#its one of the rare shows where you see cop protagonists do and say awful things but theyre actually framed as awful for once

[micahdotgov]

he's got a 9 to 5 so she takes the night shift... martin hart must die for the way he treats women im dead serious

[mst3kproject]

Beast from Haunted Cave

I’ve actually received a couple of requests for movies to review, and I am looking into them.  I just have a few others I want to get through first… like this one.

Beast from Haunted Cave begins with a familiar tune – over the credits we hear the same jumpy ‘suspense’ music that opened both Night of the Blood Beast and Attack of the Giant Leeches.  It seems to have been a favourite of Gene Corman (Roger’s brother), who produced all three movies.  The writer, furthermore, was Charles B. Griffith, who did the same job for half a dozen MST3K movies, including It Conquered the World, Gunslinger, and Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II.  Finally, Beast from Haunted Cave has the strange distinction of being the only movie I’ve ever seen that thanks ‘the people of South Dakota’.

A master criminal and his drunk, stupid henchmen (one of whom is a drunk, stupid henchwoman) have decided to rob a mining operation.  In the process they annoy some kind of giant bug monster that was living in the mine, and it stalks them and their guide through the wintery mountains until they reach a cabin where they hole up to wait out a blizzard. Between the monster lurking outside and the fact that the gang are all getting fed up being stuck indoors and starting to hate each other (a familiar scenario in 2020), it’s a good bet that no more than two of them are getting out alive.  Probably the henchwoman and the guide, since they were kissing earlier.

Beast from Haunted Cave is a typically cheap Corman production.  The familiar music persists through the entire film, and gives the same impression it did in Blood Beast – the soundtrack people were given a set of pre-existing pieces and did what they could with them.  A terrible winter storm is represented by howling wind noises, but it never actually snows.  The monster is dreadful.  The webs draped over everything demonstrate that it’s a spider, but all we actually see is a featureless head and a couple of flailing arms that resemble nothing so much as one of those inflatable tube men at a used car lot.  When all we’re seeing is one leg reaching out to grab people it’s not awful, but as soon as we get a good look at the whole creature it’s clear that this is some kind of repurposed Hallowe’en decoration.  The gold bricks the thieves came to steal are just… well, bricks painted gold.  The paint isn’t even shiny.

Outside of that, however, the movie isn’t really that bad.  Everybody on the crew seems to have known what they were doing, and did their best to work within their meagre budget.  The photography is surprisingly competent.  The lighting rarely qualifies as atmospheric but there’s always enough of it – even in scenes set at night or in a dark cave, I never found myself squinting and wondering what’s going on.  The snowy landscapes are shot on location and look suitably hostile (although they could often only do one take, since after that the snow wouldn’t look pristine anymore).  You can see the actors’ breath, which gives a visceral sense of the cold.  The writing is mostly just serviceable but every so often there’s a little gem tucked within it.

The two places where this shows best are in the character of Marty and in the relationship between the mastermind, Alex, and the henchwoman, Gypsy.  Marty is a drunken buffoon but there’s more to him than that.  Early in the film he invites a cocktail waitress from the ski lodge, Natalie, to make out in a cave with him.  They disturb the monster, and Marty escapes but leaves Natalie behind.  For the rest of the film, even as he continues to be a drunken buffoon, it’s clearly eating him up that he abandoned this woman.  There’s an ambiguous moment when he finds Natalie’s still-living body webbed to a tree in the middle of the woods – perhaps it really happened, or maybe he’s having a nightmare.

Gypsy has clearly been working for Alex for some time, as secretary, girlfriend, and as a way of distracting the targets of his robberies. She’s an alcoholic sad sack who looks ten years older than her stated age of twenty-six, and clearly regrets her self-destructive life.  She cannot leave, however, because Alex is controlling and violent, and because she wouldn’t know what she wants or who she is without him.  When he beats her up for kissing Gil the guide, she later says Alex had a perfect right to slap me.  At the same time, the film hints of happier times between the two in a running gag, never explained, where Alex and Gypsy call each other ‘Charles’.  This seems to have once been an endearment, but is now a passive-aggressive insult.

One character whom I wish had done more is Gil’s housekeeper, Small Dove.  She rarely speaks, but she carries an axe and spends a lot of time judgmentally watching the stupid white people.  She could have been this movie’s Eulabelle, but she ends up getting eaten by the monster without ever doing anything badass.  Shame.

Let us now return to a familiar question: who is the main character in this movie?

I guess Gil is the ‘hero’.  He’s the hunky male lead, who gets the girl at the end. He never does much to further the plot, though, except for urging Gypsy to leave Alex and figure out how to lead her own life. Although she seems romantically interested in him, Gil may not return the sentiment – it’s hard to say.  He doesn’t kill the monster, Marty actually does that by setting it on fire with a flare gun.  Gil is just sort of there, a cardboard cut-out in the ‘handsome guy’ box all movies must have.

Gypsy has a much better claim on the protagonist role.  The script takes much more interest in her situation than in anybody else’s, and we are encouraged to sympathize with her feeling lost and trapped.  She survives at the end to run off with Gil, though we’re not given any indication of what they’ll do now or whether the budding relationship between them will last.  Like so many other movies of its era, Beast from Haunted Cave has no denouement.  We simply fade to black from the monster on fire (another thing they could only do once, since they actually burned the prop).

Gil is the one who describes the cave as ‘haunted’, but this never has anything to do with the story.  There is not even a hint of a ghost or even a ghost story connected with the cave.  I assume the word is in the title mostly because Beast from Cave sounds like a dinosaurs-and-cavemen movie made by the cavemen, and having put it there, Griffith felt he had to justify it with a line of dialogue.

The character who had the most potential to go through an arc is actually the antagonist, Alex.  He’s been pulling heists like this for years, and is proud of his success.  He has no reason to think this job will be any different, and yet as the movie progresses, Alex has to watch his plans fall apart all around him.  One of his henchmen is going mad from terror and guilt.  The other, Byron (who you can tell apart from Marty because Byron is The One In The Stupid Hat), is developing a crush on Small Dove and thinking about getting out of crime and settling down.  Gypsy is kissing Gil right in front of him, and Alex worries what she might have told him about the real purpose of the ski trip.  Then there’s the storm, which means the plane that was supposed to take them to Canada can’t get to them, and the lurking monster.  At the end of the film, Alex is still trying to regain control of the situation, even as the monster closes in on him.

Criminals on the run getting menaced by a monster seems to be a surprisingly common plot for a movie.  Voodoo Woman and Killer Fish were both variants on the theme.  I’m guessing this serves two purposes within the plot: the first is that it means we’re not too sad when the main characters die, since they were already bad people.  The second is what I think Beast from Haunted Cave was going for – it means that the characters cannot ask for help with their situation.  The group know, from hearing it on the radio, that they’re being hunted by the authorities.  If they were to call for help, whoever came to the rescue would find the gold bars in their bags, and they’d go straight to prison.

This idea is mostly implied.  Nobody ever actually suggests calling for help, or even trying to contact the people who were gonna be flying their getaway plane.  It also seems that they had no contingency plan for bad weather, which makes the whole operation look very poorly-planned.

One thing I did find myself thinking about is that the radio news mentions the police looking into the theft, but we never actually see the cops investigating.  This applies to the other movies I mentioned above, as well… in Voodoo Woman we’re in an area that doesn’t seem to have much by way of police, but in Killer Fish, too, law enforcement is entirely absent. This is a good choice on the part of the writers and directors, because it allows us to focus on the monster plot. If they were to include detectives, that would unnecessarily complicate things and require a resolution of its own.

Then again, if they had two resolutions, they might have had to include some ‘wind-down’ time.  I don’t like it when movies end abruptly after the monster dies, because it tends to leave dangling subplots.  Gil and Gypsy are still in the middle of nowhere, and must now shelter in the cave until the storm ends.  Are they going to be okay?  Last time we saw Small Dove she was weakened from blood loss but not yet quite dead.  Can they save her?  Will Gil and Gypsy stay together, or will he encourage her to go find herself? So there’s another lesson for aspiring film-makers: don’t end your movie until the story’s actually over.

[greatfay]

controversial opinions?

Cold pizza actually not good. Tastes like angry bacteria.

There’s a completely separate class of gay men who are in a different, rainbow-tinted plane of reality from the rest of us and I don’t like them. They push for “acceptance” via commercialization of the Pride movement, assimilation through over-exposure, and focus on sexualizing the movement to be “provocative” and writing annoying articles that reek of class privilege instead of something actually important like lgbtqa youth homelessness, job discrimination, and mental health awareness.

Coleslaw is good. You guys just suck in the kitchen.

Generational divides ARE real: a 16-year-old and a 60-year-old right now in 2021 could agree on every hot button sociopolitical topic and yet not even realize it because they communicate in entirely different ways.

Sam Wilson is a power bottom. No I will not elaborate.

Allison’s makeover in The Breakfast Club good, not bad. She kept literally and metaphorically dumping her trash out onto the table and it’s clearly a cry for help. Having the attention and affection of a smart, pretty girl doing her makeup for her was sweet and helped her open up to new experiences. Not every loner wants to BE a loner (see: Bender, who is fine being a lone wolf).

Movie/show recommendations that start with a detailed “representation” list read like status-effecting gear in an RPG and it’s actually a turn-off for me. I have to force myself to give something a try in spite of it.

Yelling at people to just “learn a new language” because clearly everyone who isn’t you and your immediate vicinity of friends must be a lazy ignorant white American is so fucking stupid, like I get it, you’re mad someone doesn’t immediately know how to pronounce your name or what something means. But I know 2 languages and am struggling with a 3rd when I can between 2 jobs and quite frankly, I don’t have the time to just absorb the entire kanji system into my brain to learn Japanese by tomorrow night, or suddenly learn Arabic or Welsh. There are 6500 recorded languages in the world, what’s the chance that one of 3 I’ve learn(ed?) is the one you’re yelling at me about. Yes this is referring to that post yelling at people for not knowing how to pronounce obscure Irish names and words. Sometimes just explaining something instead of admonishing people for not knowing something inherently in the belief that everyone must be lazy entitled privileged people is uh... better?

Stop fucking yelling at people. I despise feeling like someone is yelling at me or scolding me, it triggers my Violence Mode, you don’t run me, you are not God, fuck off. Worst fucking way to "educate” people, it just feels good in the moment to say or write and doesn’t help. Yes I’ve done it before.

Violence is good actually.

Characters doing bad things ≠ an endorsement of bad things. Characters doing bad things that are unquestioned by the entire rest of the cast = endorsement of bad things, or at the least, a power fantasy by the creator. See: Glee, in which Sue’s awfulness is constantly called out, while Mr. Shue’s awfulness rarely is because he’s “the hero.” See also: the Lightbringer series, in which the protagonist is a violent manipulator who is praised as clever, charming, diplomatic, and genius by every supporting character (enemies included), despite the text never demonstrating such.

Euphoria is good, actually. It falls into this niche of the past decade of “dark gritty teen shows” but actually has substance behind it, but the general vibe I get from passive-aggressive tumblr posts from casual viewers is that this show is The Devil, and the criticism of its racier content screams pearl-clutching “what about the children??” to me.

Describing all diagnosed psychopaths as violent criminals is a damaging slippery slope, sure. But I won’t be mad at anyone for inherently distrusting another human who does not have the ability to feel guilt and remorse, empathy, is a pathological liar, or proves to be cunning and manipulative.

It’s actually not easy to unconditionally support and love everyone everywhere when you’ve actually experienced the World. Your perspective and values will be challenged as you encounter difficult people, experience hardship, are torn between conflicting ideas and commitments, and fail. My vow to never ever call the cops on another black person was challenged when an employee’s boyfriend marched into the kitchen OF AN ESTABLISHMENT to scream at her, in a BUSINESS I MANAGED, and threaten to BEAT the SHIT out of her. Turns out I can hate cops and hate that motherfucker equally, I am more than capable of both.

Defending makeup culture bad, actually. Enjoy it, experiment, master it, but don’t paint it as something other than upholding exactly what they want from you. Even using makeup to “defy the heteropatriarchal oppressors!” is still putting cash in their pockets, no matter how camp...

Not every villain needs to be redeemed, some of you just never outgrew projecting yourself onto monsters and killers.

Writing teams and networks queerbaiting is not the same as individuals queerbaiting. Nick Jonas performing exclusively at gay clubs to generate an audience really isn’t criminal; if they paid to go see him, that’s on them, he didn’t promise anyone anything other than music and a show. Do not paint this as similar to wealthy, bigoted executives and writing teams trying to snatch up the LGBTQA demographic with vague ass marketing and manipulative screenplays, only to cop out so as not to alienate their conservative audiences. And ESPECIALLY when the artists/actors/creators accused of queerbaiting or lezploitation then come out as queer in some form later on.

Queer is not a bad word, and I’ve no clue how that remains one of few words hurled at LGBTQA people that can’t be reclaimed. It’s so archaic and underused at this point that I don’t get the reaction to it compared to others.

People who defend grown-woman Lorelai Gilmore’s childish actions and in the same breath heavily criticize teenage religious abuse victim Lane Kim’s actions are not to be trusted. Also Lane deserved better.

Keep your realism out of my media, or at least make it tonally consistent. Tired of shows and movies and books where some gritty, dark shit comes out of nowhere when the narrative was relatively Romantic beforehand.

Actually people should be writing characters different from themselves, this new wave in the past year of “If you aren’t [X] you shouldn’t be writing [X]” is a complete leap backward from the 2010s media diversity movement. And if [X] has to do with an invisible minority status (not immediately visible disabilities, or diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, persecuted religious affiliations, mental illness) it’s actually quite fucked up to assume the creator can’t be whatever [X] is or to demand receipts or details of someone’s personal life to then grant them “permission” to create something. I know, we’re upset an actual gay actor wasn’t casted to play this gay character, so let’s give them shit about it: and not lose a wink of sleep when 2 years later, this very actor comes out and gives a detailed account of the pressure to stay closeted if they wanted success in Hollywood.

Projecting an actor’s personal romantic life and gender identity onto the characters they play is actually many levels of fucked up, and not cute or funny. See: reinterpreting every character Elliot Page has played through a sapphic lens, and insulting his ability to play straight characters while straight actors play actual caricatures of us (See also: Jared Leto. Fuck him).

I’m fucking sick of DaBaby, he sucks. “I shot somebody, she suck my peepee” that’s 90% of whatever he raps about.

“Political Correctness” is not new. It was, at one point, unacceptable to walk into a fine establishment and inform the proprietor that you love a nice firm pair of tits in your face. 60 years ago, such a statement would get you throw out and possibly arrested under suspicion of public intoxication. But then something happened and I blame Woodstock and Nixon. And now I have to explain to a man 40 years my senior that no, you can’t casually mention to the staff here, many of whom are children, how you haven’t had a good fuck in a while. And then rant about the “Chinese who gave us the virus.” Can’t be that upset with them if you then refused to wear your mask for 20 minutes.

Triggering content should not have a blanket ban; trigger warnings are enough, and those who campaign otherwise need to understand the difference between helping people and taking away their agency. 13 Reasons Why inspired this one. Absolutely shitty show, sure, but it’s a choice to watch it knowing exactly what it contains.

Sasuke’s not a fucking INTJ, he’s an ISFP whose every decision is based off in-the-moment feelings and proves incapable of detailed and logical planning to accomplish his larger goals.

MCU critique manages to be both spot-on and pointless. Amazing stories have been told with these characters over the course of decades; but most of it is toilet paper. Expecting a Marvel movie to be a deeply detailed examination of American nationalism and imperialism painted with a colorful gauze of avant-garde film technique is like expecting filet mignon from McDonalds. Scarf down your quarter pounder or gtfo.

Disparagingly comparing the popularity and (marginal) success of BLM to another movement is anti-black. It is not only possible but also easy to ask for people’s support without throwing in “you all supported BLM for black people but won’t show support for [insert group]” how about you keep our name out your mouth? Black people owe the rest of the world nothing tbh until yall root out the anti-blackness in your own communities.

It is the personal demon/tragic flaw of every cis gay/bi/pan man to externalize and exorcize Shame: I’m talking about the innate compulsion to Shame, especially in the name of Pride and Progress. Shame for socioeconomic “success,” shame for status of outness, shame for fitness and health, shame for looks, shame for style and dress, shame for how one fits into the gender binary, shame for sexual positions and intimacy preferences, shame for fucking music tastes. Put down the weapon that They used to beat you. Becoming the Beater is not growth, it’s the worst-case scenario.

Works by minorities do not have to be focused on their marginalized identities. Some ladies want to ride dragons AND other ladies. The pressure on minorities to create the Next Great Minority Character Study that will inevitably get snuffed at the Oscars/Peabody Awards is some bullshit when straight white dudes walk around shitting out mediocre screenplays and books.

Canadians can stfu about how the US is handling COVID-19 actually. Love most of yall, but the number of Canadian snowbirds on vacation (VACATION??? VA.CAT.ION.) in the supposed “hotbed” of my region that I’ve had to inform our mask policies and social distancing to is ASTOUNDING. Incroyable! I guess your country has a sizable population of entitled, privileged, inconsiderate, wealthy, and ignorant people making things difficult for everyone, just like mine :)

No trick to eliminate glasses fog while wearing my mask has worked, not a single one, it actually has affected my job and work speed and is incredibly frustrating, and I have to deal with it and pretend it’s not a problem while still encouraging others to follow the rules for everyone’s safety and the cognitive dissonance is driving me insane.

It’s really really really not anti-Japanese... to be uncomfortable with the rampant pedophilia in manga and anime, and voice this. I really can’t compare western animation’s sneakier bullshit with pantyshots of a 12-year-old girl.

Most of the people in the cottagecore aesthetic/tag have zero interest in all the hard work that comes with maintaining an isolated property in the countryside, milking cows and tending crops before sunrise, etc. And that’s okay? They just like flowers and pretty pottery and homemade pastries. Idk where discourse about this came from.

You think mint chip ice-cream tastes like toothpaste because you’re missing a receptor that can distinguish the flavors, and that sucks for you. It’s a sort of “taste-blindness” that can make gum spicy to some while others can eat a ghost pepper without crying.

Being a spectacle for the oppressive class doesn’t make them respect us, it makes them unafraid of us. This means they continue to devour us, but without fear of our retaliation.

Only like 4 people on tumblr dot com are actually prepared for the full ramifications of an actual revolution. The rest of you just really imprinted onto Katniss, or grew up in the suburbs.

Straight crushes are normal. They’re people first, sexual orientation second. Can’t always know.

The road to body positivity is not easy, especially if what you desire is what you aren’t.

You’re actually personally responsible for not voluntarily bringing yourself into an environment that you know is not fit for you unless you have the resolve to manage it. Can’t break a glass ceiling without getting a few cuts. This one’s a shoutout to my homophobic temp coworkers who decided working a venue with a drag show would be a good idea. This is also is a shoutout to people who want to make waves but are surprised when the boat tips. And also a shoutout to people who—wait that’s it’s own controversial opinion hold up.

Straight people can and should stay the fuck out of gay bars and queer spaces. “yoUrE bEInG diVisiVe” go fuck yourself.

[bysombreseas]

The Dusk Patrol - Chapter One Excerpt

Authour’s Note: 

The first two thousand words or so of my WIP, a little scene where our protagonists are introduced and roles are established. Hope you all enjoy!

Taglist: @aurisadventure , @adayforducks , @danielleslayer , @wordsofpaintandsmoke , @smudged-glasses-writing

Episode 1 – Nightwalkers

It was only when the sun fell that Hope City lit up. Neon flames danced to the pounding chorus that spilled from club doorways and underground raves. The orderly suits of the business sector gave way to brightly dressed youths and drunken partygoers. Beer and blood and drugs beckoned from every doorway, while on the street a thousand honking taxis fought to push through endless gridlock.

There was a lot of crime in Hope City. Beyond the dazzling wealth of its tourist sector lay ramshackle neighborhoods and creeping decay. Hope was two cities, really; one was for the tourists, and the other, much poorer and far more violent, for its permanent residents.

It was in this second city that Dusk Patrol cadet Wren Nichang found herself, her police trainee badge flashing white every time she passed beneath a streetlight. The wind had started to pick up, ruffling her bob cut and sending a chill across her bare arms. It got cold quick at night, even in the summer.

Her mentor tonight was Brian Okave, six foot five and built like a steamroller. The Faith’s golden halo hung around his neck, though Wren couldn’t imagine him as the kind of man who prayed. Everything else about his uniform was standard Dusk Patrol; one Gaea L56 sidearm, one crackling walkie-talkie, a UV-capable flashlight and two clips of hollow-point bullets. Okave was one of the best mentors on the force and Wren was hoping she’d be assigned to shadow him for her training period. It was hard to tell if Okave reciprocated the feeling. There was a veneer of calm about him that rarely broke, even when he raised his voice.

“Nichang. Situational assessment.”

They were in a quieter part of town, the buildings ramshackle and the streetlights few and far between. It wasn’t a place that outsiders visited often, a hidden slum just blocks from one of the city’s biggest concert halls. “There are no cars in sight,” Wren said, squinting as she peered into the darkness. “Fence behind us isn’t short enough to jump. The houses across the street are too close together for there to be alleyways. There’s only one person in the immediate area, leaning against that streetlight. I assume that’s our contact.”

“Good eyes,” said Okave. “Professional assessment. Keep your guard up nonetheless. This is a bad part of town and some nightwalkers are very good at hiding.”

The wind picked up, a soft howling that competed with the distant city noises for attention. As they crossed the street, Wren folded her arms and wished she’d remembered to bring her jacket. “Sir?” she ventured. “Shouldn’t we be wearing plainclothes?”

“We should, yes.”

“Then why–”

“Department rules, Nichang. You’ll see when you meet her.”

“Oh.” Wren frowned. Suspense was never a good thing. “Have you known her for long?

“Several months. I met Anderson on a case. She was mugged on her way home, broke the poor bastard’s arm in three places. I brought up a murder I was working on and she gave me a name. Been my contact ever since.” There was a note of pride in Okave’s voice.

Wren nodded, unsure what to make of that. “With all due respect, sir, I didn’t realize the Dusk Patrol kept informants. None of my previous mentors had any.” Wren left out that her previous mentors hadn’t been too interested in casework. The mentors only got one night with each cadet before putting down names for permanent assignment, and most spent that time getting to know the trainees instead of doing actual policing. Wren–who couldn’t hold a conversation if it was glued to her hands–had spent the last two weeks red-faced and mumbling as each mentor’s initial enthusiasm faded into awkward silence.

“We don’t,” Okave replied to Wren’s query. “This is a special case.”

The figure waved at their approach. A girl, around a year younger than Wren, maybe eighteen. She wore an oversized sweater with the hood pulled up, torn jeans, and fingerless gloves. Her shoes were cheap knockoffs with a brand name like Noke or Jordens. Her face was drawn and pale, feral almost, her short brown hair so ragged and messy Wren was sure that she’d cut it herself with a dull knife and no mirror.

“Brian,” the girl said. Her voice was low. “Who’s the Asian chick?”

“Don’t call me that,” Wren scowled. She was an addict of some sort, that much was certain. Probably wearing the sweater to hide the marks in her arms–though from needles or teeth it was impossible to say. It wasn’t unheard of for people to give themselves up as blood banks, even if feeding was illegal outside of approved centres. Then again there’s the other possibility. She’s one of them.

“Sure thing cutie,” said the girl, with a smile. “I’m Anderson. Ann for short. Brian you didn’t answer my question.”

“Her name is Wren. She’s my shadow for the evening.”

“That’s cool, that’s cool. What am I here for? And I know you’re gonna say ‘the murder of course’ but which one? Cops gunned down three nightwalkers on Cinder Street–”

“Official statement is they drew first.”

“Cross that off. There’re some dead people in a hotel. I think it was a murder-suicide, but I don’t know much. Heard it was gruesome–blood and wax everywhere. Pretty spooky.”

“We want to know about this man.” Okave drew a rumpled photograph from his pants pocket and passed it to the girl. She looked it over, pursing her lips. “Try to remember, would you? I’m sure it can be worth your while.”

Wren watched the interaction from behind Okave. Dusk Patrol was weird in that way; for some things you had complete autonomy and others none. It was probably a rule somewhere you had to wear uniforms when talking to informants. Something about ‘maintaining a position of authority’. They were big on that stuff, pride before practicality.

The autonomy though. Only in the Dusk Patrol could you park your squad car two blocks away, walk to some crap-sack neighborhood and offer a lowlife a bribe without calling any of it in. Then again, when every case was an assault or murder, the criminals were monstrous nightwalkers and officer mortality rates were high enough that a sizeable part of the budget went to paying off life insurance, for most the perks weren’t worth the risk.

“I think I’ve seen him before.” The girl’s voice grew in confidence with each syllable. “Yeah, he was at Iris last Saturday. Bought a drink or two.”

“Iris?” Wren asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s a nightwalker club.” Anderson smiled, a big smile, large enough to show incisors. “I am a vampire.”

Wren stared and Okave sighed and Anderson’s wide smile grew wider.

“Let’s get back on topic here,” said Okave. “We know the guy was at Iris. I wouldn’t be here talking to you if we didn’t know that–”

“I work drinks,” Anderson explained to Wren.

“–so clearly I’m looking for more. Who was he? What did he do? Where did he go?”

“Why does it matter?”

Okave sighed again, running a dark hand over his forehead. “Because he’s been dead two days. We found his body in a dumpster on Queens. Throat slashed, drained dry. He had no wallet, no ID, and we’re waiting on forensics to match his prints. Autopsy came back yesterday; shows he wasn’t a nightwalker.”

“And then you started caring.” Anderson’s voice took on an edge. And that’s why we don’t have informants, Wren thought. To say the relationship between nightwalkers and the Dusk Patrol was poor would have been the understatement of the century. They hate us.

“I just do my job,” Okave said flatly. “The case came on my desk yesterday. A witness placed the guy somewhere in Iris’s vicinity, so I figured I’d talk to you.”

“Well I don’t know his name,” said Anderson. “But I know what he was.”

“That’s a start.”

Anderson scratched the back of her neck. If she felt threatened by the two officers she did not show it. My first vampire, Wren thought. Not entirely true, as she had seen other nightwalkers during training. Behind cells, though, or in interrogation rooms. Anderson was out in the wild. She was different than what Wren had expected. Cocky and rude, but not entirely unfriendly. How does it come so easily to her, that confidence? I wish I had that.

“He was a familiar,” Anderson was saying. “Your shadow know what I’m talking about?”

Okave looked to Wren, who was still staring. “Well?”

“Oh. Uh, they’re humans that want to be nightwalkers, right? Vampires usually.”

“It’s like a fetish,” Anderson chuckled. “He came up to the counter and asked for a beer. I think it was an excuse to make small talk; you should have seen his face when I told him my age. He asked my name, but I already knew where this was going. I told him I wasn’t interested in that sort of arrangement.”

“Blood for money?” Wren asked.

“Providence no, it’s blood for love. It’s blood so maybe a vampire might take you into their home, or even illegally turn you if you’re lucky.”

“I see.” Wren fought to keep her face blank. The thought of willingly letting a vampire drink her blood was a repulsive one, but she didn’t want to offend Anderson. “Does it happen often?”

This time it was Okave who answered. “Rarely, and rarer still the authorities don’t find out. There’s always the danger of ending up with an abusive vampire, or a pathological liar that just wants you for blood. That said, not that all vampires are manipulative, nor are nightwalkers in general–”

“Aw shut up,” Anderson interrupted. “Always with that PC bullshit. Anyways, I told the guy I wasn’t interested, and he left. To be honest I’m not too surprised he’s dead; dude was naïve, nervous. Probably his first time out.”

“Did you see him with anyone?” Okave asked, but the vampire just shrugged.

“Come on, Brian, it’s a busy place. It’s hard to make out faces in a crowd.”

Okave stuck a hand in his pants pocket and came out with a few bills. He let the glow from the streetlight catch on them. “How about these faces?”

Anderson snatched the money. She was almost a head smaller than Okave, her thin form dwarfed in his shadow. “Yeah, I recognize them. I remember your dead man too. Saw him leave with a woman, some ‘crat.”

“You have a name?”

Anderson shook her head. “No, she’s new, but I know the guy she was drinking with. His name is Tim Gossel.”

Gossel, she explained, had been turned legally at a government center when he was eighteen, one of the last before they got shut down. He was a college student and, Anderson added, a ‘hippy’. Wants to ban silver bullets and reopen turning centres. Thinks the Dusk Patrol and the Faith are evil. To Wren he sounded much worse than a hippy; he was a radical with dangerous views. No doubt he thought nightwalker criminals were all good people as well, victims of culture and circumstance and societal pressures.

At least she doesn’t think much of him either, Wren mused. The contempt in Anderson’s voice was palpable. “I didn’t think he was violent,” the vampire was saying. “Though I bet he’d take a swing at me if he knew I talk to you guys.”

It occurred to Wren just how risky Anderson’s actions were. People like Gossel were rife in Hope; no doubt they would consider speaking to the police some form of betrayal. “Does that worry you?” she asked, feeling a note of concern for the slouching girl.

“Fuck no I’d kick his scrawny ass,” Anderson laughed. “Kid’s three, I’m a hundred– Wren, are you alright? Your eyes just got real fuckin’ large again.”

“She’s fine,” Okave said. “If you don’t have anything else, I think we’re done here.”

“Fine by me.” Anderson straightened, adjusting her hood. “Nice to meet you, Wren. See you around sometime.”

Wren managed a quiet ‘bye’ as the girl walked past them, out of the streetlight and into the shadows. She closed her eyes, trying to clear her thoughts. She’s a vampire. The Dusk Patrol is supposed to kill her kind, and werewolves, and demons, and ghouls, and any kind of nightwalker that makes trouble. But she doesn’t care, no, she’s our friend. And she’s a hundred, plus what, the seventeen, eighteen years she was human? Did she call me cute?

Providence, she did. That’s so cool.

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

Tintin in the 21st Century

It’s weird that Tintin is only really known in continental Europe, and obscure as hell in the UK, because it was localised extremely well - so much so that it really confused me as a kid when, in The Black Island, Tintin takes a ferry over to Britain. If he tends to be knocking about in Brussels pre-adventure, I certainly didn’t notice.

What tends to get emphasised about Tintin these days is the racism - as in this Robert Brockway column - and yes, Tintin in the Congo comes off like Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden crossed with those episodes of Looney Tunes that they won’t broadcast any more, but Herge himself disavowed that one as being basically early installment weirdness. There is a good deal of fairly iffy content in some of the others, including, in Shooting Star, a scheming Jewish financier serving as antagonist (which to be fair, Herge wrote while living under Nazi occupation, and later edited), but none of this was key to the comic’s appeal.

What I’m criticising specifically here is Brockway’s assertion that “Nobody knows how to deal with the racism. [Modern adaptations] keep trying to whitewash it -- pun so totally intended, friend-o -- and every time they do, they act surprised that the property has lost all its magic”, an assertion he illustrates entirely with excerpts from Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in the Land of Soviets (an even earlier work than Congo and an anti-communist tract in which Tintin is a prick to everyone in Russia). I’m well aware that this all may come off as a white European trying desperately to salvage one of his Boy’s Own mighty-whitey heroes from the dustbin of history, but look at the following excerpts:

(The next panel is Tintin breaking this awful man’s cane. There’s a lot of instances like this throughout the series, where someone’s being a dick to a POC, and Tintin lets them have it. Yes, it’s robbing the POC of agency in favour of Tintin as mightiest of whities, you could call it racist, but it’s not quite a Klan march, is it?)

Certainly they’re depicting racism, but is anyone really looking at those and getting the impression that the author endorses Native Americans being thrown off their land? Or that the author agrees with the stereotypes he’s calling people stupid for believing? (The stereotypical Chinaman picture serves as a bit of a brick joke when, later on, Thomson and Thompson attempt to blend in.) Those last two excerpts are from The Blue Lotus, often held up along with Tintin in Tibet as a rebuttal to the charges of racism laid against Herge (largely because of Chang, based on one of Herge’s life-long friends). Ironically, The Blue Lotus was criticised for racism against the Japanese: the villain, Mitsuhirato (that’s him in the last panel) is a pug-nosed, buck-toothed opium trafficker who commits seppuku after the climax, so it’s a fair cop, although The Blue Lotus depicting Imperial Japan as authoritarian warmongers claiming more and more of Manchuria on flimsy pretexts has perhaps been vindicated by history.

Brockway’s column describes Tintin as ‘a racist Indiana Jones...for kids’, and this is basically accurate, although I think it’s debatable whether Tintin is more Indiana Jones or James Bond. (Last Crusade, apparently, began life as Spielberg’s Tintin fan script.) You could easily go with both - the crucial points are the globe-trotting, the intrigue, and Tintin’s own indomitable capability. To paraphrase another Cracked columnist, the weird thing about Tintin is that he was awesome. He looks like a cherub but will happily get mixed up in, and win, a fistfight or gunfight any day. He’s about 19 and already has a nemesis - a Greek nemesis. Despite being half a boy, and despite being a journalist who never writes anything, he’s self-sufficient in every way, and as physically capable as a man twice his size - which can flow back into the mighty whitey stuff in some fairly unfortunate ways:

but then again, take the racial dynamic out of that page (or, if you prefer, focus more on the white colonialists bossing about the South Asian guys) and it’s pretty standard protagonisty stuff.

The series is ‘for kids’ in that Tintin is your classic boy hero - given his trusty dog companion, it’s a lot like one of The Famous Five aged a few years and got a real job - and a lot of the humour is generally accessible, slapstick stuff - there’s a bit in Tintin in Tibet where Captain Haddock spends about three pages bumping into people and tripping over. Then, out of nowhere, an international arms dealer will plant opium in Tintin’s luggage to get him banged up by the cops. Seriously, most of the villains are gun-runners, opium smugglers, or both - there’s nothing too graphic, no Trainspotting-style illustrations of the full horror of the global opiate trade, but still, heavy stuff for a comic book. Particularly considering the great costumed comic heroes never even touched the subject of drugs until around the ‘80s, and an endless stream of edutainment telling kids to hey, just say no, man.

One crucial difference between Tintin and Indiana Jones/James Bond is the series’s utter sexlessness. Female figures, on the rare occasion they show up at all, are either damsels in distress, desexualised mother-types, or both. This aspect of the series has drawn its share of Freudian analysis over the years, and, due to Tintin’s best friend and roommate being salty seaman Captain Haddock, came in for a bit of ribbing in the bootleg Tintin in Thailand. If you were to put James Bond into that machine from Red Dwarf that splits things into their good and evil selves, you’d end up with Tintin and Sterling Archer. 

Really, Tintin’s closer to a modernist-era Hitchcock protagonist, who gets swept up in events and has sufficient pluck to see them through, and while I forget which way round the inspiration came, The Black Island bears a striking resemblance to Hitch’s The 39 Steps. To stick with The Black Island a moment - being half-Scottish, it was always a family favourite - I’d just like to present the first page in full:

Take note, any film or narrative that wants me to spend fifteen minutes with idiots, because that’s how you kick off an adventure. There’s your wholesome protagonist out for a walk with his dog, and there’s your bad dudes up to bad shit. Tintin spends the night in hospital, then proceeds to walk off the bullet going after the guys - who, it turns out, are some conspicuously German forgers operating in Britain, in 1938. Again, there’s nothing too graphic, but perhaps that’s bending the definition of the word for a work that involves the protagonist stepping in a bear trap, nearly being consigned to a Nazi asylum, getting knocked out during a gunfight with a White Russian when his bullets smash some bottles of chloroform, and then getting caught in a house fire (all this, incidentally, happens in one sequence of five pages or so).

To return to The Blue Lotus, one of Tintin’s allies in that, Mr Wang Chen-yee, more-or-less fits the bill for @thathopeyetlives and @raggedjackscarlet‘s idea of a mirror-universe Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which Bizarro Frank-N-Furter comes to represent the good side of traditionalism, the idea that ‘here is something worth believing in, if you dare to’:

Yeah, he’s a stereotype - you know it, I know it - he’s that specific kind of East Asian man they invented the word ‘venerable’ for, and the fact that at no point in The Blue Lotus does he use kung fu to devastating effect just makes you more certain he’s a master of it. But crucially, he seems like - as with Speedy Gonzales - the kind of stereotype the people it depicts could really get behind.

Mr Wang is the leader of The Sons of the Dragon, a secret society - and a robust, active secret society at that, much closer to the mafia than to the Freemasons (or, if you like, closer to the classic Freemasons than the modern Freemasons). Tintin first meets him after having been kidnapped and smuggled back into China, on his orders - and Mr Wang is hoping that Tintin will help them to fight opium smuggling. How perfect is that for a secret society? There’s your completely justified underdog, there’s something you can believe in, or at least you could before world governments introduced some anti-drugs boilerplate and fucked everything up for everyone.

There was a very mild religious grounding to Tintin - it didn’t come up a lot, but to be fair these were still the days when religion and a moral core were thought of as basically one and the same. It wasn’t lessons in theology like Linus in Peanuts, it was a more general use of universally recognisable icons, a lot closer to how Baikinman was elevated to go-to antagonist symbol in Japan - here’s the villains of Tintin and the Broken Ear being literally dragged off to hell:

Here’s Tintin invoking heaven’s name to try and stop the villain from capping himself (luckily, his gun’s been switched for a joke one):

And here’s Snowy grappling with his alcohol problem via his good and evil selves:

(That’s not a joke. Snowy’s taste for hard liquor was a recurring theme, at one point leading to Tintin spanking him as punishment for getting drunk in the Himalayas and nearly going over a waterfall - both content which I suspect simply wouldn’t fly today in the face of the animal rights lobby, at least not in a children’s book.)

Interestingly, this isn’t limited to Christian theology - here’s Snowy again, this time envisioning Tintin’s wrath by having him wield Zeus-style thunderbolts:

And a Buddhist monk levitating while in a prophetic trance:

Similarly, bona fide magic makes some semi-regular appearances in the series. In Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin is temporarily hypnotised with one glance from a fakir, but the most audacious depiction of this comes in The Seven Crystal Balls/Prisoners of the Sun, in which ball lightning attacks the gang, causing Professor Calculus to levitate, and it turns out the neo-Incas have been using what are essentially voodoo dolls to torment the explorers who looted their temple - this is particularly jarring in Prisoners of the Sun, contrasted as it is with Tintin’s little yay-science moment of getting out of his own execution by exploiting his knowledge of an upcoming solar eclipse.

In a way, all this magic and the various acts of god were an extension of the deus ex machinas that were a staple of the series from the start. Tintin in America is probably the worst offender in this regard, with the most ridiculous moment being a toss-up between the time the meatpackers go on strike and turn off the machinery seconds before gangsters throw him into it, and the time he gets chained to a barbell and thrown in a lake, only to discover the barbell’s inexplicably been switched with the wooden barbell of a crooked strongman.

Come the later adventures, though, the deus ex machinas would take a slightly different form to the literal intervention of god:

That’s not out of context, that’s not an idle aside - in Flight 714, the second-to-last complete comic, the gang gets out of a tight spot (an erupting volcano-cum-ancient ruin, no less!) when literal fucking aliens turn up to save the day and cart off the baddies. And, unlike most narratives of that ilk, they get out of it with definitive proof of extraterrestrial contact - Professor Calculus brings back a bit of metal composed of an alloy that does not exist on earth, although this is played off as a product of his cloth-eared eccentricity.

Even with the time difference, you’d probably say there’s surely a bit of a leap between the wholesome-but gritty early exploits of Tintin, where he’s running around after forgers and smugglers, and where he’s literally encountering aliens. Fortunately, there was an adventure that bridged that gap very nicely:

And you may well gather from that adorably kitsch rocket that this went down long before the actual moon landings - but despite this, Herge had done his research, he didn’t have the place turn out to be composed of cheddar like Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out, he depicted space travel and lunar survival reasonably accurately. A lot of people credit the white expanses of Tintin in Tibet as Herge’s masterpiece, but man, the inky blackness of Explorers is surely its underdog brother:

The final adventure, Tintin and Alph-Art, exists only as concept art and various bootleg versions. It features some genuinely radical departures from the established norm - a black Jamaican artist gets to have a heroic moment of his own, rather than just being acted upon by white people, and Tintin plans a date with an actual human woman. So the series obviously had come a long way from the days of publishing a version of Heart of Darkness where Kurtz is the good guy. And to go back to where we started - it’s not like we had to write off Bugs Bunny because of all the times he blacked up, right?

[wallkickswillwork]

signal jamming

incoherency is comforting because of the narrative weve been fed our whole entire lives that in order to be palatable media must in some way be complete and have beveled, well-defined edges rather than being a mess of finger paints, bright colors, strange dialogues and verbiage, build trees of moods.

thoughts on: -futuristic anime, 90s anime and the unique sense of mood in toonami shows. they are a very good series of shows for people who are coming of age and who must slowly be forced to reckon with the industrialization and mercenary nature of adult life, as it is increasingly held captive by capitalism. there is also something essentially spiritual about it, especially shows like precure and dbz, where an interior or exterior-made-interior force is responsible for the protagonists' success in the face of an oppressive world-system. under capitalism, it frequently is the case that the entire world or entirety-of-world is against us. heroes must overcome overwhelming odds to leave their mark on a gauntlet of greats. -cowboy bebop, final fantasy 7, metroid as meditations on loss, urbanization, dating back to blade runner. this is a type of meditation that is present in much of cyberpunk, but its also not exclusively cyberpunk, and can extend in nature to non-cyberpunk works.

thinking about necrobarista and how its attempting to "resuscitate" anime, while this approach doesnt really examine what contemporary anime like jojos, precure, and slightly more dated anime like hidaske and nichijou do well. if we get all this tunnel vision for gurren lagann and flcl we can never look forward. i think a lot of the visual work that needs to be done is probably in movies. i think maybe there could be work done to marry cinema proper with its animated counterpart. steven universe seems like it gets it, and there are some anime that really seemed like they got it. i dont think were beyond salvation.

-listening to the whos "tommy" and thinking about how trauma and the humanity of that trauma is experienced and lived-through by the main character in socratic fashion. these stories are discussed by people whose actual, authentic experience of trauma irl is doubtful at best. they are great successes on stage who dont struggle in the sense that an actual victim would struggle. calls to mind how a lot of freuds patients would fabricate csa in order to fulfill the expectations of the therapist. but in other cases, actual patients with csa would repress their experiences or not feel comfortable discussing. so thats how i feel about gurus like meher baba or i guess alan watts. less trustworthy and more like scam artists. i do believe in what they teach, however. i think that a guru can teach the truth even if that guru is a liar. maybe its the truth, but the guru doesnt know it to be true, or else, the way the guru teaches it is untrue.

-for a while i imagined my own autism to be the result of childhood trauma that was repressed, but later emerged that those memories were fabricated, to my knowledge, and was left wondering.

-learning to regard the world with a sense of wonder from media like cowboy bebop and ff7. these worlds are jaded and decaying realities but there is a sense of awe at the vast, uncompromising reality. truly vast, sprawling and yawning cities and vast starry skies up above. beholding these things and beholding the starry skies and huge cities of our own planet surely stirs something in me.

-fantasy anime tends to go the joke route like slayers or else the route of "we are all kids, bro, stuck in an mmo" and i think this is mostly due to the admittedly antiquated setting of high fantasy in european trochets and history which to japanese people probably feel like white person set dressing and as they should, i mean. there are more high fantasy themes in something like inuyasha and japans history can be feudal, edo, the meiji restoration, primordial like princess mononoke, etc, so theres more wiggle room for historical works there. slayers et al is usually reduced to "characters moving around the forest" which is almost like this grand slice of the collective anime consciousness as it stands overlapping with, say, pokemon, to the extent where its one of the cliche anime things everyone thinks about, alongside high school, robots, nurses, etc.

-another thing to which we could probably ascribe the success of something like slayers to is wizardry and by proxy dragon quest. small graph paper monster garden games. the appeal is entirely mathematical so there are only a few directions that anime directors tend to run with it (goofy gag comedy if youre making a show or cut and dried authentic dungeon crawlers with moe characters instead of the usual dbz ones). going off what you definitely learn in japanese history class if youre a japanese student, for starters, there are thousands of years of chinese history, so you have romance of 3 kingdoms type stuff. or you have high school romances accounting for the various fire emblems where the appeal becomes game of thronesy "which of my characters in dragon quest land can i make kiss each other and myself", very good ground to cover as we start asking the important questions. theres samurai stuff as we already know, drawing on years of samurai media, kurosawas films and zen spirituality, art of the blade type stuff, jeet kune do in some instances and reaching so far afield as to probably raise some interesting and important questions about pan-asiatic cultural identity which this author (white) is ill-advised to answer. but reeling it back in, the question mostly being of history, and how a lot of fantasy media draws more from History proper as a codified cultural body than histories being individuated familial experiences. its true that when a work does something unique with history (earthbounds hippy dippy approach to the 1960s, undertales handling of furry culture, yume nikkis south american murals) its tended to be seen as that works "thing" as if because hulk hogan was an all american wrestler that precluded john cena from being same, or at least, embodying a similar if slightly modified niche. nobody can make a hippy dippy rpg now or something because itd just be called an earthbound ripoff rather than a loving homage. and i think thats wrong headed and how genres become stillborn rather than invented and developed upon. we have this vast morass of stuff from the 20th century and we could be developing various 60s, 70s, 80s fantasies. hindsight is 20/20 i guess. who knows, we could see bluff city become something in 50 years time.

i feel this is because of extreme stringent expectations of intellectual property laws and their dissemination into everyday discourse online. i dont really like or agree with monolithic cultural expectations like intellectual property or *shudder* advertising, but only to the extent where i can acknowledge that whether or not i agree with them is irrelevant to their all-consuming scope and the need for marxists to actively combat them. its one thing to say "x is bad" and another to clamor for urgency of fighting x, which is, if you believe what we read every day about global warming, too late, so its not important. nevertheless there are a multiplicity of settings that could be developed into genres and identities and ideologues that rarely are if only because it would be seen as "oh yeah like that other thing". people are fickle and develop dwarflike strange moods when it comes to defining what constitutes original versus hackneyed and derivative. i think its mostly dictated by star signs and the weather.

so lately if you follow me on twitter youve probably noticed im doing sort of a tweet concrete kind of thing where i post plaintext quotes from various media taken out of context. i decided to do this for a while, maybe a few weeks, because aesthetic blogs and the aesthetic style of blogging allow me to pool and channel my energies towards larger and more ambitious styles of writing. i usually get loaded on caffeine during this process and frequently watch large amounts of anime and meditate some. its definitely a process and its geared toward something hazily, vaguely spiritual but with pretentions toward being authentically publishable as theory. the idea also being i would like to make some money to support my livelihood, and i like to write, and am somewhat skilled at it, or at least experienced in kind of a ramshackle homespun sort of way. so if my social media presence is pretty boring and kind of weirdly nostalgic or else contrariwise if you feel it has improved lately thats the reason why that happened.

ive been getting very hazy and foggy mentally lately. i feel like it has to do with caffeination and lack of sleep. its important to get everything flowing properly, and sometimes depression and anxiety make that difficult to do. theres anxiety over unemployment, something im trying to remedy, and theres anxiety over theory and where to proceed next via theory. for years i was a devout buddhist in some ways, and meditated a lot, almost every day. i prayed to the bodhisattvas and copped to buddhist metaphysics, something which, based around personal life experience, i had every reason to believe was true. lately and in my own, strange way, ive begun to question this ideology and interpret it as part of a patchwork of ideologies, each one which attempts to describe a totality, a totality which is rarely if ever described properly by any ideology. grasping at straws in a structural sense, and feeling nonplussed but with no ground to run to, and im back on the boss level in super mario 64 where bowser smashes the ground to make it fall away. attempts at restructuring as this dissolution transpires only serve to create new protocols equal in scope to pre-existing paradigms. and there are plenty of people who dont struggle this much with religion and probably still go to heaven, or think theyre going to heaven, or something. hows marge and the kids. did jerry get that new promotion. mom just got back from vacation in cancun. smalltalk style concerns arising in every day transitionary speech feel distinct and very distant from these kind of hazy, pie in the sky questions. plato never wrote about the kind of stuff you see in a cheers episode. there are philosophy books that try to merge the two, but they usually get shelved in the comedy section.

so its mostly a matter of trying to absorb and contain new information, which abides in abundance, and trying to corral it into sort of a pointing arrow to direct me where to go, in my hewing, a feat not easily done. probably the endgame is in the crafting and solution of art, but what kind of art, and whether i have the tools at my disposal to even create it, is less easily answered. so for now, i guess, im absorbing, waiting, asking questions, and who knows, and who can say.

earliest memories of religion are of the greco roman religion and not knowing about the mystery religious rites but knowing about an abstract concept of wisdom and the ocean and extrapolating the existence of athena and poseidon in that way. later i have memories of exposure to christianity and buddhism and bahai but none of these things feel particularly useful to me at this time in my life. i can more readily receive a picture, a kind of enlarged image, of a broad religious landscape and some of the questions it attempts to provide answers for, or at least, a way of thinking about. the greco roman religion, for instance, is a presentation of a deleuzian multiplicity, and the monotheistic religions are a monad, but i also dont think either of these things can say the other is inherently undesireable. tolerance seems to be the best method, but also, and likewise, not dwelling specifically in any of them. acknowledging they all exist, but not being any of them. enjoying in surfeit the tension between multiplicity and monad. that there can be many things and one thing. like the album cover of dark side of the moon.

[avanneman]

Gregg Easterbrook watches the lying liberal media so you don’t have to

What is the deal with lying liberal media these days, those bad old legacy networks like CBS and NBC, filling the air with their bullshit lies? Deceit is the deal, and the Weekly Standard’s Gregg Easterbrook is on the case. Unfortunately, Gregg, in his role of “Tuesday Morning Quarterback,” tends to hide his epistemological light under a bushel basket full of bad boy blather regarding what’s up, and who’s down, in the NFL. Fortunately, I read Gregg so you don’t have to, and this last Tuesday ole Gregg went on a tear, tearing both CBS and NBC a new one, from which I will quote at length.

First up was the CBS shoot ‘em up Hawaii Five-0,1 which Gregg mercilessly indicts for its cartoonish carnage:

Five-0, a ratings hit, just reached its ninth season. In each season, individual episodes have shown more murders than occur in the actual state in a year. [35 in 2016, Gregg tells us] Five-0 has depicted machine-gun slaughters of surfer dudes and bikini babes on Waikiki beach; gigantic blasts leveling whole buildings in downtown Honolulu; bioengineered diseases causing evacuation of Hawaiian cities; death drones killing hikers and joggers on scenic Hawaiian hills; Honolulu bank robberies involving a dozen hoodlums firing military weapons; wildfires smothering Oahu; exploding tractor-trailer trucks in tourist areas; attacks by helicopter commandos on Hawaiian prisons; murders of the governor and other top public officials; and at least 100 police officers gunned down, significantly more than the total number of law enforcement officers who have died by gunfire in the entire history of the state.

But wait, Gregg’s just getting warmed up. He saves his real fire for Chicago P.D. I’ll quote from what he has to say at even greater length, since he touches on so many things that bother me about virtually all cop shows for the last 30 years—that, thanks to dramatic license/“magic”, we in the audience always know that the “perp” is not only “guilty” but guilty of the most “heinous” crimes, and not only guilty of the most heinous crimes, but a smug, arrogant smart ass as well, and thus all too deserving of getting his ass kicked sans any of this due process shit. What these shows are really about is revenge—we want to see awful people do awful things, and then have awful things done to them in return. Worst of all, as Gregg points out, on Chicago P.D. (which I’ve never seen) the awful people are black and their hapless victims are white.

Primetime American television, which is heavy on crime procedurals, is trebly wrong in its core depictions. First, violent crime is shown as out of control, when actually it is in a generation-long trend of decline. Second, affluent whites are depicted as primary targets of violent crime, when low-income minority group members are far more likely, as a population share, to be harmed. Third, law enforcement agencies are depicted as super-efficient avengers who always get their man, though, as the Washington Post reports, in the past decade, police in the nation’s largest cities have failed to make an arrest in about 50 percent of homicides.

Chicago P.D. takes these structural faults of primetime police procedurals and multiples them, pretending to be realism while relentlessly distorting practically everything about the city’s law enforcement.

,,,

Further troubling about Chicago P.D. is that the show lauds torture of suspects. Brutalized suspects always turn out to be guilty as sin, and the beatings always cause them to reveal information that saves an innocent life. Whether torture could be acceptable if law enforcement knew for sure an innocent life would be saved is a complex moral issue. In real-world policing, detectives rarely know if they have the right guy, while torture is, itself, a crime. Chicago P.D. manipulates audiences into rooting for torture, suggesting cops have godlike powers of knowledge and would never harm a suspect except if given no choice to protect the innocent.

Constitutional protections are laughed at on Chicago P.D. In this season’s premiere, the protagonist busts into the apartment of a dope dealer, threatens his girlfriend, and starts burning the dealer’s $100 bills to get the dealer to admit where the stash house is. The detective has probable cause, so why couldn’t the entry to the dealer’s apartment have been done legally? Because real heroes don’t waste time filling out forms for some namby-pamby warrant!

Chicago P.D. suggests to the NBC primetime audience that crime could end tomorrow if bleeding-heart politicians didn’t tie the hands of heroic cops who inexplicably know exactly where every offender is at every moment and never, ever mistreat the innocent. I wonder if Dick Wolf would want to live in a neighborhood where cops are free to smash down his door and rough him up because only a wimp would go to a judge for a search warrant.

Most disturbing is that Chicago PD depicts police officers as the real victims of urban dysfunction.

In one episode, a foot patrolman chases a murder suspect while loudly yelling “Stop! Police!” After the suspect raises a gun and the patrolman shoots him, the officer is immediately fired, then prosecuted. In another episode, a policewoman observes a murder and shoots the killer while trying to apprehend him; she is fired immediately, without any investigation or union rights. In both episodes, mobs of angry African Americans form outside the precinct house—causing the viewer to perceive police officers as the ones in danger, and blacks as the real threat.

At the end of last season, a decorated detective—shown to viewers as dedicated to protecting the innocent—is sent to prison on a trumped-up charge in order to appease the media and a sinister African-American higher-up. Though the detective’s record is clean, the judge denies bail. As soon as the noble officer is behind bars, he’s stabbed to death by the drug gang that runs the jail.

Why would a judge deny bail to an officer with no prior conviction? “I got a call from the mayor,” the judge explains to the show’s hero. The media and the minority group mobs, it is implied, like to hear that white Chicago cops are being killed.

Maybe there are cities in which mayors telephone judges with instructions, though this is really not how the criminal justice system is supposed to function. But that’s how the criminal justice system is presented to NBC’s primetime audience, in a show that bills itself as the hidden truth about Chicago law.

Yes, we are living in Trump’s America. NBC tells us so.

Afterwords Yes, I am quoting an awful lot of Gregg’s piece, but I don’t see why readers have to wade through 50 column inches of “funny” jokes about wide receivers to find this excellent journalism.

The one thing I would add to this piece, which Gregg actually touches on in his discussion of Hawaii Five-0, is the grotesque overemphasis on terrorism as a threat on these shows. Since 9/11, all of the major terrorist events in the U.S. have been the result of a few individuals, either citizens or long-time residents, acting without assistance from international terrorist groups. We have had no incidents involving "weapons of mass destrution" of any kind, and, as I've said before, those weapons, while terrifying, are not, in fact, "weapons of mass destrution", being no more (and no less) effective than old-fashioned explosives and considerably less reliable.

Typographical trivia, anyone? “Hawaii Five-0” supposedly means “Hawaii 50”, since Hawaii is the fiftieth state. But (I guess) “Hawaii Five Oh” is easier to say than “Hawaii 50”. But CBS “spells” the title with a “0” (zero) rather than an “O” (capital letter). “Everyone” still pronounces “0” as “O” (again, I’m guessing), even though computers have made the distinction significant for almost forty years now. ↩︎

[mst3kproject]

802: The Leech Woman - Part I

I tend to get all social-justice-y on this blog, so it will probably come as a surprise to you that I kinda like this movie.  I won’t pretend for a moment that The Leech Woman is not stupid and offensive, but something about it absolutely fascinates me.

Dr. Paul Talbot, an endocrinologist, is searching for a cure for Old.  This is at least partly because it will make him ludicrously rich, but also because his wife June has turned forty and he’s no longer attracted to her.  An old woman, Malla, tells the Talbots that her people, the Nando, know the secret of renewed youth.  They therefore follow her to Fake Africa where they learn that the Cure for Old has two ingredients: the pollen of a rare orchid, and a human pineal gland, scooped from a still-living brain.  Is June willing to commit murder in order to be young and beautiful again?  You bet your sweet booty she is!

I was kind of surprised when my word processor didn’t underline ‘Nando’.  I googled it, and apparently Nando’s is a South African restaurant famous for their ‘Peri-Peri Chicken.’  You learn something every day.

This movie is gross on so many levels.  It hates everybody.  Its ‘Africans’ are primitive mystics in loincloths and skull headdresses, its women are domineering and predatory, its men abusers, criminals, and dull-ass ciphers. I hardly know where to start.  In fact, the badness of The Leech Woman is so complex and pervasive that I think we’ve got another multi-part series here.  In this review, I’m going to talk about the characters.  Next week, I’ll go on to other stuff.

The Leech Woman is, of course, not the first movie I’ve watched in which there is no hero… but I’m not just talking about this being another film in which the so-called ‘hero’ doesn’t do anything.  This is more like The Amazing Transparent Man in that there is literally nobody in the film who can be described as ‘good’.  It’s not a movie about good overcoming evil, it’s a movie about evil destroying itself.  That’s probably part of the reason why I find it so interesting, as it’s an unusual way to approach a narrative, and The Leech Woman shows an astonishing amount of commitment to it.  We’ve seen a number of movies on MST3K where the good guys really aren’t important but there’s still somebody, usually a dull cop or reporter, who theoretically fills that role.  The Leech Woman doesn’t even have one of those.

Let’s take a look at our cast, shall we?  We’ve basically got six important characters: Paul and June Talbot, David the jungle guide, Malla, Neil the lawyer, and Neil’s fiancée Sally.  I think I’ll start with the men.  They’re all terrible.

The first character who speaks is Paul, and the first thing he says is to insult his wife, sneering at her about her drinking.  The conversation that follows tells us not only that they hate each other, but that Paul seems to have married June primarily so he could experiment on her, and is pissed that she doesn’t want to let him.  Then while June is hurt, drunk, and vulnerable, he goes from insulting her to fawning over her, softening her up so that he can return to emotionally abusing her later.  When, on the trip to Africa, she accuses him of ignoring her, he tells her she’s imagining it.  He’s also deeply unprofessional at work, insulting and scoffing at Malla when she’s there in response to his request for research subjects.

Of course, Paul is a villain in this story.  We’re glad to see him go, and the nice irony of him not living to see June rejuvenated is one of the few things The Leech Woman does right.  His detestable traits are so cartoonishly overblown, though, that it’s really hard to take him seriously as a character.  Paul comes across more than anything else as a plot device, a necessary stepping stone for June to come into contact with the Nando and their youth pollen.  Once he’s served that purpose he’s no longer needed.  Nobody misses him, and June never shows the slightest trace of regret, immediately attaching herself to David instead.

David starts off seeming like a slightly better person than Paul, since he treats June like a human being and attempts to offer her some actual comfort after she fights with her husband.  Then he goes steadily downhill.  He steals the youth pollen and the ring at a moment when he should be worrying about them getting out of there alive, and then when June ages again, he not only refuses to give them to her, he runs away.  I guess he’s supposed to do this because he realizes he’s the only person around she could tap for pineal juice, but at this point we have no evidence that she’s willing to do that.  She didn’t even watch while the Nando killed Paul.  Instead, it looks for all the world like David runs because he’s physically repulsed by her, or because he’s afraid she’s going to infect him with Old.

Finally, there’s Neil.  I think we’re supposed to like Neil… I think we’re supposed to see him as a nice guy destroyed by a scheming woman, but the truth is that Neil destroys himself.  The moment he sees young June, in her disguise as ‘Terri’, come up to him, he throws all decency out the window and practically follows her around drooling for the rest of the movie.  When his fiancée points out, understandably, that this is unacceptable behaviour, he treats her exactly as Paul had treated June, telling her that she’s imagining things. All these things stack up against us liking Neil, and he displays no redeeming qualities to offset then… in fact, other than being easily led by his dick, he has no qualities at all.  He’s a cardboard cutout with ‘handsome guy’ written on it.

Of course, none of these men are a point-of-view character in the story. The Leech Woman is a story about women, so how about them?  Well, unsurprisingly they’re terrible too.  Malla uses the Talbots to get her back to Africa and then tries to have them killed, and clearly has no problem with the whole ‘a man must die to make her young’ thing.  The Nando as a culture are used to this idea, but Malla didn’t grow up with that – she was raised in the west, where people would definitely not be okay with it.  If the men were shown to be willing sacrifices this might not be quite so bad (although it still wouldn’t be okay), but no, the guy we see is struggling as he’s held down and drugged.

As for Sally, the movie evidently wants us to think she’s a nagging harpy.  It doesn’t quite succeed, because of the way Neil drools after ‘Terri’. Sally has every right to be worried, impatient, and annoyed, especially when he brushes off her concerns the way he does.  Instead, what’s terrible about Sally is the way she offhandedly threatens Neil (“you better not try anything like that if you want to stay in one piece”) and seems to view him as a possession rather than a partner.  When he admits he prefers ‘Terri’, Sally’s plan is to send this woman away until she and Neil can marry, as if signing his name to the paperwork means he can never escape from her again.  He belongs to her now.  She has a receipt.

I assume that Neil and Sally met through Paul, but until the point where they turn up at the airport, we never see them together and have no indication they know each other exists. The impression I get is that the Bride of Neil was originally going to be a different character, but they couldn't afford another actress.

Then there’s June.  The Leech Woman is obviously her story – she’s in almost every scene, and is the one with a bit of a character arc.  It’s possible that we see Paul as unsubtly evil and Sally as a paranoid bitch because that’s how June sees them.  If anybody’s the protagonist, it’s her, but she is never, ever likable even in a villainous sort of way. We root for her to destroy Paul because we hate him too, but everything she does is awful and like the other characters, she doesn’t have any good characteristics to offset it.

When we first meet her, she’s a self-pitying drunk. She is so badly-treated by Paul that by the time it looks like she’s going to have him killed and run off with David, we’re all for it.  Then her downhill spiral begins as she murders David for his pineal.  This is supposed to be a surprise and a demonstration that June is irredeemable, and it works as far as it goes, but it leaves us with no interest in her affair with Neil.  We don’t root for them to get together because it’s obviously impossible, and we cannot believe that this is some great tragic love when they’ve only just met. It’s just a couple of selfish idiots being selfish idiots.

After the way Paul has treated June, we understand why she enjoys seeing men doing her bidding.  She’s always been ignored and disregarded, so she derives great joy from being able to make people pay attention.  She uses beauty to wrap Neil around her little finger, and wealth to do the same to the would-be robber.  She knows she’s ruining Neil’s life by seducing him as ‘Terri’, and she seems positively gleeful about that.  The problem is that she’s not really trying to accomplish anything through this manipulation.  She has no long-term plan, it’s just all-out hedonism, and when she finds herself cornered, she commits suicide.  June never learns anything from any of this, and nobody else learns anything from her. At the end, she’s just pointlessly destroyed a number of lives, including her own, and it’s hard to say what the audience is supposed to take from that.

And man, that’s just the dramatis personae!  I have way more to complain about in The Leech Woman, so stay tuned.  Next week I’ll be back in SJW mode with a vengeance.  See you then!