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SeekingBlood  1yr ago (text post)   2398 thread views

I feel that people often praise movies that call out or subvert expectations of their genre solely because they do that, even if execution of the subversion itself is not good.

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A Cabin in the Woods is fun because it puts all horror movies with their standard tropes into a shared universe with an explanation for horror cliches.

The next time you're watching a horror movie with a friend, and they say "Why would he do that? It's a stupid move." You can respond with "The Organization drugged them, remember?"

It's more of a love letter to horror movies than a subversion.

Not gonna talk about NCFOM since everyone else has it covered but I'd say Cabin in the Woods doesn't subvert tropes it contextualizes them or simply points them out. Nothing about the movie really subverted what you expected to see. I think anytime something is meta at all people just say it's subverting expectations for no reason. I didn't particularly like it but it's not criticizing tropes it's just trying to fit them all into the movie so they can all be explained by the movie itself. It's generic by design because it needs to be as trope-filled as possible while also giving those tropes a reason to exist beyond "they were stupid, serial killer is evil, monster was hungry." The entire movie reminds me of a scene in Community where Annie tells a joke but it's not 100% factual so somebody corrects her. Great. Thanks for making my horror tropes have contextual reasons to exist, now they're terrifying.

Might be good to note that, in the case of No Country For Old Men, Moss' death occurring offstage is true to the source material, the novel by Cormac McCarthy. The film was notable for very tight adherence to the book, almost scene-for scene, and using McCarthy's dialogue line-for-line in many places.

Not showing Moss' death, as part of that keeping to the source, does very much go against "standard" movie storytelling and audience instinct, leaving the viewer with a weird sense of incompletion. Something in our brains likes resolution, a phenomenon we can see in music as well, where chord progressions "return home" and conflicting passages resolve into harmony. McCarthy's subversion of that internal expectation is absolutely intentional, another iteration of the themes of the novel, that our pasts are inescapable and our futures subject to influences beyond control: we don't always, or even most of the time, get things wrapped up tidily with a bow on top, even if they're things we don't like (sad endings for protagonists), and the world moves whether we are paying attention or not. It's a "brave" choice by the filmmakers to stick with the script perhaps, but I don't think Moss' offscreen death is the, or really even a, reason the film is highly regarded.

One thing I would like to add with regard to the climax: the film actually pisses me off a bit in that regard. It's been a while since I've seen it, but as I recall in the film Moss, at his final hotel, is sitting outside drinking a beer when a pretty girl walks by, and he whistles at her or some such. In the novel, Moss picked up a 15-year-old hitchhiker runaway girl headed to California, who offers herself to him for sex, more than once. He books them separate rooms at the ultimate hotel, and the absolute last word we hear from him is him turning the underage runaway down once more:

There's a lot of good salesmen around, and you might buy somethin yet.

Well darlin you're just a little late. Cause I done bought. And I think I'll stick with what I got.

The climax is Moss' internal struggle, really, and it's emphasized again in the description of the gun battle: the Mexican has a gun to the girl's head, and Moss has him in his sights. Moss, being the ultimate Good Guy, puts his gun on the ground. At which point the Mexican shoots the girl, then shoots Moss. The whole hitchhiker subplot (and it's gorgeous dialogue) are all excised, and we end up seeing a lecherous Llewellyn, an ugly representation of our Hero, as the last interaction with him.

Chigurh getting hit by a car is manifestation of, no matter how badass we are, we really don't run shit.

The Coen brothers work with the same themes as the book of Job, where the mores and dreams of man are crushed beneath the capricious whims of an alien God. The message is subversive in that people want the world to be fair and then it isn’t, but the plot and the structure of the film sit comfortably within the bounds of tragedy. I get disliking a hero’s ignoble death aesthetically, but it’s more like you not liking dark chocolate rather than the chef not understanding how to add more sugar to the blend.

Subverting an audience's expectations as part of a deeper artistic/philosophical/moral point can be highly effective. To cite two of my favourite narrative video games, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Spec Ops: The Line would not have been half as effective if they had announced upfront what their themes and intentions were. Pulling the rug out from under the player made the messages of these games more impactful.

Subverting an audience's expectations just for the sake of doing so (or for the sake of surprise/shock value) is shallow and masturbatory.

"Subversion" is what technically accomplished but deeply uncreative people do. As an act of artistic creation, it is by definition reliant on the creative exercise of countless other artists. The trope must be subverted, but a "trope" is nothing more than a whole lot of individual creative decisions that converged in some sense.

It is witless rebellion for its own sake, and as such, we can look forward to hearing a lot more about it for the next millenium.

I'm more inclined to think that subversion can be done well or poorly, like much else. Parody and pastiche seem like natural subcategories of subversion, and those require considerable creativity to execute well. I find less value in the more purely iconoclastic approaches to subversion, though.

Well or poorly for sure, but even at its heights, subversion can never reach greatness. It is only by "subverting" some better work that it exists, after all. Subversion is to story as impressions are to comedy.

I'd argue many of the great enduring works are subversive. The Christian gospels are extremely subversive works in many ways. Everyone thinks Jesus is marching into Jerusalem to take the throne as "king of the Jews," but his real purpose there is to be tortured to death like a common criminal. "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last." The gospels are loaded with stuff subverting the religious and cultural expectations of the time and place.

I think my argument stands. The gospels aren't exactly great literature.

2000 years worth of history would appear to disagree.

Meh, Fifty Shades of Gray outsold The Fall by a factor of seventy. I'll stand by my judgement.

Except we're not talking about Camus, we're talking about the Bible.

Icons are a prerequisite for iconoclasm. Once the great idols of gods are torn down, the statues of great men are next, and then the statues of ordinary men. When only the memory of statues remain, they must rail against and try to tear down memories too, to remain iconoclasts.

NC4OM knows what it's doing, because Llewelyn's death (foreshadowed by an equally ignoble death of Wells) is when you see Ed Tom start to spiral down. He's too late to save Llewelyn, he is too afraid to be a hero and confront Chigurh, he can't save Carla Jean or pick up Chigurh's trail, the whole case is one big failure. Troubled by his inability to change the world for the better, he then learns that it's nothing new or unique.

I don't think No Country For Old Men subverts expectations. Maybe if your prior is "A movie has a hero's journey and then rising action and a conclusion etc etc" But the movie from the title to the ending narration "No country for old men" is about the fundamental chaos of the world and how people try to impose order on that chaos (Bell, Moss, Chigurh [moral codes, laws, randomness]) while ultimately futile. Moss dying unheroically and Chigurh being seriously wounded in a car accident fit that very closely.

Broadly speaking people evaluate things whether they enjoy them, not whether they are strictly good (I do think most people would agree with this distinction). Humans are very good at recognizing patterns and also novelty gives us enjoyment (Drugs, the McRib, twist endings). Historically a majority of the development of art/media practices are in response (anything there's a post- or 'critique' in the title is a good hint) to popular ways of doing things.

The medium is the message - the same goes for trope subversion. A bad (acting/writing/pacing) movie can be more enjoyable than a good (same 3 criteria) one for those reasons, but they are being evaluated for different things.

I'm unconvinced by your hypotheticals because they are non-falsifiable. Maybe Breaking Bad would in fact be better if Walter died in season 2. The reason you don't expect changes to these shows to be net-positive is because they're already evaluated very highly, so a change is more likely to revert it to the mean. Ask yourself the same question about the 50 bad tv shows or movies that come out every year. Would the Aladdin remake be better if the Genie's magic failed and Aladdin and Jasmine had to live in obscurity under Jafar's rule? Maybe, who knows.

Is it? I've never understood the praise The Princess Bride gets. If it was a musical instrument it would be a kazoo.

How good would the first few seasons of Game of Thrones have been if Tywin Lannister abruptly died of a disease in the beginning of Season 3, or if Jon Snow were killed by unnamed wildlings after he travels with the Night's Watch beyond the wall, as realistically someone in his position would be?

It's funny you say this, because Game of Thrones arguably got famous for an "anticlimactic" death or even a set of them

I remember a fan being absolutely offended at the death of Ned. Yet it was broadly considered bold and became famous. Why?

Because it was set up by the story. Ned's death is simultaneously unpredictable but also predictable and it's consequences were similarly so. It fit with the themes Martin was writing.

Similarly, No Country for Old Men is about many things, but it emphasizes the limits of the Sheriff's power to change life's brutality and the hubris of Llewellyn. This is emphasized multiple times, even directly at the audience via parables with helpful summations. The ending is also an "anticlimax" where Chigurh gets hit and walks off but it highlights that even Chigurh isn't really separate from vagaries of the world despite his rules (which he believes protect him), again tied to debates in the film.

Now, I get why that might not work for you but that similarity to GoT's Season 1 (maintaining thematic consistency) is why the movie was so well-received in spit of its "anticlimax".

Another factor is that No Country for Old Men is a movie, which means that it has a much more compressed time frame. We knew Moss for two hours, Ned for 10, Jon Snow for ~75. Different expectations.

tl;dr: My defense is that Game of Thrones and No Country for Old Men are admired for similar reasons, therefore GoT isn't a good counterexample.

When I read A Game of Thrones back in 2004 (while I was supposed to be paying attention in Grade 9 English), I was absolutely floored by Ned's death. All the fantasy books I had ever read drilled into me, consciously or not, expectations about how the story would go. The hero always survives, good ultimately triumphs, things come around in the end. There's a sort of nervous, excited energy you get when you realize a story isn't going to go the way you thought, and all of a sudden instead there are a million possibilities. I can remember vividly some of the times this has happened to me and Ned's death was one of them.

From a writing perspective it's also a very well constructed twist: it's set up in the book itself of course, but I'm referring more to the way it toys with the reader. The reader is used to seeing the protagonist escape seemingly impossible situations, and the book gives you various different reasons why it would make sense within the logic of the characters and the story for Ned to survive (not to mention the reader's knowledge that this is book 1 of a series). And then he doesn't.

His death also felt much less random than Llewelyn's death; whereas Llewelyn was killed by unknown cartel gangsters off-screen, Ned Stark's death was ordered by one of the most significant characters of that season.

Llewelyn's death wasn't "random": he was hiding from drug dealers, we were explicitly told that he would have extra dealers other than Chigurh on his tail (something Chigurh was foreshadowed as being angry about) and Moss is...just some guy. If anything, his death is the most predictable thing that happened. It was just anticlimactic.

This was also the point of the story of the cattle and the man with the prod: even in the best of times you can lose. Moss wasn't in his best times.

because his arc was not leading towards something that never ended up happening.

What exactly did it seem like Moss' arc was leading to? Cause I don't feel like the movie ever gives you any reason to think happiness or some grand achievement is on the cards. Moss' theft of the money is soon discovered and he has a psychopathic criminal on his tail, combined with his bosses who want to throw more resources at it (and are only stopped by said murderous criminal...for now).

Meanwhile, the Sheriff's perspective is basically one of fatalism and an inability to reckon with the evils of the day. At one point he seems to have been facing Chigurh (probably his imagination) and can't seem to bring himself to do anything. He's no savior for Moss.

Llewelyn isn't really just some guy.

Llewelyn has some kill but makes multiple mistakes - the most obvious being going back to offer water to the dying man and not checking the money early on - and shows what, quite frankly, is hubris. His dismissive attitude towards Wells, who is the only one who knows something about his nemesis, is telling.

He has some skill but he was clearly way over his head.

I felt like it was random because he was killed by the Mexican gangsters who were not really pivotal at any point of the show.

The Mexican gangsters actually came close to Llewelyn in the hotel. They were killed by Chigurh, close enough for Llewelyn to hear. Given how they were multiple men with automatics, I doubt it would have ended well for Moss.

Just as it didn't later. He was always screwed, and him being hunted by other people instead of just Chigurh had already been foreshadowed.

With Llewelyn telling Anton on the phone that he would find him, and his previous showdown with Anton, I definitely felt like the film was leading towards a battle between the two.

Fair enough, I can see that. IIRC my personal feelings I thought we were supposed to see Moss as hubristic and feel bad for the unenviable position he was in and had no choice but to try to fight his way out.

If Chigurh/the cartel had offered him the opportunity to drop the money and walk and Llewelyn didn't, I don't think anyone would see it as anything other than a dumb decision.

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