io9 
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San Francisco, 8:54 PM
Wed Dec 9
28 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/02/09
12/02/09
Very few people go to these movies looking for philosophy.
-Kle.
12/02/09
12/03/09
Yeah, that's been disproven, too.
Besides, I didn't say it provided catharsis - I just said that watching a movie is better than punching someone.
-Kle.
12/03/09
12/04/09
Generally, the studies are inconclusive, with many competing studies reporting opposite findings.
In the absence of repeatable experiments that all get the same results, I'm going with the conclusion "influence of violent entertainment on violent behavior currently unknown".
-Kle.
12/01/09
What I think, and this definitely isn't the only idea worth considering, is that it has something to do with people's inherent love of the macabre. The idea of treating a human body with so little value as Logan does is horrifying, but also somewhat exciting. You're right, I think there is a Nietzschein element to it. We want to see the strong burst through the feeble laws society has set up for us.
12/01/09
[www.movingimagesource.us]
12/01/09
They're written by writers working in the movies.
They're flat-out revenge fantasies.
Kill the director, kill the actors, kill the studio executives, kill your parents, kill your school mates, kill the world.
In slow motion. Over and over.
But not you.
You're ignored.
You're victimised.
You're misunderstood.
You're unique. You're a fucking snowflake.
Die, world! Die!
12/01/09
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12/02/09
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12/02/09
When is killing justified again? This is all point of view, who's side your on... The poor German's weren't murdering the Allied soldiers either, just killing them.
You used war as an example but: killing in war is intentional, not an unintended byproduct. And then you can always question if going to war is really justified... so by your own definition... murder. Semantics.
You're not going to convince me that killing is OK sometimes as long as it's not called "murder".
12/02/09
This IS a discussion about a comic book character, so using one as an example is not strange. If you think that killing German soldiers in WW II while engaged in combat (as opposed to, say, executing prisoners) is murder, I don't think that there's much help for you Adolph.
On the point of semantics - so what? Our entire society and system of laws is built around what you would call semantics. Do you distinguish between bananas and watermelons, or is that too semantic, and you just use the word "fruit"?
Manslaughter (recklessly taking a life through negligence, for instance) is not murder, but it is still wrong. Some would say that assisting a terminally ill patient to kill himself by providing the means is wrong, but few would call it murder. There is a term (I know, semantics again) for the killing of a human being - it is called "homicide", and murder is a sub-set of that.
12/03/09
12/01/09
The fact that secondary characters are expendable for the stories of main characters doesn't seem new, though I guess I'd agree there have been new ways of making it problematic, and sometimes annoyingly psuedointellectual. (Re: Saw. Human life is important! We'll drive that point home by killing people in ridiculously gruesome ways!) Sometimes it's made more problematic by the individual circumstances of the characters' expendability - e.g., the tropes of Women in Refrigerators and Black Guy Dies First. The hero doesn't need to be the murderer for the dead characters to be effectively dehumanized and made into window dressing for the (usually white, male) hero's narrative.
But I guess when it comes down to every henchman or antagonist or even friend or lover or etc. who the hero kills or who is otherwise killed for the sake of the narrative... yeah. They're redshirts. They don't have families waiting for them at home because they're not real, even in the context of the story, even when Kirk sure feels bad about another one of his redshirts dying because he had a wife back on Colony 95 or whatever. Casting a bit wider, I'd also say that fiction allows us to explore an ethical space that we neither want to exist nor want to impose in reality - our moral standards would likely be different if there were only 40,000 people left in the human race or aliens are for real going to take over our planet or even scenarios that are real, such as being at war. There is going to be a point where the hero can't think immediately about an antagonist's or even a friend's humanity, and will have to deal with those consequences later.
Though really, I feel like most action heroes at this point are encouraged to have a fair amount of brooding, no matter how dark their souls are. And that reaction is supposed to say something about themselves. So in the end it seems like they do recognize the humanity of others - it's just that they make it all about themselves and their own understanding of their humanity.
12/01/09
Season two of Angel: An entire family (mother, father, and two small children) have just been murdered and are lying dead on the floor. But hey! Cordelia's ok! We're good! No one say anything, we're too busy celebrating how safe Cordelia is! Now that we've learned how together Angel Investigations should be, let's get outta here and sip back some beers 'n blood.
And then there was that poor shop girl who was shot in the face in the 1st season finale of Dollhouse, and then written off with one line from Adelle.
12/01/09
Everytime I see a figure like 40,000, I think 'stadium-crowd' and the population of the British Isles during the stone age.
If on average one person dies out every event held at a stadium (heart attack, stroke, car crash on the way to the stadium, whatever), that's sad, but it's a statistic.
If one person died building Stonehenge, 5,000 years ago, or froze to death fleeing across the alps, like Otzi the Iceman, at the same time, it was and still is, a tragedy.
The population of the planet is now 6,790,000,000 [give or take a hundred million (see what I mean?)], it's doubled since the Cuban Missile Crisis (or, as Cameron Crowe so beautifully scene-set, since Jerry Maguire was born), tripled since WWII.
330,000 people die everyday, most of them horribly, miserably, in pain, unwept, unmourned, unsung.
Why should fiction be any different?
We are all history's disposable characters.
Unpleasant, isn't it?
12/01/09
(Hopefully the shame I feel at that, is genuine and not just a plot point, to make me seem more sympathetic to myself.)
Contrast Whedon's treatment of the death of Buffy's mother in 'The Body'.
She mattered to his heroine, so she mattered to Whedon.
I'm guessing his last act on Dollhouse, his last act on network television, will involve the deaths (or worse, much, much worse) of pretty much all of us.
I wonder if we'll matter?
12/01/09
I can tell Whedon is a militant libertarian (hell, so am I, to a point) but now he's just being elitist.
12/01/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
However, I meant that that one line was the only closure we GOT from the entire episode. Just murdered, and then written off as a Casualty of Narrative Causality.
Her death had literally no weight. It felt like she served her purpose in the storyline, and the writers needed a jump scare, so another minor character bites the dust. While some of the numbness can be chalked up to the Dollhouse's immoral behavior, most of it feels to me like a game of Bit Character Chess on the part of the writers.
It's tight and efficient plotting, yes, but it doesn't feel quite as organic and realistic as it could.
12/02/09
There's a reason people in war zones often become callous, after all. The life Angel and Crew lead in L.A. has a higher death toll than a lot of war zones . . .
And, actually, in the case of Dollhouse it's those moments of callousness on the parts of the characters that has me actually enjoying the show; doing what those people are doing it really seems likely that the result (and/or the qualification for the job) is going to be a rather diminished view of the value of individual people.
12/02/09
A well deserved reminder (Thank you! @SagunaOphion ), of a long-forgotten, never-noticed, never-even-seen-on-screen, character, their unremarked-upon life and their unknown fate.
Too much to hope Ridley Scott will remember him (her?), in the prequel? [en.wikipedia.org]
PS I wonder what made Ms. Weaver dislike Joss Whedon's script so much?
12/02/09
I can only remember a few occasions when Mrs. Overclock's (and mine, and countless other's) perspective on the world, was even hinted at in movies;
Jason Bourne's horrified "Now why would I know that?" monologue [en.wikiquote.org] , in the roadside cafe, in 'The Bourne Identity' in 2002 [en.wikipedia.org] .
Martin Scorsese's 1998 'Bringing Out the Dead' [en.wikipedia.org] , where Nicholas Cage's [who I think I may have been 'channeling', in my "Die, world! Die!" soliloquy, further up this string :) ] graveyard shift paramedic, rides nightly through the charnel house of his past 'unsaveds', that Hell's Kitchen has become, in a triptych of despair and redemption.
... and most effectively, in Harold Becker's 1989 'Sea of Love' [en.wikipedia.org] , where Al Pacino's burnt-out detective, desperate to reach out and try to connect with his last chance at life, the wonderful Ellen Barkin's shoe saleswoman, walks beside her, down a teeming, vibrant, sunlit New York avenue, pointing out the cityscape of blood-soaked crime scenes, that it has become to him.
Living in tourist destinations is the worst.
It's an endless litany of predictable and unnecessary carnage, as unsuspecting visitors rent deathtrap mopeds and defective scuba gear, from callous indifferent sociopaths, interested solely in their money, and get squashed bug-flat by buses and inhale lethal bacteria, with sickening regularity.
Don't think of doing anything in a tourist destination, that you wouldn't think of doing at home.
What happens in Vegas (or Maui), usually goes home in a casket.
12/04/09
For instance, in the second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander's friend gets turned into a vampire. To the best of my recollection (since it's been ages, please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) after he's dusted Xander has almost no emotion about it and a person that's likely known for years is never mentioned again.
I'll agree with you on those moments of callousness on the part of Adelle, but if there's no one to mourn the people who get caught in the gears of the Dollhouse (like Paul Ballard, who's ostensibly the most moral character up to "Omega") then it just seems incomplete to me.
It's totally personal taste, of course.
12/04/09
Sometimes I think things are better left up to the imagination (i.e. "You flew the Gulffire over Leningrad.") I hope the script doesn't stuff in references to the Space Jockey and the Company and stuff like that. That sort of connecting the dots is best left up to fanfiction.
Look at the Prequel Trilogy, where things happen not because of the story, but because it needs to be set up for the Original Trilogy.
12/01/09
He's a monster, he knows he's a Monster, and he hates he's a monster, Murder is Easy for him. but he uses the Guilt of knowing it's so easy for him to stay closer to being human
12/01/09
12/01/09
12/01/09
and @LoganAdams: i'm was raised Catholic also that's just how I raised.
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12/01/09
Take "First Blood", the first Rambo movie. The only people killed were in the helicopter. Everyone else was wounded.
Terminator 2, Conner's order not to kill. This helped the Terminator gain some humanity.
Why use suspense, tension, clever self discovery or even humor when you can plug in a well choreographed fight seen where one after the other falls to the hero.
12/01/09
Bring the kids!
12/01/09
12/01/09
The combination of "hero finds his identity" and "killing machine" character has always been a staple of revenge exploitation films, like Lady Snowblood, Kill Bill (which riffs on Lady Snowblood), or western counterparts such as the Death Wish series.
The point is, these were genre films, but gradually "revenge exploitation" has become more and more mainstream, probably helped along by movies that combine the genre with a Rambo/Die Hard action hero type.
Anyway, the revenge exploitation genre has never been deep or profound... at best it can be innovatively stylish. Yet this genre has become increasingly a part of mainstream action cinema... possibly due to modern directors who have a fondness for classic revenge films.
Just a theory, anyway.
12/01/09
The one is the Hero's Journey, where the hero is the person who must go off and set himself apart from the mass of humanity in order to discover his own essential humanity/divinity (see: Gilgamesh, Neo, Luke Skywalker). The other is the Myth of Redemptive Violence, in which worlds are created and saved through judicious use of homicide (see: Marduk fashioning the cosmos out of Tiamat's body). Combine them and you get exactly what you're talking about here.
Unfortunately, it's not limited to the silver screen. The reason these myths hold such resonance and keep getting played out is because those are among our society's dominant paradigms. If you read many apologetics for war, like C.S. Lewis' defence of why war is a moral good (not just a necessary evil, but a positive good that the world would be worse off without), the manly, "humanizing" dimension of killing or being killed is a major argument. And of course, it finds fertile ground in the movie industry of a country that was itself created by violence and has pretty much never not been at war with somebody somewhere (even itself!).
The alternatives, like how we find our own identity most clearly through being immersed in deep positive relationships with other people, tend to be reserved for smushy philosophies like pacifist Christianity. They don't seem to make for good cinema, nor should they really. Even movies about Jesus tend to gloss over His actual teachings because they're meant to be done, not meant to be sources of entertaining melodrama.
12/01/09
Perhaps oddly, the Internet-Tough-Guy-Fantasy-Comes-Alive-and-Makes-You-Dead trope has bothered me less lately in movies (where the visual excitement is both a distraction and a justification: did Chuck Norris/Wolverine/Iron Man kill every henchman in that corridor or did he just maim a few with his exploding wall-flip kick?) than on television, where the choreography and effects aren't as impressive, and in books. I suppose I've just lost the adolescent fascination with characters who kill other people thoughtlessly, arrogantly, distractedly.
12/01/09
Because watching 2 hours of someone reclaiming their 'self' in therapy would make for a really dull movie.