Scream If You Wanna Die Faster!

[A short retrospective of the Scream movies, major spoilers included.]

Scream is my favourite horror franchise. In my opinion, there hasn’t been a dud – a truly bad instalment – throughout the entire series. It’s a franchise that’s perfectly catered toward people like me, movie nerds and die hard horror fans. With someone as entrenched in the genre as Wes Craven at the helm, until his death in 2015, it’s no wonder that these movies are able to appeal to horror fans while providing meta commentary on the genre. 

In the first movie, as has been well noted by now, the commentary is aimed squarely at the stagnation of the genre as a whole. The over-abundance of slasher flicks with predictable plots, cheesecake nudity, shallow characters and hoaky effects had led audiences to grow bored with the offerings of the time. Scream injected some life into the entire genre and hit the slasher sub-genre like lightning. There’s no gratuitous nudity, the killer isn’t an invincible killing machine and gets their ass handed to them throughout the movie, the whole cast of characters are likeable and engaging, and all the references and criticisms of other genre classics is done with a clear respect and love for them. It was the right movie at the right time and changed the genre for the better.

The commentary is admittedly lacking in the sequel, sure there’s the few Randy scenes where they discuss sequels and have delight film nerd banter, but that’s about it. A very meta commentary light entry that mostly re-treads old ground in a college setting. 

However, the third movie, and what was at the time the ending of a trilogy, delivers on what the previous film was lacking. There’s obviously commentary on trilogies, Hollywood in general, and they also very lightly touch on true crime and movies ‘based on a true story’. Things come full circle, the past returns to haunt the characters, issues are resolved, and the characters face their fears. All that along with being set on a movie set where they’re turning the events of the first movie into a movie, Sidney’s room fully recreated, make it a home-run. 

Eleven years later Wes Craven returned with Scream 4. The opening is incredible, the references are delicious, and the mystery of the killer’s identity is actually well set up with great misdirection. While this movie contains some truly egregious misunderstandings of how live streaming and internet video works, I feel it still holds up on the meta commentary front. Sidney’s cousin Jill is jealous of the ‘fame’ that her trauma has brought her, thus the movie is commenting on how survivors are often accused of coming forward for attention, fame and money (when in reality these things are never forthcoming for the traumatised), and how those that cling to horrific events – those who were never really affected – will inflate their involvement and suffering for personal gain. 

The re-sequel, our first Scream film after the death of Wes Craven, sees the legacy characters passing the baton onto the new cast. Of course we have to address the fatherly hallucination in the room, it is incredibly goofy that Sam has visions of a father she never met, but it is a well defined horror trope for the descendants of horror villains to have to reckon with the age old battle of nature versus nurture and Sam is never under suspicion of being the killer from the perspective of the audience thus subverting the trope. As a re-sequel, we retread the ground of the original with an update on the references and commentary as the genre has evolved and changed in the twenty six years since the first film. There’s also some commentary on how bad actors with fatal intentions are able to find each other and organise over the internet. All in all making this a strong entry in the series. 

Ghostface takes a bite of the ‘Big Apple’ in the sixth entry into the franchise, as the second instalment in the series without Wes and with our new cast of characters, we reflect and refract the original sequels with thrilling results. The meta commentary is biting and enjoyable. The targets in this movie being the previous films, fanaticism, legacy again, and how victims/survivors are treated in the current cultural climate by again using the internet’s influence on society and pop culture to great effect. Gale does what everyone has been screaming (heh) for the characters to do throughout the entire series and *69’s the killer. And while I’ve seen criticisms of the characters commenting that ‘anyone can die’ while the returning cast all survive, the same thing also occurs in the third film, so charitably speaking it’s a callback but also who cares anyway I want to see these characters again. 

And there’s so much more besides the meta commentary that makes the series so compelling. Scream subverts the genre in more ways than just flipping and avoiding the obvious cliches, for one, in other horror franchises the killer/villain is the character that returns most often. In Nightmare On Elm Street, Nancy returns twice with the actor playing herself in New Nightmare returning for a third time, but Freddie’s in all seven movies. Laurie Strode is in just over half of the Halloween movies, where Michael Myers is only missing from one film in the series. Leatherface is always Leatherface, but can you remember any returning characters from the Texas series? And what about the Friday the 13th movies? 

That’s where Scream differs. 

Scream stands out by having a cast of victims, survivors and heroes who are all likeable compelling characters that return and return and you want them to. Where most other series and franchises only have the killer for the audience to get attached to, to root for, in Scream we’re all rooting for Sidney Prescott to kick another idiot who thought they could get the drop on her down a flight of stairs and shoot them in the head. Where it took forty years for Laurie Strode to get character development, where you’re always rooting for Freddy to torment the next teens, where every damn character in the Friday the 13th series is poorly written and entirely forgettable, the cast of Scream stands out. Because with every new instalment I’m excited to see how Sidney will kick ass this time, I want to learn how Dewy and Gale broke up before the movie started and watch them come back together again, I wanna watch Tara and Sam’s bond grow, I want to see how Sam’s visions of Billy develop and affect her character, I want to see the tension in Sam between protecting her sister and the psychological poison of her dead father’s actions. I’m rooting for them, I’m never rooting for the killer.

Ghostface, as an icon, as a symbol, is also interesting in their own right. There’s this strange element in all of the movies regarding Ghostface, since the identity of the killer is always a mystery until the final act, the words and actions of Ghostface have to be uniform and never point in the direction of any character. So you find yourself in this weird place with the series where Ghostface has a consistent personality throughout all the movies regardless of who it ends up being behind the mask when the killer’s identity is revealed or what their motive is. Ghostface is always a goofy horror fan who only manages to kill people by getting lucky, they’re a total bumble king eating shit as they crash through every piece of furniture, they’re a major nerd, petty as hell, and always manage to under-estimate Sidney and Sam. It doesn’t matter who you were before you put the costume on, as soon as that mask’s covering your face you’re compelled to ask “what’s your favourite scary movie?” 

In this era of ‘elevated horror’ movies marketed in a way that makes it sound like horror is a dirty word, a genre that should be ashamed of itself, that are desperately trying to distance themselves from the rest of the genre. A cast of films that seriously tackle heavy topics with the weight they deserve, but often are also a little self-serious, are becoming predictable and tiresome with their oversaturation in the genre. Well I think it’s nice to have a series that isn’t just not ashamed to be a horror movie but proud of it, a franchise that’s having fun and playing with the genre. Long live Scream! 

Shapes in the Static [Skinamarink review]

Here’s my quirky one liner: The creepypasta generation’s answer to Poltergeist leaves a lot to be desired.

Now time for the real review: Let’s start with some positives, the atmosphere is impeccable, while it is obviously not filmed on video the grain/noise effect is really good and is a large part of the general atmosphere, a couple key moments of incredibly striking visuals and two terrific scenes that deliver great character moments as well as build tension and deliver on scares. It reminded me of the golden age of youtube creepy pasta with channels like Marble Horents and theLittleFears (www.youtube.com/@theLittleFears ), and this video in particular: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzqPL1iXuxo

You have to commend people for trying something different, and I wish that more people got the chance for their strange experimental horror movie to go viral and have a wide release.

However, as mentioned in my quirky one liner, there’s a lot to be desired. The movie as a whole lacks visual variety, which makes it tiring on the eyes. And while holding on a black screen or a dark room can be effective and scary when done well and sparingly, one hour and forty minutes where the screen is mostly filled with wavering blacks or ominous darkness loses its effectiveness and becomes tedious. I ended up checking the run time almost every ten minutes because the movie started to drag from the very beginning.

It took me a long time to work out what was happening, and I spent most of the movie quietly confused as to what I was expected to understand as happening. This avoidant style of filming where almost everything is happening just out of the frame becomes frustrating at times. The POV of the camera is very confused. For the most part it’s static, looking into rooms in a way that classically suggests voyeurism and is kind of reminiscent of surveillance, but it often changes to represent the POV of a character which was jarring and difficult to tell what was going on until another character said the character’s name. Just because the audience can’t tell what’s going on doesn’t make it interesting and mysterious.

This is very much a ‘hurry up and wait’ sort of movie, the abundance of static shots trying to build tension simply built boredom. It not that nothing happens, it’s just the way that nothing happens. And at times it felt like the movie was aimed at the sort of people that are always on their phones or are doing something else while the movie plays in the background.

The jump scares were trite and tired, and I feel that people latched onto the image of the Fisher Price Telephone because it was one of the two properly curated and interesting visuals in the entire movie, and was the only narrative through line to occur that was remotely engaging. And at times I felt, whenever the movie was trying to show me a clear and distinct visual, like a child was waving one of those ‘every colour’ paintings at me – the ones that always end up as a big purply brown splodge – clearly very excited and impressed by their artwork. It’s charming but not entirely effective.

Also, they really missed an opportunity to do a sick title drop right at the end of the movie that I found personally disappointing.

While I have some major issues with the movie, I would recommend it and think that it’s certainly a positive that a movie like this has garnered such a response. I’m definitely interested in seeing what they do next because there is genuine promise here, and we need this sort of weird and strange experimental stuff for the medium to develop and grow. It’s an endearing mess.

What is Freedom to Those That Aren’t Free?

Throughout history many people have been criminalised for who they are, the criminality of someone’s personhood has historically been drawn across lines of class, race, gender and sexuality. The LGBTQ+ community itself has a long history of criminalisation. Be it the laws that prohibited people from being seen as dressing in a fashion not belonging to their sex/gender, anti-sodomy laws, and so on. Great Freedom depicts one of these acts of criminalisation, one that is often forgotten in the wider history of human cruelty.

After the liberation of concentration camps at the end of WW2, many were handed back their freedom, but gay men were moved from the camps and straight into prisons to serve out the rest of their sentences. Great Freedom follows Hans Hoffman, one such man, through the years as he finds himself imprisoned again and again for the crime of loving and having sex with other men. 

We follow Hans through three sentences in prison, while not chronological as the story is framed and centred around his stay from 1968-69, we’re also given insights into his stays in 1945 and 1957. The focus of the narrative is the relationship between Hans and his first cellmate Viktor. We watch as their relationship develops from hostility and into open affection and possibly love.

In their first meeting, Hans is emaciated and timid, clearly traumatised by his time in the camps. At first Viktor is somewhat enraged to find that his new cellmate is a gay man, seeing Hans’ offense under his name on their cell door, and for a time they keep their distance. This doesn’t last as Viktor comes to learn more about Hans as a person, and his compassion seeps through. While sharing cigarettes Viktor offers to cover up Hans’ camp tattoo. 

The instruments Viktor uses to tattoo Hans are found by the prison guards and both of them are punished with solitary confinement, in a dark room with nothing but a bucket and divested of their clothes, a place similar to the one the allies liberated Hans from. He is violently forced to comply and experience that trauma all over again.

Hans’ second stay is in 1957, he is arrested along with his boyfriend Oskar. They are separated and unable to speak to each other. Hans devises a way to communicate through code in a bible, he enlists Viktor to deliver the message – the book – to Oskar’s cell, and in return Viktor requests a blowjob. The message is delivered and they’re able to meet, but Oskar cannot share in Hans’ emphatic optimism and finds that he can’t see a future where they’re free to be who they are.

Oskar jumps from the roof, killing himself. Hans learns of Oskar’s death from Viktor while they’re in the yard and collapses, bereft. Viktor allows himself to show sympathy for Hans, he comforts Hans and berates the guards for trying to punish him for his grief. Hans is dragged into solitary confinement again.

In his last sentence, Hans has been caught on film, as part of a sting operation, having casual sex with men in a public bathroom. While in prison he starts something of a relationship with another young man who was caught with him. Viktor reminds Hans of what happened the last time, and Hans lets the relationship go, helping them to have their sentence overturned and released from prison.

Hans stays behind and, after managing to once again become Viktor’s cellmate, helps Viktor get clean off the drugs he’s become addicted to. Over their time as cellmates, their relationship turns toward romance and even becomes physical. Hans begins to talk of escape and Viktor shoots it down.

In 1969 Paragraph 175, the law that Hans is being held under and which makes it illegal for men to perform ‘homosexual acts’ together, is revised and Hans is released.

After spending so long in prison, under the thumb of criminality, Hans doesn’t seem to know what to do with his freedom. Hans visits a bar that is heaving with men. He goes from room to room, seemingly searching for something, and catches the eye of another. Following the man down into the bowels of the building, moving through the cold stone halls of what appears to have once been a kind of jail, and Hans passes by men in the middle of various sexual acts. Before he catches up with the man he’d been following, Hans changes his mind and leaves.

In the final moments of the film, Hans breaks the window of a jewellery store, pockets whatever he can get his hands on and waits patiently on the curb for the police to arrive as the store’s alarm blares behind him. And as the credits roll we’re left to assume that Hans intends to return to prison and to Viktor, to return to what he knows, understands and can make sense of.

The way criminality, the law and prison has shaped these two men, changing them slowly over time, beating them into the desired shape and cutting off all of the unwanted pieces, stunts and stifles them and their humanity. It is no accident that after so long staying in captivity, Viktor seems far more free and sure of himself than Hans does with his intermittent freedom. But there’s an important difference between them. Viktor knows that what he did was wrong, while Hans knows that who he is cannot be morally wrong. There is a large difference between doing something reprehensible and being punished for it, and being yourself and being told that who and what you are is wrong and that entire parts of you must be suppressed and eradicated.  In this sense, Hans has never before felt true freedom, even while outside of prison, and finds that after all this time dreaming for freedom, that he cannot do as the free do.

Great Freedom is an indictment of a society that has criminalised, and continues to criminalise, people for fundamental aspects of their being and the horrific treatment this criminalisation entails. How can you be free, when you don’t know what it means?

The Misfits’ Journey: Self Actualisation Through The Other.

[a revisit and revision of a review I wrote last year]

Swiss Army Man is a hard movie to condense into a snappy synopsis without feeling like you’re missing the forest for the trees. “A hopeless man stranded on a deserted island befriends a dead body, and together they go on a surreal journey to get home,” isn’t wrong and neither is it wrong to describe the movie as an “absurdist black comedy”, and while the popular descriptor of “a movie about a farting corpse, it’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry” is also not wrong, it does somewhat comes across as a refusal to engage with the movie on any serious level because it’s so much more than just that and I want to take a deeper dive into the world of Swiss Army Man.

The movie opens with a pathetically comical failed attempt at suicide. Hank – our protagonist – stands with a noose around his neck, humming a song to himself about to step off the cooler he’s standing on, when he spots a body washing up on the beach he’s been stranded on for a while now, he tries to step forward and inadvertently hangs himself only for the rope to snap some long seconds later leaving him prone and coughing in the sand. He rushes over to the body only to find that it’s a corpse. In vague terms he talks to the corpse about how dissatisfied he is with his life and how he thought for just a moment that this might have happened for a reason, and that’s when the corpse starts farting.

Hank and Manny – the corpse – strike up an odd friendship borne from necessity and utility. Manny’s amazing special bodily abilities help Hank survive and navigate his way through the forest, while Hank helps Manny remember what it means to be alive in a hilarious and darkly stark twist of the ‘born sexy yesterday’ trope. They build the kind of intense and intensely silly relationship that children often develop. There’s a lot of creativity and imagination between them, acceptance of the weird and ridiculous that we tend to lose as we grow up, a true freedom of expression that our restrictive society tends to dissuade and oppress.

Manny is everything that Hank has ever been afraid of being. He’s painfully earnest, haltingly honest, often gross and unashamedly weird. And Hank can’t stand it because he’s grown up believing that “weird is when you do stuff that no one else does and they make fun of you for it.” Throughout the film he has to unlearn and challenge all his preconceived notions about what being weird and different means in order to help his friend and himself, and Manny shows him through the wonderful abilities of his body and their growing friendship that there’s nothing wrong with being different and weird.

There’s something inherently queer about this movie. We – queer people – tend to find ourselves in the monstrous in stories throughout all time, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to The Little Mermaid’s Ursula, because of our otherness and our rejection from society is mirrored in these characters. And there’s something transgressive about taking the repulsive and monstrous and turning it into something positive as Swiss Army Man does with Manny.

And in the pursuit of something false, they create something real.

Through some awkward misunderstanding and in order to teach Manny about love, Hank finds himself cross-dressing and roleplaying as a woman. He takes on the persona of a woman he’s only ever seen on the bus and social media, adopts a feminine affect and allows Manny to flirt with him in an odd reflection of the man he thinks he wants to be. They have several staged dates, and learn more about each other as they have the most fun they’ve had throughout the entire film, and through these refractions and reflections they both learn that they’re capable of love and being loved.

That queerness extends to Hank and Manny’s relationship, even beyond the roleplay. After their ‘dates’, they have to make a treacherous crossing over a river and while Hank is trying to concentrate, Manny has a thought that he feels compelled to talk about. Manny says that he feels like there’s something between them and he knows neither of them are going to talk about it, but he doesn’t know how to talk about it anyway because he doesn’t understand it. And that sounds like, if not falling in love then the beginnings of it. Directly after Hank brushes these feelings off, they find themselves dangling over the water and Manny says something that could almost be a confession: “I think if I die, I might really miss you.” And Hank, who obviously doesn’t want to confront his feelings, says “oh you’re the worst” just before they plummet into the water.

They crash into the water, and Hank watches as Manny sinks down toward the bottom. He swims toward him and kisses him. His reasoning is unclear, maybe it’s because he thinks they might die, maybe it’s an apology, and maybe it’s a goodbye? As they kiss, memories and things that could have been flash across the screen, and though it’s not clear who’s thinking, there’s a moment from the night before where they almost kissed as themselves but this time in the water they do kiss.

And as he’s kissing Manny, Hank realises that Manny’s breathing air into his mouth, and isn’t there something so inherently queer in the notion of a man kissing another man and breathing air?

There’s also a queerness in Hank’s infatuation with Sarah, the woman from the bus. He never seems like he’s truly attracted to her, he appears to realise that he doesn’t want to be with her and maybe he never did, maybe he wanted to be her, he wanted to be as happy as she seemed. When she asks him why he has a picture of her on his phone, Hank says “You just seemed really happy, and I wasn’t.”

When they reach civilisation and Sarah’s home, neither of them are able to talk, Hank regresses to who he was before he got lost and Manny returns to a corpse. But when Hank shakes off the shackles of polite society, in his devotion to and compassion for Manny, he allows himself to break out of this stupor in order to show everyone that it’s okay to be different and weird.

Swiss Army Man explores loneliness, depression, isolation, ostracisation, weirdness, otherness, creativity, friendship, queerness, self-acceptance, how society is often hostile toward nonconformity and how we have to work together to create a society that accommodates everyone without prejudice. In an early scene, Hank and Manny find a lot of things in the woods, things that people have left behind because they’re broken, empty, dirty, smelly, useless and old, because they’re trash. Hank and Manny are the trash that has been left behind by the world. But together, Hank and Manny find freedom and purpose through their mutual strangeness. And while it’s true that Swiss Army Man is silly and absurd and dark, it’s also heartbreakingly sad and earnest in that vulnerable way those truths that have the ability to deeply hurt us are. Maybe we could all do with being a bit more like Hank and Manny, by embracing our weirdness and encouraging those around us to do the same. We should stop hiding and let ourselves be weird because life is short, and no one deserves to ride the bus alone.

Hank : “Because I’m just a scared, ugly, useless person.”

Manny : “But maybe everyone’s a little bit ugly. And maybe we’re all just ugly, dying sacks of shit, and maybe all it’ll take is one person to just be okay with that, and then the whole world will be dancing and singing and farting, and everyone will feel a little bit less alone.”

Hank : “Manny, you have no idea how nice that sounds.”

A Short Review of The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

The first thing that really hit me about The Killing of a Sacred Deer was the dialogue, there’s just something so compelling about it. It’s utilitarian, every useless needless word cut out and chiselled away, and it’s bone achingly frank and blunt in its base honesty to the point of shock and awe. Through this dialogue, the characters come across as tactless and impulse driven, every thought has to be said and there is no second thought. It adds to the strange air of modern mythology the movie creates. Something part Norse mythology, part chivalric romance, part Shakespearian farce, and part modern family melodrama. A surgeon has cursed his family by allowing a man, a father, to die on his operating table and losing touch with that man’s son and not bending to the boy’s every whim. In his inability to take accountability for his own actions, he traps himself on a throne as his family plead to be spared from the one he must kill. And it is this that makes it a dramatic farce, every point of hilarity spoken with grave honesty and gravity, it’s deathly serious in its vapidity. The surgeon’s own hubris destroys his family, because he conveniently forgets that he too is a member of his family and could so easily make the sacrifice. A father for a father would be true balance, no?

Under The Silver Lake and our Obsession with Mysteries.

What if all the stories, the outlandish and the scandalous, you’d ever heard about Hollywood were true? What if you cracked the code and found all the hidden messages in those rock songs, video games and movies? What if you solved the mystery and no one cared? Does the solution of the mystery matter or do we only like mysteries for their mysterious nature? Do the facts really matter or do we prefer the fiction?

There’s a lot going on in Under the Silver Lake, for instance: the modern mythology of Hollywood, the captivating nature of conspiracy theories, society’s obsession with pop culture and its icons, audience entitlement, symbolism in media and how its intrinsically tied to white patriarchy, how we treat talent and the cultures we build up around the media we consume and the people who create it.

This movie plays with the ‘neo noir’ genre, taking its style and tropes to say something about films, and by extension all media, and mysteries. In itself, it’s something of a stroke of genius, a meta analysis of Hollywood through one of its most icon genres.

The real world is mostly devoid of actual mystery and most especially of the kind you will find in any noir movie or Agatha Christie novel, the answers are rarely satisfying and it’s certainly never all wrapped up with a nice little bow on top.

People usually like to know what something means. They spend hours online, post their own takes to twitter, watch youtube videos of other people discussing it, talk to their friends about it, they look for interviews with the creators and those involved in its making all in order to figure out what it all meant. Why? Why do we do that?

Andrew Garfield’s character is a self interested, self-entitled, hater of the homeless, complete and total burn out who finds himself at the centre of a mystery that has pretty much nothing to do with him and at the end the answers don’t really even matter. He learns basically nothing and was he even actually interested in finding out the truth anyway? At the end of the movie we don’t know much more than we did at the beginning. Garfield’s character is just like a million other guys out there, you probably know someone at least a bit like him. Oh and he’s probably maybe the dog killer but that doesn’t matter either. Does any of it matter? Is it important that anyone finds out what this movie means?

David Lynch once said that he hates talking about his movies because the movies “are the talking”. And there’s a part of me that wonders if this movie is a commentary on that, how we, as a society, build our own mythologies around the media we consume and these stories take over and become bigger than the media itself or the people we’re talking about, how we make these mythologies because the real world is so unsatisfying.

I think this phenomenon is most well portrayed by the now infamous story of the screening of the Lumiere brothers’ “L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat”, a short film that documents the arrival of a train to a station. The story goes that as the train came closer and closer to the camera, the audience erupted with fears and hysterics because they thought that the train was about to break through the screen and hit them. It’s a great story, but it most certainly did not happen (youtuber Jacob Geller has a wonderful video about this continued phenomenon here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2DP-A6FhA0).

Where these falsities stop simply being tiny pieces of trivia that hold no real weight and are easily debunked and turn into dangerous swelling conspiracies is at the intersection of disenfranchisement and the directionless desire for something more. There comes a point where interest becomes obsession and all logic flies out the window. Take any garden variety conspiracy theory, for the most part, they start out as a vague interest in some mystery without any answer that the subject find satisfying. And that’s the rub because it seems that whether the mystery has actually already been solved or not rarely seems to matter, what does seem to matter is find a satisfying solution. Their obsession is fuelled by the notion that there has to be more because the actual reality does not meet their standards. But as I said before, when is real life ever satisfying?

You can’t live in fiction, reality will not satiate your desire for a satisfying narrative, real life does not have a three act structure, there are no real heroes and there are no prizes for figuring out the mystery, life goes on with or without you, reality does not care about you and you have to make your peace with that. And maybe that’s what Under The Silver Lake is about, maybe not, who knows, maybe that’s the point.

The Relatability of Responsibility (Why is Spider-Man so Popular?)

For practically my entire life, Spider-Man has been one of the most popular superheroes of all time (consistently in the top 3 with Batman and Superman), he’s also been my favourite superhero since I was five. Over the holidays I re-watched all the movies (though I still haven’t seen No Way Home), played both Playstation (Insomniac) games and got the Spider-Gwen omnibus, suffice to say I submerged myself in the Spider-Man universe and came out with a lot of thoughts about what Spider-Man means to me and why he’s been consistently so popular.

A few years ago I wrote a twitter thread about the wide appeal of Spider-Man and posted an edited version of that to this blog, it’s a little simplistic and years later I have a lot of different thoughts that I want to dive into. In that post I spoke about his relatability so let’s start there.

Before he becomes Spider-Man, and afterward when he’s not being Spider-Man, Peter Parker is just a regular guy and he gets his superpowers by sheer accident which is unique among the other heroes he shares the top spot with. Let’s go through a few of his counterparts: Batman’s ability is arguably being rich and been taught by people older and wiser than him, Superman is an alien, The X-Men are born that way, Thor’s technically an alien while also being a demi-god, Ironman is rich and smart, Black Widow is a highly trained assassin, Captain America is a literal super solider who got frozen in ice and is Wonder Woman even human? Unlike all of these characters, Peter Parker is just a guy who trips and falls into acquiring superpowers, and though he’s sometimes portrayed as a bit of a genius he’s still just some guy. He has bills to pay, is constantly worried about his rent, is struggling to juggle his social life with his work life, is terrified of letting people down and hating how it’s inevitably going to happen, he’s always trying to do the right thing while secretly scared that he’s messing it up and he makes stupid jokes to hide his insecurities. Haven’t we all been there, haven’t we all experienced these things and feelings? And that’s what really sets him apart from the rest. Spider-Man/Peter Parker has real world problems, on top of his superhero problems, and they affect his life as much as the superhero problems.

Also, it’s weird how revolutionary it feels that a superhero has a job and is actively worried about making rent, but it really is groundbreaking because we’ve never seen it before (I’m sure there are other superheroes out there that tackle this issue but they aren’t as big as the aforementioned characters).

But relatability is only half the story. I’m not ever interested in a character just because I relate to them, there has to be more to it, they have to symbolise something and boy does Spider-Man symbolise a whole lot of things so why don’t we talk about a few.

Let’s start with relatability and what that means within the themes and symbolism of Spider-Man. There’s a scene in Into the Spider-verse where a character, kind of as an aside sort of joke, says that we all have the ability to be Spider-Man but it’s true. Peter Parker only becomes Spider-Man through sheer chance, and it quite literally could have been anyone else. And outside of the text of his origin story, Peter Parker could be anyone, there are millions of people out there just like him. But that’s not addressing the paraphrased quote in full. In a sense, we do all have the ability to be Spider-Man, and by that I mean that we have the ability to do what we can to help others and work to make the world a better place.

And that brings me to the next theme I want to explore, responsibility. At this point, we all know the famous Uncle Ben line “with great power comes great responsibility”, but we haven’t really dug into what that means. Of course it means a lot of things to different people but I can only speak for myself and so I will. Whether you like it or not, we live in a society, we as a species are communal, and we need other people in order to survive. In my ideal world everyone would receive everything they need and would give what they could according to their ability. But outside of my own ideological beliefs, if we want to continue comfortably for many years, centuries or millennia to come, we are going to have to collaborate and help each other. All that is to say that you have a responsibility to the society you live in to do what you can to leave it better than how you found it.  

So where does that leave Spider-Man/Peter Parker and how does that make him popular? It means that he’s just like us but he’s the best possible version us, he’s who we hope to be. He’s not perfect, he messes up a lot, a whole lot, to the point where it’s an integral part of his character, but that’s part of the point. He’s smart, he’s nerdy, he’s funny, he’s awkward, he’s sarcastic, he’s unreliable, he’s a hero and he’s doing his best just like the rest of us.

A Coming of Age – The Green Knight.

I had been meaning to watch The Green Knight since it was announced, but what pushed me to finally watch it was coming across someone saying that they didn’t understand it. Whenever I see a sentiment like that it always piques my interest and I get the urge to go and see what I think. It’s the contentious things are usually, at the very least, interesting.

Throughout the movie, I started getting a sense for something, and as soon as it was over I got it. This is a coming of age story. The form and structure overlap so well. And though The Green Knight obviously is structured in the manner of the chivalric romance it’s adapting and the folktales I’m familiar with from my childhood, I think that it’s only natural that the coming of age story should come out of the folklore of a hero’s journey, and why not then bring it full circle and meld the two.

And though I am fond of and familiar with the British folktales I’ve heard since I was a child, while watching, I couldn’t help but compare it to my favourite coming of age story, The Catcher in the Rye. From the boy so sure and yet unsure of himself from the very start, who makes a gallant display of his manhood but is unaware of how the display shows him to still be a boy, the kindness and naivety, the desire to have the desires of a man without actually having those desires, and finally accepting the state of things and it is that things are about to change irrevocably.

Of course, tropes and themes trickle down through the ages and endure because they are so affecting, but also because these things remain true. Time changes us, and that fact is universal across all eras, time changes everything and we are helpless to do anything about it. Be it maturing, birth and death, relationships and the entirety of the world around us, time changes it all. And yet, that is the only thing that remains the same.

Midnight Mass and Where Faith Comes From.

On the 24^th of September, Midnight Mass, the latest Mike Flanagan project, dropped on Netflix. After success after success including Doctor Sleep, Gerald’s Game and the preceding series The Haunting of Hill and The Haunting of Bly Manor, you might have thought that you knew what to expect from Flanagan and his team. And though Midnight Mass isn’t a departure in quality or style, the subject matter is, as far as I’m aware, new ground and may just be their best work yet.

As a non-American who has been largely disconnected with faith and theology, only visiting churches for weddings and funerals, and the odd Scouts day or choir performance, I found myself unsure as to whether I would connect with Midnight Mass as much as I had with Flanagan’s other work. My worries were quickly dashed.

The show is multi-layered and filled to the brim with themes, but the ones I found the most compelling and explored in a way I had not seen before were: where does your faith come from and what informs your belief.

And, even though it mostly explores Christianity, there are many types of faith on display and even outside of religion. There’s hereditary faith, passed down through family ties, there’s the kind that comes from overwhelming love and devotion, the kind that comes from duty and tradition, from fear and shame, the kind that comes from a desire to be better than those around you.

Some people, though I haven’t seen them, have criticised the show for its penchant for monologues. But in a show about theology, having people preach about and discuss their beliefs, is enrapturing in its simplicity. It’s intimate and spiritual, fitting the show’s themes.

Of course the show isn’t perfect, it was never going to be, and though I have problems with some of the effects and how some things were given more attention than they warranted and others less, I found that this series solved a lot of issues that I’d had with Flanagan’s previous work with Netflix. Where Hill House and Bly Manor spent a lot of time on story and plotlines that went nowhere and didn’t add all that much, Midnight Mass has a singular focus that affords it some freedom to explore the topic and themes more deeply.

The whole conceit of the show rest on this one idea: a pious but lost priest finds evil, mistakes it for salvation and spreads that evil throughout the community he loves so dearly. He wants to believe so desperately that he can change things through the one thing he has, the one thing he has spent his life devoted to, he wants to believe that good can come from this simply because he believes it in his heart. And the prodigal son (Riley) returns without faith or hope, looking not to absolve himself but to do right by those around him. He tries to show the priest that what he’s doing is wrong. He tries, the only way he knows how, to save the ones he loves.

In the end, it comes down to one thing. Does your faith come from a selfish love or a selfless one?

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On an unrelated note I, like a few others, have a bone to pick with those that have criticised the show for having ‘monologues’. There are these large swaths of time where everything slows down and we sit with a few characters and they talk, they talk to each other in that intimate and honest way that usually happens at 2am between friends or they bare themselves in order to shine some light on the shadows. Some people have said that it grinds everything to a halt, stops the plot dead, takes too long and is unrealistic. When did people talking to each other become unrealistic? I’ve had conversations like the pivotal discussion of the afterlife, quite a few in fact, and I guess we just have different friends. The idea that the plot isn’t going anywhere when characters are talking is nonsense, this is the plot, pay attention and you’ll find it. I saw someone suggest that they just do a flashback when the sheriff is talking about his history and my gut revolted at the idea. Things do not always have to be racing from one dramatic set piece to the next, and just because it’s dialogue doesn’t mean that it’s telling not showing, talking about it this way is kind of a kick in the teeth for the actors who put their heart into these performances. Maybe try to sit back and listen, who knows, you might enjoy it.

Donnie Darko Might Be Satire?

I recently rewatched Donnie Darko, it’s been around ten years since the last time I watched it and had a completely different viewing experience. The last time I watched this movie I was still in my teens and engaged with it as shallowly as relating vaguely to Donnie and finding it compelling for reasons I could not discern. Well, I think I can discern them now.

While I’ve seen people go in deep on the science fiction and mental health elements of the story, I’ve not yet seen anyone discuss just how laden with satire this movie is. It holds a mirror up to suburban middle class America and reveals the inherent hypocrisy of it.

With the mother that is judgemental of those around her, narrow-minded and rigid, who defends a motivational personality when he is accused of owning sexual images of children. The psychiatrist, who seems wildly out of her depth and offers Donnie shallow platitudes, and spends the epilogue staring at the ceiling. And the flat and shallow political discussion between Donnie’s dad and his sister, which is nothing more than mud filling while they try to rile each other up. The previously mentioned judgemental mother leading the PTA to ban a book, while the young progressive teacher tries to stand against it, but is ultimately thwarted. When Donnie going off on a tirade about Smurfette, a heightened version of school yard discussions, it is horrifically reminiscent of ‘nerd’ personalities online over the past ten years. Then when his psychiatrist tries to hypnotise him, he starts talking about how he thinks about sex all the time and begins to undo his pant.

It almost perfectly captures a moment in time, and it’s also incredibly funny.

Take for instance the Fear and Love activity. Donnie has a real honest human response to being told to determine whether a scenario is a product of fear or love, he questions whether anything can really be made that simply and says that most things require more nuance and context, but the teacher says that he has to do it otherwise he won’t get the class credit. Donnie stares at her as he boils with futile rage and we quickly cut to a farcical scene in the president’s office where it becomes clear that Donnie told the teacher to shove the info card up her ass.

Then there’s the scene where Patrick Swayze’s character is doing his thing at the school. The previously mentioned scene acts as set for this one, we already know that this ‘motivational speaker’ is giving people easy answers to difficult questions, and we’re waiting for something to happen. Swayze’s character talks to various children at the school and gets them to stand with him on the stage. Then Donnie comes up to the microphone. At first he addresses Swayze with all the usual shallow criticism of these sorts of people, and then he addresses the other kids, in another movie you might expect him to give them genuine advice, but instead he gives them a different kind of useless easy answer because he’s a damaged teen. Here the comedy comes first and then the raw reality comes in like a sucker punch. Swayze’s character says that Donnie is angry and scared, troubled and confused. And Donnie agrees, he is troubled, confused and afraid, but he also thinks that Swayze is “the fucking anti-Christ”.

And as we approach the end, it feels like we’re picking up momentum to finally find out some secret or hidden truth that the whole movie has been leading up to, but it just culminates in a few minutes of high tension, tragic accidents and bad decisions. In the end everything falls apart instead of coming together.

There’s something of the divine comedy to it, take the ending, Donnie and God are watching and they’re laughing at us.