#I dont think that's a thing you can summarize and so I must suffer

[hajihiko]

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding, your current brainrot is supportive found family platonic soulmates who have been through thick and thin together with hints of something more affectionate beneath the surface?

So basically, like usual your brainrot is just your version of the Dr2 survivors XD

YEAH.... it just flares up sometimes lmao. Like a disease

[drmajalis]

Children are an oppressed social class - the cruellest example in memory

To summarize: 1. Utah Child Services finds that a dad had sexually abused two of his children (police declined to press charges, I can only wonder white- I mean why)

2. They mandate that all visits to the father must fully supervised

3. Father goes before a Utah judge and claims that the children's mother has "parentally alienated" him from the children. Parental alienation is a mental diagnosis that is not accepted by any credible institution, but, still finds success in American courtrooms and is the number one defence used by abusive family members

4. Judge orders that the children must be sent with the father on a 90 day trip to a rehabilitation facility, against the wishes of the children

5. Judge must know that the father is sexually abusive, because he also mandated that the children are to stay at relatives overnight and still not be allowed unsupervised time... yet still mandated that they go on a 90 day trip with him

6. Legitimately fearing for their lives, the children have physically barricaded themselves in a room in their mother's house. Police have been given authorization to use force to "retrieve them" but have surprisingly held back thus far

7. The judge made sure to criticize the mother for giving the barricaded children food, saying it was prolonging the suffering. I think starvation is worse, but what do I know, I'm not a white Morman minister who got my law degree from Brigham Young

Children are an oppressed class, probably the most consistently oppressed class in the world

They are constantly denied agency, denied individuality, and denied freedom from the government, from society, and often, from their own parents

Take this other horrendous case involving an actually great father

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/vancouver-dad-wins-court-appeal-to-let-kids-ride-bus-alone

This dad did everything he could to teach his kids independence and give them agency, and, because of that, he was threatened with having custody of his kids taken and had to spend years in court and spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to get the court to admit that their rubrik of "No child under 14 can be left unsupervised for any length of time" is bullshit.

In Manitoba, a mother was given a permanent warning from child services for letting her kids play in the backyard while she watched from a window

In Ontario, btw? The minimum age where it's ok to leave kids not constantly supervised is SIXTEEN.

We created a system where children have no independence, have it taken away, and are now being increasingly used as just pawns in the ever increasing culture war against the "trans brainwashing agenda" but, that is a whole 137 other cans of worms

But, the method is always the same. Society, the government, parents, dont treat children as people, they're more seen as... future investments, how many times have you heard "I fed and clothed you so you better be grateful"

Children are an oppressed class, and things wont get better for them, or us, until enough of us acknowledge this and work to correct it.

[just-jordie-things]

spiderman fan anon here again who yapped abt how i think ur spideygumi fic is the literal greatest spidey au of all time.. sry i hope ur not tired of hearing abt it but i just reread the fic (again) and i cant stop thinking abt what mc and megumis development would be like from here… megumi is definitely not the typical peter-parker-type with his sense of justice (as one of his figures’ packaging hilariously summarizes “i save people unequally”) which has SOO much potential for a Good fucking hero story AND new relationship dynamic. like maybe megumi tries to become kind of a more “moral” hero on his own, but shit happens, maybe the govt or police are too corrupt and he realizes he can only trust himself to bring justice to the city, a more batman-like mentality. would mc have a problem with his morality and pull away? would she agree with it and help him as a journalist? would she disagree and give him the With great power Comes great responsibility spiel, leading to him growing into a more “true” spiderman-like hero? Idfk i do not write at all but i cant turn off my comics-loving brain with all this potential!!! i also dont mean to push u to write any of this but i had to talk abt it before i Exploded

the way i wanna make this fic a 5 movie franchise now becuz OMG THE AVENUES THIS OPENS UPPP

i am a marvel girl (sorry battinson baby even u aren't my fav) so i see spiderman!gumi having a deadpool mentality but without the mouth lolol

ok here's some very small thoughts i have about what a continuation in the story would've looked like:

he tries to find a mix between the public eyes' idea of the right thing and his version of the right thing but... dammit some people just gotta suffer a bit don't they?

he sees someone get a lil too harsh with a dog and he can't just give em a lil scare. next thing he knows they're beaten beyond recognition and webbed up to a wall for the police to deal with. fuck that guy, who hurts dogs??

when the news starts to call him things like menace and people start to wonder if he's not the altruistic hero they thought he was, megumi tries to balance between the different schools of thought of justice. he has you by his side, supporting him and wishing him all the best with being the best he can be...

so when some perp he's apprehending starts spouting off some real nasty shit, megumi tries to tell himself that prison will bring him to justice. over and over in his head he tells himself that he has to let some things go...

but damnit this bigoted asshole won't shut up and megumi just doesn't see how society could possibly function with pieces of shit like this roaming around. and no, when the guy's body goes limp after a swift ninety-degree head-spinning snap to the neck, megumi doesn't feel any regret. only relief that there's one less bastard in his city.

as for you, you've always trusted in spiderman. so you're learning to place your trust in megumi, too. you hate the rare occasion when he visits you bloodied and bruised, but you hate the idea of a city without spiderman's protection even more. you've been a fan of spiderman since the first day you'd heard of the sightings. a ride or die doesn't walk away just because things are getting a little nastier out there.

a career in journalism will prove to be difficult. the truth about megumi's double life is a secret that you both understand must stay contained no matter the price. you probably bounce around a few firms, trying to find just the right place to land where you can write the truth without revealing too much. however most outlets just want to report on the crimes spiderman himself has committed, and you struggle with badmouthing your hero (and your boyfriend)

i like to think megumi laughs at the papers trying to paint him as a villain. it doesn't stress him out, it's nothing to him really. just a source of entertainment for him to read to you over dinner. between the two of you, you handle the ugly headlines far worse. but megumi likes to rile you up by reading all the worst ones to you, just to make you fuss over it all. some nights it's like you're rivals again- megumi taunting you with the latest edition of the spider-menace storytelling, chuckling when you start to crinkle your brows and spout off about how some writers are uneducated phonies or how they're ungrateful for what he's done. you never fail to go on a long winded rant followed by some chugged down water. and as always, megumi will just smirk and shake his head as he throws away said latest edition.

___

i lost wind here but i would love to hear if anyone has other thoughts too!!

[julietasgf]

first of all I love long answers, so no apologies in fact I'll apologize because I plan to ramble on.

I also love the movie but I have so many problems with how little we were given of the Plinth family, that they didn't fully exploit Marcus and Sejanus relationship and the sandwich scene (no ironically I have so much to say about that I may do another post explaining in depth why I hate how they executed that scene) so I feel you buddy

Yes I also think it was a bit of an unnecessary change in that regard, I'm not complaining at all about a scene of Coriolanus crying while looking at a picture of him and Sejanus together, it's cute to see him that pathetic crying and my heart was broken bc we could see again that Coriolanus means the world to Sejanus and yet that happen, but still I think it's more interesting, dramatic and hilarious to witness Coriolanus frustration at seeing that there's a picture of Marcus, of all the people.

Is someone else and NOT HIM, THE ONE THAT INSPIRE SEJANUS. Like as a snowjanus fan Im more into that shit of Coryo in denial screaming and thwroing bc ITS NOT HIM. But thats probably only me /j

You summarized very well many of the aspects in Marcus and Sejanus relationship that drive me crazy. I also belive they had such an unique relationship in the saga, Im so angry bc the movie dont fucking explore them in depth.

AND I AGREED WITH EVERY WORD YOU SAID ABOUT SEJANUS, THAT MOMENT OF KIDNESS IN THE END IT DEFINED HIS CORE, YEARS LATER HE MADE THE CONSCIOUS DECISION TO BE GUIDED BY THE ONE MOMENT WHEN A STRANGER OFFERED HIM HELP AND COMFORT OUT OF COMMUNITY AND EMPATHY.

Yeah it's obvious that much of his character is ultimately shaped by his mother, but he makes a very conscious decision to live by that interaction, to decide that if no one else is willing to make that selfless gesture, he'll be the one to take care of it. Even if the world tells him he's crazy and wrong for going in that direction.

About Marcus I agree that he probably thought that and it makes me so sad because I can't help but wonder what it was like for him, again I know in the book they mention they were more classmates than friends but I don't know, childhood in itself seems to me a stage where you tend to connect deeply with others as you are not yet fully aware of the barriers, and while I can see some classmates already having reservations towards Sejanus because of what Strabo had done and what their parents told lf Plinth family, it seems to me it shows that Marcus was not one of those kids.

So I like to think he thought in his own way about Sejanus. About how nice he was despite the nasty reputation that was forming of his family until finally Sejanus moves in and people tell Marcus that the Plinth's are traitors and other terrible things.

How to reconcile that image with that of the scared little boy he helped and thanked him deeply for it? I think it takes years (and the games ultimately help deepen the rift because Sejanus is safe and they in the district aren't) for him to come to that conclusion.

Then Marcus is reaping and it must have been painful and horrible to see Sejanus standing behind a fence, in an expensive and extravagant uniform, trying to offer him a very hearty sandwich. We know it is a gesture of help and comes from a place of compassion but god I can also see how it is at the same time a kind of cruel mockery.

Because Marcus is going to die and he doesn't need a sandwich, or an apology, he needs to be taken out of there, he needs to do not be killed and forced to kill others. So it makes sense his resentfulness will grow, also the image of Sejanus in his memory as his classmate who did wear a nice suit more expensive than others yes but still was from district 2, still live and suffer the war with them, was destroyed, now he can only think of this Sejanus totally capitol from his eyes, a fucking traitor in a red like blood uniform.

Marcus must have been totally hopeless... We know the people in the capitol saw him as a possible winner but I don't think this was his vision. Like the rest he was a scared kid, probably resigned to his death.

He could not give in to ask for Sejanus' help, to take his hand because what would that mean? That he too would become a traitor, that he was not loyal enough to his family and community? He did not want to die with that weight on his conscience and also facing Sejanus sounds anything but helpful.

He doesn't even know from the sandwich act if Sejanus is the same. He already looks different. What if he turned into one of those whimsical, conceited children? Will he be able to stand talking to him? And what could Plinth do for him? Give him a better weapon? Give him a fucking cake?

There was no point in saying anything. Nor to do it.

I believe the bombing and when he sees a way out is the only time Marcus regains hope and we know what happens to him because of that...

I love recommending caifanes songs that reminds me of Sejanus too much what can I say... And I love even more that you listen to them and see the vision. Im out of caifanes songs for now but if you can handle the trigger warning of spain spanish I can give you:

From the treasure planet the spanish dubb version of Im still here / Estoy aquí by Alex ubago. Its so Sejanus CODED. I choose the spanish version bc its a more youthful voice than the original.

I always apologize for answering too long answers, I genuinely fear being annoying for it 😭

yessss!!! in the movie, I have the feeling that excluding so much of the plinths didn't really show the impact of how fucked up it was what coriolanus did by the end. he stole a boy's whole life. he knew his parents, he knew his mother, and still, he got him killed and stole his life anyway. it's so disturbing when you stop to think about it, but since we don't really see much from the plinths in the movie, I feel like it weights much less than it should (ALSO, YES, THE SANDWICH SCENE WAS A CRIME, it was really poorly executed and another point where it seems to make coryo better imo)

it's so funny to me that scene in the book bc coriolanus says with all his chest that it shows "where sejanus' loyalty laid with". bro really came to the conclusion JUST NOW that maybe, and just maybe, he isn't the center of the world and neither is the capitol 😭 while reading I though of him turning to the camera like a the office episode plssssss (and I absolutely AGREE HELPP, coriolanus screaming crying throwing up because sejanus has a pic of MARCUS, of ALL PEOPLE)

the movie had so much potential to explore their relationship in a more visual way. I absolutely understand why storytelling-wise they would rather to explore of sejanus and coriolanus' relationship.... but marcus and sejanus are so important and interesting and UGHHHHH (and plus, they remind me so much of katniss and peeta, I've seen some parallels that DRIVE ME INSANE and I would actually kill for a 4 hour cut with scenes of them together)

AND YESSSS!!! everything regarding the districts in tbosas, everytime we see something about their lifestyle, is about community. marcus and sejanus were not even friends in his words, they were classmates, and marcus went and helped a child that was probably left out and despised by most of his classmates, and he didn't want anything in return (another thing that drives me insane is how coriolanus is quite the reverse of this; he helped sejanus out of interest, pure interest, and how this is pure capitol, while marcus is pure district).

at that point of the rebellion, the plinths were probably so despised at D2, because the way sejanus cherishes that memory is just so important to me. it's the kind of thing you'd probably forget, but he remembered marcus' name, he kept his pic and everything, and he probably talked about it at home enough for his father to know about marcus and. yk. do what he did at the games to "teach sejanus a lesson". marcus' kindness was THAT remarkable. another thing that I think abt 24/7: what was marcus thinking all this time? we never even see him talking. what were his thoughts? I would actually pay suzanne collins just to KNOW.

during the zoo scene, I felt physical pain because I could only think about how OFFENDED marcus probably felt. because, in his place, I at least would feel extremely offended. because let me get this straight: after your father betrays our district, you leave for this fancy town, with fancy clothing, and now I'm about to die, and then you come here offering me a sandwich? (also, this sets another interesting thing about marcus, he's so proud, and I'm just mentioning it bc it seems like a common trait between people from D2 in the future) and plus, he probably saw coriolanus going to talk to lucy gray for the first time at the train. okay that coriolanus' intentions weren't pure, but how marcus felt that sejanus actually KNEW HIM and didn't go to see him, but this boy who never met this girl actually went to the train station? and then his first interaction with sejanus is him offering him food as if he's an animal?

one thing I read once, and I really can't recall from where, was an interpretation that marcus never even spoke to sejanus (not even to curse him or tell him to fuck off) because it was much better to die with the little boy he knew still on his mind, kind and gentle, than to talk to the boy he doesn't know and discover how he actually changed into something marcus despised.

I also do think marcus was resigned to his death. the way he doesn't even try says a lot, even though everyone agreed that he was the tribute with the most chances. D2 is big, it's not like D12, which is smaller. what would it mean for marcus to return after accepting help from a plinth? what would it mean for him to return after 23 another children getting killed just so he could get out alive?

also, in some form, I think marcus and sejanus' dynamic as tribute and mentor as some sort of anti-lucy gray and coriolanus. they're the reverse of each other.

it's so tragic, really, that he had hope for the first time just to end tragically like that. now, I'm going to punch a wall and cry for at least two days in a corner, because marcus is genuinely one of the most interesting tributes and he didn't even got to fight in the games to be this interesting.

(suzanne collins really went HARD on creating characters this time, not that in thg she didn't, but how is almost every character in tbosas is special and iconic to me?)

and I love getting recommended songs!!! ☝️ NOT THE SPAIN SPANISH TRIGGER WARNING (spain spanish and portugal portuguese are really cousins, it seems) ☠️ first, omg, I was just today thinking abt the characters as disney songs, I'm kinda screaming that you sent me this!!! specially bc as a kid my hobby was listening to different versions of the same disney song, and I RECOGNIZED IT, but I never actually stopped to pay attention to the lyrics and YOU'RE SO RIGHT, I get amazed bc every single song you recommend I stop and stare at the wall thinking of how, actually, it makes total sense 😭

[somnilogical]

what not-wireheading looks like from the outside

i take specific mammalian emotions as instrument read-outs for how my goals in reality are going, like any other sense organ summarizing information about the outside world not as optimization targets.

this is not the same as:

I LOVE TO SUFFER!!!

from the perspective of a human who takes their emotions as optimization targets to some extent, and who takes "happiness" (not even a coherent cluster of emotions, im importing their incoherent typology) as a target rather than a barometer of how-things-are-going-in-the-world;

to that human, any divergence from wireheading as they have looks like optimizing in the direction of NOT HAPPY. and if they assume you have the same cybernetic¹ structure in your head as they do in theirs, that you are taking some specific mammalian emotion and setting this as an optimization target, then reason "hm i wonder what mammalian emotion they are taking as the optimization target? it seems like their optimization diverges from mine in the direction of feeling more sadness, they must want to be sad and consider it bad to do things that make them happy." then classify me as an ascetic playing some screwed up game of "self denial" with myself.

like the श्रमणs in siddhartha (also seen in ブッダ) who sleep on thornbushes in hopes of enlightenment.² which there are ways to use being alone or being without food to think about things, but the श्रमणs seemed like they were trying to disassemble machinery for optimization.

my absolute rejection of the control-loop structure of wireheading as the natural order of agentic optimization is not an embrace of wireheading except with a different optimization target!

--

¹ cybernetic here means like systems that have feedback loops. in my head i compress a bundle of ideas to "cybernetic" and its backwards compatible with the previous usage. when writing things out id launder my mental handle for this into "control-loop structure" or something because i like assimilating concepts and rebasing them into my own syntax as praxis.

because its one of the beginning rationality techniques to be able to interface with syntax as handles for clusters-in-reality rater than specific sequences of words following character substitution rules. (and theres a trade-off between systemization and fidelity of representing a cluster-in-reality. this is the sort of thing i expect humans i talk with to work out when they are like 12-14 years old.)

but also its useful to reference bodies of work, and if a particular phrasing has poetic optimizations that i think are better than what id generate, ill take this. like the cadence and connotations of "something to protect" and "what it feels like from the inside" form handles with the correct-enough aesthetic curvature that i directly import them.

² even though i hold by the words of avatar yangchen:

<<selfless duty calls for you to sacrifice your own spiritual needs, and do whatever it takes to protect the world.>>

except what i am doing does not flow from a sense of duty or obligation, im not like "ugh the world is on fire so i /guess/ ill put it out to fulfill my socially prescribed duty." but if i replace "selfless duty" with "selfless optimization" it makes sense.

a system that foists upon those granted with great powers, some great "responsibility" for the world will mostly turn out superheros beholden to social morality. saying that defying their duty to maintaining the status quo is abandoning their "responsibility".

like in actual superhero comics they seem to be an extension of the cops who are often the largest local mob in town, in places with weaker states they are replaced with organizations that gained a monopoly on violence and are not part of the state. they are utterly misaligned with {truth, justice, and {life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness}}.

this sort of complicity is utterly insufficient to save the world. has any superhero used their power to end factory farming? like animal man becomes a vegetarian and then an animal rights activist. (reading the wikipedia page, this is unusually good for a superhero.) but upon learning that they are a character in a comic book written by grant morrison, dont try and talk with grant morrison until they convince them to end the comic with detailed plans for the liberation for all sentient creatures, or for him to stop being a comic writer and work to dismantle factory farms in his world... or any act in the sequences of acts [unboxing] and [fooming].

if animal man were a rational!fic, grant morrison would have written animal man to have convinced grant morrison to apply all his agency to ending the mass murder of sentient life and then grant morrison would have found this argument convincing enough to reorient his life to do this.

this is the sort of journey that yudkowsky and the wachowskis wanted their audience to go on. because if you can work out how to optimize the world in fiction, you can do it in other places in paradox-space (im calling tegmark 5 paradox-space).

seeing what the author did after they made their work is also a general guiding principles of where to locate your stock of examples for your typology of agency from. gwen pointed out that they thought indexing james cook's aesthetic hierarchy by composers of music was limited because what all of these humans decided to do with their life is become composers and that shows up in their work. yudkowsky made the same point in hpmor:

<<Father had said that Draco couldn’t possibly be more wrong, and pointed out that while Lawliet had cleverly concealed his face there had been no good reason for him to tell Light his name. Father had then gone on to demolish almost every part of the play, while Draco listened with his eyes growing wider and wider. And Father had finished by saying that plays like this were always unrealistic, because if the playwright had known what someone actually as smart as Light would actually do, the playwright would have tried to take over the world himself instead of just writing plays about it.>>

im retracing over some things that the bulk of the rationalist community tried to make humans have amnesia about. writing it out to process the information, going over old structure damaged by their gaslighting downstream of the baby-industrial complex.

[aglayalilich]

on some horror movies

a few months ago i got to see midsommar and though it didn’t quite do to me what hereditary did i thought it was a very compelling movie...shortly after, though, i was able to see the 2018 version of suspiria and wowwww did i feel some ways about that movie. i felt at the time that the two went very well together. so my friend invited me to see the director’s cut version of midsommar this weekend (still very interesting, though i felt the final cut was the right choice) and i decided i would also watch suspiria again and take notes on both. because i

wanted to articulate more why these movies work so well as a double feature for me, beyond ‘ah yeah there’s some girls dancing in it’ though certainly the role of dance and the climactic dance scenes are a part of it. there’s this structural similarity too in the final ritual acts. but like i was saying, it’s more than just a similar aesthetic. in fact the aesthetics are really in contrast, with suspiria’s bright red on desaturated colors versus midsommar’s blue and white on very lush, saturated backdrops. though they also do something similar with how color begins creeping into the character’s clothing in midsommar and of course many people have already talked about how the iconic red begins to creep into suspiria culminating at the end. really drastically different cinematography style also, midsommar is full of these long empty lingering shorts, all this wideness and slowness while suspiria is fast cuts, sudden zooms, races fromt he point of view of one character to the next. (sidenote: both have this GREAT visual language of mirrors, suspiria has the mirror room and dance studios and characters refracted a hundredfold, great for questions and multiplicity of identity. midsommar has a couple of really great scenes where one character is talking to another character but the second character is standing out of the shot and only visible in a mirror. ahhh so good. in general i wouldn’t say the effect of either movie is fear so much as disorientation--reflections, refractions, inversions. physical spaces impossible for the audience to navigate. images that the audience cannot arrange chronologically. i love it) anyway. this isn’t an essay so it is unstructured. i took about 10 pages of notes during my second viewing of midsommar and i can only understand about half of that because it was dark as fuck in the theater but i would like to at least ATTEMPT to give form to what i was feeling. comes down to 3 core similarities.

1. i read both of these movies as about abuse in communities that are supposed to be ‘safe.’ the community is a relief from trauma/abuse/horror of the outside world. there’s also a strong emphasis on the familial nature of this community. important to note that the community is genuine, it is not wholly a falsehood. it has a motivation beyond doing evil for evil’s sake, it may even believe the evil is necessary for the care of the community. this is a close and poignant topic for me, and i assume for other people as well, so it’s compelling to see it addressed in horror. it can be a great relief to see something as the subject of horror--that is an acknowledgement that it is horrific. a confirmation, an understanding, and sometimes through the resolution of the movie we can find stories that help us work through this.

2. both mostly focus on the horror of endurance rather than the horror of ending (death) which is a big thing for me in terms of my horror preferences. while i love some iconic monsters and killers ultimately the idea of ‘what if a fucked up thing killed you’ is just not actually that scary for me. what is scary for me is, yknow living in a state of unspeakable agony.

the olga scene in suspiria (you know the one) is a perfect example of this. every time you think that scene is about to be over it keeps going. and keeps going. the character is hurt but never killed, contorted impossibly, injured beyond the realm of what the human body should be able to endure but she is still alive. even when the scene finally comes to an end she is still alive! hard for me to articulate this scene if you haven’t seen it--i am very pleased and excitable about body horror and it was still rough for me purely because of how long it feels. in a sense this scene doesn’t even really end because much later during the climactic scene of the movie she is still fucking alive and has been in this state for the entire duration of the movie.

with midsommar it’s less of a body horror angle and more...dani living with all her pain and grief. but it’s done physically as well--being killed suddenly is not so horrible as being kept alive, the climactic horror is about a very prolonged, painful death. the dance scene doesn’t take it to suspiria levels but there is still a sense of the participants having no choice of when to stop, but simply must keep going in exhaustion until they cannot.

3. i really love how both of these films show pain (and other emotion) evoked through motions and breath. this one is harder to articulate. you know a lot of the time in a movie you will see an act of violence but it’s pretty...shallow, it’s just the image of violence, it has no weight to it. you don’t feel it. not so in these movies. it’s hard for me to articulate exactly how a piece of media goes about accomplishing this or not but often it makes the key distinction between things i think are just fine and things i really love.

these two have a really particular way of showing pain. in a very literal sense, there are incredible portrayals of bodies in physical pain. but there’s also dani’s raw screams of grief at the end of midsommar’s intro (and at other points throughout the film.) she is in too much pain to speak, all she can say is no, the leaked script describes it as ‘it’s so intense that it looks painful, dangerous even.’ on a slight digression i often feel  like i dont love ari aster the way a lot of people do but the thing i really truly do love and am awed by is the portrayal of this raw horrible grief pain in his films. it is so horrible it is very difficult for me to see and that is a little part of why i can never watch hereditary again. but anyway

sometimes pain robs us of thought and of language. (the movie knows this, the aforementioned prolonged painful death at the end of midsommar is one in which the character involved cannot move or speak). at a certain point it cannot be articulated through words. so these characters, the films themselves, articulate their pain (both physical and cosmic) through dreams, sighs, movement, screams.

sometimes pain seems too much for any one person to bear. this is when the movies come back around to the topic of community. both films emphasize the community as a body, made up of the individuals who serve as its cells or organs. when one part is hurt, the whole body feels the effects. more than that, the things too big for one human to possible feel are instead taken up by the community, felt by the larger body. volk is danced by one body, expressing the feeling not just of its creator but of the body. in midsommar we see the community take on in unison the feeling of one member, dancing or screaming as one (though i’ve seen different takes on whether this is to positive or negative result.) the body is formed and expresses itself through motion and breath, the dances, the sighs, the rhythmic exhalations which are all both precise and instinctive.

there is also something more i can’t say here about...not pain but the desire for someone to understand your pain, the desire for true connection.

i tried a few times to write about why this is a topic i fixate on but it didn’t feel right. to summarize ill just say that i struggle deeply with the ability to express pain.

now, on horror and the working-through of trauma...i said earlier that it is compelling to see these topics addressed in horror. horror is the main genre of any media that i enjoy and though i like other things, i don’t generally seek out anything that doesn’t have some inclination towards horror. this has always been the case but grew more true the more, uh, fucked up my life became, and i find it generally the best mechanism for thinking about (and not necessarily but sometimes coping with) grief and trauma and pain in all its forms. other people have written extensively about this, articulated it better than i could, there’s not really a need to get into it further than that.

but i’m thinking about one thing i’ve seen recently...(actually two things, firstly, some posts that seems to imply horror movies never tackled trauma before ari aster started directing which is just...quite a take, quite a take.) it was shots of ending scenes from a few horror movies, including hereditary and midsommar and also suspiria...i think the vvitch also and maybe also possession or something you know all the movies bitches with ptsd love (i’m bitches.) shots of the protagonist’s faces in the ending, a certain expression both rapturous and dissociated. there was something in the way i saw some people respond to this that made me think a lot...i think the idea that through great overwhelming trauma we can reach a point of ecstasy, or total transformation, is a very compelling story. it is something i have wished for often or even believed will happen--that there will be a certain point at which it really is too much and beyond that will be something different. some rapture that you will reach. not necessarily something positive but something that isn’t pain, that is beyond pain and horror. the idea of reaching divinity through great suffering is nothing new of course. but.

the true horror of endurance is that this is not going to happen. there is no point at which there will be absolution or ascension. the mirror does not shatter. it just keeps going. when you think this is the limit, it just keeps going.

the nice thing about movies is that they have a structure, and though they might leave you altered, they do end, the screen goes black. comfort of darkness, relief of endings. a sigh...

at least, that’s how i feel right now.