Monday, October 23, 2017

Macabre Goes Mainstream: A Halloween Story



I will begin with the personal story. At some point in my awkward adolescent years when I was too old to trick or treat yet not yet old enough to do anything else on Halloween I was left with the responsibility of giving out candy. Left alone and somewhat bored I decided to make it fun. In between rings of the doorbell I gathered up an old "Creature from the Black Lagoon" mask and my "Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House." The record supplied atmosphere and then I would jump out from behind the door. As the night went on I became more creative, leaving a hatchet covered in ketchup in view of the door, placing an iron black cat doorstop in the window, and so on. My brother soon came home and found scaring kids to be way more fun than going door to door getting candy.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Scenes of Violence: Between Ultraobjective and Ultrasubjective Forms of Violence


How to make sense of the daily brutality that seems to surround us? Balibar's Violence and Civility can be seen as offering a sort of solution to this problem. Balibar's solution is framed in terms of three moves. First, he dubs inconvertible violence cruelty, the name suggests an excess, or in Balibar's terms inconvertible form of violence; it is violence that cannot be placed on any trajectory of progress, even the cunning of reason. Second, cruelty is differentiated in terms of ultraobjective violence, the violence of populations that are exposed to natural disasters, wars, or the effects of the market. This is violence without a face or name.  Ultraobjective is contrasted to the cruelty of ultrasubjective violence, violence that is not only intended, with a face and name, but often is aimed a particular group. Third, and this is the most important point, there is the question of the relation between these two forms of violence, unified under the same name, but differentiated.  As Balibar writes,

Saturday, October 07, 2017

How Can It Not Know What It Is? On Blade Runner 2049


I think that I may have grown up watching Blade Runner. I do not mean that I watched the film several times growing up, although that is probably the case, but something happened when I first watched it that was integral to growing up. All of this is because I grew up, in the first sense, watching Harrison Ford play a hero; Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were a big part of my childhood imagination. I had the toys and I am sure I went as Indiana Jones one Halloween. So when I saw Blade Runner for the first time, I think on VHS, I expected the same comic book morality of good versus evil and the same wisecracking character (Let's just be honest and admit that Han Solo and Indiana Jones are basically the same character). The movie both thwarted and ultimately exceeded my expectations: in its failure to live up to my action packed expectations it redefined what made a good film. I do not think that I could watch films again in the same way; incidentally, I am fairly sure that it was my attempt to see the film on the big screen a few years later that drew me to my local art house theater, the Cleveland Cinematheque. It is not just that Blade Runner has a formal connection to film noir and larger film world, for me it had an anecdotal one as well.