Ginger Snaps As Some Sort Of Roundabout Conclusion

And so as our brief class draws to a close, we sit around eating leftover pizza and watching the Canadian horror classic Ginger Snaps to bring this semester to some sort of roundabout conclusion. I discovered this little gem in highschool when some of my more angst-ridden pseudo-goth classmates consumed Ginger Snaps and movies like it with a wide-eyed fervor usually reserved for black eyeliner and new Nine Inch Nails records. This film has obvious cult appeal for any slightly offbeat teenagers starved for popular culture artifacts populated by young people even remotely like them, and like any potent underground teen flick Ginger Snaps offers its core demographic the giddy pleasure of seeing its social outcast protagonists romanticized for rejecting the pressures of conformity and striking defiant counter-culture stances that win them coveted power over their despicably mainstream peers. And so this is pure fantasy escapism for kids who clearly can't relate to American Pie or Never Been Kissed's jock/bimbo binaries and who nevertheless refuse to resign themselves to the traditional Breakfast Club roles of nerd or loser—these are the kids for whom Ghost World represents the greatest cinematic acheivement in American history, and maybe I'm generalizing but I swear I'm not deriding because, hey, these are the teens that wind up infinitely more likable than the She's All That set ever could.

Predicatible demographics aside, I think Ginger Snaps is considerably better constructed than most other horror/slasher films from the past decade and a half, and beyond that I think it's just generally pretty interesting to think about and discuss. Like Joe made clear in class, Ginger Snaps is the go-to film for pedantic film essays about superficial feminist readings and so on, but its obvious menstration allegory, despite hitting you over the head with its point, is still pretty fun. I think it's great that the presenters drew that comparison to Cronenberg's The Fly, because I think it's true that there are a lot of really interesting similarities, even beyond the way that the transformations in both resembled one another. The slow process of deterioration and the initial growth in physical/sexual prowess is echoed, though in a slightly more extreme way (Goldblum's character in The Fly finds he has nearly superhuman physical strength and acrobatic ability before his body begins to lose its human qualities), and where Ginger Snaps sees its transformation as metaphor for menstration and the "transformation" into womanhood, The Fly has been read as an allegory for the AIDS pandemic, where Goldblum's alienation after "catching" his disease seems to echo some of the anxieties over HIV pervading North America in the 80s.

Like Hostel, Battle Royale, River's Edge, Elephant, The Faculty and most especially Bugcrush, Ginger Snaps actualizes extreme anxieties felt by teens and the elder generations, realizing what occassionally feels like semi-satirical interpretations of fears we find deeply rooted in the social discourse about the current state of American youth. Almost all of the films screened this semester take realistic and relevant social concerns to their logical conclusions, offering reasoned critiques of these issues while ironically providing concerned parents and media representatives with further material to condemn in the continued war on the roots of social evils; these films have worthwhile things to say about the state of North American teenagers and their position in a world overrun not simply by actual danger but by a prevailing tendency to fearmonger, and yet the bulk of these productions find themselves dismissed or banned or both.

Dangerous Liasons

I can't stop thinking about Bugcrush. I knew almost nothing about this film prior to yesterday's pre-screening presentation beyond having seen (and being largely underwhelmed by) Carter Smith's debut feature The Ruins (2008), and so my expectations were about as neutral as one can reasonably expect when faced with an obscure arthouse short. And so but: Bugcrush floored me. I've grown accustomed to liking the movies we've been screening in a kind of distanced academic way, in that they're more interesting centres of discussion as products of a broader system, but Bugcrush was the first new film we've screened that I enjoyed on a totally visceral/emotional/psychological/gut level—I was actually kinda giddy walking home last night (and I had more than a little trouble falling asleep later). Whew.

Anyhow, there's a lot going on in Bugrush w/r/t teenage sexuality, both explicitly and metaphorically. I kinda see the movie's narrative thrust—our protagonist's descent into some mysterious and seamy world of pseudo-fantastic drugs and implied gang rape—as an allegory for the sensationalization of vague dangers facing youth. A major theme we've dealt with course-wide is the sense of fear and anxiety cultivated by concerned parents and perpetuated by media (mis-)representations, where social order and a system of traditional moral and ethical values seems perennially threatened by impending collapse. Bugcrush hints at some very basic dangers—substance abuse, sexual deviance, rape (presumably), and gang mentality—before supplanting them with fantastical alternatives. The insects employed as psychoactives represent a mysterious (and fictitious) extreme, standing in not for any specific drug (though the method of use and the eventual scarring share similarities with heroin injection) but simply the idea of dangerous, ambiguous drugs. The film as a whole plays on an enduring but vaguely-defined anxiety permeating the social consciousness of our generation: lurking beneath the surface of any pleasant suburban American veneer is the constant threat of being drugged, raped, and beaten half to death—as a danger it seems to grounded in media-hyped fearmongering to be a legitimate concern for youth, and yet the essence of those fears persists. Bugcrush makes actual just these sorts of hypothetical dangers, magnifying the 'Worst Case Scenario' until it resembles pure fantasy and fiction. If the film is frightening (and it is), it's because its eventual conclusion is so literally incredible. Horror films tend to resonate the most strongly when the extremity of the fiction begins to bleed into our conception of reality—when it starts to feel, even slightly, like possible reality—but Bugcrush takes the opposite approach: the film gets less and less credible as it continues on, building realist tension and dread to a conclusion that's totally surreal.

Undoing Let The Right One In

I suspect most people opted to skip this week's post given that Joe provided the opportunity to anybody who attended the last lecture, but I missed my chance to talk about O and thus need to play catch-up. In any case, I've got quite a bit to say about Let The Right One In and guest-professor Jonathan Hough's interesting lecture, so I don't feel too bad about sitting down to get this done.

Jonathan's lecture described the history of sexual discourse across the four major theorists—Freud, Kinsey, Foucault, and Butler—recognized as having the most significant contribution to contemporary understandings of human sexuality. I have a fairly extensive background in philosophy and theory and have thus studied most of these names at some length, but it was good to have a succinct general overview of each thinker in relation to historical understandings of the subject. I imagine most people are at least vaguely familiar with the Freud and his work on psychoanalysis, particularly anybody's who's taken courses in psychology or film/literary theory, but Jonathan ran through the basic stages of Freud's developmental psychoanalysis for anybody who needed a quick refresher. I am, to be honest, a little less familiar with the work of Kinsey, although I know all about his scale of sexual preference and the cultural importance of his work in terms of explicitly dealing with sexuality (although, as Foucault will argue later, the persisting idea that society silences discussions of sex and sexuality is largely illusory and problematic, but whatever). Who I am intimately familiar with is Foucault (I think I've read all of his primary texts and a handful of essay and interview collections), and so it was a pretty fun getting the opportunity to go through his terrific History Of Sexuality in the lecture. Butler, too, whose work is borne from the groundwork established by Foucault, is a fun read and a good topic of discussion, particularly with regards to gender, sexuality, and performativity.

Let The Right One In is a movie I'd seen late last year and loved immediately, but though I'd not thought of it very deeply in the context of sexuality and gender, watching it again made me realize just how much there is going on in the film implicitly and explicitly as far as both of those subjects are concerned. It's interesting to consider not only the actions and behaviors of our two dramatic leads, Eli and Oskar, in relation to gender performativity and dichotomous sexuality, but also the implications of their (arguably non-sexualized) relationship. As Jonathan discussed at length in his lecture, vampires as a cultural phenomenon have always been ensconsed in charged sexual discourse, and their function in film and literature is traditionally tied to sexual behaviour, and especially deviance, both explicitly and implicitly. The vampire's bite has obvious sexual/phallic overtones (especially w/r/t penetration, notions of dominance and rape, and the intimate nature of the mouth and neck connection), yes, but even the genre's traditional narrative conventions set demure/"innocent"/virginal protagonists against a backdrop of sexually charged and implicitly "active" or predacious vampires. Take the most banal, mainstream vampire flick you can think of—Twilight doesn't count because it's primarily an allegory for mormonism, so let's say Queen Of The Damned or something—and the overwhelming tone is one of lust and deviant passion.

Let The Right One In approaches sexual relationships in two very different ways: the film retains the traditional sexualization of the vampire's bite by investing Eli's infrequent feeding with a sense of criminality and deviance—she avoids killing to feed where possible, and is striken with intense guilt when she finds that she must. But the sexual nature of the attacks is subverted by film's end, when Eli slaughters Oskar's tormentors in order to literally save his life, thereby strengthening their personal bond and bringing their relationship closer to its ideal form: Oskar as giving caretaker and Eli as sheltered deviant. Much has been said about the nature of the relationship between Eli and her elder caretaker, with some critics citing potential pedophilia, but their relationship seems more complex: given the nature of the conclusion, the film seems to suggest that Oskar is taking over the position once held by Eli's previous man, and, more depressingly, that Oskar is headed toward a similar fate. Recall that Eli does not age; it seems likely that her older partner was not so old when they initially found one another. An even more disconcerting reading establishes Eli as a user who replaces her caretaker with a younger model when he continues to prove himself incapable of functioning as her help—when Eli finally climbs into Oskar's bed, agreeing to be his partner, she has just returned from witnessing the end of her former lover's life (and, thus, the end of his function to her).

More interesting still is the sense in which Eli has been conspicuously de-gendered and de-sexualized. On numerous occassions she tells Oskar that she is "not a girl", and when Oskar dares to spy on Eli as she changes into some of his mother's clothes, we're given a brief glimpse of some ambiguous sexual organs and something which looks strikingly like scarring or mutilation. In the novel on which this film is based, Eli's character is explicitly described as a male eunich castrated generations prior—the film seems to divert somewhat from such an extreme revelation, but it remains true that Eli never embraces or fully embodies feminity (or, really, any gender at all). Considered in light of Oskar's relative androgeny (his delicate features, undeveloped body, etc.), the relationship between these children rejects traditional heteronormative readings in favor of something a little more ambiguous.

Hostel Understood

I figured out Hostel: Potential reading: Actualizing underlying American fantasies of conquest and domination in an increasingly Otherized post-9/11 world. Foreigners are fundamentally evil and hate Americans, and it takes a strong, assertive heteronormative masculine figure to disrupt their system of hegemonic power and control w/combative force. Women, by and large, exist to serve two functions: passive bodies upon which you can assert your objective of sexual conquest, and deviously active bodies who will backstab you at any opportunity. Women must, therefore, be fucked thoroughly and killed brutally (both of which happen here). Homosexual men will attempt to literally queer your capacity for active control by forcing their sexual deviance upon you. The only solution is to deflect their advances, reassert your heterosexuality via more sexual conquest, reify heteronormativity, and (ultimately) torture and murder the homosexuals brutally, thereby satiating a personal desire for revenge and satiating a deeper cultural desire for American supremacy through the reinforcing of vengeance policies.

Abject Hostility

Eli Roth's Hostel is a patently ridiculous post-slasher typically cited as the inception of the "torture porn" or "gorno" genre. Hostel is a kind of juvenile exercise in tolerance and excess, making only the grandest and most ridiculous gestures in order to test the audience for what they can accept and digest (and stomach). Roth gets derided in popular film criticism for shooting gore for the sake of gore and for being somehow morally corrupt, but in comparison to a lot of international horror cinemas—most obviously the trendy Asian Extreme pictures from Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea—its violent content is fairly tame. Being that the movie is presented by Quentin Tarantino, and seeing as how Roth posits himself to be a sort of Tarantino underling or disciple, we might consider the presentation of violence in Hostel as comparable to that of Pulp Fiction, where there is an excess of violent acts taking place narratively but very few (if any) taking place explicitly on-screen. For a film ostensibly about torture chambers in Eastern Europe, Hostel really only has one or two extended torture sequences, and most of the torture itself is implied: When our second protagonist falls prey to his torturer, his body is gored with a power drill and his tendons are slashed with a surgical knife, but in neither case do we actually witness these inflictions (instead we see his writhing body and pained face; we fill in the rest mentally); later, when our final surviving protagonist faces a nervous German torturer, he manages to avoid all but one graphic injury—the severing of two of his fingers, which is one of the only explicit injuries shown film-wide. As Marissa mentions in her blog entry on the film, the film's only real explicitly violent and aesthetically excessive sequence involves the removal of a girl's injured eyeball, at which point the violence is so absurdly indulgent as to resemble Tom Savigny splatter stuff—which stuff is typically intended to be more tantalizing and amusing than frightening or shocking.

Curious, then, that Hostel is usually considered in the context of films which break the rule of 'what you don't see is scariest'. Horror, and particularly slashers, liked to build tension in the classical Hitchcockian style: continue to subvert expectations by denying audiences the thrill of actually seeing what they're most scared of seeing, thereby heightening the impact when they actually see it. Hostel, Saw, and the rest of the splat-pack glut get slammed for showing us too much too often, but that's simply not the case: even just structurally, Hostel denies the audience what most probably paid and expected to see for the longest conceivable time, opting to build tension by dangling the expected inevitable for the film's first three quarters.

Marissa talks a fair deal about the subversion of slasher stereotypes and typical conventions in Hostel, with particular regard to its use of men as dramatic leads and primary targets. I think the decision is unusual by the standards of slashers, but it makes good demographic sense: the movie's target audience is young males, who are invited to identify with and live vicariously through the male characters on-screen. The implications of the identification are two-fold: on the one hand, eager young males (presumably, and I am generalizing a little here) identify with the "cool" male leads, hypothetically high-fiving each other in their theatre seats when the bro-tastic crew bang hot chicks and call each other fags. The earlier sequences encourage viewers to project ideal versions of themselves onto the male leads, with the potential for idealizing their world-traveling, pot-smoking, bar-carousing ways, which, when the heads finally start to roll, makes for big scares. The old slasher model operated under the pretense that young (heterosexual, white) males would prefer to see young (heterosexual, white) females in lead roles because of the potential for some Laura Mulveyian girl-Gazing (I guess), which is to say that if you're going to properly entertain your paying males, you'd better give them something to stare it. Hostel takes a different approach, but a financially/cinematically/demographically sensible one: Construct your slasher like a classical Hollywood film and have the strong, idealized male protagonists a)situated as both victims and heroes, allowing for frightening identification when characters are tortured and killed and pleasing identification when a character finally escapes/saves the day/gets revenge, b)characterized as safe Americans by contrast to the scary foreign Other, and c)set-off against a background of passive (attractive!) females who are (of course) both i)desirable sexual objects to be conquested and ii)devious backstabbers who must be punished by graphic vehicular slaughter. Cough. So, like: Marissa, you can relish in the torture of the males all you like, but remember that Eli Roth hates women, foreigners, homosexuals, and anybody unlike himself (probably).

UNLESS: This is a satire, ho ho! I doubt it, but whatever: This could be some scathing attack on consumerism and a critique of all of the things I just slammed the movie for being. Sure, entirely plausible. But I'm skeptical.

ALSO: Speaking of Eli Roth hating homosexuals, there's some really weird/interesting stuff going on earlier in the film with regards to the relationship between Josh and the Dutch torturer, but any somewhat vague or cleverly ambiguous insinuations are kinda left aside when the murdering actually begins. Being that Paxton is continually and so vocally homophobic, calling everybody a fag on every possible occasion and asserting his masculinity and heterosexuality wherever and whenever possible, it's a little uncomfortable when he goes on his end-scene Dutch-killing rampage and murders the only character with a somewhat unclear sexuality. Not saying that the movie itself is especially anti-homosexual or even homophobic, and I'm sure Eli Roth would defend himself by arguing that the film portrays American teens as they really are!, which is, like, homophobic and stuff, I guess, but Paxton's role as unstoppable hero muddles that a bit.

And ALSO: I feel really weird watching this movie in the beginning because I have no idea how a)I personally relate to it or engage with it and b)how I'm supposed to be relating to it and engaging with it, because I'm never entirely sure whether the movie wants me to despise the jock guys who play our protagonists (which, I kinda do, because they're pretty reprehensible and dislikeable, with the only remotely non-douchey one remaining totally passive/weak in relation to his more assertive and jocky buddies) or just happily relate to them or think they're totally bad-ass and awesome. Because I get the impression, and again I am indeed generalizing, that this movie's primary audience does relate to these guys, and that a lot of college-aged guys behave like these guys behave, and if that's the case then I probably fall so far outside of the movie's intended demographic that any enjoyment I get out of must be accidental. Which is weird. Airhead American teens often misread stuff like A Clockwork Orange or Catcher In The Rye and find those characters unambiguously cool or respectable when the texts themselves seem to be examining the protagonists more critically, but I never get the sense that Hostel is treating its characters with such a distanced/cautioned eye. Last week I saw Full Metal Jacket at the Mayfair theatre, and this is a movie that's pretty critical of all but one of its lead characters, and in fact it often seems to be outright making fun of them for being cold/merciless/idiotic pawns of the military institution, and yet the theatre was full of (generalizing!) teenage guys who (literally) hooted and hollered anytime Adam Baldwin's character said something about sex or violence or both. And it's like: Am I missing something, or are they? I feel way less confident about the way I look at Hostel and the relationship between its protagonists and its characters, and maybe part of that has to do with how I consider Eli Roth in relation to, say, Stanley Kubrick, who seems a little more reasonable and subversive when it comes to corrupt characters.

So basically what I'm saying is that if you relate to the protagonists or think they're cool, help me out here. I don't get it.

On Elephant And The Rejection Of Satisfaction

Gus Van Sant's Elephant aims to subvert traditional narrative conventions of pleasure and satisfaction by continually rejecting predictable or expected results. The film establishes what initially appears to be a typical feature fiction narrative built around a Columbine-like school shooting, but all recognizable tropes are deconstructed in a way which makes the actual action considerably more disconcerting.

Our good pal The Watcher describes Van Sant's technical peculiarities—namely lengthy tracking shots and visual repetition—as giving Elephant a "documentary-like feel", with its long takes "serv[ing] to give the audience a sense of space". I don't find Van Sant's employment of these extended travel sequences space-establishing as much as a device designed to deliberately disrupt any kind of sensible narrative flow, in that at such moments the focus or attention of the film itself seems to wander. In Hollywood cinematic terms, meandering means disinterest, which is unacceptable. Van Sant rejects the traditional economy of space and time in order to detach his audience from the narrative, but where the French New Wave convention of detachment had Brechtian fourth-wall-breaking intentions, Elephant's distancing effect targets our emotional involvement in the narrative instead.

Consider that the implicit primary goal of narrative fiction, even fiction which aims to "challenge" its audience in some abstract way, is to engage and entertain; films are constructed in such a way that our personal investment in them pays off, that by the end of the running time we are in some way emotionally or psychologically satisfied. This all goes back to the Aristotlian notion of dramatic fiction's fundamental appeal, but it manifests itself in both overarching (well-structured three-act narratives with proper closure) and minute (all minor tropes established must serve some utility, etc) ways. With Elephant, though, we have a constant and often frustrating rejection of all the ways in which the film might satisfy our demands of it. Characters are introduced and remain ambiguous or mysterious (our introduction to and implied investment in John, for example, eventually goes nowhere as he is neither hero nor villain and has a generally pedestrian role in the events which take place—this runs counter to the traditional convention of making your narrative's protagonist or primary character somehow more important than his peers), events unfold at an uneven and seemingly arbitrary rate and pace (long stretches of nothing, like the tracking shots of students walking through campus, seem to have unnecessary weight in comparison to the dramatic shooting sequence by virtue of their length and focus alone), and, most obviously, we're left with no resolution. The final shot isn't even as surprising or frustratingly unfinished as it might have been, though, because by this point in the film we are so accustomed to finding expectations quashed that we don't seriously expect anything exciting to occur; Van Sant's continual subversion of narrative conventions prevents us from investing the final scene with the kinds of thoughts and feelings we would have typically invested in a standard Hollywood film—just imagine how bizarre and disappointing such a final scene would have been were it tagged on the end of a movie like Terminator Salvation or Star Trek, where we necessarily demand closure and satisfaction.

My favorite example of Van Sant's trope-rejection is the lengthy sequence focusing on Benny, who we understand after decades of enjoying typical narratives is being implicitly established as a disruptive and perhaps heroic force. The sheer time and attention dedicated to his passing through the school allows us to project our desire for heroic action onto his progression toward the shooters, and thus his immediate death is both surprising and deflating. Of course, a real school shooting so rarely conforms to the traditions of narrative fiction, so our expectations for Benny's potential role are illusory and, Van Sant appears to be suggesting, pretty damn unfair.

Faster, High School Kids, Kill! Kill!

Whether visceral trendy-thing or damning allegory, Battle Royale is a contentious but immensely satisfying Asian Extreme import that gels well with our class's recurring themes and motifs. Where Buffy took the usual conventions of teen dramas and subverted them for primarily comedic ends, juxtaposing trivial teenage concerns (popularity, fashion, socializing) with problems of absurd gravity (vampires, hell, the destruction of the entire human race), Battle Royale takes a similar approach with considerably different results: the Western teen's fixation on self-identity and social image are replaced by the Eastern teen's need to succeed—these kids care less about their relative "coolness" (evidenced, even superficially, by the school uniforms worn by all, preventing any conspicuous social hierarchy from being formed aesthetically) than about outperforming their peers in more concrete ways. Like Buffy, Battle Royale satirizes social pressures by supplanting them in a more ostensibly extreme context, actualizing the sense in which Japan's school system is "cutthroat" by forcing students to literally compete for their lives.