Creepy

Bruce Springsteen pointed out the dangers of having too many cable channels, but when you're jet-lagged at 4 am, it's not so bad. There weren't any zombies, so I decided to watch Hostel because a few nights before, my brother-in-law Jim was making the case that it was an interesting movie.

I'm inclined to believe Jim because he's someone who's interested in what's interesting. Besides being widely knowledgeable about everything from tarot to dinosaurs, he's expert on a number of topics like H.P. Lovecraft and New York City, and along with my sister he helps to run the media watchdog FAIR, which makes them both issues/media/politics experts as well.

And I think he's right about Hostel. It is interesting. Reviews mixed precise technical praise with diffuse moral scorn (an interesting combination). Passing recognition of the admittedly scarce political critique drops abruptly into peevish befuddlement over the apparent lack of a point. Why did they expect one?

When my car broke down in Medford last year, the garage kindly ferried us to the local mall during the repair. The van driver was about 16 and thinking about getting out of Medford but didn't know where to go. He asked where we lived and when we said Europe, he said, "Like that movie Hostel? Because I'm definitely not going there." Which might be one of the film's points and is certainly one of its effects.

But if you're after cogent political discourse in exploitation films, you really want Russ Meyer's Vixen!. Ultra-deranged along every moral, aesthetic and psychological dimension, it also contains the most reasonable debate over communism I've ever seen in a fiction film. (I think it's fiction.)

I'm a horror fan, so for me the horror is the point. I'm interested in the other things a story has to say, but I'm mainly drawn to the core points that successful horror always makes: We are fragile. The worst thing you can think of has already happened to someone just like you. Pay attention to detail. Things are not what they seem. These have become some of my points, which is what makes me a fan. A guy stopped me on the street once and asked, "Don't you think that there is something basically very wrong with the world?" He was recruiting for the Spartacist League, but I think most horror fans would agree. Which is why I harbor an unjustified, purely rhetorical belief that horror fans tend to be liberals, animated by a common belief that something is wrong in the world, but of different minds as to whether that basic fault can be addressed directly, if at all.

Take Rod Serling, outspoken liberal and great tragic thinker. The awful, creepy thing out there always turns out to be inside us so all you can do is have hope, show tolerance and offer forgiveness: liberal values. Every Twilight Zone epsiode was so deeply imprinted on my childhood memory that avoiding violent and ironic comeuppance has become my primary life goal. The bitter ironies of the endings usually cut against those who see no way but their own, so they never see it coming.

Which is why I think that Joss Whedon (Serling's true heir) often uses lead vocal melodies that intertwine so that different characters are singing from their own perspectives but we can see that they're really singing about the same thing. He uses this technique in both the Buffy musical episode and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog ("one of the best inventions of 2008" and a good example of iro). To sing in polyphony is to consider other points of view.

Whedon and Serling each produced a short-lived, existential Western series, Firefly and The Loner, both of which are meditations on fate, losing and the morality of violence. Horror deals with the same topics, but in westerns it's laid out more starkly, geometrically. Things are what they seem. The badness is clearly human and walks in daylight. Everything is connected by lines straight as bullets. Westerns are like the sun-dried bones of horror.

 

Comments

[Emily]

Oh my, jetlag suits you.