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Monday, March 28, 2011

OUR BELOVED, GLORIOUS, SUPER-TALENTED, PRECIOUS KIDS ARE DEAD. A lot of IP regulars don't think I do enough to keep up with science-fiction movies, but I try. (And Stargate Universe has gotten considerably more interesting in theological terms since I wrote that early review. Now they're looking for a structural god principle at the heart of the universe...) But I also have other fish to fry, other low genres to keep up with. Like comic strip movies. And horror movies.

For example, I even watch FearNet at Comcast On Demand, as well as the horror stuff that makes it onto the other cable channels. Not when Mrs. CP is around because she can't stand the gore, as I also frequently cannot. But she knows why I do it. So many young screenwriters and directors get their first chance to make movies by doing low-budget horror films. In that respect it's a glimpse of the future. Obviously, not all low-budget horror makers will become successful or important. Still, their vision of what horror is in the contemporary context is an indicator of what their young audience responds to.

Which is concerning. Especially when you look at the output in terms of trends and, well, obsessions. Of these, there are two. Vampires and Zombies. Kids love these themes. Which are both about death.

Yeah, I know that youngsters have always flirted with death. John Keats wrote:


Of course, Keats was 26 when he really did die. Shakespeare lived longer, but his young Hamlet also posed the life-and-death question:


It isn't the question that's new. It's the way it's being posed and the way it's being disposed. Which are alarming. Zombies are the simplest exemplar of the problem. The first zombie movie was George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," made for about $10,000 in 1968. It was crude social commentary, suggesting that selfishness outweighs all other considerations when life-and-death issues are at stake, and its punchline was racial. The altruistic black hero gets gunned down in the final scene. Romero persisted, recreating his zombies into symbols of everything wrong with modern culture until it became clear he was using zombies as a symbol of everything homogeneous about modern American life. Interesting and to the point? Not really. Easy and superficial if you're a grownup. Easy and convenient if you're a kid. Everybody's dead but you. Or so it seems until you factor in the vampire obsession.

Some of you may remember that the original Bram Stoker vampire tale was about the conflict between good and evil. The implied sexual deviancy of vampire intimacy then became the basis, in the counterculture, for equating vampirism with repressed sexuality, which led indirectly, via Ann Rice's paeans to differentness, principally homoeroticism as a distinct path to eternal life, to the blatant romanticization of vampirism in movies like Underworld and Twilight, which spun the mythology 180 degrees in the opposite direction from its origin. Vampires are the living ones, possessed of supernatural and beautiful powers, and everyone else is dead.

Where does all this lead? Where it began. Death. What our pampered youth identifies with most. Death. Courtesy of FearNet, I have a couple of observations. There are disturbing trends in recent horror movies. I watched two this morning which only belatedly revealed themselves as vampire movies. They were as different from one another as could be, but they ended in the same place. The first was called The Hamiltons, about a family which had lost its mother and father in a car accident. An elder brother, a pair of brother-sister twins, and a younger son were struggling on their own. The younger son was trying to make sense of his life by recording family scenes on a camcorder. Only slowly do we realize that the Hamiltons are born vampires, their plight described several times as a "disease," which results in callous and brutal killings of innocents, accompanied by multiple other predictable human crimes -- rape, sadism, murder, incest, and psychopathy. Our camcorder hero's progression is from rebellion to acceptance of his "disease" and finally reunion with his family. "We need blood and lots of it." The movie ends with a rancid, unsmiling smile.

What's extraordinary is the emphasis on blood alone. The narrator and protagonist for most of the movie is a typically disaffected teenager. He has no girlfriend, no interests other than his camcorder, no friends, no identity. He falls for one of his brothers's female victims and only comes into his own when he tries to rescue her and winds up killing her because she was already, uh, irresistibly, bleeding. He makes it clear that vampires (a word never mentioned in the movie) are not made but born. Everything we think about them is not true. They live in the daylight and they are among us, all of us, our next door neighbors, our friends in school, everyone we regard as normal. There is no happiness. They are the living dead among us. (I won't ask you to think of a chewed up human breast as a symbol of annihilated family...)

The second movie, "Grace," seems to start from an exactly opposite perspective. Rosemary's Baby as opposed to dysfunctional family. The first scene is (discreetly) an act of coitus between husband and wife. He moves while she passively accepts without pleasure and then elevates her pelvis to let the sperm do their work. And then we are slowly lowered into a horror movie metaphor centered on the lifegiving properties of the female breast. (Yes, I'd have turned it off if it were a boob movie, but it wasn't.) The conflict was bizarre, perverse, and subtly brilliant: breast versus death, milk versus blood, and the widow's imitation life of New Age vegan, tepid sexuality, and empty affectations versus the brute animal will to survive. The husband died in a car accident, the baby of his critically injured wife was pronounced dead three weeks before delivery, but the tofu-eating mother with the ex-Lesbian lover midwife carried the dead baby to term, delivered it, and then willed the stillborn child to life. Except that the infant girl really was dead. Her temperature kept dropping, flies swarmed her crib, and when the baby breastfed she invariably drew blood. Tofu mom finally tumbles to the fact that her baby is feeding not on milk but blood and starts buying meat, from which she drains the bloody juices for her baby's bottle.

Ultimately, she even kills to give her baby a blood bottle. Satire or allegory? The dead husband's mother is also obsessed with breast milk, believing she can, at the age of sixty, still save her granddaughter because her sole sexual contact with her husband over the years has been to keep her nipples stimulated and supple. (She breastfed her son till the age of three; it's her oxymoronically arid definition of motherhood.) She still has a breast pump and it still works after she blows off the dust. She sails in to the rescue when she learns the mother is critically anemic. She dies for her delusion. The only hero is a spittingly protective black cat, who delivers dead rats into the baby's crib to keep her alive. The movie ends with the mother and the midwife (and the cat) on the road in an RV seeking blood for their monster baby -- and the formerly vegan mother's discovery, now that she's on a high protein, liver-rich diet to bolster her breast milk -- that her baby is now teething. Final horror shot is of the result...

Yes. Horror movies. Cheap but not trivial. My conclusions? Vampirism isn't an obsession because it's romantic. Anymore than zombie movies are about conformist adults. They're important to our kids because there's something missing in their lives -- namely, life itself. They feel themselves a herd of the dead, born dead, advancing on the culture without anything but voracious appetites and guiltily protective parents. They know it can't be right, the way they feel, but all they can think of is what they want, with very little knowledge to vitiate their desires. They have sexual desire of a sort -- akin to the vampire's bloodlust -- but their own blood is lacking in the vitality that leads to dreams, ambition, accomplishment, greatness and honest-to-God consciousness. They sense that they are the dead ones, and however much they'd like to pretend they're possessed of extraordinary powers -- as the MSM and the public schools keep repeating, repeating, in hopes it might be true -- they know they're shallow, ignorant, only a cellphone call away from comatose, and dead on arrival.

There's one more trend I've seen in recent horror movies, led, I think, by the Brits, who used to have a feel for such things. The new standard ending of horror movies is for no one to survive. I won't recite all the examples. (Endless.) The one I will mention is an American movie called Qube, which I thought brilliant down to its last ten seconds. The heroine was Kari Matchett, whom we've loved since Nero Wolfe, and she survived a nailbiting two-hour ordeal that had us all rooting for her in a movie of truly brilliant conception. She turned out to be the heroine who solved the unsolvable problem, and then, two seconds after she delivered her solution, she got shot in the back of the head. Roll credits.

This is the new paradigm in a nutshell. How to spoil an otherwise good movie in a microsecond.

Ya know? Fuck you, youngsters. If you want to die, die. Go ahead. Just don't bother your betters with your nihilistic pretensions. I feel sorry for you. But I cannot save you if you don't have a passion for living.

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