Moral Ambiguity and Certainty

I was watching an interview with a comic on that channel that interviewed Wil Wheaton and Jonathan Frakes.   I forget the comic's name but he was talking about how he had a real disdain for movies that had to give the villains a backstory.   It's a not so surprising reaction from a comic.  He was talking about Horror movies and though partly, I would agree, it's not a real agreement in the sense that I think he means.  If he had specified that he was tired of the convention of the bad guy, evil guy, who had to have some kind of relatable back story, then yeah, that can seem contrived and somewhat obviously "tacked on".   But even if I felt tired of seeing this convention, from a theory standpoint, it could be useful to unpack what's going on in terms of the movie's messages and subtext.  

Where I don't agree is in the idea of maybe needing moral certainty.  The bad guy should just be the bad guy.  Where this comes into deeper focus for me is in the idea that certain actions are unquestionably justified, that they should be able to just charge forward against the monster.  It's a kind of ideology that allows a moblike behavior to express itself.  "The Monster Are Due on Maple Street" is the Twilight Zone that comes to mind.  That certainty is what allows certain awful public and political acts to occur.  A kind of rabid moral certainty can lead to zealotry and urgency that leads to Kangaroo courts and unfair punishments.  Part of the horror of the zealotry is that people can end up inventing monsters, accusing innocent people, forcing people to act in ways that they normally wouldn't.  It takes away the mirror from ourselves and casts what would seem to be a healthy self-reflection onto the victim of suspicion and object of scrutiny.  It is the emergency state of mind.  

The thing about supplying the monster or villain a backstory is that it doesn't necessarily make the monster more relatable in some respects.  You can have an understanding of the monster without necessarily feeling like you have to totally abandon the idea that the monster needs to be eliminated but it potentially makes everything more "messy" (the protagonist may end up doing things that are morally ambiguous or which bring up the question of whether the ends justifies the means)  or you can feel a sense of pathos and tragedy.    

(to be continued....)

Un/familiar noises that scare you

 I was thinking about the bumps and cracks and dropping noises that you hear sometimes late at night.  It's all the more pronounced when you are alone or are the only one awake.  And it's a convention that's often used in horror movies -- especially from the point of view of children or young adults.  Part of how horror movies often increase the "tension meter" in the movie is to use these noises to suggest something sinister, something that is the CAUSE of the strange, unexplained noises.  In real life (whatever that means), it's mostly really boring reasons why the noises happen -- the house is settling, an object like a cell phone (um...) was left on the edge of a table/chair, the cycling of a heating/cooling system, the random noises that normally aren't paid attention to like rain or wind.   But what's unsettling is that I've often heard in Flagstaff a double-sound like a foot step in the hallway.  I never figured out exactly what causes/caused it but investigating the noise(s) often makes the situation worse.  And one can really start to scare oneself if begins to start worrying/catasrophizing (sp?)/horror projecting (???) when one is alone or even when one isn't alone.  That's when the narratives of so many awful news stories and horror movies and urban legends begin to spin out little possible narratives that can't completely be dispelled.  I hate that I understand a little about probability because a .1% does actually turn into a real situation once in a great while.   It should be comforting that's there's only a tiny fractional chance that a noise is actually a sign of something horrible (I just looked over my shoulder as I wrote this sentence), but I kind of do the glass half-empty thinking.   My past as a diving instructor and cave explorer comes into play in an unhealthy way. 

 That moment when you realize all your old highschool friends are racists.

Supreme Court rejects Texas' and Trump's bid to overturn election

By Ariane de Vogue and Maegan Vazquez, CNN

Updated 4:13 PM ET, Sat December 12, 2020

...

 

Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg said Trump's crusade to undermine the election's results through rhetoric and court challenges "put a huge stress test on our democracy."

"The Republicans who did follow Donald Trump really have an obligation now to make the country strong again, to heal the chinks that Donald Trump tried to put in the foundation of the country and the democracy," Ginsberg told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room."

 

 ...

 

 

I guess I can use ethnic slurs against Jews as "normal usage" or part of the "normal" idiom and then claim that anyone who takes offense is the problem.  This >bleep< Ginsberg knows exactly what he's saying and CNN knows exactly what they're publishing.   I've got to the point where I know I'm on the right side of this -- even if it takes history another 500 years of bullshit hatred and institutionalized bias.

An Observation...

Foucault > Chomsky > Buckley Jr > Sycophantic Audiences who tend to support the weakest link in any chain

Scary Suggestions on Amazon

 

This is a sort of trivial example, but there are endless, momentary narratives of advertisement "horror" on places like Amazon and Youtube or various news outlets.  I don't know how many times I've seen a strange juxtaposition of seemingly "random" product placement in the context of some tragic news story on Youtube.   

This randomness is actually expressive and no one really writes about it. It reminds me of the term, aporia. 

 

 

 

Some Movies to Look Into

 

Headless (2015)

The Woman (2011)

Eden Lake (2008)

Ichi the Killer (2018) -- hm...

Martyrs (2016) -- the remake

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

House (1977)  -- Criterion Collection

 

The Ichi movie reminds me that I have to write something about the "Orientalizing" of horror.  Initially, it seems like there's a lot of work to do in terms of how American audiences see Asian horror in the context of their broader racist assumptions.