Posted Jan 22, 09 09:17 AM
"Stigma-ta-doo"
I loooove my Thursday night tennis pool. Every week, one of us Joes (and one Joann) somehow -- SOMEHOW -- miraculously cross-court lobs or smash volleys a SportsCenter moment.
On a recent change-over between sets, a recurring question recurred, as recurring questions have been rumored to do. A friend -- by all rights not an enthusiast of the dark side of cinema -- asked the proverbial "why horror" interrogative. That semi-disappointed glint was in her eye. Chances are, amongst those you've gotten comfortable with, over time you've detected that same said glint, as if people secretly wished a better way of life for us.
I understood wholly that she didn't understand completely. In fact, I felt her pain. It's akin to the gnawing embarrassment that creeps up on me in the less-dusted shelves of 20/20 Video, when I'm desperate for a horror title that doesn't...okay, SUCK!
No other genre comes pre-packaged and ready-to-serve such an expectation of violence. Which is pretty much inherent for a category of entertainment (and sometimes art) supposedly devoted to the expectation of fear. Supposedly. Becaaaaause horror's most identifiable draw has often been it's most grievous drawback in terms of credibility among those on the outside looking in. For the detractors, films lumped as horror must seem devoted more to the exploration of gory prosthetics.
I absolutely adore film critic Roger Ebert, champion of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, John Carpenter's Halloween, Ridley Scott's Alien and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. But having poured over a thousand of his reviews, often repeatedly, I'm left with the gnawing conclusion that he precludes much of horror's "raison d'etre". He admired William Friedkin's raw craftsmanship of The Exorcist, but wrote, "Are people so numb they need movies of this intensity in order to feel anything at all?" He back-handed a four star review to Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers, tagging that the director's skill was in service to a "disreputable genre". Ebert called Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre "an effective production in the service of an unnecessary movie", grouping it "in a select company (with Night of the Living Dead and Last House on the Left) of films that are really a lot better than the genre requires." Why penalize films that work? My contention on his feelings lays in the recurrence in his reviews of that repeat phrase -- "shock and disgust". (On a side note, Tobe Hooper's brilliant exercise in manipulation -- like Clive Barker's Hellraiser -- does leave a LOT to the offscreen imagination. These films' reputations absolutely precede their actual R-rated content.)
But back to the concept of "shock and digust" in horror: the elements Ebert addressed were always there, but the violence line -- physical, ethical, psychological, and spiritual -- wasn't always trespassed. As explicit (hopefully aestheticized) content in service to a disciplined narrative that may or may not have something profound to say about the human condition, even disguised in metaphor, "shock and disgust" don't best describe horror's machinery. But in reference to gratuitous, geek show depravity -- material that I myself do not define as horror -- Ebert rightfully calls out shlock as shlock with the term "shock and disgust".
Film historians put the philosophical divide between classic and contemporary American cinema between 1967 and 1969. The three punch of The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch exposed audiences to disenfranchised youth, romanticized violence, and crumbling institutions (the last being a symbolic retort to American policy in Vietnam). Each genre, in turn, had it's ripple effect and, subsequently, it's loss of innocence. Between 1968 and 1974, the horror of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre brought paranoia, an increasingly existentialist world suddenly unequipped to handle a theological nightmare, and a subversive underculture of America (well and alive).
To clarify, from the offices of the Chicago Sun-TImes (hi, Roger!) to the tennis courts of Los Angeles, I "get" the glint in your eye, the tone of your Pulitzer Prize-winning phrased critiques. To agree, horror used to be the expectation, not the violence. In a generation, the two have interlocked as one. And to assure, for the next generation, I, too, worry that it's only being perceived as the latter.
Posted by Mike Kalvoda at 09:17 AM