tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54445384999606292742024-02-08T11:28:18.124-08:00Jeremy's RoomIdea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-76889306564658071762013-05-09T02:06:00.005-07:002013-05-09T02:06:39.190-07:00Ghostbusters <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
I
was pretty psyched that something would finally force me to watch this movie,
because it’s one of those iconic pieces of pop-culture that everyone knows
about and I’ve always felt like I should really get around to seeing sometime.
I went into it familiar with most of the imagery from its signature
moments--the green ghost, the laser backpacks, the giant marshmallow man--and,
perhaps more importantly, I was aware of the fondness with which it’s
remembered. I’ve never heard a bad word spoken about this movie or anyone in it
(I challenge you to find a single negative comment about Bill Murray on the
internet; that shit just doesn’t exist). Even knowing the special effects of
the eighties were gonna wind up a little underwhelming, its reputation as one
of the big cinematic events of the decade had me pretty excited. Now that I’ve
watched it, I’m happy to say: Yeah, it was pretty good.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
None
of it made me laugh, but none of it left me cringing at jokes that completely
flopped, either, and that was with the comedic handicap of watching it solo. A
lot of the humor was centered around Bill Murray being a jerk, and while that’s
right up my alley when it comes to stuff I find funny, it just never quite did
it for me. Maybe shows like Archer and Always Sunny have accustomed me to
stronger doses of the watch-people-be-assholes drug. The goofier stuff, like
nerds being awkward (haw!), hit home more often despite feeling kinda dated.
Rick Moranis is awesome.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
I
thought the ghosts were handled pretty darn well. The movie does a solid job of
steadily upping the tension without ever losing its lighthearted charm, and
while the conflict seems to wind up having more to do with gods and demon-dogs
than phantoms and hauntings, it maintains a deft balance of horror, action, and
comedy right through to the end. The inclusion of a convoluted mythology to the
whole affair felt a little at-odds with the tone of everything else, but it
enabled that big spectacle at the end with the marshmallow man and the shaving
cream ‘splosion, so whatevs. I flinched when the library ghost made a crazy face,
I got spooked when hands popped out of Sigourney Weaver’s chair, and I had fun
watching that green thing do considerably less damage to the hotel than Murray
and his Ghostbusters. I liked it.<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-46965157898722955472013-05-03T22:12:00.002-07:002013-05-05T01:06:51.834-07:00'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
It’s
tough to discern what can actually be learned from A Christmas Carol. The story’s
over a hundred years old, comes in more variations than Monopoly, and gets
viewed/read/experienced a half-dozen times by every person in the world before
they’ve reached the fifth grade. Trying
to objectively examine what does and doesn’t work with it feels almost
impossible, because our experience is inevitably colored by our childhood
memories and the feeling that only a cynical asshole would bag on a tale so
earnestly heartwarming and universally beloved. I don’t intend to take on the
role of that asshole here--I felt just as warm and fuzzy during this read-through
as I did when I was seven--but I am interested in whether the ridiculously
over-the-top romanticism Dickens writes with would be considered as masterful were
the story released today. I don’t think it would be, or should be, and that’s
not a criticism of the story.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
The
staying power of A Christmas Carol is possibly the best argument around when it
comes to challenging the role of moral complexity in storytelling. The
emotional direction of each scene is so blatant, so forcibly thrust in the
reader’s face, I imagine even Ayn Rand might find herself thinking “I don’t
know, man. Doesn’t that seem kinda heavy-handed?” Scrooge, his nephew, his
sister, the Cratchets--Dickens paints each of these characters in the boldest shades
of black and white he can find on his palette, developing each of his moral
conclusions by saddling positive and negative qualities accordingly. Some might
argue that Scrooge, in the journey through his soul that spans the length of
the book, adds some degree of moral nuance to the tale, but I’d disagree. He
goes from all-bad in reality, to all-good in flashback, to all-bad in
flashback, to all-good in reality; his shift to the dark side isn’t a Breaking
Bad transition in value judgments, but a switch that gets flipped on and off as
needed for the story. All of the characters function this way--not as
individuals with desires, but as one-note personifications of whatever feeling
Dickens wants to express through them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
And
what the hell, it works. I think we read this story less like... well, a story,
and more like a fairy tale, where it’s okay to express a big, loud moral
through perfect heroes and hateful villains (the three-tiered plot construction
certainly has the ring of a fairy tale, doesn’t it?). It’s the kind of story
you read to a kid before bedtime to reassure them the world works a certain
way, and to that end it’s successful. While you’re not thinking about how
Scrooge couldn’t have afforded to pay for Tiny Tim’s medical care if he hadn’t
spent his life accruing his vast fortune, you’re immersing yourself in a
reality in which good and evil are plain as day and the right attitude is all
it takes to live happily ever after. It’s good at what it does. Great at it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
We’ve
set the bar higher since A Christmas Carol, though. It might seem laughable to
say while we’re fresh past of the glory days of Twilight and Fifty Shades
fandom, but I think storytelling is something that’s only gotten better with
time. It has to, really. Discriminating readers demand depth and complexity of
their fiction, and, having read and become jaded to most of the deep and
complex stuff of the past, the demand for quality inevitably gets set higher
and higher as time goes on. I think this is a good thing, even if it means that
treasured works of the past wouldn’t hold up again if they had to surface anew.
It doesn’t detract from the magic of A Christmas Carol to argue that we wouldn’t
sing its praises so unanimously if it didn’t come with all the baggage it does.
It just reminds us how magical some of the stuff we have today really is.<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-56848908385464475382013-04-26T20:30:00.001-07:002013-04-26T20:30:33.205-07:00Scary Dairy<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
Patrolled
by police during the day and closed to the public at night, Scary Dairy is
about as haunted as anything can get in the golden hills of Camarillo, CA. Only
a splintered framework remains of the wooden farmhouse, but the graffiti-riddled
dairy itself is still largely intact. The farm, adjacent to the Camarillo State
Mental Hospital, was originally constructed as a means for the patients to
develop work experience and provide additional income for the hospital. While dark
rumors about the nature of the initial labor and the murderous patients
involved are common among highschoolers, much of the farm’s current notoriety stems
from its regular use as a hideout for gang activity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
Word
on the street is that the doctors’ treatment of the patients was largely
unethical, involving forced labor, lobotomies, electric shock therapy, and a
relative lack of confinement for murderous individuals while situated only miles
away from residential areas. The hospital was closed down due to controversy
over its methods and location, and after attempts to readapt the area into a
prison, then a school, the buildings were abandoned. Some claim that the Eagles’
“Hotel California” references Scary Dairy and the adjoining hospital, though
there’s no real evidence to support the notion. Paranormal occurrences reported
to have taken place involve the sensing of negative presences, the rapid
depletion of electronic batteries, and the sighting of purple plasma energies.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
My
friends and I used to airsoft at Scary Dairy when I was in high school, and a
few of them were under the notion that the dairy had also served as a
slaughterhouse back in the day. I haven’t found any info that suggests that,
but I like the idea, fiction-wise, of so much blood, violence, and depravity
culminating in one place. Were I to incorporate it into a story, I think I’d
opt for the Shining/Hill House method of developing the location into an
antagonist. Something involving victims going insane and viewing the others
like cattle needing to be slaughtered. Or something to do with milk. There’s a
lot to work with.<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-90430763538170181962013-04-20T01:02:00.002-07:002013-04-20T01:02:25.918-07:00Paranormal Activity<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve never known anyone who thought Paranormal Activity was “all
right.” It’s either another innovative testament
to our fear of the unknown or a boring, soulless attempt by Hollywood to
capitalize on cheap production costs. “Oh, doors slamming shut are all it takes
to scare you?” As someone who falls into the receptive camp, I’d like to
confirm that they totally are, because in that moment we’ve got no idea what’s
on the other side.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s gotta be something to the hot-cold split in the
reactions to this movie. Those who hate it tend to claim it’s poorly made and
those who defend it insist the detractors “didn’t understand it” (which I guess
could be said of any argument over artistic preferences), but the all or
nothing dichotomy really has me thinking that an individual’s reaction to this
movie is somewhat independent of both the film’s quality and the viewer’s
critical merit. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some stuff just isn’t for everyone. Some people’s taste buds
just line up in a way that they don’t like a certain flavor. Where a million
different variables create a more gradual distribution of enjoyment for most
movies, the sharp cutoff for receptiveness to this particular movie indicates
that it comes down to how affected you are by just a few distinctive elements. How
scared you are of a door moving back and forth in the night has a lot more to
do with your own subconscious ideas about danger and the unknown than it does
with the ability of the person presenting it to you. Granted, it’s a storyteller’s
job to figure out which concepts will press the right emotional buttons, but in
the case of Paranormal Activity, the filmmakers did just that. The people whose
fear nerves got all tingly when an invisible figure began pounding on a slammed
door can attest to it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This isn’t an argument for artistic quality being determined
by popular opinion. This is a guess about this movie involving elements of
horror that simply don’t resonate with everyone, based on the fact that the
people who don’t like it tend to feel that none of it was even slightly scary.
I’ve felt <i>some</i> fear watching horror
movies I didn’t like. I’ve felt <i>some </i>fear
watching horror movies I ultimately didn’t think of as scary. If you came away
from Paranormal Activity completely unfazed by a single part of it, then, I’ve
gotta ask: Do you think that you experienced Paranormal as it was meant to be
experienced and simply saw through shoddy craftsmanship, or that there’s a
chance that the movie hinged on an avenue of horror that just doesn’t click for
you?<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-51920933175055449052013-04-14T20:44:00.000-07:002013-04-14T20:44:08.569-07:00Elaine Mercado's 'Grave's End'<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
Well, it was better than Amityville.
I know, I know--dead horse, doesn’t tell us much, yadda yadda. If I didn’t come
into this one with a bunch of no-fun-at-all skepticism keeping me in check,
though, there’s a good chance I would’ve bought into it. It isn’t just that the
writing is better than Anson’s (It is. It’s a <i>lot </i>better, even if it still felt like there was a gap between
Mercado and a polished storyteller), but that the entities being drawn up here simply
feel more believable. For the most part. While there was definitely a turning
point at which the spirits of Grave’s End began reading a little too clichéd or
nonsensical to take seriously (looking at you, weepy bride and ghost farts),
the believability factor remained relatively intact throughout, thanks in no
small part to the tedium and anticlimax that washed over the text like a cold
shower.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
Fiction
usually delivers. It’s kind of its thing. When it comes to fiction we can
legitimately expect that justice will be served, that emotions will define
events, and that big, loud, meaningful things will happen. We’re so accustomed to
stories working this way, I think, that we’ve come to associate the opposite of
these qualities with reality. Compared against fiction, reality is slow and
boring and rarely delivers. You’re a lot more likely to fall in love by meeting
someone through mutual friends and talking than by realizing the lab partner
you’ve hated for so long actually gives your life all the beautiful things you
never knew you were missing. When I argued that The Lovely Bones invested too
much in establishing a sense of reality, I viewed the tease of dangling Harvey’s
potential arrest in front of the reader, as well as the subsequent dashing of our
hopes, as an attempt to show how real it was by painting itself in very “anti-fiction”
colors. This isn’t to say that I don’t approve of the technique; George R.R.
Martin’s got a similar thing going in his Song of Ice and Fire series, and I
enjoy the hell out of that. On the contrary, I think it’s extraordinarily
useful when applied with some tact, and it’s what elevates the sense of
authenticity in Grave’s End’s hauntings over those of Amityville.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
Grave’s
End is largely just a bunch of waiting. Waiting for the ghost antics to
escalate, waiting for the psychics to arrive, waiting for Elaine’s marriage to
fall apart. Its events stretch out over the painfully slow span of twelve
years, and it ends with their first proactive attempt to manage the situation
through a fairly uneventful cleansing. The conflict arc plateaus after the
first forty pages and drops off effortlessly in the last five or so, and I can
believe the hell out of that. I thought it was kind of boring, and I probably
wouldn’t read it again unless I had to, but it definitely has the ring of a
true story. Whether Mercado captured that feeling by accident, by legitimately
telling the truth, or through conscious effort, her book has a quality that I
think most fiction writers are constantly striving for. If we can maintain that
level of truthiness and still work in all the juicy perks that make fiction
worthwhile in the first place, we pretty much win the game.<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-53433141382770445372013-04-07T04:09:00.001-07:002013-04-07T04:10:51.385-07:00The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
It’s hard to think of anything worth
saying about The Amityville Horror. The work’s notoriety stems largely from the
hoax that surrounded its release, as well as... Oh, wait. No. That’s all it’s
got going for it. The quality of the writing is among the worst I’ve seen in published
material, fiction or non-fiction, and the fact that it’s reached a level of
popularity so far beyond anything the story itself deserves can only be a testament
to the power of... gullibility? Hope? You tell me. Part of me wants to give it
kudos for managing to generate controversy and investigation in the first
place. Anson and the Lutzes must have struck some kind of nerve to ever get
that far, right? I wonder, though, if they’re not simply the first people with
the gall to lie that boldly and in that particular way. Whatever the case, they
managed to convince some people for some amount of time, and given how heavily
fiction relies on blurring the line between reality and make-believe, there
must be something worth exploring in that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
Even
under its initial guise as the recounting of a real event, Amityville presented
itself as a story rather than a purely informative work. More importantly, it
presented itself as a story intended to scare. Anson’s always sure to pepper an
exclamation point or two on top of anything we’re supposed to be astonished or
frightened by, and every now and again he indulges his pronoun-starved prose
with the poetic flourish of a writer setting a scene. It touts itself as an
examination of events, but its identity as a horror story is unmistakable, and
for the sake of developing an idea I’m going to assume that it’s a successful
one. I’m assuming that the people who read it when it first came out were
frightened, and that anyone who’s read this far in my essay is on board with my
stance that the story’s pretty crap on a technical level, because doing so
allows us to examine a pretty cool dimension of fiction. Amityville’s success
as a horror novel in spite of its poor artistic merit illustrates how
significant the complementary relationship between a story’s emotional potency and
its grounding in reality actually is.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
I
complained that The Lovely Bones invested too heavily in establishing a strong
sense of reality, and I argued against Professor Johnson’s essay on the
inclusion of reality translating to better storytelling, but Amityville’s got
me re-examining both of those points. All fiction attempts to produce an
emotional reaction from its audience, and because artists have succeeded in
doing so through mediums as distant from reality as cartoons and claymation, I’ve
never considered maintaining plausibility as being that integral to the
artistic process. Something worth keeping an eye on, maybe, but nothing to get
hung up over. I think I was wrong. Our reactiveness to the events in a work of
fiction is based not only on the value judgments being triggered but on the
extent to which the author has tricked us into believing that what we’re
reading is true. If the triggered values make up a story's length and width, the sense of reality is what constitutes its depth, multiplying the impact
by making it not just something that resonates with us, but by virtue of
being more "real" something that threatens to genuinely affect us. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
For
the initial readers of The Amityville Horror, then, the shoddy “width” and “length”
were experienced in conjunction with incredible “depth”. By simply adding
another lie to the long string of lies that make up any work of fiction--by
claiming that it was real--Anson could write all the clichés and crappy
dialogue he wanted and <i>still</i> impact
his audience. I can only imagine how scared they might have been had this one-time-only
opportunity fallen into the hands of a more capable author. <o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-58237250180634930772013-03-31T01:38:00.002-07:002013-03-31T01:38:36.808-07:00Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
I’m always afraid of treating
popular material unfairly in the name of insincere anti-conformity, so I do my
best to give mainstream stuff every possible chance. How “mainstream” Alice Sebold’s <i>The Lovely Bones </i>actually is might be
debatable, but I’ll take the fact that my mom knows about it to mean it’s
crossed some noteworthy threshold in popularity. Imagine my relief to find that
I really dug the story, that I found the prose to be easily the strongest of
any of the works we’ve covered so far, realizing a depth and poetic grace that
Shirley Jackson, in my opinion, attempted and failed in <i>Hill House</i>. Imagine my disappointment to find that, after a
powerful opening and a workable middle, Sebold apparently threw in the towel
and opted to let her story peter out into a dull series of slice-of-life snapshots
that everyone claims literary fiction is snobbishly committed to. I felt
deflated by the time things rolled to a slow, yawning stop, and after looking
back at the pages that I did enjoy, I realized that I should have expected it
all along.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
The
story is about grief and overcoming loss more than it is about seeking justice
for a murder. I get that. That’s no excuse for spending the first half of the
book toying with the reader’s legitimate expectation that events will develop
into a conflict between George Harvey and the Salmons, only to look back
innocently at the end of it all and say, “Oh, you were expecting resolution?
What ever gave you that idea?” If poetic justice was never on the table, why
show us so much of Harvey when a view of the Salmon family and the teenage
hipsters would have been enough to explore the eventual focus? The argument
that “it’s about dealing with the fallout of murder and Harvey’s one of the
people dealing with it” doesn’t really hold, because nothing ever changes about
the man. Every passage involving him only goes on to explain the depths of his
evil and some off-putting features of his childhood, right up until the moment
he’s killed by an icicle (‘anticlimactic’ doesn’t do it justice). It was a tease.
Look how much you want him dead but nope-sorry-kids-life-is-tough-sometimes. At
least when <i>No Country for Old Men</i>
pulled this stunt it had the decency to make injustice the overt theme of the
story.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
Harvey’s
static nature underlies the bigger problem I had, which is that weight is never
actually attributed to any of the characters’ decisions. Everything that
happens is a product of coincidence, happenstance, or spontaneous insight, and
the path each character takes is portrayed not as a series of crossroads but as
arbitrary reactions to events they never influence. Jack just knows that Harvey
did it. Ruth locked eyes with Susie once and remained obsessed ever after.
While much of the novel seems to be establishing realism by denying any
connection between value judgments and tangible consequences--Harvey does
terrible things <i>but</i> he never suffers
consequences; Abigail runs away from her family <i>but</i> nothing changes in her relationship with Jack--it saves its
romanticism for absurdly hollow gestures like the Ray/Susie sex scene at the
end. Their morally questionable intercourse is among the closest things we get
to a climax (no pun intended, it was the best word for the sentence), and it
doesn’t show us anything about either character we didn’t already know. None of
the decisions did, really. Everything we needed to know was already told to us
through Sebold’s beautiful, elegant narrative commentary, sparing the reader
the burden of deciding for themselves what to make of the story’s events.<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-75197481804450169882013-03-22T23:40:00.003-07:002013-03-22T23:40:30.101-07:00The Others<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">
I can only think
of a single other horror movie (and I don’t want to name it, at the risk of
spoiling the ending) where the final twist is that the characters were never in
any real danger, and with both films I walked away feeling like I had watched a
drama rather than a horror. I didn’t think either of the movies were
particularly bad, but I didn’t think they were particularly engaging either,
and my brain really recoils at the thought of watching them a second time. By
all accounts, I <i>should</i> like The
Others--the characters are solid, the idea is original, and the atmosphere is
top notch. I just wasn’t scared (‘cept the little girl/old lady bit), and the
fact that nothing was ever at stake sorta lets the air out of what middling
interest I did have.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">
Even before I caught on to the
twist (which happened around midway through the film) I never had the feeling
that the unseen forces in the house were a threat to the Stewarts. This might
actually be a testament to the skill of the filmmakers, matching the ‘supernatural’
occurrences to the actions of the defensive, confused individuals on the other
side so accurately that the absence of malevolence shone through, but it’s hard
to view the absence of horror in a horror story as anything but a handicap. I
want to say that this is a product of our never seeing harm befall anyone at
any point; we never get the “meat shot”, as Arnzen would say, to drive home the
fact that the threatening force means business. Problem with that claim,
though, is that a ton of horror eschews early demonstrations of the evil power
in favor of working its way up to something big in the finale. Paranormal Activity is one of ‘em, off the
top of my head. Still, most of these stories do wind up throwing us a few bones
at least midway through, and I tend not to like the ones that don’t (Hill House
comes to mind). Maybe it has to do with attention spans, and varies from
person-to-person.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12.0pt;">
I dunno. I don’t think <i>The Others </i>is a bad movie. Honest. I just got kinda bored with it.<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-49588263792262119072013-03-15T22:29:00.002-07:002013-03-15T22:30:56.160-07:00Stephen King's "The Shining"<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Stephen King has always read to me as an author whose
strengths outweigh his weaknesses, like a fighter with lousy form who still delivers
a solid enough knockout punch to earn his place in the ring. I enjoyed <i>The
Stand</i> but thought it ended poorly. I
was chilled by the finale of <i>Rage</i> but
thought a lot of his characterizations were a hard sell. In general, King’s skill with scene-building,
character depth, and intensely emotive narration (as well as what has to be a gargantuan
memory bank of brand names and colloquialisms) do battle with, and ultimately
prevail over, his tendency towards overlong plots and prose that’s decidedly,
almost deliberately, lacking in finesse.
<i>The Shining</i> wasn’t much
different. He puts us squarely in the
place and minds of his characters, wallops us with some incredible, high-intensity
scenes, and then more or less shrugs off the reader’s need for emotional
closure. It’s powerful, fun, and a
little bit empty when it’s all said and done.
That’s what I expected and what I got. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
From what I’ve read of King’s thoughts on writing, he wouldn’t
consider the “weaknesses” I’ve outlined to be worth losing any sleep over. Where other writers might get hung up on
weaving a concrete detail into a scene without disrupting the flow of the
action, King doesn’t bat an eye. Dude just
comes right out and says whatever he wants to say. The chance that a lengthy paragraph of description
or dialogue might weigh a scene down never pushes him to pass up an opportunity
to bedazzle the reader just <i>that</i> much
more. Given that I’d seen enough clips
of (though never actually seen) the film to have a general notion of how it all
shakes out, it’s hard to say what was really “necessary” for the buildup of
tension for this particular story, but amidst generous descriptions of the
Overlook Hotel and a few too many scenes going over similar points (Danny is
psychic, Jack has violent/indulgent urges, Winnifred is worried), <i>The Shining</i> did seem to take its time
getting off the ground.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And this shouldn’t be read as a criticism of the author’s
style. For any points I could make about
a clunky dialogue tag here or there, the guy produces some furiously gripping
work. He can afford not to worry about how
tight his plotting is because he more than makes up for it elsewhere. For those of us not blessed with the high-speed
(possibly corrupted) supercomputer that is Stephen King’s brain, though,
reading his work from the perspective of a learning student can feel an awful
lot like watching a circus performer in awe.
“Boy, that’s impressive! I sure
couldn’t do that, and I don’t particularly want to learn.”<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-77315937778804338462013-03-01T22:38:00.001-08:002013-03-01T23:59:04.308-08:00"Ghost Story" by Peter Straub<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The idea of antagonistic species who hate on humanity for
being inferior has always struck me as kind of funny. It seems akin to a bunch of humans saying, “I
hate dogs! They’re so stupid and predictable they don’t even deserve to live!”
before going on to torture and kill anything with the audacity to wag its
tail. Just seems kinda arbitrary. That being said, the ‘things’ in Peter Straub’s
<i>Ghost Story</i> really were mysterious
and intriguing as all get out through a solid majority of the novel, which is
no small feat in story just shy of 500 pages.
While there’s definitely some depth to the journey experienced by the
many protagonists as they overcome their internal struggles to take down the
external ones, that topic hews a little close to my last essay’s, so my
analysis of <i>Ghost Story</i> is going to
be reined in to scrutinizing the presentation of its creatures. More specifically, I’m arguing that the story
is at its most frightening (though not necessarily its most entertaining)
before we know the motive of the entities haunting the town of Milburn.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Reflections on the unknown being scarier than anything we
can perceive are overdone in this brand of discussion, but that’s probably
because the truth in them is a basic principle of so many elements of horror. I’m not exactly breaking new ground when I
claim that an increase in information lessens the fright factor, so it’s important
to clarify exactly what kind of information becomes ‘too much’. For me, the turning point was the scene in
which Gregory kills Mrs. Barnes, gloating to Peter of his origins and nature. The scene doesn’t lay out a motive for the
Bates brothers, nor does it give away information amounting to more obvious
fear killers (like the fact that you can kill them the same way you can kill
everything else). What it does do is
display a sense of awareness in the antagonists, signaling that we aren’t
dealing with the purposeless hate machines the text insisted we were, but
entities with feelings and ideas--ideas which can be broken down, examined, and
criticized. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is crucial, I think, because evil ideas walk a tricky
line between being stupid and being wrong, neither one of which is particularly
frightening. The times at which I was
the most frightened by and interested in Anna and Co. were those in which their
actions couldn’t be tethered to any particular motive. Why did Anna spend so much time with Don only
to disappear and kill his brother? Why
would these powerful beings be interested in killing a group of old men? Why was Gregory so damn mean? These questions are at their scariest when
they’re unanswered, even if the story clarifies ahead of time that the questions
cannot be answered (how many horror stories define their spirits as the
physical manifestion of an emotion?).
The introduction of these characters in all their initial mystery--Gregory
as a hateful force of nature, Anna as a whimsical harbinger of death--represents,
to me, the peak of their intrigue and menace.
Their actions cannot given a “why” without giving up the vulnerable,
vulnerable ideas, meaning that frightening characters can never really be ‘characters’. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s a point in Stephen King’s <i>The Stand</i> where Satan (or a Satan stand-in, I forget) tells one of
the main characters that he’ll spare his life so long as he kneels down and worships
him, at which point the character bursts out laughing. I assume he would have laughed at the
antagonists of this novel, also, as the concept of beings with such immense
power and knowledge being coupled with the pettiness of a twelve-year-old girl is
downright absurd. This corner of the
horror genre--big evil baddies with genuine motives--might be something that
just <i>can’t </i>work. Evil ideas just aren’t that scary. They’re generally just stupid, and it’s only
the possibility that anyone could act on them that’s worth fearing.<o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-41755030540088621992013-02-15T22:18:00.000-08:002013-02-15T22:18:26.778-08:00Hell House by Richard Matheson<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
I’m not a horror writer, and while I
am developing a growing appetite for the genre, I can’t say I’m much of a
horror reader, either. I took this
course because I determined that the effective presentation of external
conflict in <i>any</i> genre requires techniques
at the foundation of a good horror story--namely, scare tactics. A villain doesn’t carry much weight if they
don’t instill fear in the reader, and the threats of death, pain, and sadness
that we level at our protagonists have only as much impact as their execution
enables. <i>Hell House</i> vindicated my method of study, not so much by being scary
(it had me going at a few points, I’ll admit) as through the feeling of triumph
I was left with at the end. Fear-based
conflict has all kinds of capacity to amplify the heroic qualities of a story’s
characters, and on that level, <i>Hell House</i>
totally delivered. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
One-sided
fights go hand in hand with horror. As
soon as we get the sense that the victims of a monstrous force stand a decent
chance of victory, the force ceases to be monstrous and the story ceases to be
scary. Right from the get-go, then, the implicit
context of simply being a horror story primes us to anticipate the protagonists
of <i>Hell House</i> being overmatched. We already know that Barrett’s Reversor isn’t
going to work; we already know that Florence’s compassion won’t save any
souls. We go into the story expecting to
watch snakes eat mice, wondering whether any will be smart enough to escape,
and that’s what makes it so much cooler when the mice pull off the win. These characters are fighting tooth and
nail--Florence bites through her hand to retain sanity; Barrett persists in assembling
his machine amidst a constant stream of injury; Fischer overcomes an excessive addiction
to moping--and the overwhelming sense of futility in it all elevates their struggles
to impressive feats of heroism when the unification of their efforts winds up
being enough to take the house down. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
I
might not have responded so well with this aspect of the story if Matheson had
opted to trivialize his characters by burdening them with cartoonish
weaknesses. While the house ultimately
preys on the vulnerabilities alluded to at the beginning--Barrett’s pompous
overconfidence <i>is </i>his downfall;
Florence <i>is </i>too caring for her own
good--it’s only after the author has explored the strengths of each character with
what read to me as sincerity. Florence
isn’t an airheaded fool, but a compassionate, intelligent medium whose strength
of will is crucial to Fischer’s ability to reason through the house’s
phenomena. Barrett isn’t a willfully
ignorant windbag, but a capable physicist who was pretty damn close to
extinguishing the house’s powers. The
characters are flawed, definitely, but only enough to give value to their more
impressive qualities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">
I
know a lot of my classmates didn’t think <i>Hell
House </i>was scary, and I agree that, yeah, a lot of the time it isn’t. I’d argue, however, that through much of the
novel it maintained a crucial element of any horror story--the overt sense of a
dangerous, unbeatable threat--and that it used that element to pull off a more
than satisfying finish. <o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5444538499960629274.post-8005110885975909682013-02-01T21:07:00.004-08:002013-02-02T09:54:27.306-08:00"The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can’t help but feel as though I’ve failed Shirley Jackson
somehow. When a story is so pointedly
distinct from the expectations provided by its subject matter and so greatly
revered (or so a brief amount of research tells me) by its target audience, I
have to conclude that my complete disengagement with the material must be
rooted in my own shortcomings as a reader.
Whether I’m defective or not, though, <i>The Haunting of Hill House</i> failed to hold my interest, and my
slipshod analysis of what it is that Jackson was really trying to do here won’t
be fun for any of us. In lieu of that,
here’s my breakdown of why I not only didn’t get into this story thoroughly
enough to experience whatever emotional turn it was geared for, but why
I’m not even all that interested in doing so.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve got no problem with Jackson choosing to center the
story around Eleanor’s reaction to Hill House rather than the manifestations
within it. Internal conflict is arguably
more integral to storytelling than the external stuff, and I won’t hold a story
to the promise implied by its title if the content is good enough. No, my difficulty with <i>Hill House</i> was more a product of my never understanding what the
conflict actually <i>was</i>. It’s easy to point to issues Eleanor is
trying to deal with--the death of her mother, her desire for friendship, the
lack of control over her life--but I was rarely able to connect those conflicts
to the particulars of any given scene.
Eleanor’s loneliness isn’t enough to justify the long, long stretches of
banter exchanged between the core characters, and the quartet’s persistently whimsical
attitude towards <i>everything</i>--not even
a ghost at the door can stop them from dropping one-liners--made unclear to me
what was actually at stake. Characters
went from being unnaturally friendly, to unnaturally critical, to unnaturally
brave with a rhyme and reason that I couldn’t decipher, to the point that by
the end of it I just stopped caring. <br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As noted, my confusion might not be Jackson’s fault. She can’t control how perceptive her readers
are, or how long their attention-spans might be. What she <i>can</i>
control, however, is how inclusive her story is to the reader, and I felt like
I was being shut out of the story in a lot of respects. I recognize that POV standards might not have
been as stringent at the time of the novel’s publication as they are today
(though I consider <i>Hill House</i> a
decent example of why POV stability is important), but even discounting the inconstant
head jumping, I rarely felt connected enough with Eleanor’s experience to
sympathize with her on any level. It might
have been the regular use of telling over showing--Hill House is described as bad
and awful and terrible as soon as we see it, even if descriptions demonstrating
the point are a long time coming--and it might have been my inability to
understand the characters’ behavior at any given time. It’s rare that I nitpick technical details in
my reviews of published work, but I really feel that the application of some
basic storytelling principles--close POV, concrete details, showing over
telling--could have done a lot to connect me to Eleanor and whatever story was
trying to be told through her.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I would have preferred clearer conflict, harder details, and
more accessible connections between the story’s events and the characters’
reactions to them. Maybe I stumbled
right past the point of the work, and to make such changes would have
compromised Jackson’s whole endeavor, but at the end of the day I wasn’t
entertained. I was really unentertained,
in fact, which damns the novel on the only scale that matters to me. <o:p></o:p></div>
Idea-Manhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02743219730155057705noreply@blogger.com3