow I had gotten the impression that the studio was going to do the smart thing and make a sequel that created a franchise on the basis of the visual content and overall character of the films, rather than a conjoined cast and story arc.
The strength of the first Paranormal Activity was never its plot. The story was little more than an escalating series of events, and it was the vicarious experience of those events that made it frightening and engaging. The dialogue about the entity having followed the Katie character throughout her life, and other allusions to her past were interesting, but they did not need to be explained. To the contrary, they simultaneously added elements of mystery and vague explanation, which tied together the various occurrences, but by no means drove the film forward. Paramount Pictures should have recognized that they had a film executive's wet dream on their hands - a franchise to which plot is irrelevant, even to highly analytical people like me. The strength of the film was the creative and intimate presentation of its content, and further films should have carried its name on that basis, rather than on the basis of sharing characters, including an invisible demon.
Why is film and television so averse to the idea of creating conceptual sequels, as opposed to direct ones? Do they think that audiences develop loyalty to franchises on the basis of a personal relationship with the characters, rather than, say, on the basis of their enjoyment of each subsequent film in the series?
I remember when the Fox television series 24 premiered in November of 2001. It was heavily marketed for the gimmick of presenting each episode as one real-time hour in a day that was to span the season. That was so strongly emphasized that it seemed that the show wasn't strictly about about a counter-terrorism operation or anything else. It was about the day during which it took place, and audiences were expected to be interested on the basis of the unique presentation of the sequence of events. That is, that was expected to be the source of interest for two or three episodes, after which Jack Bauer, his family, the soon-to-be president and other identifiably participants in the storyline were the only thing that was expected to bring the audience back next week and next season.
But I recall thinking that that show would have presented an excellent opportunity to introduce new characters and news situations with each season that the show was renewed. If we were allowed to continue thinking that the reason for the show was to present each tense hour in a fraught twenty-four hour period, it might have provided a marvelous opportunity for the studio to offer the audience fresh new material each year under the same brand, while saving money by not having to pay increasingly large salaries to an established cast on a successful show. It might also have made the continued use of the twenty-four hour narrative device markedly more plausible. Instead, we got eight seasons of increasingly familiar and increasingly absurd situations faced by the same Kiefer Sutherland character, each of whose active adventures seem to take place over the course of one sleepless twenty-four hour period.
I still think that show was a missed opportunity to break with the orthodox practice of always keeping as much of the same cast as possible in sequels and renewals, but that wasn't so obviously preferable an option as is the case with Paranormal Activity 3. We don't need to see the characters of the first two films as children. The original storyline will not be benefited by further stripping it of the intrigue of unanswered questions, and trying to add content earlier in the overall story in the hopes that it will be even scarier only serves to make the later events seem dull and almost routine. It would automatically be a better film for leaving these characters behind and letting some other family experience paranormal activity somewhere.
The tired formula of sequels has gotten us accustomed to the ridiculous tendency of the same things to happen repeatedly to exactly the same people, but if there's one franchise-defining series of events that should be common to more than one set of characters, its the act of recording a bunch of weird goings-on in an otherwise normal suburban home. That can scare us no matter who it happens to, and it's more likely to do so if we aren't perplexed by questions about why over the course of twenty years, an entire family that is plagued by recurrent supernatural activity never calls in a bevy of professional exorcists, or goes to a university or media outlet with their absolutely copious amounts of irrefutable video evidence of malevolent ghosts.
The Amazing Spider-Man
I'm still fascinated by the idea of a series reboot coming only ten years after the first entry in the original series. I think this new film looks terrible. After a minute and a half of overreaching melodrama surrounding foundational plot points with which we are already well-familiar, the only genuinely original content that we're introduced to is a special effects cluster fuck that is supposedly intended to wow us visually and make us beg to fork over extra money for 3-D glasses. But since I first saw blind faith in computer generated magic showcased in The Matrix: Reloaded, I've been continually frustrated with the common belief among film makers that they can replace entire segments of a film with animated sequences and expect it to meld seamlessly with footage of real people and locations.
I can be wowed with pure visuals, but this trailer did not cut it for me, and regardless, I need some other reason to see the movie, and I'm certainly not getting that here, especially given the line they thought would provide an excellent final punch to the trailer at the moment that the image of a computer-generated Spider-Man was revealed: "We all have secrets - the ones that we keep from others, and the ones that are kept from us." If you think about it for half a second, that means nothing. It means less than nothing in the context of a Spider-Man story.
Dream House
I cycled through several reactions to this trailer as I was watching it. It is visually compelling from the start, due entirely to cinematography and editing, and it does a fine job of building tension through a skillful use of music, before we have any idea what we're watching. But at about fifty seconds in, I am convinced that what I'm watching is a preview for a new take on The Amityville Horror. It's that tried and true plot about a house that is so haunted by its dark legacy that it unseats the sanity of its new occupant. The similarity grows for thirty seconds up to the confrontation of the protagonist with the image of a perpetrator that looks just like him, but then this film leaps in another direction by saying that they actually are the same person and making the protagonist's conflict curve around uncertainty about what is real.
It remains grounded in an extremely familiar concept - the house with a repeating history, which terrorizes a tight-knit family, the struggle of the head of household to retain (or perhaps forfeit in this case) sanity. There is still that shouted emphasis, "There's something wrong with this house!" It builds on established tropes, but it may just build on them in creative and satisfying ways. I'd be interested to see this film. It may give me hope that Hollywood is capable of being original within the context of its love of repetition. But I worry that the best it can be is the exception to the rule.
Several weeks ago, I was walking by a local movie theater with a friend, and I stopped in my tracks and dragged her in front of the marquee and asked her to look down the list and take note of the pattern. At that time, every movie that was showing save one was a sequel, remake, or part of an existing franchise. And that one exception was just a romantic comedy that in all likelihood followed the exact formula of all of its predecessors. Even the things that don’t carry familiar names sometime appear to build on a franchise.
Observing this week’s trailers, I find that in some instances, film makers succeed in building new appeal into arguably trite concepts, but all too often they attach a dollar amount to something unoriginal and go no further than that.
Paranormal Activity 3
As I said, I have no idea what’s forthcoming on the pop culture scene, so I managed to be surprised to see this trailer on the current list. I thought the first sequel was a silly effort at capitalizing on a title that the studio didn’t believe in in the first place, but made an unexpectedly huge profit on, yet I found the film entertaining on its own merits. It demonstrated a capability for bringing a moderately larger budget to bear on elaborating on the mode of presentation that made the original film so effective. It was by no means as good as that low budget, high-concept original, but it was somewhat visually and atmospherically impressive, as I basically expected of it. What I did not expect, because apparently I am still as naive as a child, was a storyline that leveraged in small roles by the characters from the original, and established an unnecessary and ultimately detrimental prequel to the first film. Somehow I had gotten the impression that the studio was going to do the smart thing and make a sequel that created a franchise on the basis of the visual content and overall character of the films, rather than a conjoined cast and story arc.
The strength of the first Paranormal Activity was never its plot. The story was little more than an escalating series of events, and it was the vicarious experience of those events that made it frightening and engaging. The dialogue about the entity having followed the Katie character throughout her life, and other allusions to her past were interesting, but they did not need to be explained. To the contrary, they simultaneously added elements of mystery and vague explanation, which tied together the various occurrences, but by no means drove the film forward. Paramount Pictures should have recognized that they had a film executive's wet dream on their hands - a franchise to which plot is irrelevant, even to highly analytical people like me. The strength of the film was the creative and intimate presentation of its content, and further films should have carried its name on that basis, rather than on the basis of sharing characters, including an invisible demon.
Why is film and television so averse to the idea of creating conceptual sequels, as opposed to direct ones? Do they think that audiences develop loyalty to franchises on the basis of a personal relationship with the characters, rather than, say, on the basis of their enjoyment of each subsequent film in the series?
I remember when the Fox television series 24 premiered in November of 2001. It was heavily marketed for the gimmick of presenting each episode as one real-time hour in a day that was to span the season. That was so strongly emphasized that it seemed that the show wasn't strictly about about a counter-terrorism operation or anything else. It was about the day during which it took place, and audiences were expected to be interested on the basis of the unique presentation of the sequence of events. That is, that was expected to be the source of interest for two or three episodes, after which Jack Bauer, his family, the soon-to-be president and other identifiably participants in the storyline were the only thing that was expected to bring the audience back next week and next season.
But I recall thinking that that show would have presented an excellent opportunity to introduce new characters and news situations with each season that the show was renewed. If we were allowed to continue thinking that the reason for the show was to present each tense hour in a fraught twenty-four hour period, it might have provided a marvelous opportunity for the studio to offer the audience fresh new material each year under the same brand, while saving money by not having to pay increasingly large salaries to an established cast on a successful show. It might also have made the continued use of the twenty-four hour narrative device markedly more plausible. Instead, we got eight seasons of increasingly familiar and increasingly absurd situations faced by the same Kiefer Sutherland character, each of whose active adventures seem to take place over the course of one sleepless twenty-four hour period.
I still think that show was a missed opportunity to break with the orthodox practice of always keeping as much of the same cast as possible in sequels and renewals, but that wasn't so obviously preferable an option as is the case with Paranormal Activity 3. We don't need to see the characters of the first two films as children. The original storyline will not be benefited by further stripping it of the intrigue of unanswered questions, and trying to add content earlier in the overall story in the hopes that it will be even scarier only serves to make the later events seem dull and almost routine. It would automatically be a better film for leaving these characters behind and letting some other family experience paranormal activity somewhere.
The tired formula of sequels has gotten us accustomed to the ridiculous tendency of the same things to happen repeatedly to exactly the same people, but if there's one franchise-defining series of events that should be common to more than one set of characters, its the act of recording a bunch of weird goings-on in an otherwise normal suburban home. That can scare us no matter who it happens to, and it's more likely to do so if we aren't perplexed by questions about why over the course of twenty years, an entire family that is plagued by recurrent supernatural activity never calls in a bevy of professional exorcists, or goes to a university or media outlet with their absolutely copious amounts of irrefutable video evidence of malevolent ghosts.
The Amazing Spider-Man
I'm still fascinated by the idea of a series reboot coming only ten years after the first entry in the original series. I think this new film looks terrible. After a minute and a half of overreaching melodrama surrounding foundational plot points with which we are already well-familiar, the only genuinely original content that we're introduced to is a special effects cluster fuck that is supposedly intended to wow us visually and make us beg to fork over extra money for 3-D glasses. But since I first saw blind faith in computer generated magic showcased in The Matrix: Reloaded, I've been continually frustrated with the common belief among film makers that they can replace entire segments of a film with animated sequences and expect it to meld seamlessly with footage of real people and locations.
I can be wowed with pure visuals, but this trailer did not cut it for me, and regardless, I need some other reason to see the movie, and I'm certainly not getting that here, especially given the line they thought would provide an excellent final punch to the trailer at the moment that the image of a computer-generated Spider-Man was revealed: "We all have secrets - the ones that we keep from others, and the ones that are kept from us." If you think about it for half a second, that means nothing. It means less than nothing in the context of a Spider-Man story.
Dream House
I cycled through several reactions to this trailer as I was watching it. It is visually compelling from the start, due entirely to cinematography and editing, and it does a fine job of building tension through a skillful use of music, before we have any idea what we're watching. But at about fifty seconds in, I am convinced that what I'm watching is a preview for a new take on The Amityville Horror. It's that tried and true plot about a house that is so haunted by its dark legacy that it unseats the sanity of its new occupant. The similarity grows for thirty seconds up to the confrontation of the protagonist with the image of a perpetrator that looks just like him, but then this film leaps in another direction by saying that they actually are the same person and making the protagonist's conflict curve around uncertainty about what is real.
It remains grounded in an extremely familiar concept - the house with a repeating history, which terrorizes a tight-knit family, the struggle of the head of household to retain (or perhaps forfeit in this case) sanity. There is still that shouted emphasis, "There's something wrong with this house!" It builds on established tropes, but it may just build on them in creative and satisfying ways. I'd be interested to see this film. It may give me hope that Hollywood is capable of being original within the context of its love of repetition. But I worry that the best it can be is the exception to the rule.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Getting Off
In one of the lighter pieces posted over the weekend at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz writes about bad films, and describes Sex and the City 2 as "wealth porn." I think that could prove to be a very valuable phrase, if used widely, and I am frankly upset that I hadn't thought of it on my own yet.
I have long described many modern so-called horror films as being better identified as part of the "torture porn" genre, and I am hopeful that a tasteful viewing audience will start to catch onto the distinction and recognize that horror doesn't need to driven solely by gore and shock value. As a horror fan myself, I think it does a disservice to the genre to let the likes of the Saw sequels and Hostel, which are much more prominent, but have a very particular appeal, define horror. I like the term "torture porn" because it makes clear what the focus of the film is, whereas horror, on my conception, might not aim for disgust in its presentation, but rather atmosphere, and may possess a story that strive to shock, to startle, to amplify an audience's fears by logically presenting the threat of a subject, or to instill the subtle, creeping atmosphere of dread or nightmare.
I also like the term "torture porn" because it's disdainful to the specific sub-category of horror that I think of as pandering to the lowest common denominator. Despite changing attitudes, "porn" is still a pejorative word, and attaching it to anything serves to suggest an exploitative impulse, and an utter lack of nuance. Individual instances of torture porn may have other merits to them, but in general, I think people watch such films as ways of indulging their most base impulses without reflection, whether that means putting themselves in the role of the victim, or imagining themselves experiencing a pain they could never really experience, or just participating in anything that's seen as pushing the envelope and abutting with polite society. Giving it a more specific name than "horror" helps to bring all of this out into the open, and hopefully prompts a bit of the reflection that is otherwise conspicuously lacking.
"Wealth porn" is a phrase that can aspire to the same effect on a different class of media, and one that is vastly more commonplace these days. Between Sex and the City, celebrity gossip, and the plethora of reality shows that focus their lenses on the obscenely rich, there is a almost ubiquitous impulse among consumers of American media to watch other people enjoying, taking for granted, and wasting the benefits of a privileged existence. It is absolutely right to call it wealth porn, because it shares so much of its appeal with actual pornography, in that it is an escapist fantasy in which other real people are surrogates for your own would-be participation. You can't have wild anonymous sex with the buxom, blonde co-ed who stops by to help you study for your exam, and you can't spend four hundred dollars on dinner for two and then spend the next day hanging out in all the most posh martini bars. So you watch someone else doing it, and you satisfy yourself by forgetting for a little while that you're overweight and lonely, and your gas bill is past due.
Branding is enormously effective in generating breaking points. By terming something - correctly - as porn, we can potentially prompt a handful of people who would tend to have a bit of shame about participating in actual voyeurism to look with a more critical eye on what gives them satisfaction and realize, as they should have realized long ago, that it is an empty sort of satisfaction, completely reliant upon the glorified presentation of something that simply shouldn't be. So let's call everyone who films a "real housewife" or their ilk a wealth pornographer, and understand that by being asked to swallow it as if it's just any other form of entertainment, we're being screwed in a way we ought not accept.
I have long described many modern so-called horror films as being better identified as part of the "torture porn" genre, and I am hopeful that a tasteful viewing audience will start to catch onto the distinction and recognize that horror doesn't need to driven solely by gore and shock value. As a horror fan myself, I think it does a disservice to the genre to let the likes of the Saw sequels and Hostel, which are much more prominent, but have a very particular appeal, define horror. I like the term "torture porn" because it makes clear what the focus of the film is, whereas horror, on my conception, might not aim for disgust in its presentation, but rather atmosphere, and may possess a story that strive to shock, to startle, to amplify an audience's fears by logically presenting the threat of a subject, or to instill the subtle, creeping atmosphere of dread or nightmare.
I also like the term "torture porn" because it's disdainful to the specific sub-category of horror that I think of as pandering to the lowest common denominator. Despite changing attitudes, "porn" is still a pejorative word, and attaching it to anything serves to suggest an exploitative impulse, and an utter lack of nuance. Individual instances of torture porn may have other merits to them, but in general, I think people watch such films as ways of indulging their most base impulses without reflection, whether that means putting themselves in the role of the victim, or imagining themselves experiencing a pain they could never really experience, or just participating in anything that's seen as pushing the envelope and abutting with polite society. Giving it a more specific name than "horror" helps to bring all of this out into the open, and hopefully prompts a bit of the reflection that is otherwise conspicuously lacking.
"Wealth porn" is a phrase that can aspire to the same effect on a different class of media, and one that is vastly more commonplace these days. Between Sex and the City, celebrity gossip, and the plethora of reality shows that focus their lenses on the obscenely rich, there is a almost ubiquitous impulse among consumers of American media to watch other people enjoying, taking for granted, and wasting the benefits of a privileged existence. It is absolutely right to call it wealth porn, because it shares so much of its appeal with actual pornography, in that it is an escapist fantasy in which other real people are surrogates for your own would-be participation. You can't have wild anonymous sex with the buxom, blonde co-ed who stops by to help you study for your exam, and you can't spend four hundred dollars on dinner for two and then spend the next day hanging out in all the most posh martini bars. So you watch someone else doing it, and you satisfy yourself by forgetting for a little while that you're overweight and lonely, and your gas bill is past due.
Branding is enormously effective in generating breaking points. By terming something - correctly - as porn, we can potentially prompt a handful of people who would tend to have a bit of shame about participating in actual voyeurism to look with a more critical eye on what gives them satisfaction and realize, as they should have realized long ago, that it is an empty sort of satisfaction, completely reliant upon the glorified presentation of something that simply shouldn't be. So let's call everyone who films a "real housewife" or their ilk a wealth pornographer, and understand that by being asked to swallow it as if it's just any other form of entertainment, we're being screwed in a way we ought not accept.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Film Comment: Dracula (1979)
Last night, I had the pleasure, for the first time, of watching the 1979 version of Dracula, with Frank Langella in the title role, and Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing. I was quite taken with the stylistic presentation, as well as with the performance of the cast, particularly Langella’s sympathetic portrayal of the Count.
I am rather familiar with the 1992 Dracula film by Francis Ford Coppola, as I first saw it when I was about eight, and now, having seen another version that predates my very life, it does not escape my attention how much the Dracula of my childhood owes to this one. Aspects of the atmosphere and certain shots like the creepy image of Dracula crawling down a wall are reflected from one into the other. And more significantly, the romantic emphasis is present in both, and with it the impulse to humanize the character.
I noticed the interesting choice made in the screenplay for the Langella film, deviating slightly from a well-known line from the iconic 1931 version, which was in turn taken from the book. The original Dracula listens to the baying of wolves and comments, “The children of the night: What music they make!” But in 1979 he says instead, “what sad music they make,” and this prompts a few moments of dialogue during which the humanized vampire expresses melancholy at being unable to walk in the daylight. The scene deftly suggests a Dracula who is an outcast and a tragic character, and more than that, it gives voice to the contrasting impulses and experiences of human existence that are vitally important to understanding the vampire mythos.
It is extremely interesting to me to observe how much art and media has evolved in its treatment of the archetypes that our culture has created and let develop for periods of decades or centuries. The first impulse, I think, is always to give the most simplistic, one-dimensional reading to these things, and so Dracula has traditionally been interpreted as something that is purely and simply evil and threatening, and on that reading, subtext is not a major concern.
The same impulse to simplicity persists today, in the vampire mythos and in all shared folklore. In the case of stories with their genesis vaguely placed in the Dracula story, however, the impulse works towards the exact opposite side of the character, making the archetype exciting and attractive, and forgetting the rest. But the best vampire will always have an element of both: the sexual and the deadly, the thrilling and the terrifying. I think the 1979 version gets the balance of elements almost spot on.
Not all treatments of the character or those of his kind are so thoughtful, however. I daresay very few are. And we’ve had well over a hundred years of Dracula during which to refine the way we perceive him, and centuries more with the folklore on which he is based. I usually thumb my nose at remakes, but there’s something remarkable about culturally shared intellectual property like this story. Part of what’s remarkable about it is that it may take dozens of reinventions of a character or storyline to help us effectively draw out the meaning behind them, and to prompt good dialogue about metaphor and interpretation.
Or, put in a much more derisive way, we really might be so dumb as a culture that it takes us years to turn our interpretative eye toward character development, and many more years of phasing between emphasizing and ignoring it before we reach an intellectual breaking point and recognize that such a thing really is important to the story, no matter how it is otherwise being presented.
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