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truepennySo, finishing up our weekend of movies, HL and I watched Cry-Baby, Donnie Darko, & Ginger Snaps.
I don't think I have anything to say about Cry-Baby, aside from the fact that it's a lot of fun and Johnny Depp is a dreamboat. The other two, on the other hand, deserve discussion. I'm not at my most scintillating tonight, so I doubt I'll do them justice, but I figure I'd better say what I can while they're still fresh in my mind.
Spoilers for both.
Donnie Darko:
This is the My Brain Hurts movie for the weekend. Time-travel always makes me a little dizzy, and DD does not make the slightest attempt to soften the inherent twistiness of its premise. I like that in a movie.
As much as anything, DD reminds me of Jacob's Ladder. There's the same nightmarish surreality, the same inability to distinguish between hallucination and truth, the same ultimate recognition that there is no difference between the two. You could call them the SF and fantasy sides of the same coin, although perhaps that's stretching the resemblance a bit. But they are both tremendously sad movies as well as being INCREDIBLY creepy. And both of them work their creepiness at least partly through objects which oughtn't to be quite as creepy as they are: a child's bicycle in JL and, yes, a man in a bunny-suit in DD. Not that the bunny-suit isn't creepy enough on its own, mind you, but there are so many ways in which, as a device, Frank ought to be ludicrous, and he isn't.
The thing I like best, ultimately, about DD is the way in which it renounces all of its SF aspects except the central one. Frank isn't an alien, and the world isn't literally coming to an end. Donnie Darko thinks he's trying to avert the apocalypse, but it turns out that the world ending is merely his own--although the freight of death that carries along with it is impressive (Frank, Gretchen, Rose, Samantha, am I missing anyone?).
There are two things that bother me a little. One is that it's Frank who saves Donnie's life to begin with, by calling him out of his room before the jet turbine crashes through it. And this puzzles me, because then why is there any NEED for all this elaboration to send Donnie back in time to die? All Frank has to do is, hey, not wake him up. Mirrorthaw tells me that there are a bunch of deleted scenes on the DVD, and maybe one of them could make sense of this for me, but in the theatrical release, that one thing doesn't make sense.
The other thing, which purely bothers me, irregardless of logic, is that apparently Jim Cunningham isn't going to get busted for his kiddie-porn ring. And with the very creepy softcore porn approach that Kitty Farmer takes toward the costuming and dance-routine of Sparkle Motion, and considering what a big fan of his she is, I worry about what's going to happen to Samantha in the world where Donnie is killed by the jet engine. It's perfectly possible, of course, that his death will have a ripple effect, and Cunningham will end up getting busted anyway--or, at least, Samantha won't be part of Sparkle Motion--but since it's so very specifically Frank and Donnie who get Cunningham's nasty secret discovered, I'm not convinced.
But those are both relatively small things.
I thought this movie was brilliant.
As was Ginger Snaps:
I said to HL that it would be interesting to pair it with Heathers; both of them are about misfit girls in high school; both are very much about the toxicity (HL, were you waiting for me to use that word? *g*) of cliques, although one from the outside and one from the inside.
Ginger Snaps gets described in shorthand as a "feminist werewolf movie," and while that's accurate, it doesn't begin to capture what makes it a good movie. Associating menstruation and lycanthropy goes back AT LEAST to Peter S. Beagle's "Lila the Werewolf" (which he wrote in 1967)--and if anyone knows of earlier examples, please let me know--but what Ginger Snaps does is to take that metaphor and push it, arguing that becoming a werewolf is like becoming a woman. Ginger's metamorphosis is inextricably intertwined with her first period, and the sudden blossoming of her sexuality, while clearly an effect of the lycanthropy, is associated by her, by her sister Brigitte, and by the movie, with her reaching sexual maturity. The way Ginger and Brigitte feel about menarche and puberty (that it turns you into a monster, even without the werewolf part thrown in) is exactly the way I felt, so this movie hit a chord for me on that purely personal level. And their mother's terrible way of handling it, her completely different understanding of what "womanhood" should mean, merely reinforces the sisters' understanding of themselves as outsiders, as near monsters even before Ginger gets bitten. I particularly like the way their mother's performance of femininity gets undercut later in the movie, first by the dogged "unfeminine" way she tracks down the truth, and then by her crazed fantasy of torching the house and running away with her daughters. The fact that this is no different from Brigitte's fantasy of curing Ginger and running away merely emphasizes the likeness beneath the surface between the women in the movie. Mrs. Fitzgerald is just as much a dreaming monster as her daughters, and the movie suggests strongly that that's simply part of being a woman.
But, having argued that the onset of menstruation is the onset of monsterhood, the movie swings round to the other side. Ginger and Brigitte can't win. They're outcasts if they reject adulthood (and it's clear that Mr. Wayne, at least, regards them as monsters); they feel that becoming adult women will MAKE them monsters. And then, when Ginger tries to take control of her body and her sexuality, that makes her a monster, too. Ginger's aggressive sexuality, also triggered by the lycanthropy, is coded as monstrous--at first simply in terms of socialized gender roles (and I loved her rant about that, too), so that the movie is pointing out that women cannot be sexual and be "normal." But as the lycanthropy progresses, it exaggerates the problem; Ginger's one-on-one with Sam in the greenhouse is very explicitly framed and written to evoke rape, with Sam being the one trying to tell Ginger no. Like many other horror movies, this one tracks a shift from the idea of monstrousness as strength against social norms to the monstrous as the completely alien and inhuman. Becoming a monster pushes one farther and farther outside, until--and Ginger Snaps is very specific about this--Ginger no longer even feels connected to Brigitte: "You know," she says, "we're almost not even related anymore." And Brigitte's terrified and furious attempt to reconnect by infecting herself with the lycanthropy virus results in one of the most primitive schoolyard gestures of exclusion. She cuts her palm and then Ginger's and holds them together, in a twisted reflection of their pact-making at the beginning of the movie. "Now I am you," Brigitte says, and Ginger responds, "I know you are, but what am I?" Ginger is determined to drag Brigitte down with her--as Brigitte finally recognizes--but that's greed, not love.
Sex, blood, and death are in a very tight triangular configuration, as some of the Fitzgerald girls' posed "death" photographs in the credits montage makes clear, and it becomes only closer and closer as Ginger changes, until she becomes no longer able to distinguish between sex (represented by the blood of menstruation) and death (represented most vividly by the trail of blood Brigitte follows to find Sam and Ginger in the basement, and most explicitly by her attempt to pacify Ginger by drinking Sam's blood).
Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle are both brilliant, and the sister dynamic they give their characters is marvellous. One of the things the movie is about is the way in which their incredibly close relationship is in fact toxic, the way in which Ginger's domination of Brigitte is bad for them both and, more and more clearly and chillingly as the movie progresses, based at its core on Ginger's selfishness, her determination to keep Brigitte for herself. She can experiment and go out with boys and all the rest of it, but her incredibly nerdy little sister has to stay behind her. I was praying they wouldn't kill Sam off, but I knew that they had to. Not simply in horror-movie terms, where the sidekick is always doomed, but because he's the only thing Brigitte has that Ginger doesn't. Ginger has to kill him, by the inexorable tragic logic of her character and the way the movie uses the vehicle of lycanthropy.
I don't think I have anything to say about Cry-Baby, aside from the fact that it's a lot of fun and Johnny Depp is a dreamboat. The other two, on the other hand, deserve discussion. I'm not at my most scintillating tonight, so I doubt I'll do them justice, but I figure I'd better say what I can while they're still fresh in my mind.
Spoilers for both.
Donnie Darko:
This is the My Brain Hurts movie for the weekend. Time-travel always makes me a little dizzy, and DD does not make the slightest attempt to soften the inherent twistiness of its premise. I like that in a movie.
As much as anything, DD reminds me of Jacob's Ladder. There's the same nightmarish surreality, the same inability to distinguish between hallucination and truth, the same ultimate recognition that there is no difference between the two. You could call them the SF and fantasy sides of the same coin, although perhaps that's stretching the resemblance a bit. But they are both tremendously sad movies as well as being INCREDIBLY creepy. And both of them work their creepiness at least partly through objects which oughtn't to be quite as creepy as they are: a child's bicycle in JL and, yes, a man in a bunny-suit in DD. Not that the bunny-suit isn't creepy enough on its own, mind you, but there are so many ways in which, as a device, Frank ought to be ludicrous, and he isn't.
The thing I like best, ultimately, about DD is the way in which it renounces all of its SF aspects except the central one. Frank isn't an alien, and the world isn't literally coming to an end. Donnie Darko thinks he's trying to avert the apocalypse, but it turns out that the world ending is merely his own--although the freight of death that carries along with it is impressive (Frank, Gretchen, Rose, Samantha, am I missing anyone?).
There are two things that bother me a little. One is that it's Frank who saves Donnie's life to begin with, by calling him out of his room before the jet turbine crashes through it. And this puzzles me, because then why is there any NEED for all this elaboration to send Donnie back in time to die? All Frank has to do is, hey, not wake him up. Mirrorthaw tells me that there are a bunch of deleted scenes on the DVD, and maybe one of them could make sense of this for me, but in the theatrical release, that one thing doesn't make sense.
The other thing, which purely bothers me, irregardless of logic, is that apparently Jim Cunningham isn't going to get busted for his kiddie-porn ring. And with the very creepy softcore porn approach that Kitty Farmer takes toward the costuming and dance-routine of Sparkle Motion, and considering what a big fan of his she is, I worry about what's going to happen to Samantha in the world where Donnie is killed by the jet engine. It's perfectly possible, of course, that his death will have a ripple effect, and Cunningham will end up getting busted anyway--or, at least, Samantha won't be part of Sparkle Motion--but since it's so very specifically Frank and Donnie who get Cunningham's nasty secret discovered, I'm not convinced.
But those are both relatively small things.
I thought this movie was brilliant.
As was Ginger Snaps:
I said to HL that it would be interesting to pair it with Heathers; both of them are about misfit girls in high school; both are very much about the toxicity (HL, were you waiting for me to use that word? *g*) of cliques, although one from the outside and one from the inside.
Ginger Snaps gets described in shorthand as a "feminist werewolf movie," and while that's accurate, it doesn't begin to capture what makes it a good movie. Associating menstruation and lycanthropy goes back AT LEAST to Peter S. Beagle's "Lila the Werewolf" (which he wrote in 1967)--and if anyone knows of earlier examples, please let me know--but what Ginger Snaps does is to take that metaphor and push it, arguing that becoming a werewolf is like becoming a woman. Ginger's metamorphosis is inextricably intertwined with her first period, and the sudden blossoming of her sexuality, while clearly an effect of the lycanthropy, is associated by her, by her sister Brigitte, and by the movie, with her reaching sexual maturity. The way Ginger and Brigitte feel about menarche and puberty (that it turns you into a monster, even without the werewolf part thrown in) is exactly the way I felt, so this movie hit a chord for me on that purely personal level. And their mother's terrible way of handling it, her completely different understanding of what "womanhood" should mean, merely reinforces the sisters' understanding of themselves as outsiders, as near monsters even before Ginger gets bitten. I particularly like the way their mother's performance of femininity gets undercut later in the movie, first by the dogged "unfeminine" way she tracks down the truth, and then by her crazed fantasy of torching the house and running away with her daughters. The fact that this is no different from Brigitte's fantasy of curing Ginger and running away merely emphasizes the likeness beneath the surface between the women in the movie. Mrs. Fitzgerald is just as much a dreaming monster as her daughters, and the movie suggests strongly that that's simply part of being a woman.
But, having argued that the onset of menstruation is the onset of monsterhood, the movie swings round to the other side. Ginger and Brigitte can't win. They're outcasts if they reject adulthood (and it's clear that Mr. Wayne, at least, regards them as monsters); they feel that becoming adult women will MAKE them monsters. And then, when Ginger tries to take control of her body and her sexuality, that makes her a monster, too. Ginger's aggressive sexuality, also triggered by the lycanthropy, is coded as monstrous--at first simply in terms of socialized gender roles (and I loved her rant about that, too), so that the movie is pointing out that women cannot be sexual and be "normal." But as the lycanthropy progresses, it exaggerates the problem; Ginger's one-on-one with Sam in the greenhouse is very explicitly framed and written to evoke rape, with Sam being the one trying to tell Ginger no. Like many other horror movies, this one tracks a shift from the idea of monstrousness as strength against social norms to the monstrous as the completely alien and inhuman. Becoming a monster pushes one farther and farther outside, until--and Ginger Snaps is very specific about this--Ginger no longer even feels connected to Brigitte: "You know," she says, "we're almost not even related anymore." And Brigitte's terrified and furious attempt to reconnect by infecting herself with the lycanthropy virus results in one of the most primitive schoolyard gestures of exclusion. She cuts her palm and then Ginger's and holds them together, in a twisted reflection of their pact-making at the beginning of the movie. "Now I am you," Brigitte says, and Ginger responds, "I know you are, but what am I?" Ginger is determined to drag Brigitte down with her--as Brigitte finally recognizes--but that's greed, not love.
Sex, blood, and death are in a very tight triangular configuration, as some of the Fitzgerald girls' posed "death" photographs in the credits montage makes clear, and it becomes only closer and closer as Ginger changes, until she becomes no longer able to distinguish between sex (represented by the blood of menstruation) and death (represented most vividly by the trail of blood Brigitte follows to find Sam and Ginger in the basement, and most explicitly by her attempt to pacify Ginger by drinking Sam's blood).
Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle are both brilliant, and the sister dynamic they give their characters is marvellous. One of the things the movie is about is the way in which their incredibly close relationship is in fact toxic, the way in which Ginger's domination of Brigitte is bad for them both and, more and more clearly and chillingly as the movie progresses, based at its core on Ginger's selfishness, her determination to keep Brigitte for herself. She can experiment and go out with boys and all the rest of it, but her incredibly nerdy little sister has to stay behind her. I was praying they wouldn't kill Sam off, but I knew that they had to. Not simply in horror-movie terms, where the sidekick is always doomed, but because he's the only thing Brigitte has that Ginger doesn't. Ginger has to kill him, by the inexorable tragic logic of her character and the way the movie uses the vehicle of lycanthropy.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-04 08:43 pm (UTC)*ahem* Sorry.
Ginger Snaps appeals strongly to my sense of humor--which is morbid to the nth degree. The movie's about half black comedy, along with the tragedy. Also, there's a large part of me that WAS Brigitte in high school, and a smaller part that wanted to be Ginger--not with the werewolfy-ness, but with the confidence and power in her own sexuality. It's a very cool movie.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 06:51 am (UTC)Charles Taylor had a good review of it in Salon that first piqued my interest -- good except for only tracing back the association of werewolves and menstruation to Willow's offhand comment to Oz in "Phases," which is dumb. "Lilah the Werewolf" and Suzy McKee Charnas' "Boobs" are much more significant antecedents.
Becoming a monster pushes one farther and farther outside, until--and Ginger Snaps is very specific about this--Ginger no longer even feels connected to Brigitte: "You know," she says, "we're almost not even related anymore."
If I'm remembering the placement of that correctly, I disagree with this one--Ginger says this as a prelude to a come-on: it's an excuse for a way to bind Brigitte to her with sex, a declaration of the distance between them as another declaration of the way that Ginger is ahead of Brigitte and as the first step in another attempt to bind Brigitte to her.
According to the IMDB, the producers are working on both a prequel and a sequel, which strikes fear into my heart. I don't see how they'll manage it.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 07:04 am (UTC)If I'm remembering the placement of that correctly, I disagree with this one--Ginger says this as a prelude to a come-on: it's an excuse for a way to bind Brigitte to her with sex, a declaration of the distance between them as another declaration of the way that Ginger is ahead of Brigitte and as the first step in another attempt to bind Brigitte to her.
Huh. That is completely not how I read that scene. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that if that's what's going on, I missed it.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 08:02 am (UTC)I was surprised your commentary focused so much on Ginger, because I identified so heavily with Brigitte. I mean, Ginger had a lot of what I envied, desired, and feared as a teenager -- that open sexuality, that comfort in--glorying in--her own body. Brigitte's caution and reserve were much more what I was like, though.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 09:58 pm (UTC)Still, I'm not going to watch it again to check, because, uh, I hated it-- for us it was nothing but a confused kinda-sorta feminist idea buried under a metric ton of bad acting and bad monster costumes and lots of implausible scientific explanations. ... My revulsion towards it may have something to do with the fact that we got Chinese food before we watched it, and were eating happily until we got to the credits, and, man, those penny-a-dozen pretty-dead-girl poses, that fake blood-- I had to stop eating, and remained in the same queasy, eye-rolling mood for the rest of the movie, until (thanks to my completivist thing) it was done. Your convincing and (of course) well-written review makes me want to like the movie, but still it seems to me like the trailer on the DVD which we watched after the movie: the very best product possible with some really, really unappealing source.
But-- here's where I get to my reason for writing this comment, 'cause I don't usually barge into people's posts just to disagree with them wildly; I'm not backwards enough to believe my opinion is earnestly sought-- I actually bought the DVD at the video rental place, because it was cheap and I had heard GS praised as a piece of feminist art with an elegant metaphor by many people. I can't return it, because it was clearance.
Do you want the DVD? It's just going to sit next to my computer being used as a water-glass coaster, if you don't. I'll mail it to you, free. Along with some tendonitis things and the poetry I want to give to h.l...? <tempts>
no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 05:05 am (UTC)Rliz, I honestly can't remember, are you, in general, a fan of horror or not? I'm wondering if some of what you disliked in GS, particularly the pseudo-science, was the markers of it being a werewolf movie. But I don't know if you're into the genre or not, and so hesitate to theorize.
I do find it interesting that you found the acting unconvincing, whereas I actually thought that was one of the movie's strong points, particularly in Emily Perkins's performance.
Have you seen Heathers? [like | dislike] ?
And, I just realized, Ginger's "It's like we're not even related" can be both: come-on and repudiation all rolled into one. Since it is, after all, clear from the beginning of the movie, that Brigitte and Ginger are united as sisters, and united AGAINST sex. So sexualizing that means (a.) rejection of Brigitte as part of the inner circle and (b.) Brigitte's classification as Ginger's prey. Brigitte's answering gesture, mingling their blood, defends her on both counts. That's efficiency, that is. :)
no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 08:46 pm (UTC)That's a good thought-- and I'm not often a watcher (or even reader) of horror fiction; maybe the form had a good deal to do with my reaction.
I was thinking about this, and I decided that what I disliked so much about the movie was that it seemed, simultaneously, so transparent and so commonplace, through and through. It wasn't just the integral metaphor of the movie (werewolf metamorphosis --> transformation of puberty), which felt obvious, and even *misogynistic*, rather than feminist. The general feel of the movie was schlocky and overstated-- apparent from the very opening scene, in which a little boy finds the bloody foot of his chewed-up pet dog in his backyard playbox, pan to the doghouse covered with scratches and liberal bloodsmears, mother runs to the front porch clutching her boy and screaming, really screaming, "Baxter! It got Baxter!" And so on from there! All of the characters seemed to behave not like believable people but the teen-movie caricatures of themselves (perky suburban mom [*], obnoxious sex-obsessed teenage boys, brooding death-obsessed outcast teenage girls, etc., etc.). The acting, which I found shallow and one-note *especially* in the case of Perkins. Brigitte's character development was both minimal and clichéd (and, oh man, the shoulder-hunch, the hair in the face, the idea behind having other people *acting* out a text is that they can do a *better* job than I would have!).
[*] the first time she became interesting to me as a character was with that wonderfully psychotic suggestion that they blow up the house and all run away
The characters of Ginger and Brigitte, pre-transformation, were completely boring; I had no chance to become invested in them, to be able to later valorize their pre-werewolf relationship at all. Even as Brigitte looked slowly around their shared bedroom, at the very end of the movie, the dying werewolf-state Ginger in front of her (the very best, I thought, piece of the movie, and most visually beautiful), and the camera panned down over all of the artifacts of their old death obsession, their sisterly closeness, their pact-- I couldn't keep myself from thinking, There's nothing interesting here! They're just like any third gothy teenage LJ user I find while playing with /random.bml! Tedious tedium. Someone spent *five* minutes thinking up these characters and it *really* *really* shows.
(And oh my god I don't think I mentioned my reaction to the dialogue, but. "Looked like a lycanthrope to me, officer." "You see... werewolves... often?")
I haven't seen Heathers.
And, hm, I have something to say about the horror-genre idea, but I'm afraid this comment will get too long, so I'll continue in another one.
> And, I just realized, Ginger's "It's like we're not even related" can be both: come-on and repudiation all rolled into one. Since it is, after all, clear from the beginning of the movie, that Brigitte and Ginger are united as sisters, and united AGAINST sex.
Oh, yes! That's right. That *is* nifty.
(I liked that line, too. Actually. I'd hit very early on in the film my gayness-is-the-only-redeeming-quality state of movie-watching, and I was all, "Finally, lesbianism!" Reema: "...")
no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 09:11 pm (UTC)That said, I think some of what you're objecting to is the conventions of the horror movie genre. The dialogue, for one thing; Sam's "lycanthropes" line is funny because it's an acknowledgment of the perennial problem in the genre of how the protagonist convinces someone else to believe them about the vampires/aliens/pod people/what have you. The Lost Boys (which is an excruciatingly bad, and badly acted movie) has a similar gesture, in that the Frog brothers believe in the vampires before the protagonist does.
But we experienced the movie very differently, and I wonder if it has to do with the standards we come to it from. I don't have particularly good taste in movies, and since I watch mostly genre films anyway, my standards are set by terrible dialogue, wretched acting, and cheesy special effects. One of the reasons Scream is such a terrible movie (and it is terrible) is that it doesn't have the courage to face its own goofiness. It wants to be all ironic and distanced and yet scare the audience anyway. It cheats. I don't know what kind of movies you generally watch, but I'm guessing they tend to a higher standard than horror movies do.
The feminist/misogynist conundrum is also clearly a matter of widely separated perspectives. Because I see what you mean--I understand where you're coming from--but I don't agree with you. Possibly because it was, for me, a tremendous relief to have characters voicing my feelings about puberty and the movie accepting their valuation. The other characters at the high school are very broadly drawn (standard, again, for the genre), but that's part of the point. It really is Brigitte and Ginger against the world.
Clearly, YMMV.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 09:19 pm (UTC)I think you must be right about the perspectives thing-- I have questions about the definition of "horror movie" in the other comment I'm writing right now, which talks about the, heh, *other* horror movie I've seen.
And, absolutely, one of the biggest reasons I couldn't connect with Ginger Snaps (that is, btw, a wonderful little title) was the characters-voicing-their-feelings-about-puberty thing. (I was-- this was in the middle of my psuedo-Wiccan thing, too-- of the really-really-eagerly-anticipatory camp of pubescent girls.) I knew even as I was watching it that this part of my reaction was purely visceral and I ought to have gotten over it... although I think that if the rest of the movie were less with the hateful-to-me, I would have been able to, because I *do* handle pov-characters-that-are-not-me in other fiction all the time.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-07 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 10:46 am (UTC)This may go a long way towards explaining who likes this movie and who doesn't-- I came to the conclusion, at age 11, that hormones made people go utterly insane, and that the only clear thinking I would ever do in my life would be done before the hormones hit. I was pretty pissed off about the whole upcoming experience, and then going through my teen years did nothing to change my opinion that the whole thing was a bloody mess. Lots and lots of unfocused anger. No fun.
Good to know somebody had a better time of it than I did, though...
no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 09:40 pm (UTC)Okay, so, I know almost nothing about the horror-movie genre and have never intentionally sought one out, so it's odd, isn't it, that I happened to watch two in the same week recently. That'd be Ginger Snaps and 28 Days Later, which, in contrast, I really, really loved. (Have you seen it?)
What I'm wondering is-- and because I have no familiarity with the landscape of the genre I have no way of knowing this save actual research, and who likes research, tra-la-- whether 28 Days Later were some kind of crossover flick, not hardcore horror, something. I mean, yeah, it's about a nationful of marauding zombies that want to biiite you and make you one of them [*]! But this movie is brilliantly set up (once you get past the inevitable stupid-science beginning. "The monkey has been infected with pure rage!") and directed (um, in the way I'd use that word to talk about a story-- meaning how you the reader are directed, how you follow the characters and plot with your emotions and sympathies), not to mention beautifully acted, soundtrack'd, and *really* well video-edited. It's incredibly scary. Very effectively manipulative, both in the big sense that it taps issues that are sore spots for all of us (like biological war-terror, destruction of cities and all the complex art and society we've built, losing control of our own minds and bodies and helplessly becoming something else, etc)-- and manipulative in the little sense, that the acting and camera angles and video-editing all really make you feel through the POV character.
It was so very very scary that I (watching it via my mother's laptop) had to keep pausing it, to talk to Reema or read LJ or do anything to remind myself that, in fact, there were no zombies, that was a fictional universe and not mine. But it wasn't all horror-borne-of-implausible-science; about two-thirds through the movie, it took another direction and the horror deepened, became more complicated. It wasn't anymore just the-projection-of-scary-things-coded-through-nonrealworld-postulates-such-as-zombies (which is, as I've kind of heard it, the basic idea of horror) but now-- shall I spoil it for you? I'll whitefont, 'cause, man, you *have* to see this and you have to see it unspoiled-- It is brought into the realm of actual, human (not even those masked serial killers of slasher films are real believable rounded empathetic characters), real horror. And it's so good, it's so structurally gorgeous. (This paragraph interrupted, in fact, by an interlude in which I jumping-up-and-down-ily narrated the movie to my mother, who had come by to ask when I was going to bed.) But.
Is there something in the definition of a horror movie that precludes deeply developed characters and emotional arcs? I'm not being sarcastic or faux-innocently mean-- I'm wondering, really, if the cartoonish aspects of Ginger Snaps were in fact integral to its genre. When 28 Days Later shifted out of the encoding-of-human-horror-in-the-supernatural and into the actual noncoded human horror, was it also shifting out of its genre...?
[*] kinda. They're not humans that have been altered so that their state is supernatural, or anything; they're just humans infected with a virus <koff> that makes them do the crazy rage thing. And infection is only incidental to their real goal, which is fucking your shit up, as well as the shit (I keep typing "shirt") or anything or anyone within reach. ... With the bad science! But never mind that part.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-07 05:39 am (UTC)Ironically, I don't watch very many horror movies, either. I am extremely susceptible to camera tricks, so that the experience of watching a movie like The Sixth Sense or The Gift is traumatic all out of proportion to the horror involved. (This is especially true of The Gift, which uses camera manipulation instead of plot or character development. "Manipulative" in both senses.) So, even though I'm fascinated by what I've heard about it, I haven't seen The Others and don't intend to, because the extent to which it will fuck me up is not worth the intellectual pleasure I'll get out of it. Also one reason the last chapter of my dissertation turned out NOT to be about horror movies.
Horror movies are, in their origins, B-movies. And the nature of the B-movie, as you put it, precludes deeply developed characters and emotional arcs. That's not to say horror movies CAN'T transcend their origins, although they don't very often (I am now struggling to think of a genuine horror movie which has depth of characterization, and not finding any). But the point of a B-movie is to "get to the good stuff," meaning in this case the blood and guts and gore (and from that perspective, the credits montage is a gorgeous bait-and-switch, offering and denying at the same time, and commenting on the desire as it does so), so characters tend to be broadly drawn--cartoonish, as you say, or archetypal would be another word, or stereotyped, depending on how you want to spin it. Some of them reduce to the starkness of a medieval morality play--Flatliners in particular (yes, I know, it's a TERRIBLE movie, but it has Kiefer Sutherland in it! and Oliver Platt!), where the characters are defined entirely by the sin that haunts them (except for Julia Roberts's character, because apparently women are victims, not victimizers--gaah. There's misogyny if you want it.). Ergo, also, the prevalence of misogyny in horror movies, because it's easier. That may be another reason I liked Ginger Snaps so much, and found it feminist. Brigitte starts the movie an unreconstructed nerd and she ends the movie an unreconstructed nerd. She doesn't have to conform to social standards of beauty and behavior in order to survive; she doesn't have to be tucked neatly into any kind of box. The love interest (if that isn't grossly overstating Sam and Brigitte's relationship *g*) dies instead of rescuing her. When most horror movies (and here I cite Scream again, along with the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises) use women as beautiful monster-bait, or at best as sidekicks without even so much character and interest as Sam has, it completely delights me to have a movie that stays completely focused on its female characters and that accepts them for the outsiders and misfits that they are.
Horror
Date: 2003-09-10 08:40 am (UTC)I'm just not sure whether or not I want them to be direct-to-video. On the one hand, I want them to be amazingly successful, because the first movie was good and I'd love to see the makers rewarded. On the other hand, I found a lot of the blood and gore really hard to deal with--I always do--and I'm not sure I could see them in a theater. Being able to turn on my lights and control the DVD player were immensely helpful.
I was thinking the other day, "Oh, of course, Truepenny doesn't mind the blood, she's working on Senecan tragedy!" It was one of those "Duh, I am stupid and miss the obvious until it hits me in a blinding flash" moments. :)
I think I have the opposite reaction to you -- I haven't seen "The Others" yet, but I'd kind of like to, from what I've heard; I don't mind tension or suspense, but I hate gore.
Re: Horror
Date: 2003-09-10 09:15 am (UTC)It's true that gore doesn't bother me. My susceptibility to camera tricks in part, I think, springs from my terrible eyesight; my peripheral vision is lousy, so things suddenly appearing out of fucking NOWHERE is really alarming (in RL, it mostly means I'm about to run into something or stub my toes or some similar painful experience). And because I have to get really close to things (e.g., questionably dead bugs) in order to see them, the cliché trick of slowly, slowly panning in on something that then turns and leaps at the camera or what have you ... that scares me half to death just from the suddenness of the motion. It's not the THING that gets me; it's the startle.
But, yes, there's a reason why I like writing about plays that can be accurately classified as wallowing in gore. :)
(Ooh, I could write about Ginger Snaps in my conclusion! *smacks self* No frickin' TIME, dumbass. But my god wouldn't THAT be cool?)
Re: Horror
Date: 2003-09-11 12:58 pm (UTC)I think the prequel would be categorized as "AU" if it were fanfic, and I have to admit that I find the thought of the same story being told in a different setting/timeperiod is fascinating. What remains the same? What changes?
Re: Horror
Date: 2003-09-12 10:35 am (UTC)I'm pretty damn sure she's in the sequel. This still (http://www.ginger-snaps.com/media_gs2/pic_brigitte02_big.jpg) has to be from it -- she's not wearing a wig. :-)
Re: Horror
Date: 2003-09-12 10:42 am (UTC)Just bad phrasing, then.
*relief*
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 09:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 11:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 11:39 am (UTC)But it's also true that I missed the sexual reading the first time around. And clearly, from you and Mely and Rliz, I just plain missed it.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 07:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 08:05 pm (UTC)Love Ginger Snaps insanely. Saw it during a blizzard a year and a half ago with several friends, and we were all deeply impressed. For all of the places it pushes almost too hard (and I do know several people who hate the movie), it has such lovely detail to it. The way that Ginger meets her ultimate end is the best of these (considering there was a definite choice there, possible healing in one hand and death in the other), but the delightfully macabre bit with the severed fingers in a tupperware container is another that sticks in the mind.
I think a big reason I love this movie is that you're right, for a young girl coming into sexual maturity there's this horrible feeling of turning into something else inside your own skin, a process that alienates you from *everyone*-- particularly your own mother. I never hated my mother more than when she was trying to explain how normal and wonderful the changes I was going through were, because it didn't *feel* wonderful, it felt terrible and disgusting and it made me furious to have to go through it. (Cue the dewclaw scene in the movie and the contempt in Ginger's voice when she speaks to her mother-- underneath the metaphor is every girl's contempt for a mother's attempt to make this savage thing seem normal.)
God, now I really need to watch this movie again. I should own it. Thanks for the great read!
no subject
Date: 2003-09-06 08:17 pm (UTC)And the way that Ginger and Brigitte feel about puberty is exactly how I felt. The body becomes this alien, disgusting thing that behaves in ways it didn't before, and they're embarrassing and gross and painful.
BRIGITTE: Are you sure it's just cramps?
GINGER: Just so you know, the words 'just' and 'cramps'? They don't go together.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 11:54 pm (UTC)I was an adorable, good-girl, do-whatever-you-like-type moppet right nearly up until puberty, and then BOOM. I became this angry, vengeful, moody person who didn't calm down for years (and who also fell prey to nasty depression, linked decades later to nasty PMS). Oh man, the hormone storms, oh man oh man....I sometimes think I didn't start thinking clearly again after that until I was about 23.
(Dread: is this TMI? But clearly there are others in this thread who found the onset of menarche upsetting, so I hope it isn't.)
moira (formerly redredshoes)
no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-08 06:14 pm (UTC)Read my review and reply there if you like:).
no subject
Date: 2005-03-13 04:37 am (UTC)Belatedly...
Ha! Awesome.
I just watched Ginger Snaps and went hunting for posts about it. Thought I remembered one by Coffee_and_ink, and that led me here. And: awesome.
This has been my problem with Donnie Darko for a while now. There's a lot that I love and admire about the movie, but the more I think about it, the less I think I'm going to be able to watch it again. (Er. I've seen it half a dozen times by now, so that may not be a tragic loss.) Every good thing that happened during the course of the movie happened because of him. So sure, Donnie saves the world.
But I don't want them living in that world without him.