As I have mentioned before one of the things I like doing on YouTube is watching younger people reacting to films that they have never seen before. It’s always interesting to see which scene and moments are commonly and sometimes universally selected for their review videos.

A side-effect I has not anticipated when I discovered these videos is the bluntness with which I would come to understand just how much the world has changed in my lifetime.

My 50s are behind me and a lot of these films that are reacted to come from the 70s and 80s containing references that were understood my nearly everyone in the audience but are now strange cryptic moments to younger viewers.

For example, in the 1973’s The Exorcist Father Merrin, Max von Sydow under fantastic old-age make-up by Dick Smith, frequently with shaky hands opens a tiny tin and take a small white tablet. People of the time and well into the 80s and 90s understood with any expositions that this was medication for a heart condition. Merrin has server heart disease and is in poor health. Younger viewers have no comprehension of this and Merrin’s heart attack, which is not called out as one on-screen, comes as an inexplicable surprise.

The Legal Framework for South Africa’s Apartheid was passed into law in 1948 and remained enforced until the 1990’s creating as oppressive, racist, regime the disenfranchised, abused, and subjugated the majority population of that country by the white Europeans. The 1980s saw significant outrage and international protest about the South African government and its racist rule. This naturally bled into entertainment and 1989 the sequel to the hit Lethal Weapons utilized this wide-spread disgust at Apartheid to craft villainous South African diplomats as their antagonists.

And this intuitive understanding of the evils of Apartheid has sublimated away from morning dew. A millennial watching Lethal Weapon 2 was confounded by the inclusion of racism into these already despicable foreign diplomats. (Undoubtedly had they been from the American South wearing the ‘stars and bars’ it would have failed to be shocking. The Confederate Flag is an internationalsymbol of racism appearing in Icelandic Television as that signifier.) The widespread knowledge, disgust, and repulsion to South Africa’s apartheid is a subject for history textbooks and not popular media.

The world is forever changing and what is something that ‘everybody knows’ is tomorrow’s obscure trivia.

My earliest memories are of horror film playing at a drive-in theater. Fragments of the film, vivid color, brains in jars, stay with me to this day so many decades later. It is not surprising I grew up with a taste for horror movies. Over the long years those tastes focused and resolved into my best-loved types of horror cinema.

Ghost stories are without a doubt the horror I love best. I can’t explain why this genre appeals so strongly to me but from classic cinema and literature such as The Haunting/The Haunting of Hill House to more recent fare like The Night House, or Last Night in Soho, ghosts have fascinated and occasionally terrified me. Ghosts hold no terror for me in reality. I do not believe in ghosts and spirits. Life is a bio-chemical reaction and once the reaction stops, we are gone from this Earth. The emergent properties from out brain that we call ourselves vanishes with the cessation of life. But despite this firm, mechanistic view of reality and life, it is the ghost story that fascinates and compels me.

At the other end of my horror preferences lies the genre of Slashers.

What makes it strange that slashers so often are uninteresting or laughable to me is that they bear a close evolutionary relation to a genre I do very much care for the giallo. What differentiates the giallo from the slasher, at least to me, is that the Italian films are more centered on the mystery, the macabre, and flamboyant cinematic style while the latter is more focused on the kills, the more gruesome and outlandish the better. This is not to denigrate or belittle those who love, adore, and flock to the slasher movies. The beauty of the arts is in their diversity. We should always love what we love with shame or apology.

It is my apathy towards slashers that made films such as X difficult for me to suspend that vital disbelief that transforms a movie from something you watch to something you experience.

Each of us has the stories and genres to speak to something deep inside each of us and it the artists that bring us these fantastic fantasies I am continually in awe of.

1991 Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs was released to great commercial and critical success eventually winning 7 Academy Awards including a sweep of the ‘Big Five’ some only three films have accomplished.

In addition to accolades the film also drew protests and criticism directed towards the film’s serial killer antagonist Jame Gumb. Protesters picketed theaters and there were even concerns that the national broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony might be disrupted. The fictional Gumb stalks, abducts, kills, and skins women in pursuit of making a ‘woman suit’ to fulfill a twisted and erroneous self-image as a transsexual. The script goes out of its way to lay out that Gumb is not a transsexual but rather his distorted self-hate had created the self-deception. Furthermore, the audience is informed that Gumb was not born a monster but made one by years of systematic abuse. Something very true of serial killers. Both the transsexual and homosexual communities presented grave concerns that the character perpetuated harmful, disparaging, and untrue stereotypes about gay and trans people. Such a viewpoint is quite understandable given cinema’s history with the gay community and their frequent depiction as dangerous deviants. I will leave it to the reader to determine for themselves if the script did enough to separate the character of Jame Gumb from the hurtful stereotype. What is important to this essay is that there were public protests about this character and the man he was depicted.

Pulp Fiction released three years 1994. A collection of sensationalist short stories connected by a common collection of characters Pulp Fiction also garnered commercial and critical success winning one Academy Award for its screenplay and the Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

In episode 5 of the film, The Gold Watch, boxer Butch, on the run from the mob after not throwing a fight he had been bribed to fix, finds himself and the local mob boss, Marsellus Wallace, captured and imprisoned in the basement of a pawn show by Maynard and Zed.

Maynard and Zed abduct, rape, and enslave unwary men and Butch and Marsellus are their next victims. While the pair are busy raping Marsellus, Butch breaks free, kills Maynard, and leaves Zed to the torturous death Marsellus plans for the rapist.

Pulp Fiction faced no protests over the psychopathic raping homosexuals characters of Maynard and Zed. No picket lines outside of theaters, no threats that might derail the live broadcast of the Academy Awards. Maynard and Zed inspired none of the outrage seen just a few years earlier with the character Jame Gumb.

Why?

There’s no genius, albeit criminal, psychiatrist explaining that Maynard and Zed are the products of cruel systematic abuse. There’s no backstory, no establishment of the history to serve as a reason for their horrific acts. The pair are presented fully formed, without comment or elaboration, and no one protests.

There is something that makes these two characters stand out from every other character in the film. Despite the film being set in Los Angeles Maynard and Zed from the moment they speak their first word are identifiable as southern. And there lies the answer to the lack of outrage and protest.

Their southern identities are the dominate ones overriding all other associations and characteristics. Harkening back to the classic adventure film Deliverance all manner of sadistic behavior can be explained with an accent. Characters speaking in such a manner can be stupid, cruel, or rapists, and it is simply accepted as true their nature.

Both The Silence of the Lambs and Pulp Fiction are masterworks of cinema, and both reside in my library, but it is always instructive to examine what we accept without question.

First off, I am sorry that there haven’t been updates the past couple of weekdays. I just haven’t had a lot to write about on this blog before I go to work and perhaps it is because the work on my novel is going very well. (My minimum word count goal for the end of this week was to be at 30,000 words and I will be just north of 33,000. Yay team me!)

Later today I am going to be picking up from my local library branch a copy of as play Pools Paradise: A Farce in 3 acts by Phillip King. Now I am not the type of person who just sits around and reads plays for entertainment. Go and see them yes in pre-covid times but read them, not so much. What makes this different is that way way back in 1979 I appeared in a community theater production of this play.

This what I mean by I must be getting old, the reliving of things from my teenage youth.

I had a tremendously fun time acting in that play. The rehearsal where one actor flubbed a line in the climatic third act but the cascade from that out of sequence line delivery altered the next person’s line and then the next, tumbling out of control until it came around to me and not only did I have to work out the right line I had to do math on the fly in my head so the number that I said would actually match up to where we were in the characters countdown toward victory. The opening night when a prop clock flew off the stage, as it had during final dress rehearsal during which the director had advised the actor that if it did that the director would return it to the stage and that the actor should NOT leave the stage to get it. Or course she did, bouncing it off the tips of her fingers sending it rolling up the aisle where she chased like a kitten.

For a few months now I have been thinking about that play, what I remember from it and so on. Last week I discovered the city library has a copy and I had them dispatch to my local branch. It will be curious to see what I think of it reading something I spent so much time on 43 years ago.

Not going to chat about news, political, or world events this is my 2021 and how it went.

First off and best I did not lose anymore dear friends to this thrice curse plague. Nearlyeveryone I know has been vaccinated and that is quite important to me.

Thanks to the fantastic scientific advancements of the last few decades and my day-job within the health care industry I received my vaccinations and boosters quickly and while I have not yet fully relaxed public gatherings, I have returned to seeing film in the cinema.

Since mid-May, when I treated myself on my birthday, I have seen 20 feature films in theaters and with one more today that will bring my 2021 total to 21. (updated the count as I had forgotten the 1 film I had not watched at an AMC Theater)

I completed my first murder mystery novel. It is of course science-fiction set aboard a generations starship which after 200 years of utopian coexistence faces its first murder. That novel is out on submission and here’s hoping 2022 brings a bit of good fortune on that front.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe shows began streaming on Disney+ and while I have not loved all of them nor have I hated any of them. WandaVision remains the one I enjoyed the most and the one I respect for taking the biggest of swings at doing something different while The Falcon and The Winter Soldier stuck me as the most standard approach of the attempts.

June witnessed another milestone in in aging as I had cataracts removed from both eyes. I am now seeing far better than I have in decades and the experience was quite interesting. Overall, my health was stable and fair during 2021 with all my chronic conditions well managed.

2021 was not the year of liberation that I or many of us had hoped for and its tragic and stupid that this nation saw more deaths from the pandemic after the introduction of the vaccines than before it but personally I and my friends thrived.