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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3572 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Dude, thanks for reminding me about The Wailing. Watched it on a random Netflix Saturday Night years ago, thinking it would be some sort of Ju-On knockoff that would help pass the time.

Absolute power banger of a film. The final ending gave me legit horror move "I am fucking scared" vibes I hadn't felt since watching OG Exorcist when I was 12 or something.

I think your post - in its entirety - is the "right" answer. This film is doubt and doubt on multiple levels. Forget "who's the bad guy", do we even know what the fuck actually happened? I think an interesting comparison to make would be No Country for Old Men. On the surface, it's a really good neo-noir-western with a hero Cowboy protagonist assisted by the grizzled elder sheriff. Unfortunately, our hero just runs out of time and luck.

Right? Maybe not. Maybe the whole pont of NCFOM is that all of the action - the chase scenes, the cleverness of the protagonist, the one-step-behind earnestness of the sheriff - is actually totally pointless. The universe scale forces of fate and end consequences of seemingly insignificant actions are as inescapable as they are unknowable. "What do I have running on this coin toss?" "Everything." What actually happened in that movie? Maybe nothing. The ending is notoriously abrupt and follows a soliloquy that, although vivid, sort of has no point. It is as if the movie itself is telling us "nothing happened in this move and you knew the end before you walked in - which is that there is nothing in the end."

The Wailing does this by confronting us, at first, with a good-vs-evil doubt situation. But the more times you watch it the more you start to think, "Can I even tell good an evil apart? Do I have any coherent plan for 'stopping' or 'fighting' evil if I think I've confronted it?" It's doubt on top of doubt so that once you simply reconcile yourself to taking a leap of faith on one plane, you are immediately confronted with a whole never world of doubt on another one.

But I could be wrong.

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