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natromanxoff · 2 years

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Record Collector - December, 1996

Credits to Louise Belle and Queencuttings.com

NEWS FOR THE RECORD

COMPILED BY MARK PAYTRESS

MERCURY MULTIMEDIA

THE FREDDIE MERCURY PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

An exhibition featuring over 100 photographs of Freddie Mercury went on show at the Royal Albert Hall last week, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the death of the Queen frontman. The display is drawn from both private and public collections and spans the singer’s life from his infancy in Zanzibar to his final, formal portrait, taken during his battle against Aids. The exhibition is free of charge, and is open until 11th December.

Turn to the feature elsewhere in this issue for more details, plus an exclusive selection of images from the show.

QUEEN GIVE US THE EYE

Queen Multimedia, in conjunction with Electronic Arts, have announced the launch of “The Eye”, an interactive, action-adventure computer game, based on the music and imagery of the band.

The game will be available in March 1997 as a five-CD-ROM set compatible with IBM PCs. Ninety minutes of original and remixed versions of Queen’s best-known songs have been aligned to “motion captured characters and real-time facial animatio”.

“ ‘Queen — The Eye’ will be the first music game of its kind,” claims Tim Massey of Destination Design, who created the package. “This resourceful vision makes the integration of Queen’s timeless appeal with the revolutionary audio and visual gaming technology a ‘must have’ product.”

Expect a flurry of promotional and advertising initiatives to tie in with the release of the game, including a ‘making-of’ TV documentary; a worldwide syndicated radio special; and at least three associated books, to be published by Boxtree. A price for “Queen — The Eye" has yet to be fixed, although the manufacturers estimate it will be in the region of £40.

STATUESQUE MERCURY

On 25th November, five years after the untimely death of Freddie Mercury, a 9ft bronze statue of the late, great singer was unveiled at the waterfront at Lake Geneva, Montreux, Switzerland, near to Mountain Studios where Queen recorded their final album, “Made In Heaven”. The statue was paid for by Freddie’s family and friends, and the patch of land on which it stands was donated by the commune of Montreux, who got to know Freddie during his final years.

The statue is the work of Czech sculptor Irene Sedliek, a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and a memory of the Society of Portrait Sculptors. The memorial was unveiled by opera star Montserrat Caballe, with whom Freddie recorded his “Barcelona” theme tune to the 1988 Olympic Games.

WIENER WILL ROCK YOU

Following screenings at film festivals in Venice, Cannes and London earlier this year, Queen’s “Made In Heaven: The Films”, is now available on a compilation video, via independent label Wienerworld, priced £10.99. Without Freddie as Queen's focal point, the band bypassed the traditional rock video medium and opted instead to commission eight short films from young directors via the British Film Institute.

“Queen were the pioneers of the promo and have reinvented it on many occasions. The project offered the opportunity to think hard about what has happened to the music promo, and how to invigorate a more dynamic relationship between pictures and sound,” said executive producer and head of the BFI Film Division Ben Gibson. “l think the results, which are films in their own right, vindicate everyone’s belief that the project has crossed new boundaries on short film-making.”

EURO GA GA

“Queen Dance Traxx 1” is a new album featuring sixteen Europop cover versions of songs made famous by pop's most flamboyant foursome. Issued on the Continent in October and in January in the U.K., the CD features dancefloor-orientated reworkings of Queen anthems like “We Will Rock You” (by Interactive), “Under Pressure” (by Culture Beat), “l Was Born To Love You” (by World's Apart) and “The Invisible Man” (by Scatman John).

“The first time I heard ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ I stopped what I was doing and just listened,” reports the Scatman. “As a jazz artist at the time, I knew I was hearing something special. Freddie Mercury’s knowledge of music, coupled with his vision, was clearly understood by the band… and there was a development and execution of that understanding that created music I felt was of genius. With this project, we’re aiming to bring a new life to the music of a past generation with sensitivity, with taste and with creativity.”

LASERS LEAD THE WAY

Two other Queen films, the “Champions Of The World” documentary and “The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert”, have just been issued on Laser Disc, via Pioneer. The Laser Disc is the principal video format in the States, and is growing in Europe. The manufactures of these 12" diameter, double-sided discs claim digital sound and broadcast-quality pictures, plus the added bonus of compact disc-style indexing. On music titles this means you can key into favourite tracks without having to bother with out-moded ideas like fast-forward and rewind.

“Champions Of The World” is priced £24.99, while the double-disc “The Freddie Mercury Tribute” costs £34.99. Forthcoming Queen Laser Disc releases include “Greatest Hits 1 & 2” and “Wembley”.

FLASH!

THE FREDDIE MERCURY PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

ANDY DAVIS INTRODUCES A NEW VISUAL CELEBRATION OF QUEEN’S MUCH MISSED FRONTMAN

It’s now five years since the rock music world learned of the tragic death of Freddie Mercury. In that time, the surviving members of the band have paid tribute to him by completing and releasing the final album they recorded together, “Made In Heaven”, and have sanctioned a whole host of projects by which fans can remember Freddie and the group he fronted with such astonishing showmanship for twenty years.

Now, to mark the fifth anniversary of his death, and to celebrate his extraordinary life, an exhibition featuring some of the best photographs of Freddie Mercury has just opened at the Royal Albert Hall. Sponsored by EMI Music, the exhibition was conceived by Queen’s manager Jim Beach, and is being put together under the aegis Of Freddie’s publishing company, Mercury Songs. One of its principal aims is to raise both funds and awareness for the Mercury Phoenix Trust, the Aids support charity established in Freddie’s name in the wake of his death. (To date, the Trust has raised around £4 million.)

The choice of venue — the circular corridor which runs around the inside perimeter of the Royal Albert Hall — is both unusual and prestigious, as explained by the exhibition’s curator, Richard Gray, who as Queen’s art director, has been the man behind all the band’s artwork for the last ten years.

“It took a long time to figure that the Royal Albert Hall might be the venue,” he reveals. “Exhibitions like this are usually something they don’t get involved with. But we wanted people to have access to the show without getting the feeling you can get, for example, in some art galleries, where the door has to be unlocked for you before you can even go in. The exhibition is free of charge, but there will be collection boxes on the site, and we hope that people will be generous!”

CUTE

The exhibition features over 100 colour and black-and-white images spanning Freddie’s life, from cute baby photos of the infant Farookh Bulsara just a few months old in Zanzibar to his final, formal portrait, taken by Richard Gray for “Greatest Hits II” in 1991. Each photograph has been enlarged to 20” by 16”, and has been carefully retouched where appropriate, and then finished using the most sophisticated imaging techniques available. In all, the show took over a year to complete.

“The big jump came when we were granted access to Freddie’s parents and his photo albums,” reveals Richard. “Initially, Freddie’s parents weren’t sure whether they wanted to open up their family albums, but once they’d made that decision they were happy for us to continue.” Because ofhis family’s co-operation, fans now have a rare opportunity to glimpse the man, the child even, behind the Mercury persona which Freddie spent much of his life cultivating. But what a persona!

Among the pictures Brian May contributed from his personal collection are a series of stereo photographs of Freddie taken the late 70s and early 80s. “Stereo cameras take two he shots of the same image and turn them into 3-D,” explains Richard. “They’re quite amazing. There are five stereo pictures on show in a special viewer, all of which feature Queen live on stage. Brian would lend his stereo camera to photographers covering the concerts, and there are others by David Burder, an expert in 3-D photography, who also happens to be a friend of Brian’s. He helped me get the shots together.”

Among the other images on show are pictures of Freddie at Ealing Art College in the late 60s, dozens of stills of him in Queen throughout the 70s and 80s, and a handful of Polaroids of the lakefront view at Montreux, which Freddie sent home to his parents. “It’s more the case of telling a story than just a photographic exhibition,” maintains Richard Gray. “There are lots of photos which you'll recognise, but others, probably about 25%, which have never been seen before.”

Another highlight for fans will be the only U.K. showing of the three-foot high plaster model which sculptress Irene Sedliek used for her statue of Freddie, recently erected in Montreux, Switzerland, and which appeared on the cover of “Made In Heaven” album. A smaller version of the statue, measuring about 12” in height, will be included in the exhibition when it travels abroad next year.

After a break for Christmas, the exhibition will move to the National Theatre in Paris for two weeks in January, followed by a season at the Cologne Philharmonie in Germany. Thereafter, it will undertake a two-year world tour, and there are plans for it to return home sometime in the near future, where it will be staged in various provincial British cities. Commemorative tie-in merchandising, including a set of six postcards, a poster, T-shirt, and a 20-page programme, is on sale at the exhibition, all profits from which will go to the Mercury Phoenix Trust.

All photographs reproduced by kind permission of Mercury Songs Ltd.

The Freddie Mercury Photographic Exhibition is open from 10.00am to 1.00pm until 11th December 1996 (excepting Thursday 5th December), at the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, London SW72AP. Admission is free but by ticket only. 500 tickets are available in advance for each day of the exhibilion. A further 1,000 tickets are available each day to personal callers.

Telephone bookings/enquiries: Royal Albert Hall Box Office, 0171 589 8212, open 9.00am to 9.00pm every day.

Photo captions:

• Farookh Bulsara pictured at home in Zanzibar in spring 1947, as captured by a local Indian photographer.

• LEFT The young Freddie Mercury, snapped by his father in the family’s back garden in Zanzibar. He’s dressed for a blessing ceremony at a fire-temple, as a birthday celebration.

• ABOVE Freddie and his sister Kashmira, again photographed by their father, in the Indian village of Bulsar, from which the family took its name.

• The Hectics, Freddie’s first rock’n’roll group, at St. Peter’s School, Panchgani, India in the late 50s.

• ABOVE A Little Richard impression from Freddie and the Hectics. That’s the fledgling Mr. Mercury at the piano, of course.

• BELOW Young Freddie Bulsara and his St. Peter’s School classmates in the original “Bicycle Race” from the late Fifties.

• Freddie live on stage in America, during 1980 — playing up to drummer Roger Taylor while his audience watches adoringly.

• ABOVE Backstage during the South American tour, Freddie experiments with an acoustic 12-string.

• RIGHT Queen in the enormous Estadio Municipal at Mar Del Plata, in Argentina, during their 1981 South American tour.

• ABOVE An armed security guard greets Queen as they arrive via helicopter in Argentina in 1981. Within months, the Falklands War had broken out.

• BELOW Freddie and Queen enjoying the company of Argentina’s armed police motorcycle escort!

• LEFT A still from the unforgettable 1984 video for the “Radio Ga Ga” single.

• RIGHT Another video still, as Freddie catches up with the hoovering on the set of “l Want To Break Free”.

• BELOW Freddie in full flight during the band’s 1982 U.S. tour.

• LEFT The 1987 version of Freddie’s peacock suit first seen in “It’s A Hard Life” — an inspiration for Paul Weller’s last single, perhaps?

• ABOVE A candid portrait from Freddie's final years, used to promote Queen’s 1990 album, “Innuendo”.

• BELOW An official portrait for Freddie’s duet with Montserrat Caballe in 1988.

#queen #queen band #roger taylor #freddie mercury #brian may #john deacon #montserrat caballe #queen scans #queencuttings.com #record collector december 1996

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eternalstrigoii · 4 years

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Dark Fey Reference Post #1: Habitats + Dwellings

“She was silent for a long while, taking it all in. Conall had been somber when he said this was all that was left of the fey - but to her, the number seemed huge.” - Maleficent: Mistress of Evil novelization by Elizabeth Rudnick

There are scores of clear canon disagreements between the novelization and the film, yet the most striking lies in the novelization’s understatement of the Nest of Origin. The Nest’s depiction on paper (p. 134-136) lasts little more than a paragraph and makes no mention of the climate, topography, or their living spaces -- and also reduces the Dark Fey to an unnumbered “several dozen.”

Every single frame of the Nest’s introduction is rife with detail, so I decided to go Full Nerd and write several love letters to the details of the Dark Fey and The Nest of Origin, the first of which comprises Dark Fey Habitats and Dwellings. Though camera angles work to make the Nest simultaneously vast as well as compressed, which leads to the pitfall that we can’t always keep track of where, precisely, we are in the given space, we’re still gifted with an exceptional amount of detail.

For the sake of chronology, let’s begin with the Tundra:

As soon as we enter, we’re enveloped by sharp, snow-capped peaks. The Nest itself is cavernous, but the vastness and intricacy of its pathways is apparent from the beginning. Natural archways connect areas like bridges, there’s greenspace below, and, as soon as we/Maleficent notices the outcroppings, how densely populated they are becomes revealed to us in full.

Fig. 1 (click to enlarge)

The Tundra Fey’s nests blend well with their environment. In fact, there are several nests on every outcropping in Figure 1. (Some are easier to spot with the camera angle than others; moments later, as Maleficent passes, a great many of their occupants come to the ledge’s edge to see her.)

Tundra nest groupings seem to occur most frequently in groups of 3-4, though at least 2 are present on each outcropping, and are closely gathered around a central point (generally a fire).

(As per Fig. 3, every outcropping in the Tundra has a nest grouping on it. Tundra fey actually may be the most populated of the Dark Fey groups -- which would be reasonable, as humans are notoriously cold-susceptible and would have a more difficult time driving them from their lands.)

The Tundra transitions into the Forest with connective greenspace resembling a mountainous deciduous forest; we don’t actually see much of the Forest Fey’s living space. There is the possibility that, rather than nesting, they live in hammocks among the trees like young Maleficent did in the original movie (or before Maleficent moved into the peaks herself with the regeneration of her wings (though that is not confirmed)).

Or, perhaps, the elevated cluster of roots is a nest -- however interconnected is left up to the imagination, but we do get some choice shots of indentations in said cluster of roots as well as several fey emerging from it. (Fig. 5 + Fig. 6)

There is also the possibility that forest-dwellings are well-hidden and/or opportunistic (as Maleficent’s possible nesting in the peaks). The Forest fey appear to be the least well-populated of all fey types, with under a dozen seen at the biome’s introduction.

How the Forest transitions to the Jungle is left largely up to imagination, though we know there is a curving, or a narrowing, in the peaks that bring the “walls” of the Nest closer together in that space. The Jungle is lush and well-planted, multi-leveled like the Tundra, and the most prevalent type of nest (or, at least, the most obvious) are teardrop shaped pods made of woven, still-living greenery, descending from the cliff-face (Fig. 7, Fig. 8, Fig. 9).

Much like the Tundra fey, Jungle fey are also quite well populated, with rampant color-pattern diversity as well as nests that blend into their native environment.

Jungle Fey nests appear relatively evenly spaced, largely equidistant from one another with no central focal direction. They seem to be single-room-type dwellings, which may imply that gatherings as well as day-to-day activities occur below the canopy.

The Jungle’s transition into the Desert is marked with a natural archway dense with lush greenery, a significant contrast to the sandy, arid conditions below (which also may provide a regular water source, if rain-forest climates are to be believed present).

The Desert Fey appear to live in the least homogeneous conditions, with distinct group settlements at different elevations throughout their biome (Fig. 11).

Desert Fey dwellings also take on two distinct forms - an open-sided, clam-shell like nest (Fig.12 + Fig. 13) as well as a cavernous one (seen from the inside in Fig. 14). Whether or not the more open-sided nest is actually a nest or is a place for a Desert Fey to seek shelter from the sun is unknown. Nests are subtle, naturally derived or possibly built into existing land-masses.

(See this Gif for additional details to the left and right of Fig. 12 + Fig. 13.) The Desert’s nests appear well-spaced and not entirely equidistant. Fires are not precisely centralized, though may still be a focal point. Though only 3-4 nests are seen in the immediate nesting group, there are other nesting sites nearby, with three fires present in relatively close proximity to one another. The desert fey are land-dwelling fey, seeming to prefer level land upon which to nest. Several Desert Fey are seen flying overhead, though only six (including Borra) are present in the introduced nesting group.

(I desperately want to know what is dangling in the corner, there, and what the inside of that nest looks like.)

In conclusion:

While the phrase “several dozen” is technically correct, the Forest Fey seem to be the least populated habitat, and the Tundra the most densely; though the Nest varies in level, the majority of individuals’ nests are ground-based and constructed from natural materials suited to the inhabitants. As the Dark Fey roamed every part of the world, the Nest’s inherent habitat diversity is well suited to meet the needs* of her ecologically-diverse inhabitants.

(*Although I still did not see any animals, particularly large game, and there’s almost no argument for beings with such high muscle-density not to exist on a protein-rich diet. All birds eat meat - the larger the bird, the more readily identified their carnivory (ie Birds of Prey).)

#Dark Fey #Maleficent: Mistress of Evil #maleficent 2 #Maleficent Mistress of Evil #The Dark Fey Reference Posts

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orionsangel86 · 5 years

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“I Think It’s Time For Me To Move On”

...And Other Things That Have Destroyed Me This Weekend...

So there is this common trope within love stories which generally happens at the end of the second act in which everything goes wrong and we all think that the lovers are doomed to failure. Its pretty much standard in every Jane Austen novel, every romantic film every made, every single bloody love story. Go ahead, name one. I guarantee you the break up moment is there.

Within the epic love story of Dean and Cas, there have been many break up moments, and all have had their emotionally devastating impact on the relationship and the show...

But THIS was a different level.

(For a nice summary of Destiel break up moments and understanding of this trope, @tinkdw wrote about it here.)

I didn’t think that there would be another moment within Dean and Cas’s relationship that could hit me this hard. The mixtape in 12x19, the wrapping of Cas’s body in 13x01, and the return of Cas in 13x05 are moments that I consider to be the very top of the scale in making this pairing undeniably romantic. Moments that pushed it beyond a platonic interpretation. These three moments have been the things I cling to when the show has otherwise made me doubt any conclusion to the DeanCas story, and since there hasn’t been another one of those moments since 13x05, until now I have been somewhat nervous that the story was dropped, or being forced back behind a platonic screen.

15x03 has ripped that screen away.

Emotional meta under cut...

This entire episode was an emotion fuelled dramatic roller-coaster that killed off three characters including our beloved witch queen in a scene that almost stole the show and practically canonised the SamWitch ship. Rowena’s death should have been by far the most torturous moment for viewers to endure, and it was extremely torturous and had me sobbing on a plane 3 hours into a 7 hour flight. That incredibly heartfelt moment between Sam and Rowena will probably go down as one of the top tear-jerking moments on this show. It was tragic in the best way - the way Supernatural is famous for.

But lets not gloss over the fact that in an episode where THAT should have been the climax, where THAT should have been the emotional highlight and end point, instead we get a further MORE dramatic stand off between Dean and Cas that pulled focus and ripped all of our hearts out just as violently as poor Ketch in the first act (a very clever and smug piece of meta foreshadowing there Mr Berens).

On a meta level, this is HUGE as a writing choice because they MUST know how this looks. This was the climax of the third episode of the finale season. The way Supernatural has always structured itself since Carver era is that the first three mytharc episodes of each season establish the direction of the story and set the foundations for the character level focal points and dramatic key notes to come.

That the writers have chosen to end the foundation episodes with a DeanCas break up moment that was more dramatic than a Spanish Telenovela has just stunned me and left me reeling because I just can’t see how else this can go. This break up scene absolutely DEMANDS a huge reconciliation of the sort that will be part of the A plot of the season - the FINAL SEASON. Guys. Part of the reason I have been so quiet and so disillusioned with the show during late season 13 and season 14 was because they pushed any Destiel plot into non existent territory - it became kinda irrelevant and Dean and Cas just acted like friends (homoerotic friends yes, and sometimes like an old married couple, but it was mostly played as an afterthought imo), so for this to suddenly be brought to the forefront of the emotional story again is excellent news for us.

The thing is, like with those huge moments I listed above, the break up scene is basically undeniably romantic when you break it down to its components:

1. It’s only Dean and Cas.

Once again we have another scene of high stake emotions that excludes Sam. In a platonic reading of the show, it makes zero sense for there to be such a hugely disjointed relationship between Cas and Dean and Cas and Sam given he has known them both for so long now that if they were all “just friends” then surely Sam would also feel the impact of Cas’s choices as heavily as Dean. In a platonic reading, Dean comes across as an asshole, Sam comes across as being weirdly uncaring about his friend of 10 years, and Cas comes across as not even bothering to get Sam’s opinion before leaving. A romantic reading makes sense because quite literally THIS IS A ROMANTIC BREAK UP.

2. The words spoken.

“Well I don’t think there is anything left to say.”

“I think it’s time for me to move on”

From Cas’s perspective at least, name one time in a piece of media where such language has been used for a platonic breakup sincerely? There have been heartfelt break up songs that use these exact words. (I should know I’ve spent the last 24 hours listening to them all).

That last line in particular is so heavy. It’s the last line of the episode and nothing about it is platonic. This is relationship terminology my dudes. “I need to move on, and get over you.” This is Cas’s bloody Adele song. My heart breaks for him, but if I was his sassy and fabulous best girlfriend right now I’d be sitting him down, sipping a cocktail, flipping my hair and telling him “Babe, you’re too good for him. Good Riddance. Let’s go out, have some cocktails, something pink and fruity. No dive bars for us darling. I’ll take you to Heaven... the fun one in London.”

In all seriousness though, from Cas’s perspective, this was him admitting defeat and giving up the fight for love. How anyone can possibly say Cas isn’t in love with Dean after this, well I just don’t know what show you are watching. This is the face of a heartbroken man who has just accepted that his love is unrequited.

3. The many faces of Dean Winchester

On the other end of the scale, Dean was mostly silent after his poisonous words “And why does that something always seem to be you?”

Forgive the terrible gif quality I’ve no time for fancy gif work!

Look at his face here. He knows what he said was fucked up and he immediately regrets it. The way he swallows around that regret and then turns away.

and after Cas says that devastating final line and walks away? We get THIS reaction from him:

The jaw clench as he looks down. The sorrow on his face as he realises he has well and truly fucked this up. LOOK

Finally, he looks up, makes himself look up and watch Cas leave. If that isn’t the face of a broken man I dunno what to tell you. Anyone who thinks Dean is totally heartless and uncaring right now needs to reassess because this is NOT the face of someone uncaring. This is the face of someone who has just lost everything. Again.

4. The FUCKING MUSIC

Seriously. The sweeping heavy drama of the low strings that come in right after Dean says that horrid line, that carry the weight of the look of horror and heartbreak on Cas’s face as they amplify the emotion there. As they blend seamlessly into the slow and subtle version of the Winchester family theme behind Cas’s heartbreaking speech and Dean’s stubborn stoic face hiding a multitude of emotion, until the violin dominates as Cas says “I think it’s time for me to move on” and the Winchester Theme swells to its climax, ripping all our hearts out just like poor Ketch as Dean watches Cas walk out of his life surrounded by darkness.

I MEAN.

A friend on Twitter reminded us all of this point about the importance of this theme via @justanotheridijiton here which is essentially:

“The Winchester theme is not simply an aural marker to let the audience know when and how Sam and Dean love each other (any Supernatural fan knows that is the baseline of their relationship), but to provide narrative information, especially when the image and dialogue are incomplete or inconsistent with the true situation... Seasoned fans will recognize the theme and its history of being paired with images indicating deep emotional bonding and a desire to do the right thing by the Winchester code. Here we trust our ears over our eyes to reveal the truth.”

So here is yet another key indicator that any surface read that this is actually an ending between Dean and Cas and that Dean really is just an angry asshole is utter bullshit.

Honestly, this was PAINFUL, but it was painful in the best way. It was 13x01 levels of pain, but this time it was Cas choosing to walk away which makes all the difference. Dean’s greatest fear isn’t his loved ones dying on him after all, but of his loved ones choosing to leave him. This was exactly the kick up the ass Dean needs in order to win Cas back, classic love trope style.

Hence my excitement at what is to come. Yes we won’t see Cas again until 15x06, but in the meantime I fully expect a good helping of angst and wallowing from a depressed Dean who has to deal with the fact that he has just lost the love of his life and it is all his fault. That he just pushed away the one person who promised they would always stay by his side. That has got to hurt.

So yeah, this episode emotionally destroyed me, and I’ve only really covered the primary reason, let alone all my feels over SamWitch, Rowena’s death, Belphegor’s taunting of Cas over his deepest fears and then having to suffer through smiting a creature wearing the face of his son until his body was nothing but a burnt corpse... I wonder if Bobo had a bet going in the office over how much he could hurt us all? He was certainly enjoying scrolling through the Supernatural tag on Twitter and liking everyone’s reaction tweets including some brilliant Destiel related ones. I do love Bobo. Our Angst Goblin King.

If anyone had asked me a few weeks ago what my thoughts were on the chances of getting explicit canon Destiel by series end, I would have said somewhere in the realms of 30-40%, considering it a battle of wills between DabbBerens and CW studio execs who I still feel are against it in general. I would have considered everything that happened after 13x06 as the writers getting a big NO on Destiel from the network and therefore having to pull back on any Destiel related plot points (purely my own speculation on BTS matters of course).

Now I am wondering if Dabb kept fighting the network? If he managed to wear them down into begrudging acceptance? I’m currently up to around an 80% chance of textual canon DeanCas if we continue on this path. If Dean is clearly shown to be mourning and hating himself over Cas next episode, and if this DeanCas dramatic plot line continues to be a focal point of the emotional story arcs... well...

I’m side eyeing 15x07 a lot right now. Only in my wildest dreams would I think that they might actually introduce an old boyfriend for Dean in a “coming out” episode, but the placement, timing, and potential is all there and I’m kind of once again donning the clown mask because I’m just in awe at everything that they are doing. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, I’m gonna paint my face in red and white and wear my rainbow wig and listen to break up songs on Spotify whilst trying to shove my heart back into my chest where Bobo Beren’s gleefully ripped it out with his hands like the demonic angst goblin he is. Wish me luck, I’m not sure I’m gonna get through this season with my emotions intact.

#destiel #supernatural #spn meta #destiel meta #spn speculation #season 15 #15x03 #castiel #dean winchester #spn spoilers #my meta #destiel dreaming #destiel break up

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blackjack-15 · 4 years

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Silly Rabbit, Ecological Terrorism is For Kids! — Thoughts on: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek (ICE)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it. As ICE sends off the Jetsetting Games category and moves into the Odd Games category, there will be a section between The Intro and The Title called The Weird Stuff, where I’ll go into what storyline marks this game a bit Odd in the Nancy Drew series as a whole.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: ICE; TRT; mention of FIN; mention of CUR; mention of TRN; mention of SEA.

This meta is under a read more because of its sheer length.

The Intro:

Ughhhhh. UGHHH.

The White Wolf of Icicle Creek has a lot of things that make it distinct in the Nancy Drew video game series — it sports the first new interface since SHA, it has the world’s most boring list of ‘enticing moments’ from the game on the back, its assets look like they were forcefully molded out of gummy bears, it randomly was released on Wii, it’s the best-known game among non-fans thanks to the Game Grumps — but it also stands out because not one of those things make it enjoyable to play or to watch without a heavy amount of MST3K-style commentary.

Also because it features the fandom’s least favorite puzzle of all time…but more on that later.

A point to get out of the way before we get into the game proper is that this game feels a lot like a cheap knock-off of Treasure in a Royal Tower. Like, a lot like a cheap knock-off. One of those animated films called “Bemo’s Lost in the Ocean” or “A Toy Tale” that come out around Disney/Pixar films to try to trick hapless grandmas into buying them.

Just lining it up, we have Nancy stuck in/around a lodge in winter, an edict from the owner of the lodge to figure out what’s up with repeated Incidents and possible sabotage while most guests have left, an academic around Nancy’s age, an Old Coot, an Olympian whose grandparent was important, chores (including food related chores) to do in order to progress in the story, a suspect you can only talk to face-to-face for part of the game…the list honestly goes on in both big and small ways.

While ICE isn’t the only one that tries to do this (since I’m not doing a SEA meta, I won’t get into the fact that SEA literally just remastered DDI’s characters and said ‘good enough’), it does feel particularly egregious because, for all its copying, there’s not enough in the game to distract from it even a bit.

ICE is a game searching for an identity and unable to find one, no matter how many plot points, chores, or games (horrible, unskippable games) they throw at the player. We have full on international espionage and ecological terrorism here (more on that in the next section), and it just…doesn’t matter, at the end of the day. It also takes place in Canada, but your only clue to that is that one of the characters says “eh” a lot, so that’s not great either.

If ICE is a new game to you (it can be a bear to install and even worse to complete, so I’m going to go off the assumption that not everyone will be familiar with it), you’ve probably only heard of the cooking chores, fox and geese, and that this is the game with the Return of Tony Balducci, previously of TRN fame. (Honestly, ICE had a big enough cast without its phone characters, but HER decided to shove three phone characters along with one partial phone character at us anyway.) And, to be honest, that’s pretty much all there is to the game.

Now I know this sounds harsh, but there is a possible explanation to the lack of content in this game. In my previous meta (link at the top of this post) I made a note that CRE’s production in all likelihood suffered because the company was focused on ICE’s new interface. I don’t think it’s a leap at all to say that ICE’s story and characters could also have suffered because of the same thing.

The biggest problem with ICE — besides the weird stuff we’ll get into below — is that it’s a shallow game. None of the characters have any real depth, the plot is a paper-thin copy of TRT, the puzzles are alternatingly impossible and extremely easy, and in an effort to add “depth”, we get…well, we get this next section.

The Weird Stuff:

With each of the Odd Games (ICE through RAN, Heaven help us all), there’s something that makes the game truly…well, odd. Odd for the Nancy Drew series, odd for the age range specified on the front of the box, and odd in general when you look at the rest of the plot.

In this game, it comes in the form of terrorism — or rather, two types of terrorism. Guadalupe is our first (and only, in this series) ecological terrorist, belonging to a fringe group called “Run and Go Free” and being perfectly fine with illegal acts (destruction of the fishing lodge, sabotage of personal property), even telling Nancy that she’s done worse in the name of Run and Go Free.

Nancy Drew Games are no stranger to hippie/naturalist types (see DOG, DDI, CAR, etc.) but Lupe is our first to be legitimately dangerous. Sure, she doesn’t end up being the ultimate Bad Guy, but she is A Bad Guy, and it really does seem very odd to me that after everything Lupe does (and insinuates that she’s done), that she gets away with barely a slap on the wrist in having to leave the lodge.

Lupe in no way fits in with the rest of the plot; there’s nothing to justify her being present in the game, she can appear about halfway through the game and then leaves to become a phone contact soon after, she’s not present enough to be an actual suspect — she has no place in the plot nor the game, and it really does just boggle the mind that a character is in it at all, especially with ICE having a greater than average number of suspects to begin with.

On the other hand, however, we have Yanni, an Eastern European Olympian spy/terrorist, sent by the Fredonian (a commonly used fake country) government to bomb around the lodge to find uranium under the cover of training for the next Olympics.

That is a whole lot of things for one character.

You’d think with the presence of Lupe that Yanni would fit right in, but he doesn’t make her — or himself — any less odd or out of place than he would have been alone. It’s a ‘suspicious Olympian’ character that we already got with Jacques, but he’s a million times worse, setting off friggin bombs to find a metal that his government wants for…well, the normal reason that governments want uranium.

So we can add in “reference to ongoing nuclear warfare” as another thing that makes this game Odd.

Yanni doesn’t fit the game or the plot, which is pretty bad considering he’s responsible for about half the plot in the first place. He also has that weird aside about his grandmother being eaten by wolves, as if HER wants the player to suspect him because of some twisted revenge against wolves plot (which would have been Very Weird) so that they can pull the rug out at the end and be like “see?? He’s a political terrorist looking for uranium for nuclear bombs for his country!!! Gotcha!!”.

Like, it’s not a Gotcha if it’s absolute lunacy. My land.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s get to something a little less Odd.

The Title:

I actually don’t have much to say here. The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is honestly a great name; it tells us the focal point of the game (the wolf), the location, (Icicle Creek), and even pretty much tells you the season that this game is happening in (white, icicle). It accomplishes a lot in a very short amount of words, and pertains accurately to the game we’re dealing with.

We’ll chalk that up in the “Win” category…especially since we’re going straight back into the “Lose” category with the next section.

The Mystery:

The mystery is a mess, full stop. There’s way too much going on for the amount of payoff (i.e. little to none), and the plot, thin at best, completely drops off at the 2/3rds mark when all the player has left to do is wait for random events to occur and keep putting off fox and geese.

Anyway.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage to parts of the resort. Asked for help by the owner of the resort who’s away on business, Nancy must pick up the slack left by staff who have quit, run food-related errands, and discover who might be behind these attacks before it’s too late.

Oh wait, that’s Treasure in a Royal Tower. Lemme start again.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage —

You get the picture.

The biggest difference pre-game is that after every incident, a white wolf is spotted, only to disappear before the police get there. People start connecting the wolf to the crimes, and go as far as blaming it for cases of food poisoning and slashed tires, as if the wolf is cooking food and using a knife with its paws.

Just as Nancy’s arriving on scene, the bunkhouse is blown up and she hears the wolf howling — so obviously there must be a connection there, and a wolf definitely isn’t just responding to a loud noise.

This part honestly feels a bit like the beginning of CUR, where the game tries to establish Scary Feelings and Ominous Threats and just comes off ham-fisted.

The back of the box features three ‘exciting’ things that Nancy gets to do in this game, which are as follows: cook lunch and dinner, ride a snowmobile and wear snow shoes, and do snowball fights and ice fishing. While it’s sad that those moderately exciting things are the best that the box can boast, it’s even sadder that they really are the best the game has to offer.

It’s easy to lose thread of the mystery nearly as soon as Nancy gets to the lodge, because she’s immediately bombarded with laundry that has to be done before a certain time, meals that have to be done within a certain hour or two, and a suspect (Lupe) that can just refuse to show up.

Oh, and the return of Tino Balducci.

Returning in a game where he doesn’t fit in and where no one wanted him in the first place, Tino’s there to “help” Nancy solve the mystery by giving her a questionnaire for her suspects to fill out that asks what planet they see themselves as, among other inanities.

Honestly, this whole section could be summed up as “Tino returns, among other inanities”.

Nancy, throughout all of this, somehow has time to do a bit of detective work, interviewing a cast of rather one-note suspects, figuring out that more than one person is responsible for the many accidents. Guadalupe’s sabotage is discovered and she’s sent home, Yanni is increasingly unavailable (which is hugely suspicious), snowball fights are more prevalent than necessary, and finally the villain is exposed, all culminating in a glitchy, nigh-impossible snowmobile chase.

Oh, and there’s a half-tamed wolf storyline that kinda pops up every now and again.

All in all, the mystery is a weak thread throughout the game — which is a problem, because it’s the only thread throughout the game — that’s easily overshadowed by the chores, games, and frankly awful visuals throughout the game.

Now, to those who contribute (in a way) to the non-entity that is ICE’s story:

The Suspects:

Ollie Randall is our resident grumpy caretaker and is Chantal’s right-hand man, along with being on the Avalanche Patrol and a firm believer in the bad luck that wolves bring. His wife can’t handle cold temperatures due to a nerve condition, so he’s also his daughter Freddie’s sole parent during the winter.

As a culprit in the game as it now is, Ollie would have been the only sensical option; fed up with the awful guests that come and cause havoc, he starts causing little easily-solved accidents to spook away the less hardy-type guests, but it keeps spiraling as it doesn’t keep out everyone but people like Bill Kessler. Frustrated by the treatment the lodge gets, he decides that if people don’t treat it nicely, they can’t have it at all…

Unfortunately, Ollie is limited to being Grumpy, and not a lot else.

Freddie Randall is Ollie’s daughter and the self-proclaimed Snow Princess due to her ability to stay out in the cold for hours in her snow fort, and to take repeated snowballs to the face courtesy of a teen detective.

Freddie is…I know I talked about how Yanni and Lupe don’t really fit into the game, but Freddie really doesn’t fit any version of this game. She’s there for a mini game, she doesn’t have a personality, you can’t skip her mini game, she’s voiced by Lani Minella…the list goes on and on. Her shining moment of glory is acting as a red herring by throwing a snowball through Lou’s window.

She’s pointless to talk about as a potential culprit, even though she would have been an interesting “culprit” in a case where all the incidents are actually Freddie accidentally causing trouble, but that probably would have been even less satisfying than how the game actually went, so we’ll just move along here.

Our cross-country skiing Olympian from the fictional Eastern European country of Fredonia, Yanni Volkstaia is both our only suspect wearing a onesie and our only suspect with a family member eaten by wolves.

I know, that’s already a high bar to top. Don’t worry, he’ll fall very, very far below it.

Yanni, as mentioned above, is our odd spy/terrorist villain who is disguising his being there for uranium by saying that it’s his Olympic competitors trying to throw off his training. Why an Olympian is training alone without any coaches or security…well, let’s just say that Yanni didn’t really think his cover story through.

Just because Yanni’s the obvious culprit doesn’t mean he fills the role well; Yanni is obvious, annoying, and his paper-thin cover is just annoying enough to be…well, annoying. He throws out that his grandmother was “killed and devoured” by wolves as if he wants Nancy to believe that that’s the reason he’s targeting the lodge but…it still points directly to him. It’s just not great all the way around.

Joining Yanni in terrorism is Guadalupe Comillo, activist from California and hard-to-find suspect. Lupe can, as mentioned above, literally just not appear for a bit, stalling out the game and making her even more annoying than she already is.

Lupe’s cover is that she’s a bird watcher, but she knows absolutely nothing about birds — like honestly nothing, even though she had time to make her cover story (not unlike Yanni).

She gets sent away by destruction of private property (Ollie’s gun – super dangerous to make a gun misaim out in the wild and she’s lucky he didn’t hit anything problematic [like another person] because of it) and good riddance, but appears as a phone friend to rather pointlessly exonerate herself and do pretty much nothing else but stop the game in its tracks until she lets it proceed.

As a culprit, Lupe would have been the other obvious choice, but she’s just not in the game enough, so she’s easy to ignore. Her cover is thin, but so is her motivation (!!! Save the wolf!!!), so she’s one of the most annoying non-entity suspects in this series.

Our second Californian in the cast is Lou Talbot, who is a college student, master of ‘earthitecture’ (inspired by Poppy Dada) and stealer of dinosaur bones for money. He also plays fox and geese with Bill in his spare time. He does a really good impression of the Guy in my MFA twitter as well, but that’s literally it.

No, really, that’s his entire character. I can’t even posit what he would be like as the culprit because that is LITERALLY all we’re given on him. End of bio. My gosh, what a waste of pixels.

Lou’s partner in fox and geese is Bill Kessler, who loves to fish and whose grandmother used to own the lodge before Chantal. While he feels that his grandmother Tilly was cheated out of the lodge, he has little desire to get it back, and really just wants to hide the fact that he’s been to the lodge before (an odd thing to hide, but whatever makes him feel better.)

Like Lou, apart from that, he really doesn’t have any character. He basically is a mix of TRT’s Jacques in his family connection to the lodge and SHA’s Dave in actual amount of motivation (i.e., 0 motivation) to do anything about it. He is, however, the person who makes Nancy play fox and geese, and for that alone, I hate him.

As a culprit, Bill’s played as a red herring for a solid 5 minutes of gameplay (though not very well — why would an avid fisherman blow up a fishing shack?), and then totally discounted the moment Nancy finds out his backstory. He’s really just there — like most of the cast, worryingly enough — to pad out the number of suspects and to give Nancy a taste of Hell through fox and geese.

The Favorite:

There are a few bright spots in this confused mess of a game, so let’s go through them.

My favorite moment in the game is when Nancy, after Yanni says the horrific line about his grandmother being killed and devoured by wolves, can ask “how”. As if that’s a sentence that needs a ‘how’. It’s a great moment of Nancy being absolutely tone deaf, and I giggle like a madman every time I think about it.

My favorite puzzle in the game is probably the cooking minigame, which I dislike in frequency and time requirement, but do love in actual practice. It’s fun to cook in every Nancy Drew game, and this one is no exception. I just wish it wasn’t regimented so heavily.

I love the atmosphere of the lodge; it’s beautifully animated (in fact one of my favorite locations in the ND games), big without being too big, and is never boring, even by the end of the game. The lodge is largely a character unto itself, and is quite successful as a wonderful location.

The Un-Favorite:

There’s a lot to unpack here, but we’ll keep it short because the fix section of this meta is gonna have me by the throat.

My least favorite moment in the game is the moment Tino comes into the game. As the game now stands, there’s no reason for him to be involved, and short a comment about him by the Hardy Boys, which would at least justify it a little, he’s purposeless. He’s worse than that, actually — he’s there to slow the game down, and that’s a cardinal sin.

My least favorite puzzle in the game is a tie between fox and geese (UGH) and the final snowmobile chase. My problems with fox and geese are obvious — they’re everyone’s problems with fox and geese: it’s a required puzzle, it’s hard to do, there’s no way to cheat through it, and it takes forever.

The final snowmobile chase is somehow even worse. It’s buggy, laggy, has nothing to do with the actual plot, has arbitrary win conditions — it’s the worst (or at least among the worst) that HER has to offer with final puzzles. If everything else about ICE was perfect, engaging, fun, and thought-provoking, this final puzzle would still put me off of playing it. It’s just that bad.

The storyline with Isis and that whole backstory isn’t treated well in game; it’s almost as if they came up with the title and then remembered at the last minute that there’s supposed to be an actual wolf. I would have loved more of a focus on that storyline; as it is, it barely counts as a blip on the game’s radar — which is a shame.

The Fix:

Gosh, how on earth will I fix The White Wolf of Icicle Creek? The answer is that I don’t feel like I can just apply a few quick fixes and be on my way; the only answer I could find is to approach this as if I was at the proposal meeting for this game — how would I outline the barebones scenario?

This section will be long, as I’m going to start just from the skeleton and build things in. What follows is my own imaginings of what my own personal ideas would be to create ICE, rather than to fix it from what the finished product was. As an important note, the side-plot with the wolf, as it was really neglected and bare-bones to begin with in the game, is mostly removed.

The first section I’ll work on is structure. Though it wasn’t done perfectly in FIN, I feel like the pacing of ICE could be vastly improved by putting a clock on the game by assigning designated days and tasks. Three days is still probably a good idea, as it lets us easily break the story into a 3-act structure and delineate certain tasks for certain days without overloading one day in particular. We’ll get more into what should happen in Days 1, 2, and 3 later in a general overview of how the plot would go.

The mechanism used to get Nancy there — Chantal being a friend of Carson’s — isn’t bad, but I’d change it up just slightly. Nancy’s not yet a “professional” detective, but we’re only 2 games from her being hired by a foreign country’s authorities, so she should be making her way up there. It stands to reason that Nancy would attract some attention from the business in CRE since the Hardy Boys would definitely mention Nancy in their de-briefing and Aikens is a big name, so let’s build on that from here. Chantal is still Carson’s friend, and she still wants to get these incidents solved while she’s away from the Lodge for legal matters — someone got injured at the lodge and is now suing.

Carson decides to officially hire Nancy — paperwork, legal documentation, etc. — as a “concerned third party” in Chantal’s problems, telling her that her job is to find out two things: find out what’s causing the incidents of sabotage, and give Carson enough evidence in favor of the lodge’s safety that he can prove reasonable doubt against the people accusing Chantal. Nancy will be there undercover as a family friend of Chantal’s, with only Ollie knowing that she’s there in an official capacity.

ICE has a cast that is both unwieldy and characterless, and I feel like the way to fix that is through combining characters. Starting out we have Ned, Chantal, Tino, the ex-maid, her boyfriend, Ollie, Freddie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill — 10 characters that we deal with in the present, plus one other player (in the boyfriend/stalker guy). 11 in total. That is a huge, huge cast that we definitely need to pare down.

The first thing to do is to take out Tino Balducci. He slows down the plot, is completely unnecessary, and isn’t even entertaining. Since there’s no Hardy Boys to play off of him (and I would keep the Hardy Boys out of this game, even with my love for them), Tino needs to go the way of the dodo. And good riddance to him, honestly.

Freddie, an obvious subject to axe, should instead be aged up to around 20 and combined with the maid whose ex-boyfriend’s letter Nancy finds at the beginning of the game. Freddie would handle all the chores the first day except the cooking.

Instead of a nebulous, incident-causing ex-boyfriend, Freddie would have just started a relationship with Lou, keeping our cast tight and visible, rather than one-off characters with nothing else to give to the story.

By now we’re down to Carson, Ned, Chantal, Freddie, Ollie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill. I think we can do a little better than that.

The next step I’d take is to remove Yanni entirely. Yes, I know it’s a big change to remove the canonical culprit, but bear with me. With Yanni and Lupe having so many similarities and together being guilty of 99% of the Crimes in this game, I’m pretty comfortable in combining them. I’d also make the minor change of having Lupe be an Indigenous Canadian rather than Hispanic and from California, since our game is set in Canada and there’s absolutely no reason for a large portion of our cast to be American.

With Yanni gone, Lupe (or whatever her new name would be, since the name ‘Lupe’, all nationality changes aside, in a game ostensibly about a wolf makes me want to kill myself) assumes a few of his personality quirks – most importantly, a family member with a past with wolves. It doesn’t really matter if it’s positive or negative, you just want the association there as a herring (red or otherwise).

That puts us down to 5 suspects to talk to and three phone friends for a total of 8 players in the present. Since Chantal is supposed to be busy, I’d remove the ability to talk to her entirely — anything that Chantal could offer can come through Carson as Nancy’s official “employer”, which brings us to a nice 7 players — an entirely manageable number.

So let’s begin.

The beginning of the game with Nancy at her desk always includes a case file, so this time the case file would say that Nancy, at the behest of her ‘client’, Carson Drew, is flying out to Alberta to investigate strange happenings at Chantal Moique’s lodge. Chantal is trying to settle with people who got hurt there and are trying to sue her, and Carson’s helping to advise her. Nancy’s mission is two-fold: figure out what’s causing the incidents at the lodge, and find evidence that Chantal can’t be held liable for the injuries incurred by the guests suing her.

Wolves are commonly seen around the area of the lodge — Northern Alberta has some of the highest population of wolves in North America — and there’s a rumor at the lodge that the spirits of the wolves that are hunted in the area every winter are causing some of the sabotage.

Chantal thinks the rumor is being spread by whoever is doing the actual sabotage to make her guests leave and force her out of business, so Carson tells Nancy to pay attention to the stories about the wolves — and one snow-white wolf in particular, who is often sighted very close to the lodge. Carson suspects that, if it exists, the white wolf is actually a trained dog (a white/white and silver Siberian Husky, for example) being used to whip up panic, but tells Nancy to keep an open mind.

As Nancy’s arriving at the Lodge, an explosion occurs in the distance, causing the rumbling of snow to start. Ollie, who’s picked up Nancy from her plane, says darkly that he’s been waiting for something like this to happen, and that this will probably cause a minor avalanche (his opinion as the head of Avalanche Patrol in the area), making it impossible to leave the lodge for a few days. He tells Nancy to head straight to bed once they get to the lodge, as she’s in for an exhausting time dealing with the “weirdos” still left at the lodge.

Nancy wakes up and Day One begins with Freddie freaking out outside Nancy’s door. After explaining that the regular chef (who was off for the last month visiting family) can’t get back to the lodge until tomorrow and that Freddie’s only manned the kitchen once or twice, Nancy says that she has experience cooking and offers to take the chef’s duties for the day.

Day One has Nancy meet all the suspects – Bill’s playing a game (I don’t care what it is as long as it’s something that involves writing things down) with anyone who passes by and talks about how out of all the lodges in Canada, this one’s his favorite; Lou hangs out near the bones (make him an archeology major or something related to but not exactly paleontology) and Definitely Doesn’t Know the Cute Girl Who Works at the Lodge, How Dare Nancy Assume; Not-Lupe is gone until 4pm when it starts getting dark because she loves spending time in nature, especially with the Super Special Wolf running around the place; and Ollie’s in the workshop fixing the things that have been sabotaged, worries about his daughter being away from her mother and about her ‘cavorting’ with a guest.

Nancy still preps lunch and the day goes on without a hitch other than Lou having an overheard argument with someone at around 6. Nancy cooks dinner, accidentally (due to smudged instructions from Freddie) sprinkling paprika in everyone’s food and setting off an allergic (mild to moderate anaphylaxis, helped by an epi pen) reaction + hives in Freddie, who they fly out via helicopter that night.

Ollie, feeling hostile towards Nancy, takes a look at the instructions/recipe that Nancy worked off of and says to her that the first page is Freddie’s handwriting, but the second page isn’t — someone did this on purpose. Nancy calls Carson, who says that the soonest he can get there is the day after next, and to keep herself safe above everything — he’ll check in with the hospital Freddie’s at since it’s also in Edmonton, where Carson and Chantal are. Carson warns Nancy that the guests were about to settle the lawsuit when the news about the explosion hit the news, and are now more determined than ever to sue for all Chantal’s worth.

Day 2 opens with the cook (who’s unseen and just exists in order to relieve Nancy of kitchen duty) arriving and a phone call from Carson asking for Chantal/Freddie if Nancy can grab the laundry bags from the guests’ rooms and that the spare key is in the register at the front (of course guarded by a puzzle — I’d even accept a mini fox and geese, as one of the big problems with that puzzle in the vanilla game is that it goes on way too long.

While snooping in the desk, Nancy finds evidence that Chantal might have been guilty of criminal neglect — a few things around the lodge are listed as “fixed” and totally safe when really they still need some maintenance — and wonders how she should tell Carson and if she should wait until she has more evidence. Before she goes out for the day, Not-Lupe mentions to Nancy “in confidence” that she overheard Lou fighting with Freddie before dinner, calling it a “lover’s quarrel”.

After lunch and talking with all the suspects again, Nancy goes to grab the laundry with the master key and snoops in everyone’s rooms, finding various clues and suspicious things: Bill’s journal detailing how Chantal is running the place into the ground and needs to be replaced, along with a few lodge magazines; Not-Lupe’s gloves with suspicious specks of things on them (Nancy takes a sample of it in a Kleenex or something); Lou’s heavy suitcase that has a case with imprints of bones in it; Ollie’s has maintenance books that also detail how to take things apart and maintenance notes that say he saw the wolf around but didn’t have his gun; Freddie’s only thing of interest is a little dinosaur pin on her dresser.

Nancy takes the opportunity to snoop in Chantal’s normal room and finds that the things that were listed in the documents in the front desk really were fixed; Ollie reported to Chantal that things that he fixed were un-fixed by the time he went back to them the next day — most of the time suffering damage as well, such as the sauna that injured the guests that are suing Chantal. Nancy calls her father with the news, and Carson says to save those documents so that he can come get them tomorrow, and to see if she can find any clues to who might have done it.

After dinner Nancy talks to Lou, who confesses that he and Freddie started dating a few days ago after meeting online last semester in a dinosaur enthusiast forum — hence his decision to come to the lodge, as Freddie said there were cool bones here. He was originally going to steal a few small ones and thought no one would notice if he replaced them with resin-cast replicas, but Freddie caught him and they had a fight which ended with Lou deciding not to steal, and Freddie saying that she could help him make replicas for him to take home and keep in his house.

Nancy asks why he’s telling her, and Lou says that Ollie seems to get along with Nancy well, and he’d like Nancy to calm Ollie down if Ollie discovers that he’s dating Freddie. Nancy asks Lou about the wolf, and Lou says that some of the stuff could be a wolf — he’s seen one around the lodge once or twice — but he hasn’t really been paying attention to anything except the bones and Freddie (who he’s looking forward to visiting once he can).

When talking with Bill, he offhandedly mentions that he used to be a handyman — the sink in his room started acting up, but he fixed it easily because he thinks that Ollie has enough to do without doing this easy fix. Bill says that this would never have happened when Chantal’s father was running the Lodge and accuses Chantal of preferring to spend long “business trips” in the city to actually paying attention to the Lodge — he says she should just live in the city and hire a manager with experience who actually cares. Nancy asks Bill about the wolf, and he says if anyone could be haunted by wolves, he’d believe it was Chantal.

Nancy, it should be noted, during her explorations around the lodge, sees a few pawprints and some chewed-on debris, but otherwise hasn’t seen the wolf in person. Just traces and tracks.

Not-Lupe and Ollie both dodge Nancy’s questions – Ollie’s busy as everything seems to be breaking at once, and snaps at Nancy that without Chantal around, he’s the only person keeping the lodge afloat, and he’d be better off without the stress of this job. When Nancy asks him about the wolf, Ollie says that the last thing they need is some idiot tourist being attacked by a wolf, and so he refuses to believe that there’s a wolf around the area.

Not-Lupe is at her normal place at the window (though there’s a chair there because no one stands all day), and when Nancy asks about the wolf, says that that’s why she’s there — she heard the rumor about the wolf and wanted to see it, but that her visit’s been very disappointing — just a junky lodge with incompetent staff and no wolves anywhere. Her hobby is visiting winter lodges, and this one just Isn’t up to snuff.

Nancy tries to pry deeper, but Not-Lupe shuts her down and goes to bed; Nancy investigates the living room as everyone leaves for bed and finds crinkled up under the couch a magazine cutout about the Premier Lodge Group, a company that owns winter lodges all over Canada and the United States, and their plans to build a group of lodges in Alberta as soon as a few “minor inconveniences” with location are solved.

The day ends with Carson calling; Nancy tells him about all the suspects (Carson confirms Lou’s story by having talked to Freddie), the magazine, Ollie wanting to quit, etc. Carson promises to do some research on Premier Lodge Group and tells Nancy to send him a picture of the stuff she found on Lupe’s gloves. Nancy does so, and that’s the end of Day 2.

Day 3 opens again with Carson’s phone call, informing Nancy that he’ll be there in the early evening — he’s having a contact of his look at the photo Nancy sent, but he’s pretty sure it won’t be good news.

Premier Lodge Group was investigated a few years ago for sabotage to their competitors but ultimately nothing came out of it, and Carson suspects that people were paid off to keep quiet about it. Carson says that he’s looked into Ollie (since Carson suspected him the most) and apparently Ollie always grouches about quitting when he’s stressed but has been there for 20 years and is as loyal as they come, so Nancy says she’ll focus on Not-Lupe and Bill — the two lodge-hoppers who seem dissatisfied with the lodge.

Both Not-Lupe and Bill are gone when Nancy gets downstairs, and Lou (who’s planning on leaving that night to go to Edmonton) says that they both got a sack lunch from the kitchen and left early in the morning to go explore outside. He tells Nancy she can borrow his snowshoes and says that they both headed out (independently) in the direction of Skookum Ridge.

When Nancy gets up to the Ridge, she spots the “wolf” — really a Siberian Husky, like Carson thought, who seems very well trained. When the dog comes up to Nancy, a gunshot ripples through the air and nearly hits the dog, who would have gone running off had Nancy not grabbed her collar and yelled not to shoot. Nancy sees Bill across the ridge and waves him over, explaining that it’s a dog, not a wolf. The dog (whose name is something way better than Isis — literally anything else would do) is suspicious of Bill at first, which convinces Nancy that it’s not Bill’s — the only suspect left is Not-Lupe.

When she tells Bill what she knows about Not-Lupe, Bill admits to having seen her before at a lodge that went out of business due to mysterious accidents, but thought it was a coincidence before digging deeper in the magazines he brought and finding Not-Lupe in the back of a small photo of Premier Lodge Administrative Staff — he was worried about keeping it safe and knowing that there would be no cleaning staff until at least the next day, crumpled it up and put it under the couch he normally sits by.

A happy, friendly dog in tow, Nancy and Bill head back to the lodge only to find Ollie and Lou standing outside looking worried. They tell Nancy that they both went outside because they heard a loud noise, only to find the door locked behind them — and every other door locked as well. After realizing that Not-Lupe wouldn’t open the doors for them, Ollie went to get an axe for the door, only to have a note appear on the door’s window that if they forced their way in, the whole Lodge would be burned to the ground in an instant.

Carson calls then, saying that he’s a few minutes away, but that his friend got back to him — Not-Lupe’s gloves were covered in residue from explosives. Bill takes Nancy’s phone and begins to fill Carson in on who they think Not-Lupe is working for and who she is. Nancy asks Lou and Ollie to hoist her up to her own window, which she keeps unlocked, and crawls in, creeping downstairs to the main room to try to find how Not-Lupe will burn the lodge and stop her.

Nancy confronts Not-Lupe, who confirms her identity as a saboteur for the Premier Lodge Group, saying that with the bad press around the lodge Chantal would have already had to sell — but she’s going to go one step further and cause an ‘incident’, blowing up the lodge with fuses hidden around its ground floor — Chantal’s father won’t spend the money to rebuild the lodge, and the only proof that is against her is the word of two American kids, an old man, and a lodge-hopper with a very incriminating diary that would be found soon enough. She tells Nancy that she can either try to catch her or try to save the lodge and runs out the back, intent on escaping as she pushes the button to arm the explosives.

Nancy yells out the window for them to catch Not-Lupe, who’s got to be headed out to the main road, tossing the cushion of the seat Lupe usually sat in so that her dog can catch her scent, then has the final timed puzzle be switching off each detonator (which would be in each of the places where the suspects usually were, with the exception of Ollie’s whose is in the front desk).

As soon as Nancy disarms them, Bill calls out to her that Carson just called — Lou and the dog tracked Lupe to the main road, and Bill called Carson to let him know. Carson’s car stops Not-Lupe (Carson brought a policeman on a hunch), and the day is saved. Premier Lodge is snagged in a major lawsuit by Chantal’s father and other lodge owners who have had the same thing happen to them, and Chantal hires Bill as co-manager to ensure there’s always someone there to manage the lodge and for his wealth of knowledge of what makes a good lodge and good experience for guests.

The game ends with Nancy writing her letter to Hannah (so that Hannah doesn’t worry about them), and with her dad’s praise for a job well done.

I realize that this is a monumental fix; it’s a brand-new game made out of the skeleton of the old one. I also realize that there are a million and one ways to re-write this game; this one takes the idea of sabotage, one of the most frequent inciting incidents in the Nancy Drew world, and just makes it a little bigger.

No terrorism required.

#nancy drew #clue crew #nancy drew games #white wolf of icicle creek #ICE #long post #video games #nancy drew meta

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Text

Brian Jarvis, Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture, 3 Crime Media Cult 326 (2007)

Abstract

Serial killing has become big business. Over the past 15 years, popular culture has been flooded by true-life crime stories, biographies, best-selling fiction, video games and television documentaries devoted to this subject. Cinema is the cultural space in which this phenomenon is perhaps most conspicuous. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 800 films featuring serial killers and most of the contributions to this sub-genre have been made since 1990. This article examines seminal examples of serial killer fiction and film including Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels and their cinematic adaptations, Bret Easton Ellis and Mary Harron’s American Psycho (1991 and 2000) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). The main contention is that the commodification of violence in popular culture is structurally integrated with the violence of commodification itself. Starting with the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed, this article then attempts to uncover less transparent links between the normal desires which circulate within consumer society and monstrous violence. In ‘Monsters Inc.’, the serial killer is unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

But the notion of the monster is rather difficult to deal with, to get a hold on, to stabilize . . . monstrosity may reveal or make one aware of what normality is. (Derrida, 1995: 386)

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin (1999a) memorably proclaimed that ��there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (p. 248). In contemporary US culture Benjamin’s chilling axiom is turned on its head: it seems there is now no act of barbarism which fails to become a document of civilization. Serial killing, to take one important example of this trend, has become big business within the culture industry. In his cult documentary, Collectors (2000), Julian Hobbs both explores and contributes to the explosive proliferation of art and artefacts associated with serial killers. Hobbs investigates the burgeoning market for ‘murderabilia’ and follows enthusiasts in this field who avidly build collections which mirror the serial killer’s own modus operandi of collecting fetish objects.

Murderabilia ranges from serial killer art (paintings, drawings, sculpture, letters, poetry), to body parts (a lock of hair or nail clippings) from crime scene materials to kitsch merchandising that includes serial killer T-Shirts, calendars, trading cards, board games, Halloween masks and even action figures of ‘superstars’ like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Although it might be tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as the sick hobby of a deviant minority, murderabilia is merely the hardcore version of a mainstream obsession with the serial killer. Following negative publicity, trading in murderabilia was banned on eBay in 2001. However, it is still possible to purchase a vast array of legitimate serial killer merchandise online and elsewhere. A keyword search for ‘serial killer’ at Amazon, for example, produces hundreds of links to gruesome biographies, true-life crime stories and best-selling fiction by Thomas Harris, Patricia Cornwall, Caleb Carr and others. A search for ‘Jack the Ripper’ uncovers 248 books, 24 DVDs, 15 links to popular music, a video game and a 10’ action figure. The Jack the Ripper video game invites players to solve the Whitechapel murders, but a large number of its competitors profit by encouraging ‘recreational killing’. In some of the most commercially successful video games, one’s cyber-self may be a detective, a soldier or a Jedi Knight, but the raw materials of fantasy are constant: an endless series of killings.

In Christopher Priest’s novel, The Extremes (1998), FBI agent Teresa Simons becomes dangerously addicted to a Virtual Reality (VR) training programme which recreates infamous serial killings. It might be argued that other elements in Priest’s novel are ‘re- creations’: the focus on a female FBI agent seems indebted to the Silence of the Lambs and the VR game, known as ‘ExEx’ (Extreme Experience), recalls the SID 6.7 software in Virtuosity (1995). In Brett Leonard’s science fiction film, SID 6.7 is a computer pro- gramme which synthesizes the personalities of 183 serial killers and mass murderers including Ted Bundy, Vlad the Impaler, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler. Somewhat inevitably, SID (short for Sadistic, Intelligent and Dangerous) escapes virtuality and is hunted down by a detective played by Denzel Washington. Shortly after he starred in Virtuosity, Washington appeared in a supernatural serial killer film (Fallen, 1998) and a forensic serial killer film (The Bone Collector, 1999). Three serial killer films in four years is less a signature of Washington’s star persona than a symptom of the recent growth spurt experienced by this sub-genre. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 800 films featuring serial killers and most of them have been made in the past 15 years. Serial killer cinema has many faces: there are serial killer crime dramas (Manhunter, 1986; Se7en, 1995; Hannibal, 2001; Saw, 2004), supernatural serial killers (Halloween, 1978; Friday the 13th, 1980; Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984), serial killer science fiction (Virtuosity, 1995; Jason X, 2001), serial killer road movies (Kalifornia, 1993; Natural Born Killers, 1994), true-life crime dramas (Ted Bundy, 2002; Monster, 2003), documentaries (John Wayne Gacy: Buried Secrets (1996) and Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1994)), post-modern pastiche (Scream, 1996; I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997) and even serial killer comedies (So I Married an Axe Murderer, 1993; Serial Mom, 1994; Scary Movie, 2000). The expansion of this diverse sub-genre is facilitated by the fact that films about serial killing often appear as part of a series (Saw 1, Saw 2, Saw 3). The serial killer has also become a staple ingredient in TV cop shows (like CSI and Law and Order) and cult series (for example, Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Millennium).

According to Robert Conrath (1996: 156), ‘when Jeffrey Dahmer’s house of carnage was discovered in Milwaukee in 1991, television rights to his story were being negotiated within the hour’. Over the next few years, Dahmer was the subject of numerous documentaries (including An American Nightmare (1993) and The Monster Within (1996)), films (The Secret Life (1993) and Dahmer (2002)), several biographies and Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalized Zombie (1996), a comic strip (by Derf, a cartoonist and coincidentally Dahmer’s childhood acquaintance) and a concept album by a heavy metal band called Macabre. The extensive media coverage of Dahmer’s exploits in 1991 coincided with the release of Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (which won the Best Picture Oscar and grossed US$272,700,000 in worldwide box-office) as well as the controversial and commercially successful Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho (1991). Since the early 1990s, the translation of serial killer shock value into surplus value has become an increasingly profitable venture. This market both reflects and produces an apparently insatiable desire for images and stories of serial killing in a gothic hall of mirrors. According to case histories and psychological profiles, serial killers themselves are often avid consumers of films and books about serial killing. At the same time, the fictional monstrous murderers in popular culture, from Norman Bates to Hannibal Lecter, are often modelled on historical figures. In this context, Philip Jenkins (1994) proposes that, at least in the popular imaginary, the distinction between historical serial killers and their cinematic counterparts is dis- solving. In fact, even the label of ‘serial killer’ indirectly belongs to cinema. This term was coined by Robert Ressler, an FBI agent who named the killers he pursued after the ‘serial adventures’ he watched as a child in US cinemas. In his study of serial killers, Mark Seltzer (1998: 129) has offered a compelling critique of the virtualization of violence: ‘fascination with scenes of a spectacularized bodily violence is inseparable from the binding of violence to scene, spectacle, and representation’. The engine which drives this process is primarily economic. The commodification of violence is inseparable from the violence of commodification. In this article I wish to build on the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed towards the less transparent links that exist between consumerism itself and violence. A range of serial killer texts will be examined with the aim of uncovering unexpected intimacies between monstrous violence and the normal desires that circulate within consumer society. The serial killer will be unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

JUST DO IT: Killers, Consumers and Violence

Most people could confidently identify a serial killer, but definitions are more elusive. How many murders does it take to make a serial killer? Do these homicides need to involve a specific MO, in particular locations and within a prescribed time frame? Do serial killers have a characteristic relationship to their victim? Do they have to be motivated by sexual fantasy rather than material gain? And how exactly do serial killers differ from mass murderers and spree killers? There are competing definitions of the serial killer inside and outside the academic world. I have neither the space nor the skill to offer an authoritative classification, and so for the purpose of this article my working definition will of necessity be expansive. My focal point here will be fictional representations of the serial killer in film and fiction, but I will include reference to historical counterparts and supernatural metaphors (specifically, the vampire and zombie as figurative practitioners of serial homicide). The number of murders committed, the individual MOs, the timing and setting of the crimes, the connection to the victim and the motivation will be wildly divergent, but, in each instance, I hope to reveal covert affinities between the ‘monstrous’ serial killer and the ‘normal’ consumer.

While precise defintions prove elusive, the clichés are unavoidable. One of the most conspicuous commonplaces in the popular discourses of serial killing concerns the terrifying normality of the murderer. Rather than appearing monstrously different, the serial killer displays a likeness that disturbs the dominant culture. The violence of consumerism is similarly hidden beneath a façade of healthy normality. The glossy phantasmagoria of youth and beauty, freedom and pleasure, obscures widespread devastation and suffering. Etymology is instructive in this regard: to ‘consume’ is to devour and destroy, to waste and obliterate. With this definition in mind, Baudrillard (1998: 43) has traced a provocative genealogy between contemporary capitalism and tribal potlatch: ‘consumerism may go so far as consumation, pure and simple destruction’. The consumation of contemporary consumer capitalism assumes multiple forms: pollution, waste and the ravaging of non-renewable resources, bio-diversity and endangered species; the slaughter of animals for food, clothing and medicine; countless acts of violence against the consumer’s body that range from spectacular accidents to slow tortures and poisonings. At the national level the consumer economy produces radical inequalities that encourage violent crime. At the international level, consumer capitalism depends heavily on a ‘new slavery’ for millions in the developing world who are incarcerated in dangerous factories and sweatshops and subjected to the repetitive violence of Fordist production. In his autobiography, My Life and Work, Henry Ford calculated that the manufacture of a Model T required 7882 distinct operations but only 949 of these required ‘able-bodied’ workers: ‘670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed and ten by blind men’ (cited in Seltzer, 1998: 69). Third-world workers trapped in this Fordist fantasy to serve the needs of first-world consumers undergo dismemberments (figurative and sometimes literal) which echo the violent tortures practised by serial killers in post-Fordist cinema. And the violence of consumerism is not restricted to the factories and sweatshops. In The Anatomy of Resource Wars, Michael Renner (2002) explores links between first-world shopping malls and third-world war zones. Insatiable consumer demand fuels conflicts over resources in the developing world – from tropical forests to diamonds and coltan deposits (a mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones and other electronic devices). Renner estimates that these conflicts have displaced over 20 million people and raised at least US$12 billion per year for rebels, warlords and totalitarian governments: ‘most consumers don’t know that a number of common purchases bear the invisible imprint of violence’ (p. 53). Recent conflicts in the Gulf are fuelled by the needs of western car cultures. In the 20th century the development of a consumer economy was twice kick-started by global war and the roots of 19th-century consumerism were terminally entangled in colonialism and slavery.

The violence of consumerism is structural and universal rather than being an incidental and localized side effect of the system. For many in the over-developed world this violence remains largely unseen, or, when visible, apparently unconnected to consumerism. In cultural representations of the serial killer, however, consumerism and violence are often extravagantly integrated. In fact, the leading ‘brand names’ in the genre are typically depicted as über-consumers. In Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the eponymous Patrick Bateman embodies a merger between ultra- violence and compulsive consumerism. A catalogue of obscene and barbaric atrocities (serial murder, rape and torture) is interwoven with endless shopping lists of designer clothes and fashionable furniture, beauty products and audiovisual equipment, videos and CDs alongside multiple purchases at restaurants, gyms, health spas, concerts and clubs. As James Annesley (1998: 16) notes, ‘In American Psycho the word “consume” is used in all of its possible meanings: purchasing, eating and destroying’. Each brand of consumption is described in the same flat, affectless tone to underscore Bateman’s perception of everything in the world as a series of consumables arranged for his delectation.

Patrick Bateman thus represents a gothic projection of consumer pathology. In this respect, although his name echoes Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho, Bateman can be seen as a Yuppie analogue to the aristocratic Hannibal Lecter. Both killers coolly collect and consume body parts and can boast an intimate familiarity with fashionable commodities. In Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon and Hannibal, Lecter offers a connoisseur’s commentary on designer suits and Gucci shoes (a present for Clarice), handbags, perfume and aftershave. Lecter himself has become a voguish icon in millennial popular culture although his name alludes to mid-19th-century French verse. Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’ (1998 : 5) concludes with the following apostrophe:

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!

[You know him, reader, that fastidious monster, You hypocritical reader, – my double, – my brother!]

If we follow Harris’s allusion, Lecter can be read, like Bateman, as the dark double of the monstrous consumer. The serial killer’s perverse charisma might be attributed in part to their function as allegorical embodiments of consumer drives and desires. According to this reading, the serial killer’s cannibalism is less a barbaric transgression of the norm and more a Neitzschean distillation of reification (in its simplest terms the tendency, central to consumerism, to treat people as objects and objects as people).

In Silence of the Lambs, the casting of serial killer as predatory über-consumer is underscored by animal and insect imagery. Clarice Starling is haunted by traumatic childhood memories of witnessing the hidden violence of animal slaughter. Dr Lecter diagnoses her devotion to the law as an attempt to silence the ‘screaming of the lambs’. Perhaps Lecter’s cannibalism might be diagnosed as an alternate response to that ‘screaming’, one which reverses power relations by putting consumers on the menu. Alongside the lambs, moths are a second key symbol that hint at the widespread though often invisible violence of consumerism:

Some [moths] are [destructive], a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do . . . The old definition of moth was ‘anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too . . . Is this what you do all the time – hunt Buffalo Bill? . . . Do you ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer or the amusing house wine? (Harris, 1990: 102)

The second serial killer in Silence of the Lambs is similarly doubled with the consumer and associated with animal imagery. While Lecter hunts for food, the predatory Buffalo Bill hunts for clothing. After the chase, Buffalo Bill deprives his prey of subjectivity and treats them like livestock: victims are penned, fed and then flayed for their skins. The nickname given to Jame Gumb by the media is suggestive. As a professional hunter, Buffalo Bill Cody was one of those responsible for reducing the bison population in North America from approximately 60 million to around 300 by 1893. After the near extinction of his prey, Buffalo Bill moved from animal slaughter to entertainment with his travelling ‘Wild West’ show. Thomas Harris’s ‘Buffalo Bill’, with his own serial killer trade marks, combines an identical mixture of hunting, slaughter and flaying with spectacle and entertainment. Buffalo Bill, alongside Francis Dolarhyde (the name of the killer in Harris’s Red Dragon again links money, skins and a doppelganger monster, Stevenson’s Mr Hyde) and above all the iconic Hannibal Lecter, have established Harris as a brand market leader in the commodification of serial killing.

The roots of the brand – the repeated logo or symbol that identifies a product – lie in cattle ranching. At the first crime scene in David Fincher’s Se7en, a morbidly obese murder victim is discovered after being forced to eat himself to death. (This MO is repeated in Brett Leonard’s Feed (2005) when a serial killer force-feeds obese women and broadcasts their demise on the Internet). When the detectives in Se7en investigate the crime scene they discover the word ‘Gluttony’ scrawled in grease behind the victim’s refrigerator beside a neat pile of cans with the ‘Campbell’s Soup’ brand clearly visible. The repetition of the Campbell’s brand of course alludes to Warhol’s series of paintings on the subject of consumer seriality. If, like the detectives in Se7en, we are prepared to ‘look behind’ objects in serial killer texts we may discover further clues to the hidden violence of serial consumerism.

Discover A New You: Killers, Consumers, and the Dream of ‘Becoming’

His product should already have changed its skin and stripped off its original form . . . a capitalist in larval form . . . His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation, (Marx, 1990: 204, 269)

Although the serial killer in David Fincher’s Se7en justifies his murders with pseudo-religious rhetoric, the victims he chooses also exemplify some of the capital vices and anxieties exploited by consumerism: the ‘Gluttony’ victim is guilty of over-eating; the ‘Pride’ victim is a fashion model guilty of acute narcissism; the ‘Sloth’ victim, according to Richard Dyer (1999: 40), is a case study in the dangers of under-exercising; the ‘Lust’ victim embodies a hardcore version of mainstream desires and fetishes. By foregrounding ‘sins’ that are central to consumerism and by naming the murderer ‘John Doe’, Se7en hints at the hyper-normality of serial killer pathology. Key aspects of consumer sensibility intersect with the trademark features of serial killer psychology: anxious and aggressive narcissism, the compulsive collection of fetish objects and fantasies of self-transformation.

In Silence of the Lambs, the epiphanic moment in Starling’s search for Jame Gumb comes in the bedroom of the killer’s first victim: Frederika Bimmel. As a Point Of View (POV) shot surveys the dead woman’s possessions the spectator sees the following: a romantic novel (entitled Silken Threads) beside a diet book, wallpaper with a butterfly motif, a tailor’s dummy and paper diamonds in the closet. Starling intuitively connects the paper diamonds to the cuts made by Gumb in the bodies of his victims. The spect- ator, however, might make additional connections. Demme’s mise-en-scene offers a symbolic suturing of the normal girl’s bedroom and the serial killer’s lair. Both spaces house dreams of romantic metamorphosis driven by self-dissatisfaction: the moths in Gumb’s basement are linked to the Silken Threads and butterflies in Bimmel’s bedroom while the diet book suggests the young woman shared the serial killer’s anxiety about body image. Clarice Starling, the young woman figuratively donning the traditional male garb of law enforcement (a woman trying to make it in a man’s world) is perhaps too preoccupied with tracking down a man who wants to wear a ‘woman suit’ to pursue these leads. Silence of the Lambs extravagantly foregrounds the importance of gender to subject formation. At the start of the film we are introduced to Clarice Starling in androgynous sweaty sportswear while training on an obstacle course. When the spectator subsequently arrives at the serial killer’s house, we see Jame Gumb sewing, pampering his poodle and parading before the camera like a catwalk model.

Jame may be symbolically feminized, but in Demme’s film, as in Harris’ novels, Se7en, American Psycho and the vast majority of serial killer texts, the murderer is biologically male. There are variations in the statistics (roughly between 88–95%), but the vast majority of serial killers are male (Vronsky, 2004). From a feminist perspective it could be argued that serial killing is not so much a radical departure from normal codes of civilized behaviour as it is an intensification of hegemonic masculine ideals. For the serial killer the murder is a means to an end and that end intersects in places with socially sanctioned definitions of masculine identity in institutions such as the military, many working places and the sports industry. The serial killer is driven by the desire to achieve mastery, virility and control: his objective is to dominate and possess the body and the mind of his victims. According to the binary logic of patriarchy, the killer/victim dyad produces a polarization of gender norms: the killer embodies an über-masculinity while the victim who is dominated, opened and entered personifies a hyper-femininity (irrespective of biology). The gendered power relations of serial homicide climax but do not end with the act of murder. Post-mortem the murderer will often take fetish objects from his victim. These totems function as testimony to his continuing domination of a dead body which exhibits an extreme form of the passivity which patriarchy seeks to assign to the feminine.

While serial killing is both literally and symbolically a male affair, the paradigmatic consumer is of course female. According to patriarchal folklore men are the primary producers and unenthusiastic shoppers while most women are devoted consumers and typically figure in the family as the person with overall responsibility for decision making with regard to most domestic purchases. Brett Leonard’s Feed (2005) might be mentioned here as a particularly pure example of this stereotypical dichotomy between the male serial murderer and the female consumer (the victims in the film are ‘Gainers’ who are fed to death). However, since the 1980s and throughout the period which has seen a dramatic rise in serial killer art, the consumer sphere has witnessed a withering of gender polarities. From the late 19th and for much of the 20thcentury, women were the primary target of advertising, particularly in the fields of beauty and fashion. The female consumer was relentlessly bombarded by images and messages in magazines, on billboards, and then through radio, cinema and TV, that encouraged physical self-obsession. Beneath the patina of positivity, this bomb- ardment aimed to promote an anxious policing of the female body – how the body looked and felt, what went over, into and came out of it. The covert imperative of this advertising was to manufacture that sense of inadequacy and self-dissatisfaction which is the essential psychological prerequisite for luxury purchases. Since the 1980s, the beauty and fashion industries, recognizing the potential of a relatively untapped market, began to target the male consumer in a similar manner. Subsequently, there has been a massive worldwide increase in sales of male fashion accessories, cosmetics and related products.

In the context of this erosion of gender polarities within consumer culture, it is noticeable that representations of the serial killer often involve androgyny and gender crisis. The killer is typically feminized by association with consumer subjectivity. He is obsessed with different forms of consumption and collecting and driven by dreams of ‘becoming’ (the key phrase in Harris’ Red Dragon), of radically refiguring his appear- ance and thus his identity. The killer’s violence might be read both as complicity with and rebellion against feminization through a reassertion of primitive masculinity. According to Baudrillard (1996: 69), in consumer culture there is a ‘general tendency to feminize objects . . . All objects . . . become women in order to be bought’. The feminization of the commodity is structurally integrated with the commodification of the feminine and the serial killer aims to assert mastery over both spheres. The violence of serial homicide might even be diagnosed as a nostalgic mode of production (of corpses and fetish objects) for the anxious male subject.

In Silence of the Lambs, Lecter offers the following diagnosis of Gumb’s pathology: ‘He’s tried to be a lot of things . . . [But] he’s not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill’ (Harris, 1990: 159, 165). The killer is driven by a profound sense of lack to ‘covet’ (Lecter’s term) what he sees everyday and then to hunt for the new skin that would enable a radical self-transformation. In this respect Gumb constitutes a psychotic off-shoot of normal consumer psychology: his violent response to lack is deviant, but the desires which move him are mainstream. Gumb succumbs to mass media fantasy and advertising which have trained him to feel incomplete and anxious while promising magical metamorphoses on consumption of the ideal (feminized) commodity. The dreams of the serial killer and the serial consumer converge: reinvent- ing the self through bodily transformation and transcendence. Buffalo Bill, we might say, is merely fleshing out the advertising fantasy of a ‘new you’. This is the same dream of ‘becoming’ pursued by Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon/Manhunter. It is also the dream of Patrick Bateman, known by his acquaintances as ‘total GQ’ (Ellis, 1991: 90) but who, like Jame Gumb, experiences himself as ‘total lack’: ‘There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory . . . I simply am not there’ (pp. 376–7). Bateman attempts to fill the void with an endless procession of commodities and logos: designer clothes and cuisine, male grooming products and technological gadgets, Versace, Manolo Blahnik, Giorgio Armani. Bateman is a cut-up (like his victims) of commodity signs. He talks in the language of advertising and incessantly imagines himself in commercials, sit-coms, chat shows, action movies and porn films. Bateman’s ultra-violence gives physical expression to the acute feelings of anxiety and incompletion which accompany the consumer society’s unachievable fantasy of perfect bodies living perfect lives.

Silence of the Lambs similarly articulates the complex integration of violence, fantasy, gender identity and consumer subjectivity. The first clue that Lecter gives to Starling is the cryptic, ‘Look deep within yourself’. Subsequently, Starling discovers that ‘Your Self’ is in fact a storage facility in downtown Baltimore. Closer investigation uncovers a dead body in a car crammed alongside hoarded possessions. Forcing her way into ‘Your Self’, Starling discovers a decapitated man’s head placed on top of a mannequin wearing a dress. This tableau captures the dark underside of consumer psychology: erotics, fetishism, fantasy and death. The victim’s cross-dressing signifies the same yearning for self-transformation witnessed in Buffalo Bill and Frederika Bimmel. For the killer, the victim and the consumer, fantasy is the exoskeleton of the commodity. The murder, the dressing-up, the purchase; each is driven by dreams of metamorphosis. Consumption, Baudrillard (1998: 31) reminds us, ‘is governed by a form of magical thinking’. Numerous case studies have concluded that serial killers are prone to hyperactive fantasy lives (see Seltzer, 1998; Vronsky, 2004). It would be a mistake to dismiss these fantasies as merely the overture to violence; rather, the violence is a means of sustaining the fantasy. By the same token, the practice and pathology of serial consumerism are driven by fantasies that cannot be fulfilled and so are compulsively repeated. We consume not products, but dream-images from a collective phantasmagoria.

These fantasies are fuelled by capitalism’s official art form: advertising. Perhaps in part the serial killer’s crime is taking the promises of advertising too literally – acting out the fantasy of a world ready-made for our consumption. The serial killer is both a millennial vogue and perhaps the ultimate fashion victim. Every aspect of Patrick Bateman’s lifestyle – clothing, diet, gadgetry, interior design and leisure time – is dictated by fashion. In his basement, Jame Gumb adopts glamour poses before a camera and struts like a catwalk model. The Death’s Head moths in his garment sweatshop symbolically suture the fashion industry with fetishism, hidden suffering and death. In his critique of the French arcades, the first cathedrals of consumer capital and forerunners of the department store and mall, Benjamin (1999b: 62–3) argued that fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse . . . fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between women and ware – between carnal pleasure and corpse . . . For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman.

EXQUISITE CORPSE: Killers, Consumers, and Mannequins

The sexual impulse-excitations are exceptionally plastic. (Freud, 1981: 389)

According to Benjamin (1999b), a key fetish object in the phantasmagorical arcades was the mannequin:

the fashion mannequin is a token from the realm of the dead . . . the model for imitation . . . Just as the much-admired mannequin has detachable parts, so fashion encourages the fetishist fragmentation of the living body . . . the woman mimics the mannequin and enters history as a dead object. (p. 78)

One of Benjamin’s German contemporaries, Hans Bellmer, explored the deathly sensuality of the mannequin through the lens of surrealist photography. Eroticized dolls were dressed in veils and underwear or covered in flowers. The mannequin was shot both as whole and dismembered, sometimes posed coyly and at other times torturously convoluted and bound in a perverse meeting of the shop window and the S&M dungeon.

In the 80s and 90s, the photographer Cindy Sherman developed a more explicit and grisly mode of mannequin pornography. In her ‘Disaster’, ‘Fairy Tale’ and ‘Sex’ series, Sherman deploys dolls and prosthetic body parts in tableau that combine eroticism, violence and abjection. Sherman’s photographs recall Lacan’s (1989) work on ‘imagos of the fragmented body’:

These are the images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body . . . One has only to listen to children aged between two and five playing, alone or together, to know that the pulling off of the head and the ripping open of the belly are themes that occur spontaneously to their imagination, and that this is corroborated by the experience of the doll torn to pieces. (p. 179)

Imagos of the deconstructed body are everywhere in the infantile fantasies of consumer culture: perfect legs, perfect breasts, perfect hair, perfect teeth, bodies endlessly dismembered in the ceaseless strafing of advertising imagery. Sherman’s photography foregrounds the rhetoric of advertising: the dissection of the body by fashion, fitness and beauty industries into fragmentary fetishes. At the same time these images stage a spectacular return of the repressed for those anxieties (about filth, aging, illness and death) covertly fuelled by consumerism’s representational regime.

In 1997, Sherman attempted to import her ‘imagos of the fragmented body’ into the mainstream in the film Office Killer. Dorine Douglas, a female serial killer, murders her co-workers at Constant Consumer magazine and takes the corpses home to her cellar where she plays with them as life-size dolls. Douglas’s hobby echoes Jeffrey Dahmer’s confession that his ‘experimentation’ with the human form began with the theft of a mannequin from a store: ‘I just went through various sexual fantasies with it, pretending it was a real person, pretending that I was having sex with it, masturbating, and undressing it’ (cited in Tithecott, 1999: 46). The mannequin enjoys a peculiar prominence in serial killer texts. In Maniac (1980), Frank Zito scalps his victims and places his trophies on the fashion mannequins that decorate his apartment. In Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, Benjamin Raspail’s decapitated head is placed on a shop dummy and mannequins are conspicuous in Jame Gumb’s garment sweatshop. Similarly, in Ed Gein (2000), the eponymous killer’s ‘woman suit’ is draped over a mannequin in his workshop. The climactic scenes in the serial killer road movie Kalifornia (1993) take place in mock suburban dwellings (part of a nuclear test site) occupied exclusively by mannequins. In House of Wax (2005) the serial killer trans- forms his victims into living dolls by encasing them in wax and a similar MO is evident in The Cell where the killer bleaches his female victim’s bodies in imitation of the dolls he played with as a child.

Although mannequins are less conspicuous in Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) than in Glamorama (in which they function as a key motif signifying the millennial merger of fashion with terrorism), they still perform a crucial symbolic function. Mannequins epitomize the ideal of 80s body fascism: tall, youthful, slim, impervious to wrinkles, scars and blemishes, untouched by illness and aging. Bateman’s obsession with the designer clothing worn by others in his social circle underlines their status (and his own) as mobile mannequins. Bateman’s fetishistic fascination with ‘hard bodies’ – both the muscular torso built in the gym and the stiff and frozen body parts he collects – similarly attests to the prevalence of a mannequin ideal in contemporary consumer culture. In ironic affirmation of this aesthetic, the film adaptation of Ellis’s novel was accompanied by the marketing of an ‘American Psycho Action Figure’ – an 18’ inch mini-mannequin equipped with fake Armani suit and knife.

In pursuit of the hegemonic fantasy of the hard body, in the gym and in his daily fitness regime, Bateman remorselessly punishes himself. The über-consumer is narcissistically fixated on his abdominal muscles, his face, his skin tone, how his body is adorned, what goes into it (dietary obsessions) and comes out (especially blood). The violence that Bateman inflicts on his victims appears as an extension of his own masochistic self-objectification:

Shirtless, I scrutinize my image in the mirror above the sinks in the locker room at Xclusive. My arm muscles burn, my stomach is as taut as possible, my chest steel, pectorals granite hard, my eyes white as ice. In my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week. Two are washed off, one isn’t. There’s a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied around my favourite. (Ellis, 1991: 370)

In Bateman’s locker we witness the gender confusion of the male killer and the latent violence of consumer body culture writ large. Bateman’s attempt to transform himself into an anthropomorphosized phallus is partly offset by the accessories (a hair clasp and ribbon) and pathologies gendered ‘feminine’ by patriarchy (vanity and masochism). According to Baudrillard (1998: 129), the consumer is ultimately encouraged to consume themselves: ‘in the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other . . . That object is the BODY’. For Patrick Bateman, serial killing is a mode of extreme make-over: a refashioning of bodies, including his own, into trophies. In Demme’s Se7en, John Doe’s body terrorism (force-feeding a fat man, cutting off a female model’s nose) mirrors, albeit in grotesque distortions, the mania of millennial consumer society. Similarly, the serial killers in Thomas Harris are fixated on bodily transformation: Buffalo Bill attempts to put him- self inside a new body while Lecter puts others’ bodies inside himself. The horrific practices of these fictional killers find their everyday analogue in the slow serial torture of the consumer’s body by capital: the injections and invasions of cosmetic surgery, the poisonings, pollutions and detoxifications, the over-consumption and dieting, the leisure rituals and compulsive exercise.

In an early scene from Mary Harron’s adaptation of American Psycho we witness Patrick Bateman’s morning exercise and beauty regime: crunches and push-ups are followed by ‘deep-pore cleanser lotion . . . water-activated gel cleanser . . . honey- almond body scrub’. As Bateman admires himself in the bathroom mirror his face is sheathed in a ‘herbal mint facial masque’ that lends the skin a mannequin sheen. When Bateman peels off his synthetic second skin the gesture echoes the gothic facials practised in Silence of the Lambs. Lecter, who, at their first meeting, identifies Clarice by her skin cream, escapes his captors by performing an improvised plastic surgery – he removes a guard’s face and places it over his own. This act is the prelude to a subsequent ‘official’ plastic surgery performed to disguise his identity. Jame Gumb’s needlepoint with human flesh might be traced back to Norman Bates’s taxidermy. Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s movie) was loosely based on Ed Gein’s flaying and preserving of human flesh. Gein’s ghost also haunts the exploits of the Sawyer family in the series of Texas Chainsaw films: throughout the original (1973), the sequels (1986, 1990), the Next Generation (1994), the remake (2003), and the Beginning (2006) flesh is flayed, cut, tanned, sewed, worn, displayed and consumed. Mark Seltzer (1998) has noted the prevalence of ‘skin games’ in serial killer cinema and fiction. Beneath these ‘games’ we might catch glimpses of a profound skin disease promoted by the mannequin aesthetics of the beauty industry. As Judith Halberstam (1995: 163) has commented, ‘We wear modern monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us’.

OBEY YOUR THIRST: Compulsive Seriality

The circulation of money is the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process . . . the endless series . . . the series of its [the commodity’s] representations never comes to an end. (Marx, 1990: 156, 210–11)

The structure of repetition which is the economy of death. (Blau, 1987: 70)

Baudrillard (1998) proposes that the models and mannequins conspicuous in consumer culture are ‘simultaneously [a] negation of the flesh and the exaltation of fashion’ (p. 141). Conversely, it might be argued that contemporary consumerism entails a massive extension and eroticisation of epidermises. The bioeconomics of consumerism involves ceaseless and intimate miscegenation between capital, commodity and the corporeal. This results in both an objectification of the body and a somatization of the commodity. In his Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, Haug (1986) explores ‘the generalized sexualization of commodities . . . the commodity’s skin and body’ as it penetrates the ‘pores of human sensuality’ (pp. 42, 76). The passion for commodities, their pursuit and possession by consumers might be diagnosed as a socially-sanctioned fetishism. The collection of shoes and the collection of human feet of course involve radically different fetishistic (not to mention ethical) intensities, but these activities share psychodynamic similarities.

For Baudrillard (1996: 87) there is a ‘manifest connection between collecting and sexuality . . . it constitutes a regression to the anal stage, which is characterised by accumulation, orderliness, aggressive retention’. Case studies suggest that serial killers are often devoted collectors (see Vronsky, 2004). Their histories typically begin with killing and collecting dead animals and when they progress to human prey the murder is accompanied by the taking of a trophy. In Collectors, Julian Hobbs offers an uncomfortable analogy between this trophy-taking, the hoarding practised by the cult followers of serial killers and the collection of images by the documentary film-maker. This practice is similarly conspicuous in fictional representations of the serial killer from Norman Bates’s collection of stuffed birds, to his namesake, Patrick Bateman, who compulsively collects (and seemingly without distinction) clothes, gadgets, music CDs, body parts and serial killer biographies: ‘Bateman reads these biographies all the time: Ted Bundy and Son of Sam and Fatal Vision and Charlie Manson. All of them’ (Ellis, 1991: 92). In Silence of the Lambs, Gumb collects flayed flesh while the more refined (at least while incarcerated) Lecter ‘collect[s] church collapses, recreationally’ alongside fine art prints (Harris, 1990: 21). The killer in Kiss the Girls (1997), like Jame Gumb, collects his victims and hordes them underground. Similarly, in The Cell, the killer locks his victims in underground storage before using them to build a collection of human dolls. Although the killer in The Bone Collector is only interested in accumulating skeletal fragments, his activities similarly require subterranean investigations. Digging beneath the psychological surface of the collector and his system of ‘sequestered objects’, Baudrillard (1996) detects a ‘powerful anal-sadistic impulse’:

The system may even enter a destructive phase, implying the self-destruction of the subject. Maurice Rheims evokes the ritualised ‘execution’ of objects – a kind of suicide based on the impossibility of ever circumscribing death. It is not rare . . . for the subject eventually to destroy the sequestered object or being out of a feeling that he can never completely rid himself of the adversity of the world, and of his own sexuality. (pp. 98–9)

Irrespective of the object, ‘what you really collect is always yourself’ (Baudrillard, 1996: 91). Serial killing, like consumerism, is driven by a sense of lack. Psychological profiles of serial killers typically diagnose the cause of the subject’s compulsive behaviour as a profound sense of incompletion (see Seltzer, 1998). Although of a different order, comparable dynamics are evident in what Haug (1986) calls the ‘commodity-craving’ of consumer sensibility. Estimates vary (from 1 to 25%) but an increasing number of studies agree that compulsive shopping is a recognizable and burgeoning problem (Hartson and Koran, 2002). American Psycho offers an extended parallelism between compulsive consumerism and compulsive violence. Attempting to describe the sensations he experiences after his first documented attack Bateman relies on consumerist tropes: ‘I feel ravenous, pumped up, as if I’d just worked out . . . or just embraced the first line of cocaine, inhaled the first puff of a fine cigar, sipped the first glass of Cristal. I’m starving and need something to eat’ (Ellis, 1991: 132).

Ellis juxtaposes exhaustive catalogues of commodities with exhaustive catalogues of sexual violence and proposes that the frenzy of consumer desire climaxes, for Bateman, not with fulfillment, but increasing boredom and acute anxiety.

In Serial Killers, Mark Seltzer (1998: 64) proposes that

The question of serial killing cannot be separated from the general forms of seriality, collection and counting conspicuous in consumer society . . . and the forms of fetishism – the collecting of things and representations, persons and person-things like bodies – that traverse it.

Every aspect of Bateman’s existence is structured by the compulsively circular logics of capitalist reproduction. Bateman (Norman Bates’s yuppie double) has seen the film Body Double 37 times. When he is not watching Body Double over and over, Bateman compulsively consumes other examples of serialized mass culture: daily episodes and reruns of The Patty Winters Show (a parodic double of the Oprah Winfrey Show); restaurant reviews and fashion tips in weekly magazines; crime stories in the newspapers and on TV, endlessly repeated video footage of plane crashes. On a shopping expedition, Bateman finds himself mesmerized while ‘looking at the rows, the endless rows of ties’ (Ellis, 1991: 296). On the run from the police he is similarly paralysed by rows of luxury cars (BMW 3, 5, 7 series, Jaguar, Lexus) and thus unable to choose a getaway vehicle. Bateman collects clothes in series (matching suits, shirts, shoes), beauty products, music CDs, varieties of mineral water, recipes and menus. Despite the advertising promises of unique purchases that offer instant fulfilment, there are no singular only serial objects in consumer society and ‘each commodity fills one gap while opening up another: each commodity and sale entails a further one’ (Haug, 1986: 91).

The pullulation of serial objects is accompanied by the expansion of serialized spaces. Throughout American Psycho, Bateman is continually lost and unable to distinguish between identical office buildings, restaurants, nightclubs and apartment buildings. This confusing interchangeability extends to people. Although clothing is instantly recognizable (everyone identifies everyone else by labels) people repeatedly misidentify each other. Thus, American Psycho underscores Jeffrey Nealon’s (1998: 112) disturbing contention that, in contemporary consumer society, ‘identity, for both commodity and human, is an effect rather than a cause of serial iteration’. The killer in Se7en, the anonymously named John Doe, attempts to build a distinctive identity by performing a series of grisly murders. At the first crime scene, as noted earlier, Doe’s arrangement of Campbell’s soup cans clearly alludes to Warhol’s work on the seriality and compulsive repetition of consumerism. Manhunter (1986), the first of the Hannibal Lecter films, makes a similar point in more comic fashion. A shot-reverse-shot sequence in a supermarket is littered with glaring continuity errors as father and son remain motionless while the products lined up in neat rows on the shelves behind them change (and the sequence ends with the detective framed by the cereals aisle). In Manhunter, Dollarhyde’s repetitive violence is partly inspired by Hannibal Lecter. This repetition is repeated in Red Dragon, the remake of Manhunter. Serial killers are often copycats and serial killer cinema repeats this trait: in Copycat the killer repeats famous murders and in Virtuosity a virtual criminal is manufactured from a serial killer database. Serial killer films themselves become series, spawning sequel after sequel. Although these narratives typically conclude with the murder of the killer, the audience is reassured that he will return in a vicious circle that begs the question: can seriality itself be killed?

DARK SATANIC MALLS: Killers, Consumers, and the Living Dead

We suffer not only from the living, but the dead. (Marx, 1990: 91)

[Bateman] moved like a zombie towards Bloomingdale’s. (Ellis, 1991: 179)

Serial representations of serial killers are often haunted by suggestions of the supernatural. In Silence of the Lambs, for example, one of Lecter’s guards nervously inquires whether he is ‘some kind of vampire’. This question echoes the nicknames given to serial killer Richard Trenton Chase (‘Dracula’ and the ‘Vampire Killer of Sacramento’). In Psycho Paths, Philip Simpson (2000) tracks the ways in which ‘fictional representations of contemporary serial killers obviously plunder the vampire narratives of the past century and a half’ (p. 4). Simpson also proposes that many of the supernatural monsters that have evolved from folklore (vampires, werewolves, zombies etc.) may have been inspired by historical serial killers avant la lettre. Historical and fictional serial killers are often traced through a supernatural stencil and in this concluding section, I shall consider the supernatural monsters of contemporary popular culture as metaphorical serial killers/consumers.

Since the 80s, cinema and video audiences have consumed a succession of successful horror franchises founded on supernatural serial killers: for example, Freddie in Nightmare on Elm Street (parts 1–8), Jason in Friday the 13th (parts 1–13) and Michael Myers in Halloween (parts 1–8). The popularity of this sub-genre has grown alongside the increased media coverage of serial killing and might be interpreted as a form of displaced engagement with the urgent reality of violent crime. Within this gallery of celebrity monsters the vampire continues to be a conspicuous presence. Dracula, for example, continues to appear in fiction and film, comics and cartoons, children’s culture (Count Quackula) and breakfast cereals (‘Count Chocula’). The publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire in 1976 was the prelude to a renaissance in vampire film and fiction: Rice’s own highly successful Vampire Chronicles (including Tale of the Body Thief in which an angst-ridden vampire assuages his conscience by preying on serial killers) have been augmented by Blade and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Underworld and Van Helsing. These gothic incarnations of the predatory serial killer have never been so legion. In criticism of this oeuvre it has become almost compulsory to read vampirism as a metaphor for capitalism. This trend can be traced to Marx’s (1990) own penchant for vampiric tropes: ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (p. 342). Perhaps Marx, an avid reader of horror fiction, was inspired here by the serialization, in 1847, of James Malcolm Ryner’s Varney the Vampire. Despite his aspirations to scientific objectivity, a gothic lexicon is employed repeatedly in Marx’s work: Capital is crowded with references to vampires, the Wallachian Boyar (a.k.a Vlad Tepes, the historical inspiration for Stoker’s Dracula), werewolves, witchcraft, spells, magic and the occult and Marx claimed repeatedly to have detected ‘necromancy’ at the heart of the commodity form. In the work of Walter Benjamin, similarly packed with gothic tropes, ‘necromancy’ elides with necrophilia. For Benjamin, the sensual engagement between consumers and the products of dead labour blurs the lines between lust (appetites) and leiche (the corpse). Precisely this disturbing entangle- ment of death and eroticism is at the core of the predatory vampire’s charisma. The vampire has fascinated consumers and Marxist critics alike – the latter as an allegorical embodiment of the monstrous and mesmerising energies of capital.

A far less seductive version of the living dead, one who has received relatively little critical attention alongside the aristocratic vampire, is the zombie. The MO of the zombie – cannibalism – is also practised by many historical and fictional serial killers. In fact, the consumption of human flesh, blood and organs is the most transgressive taboo performed by historical and fictional serial killers from Jeffry Dahmner (subject of Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie) to Hannibal Lecter, from Armin Meiwes to Patrick Bateman and Leatherface. Cannibal studies has become a burgeoning field in contemporary critical theory and one of its most contentious assertions is that modern consumerism constitutes a mode of neocannibalism. For example, Crystal Bartolovich (1998) proposes that consumerism embodies the cultural logic of ‘late cannibalism’, Deborah Root (1996) detects a ‘cannibal culture’ in contemporary consumerism, art, popular culture and tourism while Dean MacCannell (1992) has similarly called for a reinterpretation of western tourism and other aspects of consumerism in terms of cannibalism. In a variety of fields, from ecology and tourism to sexuality and organ transplants, from business take-overs to pop culture intertextuality, critics in various disciplines have uncovered intricate intersections between cannibalist and consumerist modes of incorporation. Although contemporary capitalism is of course founded on a figurative rather than literal practice, with its relentless consumption of land and labour, resources and spectacles, cannibalism without necrophagy still mirrors the modes of desire and domination, the obsessive violence, wastefulness and irrational excesses that under- pinned classical cannibal practices. According to Deborah Root (1996: 3), one might detect in the endless hunger of late capitalism a ‘pervasive cannibal unconscious’.

The past few years have seen a dramatic upsurge in films that focus on flesh-eaters: Land of the Dead (2005) and Return of the Living Dead 5 (2005), Resident Evil (2002) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) (based on a hugely successful survival horror video game franchise), 28 Days Later (2002), Children of the Living Dead (2001) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). US popular culture began its colonization of Haitian folklore in 1932 with Bela Lugosi starring in White Zombie. The setting of Victor Halperin’s film on a Caribbean sugar plantation offered a suggestive analogy between zombification and slavery. Although most see the zombie as sheer superstition others have read it, like vampirism, as political metaphor. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre used the metaphor of colonial subjects as zombies. On occasion zombification could be more than mere metaphor. In 1918, in Haiti, newspapers reported that most of the employees of the American sugar corporation who worked on the cane plantations were zombies. Conspiracy theorists proposed that US chemists had finally caught up with voodoo medicine and had started poisoning the workforce to produce docile and submissive labourers.

George Romero’s seminal zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), overturned the tradition of offering zombies as symbols of oppressed colonial labour and instead offered a gothic caricature of consumers as the living dead. Dawn of the Dead is set largely in Monroeville, a shopping mall in Cleveland, some time after a zombie epidemic has swept the nation. Four human survivors seek refuge at the mall but their respite is interrupted by the arrival of hordes of zombies. One of the characters explains their presence thus: ‘some kind of instinct. Memory . . . of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives . . . It’s not us they’re after, it’s the place. They remember that they want to be here’. The zombies seem like slapstick shoppers: they are hypnotized by the mannequins, they fall over on the escalators or into fountains while looking at glistening coins. Initially, the humans have no trouble in trapping and killing the zombie-shoppers using muzak, PA announcements and by posing in shop windows as consumable bait. Gradually, however, the threat increases and Romero progressively collapses the distance and differences between the human characters and the zombie mob.

How pertinent is Romero’s carnivalesque parody of mindless consumerism? In The Malling of America, William Kowinski (2002) describes the psychology of shopping in malls as a ‘zombie effect’. The architectural design of malls induces consumers to wander for hours in an endless pursuit of goods and services. In ‘Islands of the Living Dead: the Social Geography of McDonaldisation’, George Ritzer (2003) focuses on the devivifying influence of commodification. In accordance with a socioeconomic and psychological design perfected by McDonalds, the landscapes of consumerism are so structured, standardized and disciplined that the subjects moving through them are, he contests, simultaneously alive and dead. Ritzer borrows a phrase from Baudrillard to describe this as a world that resembles ‘the smile of a corpse in a funeral home’ (p. 127). Sometimes shoppers shuffle numbly by instinct between aisles and shops (like Romero zombies), but sometimes they can get nasty (like Romero zombies). Rhonda Lieberman (1993) and other analysts of shopping disorders have commented on increases in violence in consumer spaces: mall hysteria, sales frenzy and even full- blown riots. For example, when IKEA opened a new store in Edmonton, North London, in 2005, a riot involving 7000 people and multiple stabbings ensued (Oliver, 2005). The zombie desires to consume all the time and when it is prevented from consuming it becomes violent. An emergency broadcast in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead explains why the zombie plague has spread so quickly across the country. The living dead only consume around 5 per cent of their victims before moving on in search of the next meal. The violence, wastefulness and instinctive serial consumption of the zombie makes it, like the serial killer, a gothic projection of the commodifying fury of late capitalism. Monsters Inc. is a booming business. The spectacular increase in images and narratives of serial killing in millennial western culture, from the media coverage of historical homicide to the proliferation of fictional and supernatural fantasies of serial homicide, ultimately embodies the consumption of consumption in a necrocapitalist order.

References

Annesley, James (1998) Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto.

Bartolovich, Crystal (1998) ‘Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism’, in Barker, Hulme and Iversen (eds) Cannibalism and the Colonial World, 204–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baudelaire, Charles (1998) The Flowers of Evil. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Baudrillard, Jean (1996) The System of Objects. London: Verso.

Baudrillard, Jean (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: SAGE Publications.

Benjamin, Walter (1999a) Illuminations. London: Pimlico.

Benjamin, Walter (1999b) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Blau, Herbert (1987) The Eye of the Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Burroughs, William (1965) ‘The Art of Fiction’, Paris Review 35: 1–37.

Conrath, Robert (1996) ‘Serial Heroes: A Sociocultural Probing into Excessive Consumption’, in John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet (eds) European Readings of American Popular Culture, pp. 147–58. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1995) Points . . .: Interviews, 1979–1994. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press.

Dyer, Richard (1999) Se7en. London: BFI.

Easton Ellis, Bret (1991) American Psycho. London: Picador.

Fanon, Frantz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove.

Freud, Sigmund (1981) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Halberstam, Judith (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Harris, Thomas (1990) Silence of the Lambs. London: Mandarin.

Hartson, H. J. and Koran, L. M (2002) ‘Impulsive Behaviour in a Consumer Culture’, International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice 6(2): 65–8.

Haug, W. F. (1986) Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Advertising and Sexuality in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Polity.

Jenkins, Philip (1994) Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Kowinski, William (2002) The Malling of America. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris.

Lacan, Jacques (1989) Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge.

Lieberman, Rhonda (1993) ‘Shopping Disorders’, in B. Massumi (ed.) The Politics of Everyday Fear, pp. 245–68. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

MacCannell, Dean (1992) Empty Meeting Grounds: Tourist Papers Vol. 1. London: Routledge.

Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. (1998) Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Oliver, Mark (2005) ‘Slowly but Steadily, Madness Descended’, Guardian, 10 February.

Priest, Christopher (1998) The Extremes. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Renner, Michael (2002) The Anatomy of Resource Wars. Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute.

Ritzer, George (2003) ‘Islands of the Living Dead: The Social Geography of McDonaldization’, American Behavioral Scientist 47(2): 119–36.

Root, Deborah (1996) Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Seltzer, Mark (1998) Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. London: Routledge.

Simpson, Philip (2000) Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Tithecott, Richard (1999) Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Vronsky, Peter (2004) Serial Killers: The Methods and Madness of Monsters. New York: Berkley Books.

#deviance #commodification #Consumerism #popular culture #serial killers #violence #true crime #serial murder #hannibal lecter #spectacle #consumption #media consumption #murderabilia #violence of commodification #deviance studies

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Frozen II Review

Some spoilers for the movie ahead.

Confession: I loved the original Frozen. I mean, I also got annoyed by everyone and their mother playing “Let It Go” ten times over (in truth, I found “For the First Time in Forever” was the song that stuck in my mind), but I loved the movie. I have a weakness for stories about siblings, okay? It just hits me right in the feels. And so I was pretty excited when a sequel was announced. The first film had a lot of really cool ideas it could work with in a sequel. I probably watched the trailer ten times. So I saw the film this past weekend, and after much anticipation, I can say… I have mixed feelings about it?

Frozen II is not a bad film, but it’s a jumbled film. It feels rushed and confused, with a Plot that doesn’t add up and a cast of characters who mostly don’t have anything to do. In the end, its conclusion doesn’t feel like it makes sense for the characters. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s gorgeously animated, masterfully performed, and it has some fantastic scenes. But it’s not the excellent follow-up that’s been advertised.

So the story goes something like this: Elsa has been queen for a while now, and things seemed to be going well. But she hears a ghostly voice calling out to her and when she responds to it Elsa accidentally awakens elemental spirits that threaten Arendelle. In order to save her home, she, Anna, Olaf, Kristoff and Sven decide to go up north, to an enchanted forest her father once told her and her sister about to find answers as to why the elemental spirits are restless and perhaps find out more about Elsa’s own powers.

A sequel that says “Let’s explore the origins of Elsa’s powers” isn’t a bad idea; after all, several viewers of the original commented that they were bothered that they didn’t get an explanation for those powers. I didn’t think it was that big a deal, but it’s a good starting point for the sequel.

Where this falls apart is that the Plot hops along confusedly. Because this isn’t just learning about Elsa’s true nature, but also about the relationship between Arendelle and the enchanted forest, the history of enmity between the two peoples, how Elsa and Anna’s parents died, how they met, and Elsa and Anna’s relationship. And also Kristoff spends the entire first half of the movie trying to find the right way to propose, but he’s shoved off-stage for the last third of the movie.

As a result, there are a lot of characters that don’t do anything substantial to the Plot. There are a group of soldiers from Arendelle stuck in the forest, and their leader is a cool character, but he does absolutely nothing until the climax, and even then it’s no action that could not have been done by a previously-established character. The people in the forest have three named characters in their ranks, who contribute nothing to the Plot at all and made me wonder why they’re included.

The film wants to act as if it’s doing an interesting theme of grappling with past sins and colonialism, in its relationship between the people of Arendelle and the people of the forest. But that’s not very clearly done at all; outside of the flashback sequences and the soldiers stuck in the forest, there’s little sense of animosity between these two peoples. And discovering that long ago Arendelle did something to upset the balance in the enchanted forest is treated like a major revelation that changes everything to our characters, but this means jack squat since it isn’t as if Anna and Elsa looked up to or even mentioned the people involved, or held any prejudice against anyone.

Like, imagine if I were to walk up to you and say, “You know that cool Puerto Rican privateer, Miguel Enriquez? Well he’s not so cool, because guess what? He owned slaves!” Except unless you’re familiar with privateers in the colonial era of Puerto Rico, this means nothing to you. Some people thought that Hans being evil in Frozen was a weak twist because it came out of nowhere, but at least we’ve seen that character the entire movie. A past character who was never even mentioned before this movie, and has very little presence, and none of the other characters associate or even knew about his actions… it’s hard to care, is what I’m saying.

Furthermore, despite some reviews claiming that this movie is a scathing indictment of colonialism or something, it really pulls its punches, in that it implies that correcting the past will lead to good in the long term but struggles and hardship in the short term… and then just doesn’t do that. It sounds like there’s going to be a price for correcting the mistakes of the past, but instead there isn’t, and everyone’s just happy-go-lucky at the end of the day.

It wanted to make a point, but didn’t really commit to it. It wanted to introduce some cool characters, and then didn’t do anything with them.

The humor mostly works, though. Olaf I think has a couple of moments where he overstays his welcome, but that’s a Your Mileage May Vary thing, and he never fully crosses over into being an irritating character, which is always difficult with a comic relief character.

And on the subject of character, Elsa and Anna’s relationship is still a focal point in this movie, and thankfully it’s still very strong. Unlike the last movie they click a lot better here, though they don’t always see eye-to-eye. Their scenes together were the strongest parts of the movie. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel should get all the credit for their acting here. That, and their singing--like I said, the musical numbers in this film are phenomenal, and by themselves are worth the price of admission.

Helping to bumping up the quality of those musical numbers is the animation. Taking a step up and experimenting with more warm colors, the film is gorgeous to look at. That’s not even counting the action scenes; yeah, maybe Elsa’s powers are treated more like a superhero’s in this film, but it leads to spectacular sequences such as Elsa’s battle with the fire spirit. Scenes like that are meant to be seen on the big screen.

Still, story is what captures my attention most, and in my opinion the story in Frozen II is lacking. If you’re a fan of animation, or a diehard Disney fanatic, you’ll want to see this movie in theaters, but otherwise it’s not so exceptional of a story that I’d urge you to see it right away. You might be better off waiting for it to stream online or finding a way to rent it for home release.

-Eduardo A. Hernández-Cruz

#Frozen II #movie reviews #Disney

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brokehorrorfan · 5 years

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Blu-ray Review: This Island Earth

This Island Earth has never quite received the respect it deserves in the annals of science fiction. At first glance, the 1955 film may appear to typify schlocky '50s fair, a reputation exacerbated by the fact that it's the subject of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. While it is a pulpy space opera, further inspection will reveal that much of it goes against the grain for sci-fi of the era, helping to lay the groundwork for those to come. Its poetic title may not do it any favors when compared to the conspicuous names of the era, but it accurately reflects the ambitious film.

Director Joseph M. Newman (Dangerous Crossing) gets a lot right when it comes to the genre elements, from sociopolitical commentary (thinly veiled as it may be, with atomic energy casually discussed in the opening scene) to a memorable monster (the Metaluna Mutant is a late addition to the classic Universal monster lineage). Franklin Coen (The Train) and George Callahan (Dark Alibi) penned the script, based on a series of three serial stories by Raymond F. Jones (originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories magazine before being collected as a novel in 1952).

When Dr. Cal Meacham (Rex Reason, The Creature Walks Among Us) receives a series of mysterious packages featuring thousands of unearthly parts accompanied by a user manual, he does what any man of science would do: follow the instructions. He successfully assembles the so-called interocitor, a complex machine that allows him to video communicate with an inscrutable scientist by the name of Exeter (Jeff Morrow, The Creature Walks Among Us), who has an elongated forehead topped with stark white hair.

Having passed Exeter's covert aptitude test and witnessed his technological advancements and threatening power, Meacham is recruited to join a team of exceptional scientist. An unmanned plane flies him to a cult-like compound that hosts several of the best scientists from around the world with the alleged goal of putting an end to war. But Meacham, along with fellow scientist Dr. Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue, It Came from Beneath the Sea), is skeptical, and his suspicions are soon confirmed when they're brought to Exeter's home planet of Metaluna.

While budgetary restraints prevent the film from going intergalactic until the final act, its 87 minutes move at a fairly snappy pace. The exposition-heavy front half successfully builds intrigue that's paid off by the time the more exciting elements are introduced. Unlike many of its 1950s sci-fi brethren, this is a color picture; Technicolor, to be exact. Cinematographer Clifford Stine (It Came from Outer Space) utilizes the vibrant palette to bathe the screen in primary shades during several key sequences. The film also features inspired production design from art director Alexander Golitzen (Spartacus).

The Metaluna Mutant is credited to head makeup artist Bud Westmore (To Kill a Mockingbird), but we now know that it was designed at least in part by Milicent Patrick (Creature from the Black Lagoon) and constructed by a team of artists. The striking design features insect-like eyes, piercing claws, a bulbous brain that inspired Mars Attacks, and... normal human pants. Despite being a focal point of the marketing, the creature only appears briefly during the climax and is hardly integral to the plot. But, not unlike the Bride of Frankenstein, the character left a lasting impression on viewers, elevating it to classic monster status.

The length of This Island Earth's production was as much a part of the marketing as its creature, with "2.5 years in the making!" serving as a tagline back when such a time frame was extraordinary long rather than the norm for a high-concept film. Much of that time was dedicated to the deluge of optical effects, ranging from rotoscoping and pyrotechnics to matte paintings and miniatures. With the exception of one glaringly bad blue screen shot, the effects are quite impressive for the time.

Reason is epitome of a leading man: classically handsome with a chiseled jaw and a perfect quaff of dark hair, along with a commanding, baritone voice. He also has decent acting chops, but that’s almost secondary. It's nice to see a woman as a scientist in that era, but Domergue ultimately defaults to the damsel in distress archetype. Morrow's character has a rare arc for an alien, and he develops it successfully. Robert Nichols (The Thing from Another World) has a supporting role as Meacham's meek assistant, but the most recognizable actor in the film is Russell Johnson (the Professor from Gilligan's Island), who plays another scientist. Stunt performer Regis Parton (The Monster Squad) is uncredited as the man in the mutant suit.

Scream Factory has scanned This Island Earth in 4K from the original inter-positive for its new Blu-ray release, allowing the extravagant Technicolor hues to really pop in high definition. It's presented in its 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio by default, while the 1.37:1 open matte view is available as a special feature. The original Perspecta Stereophonic Sound has also been restored; this short-lived process created a dynamic, three-channel directional audio track from standard mono optical elements.

Two new audio commentaries are included. The first is hosted by visual effects artist Robert Skotak (Terminator 2: Judgment Day), who surprisingly doesn't comment much on the film's optical effects. It's a bit slow, but he brings insight he learned from conversations with Newman. The second track is dedicated to the film's inventive, uncredited score, which was largely composed by Herman Stein with additional music by Henry Mancini and Hans J. Salter; all three also worked on Creature from the Black Lagoon. Monstrous Movie Music producer David Schecter makes a strong argument for it being one of the best sci-fi soundtracks of the '50s. The track only runs for 28 minutes, but it's virtually breathless with the exception of score selections.

In a new interview, Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi explains the inspiration of This Island Earth on his own space opera, Starcrash. Daniel Griffith's 2013 documentary This Island Earth: Two and A Half Years in the Making has been re-edited into an extended 48 minutes, wherein industry professionals and historians - including director Joe Dante (Gremlins), screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner (Class of 1999), Weta prosthetics technician Bob Burbs (The Lord of the Rings), and Skotak - trace the movie’s history, production, and legacy.

The film was condensed and renamed War of the Planets for the home movie market in 1958. Both the 16mm (which runs for about eight minutes with sound) and the 8mm (three minutes and silent) versions are included, and they illustrate that it is an entirely different movie in black and white. A gallery showcasing archival sales literature highlights the advantages of Perspecta sound. Dante provides a fun trailer commentary in which he details the impact the film had on him as a monster kid. Still galleries of poster and lobby cards, publicity stills, and behind-the-scenes photos are also included.

It may not be quite as prestigious, but This Island Earth can hold its own against any of the alien invasion classics of the era: Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, et al. Although not billed as such, Scream Factory's new Blu-ray release of the film is worthy of carrying the Collector's Edition banner. The awesome picture quality alone is worth building your own interocitor, but the variety of special features make it a must-own for sci-fi fans.

This Island Earth is available now on Blu-ray via Scream Factory.

#this island earth #metaluna mutant #scream factory #jeff morrow #rex reason #russell johnson #dvd #gift #review #article #1950s science fiction #50s sci fi #faith domergue #joe dante #shout factory

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kris10tisme · 6 years

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The Blazers: Mean Girls AU

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17867279

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13213575/1/The-Blazers

"I hate LA"

It's the first thing she blurts out to her brother upon entering the kitchen in the morning.

"And a good morning to you too sis, protein shake? He says while extending out his arm out to her while holding out a glass.

Katara gives him what some would call the stank eye.

"Great, you've already adapted one of Los Angeles' prime LA'isms, proud of yourself? We've literally have only been here two weeks!"

"Hey it's very warm here. Warm weather means more sleeveless shirts. More sleeveless shirts means more arm exposure. I can't walk around with flabby arms, so I need to quickly adapt to the LA ways."

"I think bony is a better adjective to use when describing your arms."

But Sokka carries on like he hasn't heard her, slurping away at his liquidated soy. Katara lets out a huff and moves to walk to their cupboard to get out some breakfast cereal.

She hasn't taken kindly to LA since moving here two weeks ago. The culture shock has hit her by storm.

She's moved from a city that was primarily rainy, snowy, and cold with a population of 800; to a city that's dry, literally fiery, and warm. and has a population of a whopping four million.

Growing up and spending the first sixteen years of her life in Yakutat, Alaska hasn't readied for well… all of this.

Within two weeks she’s had to buy a completely new wardrobe, a wardrobe that is better suited for the warm weather, rather than the frosty weather she grew up accustomed to.

She's used to knitting her own sweaters, mittens, and scarves, and now she figures she’ll probably have to resort to knitting skimpy crop tops if she takes in consideration the weather and culture.

All in all, she hasn’t settled in to her new life well. She envies Sokka, he’s loving it here. Her brother is the type of person who turns lemons into lemonade. He makes the complete best of any situation he’s put in to. He’s quick to adapt in any situation he’s thrown in to.

Katara is the polar opposite. She’s always loved and valued where she’s come from. Growing up in a small town, completely isolated from the world has never made her upset. Quite the opposite actually. She loved being from a small tight knit community, a community where families and neighbors grew up together in harmony, bonds that spread between families through generations.

Yakutat was a town where you earned your keep, whether it be by hunting, knitting, fishing, everyone made a team effort to ensure everyone lived comfortably.

This type of comradery completely nonexistent in LA from what she’s observed in her two weeks of living here and in film and pop culture. Here, everything is a game, everyone here is in it for themselves, looking to climb the social hierarchy. She finds it reprehensible.

Granted, she hasn’t properly met anyone here yet, but she can only imagine what her first day of high school has in store for her. Which is why she is in such a crabby mood.

She takes a look back at Sokka and sees him slurping up each last droplet of his protein shake, and the sight makes her slowly lose hope in humanity.

**********************************************************************

Sokka pulls the pick up truck into the school parking lot, a parking lot that’s filled with ferraris and convertibles.

Katara refuses to feel shameful about it though. She reminds herself again that she’s proud of her humble beginnings.

She steps out of the truck, processing her surroundings. She notices how many students there are, which reminds her how insignificant her presence must be here. In Yakutat everyone mattered, it was weird to not make eye contact with someone a give them a greeting.

She approaches the entrance of her school with Sokka, keeping her head up high and proud. She won’t conform to the social norms, she will not walk around with her phone in her hand all the while not taking note of her surroundings.

She’s gotta admit to herself that she’s scared shitless, but at least she’s not in this completely alone. She has her brother.

She turns her head to look at her brother for support and finds him missing. She panics. Did he get lost already? Is he in trouble. She’s always been overprotective of her brother. She always feels like she has to compensate for the lack of maternal figure in the household.

She moves her head swiftly from left to right scanning the hall for her brother. She spots him and he's… flirting?

He’s standing in front of some bulletin board, his arm raised and he’s leaning against the board, standing before some girl with short light brown hair. She’s giving him a smug smile in response to his flirting.

Katara lets out the biggest eyerolls of eyerolls. She is irate.

Just who is he to completely abandon me on our first day, for the first pretty girl he could get ahold of! I was so worried about him!

She inwardly muses.

Forget him, she thinks. She can take care of herself. Just a sixteen year old girl who’s never been to a school that didn’t include grades K-12. It's not like just because she’s only ever encountered about a dozen other people in her age group doesn’t mean she’s gonna find it difficult making friends here. She’s got this!

She holds her head high and saunters off into homeroom. She refuses to be intimidated by this city and its inhabitants.

I won’t let them win.

**********************************************************************

The day is toppled off with her being completely mortified in front of her entire homeroom classroom.

The school's principal found it necessary to make a little visit to her homeroom and have her introduce herself to everybody.

He mentioned that Katara came from a very small town in Alaska, and she was of inuit descent. She’s pretty sure three quarters of the class had no idea what that meant.

He also thought it would be a good icebreaker for Katara to share with the class about her culture, he broached the subject by saying “Tell us about your “people.”

She tried to explain a bit about what it’s like back home while also trying to get the point across that she wasn’t some foreign oddity.

Katara made it known to the class and that stinkin principal that Alaska was in fact IN AMERICA, and yes; English is her first language.

She explained how she would go fishing back home and hike, as she spoke with the dullest tone, knowing that these teens couldn’t give a flying hoot about her or where she’s from, but also to spite this ignorant man they call principal!

He seemed unimpressed by the activities she listed, given that they’re pretty much the same things people do here.

He dismissed himself, and implored the homeroom to make Katara feel welcome and help her adjust. He was met with silence.

And to top it all off, her homeroom teacher HAD to mention that she heard from her ancestry DNA test that she was 14.9% Native American, and asked the class if they too had some inuit ancestry.

The whole thing got derailed within minutes when some students found it necessary to strike up a debate about their confusion about why Native Americans can’t be called Indians.

The rest of the day followed with Katara being as lonely as can be. There’s not much socialization going on while in class. Katara was only approached once the whole day and that was because somebody asked her to borrow a pencil. They never gave the pencil back.

Gym class was hell, the girls locker room was beyond anything Hollywood movies could ever prepare her for. The fumes from all the different types of perfumes of lotions rang through the air, mixed with a bit of what she could assume was weed, and Katara couldn’t go two seconds without choking on her breath. Bras and panties were thrown all over the place. Lewd conversations were rang through her ears, conversations about breast sizes and sexual organ sizes seemed to be the focal point of conversation amongst the girls in the locker room.

Katara couldn’t believe her ears. Did these girls have no shame? To talk about this stuff so brazenly and openly boggled her mind.

It was safe to say that she didn’t make any small talk with anyone in that locker room. She’s never felt more alone.

Fortunately, she and Sokka shared the same lunch period. She was still immensely pissed at Sokka for ditching her first thing in the morning, but due to how lonely the day has been for her, she decided to let it slide just this once.

She ate lunch with Sokka and the girl he was flirting with this morning, whose name she learned is Suki.

Meeting Suki was the only highlight of her day, she was warm, welcoming, and seemed to see through her brothers B.S, but at the same time didn’t mind it.

She was curious and asked them questions about their background without being woefully ignorant and offensive about it. She shared with them some tips about how to survive the modern high school experience, tips Katara took into consideration, while Sokka just gawked at her.

She beckoned Suki goodbye when the period rang, and Suki invited them to have lunch with her again tomorrow. She just hopes Sokka’s shameless ogling doesn’t get in the way of this potential friendship.

She ends the day on a positive note, with Marine Biology being her last class. She loves Marine Biology, she loves marine life, the water, everything about the ocean she’s completely in love with. It’s the closest she’s felt to home the entire day.

The bell rings for dismissal and she’s the first one out the door in her class. She can’t stand to be in this school for another minute. She figures its too much exposure therapy for one day.

She scrummages through the halls making her way towards the exit, she’s almost there…

All of a suddenly she is picked up off her feet, someone grabs her from her lapel and places her down gently in front of the lockers on the side of the hallway.

Initially she is too stunned to speak, but when the shock wears down she moves to open her mouth and lambast whoever did that when she’s met with an index finger to her lips.

The rude finger to her lip isn’t what stops her from sticking up for herself, it's the sheer empty silence she’s met with. She also notices how the hallway is split apart, like everyone's making way for the grand entrance of some important person.

She’s so thrown by the way everyone is reacting right now that her anger dissipates, and she finds herself tiptoeing to see over people's heads so she can get a clearer opening at the scene in the hall. She wonders if some type of moviestar is making their way through the hall. She’s ashamed to admit that she can’t withhold her own curiosity.

She’s able to catch a glimpse of what's going on in the hall. She sees three girls strutting confidently down the hall. The one in the middle obviously leading the charge.

She has jet black hair tied up in a single topknot, with the two single tresses shaping the side of her face. Her eyes honeycoon gold, shiny, looking like they could pierce you and turn you to stone if you looked into them for too long. Her lips are full and glossed to perfection. She’s smirking, her face is all knowing. She knows she’s got this whole school groveling at her, with minimal effort on her part.

Katara takes note of the people staring at the sight before them. They seem to look more petrified than enamored by the sight of whoever this is. And weirdly, Katara can’t blame them. This girl seems… untouchable.

Her other two cronies follow suit. One of them also has jet black hair, but her hair is neatly pinned into two buns at the sides of her head. Her face is anything but smug, quite the opposite, she looks placid. Like the attention everyone's giving her holds no significance. The other one is practically skipping down the hall. She's’ the only one wearing a full smile, she has the longest braid Katara’s ever seen. The braid bounces from side to side due to the jovial skipping.

What a weird mix of girls. Katara thinks to herself.

They’ve now made their way out the doors of the schools exit. It felt as though to Katara that they were sauntering down the hall in slow motion based off how many observations she was able to make about the three girls in a five second interval.

Everything has seemed to gone back to normal, the middle of the hallway is not cleared out anymore, and everyone seemed to snap out of whatever trance they fell under.

That was the weirdest, trippiest thing Katara has ever experienced in her sixteen years on this earth. She’s never seen human beings grovel so openly about other human beings.

Katara overhears a few conversations when she makes her way out of the schools exit.

Did you hear that Azula is rumored to be cast in the new Steven Spielberg movie as a vampire? Gosh, that’d be the perfect role for her!

Did you hear Mai’s father is going to run for mayor?

I heard Ty Lee slept with over a dozen guys this summer!

Apparently Zuko and Mai are off again!

That's the last sentence Katara listens to before snaps out of the weird fascination she all of the sudden got for the people in her school.

She considers it lapse of judgement and moves on to the exit and out to the parking lot to wait for Sokka to take her home before this place can further poison her mind.

#zutara #Zuko #katara #azula #avatar: the last airbender

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