Holy class warfare, Batman. (Spoilers follow.)
Sidetracked by palimpsests.
If that is in fact the plural.
We’re watching In the Name of the Rose, and the text is in German, and the credit is something like “a palimpsest from Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose“. I don’t assume that it means exactly the same thing as in English, but I can see where a similar meaning could be useful.
A palimpsest, for the record, is a document or part of it–a manuscript page–that has been scraped clean and reused. Wax that was melted or pressed smooth again, vellum that had the top layer (and the ink) scraped off. The idea that there’s a specific word for this always sort of intrigued me. A bit difficult to articulate, but it’s a word for something that once had a characteristic which no longer exists; which is defined by being itself made over again.
There are very few terms for things like that. “Recycled” or “upcycled” focuses on what it is now; “reused” is close, but it’s about what happened to it, not what it was/is.
I don’t think I’m being particularly persuasive; I’m seriously distracted by the movie. It’s a deeply lovely film. Not pretty, it is very good at not being pretty, but it has a lovely depth to the faces and architecture and light and framing.
(I was going to write something about how I’d lost touch with people and how I was okay with that, but I can save that for later. Now I am going to focus properly on the movie.)
This just in…
…and by “this”, I mean “me”. Just got in from the late showing of The Avengers. We were going to the earlier one, but it was sold out, so we all went for dinner and hung out for a bit. And now are home.
Some quick notes, not spoilery:
(1) Much love for Banner. More the more I think about it, actually. I… really bought him. Been there, know that guy.
(2) Heee, the lines.
(3) Liked Loki and Thor much better than in the Thor movie.
But yes. And aside from that, something happened on the way to the movie:
I ran into a friend.
This hasn’t happened in… years?
I mean, I see people, sure. But I don’t meet them by chance–and no, I don’t count meeting a knitting friend that I know from knitting at the knitting store where we both go a fair bit as meeting by chance. Meeting the knitting friend that I know from knitting because she is headed one way after dinner and I am headed the other for a movie and our paths happened to cross? That is meeting by chance.
Nice feeling. Makes this place seem a bit less lonely.
Right. Sleep is in order, now.
Lightning and lightning bugs.
Was thinking of movie commentary in the car this morning, and of Return of the Living Dead, and something that’s been in my head on and off came to mind: Why isn’t there a word that defines what gender you’re attracted to, but doesn’t do so in relation to you?
I mean, the movie has a striptease scene in a graveyard, and part of the commentary (or possibly an interview I read once; regardless) is along the lines of “Yeah, we did this for the guys… If we’d known there would have been so many girls in the audience, we’d have put in eye candy for them too.”
Which is actually kind of nice to hear, but that’s a tangent–what I’m trying to address right now is that the group meeting the definition of “finds women attractive” is not the same as the group that meets the definition of “guys”. (And yes, I get that the movie is nearly thirty years old, I am perfectly aware of colloquial assumptions, I know there is a long habit of going with the “everyone is straight until proven otherwise” assumption, and I think it’s at best a bit of a lazy and horribly erasing habit but that is neither here nor there. So.)
So what is the word or term for people who are attracted to men or women? As humans we tend to label and categorize and articulate; I can’t believe that there hasn’t been a term a little less unwieldy than “straight women and gay men and bisexuals of either any or all genders” created yet. I doubt it’s a perfect term, because one of the other things we tend to do is simplify and generalize, but there has to be something.
And am I completely missing something? Christ knows it’s possible–this knapsack is invisible, but it does one hell of a job as a pair of blinders.
Thoughts?
Edited to note:
The terms exist! They are androphile and gynophile.
Slinking back in.
It’s not much god to say it now, but I’ve been busy. Obviously.
Light of my life got me the new Fright Night on DVD on Saturday. Very pleased.
Way way behind on my TV, partly due to lack of Walking Dead and partly due to Steam and partly due to the holiday crunch. I thought is escaped it, and then wham! But I’m making it through.
Best to any and all of you, and see you, at the latest, on the other side
American Horror Story episode 9
…..aaaaand Ben just became unspeakable.
Given that about five minutes ago Constance turned into one of the more likeable characters on the show, and she hasn’t changed much, this should indicate that the bar is currently set really bloody low. There was a moment where I really felt for Moira, which I don’t usually when she’s been seen by Ben.
*sigh*
It’s touching on the obsessed-over ideals of fame and love pretty well. Really well, actually.
We haven’t seen Violet yet, and only seen Tate for thirty seconds. And I’m feeling sorry for Hayden; I want to smack her, and I think she’s seeing things with a warped perspective, but I’m feeling sorry for her.
Right. Working on finishing up the second half of my reaction to the last two episodes. I think Constance might end up dropping back down to Ben levels of–
Oh holy fucking hell, yay Moira, yay, I am going to keep watching now.
(Even if they are dragging in something in by the heels that makes me hope the writers are screwing around, because in terms of plausibility it’s reminding me of the opening to Deep Blue Sea where the sharks attacked a ship because red wine was spilt into the water. And you know, it’s red stuff spilling through the water! That’s what sets them off, right?)
Meeting a classic.
I’m a bit swamped/sick/exhausted right now, so I’m dusting off some old notes–my initial impressions from watching Night of the Living Dead, the original.
I actually only saw it six years ago–I’d read Russo’s novelization, which pretty near exactly follows the screenplay–and it was interesting to note what does and doesn’t show up. The word “zombie” doesn’t appear; they’re “ghouls”, “flesh-eating ghouls”, or “flesh-eaters”. They’re afraid of fire, and dislike particularly bright light, which never really seems to show up later (although the modern The Walking Dead does mention that walkers seem to be more active after dark). They seem to kill you first and eat you once you’re dead, rather than start chowing down while you’re still warm and screaming as in the later movies. They can use tools, crudely–a couple of them pick up rocks to break windows, and a couple pick up a club or a knife (actually, a trowel, but the intent’s there). This, to my mind, is something Dawn and Day did better than Night; the zombies in them don’t use tools, which makes the slow almost-recognition they display towards certain objects much creepier.
Apparently only the unburied dead rise–the radio broadcast uses that particular adjective at one point–which while it’s fairly conventional is something that’s rarely specified in zombie movies (to the point that I for one hadn’t consciously noticed it before). And the first one you see is pretty quick, although his fine motor control is for shit–he’s walking slowly at first, but he manages a shamble that could match a decent jogging speed for a while chasing Barbara. They’re all stumbling around very slowly by the end of the movie, though. Maybe he was particularly fresh at the beginning, or maybe they just can’t see very well in the dark and move slowly as a result…?
A couple of the events in the movie happen very abruptly; there’s a little dramatic build-up, and then a sudden resolution in which the movie generally does not behave the way polite convention indicates the movie is supposed to behave. It’s not quite disconcerting enough for me to call it shocking, but I think it might have been if I didn’t already know how the movie was going to run, and I sure it would have been if I deeply expected movies to follow polite convention. (If I ever get a week to spare, I’ll sit down with a bunch of mid- and late-sixties horror movies to get into the mindset, and then watch Night of the Living Dead and Westworld and anything else I can find that includes scenes which specifically break with the conventions of the time.)
The actual scenes of the zombies eating were much better than I expected. I thought I’d be interested–this is, after all, pretty much the zombie movie–and maybe a little squicked. It was interesting and squicky.
It was also creepy. I did not expect that. I am glad it happened, though. It was fairly standard presentation, I guess–level, detached shots of humans eating human bits, unflinching presentation of girlfriend gnawing flesh off former boyfriend’s hand, clinical and helpless protrayal of horrific events, uncaring universe, etcetera. (Best example I’ve seen of this is still the end sequence of Hannibal.) The scenes were pretty dark, which is a little unusual and probably helped the creepiness factor, putting together a relatively rare combination of indifferent horror with the viewer’s imagination needing to be involved to identify all the elements of the scene.
(Sidenote: dammit, creepy can’t be that hard to produce if they were doing it in ’68. Why am I not getting more creep in my horror movies? Why am I so often stuck with something that gets a twitch or a yelp or a flinch instead of that feeling that my skin is trying to crawl off my spine so it can leave the room where the scary pictures are showing? Come on.)
On a related note: I need to watch a little more of John Carpenter’s stuff. He’s prone, I think, to very static shots with very little movement in the frame, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s just me anticipating that something will happen that makes this disconcerting, or if he’s actually doing something with the composition of the scenes or the pacing of the movie.
Missing Cassandra.
Happily rewatching the first season of The Walking Dead, which led to my discussing it when I was out with a friend yesterday afternoon. And so the topic of zombies in general entered the discussion, and we circled around and back to it a couple of times, as you do.
Something consciously occurred to me which has never occurred to me before. Back up a bit; I’m going to make a generalization about horror movies, and that generalization is someone knows what is going on. Someone knows the what, and if people in general are beginning to be aware of the what, someone knows the why. There’s a spooky caretaker or a horror movie geek who knows the slasher rules[1] or a PTA conspiracy or a brilliant and insane cannibal[2] who knows the secret.
Because there is a secret.
You don’t get this in zombie movies. There is hardly ever any struggle to figure out what’s happening or desperate effort to explain to people, and when it does show up, it’s a brief thing–a panicked phone call to a disbelieving 911 line or something, lasts maybe forty seconds and then everyone gets back to falling apart or surviving. Because in zombie movies, the how and the why don’t matter, so the secret has no power. It has no weight.
This is rare in horror movies. Combined with the lack of any kind of mystery, you get an utterly mechanical threat–something that is really rare in horror movies. The only thing you need to know about zombies is to shoot them in the head, and that’s not even the kind of thing that you wouldn’t try if you needed to stop a crazed human attacker.
The light of my life makes a fairly convincing argument that the zombie movie is basically a natural-disaster movie. I think he’s right, but until the discussion yesterday I hadn’t begun to actually see what it doesn’t have that most horror movies do. Between the utterly prosaic threat and the ubiquitous spread of same, the element of the unknown is practically non-existent. It’s seeing the situation for what it is that’s truly horrifying–
Huh.
How very Lovecraftian.
—
[1] I love ya, Randy.
[2] Come on, Hannibal Lecter so fits. I didn’t see it for ages, because the setting is so atypical, but he is absolutely the Spooky Stranger Making Pronouncements who Understands the Nature of the Threat and who can tell the protagonists what they need to know to defeat the monster.
Apocalypse as revelation.
Pardon the etymology geekery, here. Apocalypse, broken down to its Greek roots, means revelation (from apo-, “from, away from; after”, and kalyptein, “to cover, conceal”.) So it’s a sudden shocking understanding, a tearing back of the shrouding curtain of ignorance; in Middle English it referred to a sudden vision or insight.
So. Going back to the post about the lack of end-of-the-world movies; half of the ones I listed came with a sudden revelation that cast the events of the movie itself in a different light, and of the two Dead movies, Day had a pretty shocking (within the genre) revelation right around the climax.
I suppose it’s easy to have everything go wrong. But it’s harder to have everything go wrong and have people not feel cheated. Paying attention and following a story and then having the protagonist fail and the things you cared about be undone regardless of your caring about them is annoying. But paying attention and following a story and then having all the little details you picked up and absorbed mean something new and different while the protagonist fails; that can work. It’s a different pay-off; rather than vicarious victory through the story, you get personal understanding of the story. At its best, it’s that brilliant “oh my god, that’s what was happening!” at the end of The Usual Suspects.
I wonder if it’s easier to do in speculative genres because the audience is more prepped to pay attention to details of the setting, so it’s easier to seed things for them to pick up. Or possibly in crime/mystery stories, because the genre invites people to try and figure it out; there’s the expectation of some kind of puzzle, even if it’s not necessarily a world-twisting puzzle.
I suppose the advantage of doing this in stories rather than movies is that people will generally feel like they’ve invested less in a story that suddenly twists to become something different, and are less likely to resent it if they don’t like the change.