Videodrome (1983)

Science Fiction-Double Feature...

I'm going to assume that you've seen this film and skip doing a synopsis as they're not fun to write and I'm an indolent degenerate. Go and watch it if you haven't, it's worth your time. This is less a review and more a thematic discussion.

Videodrome was made about 30 years early. It's sharp, resounding critique of television is uncomfortably applicable to the Internet generation ('...soft...'), with its ready access to unlimited entertainment and stimulation. At the heart of Videodrome is fear about our future and how technology relates to it. This is a theme I've addressed several times before, and shall most likely never stop returning to...

There are two competing forces in the film: Videodrome and Prof. O'Blivion (his 'television name'). Videodrome's ambition is social purification, O'Blivion's is evolution. The Videodrome project is being carried out by elements or organisations unknown (the notion of the deep state is doing the rounds in the horroristic edge of the Reactosphere, so I'm going to head-canonise it as that) who wish to purge the North American continent of unwanted types of person- the type of person who would watch the Videodrome transmission. There's an obvious, though well-delivered, meta element whereby Cronenberg is asking what kind of person would watch his movie in the first place (the viewer is the scum to be purged in much the same way the viewer is the ancient god to be appeased in The Cabin in the Woods- at least in my reading...).

The Videodrome transmissions appear to be both nihilistic and nihilising, not only devoid of any abstract meaning or plot, but hostile towards meaning. The signal they carry actively damages the brain of the viewer, after all. Though, far more disturbing is that it carries an occult agenda; the character Masha (Lynne Gorman) warns James Woods that Videodrome's danger lies in the fact that 'it has a philosophy.' Videodrome is pure social Darwinism: considering Cronenberg's penchant for the bodily, it is not appropriate to describe it as social engineering- it is social surgery, it is cutting out the cancerous elements of society in order to allow that society to survive. The forces behind Videodrome fear that the peoples of North America are not up to the challenges that await them in the coming century. In their view, the people of their continent have became 'soft' while the rest of the world was becoming 'tough.' What future is there for the social body if the diseased flesh is not excised?

O'Blivion, on the other hand, considers the Videodrome signal to be the doorway to a new form of reality. Throughout the film there are disturbing images of the mechanical and the biological merging, warping together into something new. Woods' hand becomes his gun, his television his lover. O'Blivion has realised that the distinction between the real world and the 'video (virtual) world' has already broken down, and that the technological will not stop at our thoughts, it will seep into out flesh, transforming it and reshaping it as it itself is reshaped by the flesh to produce the New Flesh (long may it live!). For O'Blivion, who by the time the film begins exists solely on video, no biological components of him still functional, the tumour induced by the Videodrome signal is a new organ, one that transforms our perceptions and thus reality itself. Hardware/software/wetware are forcibly wired together into the New Flesh, into new forms of revealing and living which are not even conceivable to us on this side of the Singularity.

Neither option looks particularly appealing, do they? On the one hand, a systematic cultural purge, on the other...who knows?

Something uncomfortably new.

The Thing (1982)

Now THAT'S a movie poster!

As ever, spoilers

Ah, The Thing...

If I had to define the most important feature that a genre film has to have in order to be a great film, I would say- it has to leave you guessing, it has to leave you trying to figure things out. In can't leave you with all of the answers, there has to be room for interpretation, because that's one of the most insidious ways it can invade your mind and memory; that is, you keep thinking about it, trying to work it out. The Thing is one of those films.

How does it do this?

For a start, the special effects (oh, the special effects...oh, the special effects...) are notoriously brilliant. Rob Bottin's practical effects are horrifyingly convincing, bringing the Thing creature to a terrible life we'd all rather it didn't have. The graphic, disturbing and often surprisingly brief scenes of absorption, assimilation, transformation stay with the viewer. Combining the high realism of the effects with the often, though not always, brief or distorted shots of the victim/attacker grant it a hallucinatory flair. This is, of course, fitting given the Protean nature of the beast in question. One cannot get a grip on it, cannot grasp hold of any of its surfaces. What does the thing look like? Of course, the answer can only be partial- it looks as it wishes, there is no knowable true form for it to assume.

But, the question that I have always grappled with (and, reportedly, so did the cast and crew) is- would one know that the Thing had taken or was taking you over? At what point would one loose volition, would one be under the Thing's control? Presumably, as we see the Thing bodily absorbing Bennings, Gary and at least some of the dogs, it can be immediate and total. From that point onwards, the Thing has access to the body and, one assumes, memories and perhaps even idiosyncrasies of the assimilated form, in combination with those of all its previous victims, being able to mimic them perhaps perfectly. However, what of Norris? The character's refusal to take command was viewed by the actor as him knowing that the Thing had infected him, that he was compromised, that it is utilising him as a resource. (What a horrible thought that is, realising that your body and mind are being consumed, processed, put to use as a means for further propagation by an incursive entity...) This thus indicates that there is a period of 'grace,' so to speak, where one is aware of what is happening, and presumably also aware that one cannot stop it.

The Thing is not a unitary entity either, it is a conglomeration of entities, a Gestalt organism composed of billions of individual organisms working in tandem with one another. How much of its host does it take with it? Do Thing-thoughts happen behind the imitation, or does it loose itself within the host-identity, only revealing itself and taking full control at opportune moments, when an instinctual switch is thrown? Could it conceal itself from itself? Might its survival instinct be so powerful that it could completely override its sense of self (whatever sense of self a Gestalt organism would recognisably have in comparison with a unitary, Cartesian self), entirely conceal its identity in order to pass undetected among its prey. The discovery of its true Thing-nature would be as traumatic, likely more so, for the host as for those around them. When Blair, surely now infected (my theory- Blair is infected from the scene where he first described the organism and puts his pen to his mouth...), tells MacReady that he is feeling 'much better now', does he think he is? Does his transformation surprise him? Does the Thing baulk at itself?

A final speculation: might the Thing's ultimate survival strategy be to conceal itself from itself and from the other Things? Might the Thing so entirely assimilate a persona to forget its Thing-self, destroy the other Things to assuage suspicion for as long as possible, and so retreat to a safe haven and begin the process again? Might that be what happens to MacReady or Childs after the screen cuts to black?

As you can see: The Thing leaves me guessing...

V/H/S (2012)

Spoilers

This film should have been so much better than it was. Perhaps even that's too high praise for it, but...I like found-footage, and I like it for all the stupid, clichéd reasons it's popular too: it adds realism to a film, it puts the audience in the midst of the actions taking place, and (perhaps most importantly) it's relatively low-cost grants opportunities to amateurs that wouldn't exist otherwise; The Blair Witch Project cost a mere $25,000, Paranormal Activity, $15,000, according to Wiki at least.

But, before this becomes a rant about the relative merits of found-footage, I'll rein myself in and direct my energies towards this particular target...

V/H/S correctly understands a lot. It understands that there is something pleasingly visceral about videos over DVDs. It also understands that horror often works better with little, or no, exposition, when the events in question are simply left to play out. I've often felt this is why horror works so well in the short-story format, that giving the audience only very little, and refusing to offer many answers at all (if any) is a fantastic mechanism to build atmosphere, if correctly deployed.

The plot, for as much as there is one, has a gang of petty criminals breaking into a house to steal a videotape for reasons I didn't pick up on and didn't care about, to be frank. As a result of this, they end up splitting up (naturally) to search for the tape, while one of them watches the tapes to see if it's the one they're looking for. The tapes they find form the meat of the film, providing us with the vignettes. None of them are brilliant, to be honest, though some worked much better than others.

Only one (Second Honeymoon) exploited found-footage as a genre particularly well; the other stories all would have worked fine as normally shot movies (or at least as well), but Second Honeymoon needed to be shot on a handheld by the characters it featured. For the most part, the others were rehashings of clichéd horror movies tropes (teens at the lake; haunted house; even a dash of rape-and-revenge, sort of), but there were genuine moments of originality in all of them, even the weakest (The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger) was relatively well executed. Most frustrating was the last vignette, 10/31/98, which almost ventured in the realms of Lovecraftian horror. Almost.

Indeed, that says pretty much everything that needs to be said about this film: it was almost there. That it didn't quite make it, rather than failing outright, somehow makes it all the worse.

Candyman (1992)

Spoilers, obviously

I was expecting a shlocky monster movie, albeit an enjoyable one. I was wrong. To my pleasant surprise, it turned out that Candyman is a well-crafted, genuinely unsettling and rather intelligent piece that takes the viewer through a journey that involves racism, urban stratification and decay, class-warfare and, especially, the nature of myth and folklore. And also hook-handed serial killings by a ghost in a fur-coat (let's not forget ourselves, here).

Before we get too bogged down in half-baked theorising, let's talk about why it's just a damn good film first.

The plot follows Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), a grad student writing a thesis on modern folklore and urban legend, who becomes fixated on 'the Candyman,' (Tony Todd) a hook-handed supernatural killer, the mutilated-and-murdered son of an ex-slave, who wreaks bloody revenge on anyone who says his name five times into a mirror. A very typical urban legend, of course, one that we're all familiar with, local variations included. As her investigations into a spree of killings attributed to the monster progress, she finds herself getting drawn further and further into the mythology of the Candyman. While initially it seems that Candyman is just an identity adopted by a local gangster, it swiftly becomes apparent that Candyman, hook-hand and all, is very real indeed. Candyman is seeking to extend and reinforce his myth, having no existence beyond the belief that people have in him (his 'congregation'). After attempting to drag Helen into his story, she escapes, but dies in the process, and becomes a myth in her own right, one just as blood-thirsty and vengeful as the one she unwittingly usurped.

Candyman is, in some ways, less a slasher movie than it is a movie about slasher movies. It begins with a knowing nod to the classic formula of the slasher movie: the babysitter, sexual immorality, the necessarily brutal murder. I was reminded of The Cabin in the Woods, which I will be writing about in the future, in that it dealt with and, to an extent, deconstructed the expectations of the audience (not to the same level of excellent abstraction as TCITW, but impressive nonetheless). I am, perhaps, getting a little distracted. Candyman is not a meta-film per se, but it is certainly meta-horror, perhaps even meta-mythic (which would be a great name for a band...). The film explores the evolution of stories and mythology, our fixation on the bloody and the nightmarish, though updating it for a modern, urban context.

The advent of modernity has not abolished mythology, it has simply created a new ones. Perhaps not quite so virulent as they once were, but still present all the same. Interestingly, it is those with the status of 'outsider' in Candyman who are most afflicted by his presence, namely, the black urban poor. There is a scene at the beginning of the film were Helen mentions that the apartment block she lives in was originally intended to be 'project housing,' but it was realised after construction that there were no local features (highways, bridges and so forth) around it to insulate it from the rest of the city. The urban poor, instead, are cut off from the rest of the city and largely left to fend for themselves. Initially, Helen assumes that the prevalence of Candyman mythology, ritual and graffiti ('Sweets to the sweet') is a coping mechanism for the disenfranchised to make sense of their environment, filled with casual violence and brutality; like I mentioned above, it is initially suggested (the audience, surely, does not believe this explanation) that the killings blamed on Candyman are just those of a local gangster creating an aura of fear around himself. Indeed, this is partially true, but this does not detract from the reality of Candyman.

It is not accidental that her own disenfranchisement, her committal to the status of outsider (insane, criminal, child-killer), when Candyman frames her for his own deeds, occurs at the same time that she is forced to absolutely accept that this supernatural force does exist. When she, an educated, middle-class, affluent white woman is robbed of her power of self-determination and her social status, she understands the truth of the situation. Candyman does exist, he is a genuine supernatural force, and those who believe in him are not deluded, they are, in fact, right. Their version of events, their belief that they are at the mercy of a force beyond reason, comprehension or resistance, is not a 'coping mechanism,' but an actuality. It is not a clever game for intellectuals, a puzzle to be figured out from the comfort of an armchair, but a destructive reality that is only disestablished when Helen accepts that it is true and sacrifices her own life to frustrate its plans (though the existence of two sequels suggest limited success...perhaps it's best to ignore them).

Ultimately, though Candyman is destroyed, Helen becomes a vengeful spirit in her own right, obeying the same rules (five times into a mirror), and slaying her unfaithful husband, in such a way that implicates the woman he left her for. The myth, the meme, perhaps, has not ceased to be, it has merely adapted and evolved itself. The cycle of revenge and murder continues as it always did, uninterrupted, just with a different face. Nothing, in the end, has really changed at all.

Let's See What Happens!

I don't know where this blog is going to go, but I am looking forward to finding out!

The plan is: I watch a movie (which will probably be either SF, horror, fantasy, experimental or anything else that takes my immediate fancy), then I write about it. I imagine that what I write will be somewhere between a review and a thematic analyse. I might do the occasional editorial, on my abstract themes or observations, but I think for the most part, I'm just going to watch crap and talk about it.

If you want to recommend me anything, please do.

I've decided to do this here, rather than on my other blog, as I want to try and make it more exclusively philosophical, rather than as a blog of general ramblings (I doubt I'll succeed, but ho-hum).

So, without further ado, I'm going to write about why Candyman is brilliant!