Thursday, February 15, 2018

Horror Films and Meaning in Stories`

So, this is the kind of thing that runs through my head at the gym (quarter after 6 this morning ... first time that early in years) while I'm listening to Imagine Dragons or Lacey Sturm and trying not to drop a bar on my throat before I've even really woken up.

As soon as I get off editing a book on internet daemons (a legion of background programs involved in packet routing in the internet, the internet as a possessed place, and the implications of the level of flow control assigned to daemons independently for net neutrality), maybe I will get around to finishing the first book and then reading the second by the author I playfully dub "Captain Anglo-but-Catholic," the first on Shakespeare's life as evidence he was Catholic (in a time when that was a bad idea in England) and the second on the plays as evidence. And even from the one instance of  material from the plays he has had in the first fifty pages of the biography book, I can see the point he is making and think there will probably be a decent level of validity in some of the individual observations, maybe even a majority of them (but I've already said that I think that his stated underpinning "authorialism" philosophy and his version of "incarnational literature" are dangerous bunk).

So, I'm at a point of seeing the serious criticism of Shakespeare from a Tolkien perspective but also thinking that there are some other things possibly of value in Shakespeare. So, as I have mentioned in some other posts, this has gotten me started on a string of thoughts of different ways in which meaning happens in stories. It's an ongoing project to think about different kinds of meaning and their instantiations in stories, such as Tolkien's "narrative art" as based in enplotment or Shakespeare's possible use of mouthpieces (which I don't mean pejoratively) or Rowling's use of literary alchemy and Dumbledore as a mouthpiece or As Above So Below using Dante and Alchemy in a found-footage horror piece.

[ASIDE: Admittedly, there are some stories that might take a little bit more work to fit into any model even though I think they are good and I love them: I can fit Snatch into a "value of underdog" and Way of the Gun into "exposition of the natural order and the idea of not stepping out of it" (small time hoods reaching above their station and the Chiddicks using a surrogate rather than the natural way), but I'd probably be pressed to give a good exposition of how "proper f*ck*d?" (the coursing scene in Snatch) or "we're not asking for forgiveness, we're not asking for absolution ... but isn't that the way it is, every g*dd*mn time?" (closing line of Way of the Gun) fit into all that meaning finding method in the way that I love the lines and think they encapsulate something in the film (or how, even though Resident Evil: Apocalypse is mainly pumped up adrenaline and a predilection for noir on fire and appreciation that Jovovich has great form and persona for all these acrobatic kick-ass sequences like running down a building or jumping a Harley through a Gothic church window and killing the big bad with a double-barreled shotgun firing stacks of quarters, even though it's mainly that [which is why I have watched all six RE franchise movies, in addition to all five of the Underworld franchise, so often on my elliptical machine at home], I think that it also does capture something primal in human experience when Jill Valentine coughs out cigarette smoke and says "f*ck me" when she hears the yield of the nuke after having asked as a way to keep up her "we might still be able to last this situation out" tough spirit ... but I don't think I am getting that through the door as "meaning" for some types, types with whom I share some habits of thought, habits of thought for the sake of which I do these mental experiments of wondering how different types of meaning get into stories and how they are read there ... but I still try to see how they might fit together). END ASIDE]

So, one person I know has said they don't think there is really anything productive or positive added to the world by generating the emotional experience of fright or terror for its own sake, which is what this person mainly conceives the genre as being, in all instances. Admittedly, there is a lot of it that is that, especially slashers (and then you have the "sophisticated" stuff that the critics wet themselves over like Josh Whedon's Cabin in the Woods because it goes meta, to which my response is a bit the same as Robert Downy Jr's advice to Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder, "never go full retard" (for the most part I had no use for that movie, and I apologize for any offense in the terminology, but the "never go full" does have transposition value here) ... I say "never go full meta"; when everything was meta, they had no place to go to do something with a metaphorical or symbolic or emblematic or any other type of referent outside the story without using some overblown image like these nebulous gods, and then the gods win because, well, they're gods, and you just got two protagonists sitting there going "I guess we lost" ... boring at best, but the critics all trip over each other to wet themselves because it's "sophisticated" ... it's what I call the "sophisticati," an adaption of all the conspiracy-theory connotations of the illuminati trope).

But I think there can be a point to horror and the emotional experience it gives rise to when done well. That's basically just saying that I think it has a particular type of meaning that can be put into it and brought back out of it in a way proper to the way it works, by the feelings of horror and fright. In As Above So Below, it's the heaviness and grit and fear of reconciliation, the way in which "digging in the dirt, find the place we got hurt [or did the hurting]," to quote Peter Gabriel, is horrific like digging into thousands of bones in a grave world under the ground and being attacked by them, and in Insidious: The Last Key, it is being aware of the horror of the realization of the times when violence was actually still going on right around one and not realizing and the social criticism of manipulation of abusers.

That's the main point of this post. Just a thought that occurred to me at the gym this morning of connecting the "types of meaning" thing I've been contemplating in regard to Tolkien and Shakespeare and my interest in horror of a certain kind. I've already written on As Above So Below and Insidious 4 individually; this is just a succinct statement of fitting that interest into my larger thought system about literature (or at least an attempt to fit it in).

P.S. If you're reading this from checking out my blog from hearing of it in the podcast on Mugglenet's "Reading, Writing, Rowling" and you've ever wondered what the Wyrd Sisters sound like ... I have always thought that Tom Waits is the secret model or epitome, so you should check out his whole body of work (except maybe Small Change and Heart Attack and Vine, I've never gotten hugely into them ... actually, the ones to which to listen especially are Closing Time and Nighthawks at the Diner and then the albums from 1983 on: Swordfish Trombones, Franks Wild Years, Rain Dogs, Bone Machine, Mule Variations [greatest line maybe ever about human experience: "I know you can't speak, and I know you can't sign, so just cry right here on the dotted line"], and Real Gone ... I haven't had a chance to check out Bad as Me yet ... well, with it being seven years, yes I have had the chance, but I haven't gotten around to it yet) ... that's what I'm listening to as I write this.

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