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Notes -
I watched Sinners last night.
It’s a flick about 1930’s vampires set in the American bayou. It’s a black flick. It’s about blackness, being black, black music, black stuff. Very black.
I love black cinema. From Life with Eddie Murphy to exploitation like Sweet Sweetback’s to Don’t Be a Menace to Friday I dunno whatever, even Scary Movie maybe. I’ve seen several dozen of them. They’re all ‘ black ‘ and pretty watchable for anyone. Plus anyone with even a hint of social awareness can watch them just fine.
The movie I’d most compare this to (it’s where my mind went for some reason) is Idlewild - basically OutKast (the musical group) in Atlanta in the 30’s … also very black. I love this movie.
The black characters in all these films are … black. They seem like normal people, just black. Rich black. Poor black. Dumb black. Smart black. Teacher black. Funny black.
I was born in Poland so I e always watched (not enough) a bunch of Polish cinema. Same idea. The Polish characters are Polish characters in a myriad of ways and if you’re Polish then you get it, and if you’re not, you can still be entertained and understand.
Well with Sinners - and even before really over the last few years … it just seems like the blackness is performative. It’s not that I don’t believe Michael B Jordan isn’t black, or that the writer or director don’t know about being black, it’s that I think now they’re starting to act as a fictional black narrative.
Being a 1930’s black man is no longer believable on screen. It was believable in Idlewild. Friday is believable - it’s caricature of course, but believable! I believed Dr Dre … I don’t believe Kendrick Lamar. I believed The Wire … I don’t believe (basically any ‘ black ‘ show I’ve tried to get into lately). I haven’t watched the show Atlanta but I’ve heard good things but mostly from white people, and mostly the writer and actor falls into this land of unbelievability as well.
I think there’s this black (black American) malaise that I can’t describe or catch onto over the last decade or so that makes black entertainers over perform their blackness in a subtle way.
I’ve always felt black Americans are Americans, just black. More recently I feel like they’re trying to be in some way more so.
If I were a pessimist I would say this is part of the ‘ we were kings ‘ meme that has been overloaded into the cultural psyche - if I were an optimist, I’d say it’s a culture trying to find itself and strive for a cohesive core to begin to become something other than ‘ black Americans ‘.
I’m usually optimistic in all respects but I have a lot of negativity towards, in respect to this post, black entertainment. Or at black entertainment that attempts to be mainstream.
I just watched the film. I couldn’t stop imagining how poorly received it would be with any other race combination.
A Bavarian beer hall gets set upon by Jewish vampires who menace the Germans with renditions of Hava Nagila.
A honky tonk besieged by a group of black vampires who blast hip hop and crip walk.
An English pub boarding itself up against Muslim vampires who are broadcasting a call to prayer and unfurling prayer rugs.
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I really enjoyed the first 30-40 minutes of this film. I went in without seeing any promotional materials for it, so I really didn't know what to expect. I was really excited about a gritty story set during the Prohibition, with the characters returning after making it big in the seedy underworld. The costumes were gorgeous, as was the soundtrack/music, cinematography and setting. I thought I was going to see probably the best movie of the year.
Then the horror slop started. I don't just dislike horror, I don't see the point. It's either jumpscares or unending tension. It boggles my mind why anyone would enjoy this genre. Sinners, however, is neither; it's not a comedic horror, like Evil Dead, and it's not really scary either. It just is horror because that's what it's labeled as. Yeah the scene with the Irish song (Rocky Road to Dublin?) has a great, catchy song, but it really undermines the horror element of it (just makes the whole thing really goofy). Also, people talked in other comments about suspension of disbelief, which this scene bulldozes, but what about the in-story characters? Imagine vampires surrounding you, a supernatural being that you thought didn't exist 10 minutes ago, and then, they just start dancing and singing. Goofy.
And then, actually, even the set-up I thought I was getting, the conflicts between Prohibition gangsters, their old lovers, sharecroppers, Chinese shopowners, the KKK, the young and old musicians, even that doesn't make sense. Like, how would a nightclub make sense financially in rural Mississippi (?), specifically for black people which were mostly sharecroppers and low-wage laborers? And the Twins should know this, since they worked and/or were in close-enough proximity in this sector. Hell, they even remark that their funds will run out pretty soon. Why not open up in or closer to a (major) city and have the characters from their past move there with the Twins or finding them there? But by this point, it's like an entirely different movie.
I see that it was directed by Ryan Coogler, who also directed and wrote Black Panther, the most overhyped Marvel movie so far. It's just as formulaic and average as any Marvel film (except Captain America 3 and 4, the Avengers 1 3 and 4 and Guardians of the Galaxy 1). I get that it was the first Black-led superhero movie (except for Blade), just as Wonder Woman was the first female-led superhero movie (except for Elektra and Catwoman), so it makes sense why it made so much money and publicity. I don't get why everyone pretends they are actually any good (or better than the avereage).
I was very engrossed by Sinners. It pulled me in with it's setting, from pretty much the start. I liked the actors, the music is phenomenal. I have a soft spot for American period dramas. Which is why I am disappointed the film took the turns that it did. Sure, maybe it's my fault for not doing any research before seeing it, but that would've meant I wouldn't have seen it at all. And I would've missed the amazing first parts of it.
Genuinely I recommend people just watch Sinners it until the 30-40 minute mark, shut it off and imagine the rest. Can't be worse than how the movie develops from there.
I suspect Ryan Coogler wanted to make a movie about a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta in the 30s, and then tacked on some vampires and gunfights to give it enough mass market appeal to get produced and make money.
Or he was inspired by From Dusk Till Dawn, which had a similar genre shift with a similar subject matter.
This plus the Faculty were two of his major inspirations according to Coogler himself.
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I mean this part is roughly historically accurate. Clarksdale did have a number of juke joints, it even has festivals to this day celebrating them. It's one of the important stops on the Mississipi Blues Trail for just this reason. Many of them did struggle financially as their clientele were mostly poor black sharecroppers, but they did also have a mostly captive clientele, blacks weren't allowed in white establishments, so something was going to spring up to cater to that segment. The population of the city itself then was about 10,000 but it had significant cotton plantations around it and those workers wanted somewhere to drink and so on.
"Classic juke joints, found for example at rural crossroads, catered to the rural work force that began to emerge after emancipation.[1] Plantation workers and sharecroppers needed a place to relax and socialize following a hard week, particularly since they were barred from most white establishments by Jim Crow laws."
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I've been planning on eventually writing an effortpost here about the horror genre and some of its problems. So I'm glad to see there may be some interest in that here.
The TL;DR is that the "modern horror film" as such has a lot of issues, as you correctly point out, but I think that works that have horror elements are quite fascinating (David Lynch films are a good example).
Please do! I would be interested in reading a horror fan's perspective, since my own interpretation is that people like them because it's a safe way to "overcome" an obstacle. Coincidentally, maybe, is why, apparently, if you decide to take a date to the movies (which is normally an awful choice, especially for first dates), it's best to pick a horror film.
Off-but-mentioned-in-this-thread, what's your opinion/review on the Hundred Line game? I know the creators' other works, I read previews which sound very impressive and make the game highly ambitious, but you called it a VN where I got the impression it's more like a TRPG. How do the two mesh together? How does it compare to similar games in those genres?
It's a lot of fun! Definitely recommended. If you liked any of Kodaka's or Uchikoshi's other games you'll like this too. Especially if you liked Danganronpa, because although it's a very different kind of story than Danganronpa it's got a similar "vibe".
Yeah so it's not a "pure" VN because it does have a combat system, but most people I've talked to classify it as a VN. (The main gameplay loop is long VN segment with a chance to upgrade units -> battle -> another long VN segment -> repeat). The combat (assuming you play on normal mode, I finished the game before the patch that added hard mode) is more than just a "formality", but it never gets super difficult. It's less complex and involved than what you would find in a game like Fire Emblem or FFT. You're really here for the story, not the combat.
Plus if you keep playing long enough (meaning you explore multiple routes instead of just making a beeline for the true ending) you basically get the ability to just skip combat altogether, which means you're just free to explore and at that point the game becomes a "pure" VN.
Regarding Uchikoshi works, would you recommend I check it out if I vastly preferred 999/Zero Escape over Danganronpa? It doesn't exactly look subtle.
Uchikoshi overall wrote less of it than Kodaka did, but he had a block of routes in the back half of the game where he had free rein to do his own thing. So if you’re willing to tolerate the Kodaka parts to get to the Uchikoshi parts then I’d say it’s still worth it.
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I'm interested. I'm in the same boat where the horror genre holds zero interest in me but films with horror elements can be good. Se7en is a good example of a film with horror elements that is not a horror movie, for me. (When I've mentioned something like this some people go "well, would you be interested in psychological horror instead of supernatural horror, then?", but it's not that, either, it's something else.)
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I thought it was pretty good until it it was very evident the writers decided they didn't want to write an ending. The exact moment(spoilers obviously) was when the Japanese lady suddenly and randomly invited the vampires in. At the exact moment it just became stupid. Up until that point the character were interesting and they managed to avoid it being overly preachy. But then it just became a series of pretty dumb scenes. I will say that it wasn't stupid in the way I worried about after the early reveal of the klan involvement. I didn't even really mind the gratuitous KKK slaughter at the very end because it had already jumped the shark.
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This is actually funny (and I think a case in point), because there's no reason to think Dr Dre is any more credible about his subject matter than Kendrick. Dr. Dre grew up in a similar environment as Kendrick but he wasn't a gangster. He was just a musical talent. Ice Cube also wasn't a thug. Eazy E was probably the closest to living what he rapped, because he actually was a Crip.
In essence, Dr Dre and co. faked it till they made it: it was the money that brought in people like Suge and his affiliated Bloods.
As for Kendrick himself, at best he's about the same as Dre. Maybe, depending on how deep you dig into his old catalogue or random signs and hints he throws out, he was also affiliated. He's certainly cool with the gangs today, but he is massively famous.
Dre is not any more "real" than Kendrick, he's just not (publicly) woke and endlessly praised for it. But even Kendrick is just the latest in a long line of conscious rappers who've always been contrasted with the other strains of hip hop that are seen as hedonistic, anesthetizing and assimilationist (this tension is essentially why the hip hop community has basically contrasted him with Drake forever). What he says may not be true, but it resonates with people who already believe it to be true. That's why he's popular
A fraught relationship with the American identity isn't new. Artists like Coogler being suspicious about being assimilated or "selling out" isn't new. People pandering isn't new. The final act is pure pandering, but it's no different from the movies Tarantino is parodying when Leo DiCaprio's character roasts a bunch of Nazis in his 60s films.
I would sympathize if this was about playing the "black national anthem" or trying to move the founding date of America to revolve around slavery but what's the actual specific beef here? Was it the voodoo shit ? The Asians as middle-man minority? Characters pontificating on not being free in the 30s?
Because I have to wonder if, like @Skulldrinker, people are just fatigued with certain subject matter given everything that's happened since 2020 (I would also not trust movie reviews from people who sound like they'd wear a Notorious RBG shirt btw). The last thing was notable to me, but only because everyone still complains like that in movies made today. It's not that I don't expect people of the past to make certain noises (though my model for black southerners isn't particularly deep), it's that I hear it too much today when it clearly doesn't apply to not twinge in annoyance.
I'll give my own beef: I don't get Remmick. The movie tries to draw parallels between Remmick/the Irish and African-Americans and their relationship to Christianity but Remmick is implied and explicitly said to be very old, predating racial categories. If he was there during Ireland's original conversion it wasn't exactly like what happened to blacks. Or are we supposed to take him lamenting being forced to learn the Lord's Prayer to be about learning the English version?
If I had to water down my thought to one feeling it’s this: black Americans are faking being black Americans.
I didn’t mean to make it sound like Dr Dre is a gangsta - more that I believe Dr Dre is black and Kendrick Lamar is just Kendrick Lamar.
Sinners isn’t a film about black 1930’s boot legging vampire hunters - it’s about people pretending to be black 1930’s boot legging vampire hunters, and the most unbelievable part is their blackness.
I think I'm grokking your point but let's see: would you say that black American LARPing is basically a more intense and encouraged version of Americans LARPing as Irish come St Paddy's day?
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I've shared that thought, although I'm not as sure it's new. I haven't watched the movie, but I'll take your word for it that the performance lacks the authenticity of a Friday.
Most black people are interested in protecting an ethnic identity. I'd bet that number approaches 100% when it comes to black entertainers. Cynically, because ethnicity means a target demo to make money from. Less cynically, because they are responding to cultural norms that push them to be black, and actors, often annoyingly, consider themselves representative.
Maintaining a culture that can induct new generations requires understanding and conformity. Time and entropy weakens the ties to founding myths and common understandings. A culture then places more importance on fewer pillars, popular ideas, and easily identifiable signals. There are still many black people alive who can share personal experience that bonds them to the black experience. However, these people are dying. As they die fewer grandparents share the old understanding of Civil Rights, racism, victimhood, etc. Young black people can (and do) try fit their experiences into the broader cultural framework and society, in this case, helps facilitate it. But, since these individuals cannot always credibly sell their stories as the same old stories they can sound little off. Did you know 13 unarmed black men are killed by police each year?
It's not unusual to hear black people tired of being black because blackness imposes on them. The bits that outright blame black culture is a less public grievance, because there's taboos, norms, and bad words to call people who fight this type conformity. The most socially acceptable way to express this sentiment in the mainstream is to primarily fault white people for the cultural pressure or, in entertainment, blame the Jews. Even with a few naysayers, demand for blackness remains staggeringly high. Black people favor more blackness, the studios want more blackness, many white people want more, but the black people selling blackness today lived different lives than the story everyone wants and is familiar with. Those within the culture can choose belief, others that are most inclined can humor it, but for the rest of us this is more difficult. It requires talent to sell us on an update that aligns close enough with our own. Maybe Sinners as a production didn't have much talent, but a show like Donald Glover's Atlanta did.
Black people may have another Tyler Perry to rally behind, but it's also possible we'll notice more performative blackness as relatively unblack, untalented people contort themselves to try and fill that demand. Blackness has already been fully commodified and commercialized, so maybe we can call it post-commodified blackness? Uber commodified? Flanderization also comes to mind, but what is an identity if not some grade of caricature or stereotype?
That said, if you're just now noticing this, then it's more likely something has changed your perspective recently. This is an ongoing, decades long trend, and Friday is a part of it.
I get the strong impression this is not a movie made for black people, it's a movie made for white people who like to think about racism and all the rest of that stuff. Which is fair enough, I think specifically black movies for a black audience would be way different and have much less broad appeal, which means they'd do poorly at the box office (I think Moonlight, for instance, was absolutely a 'black movie made for white liberals').
The vampire element could be fascinating if done well; vampirism as a metaphor for conversion is one of the readings on the topic. Here comes an outside entity totally different to everything you know that takes over your life and changes you completely by force and without your will, and if you are willing that is in fact even worse. Applying that to "white vampires against black descendants of slaves" is going to dig up a lot of interpretation.
But I don't know if they do that, or if the movie can handle that. I haven't seen it, I'm only going by reviews, and it does seem to be a bit too pick'n'mix about the Oppressed Minorities on one side and the - well, the who? The KKK? The vampires? - on the other side. The Chinese couple and Choctaw vampire hunters? That's taking the BIPOC acronym a little too literally.
And why Irish? I don't know enough about this Remmick to know what flavour of Irish he is meant to be (the Scots-Irish of the South, who I presume would be the whites living beside and racist to the black population? Southern Irish as per "the rocky road to Dublin"? Protestant? Catholic? Neither?) Something odd going on there. Why Irish, as against the Anglo-philic culture of the plantation owners? Or is it meant to be a subtle reference to "Gone With the Wind" (the O'Haras and "Tara" being southern Irish by descent) - a sort of 'this is how the glamorous figures in Southern-set movies really are' notion?
My perspective on the Irish part of it is that it is part of this movie's attempt to subvert the typical blacksploitation narrative. The villains are white, but vampirism eliminates the racial divide. The Irish are pop culture's whitest victims, so making the vampires Irish redeems their whiteness. Vampirism is not exclusively evil in the film - Stack and Mary are happy at the end.
But it's Irish through a black American lens - no division of North and South - every Irish person is a rebel obsessed with Dublin, always. An ancient vampire could be so old he pre-dates Christianity but also he gets kicked around by the English no matter what - because he's Irish. What @Tanista said about Americans larping as Irish on Saint Patrick's day is on point - that's the version of Irish in the film.
Feck it, I'm starting to get interested in this dumb movie now. I've seen some clips of scenes on Youtube (the end fight) and the way Remmick is going after Sammie makes me think this is about cultural appropriation and exploitation; taking the products of black culture (songs, stories) and absorbing that into mainstream/white culture. Remmick literally tells Sammie he wants his songs and stories, and it seems that the memories of the thralls become part of Remmick's memories as well, so it really is "black culture being absorbed into white mainstream society and being altered and taken over as belonging there". White culture is vampiric on the culture of the minorities (black, Hispanic, what have you) and depends on 'fresh blood' to rejuvenate and perpetuate itself.
But why an Irish vampire, specifically? I really do want to know now what the hell the director and/or writer was getting at. You can be a victim yourself and still victimise others? He was frightened at a young age by Michael Flatley? Remmick's Southern accent is a commentary on how the Irish assimilated into American society by imitating those around them and becoming racist and prejudiced in their turn? An ancestor of his was beaten by some Mick in a dance-off and now he's getting revenge?
I think Coogler is slightly less hamfisted than this, or there'd be no point to having Remmick be Irish at all (and his first victims be white supremacists) or have the Rocky Road to Dublin scene.
Or, if he's hamfisted, it's in negatively contrasting mainstream society (which is apparently either racist if white or stiflingly Christian if black) to being eaten and turning into a thrall
Remmick is offering an alternative that theoretically has a place for everyone but strips them of their agency and rootedness. There's a lot of talk about equality and loving one another and yet everyone dances to his tune. At one point, he tries to get a woman to let him in using her husband's memories and he just disappears from the frame, not even an agent. Even after he's killed, you get agency but never get to go to your culture's heaven while Wunmi Mosaku's character - mocked for keeping up with her traditional beliefs/"Bayou bullshit"* - seems more or less correct about everything, including that dying normally lets you have an afterlife, as opposed to hanging around forever on Earth with a false solace and community, even if it is antiracist and cosmopolitan. Seems more like a criticism of assimilation and selling out.
Remmick is...Disney and Sammy is Coogler? How bad was the process on those Marvel movies? Is he trying to tell us something about Bob Iger?
* Hers are the only religious symbols that seem to offer any protection btw. Of course.
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Possibly. Except Remmick makes an offer that if the black people join him willingly, they will be able to get rid of bigotry and racism entirely. He knows the Klan (because he turned a Klan member) are planning to kill the twins the next day anyway and he calls them bigots. So another way at looking at it is that Remmick is offering a pan-American assimilation. Blacks, Irish, Octaroons (like Mary), White Klan members, Chinese, all one big happy bloodsucking murderous musical family, in a way mainstream society will not tolerate. So an assimilation yes, but not into mainstream white society. (Note: Vampires are a little odd here because it seems that everyone they feed on is turned into a vampire, which seems like it should leave any area overrun with vampires in fairly short order, and the Klansmen vampires seem totally fine with the black vampires so parts of the personality seem subsumed, while others remain, vampires are not racist apparently!). Remmick wants Sammie's powers so that he can see his people again, as Sammie can bring forth the spirits of the past and future through music, and because Remmick is a pre-Christian Irishman (They steal his fathers lands and forcibly convert him apparently) his people and culture no longer exist, he can only see them again through Sammie.
Coogler said he made the vampire Irish because they too had suffered oppression which may also lean towards that idea. Now of course Remmick is happy to turn everyone forcibly to get what he wants but he does seem (as do the others he turns) to see it as a gift.
It's a reasonably good movie with great music, so I would say it is worth a watch overall. My wife didn't like the sex scenes though for what that is worth.
(1) Re: the overrunning of the vampire population if everyone killed is turned, yes you are absolutely correct and this has been a problem that vampire fiction has had to deal with (hence why they take the scene from the novel of Dracula about Dracula forcing Mina to drink his blood as "yeah but just dying of vampire bite doesn't turn you, you need to drink vampire blood too" which directly contradicts the folklore and the novel).
(2) "Remmick is a pre-Christian Irishman (They steal his fathers lands and forcibly convert him apparently)" That doesn't exactly work with the history of how Ireland became Christian, unless Remmick is talking about when the Normans invaded - but Ireland was already Christian by then and after a bit of pillaging and dispossessing the Normans settled down to assimilate into the native society, hence "more Irish than the Irish themselves"; it fits better with a later historical period, say the Tudor era or later, especially the 17th century when land was taken and efforts to anglicise the Irish were very pronounced. A bit of a mixed bag there, unless Coogler is trying to indicate that all along there were pagan Irish surviving down the centuries but that's not really so.
Anyway, expecting high levels of historical accuracy from a vampire movie is missing the mark! But damn it, the clips I've seen are making me interested in this movie - the scene where Remmick is reciting the "Our Father" along with Sammie is a reverse or perverse baptism scene (they're both standing in the river, they both pray, and then Remmick keeps pushing Sammie's head under the water then pulling him back up as he tries to 'convert' Sammie to joining him and becoming a vampire and what is his statement of faith about universal belonging).
I don't want to be thinking thinky-thoughts about a dumb vampire movie!
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I would back up this perspective (I didn't know Coogler said that though, that's cool) and while I found it disjointed and highly variable in quality, I would also recommend it. I think it shies away from easy narratives - there aren't supposed to be clear good guys and bad guys, which is why the protagonist - Smoke/Stack is on both sides. It's over-indulgent and maybe a bit amateurish, but I prefer that to hyper polished formula any day.
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A random person in real life described Sinners glowingly then talked about how it was about how evil white people are. Im disinterested watching it now, I'd rather see Near Dark again.
I get the same thing from Jordan Peele films.
These films are for white people who for aesthetic reasons want to see black people. The Peele stuff in particular gets a lot of mileage out of showing black people in peril to distress white liberals without actually hurting a Black Body.
Politely, this is critical analysis of the film on a 6th grade level. Yes, there are evil white people in the movie. There are also good white people, and also evil black people, and some of the "evil" white people are revealed to be/portrayed as surprisingly sympathetic. The movie is very much a Black (capitalization intended here) movie, and racism is certainly a central theme of the movie, but I think overall the film is much more about the search for a meaningful black identity than about racism or evil whitey or whatever. It's a good movie.
The person in question is kinda dumb in addition to being a leftist.
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It really wasn't tbh.
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Have you seen the Ms Pat show? That might be up your alley.
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This hits on an idea I was thinking about recently. In order to genuinely enjoy any sort of fiction, you have to be able to suspend disbelief. Almost all fiction has fantastic, or at least slightly unbelievable elements. While sometimes these are the crux of the work, other times they serve more mundane functions like the simplification of an overly complex plot.
What I've been noticing as I get older is that I'm able to do this less and less. When you consume new media while young, you are able to gloss over inconsistencies with ease. As you age, these become more jarring, eventually making consumption of new plot lines kind of difficult.
In light of this, I find myself wondering if a lot of new shows are as bad as they seem, or if I'm simply unable to overlook their flaws (or inadvertently comparing them to the best-in-genera alternatives)
For me effective suspension of disbelief comes down to whether or not the there's internal consistency. It's not about how outlandish or even stupid-on-its-face the impossible element is, it's whether or not the story acts as though it believes in that impossible element. As soon as the story stops believing its own impossibility, then how am I supposed to believe in it?
Example. Magic exists? Okay sure why not, magic exists. Magic exists and it's a blessing to women and a curse to men? Okay sure, that gets explained well so it's all internally consistent. Magic exists and it's a blessing to women and a curse to men but men are still in charge of everything and women are poor downtrodden and oppressed? Wait hang on a second, how does that work? That doesn't make any sense, it should be the other way around if anything, and then I'm yanked out of my suspension of disbelief and I can't enjoy the show anymore.
Or when the show/movie/book/whatever starts piling on new impossible elements and just hand-waves their existence.
Example. Magic exists? Okay sure why not, magic exists. This group of soldiers are the best soldiers in the world? Okay sure why not, there are good soldiers and bad soldiers in our world, that's fine. This group of soldiers are the best soldiers in the world but now they're all going to act unbelievably retarded because we have to further the plot? Wait hang on a second, I thought these were the best soldiers in the world! Why are they acting like mouth-breathing retards now? Oh we're just glossing over that? They're all dead? Wait now they're all alive again? How did they teleport a thousand miles south in a week?
You have to give me grounds to suspend my disbelief, you can't just demand it, but I'll happily suspend my disbelief for any kind of media that tries to work with me. It doesn't even have to be good grounds to suspend my disbelief. Stories rarely go back 10,000 years in time to the first discovery of magic in the world and the painstaking process of discovering why it exists, it's usually just presented as a trusim. Magic exists in this world. And that's fine! That's good enough! Dragons exist in this world, sure why not, sounds fun! As long as there is an iota of "look this is essential to the story so just go with it" or "here is the history of how magic came to be" I'll run with it because that's how you get to enjoy the story. It's laziness that pulls me out.
I keep being amazed by how few authors grasp this. A story should be internally consistent and stick to how things work in the real world except where explicitly noted in the text, as clearly (and largely unambiguously) established in the genre conventions or where the differences are gradually hinted at and revealed.
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I am once again going to plug the late, great Shamus Young's post on Story Collapse.
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No not at all. "Suspension of disbelief", as if you were hoping that you could be "taken for a ride" if you could only make yourself believe that the story really was a window to another world, is an immature way of approaching art (immature in the sense of pre-critical, pre-reflective, pre-self-consciousness).
The mature, critical way of approaching art (which actually just turns out to be straight up more fun) is to start from the recognition that the artwork was deliberately constructed as a product of human intentionality. Like all other artifacts of human labor, it was designed according to certain specifications in order to serve certain purposes. So our analysis begins with questions like, why was this created, what narrative did the artist tell themselves about why it was created and is it in any sense different from the truth of why it was "actually" created, what is the background casual chain of social/material conditions that lead to the production of this specific work in the specific way that it was produced, how are its formal features related to the conditions of its production, how do its formal features relate to its conceptual features, etc...
Some works reveal themselves to be richer and more amenable to this type of analysis than others, which is how the term "genre fiction" came to take on a derisive connotation.
The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely doesn't mean that wanting to see a magic trick is immature. Sometimes the point of an experience is the visceral immediacy of it.
Thinking that wanting to be immersed in a fiction is the same thing as that fiction being real is how a lot of media gets ruined by people who now feel they have to manage your perceptions.
I recently watched F1. The movie, like Top Gun before it, is bullshit in its specifics. And there's probably an interesting critical take to be written about what it says about the generational conflict in the West right now (both movies represent a rejection of the need to pass the torch, which is itself a backlash against "woke" reboots which also functioned as forced retirement for the Boomer celebrities and their IPs)
But I don't give a fuck about any of that, because I wanted to see fast cars and improbably skilled and handsome people in an IMAX theater. I wanted to be so engrossed I didn't care. And I was. Mission accomplished.
Various 20th century artistic practices that are now grouped under the heading of "abstraction" could be described in precisely this way, as an attempt to "look at the magic trick closely". Artists set out with the self-conscious intent of "breaking the illusion", of foregrounding the process of creation that normally remains hidden; in painting this took the form of abstract painting, painting that embraced the "flatness of the canvass" instead of trying to retreat from it into the illusion of 3D perspective, painting that owned the fact that it was nothing more than blobs of colored goo.
The idea was to ask whether it was possible to construct an art without illusion, an art that would endure even when the magic trick was ruined. Surely you can agree that this is at least an interesting question, even if you think it must ultimately be answered in the negative?
It's not so much that I have a definitive stance on the question (which I can grant with no issue is interesting) and more that I don't think all forms of art are or need be set up to deal with that challenge.
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Yeah I strongly disagree that critical analysis is more fun. It is a different type of fun, almost too different to compare, but definitely not more fun than immersing yourself in the media you are consuming. I think, based on your first paragraph in particular, that you have not sufficiently suspended your disbelief. Maybe suspension of disbelief isn't for you? But also maybe you have been poisoned by the media analysis framework. And it is a poison, because embracing suspension of disbelief is not pre-critical or pre-reflective by necessity, that's just critical analysis promotion, the willing, deliberate and conscious suspension of disbelief is a sacrifice the viewer makes to fully engage with the story's world and emotions. It is prioritising emotional connection over intellectual dissection and emotional connection is the heart of good art.
I'm always in an unenviable position in these discussions, because I'm always trying to bring people to a more refined and complex position than the one they currently inhabit, regardless of where they're starting out from. If I'm talking to stuck-up hipsters who say "well, there's obviously a divide between High Art and 'pop culture', the former being more valuable, more intellectual, etc" then I say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. But conversely if people say, "well art's just about having a good time, I know what I like, you don't have to make it complicated with all that fancy shit", then I just as forcefully say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. It's never supposed to be a direct denial of the starting position, but rather an invitation for us to walk the endless spiral of the Hegelian dialectic, together, as a team. But it always seems to come off as a direct denial. That's my fault; I need to work on my presentation.
Now, regarding my own capacity for "suspension of disbelief". I just finished up playing a VN recently. Fun game. I binged it as fast as I could, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for each plot twist, I got weirdly obsessed with one of the girls and wanted to waifu her, I cried when important characters died (yes I am a grown man who cries at video games). So am I incapable of enjoying stories like a "normal person"? Not at all! There's nothing I love more than a good story, it's basically what I live for. But, you know, you eventually want something more, you want to move the conversation forward. So you ask yourself: yes, I had this experience, this particular type of experience, but what of it? Well for starters, we can question the "naturalness" of this type of experience. We can ask ourselves if this type of experience might not be historically and spatially delimited. (Did the Iliad have "fans" in ancient Greece? How was their experience of the Iliad different from how we "experience" "stories" today? On the one hand, I think it may not be as different as some might suppose. But on the other hand, it might be utterly alien.) I had this experience, but what is this experience, really? What does it mean? What is it symptomatic of? Where did it come from, and where is it going?
It's as much about making your self and your own experience an object of critical inquiry as it is about inquiring into the artwork and the artist.
Not at all! Not in any way. Not that the two could ever be separated to begin with.
But, you know, this question about the connection between art and what might be called "emotion", it's a highly complex and fraught question. The way forward is not at all clear.
Adorno defined "kitsch" as "art that tells you how to feel". Genuine artworks don't tell you how to feel. Meaning, there's something fundamentally manipulative and coercive about an artwork that sets out with the explicit goal of inducing a certain emotional state. When the sad music plays and the camera zooms in dramatically and all the characters start crying, you know you're supposed to feel sad. The work is telling you to feel sad. We've left the domain of art and we've entered the domain of the "culture industry", the domain of pseudo-art and pseudo-emotion, the domain of mass market objects produced to fit utilitarian specifications. Or so this theory would have it.
Is this the same as saying that art should be "emotionless"? Not at all. Adorno was a great lover of Mozart after all, and Mozart's music could hardly be described as emotionless. But I do think he correctly identified a very real and very serious problem here, namely that an attempt to control the emotional resonance of a work too tightly can collapse into simple didacticism.
I don't understand how you can call immersion pre-critical, pre-reflective, or pre-self-consciousness then (I would drop immaturity from the conversation entirely if you want to avoid getting people's hackles up). While it can be that, you personally have to willingly suspend your disbelief to cry during a VN (which VN btw?) - your immersion isn't pre-critical, you deliberately gave that up to engage with the story.
And you are right that the connection between art and emotion isn't clear. But it is definitely strong. And of course Adorno is right about kitsch (imo), but I was looking at it from the other direction - an artist shouldn't try to manipulate the viewer, what they should do is try to express themselves, express their vision. Because if they can get their vision out, the person who connects with it - who can't not connect with it - will be moved to tears. It feels like you are trying to intellectualise that away by referring to 'emotions', but that would just be diminishing yourself.
That's why we hold up auteurs, even as movies rack up thousands of staff members - we respect the auteur because it's his vision, and he has demonstrated the ability to connect with us emotionally. Sometimes that's not because of the auteur, but he or she is usually our best guide. Sure Marvel can put out a dozen capeshit flicks and manipulate the audience with clinical precision - I would call that kitsch. But someone with an actual vision, who puts it on the page or film or score sheet, they might use camera techniques or bass heavy music to manipulate the audience, but it isn't kitsch when it's done in the service of connecting the audience to the inside of the auteur's head. The challenge in my view, is finding auteurs and other authentic artists. Sure we are all trapped in the same post-modern hellscape constantly trying to push us towards slop - even the auteurs are, blurring the lines - but true vision can still cut through.
Yeah, I have to work on my presentation. But at the same time, I really do have to ask my readers to suspend certain pre-existing conceptual and emotional associations they have around certain terms, y'know? Not erase, just temporarily suspend. Otherwise we can't make any progress.
There was a conversation here a few weeks ago where I said that love is impossible. That got a few people upset. But did I ever say that people shouldn't do things that are impossible? Did I ever say that there's no place in the world for impossible things? Not at all. Similarly, did I ever say that a certain amount of immaturity is not warranted? Not at all. (I suppose the Hegelian way of talking about it would be, you have to go through maturity to arrive at a mature immaturity.)
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Not at all! "Intellectualize"? Goodness gracious no.
We're in complete agreement that there is an intimate link between art and what might be called "emotion". But this phrase, that an artist should "express themselves", makes me nervous, increasingly nervous, for reasons that I don't fully understand myself and have never been able to entirely articulate. There's clearly something right about it, and yet we should also be cautious. Taking a shot in the dark, some of the reasons may be:
Ah, Kodaka's works, one of my favorite subjects.
That's because the implication, which is "[express themselves] within the service of a greater whole", has been lost. (Can't imagine why that would be more likely to apply to artists from highly conformist cultures at all, or why audiences from those cultures would be more likely to see it that way.)
This is also the problem with 'modern' art, by the way: when the creation of a thing is not only fundamentally selfish (it isn't interested in how you'll view it), but the work itself doesn't serve any other aesthetic purpose. It's the "doesn't owe you femininity" of the art world.
Ever notice that, especially evident with how the Western world interacts with other Kodaka VNs, that 'how the presentation will be perceived' is a central element of every ambiguous-gender character (Chihiro [Danganronpa] and Halara [Rain Code])? Progressive critique falls over itself complaining about what pronoun to use [which is the exact opposite of this], but most of their character arcs again involve that perception and service to a greater whole, where their presentation is merely an incidental/a tool to do other things.
Made in Abyss is also a pretty good example of this (and an even better one if it makes you uncomfortable)- it's extremely offensive to Western sensibilities, and it would be to mine as well if the work was just one big centerfold of a naked limbless Riko- but the fact the author thinks that way is harnessed into a narrative that flat out doesn't work if the main characters either aren't children or have the invincibility child characters usually have.
(This is also something Kodaka does when he can get away with it re: Ultra Despair Girls; Omori does this too in its own way [if you compare the Omoriboy comic, the tissue box serves the same purpose in both works, but in an extremely meta sense in the game compared to the comic]).
Which one? The first one, the tomato, the tomboy, the onii-chan, the girlboss, the swordswoman, the one that makes fun of the audience for being Danganronpa-obsessed, Hulkamania Sister!, the ahegao-faced one, the secret one, or the enemy (not that one, the other one)?
I kinda think that's just true though! The artwork doesn't owe you anything. In fact, it's a good exercise to ask yourself what you owe to the artwork.
Walter Kaufmann said of Kierkegaard, "there's no other author in world literature who gives me such a strong impression that my soul has been placed on the scales, and found wanting". I think that's what great art should aim to do. There's something fundamentally anxiety-inducing about it.
Of course, if the work serves literally no purpose whatsoever, aesthetic or otherwise, then yes, by definition we would have to question what the point of making it in the first place was. But it's actually quite hard to find a work that meets that criteria; maybe impossible. You know, even something like Joseph Kosuth's "Art as Idea as Idea" where he would print placards with dictionary entries on them and hang them up in an otherwise empty room... even something like this produces an aesthetic experience. It has its own kind of texture, it induces its own kind of perception. It's more subtle but it's there if you can grab onto it. He probably didn't even want that work to induce a "classical" kind of aesthetic experience, and yet it does, because it's inescapable.
Well, that's a result of the fanbase being largely tumblrites.
I've loved Danganronpa ever since SDR2 first released in English but I never really interacted with the community, so I was surprised to see what a big tumblr/fujo following it had. I suppose it was a result of Danganronpa being relatively "gender neutral", and having some pretty boys like Nagito to latch onto. Although I was even more surprised that the fujo contingent showed up for Hundred Line as well, because that one is much more unabashedly targeted at a straight male audience.
I want Hiruko to step on me!
V'ehx is close though, god damn they did her dirty by giving her such a short route...
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Personally, I see no reason the two are mutually exclusive. You don't have to turn off your brain to feel things and keeping your brain turned on doesn't stop you from feeling. A really great movie watching experience, to me, is seeing something that makes me feel strongly, understanding why and how it's making me feel those things, and then layering that intellectual appreciation of the technique on top of the emotional appreciation of the scene. I picture the scene in "Amadeus" when Salieri describes Mozart's music. His appreciation of the art is enhanced by technical understanding, not diminished. Understanding the camera tricks that make Hannibal Lector so intimidating doesn't make the scene boring, it makes watching the scene more compelling. When you see a brilliant musician play a great piece of music, there is beauty in both the sound of the music and in the masterful playing itself. Noticing one doesn't preclude noticing the other, they enhance each other. For me, it's the same with movies.
Immersing yourself in the media is not switching your brain off though. I would like to think my post history proves that critical analysis of media is one of my primary passions, I am not trying to shit on it - by prioritise I didn't mean to imply they were exclusive.
What I took @wingdingspringking to mean by truly enjoy media, particularly with their comments about struggling with it as they age, is immerse yourself so fully that you forget you exist outside of the media. That is a transcendent experience when it happens, and maybe this is just wingding and me (or maybe just me?) but once you have done it, critical analysis just doesn't compare.
Usually when I find media like that I obsess over it, and then I analyse it endlessly.
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For me, that doesn't sound more fun or mature. It sounds like an absolutely miserable way to experience art, and like it's trying too hard to be adult as with one who is insecure about their own adulthood (cue CS Lewis quote here). If you find it more enjoyable I can't really argue with results, but it isn't for me at all.
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Nah. A well-written show leaves you something else to mull over as your grow older. Maybe there's more depth to a character than you could even begin to understand when you were young (imagine thinking Boromir is just an asshole... couldn't be me!), or it touches on some abstract ideas you couldn't grasp earlier. Sure, I could flip the table over TNG's retarded security protocols that get broken regularly, and I probably would, if there was nothing else to redeem the show.
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I've no intention of watching the film, but I'd recommend this clip of the big bad singing 'Rocky Road to Dublin'. Who knew Irish folk music and vampires would work so well together?
Going to be a top 3 scene of the year.
I thought the movie was mostly pretty ok - but that scene was incredible.
Yeah the movie was a bit of a mixed bag, but that scene was incredible. Spoilers for the movie from here on out.
One of the reasons it was so compelling in my view is the way it subverted my expectations - up until then it had been following a pretty typical 'blacks defiant against cruel whites' blacksploitation narrative, an 'a celebration of black music and culture' narrative, with the only non-black song being the world's creepiest bluegrass rendition of a black song (that was another good scene though). Then they sing the Rocky Road to Dublin. And it starts off sounding a bit freaky like Pick Poor Robin Clean, with the main vampire calling out:
'Then off to reap the corn,
to leave where I was born,
I cut a stout blackthorn,
for to banish ghosts and goblins'
like a funeral dirge - slow and sombre, echoing hauntingly, drawing out words to throw the listener off balance. The tension builds with every second, and you wonder what heinous evil shit these kkk vampires are about to get into... And then the fiddle starts up. And maybe it's my Irish blood, but I found it impossible to not start tapping along with it, it's such a catchy tune. And not only are all of the turned people getting into it, they are enthusiastically getting into it, even Stack and Mary are joyfully singing and dancing along. It changes the entire dynamic of the film - gone is the manichean blacks vs whites narrative that the first act sets up, now things are more complicated. The vampires actually offer a form of salvation - by embracing the NRx philosophy, submitting to a philosopher king, Stack and Mary and co have gained both community and freedom.
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