Suffrage for Goons, Too!!
Prof. M: I can't stand all these 'Gender and Sex Boundaries' students -- they'll all tell you what kinds of things they're learning just so they can say look at me, I'm so edgy, be shocked by my edginess!!
Prof. O: Pshh -- we're philosophers. We killed God. You can't out-edgy us.
Have I told you yet how much I love my department? Yeah, I know, this is probably just the honeymoon phase. But, as weird as this is to say, I'm really amazingly happy with everything I get to learn here, and the people I get to learn from. Going to the semi-formal talks and film screenings the department sponsers has become the highlight of my week, just because I get to sit and listen to the professors banter with each other. In summation, I'm becoming more and more convinced each day that I want to do the PhD route -- not that it's much of a new conviction.
On a completely unrelated side note, I've come up with a General Theory of Horror Movies. This is mostly inspired by The Descent, which I went to see tonight for the sole reason that it was free. If I felt somewhat disillusioned by the end, it should have been expected: the entire movie was an excuse to watch people get eaten. There was absolutely no other point. Not even a plot, really; just an hour of suspense-building until the Gollum/Voldemort lovechildren hear the dinner bell ring, and proceed to feast for the next half hour. (Meanwhile I got to be the pretentious AP Bio kid and say, "What the fuck? Nothing with hips could climb unaided across cave ceilings like that -- you'd have to be all shoulders, fingers, and prehensile feet...not to mention that if you were really that gooey you'd slip right off...") How could this kind of horror genre best be avoided? I decided that lasting disturbment > momentary fright; therefore, nix the monster legions. The Descent could have been a decisively creepier movie without the cave goons; all you'd have to do is play up the tension between the human characters, plus the stress of there's-no-way-out and dwindling supplies (light sources, food, etc.), and then, if you still want a bloodbath, it wouldn't be hard at all to turn the group on itself. People, just by having specific intelligences and personalities, can make such better monsters. And I don't mean "people" like those you'd see in Hostel; those kinds of villains had no character, hence they were the moral equivalent of the slimy cave-mutants. I'd point out instead something like (apologies to those who've already heard this rant from me) The Shining. Jack Torrance, as a character, was a person -- the audience spent a good chunk of introspective time with him before he pulled out the axe, so there's a great deal of difference between him pursuing Danny and faceless goo-men pursuing the spelunking girls.
But then again, I'd venture to say that people generally watch horror movies for reasons of creepy Freudian repression, not for any sort of psychological drama. There's not nearly the amount of moral stigma attached to killing monsters as there is to killing humans; monster-deaths are morally inoffensive. ("Let's see, 5 humans died, but they took down 50 cave-creepies with them -- good work!" as opposed to "Gahh -- my husband's gone on a murderous rampage, but, erk, I can't quite kill him -- I'll just hit him with a bat, is that okay? I don't know, uhmm, let's put him in the pantry for now...")
Where was I going with that? Not too sure. But I want to make a reflexive horror-parody about a group of chickens trying to escape the acknowledgedly gruesome horrors of a factory farm; people would get disgusted and pissed off about it, and they wouldn't quite know why...
Prof. O: Pshh -- we're philosophers. We killed God. You can't out-edgy us.
Have I told you yet how much I love my department? Yeah, I know, this is probably just the honeymoon phase. But, as weird as this is to say, I'm really amazingly happy with everything I get to learn here, and the people I get to learn from. Going to the semi-formal talks and film screenings the department sponsers has become the highlight of my week, just because I get to sit and listen to the professors banter with each other. In summation, I'm becoming more and more convinced each day that I want to do the PhD route -- not that it's much of a new conviction.
On a completely unrelated side note, I've come up with a General Theory of Horror Movies. This is mostly inspired by The Descent, which I went to see tonight for the sole reason that it was free. If I felt somewhat disillusioned by the end, it should have been expected: the entire movie was an excuse to watch people get eaten. There was absolutely no other point. Not even a plot, really; just an hour of suspense-building until the Gollum/Voldemort lovechildren hear the dinner bell ring, and proceed to feast for the next half hour. (Meanwhile I got to be the pretentious AP Bio kid and say, "What the fuck? Nothing with hips could climb unaided across cave ceilings like that -- you'd have to be all shoulders, fingers, and prehensile feet...not to mention that if you were really that gooey you'd slip right off...") How could this kind of horror genre best be avoided? I decided that lasting disturbment > momentary fright; therefore, nix the monster legions. The Descent could have been a decisively creepier movie without the cave goons; all you'd have to do is play up the tension between the human characters, plus the stress of there's-no-way-out and dwindling supplies (light sources, food, etc.), and then, if you still want a bloodbath, it wouldn't be hard at all to turn the group on itself. People, just by having specific intelligences and personalities, can make such better monsters. And I don't mean "people" like those you'd see in Hostel; those kinds of villains had no character, hence they were the moral equivalent of the slimy cave-mutants. I'd point out instead something like (apologies to those who've already heard this rant from me) The Shining. Jack Torrance, as a character, was a person -- the audience spent a good chunk of introspective time with him before he pulled out the axe, so there's a great deal of difference between him pursuing Danny and faceless goo-men pursuing the spelunking girls.
But then again, I'd venture to say that people generally watch horror movies for reasons of creepy Freudian repression, not for any sort of psychological drama. There's not nearly the amount of moral stigma attached to killing monsters as there is to killing humans; monster-deaths are morally inoffensive. ("Let's see, 5 humans died, but they took down 50 cave-creepies with them -- good work!" as opposed to "Gahh -- my husband's gone on a murderous rampage, but, erk, I can't quite kill him -- I'll just hit him with a bat, is that okay? I don't know, uhmm, let's put him in the pantry for now...")
Where was I going with that? Not too sure. But I want to make a reflexive horror-parody about a group of chickens trying to escape the acknowledgedly gruesome horrors of a factory farm; people would get disgusted and pissed off about it, and they wouldn't quite know why...