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.

On Vampires And Rites Of Passage

You know your series is a cult phenomenon when YouTube searches yield more poorly-cut fan vids than official promos or episode excerpts, and in the case of Buffy The Vampire Slayer it's worth exploring just why the franchise took off and hit home for so many TV-gawking tweens. Buffy has its roots as a silly teen action serial taking off from a teen film of the same name, and it finds its place in the mid-90s television landscape alongside similarly idiosyncratic smashes The X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation, although its demographic was notably younger and less, well, positively nerdy. TV IPs were overwhelmingly auteur-headed even within a system more strictly studio-controlled than Hollywood cinema, giving Buffy creator Joss Whedon more room to breathe creatively than he likely would have had in early periods of TV writing history. Whedon has a very singular vision and distinctive style, and it's easy to call him "uncompromising" despite a continued history of having to acquiese to the demands of whomever's funding his projects; Whedon's infamous loss of Firefly to Fox's cancel-happy whim was career-defining for the poor dude, but you've got to keep in mind that Whedon had similar issues from the start—Buffy the film was his personal project from the start, but the studio refused to allow him (at the time a total newcomer) to direct, which was the impetus for returning to the project—presumably to do it right, as he initially envisioned—via the longform TV medium.

In typical Joss Whedon fashion, Buffy takes archetypes and stereotypes and continually subverts them, in sometimes sophisticated and very often hilarious ways. Firefly grafted Western conventions onto the Space Opera genre in a way which (unexpectedly) magnified, rather than subordinated, the classic film genre's most conspicuous markers (meaning that not only was the narrative taking cues from The Searchers, but the characters actually rode on horseback and fought in some form of the Wild West); Dr.Horrible did similar things for the superhero genre, making the protagonist the villian (fairly shallow device, sure) but then denying us a satisfying ending in such a way which expanded the series' scope retrospectively; Buffy, too, takes obvious genre signifiers—here of both the teen film and the fantasy horror—and contorts them in a way which is less superficial than it initially appears. Unlike The Faculty, Buffy is less interested in faux-cleverly twisting our expectations of the genre's conventions than in playing around with them; in this way the series retains a sort of realist gravity that parody and satire necessarily lack—this isn't a mock-up of the vampire genre or the teen film, it's a rethinking of their existence and a deconstruction of their perceived independence from one another.

By the way, if you've missed either Firefly or Dr.Horrible, you'd do well to check them out. Great shows.

The Kids Are All Trite

River's Edge represents the veritable apex of narrative sensationalism and exploitation, appropriating a then-recent shock crime to the end of making good old Hollywood feature fiction. And, yes, this is an independent production marketed toward adult arthouse audiences, but it's construction and presentation are unabashedly traditional—and while I agree with Marissa's assessment that it was probably not the director's intention to posit a "kids-these-days"-type argument, the end result is a film that demands judgment and scorn from its audience, inviting us to digest the act and its implications, drawing conclusions about the state of a)all youth everywhere, b)the parenting (or lack thereof) which quite obviously caused this degradation of the moral fibre of American culture, and c)the sum total of all social/cultural evils which contributed to the downfall of the decent way of life. River's Edge is satisfying because we get to cast judgment on others and feel better about own moral worth, because I (and, uh, my hypothetical children) would have clearly acted different. And, like, think of the children, because they're so far gone they don't even know that a dead body = a horrible crime.

I can't say I particularly agree about the assertion that River's Edge is some bold comment on violence against women or power struggles with regard to gender—as Anita proposes elsewhere—but I can see where this might come from. It's true the violent act in the centre of the film sees a man overcoming a woman, but I think it's maybe too easy to project meaning onto the gender relationship when that may only be incidental (or in the very least, significant but not deliberately or especially so—the case is based on a true crime, which crime itself may point to some more fundamental issue with gender power relationships in society at large, but I wouldn't necessarily read the film as being about violence against women so much as violence in youth culture and the apathy with which peers treat/accept it). Remember that there are several women in the social network involved in the coverup of the murder, and while both victims (the antagonist's and Dennis Hopper's recollected murdering of his girlfriend) are indeed women, so too are there women implicated in the crime by way of their silence and apathy when faced with the corpse near the river. Violence against women is a serious social issue, but its representation in River's Edge seems more symptomatic of its continued presence and significance rather than explicitly argued or critiqued; the film certainly involves the issue, but I'm not convinced that it is necessarily about the issue.

One of the more interesting sequences in the film for me—and Anita brought this up too—was the cross-cutting of Clarissa and Matt engaging in intercourse with the first time we actually see John murdering his Jamie. Cross-cutting is a traditional trope employed to suggest a casual or metaphorical connection between two narratively disparate actions—in this case, sex and violence. David Cronenberg's films often draw similar parallels between sexual acts and violent ones, but where his thesis usually revolves around how both are natural or primal acts innate within us, in River's Edge the implication seems less justifying and more damning: are we meant to see John's murderous impulse as somehow sexual/fetishistic, or is Matt and Clarissa's sex implicitly violent and taboo? Maybe the answer is that both acts show youth as flippantly and unthinkingly engaging in rash, inappropriate behavior, and that the jump from promiscuous (and presumably unprotected) sex to violence and murder is somehow negligible? It's not entirely clear, but I think it's worth further thought.

The Media: They, Uh, Say Things About You

Crispin Glover promoting River's Edge on David Letterman:



Huh.

Our Job Is To Replicate Hegemonic Power Structures And Shit

Some things to consider about Heathers:

HIGH SCHOOL = SOCIETAL SYNECDOCHE

If this wasn't made clear enough narratively, allow J.D. to elucidate: "I'm not blowing up the school, I'm blowing up society! [emphasis his]"

Uh, right. To recap: The Heathers represent the social elite, and the remainder of the school is structured in a sort of hierarchy of power. I know Joe warned about flippant/pretentious Foucault citations, but if you have a look at The History Of Sexuality, everybody's favorite French theorist tells us that contemporary power isn't propagated and maintained through threats of violence or force (as it was in the pre-modern period, where dissent would win you a one-way ticket to decapitationville), but rather through the promotion of health and sexuality—that is, it's in your benefit to acquiesce to institutions of power and be a model citizen, because you get to the reap the benefits of an orderly modern society. High School in Heathers works in a similar fashion; the power of the Heathers is maintained despite their being uniformly abhorred because students in the lower echelons of the social order desire their approval and respect, or as one Heather so nicely puts it, because "everyone wants to either be me or fuck me".

KIDS = BORN FOLLOWERS

Teenagers apparently don't think for themselves. The movie once again drives the point home:
Veronica: "If everybody jumped off a bridge, would you?"
Heather: "...probably."

The underlying joke in Heathers is that kids are so predisposed to trend-following that they're willing to go through with anything and everything in order to fit in, including, in this case, suicide.

On Tommy and Naomi Kline

I'm not especially fond of Naomi Kline's pedantic hyperleftist take on consumerism and alt-culture in No Logo, particularly given the degree to which this trendy culture-jamming took over in the late 90s/early 2000s—when everyone with a passing interest in politics gorged on Michael Moore and Adbusters like it was seriously blowing their minds!, oh dear—but she obviously has some things to say about consumer culture and the mass marketing of Cool that are relevant to our discussions of Heathers and, to a lesser extent, The Faculty.

In his post on The Faculty earlier today, So Sayeth The Watcher expounds upon the film's Tommy ad tie-in, noting the irony in a film about the pressures of conformity and the desire for individuality cashing in on product placement and character testimonials. Although I get that this move is amusing, I'm not sure it's as revelatory as people seem to make it out to be. As I observed in class—and which, granted, The Watcher concedes—marketing and product placement is standard operating procedure in Major Hollywood productions, regardless of themes or content (er, unless it's, like, Schindler's List or something). But where I most adamantly disagree with the Watcher is in suggestion that since it's "cool to sell out" (according to Naomi Kline), The Faculty's audiences obviously associate the protagonists' jeans-hawking with rebellion and individuality and hipness. We need, first of all, to distinguish between the youth culture Naomi Kline is writing about in that particular section of No Logo, teens coming of age in the late 80s and early 90s, or "the MTV generation", or whatever, with "today"'s teenagers, whose savvyness for marketing and product placement is slightly different, and maybe a little more sophisticated, than the kids of the generation prior. As Joe has noted numerous times in class, generations of kids and cool come in small cycles or waves, cycles are which are far more transient than the broader generations we associate with major time periods (baby boomers, Generation X, etc); the kids in the primary buying demographic during the hip hop boom of the late 80s or big brand revivalism of the very early 90s are importantly not the same major-demo kids of 1998, when The Faculty was released, nor are even close to the same demographic as the kids today, whose heightened involvement with social networking and myriad other technologies distinguish them hugely from previous niche markets.

Let's break this down a little, then:

THE LATE 80s/EARLY 90s KIDS:
Kline talks at length about the way kids were marketed to in the period immediately following the last recession, when big business realized that tweens and teens had buying power and a willingness to shell out big bucks for "cool" products. The focus from a marketing standpoint was to associate brands with the notion of cool, or to generally get kids to think whatever you're selling is a cool thing. We might call this the "naive" marketing stage: simple associations, like celebrity endorsements (a "cool" teen star wearing your product, for example) are effective on children and teenagers primarily because these teenagers do not have any previous experience with this kind of aggressive marketing strategy—straightforward ads appeal to their basic need to be told what is and is not cool.

IMMEDIATELY SUBSEQUENT TO THIS PERIOD:
Kline doesn't really get into this, but anybody interested in marketing strategies and the culture of cool in the early 90s would be advised to check out David Foster Wallace's essay E Unibus Pluram: Television And U.S. Fiction, which talks about the introduction of irony into television programming of the late 80s/early 90s, and how that affects audiences and vice versa. He cites an example of a popular and successful Pepsi ad wherein a guy driving a Pepsi truck stops by a beach of kids, and then sips his can of Pepsi loudly over a speaker system which projects across the area. The kids hear him drinking the Pepsi and rush over in swarms to buy one, before the slogan—"The choice of a new generation!"—is placed atop the scene. The ad is a sly parody of advertising strategies which presume that audiences will want to buy the product simply by seeing or hearing it, the irony being that the slogan, the "choice", clashes with the very idea of mass marketing and advertising and consumption. Like The Watcher notes, it's that old cliche: buy our product to be unique, just like everybody else. But not only is this a revelation and irony that was obvious in 1990, it's one that the ad companies themselves are so aware of being cliche that they work it into their own advertisements: the kids are no longer naive enough to just fall for ads and think something is cool; they now require the irony and sarcasm of new, smarter advertising to appeal to their more discerning sensibilities.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE FACULTY'S AD TIE-IN
I said it before, and I maintain it: People aren't totally stupid. Joe's right to say that many people fall for ads—right, that's why they still advertise stuff—but advertisers are smart enough to know that basic appeals to authority and figures of cool aren't enough to move units to kids who've grown up with exactly the kinds of naive advertising mentality we're here criticizing. Everybody's leery of the greasy used car salesman, the fake celebrity endorsement pitch, the voice over describing more side-effects than the product's meant to cure—these things have been drilled into our head so much for so long that to do one seriously and honestly would be unthinkable. Advertisers know that these things aren't effective, so for the last twenty years they've been making ads with that knowledge already worked in. You think Tommy Jeans and The Faculty aren't aware of the irony that their advertisement clashes with the theme of the film? Or that we're going to be aware of that? Guess what: It's not a revelation; it's part of the point. The ad in question involves a parody of movie-making, where the frustrated director repeatedly tells the actors to change until they reach a fever pitch of frustration—"Give me TOMMY JEANS!", he shouts, and suddenly everybody's cool and happy again. The ad is hip, it's nonchalant, it's meant to give you a "candid" look at the making of a movie, except it's obviously scripted and staged in advance—and we're obviously meant to know that going in.

Uh, so, anyway: I think you've got to give these advertisers more credit. This is, like, their job.

NOW THEN:
It's all about irony and disinterest. Kids are bored and dejected, they're hip and they don't care, and the only advertising that appeals to them is the advertising which seems "above" it. Designer clothes are more niche than before, with more "any-clothes-whatever" being the in thing. That's why you get this:

Instead of, like, tact and stuff. American Apparel ads are the great meta-ads of our generation, profiling sexy, skanky and totally disaffected youth in (some of) their clothing, but infused with enough pomo irony and self-awareness to prevent obvious mocking or parody. "Trite", you might say, "totally obvious". But then they say: "Well, yes, but it's not just an ordinary-looking hipster with no top on, it's a self-reflexive hipster with no top on—it's, um, subversive". And doesn't she look cool.

POINT BEING:
It's way too obvious to decide that "Selling Out = Really COOL!" and "Kids = Total Suckers", because this a far more complex system than that. And also: Naomi Kline breeds thoughtless pedantry.

OH, AND HEATHERS, I GUESS:
I'd never seen Heathers before but I liked it quite a lot. The hardlined "social satire" aspects were all well and good, its criticisms of social hierarchies and hegemonic power in high schools perfectly fair, but what I was most surprised by was the flippancy with which the movie treated the death of the students. I was expecting the narrative to go through the redundant motions of realism, excusing the murders in some totally contrived coverup way, but subordinating narrative realism to satire and humor was a good move.

More on this later, probably.

In Medias Res

Anthony Lane wrote an interesting review of J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek reboot in last week's New Yorker, and while young, goodlooking space cadets gallivanting across the Milky Way at Warp 9 might not be anybody's idea of a proper 'teen film', I maintain that the film strays from Sci-Fi and into post-O.C. territory frequently enough to warrant comment here. And, like, Kirk's causeless cocksure rebellion totally channels Jimmy Dean. Or, uh, Ryan Atwood.

Lane comments briefly on Star Trek's heavy-handed characterizations, particularly with respect to Kirk's catch-all "father dying whilst attempting to save family and crew" background, concluding that the film's reliance on conspicuous explanation is symptomatic of a larger trend in Hollywood cinema that emphasizes transparency over allusion. In Batman Begins, Lane notes, Bruce Wayne's fear of and fascination with bats is quickly reduced to a flashback of an adolescent Wayne falling headfirst into a cave of the winged icons. "What's wrong", Lane asks, "with 'Batman is?'"

Backhanded explanations such as these feel like preemptive rejoinders to questions and concerns an "average" Western audience might hypothetically have, as though the filmmakers feel compelled to curb confusion before it happens. I'm not sure whether this is indicative of a system that gives audiences too little credit or a society that really does need everything spoon fed to them—don't they have focus groups and market surveys for this sort of thing? And to bring this back to teen movies: The fallback characterization method in more "serious" teen movie fare has traditionally been to give your protagonist one easily identifiable fault or hang-up with a digestible explanation for it. If you're a troublesome rebel who refuses to do well, it's probably because you're just misunderstood—all you need is the cute new girl who really gets you to encourage you to open up and share your personal history. If you're, say, Donnie Darko, or Josh Hartnett's character in The Faculty, or the dude from The O.C. or Van Wilder or, hell, Abrams' Captain Kirk, you're only a juvenile delinquent clashing with teachers/parents/police/any authority figure whatsoever because you choose to, because actually you're an unprecedented genius with a 200-point I.Q. and "intimidating" standardized test scores, because, like, you're just too deep, and, like, nobody gets you, and obviously every fuck-up loser in backwater American highschools splits their school-skipping spare time shooting smack and reading dog-eared copies of Gravity's Rainbow. And delinquents who do badly in school are far less sympathetic for the audience. Or sexually desirable for the alternative chick who inevitable falls for him.

Also, if you're a genius delinquent with rugged goodlooks and problems with authority, you may be a vampire:

The Faculty: Some Thoughts

Yesterday evening we screened Robert Rodriguez's quirky teen monster movie The Faculty (1998), a pseudo-mashup of genres that's largely hit or miss (but mostly miss). Ostensibly a high concept combination of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and The Breakfast Club, the film begins to flirt with deeper concepts and thematic conceits—you might read the invasion and infection as an allegory for the AIDS pandemic, or perhaps a satire of homogeneous youth culture—before ultimately settling on superficial genre subversion and conventional action sequences. That's fair enough, but I would have expected the screenwriter of Scream to elaborate a slightly more sophisticated narrative.

Curious to consider is the film's continual anxiety over the introduction and initiation of the Other. This reveals itself most conspicuously in the form of the literal aliens, whose otherworldness is of course the ultimate actualization of Otherness, and whose plot not simply to destroy humanity but to overtake and assimilate it suggests a deeply-rooted fear of take over by some mysterious foreign source. Whether this is indicative of some hidden anti-immigration agenda is not for me to say, but when you consider that a)the film's primary antagonist is a student who has moved into town from elsewhere, b)this same antagonist nearly overthrows our heroes because she effaces her otherness for the sake of blending in with her new peers, and c)the major players in the film are white, middle class hometown Americans, it starts to get a little uncomfortable to talk about The Faculty's overarching thematic conceits. Huh.

Here's the trailer:



You'll note that 25% of this trailer is comrprised of footage of other movies, specifically Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Scream, which should give you a pretty good idea of how this movie was being marketed: it's a movie-lovers teen movie, endorsed via its makers' pedegree, and, like, whatever I guess. Seems odd to be marketing a teen movie by appealing to anything other than sex and violence, of which this movie has an ample supply, but then I'm not an advertising executive. Although it should maybe be noted that this movie kind of bombed, so perhaps they went down the wrong avenue for promotion themselves.

Oh, and also: What an awful soundtrack. I want my 90s teen movies to be scored by Pavement and My Bloody Valentine, not the Offspring.

An Introduction

This blog is maintained as part of an ongoing project for a Film Studies course on the production and marketing of Teen Movies. Seeing as how it's a blog and not, say, an academic paper, my adherence to any kind of grammatical/linguistic/remotely sensible format will likely be tenuous at best. In addition to some vaguely theoretical content, I'll also probably be using this blog as an outlet for creative meandering when I'm bored and have free time, or when I'm entirely intoxicated (see if you can notice a substantial difference in the quality of my writing during those particular periods).

If you're interested, you can also follow my (entirely unacademic) Twitter, or read my (slightly more academic) record reviews at CokeMachineGlow.

This is a surprisingly entertaining sequence from the otherwise-lame Not Another Teen Movie:



Satirizing genre films makes for pretty pedestrian comedy, doubly so when your target is the overwhelmingly banal She's All That. And while the observation that the 'ugly outcast' is quite obviously a knockout to begin with is self-evident, the execution here is terrific. It works. I like when trite Hollywood productions critique other Hollywood productions for being trite themselves, like when rap videos make fun of rap video cliches or when celebrities mock celebrity culture. These superficial "deconstructions" appeal to the viewer's desire to be respected for elevating themselves above mainstream material, to be congratulated for being in on the joke against the vacuity of popular culture. A teen enjoying Not Another Teen Movie is invited to pat themselves on the back for seeing through the contrived nature of the 'average' teen movie, and by extension the average popular culture artifact, the irony being that these congratulations of individual thought and liberation from the homogeneity of normative conventions come from the very production companies who rely on the predictable marketability of their audiences. In short, they sell you contrived shit and then sell you some other contrived shit that makes fun of the earlier contrived shit. Y'know, I think these movie moguls are smarter than we give 'em credit for.