An Examination (Part I: Invisible China Teacups)

A still from Cronenberg's Rabid

Thus far, the blog experiment isn't much of a success. I have some half-finished writing on Event Horizon (in response to some comments I received from friends about my last set of screenshots) and the excellent Cold Prey (Uthaug, 2006), which has been called "the perfect slasher." However, all that writing is languishing (festering?), because summer classes and various parks, beaches, and patios have prevented me from finishing...anything. A recent email exchange serves as good motivation though, so I think I'll break my silence by writing about why I love horror.

I imagine that people who are primarily interested in "legitimate" film genres spend less time mentally circling their interests and trying to figure out what being interested in That means about Them. More than (most) other genres, horror seems to encode its viewer with a set of (mostly) undeserved characteristics. I've recently read some theory that helps me being to understand it all. In "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Linda Williams examines the form, structure, and functions of pornography, horror, and melodrama, which are awarded a low cultural status for their excessive display of sex, violence, and emotion. I find it particularly interesting when Williams cites Mary Ann Doane’s writing on the “textual rape” of the viewer, who is “feminized through pathos." Each genre can be seen to victimize (feminize) the viewer through the objectification of women in porn, the “fight or flight” response elicited in horror, or the simulation of intense loss in melodrama. The key is the greater degree of bodily violation, even though we are always, always, always seeking a sensory experience whenever we buy a ticket or press "play." Although comedy seems to be a counterexample (because it can also elicit a powerful physical response from viewers), only the three aforementioned genres present a special challenge to their audience, who sit in the dark: jerking in fear, arousal, or sadness. I really can't recommend this essay enough to anyone who wants to explore these cultural "dark alleys." It has become an important piece of writing in my quest to more reasonably respond to the following proclamation:

 

On more than one occasion, I've found myself responding to what I perceived (correctly or not) as a value judgment in one of three ways:

1) Explain that I also enjoy foreign films, baby animals, and lying in fields in the sunlight

2) Push up my glasses and blather about horror's function as "cultural problem solving" 

3) Ask the naysayer why they don't like it

If I asked you which of the three yielded the more interesting conversation, I'm guessing you'd choose 3 (so choose 3). Interestingly, 3 is rarely a revelation. Turns out, horror is scary. Imagine. Or, if you have the pleasure of insulting the good taste of an academic, horror objectifies women and rubs our faces in the consequences of challenging patriarchal capitalismblahblahyawn. Lately, 2 is getting the better response, because (I think) it gives people a safe distance from which to engage the topic of What Frightens Us All. Because, after all, it's not that I'm not scared of sharks and men with mommy issues and the shambling dead...it's that I can engage with these images rather than reject them. In the BBC documentary Why Do We Dream, it is asserted that nightmares have served an important function in human evolution. Perhaps without dreaming of fanged things, humans would have gone the way of the dodo bird. It is only natural that, given the power, we would project these dreams (which serve such an important function in our lives) onto the screen. Yet, it certainly means something different to have nightmares and to willingly subject ourselves to horror films.

Coming up in Part II: Wolves and Sharks (Or How I Learned to Stop Shivering and Love the Horror Film)