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Let's see if this will fit....
2003-10-26 22:28:14
Forgot something on the previous guide to “false sleeplessness” (and people wonder where my lj name came from).
Step eight, you will want to avoid eating much, but drink all you like. Preferably something low in nutrient value like water or decaffeinated tea. Coffee’s acidic enough that drinking a lot of it will give you a stomach ache, which will help you stay awake, but keep you from doing anything useful with the time gained. Anyway, the point is that having a stomach full of water won’t make you sleepy (frequent trips to the can will keep you up anyway) but it will stave off the worst of the hunger. This particular trick has a long history of causing real problems in countries suffering from famine. The term “water on the brain” (hydrocephaly) refers to a condition caused sometimes when mothers with no food to give their children give them all the water they can drink instead. A few weeks of this with minimal real food reaches the point where the water balance in the body starts being thrown seriously off, and begins messing with ion balances and the like in the body, resulting in an excess of fluid buildup in the brain and distortion of the skull. (Hydrocephally can also occur due to an enzymatic imbalance caused by a genetic disorder. Unfortunately, the genetic version is always fatal, though the child can live for seven to ten years if medical treatment is consistent and the disorder is slow to develop.)
Step nine, DON’T drink lots of caffeine. Caffeine is for people who want to stay up for a day and a half or two days. You try to keep going on caffeine for longer than that, you’re going to seriously screw up your system. Get the nasty shakes, chills, and hideously severe headaches. I’m not sure if the latter is an independent effect or just hurrying up the sleepless-headache. See, the problem is that caffeine is a limited-effect stimulant. Your cells all have storage granules for storing energy (ATP or sugar, I forget which). The storage devices have little mechanisms that continuously shuttle sugar (ATP, whatever) into the storage area and out of the general cytoplasm. There are additional mechanisms that open channels to pour sugar into the cytoplasm to amp up the cellular activity. When you drink caffeine, the caffeine causes all of these intracellular stores to empty simultaneously, completely filling all the cells with as much sugar as possible, and giving you that rush of energy. However, the little mechanisms that fill the stores are still operating, and immediately start trying to refill the stores by pulling sugar out of the cytoplasm. So you take your second shot of caffeine, and the cells have already still got some of the sugar floating around in the cytoplasm because the stores haven’t refilled yet. So the stores dump AGAIN, and you get a much milder rush. Repeat ad infinitum until the caffeine has no effect because the stores are totally empty, and all the sugar is circulating your system making you jumpy, shaky, and paranoid. Plus the diuretic effect kicks in as your body tries to regulate sugar levels by dumping sugar out in your urine. Moral? Short term it works. Long term it’ll undermine your efforts by making you really ill. Welcome to any recreational drug abuse.
And now, the promised review. This will probably take a few days to assemble, because I’ve got a lot to say on this one. Before I get started, however, I have to define another term for you. Those who’ve been reading this for a while will remember when I had to define a different term from my own personal vocabulary, “vicious,” for the sake of talking at length about “Jack.” Well, I’ve got another term to which I’ve attributed just as oddly specific a meaning. “Severe.” When I use the term “severe” in a movie review, I’m referring to an almost sidelong breaking of the fourth wall. See, when we watch films there are certain unspoken rules that are followed. They’re unspoken, because we view them almost entirely unconsciously at this point, to such a degree that we don’t even realize they’re there. They’re part of the storytelling craft that keeps things moving and working “properly” according to the genre. They’re most obvious in horror because of how strictured the tropes and ideals of the genre are, but you don’t realize they’re there unless someone points them out. In horror, you could think of them as the “rules” that they go over in “Scream.” First kill always happens in such a way that no one else is notified, and the disappearance is explainable. The characters unaccountably split up. If a character previously thought dead shows up, it’s a trick of some sort. Gradual spiral as the characters get picked off, suspicions grow, and everyone finds themselves in deeper and deeper shit. The monster is always in the shadows, and difficult to spot. One blow from the monster/killer is enough to so totally kill a victim that they become props instantaneously. These are the things that prompt the shouts of “don’t go in there stupid!” from the audience, and make the novice (like me) feel really clever when he spots some upcoming incident before it arrives. It’s like cliffs notes got handed out to everyone before the film started.
A “severe” action can be thought of as a breaking of the cinematic chain. (Or similar breaking of tropes in other genres/mediums.) An insertion of something so sudden and unexpected that it feels as if the film has suddenly become unhinged, run out of control, taking the audience completely by surprise and partly destroying the distance between audience and film by removing the security of predictability. “Oh, so the monster jumping out of a closet is “severe”? Hah, you’re kidding right?”
No, that’s not it. This is really hard to explain because I’ve never tried to get it down in words before. Let me give you a couple of examples. Blair Witch had its faults, but it pulled off a couple of really “severe” moments, the best (or worst) of which is when Heather finds the little soaked bundle of cloth and twigs after Josh disappears. Now, admittedly, most of the “rules” for horror flicks have been thoroughly broken just by the odd format used for the film, but a truly seminal one is that, in order to horrify the audience, you have to confront them with something, anything, shocking and awful in order to get them to react with that visceral “ewwww” or “ahhhhh!”, and that means you have to hold up something recognizable for the audience to see. Fingers. Eyes. Tongue. Something. Heather unwraps the little bundle and partly opens it. We get a brief flash of some stringy red meat, flecks of white, while she pauses in puzzlement over what she sees, and then Heather lets out one of those sudden stuttering inhalations that are SO MUCH WORSE than screams for portraying actual horror (considering the way in which the scenes were shot, it’s entirely possible that the horror was genuine on her part) and the camera scrambles backwards. I’ve seen the film three times and I’m still not sure what’s in that bundle, and that makes it “severe”. A regular film, however horrific, would have been sure to show us clearly what it was. This deviation from the “unspoken rules” of storytelling is unsettling. It makes it seem that_much_more_real that things aren’t working according to movie rules. Similarly, as much as the scene has been parodied, the monologue Heather has with the camera is severe. We’re not used to characters speaking directly to the viewers like that, like, well, victims honestly scared out of their wits. The most severe moment, of course, would be the end, where the audience is denied any closure at all. Broke the most cardinal rule of the bunch, which succeeded in making it feel more like the “documentary event” it claimed to be and not a horror film. For another comparison, look at “The Ring.” I’ve yet to see the Japanese version, but the American film has one truly severe moment. It’s when the little kid looks up and says “you weren’t supposed to help her.” It’s a different aspect of the disillusionment, but think about it. Throughout the first 3 / 4 of the film, we’re following the formula. The rules are established, a compromise is made. The movie is creepy as hell, but standard. The ghost is appeased in an appropriately ghoulish manner. Then the little boy looks up and says “you weren’t supposed to help her” and everyone in the audience goes “oh shit”. All bets are off, no one knows what’s going to happen now. They aren’t following the rules.
Severity doesn’t have to be something that seminal to the story, though. It can be in the little things. Someone who gets killed in the middle of a really cool line would be an aspect of severe. (It was mostly parody, but an example would be the only good part of “Deep Blue Sea.”) Or killed “early” or far too “suddenly” by your estimation. (The first death in both versions of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” occurs so suddenly and unexpectedly that the audience doesn’t have time to draw breath for a scream.) Or killed off-center in the film blocking. There’s a feel that everything has suddenly gone off the rails. The audience gets nervous, realizing they may not be able to prepare for the next death. Stuff gets edgy, people get uneasy. Horror is especially suited for severity, since the primary purpose is to catch the audience off-guard and scare them. Destroying the illusion of the fictional “rules” is still not readily done, however, since even the filmmakers usually don’t realize that they’re there to be broken. Severity in drama is usually a lot more cultured and carefully crafted than the kind you encounter in horror stories, but is usually decried for its “unrelenting dark oppressive nature.”
Unlike my definition of “vicious,” however, “severity” does not automatically make a film good. Rob Zombie was trying to make an unrelentingly severe film in “House of 1000 Corpses” but it all crumbled down into a stupidly disjointed account attempting to string severe scenes together one after another, forgetting along the way to tell a coherent, interesting, or even scary story. On the other hand, Quenten Tarrentino manages severity fairly well.
A film which managed to be both vicious and terribly severe would likely cross the line to completely unwatchable....not because it was awful, but because it would be so terribly affecting and difficult to take.
All of which brings us to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and its director, Tobe Hooper, who practically invented the slasher-film genre with this flick.
Hike up your skirts, ladies, this one’s gonna get pretty damn deep.
Before I go any further, though, I need to clear one thing up. At the front of both the old film and the remake is a paragraph talking about how “this film is based on a true story.”
Bullshit.
The remake is much more nebulous about the statement, presenting it in such a way that it’s not evident whether the declaration is to be taken as true independent of the film, or whether it’s just a part of the film’s backstory. This was probably at the insistence of some editor who didn’t want to get sued later on the topic. You see, by “based on a true story” what they meant was, “the director heard about this one guy who was really, really sick, and after having grossed himself out by reading about the guy, went on to write this film.” No real relation between the actual events and the film can be extrapolated. This was a single man, not a family, he wasn’t disfigured, there was really no reason to suspect cannibalism, he didn’t use a chainsaw, it wasn’t in Texas, and in the end they could only prove that he’d killed two people, although an additional four were suspected.
The person who inspired the TCM, as well as Norman Bates from “Psycho” and “Buffalo Bill” from “The Silence of the Lambs” was a resident of Plainfield Wisconsin in the 1940’s and 50’s named Ed Gein. Ed Gein was a profoundly sick man. Probably the most world famous necrophiliac since Prince Charming (Snow White.....glass coffin.....think about it) desperately lonely and raised in a weirdly sexually repressive environment by his adored mother (Psycho), he went very badly crazy after her death. He began repeatedly robbing local graveyards of fresh corpses, and using them as materials to furnish his house with. He created a full suit out of human skin with an apparent inkling to transvestitism. (Buffalo Bill) Bowls from the tops of skulls. Wastepaper baskets of strung human skin. Apparently it got to the point where he wanted fresher material, and went out to kill his own, but he was caught after only two killings. The interested should look here: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/gein/bill_1.html
So where are the parallels? Well, there’s the dilapidated, isolated house, the leather mask of human skin, the weird sexual repression, and the furniture made of human remains......and that’s about it. The women Gein actually killed he had shot and then drug their bodies away. If TCM was the “true story” of Gein, it was the “true story” of every other slasher flick since.
That just needs to be said, because there are far too many people on the internet out there who will tell you, straight-faced, that the TCM did really happen. About the same number of people who will tell you that the “Necronomicon” actually existed.
Anyway, back to the assertion that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre practically invented the slasher genre. An absurd proposal? Don’t be so sure. It came out in 1974, six solid years before the first Friday the 13th, and even longer before the first “Nightmare on Elm Street.” It is distinctly different in style and presentation from European horror films of the same era or earlier in ways that became part of the genre in the American style of slasher.
But wait, what about “Psycho?” Ah, a good point. Fourteen years earlier. Isolated depraved loner, serial killer, obsession with the dead, it would be blind ignorance to say that Psycho wasn’t formative in the development of the modern slasher flick. Perhaps a better way to put it is that TCM filled in all the remaining holes between Psycho and Friday the 13th, and there were a lot of holes to consider. For all the horror that came between Psycho and TCM, building up that particular sub-genre, none of it was very innovative, adding new and lasting ideas to the genre. Mostly they just hung parasitically from Hitchcock’s masterpiece, without ever thinking to add something new or different.
For all that Psycho is a masterpiece of the genre, it does remain basically a mystery/suspense with an utterly unique twist so absurd and horrific that no one of the era would have seen it coming. TCM’s additions basically rounded everything out into a subgenre, but its additions weren’t pretty, nor were they especially well-formed. Not many directors could stand up beside Hitchcock for pure mastery of the medium, and Tobe Hooper is no exception. Much of the original film felt somewhat half-formed, scenes so thoroughly odd that it’s not really evident what effect was intended. A few moments that are plainly laughable, and the absence of a significant budget of any kind make sure that critics who don’t enjoy horror will have enough flaws to pick at until they’ve entirely invalidated the film among the “thinking classes.” Go read Ebert’s review of the remake. http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/wkp-news-texas17f.html He doesn’t just pan it, he doesn’t just give it zero stars, he attacks it. He tears into the director personally, uses it as a counterexample to films he likes. He goes after OTHER CRITICS who might give it a good score. He hates it with such intensity, you wonder if his mother might have been killed by an advanced reel. “Ugly emotions are easier to evoke and often more commercial than those that contribute to the ongoing lives of the beholders.” Ouch.
Why they feel the need to do that is entirely beyond me. Oh, it’s evident why they feel it’s justified. Hideously violent, without moral or social commentary, seemingly without any merit for the medium whatsoever, you can only imagine what films the critics thought would spring from inspiration such as this. Even on an artistic level, stepping back and ignoring the innovation and truly frightening moments, the film seen through the right lens is one long delve into the depths of depravity. A plot that barely exists past the first reel, constant “jumps,” barely existent acting that consists mostly of monstery “nnNNNnnnggggggGGGG” and screams, and several scenes shot in a pattern so static that it occasionally feels like the film was recorded with security cameras.
But the thing is, its legacy has mostly been supplanted by its own children. TCM is hardly a popular flick among anyone but hardcore horror fans. Modern audiences find it hokey and pointless at best, just flat BAD at worst. And the SEQUALS! Ohhhhhhh...... I think TCM has suffered the worst of any horror flick in the progression of its sequals. I’ve only seen the original and fourth (final...I think) sequel of TCM, (The first I hunted down out of curiosity, the latter comes on late night movie channels a lot more than you’d ever expect.) but by the fourth film the entire project had been hijacked by Film School students who decided to explode the subtext of a film about a family of cannibalistic backwoods serial killers by making Leatherface a transvestite, the Hitchiker a cyborg with a mechanical brace on his knee controlled by TV remotes, added a trailer-trash real-estate woman in red, and had the whole thing be an experiment in “transcendent experience” controlled by the CIA. To the best of my knowledge, the only other film that got so utterly and completely warped in the sequel would be C.H.U.D II, and even that wasn’t _bad_, just wrong. This was like watching Cronenburg on a bad day without the subtlety. The real surprise? It stars Matthew McConaughey.
What remains of TCM’s original cult status, aside from those who recognize it as the innovator that it was, was really gained by how ridiculously well it did in theaters for being such an utterly low-budget film. TCM broke a lot of records for independent movie release back when it first came out, being something like the “Blair Witch” of 1974. Unfortunately, this did only a few people very much good because the producers of the film managed to secretly gather all of the profits together, and skipped the country. The first of the sequels was basically made in an attempt to actually make some money for the people who were all left high and dry by the desertion. (I rather want to see the first of the sequels, just because it stars Dennis Hopper.)
So what, exactly, did TCM bring to the genre already? Well, it brought the monster, as such. Leatherface is really kind of a proto-Jason on several levels. It brought the scenery, to the extent that it wasn’t fully covered by Psycho (isolation, inescapability, deserted backwoods town/community). It brought an enormous amount of subtext that built on what Psycho implanted. It established the “ending that’s not really an ending” (the monster survives to kill again, although the victim gets away). It established the “teen road-trip” as the favored prey. Most importantly, for the film analysis crowd, it introduced the concept of the “final girl.” (Recent films have disregarded this concept so that the girl can run off with her boyfriend and we can have an unabashedly happy ending.) Up until then, it was naturally accepted that women in horror films would have to be rescued in one way or another. Boyfriends come to investigate. Husbands and fathers start to worry. Cinematically, this ends up being rather absurd. Even Hitchcock, with all his artistry, had trouble with this in Psycho. Norman Bates is finally wrestled to the ground by a missing girl’s boyfriend, a character so thinly defined he’s barely a silhouette. Standing next to the other exquisitely developed characters of Bates and each of his victims, the contrast of this Dudley Dooright figure of righteousness is a sad imitation of the other characters. It’s as though Hitchcock wrote himself into a corner. “I want a nosey woman to make the discovery of Norman’s mother.....but it would naturally follow that Norman would find her immediately....and OF COURSE the woman wouldn’t be able to fend him off....but he has to be stopped. Hm...... guess I’ll just introduce stock stalwart character #3.”
As hackneyed as it seems, the tradition of “a group of kids on a road trip start getting picked off....there’s one fat/stupid/disabled kid, a handful of promiscuous kids, and one chaste kid.....everyone but the chaste kid get killed.....she’s able to somehow escape/thwart the villans/monsters on her own through intellect or just running really fast...” had to come from somewhere the first time, and it actually comes from TCM.
Does that make the film good? Of course not. Just because it’s the original doesn’t mean that it’s any good, and opinions are widely divided on whether the original TCM is worthy the respect it’s granted in some quarters. To be honest, I haven’t seen it in over four years, so my memory is more than a little fuzzy on the subject. That, however, tells me that it is quite good, but possesses all the technical markers of an “amateur 70’s work,” very bright, undersaturated color of the prints, somewhat clumsy blocking, and antiquated filmmaking techniques with the camera placement, dolly shots, etc. A bit like “Saturday Night Fever” gone horribly wrong. The biggest strike against it is that, past the introduction, much of the “plot” becomes rather tertiary to the film, even moreso than with most slasher flicks, there being just a lot of running around and screaming. A group of kids, hearing about the desecration of one of their relatives graves, car-trip it out through Texas to investigate. Along the way they pick up a demented, inbred backwoods hitchhiker, who suddenly attacks them. After the subsequent kicking-out, they stop at the deserted old family homestead. Exploring the area, they start splitting up, and a couple of them discover a neighboring house with a gas generator going. Exploring the house, they’re suddenly attacked by Leatherface (he wears a butcher’s apron, and a tanned human face for a full-head mask...which is really rather odd because it’s not immediately evident what precisely is wrong with his head, just that it seems rather expressionless), killing one of their number immediately. Screaming and panic ensue, and they flee wildly back to the van, trying to gather the remaining kids, including one in a wheelchair. Two more get grabbed by Leatherface and drug, literally kicking and screaming, back to his ad-hock butcher shop. We’ll come to that by and by. The remaining extra in the wheelchair is the only one to actually get chainsawed. The last girl flees to the nearest structure she can find, where (gettin’ fuzzy) she beseeches the owner of a truck stop (or possibly a cop, can’t remember) to help her. He calls for help. Unfortunately, it turns out he’s in on it too and called the hitchhiker instead. The two of them bundle the girl into a burlap sack and haul her back to the house. There it’s revealed “at dinner” that the whole family (Leatherface, truck-stop-owner, Hitchhiker, and the nearly-mummified “Grandpa”) used to be slaughterers at the local slaughterhouse, hired in the era before airguns (pneumatically fires a retractable 3/ 4” wide bolt into the cow’s brain, crushing it instantly) to crack each head of cattle right between the eyes with a 20 lb sledgehammer. Seems this relentless march of technology put them all outta a job, and they’ve had some trouble readjusting, so they took to slaughtering travelers and butchering them for the meat. Being the sharing family that they are, they wanted to throw the old man a bone, so they tried to help Grandpa brain our leading lady. Grandpa, however, is so old and decrepit (he literally doesn’t look any different than the stuffed murder victims sitting at the table) that he can’t even grip the hammer anymore, and only sucked blood weakly from her pricked finger. In the ensuing confusion, she gets away, there’s a lot more chasing and roaring chainsaws, and she eventually makes it to the Highway where she flags down a passing trucker and escapes. Leatherface chases after her, but gets knocked down at one point, with the running chainsaw landing on his own leg, gouging him badly. One of the most iconic scenes of the film is after she’s completely gotten away, Leatherface rages, spinning the running chainsaw almost out of control as he whirls in place on the road. That’s the complete end, though. No police investigation or apprehension at the end.
It is, without a doubt, a classic. It is also, in my opinion, very good. But above all else, it is very severe. Even as it was inventing the genre, establishing the major rules, TCM broke a lot of the implicit minor rules that we’re used to today. Like, for example, let’s talk about the “first kill” rule. You’ve got a handful of kids, you’ve gotta stretch them out to last the film, right? So the first kill always leaves a question mark, either in the audience or the characters. A disappear into a darkened corridor. A decapitation around the corner from the other characters. A believable disappearance so the character can be brought back out later. A hook for the other characters to split up and go looking for. A phenomenal jackass so that everyone thinks it’s a stupid joke. Right? Right.
First kill in TCM. They’ve wandered over to the house with the gas generator. Wandered in the front door. Everyone’s a little anxious, but their shouts aren’t bringing anyone out. There’s a sliding metal shutter straight ahead next to the stairs. One of the kids walks up to investigate, but can’t get the door open. He turns around and says “There’s nobod...”
*BAM* Shutter slides open, Leatherface framed in the doorway
*BAM* 5lb hammer crushes the back of kid’s head
*BAM* kid hits the floor. All this happens in the space of less than a second and a half, not even enough time to draw breath for a proper scream.
Time for a second talk about the rules. Any killing blow turns a person into an inanimate object, right? Stab someone in the stomach with a meat cleaver, they’re dead, end of story, right? (OK, with the exception of Stephen King.....who has a person get up after being struck full-bore with an axe....”The Shining”) Clap ‘em in the head, they become a clickable object, right? Right.
So first-kill-kid is dead and motionless before he hits the ground, right? Wrong. Kid hits the ground and simulates an ACTUAL severe head-trauma case, going into something similar to a grand mal seizure, arms and legs beating a tattoo on the moldering hardwood floors. Leatherface hauls him behind the shutter and slams it closed. All this happens in full view of the other characters.
It’s little breaks like these throughout the film, destruction of protocol that didn’t exist yet, but would, nonetheless, have been obvious for simple storytelling, that lends TCM it’s edge of violent severity. That pulls it apart from other films, and established it as a classic, and threw it into long-time disfavor even with some fans of the genre. Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike it, it really is hokey in parts, and the film and sound quality leave something to be desired. Leatherface is well established as a mental incompetent, and, while more frenetic, has a much lower “cool” factor than most slasher-movie monsters. The scene at dinner is almost laughably awkwardly acted. The film is actually very low on explicit gore, but high on implicit gore. Nonetheless, it is an undisputed classic.
So why are they remaking it?
I asked myself the very same thing. The obvious answer is to update it. Which is what I was afraid of. “Update” would mean insertion of cutesy, clever, self-aware comments. Let’s put some humor in there. After all, it’s far too heavy a film to be tolerated these days unless we lighten the mood somewhat. Let’s have the girl pull Leatherface’s mask sideways and have him stumble around for a few minutes. Oh, and let’s forget that whole “no sudden appearance of characters we thought were dead” crap. I mean, didn’t this Tobe Hooper guy know how to write a film? Is he trying to scare the audience or something?
I am relieved to report that this Markus Nispel guy, for whom this is his very first film, is not only an extremely talented director with a gift for knowing how to apply severity and frighten audiences, but he is also extremely respectful of the material.
Even better, almost inconceivably so, he knows how to do a remake. He knows how to follow the myth, but not the same plot, telling the story without being predictable. How to reward fans of the original with a nod here or a parallel there without stranding the newcomers. How to leave some stuff out and add in other new stuff. Amplify and vary, reinterpret while respecting, and still reawaken the terror of the original in fans who know the source by heart. You know what never gets watched? That remake of “Psycho” a few years back that just reshot every scene, motion for motion, with color and different actors. If there’s nothing new, there’s no reason to bother. The original can stand very nicely on its own.
In all honesty, this film stands in stark contrast of recent remakes that I really do like, like Jason X and Jason vs. Freddy. Humor was added in those, and the directors just had fun with it. TCM: Remake is a whole different beast, not a “fun” film but a horror film that’s remembered the core essence of its source.
So enough with the praises, lets get on with the review!
I should mention, as I said in the previous entry, that I saw this flick in an absolutely packed house on the Saturday night of its release in the North Dekalb Mall cinema, which is probably the most idealized conditions for such a viewing. I mean, people resorted to filling in those individual seats that couples leave between one another out of courtesy.
The lights go down, and the film starts up. Once again, we’re told about how this is the story of a terrible event that happened in 1974 involving five victims. “That they were young made the events that much more tragic, but even if they had lived full, long lives, none of them could’ve expected the horrors awaiting them in that house of murder.” (Uh...paraphrased.) The film starts showing us those snapshots they had in the preview for the film, along with that weird noise. Then we move on to the “crime scene walkthrough” conducted by a VERY Texan deputy with an oversized audio recorder (1974, remember?) stepping awkwardly through the house and descending to the lower levels. Scratches in the concrete are noted, as is an embedded fingernail. And we drift into the film proper...
Five “hippie” kids in a van (not really stereotypically hippie, although the originals were, these are more white trash than anything else) are charging blithely through the Texan outback on their way to a Skinnard concert in 1974. There’s three guys and two girls, just like the original. We’ve got the vaguely Hispanic guy (Eric Balfour, the high-school boyfriend from “Six Feet Under”), Mr. Non-descript (Jonathan Tucker, generico-dude....yeah he ain’t getting out alive), and a stand-in for the wheelchair-bound. In the original, the brother of the girl who survives is in a wheelchair for the whole film. It doesn’t figure much into the plot, except for the way in which it seals his demise (rough ground, low top speed, he’s the only one to really get it from the chainsaw), so the absence isn’t really key. Mike Vogel is “Kemper”, the stand in, since he’s the poor dateless schmuck that spends half of the film stoned. (The only real nod to the “hippie” past, beyond their “love wagon” appears to be the two pounds of pot they’ve just bought in mexico and are smuggling into the country inside of a piñata .) Oh, the dates? One’s “Pepper” a girl that they picked up for an impromptu road trip and a lot of “it feels like I’ve known you forever! We must be soul-mates” cooing with Mr. Non-descript. The other is our actual main character, Jessica Biel (Erin), apparently on a summer vacation from “7th Heaven.” Boy, her faux parents are gonna be pissed when she gets back. You know, it’s interesting. Whether the reviewers hated it or not, the one thing universally commented upon was Jessica Biel’s....profile when her white T-shirt gets soaked in the basement of the house halfway through film. Anyway, she and Kemper (Balfour) are a long-term item, and she’s none to happy to find out about the illicit cargo they’re carrying back. Fortunately for everyone, this needless subplot is literally thrown in a wheat field a dozen minutes into the flick.
See, they encounter the hitchhiker. And the first flare goes up telling us how different this film is going to be. ‘Cause the hitchhiker’s a girl. In the original, the hitchhiker was a weird, scabrous, scrawny man. When they picked him up, he sat in their van and stared at them all intently, with the smile of the mad stretched across his face. Then he pulled out a razor, and cut his own arm open as the kids watched in shock. (They did a little more than watch, though, when he reached over and started doing the same to the kid in the wheelchair. Tossed him out on his ear.) Anway, the girl is wandering in an unseeing daze down the center of the road. After nearly hitting her, the van pulls over and they try to get a response out of her. She’s in pretty bad shape. Lips chapped and cracked, nose running, eyes blank and bleary, hair disheveled. But wait, it gets worse. They persuade her into the van, and start looking for anything resembling a hospital for her. Unfortunately, everyone’s out of luck, because they’ve gotten really lost. She, meanwhile, only utters a handful of lines, all of them scary and prophetic. “They’re all dead.” “I just want to go home.” And then a panicked “You’re going the wrong way!” The car pulls over again, and she starts a kind of sedated freaking out. Repeating that “[she’ll] never go back there” over and over again, we notice, for the first time, out of the corner of the screen, the blood caked down the inside of her thighs.
Whoa. Waitaminit. Not good. There’s a couple of immediate conclusions to be drawn from such an image, and all of them are a several steps beyond where even the original TCM would go. I’ll go ahead and say that it’s not what your first instincts tell you....exactly. There’s a revelation much later in the film that you have to pick up on, but it tells you what actually happened, and in some lights it’s even worse than the expected. So why would they do something this awful in the film? Breaking rules. Severity. (If you’ve lost the stomach for the flick at this point, I don’t blame you, but you’ll want to skip the rest. It only gets worse from here in.) Horror is all about pushing the limits, and I realize that this may put the film beyond where most people are willing to go. I think that’s what engendered the negative reviews as well. To some degree, it’s a good note, because it’s a blaring siren to get the kiddies and weak stomachs outta the theater. No responsible parent would watch past this point with junior in the room.
Anyway, the girl suddenly pulls a gun from.....uh....under her dress. (No, it’s not really clear exactly where she was hiding it.) And after a minimum of sedated waving it around and freaking out the other passengers, she sticks it in her mouth and blows the back of her head out the rear of the van. Getting severe enough yet? We also get the second signal flare going up, because there’s a “reaction” pan that backs out of the front seat, past the second seat, in the girl’s mouth, out the back of her head, and out the rear of the van. Uh oh. “Clever” camera work to add humor to the scene. Not a good sign in a film directed by a music video maker. Fortunately, it’s mostly a false alarm, and the clever camera work isn’t really used for humorous intent later, although (IMHO) it does rob a few scenes of the horrific immediacy that the original perfected.
The kids all bail and start compulsively vomiting in the weeds. After deciding to go find the police to report the incident (and tossing the weed in a wheat field), they mat the corpse over with newspapers (mostly so they don’t have to look at her) and cautiously get back in, driving to look for some place to call the police from. The sequences following are actually played for humor, making it some of the most macabre gallows joking you’ll find in the theaters this season. Eventually they find a roadside store (with a meat counter full of flies) where an elderly and rather creepy old woman (sort of an evil Alice Nelson from the Brady Bunch) gives them the “what a shame” talk, and calls the police. The sheriff, it turns out, wants to see them over by an old mill a few miles further down the dirt road. Getting kinda isolated? Kinda weedy? Yup. You bet. Over their protests, they eventually resign themselves and pull down the old rutted road to the deserted farm.
And find it deserted. No sign of the sheriff anywhere.
Well, now what? Like any good Scooby-group, they go exploring. After a standard “cat in the closet” gag with a distinctly backwoods twist (hello Pogo), they encounter the sole inhabitant of the farm. A hollow-eyed, filthy, scrawny kid with an overbite like a bulldozer. His head weaves about constantly in a manner I’ve grown to associate with Aspberger’s syndrome. His name? “Jeddidiah.”
Of course.
Jeddidiah, after some questioning, agrees to lead ‘em across to a house where they can call for the sheriff again. Our 7th heaven honey and her boyfriend follow him while the others stay behind, in case the sheriff finally stops by.
And he does.
Damn.
It’s R. Lee Ermey.
Any doubt about whether the film was going to pull the “go for help that turns out to be in on it” trick again is out the window. What the hell is up with really big and famous stars making their way into TCM flicks? Do they actually recognize the significance of the original, or is it a taste for the old ultraviolence?
Who’s R. Lee Ermey?
Maybe this’ll ring a few bells. “Five-foot-nine, I didn't know they stacked shit that high.”
Yup. It’s the gunnery sergeant from “Full Metal Jacket.”
Double damn. Maybe the only person in the film scarier than Leatherface, Ermey pours himself into the role like he was born for it. He even sneaks a “maggot” line in for the people paying attention. (It also appears that he’s immortal, since he doesn’t seem to have aged more than a year or two since FMJ in 1987.) So Ermey steps to in the scene, being brutally casual about the corpse, enlisting the teens’ help in wrapping the body in cellophane and tossing it in his trunk....but not until after his narration of the scene and giving the corpse a good grope in everyone’s full view. (Ewwwww.......that’s pretty sick even for you Ermey.) Having thoroughly grossed out everyone within range, he settles back into the squad car and drives off.
Back at the house (not entirely true, the flick cuts repeatedly back and forth between these two scenes) we encounter grandpa. Grandpa is entirely different in this film, and honestly, probably for the better. The “dinner scene” that served as a staging area for most of the exposition in the original film is entirely missing from this film, so the portrayal of Grandpa as a desiccated corpse is unnecessary. Instead of the toothless old mummy, they make him impotent in an entirely different manner. He’s missing both legs. In response to their shouts (Jeddidiah’s disappeared) Grandpa wheels himself out onto the porch. He says the girl can go inside and call the police, but suspicious Mr. maybe-hispanic has to stay on the porch. Naturally, having been in an HBO continuing series makes Mr. Balfour far too important to not go snooping around, and he sneaks inside.
First kill.
Note the differences. “Kemper” is killed out-of-sight of the other characters, in a believably “maybe he went back to the van” manner. This is a major deviation from the original. That said, however, the severity remains, but with clever camera angles. Kemper crouches down in a doorway to look at something on the ground. We look upwards from worm’s-eye-level towards Kemper and over his shoulder to the upper right corner of the doorway. Leatherface makes his first, instantaneous appearance with a single step to the doorway that brings with it the downward swing of a 20-lb. sledgehammer to the back of Kemper’s head. I don’t know how much gore resulted, or how quickly they cut away, because, for the first time in five years, I instinctively closed my eyes. Knowing the suddenness of the first kill in TCM original, I’d actually expected it, and thus had time to prepare. The rest of the audience (minus the dozen other people who’d seen the original) hadn’t, and screamed bloody murder. SO MUCH FUN.
“Erin” finishes her call and tries to go back outside, but ends up helping Grandpa on the can. Eventually getting out and not finding her boyfriend, she goes back to the van. There’s a bunch of dickin’ around for a while, before everyone decides that “something is up” and Erin returns to the house with Mr. Non-descript. (DUDE! YOU’RE A RED SHIRT! RUN THE FUCK FOR IT!) In the meantime, we watch as Leatherface warms up his workbench, that, unaccountably, has an enormous amount of water pouring down onto it from everywhere. This is really for the sake of being “artsy” because A) if the pipes leaked that much there wouldn’t be running water anywhere and B) the basement would be filled to the rafters long ago. Leatherface then does the unthinkable. He takes off the mask. (This has, AFAIK, never happened before.) The face underneath has an empty, rotted socket where the nose is supposed to be. (The rest of the face is Andrew Bryniarski, a fella with one of the weirdest resumes I’ve ever seen.....Zangief? Lobo? Chip Shrek? Wow.)
Erin’s job on the way back is to distract Grandpa outside while Mr. Non-descript, armed with a tire-iron, sneaks inside in search of clues. (Doesn’t really fit the “Velma” model, though.) Erin does a totally stupid job at being a distraction, and abandons all pretense when Non (after a number of entirely indecipherable but really creepy discoveries) manages to accidentally FLIP OVER A REFRIDGERATOR. She runs inside, and Grandpa, pissed off by the uninvited invasion, effectively hems them in while pounding on the floor with his cane and shouting “BRING IT!” This gains only derision from the early-20-somethings.
Then the roar starts up. The roar of a single-stroke engine. A chainsaw.
This is one of the best action scenes I’ve seen in horror flicks for a while. They actually pull off a believable “flailing, panic-ridden attempt at fleeing that turns, from their own terror, into a clumsy stumble and fall at exactly the wrong moment” which is more than any “I broke my heel” crap you’ll get elsewhere. The two struggle past Grandpa, who’s blocking the hallway, but only after Non manages to intercede his tire-iron between himself and Leatherface’s tool of choice. (Bullshit alert! You hold a chainsaw down on a tire iron for that long and one of two things is going to happen. A) the iron gets flung across the room or B) the chain breaks and flings pieces around the room....they aren’t built to encounter something as sturdy as steel....which is how Greenpeace has killed several dozen loggers with their “spiking” of old-growth trees.) There’s even a chase through the washed laundry sheets as Non tries to get away. Unfortunately for him, he looses his footing. Well, one, anyway. (More bullshit....chainsaws don’t work like swords. They’ll mangle upon brief contact, but won’t cut clear through without some applied pressure....and there wasn’t enough momentum applied.) He dies, right? Nah....remember that embedded human fingernail? Non objects to being taken downstairs.
Fortunately Leatherface knows how to deal with objectors.
One of the most disturbing and iconic (of the film, not the genre) scenes of the first TCM is when Leatherface gets a hold of two victims at once. One gets flung in the chest-freezer where he flails about and repeatedly flings the lid open in an entirely believably earnest, but fruitless and clumsy attempt to get out, but the other is a problem. She just won’t stop that ineffectual battering at Leatherface. And there’s only one freezer. So he hangs her up. Hanging from a strut is a sequence of meathooks. Leatherface picks the girl up and impales her, back first, on the hook. Instantly dead? You wish. This is probably the most severe scene of the entire first film, as she gasps in pain and surprise, and then wheels about on the hook’s pivot, flailing for anything to grab hold of to pull herself off the hook. Realistically, what would have happened is that the hook would’ve gone to one side of the spine, just under the ribcage in the back, puncturing a lung. (the lungs actually rest surprisingly close to the spine.) Suspended about a foot and a half off the ground, she never manages to get off that hook, but she lives for quite a while, the collapsing lung unable to sustain a very loud scream of pain. To amplify the abject horror, the whole scene is shot from an upper corner of the room, making it feel like “America’s most horrific security cameras” and adding uncomfortably to the realism of the scene. (Much of the original was marked by this “uncomfortable realism.”)
This time around, Mr. Non-descript is the one to end up on the hook. This massively fucks with the sexual subtext message of the film, but that’s a discussion for later. Again, as an example of the difference in styles, there’s a protracted struggle between Leatherface and the ass-kicking contestant as he maneuvers the fish up into the air above an upright piano. Quick cut to a camera-angle that looks directly at a meathook which Non turns and notices just a moment too late. Overly clever camera work, warning the audience, but really a minor quibble. Impaled, Mr. Non does a bunch of struggling, levering up on the exposed, leaking pipework of the building, all for naught as he repeatedly just slides back onto the curved hook. In an additional bit of “artistry” he can just tickle the ivories of an upright piano beneath him with the toes of his remaining leg. Further, he rests his arms on the piping, making the hook scene into a “crucifixion” of a sort. This doesn’t really have any meaning, and it’s not entirely clear that it’s intentional, it just adds to the “arty” nature of the film. This actually takes some of the severity from the film by the insertion of “film logic” and imagery that pulls us a bit away from the unnerving realism of the first film. (Similarly, one of the most common comments I’ve heard about the first film was that some of the last girl’s screams are “too realistic.) It’s a delicate balance of frightening the audience and making them believe, and not ending up with something that looks like a tape of home movies.
Meanwhile Erin flees like she bloody well should. Makes it back to the van, tells everyone they’re getting the fuck outta there.......and the van won’t start.
Emrey shows up, scaring the shit outta the audience. There’s a long scene of mental abuse that follows, triggered by Emrey spotting a roach on the dashboard (not the insect kind). Emrey hauls everyone outta the van, throws them face-first in the dirt, and digs in with the most severe “you ain’t from around heah.....ah you, boy?” session you’ve ever seen, refusing to listen to the ravings of the “drug-addled youths.” Eventually he essentially goads Andy (handicapped stand-in) into pulling a gun on the sheriff under the pretense of reenacting the suicide, which Emrey now believes was a murder. Arresting Andy and tossing him in the back of the squad car, he leaves the two girls behind. Andy gets taken to join Mr. Non after a touch of police policy. Nuff’ said. The girls, on the other hand, manage to hotwire the van, only to have all the wheels fall off. I’m not kidding. I’m not sure what exactly was supposed to have happened here, but I think they drive straight into a pit-trap that’s been ten inches in front of them the entire time. (Overly extravagant insertion, like cars flipping over and exploding in movies, this is another example of movie logic interceding into a film that’s otherwise gotten us wishing for less believability.) Then the chainsaw comes down through the roof. Things kinda go downhill from there. Much chasing and screaming. “Pepper” gets it as a chainsawed victim, feathers from her down jacket flying all over the place. Leatherface turns out to be wearing a brand new mask....one with a touch of Hispanic in it.
Erin flees into an entirely new film. One with very interesting things to offer. In place of the “dinner scene,” Erin flees through the woods until she finds a trailer inhabited by two women. Almost surreally contrasted, one is obese to the point of immobility and one is a hollow-eyed wastrel with a buzz-cut, wandering around like a mental invalid in a robe.
This is supremely interesting. Leatherface disappears. The women aren’t concerned in the least, and insist that he knows better than to bother them. They assure Erin that she’s safe, but admit they don’t have a phone (too much trouble). The only thing they’re insistent on is that Erin drink up the tea they’ve prepared....tea that makes Erin’s head spin. Then the baby starts crying. (Which starts us all questioning “then who’s the fath....ohhhh.....”)And the (absent?) phone rings. Looks like these girls are in on it too.
Why?
Erin spots a resemblance in the child to the hitchhiker from the start of the film. Which means.......and nine months........then the blood.........wow....now that’s severe.
Erin wakes up as Ermey....plays with her. Turns out that EVERY character we’ve met is in on the butchering as well, that old woman from the truck stop turns out to be Leatherface’s concerned, caring mother, who hates all the pretty girls for the way they made fun of her poor, diseased boy. Erin gets tossed in the basement to await her turn as Leatherface (distinctly Psycho-like) peers down between the floorboards above. Probably just for the fact that she landed face-first in the ankle-deep water gathered down there, and she’s still wearing that white t-shirt. (I won’t lie, I readily noticed it too. The circumstances kinda precluded ME from considering it as arousing. I guess all those reviewers are more thoroughly numbed to circumstances than I.) There she finds Mr. Non, still alive and unable to hoist himself off the hook. In a dramatic scene that feels distinctly out-of-place, he begs for her to kill him, (a scene so melodramatic and lacking in the realistic urgency of the rest of the film, that I think it’s the primary piss-off point for the fans crowing how much better the original was) and she does, by stabbing him IN THE STOMACH and LOWER INTESTINE. Geez. They did so well on the realism count up until now. Stabbing him in the stomach only empties the hydrochloric acid into the body cavity, ensuring an even more painful, lingering death than the slow death by suffocation and blood loss he was suffering.
Much of the remainder is chase scene. She finds the handicapped stand-in in a tub of water with a big pierce wound in his back. With some unexpected aid by Jeddidiah they find their way out of the basement with Leatherface right behind them. Half of Andy ends up suspended from a chandelier, and Erin flees across-country until she stumbles on........the slaughterhouse! Like a complete fool she actually manages to climb into the killing room, and barely slips away in time. A somewhat lame stunt is pulled, and she actually manages to CHOP LEATHERFACE’S ARM OFF. Wow. With a cleaver (bullshit ala....oh who cares). Erin flags down a trucker on the road outside......and then, just to add irony in comparison with the original, the semi stops at that very same truck stop by the highway. Erin repeats the exact lines as the original Hitchhiker, but has the good sense to sneak out of the cab when no one is looking.
In the final denoument, Erin kidnaps the child, hotwires Ermey’s squad car, runs him down, throws it into reverse, runs him down again, throws it into forward, and runs him down a third time. Leatherface gets a final appearance in recognition of the iconic moment at the end of the first, swinging the chainsaw one-armed down the side of the squad car as it passes him.
Finally, we go back to that “crime scene walkthrough” from the start, which is suddenly interrupted BW-like as Leatherface cuts down the two police officers. This last bit actually doesn’t work very well, and is kind of a bad addendum to an otherwise well-crafted film.
Whew. I wouldn’t ‘ve been quite so thorough this time around, but I know a lot of you aren’t the least bit inclined to see this film, but are nonetheless curious over what all the hullabaloo concerned. In comparing the two films, it’s best to look at the second in relation to which scenes it excluded from the first, and which parts it added. Oddly enough, most of the explanation scenes were left out of the remake. The family’s history in the slaughterhouse business is entirely excluded, leaving us with the impression that this is just the sort of thing that backwoods hicks do. There’s no mention of the cannibalism that was central to the first film (and the entire subject of the second film), which is very, very odd, because it could’ve been included by the simple expedient of something recognizable in the meat counter, someone biting down on a butchered arm, a “roast” in the oven......ANYTHING would’ve done to get this point across. I’m hardly upset about it, but I am profoundly puzzled. The only real indication of it is when Leatherface salts and wraps Mr. Non-descript’s leg as he’s hanging from a hook. I took it to mean that the meat was being preserved, but I think that’s only because I knew the story. Someone else might assume he’s just keeping the kid alive for torture. Even during the run through the slaughterhouse they could’ve thrown us a bone or an indication that this was the family’s old business, but no such offer was given. Without knowing that it was the family’s old work, the slaughterhouse is an almost absurd intercession into the film. Like the Scooby gang running from the ghost of the “Baron” and emerging from the woods to find an old carnival in the clearing so they can create some absurd trap. Also missing from the remake is anything that could be drawn back to the origins in Ed Gein. TCM:original had several scenes with furniture made of human remains, workshop, a table set before guests all stuffed with sawdust, etc. The remake has only a few vauge hints and Leatherface’s mask. Honestly, if you think about it, there’s no real notion at all what the family does with the bodies in the remake. Great leaky workshop, blades and thread and needles and sewing machines, but the only purpose any of these remains are put to is to cover Leatherface’s head. Apparently they’re just killing passerby’s to stock his wardrobe and get the trailer ladies a kid.
On the other hand, there’s the scenes they added or altered. The bit in the trailer with the two spinsters was extremely good. Abstract and absurd in a way that rings surprisingly true in this environment. Then there’s the hitchhiker. Honestly, I kinda like the original take on the hitchhiker better. Hard to say exactly why. It’s like they pick this guy up, and everyone sitting and watching him, you completely don’t know what to expect.....and then he actually pulls off something that surprises you....without going totally berserk or....I dunno.....exploding or something. He goes into it with this totally intense look.... The remake’s take is a little more orchestrated. Equally horrific, probably moreso, but a bit more cinematically paced and predictable (as soon as the gun appears, you know what’s going to happen). Nonetheless, very well done and reinterpreted, as well as an enormously successful springboard for the rest of the film.
The second takes on each of the killings were a little too cinematic for my taste in the remake. I preferred the bare-bones-and-sawdust aspect of the first one on that count, especially for the first killing. The endings, I think, are dead even. There’s the hokey-ness of the slaughterhouse balanced against the hokey-ness of the “dinner.”
In the final analysis, TCM: Remake is a ridiculously well done film, honestly scary, cinematic, and stylish in it’s treatment of the original. This one reinterprets and twists message of original skillfully, gives something new to consider, not just repeat, and also not completely fuck up original. However, the insertion of a bit too much clever camera work (despite a conscious attempt to ape the original in places that feels a little anachronistic) and deus ex machina in the plot pulls it down to just barely inferior to the original.
Ok, now for the real gore. You see, I covered this film in a class I took while in undergrad. This was an elective film analysis class that concerned itself with digging elbow-deep into the subtext and supposed subtext of films, and the specific class I took concerned itself with “The Look of the Perverse.” So we went spelunking into the truly, famously perverse films by true masters. Films by Cronenburg as analyzed (or anal-ized) by Andrea Dworkin. Blue Velvet. A week spent on the complex undercurrents in classic porn. (No viewing assignments on that portion....damn.) So? So, after the “rape revenge genre” section we landed with both feet in the grime and muck of the slasher sub-genre. And where do you go in there? Why, naturally, you go back to the originating films to form your theses. That means “Psycho” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
People with little stomach for impossibly convoluted analysis of subtext in horror should leave now.
You see, according to most film analysts, the slasher in slasher films could best be summarized as men who “don’t know what to ‘do’ with women when they ‘have’ them.” Their sexuality and perversity is externalized in the wielding of phallic cleavers, swung about wildly in massive overcompensation for some impotence in the monster themselves. Victims therefore get “penetrated” with knives, hooks, etc. Absurd? Freudian interpretation of film gone haywire? Welll.....it’s easy to say that, but just go back and look. You have to remember that we’re not talking about how the world actually works. We’re not delving into the psyche of actual killers here, we’re talking about themes consciously put into film through direction, casting, dialogue and framing, the creation of an entire fictionalized, abstracted world. It’s not by coincidence that “Aliens” ends with a kind of re-structured cyborg family, Ripley triumphant, the adopted child Newt, and half of cyborg Bishop (spitting buttermilk-blood everywhere), flushing the ultimate in biological childbirth (queen alien) into the cold of deep space. It’s not coincidence because every few seconds on the screen translate into TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. A good director isn’t going to put anything up there without being damn sure that it’s what they want, so looking for significance in the minutia, much less the overall themes, isn’t as far-fetched as you might think.
As for the sex angle on slashers? It’s plain to see how this theory derives from Norman Bates, with his transvestitism (ignoring what such a hobby actually means, remember what such a tendancy would mean to audiences in the 1960’s), but if you look hard, the trope actually extends tendrils throughout a lot of the genre. Jason is basically an overgrown child, mentally, who makes a point of slaughtering teenage, sexually active kids, often in the middle of congress. For explicitly stated exploration of this, check out his time in hell from “Freddy vs. Jason.” Freddy comes after the same age range, literally attacking them “in their beds” and in a distinctly “teenage frustration” manner in a couple of the films. Michael Meyers, it’s implied from flashbacks, killed his sister after she was making out with her boyfriend. Even the the lesser-known works from around the world picked up on this, the mysogny of “Pieces” contrasted against the tittering, simpering character who is eventually revealed as the villain. It is, after all, the “quiet ones” the “unassuming ones” or perhaps more precisely, the “ones too shy to ask anyone out” the “virginal loosers” that are cast in the role of the slasher. In fact, stereotypically, the one who escapes is the chaste girl, the one who isn’t sexually active, and thus “immune” to the monster’s massively perverse, oversexualized attacks.
So where does that leave us with TCM? Well, let’s see, Leatherface wearing another person’s skin, charging around holding the chainsaw out in front of him with both hands, the hitchhiker cutting himself up, and that weird scene of four men all strangely unable to “handle” one woman as they wrestle an -
Ersatzinsomnia’s guide to staying awake for three days.
2003-10-19 00:59:57
First of all: don’t do it. Cancel whatever the hell is scheduled with your friends or your work that’s going to make you spend those extra two days in a vertical position and get some sleep instead. They’ll understand, and you’ll have less of a chance of narcolepsy. Believe me, you really don’t want to do this. I’ve said in the past that “the more sleep you get, the more you think you need” but I was really just joking.
Step one, get over the hump. Just like hunger, there’s some sort of automatic feedback mechanism in your body that will switch off warning alarms when they get too strong. You’ll go from absolutely exhausted and sorta fading in and out for twenty minutes to an hour when you pass the point where you’d normally just curl up and sleep, but after that, you’ll come out of it and exist in a sort of mildly dazed state where you function perfectly, you’d just really rather be functioning perfectly while sitting down. Posture goes to hell, wit deserts, and you may experience a decrease in vocabulary, but you’ll get stuff done if you keep pushing.
Step two, engage only in things that interest you. If you are even slightly bored with whatever it is you have to accomplish or who you are talking to, somewhere near the middle of the second day you’ll be unable to maintain consciousness as a subliminal excuse to no longer be staring at the screen/textbook. This is why all-night cram sessions rarely work very well.
Step three, don’t eat much. I call it the “carnivore effect” the way big meals will make you want to lie down and sleep. (I call it that because only the critters at the top of the food chain can afford such a luxury. Prey species would be eaten if they took a nap after every big meal.) That’s not what I’m talking about here. Hunger pangs will help keep you awake, and if you get past the hump on those as well, you’ve fucked up your metabolism so thoroughly it doesn’t know which way to turn.
Step four, avoid physical exertion. This is more important the longer you’re up. First two days or so you can keep going just by pushing yourself, but round the middle of the third, any real exertion is going to make you collapse and sleep whether or not there’s a bed nearby. At the end, sitting very, very still while doing something that requires an enormous amount of concentration and no waiting can keep you going indefinitely. Especially if there isn’t a clock nearby. This is how LAN parties are run for entire weekends.
Step five, be picky about sleeping conditions. If you’re one of those people who really only feels comfortable sleeping in your own house or on your own bed, amplify those emotions in your head. This will help you remember that real, solid sleep is in the future, if you can just get this last thing done....
Step six, unreasonable stress is your friend. Deadlines keep you going. ‘Nuff said.
Finally, step seven, stop before the headaches. If you get to the point where the lack of sleep has manifested in a real scorcher of a headache, the one where you can feel the throbbing pulsing right behind your eyes, and it feels like the pressure in you head has gone up and is bleeding slowly out of the hinge between your spine and your skull...the kind where you can see your pulse reflected in the world around you because you can make out the flexing corpuscles in your retina by the way they distort everything you’re looking at, then you have gone too far. Something is really getting damaged here, and you better get sleep right now. (Or food, since the same thing manifests when you don’t eat for two or three days. Pangs of hunger from your stomach is just the feedback mechanism. A headache means the lack of nutrient is really starting to mess with you.) Ironically, it’s actually harder to sleep at this point because of the pain, but do it anyway.
Damn, what a weekend.
Started for me on Thursday, 8:30 in the morning. Despite the fact that I expected to get blood today, I didn’t want to sleep any longer because I had other work that had to get done, namely creation of a new poster for poster presentations at the Educational Partners conference on Sunday. (Annual event where all the people who give tech money for research come down and having explained to them what research has been done with their money in the hopes of convincing them to keep funding going.) So I go into work. Sure enough, by 11:00 we get the call that they’ve got blood samples waiting for us. I drive out and pick them up, bring ‘em back and start working. Work was delayed for a couple of hours for lunch and a few preporatory steps I’d forgotten, but I got going quickly enough. Experiments ran until about 2:30 AM. At that point....I went back to work on the poster. See, there are only two poster printers available to me, and one has a week-long waiting list. So I have to use the CHBE department’s plotter instead. But that’s locked up in a room. During weekdays I can fetch a secretary or someone to come open the room for me, but during the weekends the place is a ghost town for administrative staff, and any labworkers are sequestered away from casual eyes. So that meant I had to do the printing on Friday, after a full night of experiments. So I worked on the poster until about 11:00 in the morning. (I really want this one to be good, but it always ends up pale in comparison to the more artistically-minded individuals bracketing me. For some reason, everyone always tells me that I use way too much text and not enough visuals or white space (spread out) on the poster. Huh. Wonder where that comes from.) Then I go over to the plotter, con my way in, and start in on it again. The plotter (4-foot wide printer) is far from intuitive in its setup, and it takes me until 1:40 to get it printed properly.
Even then, it wasn’t really printed properly. There are some typos that can only be seen when they are three feet tall. (Gahhh.....) It was no use, though, I was far too out of it (hump) to contemplate sticking around for another printing (each one took 30 minutes because I was using the highest print quality.) so I decided to try for the weekend, and went home to die.
Problem. The CoC game I regularly run for my friends was scheduled for Friday. This is what I should’ve canceled. Problem was, they’d planned on starting early because several of them had to leave early, which necessitated several of them getting out of work early to make it on time. Now, considering how little action there is in my games (highly investigative-oriented) it is an incredible compliment that they, on their own initiative, got time off from their respective jobs to come and play my game. So I couldn’t blow them off. Further, because they were planning on ending early, that meant I could still make Shelly and Amy’s party at a reasonable (for us) hour. So, game at 4:30, they live an hour away, so I get to sleep between 2-3:30. Whoopee.
I set the alarm wrong. Gahhhh..... woke up on my own at 5:00. (Yes, I know this means I wasn’t up for the three days I say I was. Shut up.) So I end up BOTH not getting any real sleep, and ALSO still standing up my friends at the game for two solid hours. Tear out to the car, and swear a blue streak for the hour and twenty minutes it took me to get to the game through rush hour traffic. (Actually pretty good time considering the distance.) Rush into game apologizing profusely, and run the game. I arrived two hours late, so I let them run about an hour and a half past when I should’ve left, making it an even 11:30 for the end of the game. 85 to 285, to 75, down 75 to Quu’s for the party. (Dammit, forgot to bring the Guinness.) I was really glad to see that there was still a sizeable crowd around, so my appearance wasn’t entirely lame. (Missed all the chili, though. :( Considering I’d only had two rough meals since Wednesday night, I could’ve really used it.) Somewhere during the party wind-down I transferred into the “stationary” part of sleep deprivation. Again, stupid instinct followed, I ended up playing the “campaign” mode of Halo all night until about 10:30 AM. Didn’t even feel remotely tired at that point, but I think that was mostly the “got past the hump” stage combined with a strange trepidation I have about sleeping at anyone’s place other than my own. I have no real reason for this, it’s just something that I picked up a long time ago. Skedaddled back to the apt., got there around 11:00, set the VCR to record X-Men (‘the hell? Apocalypse’s horsemen are Xavier, Magneto, Mystique, and Storm? THAT ain’t right. I might actually start bitching about continuity if they keep this up. At the very least, they need to convert Angel to Archangel. (Angel was Apocalypse’s horseman “death” following an apparent suicide after he lost his wings during the mutant massacre.)).....and set the alarm clock for 3:00 again. Remember, I still had to print the poster, right? Gotta intercept with one of the people who had a key for that room, and my chances are better during normal working hours. Besides, some standard labwork left to do.
Got up groggily after my four hours, went to the car to go to work, turned the key....and nothing happened. I’d been so out of it by the time I got back that morning that I’d left the lights on. *Sigh* Walked to work, put in my hours at the pipette, and started hunting for someone with a key. Got one, discovered that my card actually has access to the new CHBE building, and started re-printing. That all put me at about 7:30 when I walked back to my dorm and called home. Why? Because I had to do that poster presentation on Sunday. For which I needed to be dressed up. I have a suit in here at Tech, but the one thing I don’t have is the proper black shoes. Every time I dress up to go to church with my family, I leave tech properly attired, go home with my parents, change into more casual clothes, hang around for a while, and then drive back to Tech. The suit-bag I always remember. The shoes I always forget. So they continuously migrate homeward. I should fill them with messages and release them out my window rather than bothering with the telephone.
Dad agreed to come down and drop off the shoes, arriving at about 8:40. He brought along jumper cables (I have AAA, but have had issues with punctuality with them before, and I wasn’t about to stand out in the cold for an hour.) and jumped the car. We said a somewhat abbreviated goodbye, as I had to run the engine for 15 minutes to get the charge back up, and I drove down to the west Dekalb mall to grab a dinner. Ate up, walked by the AMC outlet......and saw that the remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, which I’d totally forgotten was being released today, was starting in five minutes.
Ehhhhhhh.
Unnnhhhhhh......
Dammit.
I went in and saw it. Full review when I have a chance, but in summary, two words.
PACKED HOUSE.
You know those ads for theaters which show audience reaction? Everyone tearing up at romance or drama, and then a clip of the ENTIRE THEATER screaming in unison in genuine surprise at something in the film? Popcorn box flying up and dumping on someone because they were startled so badly? Think that’s an idealized situation?
I just lived it. For audience reaction, this beat the shit out of “Jason vs. Freddy.” It wasn’t constant startling, like some of those “cat in the closet” flicks, only a handful, but so incredibly well placed it ALWAYS scared the shit out of the audience. (With the exception of the final jump, a post-mortem of the film that didn’t work very well.)
As someone who watched and appreciated the original TTCM, and even discussed it at great length in a film and thematic analysis class, I’m more surprised than anyone to say that this is a worthy successor to the first. This means that if you saw and could stand the original, even appreciate how much of a milestone it was, you don’t want to miss the remake for the world. If asked which one was better, assuming we strip the original of its cult status and subsequent effects on the genre, I actually have to stop and think for a minute to decide, which is far more than I’ve had to do with any other remake. (Since I haven’t seen “Manhunter” I can’t comment on that particular remake.)
What it also means is that if you couldn’t take the first one, or didn’t like it, then don’t go anywhere near the theater for this remake. This film, much like the original one was made famous for, is ridiculously severe. (A term I will define from my perspective next time.) It will be very hard to watch for some people, and I, even *I*, reflexively closed my eyes at the moment of the first killing. (It sort-of mirrors the first killing from the original.)
See, the remake is actually a complete, honest reinterpretation of the original, by people who LIKED and deeply studied the first film. Unlike, say, the director for House of the Dead. It both does and does not tell the same story, as though they got the Myth right, but are in a slightly parallel universe. They’ve got that strange regional backwoods horror element that I talked about during the discussion on “Jeepers Creepers” down and nailed to the floor. The camera work is far superior in this remake than the original, but that actually added to the horror of the original. There’s implied humor in some parts of the film due to the camera work. (Pan backwards away from shocked teens, through the hole in the back of the head of a victim.) Secondly, some fairly key alterations completely fuck with the sexual politics of the film. Twist it around itself. A phrase like that needs some descriptors, but I’ll get to them at the next update. I think the original is better, but by a much narrower margin than I ever expected to see.
Now, I finally, sleep.
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“This episode of Angel contains graphic imagery and partial nudity”
2003-10-16 00:37:53
Oh FUCK yeah, I’m taping that. They went ahead and tacked a warning on the preview for next week? I am so there... Apparently we get a good look inside the Hell Spike is heading too. I’m not sure, but I think one of the shades walking around has a coathanger sticking out of her eye.
And it looks like A) some of the humor is coming back to the show and B) they’re inserting a werewolf into the regular cast. Angel might be shaping up a bit. On the other hand, the end of this one was a little....uh....either nonsensical or inconsistent. Ah, whatever.
(Alternate title “Pynchon Fights Dirty”)
So, a mid-week update? What the hell?
Yeah, I think I’m gonna go for the shorter route for a while. The reviews were really starting to drag on me. Part of an entry would sit on my harddrive for most of the week as an entry got cobbled together in bits and pieces, with an eye towards saying something profound. Bleh. Failed more often than not, so it’s back to the standard rattle. Don’t expect 20-page diatribes outta me for a bit. That was just boring me. And probably everyone else.
So what to natter on? I used to keep a little notepad with me to write triggers on whenever something interesting happened during the day that I might want to note here (if only for my own edification, and nothing else). Stopped doing that, and quickly discovered that I wasn’t remembering any of the stuff I’d encountered during the day. Might go back to that method, not sure.
New comic day today. Stopped by and picked up my weekly load at Oxford’s. I’m starting to worry a bit about that hobby. This is the second week in a row that I’ve spent over $40. Last week it was just a bumper crop + a Heavy Metal, but this week was a bumper crop too. I really can’t afford to follow that many stories or pick up that many extraneous bits (graphic novels, gaming books, etc.) every week of the month. Used to be I could wait until a slow week of one or two books, and pad the difference with a discount DVD, but I haven’t had a slow week for a while now.
On the other hand, the haul was SO GOOD. Top of the heap was “Smax” part 3. A mini-series spinoff of ABC’s “Top 10” comic. Top 10 was a comic following the police force in a city where every single person had superpowers of some sort. Really, really fun, and really really funny. One of it’s best parts was that every crowd scene had a dozen or more cameos of heroes from EVERY genre, company, and generation swarming the backgrounds. And it was written by Alan Moore, so you know the guy can hit levels of your memory you didn’t even know existed anymore. I won’t ruin Smax by going over the plot, but I was actually kinda worried through the first two issues, because these cameos were missing, and the characters seemed a little....off model. Third one, though, in addition to being frickin’ hilarious, restored the background cameos, because the characters go into town. They travel in a pumpkin drawn by two white mice. (Eh....obvious reference) Which they get into at the bus-stop which has a plainly-drawn silhouette of a pumpkin carriage.....and another with a big “not” sign through the obvious outline of a NEKOBUS! (OMGWTF! Wait....when exactly did this abbreviation become endearingly kitsch and stop being hideously annoying?) They pile in next to a man dressed all in newsprint (Gladstone, of Gladstone and Disraeli, as portrayed by Tenniel for Carroll), and later travel past Knockturn Alley down the Street of Eerie Children....where we see Spookey, Wendy; the little Witch, Casper’s bowler-wearing friend (forgot the name), Pugsley, Stewey holding a gun to Maggie’s head, the kids from “Nightmare before Christmas”, L’il devil, and JTHM! Damn, I love Alan Moore’s work. Might do a review of some of his comics some day.
In other news, Lee’s out stirring up a shitstorm with his post on gender inequality. I do have an opinion on how these things work, but I will also admit that I have a biased perception, being of one, and only one, gender. As far as I’m concerned, the only one who could speak knowledgeably on the subject would be that blind prophet from....uh....the tale of the Argonauts.....the one ...with the staff....and struck the snakes.... quizzed on sex by the gods... OK, someone help me here, I’ve forgotten his name. (Damn you Google! How could you fail me now!)
At any rate, let’s say that gender equality is ranked on a scale from 0-10, with true equality being a 5, complete oppression of women being at 0, and complete oppression of men being at 10. Fortunately, there’s been very little in the way of existence in human society at either 0 or 10. A society built on such a manifest would die out pretty quick. There is little denying, however, that a lot more of human history was built in the 1-3 range than the few incidences of 6-9. (Not entirely unheard of...the Isis cults of early history could waver around an 8.3 in some respects.) So how is this graduated? Well, 1 would be roughly Iran a few years ago. (They’ve crawled up to a 1.1-1.3 or so since there’s 140,000 American troops sitting across the border.) Bride burnings, honor killings, repeated beatings, mandatory enforced “modesty” in the form of a Burkah, etc. 2 would be a sort of enforced Donna-Reed world, where everyone acts like the Stepford Wives, is expected to “work through” incidents like being beaten by a drunkard husband, etc. Sort of a “50’s as hell” situation. 3 I mark somewhat arbitrarily at suffrage. Legally allowed to participate in governance and the laws under which they live. At 4 there is no legal difference between the genders (similarly at 6) but societal expectation and pressures allows only the exceptional to be considered the equivalent of a man. (And vice versa at 6.) Laws dictating equality before the government are ignored or improperly enforced, and cultural stigma are designed to “keep people in their place.” I suppose a rough equivalent would be the near-worst “Good Old Boy” treatment of blacks in the South during the early 60’s.
On average, at my guesstimate, I think the US is resting solidly between a 4.8 and a 4.9, with 5.0 as an ideal goal. The problem is, of course, that that’s an average, not an ultimate signifier. A woman who got caught up in the “Good Old Boy” network might have regular experiences down around a 4.5, and, if challenging it, might encounter incidents all the way down around a 4.2. These, however, in my personal experience, are vastly in the minority. What needs to be understood, and often is not by either the more virulent feminist groups or the people who challenge them, is that there are just as exceptional excursions above the 5.0 mark.
The real problem that a lot of people have with feminist groups, however, is that they feel they have to open the eyes of their members to that remaining 0.2 or 0.1 difference. See, the trick is that you can live happily anywhere along the line from 1-9 (10 and 0 are inarguably unfair from the perspective of anyone living them) if you are merely _convinced_ that the situation is correct. Iran is able to hold it’s population around a 1 because everyone has been told for years that women are incapable of bearing the responsibilities of men, less intelligent, and such overpoweringly sexual beings that the merest flash of flesh is sufficient to, harlot-like, enflame the men around them to sin. Women are told that it is virtuous to remain at a “1” level, and the wearing of the Burkah is a sign of “modesty.” To a significant degree during the era of the women’s suffrage movement, there were many women who didn’t WANT the vote. They’d convinced themselves that they didn’t want that responsibility, and the women who were trying to get the vote were all aspiring far above their stations. (To put it in the mildest of manners.) Now’s the bit where I get in trouble. The problem is, many of the women WEREN’T capable of bearing that burden. Not initially. They weren’t capable of being useful (informed) voters, because they’d never educated themselves on the issues. Taken the sides of husbands or parents unquestioningly in the past. The ironic thing was that existing just on the other side of a 3, they were actually being kept in a condition where they couldn’t, without an enormous effort, actually BE good at self governance. There were laws and the heavy weight of the community eye that gave them the ability to vote, but discouraged them from thinking for themselves. To grow up in such a condition and trying to move even your own ideas about yourself from a 3.5 to a 5 must’ve been a massive uphill climb.
Well, the climb is similar now, but less recognizable. Legally, anyone treated differently because of their gender can and probably will successfully sue to maintain their rights. The problem is, that society, while no longer leaning to keep one gender greatly repressed in deference to another, it is striving to keep them individualized. As such, the exceptions are getting “spikey,” with stereotypes arcing out to 5.5 and 4.5 pretty regularly, while the mean remains around 4.9. (Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon. Sally, the receptionist, approaches Alice, saying something to the effect of “Women are so badly treated in the engineering field. This paper here says that the average woman receives 2/3 the pay of the average man in the field!” A:”I’m the highest paid engineer at this firm, and I got the largest bonus this year.” S: ”That can’t be right. It says here that the average...” A: ”I think I see the problem here...”) Feminist groups, however are attempting to bridge that final 0.1-0.2 to get to 5. But they’re having to overcome all this spiky data, because a difference of 0.2 is hard for us to see in our everyday lives when we can all think of a dozen exceptions on either side of the fence. So in order to “wake women up” to the remaining injustice, and, to some degree, to act as a watchdog that the numbers don’t start slipping downwards, the feminist groups will argue that we actually exist at 4.2, and that women should be aiming for a 5.8. Societaly, they argue, women are better suited to govern because of their even temperaments, lack of testosterone-induced dick-waving contests, greater, more nurturing creativity, etc. etc. etc. All the associated bullshit that goes along with the community eye deciding to judge someone based on their gender. The really radical groups will actually argue for a move to 6.4 or 7.1. (Dave Sim seems to think he lives in a world around a 7.75....but that may have something to do with his crazy.)
What I don’t know, and cannot figure out how one would know, is how many women join these organizations actually believing that the world would be a better place for living at a 5.5 or 6.1 level, and how many are members to the end of pulling upwards, granting confidence enough to those women still thinking at a 4.2 level, so that everyone could honestly get to the 5.0 utopian goal. Many men will see these arguments, realize how thoroughly nutsiod they are, and believe that we are already living in a world of 5.1 or 5.2. Hence the reactionary response. See, conditions as they are, differences in perception could place the average to either side of 5.0, strictly dependant upon observation, and priorities. How an individual is allowed to dress is differently prioritized by different people, and individual exceptional experience will badly warp where you perceive the average at. For the record, there’s a tenured professor at GaTech who is a mild cross-dresser. He gets a few snickers from the new students, but everyone takes it in stride, faculty, grad students, etc. (True, everyone kinda wants to know why, but I’ve yet to see anyone who treats it maliciously who wasn’t first failed by him in a class.)
It doesn’t help that being at 5.0 would be like balancing on the head of a pin, when you don’t know where the pin is. Oh, the Democrats can try to continuously draw lines and borders and legislate boundaries and quotas until all the angels are gathered in a respectable cake-walk on the head, but I don’t think it really works, since they can’t be certain where that pinhead is. We’re beyond the dictates of law and into social interaction and opinions here, where a little slip, and you’re standing to one side. But you don’t even know you fell off. Men and women _are_, on average, different (viva la.....oh forget it.), and, on average, have different capacities in different fields. But, to use a bit of statistical language, I think the standard deviation bars are so large (and non-systemic) that the p values never even approach 0.05 (significance range). (Personally, I just always consider my actions something that “I” can do, and never as something that “men” can do..... or “white men” for that matter.) Men “typically have greater upper body strength than women,” but I’m sure there are women that could beat me at arm wrestling. In fact, I’d be surprised if a majority of them couldn’t, since I never exercise or weight lift. (But I’m quick and feisty though! So watchout!)
The real note to take home is that individual indicators don’t mean shit. The way that the culture of the US is spreading out weirdly, no single incident or single subject can be used as a metric for true judgement of gender bias one way or the other. I honestly believe that we’re fighting over very small potatoes considering how far we’ve come as a country. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth fighting over, but that does mean they’re not worth holding a revolution over. Consideration of the opponent’s viewpoints is key here, and if both sides would calm down, I think the debate over gender inequality can actually now move to the level of debate, without venturing into the derision of a public rally. (Great example. Not going to get into it here, but gals, you have to realize exactly how insulting is the bumper-sticker that says “If men gave birth, Abortion would be a sacrament.” Tells the world you’re living at 2.9, and should be at 6.2 Recognize that it’s not JUST an issue of gender inequality here. There are a lot of pro-life women out there, and they ain’t been brainwashed, no matter how much you tell them different.)
You know, a lot of this particular system could be applied to the current political climate. Hmmm. http://www.catandgirl.com/view.cgi?68
(And, as a total non-sequiter, how I feel when people are talking about all these cool bands I’ve never heard of: :) http://www.catandgirl.com/view.cgi?113 )
So now, a review? Maybe a brief one. I finished this book a while back, and it’s been crowding my end-table, waiting for me to pay attention to it. If I review it, it’ll go away and be put on a shelf somewhere and open up another spot for new clutter I haven’t read. Besides, I haven’t listened to the Roger Corman audio commentary on “X: the Man with X-ray Eyes” yet.
Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” This was one of those books that was sort-of on my “should have read this by now” list, but only kind of off in a corner, because I really had no idea what it was famous for. For some reason, I always grouped this book with “Catch 22”. I think they may have been on the same reading list back in highschool or something. I saw it in the discount bin at a used bookstore, and thought “why not?” Figger’d that I’d do some reading to actually improve my mind instead of the standard gore. ‘Course this book turned out to be gory, so double score!
Truman Capote likes details.
Man, does he like details.
“In Cold Blood” is essentially an “America’s Most Wanted” re-enactment of a crime that took place in Holcomb, Kansas in November of 1959. Truman Capote essentially wrote the sequence of events, down to the smallest recoverable detail, of a gruesome premeditated multiple murder committed by a pair of what you might refer to as “drifters” Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. It skips most of the graphic details, and actually leapfrogs the crime itself, telling it only in flashbacks after the two are caught. The book spans all associated events, from the week or so of build-up as the killers are driving towards Kansas and getting what they’ll need, and then for the whole extent of the investigation, the capture, the long, long wait on death row, and ends with the two men’s execution.
The story starts out with a really annoying technique. The entire book is broken into four roughly equal parts. The first, “The Last to See Them Alive” is 90 pages long, but is broken into lengths ranging from 2-4 pages of individual passages, swapping back and forth between events on the farm where the eventual murder victims will be killed, and to the fast approaching killers, as they make their preparations. It’s a clever idea, but remember, this swapping back and forth goes on for 90 pages, and gets really annoying by the end, especially since its also used as a partial introduction to the characters, so the events tend to be a little weirdly dramatized.
The victims are the “Clutter” family. Capote portrays them in an oddly....uh.....somewhere between “domesticized” and “sitcom-ideal” manner. The family consists of the patriarch, a massively successful, but friendly and staid farmer, a wife with an odd mental disorder which sounds like severe manic-depression that keeps her from accepting visitors much, Kenyon, rather non-descript son, and Nancy, who’s essentially what Pollyanna would’ve been as a late teen-ager, teaching the neighbor girls how to make pies, pitching in at the school, etc. With the exception of the mother, sound idealized? Yeah, to me too. It’s not nearly as severe as I’m portraying it, though, but there is a feel to the setting and people in this book. Holcomb is an agrarian town, and the people therein are portrayed as....rather un-urbane. Country folk, without being coarse. “The Good Old Days” before the modern hullabaloo. Or, alternately, just a little simple. Not as clever as them “big city folk”.....but everyone gets portrayed that way. Country, simplified in environ, routine, and mind. Think Andy Griffith show. Honestly, I was a bit offended for a while when I got a few dozen pages in. I grew up in a small town, and I’ve never really had to deal with the “country bumpkin” stereotype because my family hails from all over the country, but I thought I could recognize the stereotype easily enough. Now I’m not so sure. It could be that the portrayal Capote made of everyone having being based off of accounts from or about the real people meant a direct extension of the character from the clues left behind. Had to determine what kind of people they were by extrapolating straight lines from their books, community standing, possessions, etc. with little room for guessing at subtlety of people’s real motives or personalities. The overall effect would be one of “simpleness”. Makes me wonder what people would think of me, and extrapolate out of my mind based on the contents of my room.
The killers are Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. They’d hooked up in prison where one had heard tell of the Clutters from another inmate who’d worked for them. The inmate had known how successful the Clutter family had been in business (second largest ranching interest in the state), and assumed the family was rich. He was right, but what none of them had known, though, was that most of the money was re-invested or sitting in the bank, not kept on the farm itself. The killers are a really odd pair. Capote works on their odd camaraderie throughout the whole book. Both had been horribly scarred in road accidents, one having split his face down the middle by going into a windshield face-first, and being stitched together somewhat lopsided afterwards, and the other having wiped out in a motorcycle accident that destroyed his legs to the extent it took him years to learn how to walk again. He became addicted to asprin as a result. Their life stories are just....weird. One was the son of traveling circus performers, and an odd form of malnutrition from eating nothing but condensed milk (high-sugar) for days as a kid left him a permenant bed-wetter. He obsessed about discovering buried or sunken treasure. The other I remember less well, but involved building a hunters-lodge retreat with his father that eventually fell through disastrously, and ending up in the extended care of a local American Indian that took him in. Bizzare.
At any rate, the first quarter of the book essentially sets up all the characters as the two killers close in. Then it leapfrogs the incident itself, and jumps to the discovery and announcement.
The second quarter of the book, “Persons Unknown” fortunately stretched out the breaks between narratives to a much more acceptable pace. One segment covers the reaction of the townspeople (if anything, much more “country bumpkin” than the portrayal of the Clutter family) and the mounting of the police investigation. Meanwhile, Richard and Perry drove back to one of their relation’s, dropped the other off at a hotel, and bed down. After a bit of dallying, they go on a mad bad-check-writing spree, gathering up lots of re-salable goods under the con that they’re outfitting a man for his marriage and getting wedding presents. Then they head off down to Mexico. In both tails, the story is festooned with detail. Every iota of information is scoured from the home, every dead-end investigation is detailed. After a bit, I thought I was reading the novelization of “Alice’s Restaurant”. It really was pretty interesting, though, although it got a bit tiring.
Third quarter is entitled “Answer”, and begins with the answer to the question “why the Clutters?” An informant shows up named Floyd Wells. He’d been cooling his heels in the state penitentiary when he heard about the murders. After several months debating it, he came forward. It seems that he’d been the one to give the two the idea, seeing as how he used to talk with his cellmate, Richard Hickock, about the sweet job he’d had at the Clutter’s years ago. From the apparent wealth of the family, Hickock had assumed they’d have a lot of cash on hand, and got the farm and building layouts from his conversation with Wells. Meanwhile, the two killers, having frittered away all the money gained from the bad-check spree, and having slowly worn out their welcome as either a gigolo to wealthy widows of the area or “gentlemen friends” of a visiting German aristocrats / Industrialist (I don’t think Capote could get much info on this guy), and discovering that they didn’t like the wages of honest work, pull a couple more cons and slip clumsily outta town. Selling the car and hitching their way across the desert, then stealing a car and continuing in a great Arc up to Kansas City, then to Las Vegas, where they were finally nabbed. The police, once they had their names, had found a P.O. Box registered to Perry in Las Vegas that Perry had used to mail himself some of his stuff to avoid toting it himself. Inside? The boots they’d worn during the killings. This chapter also covered the crime itself, in the words of the two killers. They’d come into the house, cut the phone cords, woken up Mr. Clutter, told him they’d wanted money, and then escorted him around the house at shotgun-point and told him to tie up his other family members so they wouldn’t have to kill them. That done, they tied him up in the furnace room, and started taking the house apart, looking for the safe they’d been expecting. Halfway through, Perry had to keep Richard from raping Nancy, as Perry wasn’t about to have anything to do with such an abuse. Finding no money, the two went back and tortured Mr. Clutter with a knife for a little while, trying to get him to admit to a secret stash somewhere. Eventually giving up, they shot him in the head with the 16-gauge, and then went around the house, shooting Kenyon, the mom, and finally Nancy, each once in the head with the shotgun. Gathered up the spent rounds and left.
The final chapter is “The Corner” which covers the trial of the two killers in excruciating detail, reveals a bit about obscure insanity laws in the Midwest (long since changed, I’m betting), their sentence (death for both), their transfer to death row, the stories of those who kept them company on the row (including a couple that I daresay were much worse than these two) six years worth of appeals and waffling and final their execution by hanging on April 14, 1965. While the rest of the book is more of a story, the last chapter is really an analysis with a story thread running through. Each of the killers gets a rather elaborate psychological profile based on bits and pieces (letters, etc.) from earlier in the book, as does their relations who show up to the trial.
All in all, it is a rather odd book. I was afraid at one point that the massive detail going into the killers was in an attempt to make us “understand where they were coming from” as a societal justification of their actions (especially before we hear what actually happened), but that level of detail was really spread with an even hand. EVERYONE got that kind of deep background done on them, so it does come off as a very level portrayal, letting the audience make their own decisions. Not much moralizing or slanting done, just straightforward storytelling. That said, the detail level is really absurdly high throughout. You find yourself spending twenty minutes digging literally (reading about digging) through Perry’s dirty laundry as every item in his suitcase is enumerated. Letters that Perry saved (he’s the most memorable of the two because he was a packrat who kept everything that had any meaning to him at all) are transcribed in their entirety. Long conversations are broken down. Exact profit from bottle collecting with hitchhikers is calculated. As I mentioned before, that detail used to define their personalities leaves everyone looking a little “country” as their thoughts lack deeper complexity that couldn’t be guessed at by how many asprin Perry took that morning. I understand that this book sprung up something of a wellspring of “true crime” interest in the popular market, so that is probably the source of its status as a classic. It kept me interested throughout (until they start transcribing letters and journal entries) but sometimes the necessary slow pacing got excruciating.
That’s all for now, I’m to bed.
-
Damn, Smokey! Don't you know you can't argue with a woman!
2003-10-14 21:57:47
Since the last bit was such a snooze, a couple of memes to excuse my constant inability to keep up with my own hobbies.
Age: 27
Boyfriend: A position I do not currently occupy
Chore You Hate: Keeping up with e-mail....even when it means money to me.
Dad's Name: Tom
Essential Makeup Item: Uh....qua? Hairbrush? (Sometimes it's good being a guy.)
Favorite Actress: At the moment? Katharine Isabelle
Gold or Silver: Gold
Hometown: Boulder Colorado or Bloomington Indiana
Instruments You Play: Piano....very badly. Haven't practiced in eight years.
Job Title: Graduate Research Assistant
Kids: Nope.
Living Arrangements: 10x10x10 cube.
Mom's Name: Sheila
Number of People You've Slept With: A gentleman never tells.
Overnight Hospital Stays: Tore a 13 inch long gash in my side when I was four
Phobia: If we stay away from the existential stuff, heights, depths, and cockroaches
Quote You Like: "Man, that goalie was pissed about SOMETHING."
Rude Habit You Have: Ignoring people when I want to be left alone.
Siblings: I was an only child....eventually.
Time You Wake Up: 7-8 weekdays. 8-2 weekends, depending.
Unique Habit: Balancing pennies when I'm bored.
Vegetable you Refuse to Eat: Eggplant. Bleh
Worst Habit: Procrastinating. (no...really?)
X-rays You've Had: Teeth. Uh....think that's it.
Yummy Food You Make: Creamed chipped beef on toast.
Zodiac Sign: Virgo
1. Your name spelled backwards.
ainmosniztasre....which, of course, is the sound you make if you sneeze during a hiccup
2. Where were your parents born?
Madision Wisconsi and....somewhere in Ohio. My dad's family moved out to Albuquerque, so I never saw his homestead
3. What is the last thing you downloaded onto your computer?
big big's "Car bomb" clip
4. What's your favorite restaurant?
Garcia Bros Pizza. More recently, Ippolito's
5. Last time you swam in a pool?
Damn. Uh, two summers ago?
6. Have you ever been in a school play?
When very young. Oliver/Annie musica revue mix. I played Fagan.
7. How many kids do you want?
Fewer than three. Beyond that, indeterminate.
8. Type of music you dislike most?
Linkin Park. I know it's a cop out, but I run a contest. I'm allowed.
9. Are you registered to vote?
Yup
10. Do you have cable?
Yup
11. Have you ever ridden on a moped?
No.
12. Ever prank call anybody?
Not on purpose. (Long, stupid story.)
13. Ever get a parking ticket?
Oh yeah. I can't park near my work, but have to transport biohazards from the hospital to there. I just consider it a $20 parking space.
14. Would you go bungee jumping or sky diving?
I could get all the way to the edge before chickening out on either...
16. Do you have a garden?
Nope.
17. What's your favorite comic strip?
Far side, Something Positive, Zebra Girl, Mac Hall, Jack. All for different reasons.
18. Do you really know all the words to your national anthem?
Either everone's a lot better at this than I am, or they all just mean the first verse. That I know. The fourth one that's all insulting to Great Britan I can never remember.
19. Bath or Shower, morning or night?
Shower, night.
20. Best movie you've seen in the past month?
Past month? Uh..."X" the Man with the X-ray eyes. Next review.
21. Favorite pizza topping?
Barbecue Chicken
22. Chips or popcorn?
Popcorn. Chips stick in my teeth.
23. What color lipstick do you usually wear?
Qua?
24. Have you ever smoked peanut shells?
Barring some weird-ass euphamism, no.
25. Have you ever been in a beauty pageant?
Peh.
26. Orange Juice or apple?
Orange
27. Who was the last person you went out to dinner with and where did you dine?
EK, TJ, Brett, and co. at Umezono's
28. Favorite type of chocolate bar?
Heath bar
29. When was the last time you voted at the polls?
Last Senatorial election
30. Last time you ate a homegrown tomato?
Two weeks ago. Someone at the lab keeps bringing in baskets from her aunt's fields.
31. Have you ever won a trophy?
Dinky little things for Baseball and Basketball.
32. Are you a good cook?
No
33. Do you know how to pump your own gas?
Again, barring euphamisms, Yes.
34. Ever order an article from an infomercial?
Nope.
35. Sprite or 7-up?
Bleh. Neither.
36. Have you ever had to wear a uniform to work? how about school?
Ever? Suit and tie a few times for general addresses.
37. Last thing you bought at a pharmacy?
Theraflu
38. Ever throw up in public?
Yup. (Stupid stomach flu)
39. Would you prefer being a millionaire or find true love?
The latter, though I already fucked that up once.
40. Do you believe in love at first sight?
Sure, I guess. Don't know from personal experience.
41. Ever call a 1-900 number?
Yeah, actually. There was some company I had to call from work that had a 1-900 number. Odd.
42. Can ex's be friends?
Yup.
43. Who was the last person you visited in a hospital?
My grandfather, right before he died.
44. Did you have a lot of hair when you were a baby?
It was blond, but I've no idea about the amount.
45. What did you eat today?
Two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a glass of water.
46. What's your all time favorite Saturday Night Live Character?
Never watched it regularly. I'll do Kids in the Hall instead. Hecubus.
47. What was the name of your first pet?
Hmm. MY first pet was Whiskers. First family pet was either P-cat, or Socks (man what a stupid cat).
48. What is in your purse?
Pockets? Hmm. Wallet, Checkbook, keys, lint, two pens, four knives, fork, segment of plate, change, discarded counter-sunk bolt, half a dozen notes to myself, and a couple of other things I don't discuss.
49. Favorite PG rated thing to do before bedtime?
Read comics
50. What is one thing you are grateful for today?
Got through it in one piece.
And, finally, just to try and contribute a bit of inventiveness to this post, (and not intending any offense to anyone or anything. This is just a joke.)
You know you've been running contests or judging AMVs for a while when (hey, I've only been running for two years, but I've helped judge since about AWA4)...
You know every Linkin Park lyric by heart, and you're not a fan.
You remember when Wierd Al was the latest Linkin Park.
You remember when Queen was the original Linkin Park.
You remember when it only took four vids to the same song to earn that distinction.
You own Sarah Brightman's "Dive" album.
All of your favorite bands (EXCEPT Sarah Brightman) have been ruined for you.
You consider the judging sessions "sneak previews" to the endings of every series you've wanted to watch.
Something you've encouraged has bitten you on the ass.
You spend three days trying to track down Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" video to show people who think AMVs have only been around since 1998.
You've said "this year's crop was disappointing." (You'll always say that. It always seems worse than you remember because you don't remember the ones you didn't like.)
You've lost your copies of Corn Pone Flick's Vids three times now.
You learned to hate "X-the Movie" BECAUSE of its pretty visuals.
You've never seen all of Eva, because you don't need to.
Strobe lights don't remind you of raves, they remind you of sitting in a room full of people with pencils and notepads all screaming in pain.
You realized the secret to Quu's "Partical Dance."
You have seen over one trillion rose petals.
You remember the days when "tech problems" meant color rainbows, static, and vertical hold loss.
You remember wondering if anyone would ever be sick enough to do a video to Urotsukodoji.
You remember running out of storage space for all the "Master Copies."
You meow during "The End of the World". (My journal, I get to prop myself.)
Wow, it's easy to fill a couple pages when everything is double-spaced.
-
Holy Cow. Batman just saved the JLA (again) but this time with the power of his theme song....
2003-10-11 22:03:18
Haven’t seen Kill Bill or anything else in the theaters since AWA. Careful examination of the budget reveals that I’m only getting back about $2600 of the 3K I spent on the track this year, so I’m gonna cut back a little on the flicks until the difference is made up. I’m not too concerned, I knew I went over budget this year for the sake of the VAT server, and I actually thought the damage was much worse, but I still gotta tighten the belt a little. Doing so this afternoon actually depressed me rather profoundly, although that may have more to do with work than anything else.
In other news, I checked the DVDs of MST3K, and they do, in fact, work (at least a sample of them do), so I didn’t get ripped off at D*C. Also, although the Shadow episodes don’t play in a standard CD player, they will play on the computer, (mp3s) so, again, no ripped off.
I have actually been whittling away at mount DVD quite a bit, but it’s all been double-dvd sets of Farscape episodes, which would be pretty silly to review individually. I’ll do a series review when I finish out the entire series, (Most of the way through the next-to-last season now) if the fancy strikes me.
So in the last couple months I’ve gotten a couple of questions about how I compile all this crap into coherent accounts. Not the writing, naturally, as that’s amateurish enough to explain itself without any help from me, but the fact that I actually remember this stuff. Enough stuff to ramble on for fourteen or twenty pages a week. Glips and blits and snatches of past memories. Old obscure animated TV shows, segments from RPG systems, bits and pieces of pop culture that most people had the good sense to discard with the fashion sense of the 80’s, moments from a lost weekend.
‘Course, the answer’s really simple. Most of it I don’t know. On movies, imdb is indispensable. Most of the time I watch one of these crappy horror flicks, and then browse through the repertoires of actors listed to see if anything jumps out at me. Occasionally I’ll hunt down some actor that made an impression, or search out a face in the background of someone I just can’t place. The genre helps a lot, since it’s a notoriously irregular mix of big shots on their way up or down, and one-shot disilluminaries who never went anywhere. Therefore, anyone can be forgiven for not recognizing a famous face in the crowd. Makes me look better-versed than I actually am. That, and practically no one else has ever seen a lot of these barrel-scrapings, so I’m not likely to get corrected.
Yeah, it’s kinda cheating, but if it makes for a more entertaining review or pulling off some obtuse, convoluted reference, then I figger we’re even. I’m trying to hone a blade here, and occasionally some finely filigreed scrimshaw gets properly shorn off by the constant work at the whetstone, overmixing my metaphors and getting the ornate verbiage outta my system.
I further cheat by taking notes when I watch films. Most people would find that really annoying, but on occasion it’s rescued a truly awful film from just boring me to sleep. Makes me feel more involved in the flick, like the MST gang. If some wisecrack strikes me in the middle of the flick, or a character reminds me of someone, or a particularly badly-written line just about bowls me over, I don’t want to have to sit and remember the quip until the end of the film. That’s what _I_ find annoying. Same goes for plot holes and the good parts of the flick. I want to leave the flick remembering everything there is, good or bad, worth remembering. What I _don’t_ want to do is walk out of the film trying to remember “that line.” “Oh, you know, that bit in the middle? Where the one fish says something and the other fish responds with that perfect comeback that I can’t remember?” Things like that really do bug the hell outta me.
The rest of the stuff, though, is something else. All the odd little asides and strange tangents, weird-ass interpretations and bringing in of seemingly unrelated material.
To at least some degree, I get that from my father. My dad is the most voracious reader that I’ve ever known, but his obsession is almost as narrow as mine. He loves Victorian Ghost Stories, and is one of those people who you can never buy books for because he’s already read every story you could find in a week’s searching, and likely out of the very same book. He loves trains, and anything to do with them. He loves history, and has read every major popular-edition account of every war written. He’s read enough biographies of presidents and kings to flip through six-hundred page new accounts to find the five or ten pages of new material he hasn’t seen before. He’s read volumes on the Windtalkers, for heaven’s sake.
The point is, though, that he can come up with an historical anecdote linked to just about any random topic you would ever care to mention.
Like any good kid, I naturally idolized my father when I was a young boy, and attempted to imitate him as much as I could. I wanted to be quick and clever and tell jokes that fit and made people laugh. So I began to read. And read. And read. I read the everliving fuck outta the entire children’s and young adults’ section of the Bloomington City library (In.). What I never really told anyone, though, is that I actually thought, at some point, that I would be done. That I would have read everything. Known everything that was worth knowing. Hey, in the little kid’s library it looked possible. And those “great works” could get ticked off slowly, one at a time. (Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, check, “Great Expectations,” check...) I used to try and memorize facts from those big “1000 fun facts about science” books they pass along to kids that show “promise” in the hopes that someday they’ll grow up and find a cure for cancer so the rest of us can lie back and relax. Fortunately, it never worked. Or rather it backfired frequently enough that it effectively canceled itself out. After graduating upstairs into the “big people’s library” and discovering that I couldn’t plough through three books a day any more since there were very few pictures, (that’s OK, since I discovered the “Conan” novels, which painted much more explicit pictures than anything downstairs...) the task became more daunting, and I effectively gave up on reading _everything_, and stuck to trying to stem the tide at the fountainhead where everything was getting in, the “new arrivals” desk for sci-fi and fantasy.
So I ended up reading a lot of crap. (Not getting anywhere in this story? Well, yeah. But it’s my story, so shut up.) Didn’t get much in the way of universal knowledge there, unless you wanted a detailed listing of everything Alan Dean Foster ever wrote. (Spellsong epic and the Flinx series were great....with the exception of Bloodhype, which was frickin’ awful.) Thing was, I still wanted to be that smart guy who could rattle off the facts like he knew what he was doing.
In aid of that, I signed up for the most intellectual after school activities I could manage. Chess club and Quiz bowl. Chess club was great, but mostly because it was the local freak magnet. I got a little good at Chess, but the pursuit is mostly based on the memorization and application of various strategies. You’ve got to remember the classic openings and how to break them or your opponent will fuck you over faster than you can think. Or so they tell you. My only skill at the game was in doing something so totally random that the opponent couldn’t find a standard way of dealing with it. ‘Course if I played one person often enough, they’d figure out how I thought and would start beating me regularly. I was especially infuriating to a visiting French student we had who regularly tutored the rest of the team. Seems I just didn’t know enough to play well enough for him. Suggested a whole bunch of chess strategy books for me, but I always found them phenomenally boring. I was last chair on our chess team for a couple of years, with no real prospects of ever advancing beyond that.
Quiz bowl was another matter entirely. (For those who don’t know, imagine speed Jeopardy where you can interrupt the questions. Four people to a team, two teams. Couple of other quirks.) Our high school was rather famous in the Quiz Bowl circuit, and the guy in charge of it (my AP history teacher, Mr. Barry) cultivated and cultured his team from year to year to such an extent that I don’t even know how new members were recruited. Had the air of a secret society. I ended up only helping out with the tournaments, and playing on some test rounds.
College was another matter. Quiz Bowl there was more advanced, Emory had a long-standing reputation in the game, and the team had been badly depleted in two years of the top players graduating. So I joined up, sat down, and got my first real taste of the punditocracy of smart people quizzing one another on the real important facts and figures of life. Damn I was outta my league. They were asking questions on OPERA for heaven’s sake. Knowing famous figures from the date of their death! Knowing the author of “Jude the Obscure” (Thomas Hardy...thank you google). There were questions that were answered before they even started making sense. Obviously I had a lot of catching up to do.
It took me nearly a year to realize it (shows you how intelligent I really am) but I slowly spotted something a little “off” about the whole procedure. The questions were all sounding familiar. I still couldn’t answer them, but I was definitely recognizing some of the odder phrasing and more obscure mentions.
It turns out that very nearly all of the information in Quiz Bowl was rote.
Let me explain. In writing questions for Quiz Bowl, which everyone was required to do in order to enter the tournaments, there was a standardized, accepted way of writing questions. Take your subject, and begin with an almost unimaginably obscure reference. Nonsensical factoids, quotes, or almost entirely unrelated subjects were the first sentence of a question. Often, it wouldn’t even be clear what kind of question was being asked. From there, you offer a relevant fact, but stripped of context. Finally, you pop in with a “giveaway” clue. Let me give you an example.
“His first movie appearance was in a little known cult horror film called “God Told Me To”. Later, he became famous for his live reading of “The Great Gatsby” and imitations of Elvis. For ten points, name this famous wrestler and comedian whose life story was told by Jim Carey in “Man on the Moon.” (A: Andy Kauffman)
See? First factoid no one could ever know outside of film trivia hounds. Second factoid doesn’t even make sense unless you’ve seen some of Andy’s standup routines, or heard about the infamous show he did where, in some kind of meta-humor, he stood up and read the first two chapters of “The Great Gatsby” to the audience. “Man on the Moon” anyone could get from the film posters. Hell, you could’ve gotten it from the REM song.
So what’s my point? My point is that you don’t actually have to have seen either of the films. You don’t have to have seen the standup routine. All you have to have, is to have actually HEARD of the events in order to get the question. This was brought out in high relief when I finally managed to wring out a 30-point bonus on questions about “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” I thought it was a pretty good question. The 3-part bonus involved identifying various characters from the books by listening to their quotes. I read out quotes by the Red Queen, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Knight. They didn’t get a single point, and berated me for writing questions that were so hard. I was puzzled. Very puzzled. The bits I’d read out were fairly key quotes, the Red Queen’s “running non-stop to stay in the same place”, Humpty’s “a word means precisely what I want it to mean” and a portion of the White Knight’s song. Surely this wasn’t as obscure as knowing the date it was written on, or the fact that the main character was named after Alice Liddell, or that Carroll was a mathematician, or that the excluded chapter (because the illustrator couldn’t get the picture right) was “a Wasp in a Wig.”
After a little questioning, I discovered that I was the only person in the room who had actually read the book.
A little more questioning and I found that no one had read Chinwa Achebe’s book “Things Fall Apart”, but they could all quote the poem the title was taken from, and knew the cultural ramifications and surrounding controversy.
It was far from universally true, but much of the information the team knew, and knew well, was not from understanding the actual material. Not from having read the books or seen the opera, or played the classical music, but from having memorized great long lists of information. Dates, times, places, names. Cliff’s Notes were required reading for Quiz Bowlers.
In fact, having actually read the stories or seen the operas turned out to be a handicap in a lot of ways, because of the way most people’s minds work. My having read “Tess of the D’Ubervilles’” meant a unique experience from my perspective. It was required reading in my HS class, and the teacher was absolutely obsessed with cows. So she always attached great importance to every scene with cows or milk in it. We studied this book for weeks with an eye toward the cows. Therefore, whenever I think of this book, I think of the stupid cows that populate it. I can absolutely guarantee that there never has been and never will be a Quiz Bowl question written where the answer is “Tess of the D’Ubervilles” and the question involves cows. Instead, the question will involve something ABOUT the book, a hint here and there, and the clinching clue will be when they give the author’s name.
You see, what I learned from Quiz Bowl, was triggering.
They never called it that, and as far as I know, the term is unique to me, but it was a technique every successful player used to beat me to the punch even on questions that I could’ve answered standing on my head. Triggering was a deep, Pavlovian twitch in response to certain words in the question. They hear the word, they ring in. The time it takes for the referee to look up at you was used to recall what you were supposed to say in response to the trigger. Much like the widely discredited Freudian technique of word-association, these words were an incredible condensation of facts about a subject down to singularly unique references. Like “Password” but much faster. Almost as if by consensus, all questions were built around these triggers, and thus knowing the triggers was the trick to answering questions. It wasn’t actually by consensus, but everyone condensed the facts about a book or person in roughly the same way, so everyone ended up with the same facts to write from. It’s not like someone was going to go read all of Thomas Hardy’s works to write three questions from them.
Example: I’ve forgotten the name of a famous astronomer. If I’m with a regular person, I have to provide context and a description if I expect to get an answer back. “Uh...he lived a long time ago...one of the first astronomers....took lots of careful measurements of the star and planetary positions....Copernicus worked from his notes...” “Dude, you expect me to know that?”
Now, with a Quiz Bowler: “Silver Nose” “Oh, Tycho Brahe.” (Most of the time that’s all they cared to know. Me, I’m more curious. Brahe got his schnozz clipped off in a sword duel over mathematics when he was young, and had an artificial one glued in place. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a980717a.html )
(Another example of triggering. With MY friends: “Uh....I’ve forgotten that astronomer’s name.” “Which one” “Wang” “Oh, Tycho Brahe.”)
I was never able to apply this directly, even after figuring it out. Most of the time I second-guessed myself a little too extensively and waited the fraction of a second after I recognized the reference.
However, many years ago, I started reorganizing my head in a way very similar to triggering. At first it was in a desperate attempt to develop a sense of humor. I used to have a really crappy sense of humor, because I couldn’t manage spontaneity. The jokes I remembered were never appropriate, and everyone was always faster off the mark with comebacks than I. Mostly, my attempts were just annoying. Then we got cable and the Comedy Network. (No, not Comedy Central......Comedy Network and HA! That should date this sufficiently.) The Comedy Network and HA! had two shows that worked on triggering. “Stand up, Stand up!” which were compiled 40-second segments of stand up routines, and “Short Attention Span Theater” which were compiled 2-minute segments of all the funniest parts of comedy films, again categorized randomly. Slowly I was able to work my memory in such a way that individual segments were triggering with specific punchlines or topics. I didn’t realize I was triggering, but after several years in Quiz Bowl, it all started coming together, and after a little initial effort I now trigger-tag most of the stuff I see or know instinctively. (Of course, everyone does this to some extent or another. I still trigger “Heart of Darkness” from the word “sepulture” or “straw man” ever since I read it in 10th grade.) The triggering, though, is completely random. It only works if I’m interested, and it’s become multi-layered and context-dependent. “Turtle” triggers “Happy Together.” OK, reasonable. And a local rental place that used to screw me over on video game rentals. It also triggers an episode of Frasier where he and his dad went on “Password”. The Password was “Turtle” and the clue Frasier gave was “Aeschylus”. Because Aeschylus was an ancient greek playwright who originated the greek tragedy, wrote a hundred plays, but was killed when an eagle trying to crack open a turtle’s shell dropped the turtle on his bald head (thinking it a stone) from a great height. I also trigger that story from greek myth. Most importantly, it triggers a quip from MST3K during the movie “Gamera vs. Gaos” where Gaos dive-bombs Gamera into the dirt, and Tom Servo says “Hey, Aeschylus died like that.” (MST3K is probably the best example of triggering ever.) It doesn’t trigger “Love Hina” because I don’t like Love Hina. It doesn’t trigger the people who always block in street-fighter games (“turtles”) because I suck at those.
The important thing to notice here, is that the triggering is dense enough that I can pretty much richochet from trigger to trigger with no effort now. I just expanded the word “turtle” into one pop song, a personal memory, two obscure pop culture references, and a piece of greek history. Context dictates which way I turn, whether I want to impress or make someone snort soda into their sinuses. (My regular DM _hates_ when I do that.)
Thing is, everyone actually has all of this information stored away. Most people have heard the Aeschylus story once or twice somewhere, and it’s lurking back in their memory. They just can’t get at it quite as conveniently, and even if they could, their sequence of triggers is going to be completely different from mine. (When triggers coincide, you get stereo quips.) We’re not racing to remember the day that Nero died here, we’re racing in completely random directions to add a punchline to the overblown. Other people think it’s funny because you manage to pull out an extended trigger that they recognize, but that comes completely outta left field for them, since they’re racing somewhere else. Films and all other media become enormous multi-layered self-and-outside-referential sequences, pulling in and feeding off everything you’ve ever encountered or heard about. Everything is a Farscape episode or an Evil Dead film. (Hey, there are worse things...) Everything is MST3K. Everything right is wrong again.
The really weird thing is that the wiring in my head for triggering seems to have improved my memory in certain areas. It’s still crap in areas I don’t find interesting, but I’m getting damn impressive in pop culture and anything else I enjoy (If “impressive” is a better term than “pathetic”). I can remember sitcom quotes verbatim without even thinking about it. I’ve become some sort of media slore, (You know...a ravening slore.....one form of Gozer) an inside joke hog.
The only other thing that really influences all this was two elective classes I took at Emory back in undergrad on cyborgs and pornography. (It’s elaborate, but I ain’t lying.) Not sure how much of it was actually worthwhile information-wise, but it sufficiently fucked up my way of thinking that I learned how to take the weird-ass scholarly perspective on nearly everything. Makes a lot of things really trippy.
All right, enough about me, y’all are here for my tediously tardy reviews, right?
Well let’s drop right into the Underworld. (Psssst.....anyone else think the “Screen Gems” logo looks like the company ID at the end of the old Muppet Show episodes?)
We drop right in the film, to find it’s already started up without us. (The technical term is “in media res”) We’re introduced to a lot of the major concepts very quickly through a monologue voice-over by our main character as the camera slowly moves about the gothic ornamentation on the towers of an unnamed modern city. Unfortunately, no on actually hears the introduction because Kate Beckinsale is perched in a partial crouch on a stone banister with the wind whipping her floor-length black leather duster around, occasionally granting glimpses of her truly spectacular ass. For some reason, vampires seem to find that black leather, form-hugging leather corsetry, and and a skintight black latex catsuit are the appropriate apparel for a drizzly, oppressively humid night out. I guess the undead don’t sweat, or their boots just gradually fill up from the rivulets during the night. (I struggle to understand how the corset doesn’t get in the way, but some conventional form of pants would. And she’s supposed to be the practical one. Ah well.) OK, I’ll try to keep the fashion bitching to a minimum from here on in. Fact is, I appreciate the modern goth cheesecake. I just refuse to make excuses for it.
Back to the voiceover. Very long exposition short, she’s a vampire. So’s the couple of guys perched in neighboring towers. They’re out here stalking Werewolves or “lycan(thrope)s”, because that’s their job. Not all vampires, just them. Seems that there was a great war a long time ago (middle ages, at a guess), and the lycans lost. Their armies destroyed before the vampire legions, there exist only a quickly dwindling handful. Now these “Death Dealer” vampires are just here mopping up the few remaining. They’ve spotted a couple potential targets, and hop off their buildings to follow the suspects into the underground (subway). They land and rebound with a practiced gait (OK, yeah, that was really cool) and move in.
What they don’t realize until later, though, is that the lycans were stalking prey of their own. You see, they’re all really big fans of “Felicity” and, being the celebrity hounds they are (ha HA) are trying to get Scott Speedman’s autograph. The lycans, in sharp contrast to the vampires, stick to more sensible outfits of flannel, sweats, and track suits, mostly for easy discard when they transform.
All the players move into the subway station, the lycans detect a trap, and all hell breaks loose. It’s at this point that all the supernatural monsters......pull out guns.
Qua?
Should I even bother? OK, it makes some sense for the vampires to have guns, ‘cause of the whole silver bullet thing. Vampires, according to oft-ignored legends, can also be killed by silver bullets (I’ve forgotten the actual magical principle at work), but I’m not aware of a single film that takes it into account. I have to admit, though, that I wasn’t expecting Woo-sign quite as frequently in this film as it crops up. There are great raging gun battles several times throughout this film, and I suppose it does make sense. However, every elaborately choreographed fight scene moves this film about two great classical monsters further from a horror and closer to an action flick. Of course, I was effectively forewarned of this by the ads, which, as is their wont, focused on all the action to lure in the fans.
During the fight, one of the lycans goes down, which is somewhat expected (being a werewolf-killing squad and all), but also one of the vampires goes down from a bullet-round and disintegrates, much to the distress of all the other Death Dealers. It seems they’re used to coming in, and picking off lycans from the safety of range without ever having to worry about returned fire doing any actual damage. Fights continue, several lycans escape, people scream, pursuit into tunnels, blah blah blah. Kate Beckinsale, toting a pair of automatics that have apparently been been modified with hellfire triggers (three bullets for one pull of the trigger) follows one of the lycans deep into the subway tunnels, and comes across a fight-club gathering of two dozen or so lycans. Forced to sneak away, she has to leave the “den” without confronting any of the werewolfs. A rather interesting question crops up at this point. If you’ll excuse the proper terminology, “where be all the bitches?” The Vampires appear to be a little over-represented in the female department, but there are definitely both genders there. The lycans, however, are all men. No mention is made of female lycans anywhere in the film or in flashbacks to the past, despite the fact that it is made very clear that lycanthropy is transmitted by bite.
I can tell you why, though. Because, for the goth crowd, women are ALWAYS the vampires, and NEVER the werewolves. ‘Cause it’s sexy and more photogenic. Oh, sure, older films would get a good mix, “An American Werewolf in Paris,” “My Mom is a Werewolf,” and three of the “Howling” films. Also the personal favorite “She-Wolf of London”, though its scatterbrained nature means nearly no one remembers it. Here, though, the Lycans are all enormously hiristute men, and I suppose it could simply be too much of a turn-off for audiences to put a female of the species in there.
Before I go on, there’s the need for a quick review of the Storyteller system. This film isn’t explicitly based upon the “Vampire the Masquerade” RPG, and especially not on the “Werewolf: The Apocalypse” game that followed it, but enough of the tropes are present that understanding the game concepts leapfrogs much of the explanation. In V:tM, Vampire societies are widely diverse, but usually preserve a strong devotional sire-childer bond (Master Vampire-younger vampire they “embraced” or created) that stand strongly on formality and respect for elders. Stereotypically, they also have a heavily decadent society that settled aesthetically into the lace cuffs, pouffy shirts, and corsets of a laid-back version of the Victorian era. (I say stereotypically because several of the “clans” as defined in the game settle on this particular aesthetic. Other clans have more diverse tastes, and thus no specific associated style. The style shown in this film is the most stereotypical.) The basic idea is that the Vampires exist as a form of secret society of immortals. Their age and demeanor causes several clans to reflect contemplatively on their past when they wielded the peak of their power, and thus maintain the traditions and aesthetics of that age. They hold themselves above the rest of the world, and collectively regard mortals as livestock. Though they still remain extremely powerful, they must continuously remain cautious not to reveal their existence to the outside world, a job becoming more and more difficult with the increasing interconnectedness of the world. Thus they must continuously maintain the “Masquerade,” the façade of normality that keeps the outside world from discovering them and their nightly killings. To this end, a series of bureaucracies have been installed over the centuries to make sure that the brash younger generations don’t undo the millennium of work their elders have put in to maintaining their secrets. Thus, there is a seniority hierarchy of nobles at work, with the most local level being the “Prince” of a city or region. The restrictions are enforced through “domination” (blood bond) of lower ranks by the higher....kind of a magical emotional manipulation, for lack of a better term. Ironically, these restrictions often clamp the PCs into roles of reserved, obeisant secrecy. Immensely powerful monsters that must report in to superiors, follow orders, and whose heart and “soul” are devoted unquestioningly to their sire and their prince. In all honesty, it seems a pretty interesting world to role-play in, except, in my opinion, the world is too over-defined to grant much in the way of unexpected adventure, and I’ve had very bad experiences with egotistical game master on the few occasions I’ve played. Again, this is a stereotypic treatment, applying more readily to the clans of Giovanni, Toreodore, Nosferatu (in regard to authority), and Ventru (IIRC) than the anarchists of Brujah, the insane members of Malkavians, the wilderness Gangrel, or the treacherous wizards of Tremere (Yes, I know I’m forgetting a bunch of the later clans. Can’t be bothered, frankly.) This film, though, is invested very heavily in the stereotypes, so that’s really all you have to consider. The clan apparent in the film is most likely Ventru, or, stretching a lot, Giovanni or Toreodore.
Werewolf: the Apocalypse was initially a very different book than the Vampire game which preceded it. The werewolves were, indeed, a dying race, but ones that acknowledged the lost ground and were determined to stand their ground to the last member against the forces of unconquerable corruption swamping them. Werewolfism was genetic, and only a delusional lycanthropy could be passed on to others. Importantly, they were also mortal, and thus did not have individual histories stretching back centuries, as the vampires did. Their concept was heavily bound up in an elaborate mythology involving the figures of Wyld (chaos), Weaver (order), and Wyrm (destruction). Essentially, it was a mythology of balance in the natural world, a balance that the Werewolves saw mankind as disrupting with their proliferation and rape of the natural world. In ages past, the werewolves acted as agents of the Wyld, culling the numbers of mankind to keep the three forces in balance. Pity on their part stilled the culling and allowed mankind to gain a foothold. Since then, it has been a long, slow slide downhill, with the Werewolves fighting it every step of the way. More importantly, though, when the balance was thrown, the Wyrm went mad and began destroying indiscriminately, creating and corrupting beings to its end. As you can tell, this fundamental alteration to the legends makes for us a creature almost entirely unrecognizable from its legendary counterpart. It constructs a framework around the lycanthrope’s preying upon mankind. Gone is the horror of the uncontrollable transformation and the unwilling killer. Honestly, though, I can understand the change, as they were attempting to build a world wherein one could play a Werewolf character. Playing the same angst-ridden unwilling Bruce-Banner figure over and over would’ve been pretty crappy, and not made for much of a group PC interaction, as the only end sought by the group would be a cure. So they had to make a society wherein they could interact. And it couldn’t resemble the Vampire structure, as that slot was already taken. The end result is a very loosely-constructed society. One in which you were born to, not brought into. There are “pack” hierarchies, but they are held together only through respect and mutual consent. (Those here are likely Get of Fenris, disenchanted Silver Fangs, or Bone Gnawers) Groups gather according to common ideals, not ancestries. Most interestingly, instead of the Masquerade, the Werewolves have “The Veil”. On a primal level, mankind remembers the ages of the culling, and thus have instinctual, blinding fear of the Werewolves. So much so that people who witness a transformation will automatically flee in a dead panic, without knowing why. Afterwards their mind substitutes an appropriate excuse that does not include the intervention of the supernatural. In other words, the Vampires must maintain the Masquerade. The Veil maintains itself, and the lycanthropes can effectively ignore the rules about appearing in public. In general, although it plainly appears that the lycanthropes in the film are based off the game in their structure, they are severly altered in nearly every respect of their history. In this flick, they form a diminished mirror of the Vampire world, driven literally underground in order to stay alive. The older Werewolves, we’re told, can change at will now....a statement that implies this is a new development, and goes a long way towards explaining why it’s been so easy to mop up the suspects until now, if they could only change on the full moon.
Losing a lot of momentum here.....
Anyway, “Selene” goes back to the Vampire mansions where she stands out among all the females there as the only one dressed like she’s just come from a fetish ball, and they’ve all come from a somewhat disheveled Victorian-era ball. First she storms into the armory and plops down one of the surprisingly deadly Werewolf weapons in front of their head armorer. There we are informed that “they’ve harnessed the power of the sun” by creating Vampire killing bullets that are filled with an irradiated fluid.
See, radiation is like sunlight.....just because it is. Yeah. On the other hand, they’re so highly irradiated that the TRANSPARENT casing GLOWS BLUE. I suppose that amount of radiation might actually do something. On the other hand, I require an explanation as to why the bullets aren’t painful for the vampires to handle. That amount of radiation would be bad for a HUMAN to handle.... This also follows the Hollywood dictate that any fluid which kills Vampires has to glow blue. See also: EDTA in Blade.
Then she goes in to report to the Prince, who has little respect from Selene, because he really is awful at putting any kind of force into his acting. Selene doubts his leadership abilities, and regularly implies and even states this to his face, speaking for the audience who wonders how such a “Kraven” (his name) idiot rose to such a position of power.
Here things get complicated, and justify my assessment of this film being a direct offspring of the Storyteller games.
See, we’ve been treated to a couple of expositionary monologues and voice-overs to set up this world, right? Well, in most films, once this world is set up, you’d go about exploring it. Testing the boundaries of such a world and defining its driving forces. There would be some elaborate story built around totally defining this world. Instead, in this case, they tell a story within the boundaries of an already established world in an attempt to move it further, to another level of complexity within this concept. Most films like this you’d go Vampires exist, Werewolves exist, now we put characters in a box and show how they interact in order to define this world. Fairly simple story arc, just concerned with this definitions, actions that run right up to the edge of the world possibilities, probably some world-shattering problem. Think of “Legend” or “Hawk the Slayer.” “Magic is real, a fantasy world is real, now watch this hero and see how the world works.”
Not this film. Here we go: Vampires exist. They have a society like this: etc. Werewolves exist. They have a society like this: etc. Covered in the first twenty minutes. NOW, watch carefully to see this story going on with this EXCEPTION standing over here, and see how the EXCEPTION works within this world already fully defined. In other words, the film takes for granted that you’ll be able to follow the concept of the world closely (although they keep the concepts somewhat simple), and weave an elaborate plot within it. It’s the difference between a film that explains the cold war, and a film that follows some clever plot within the cold war.
From this point in, there are three components of the film. A) Elaborate story. B) Star-crossed Romance C) Action scenes.
First the story. Selene, discovering from the surveillance photos that the Lycans were stalking someone, snubs Kraven’s demands that she attend a social function, and runs out to interrogate the human. She finds “Michael Corvin”’s apartment and intercepts him, but only a minute or two ahead of the Lycans. Fight sequence follows, and Michael is separated from Selene and confronted by the mysterious leader of the Lycans, who greets him with a friendly savaging on the shoulder. (Bit down hard.) Selene “rescues” him in her fashionably streamlined speedster, more fight continues (including some truly kickass moves by the leader), Selene gets badly stabbed through the shoulder (showing us exactly how thin that latex catsuit is) and passes out at the wheel while diving off a pier. Michael rescues her, patches her up, and passes out from his own wounds. She wakes up and takes him home, pissing off Kraven. Bit character figures out that Michael has been bitten by a Lycan, but keeps it to herself. Michael wakes up and escapes, and goes back to the hospital where he works, another orderly sicks the police on him, and he flees back to the Vampire mansion.
Meanwhile, the head Werewolf reports back to some mysterious laboratory where a thoroughly creepy pop-eyed scientist is performing some kind of experiment on the blood sample the leader brought from Michael.
Meanwhile meanwhile, Selene, not happy with the verbal drubbing she got from an actor as bad as Kraven, breaks into the Vampire archives and goes digging through the ancient history of the wars with the Vampires. From the evidence she finds there, she believes that the lead Werewolf is actually Lucien, the legendary leader of the Werewolf armies who Kraven supposedly killed centuries ago, bringing back a brand from the Werewolf’s arm as proof. Which means Kraven is a traitor, but he’s the biggest authority in the area, putting her in a bind. So she decides to do something unthinkable.
More backhistory. This is pieced together in scattered chunks during the movie in a manner challenging to the audience. I’m not complaining, as I think this kind of credit granted to the audience is an advancement, but I can understand how someone unfamiliar with the RPG worlds might find it all a lot to take in at once.
Selene, it turns out, was orphaned by Werewolves back in the middle ages. She, herself, escaped, only to be “embraced” by Viktor. Viktor, it turns out, is one of the three ruling Vampires of the “coven,” but only one of them is ever awake at a given time. The other two are starved down into a state called “torpor” which allows them to sleep as dried out husks, embedded in the council chamber in a specialized coffin. Viktor’s time to rule isn’t for another century, so he lies in torpor right now. Presumably, the previous, unnamed leader has just been returned to his coffin, for the big social event that Selene snubbed was a preparation for the awakening of the third leader, another Michael, IIRC. They are awaiting the arrival of another coven for the awakening. The awakening is done by an elder of the clan (more elder than Selene) for the Vampire ruler is able to derive all the events of the preceding two centuries from the blood that elder gives him to start the awakening process.
*Gasp*
So Selene, feelin’ that sire-childer pull, and not knowing who else to turn to, initiates the awakening of Viktor herself. She sets things in motion, and then runs out to tend to Michael Corvin. On her way out the door, she’s told by bit actress that Michael has been bitten by a Lycan. She goes out, fills him in on the whole base concept of the world, and then locks him up in a safehouse to undergo the first transformation. (Note, both these acts amount to a treachery on her part.) Then she returns home to speak with the awakened Viktor. Turns out that, since she’s not an elder, the slowly vitrifying corpse of the Vampire ruler can’t make head or tails of the information in her blood. (His slow transformation from desiccated corpse to Romanian nobleman is very well pulled off, although he’s missing the accent.) He berates her, and tells her to bring him real evidence.
Now we leap a great deal of the film, because it gets even MORE convoluted, and insert the backstory discovered.
In the beginning, we are told by the informant Werewolf that Selene eventually produces, there was but a single nobleman in Romania who survived a massive plague that ravaged his kingdom, and left no one other than himself and his wife alive. He, it is supposed, had contracted the plague, but was somehow able to alter it so that it kept him alive instead of killing him. She gave birth to three children. One was a vampire, one was a Werewolf, and one showed no outward signs of either supernatural alteration. This was the legendary source of all Vampires and Werewolves. Michael, the main character, is the descendant of the third child, a carrier of the plague but not an expressor of either disease. (They refer to them as diseases, but don’t really expand on this.)
Time passed, and the Vampires took a dominant role, likely due to the (at the time) uncontrollable nature of the Lycan’s transformations (dictated by the moon phases). Eventually, Viktor ascended to a position of power. The Werewolves were slaves to the Vampires, and acted as daytime guardians of their tombs. (Wait......why would you want a Werewolf who can’t transform during the day....to guard you during the day? Eh. Plot hole.) In that time, Lucien was a servant of Viktor’s, and fell in love with the nobleman’s daughter, and she became pregnant, a mingling of the two species that would have unknown results, and hence was completely forbidden. Viktor had the two chained and left where the rising sun would incinerate his daughter. After she died, Lucien escaped, vowing revenge. Thus began the war, that went as already detailed. Near the conclusion of the war, by coincidence, Kraven was the last living Vampire of a force that attempted to assassinate Lucien. There, for unknown reasons (either pity or sympathy for his plight, or a hunger for power on his own behalf) Kraven struck a deal with Lucien. Cut the brand from his arm, and Kraven would take it back to Viktor, declaring victory over the Lycans, and giving Lucien time to muster new forces, while Kraven used his newfound status to be named Prince, begin consolidating power, and draw any challenges to his authority out where the Lycans could kill them. Further, the lab experiments was a joint Lucien-Kraven enterprise, an attempt to merge the two bloodlines for a new, superpowered race that was both Lycan and Vampire. The plans, however, met with repeated failure, as no one could survive both variations of the plague without dying. That is, except a descendant of the third child, Corvin. (Wait....couldn’t they have gotten a Vampire woman pregnant by a Lycan? Like Lucien did? Eh. Plot hole.) Which is why they were hunting Michael. Centuries later, Viktor, while out disobeying his own rules by slaughtering and feeding off of an isolated estate, came upon a girl who reminded him sorely of his own daughter who had fallen for Lucien, and Embraced her, calling her “Selene” and telling her that the Lycans had killed her family.
Now the interesting thing here, is that Kraven could be thought of as a hero in this picture. He disobeyed his lord, having been ordered into a genocidal war to cover up the shame of his daughter having bad taste in men, and conspired to keep alive the very person that Viktor had wanted killed. He even directly helped the Lycan to achieve his revenge. His basic problem, though, is that Kraven is a little bitch, and totally unlikable from the perspective of the film. Even when he tells Selene the unadulterated truth, we’re nudged to hiss and boo him in his appearances. Eventually he even shoots Lucien with deadly silver nitrate bullets (eh..... should I start? OK, it’s plain that the stuff we see is actually mercury, as silver nitrate is not silver in color, but a crystal that dissolves into a turbid but transparent solution. Besides, it’s just a plain repeat of what the Werewolves did to make Vampire-killing bullets. Convert the toxin into a liquid so the Lycans can’t just expel the bullet like they do normally. (Several times we seeIn the end, though we’re honestly not given any evidence one way or another, I think we’re supposed to assume that Kraven set all this up as an opportunistic grab at power, that would just take seven hundred years to reach fruition.
The climactic results of all this are that Kraven arranges an ambush of the visiting Coven leaders, having the Lycans slaughter them all upon their arrival at the train station. Viktor finds out about Kraven’s treachery via the captured Werewolf scientist Selene delivered to him. And Michael, having been tossed around in this tempest like a rag doll, gets infected with both strains when Selene finally bites him. Kraven shoots Lucien in the back in a fit of petulant spite, having been giving the dismissive air one too many times. Kraven gets done in by the remainder of the pack, IIRC (although I’m a little fuzzy on that), Selene runs to Michael’s side and turns her back to Viktor, and Lucien lives long enough to see Michael’s comeback as the VampLyc, there’s a lot of group battles between Vampires and Lycanthropes, Viktor goes into an appropriately climactic battle with the new creature, but eventually gets his head sliced in half by Selene.
So what does the combo look like? Uh.... Odd. His skin is a kind of dark navy blue, his hair gets all stringy (although that might be from the ditchwater he kept falling in) his fingers end in points, and his eyes are jet black. No other special stuff as far as I could tell, but he went toe-to-toe with Viktor less than a minute after his first transformation, so that should be a pretty good metric of their relative power.
B) The romance. Whoever told me that this was “Romeo and Juliet” was on crack. Other than the phrase “star crossed lovers” and the concept of “from two houses” those are the only parallels that could be drawn. As one could infer from my previous posts, I think this an immense improvement. However. I have to say that in the showing I was at there were twenty or so teeny-boppers sitting two rows ahead of me, and any time when the scene was supposed to show the growing affection of Selene for Michael, they all burst out laughing. Frankly, it _was_ funny, because the only time this ever happened was when Michael got himself knocked unconscious, and we’re left with fetish-leather woman gazing in confusion down upon a guy with his eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth lolling open. On a similar vein, there were several times where something happened in the film that must’ve sounded cool on paper, but translated visually became hilarious. “Bit character is examining Michael lustily, but upon noticing the werewolf bite springs to the ceiling and hisses loudly at him.” (Stage direction: be sure your mouth remains open so we can see the fangs.)
Bwa ha ha ha ha.
I’m sorry, it just looked dumb. Maybe she could’ve crossed her arms in front of herself. Then he couldn’t see her. : )
It’s also something of a romance without resolution. It’s not like anyone’s asked Michael at this point. Oh hell. Who are we kidding. LOOK at her ass. He’d follow her anywhere.
C) The fight scenes. I’m sorry, but some of the fight scenes were just incomprehensibly stupid. And I’m not even talking about the “count the bullets” stupid, since those hellfire triggers would’ve depleted her reserves in five trigger-pulls. No, I’m talking about stupid gimmickry and unexplainable stupidity. Lets start with the worst abuse, the Werewolves. OK, you’re a Werewolf. Apparently you’re access to the Vampire killing rounds is limited, because not all of you get some. However, you can literally bite the heads off of lesser vampires, and tear them apart with your claws. The average Lycan can tear the average Vampire into tiny little pieces. Further, you can absorb nearly a dozen rounds before going down or even being badly injured. CHARGE THE FUCKERS. You shorten the range and you’ve got a solid advantage. The really stupid part was the wall-crawling. For no apparent reason, three Werewolves coming down the hallway will not stand in line and rush at top speed, but instead will opt for going at one quarter speed by CLINGING TO THE WALLS AND CELINGS and DIGGING THROUGH THE MOULDING to progress down the hallway. This isn’t even in deference to the one on the ground, because NO ONE is going along the ground.
WTF? Really? I mean, who thought this was a good idea? Who thought it would look cool? It is really, phenomenally dumb.
Fortunately, that’s as dumb as the action gets. Most of it is just fun and fairly good fodder. The Lycans themselves are fairly good CGI and makeup work, although I wasn’t honestly keeping an eye out for faults, and the camera didn’t linger over them very often except during transformations. The best transformation was Michael’s, although it ended rather lamely. We watch as the Vampire bite and Lycan bite kick in simultaneously, and they run the camera INSIDE him, as we watch his ribs break and re-set, great gaps between his organs forming, as half his body tries to maintain shape, and the other half tries to transform. The final transformation just lengthened and sharpened his fingers, changed the color of his eyes and skin, and muscled him up a bit. They do go heavily for gimmickry, though, the Death Dealers pulling out silver-razor-bladed whips (Pssst.....wouldn’t more silver bullets have worked better?) and little spinny UFO-thingys with blades that you throw into the Lycans. (Uh...again....won’t bullets work better?) And then, of course, there was all the jumping around in latex and leather corsetry. I’m not enough of a hypocrite to complain about that, although some actual properties of the material cropped up in the later scenes. While wandering among all the falling down construction sites, her latex got enough of a static charge on it to keep this fine film of dust sticking to the exterior.
In the end, the majorly disputed point of the film is its ludicrous complexity. Let me state this very clearly. I like the complexity. I love stuff that can actually keep three steps ahead of my guesses. This film, though, is going to be more than most people unfamiliar with the RPG world are satisfied with keeping up with. A new fantastical world is established. Within that world, another (the legends and experiments) is established. Plot threads wind elaborately between the two. Motivations go unexplained. Actions are only explained long after the fact. Four separate times we have to listen to long expositions just to fill us in on what hasn’t been told to us yet. I haven’t encountered this much exposition since Dune, and that was an hour longer. Honestly, the film plays out like an RPG, where all these elaborate interactions would be the source of a really good gaming session. The difference, though, is that gaming sessions last for multiple segments of 6-hour blocks, once a week, for three months or more. This is a two hour movie. More than a little compression.
If you’re a fan of the Storyteller series and aren’t one of those obnoxious brats who wanted direct adaptation, go see this film. It’s got much of the same mood as the books, and enough parallels to keep you happy. Like action films with heroines in skintight outfits? Like action films with CGI effects and Woo-sign instead of wire-fu hop-saki? You’ll like this film. Wanna just relax and stare at the screen for a while? Think the “Vampire Goths” are the single most imbecilic expression of pathetic “look at me” nerd and teen culture to come down the pike since slask Trek fics? Stay away. You gotta be awake and open to new stories to follow this.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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