Hex Life: Not Entirely Enchanted

The subgenre of “Witch Horror" is one of Speculative Fiction’s most intriguing categories.

Academic critics and professional reviewers alike have praised “Witch Lit” as uniquely, and admirably, “feminist.” Horror and Fantasy stories within the category are rich with both iconic stereotypes inherited from medieval Europe and more modern derivations of female resistance strengthened by “magic.” Of course, these positive readings can often feel “forced,” and the wisest of readers must accept that ambiguities will always be a part of the subgenre as far as feminist theories or concepts of feminine empowerment are concerned.

When authors Christopher Golden and Rachel Autumn Deering combined their talents as editors of the Hex Life anthology, they came away with a wicked brew of 18 short stories that run the gamut of depictions of the iconic witch — from the Monstrous Female woodlands witch to the Wise Woman healer and guardian of the city, with pretty much every combination in between. (To celebrate the 2020 release of their book, the editors offered the fabulous Ginger Nuts of Horror review site a brief essay on popular misconceptions about fictional witches.)

At the time of the book’s release, a Publishers Weekly review said of the 18 tales in Hex Life, “Nothing here really wows.” Snappish little put-downs like that are no longer popular in this online age of trolls, trigger warnings, and pile-ons. And so the Publishers Weekly reviewer then tries to soften the blow by saying that “fans” of the subgenre will find the anthology “a pleasant diversion.”

Set aside the truth that calling the book “a pleasant diversion” is itself a negative comment, and focus on that first stab: “Nothing here really wows.” This is where the Publishers Weekly quick-bite review gets the book all wrong, because there certainly are stories in Hex Life that can “wow” a reader.

Unfortunately, those stories are not the focus of this Z-Street Shuffle review. For that, you’ll have to look at the Hu Reads Horror blogsite, where I hone in on five stories in the collection that really do “wow” me. Of course, what turns me on about those stories is their depiction of the witch as a force of nature, a keeper of an ancient cosmology that has been lost to most of us within the industrialized modern societies worldwide. These are stories of female power, and they range from the “positive” portrayal to the “negative” portrayal of witches.

What is provided here is a rapidly written “fan” nod to the other 13 stories in Hex Life, the ones that didn’t make the cut for a longer and more focused rave only because they do not match the criteria of imagining the witch as a cosmic power. (Though admittedly a couple of them do fall short of even being “a pleasant diversion,” but I don’t want some disgruntled publisher’s assistant, outraged podcaster, or social media figure to go ballistic.)

There is gold in this anthology’s “13 others,” but if there’s anything I’ve learned from television it is that to get the shiny nugget you have to dig through lusterless soil. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because for this book the “soil” is fertile, ready to nourish a mind that needs a bit of unchallenging entertainment, maybe a fun bedtime read before sleep overcomes the reader.

Among the most “successful” of these entertaining shorts are those that reach into pulp fiction territory with one hand while keeping a firm grip on the narrative landscape of creative, compelling, even surprising storytelling.

Innovativeness is a key quality here.

Among the best of these is Alma Katsu’s “Gold Among the Black,” which plays with a medieval setting and mixes in some werewolf lore.  Like other contributions to the anthology, Katsu’s story offers the witch as a shape-shifter, a creature of the wilds, and a determined commitment to self-survival.

“Toil & Trouble” by Sherrilyn and Madaug Kenyon similarly sets itself in the past, assumedly sometime in the 17^th Century when Europe and England threw themselves with a fury into persecuting women accused of practicing witchcraft. “Toil & Trouble” seems to draw inspiration from Shakespeare’s “three sisters,” with the focus twisting not to the witches but to their indentured servant girl who harbors a secret hatred for “the three Stygian bitches and their sing-songy lies” (283). Somehow, “Toil & Trouble” ends up being a devilishly tricky morality tale.

Rachel Autumn Deering provides yet another nod to Shakespeare’s trio of witches with her story “Where Relics Go to Dream and Die.” Deering’s story includes many of the common tropes: the cauldron, child sacrifice, even the succubus. It is a tale of final wish fulfillment — the good death — and romantic sacrifice. The finest twist in the story is a witch being trapped as a candle, “an act of spite” that left her alive and lonely/longing for as long as the candle remained intact, unconsumed by flame. This suspension of death would only be ended by flame.

Amber Benson quite successfully plays with the police procedural “confessional” format with her story “This Skin.” It is entirely chilling, albeit with a possibly disappointing and somehow overdone twist at the denouement.  

Kelley Armstrong’s “Black Magic Momma” likewise plays with the crime subgenre, her witch being something of a private detective searching for lost grimoires that she then sells to the highest bidder. The story feels like it belongs within the world of Harry Potter, which means it is fast-paced and fun. Witch candy, anyone?

Equally fun and flat is Rachel Caine’s “Home,” a story that tosses the undead into the mix and cooks up as something resembling a Charlaine Harris’ vampire novel.

Kristin Dearborn seems to be drawing blood from the same vein with her story “The Dancer,” yet another “nothing new under the sun” narrative about a psychic investigator looking into the case of an adolescent with a terrifying telekinetic power.

“The Memories of Trees” is admirable for author Mary SanGiovanni’s attempt at mixing Folk Horror, Science Fiction, and Dystopian Narrative together.

Hillary Monahan’s “Bless Your Heart” is among the finest in the collection insofar as it makes use of events that many readers may be familiar with in the real stories of their lives: bullying, single parenthood, class-based inequality, and educational systems that sometimes fail their students in the most regrettable ways. Monahan’s contribution is heartbreaking in its depiction of a smart, gentle child being bullied to the point of self-hatred. Teasing the image of a housewife learning to cook from a Julia Child cookbook, “Bless Your Heart” portrays witchcraft as a means toward “revenge” and the reclamation of justice for the powerless who have been brutalized by the powerful.

Two of the stories in the book build directly from the pre-Civil Rights period of segregation in the Deep South. Here is Chesya Burke’s “Haint Me Too” and Tanarive Due’s “Last Stop on Route Nine.” Of these, Burke’s narrative is the strongest in its presentation of the supernatural being used as a tool for resistance to the violence of lynching.

Yet another historical period of madness is called forth by Helen Marshall for her story “The Nekrolog.” Marshall backgrounds her story in the oft-overlooked time of ethnic violence and genocide that exploded into warfare in the Balkans following the dismantling of the Soviet Union. This is a praiseworthy literary work, offering a narrative that shifts with slyness between two expanding plots. It is heartrending to see a family separated by deceptive state agencies, the kind of story that has global echoes in the actual histories of indigenous, colonized peoples around the world. “The Nekrolog” eventually directs its energies into a story of government-sponsored Psi-Op training, leading to one of the collection’s best images of young women quietly turning tables on their captors and using what they learn against their oppressors. Marshall’s is a story of resistance that hits its target, while other stories of a similar vein merely try to aim.

The collection ends with Theodora Goss’ “How to Become a Witch Queen,” a creative retelling of the Snow White fable but with a pinch of political and military strategy. Like Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, this tale is most appealing for making the familiar less so while adding a dose of feminist resistance to the hard power of state authority.

These are the stories that somehow fail to weave a complete enchantment. What the editors have pulled together is impressive for its diversity, and taken as a whole the collection is an entertaining book that serves well as a bedtime read. That’s not a very enthusiastic compliment, but neither is it a put-down.

Readers who love Horror will probably be disappointed by Hex Life.

Fans of an entertaining reading experience who don’t demand much of their TBR pile will probably find the anthology more to their liking, and like me they’ll breeze through it and feel no qualms about donating it to the secondhand bookstore.

Graphics: 
The Weird Sisters, 1782, by Johann Heinrich Fuseli.
John Henry & the Witch Woman, 1935, by Fred Becker.

Daryl Dixon in France ... Très Bien

As someone who is always late to the party, I only recently completed my watch of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, the fifth spin-off of the franchise. Composed of only six episodes, the show dropped for audiences in September-October 2023, and received generally strong reviews from critics and audiences alike. My own response is similarly positive, and for some of the same reasons.

At the top of my list is the removal of the very American title character (played by Norman Reedus) into a French setting, which begins with Dixon waking to find himself washed ashore on a beach where he is almost immediately confronted by a “burner,” a new type of super-strong and super-speedy zombie with acidic body fluids that burn whoever they touch. Of course, Daryl is touched but he prevails and begins his journey inland, toward Paris and onward to Normandy beach where he ends the six-episode first season torn between catching his scheduled ride across the Atlantic back home, or saving a child who seems to be in danger of being swarmed by zombies.

Between the two beaches Daryl is caught up in the contest for power that is taking place between two groups: the bad guys being the fascist-identified Pouvoir des Vivants (Power of the Living) paramilitary organization headed by Madame Genet (played by Anne Charrier) and her team of mad scientists, and the good guys being the “resistance” guerrilla group Union de L'Espoir (Union of Hope) and brave Catholic clergy who inspire them.

Daryl is dragged into the fray by Isabelle (played by Clémence Poésy), a nun who persuades Daryl to protect a teenage boy named Laurent (played by Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) whose odd ability to psychically control the new superzombies endows him with a messianic aura. The boy is a John Connor-like figure whose youthfulness makes him vulnerable... for now.

A majority of the online reviewers pointed out that the cinematography was possibly the strongest element in this spinoff, and I am pretty much in agreement with them. The locations were obviously “exotic” when considered in contrast to the backwoods persona of Daryl Dixon and the North American forested settings that much of the original series was filmed in. Suddenly the incredibly stereotyped American icon (representative of the ironic knowledge that comes not from formal education but from the school of hard knocks—and Daryl has gotten a lot of knocks) is set within a background that represents a more ancient European cultural history. The contrast is beautiful.

Given that I viewed the series on a low-quality streaming service from China which offered a sometimes hazy screen, a mismatch between image and audio, and the constant interruption of advertising banners, it says a lot that the visual beauty of the Parisian and French countryside settings could still pop through the haze.

But like the zombies that are ever present in the background of all Walking Dead narratives, so too we could see behind the magnificence of French art and architecture the shambling undead European history of violence in both physical and philosophical forms.  

Daryl has been plucked from his homeland and plunked down in the midst of this ancient empire of clashing ideals, kidnapped as fresh blood for the experiments being carried out by the mad scientists of the fascist Pouvoir des Vivants organization that is trying to create a new army of superzombies. (There’s nothing new here for fans of the Nazi zombie subgenre. Move along, now.) Of course, the indomitable Daryl Dixon breaks the chains that bound him, becoming both the white whale destroyer and the sole survivor of the shitwreck, er, shipwreck.

While he’s in France, however, Daryl has a chance to root his personal history into the soil of the larger European history. His grandfather had volunteered to fight in the Second World War, and the elder Dixon’s grave is part of the veterans’ memorial that Daryl will visit when he finally arrives at Normandy. This is a noticeable and important theme, the grandson inheriting the pain that is born of the ancestor’s choices. Apparently the Dixon kin passed along a resentment of the grandfather’s decision to volunteer in a war they did not see as their own. Similarly, Daryl does not see himself as belonging to the ongoing struggle in France between the fascists and the liberal humanists, both groups seeing themselves as inheritors of a noble past.

The art that features so beautifully in this show also highlights the schism between the two ideologies. Madame Genet reveals that in the “Before” she was a night watchman in the Louvre — “just me and the art: thousands of eyes followed me around.” Those eyes of history have transferred to her a grandiose vision of a future in which the individual is less important than the whole, the nation. Hers is a prototypical form of fascism born from the myths and legends of supernatural inheritances. The fall of the world to a zombie plague is merely another opportunity to re-invigorate the fascist idea of a nationalist utopia. Inspired by the eyes of the historical artwork figures, Genet takes upon herself the goal of resurrecting the ancient warrior history of fiefdoms and kings. And like so many villains, she is given some of the best lines: “We are the future for the future; we do the hard things.”

The supernatural is also a part of the resistance movement that is built upon the leftover representatives of the Catholic Church and their belief that the life of every human is sacred in the eyes of God. Theirs is a simple goal of re-establishing the political structures that guaranteed the ability of every person within the society to choose to do good for everyone, not to be forced into obedience. They carry on the hope that humans will make the right choices because the spark of divinity, of love, rests within the human spirit.

Surrounded by the latter group, Daryl cannot help but be pushed into conversations about serious ideas. While he starts off arguing that “this isn’t my fight,” he eventually displays an awareness that he is following in the footsteps of his grandfather who sacrificed himself as a player in yet another clash of ideologies, the ending of which would impact human societies around the world. Daryl’s grandfather understood that and volunteered to fight fascism. Daryl would eventually come to the same choice, actively supporting the Union de L'Espoir movement by protecting the teenaged messiah figure.

Placing an adolescent at the center of the plot helps to highlight Daryl’s own mixed feelings and gradual shift in ideological commitment. Daryl carries within himself the pain that came of an abusive father whose brokenness can be traced directly to the grandfather’s decision to leave his family and serve a larger goal. Now Daryl can confront his grandfather and forgive him. The suggestion, of course, is that Daryl’s presence upon the European continent is a continuation of a Divine intervention, of God placing him into as a chosen warrior within a larger fight between ideologies.

Whether Daryl follows his grandfather’s footsteps and continues to battle the spread of fascism within the homeland heart of Western culture, or steps onto the boat that will take him back home is something we will only find out if and when there is a second season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.

Closing Note

Daryl Dixon is both the highest critic and fan-rated show in the entire Walking Dead series, which is made up of six shows of varying lengths. Here they are in order:

The Walking Dead (11 seasons) – 79% critic score, 78% audience score

Fear the Walking Dead (8 seasons) – 73% critic score, 59% audience score

The Walking Dead: World Beyond (2 seasons) – 46% critic score, 35% audience score

Tales of the Walking Dead (1 season) – 74% critic score, 57% audience score

The Walking Dead: Dead City (1 season, renewed for 2) – 81% critic score, 79% audience score

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (1 season, renewed for 2) – 90% critic score, 89% audience score.

Source: Paul Tassie, reviewer at Forbes Magazine.

Shark Snark

The puns that are dropping online to accompany the social media splash caused by the new Netflix horror film “Under Paris” are clever, and maybe one of the best things about the amateur review space that is YouTube, Facebook, and other assorted sites of rapid-fire response.

My favorites for this action film about man-eating sharks snacking on marathon swimmers in the Seine River include:

“This film is in-Seine,” “Talk about the Chomps-Élysées!” and “Le Fins.” Mind you, the film has only just dropped, so we have more time to chum the waters with bloody bad puns.

None of this low-hanging fruit in any way serves as bait for you if you are hoping to hook a review that will help you decide whether or not to watch this French-language shark film.

Having said that, “Under Paris” seems to have made something of a splash with an awful lot of social media users. It might just be that there is so little to talk about in the genre. And of course, now that Summertime is almost upon us, it is open season for shark snark cinema.

Sadly, I'm going to contribute nothing to the discussion except to say the opening (pre-titles) scene is visually effective. This is the first shark attack, and it takes place beneath the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” where ocean-dumped plastic trash goes to die. Or never die.

I couldn't conceive of a more unappealing setting for the inevitable slaughter that you know is going to happen when a freakishly large shark shows up for the feeding frenzy that follows the death of a baby whale — with its mouth full of plastics — that has been caught in a net beneath all the human trash.

The most horrific-yet-stunning moment of this opening scene is when one of the super-shark’s victims rises gasping from the water, a stark blue sky highlighting the reflective glow of all that unrecycled trash.

Unfortunately, that's also the film's high point as a work of horror. What follows is plenty of clichéd tropes, including the foolish activist, the stubborn police team, and the arrogant but incredibly deaf politician who puts personal pride before public safety.

The denouement is also pretty entertaining, but mostly because it goes in a direction that is pretty unexpected. Unfortunately, it is also low-hanging fruit insofar as it panders to the zeitgeist, calling forth a final image that viewers will automatically associate with our fears about our ongoing environmental meltdown.

Indeed, today’s news broadcasts are reminding us of that all the official governmental attempts at reducing the levels of carbon dioxide being spewed into our atmosphere are failing miserably. The tons of earth-warming carbon dioxide in our planetary atmosphere is at all new highs. The United States is already experiencing extreme temperatures, and technically the astronomical start of summer is still over two weeks away.

India is having it much worse, with temperatures in parts of Delhi reaching almost 53 Degrees Celsius (that’s an astonishing 127 Degrees Fahrenheit) a few days ago. (CNN)

Worldwide we can all expect extreme storms as typhoons, hurricanes, and cyclones take on new orders of violence. And have we all already forgotten the annual forest fires that have become almost everyday news events? Tragically there are fires happening in continents worldwide that we in the “industrialized” (I hate to say “developed”) world are not likely to hear about given the parochial tendencies of our news outlets and our societies.

Given this real-world unfolding of crisis, it feels a little exploitative of this newest shark flick to cull from our (unspoken) terrors with a  image of Paris flooded and finned just so viewers can leave a “thumbs up” at the Netflix app when the credits start to roll. Even so, it’s a moment that is awash with surprise, and that alone makes it worth waiting for.

Articles Referenced

"There is More Carbon Dioxide than Ever in the Atmosphere." NPR News. 7 June 2024.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/06/nx-s1-4992290/carbon-dioxide-record-high-atmosphere

“India’s Scorching Heat and Lack of Water Leave Delhi’s Poor to Suffer Worst of Climate Crisis.” By Esha Mitra. CNN Website. Online.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/01/india/india-scorching-heat-climate-crisis-intl-hnk/index.html

Ninth House and the Place of Magic

I've just posted a review of Leigh Bardugo's 2019 novel Ninth House at my "Grandfather Hu" blog site. In that post I go on and on about this novel as being wonderfully "mature" for its portrayals of complex protagonists who are developed at a comfortable pace.

What is not in that review is my delight in the novel's idea of "magical" spaces, or places endowed with "power" of some sort. This is a theme I would love to investigate more deeply someday. Ninth House is a mystery fantasy novel about a woman who investigates a murder, and uncovers a massive nest of vipers among the eight frat houses on Yale University (remember, I said this is a "fantasy" novel) that specialize in magic. The book is rich with suspense and ghosts, lots of ghosts. Flowing beneath the entire narrative is the assumption that each frat house has been built upon a spot that was already naturally flowing with energy, with power. 

Think about ley lines and feng shui, about cathedrals and temples, about ceremonial spaces and sacred lands. That is one off the topics I'm fascinated by, and that is an idea at the heart of Bardugo's novel. 

Have you read Ninth House or its recent sequel? If you have, visit my "other blog" and let me know what you think of this book.  

Zombie Film's Success Reanimates Native Pride

 

A Malaysian zombie horror film earned the praise of the nation’sprime minister has won a string of film festival awards in March this year, but so far the loudest voices in support of the movie have been from those who take special pride in the film’s positive portrayal of a strong Southeast Asian tribe that had been deeply affected by the real-world historical trauma of “First Encounter.”

The indigenous Iban tribe living within the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo — which itself is divided three ways between Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei — served as the setting and main source of actors for Belaban Hidup: Infeksi Zombie (Fight For Life: Zombie Infection). 

Belaban Hidup is also special in featuring the indigenous Iban language, the mother tongue that is still spoken by the population of native Iban that has dwindled down to just a million people.

The Iban were once respected in the region as a fierce and relentless warrior culture that practiced headhunting and whom the British colonizers who saw them as fearsome pirates. Under colonial pressures the Iban abandoned both their warrior culture and their headhunting practices, with most members of the tribe now identifying as members of a Christian ethnic minority within predominantly Islamic nations. Industrialization and the environmental degradations brought about by the palm oil industry have likewise had a negative impact upon the tribe, which is a branch of the Dayak indigenous people. The British called them “the Sea Dayaks.”  

The zombie film was written and co-directed by the 45-year-old Malaysian-Chinese filmmaker Ray Lee who was born on the island and his wife Misha Minut Panggau, who is a native Iban. They had been working on bringing this film together since 2016. This is the first film to be produced by a member of the tribe.

Belaban Hidup won in the Horror and Science Fiction category at the 2021 Singapore World Film Carnival on March 18. The film went on to win Best Feature Film and Best Horror Film awards at the International Symbolic Art Film Festival (Saint Petersburg, Russia) and Best Feature Film at the 2021 Canadian Diversity Film Festival. Belaban Hidup was also nominated for the Best Feature Film at the Los Angeles Marina Del Rey Film Festival.

"We are also anxiously waiting whether we can get through the nominations for several other international film festivals such as the Paris Film Festival, Hollywood Blood Horror Festival, and the Swedish Film Award," said co-director Ray Lee.

“We deserve our own film industry,” Misha Minut Panggau told the press after the win in Singapore. “I always hope this is the kind of work that I do that will spur more interest among Dayak youths who want to get involved in the film industry,” she said.

 “Malaysian corporates don’t really support the local film industry and prefer to throw hundreds of millions into foreign productions,” her husband added, expressing hope that this zombie film will have a positive influence not only on the Malaysian film industry, but for the Iban people who might expect increased interest and dollars from the nation’s tourism sector.

For the pre-colonial Iban, headhunting was ceremonially used to end the long and strict period of mourning after a death, especially the passing of a leader. Headhunting was also a way to celebrate the birth of a son, though the practice of taking a head was mostly a sign or martial valor and gave great prestige to the winning warrior.

Within the Malaysian film industry this zombie narrative is the first major and internationally released film to so heavily rely upon Iban involvement, from the production to the acting. Indeed, only two other filmsused the Iban community on Sarawak as a setting for their stories: Chinta Gadis Rimba (Love of a Forest Maiden, produced in Singapore in 1958) by L. Krishnan, a forbidden love story between an Iban girl and a Malay lover; and Bejalai (1987) by Stephen Teo, which was the first Malaysian movie in the Iban language, and focused on the ritual journey that Iban boys take when transitioning into adulthood.  

Some reviewers have indentified Belaban Hidup as a modern tribute to the gruesome Italian zombie and cannibal films of the late 1970s and 1980s, and Southeast Asian jungle horrors like the 1980 Indonesian cult film Primitif by Sisworo Gautama Putra. South China Morning Post reviewer Marco Ferrarese speculated Belaban Hidup would please genre fans who are eager for “a unique ethnic spin on the much-abused zombie invasion trope.”

But unlike many other filmmakers working within the confines of the zombie narrative, the producers of Belaban Hidup chose to highlight beautifully envisioned jungle and river settings, and a sharp focus on the Iban tribal pride in their historical traditions as a warrior culture. Does this film maintain the tradition of nihilism that has been an almost inescapable part of the narrative since the arrival of the shambling cannibal zombies of Night of the Living Dead?

Belaban Hidup may in its own way be using the zombie narrative to address the history of indigenous encounters with invading foreign powers, though in this horror movie the foreign intruder is a mysterious scientific research organization that moves from Madagascar to Borneo to set up a hidden laboratory and uses the offer of “free medical treatment” to locals as the bait to hook human test subjects. When a group of captive teenage orphans manages to escape, they also inadvertently unleash the zombie infection. The escapees flee to the jungle and seek the help of the tribe.

While the heavy focus upon the Iban is praised by many throughout Malaysia, students of cinema might someday examine why the filmmakers chose to also rely upon a number of non-Iban actors, including non-Malaysian actors such as Slovakian star Katrina Grey and Indonesian singer Tegar. Other well-known actors include Pablo Amirul and Cassidy Panggau, who join native Ibans who have never before acted in a film.

The larger Dayak population is concentrated in Brunei, the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, and Sarawak. But tribal communities can also be found in Malaysia, mostly in Sarawak state, with smaller communities in Sabah and other parts of west Malaysia. Borneo Island, in the South China Sea, is not far from the territory claimed by China.

See the trailer for Belaban Hidup here.

Is "The Sadness" Just Below the Surface?

The film trailer for "The Sadness" is intriguing. It gives away just enough for us to know this soon-to-release Taiwan horror film is a "rage virus" zombie narrative. Of course, that much is in the press release that says “The Sadness” is centered upon a highly contagious virus that rapidly mutates, breaking down people’s inhibitions and encouraging the infected to act upon their very worst impulses.

My initial thoughts on this kind of film coming from a Taiwanese director are all about timeliness and relevance. By “timeliness” of course I'm referring to the global experience of the coronavirus pandemic that to date has reached over 86 million people worldwide, with some 1.85 million deaths. And while Taiwan has not experienced the worst of the pandemic — as compared to neighboring China — the “reminder” of the invisible infectious agent is forever visible in the masked faces of everyone in public spaces.

Adding to the ongoing fear of sickness and death from this new coronavirus is the rapid rate of viral mutation that has resulted in a new strain now making its way out of South Africa that is not only more contagious but also has the possibility of being resistant to the recently developed vaccines. It is not a far cry to say that most people around the world have never experienced anything as surprising or terrifying as this current crisis.

While Taiwan has been exceptionally effective in preventing a mass “domestic” outbreak, it was also the earliest nation to recognize the nightmare that was slowly developing in the city of Wuhan, and to see most straightforwardly the heavy handed response used to contain the epidemic. What most frightened Taiwan witnesses was their proximity to Wuhan (a mere 945 kilometers from Taipei) and the close flight connectivity between Taiwan and the China. If any of China’s neighbors were most likely to experience an early outbreak, it would be Taiwan.

On top of that, there was the mass frustration at seeing how the World Health Organization refused to acknowledge the Taiwan CDC’s initial public warnings about a dangerous new “atypical pneumonia” outbreak (during a period when China’s authorities were trying to cover up the epidemic) surely must have given the Taiwan public an overwhelming feeling of being ostracized as a nation to the point of invisibility on the global stage. 

This assumption of a “collective” experience is supported by academic observations of Taiwan as a democracy in which the processes of “societalization” work well, meaning a strong identification exists between sociocultural and political-institutional bodies so that reforms and transformations move in both directions and a high degree of trust exists between the civil society and the bureaucratic state.

With a total population of nearly 24 million, Taiwan is a mountainous island with extremely crowded urban centers on the coastal flatlands. The hyper-connected citizenry has for all of their "contemporary" history experienced intense, constant economic and political (domestic and international) stresses. As the WHO’s “ghosting” of the nation’s official medical representatives demonstrated all too clearly, Taiwan’s democratically elected government is isolated from the global structures of nation state diplomacy. At the domestic social level this results in an orphan-like experience that a majority of citizens finds quite alarming.

This sense of isolation enhances the anxiety that everyday Taiwanese feel when the China’s official spokespersons broadcast threats of martial conquest. The frequency of Chinese military incursions into Taiwan’s territorial “defense zone” has become so common that Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense now publishes these numbers on its website — demonstration of the phenomenon of “societalization” through which the public powerfully identifies with the institutions dedicated to their protection.

China’s steady expressions of aggression may have had the ironic consequence of pushing to 67 percent the number of people who assume a distinctly Taiwanese identity, an increase from 45 percent reported some 12 years earlier, according to a survey conducted in 2020 by Taiwan’s National Chengchi University. This trend is especially acute among the island’s younger generation aged 18 to 29, says political scientist Eleanor M. Albert.

Some observers might say that strong emotional expressions are part of the Taiwanese cultural makeup, but I would be reluctant to adopt such a generalization. If anything, what I see from my vantage point in Taiwan is how easily American citizens submit themselves to divisive public outbursts motivated by PACs and conspiracy hacks. By comparison the average Taiwanese citizen is much less prone to public displays of extreme fervor. Even participants at mass political rallies display a willingness to restrict themselves to performing according to the styles scripted by event organizers.

Might this be why Taiwan’s media organizations respond so strongly to even small and seemingly random public "outbursts" of passion, rage, and aggression? For example, social media sites recently found great delight in news media reports of a young woman who got into a fistfight with a security guard after refusing to wear a mask on the subway, or the elderly man who tried to remove a woman's caged hamster from the priority seating and ended up fighting with the pet owner.  News consumers viewed these incidents as ridiculous examples of individuals behaving badly in public places.

Of course, this same viewing audience was entirely justified for taking more seriously the reports of an incident on the mass transit in 2014 when an attacker stabbed 28 subway passengers with a knife, killing four of them. Even today most subway cars carry warning signs telling riders to use any object available to defend themselves, from backpacks to fire extinguishers.  Unfortunately this was not the only incident of an individual exploding into violence on a public transit system: as recently as 2019 an emotionally unstable passenger killed apoliceman on a long-distance train.

Both of these incidents pale in comparison to the shocking event in 2016 when a man pulled a child from her bicycle and beheaded her in front of her mother.  That incident sent shockwaves of horror throughout Taiwanese society.

Yes, these public assaults suggest shortcomings in Taiwan’s mental healthcare system. But these outbursts of violence from seemingly “ordinary” people behaving badly in less-than-extraordinary circumstances can also be understood as symbolic of what can happen to any of us when the stresses of survival become too overbearing and we flip over into rage. Neuroscientists are among the first to point out that heightened degrees of anger can bring into play a temporary insanity, leaving even the most mild-mannered among us prone to wrathful acts of violence.

Is it fair to ponder that Taiwan citizens undergoing not only the daily stresses of socioeconomic survival in crowded urban settings during a pandemic while also carrying upon their shoulders existentialist anxieties about their shared future as a democratic nation may be especially open to extreme breakdowns of civility?

All this is a long and roundabout way of suggesting that “The Sadness,” due for theatrical release in Taiwan on January 22 (2021), may be a cinematic commentary on the stresses being experienced by Taiwanese citizens every day. The film can probably be seen as an expression of the fear we never talk about, our worries about the fragility of social civility and the institutional structures that protect us from our neighbors, and maybe even from ourselves. 

Isn’t that an important part of most post-apocalyptic texts?  In Taiwan, where the stresses run especially high, we all must have at one time or another entertained morbid thoughts of what would happen to our now-peaceful society if even just a few of our neighbors were to psychologically break beneath these pressures.  If that’s true, “The Sadness” is very much what we are afraid of.

Is Video Game Violence Healthy for my Psyche?

Philosopher Christopher Bartell has recently posted an essay on the Aesthetics for Bird website entitled: “Why Video Game Violence Isn’t Innocent.” His brief post set off a minor electrical storm across my neocortex, just as I was getting ready to put aside my computer and take up my Virtual Reality headset.

In this essay Bartell highlights the most extreme examples of videogames that are themselves immoral, antisocial, or psychotic, and players who approach “normal” games with the rage and stupidity of their hate-filled ideals. These players, as the author says, commit acts of violence in games based on their own immoral, unethical values. “The moral relevance of our actions toward mere images is dependent on our attitudes and motivations.” 

I would hope that the majority of violence enacted in video gaming is “morally innocent,” undertaken “for purely strategic reasons having to do with the competition.” Enacting violence is how you win.

Other “innocent” enactments of violence—for the author says that there are “many reasons why players commit acts of violence in games”—are unrelated to the rules of the game: “because the violence offers a challenge, is novel, and is aesthetically rich.”

It’s a slippery slope for me, personally. I dislike games that would ask me to role play a thief or shoot a policeman, or even a war game. Yet I’ve come to love a cartoonish-looking multiplayer “paintball” game. A good friend hates the game because he feels uncomfortable targeting human players, especially friends. But my experience of “good gameplay” is that some strangers and I, when we are being mature, get a kick out of each others’ skill in dodging, shooting, hiding, and so on. We laugh and congratulate our opponent when they get in a good shot on us. There’s no hard feelings. (Hard feelings are reserved for the emotionally immature adults who respond to my good shooting with a string of profanities, but I’m learning to tell them to “bite me” with confidence.)

What of the violence I enact upon a zombie in gameplay? Yes, even in Virtual Reality the zombies can seem cartoonish, but still frightening because their sole focus is upon taking me down. I have no qualms about defending myself against their blatant attack. Of course, sometimes I get tired of the repetitive play and say “bite me” with a bit more sincerity.

Still, I may have to question whether or not violence in video gaming is good for me. At my weakest moments I justify my pleasure in shooter games (targeting zombies, robots, alien soldiers, demons, orcs) as practicing a “skill.” I’ll probably never have a chance in real life to see if I can shoot an arrow or fire a bullet into the head of a zombie, and for that I am grateful. But still, is it healthy for me? Psychologically healthy?

When I am shooting away the cartoonish-looking zombies in a game such as “Drop Dead,” I admit to moments of discomfort when one of the figures looks like me. A younger version, and thinner, and, well, deader, than I am. But it is me. And the cartoon attackers recycle, so on a good day I shoot myself over and over again.

My point is that even the cartoonish zombies signify human forms, which then sends my brain through the uncanny valley of the shadow of undeath to a land of milk and honey where real people exist, and I am not sure I would be capable of harming another individual. Unless I was insane with rage and blindly protecting myself and those I love by lashing out. Call that instinct.

Is it healthy for my psyche to be killing, to be pretending violence? Am I more than a stooge for the sports-competition industry and training myself to accept the universal military culture’s romance with aggression, dominance, and death? Should I be playing these meaningless and even boring games? Might I not be better off reading Buddhist scriptures, humming gospel tunes, murmuring mantras to Ganesh, Hanuman, Shiva and friends?

Yes, you ought to interject at this point and ask about horror films, especially zombie films, and our consumption of them. You should ask about the cinemagoing experience, whether we so totally identify with one side or the other that we are, in some way, acting as if we are playing a videogame.

OK, ‘nuff said.

Here’s the link to the Aesthetics for Birds essay by Christopher Bartell. 

Read it yourself and let me know, politely, what you think.