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mrslittletall · 3 years

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Ok, then, a post that rates all the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons fall themes coming up: SNES - Actually, I find this song to be a bit annoying. It is too repetitive and too loud. It also didn’t help, that for some reason, SNES didn’t had crops for fall, so that fall was more like a winter where you could collect mushrooms. GBC - It is the same as with the SNES, but in the Game Boy sound font. It actually is a bit more tolerable like this, but still not much. 64 - Now that’s a good fall theme! The melody is just perfectly aligned with how busy fall is and there is the sense of an underlying hurry in the theme, probably because winter is creeping up. It also sounds like a remix of the SNES fall theme, but one that was done very right. GBC2 - This one is nice. It tries to get the best out of the limited GBC sound system. It has a very nice melody, a bit melancholy, but overall catchy. If someone would play this with actual instruments, it probably would sound amazing. BTN - One of my favourites actually and not only because I love BTN. The song is just catchy, it goes in your ear and it certainly makes you think of a sunny fall day. It repeats the first notes a few times before changing it a bit and repeating. The low notes in the background really let the song shine and the constant rythm doesn’t make the song boring. GBC3 - I still can’t find a video which points out which seasonal theme is which, but it is still pretty yikes overall. AWL - Because of the lack of traditional season themes, we only have the records. The fall theme is a remix of the N64 one. It is still the same awesome melody, just cleaned up and played with different instruments. It sounds really good. What a bummer you can only get this records by trading with FoMT. FoMT - The same as BTN, but in the GBA soundfont. It definitely sounds better on the PSX. It is fine for the GBA, but too much chiptune for my taste. MM - This theme has a bit of music that would play in a lounge. Where you would go and hang out with a fancy cocktail, just relaxing after a hard day of work. The melody is definitely catchy and I enjoy listen to it. The song also is coherent, unlike the winter song, and makes me want to sway to it. Though, I have to admit, MM songs are pretty long, unusual for HM music. STH - Aw, this theme is fun. It tells you that a busy autumn day lies before you, where you stroll along the leave covered street to town to hold conversations and sell your hard earned produce. All while you sway to the tact of the music. Sadly, I can’t find the town theme. DS - Woah! Just woah! This sound starts out with a few very elegant notes and it only gets better. The song is almost creepy in a way, but it is thoroughly beautiful, with a piano melody as the main melody. Always only a few notes, and then they leave room for the background notes, but the song wouldn’t be complete without this three notes. It definitely is one of my fav fall themes. HoLV - Oh, that sounds like medieval folk music ^^ It is very cute and catchy, a very cheerful song. Certainly gets you into the mood to work on the fields and harvest your crops. ToT - Elevator music! That is straight up elevator music! Who composed this song?! The song would probably be higher in my favour if the first part wouldn’t sound so much like elevator music, but the second part is pretty good. Thanks at jake-marshall for providing a link to the night theme. I agree with them, this one would have been perfect for the day theme. A nice piano in the background and the melody is played with a violin, sounds very much like a chill fall day and more importantly, doesn’t sound like elevator music! IoH - The OST of IoH continues to convince and starts with a cheery little melody, but it very much culminates after a few seconds with a key change, which makes the music sound higher, as if floating in the clouds. Only downside again, it’s too short. AP - This song carries a sense of melancholy, but a good one. The sweet memories of the picnique you had with your crush, thinking about sitting around with your family and talking, thinking about just having dumb fun with your friends. It is a very emotional song, in a good way. A song that warms the heart, a song you want to roast sweet potatoes to. The night version is a much more calmer version of the day version, with a piano in the background and a flute for the melody. It sounds like it wants to coax you to go into bed. I defnitely get tired from it. SI - A nice song, another one that makes you think of a busy autumn day, but the same as the winter theme, it feels a bit not coherent and a bit too chaotic for my taste. GB - That is a fun fall theme! It starts with a nice little jingle and then changes into the general melody. The jingle continues as the background and the melody gets played with different instruments that complement each other wonderfully. It culminates into a medium fast version and is just fun to listen to. ToTT - I am not going to lie, this is another one of my favourites. The song just slaps. It makes you think of a busy fall day right away and you just have to sway in the melody, especially when the second part starts. ANB - Ah, ANB, you are just a source for fun and good music. The autumn theme very much reminds me of HoLV, a very medieval folk sound, with a lot of violins played in that very cheerful matter, ready to harvest the crops to. But the best part is the second part of the song, it is such a nice melody, I want to sway to it. TLV - I actually rather like this track. It sounds busy and conveys a fall day pretty well. It is also catchy and I remember not getting tired of it when listening to it in game. The melody is coherent and not grating, but it is a bit too short. The night theme sounds like someone put a blanket over the theme, it is very slow and quiet, as if it doesn’t want to disturb the night. SoS - “You are the ocean’s grey waves.” Wait a moment, Fire Emblem Fates only came out AFTER SoS. Huh, but the melody sounds very very similar to “Lost In Thoughts All Alone”. To be honest, the SoS OST is a bit too generic for my taste, it isn’t too catchy. The Fall theme is the same, only that it sounds so similar to a famous Fire Emblem song makes it stand out. SoS actually brought the night songs back (I think I forget this in the winter rating list). The night theme is very calm and sounds like someone played the main melody on a harp. It seems to say “good night”. SV - I can only find a whole video with the OST without time stamps and not the fall theme on its own, so I have to skip on this one. SoS 3oT - That one is fun. It has this usual busy melody and carries around a certain autumn wind with it. The song starts with a cheery melody and then in its second part gets to a climax.

LoH - What a nice melody. Cheery and playful. It is fun to listen to, but a bit too short. The beath drop after the beginning is done really well though. SoS FoMT - It is again, the same as from BTN, but actually... I prefer the BTN one! The SoS one is a bit too... chiptunes? I guess. I prefer the much more cleaner version we got for the PSX. This one has an alternate version that plays on the weekends/festival days. I actually really like this one. It is calmer than the usual one and uses a piano for its main melody. It has a very nice section with high notes in the second part of the song. SoS Doreamon - I actually forgot about this game in winter! But let me make up with the fall theme. I am actually not too sure about it... it sounds fine, but a bit too broken up. It has a bit of a western theme to it also, probably because of the harmonica that is used in the background. It is certainly very calm and relaxing. If I forget a game or you have a link to the songs I couldn’t find, please tell me.

#harvest moon #story of seasons #rating of the fall themes

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sword-and-lance · 3 years

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((okay no you know what now that we’re back on my bullshit again

I’m probably the one fucking person in my social circle who’s actually fans of both this game and at least some Gundam series...es...so I’m gonna sit here and seethe a bit about that Weapon sidequest line

of course I haven’t seen every fucking gundam series ever lol I ain’t that dedicated by a long shot, but

one thing that even people only tangentially aware of the series know about is that gundam loves to emphasize that war is hell

IT’S BAD MMMMKAY

WE SHOULDN’T GO AND DO IT

IT SUCKS FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED

the giant robots are neat shit and all but they’re war-weapons and inevitably cause a ton of chaos and destruction around them and We Should Not Like That

(in fact in 00 the Big Cool Robots kinda just wound up making everything WAY fucking worse in-series for a good stretch of time there but anyway)

and war doesn’t just ruin property or “just” kill people it wrecks entire lives and we should not be feeling good about it

...then we have Werlyt, whose team if I remember right is “fans of Gundam” (I believe that was in a Live Letter, maybe? An interview?), but are clearly mostly just fans of the giant robot fights or at the very least paid no fucking attention to the underlying themes at all

characterization? coherent motivations? proper character development? ...any emotional consequences from anyone at the whole “Gaius committed one of the worse war crimes in raising children to be his good little soldiers and now we’re having to kill them because they didn’t know any better but refuse to stop”?

nahhhhhh

oh we’ll just tell you “it’s ~*~*sad that they died but ah well gotta find the next Weapon teehee don’t think about it too much”

“Gaius’ turbofucked war crimes”? ...Um um OH LOOK OVER THERE ISN’T THIS LEGATUS SO EEEEEEEVIL?! LOOK AT THAT AND NOT THE GAPING CHARACTERIZATION HOLE WE’RE LEAVING UNTOUCHED! LOOK!!! WE’RE JUST GOING TO PUSH OUR ESRB RATING FOR AN ENTIRE LIKE TEN MINUTES TO MAKE. YOU. LOOK!!!!

just

I’m about thiiiiis close to slapping the fuckin taste out of that writing team’s mouths for mentioning gundam in the same fucking sentence as this questline let me put it that way))

#; mun ranting #5.4 spoilers #spoilers #this is EXTREMELY negative btw lmao #i just...get a bit madder every time i think about it is all #yes even on behalf of the gundam series that /aren't/ good lol #(I said 'i liked them' not that 'i liked them because they were objectively good')

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cisthoughtcrime · 4 years

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just watched the latest Westworld episode (s3e5) and want to braindump some thoughts about this season as I continue to procrastinate, so spoilers under the divide. if any of y’all watch westworld, would be interested to hear your thoughts too.

ok gonna try to keep this short and not overcritical but probably gonna fail on both counts.

I’m still definitely enjoying watching it and I’m likely gonna keep going until it ends, but it doesn’t feel like it’s the same show anymore so much as a spin-off. At first i thought it was just the fact that so little of it is taking place inside the park and the cast has been decimated, but this episode made me realise that s3 has been so unoriginal compared to the original premise. (again: still enjoying it, still watching on it, not shitting on it for the sake of a superiority trip. There are a lot of derivative shows I really enjoy but Westworld isn’t usually one of them).

the original premise’s underlying subject was subtle and existential and imho was very good about laying out the ingredients for the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what the show was trying to say (from the big philosophical questions like “what is humanity/consciousness/free will anyway?” to the implicit societal critiques like “morality is performative and when no one’s looking humans act different”).

I think what’s bugging me about s3 is that we finally broke out of westworld and we’re in a futurescape i’ve seen a thousand times before in scifi.

The downtrodden ‘different’ (white male) outcast disillusioned with The System and omnipresent surveillance who meets the sexy motorcycle-wearing black-leather-clad badass woman who saves him from his mediocrity and validates his disillusionment and recruits him to help dismantle the system and free the sheeple? Check.

The reclusive European gazillionaire who owns an island, has a seemingly-self-contained tragic backstory that will no doubt have one or two vestigial elements that come into play at pertinent times to blindside the audience and/or main character, and espouses his dream of a utopia derived from his trauma but that isn’t really a utopia? Check.

Everything is automated but people are still empty inside so everything the rich do to poke their ennui with a stick is the same ol’ combination of colourful hypersexualisation/orgies/prostitutes, sadism, and synthetically-made drugs that do whatever tf the writers think will play best visually while brushing off the chemistry of it all with whatever the newest version of ‘flux capacitor’ is? Check.

That’s not to say these tropes are all necessarily scorched earth. I mean, worked for The Matrix and Altered Carbon and whatever. I’m gonna try to wrap this up by synthesising what it is that actually bugs me about this in Westworld S3 specifically:

i said earlier that previously Westworld was good about talking around the core concepts and plot, leaving us to infer the patterns and parallels (which tbh is kinda what i credited for the show’s popularity, ie the fact that there was so much to discuss and so many connections for the audience to make in such a creative world of philosophical and moral questions that ofc people would latch onto it and hypothesise wildly). But eg in this episode, when Dolores sends everyone their profiles, the human-host parallels spoke for themselves and seeing people’s reactions in the streets reinforced so much (base human nature, free will, the validity of the hosts’ emotional reactions, flawed attempts to standardise reality at the expense of individuality) but Bernard softballs it in with “they’re breaking their loops,” which hamhandedly shoves the “ooooooo humans have been the automated drones all along, that’s wack man” down our throats as if that hadn’t been a staple of speculative fiction since before Aldous Huxley and as if it weren’t the sort of blatantly fucking obvious thing you or the person watching with you would gasp aloud after a twist or reveal. Not saying I disagree with the criticism of complacent routine, it’s just... we get it already and we got it since whatever grade school essay we had to write on Orwell or The Giver, no? There’s also the “human over-reliance on tech” critique which has been there since S1, but until now it was kinda baked into the background of the main satirisation of hubris in the face of mortality and self-knowledge; now ‘human over-reliance on tech” is the exact weakness that the show keeps overexplaining has opened the door to human extinction.

sidenote: twice so far they’ve alluded to the human ‘real world’ being a simulation (Maeve in War World and Liam’s stoned friend on that rooftop bar), so if this season’s big twist is that the real world is just one of the ziptillion simulations run by the Serac’s machine I might just stop watching and pretend it ended after s1, esp if part of the twist is that Dolores or Maeve somehow merge themselves into the fabric of the simulation/become one with it. don’t even get me started on if serac is a host bc what a cop-out that would be.

I’m setting aside some of my other issues with the show to focus on how weirdly narrowed/streamlined/hemmed-in this season has been. i really want to like caleb but ffs his whole arc so far is simultaneously far too recognisable and far too self-insert-gratifying when the only new thing added to his stock character is the fact that Aaron Paul is playing him now instead of Sam Worthington or Jake Gyllenhall or whichever from the parade of recognisable-action-actors who are Misunderstood and Pouty until sexy miss unreadable fulfills his call-to-adventure fantasy complete with kiss/sex either during or immediately after a big fight scene.

Now that the rich intriguing world we started in has been largely explained and almost entirely killed off, we’re left with loyalty to a few fave characters in this (admittedly aesthetically pleasing and coherent, but still) standard vision of the future, where we already know Dolores’s story and motives and are kinda waiting for Caleb to catch up, and the only questions left really are kinda linear by Westworld standards (what’s Dolores’s plan, what’s gonna happen to each of the characters, like basic unanswered questions in any plot), and they keep recycling the same plot points (’oh they’re a host too?’ or ‘this host can’t trust their own thoughts/memories/actions because they’ve been damaged or tampered with’ but now kinda cheapened bc the setting is different and no one in the show expects them to be hosts but everyone in the audience does).

TLDR

There is nothing special or specific about this future-world that connects it to Westworld. A futuristic theme park of hyperrealistic humanoid AIs designed to facilitate the consequence-free catharsis of the stunted rich elite could be transplanted into any technologically-advanced future where extreme wealth-disparity and omni-surveillance are still problems, but that describes basically every scifi show that isn’t about space or apocalypse. But that’s part of what made the park such a strong concept, and also why i expected/wanted them to have come up with a more original outside world. If the park can fit anywhere, why did they choose such an uninspired world? It just feels like these creative interesting characters left this creative interesting world, took a wrong turn at Albequerque, and ended up in an extra-preachy Black Mirror fan script.

and again: i don’t hate this season, i’m still watching and enjoying, but i’m really disappointed by the reveal of this world.

#westworld #season 3 spoilers

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cutprintscreen · 4 years

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Ang Nagpapabulag sa Nagpapasilaw

A Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag Analysis

Jobs and occupations are tough to acquire, especially in the Philippines years before. People will go through thick and thin just to earn money or make a living. The Philippines may be advertised to the world for its national beauty and landmarks, but what people fail to see is the struggles daily Filipinos face, especially people who live in poverty, people who struggle to find a well payed job, people who struggle handling the family and household, and people who are victims and witnesses of crimes and wrong doings. Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, a 1975 drama Film, is considered as one of the most iconic and most prevalent film of the Philippines. Staring Bembol Roco who played as Julio Madiaga, played one of the most memorable roles he played as an actor. Showing the hardships of a Julio, the protagonist, and his way of living, earnings, and “relationship”. The film sheds light to not the beauty of Maynila but the evil that lurks within it and its people.

The film is coherent, original and realistic in nature. It was filmed in various places in Maynila, and depicted the atmosphere and authenticity of Maynila. It also showed how tough it can be living in a very urbanized city especially if you’re not used to it such as Julio when he was working as a construction worker. The moral aspect of the film is strongly not for the underaged, it’s a film that phenomenally showed the sexual side of Maynila and its people. The sexual elements in the film were not romanticized, the sexual elements were not present to woo the audience, but to show how vast it is and how much people desire it most especially in times where you need money. Julio engages with escorts with the intention of getting money, and besides that, the film also covers prostitution (Ligaya and Ah-Tek) and how devious acts like this can still exist in our country. And it shows the complexity of urban cities and the film itself. There are literal people who engage in sexual activity for money because they had no other means of earning, how people can be (easily) tricked in prostitution, how gloomy it can be to work especially as a construction worker, and how family and closed loved ones can be greatly affected with your deeds – all captured into a beautiful 2 hour long film.

The referential meaning of the film has some underlying symbolism. Julio’s last name is Madiaga, a play on the word “Matiyaga” which means hardworking. Ligaya, Julio’s childhood sweetheart, means joy. Ligaya is literally the ligaya is Julio’s life, Ligaya gives Julio the joy and happiness he desires, he sees her as the paradise or his paradise of joy, which is why his heart strongly beats for her. Ah-Tek is a play on “kita”, money. Ah-Tek is a reference to how greedy a person can be and all he cares for is what s/he earns most especially money. And lastly Mrs. Cruz, the one who tricked Ligaya to Maynila for prostitution, is a reference to cruz or cross, meant to represent the “burden” she carries. Cruz can also be an alias, because Cruz is a common Filipino surname, which could explain why she gets away with things and/or not being suspected as a suspicious person. It overall shows the hard work (Julio) we have for our joy in life (Ligaya), and we have to be determined and patient in order to get what we love, even if our burden, sins (Mrs. Cruz) and greediness (Ah-Tek) makes us lose our way towards joy.

The symptomatic meaning is how society comprises a lot of variety in terms of financial recovery, job listings, family struggles, economic decay, and sexual favors, can be hidden in even the central cities of our nation. Our entire world spins if money continues to spin, it is because money is so powerful it can define an entire future. 1 peso today is not much compared to the time of the film, around the 70’s, where 1 peso is worth more than it is. And when people struggle to earn money especially if their job blows, it’s tough to find other ways to getting money that often engaging in sexual favors in exchange for money becomes a legitimate option. People would dare to leave their families and their hometown in hopes of getting better job opportunities. And there are also times where family cannot help you. When Ligaya was held captive by Ah-Tek, she couldn’t even tell her family about her situation especially if her life’s on the line.

It was such a blast watching this film. This film is actually listed in the “1001 movies you must see before you die”, Maynila sa mga kuko ng Liwanag is one of the, if not, the only Filipino film/s present in the list, and it shows. An old classic film cleverly captivates the viewer with it’s story, themes, and social constructs. The implicit meaning for how I interpreted the film is how there’s always a bright side and a dark side in life, and more often than not, the dark side is bigger. Both Julio and Ligaya left home in hopes of getting better jobs, they looked at the bright side where there is more to look forward to in a big city. But only to end up as a construction worker, and held for prostitution, doesn’t seem that much of a bright opportunity. Maynila, as told by a number of characters, is “mahirap”. It is never easy to live in such a city. Sometimes there is also light in the darkness, and darkness in the light as well. Prostitution and escorts are not a pretty “occupation” but at the very least you can technically earn from doing so, which is what both Julio and Ligaya have had in mind, when there’s no other way to go. Again knowing that there’s always darkness in light, Julio and Ligaya plans to escape and go back home, with a plan already in stored what’s the worst that could happen? Apparently, a life’s cost, Ligaya lost her life in attempts of trying to go back with Julio and leaving with her kids. And with Julio’s despair, he plots to kill Ah-Tek, thinking it could bring his emotional peace but only to end up being beaten up himself by a crowd of people. There are times where our deeds often lead to a bright thing but we take for granted the dark side of it, and often times, we have to settle to the darker or more devious choices because it’s our last and only choices.

The explicit meaning is how in the real world, it will not always be pretty, and evil can lurk in any crook, especially in ourselves. In the film, Julio was so retaliated and shocked how he instinctively fought purse snatcher and almost gotten to fight with another man, knowing he will actually end up being a bad guy himself by killing the person who kept Ligaya and (allegedly) killed her. We could take our actions and choices for granted, not knowing where it could lead us. And other thing to add, is how much we can get and lose things in life. Julio has lost so many things in his life, his family when he left, his money, his job, his friends, and Ligaya. While we still have these things with us, let us make the most out of them, and not take the wrong turn that can make us lose all of them one-by-one.

Maynila sa mga kuko ng Liwanag is one of the most profound Philippine films and a definite must-see. Beauty can have its flaws, and beauty can have its ugliness. Maynila is a beautiful city even before, but it’s not always the case because if you take a closer look, and experience the place, you can see how every nook can have its darkness. The film gravely captured how in the real world, how it ugly it can be and how evil can lurk in what’s bright – Maynila in the claws of the light.

Written by Keith Daniel Nicodemus

#Maynila #Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag #Maynila in the Claws of Light #FILMLANG #MM22 #itsKeithDanNic #Philippines #Film #Analysis

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betweengenesisfrogs · 5 years

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Homestuck is My Favorite Sprite Comic

Yes, you read that right.

Homestuck is my favorite sprite comic.

Those of you who remember the earlier days of the internet are probably looking at this post in disbelief right about now. Others of you might be scratching your heads, not knowing what I’m talking about.

But here’s my pitch: Homestuck is the culmination of an entire genre of internet art, and the tools that make it so powerful are the very tools that made that genre once so reviled.

Homestuck is the greatest and most successful sprite comic of all time.

And honestly, I’ve wanted to talk about that for ages, so let’s do it.

WHAT SPRITE COMICS WERE

Many of my readers are probably too young to remember the era of sprite comics. So: what were sprite comics?

Sprite comics were a genre of webcomics made entirely by taking pixel art from video games – especially character art, called “sprites,” but also backgrounds and other images—and placing them into panels to tell a story. They were near-ubiquitous on the internet in the early 2000s, emerging right as webcomics in general were seeking to establish themselves as an art form.

They were not, shall we say, known for their quality. The low bar to access meant that art skill was not an obstacle to starting one. The folks behind the huge swell of them tended to be young people, kids and early teenagers recreating the plots of their favorite video games with new OCs—not the most advanced writers or artists. They were the early 2000s’ quintessential example of ephemeral, childish art. Unfortunately, they look even worse today—blown-up pixels don’t hold up well when displayed on higher-resolution monitors.

Today, they’re mostly forgotten, remembered only as a weird, strange moment in the youth of the internet. Someone who evoked them today, such as a blogger who compared them to one of the most successful webcomics of all time, would be inviting good-natured teasing at the very least.

It would be unfair to dismiss them entirely, though. In this low-stakes environment, comics where the author could bring more skill—engaging writing, legitimately funny jokes, or especially, a real ability to work with pixel art—really stood out. (Unsurprisingly, these authors tended to skew a bit older.)

The obvious one to mention is Bob and George. Bob and George wasn’t the first sprite comic, but it was the most influential. Conceived initially as Mega Man-themed filler for a hand-drawn comic about superheroes, it quickly became a merging of the two concepts, with the original characters made into Mega Man-style sprites, full of running gags, humorous retellings of the Mega Man games, elaborate storylines about time travel, and robots eating ice cream. It was generally agreed, even among sprite comic haters, that Bob and George was a pretty good comic. Worth mentioning also are 8-Bit Theater, which turned the plot of the first Final Fantasy into a spectacular and hilarious farce, and of course Kid Radd, my second favorite sprite comic. (More on that later.)

But even if you weren’t looking for greatness—there was something just damn fun about them. The passion of sprite comic authors was clear, even if their ideas didn’t always cohere. To this day, I think the sprite comic scene has the same appeal pulp art does—it’s crude and rough, full of garbage to sift through, but every so often, something deeply sincere and bizarre shines through, and the culture of its authors is a fascinating object of study in itself.

Okay, full disclosure: I was one of the people who made a sprite comic. I’ve written about my experiences with that in more depth elsewhere, but yeah, I was on the inside of this scene, rather than a disinterested observer, and from the inside, maybe it’s a lot easier to see the appeal.

Still, let me make this claim: even with all their flaws, sprite comics were doing some incredibly interesting things, and Homestuck is heir to their legacy.

TAKE ME DOWN TO RECOLOR CITY

One of the problems people always had with sprite comics was the sprites themselves. They’re the most repetitive thing in the world. You just keep copying and pasting the same images over and over again, maybe with a few tweaks. That’s not really being an artist, is it? It’s so lazy. Re-drawing things from different angles keeps things dynamic, develops your skill, and makes your work better in general. Right?

I’m mostly in agreement. Certainly I think it’s fair to rag on the Control-Alt-Delete guy, along with other early bad webcomics, for copy-pasting their characters while dropping in new expressions and mass-producing tepid strips. And to be fair, digging through bad sprite comics often felt like an exercise in seeing the same slightly-edited recolors of Mega Man characters over and over again. You got really tired of that same body with its blobby feet and hands.

(It should be noted, though, that there were folks in the sprite comic scene who could pixel art the quills off a porcupine. I salute you, brave pixel art masters of 2006. I hope you all got into your chosen art school.)

All this said, I think the repetitive and simplistic nature of sprite comics was often their biggest strength.

THE POWER OF ABSTRACTION

In his classic work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes an observation about cartooning that has stayed with me to this day.

McCloud notes that simple, abstract drawings, like faces that are only few lines and dots on a page, resonate with us more strongly than more detailed drawings. This is because our minds fill in what’s missing on the page. We ascribe human depth to simple gestures and expressions based on our own emotions and experiences – and this makes us feel closer to these characters as readers. Secretly, simple cartoons can be one of the most powerful forms of storytelling. If you want your readers to fall in love with your characters, draw them simply, and let them fill them in.

Video game sprites work very well in this regard. They have that same simplicity that cartoons do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a huge part of the success of SNES-era RPGs was simple, almost childlike character sprites drawing people in. I think sprites did the same for sprite comics.

Here’s the weird thing: Bob and George worked. Despite four different characters being variations on the same friggin’ Mega Man sprite in different colors, they immediately began to seem like different people with distinct personalities. For me, George’s befuddled, helpless dismay immediately comes to mind whenever I picture his face, while with Mega Man himself it’s usually a wide-eyed, childlike glee. I would never confuse them. This, despite the fact that the only actual difference between their faces is that George is blonde. It’s pretty clear what happened. The personalities the author established for them through dialogue and storytelling shone through, and my brain did the rest.

Sprites, in short, were a canvas upon which the mind could project any story the author wanted to tell. Even the most minute differences in pixel art came to stand, in the best sprite comics, for wide divergences in personality and ideals, once the reader spent enough time with them to adapt to their style of representation.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this somewhere before? Character designs that focus on variations on a theme, with subtle differences that nonetheless render them instantly recognizable?

Oh, right.

Look at what greets us on the very first page of Homestuck. An absurdly simple cartoon boy, abstracted to a ridiculous degree—he doesn’t even have arms!—followed a whole bunch of characters that follow suit. Though many other representations of the characters emerge, these little figures never quite go away, do they? Why is that?

Simple: they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re modular—you can give John arms or not, depending on whether it’s useful. You can put him in a whole variety of poses and save them to a template. You can change out his facial expressions with copy and paste. You can give him a new haircut and call him Jake. It’s all very quick and easy.

Sprite comics proliferated because they were very easy to mass-produce. Andrew Hussie’s original conception of Homestuck was very similar: something he could put out very quickly and easily, where even the most elaborate ideas could rely on existing assets to be sped smoothly along. We all know the result: an incredible production machine, churning out unfathomable amounts of content from 2009-2012. I’d say it was a good call.

But it goes way deeper than that. The modular nature of sprites always suggested a kind of modularity to the sprite comic premise. George and Mega Man were different people, true, but also two variations on a theme. Was there something underlying them that they had in common? Perhaps their similarity says something like: We exist in a world which has a certain set of rules? One of my favorite conceits from Bob and George was that when characters visited the past, they were represented by NES-era Mega Man sprites, while in the present, they were SNES sprites, and in the future, the author used elaborate splicing to render them as 32-bit Mega Man 8 sprites or similar.

Suppose there was a skilled cartoonist thinking about his next big project, who wanted to tell a story centered around this kind of modularity, a narrative that was built out of iterative, swappable pieces by its very design. He might very well create a sprite comic named Homestuck.

Homestuck is a story about a game that creates a hyperflexible mythology for its players, where the villains, challenges, and setting change depending upon what players bring to the experience, yet which all share underlying goals and assumptions. What more perfect opportunity to create a modular story as well? Different groups of kids and trolls have motifs that get swapped around to produce new characters, whether that’s through ectobiology, the Scratch, or the eerie parallels between the kids and trolls’ sessions. And yet each character can be analyzed as an individual.

This is an incredible way to build a huge emotional investment from your readers. Not only does this kind of characterization invite analysis, the abstractions draw readers in to generate their own headcanons and interpretations. A deep commitment to pluralism is at the heart of Hussie’s character design. Then, too, it encourages readers to build their own new designs from these models. Kidswaps, bloodswaps, fantrolls—these have long been the heart of Homestuck’s fandom. And what are bloodswaps if not sprite recolors for a new generation? With the added bonus that now a change in color carries narrative weight, evoking new moods and identities for these characters in ways that early sprite comics could only dream of.

In Hussie’s hands, even the dreaded copy-and-paste takes on heroic depth of meaning. Even when Hussie moves away from sprites to his own loose art style, he continues to remix what we’ve previously see. Indeed, Hussie talks about how he would go out of his way to edit his own art into new images even when it would take more time than drawing something new. Why? Because he wanted to evoke that very feeling of having seen this before—the visual callback to go along with the many conceptual and verbal callbacks that echo throughout Homestuck. This is at the heart of what Doc Scratch (speaking for Hussie) called “circumstantial simultaneity:” we are invited to compare two moments or two characters, to see what they have in common, or how they contrast. Everything in Paradox Space is deeply linked with everything else. And Hussie establishes this in our minds using nothing less than the tool sprite comics were so deeply reviled for: the “lazy” repetition of an image.

(It’s fitting that some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous images in Homestuck—dream bubble scenery and the like—are the result of Hussie taking things he’s made before and combining them into fantastic dreamscapes.)

But it all started with the hyperflexible, adaptable character images Hussie created at the very beginning of Homestuck.

And if you need more proof that Homestuck is a sprite comic, I think we need look no further than what Hussie, and the rest of the Homestuck community call these images.

We call them sprites.

THE FIRST GENRE-BENDERS

Was Andrew Hussie influenced by sprite comics in the development of Homestuck? It’s hard to say, but as a webcomic artist in the first decade of the 2000s, he was surely aware of them. It’s likely that he quickly realized that his quick, adaptable images served the same purposes as a sprite in a video game or a sprite comic, and chose to call them that.

One purpose I haven’t mentioned up until now: sprites lend themselves very well to animations. In fact, in their original context of video games, that’s exactly what they’re for: frames of art that can be used to show a character running, jumping, posing, moving across a screen. It’s not surprising, then, that sprite comic makers quickly saw the utility in that.

Homestuck was, in fact, not the first webcomic to make Flash animations part of its story. There were experiments with various gifs and such in other comics, but I think sprite comics were among the most successful at becoming the multi-media creations that would come to be known as hypercomics..

Take a look at this animation from Bob and George. It represents a climactic final confrontation against a long-standing villain, using special effects to make everything dramatic, but ultimately, like many a Homestuck animation, leads to kind of a pyscheout. The drama and the humor of the moment are clear, though. This relies in large part on the music—which is taken directly from the game Chrono Trigger. This makes total sense. Interestingly, it also contains voice acting, which is something Homestuck never tried—probably because it would run contrary to its ideals of pluralism. What I find fascinating is that in sprite comics, animations like these served a very similar purpose to Homestuck’s big flashes: elevating a big moment into something larger-than-life. Another good example is this sequence from Crash and Bass. Seriously, it seems like every sprite comic maker wanted to try their hand at Flash animation.

(By the way, it’s a lot harder than it looks!! I envy Hussie his vectorized sprites. Pixel art is a PAIN to work with in the already buggy program that is Flash.)

The result: because of the sprites themselves, sprite comics were among the first works to play around with the border between comics and other media in the way that would come to be thought of as quintessentially Homestuck.

What it also meant was that another genre emerged in parallel with sprite comics: the sprite animation. Frequently these would retell the story of a particular game, offer a spectacular animated battle sequence, parody the source material, or all three. Great examples include this animation for Mega Man Zero, and this frankly preposterous crossover battle sequence. Chris Niosi’s TOME also found its earliest roots as an animation series of this kind. You also found plenty of sprite-based flash games, in which players could manipulate game characters in a way that was totally outside the context of the original works.

The website the vast majority of these games and animations were hosted on?

Newgrounds, best known to Homestuck fans as the website Hussie crashed in 2011 while trying to upload Cascade.

What’s less talked about is that Hussie was friends, or at least on conversational terms with, the owner of the site, hence the idea to host his huge animation there in the first place, and other flashes, like the first Alterniabound, were initially hosted there as well.

It’s hard to believe that Hussie wasn’t at least a little familiar with the Newgrounds scene. I suspect that he largely conceived of Homestuck as part of the world of “Flash animation—” which in 2009 meant the wide variety of things that were hosted on Newgrounds, including sprite animations.

The freedom and fluidity sprite comics had to change into games and animations and back into comics again was one of their most fascinating traits. Homestuck’s commitment to media-bending needs, at this point, no introduction. But what’s less known is that sprite comics were exploring that territory first—that Homestuck, in short, is the kind of thing they wanted to grow up to be.

PUT ME IN THE GAME

I would be a fool not to mention another big thing Homestuck and sprite comics have in common: a character who is literally the author in cartoon form, running around doing goofy things and messing with the story. This was an incredibly common cliché in sprite comics, no doubt because of Bob and George, who did it early on and never looked back. You might have noticed that the animation I linked above concerns a showdown between Bob and George’s author, David Anez—depicted, delightfully, as another Mega Man recolor—and a mysterious alternate author named Helmut—who is like Mega Man plus Sepiroth I think? It’s all very strange. I could ramble for hours about the relationship between Hussie and the alt-author villains of Homestuck and what it all means, but I’m not sure I can nail anything down with certainty for these two. Maybe Bob and George was never quite that metaphysical.

But yes, bringing the author into the story in some form was already a cliché by the time Homestuck started up. Indeed, I think that’s why Hussie’s character refers to it as “a bad idea” to break the fourth wall—he’s recognizing that people will have seen this before, and are already tired of this sort of shit. And then he goes and does it anyway and makes it somehow brilliant, because he’s Andrew Hussie.

Homestuck breathes life into the cliché by taking it in a metaphysical/metafictional direction. I don’t think that was really the motivation for most sprite comic authors, though. Let’s see if we can dig a little deeper.

I think the cliché kept happening because sprite comic authors were writing about a subject that very closely concerned themselves: video games. I’m only kind of joking. The thing about video games is that even though they’re made for everyone, playing through one yourself feels like an intensely personal experience. You develop an emotional relationship to a world, to its characters, that feels distinctly your own. Now, suddenly, thanks to the magic of sprites, you have an opportunity to tell stories about that world for others to read. Of course you’re going to want to put yourself in the story in some form.

When it wasn’t author characters in sprite comics, it was OCs. You know Dr. Wily? Well here’s my own original villain, Dr. Vindictus. You know Mega Man? Here’s my new character, Super Cool Man. He hangs out with Mega Man and they beat the bad guys together. Stuff like that. Most sprite comics retold the story of a game, or multiple games in a big crossover format, with original elements added in. There was quite a lot of “Link and Sonic and Mega Man are all friends with my OC and they hang out at his house.”

What’s interesting, though, is that because these sprite comics were very aware that they were about video games, this was where they sometimes got very meta. It started with humorous observation—hey, isn’t it funny that Link goes around breaking into people’s houses and smashing their pots? But sometimes, it grew into more serious commentary. Is Mega Man trapped in a never-ending cycle, doomed to fight the same fight against the same mad scientist until the end of time? Is it worth it, being a video game hero?

Enter Homestuck. What I’ve been dancing around this whole time is:

Homestuck is a sprite comic…because Homestuck is a video game.

Or more specifically, Homestuck’s a comic about a video game called SBURB, where the lines between the game and the comic about the game blur as characters wrestle with the narratives around them, both those encoded into the game and those encoded into our expectations.

Homestuck presents the fantasy of many a sprite comic maker: I get to go on heroic quests, I get to change the world and become a god. I get to be part of the video game. And then it asks the same question certain sprite comics were beginning to ask:

Is it worth it, to be that hero?

I want to tell you about my second favorite sprite comic, a comic called Kid Radd.

Kid Radd distinguished itself from other sprite comics of the time by being a completely original production. Its sprites looked like they could be from a variety of NES and SNES-era video games, but they were all done from scratch, and the games they purported to represent were all fictional. Kid Radd used animations with original music, and sometimes interactive, clickable games, to tell its story. It also used all sorts of neat programming tricks to make it load faster on the internet of the early 2000s, which was great—unfortunately, these same techniques made it break as web technology evolved, something Homestuck fans in 2019 can definitely relate to. The good news is, fans have maintained a dedicated and reformatted archive where the comics can still be seen and downloaded.

Kid Radd’s premise is that video game characters themselves are conscious and alive—more specifically, their sprites. Sprites developed consciousness as human beings projected personality and identity onto them, remaining aware of their status as video game constructs while also seeking to be something more. The story follows the titular Kid Radd, at first in the context of his own game, commenting on the choices the player controlling him. He must endure every death, every strange decision along the way to save his girlfriend Sheena. Then the story expands into a larger context as Radd, Sheena, and many other video game characters are released onto the internet as data. They try to find their own identities and build a society for themselves, but struggle with the tendency toward violence that games have programmed into them. The story culminates in an honestly moving moment where Radd confronts the all-powerful creators of their reality—human beings.

It’s a very good comic.

The first sprite comic authors wanted to fuse real life with video games. Later sprite comic authors decided to ask: what would that really mean? Would it be painful? Would you suffer? Would you find a way to make your life meaningful all the same? Despite the limitations of sprite comics, these ideas had incredible potential, and in works like Kid Radd, they flourished.

Homestuck is heir to that legacy.

It takes the questions Kid Radd was asking, and asks them in new ways. It tries to understand, on an even deeper level, how the rules of video games shape our own minds and give us ways to understand ourselves.

At its heart, Homestuck is a sprite comic, and it might just be the greatest of them all.

EPILOGUE

I’ve seen a lot of good discussion recently on how Homestuck preserves a certain era of the internet like a time capsule: its culture, its technology, its assumptions, its memes.

I think sprite comics, too, are part of the culture that created Homestuck. Do I think Hussie spent the early 2000s recoloring Mega Man sprites? No, probably not. But what I do know is that sprite comics were part of his world. The first webcomic cartoonists came of age alongside an odd companion, the weird, overly sincere, dorky little sibling that was sprite comics. Like them or hate them, you couldn’t escape them. They were there.

And maybe a certain cartoonist saw a kind of potential in them, in the same way he summoned Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff from the depths of bad gamer culture.

Or maybe he just knew, as some sprite comic authors did, that the time was right for their kind of story.

On a personal level—Homestuck came along right when I needed it.

Around 2009, the bubble that was sprite comics finally burst. People were getting tired of them, or growing out of them, and blown-up sprites no longer looked so good on modern monitors.

I was more than a little heartbroken. I’d enjoyed Bob and George, read my fill of Mega Man generica, and fallen utterly in love with Kid Radd. I’d been working on my own sprite comic for a long time out of a sense that there was huge potential in them that we were only scratching the surface of. I’d dreamed of maybe someday doing something as amazing as the best of them did. But I was watching that world disappear. I had to admit to myself that my work wasn’t going to continue to find an audience. That I could live with. But it was painful to think that the potential I sensed, the feats of storytelling I wanted to see in the world, would never be realized.

And then, in the fall of 2010, a friend linked me to a comic that broke all the rules, that mixed animation, games, music, images and chatlogs. A comic that crafted its own sprites, just as Kid Radd did, and remixed its images into an ever-expanding web of associations and meanings. A comic that took on the idea of living inside a video game with relish and turned it into a gorgeous meditation on escaping the ideas and systems that control us.

That this comic would exist, let alone that it would succeed. That it would become one of the most popular creations of all time, that it would surpass other webcomics and break out into anime conventions and the real world, that it would become such a cultural juggernaut, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine an internet without Homestuck—

I can’t even put into words how happy that makes me. It’s the reason I’m still writing essays about Homestuck nearly eight years after I found it.

And it’s why Homestuck will always be my favorite sprite comic.

-Ari

[Notes: The image of the kids came from the ever-useful MSPA Wiki—please support and aid in their efforts to provide a good source of info about Homestuck! They need more support these days than ever.

For more on Homestuck’s place as a continuation of the zeitgeist of early 2000s experimental webcomics, this article by Sam Keeper at Storming the Ivory Tower is excellent and insightful.

Thanks for reading, y’all.]

#homestuck analysis #homestuck #homestuck's influences #hypercomics #understanding homestuck #sprite comics #internet culture

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jkim5 · 6 years

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John Kim “Turn off, Tune out, Drop out: Preliminary Notes on Digital Escapism”

In retreat centers, adult camps, support groups, intentional communities, and other enclaves around the country, people long for resources to live a life free from a surfeit of the glow of screens. Digital detoxes, media cleanses, modern primitivisms, and new communalisms are ways, differing in intensity and privation, in which this need has been expressed. To the extent that there is a single theme that connects these movements, I want to argue in this essay that it is a need to “tune out” the media, which I also refer to as digital escapism. The reasons for escape vary, but a connective thread is that individual and social ills attend a culture beset by the media’s non-stop availability. Symptoms range from the individual to the collective, from mental and physical fatigue to social isolation and a sense of diminishing intimacy with others. It would be nearsighted to attribute such a wide assortment of disorders to the media alone, as they obviously reflect other ongoing structural changes in society as well, but the media have become an index with which to identify how our lives are being dramatically reshaped by economic, technological and cultural forces in ways that feel out of our control. By their nature, these effects can be difficult to define, and a convenient shorthand has been to focus on the ways in which the media seem to impact our health and feelings of intimacy and connection with others.

The 2018 Minneapolis College of Art and Design Gallery’s show Stream Capture, an exhibition that thematizes the representation of the nature in contemporary digital art, helps us to explore this discontent in sentiments about nature. A number of pieces on display foreground how a fascination with nature is a way to articulate our ambivalence about the pervasive sense of disconnection and dislocation. In a close study of a few works from the show, I observe that nature’s appeal is in that it eludes or evades capture by advanced forms of digital representation, including high definition video recording, computer simulation, robotic drawing and more. This elusiveness is crucial to nature’s allure, as it constitutes the real of our desire, and only by pursuing nature as a “countercultural” escape from the digital can one free oneself from the conditions that produce this malaise. This escape, however, predictably ends in failure, suggesting that the fetishicization of nature cannot be a solid ground on which to build a critique of mediated culture. I argue next that this desire for an escape from the digital is now pervasive and undergirds diverse areas of popular culture in phenomena as diverse as media-free spiritual retreats to the growing appeal of backcountry camping. Only by orienting ourselves to the nascent critique that underlies digital escapism, however, can we discover the resources to identify the forces that produce the chronic feelings of disaffection that attend culture, and meaningfully challenge them.

Digital escapism is embedded deeply along the coast of California where it is nurtured by a legacy of countercultural ideas that found a home there in the Sixties. The recent colonization of Esalen in Big Sur, California by creative entrepreneurs, who have been reimagining Esalen as a retreat center for the digital age, is yet another example of the way that Silicon Valley has been pillaging the legacy of the Sixties to create the next marketable service. An iconic countercultural center, Esalen was founded in the midst of the period’s broad revolt against modern life, including a deepening consumer society, an unease with the anomie and isolation of American society, opposition to ongoing imperial wars and the draft, a growing environmental movement, and the rise of popular feminist and anti-racist movements. Esalen has been a spiritual center for the exploration of psychosocial alternatives to society’s norms. Though the counterculture frequently did not offer a singularly coherent critique (it frequently consisted of a grab bag of social issues), it responded to the world in ways that aspired to identify underlying problems in our shared condition in order to make available modes of critique. I see none of this in the uses that are being imagined for the center today.

Esalen appeals to an audience that came of age during the counterculture, but with an aging baby boomer generation, the center has not been immune from pressures to change. As Silicon Valley exerts its influence on points further south, Esalen has started hosting programs to cater to this audience. Classes, such “Digital Detox®: Unplug and Reimagine Your Life,” “Connect to Your Inner-Net,” and others are a hodgepodge of asceticism, nutrition, meditation, esoteric Eastern spiritualities, all offered up in palatable bite-sized morsels. Students are taught how to turn off one’s digital devices as an ascetic practice and to balance time on and offline as a spiritual exercise. There is a long history of orientalist appropriation in the counterculture, and Esalen is still at its vanguard. The unification of Eastern spirituality and countercultural ideas contributes to participants’ impression that they are engaged in transformative personal growth, but this could not be further from the truth. What is on offer are therapies for reintegration back into the life that produced one’s alienation in the first place, a fact that is obvious even in the language used to describe the classes, which are frequently billed as sessions to “recharge one’s batteries.” Such programs do not offer any solutions to the underlying issues that produced feelings of discontent that compelled one to seek escape. They are billed as a temporary respite from a culture that continually produces exhaustion and overload. Even worse, the programs themselves can even be read as internal to the logic of exploitation. If the function of a retreat is to recharge one’s batteries so as to restore proper functioning, then its role is to reintegrate one into the exploitative system that produced the discontent in the first place. Sadly, this should not come as any surprise, for it is without irony that refugees from Silicon Valley--the epicenter of technological innovation--are the ones who now sell us these expensive restorative therapies for reintegration back into life.

The self-care regime that encapsulates the problems with these therapies is the “media cleanse,” a name that takes cues from dieting trends. There are many versions of the dietary cleanse, yet the underlying idea is consistent: one fasts for a given period of time, then takes dietary supplements that allows for the elimination of toxins from the body. The media cleanse focuses on the abstinence part of the cleanse. (It is unclear what supplements one could take to eliminate the memory of a bad television show.) To be fair, there is an illuminating comparison to be made here, as both the dietary and media version of the cleanse suggest that we become more self-aware of those things that we consume in order to exercise stricter self-monitoring and dieting. The foods we eat affect physical and emotional health. We consume commodity foods ill-suited to our bodies, such as corn syrup, petroleum-based ingredients, GMOs, and excess sodium, that can lead to a range of ailments. By refraining from eating certain foods, a cleanse can help to bring balance to the body.

Cleanses take as many forms as there are nutritional supplements for sale that cater to them. There is one styled after Catholic repentance where overconsumption and abstinence are a cyclical process. There is the holistic approach, in which one strives for a healthful balance. When applied to the media, a participant moderates his or her media intake according to a prescribed schedule, and a healthful diet might be structured according to daily or monthly patterns. The search for balance regarding one’s media intake, however, reveals the limitations in comparing the media to food. With food there is a fundamental limit to the amount that one can eat and correspondingly time spent consuming. No matter how unhealthy one’s eating practices, in those in between moments one has time for other activities. With the media, on the other hand, we have not yet reached the point of total saturation. The media aims for 24/7 availability and a total commodification of time. Because of this, there cannot be a holistic balance with the media for they will always strive to colonize those moments in which you are not being exposed. For this reason, we should be skeptical of any solution to our prodigious digital appetites doled out in bite-sized reconstituted spiritual ideas.

Turn off, Tune out, Drop out

An alternative approach to regaining control over our mediated lives has been the movement or migration to the rural, which I referred earlier to as digital escapism. I am interested in the ways in which people are intentionally turning away from civilization in varying degrees of austerity and distance. One can see elements of this in diverse alternatives in modern living, such as new communalist movements, modern primitivisms and off-the-gridders; I would even go so far as to argue that many who participate in the unprecedented popularity of backcountry camping are inspired by a similar idea of escape. People are motivated by a need to be away from the media’s dense supersaturation of life, which in William Gibson’s claustrophobic turn of phrase, turns the sky the color of a television tuned to a dead channel. We have not yet realized Gibson’s vision of an inhabitable virtual reality, but we already live inside of the virtual in that our lived environments have been subjected to varying modes of computational representation (I’m thinking of here geolocational services, artificial intelligence recommendation engines, Augmented Reality, and others). Digital escapism bespeaks a longing for experience that isn’t administered by the digital, an openness to contingency and anonymity increasingly difficult because of pervasive surveillance and computing, an experience of nature untainted by human representation.

Digital escapism once referred to the inverse of what I am describing here. The counterculture’s early adoption of the internet was inspired by its potential to reimagine life. For many, the early internet was an utopian space that allowed for the formation of autonomous social formations that were impossible given spatial and temporal constraints of the physical world. In a scant two decades since declarations of independence defined the early internet, we have witnessed the unprecedented commercial expansion and appropriation of online communications. One can still find autonomous formations online, but more common today are complaints that the internet provides a platform for reactionary voices to surface and reinforces existing social pathologies. This attitude is the inverse of what some in the counterculture had envisioned. Instead of the digital as a refuge from the actually existing world, we now seek refuge from the digital. Given the legacy of countercultural ideas in the reversal of the digital as that from which we now desire escape, I invert the cliched countercultural mantra (“Tune in, Turn off, Drop out”) into a version befitting our situation today: “Turn off, Tune out, Drop out.” This is a better description of the ideological bind we inhabit, where critique has been transformed into a disarticulated set of actions or steps that do not constitute a meaningful critique, and serve to deepen our integration into the forces from which we desire escape.

Turn off

For counterculturalists, “tune in” referred to the act of taking LSD and other mind-altering substances, but it was also a symbolic act, a sacrament connecting an individual to a community of the like-minded who shared a desire for social transformation. Dropping acid was synecdochal for participation in the counterculture; one tuned into the new consciousness that the counterculture aspired to bring into the world. An individual was connected to others in the shared belief that the material conditions for happiness and freedom were realizable. To be sure, there were plenty of hippies who were in it solely for the sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Despite their aversion to being grouped in with the emerging political movements of the time, the Merry Pranksters nevertheless engaged in sporadic political activities in their proto-hippie lifestyling.

As an inversion of the counterculture, “turn off,” by contrast, references the act of shutting down media devices. This can take many forms, including turning off a phone, uninstalling applications that distract, or leaving one’s laptop at home. What all of these actions lack is the connection to a collective belief or understanding of the change that is needed in order to bring about circumstances for happiness and freedom. By “tuning in” conterculturalists strove to recognize the meaning of their activities as part of a collective movement towards social transformation. “Tuning in” connected an individual to a community that held in common a critique of the existing conditions of existence. This step is now lacking. Turning off, by contrast, is a purely subjective activity that does not connect one to others in a shared recognition of what needs to change in order to overcome the forces that produced alienation or separation. One is alone in the activity of turning off, and without a connection to others and a corresponding sense of mutual care and action, a solitary activity disappears into the void, because it does not build capacity for meaningful change.

Tune out

Timothy Miller has observed that counterculturalists, rather than rejecting outright technology, advocated for an alternative vision that deployed it in service of human needs. This became the “appropriate technology” movement. In creative activities like the Human Radio, the Pranksters explored appropriate technologies at the intersection of the social and the communicative. Whereas the mass media divide collective experience into separate and isolated activities, the Human Radio was a social technology to open up a sense of connection with others, to link up with other consciousnesses. In contrast to technologies that contribute to furthering the logic of exploitation and resource extraction, appropriate technologies could be an aid to the formation of alternatives in how humans connect to others and the world. Here we can see the reason why the counterculture was so fascinated by the internet as an appropriate technology to aid the creation of communities that redress the anomie produced by modern life. What is widely recognized about online interactions today, however, is that they can reinforce feelings of separation and isolation. The feelings of control and stimulation that attend online interactions can be addictive, and face-to-face interactions, by comparison, can seem underwhelming. The toxic trolling, bullying and flame wars that abound in online interactions are symptomatic of the fact that in the absence of the physical experience of otherness, it can be difficult to empathize with an other. In order to participate in online environments, we are required to disclose and commodify aspects of our identities, including our appearance, and our interests. On websites and apps, our interactions with others are confined to these categories. Others become instrumental to the satisfaction of our needs, because we are discouraged from treating others as fully realized humans who have diverse and potentially contradictory desires, feelings, and needs outside of these interfaces. Long ago Sartre noted that we live in a consumer culture that cultivates narcissism and egoism. Despite our desire to see the internet as a fix to the primary narcissism that makes it difficult to connect with others, the current construction of online interactions forecloses the possibility that it can lead us out of isolation and separation.

“Tuning out,” by contrast, speaks to our reaction to the media run amok. As the media infiltrate our lives in more minute, pervasive and intimate ways, a response to the din is to tune out, to cover our ears and close our eyes to the noise that threatens to flood them. Tuning out extends from the act of turning off. We turn off our devices to turn our backs on them. Essential to the counterculture’s conception of appropriate technology is a recognition that a total refusal of technology is a naive romanticization of a human state free of technology. One cannot engage in a discussion about technology’s role in imagining the everyday when one plugs one’s ears to their possible value. If the media have created the conditions from which we now seek escape, then we need to reflect critically on the question of how to develop them in alternative ways. When applied conscientiously with a sense of care about human needs, technology can become a tool for helping to shape the world into one of our collective imagining. Instead of turning our backs to the media, we need to tune our relationship to them and transform them into tools for living.

Drop Out

Finally, an iconic countercultural response to society was to drop out and form alternative communities. Best remembered are the experimental communes, including Drop City, New Buffalo, and the Farm, but these were just a few of the diverse experiments in housing cooperatives and intentional communities. The Diggers, Cockettes, Black Panthers, and many others strove to create alternative community platforms to redress society’s glaring problems. For a variety of reasons, most of these experiments in living disbanded after a few years, including heinous examples of state repression and violence enacted on some of them. But even without overt forms of repression, it can be an overwhelming emotional and physical drain to turn one’s back on the reproduction of existing means and relations of production in order to invent new ways to subsist, cohabitate and communicate that liberate us from the past’s constraints. In spite of the fact that the counterculture has become the endless source of commodified nostalgia and that the conditions against which they struggled are significantly changed today, we can continue to learn from the counterculture. Their ambitious attempts to reimagine life and to bring it into existence through playful experimentation underscores the lengths to which it might be necessary to correct the problems we face today.

Digital detoxes and other escapes borrow heavily from the idea of dropping out, especially through associations with countercultural retreat centers, such as Esalen. Its legacy can be detected in the language used to describe detoxes. By going on retreats, one gets closer to nature and away from the persistent hum of human activity. Camps, retreat centers, and off-the-grid communities offer opportunities to disconnect from the world and tune out media overload. Whereas many in the counterculture dropped out without a return address, digital detoxers go on trips of fixed durations; their return postage is guaranteed. Such retreats are temporary separations from society, done with the security that one will rejoin society and can reactivate one’s accounts after a short respite. A similar accusation has been made about the original counterculturalists, that their experiments in living were simply a temporary pause that allowed them to “play at” being a Native or a noble savage. Today’s digital escapees, however, are one step further removed from these stereotypes and “play at” being dropouts. It must undoubtedly feel risky to leave one’s media devices behind, uninstall applications, or delete social media accounts in order to get closer to nature. These feelings of unsettlement might even be comparable to what counterculturalists experienced when embarking on their utopian journeys, but we need to recognize the ideology and the illusion of digital escapes: they are sad imitations of a failed revolution in living.

Capturing Failure on Displays

Returning to the Stream Capture exhibition, I want to consider how the allure of nature as a respite from the world is reflected in the representation of nature in digital art. A theme that connects multiple pieces on display is the attempt to simulate and/or represent it utilizing advanced digital technologies, including HD digital video, software simulation, robotic drawing and others.1 In his New Nature, for example, Mark Tribe captured 24 hours of footage from a single vantage point set in nature using the highest resolution (4K) digital video cameras available. New Nature is an imperfect digital archive of the wilderness that has become necessary because of the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events produced by climate change. There is a real possibility that such places will be endangered in the near future, and we will no longer be able to experience them. When New Nature is understood from this perspective, a viewer is left with a feeling of loss, because of the inadequacy of a digital archive as a replacement for nature. Despite utilizing the most advanced technologies, what is on display is the futility of a digital record, because of limitations in the current means of reproduction. We can marvel at the number of pixels used or the brightness and clarity of the image, but even the most sophisticated media technologies cannot begin to document the natural world. This shouldn’t be at all surprising, for the technological means for transcoding the physical world are still primitive. Even something as familiar as recorded sound, no matter how high the fidelity and resolution in which a piece of music is captured, is still far from reproducing the experience of a live performance. To set out to capture nature, in all its complex and multisensory dimensions, is impossible. What is on display in New Nature in the elusiveness of its original is the imperfect representation of nature.

The failure of contemporary technologies for the simulation of nature is an overt theme of other works on display. In David Rueter’s Drift, it is constitutive of the narrative itself. Rueter released a homemade weather buoy into Lake Michigan and documented his attempt to recover it employing advanced weather and water simulation software to guide him to its predicted location. The piece consists of a video recording of the simulation software at work while the audio is Rueter’s narration of his attempts to recover the buoy. The process is started multiple times, and each iteration ends in failure. Witnessing them, a viewer is left with the impression of the current impossibility of simulating nature to any degree of accuracy. Jan Robert Leegte’s New World illustrates this failure in reference to video games that simulate natural environments. The piece draws on the visual language of video games, in particular, simplified digital versions of natural landscapes. New World renders the world in three discrete ecosystems, each represented by a flat two-dimensional graphic of grass, desert and textured water. A recent trend in video games is to procedurally generate the field of game play, opening up the possibility of an expansive, nearly infinite, open terrain. Employing this technique, New World endlessly generates random blocks in the direction one moves, which makes it impossible for a player to reach the end of the game. Flights of fancy might invite comparisons between New World to the actually existing universe because of the way in which the game imitates the universe’s limitlessness expanse. Any such comparison, however, would be grossly overstated, because even with an open universe of game play, the entirety of the world is still constructed out of three types of terrain.

What Tribe, Leegte and Reuter’s works illustrate then is the aspiration and the failure of contemporary techniques for the representation of nature. Despite their use of sophisticated technologies for its reproduction, a viewer is left with the sense of the gap that separates the digital work from what it depicts. As the elusive subject of digital art, nature provokes precisely because of its unattainability. The subject of these works is the real of desire, the effort to capture nature’s distinctiveness, yet marked by the repetition of its failure.

The Color of Television, Tuned to a Dead Channel

In light of the failed representation of nature found in Stream Capture, I want to conclude on a re-examination of digital escapes. As a temporary refuge, the purpose of detoxes or retreats are to bring one back to proper functioning. From this perspective, the fundamental problem with digital escapes is that escapes restore or, even, enhance one’s capacity to endure the forces that produced the desire for escape in the first place. Instead of offering a solution or alternative to culture, the purpose of digital escapes is to restore one’s capacity for productivity. Detoxes put one on a cycle of repetition that can only result in an escalation of feelings of disaffection, from which there is no closure and no solace.

There is paradoxically a critique embedded in the desire for escape. The language of “detox” implies a recognition that culture has become a slow toxin; to require “grounding” acknowledges that life has become detached or unhinged. Slavoj Zizek has used the term post-ideological to refer to situations in which criticism itself deepens our commitment to those forms of power and control from which we seek escape. Or worse, instead of offering a solution, we engage in activities that are revealed to be complicit with the underlying problems our activities strive to correct. An oft cited example of this post-ideological bind in the West is philanthropy. With the recent passage of tax cut bills that allows more wealth to accumulate among the 1% and the simultaneous hollowing out of social services, lives are made precarious, and the underclass becomes even more reliant on philanthropy. But when philanthropy is underwritten by the richest who have accumulated wealth through the expropriation and exploitation of others, it creates a bind that serves to reinforce ideologically an acceptance of the very structure of inequality that produced it in the first place. In a dystopian landscape of privation and perpetual insecurity, the logic of exploitation is reinforced because it offers nominally humanitarian outcomes.

A similar logic exists in the appeal of the digital detox: unplugging can offer respite from our embeddedness in a mediated culture the volume of which outpaces our ability to process. In this sense, media cleanses can provide us with distance from the world in order to reorient ourselves to it and psychologically prepare for reentry. It is a singularly individual response that does not call us to challenge the forces that produced this discontent. As Guy Debord observed long ago about the media, social separation and isolation are some of their main outcomes. To the extent that a digital detox is intended to restore proper functioning, it normalizes the world without change.

In an echo of the wilderness’s role as a place of refuge for romantics, nature continues to figure prominently in digital escapes as a place of shelter and quiet. Where romantics disappeared into the country, into hermitages, and to mountain tops, today’s romantics find refuge in countercultural inspired retreat centers, off-the-grid camps and backcountry campsites. Nature continues to figure prominently, and it beckons from glossy promotional material calling us to it. Nature is the front for a growing menu of choices to disconnect from the digital world in order to recharge. The promise of escape is a post-ideological bind that does not enable us to tune in, turn off, or drop out from the circumstances from which we desire escape. Instead, it is productive of those very forces that have contributed to our pervasive sense of malaise and exploitation. Digital escapes recondition our bodies to accept the unacceptability of contemporary life. The works on display in Stream Capture teach us that nature is an endless source of awe and wonder; it calls us forth. Nature dangles in front of us with its promise of refuge and quiet, but escape continually eludes our grasp. When we turn back to the world to face its conditions unchanged, we discover we can again endure additional cycles of work and instruction. Before long, finding ourselves burdened and overstimulated, we yearn for a way to recharge, and nature beckons us back to it.

Endnotes

There is an important distinction between forms of digital representation and representation, and I am not obscuring the difference here. What I am suggesting is that they share an interest in representing nature through digital processes that involves transcoding into numerical form.

#stream capture #esalen #writing #mcad #digital #escapism #tuneinturnoffdropout

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robedisimo · 6 years

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Black Panther [SPOILER-FREE REVIEW]

[Disclaimer: this review is based on the Italian dub of the film. As such, all opinions on the quality of dialogues and acting are subjective and partial.]

So, it’s been a while since my last review and, to be completely honest, I didn’t expect Marvel’s Black Panther to be a hard one to come back on. I went into this movie expecting to enjoy it thoroughly, and in many respects I did, just... not as much as I thought I would. To cut a long story short, I spent the better part of a week trying to make up my mind about whether I walked away from this movie impressed or disappointed. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

First of all, let’s address the mini-skirted elephant in the room: in more than just a few coincidental ways, Black Panther is a retread of last year’s Wonder Woman. Both films star characters who were introduced as supporting players in a previous movie, in both cases big tentpole cross-over films – Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War, respectively – revolving around a conflict between the two main figures within the respective mega-franchise universes. Both act as more self-contained tales, in terms of cross-franchise elements, than previous movies in their narrative universes, and both feature different but thematically contiguous settings in the shape of secluded, secretive, mythology-laden kingdoms ruled in utopian perfection by a fictional society reflective of one of America’s mistreated social minorities.

On the production side of things, both were surprisingly helmed by directors known for poignant, socially-involved projects – Monster’s Patty Jenkins and Fruitvale Station’s Ryan Coogler – and, on the promotional side, both sailed towards theatres on a wave of sheer hype, being hailed as the beginning of a new era for Hollywood blockbusters and propelled forwards by baffling headlines – born, I assume, either out of stunningly poor memory or else a frankly understandable wish to forget that Steel, Supergirl and Catwoman ever happened – about how they were the first female-led, or black-led, superhero movie ever made.

Neither film, it goes without saying, rises to meet those unrealistic expectations. Though entirely enjoyable in its own right, Wonder Woman was an uneven and ultimately formulaic film that tried to juggle too many things and be too many different movies at once, and Black Panther certainly falls into the same category to a lesser degree. Part James Bond instalment, part Lion King and in part also Thor rerun, what we got on our hands in the end was a fairly mundane genre flick with a number of highs but also a handful of lows.

The good: the film looks amazing. Where its DC equivalent was content with just a few opening minutes of generic pseudo-Greek utopia, Black Panther instead realises its fictional setting to a much deeper, richer degree, to often impressive results. The mythical kingdom of Wakanda is most definitely a kind of spectacle not before seen in theatres, a bold vision of African futurism that meshes hi-tech sci-fi with tribal spiritualism in oftern stunning fashion. Its setting is easily the film’s best aspect, brought to life on the shoulders of the great conceptual design work done by Marvel’s art team.

On top of that, Black Panther is energetic and well-acted, perhaps with less overt humour than most recent Marvel projects but certainly fast and action-y enough to satisfy genre fans. The story is emotional and poignant, and Michael B. Jordan definitely shines – although I feel a pang of white guilt in reporting that Andy Serkis, for once appearing with his own tribal mask of a face, steals away the trophy for most enjoyable performance in the film – as one of the MCU’s most complex theatrical villains to date... if not, like Cate Blanchett’s Hela before him, one that truly and definitively manages to buckle well-established Marvel villain trends.

The soundtrack – if a touch obtrusive at times – is another of the movie’s high points, way less hip-hop-heavy than trailers suggested and much more genuinely African in its tones and beats. For a film that’s obstensibly about identity, the fact that its visuals and acoustics come together to form such an original, easily-identifiable cinematic brand is certainly Coogler’s, and everyone behind him, greatest achievement here.

The bad: the film looks amazing, except when it doesn’t. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is definitely developing an overreliance on CGI lately, and even Black Panther’s rather sizeable budget can’t do much to distract from some of the film’s worst effects – no spoilers, but you’ll know when you see it – and its general overabundance of green-screen shenanigans, especially in the cliché-laden climax.

The action itself isn’t especially praise-worthy either, despite a couple brief highlights: much like in Creed, Coogler blows his best action scene midway through the film and it’s all downhill from there, with a few missed opportunities along the way. The film’s focus on hi-tech gadgets, for example, sort of fizzles out without much fanfare after a while, with the same two or three tricks being repeated throughout the movie.

Other issues may be found in certain aspects of pacing, although in that area your mileage may vary. Black Panther starts off a tad slow, and then unfolds as a series of self-contained vignettes that take too long to develop a coherent throughline. When the plot finally kicks in it works in fairly satisfactory fashion, but there’s one big twist that honestly could’ve been dropped earlier in the film’s generous runtime and, generally speaking, I feel that the script could’ve stood one more round of polishing.

So make no mistake: on my personal scale, as far as enjoyment of my theatrical experience is concerned, the verdict at the bottom of this review should not rise above “MOSTLY POSITIVE”. It gets knocked up a peg for two specific reasons:

Black Panther’s impact on the American public is undeniable. In the United States, the film’s themes resonate in a way they simply can’t anywhere else, and as such this is the one Marvel movie that is perhaps the least designed for, and the least accessible to, foreign audiences... even if it is frankly quite mystifying that Wakanda’s core values would end up being framed in the context of the plight and struggle of people of colour in America, rather than pretty much anywhere in the surrounding African continent. Ultimately, I think, it’s not even a matter of said themes being satisfactorily addressed or resolved, and indeed Coogler’s film presents challenging ideas that are entirely unexpected from a superhero movie, but – partly because the script starts dealing with them too far into its runtime, as I mentioned – there’s not really the proper time for them to breather. Other critics have written that Black Panther is more interesting to think about than it is to actually watch, and I tend to agree: the ideas behind this movie are impressive, but their execution is not always the best. Despite that, Black Panther most definitely is an important film, at least in the here and now. Its missteps are easily overlooked in light of that, just as I imagine Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historical speeches would’ve still be commended for their convention-buckling message even if the reverend himself had been saddled with a comical stutter. This movie’s heart is in the right place, and it’s easy to see why that is being rewarded above all else.

From a purely technical standpoint, my viewing of this film was crippled by an adequate, and just adequate, Italian dub. I’m perfectly capable of recognising when a mediocre localisation gets in the way of a film’s original underlying richness and this was most certainly the case, with the whole English-language cast providing an array of diverse – and, I’m sure, memorable – performances, many of them in fictional African accents, that got “flattened” to an unvarying standard inflection in the version I got to see. At least in that respect, I expect a second home-video viewing in the original language to elevate my opinion of the performers’ work.

So in the end we’re left with a pretty tough question on our hands: is Black Panther a movie that exploits the genre to draw attention to relevant political themes, or one that exploits those political themes to justify its run-of-the-mill script? It is perhaps both, and that becomes a rather large problem when the film can’t make up its mind as to which of its two identities deserves its full commitment. Nonetheless, I’m eager to see how this franchise, and the larger Marvel machine whose gears grind around it, carry forward what’s been put in motion here. For the time being, Black Panther is perhaps not as good as it could’ve been... but even then, it seems to be good enough.

[Verdict: POSITIVE]

#KenAtTheMovies #Black Panther #Marvel #MCU #review

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insteadhere · 4 years

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Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia

While in a ‘let me share parts of articles I love’, here are some excerpts from one of my favourite pieces from the past year or so:

Robert J. Brulle & Kari Marie Norgaard (2019): Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia, Environmental Politics

Overall, the way they theorize ‘social inertia’ and even resistance to action w.r.t. climate change also applies very well to a variety of issues we’re dealing with today.

While in a ‘let me share parts of articles I love’, here are some excerpts from one of my favourite pieces from the past year or so:

Robert J. Brulle & Kari Marie Norgaard (2019): Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia, Environmental Politics

Overall, the way they theorize ‘social inertia’ and even resistance to action w.r.t. climate change also applies very well to a variety of issues we’re dealing with today.

ABSTRACT

The failure of societies to respond in a concerted, meaningful way to climate change is a core concern of the social science climate literature. Existing explanations of social inertia display little coherence. Here, a theoretical approach is suggested that integrates disparate perspectives on social inertia regarding climate change. Climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma. The threat of cultural trauma is met with resistance and attempts to restore and maintain the status quo. Thus, efforts to avoid large-scale social changes associated with climate change constitute an effort to avoid cultural trauma, and result in social inertia regarding climate change at individual, institutional, and societal levels. Existing approaches to social inertia are reviewed. An intellectual framework utilizing the work of Pierre Bourdieu is proposed to integrate these different levels of social interaction. Social processes that maintain social order and thus avoid cultural trauma create social inertia regarding climate change.

There has been insufficient mobilization and engagement to affect the level of public urgency and even interest that the predictions of climate scientists would warrant. Rather, efforts to address climate change have encountered substantial social inertia, the interrelated cultural, institutional, and individual processes that inhibit actions to address this pressing issue. Why is this?

The failure to realistically address climate change is a dominant theme across the social science literature. However, explanations for social inertia vary widely across disciplines and remain piecemeal, and the interdisciplin- ary conversation remains dominated by natural science and economic perspectives. As shown by Brulle and Dunlap (2015, p. 5–14), these approaches suffer from substantial limitations. What has emerged is, by and large, a confused mixture of disciplinary perspectives that fails to cohere into a comprehensive approach capable of explaining the present paralysis or guiding future action. Extending earlier attempts to develop a comprehensive approach to understanding social inertia (see Leahy et al. 2010), we seek here to develop a conceptual framework and theoretical argument to explain the interrelated social processes that drive different levels of cultural inertia on climate change.

We focus our theoretical examination on the notion of avoidance of cultural trauma. Cultural trauma is a social process that involves the sys- tematic disruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subject to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in pro- found challenges to routine, taken-for-granted ways of interacting (Alexander 2004, 2012, Sztompka 2004). We argue that climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma in two senses. First, the unusual natural events linked to climate change, such as fire and flood, can serve as a direct disruption of social practice and thus create potentially traumatic outcomes. Second, climate change constitutes a profound symbolic challenge to the existing social order and is thus a potentially traumatic threat (Zizek 2010, p. 326–327, Hamilton 2012, p. 728). This is because the social con-struction of climate change as a collective concern challenges the underlying narratives of collective identity and invokes a symbolic process of meaning construction based on a new narrative of the social order. The risk of cultural trauma is met with resistance and attempts to restore and maintain the status quo. These actions to avoid cultural trauma result in social inertia on climate change at the individual, institutional, and societal levels.

Cultural trauma and social change

Given the interlocking operation of cultural order and social reproduction, social transformation is for the most part an incremental process. However, societies can experience periods of social destabilization that take the form of cultural traumas. Cultural trauma is a social process that involves the systematic disruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subject to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in pro- found challenges to routine ways of interacting, which are normally taken for granted (Alexander 2004, 2012, Sztompka 2004).

There are two related approaches to understanding the development of cultural trauma. The first is centered on the occurrence of major disruptive events. For Sztompka (2004, p. 164) cultural traumas are events or situa- tions that produce ‘dislocations in the routine, accustomed ways of acting or thinking’. They occur when members of a specific social group are subjected to an event that creates an indelible impression and shifts the group consciousness fundamentally, such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Additionally, environmental events exert a prolonged and cumula- tive pressure that can eventually reach a point where it induces cultural trauma (Sztompka 2004, p. 158). Eyerman (2015, p. 9) expands this per- spective by showing that the failure of a meaningful response to Hurricane Katrina undermined citizens’ expectations of government protection and thus led to a cultural trauma among those most impacted. While examining different types of events, both authors center on external phenomena as driving forces behind the creation of cultural trauma.

A second approach developed primarily by Alexander (2004, 2012), centers on the social construction of a cultural trauma. For Alexander, events in themselves do not create cultural traumas. Rather, cultural traumas are socially constructed narratives that challenge the existing social order and notions of collective identity. They take the form of a narrative of ‘some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horribly destructive social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution’ (Alexander 2012, p. 16). This alternative narrative challenges the taken-for-granted narrative, leading to a symbolic struggle. In this process, the nature of dominant cultural beliefs is brought into question, and these challenges to the cultural system are then reflected in ongoing institutional interactions and at the everyday level of the habitus. They serve to dislocate the social reality that anchors individual identities and social interactions. Thus in this perspective, cultural traumas are not attributable to a particular event, but to how that event is perceived and reflected in collective understandings of the event (Alexander 2004, p. 10).

In both perspectives, cultural traumas can be seen as a systematic dis- ruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subjected to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in profound challenges to routine ways of interacting. In response, new cultural per- spectives and regimes of practice develop and expand (Sztompka 2004, p. 194), these changes in turn precipitate clashes between cultural practices of the adherents socialized in the old and new cultural systems. These clashes produce disruptions across all levels of the social order, leading to cultural transformation (Sztompka 2004, p. 194, Eyerman 2015).

Climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma as defined by both theories. First, the unusual natural events linked to climate change can serve as a direct disruption of social practice and thus potentially create cultural trauma. Eyerman’s (2015) analysis shows how the failure of an adequate government response to Hurricane Katrina led to the creation of cultural trauma among severely impacted populations.

Second, climate change has provoked an alternative narrative to the continuation of business as usual. Advanced by climate scientists, this climate change narrative describes the massive damage caused by carbon emissions to both humans and natural systems. This narrative also demands profound changes in the practices connected to carbon emissions and, as used in the Climate Justice discourse, reparations for damages caused by fossil fuel use. Thus the alternative narrative of climate change constitutes a fundamental challenge to the existing social order and has the potential to emerge as a major cultural trauma (Zizek 2010, p. 326–327, Hamilton 2012, p. 728). In a highly incisive analysis, Smith and Howe (2015) see the climate change symbolic contest as a social drama. This symbolic struggle builds on Alexander’s (2012, p. 16) insight about the social construction of climate change as a potential cultural trauma. Smith and Howe (2015) demonstrate that the intensely emotional debate about climate change is an effort to construct and advance a new narrative that would bring about a severe dislocation of existing social practice. This alternative narrative is opposed by efforts to avoid large-scale social changes and thus maintain the status quo.

#culturaltrauma #theory #environmental activism

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mild-lunacy · 7 years

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The Irene Question (redux)

I haven’t really felt the need for a new reading of BBC Sherlock, but I think I’ve become much more skeptical of certain kinds of readings-- or should I say, I’m a lot more insistent now that the surface reading is important. I’ll never again trust any analysis that doesn’t fully 100% integrate the surface reading of any character or episode in Sherlock, unless there’s symbolic analysis of the ‘comparative lit’ kind. This is what I was wrong about, I think. That is, there’s a difference between saying ‘these are the intersections with other texts’ or ‘these are the cultural implications’ and saying this is what the text means or is trying to communicate. I was always concerned with this, but now I’m especially concerned, because I wrote things that (in retrospect) should have set off alarms in my head, like when I admitted that I read HLV and TAB fundamentally differently. So, I’ve learned two things, as far as understanding intent and/or trying to make the narrative coherent: 1) the details and/or definitions of things don’t really matter, most of the time, because they’ll rarely return; 2) conversely, the themes are important, and will generally be implicitly followed up on.

‘Generally’ is a tricky word here. The episode I want to think about is ASiB, and I want to argue that the themes of ASiB are the most important aspect of it, at the same time as I have to admit that the aspect that relates to Sherlock’s sexuality is the one we have seen left hanging (and/or implicitly resolved at best) in TLD. I’ve long compared the approach to subtext and its relationship with the surface narrative in ASiB with HLV, and well... look how that turned out. I have to be careful. In general, it’s always a good idea to be careful in one’s analysis, though.

Still, I’m confident in being wary of any approach that projects the need for ‘realism’ or certain cultural norms onto the narrative (particularly the typical young Tumblr user norms), and readings that seem too concerned with making things fit too neatly, as of Series 4. Aside from that, as I said, I would need to integrate any reading I’m going to support with the surface narrative, without getting hung up on realism, details or definitions... unless those definitions are canonically addressed or prove thematically important. And so, John’s declarations of ‘not gay’ are certainly repeatedly addressed enough to be a theme, but in retrospect, are a good candidate for a running gag (read: John’s really no homo, so to speak), on one level. Authorial Intent isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, of course, and then there’s the fact that ASiB confuses its own definitions in multiple ways. What to make of the confluence of Martin Freeman’s acting, the insistence he’s ‘not gay’ and his response to Irene saying it doesn’t matter, ‘cause she’s gay herself, while still trying to respect the surface narrative?

There’s no simple answer. The surface narrative is devilishly ambiguous in ASiB, which is (of course) what tripped me up in HLV. In many ways, though, ASiB is much more complex on the characterization level. Regardless, I still think that BBC Sherlock makes the most sense if you believe ‘the underlying ideas determine the slant of events’ in analysis, even if that doesn’t translate to canon Johnlock. So, let’s sum up what I still see in ASiB:

Sherlock was fascinated but not sexually interested, and I definitely still disagree with @hubblegleeflower that Sherlock is in love with Irene, although she has romantic/sexual feelings for him, and I admit that the text wants us to wonder and to consider it possible (and so does John);

I also disagree with @watsonshoneybee’s claim that we are not supposed to read Irene’s pulse as a marker of attraction, regardless of how ‘realistic’ that is or isn’t.

Irene was being manipulative and playing a game, but the theme of the episode and her blatant mirroring with Sherlock suggests she did feel love;

John was jealous, because there’s no obvious other reason for the fixation on the text alerts (and suggesting baby names, etc), not to mention the acting:

but it’s plausible that he isn’t canonically bisexual even if he’s effectively bisexual. I don’t base my entire reading of John on ASiB, obviously, but his behavior re: Irene and Sherlock overall in ASiB is too suggestive to dismiss no matter what the intent.

Based on their behavior, one must thus disbelieve both John and Irene to some degree at Battersea, except insofar as this is what they think. There’s ambiguity; there’s no getting around that. In a sense, one should believe them, as one should believe Sherlock thinks he’s a ‘high-functioning sociopath’ sometimes. Really, there is no character on this show who may be blindly believed about almost anything (especially things they say about themselves), except if there’s supporting evidence.

Note 1: it’s fine if you critique this as misogynistic or lesbophobic. I’m simply saying I think this is the text.

Note 2: an exception is characters set up as the narrative voice or ‘in the know’ (Mycroft, Mrs Hudson in TLD, Eurus, Irene, Moriarty, Mary in TFP) commenting on Sherlock or John in the right context.

So in a sense, Irene really is gay and John isn’t (and I think this means he’s also not trying to self-identify as bisexual even if he is). Either way, the implication is that ‘it doesn’t matter’ because Sherlock is always the exception to everything for both of them.

Sherlock is functionally unavailable to both of them for different reasons in ASiB, but the difference is that Sherlock and John are already together as a ‘couple’, as Irene says, and Irene and Sherlock never will be.

‘Romance’ and ‘couplehood’ and ‘attraction’ as concepts are being played with in ASiB, though, and the line between romantic and non-romantic attraction is textually fuzzy (see: brainy is ‘the new sexy’). I think Irene is saying that sex/sexuality is irrelevant and so even if John’s attraction is nonsexual, her attraction is too-- sex doesn’t matter to her.

As Moffat said, for Sherlock, sex is sublimated or dislocated so it’s about ‘thinking’, and Irene parallels that, being a mirror of Sherlock’s sexuality. In other words, for Moffat, sex just doesn’t matter for Irene or Sherlock (from different directions). Of course, Moffat has also said Sherlock’s feelings in ASiB are ambiguous and mysterious to him too (and Gatiss said that’s as it should be).

I think Irene has her own motivations, but people who like her character have a tendency to go too far in taking away Sherlock as her unrequited Achilles’ heel, more or less. I guess that’s embarrassing or makes people dislike the episode, especially seeing as the only recurring female character who isn’t a mother figure or already married to John is also in unrequited love with Sherlock. There’s a lot of unrequited feelings that never go anywhere on this show, in ASiB and elsewhere (in some ways, you could even argue Mary’s feelings for John weren’t entirely requited, especially post-HLV).

Regardless, Irene has several facets that are somewhat in conflict in ASiB. She is in unrequited love with Sherlock, but is trying to sort of ignore that and use it for her purposes. At the same time, she’s a mirror for Sherlock on the subtextual level, so she is Sherlock, in a sense. She is certainly always trying to save herself, always working for an angle to get the code for Moriarty and/or get to Mycroft. Irene is perceptive and manipulative: this is part of the mirroring. Irene is set up as the master of deducing sexual desires the way Sherlock deduces crime scenes. At the same time, she compares her feelings to John’s at Battersea, and we must take that seriously. In comparing herself with John, Irene implies that she doesn’t think she’s straight or bisexual but is nevertheless in love/lust with Sherlock (and Sherlock agrees: see deductions of the elevated pulse, her phone password). You could say that’s effectively bisexuality, just like you could say that’s what John’s ‘not gay’ meant, but at this point I think that’s a reach. More simply (if problematically), Sherlock is the exception for them both.

Essentially, ASiB is kind of a mess, but I disagree with the many people who think that her saying she’s ‘gay’ is really what matters here, anymore than John saying he’s ‘not gay’ really matters in the sense that we should analyze it too deeply as far as intent goes. Like I said, that relies too much on realism and projecting our own values and experiences onto the text and/or Mofftiss while not critiquing it properly. In other words, it’s not so much that I’m suggesting that good analysis should simply ignore things that seem problematic, don’t make sense or are contradictory on the surface level (like John or Irene’s ambiguous sexuality in ASiB), but ideally that should be left to critique rather than straightforward analysis. My own goal is for the text be understood without ignoring any aspect of the surface while digging deeper. I want to go deeper, just not go beyond the text.

So... what am I left with as far as the slant for my reading?

Thematically, Irene has sexual and romantic feelings for Sherlock that she disregards and/or sublimates in favor of her work, but is ultimately defeated and undermined by them. The parallels to Sherlock’s arc are obvious, in that he suffers for and is definitely undermined but not defeated by his feelings for John. These feelings remain textually unaddressed but are used by others (Magnussen, Moriarty, even Mary in S4). In the end, I think the idea is that Sherlock integrates his emotions fully in TFP and indirectly deals with the trauma behind his issues, as Ivy summarized. Essentially, Sherlock thought about romantic love in ASiB and thought about familial love in TFP (any caveats about execution aside, they are shown to be thematically related issues for him).

In some ways, John is harder to interpret even though Sherlock’s feelings are the mystery in ASiB, because John’s arc isn’t there. We have to integrate John’s behavior in Series 3 with ASiB, which is doable, but also with Series 4, which is a bit more difficult. The closest thing I can come up with is that we must believe Irene that John was a full partner to Sherlock, because love is fuzzy and definitions can blur. The ‘fuzziness’ is supported by John and Sherlock’s constant paralleling between John’s feelings for Mary and for Sherlock (in TSoT and HLV particularly, they’re often mentioned at the same time, whether positively when talking about love, or negatively when talking about being ‘abnormally attracted’ to dangerous people). This doesn’t automatically mean John felt the same about Sherlock and Mary, just like it doesn’t mean John and Irene felt the same about Sherlock... but it’s ambiguous, so it doesn’t not mean that. Regardless, John’s unhappy with Mary (and presumably anyone but Sherlock), though he continues to struggle with his image of Sherlock as perfect, untouchable and superhuman in Series 4, as Ivy described. We see the issue first addressed in ASiB, and it is implicitly resolved in TLD. Instead of a ‘couple’, they become a ‘family’ in TFP, though family can certainly be an ambiguous and/or romantic way to describe two men who take care of a child together. Regardless, it shows a commitment and implicit acknowledgment of truths that both denied about themselves in ASiB.

It is beyond the scope of my current aims in analysis to determine whether that’s ‘enough’ or whether it resolves the questions posted by A Scandal in Belgravia. The ambiguity remains, and the thematic elements are resolved implicitly, which tends to be Moffat’s way, as I said, so here we are again.

#sherlock meta #a scandal in belgravia #johnlock feels #queerlock #irene adler #bisexual john #series 4 #sherlock spoilers #series 3 #narrative #characterization #sherlock's arc

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idreamtofmanderleyagain · 7 years

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Hellraiser as a Horror Fairy Tale

So for a while now I’ve been struggling to come to a clear, concise take on what I feel the classic Hellraiser’s are actually trying to be about. There’s a lot of themes here that are easy to emotionally grasp, but it’s been a bit of a struggle to try and build a coherent logical analysis on what all of these layers are conveying when properly understood all together (let alone figuring out how to verbalize what I was seeing). This is going to be a MASSIVE post, so buckle up for a long ride.

This has been especially frustrating because so many people have already asserted so much. There’s a lot of analysis out there that feels very unfocused and vague, or focuses far too much on very specific aspects that someone has isolated, like the unsettling theme of “pain and pleasure, indivisible.” The problem of course being that these aspects isolated like this are taken out of their full context, divorcing them of the very necessary emotional/psychological depth of the narrative, resulting in a rather simplistic, confused, or vague understanding of what kind of story we’re actually being told. This is problematic because it’s very clear that these films, the first two (and even three!) in particular, are deliberately using these horror elements as metaphor and analogy in a way very similar to traditional, dark and bloody fairy tales (see the outright fairy tale themes and references in H2). These are films that seem to function with a similar kind of gothic unreality that say, Angela Carter’s works do. And in any good fairy tale, a wolf is not a wolf.

Overall, I feel like the classic Hellraiser films are narratives discussing the nature of physical versus spiritual experience, the intersections thereof, and how this applies to the complexities of human suffering, trauma, abuse, etc. First, I should clarify what I mean by “spiritual.” I don’t mean “spiritual” in a faith/religious/superstitious sense, but as in humanity; in other words our personhood, the part of us that experiences emotion, empathy, craves human connection and emotional intimacy. So in turn, when I speak of “physical vs. spiritual,” I mean “physical” as the body divorced from it’s humanity. With me so far?

The first two films cover this this topic in different ways, with the second adding layers of spiritual complexity to the initial ideas laid out by the first film (and the third film, while extremely flawed, adds a few more intriguing elements that kind of bookend the themes for me), so there’s a lot of ground to cover. But hopefully, this will clarify my take on the themes of these films and how they suddenly became some of my favorite films of all time. I was actually quite surprised I enjoyed them so much, because I kind of expected something more akin to Nightmare On Elm St., or worst case scenario the subject matter would completely repulse and offend me, but instead I found something rather sophisticated and more fitting on the shelf where I put Cappola's Dracula, Labyrinth, Legend, In The Company Of Wolves, etc. It's much more like a gothic dark fantasy series than your general 80's horror franchise. I felt like I was watching a long-lost classic that nobody told me about, and nothing has really given me the same feeling I had back when I first watched all those nostalgic cult classics. Hellraiser 2 might even be ripping Labyrinth off a tiny bit, actually. If you're only familiar with Hellraiser because of the awful sequels (movies 3 to 9), you don't really know what the originals are like at all.

So without further ado, here’s my long-winded, [TOTALLY SPOILERIFIC, YOU WERE WARNED] analysis under the cut. ;P

[Warning for discussion of difficult subject matter from the films, including implications of past child abuse, attempted sexual assault, objectification of women (intentionally depicted, not as a failing of the films), allegorical kink-themed demons, etc. In the films It’s all imo presented rather tamely/tactfully outside of the over-the-top 80′s gore, but we’re talking a bit about all of this under the cut.]

I see the first Hellraiser film as dealing specifically with the evils of selfish, consumptive physical gratification, devoid of spiritual substance/humanity. Frank opens the door to Hell through a desire to reach new pleasures, because he’d exhausted all other avenues. He’s unsatisfied with what this world can give him, so he seeks out “the pleasures of heaven or hell,” he doesn’t care which. And I feel this speaks to what is at the heart of Frank, namely nothing at all. Frank is a being that exists purely for his own physical gratification. He is a textbook sociopath; essentially empty, devoid of emotional substance, and so he seeks to fill that void in him with physical pleasure. In that endless consumption Frank dehumanizes women; they become objects who’s humanity he disregards entirely. I’ve seen people try to call Frank a somewhat “sympathetic” villain (in the literary sense, not the ~redeemable~ woobie sense) even if he’s revolting, because apparently people can relate to his (and Julia’s) dissatisfaction with the banality of life, but Frank’s dissatisfaction comes from a place of spiritual emptiness. He is disconnected from his own humanity and the humanity of others, and so he wanders endlessly in search of the next base, physical high (so uh, personally, I find it hard to relate).

This is mirrored in Julia, who abandons the “emotional” roles of wife and step-mother in order to resurrect Frank, who gave her the physical gratification she holds above all else in her life, including her own morality and the lives of others. Julia is slightly more sympathetic because her dissatisfaction seems to stem from a sense of being pushed into traditional female roles that give her no fulfillment, so there are interesting elements of women’s oppression creating a human disconnect for Julia (particularly when it comes to the ways in which men dehumanize/use her). That said, I think it’s clear from Julia’s behavior across the board that her disconnect from her humanity is exacerbated by her obsession with the physical fulfillment she finds with Frank. There is an interesting line in the film from Frank, where he describes the relationship they have as being “like love, only real,” implying that he rejects the highly spiritual, emotional concept of “love,” as though he perceives what is purely physical as the only thing of real value. For Julia, I’d imagine that this has become a truth for her, because the traditional “loving” relationships of “wife” to Larry and “mother” to Kirsty brought her no fulfillment.

The men in general of the film seek this same selfish gratification - Julia seduces men home to feed to Frank, all of them seeking to consume her. You can see this underlying consumptive menace when the first man she drags home reveals his true colors, spitting angry words under his breath at her when she starts to seem hesitant. (it is interesting that she in turn is “consuming” them; they serve a material purpose to her that has nothing to do with their personhood. She’s feeding them to Frank, who literally consumes their life-force.) Larry also reveals a consumptive side when Julia tries to distract him with sexuality; she starts to shout “no!” (at Frank, who is looming menacingly in the shadows ready to strike at Larry), and it not only takes him way too many “no’s” to actually stop kissing her, he gets indignant at Julia’s “hot and cold” behavior, as if he was owed her body and denied. There’s little regard for her needs; he does not ask if something had hurt her, if she was okay, he only says with indignation that “he just doesn’t understand her,” rather than make any attempts at understanding.

H2′s Dr. Channard is another case of a consumptive soul, single-mindedly obsessed with his pursuits. However, unlike Frank, Channard’s obsessions are, for the most part, non-sexual. Channard has a sadistic, clinical fascination with the mind, endlessly consumed with a need for knowledge and discovery. But while Channard’s obsessions are focused in a mental space, it could be said that this too is a soullessly physical pursuit; he views the mind as an object to viciously plunder, and so human beings become objects for his purposes. So, like Frank, he is a character utterly incapable of empathy, humanity. The sexualized Male Gaze is unnecessary for dehumanization.

Despite all this objectification and abuse, despite the heavy underlying sexuality in these two films, they both seriously lack any Male Gaze whatsoever. In fact, all images of sexuality are pretty much entirely given to us from the perspective of women. There is a single exception of Male Gaze bullshit in H2, where there's a woman hanging topless for no justifiable reason in Julia's murder room, though you could actually blink at the right moment and miss it entirely (and we don't see a man or monster perpetrate violence against her, it's just Julia who promptly eats her). While Clive Barker directed the first film (and is a gay man), the second film was directed by Tony Randall (who is I believe a straight man), and it's things like that one little topless moment and the mild focus on Channard's enchantment with Julia that makes H2 lean slightly further away from H1's Male Gaze-less track record. That aside, Hellraiser 1 and 2 are rather unique for their time period in this way, because it's such a hard-hitting focus on women's experience of sexuality, or how women experience male sexuality in particular, which in Hellraiser is almost always predatory, un-self-aware, or in Steve and Kyle's romantic designs on Kirsty, a little bit too self-focused and limp. This is starkly contrasted with Hellraiser 3 and pretty much all Hellraiser films after it (particularly the constant callous objectification and violence perpetrated against women in Revelations, which surprise surprise, is the most recent film. Thank's modern cinema. Don't fucking remake Hellraiser you sociopaths). Hellraiser 3 was the first film to feature Pinhead committing violence agains a woman (that fact right there? that's fucking amazing for an 80's horror franchise. Especially one featuring these themes.), who in the moment is scantily clad and just had somewhat graphic sex with J.P., and the visceral and negative reaction I had to this dumb, cringey scene is very different than any of the reactions I had to the gore of the first two films. It's nothing too hard to handle (he rips her skin off with a hook in a bad effect and then the evil pillar eats her, so it's very gory but nothing shocking), but I mention it because the first two films really stand out as horror films that managed to deal with the abuse and objectification of women as a subject without actually objectifying them or showing us gratuitous, fetishistic shock-value surrounding that abuse, the way so many contemporary horror, thriller, and crime-procedural media does.

Beyond Frank and Julia, the other half of this story deals with Kirsty and the Cenobites. First of all, Kirsty is someone directly harmed by the consumptive, selfish gratification of both Frank and Julia - with Frank, there are fairly blatant implications of child abuse that may have occurred years prior (and if not, most certainly he intends on abusing her now). As for Julia, Kirsty likely wanted a mother figure after the death of her biological mother, and she was denied this emotional connection from Julia. Later, Julia becomes a direct agent facilitating Frank’s attempt at abusing Kirsty. Julia doesn’t seem to care who is harmed in the wake of Frank’s consumption, as long as she can still receive gratification.

Kirsty is the major character who breaks this mold of reckless obsession with the physical. All of Kirsty’s dilemmas are focused in a spiritual, human place. She lost her mother years prior and is still struggling with her grief. Her relationship with Julia is strained, so any hope of a mother-daughter connection after that loss has been entirely torn asunder for her. She loves her father dearly, but she’s just gained her independence and is dealing with worry over her father. Her father wants her to play mediator in his strained relationship with Julia, who she dislikes. She’s starting out a new relationship with Steve, possibly her first adult relationship ever. She’s dealing with either a secret abuse trauma and/or traumatized over Frank’s re-appearance and physical assault of her. Where Frank and Julia are obsessively absorbed in their need for physical gratification, Kirsty deals with many layers of spiritual/emotional realities, positive and negative.

The Cenobites, as we know them in the first film, are cosmic beings that exist in extreme, grotesque excess of sensory experience, far beyond any human comprehension of “pleasure.” All they truly understand is pain. Their function is to reap the souls who intentionally open Hell’s door and enact literal eternal torture; Hell consumes souls like meat to rend and tear (an interesting juxtaposition of flesh and spirit that I’ll discuss more when I get into H2). These creatures seem almost devoid of anything recognizably human in terms of emotionality (in the first film anyway), they are Borg-like. But again, a wolf is not a wolf. These beings, and Hell itself, are supernatural allegories for the human character’s dilemmas. In this film, they are the looming threat of eternal consumption devoid of humanity, given face. The oblivion on the other side of the threshold. You invoke their presence, they come at your call.

There’s more to say about how all this plays out in the first film, particularly when it comes to how Kirsty is the second person (after Frank) to summon the Cenobites and how she uses them against her abuser, but first I want to bring up aspects that are more prominent in the second film to pull this whole picture together (the films really are a “Part 1 and Part 2,” to me).

The second film (my favorite, if you couldn’t tell) focuses much more heavily on spiritual themes. It’s set almost entirely in either a mental hospital or Hell, respectively. So immediately, we’re given two pictures, one of a place of spiritual/emotional healing, and one of eternal spiritual and physical torment, the lines between the two blurring and distorting as we get further into the story. This is important because this film seems to focus much more on the experience of psychological/emotional trauma.

“The mind is a labyrinth,” Channard says, as he artfully performs a grotesque procedure on the brain of a patient. And so too is this reflected in H2′s depiction of Hell as an endless cthonic Labyrinth, where lost souls experience hallucinatory reflections of their traumas and vices, subjected to psychological and physical punishments eternally under the watchful eye of Leviathan, the “god of flesh, hunger, and desire.”

Leviathan as an entity is a rather interesting and ambiguous being. Certainly, it is a “god” of baseness and physicality, but it’s realm is made of psychological torment, perhaps more so than it is a place of physical torture. Whether you are a “good” or “bad” person is utterly irrelevant; if you are in Hell, your soul gets reflected back to you, often with a heavy focus on traumas of your past. For Kirsty this manifests in her childhood home and images of her mother, which begin bleed and transform into an image of Julia - and perhaps it manifests in Frank’s presence. Although according to Frank, Kirsty has stumbled across “his” little corner of hell which manifests “his” punishments, the first time I watched the film (before he explained where they were) I initially was convinced that behind this second door was another reflection of Kirsty, that it was another trial for her to face. It looked to be the exact same door as her own, and well, the writhing ghostly women under sheets seemed to be an image of sexual repression or fear of sexuality (the brief glimpse of the woman who Kirsty pulls the sheet off of has her hair, as well). Is this piece of hell reflecting Frank’s punishments, or Kirsty’s fears, trauma, possible repression, etc? Or is it reflecting both simultaneously? It’s still rather ambiguous to me, actually. But I digress.

The point is that there is this heavier focus on trauma in H2, where H1 was much more tightly focused on the folly of reckless, single-minded physicality without human connection. This focus on trauma adds a whole new layer of dimension to the narrative because “pain” itself is something much more complex, here. Here, it is revealed that the Cenobites were once humans, and that humanization of these creatures that were once presented to us as allegory and pure cosmic evil is very interesting. Rather than present the Cenobites as the ultimate culmination of personalities like Frank when consumed by Hell, it’s presented as if these Cenobites were perhaps relatively innocent people. Why then, do some people become Cenobites, while others stay as tormented souls? To me, the answer is still unclear. I'm not sure there actually is an answer, beyond the whims of Leviathan. (Channard is the obviously monstrous person who was changed, but he seemed to me to have been chosen as a tool in the moment and then discarded. ) That said, “suffering” itself is more than just the experience of physical pain; the psychological nature of hell implies that this is also internal suffering, and the Cenobites aren’t just entities there to enact physical torture. They are beings that exist in this eternal, perpetual suffering of all kinds, who speak of that experience as something sublime.

The Cenobites spend the majority of their time in both films popping up periodically to speak to Kirsty, from ominous threats of eternal torture, to invitation of joining them, to mocking her with insinuations that some part of her wants their world. For Kirsty, they are demons that reflect back to her all those fears and repressions, all her internal confusion and torment, which is what they spend most of their time doing in the first two films. In Hellraiser 3, there's more of this element of Cenobites as psychological reflections: Pinhead acts as a tempter, using the psyches of the humans he encounters to ensnare souls, which is why with J.P. he's literally consuming women, and for Terri, he switches gears to be the voice of female vengeance.

Earlier in the film, we are given multiple references to fairy tales, usually as used by older adults to mock and belittle Kirsty. The detective mocks her for making up fairy tales about “demons,” and Julia mocks her by comparing Kirsty to Snow White and herself to the Wicked Stepmother/Evil Queen. These side characters demoralize Kirsty in her idealistic efforts to rescue her father from Hell and fight back against forces much larger than herself that a more cynical person could scarcely imagine overcoming. Later, quite similarly to the west wing sequence in Beauty and the Beast (I think coincidentally so, Disney’s BATB came out a few years afterwards), Kirsty explores a dangerous place (Channard’s home) and finds an old, faded picture of a man who she recognizes as the monster she has previously encountered. Ultimately, Kirsty saves herself and another girl through an act almost unbelievably idealistic and naive, especially for such a dark story. She finds a way to transform a monster back into a human being. This was a victory won not with physical violence, but through humanity; a fairy-tale-esque triumph that flew in the face of those who tried to demoralize or deny Kirsty’s reality. Furthermore, this victory is not about the tragedy of Pinhead, but the triumph of humanity and empathy overcoming darkness.

There are a few expressions of human connection and empathy in these two films, like the care between Kirsty and her father, or the attraction between Kirsty and Steve, Kyle’s attraction and care for Kirsty, or Tiffany holding Kirsty as she cries over her father, But for me there was never quite a moment as striking and emotionally raw than when Kirsty and Spencer are looking at each other across the darkness once his human face is revealed. It feels like very artful, deliberate visual contrast to the circumstances and surroundings. But I digress.

So to clarify this picture: Kirsty is faced with monsters personifying everything that represented her trauma and fears, etc. They represented all-consuming physicality without humanity, they represented the things in herself she may have tried to suppress (sexuality, trauma, etc.). Monsters that wanted her to be as consumed by their world as they were. She then utilizes her demons to destroy her abuser, and later recognizes the humanity in her demons and transforms them, frees them from their spiritual and physical eternal torment, and in turn is saved from the same fate, herself.

The third film (which I enjoy despite the fact that it is admittedly a raging trash fire) features a cast of characters all dealing with similar situations. J.P. is our endlessly consumptive user, and Joey and Terri are two women dealing with spiritual trauma. Joey through the loss of her father, and Terri through a broken home life and later abuse at the hands of J.P. The reason why I include the third film in this is because of those additional elements and the insight it gives into Pinhead’s human self, Captain Spencer, and how he perfectly bookends the narrative. Spencer is another person who once opened the box, but it was never clear why he did so in the second film. In the third film, he explains that he was trying to escape spiritual suffering (war trauma/PTSD) through physical means ("forbidden pleasures,” aka kink). At some point he came across the box and opened it. While there are plenty of monstrous men in all three Hellraiser films, and Pinhead himself is a literal monster bent on taking any soul who opens the box with some form of desire in their hearts, my take away from H3 was not that Spencer himself was ever an abuser like Frank or J.P. (and indeed his behavior when lucidly himself in H2 and 3 is decidedly in immediate defense of women he cares about, up to and including two counts of total self-sacrifice), but that Spencer was perhaps pushing his explorations into unsafe realms of self-harming. He was punishing himself, and was thus made into a cosmic punisher of others by Leviathan. So, unlike Frank or Channard or J.P., people who are susceptible to the box/Hell’s temptations because of their need to endlessly consume, Spencer was susceptible because he was so effected by spiritual suffering that he turned towards unhealthy physical means of escape. In my mind, there is something in this idea of self-punishment/self-blame that is also potentially true of, say, Kirsty. How else would she be genuinely susceptible to the box (beyond basic desire having opened it initially), if not that she was teetering on a similar edge, herself? (However, I think perhaps her darkness also veers into a streak of sadistic vengefulness.)

This actually makes the extended cut of the H6 Pinhead/Kirsty reuinion scene a lot more tragic and distressing for me, because underneath all the bullshit, there’s this subtext of Kirsty still running from her Hell and yet still encountering consumptive, abusive men and being pushed off the deep end into untempered vengefulness and violence. And Spencer, who once was freed by her and in turn sacrificed himself to free her from Hell, trapped once more in his monsterous form and obsessing instead over dragging Kirsty down with him to be as endlessly consumed by her pain as he is within his own. No thanks on that grimdark noise, H6. ...but fucking wow, tho. If you've seen Hellseeker but have never seen the extended cut of this scene, I'm linking it Right Here. Warning for...just...ugh. Badly written infuriating creepy grimdark bullshit that genuinely sounds like a bad fanfiction writer wrote it. But at least you have that one moment right at the end where you can hear Spencer's voice come through to help her get free.

In conclusion, I think Hellraiser is a story about, well, Hell. But Hell not as nebulous place where the really bad people go, but Hell as an allegory for eternal spiritual suffering, that absolutely anyone can reach and be effected by once a gateway is opened for them. Particularly so when it comes to reckless physical indulgence, or consumption, or unsafe vice overtaking one’s humanity to others, or towards one’s self. So ultimately, the “moral of the story,” if you’d like to call it that, is that in order to protect one’s self from being consumed by spiritual suffering, one must cherish and cultivate their own humanity, and in the case of people who have been traumatized and/or victimized, one must fight back against the consuming force of that spiritual suffering through confronting the hell that exists within. Sometimes that doesn’t mean blasting the darkness away and ignoring it’s existence, it means reminding the darkness that it is only human.

[Regarding the content of the films, feel free to message me if you decide to watch them but you feel you need a total break-down of what to prepare for.]

#Hellraiser #This is my meta post for this weekend #some of you are not as keen on DW or are on it less often I know #so here you go my dudes #if you see me around too often call me out on it #Horror #Meta

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

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I'm amused by you and your best friend it seems like you are just listing to her thoughts thats soo.. can't relate xD. I would've argued to the moon and back about the mary and Cas i even continue arguing if someone says "lets agree to disagree" cause i dont agree with that sentiments lmfaoo yes I'm the life at parties

Eh, I know my engagement in the show is waaay OTT compared to others who watch it around me, and I can be off- puttingly into it that because no one else has that involvement, getting me too excited to talk just means getting slammed with a verbal wall of text they can’t even follow because there’s no context

(also slightly unrelated I HATE people reccing me stuff and enthusing about it at me, and I just do not get people who WANT to watch something after someone talks their ear off about why they should? I need very specific recommendations or I just crumple up in social anxiety and refuse to watch because what if it sucks/I don’t get engaged/I do but I like the wrong things etc etc :P I need a sort of gently gently approach and time to form opinions about why I should watch it alone, OR a low-stress environment where I think the people I’m watching with have no investment in the show/film/whatever… If I met me and this hypothetical POV me had never watched Supernatural, I would HATE me so much and not watch it for like a year out of spite until something more neutral reminded me to give it a go)

Anyway as you can tell I have Opinions about this show (*collective sound of my followers gasping*) so I don’t wanna get into discussions that go as deep as fandom does with people who have no frame of reference. If I start explaining all the levels of what Dabb said and story structure and underlying subtext and how Mary has been written so far and what her and Cas’s emotional arcs are and the theme of family… At this point I don’t have answers which are the gentle run up?

Also in person I am very tired, permanently migraine-y and can’t talk out loud when it comes to recalling information without kneading my forehead until my brain gives up the answers so even something I know a lot about is really hard for me to communicate so once I get past the surface level snark and sort of gossip-level social interaction that doesn’t need any brainpower, I really would struggle to try and explain my side coherently and without causing myself pain and fatigue, so it’s really not worth it when I can just make a few jokes and then put another TV show on :P

#Asks #if you haven't guessed now I channel all my pent up talking to people into writing and fandom now >.>

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evilelitest2 · 7 years

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100 Days of Trump: 1/100, Assassins, the Mind of the Alt Right

“Everybody’s got the Right to be Happy, don’t be mad, life’s not as bad a it seems. If you keep your goal in sight, you can climb to any height. Everybody’s Got a Right to their Dreams”

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So again, this is my response to my nation’s madness, to try to understand the insanity and explain WTF just happened, how did something like this ever come to pass? So I am going to recommend 100 things that can help people understand what is going and how to fight it. First and more importantly, the single most important thing to understand Trump, is the Musical Assassins by Stephen Songheim

You can listen to the soundtrack here The music is good, with a lot to recommend but I want to talk about the psychology of madness that is its core tenant.

The play is about a strange fantasy realm where all of the presidential assassins live together, from John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald, they hang out, justify, and rationalize their actions. The play is about the psychology of people who take violence, and trying to understand the people who think that killing the president will solve their problems. And very quickly it becomes apparent that to understand assassins, you need to understand American culture as a whole. That Giuseppe Zangara’s belief that killing President Roosevelt would cure his stomach illness or Samuel Byck who tried to hit Nixon with a plane in a Santa costume isn’t just the demented psychosis of demented madmen, but is part of American culture as a whole. The play notes that Presidential assassins aren’t political activists or agents of rival factions, but instead individual nutters who take it upon them selves to kill the president. These universally white and overwhelmingly male figures mostly don’t have a coherent political ideology or frame of principles, but instead more of a vague emotional bag of insecurities and demented psychosis writ large. The musical is set in a nightmarish Carnival, where the assassins desperately compete for “The Prize” of the American dream, and national renown serves as the rationalization for violence.

Sound familiar? Well its the theme of the Trump Campaign, here this is basically their theme song

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All of the assassins (except Booth who plays the role of lucifer in the tale) are in various degrees losers, the social maladjusted, the failed dreamers, left over forgotten people, but critically they all buy into the idea of the American Dream. Even as they consistently fail to do anything productive with their own lives, they idealize the American dream worshiping the notion that anybody can one day become President of the United States. These are people born with privilege, but for various reasons are unable to reep the full benefits of that privilege, and feeling betrayed they lash out. Conspiracy theorists, radicals, and racists, at their heart these people are pathetically lonely, and reminds you of nothing so much as MRAs or the Alt Right. I mean isn’t this just the Manosphere in a nutshell?

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People who fetishist the idea of guns, capitalistic progress, and above all machismo, but at their heart they are failures at all that they strive for, and whose ranting underlies a sense of insecurity and loss. These people aren’t intellectuals, instead they find the resents of an ideology and cling to it as driftwood, they make a Cargo Cult out of American values and using it as a security blanket for their own feeling of inadequacy. And in this bubble of loneliness, entitlement, narcissism and above all shame, which quickly turns to resentment. And over time, that turns to violence, and they become so myopic they no longer even realize that their actions hurt other people, that such ideas have rhetoric. Above all, these people truly believe themselves to be the underdogs, that they are the persecuted fighting against an America that owes them a prize. Where the American dream is unbridled optimism, they are what happens when you combine it with a kitch sort of nihilism which as inspired people from the Columbine Shooters to Dylan Roof. Trump is the what happens when people understand the problems with the system enough to become disillusions but lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to comprehend it properly

listen to this bit of a man quite articulately understanding the problems with the two party system and then come to the exact wrong conclusions of how to respond to it

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There is a lot to like in the Musical in how it talks about the Two Party System, Nice Guy Syndrome, Gun Culture and much more, but I just want to leave on this exchange. The Assassins plead with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK and he says “People will hate me” and Booth says “Yes they will hate you, they will hate you with a passion that is unimaginable. Imagine it, people will have strong feelings about you, people will care about Lee Harvey Oswald” The musical isn’t about endorsing them, in fact it is a very strong condemnation of that mindset, but why I recommend it, is because it is through this that you can understand the type of mindset that votes for Trump. But it is more than just the Right, because some of the Assassins are actually more leftist, its about misdirected rage and frustration being channeled into unhealthy channels by those who have internally given up on everything except the American dream, if you want a primer on how not to respond to a dying political system, this is it.

Which brings up the other reason why this musical is important, cause with the least popular president in history now in power, a lot of people are talking about killing him, and I just want to make this clear, that is not how you respond to a broken political system. All that will do is create a left wing form of what we see in assassins, a naive optimism mixed with absolute disillusionment, the same mentality of bitterness and rage that lashes out in destructive violence and it doesn’t work. It just weakens the political system and buys into their structure, the right’s narrative, and harms the country as a collective whole. The left is going through some hard times now, there is a way to fight power in the US rather than feeding into the toxic narrative of personal vengeance somehow solving complicated problems. It didn’t for help Leon Czolgosz, it certainly isn’t going to help us now

For really, what better sums up the Election of Donald Trump than this?

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#100 Days of Trump #Assassins (musical)#stephen songheim #Alt Right #dylann roof #john wilkes booth #lee harvey oswald #john hinckley jr.#giuseppe zangara #Emma Goldman #leon czolgosz #Donald Trump

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