Sunday, November 15, 2020

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.

Saturday, November 14, 2020

Snyder Tweaks the Iconic Zombie, Again

Zack Snyder's upcoming Army of the Dead features a take on zombies that strays from what he calls "the zombie canon." The upcoming Netflix movie co-written by Snyder, which is expected to release sometime in 2021, is a postapocalyptic story about mercenaries who head into zombie-infested Las Vegas to pull off a heist.  

Does that sound a bit like the Train to Busan sequel?

The upcoming film, as described to ScreenRant.com by one of the main actors, will build from the kind of zombie that we already know and are scared stiff by from Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead. As the actor said: "It's different. ... Zombies are scary. I'll tell you that. Zombies are really fast and scary." (ScreenRant.com)

Fast and scary? But this is the controversial zombie that Snyder offered the world with his very frightening Dawn of the Dead. Does Snyder or his crew think we’ve forgotten? (I’m sure some still haven’t forgiven, but that’s another topic.)

Snyder offered some more insight with his plot summary:

“A zombie plague hits Vegas, and they’re able to contain the virus to the city – they build a wall out of shipping containers. And then the city falls. And six years later, one of the casino owners hires this group of zombie soldiers to go get his money that he left in a safe in the casino.” (Bloody Disgusting)

Perhaps more worrying is Snyder’s promise that as director and producer he is free to do what he wants: “There are no handcuffs on me at all with this one,” he said. Army of the Dead “will be the most kick-ass, self-aware — but not in a wink-to-the-camera way — balls-to-the-wall zombie freakshow that anyone has ever seen.” (BloodyDisgusting)

Somehow this makes me worry. Too many lesser artists than Snyder have fallen into the trap of turning the zombie narrative into an action film, removing the heart from what could be another story about what it means to be human. But I will say nothing more until I can actually see the film when it releases on Netflix next year.

Netflix is already planning a franchise around the title. The company announced in early September 2020 that it had ordered a prequel film and an anime series set in the same universe.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

DCeased! More Superheroes, Supervillains, and Zombies

Confession: I do not normally have access to comic books. And that's partly why I've completely missed the May 2019 arrival of the zombie pandemic in the DC comics superhero universe. The "DCeased" storyline looks fascinating. As an initial review on the videogame website IGN summarizes:

The villainous Darkseid spreads a "techno-organic virus" that infects the world's computer networks and spreads to humans "through anything with a screen." This new virus, which ultimately infects some 600 million people, causes victims to rip at their own flesh and eventually become overwhelmed with violent rage.

The series is a vehicle for Batman, and focuses on how the crime fighter (who is, unlike his fellow superheroes, only human) can survive a pandemic that alters the human brain.

In February 2020 DC Comics began sales of the second six-issue series in the DCeased universe: "DCeased: Unkillables." The continuation focuses on the supervillains and their reaction to the zombie pandemic. As of this post, "DCeased: Unkillables" has released three issues. In August 2020 "DCeased: the Unkillables" will be sold as a print collection of all the individual issues, marketed as Volume 2 of the collected editions.

As pandemic lockdowns have no doubt taken a large bite from the comic book retail industry, DC Comics on 19 May 2020 began offering an online supplementary series to the DCeased storyline. This web-only comic called "DCeased: Hope at World's End."

The digital "DCeased: Hope at World's End" series will, according to the IGN website quoting from a DC Comic press release, provide "greater insight" into the fates of other heroes fighting the "Anti-Life Zombie Plague," including Superman, Wonder Woman, Robin, and Martian Manhunter. Expected to run for 14 chapters, with one going online each week, "Hope at World's End" is to be accessible via the DC Comics app, Amazon's ComiXology app, and other digital platforms. It is possible that the online comic will someday be released in a print format.


Thursday, May 14, 2020

The Tamil Zomcom that Couldn't Avoid Making Serious Social Commentary


In his 2019 Tamil comedy Zombie, Indian filmmaker Bhuvan Nullan R. set out to spoof the zombie genre, a personal project undertaken “for fun” that Tamil filmgoing audiences unfamiliar with zombie films could enjoy. 

In an online post, the director/writer emphasized the film was made, he says, “Just for own audience,” or Tamil viewers who are comfortable with the style of physical and verbal comedy more common to slapstick comedies produced by the thriving film industry of Tamil Nadu in Southern India, sometimes referred to with the portmanteau “Kollywood.”

While Bhuvan Nullan R. has certainly met his goal of spoofing the genre, with at least one very specific visual reference to Shaun of the Dead and the 2016 blockbuster Tamil zombie-action film Miruthan, he apparently couldn’t stop himself from allowing the opening pre-titles sequence from being an offhand criticism of social, economic, and judicial inequalities that encourage environmental abuses and unregulated capitalism. 



As with the 2016 internationally acclaimed South Korean film Train to Busan, zombie troubles fall off the back of a farmer’s truck, but the trail of origin usually leads back to an industrial accident.


In Bhuvan Nullan R.’s zomcom, it is a farmer who dumps a handful of dead chickens into a small pond, perhaps preferring to hide what might be a disease outbreak at his farm and avoid the government forcing a full cull of his flock. 



The camera focus shifts to a man who has witnessed the illegal dumping. The man, perhaps an impoverished vagrant, collects the birds from the water. The trash-strewn pond is fed by two large concrete sewage pipes.


As the man  gathers the carcasses into a bag, the camera shifts back into a long-distance aerial shot that reveals the pond water is connected to a large factory belching industrial strength smoke.




The bird’s eye view then cuts to a series of close-ups that show money changing hands, after which the chickens are shown being washed, plucked, and butchered.



The camera switches to a wider shot of the chicken cutlets being wheeled into a large restaurant kitchen by a cook who will deep fry them for the final service to the guests of a private resort where a party is being held.

The film title is then displayed in an animation that begins with an angry chicken’s eye that morphs into Tamil language letters that offer up a phonetic rendition of the English word “zombie.” An animated chicken leg bats away one part of the third letter and the full word is revealed before the title flips around to be replaced by an English-language title.


In both Tamil and English titles the characters/letters include “portions” of a face, including a wicked and toothy grin and an eye. Also included in both titles are a grasping arm to replace an empty space within a letter, a bandage wrapping, and a dash of stitches that demand reference to the iconic monster of James Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein.


In the Tamil title, the final character is stylishly designed as a rooster’s comb, a trick that is lost in translation. (I wonder if Bhuvan Nullan R. is familiar with the 2006 splatstick Poultrygeist, an over-the-top farce whose stylized title was nowhere near as visually creative as his dual-language offering.)

I have to wonder why the designer of these creatively stylized titles chose to shape letters into stereotypical feminine images. In both languages, the radicals at the start and end of the word are abstracted into red high-heeled shoes. Another character (the English "i") is recognizably shaped as a lipstick container. Why this suggested feminization of the word “zombie?” It may be that the first victims of the film’s zombification are mostly women who eat the chicken at a barbecue hosted by the vacation resort. I do hope it is not in any way a suggestion that women are associated with both clucking hens or zombie outbreaks.

Indeed, one of the only truly disturbing aspects of Bhuvan Nullan R.’s film is the depiction of two men who see themselves as flirting with a woman they do not recognize is a zombie. These men also do not recognize they are behaving as sexual predators, displaying behavior that could only be identified as harassment and grossly disrespectful of both women and adult men. Surely some viewers will find comedy in this, but for any male viewer with an EQ above that of a delinquent adolescent, this will be the place where the zombie comedy becomes an embarrassing display of actual horror.

This entire sequence from the opening shots of the farmer’s truck to the animated title takes up almost six minutes, followed by almost two-and-a-half minutes of credits offered on a background of animated microbes, ever shifting and multiplying.

Overall, Zombie is a pleasant film built upon the comedy of cuteness available in the fat male body and the ordinary male face, and of course the charm of actors knowingly going too far in their characterizations of the clueless and powerless. I'll try to come back to this film again in future posts.


INTERVIEWS WITH BHUVAN NULLAN R.

No Heroes or Heroines in 'Zombie'

This Film Will Pave the Way

Cast and Director TV Appearance (in Tamil)

Official Zombie Trailer (no subtitles)

Monday, May 11, 2020

Today's Pandemic will Shape Tomorrow's Zombie Narrative


Zombie films are often little more than cookie-cutter re-tellings of the basic storyline set by the early works of George Romero. But even with this overwhelming tendency to tell the same story over and over again, there are forces that shape important aspects of better-quality film and fiction. Stronger works of storytelling within the postapocalyptic zombie genre may display a very different “tone” because of their origins within different historical time frames.

In a blog post at theCBR.com website, Peter Foy suggests we are living in a historical moment that is inevitably going to find expression in future works of fiction within the postapocalyptic zombie genre.

“Art is heavily influenced by catastrophe,” Foy says, and so it is likely that the experience of the Wuhan Pneumonia pandemic will shape the zombie narratives that will be written by survivors of this ongoing pandemic. Popular entertainment products in these genres will reflect the experiences and emotions of those who have undergone quarantines—voluntary or otherwise. These fictions will be told by those who have witnessed people sickened or killed by the unknown strain of coronavirus that brought misery to China before spreading to worldwide and making a fool of Western assumptions of preparation.

To support his argument, Foy notes that the Zombie Renaissance (using Kyle William Bishop’s term) followed immediately after the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA and subsequent nightmarish scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the “Great Recession.”

Foy sees in the changing nature of films produced some 10 years after the 2001 terror attack, works such as Outbreak, the influence of expanding time and the shortening of the public memory. Time is like that proverbial train in the titular Tom Waits song: it looks smaller the farther it goes from the station. With more distance from the events of 9/11, zombie narratives become less socio-politically relevant, seeming to “lose interest in commenting on the world at large.” Foy’s criticism specifically aims at The Walking Dead, a show that builds on displays of viscera but lacks “the gravity” of an earlier zombie narrative such as 28 Days Later.

My own argument is that the changing influence of American presidents also shaped the zombie narrative, and a film such as Outbreak reflects not so much the years grown long and memory fallen short after the terrorist attacks, but the experience of a new potentiality inherent in the Obama Administration’s successful selling of the “Keep Hope Alive” campaign theme. I also confess that even the visceral appeal of The Walking Dead cannot completely hide some of the show’s strong sociopolitical and metaphysical commentary.

So, how might the current pandemic reveal itself in future postapocalyptic zombie narratives?

Foy says zombie films are “likely to be even darker in the future, but they might strive for more attempts at realism.” I’d have to agree with Foy’s argument if he is suggesting another wave of nihilism is on its way. The zombie genre has always been nihilistic, although the “Obama zombie” offered variations on the degree of nihilism displayed in the narratives. I believe we are already seeing the rise of the “Trump zombie” in films such as Patient Zero, which portrays the zombie as a new race committed to making the world a better place through aggression. Even the zomcom Zombieland sequel displays a loyalty to the idea that the enemy of the future is not the zombie, but the pacifist-artist.

What does Foy mean by his suggestion that post-pandemic zombie narratives will attempt to attain greater “realism?” Apparently he is expressing the same argument made by the investors who forced George Romero to add something to Night of the Living Dead explaining why the dead were rising. As Foy says: “While today's zombie fiction occasionally touches on biology, for the most part, creators haven't expressed too much interest in giving scientific explanations for what makes the dead reanimate and attack the living. Perhaps future zombie shows and movies will apply more medical jargon to make the uprisings feel more palpable.” Perhaps.

Right now the most horrible consideration has been how life echoes art, with people displaying many of the unstable and aggressive behaviors that postapocalyptic zombie narratives have often portrayed. Here I’m thinking of the housing community in Beijing that blocked entrance to any but those who live there, or the forced removal of infected individuals to quarantine “hospitals” in Wuhan that were little more than warehouses for the dying.

And of course “social distancing” rules and regulated home quarantines have led to a lot of unusual social media activity, the crashing of entire economies, the hoarding of supplies, and even shooting incidents. We have seen all of these in zombie films, haven’t we? And with nihilism being an almost essential quality of the genre, we know that it doesn’t always come out well in the end.

Foy is right in seeing that the Wuhan Pneumonia Pandemic “will eventually pass, but the impact it has on art will likely remain with us for much longer.”


Sunday, May 10, 2020

Skeptic of Indian Horror Cinema Finds Hope in "Betaal"


“The Indian film industry can do a lot of things, but it's a proven fact that the horror genre is not a part of that. Time and time again, most of the horror movies and shows to come out of Bollywood end up being more funny than scary and it's kinda sad.”

 Confession: I am the last person in the world who can comment on this, but with all my heart I would like to be able to say she’s off-target here. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen enough Indian films within the horror genre to give an honest reply. 

 I am, however, delighted that Bhatia, among many others, is excited about the upcoming launch of Betaal. She is excited by the trailer for what she says looks like Betaal will be “a zombie horror-thriller, “and we definitely have a dearth of that in India.”

 If I’m excited it is that the narrative is to be built around a battle between the Indian police in a small town and an army of undead commanded by an Indian officer of the colonial British Army, Is this going to be an Indian addition to the slew of “Nazi zombie” films that dragged along on the coattails of Dead Snow? But in this version, it is the revenant colonial servant who does battle with contemporary postcolonial representatives of independent, democratic India?

 Betaal is due for a May 24 (2020) release on Netflix. The series will star Viineet Kumar, Aahana Kumra and Suchitra Pillai in the lead, produced by world-famous actor Shah Rukh Khan in cooperation with Blumhouse Films. The series was created, directed, and written by Patrick Graham, the man behind the supernatural horror series Ghoul

Saturday, May 9, 2020

Unmasking the Horror Behind "The Girl in the Video" (Part 3)


In the previous post I briefly considered how author Michael David Wilson develops horror in his new novella—The Girl in the Video—through the suggestion that even the most innocent use of social media emotionally weakens his narrator-protagonist and opens him up to the unwanted, dangerous attentions of a psychotic stalker.  

In this third and final brief post I will focus on social media and surveillance technologies as the tools that enable “the girl in the video” to hunt and hurt her target. I begin this post by suggesting that the ubiquitous nature of social media and related communications and surveillance technologies have changed the rules that once dictated what correct behavior within most societies is. It is not necessarily a change for the better, as Wilson’s novella suggests in its portrayal of the psychopathic stalker who is targeting his narrator.
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Every well-functioning human group is built upon a set of expectations—limitations provided in the form of cultural taboos or legislation backed by actual state power—that determine how individuals behave in a way conducive to the safety and orderly operations of the community.

One major area of concern for the smooth-functioning society is “privacy,” a “dynamic and temporal” concept that is learned through individual interactions. Societies teach their members what is acceptable and unacceptable regarding privacy. “Privacy is a cultural compact to protect the space of individuals” so that each person can function properly within and to the benefit of the larger society, notes David H. Holtzman in his book, Privacy Lost. Technology and the ever-expanding “realm of the possible” are constantly re-shaping concepts of privacy, Holtzman says.

Michael David Wilson develops horror in The Girl in the Video from the dissonance created when two irreconcilable cultural concepts of “privacy” clash. This terrifying discord at the heart of Wilson’s narrative is born when Freddie and his wife Rachel—both British expats teaching English in Japan—realize that their cultural notions of what is private are challenged by a psychopathic stalker who threatens not only their personal privacy but their lives, as well.

In many ways, Wilson’s novella is a critique of social media. The short work presents social media as a window that gives the public a view of the private realm. Going one step further, the technological prowess of the stalker enables her an unimaginable power of invasive surveillance.

The stalker—the anonymous “girl in the video”—is a product of the social media culture. Her concepts of “public and private” are shaped by the technology that allows and even encourages her to ignore the cultural expectations of both Western and Asian societies delineating what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

To a large extent, the girl in the video fits the profile of a heavy social media user as extrapolated by various research studies: she is narcissistic and displays signs of addiction in her becoming upset when denied the fulfillment of constant acknowledgment.  She desires recognition from Freddie, a craving that is actually a hunger for control masked by expressions of love. Psychological profiles of real world stalkers have revealed this urge for power over another person as the motivation behind the predatory behaviors of observation and pursuit. Freddie’s narrative as a victim of his stalker provides a textbook example of psychopathic predation, from the invasiveness of unwanted communication to physical intimidation and the use of violence.

But always at the center of this novella is a critique of social media and the advances in surveillance technology that shape the psyches of both the victim and the predator. As a victim, Freddie’s use of social media does nothing to boost his self-confidence at an especially stressful period in his life. Freddie’s terror builds with his slow realization that an anonymous psychopath, a gifted hacker, is using readily available surveillance tools to observe, interpret, and invade his own mind. He feels responsible as a user of social media for opening himself up to the attentions of this stalker, and is overwhelmed with guilt for having responded to the girl’s brilliant use of erotic subliminal messaging and hypnotic suggestion. “What the hell was wrong with me?”

His psychic vulnerability made worse by the stress of his victimization, Freddie goes so far as to doubt his own memories of innocence when faced with threats of unspecified blackmail by the girl in the video. “You need to take me seriously, Freddie,” she warns. “I have something on you, something you thought you’d buried a long time ago. So don’t fuck with me.” And much to his own horror, Freddie has come to believe the stalker’s psychotic threats are based on some long-buried misbehavior rather than being products of a psychopath’s fantasy. It is the insecurity of thinking he deserves his own victimization and is responsible for the nightmarish acts of the girl in the video that finally sends Freddie over the edge.

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Watch the Weird Reads YouTube review of The Girl in the Video

Read the Cemetery Dance Online review of The Girl in the Video

Read what Kendall Reviews has to say about The Girl in the Video

Listen to Michael David Wilson talk about The Girl in the Video on the Booked Podcast

Listen to an Interview with Michael David Wilson about The Girl in the Video on the This is Horror Podcast

PURCHASE YOUR COPY OF THE GIRL IN THE VIDEO FROM PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE PUBLICATIONS 
(Links available to Amazon and other online booksellers)



Thursday, May 7, 2020

Unmasking the Horror Behind "The Girl in the Video" (Part 2)

In yesterday's post I had great fun picking apart the imagery provided in Michael David Wilson's new novella The Girl in the Video. The recently released novella follows the first person narrative of Freddie, who along with his wife Rachel is a British expat living, working, and planning a new life in Japan as an English teacher. Freddie's life is comfortably normal, until he receives an anonymous video download on his smartphone. Opening that first video will be for Freddie the start of a long and rapidly increasing spiral through anxiety, helplessness, and a detached sense of guilt.

Yesterday's post suggests that with the first of the bizarre videos the anonymous "girl in the video"is
cleverly using hypnotic techniques to put Freddie into a trancelike state that will leave him more open to recognizing the two warnings that the girl is giving him. The first warning is that while she hides her identity, the mysterious girl claims to have had some sort of relationship with Freddie. The second warning is that for whatever reason, the girl in the video sees herself as a powerful predator and Freddie is her prey.

With today's and tomorrow's posts I am looking at the possibility that The Girl in the Video betrays an anxiety that social media can have negative psychological repercussions for its users. For Freddie, even limited social media exposure weakens him and encourages his private insecurities. Tomorrow I will argue that social media and connected surveillance technologies, as portrayed in The Girl in the Video, are responsible for unbalancing his stalker's psyche, preventing her from learning social norms about privacy and pushing her into a terrifying psychosis in her yearning to control and even crush Freddie.
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Freddie has “a strange relationship with social media.” His regular habit of “cycling through” Twitter, WhatsApp, Hello Talk, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Line leave him feeling “anxiety and despair,” though his narration betrays something more akin to anger and frustration over what he perceives as the mundane and inane aspects of his friends’ posts.  He also expresses a sense of meaninglessness in maintaining the thinnest degrees of “contact” with people he has neither seen nor been friends with since childhood.

At the start of this novella, Freddie’s self-esteem and confidence are already under stress as he and his wife Rachel contemplate whether or not to buy a home in Japan, where they have satisfying careers as English teachers. Their plans are further affected by their decision to have a baby. Given these stresses, Freddie’s forays into Facebook fail to bring him any pleasure, and inexplicably leave him feeling angry at not only his social media contacts, but himself as well.

Social studies researchers have over the past decade confirmed a link between social media usage and poorer self-esteem, even depression and anxiety. The slapdowns that social media platforms such as Facebook give to individuals’ self-image is often a result of seeing and assuming that others are upwardly mobile, and by comparison feeling far less “successful” in terms of career, social status, and personal fulfillment.

Those who come away from the social media platforms feeling good about themselves are often people who “upload and run,” sharing something that portrays themselves in a good light and not reading or engaging with other people’s posts. Freddie is not one of these “hit and run” social media users. He pays attention to the selfies, the meals, and the vacation photos that others upload, and responds with exasperation at the inanity of their shares and perhaps frustration at his own sense of normalcy that comes from the comparisons.

What he does not realize is that despite his limited presentation of himself across various social media platforms, Freddie is nevertheless an open window.

“A sentence, any sentence, is a passage of thought,” says essayist and novelist William H. Gass.  Even in his simplest posts, Freddie is revealing himself. His experience of disrespecting what he sees as the inanity of some friends’ posts and his jealous distaste for others’ public image-building campaigns leaves him vulnerable to thinking of himself as invisible on social media. His assumptions about the smart phone screen are similar to his attitude toward the window in his home. After a shower, as he struts clothed only with a bath towel around his shoulders, Freddie is admonished by his wife: “The curtains are open, people can see straight through.” Freddie doubts whether anyone on the outside is looking in, and goes one step further in this denial by giving action to his low self-confidence: “Who’s going to be impressed by this, anyway?” he asks as he does a little dance, naked, in front of the window.

In his contemplation on his own reliance upon the symbolic richness of windows, William H. Gass points out the false security that comes from thinking of windows as one-way apertures of sight. Gass speaks of windows as visions provided through distortions of a glass encircled by pane. “…when as a character of mine looks out through a window … it’s the idea of ‘glass,’ of separated seeing, of the distortions of the medium … that dominates and determines the eye.” For Gass, the window emphasizes “the fragility of knowledge,” even as all windows serve sometimes as display cases that provoke reflection by outside viewers who gaze upon the momentarily visible inner world. The window/screen instills an ambiguity to the words “inside” and “outside,” an ambiguity that Freddie is too late to comprehend.

The shocking revelation for Freddie is the realization that he has not been the one who, through his limited use of social media, has been pulling back of the curtain to reveal himself.

Those curtains have already been tossed aside by the girl in the video, the masked hunter. This dawns on him when he receives the same message across multiple platforms: “Tell me what you like.” A quick check of his privacy settings does nothing to stop the barrage of messages that feel like “a full-on fucking assault.” The crisis only deepens with the next barrage of messages: “I know what you like.” 

Videos continue to arrive in Freddie’s in-box, one a faked snuff film, the other a compilation of images from places Freddie had lived and worked, from London to Lisbon, and ending in Tokyo. With an overwhelming sense of horror, Freddie realizes that even his limited social media use has been enough to provide anyone on “the outside” with a clear view to the inside of his private life. But, he wonders, “Who in the hell would go to such trouble?”As more violent videos and threatening texts barrage his phone, Freddie emotional strength spirals downward through panic, anger, and helplessness. "Paranoia playing tricks on me, blurring reality," he realizes. He is so shaken that when a fellow rider on the train asks if he needs help, Freddie cannot speak: "I tried to reply but no words came out, just incomprehensible grunts, tears streaming down my face." 

Unnerved, Freddie realizes that he has a stalker, a psychopath whose sickness finds strength in the social media even as her target grows weaker with every unwanted message.


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Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Unmasking the Horror Behind "The Girl in the Video" (Part 1)

Today's post is the first in a three-part look at a new novella by Michael David Wilson called The Girl in the Video. This is the longest installment of the three, largely because I enjoy the simple fun of letting my subconscious float in a sea of signification, and this short work offers a lot of room for doing that. 
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If literature is a proverbial window onto life, then horror fiction is the fenestration that provides some of the most crystal clear views of the human psyche, that shifting realm wherein the constant play of the sacred and the sinister shapes and defines who we are. Indeed, it is a typically Freudian approach that sees our minds—our personalities—as arising from the contest between our innate bodily desires and the “civilizing tendencies” forced upon us by society and culture. But what if that delimiting “civilization” is itself, as philosopher Herbert Marcuse posits, already frighteningly enfeebled and sick? Is the mind produced within this society similarly broken?

This is the dark question at the heart of Michael David Wilson’s novella The Girl in the Video, a work that displays how damaged—“unhinged”—an individual can be when the only sociocultural limits that shape the self are those set by the ubiquitous web of contemporary “social media” outlets and technologies. The titular girl in this novella is the product of social media, a woman devoid of empathy but brilliant in her ability to use technology to reveal secrets that can be used for malicious harassment.  
 
And while The Girl in the Video can be summarized as a thriller in which a married couple are haunted and hunted by a psychopathic killer, that would be too easily glossing over the insights Wilson offers into how the very act of stalking profoundly affects the mind of the intended victim—in this case, the husband Freddie who, with his wife Rachel, is a British expat living and working as an English teacher in Japan.

As the first person narrator, Freddie presents himself as witty and deeply in love with his wife, but also somewhat insecure in both his own abilities and his relationship with his wife. When caught viewing a video sent anonymously to him—an amateur recording that has an undeniably erotic affect upon him—he hides the source of his excitement from his wife. 

Later when discussing the possibility of becoming a father, he confesses his insecurity: “I fuck things up. Don’t want my kid to become another fuck-up in a long list of fuck-ups.” Despite his wife’s reassurance, Freddie cannot let go of his nagging worries about an uncertain future that may include both a mortgage and a baby.

Nor can he let go of the peculiar video he has received. In the days after downloading it to his phone, Freddie continues to re-watch the strangely mesmerizing video of a girl wearing a Hello Kitty mask that shows only her mouth. The grainy video offers a setup comparable to the famous Sharon Stone scene in Basic Instincts, the girl wearing a similar outfit albeit black with fishnet stockings—but repeatedly crossing and uncrossing her legs in rhythm to the music, until she stands and sways her hips in rhythmic coordination as well. “Delicate. Alluring. Sensual.” For weeks afterward Freddie’s finds sensual pleasure in repeated viewings until the demands of work divert him to other distractions.

Though not at all pornographic, the video is erotic but only in a mildly suggestive way: close-ups on flexing legs, swaying hips, painted lips. More disturbing is that Freddie recognizes the video is hypnotic, placing him into trance with the very first viewing. “Relaxing. Meditative. Freeing.” With his first viewing concentrated viewing Freddie enters a trancelike state, one he obviously enjoys.
Some professional hypnotists such as Ivan Tyrrell, writing on the Human Givens Institute website, have warned that trance may have a negative effect upon some, and that even a pleasant therapeutic experience may result in varying degrees of post-hypnotic depression. Tyrrell also argues that those in a deep trance may not even remember what occurred when they were in the dreamlike state, during which their minds are especially open to suggestibility and subliminal perception is at its highest.

Freddie’s pleasure in the trance state and his repeated post-viewing sensual response suggest the possibility of a subliminal hypnotic suggestion within the video.  But the masked girl in the video says nothing beyond wishing her viewer a belated Happy Birthday. Where could the hypnotic suggestion be hidden, and what is the message? Could the video be something more than a teasing of Freddie’s masculine ego? Could the underlying suggestion be an attempt at entrapment through enticement?

Even before Freddie discovers that what seems like a red and white flash in one of the sender’s later videos is actually a brief shot of the girl’s breasts with the command “find me” written across them, it is obvious that this first video is rife with elements of erogenous seduction. These are available in the physical components of the video, most specifically the focus upon the legs of the girl in the video.
“The camera focused on … her lower body … legs in fishnets, crossed and uncrossed, crossed and uncrossed, always right leg over left, in sync with the music. …swinging frenetically.” Proponents of dream analysis see legs as symbolic of confidence, especially the comfortably crossed legs. 

Freddie will later experience these legs in a nightmarish form, legs detached from the torso, the fishnet stockings taking on the auditory equivalent of “sharp razors on a blackboard, raw friction as her legs crossed and uncrossed.” It is worth considering that Freddie is portrayed as experiencing a period of low self-confidence while he and his wife negotiate their future as possible homeowners and parents. While the symbolic message of “strength” is said to be expressed in dreams of disembodied legs, in both the video and his nightmare these are not Freddie’s own legs, but those of an unknown, masked woman.

The girl’s legs, covered in fishnet stockings, are opening and closing like a net thrown out to capture prey. Rather than an image of self-confidence, these legs are giving to the insecure viewer/dreamer the suggestion of strength and security to be found within their grasp, the symbolic fish that ancient Ephesians sometimes used to depict the regenerative, vulvic powers of Artemis, goddess of the hunt.

The trap having been set, the video momentarily shows the girl standing, relishing the capture of her prey, hips swaying in a bizarre mime of beastly mastication.

The next visual focus in the video is the masked girl’s lips, with her legs still visible as they cross in time to the music. With all this motion, the girl applies a thick layer of deep red lacquer. It is worth noting that Wilson uses the word “sanguine” to identify this shade of red, suggesting Freddie’s receptivity to the allure of the masked girl through the word’s association with the personality type that celebrates friendliness, sociability, openness, and perhaps an impulsiveness that disregards social taboos about physical contact. 

In his nightmare re-envisioning of this scene, Freddie feels he is the lacquer itself, the complacent liquid—a physical state suggesting complete surrender—being brought to the girl’s mouth, one drop at a time. In this nightmare, each dip of the brush into the lipstick pot brings agony to Freddie’s ear, suggesting that he should have heard and understood the girl’s hypnotic message. At the close of the nightmare, the girl’s lips take on an enormity that ends in the eating of the dreamer.

The “belated” birthday greeting in the video is the girl’s only spoken comment, and in retrospect it can be taken as Freddie’s being welcomed into a new phase of life, of being born into a life of childlike fear brought on by the harsh ministrations of a cruel maternal image, a “bad mother” who rises in contrast to the revelation of Rachel’s pregnancy.

While the identity of the masked girl and her relationship remain hidden to Freddie, the woman is subliminally introducing herself and suggesting to her viewer, Freddie, that he had indeed been connected with her at some point in the past. The girl communicates this through the background song used in the video, humming along with it to emphasize her connection to the lyrical expression. 

Freddie finds the music familiar, and eventually recognizes it as the opening song on an album entitled “Perdition City” by the Norwegian experimental electronica band Ulver. Freddie’s recognition comes when he hears the first line of the opening piece: “What is the meaning of this voyage?” With this song the girl in the video is opening the door for Freddie and inviting him to a terrifying journey.

The lyrics of this opening song, “Lost in the Moments,” allude to a longtime relationship: “So many bends and these years we've been together passed.” The girl is suggesting that she and Freddie have a relationship that goes back quite some time. She is also confessing to a pleasure in whatever has transpired between them: 

And all this time she was tremendously excited/ 
About everything she saw/
Everything we had talked about.

It is possible that Freddie has a subconscious recognition of this message of familiarity, but it does him no good for as a teacher he has dealt with perhaps hundreds of students over the many years of his career. What his subconscious does take fright at is the girl’s suggestion that through the album she is giving him a warning, made glaringly clear when Freddie many months later hears the notes of “Lost in the Moments” being used as someone’s ringtone in a restaurant. “The damn thing made me jolt up so hard I almost fell out of my chair,” Freddie says.

The tune sets off an anxiety attack for Freddie, most likely a subconscious realization that the girl in the video is there in the restaurant, taunting him, hunting him.  One of the lyrics in another song on the “Perdition City” album warns of a world in which “Lone killers haunt the highways/ And dark forces move through the shadows.”

A quick look at the musical selections of the girl in the video supports the argument that Freddie has recognized and consciously accepted—too late—that he is now the girl’s prey. The best place to start is with the name of the band: Ulver, a Norse word for “wolf.” This alone may have set off alarm bells for Freddie. As philosopher Paul A. Trout notes in his study of storytelling tropes, “Among the earliest forms of human self-consciousness was the awareness of being meat.” 

The girl in the video has chosen well. Indeed, her Hello Kitty mask suggests she sees herself as a much larger feline predator. (Freddie may also have subconsciously recognized in the band’s name “Ulver” the phonemic suggestion of the female vulva, which of course links him back to the fish net and the symbolic connection with the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt.) 

A hint of what awaits him is available in the album name, “Perdition City.” The word “perdition,” built from Medieval Latin and Christian concepts of Hell, suggests an onslaught of suffering and punishment. Again, the girl in the video has chosen her background music carefully, knowing that Freddie is familiar with the band, the album, the music, and the lyrics. His familiarity will serve her communicative needs, opening to him the message that the journey ahead will be torturous and end in even more misery. 

With this, Wilson is giving his readers an ominous foreshadowing. 

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Friday, January 10, 2020

Eager to Return to The Walking Dead Universe

It's been too long since I've watched either The Walking Dead or Fear the Walking Dead. For the former, I was halfway through Season 7 (2016), while for the latter I stopped at the finale of the first season. For the past four years I've been wanting to return to these series, but life (not zombies) had a way of keeping me busy.

Since then I have avoided hearing spoilers and synopses. I thought that once I retired I would have time to return to binge watching, but somehow I am just as busy, though now I could not really say what it is that is keeping my wheels spinning.

I can't help but wonder what I've been missing. For me the most important part of the sixth season of The Walking Dead was Carol's moral meltdown. Her inability to continue as part of the original group following the purposeful massacre of the Saviors fascinated me. Her trauma, her crisis, spoke to one of the qualities of the zombie narrative that fuels my interest in the subgenre.

In his 2017 book Living with the Living Dead, theologian Greg Garrett quotes a series of questions posed about the zombie narrative by Episcopal priest Torey Lightcap: "Where do we draw the line in doing harm to one another in order to save ourselves? how much stress can we take before we are fundamentally changed in who we are. ...When does the impulse to protect ourselves mean we ... start actively hurting others?"

I hope The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead have avoided becoming mere entertainment and continued to portray through their separate cinematic narratives these and other questions that are worth consideration, now more than ever as we face a future that will be anything but a joyride.

The second half of Season 10 of The Walking Dead will begin airing in late February 2020, while the release date for the sixth season of Fear the Walking Dead is still pending as of this post, according to a report in The Buzz Paper.

Of course, now is also the time to return to the original comic books by Robert Kirkman, especially as the author has announced he will be concluding the series.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Dibakar Banerjee Takes Zombies Seriously

The new four-piece “Ghost Stories” film anthology from Netflix features one zombie narrative by Indian director Dibakar Banerjee. In an interview he states that the driving force behind his horror film is the fear of extinction. “We all know that we won’t be around after a few years, and that scares us. Also, as a group of people, we might not be around… and that could happen sooner rather than later. If that fear of group extinction is embedded in a story, no matter what the plot is, then that works. The best zombie films, right from the European and American zombie films from the ’60s and ’70s to now, have that core… where you are about to be wiped out.”

I have yet to watch the series, but I am certainly looking forward to it as Banerjee may be one of the few Indian filmmakers who doesn’t automatically trip to comedic mode when working with the iconic zombie. The zomcom is one of those approaches to the zombie narrative that I still have trouble enjoying because so many filmmakers seem to have trouble finding the right balance between horror and humor, turning their films into silly and immature romper rooms. When done well, however, the zomcom can be a powerful vehicle.

In other reviews of the “Ghost Stories” anthology Banerjee’s work is noted as the most “political” among the four. If that is so, then I look forward to seeing this as I view the zombie narrative as having the most potential for addressing the sociopolitical concerns of the viewer. It is this quality that I most respect. So off I go in search of the “Ghost Stories” anthology. Until then, here’s looking at you, Kid.

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Nighttime Drones and Home Invasion Anxieties


Our popular television and film media have prompted us toward paranoia and seeing enemy spies hiding behind every haystack, but who thought we’d be looking for those same intelligence rivals in the sky above those bales of hay? But that’s apparently what’s been happening for the past few weeks since mid-December 2019 when some residents in wide swaths of rural Colorado and Nebraska have been piqued to the point of paranoia by large formations of silver-and-white drones. 

As of January 1, 2020., nobody has stepped forward to claim ownership of the pilotless drones that hover over fields and homes, too far out of reach to be taken down by sharp-eyed shooters but close enough to creep out residents and set their dogs to barking. Local police officers are coordinating their efforts to determine the flight paths of the drones and perhaps figure out their origin, but so far they have been able to say little more than that the Federal Aviation Authority has been brought in to help identify who has set these flying cameras loose into the wild, and for what reason.

Might the canine clamor suggest the drones are using different technologies to map the areas they hover over? Are they looking for underground energy resources, carrying out research in night vision technology, studying wildlife populations, or conducting a simple cartography mission? One thing’s for sure: those aren’t delivery drones from Amazon.com sent to bring you that Tom Clancy novel you just ordered.

It is certainly easy to see how this story can grow in the popular imagination into something decidedly creepy. We are trained toward physical privacy, which is a good thing for sales of Venetian blinds, curtains, and window treatments.  So many of our horror stories deal with the monsters that cross the boundaries and come into the home, violating what we normally assume is a safe space. In horror fiction that presumption of home safety and the culturally respected protection afforded by the mere presence of a window and door frame is highlighted by the traditional Western vampire’s need to seek permission from the homeowner before entering. (What an absolute mindblow in the Fright Night remake when the vampire, denied permission to enter the home, finds a way to drive the targeted residents fromtheir own home.)

The creepy aspect of these unidentified drones is not knowing what they are doing. The idea that they can be scanning homes to “see” or “hear” the data, downloads, and passwords of residents feels wrong—well, it is wrong—on many different levels, but mostly because it is a form of “invasion” that combines both the high-tech (sure, we’ve been giving away our homezone privacy since we invited the Internet-connected computer into our personal spaces) and the physical (the presence of a piece of machinery that, flying by algorithm, seems to have a mind of its own and therefore in our imaginations a degree of subjecthood). That the drones are “watching us” is creepy. 

But I won’t drone on about it.