Season of the Witch: A Review of Blair Witch (2016)

         

             I finally watched director Adam Wingard’s 2016 revival of the Blair Witch franchise. I use the word “watched” loosely here, however, since I spent most of the movie looking around first a bag of SweeTarts and then, later, my phone. This might sound like high praise at first—that I was apparently so frightened of Blair Witch that I couldn’t even look at it straight on—but the whole experience ended up frustrating me more than anything. I spent most of the film looking at the screen through some sort of filter not because the actual events unfolding onscreen were genuinely frightening, but because at this point, the threat of getting jump-scared has made me second-guess every second of modern horror that I watch. There’s an argument to be made that jump scares should be accepted as a necessary and important feature of the genre; however, I would debate their ultimate usefulness at scaring an audience.

Sure, the fear of getting jumped puts you on edge, and, sure, the actual moment of the jump is frightening on an animal level since almost no one is immune to sudden loud noises, but few of these so-called “scares” have any real staying power. Oftentimes, once the jump has passed, it’s over. The viewer is released; the moment is forgotten. I don’t regard this as true horror. Jump scares have their place in the horror genre, but their overuse has, I think, become more of a deterrent to watching modern horror films. I’m highly biased in this regard, but I’m just really over jump scare-saturated horror. I tend to prefer films that instill a creeping, lingering dread or that focus their horror on specific creepy or frightening images or figures. A terrifying mood sticks with you long into the night. Films like The Babadook, It Follows, The VVitch, and, yes, The Blair Witch Project itself focus on cultivating atmosphere, and they’re all the scarier for it.

Let’s not forget that the original Blair Witch has one of the most iconic frightening images in horror cinema: At the climax of the film, the two surviving characters discover an abandoned house in the woods. They’re drawn inside by the cries of someone or something that sounds like their disappeared friend. The mad search of the house ends with the protagonist Heather racing into the basement and spotting her friend Mike standing silently, dutifully facing the far corner of the room. Heather screams and screams as she (and we) recognize the modus operandi of local legend and murderer Rustin Parr. Someone or something strikes Heather while she is screaming, silencing her and knocking the camera she’s been carrying to the ground. The film ends. Just thinking about that dimly-lit, low quality image of a man standing in a dirty basement corner while his friend screams her head off before being murdered gives me the chills. Why? Because it’s genuinely creepy, well-presented horror that doesn’t rely on any sudden loud noises to spook the audience.

The entire Blair Witch Project is a study in the measured, steady building of dread culminating in the final encounter in the abandoned house. The movie’s low budget meant that the creators had to focus on human drama and fear over flashy effects and action. Another iconic shot from the film (the one that graces the DVD case’s cover) is of a crying girl’s face—Heather, documenting what might be the last moments of her life to the audience through her camera. It’s intensely personal and raw, and it works so well in this seminal work of found footage horror because of the project’s scope and budget, the DIY spirit of the thing. The same sort of shot loses its poignancy in something like the sixth season of American Horror Story (which is itself quite good) because now we’re in the land of bigger budgets and special effects—the land occupied by the new Blair Witch.

Although the 2016 Blair Witch is positioned as a direct sequel to the first film, it feels more like a remake of the original with the budget to do the sort of things that the original might have done if it had the money. At heart, though, the story of Heather’s brother and his search for his missing sister hits all the same story beats as the original movie. There is new stuff in the mix like more body horror, an actual monster (that we see), an excruciatingly claustrophobic tunnel sequence, and some monkeying with… let’s say “time travel” with heavy air quotes. However, all of these new elements are ultimately embellishments on a plot that very closely mirrors that of the original film:

Our (larger) band fools around a bit good-naturedly before getting to the woods, and this opening includes a scene in a hotel where everyone is happy pre-frightmare. Once they’re in the woods, there’s a lot of in-group fighting, and some member(s) betray the trust of the others with regard to the group’s navigation. In the first film, Mike threw the map in the stream. This time, we find out that local volunteers Lane and Talia don’t actually know their way around the depths of the woods… after the entire group is already well and truly lost. The gang tries the sensible thing of walking in a straight line to get out but find themselves doubling back on their own trail instead. The creepy stick people show up. The piles of rocks make an appearance. One of the group members trashes the stick people and is the first to disappear. Eventually, once their numbers have been thinned out, the characters find the abandoned house in the woods, and the movie ends with our protagonist getting struck by someone or something off-screen as the camera falls to the ground and records for a few moments longer before the movie ends. This time, though, the mad dash through the house ends in the attic and not the basement. There’s more to it than that—and maybe I’m simplifying unfairly—but there’s no escaping the fact that at its core Blair Witch hits a lot of the same story beats as the earlier movie.

To give the new film some credit here, there is a suggestion that there could be some supernatural cycle at work that may be intentionally causing events to follow a similar trajectory to the first film. This comes as an actually fun, clever little reveal that happens in an understated way during the climax. The “time travel” I’m referring to very vaguely here in order to avoid unnecessary spoilers is one of the best embellishments new Blair Witch brings to the table. The tunnel scene is another good addition. It made me incredibly uncomfortable, but it was a great example of horror that will likely play on the fears of a large number of its audience members without having to resort to jump scares.

But this is still just The Blair Witch Project done flashier and without the low-budget charm of the original. It feels like they could have (and arguably should have) gotten more creative with the storytelling this time around. The aforementioned American Horror Story: Roanoke uses several different framing devices throughout its season, changing from a Dateline-style drama with the “real people” who experienced the horror narrating a re-enactment of the events performed by “actors” to a found footage horror film shot with cellphones and police body cameras to a collage of different genres (news reports, an episode of a fake paranormal investigation show, and so on) while also toying with occasional meta-commentary on itself. It does pull the Blair Witch Project card of telling the audience that such and such footage was assembled from such and such place after so and so disappeared without a trace, but that’s just one aspect of the show. It knows that just trying to sell the audience on the supposed verisimilitude of the found footage subgenre isn’t enough anymore—that the whole approach to horror filmmaking has gone stale—so it broadens the scope. Yes, this is fiction, but see how many layers of “fiction” and “fiction-pretending-to-not-be-fiction” that we can layer together using all these different lenses? The audience knows that none of this is actually real, so they have fun with it. Blair Witch 2016 still feels like it’s still trying to be Blair Witch Classic—like this is still a time when people will watch the film and be uncertain enough about whether these people are actually still alive or not to lend the whole viewing experience some extra level of dread. It needed something more to differentiate it from all the pretenders to the throne that have come out since the original film and that have, over time, caused the appearance of yet another limited point of view in a horror film filtered through yet another shaky handheld camera to be met with groans instead of excitement. There are more points of view (more babes lost in the woods equals more cameras) to use this time to construct more elaborate shots, but something more inventive like the drone camera that is very much under-utilized in the film is still missing.

The one area where this new Blair Witch matches OG Blair Witch that doesn’t feel like a shortcoming this day in age is with regard to the rawness of its performances. As viewers, we’re used to screams of supposed agony, used to seeing people supposedly fly into violent rages and lose their minds and experience all these extreme heights of emotion that we (hopefully) don’t experience ourselves. We know the screams are fake, but we buy into the emotion of the moment anyway because the approximation of what those real emotions might look like is close enough for us to pretend while we watch. Of course, one of the most well-known factoids concerning the production of The Blair Witch Project is how far everyone went to try to achieve something more real-seeming with the film: actors literally camping in the woods while being spoon-fed direction and tormented by the rest of the crew at night. I presume this wasn’t the case with Blair Witch given that this is a “proper” Hollywood film now, but the performances of distress in this movie are still very powerful. The noises that our protagonist makes at the climax of the film, as she films herself walking backwards to avoid accidentally seeing the titular Blair Witch are the sort of labored, disturbing, awful sounds you would hope to never hear coming out of a human mouth. Earlier, when the character Talia is losing her mind and jumping at shadows, she really does seem to have snapped thanks to the emotional intensity of the performance.

That rawness that I mentioned before with regard to Heather’s speech directly into the camera in the first Blair Witch is perfectly recaptured here at the film’s most emotionally-fraught moments. You feel like you’re actually watching someone come apart at the seams, which isn’t something I feel about a lot of horror films. One of the best examples of this, for me, has been and remains Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The sheer amount of screaming that Sally (Marilyn Burns) does later in the film and especially during the dinner scene where the cannibal family alternatively hurls abuse and screams back at her makes one worry for her sanity. At the very end, when she’s safe in the back of the pickup truck and racing away from Leatherface, her screaming transitions quite naturally into laughter, and it’s not relief that we feel hearing her laugh—it’s dread. It’s like watching someone’s mind finally break under the strain of what they’ve endured. The new Blair Witch captures this same feeling, and I only wish that the horror responsible for the breakdowns was more inventive and more consistently, genuinely scary. It was probably unreasonable to expect a classic in the found footage horror sub-genre to return after all this time and show everyone how it’s done once more, but it’s hard to resist the poetic allure of such a narrative. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened here. Blair Witch is serviceable—It’ll jump-scare you a bit, if nothing else—but it can’t escape the inertia of years upon years of similar films or the gravitational pull of its far groundbreaking predecessor’s achievements.

Prometheus and the Ideology of Creation

           I’ve heard it said before that your story shouldn’t end with a punchline. If everything you’ve done only serves to prepare the reader/viewer for a single moment that retroactively justifies the entire experience, then you’ve done something wrong. 

            On some level, Prometheus is all about delivering the audience to certain “punchlines”—the big mythos-reinforcing moments where the Alien prequel calls back to the original and shows you how various disparate pieces converge to create a single chest-bursting, vent-crawling entity. To that end, the development of Prometheus’ plot can be seen as a sequence of events and set pieces all building to a particular moment: the derelict vessel-base, the mural depicting some kind of super xenomorph, the motif of the monstrous armored figure and what lies beneath its helmet, the wormlike proto-face huggers, the gross invasion of human bodies by alien species that burst out or are gruesomely extracted, the android decapitation, the arrival of yet another proto-face hunger that even behaves like its leggier counterparts, and, finally, the appearance of a baby xenomorph. 

            It's arguable that Prometheus is just checking the boxes. It’s an origin story but also one big homage. On the other hand, the fact that a film so thematically concerned with creation is itself one textual and metatextual evolution seems, if not intentional, then at least very convenient. We see the xenomorph physiology and reproductive system evolve. Likewise, we see Prometheus evolve into Alien. How do we get from big, pale, totally ripped giants drinking black liquid that tears apart their DNA to the events of the first Alien? Prometheus is here to show you.

Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 27 May 2012. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

            Like Alien, Prometheus has an interest in a strong, female lead. (Check off another box on the homage list.) However, unlike Alien, this film puts that lead through a not particularly inventive kind of hell. Noomi Rapace’s Shaw is barren—a fact that we learn moments before she and her colleague have sex and she gets pregnant… with a horrible alien fetus that she is forced to remove in a scene so horrific it makes the ostensibly horrific stuff that follows look like nothing by comparison. There’s something of the torture porn genre in Prometheus.[1] Shaw is impregnated thanks to the machinations of the android David who infects her lover with the Engineer’s black liquid; she’s forced to mutilate herself to remove the fetus, gets roughly stitched back together, and then spends the rest of the movie running and getting knocked around in ways that would almost certainly tear the wound open again. If she’s not doubled over in pain, she’s heaving and breathing heavily.

            Shaw is our “Final Girl,” of course, and like Ripley she’s destined to survive the encounter with the Engineers, but there’s something almost mean-spirited about the rough treatment she receives, particularly with the emphasis on monstrous pregnancies that so many other horror/thriller films have already drawn on (see Rosemary’s Baby for a seminal example of the trope).[2] The original Alien played off the creature’s unique physiology and reproductive methods to comment on a male fear of penetration (and possibly on the fear of the body being destroyed from the inside out by cancer or Crohn’s Disease). Prometheus isn’t that inventive. Instead, it focuses on the female body as a symbol of the power of creation, which is an idea even older and more worn than that of the monstrous pregnancy. 

            Anybody can create life, jokes the doomed Dr. Holloway.

            Not me, replies Shaw, tearfully.

            Thematically, the nature or purpose of creation is Prometheus’ chief concern. Its title recalls the noble mythological sacrifice of the Titan who brought fire to humanity and was punished for it. If not strictly a creator, Prometheus was at least a benefactor and arguably the figure, mythologically-speaking, who sparked humankind’s development by giving them something that enabled them to reach their full potential. The Prometheus of the film might be the Engineer race, who apparently descended from the heavens to help develop mankind in some unexplained fashion, but it’s also the ship that bears the name (as well as Shaw and company). The hope of the owner of the Weyland Corporation that funds the voyage is that the vessel will return to earth with the secrets of creation and of life and death: a new “fire” that could further fuel the development of humankind. The question that emerges as the film’s plot developments, however, is whether or not human development isn’t a double-edged sword. 

            We’ve seen this particular issue born out in sci-fi stories elsewhere. The main antagonists of the Mass Effect videogame series are monstrous “Reapers” that cleanse the galaxy of all life whenever technology reaches a certain peak. In Prometheus, the creators are also the destroyers. The Engineers created humanity but seemingly plan to destroy it. Prometheus is supposed to bring back the “fire” but just sets off a chain reaction that results in the creation of a new threat to all life. Was the Titan humanity’s savior by virtue of his gift, or was he ignoble in that the gift was a curse? After all, with our fire, we’ve gone from simply warming ourselves and cooking food to survive to polluting the planet and finding new ways to kill one another. Prometheus doesn’t provide an answer to this question because it never explains why the Engineers want to destroy humanity. Either this was a serious omission or the writers want viewers to think of our creators as capricious like Holloway suggests in his conversation with David. 

            We humans made androids because we could, says Holloway, to which David replies by arguing that humans would be devastated to learn that their creators did much the same thing on a whim. This is the closest thing to an answer to the gift-curse question at the heart of the film that the story offers: that “fire”/life is neither gift nor curse—it was simply something for Prometheus or the gods or Engineers to do when they were bored. Human life was a lark, and stamping it out would likewise be nothing more than something to do. It is a pessimistic outlook.

            Of course, Holloway is also wrong about David. Presumably androids serve important roles during space travel because of their relative immortality and the fact that they require fewer resources to operate while the rest of the crews is in stasis. It is equally unlikely that such a creation was built only on a whim. Furthermore, androids are superior to humans in many obvious ways—stronger, more durable, and with greater mental faculties. Even David’s supposed emotionlessness may not be strictly true. After all, in addition to admitting that he was afraid for Shaw during the final confrontation with the last Engineer, David’s treatment of Holloway also suggests that he can experience feelings like resentment. Having been the object of low-level resentment and mistrust throughout the mission, David’s decision to “poison” the scientist with the Engineer’s black liquid feels both coldly scientific and not quite impersonal. He even makes a point of asking Holloway to what length he would go to make the mission a success, thereby manipulating him into saying exactly what he knows he would (that he would do anything for the cause) so that he can justify poisoning him. David doesn’t need the justification, but his duping Holloway represents a bit of spiteful fun on his part. We appreciate  the dramatic irony of the question and what it entails and so does David. 

            David’s very existence and the parallel the film draws between his relationship with his creators and the humans’ with theirs, including the disappointment that comes with knowing the Engineers are all too mortal, calls into question the mythological importance of creators. David is superior to his creators, and humanity might likewise be superior to their own. After all, in addition to sharing the same DNA as their creations, the Engineers are also not immortal and may very well have their own questions about their origins. 

            Although we are told by Janek that the Engineer structures on the planet are a military installation and that the black liquid is a weapon, the evidence on display in the film suggests otherwise. Beyond their prodigious strength, the Engineers do not seem to be equipped with any weaponry. Their vessel is likewise unarmed except for the hold filled with deadly canisters. If it were otherwise, and the ship beneath the dome was military, why not eliminate the Prometheus after taking off to prevent pursuit and start the human genocide early? What goes unstated in the film is the possibility that the Engineers who were on the planet were scientists like Holloway and Shaw. The canister shrine room in particular suggests that the Engineers are scientists who have married technology and theology—at least, one might make that assumption based on the ritualistic arrangement of the canisters before the aforementioned xenomorph engraving and a massive stone idol head (which does resemble an Engineer and might suggest that they are self-worshipping, not unlike humans who like to render God as a man). Since the humans and Engineers are otherwise frequently paralleled with one another, this reading of the latter as scientists who have resolved in their culture the age-old debate between science and faith seems highly probable given that Shaw is doing much the same thing, personally and in her relationship with the less spiritual Holloway.

            Also, who is to say that the black liquid is actually a weapon? It could certainly easily be weaponized, but reading it as only a weapon of mass destruction requires assuming that the Engineers view life and death the same as humans do. The very first scene in the film suggests that they don’t. The ritual suicide of the otherwise seemingly healthy Engineer is presented largely without context; however, the act and its aftermath tells us a lot about the Engineers’ outlook on life and death and how it ties in with the black liquid. The Engineer willingly gives up his life to produce something new. His body and DNA break down, but the remains are repurposed rather than outright destroyed. Although the Engineers are certainly not without a sense of self-preservation, which is obvious during the sequence where the holograms are shown fleeing within the bowels of the dome, they may view self-sacrifice for the greater good or to further the development of life in the universe as necessary and not evil. Like the mythical Prometheus, the cost of advancing civilization is great personal pain. The idea that the Engineers might view humanity’s mass destruction as another step toward further growth is floated at least once in the movie, and based on the aforementioned visual evidence, the idea seems likely. The Engineers might have been hell-bent on wiping out humans, but the act likely wasn’t one they would see as evil. They would instead be creating new life from all that death.

             The Engineers might actually see themselves as Promethean, delivering to humanity the source of further evolution and development that Weyland is seeking. Ironically, though, the life it would deliver would mean the death of the individual who seeks, greedily, to preserve his own existence. The alien of Alien is an apex predator that results from the mass death of Prometheus. It’s the punchline of the film but also its literal and thematic culmination, suggesting that it may be the next step in Engineer-human evolution and therefore a superior being much like David is. To create is to risk being upstaged by the offspring, and to be a creator is to be outmoded, if not outright destroyed by the next generation.      

*

             Prometheus is a great sci-fi film. The futurism of the technology and the backdrop of deep space only serve as the icing on the thematic cake. This is a film concerned with deep-rooted questions regarding the ideology of creation and of humankind’s place in the universe. As someone with a religious background, I find the issues Prometheus interrogates especially salient. There are a lot of bad Christian movies out there: God’s Not Dead, 90 Minutes in Heaven, War Room. Stuff like Billy Graham’s The Homecoming (which I grew up with) has always existed on the periphery of the major movie business, which used to use “spiritual” stories like The Ten Commandments as an excuse to hype up the violence and sexuality of the film without censure. The new wave of theatrical Christian releases, however, is more dogmatic than ever—concerned less with thematically rich narratives and more with (literally) preaching to the choir. Ridley Scott’s own Exodus: Gods and Kings was so bland and uninventive that it’s hard to imagine the Christian it could offend.

             Meanwhile, films that explore Christian themes or stories that aren’t particularly dogmatic or traditional in their approach, such as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, are lambasted by Christian audiences for taking liberties with the Biblical source material—while it’s apparently ok to tell viewers that college professors are out to force students into becoming atheists and that victims of domestic abuse just need to try harder to be faithful to God rather than seeking real world counseling or leaving a dangerous situation. I’m sure that it offends some Christian viewers, but Prometheus is a film with an interest in faith beyond how one’s particular beliefs explain creation alone. Although belief in a specific creator (or creators) of the universe is not unique to Christianity, in the western world, it’s not hard to see Prometheus as a largely Christian film, especially given the way that human beings are fundamentally (at the genetic level) created in their makers’ image. What the film has to say about faith specifically isn’t entirely negative or ambivalent either.

            Prometheus implies that Shaw is a Christian, and she maintains that belief through everything that happens to her. While Holloway is quick to give up hope when the Engineers are seemingly all dead, Shaw continues to believe that there are still answers to be learned from them, though they may be physically absent. Furthermore, the question of who created the Engineers is also raised, so while Prometheus might be blasphemous for suggesting that God didn’t directly create humankind, it doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility that there wasn’t a divine hand involved. Since the Engineers are human on a genetic level, one extension of this revelation in the film’s universe is the possibility that the Engineers are the first humans created by God and we’re they’re “offspring.” The movie does question whether there is an afterlife or not, since the dying Weyland claims that there “is nothing,” presumably on the other side—a fact which the decapitated David seconds, though his agreement is not proof positive that Prometheus does not believe in an afterlife since David is, after all, is nothing if not duplicitous. Weyland himself is not religious in the traditional sense. Since this is the film’s final word on the subject, however, after young Shaw is seen posing the question of where people go when they die to her father in a flashback earlier in the movie, it’s not altogether impossible that it is suggesting that there is no divine hand involved, and if the Engineers aren’t the source of all life, then they themselves sprang from mortal origins.

            The point that I’m trying to make here is that Prometheus is a better “Christian” film—especially insofar as it tackles some big questions and themes relevant to that faith—than other movies that are explicitly marketed as such. Of course, this is my personal opinion, and my opinions trend more secular and liberal than many Christians would abide. The financial successes of films like the ones I mentioned before is proof positive that this super conservatism still exists. I think Prometheus is a good film for Christians who are interested in asking questions and entertaining “what if”/alternate universe explanations for the stories they’ve heard so many times before. It doesn’t serve as an echo chamber, though, and that seems to be what a lot of Christian films do—provide an experience that doesn’t question or even do much at all with the interesting ideas offered by the faith. There are no challenges to face or obstacles to overcome there. These movies are celebrations of a particular mindset and don’t demand anything of the viewer other than that they also celebrate that mindset. Prometheus is in its own way far from revelatory, though, and the nihilistic nastiness and quasi-misogyny lurking in its heart are nothing new.  

            Additionally, I’m not sure there isn’t something transmisogynistic about the portrayal of Charlize Theron’s Vickers. We learn that she is Weyland’s child, but he is apparently not pleased with her. In his fake will he describes David as the son he never had. Now, either Weyland is simply expressing his displeasure at having a daughter (an Assigned Female At Birth daughter), or he may be implying that Vickers is trans. She is depicted as a strong or even masculine figure (we first meet her as she’s doing push-ups, for example), and Janek asks her at one point if she is a robot—questioning her humanity but also, by extension, her realness. Possibly her womanhood. Consider also that when Shaw attempts to use Vickers’ medical equipment to extract the alien fetus that the machine explains it is “calibrated” to only treat men. There are other explanations for these weird beats, of course, but a reading of Prometheus as rather typically transmisogynistic (on top of every other typical thing it does) is still possible and very bothersome. 

            The box art and menus for the DVD emphasize three characters: David, Shaw, and Vickers. Vickers and Shaw both survive longer than any other human character in the story, but neither is treated very well. Shaw gets put through the wringer, and Vickers lives because she’s a coward. We are shown her antagonism early on when we learn she doesn’t share Shaw and Holloway’s faith. She’s a bureaucratic presence who refuses to let the wide-eyed scientist believers make contact with any intelligent life they might meet. She constantly wrests authority from the easy-going, likeable Janek. She’s designed to be unlikeable, and the possibility that she might also be trans means Prometheus, like so many other films, has nothing new to say about trans people either, suggesting instead that they are fake, duplicitous, inhuman, etc. Unlike Charlize Theron’s wonderful turn as Furiosa in this year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the woman she plays here is less obviously a figure worth praising. Prometheus might feature two of its three (only three) female characters prominently and might cast itself as some kind of pseudo-feminist narrative by having Shaw survive, but its treatment of them—especially of Vickers—is questionable.

            After seeing Prometheus, I have since read a lot criticism levelled against it. More than anything, a lot of people have pointed out the illogical or just outright bad decisions made by supposedly intelligent people in the film as annoying typical. I’ve felt for a while now that most horror movies take place in alternate universes where for some reason the genre does not exist, and Prometheus must occupy a similar space. I can see the flaws now; however, when I was first watching it, I was very much swept up in the film and its mythology. It may hit a lot of familiar notes (some more problematic than others), but it’s also a film that seems to be greater than the sum of its parts. That it made me think about its themes at all is admirable, and I personally find it well-paced and beautiful. CG landscapes always look dead to me anyway—Disney’s attempts to create a sense of wonder with them in Alice in Wonderland and Oz the Great and Powerful have been laughably bad—so the stuff in Prometheus actually looks good because of how devoid of life it generally is. And that’s just another metatextual element that enforces the theme of the movie: From death comes new life. Of course, as a human being living a finite, fragile existence in a dangerous world (see the number of deaths by gun that have occurred in this particular country this year alone), that’s also a hard message to stomach.

Notes:

[1] According to Urban Dictionary “torture porn” is “[a] term coined by various critics which discusses the current trend in horror Hollywood which consists of horror movies having no story whatsoever but gratuitous images of people having random body parts removed. . . .” (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=torture+porn). In essence, films like Saw and Hostel qualify as torture porn because of their heavy reliance on body horror—on creating a sense of unease, horror, or disgust by deforming, mutilating, or deconstructing the human body. The drawn out manner in which the removal of the alien fetus from Shaw’s abdomen is conducted feels reminiscent of this sub-genre of horror.

[2] The “Final Girl” is the female character in a horror film who is usually the one to confront and defeat the killer or monster in the end. Though her survival is not always guaranteed, she will last the longest, and according to TV Tropes, “[e]specially in older works, she’ll also almost certainly be a virgin, remain fully clothed, avoid Death by Sex, and probably won’t drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or take drugs” (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FinalGirl).  Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods plays with this horror trope by building an entire mythology around the fact that characters in horror movies always fill certain roles (of which the Final Girl is only one; another is the stereotypical “stoner”), and Carol J. Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chainsaws examines issues of gender and identification in horror films by suggesting that male viewers actually root for and identity with the Final Girl rather than the murderous, rampaging monster or killer (the ostensible source of their interest in the film).   

You’re only good until you’re not / You’re only certain until you’re not

“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” – Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight (2008)

            On the internet it’s very likely that not even dying could stop you from becoming a villain these days. “Call-out culture” is now a part of that digital ecosystem and, in essence, “refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publically name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, abeliest, and [etc.]”[1] There is potential in calling out truly dangerous actions—such as abuse and assault; “like confronting a rapist, for example”—to hold the perpetrators accountable and to publically call attention to their behavior in such a way so as other potential victims know to avoid them; nevertheless, there are serious problems with call-out culture as a form of “political critique.”[2] Because calling someone out is a highly public event thanks to the social media platforms that enable the culture, the act is never private and is tantamount to “a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are.”[3] There are definitely problems with even a seemingly justified call-out, but the issue of a “statute of limitations,” say, on statements of a political nature previously made by a person raises its own questions. 

            As the second article quoted above suggests, calling attention to harmful behaviors and actionable acts of violence is one thing, and making something potentially hurtful, insensitive, or uninformed someone said years ago the evidence in a trial of that person’s current politics is another altogether. Oftentimes, however, this latter type of squabble seems to be the focus of call-out culture. This is the reason why it can be difficult to answer the question “Who do we actually like and trust?” (or, “Who is really good?”) when browsing the tweets or blogs of socially- and politically-conscious people. It seems everyone has some dirt in their past that eventually gets called out, forcing us to decide if that person was ever really as “good” as they appeared. It’s a difficult matter to parse generally. For example, I use the term “good” here as a last resort. What other, better descriptor is there for the something about that person that shifts the minute an old tweet or blog post or reblog emerges from their past? Especially when the material is years old, how much weight should it carry with regard to our current perceptions of that person? How much does it actually speak to who that person is now and what they believe? Is it out of line to expect the person in question to apologize years after the fact for something they said or thought before? I don’t have an answer—nor, I suspect, does anyone else. What I do know is that The Dark Knight was more or less right: You’re only good/a hero until you’re not.

            Ultimately, call-out culture is only related to the topic I actually want to address in this post. I want to talk about the supposed “controversy” surrounding the news that some incoming freshmen at Duke University refused to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (as a common reading experience book) on moral grounds. My immediate reaction to this news item was to post to Facebook and mock the fact that it was a news item at all: “‘Extre extre! Incoming college freshmen tend to bring conservative views with them!’ (Since when is this news and/or surprising to anyone?)” After posting that initial response, however, I started to think about how this non-news could be used to address larger issues of personal and political expression, knowledge, and certainty. I still think that this individual story is a virtual non-issue—“some” students objected to the book; “several” declined to read it; even the sites running a story seem to suspect that there’s nothing remarkable here given that people object to things like this all the time, and a student not doing the reading? That’s not breaking news.

            What I do think is interesting and noteworthy about this story is how it lends itself to a larger discussion—namely, whether any of the names attached to the story who objected to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel/memoir Fun Home for its open discussion and depiction of sexuality (and especially homosexuality) will one day find the things they said now with such certainty coming back to bite them in a call-out. Let me say upfront that this isn’t me suggesting that that might be comeuppance of some kind. My natural inclination to mock aside, I take the issues surrounding this news story seriously. It raises the important question of at what point anyone ought to make their personal and/or political views public in any way. 

            I was already thinking about this topic because I recently got a new job and in the process of completing my required training came across the statement that no one should ever post anything to a social media platform that they wouldn’t want displayed on a banner. That sounds good and seems to make a lot of sense, but it also ignores the fact that sometimes what you would want held high on a standard one day does not inspire the same confidence days, weeks, months, and especially years later. We are often very certain about things at various points in our lives only to find that certainty challenged down the road. Part of being human is learning, growing, and changing. If we generally agree that our progress is forward toward a fully-developed human being, then the old ideas or certainties we leave in our wake may no longer apply to the new model. The problem is that internet culture preserves (and sometimes resurrects) these old ideas down the road, and what can we do? It’s true that what we post to the internet stays on the internet indefinitely somewhere, but, again, what’s one to do about that? At what point is anyone (college freshman or otherwise) allowed near a computer? We want our ideals on a banner, and we want the community that comes with rallying under shared ideals.

            To return to the specific case of the Duke students, however, I think that the college seems to have taken the proper, educational track with the “controversy.” At least, that seems to be the case based on what a member of the summer reading book selection committee had to say on the issue: “I would encourage them [students who disagree with the book] to talk about why they chose to read it or not.”[4] Although I did see comments on the story to the effect that the students should be indirectly punished in some way with a quiz or that they should more or less gut it out, it’s much more effective to make this a teachable moment rather than mete out some form of punishment to force them into broadening their perspective whether they like it or not. Specifically, I think that this is an opportunity to foster critical thinking. It’s easy to see student responses that accuse Duke of indirectly peer pressuring people into reading the book, or that suggest the university simply does not know that students with conservative views exist, as worthy of scorn; in fact, in a national culture that is becoming increasingly (though only gradually) more progressive-minded, it’s easy to look at the shock—“I thought to myself, ‘What kind of school am I going to?’”—and perform something akin to a call-out where all sorts of liberal and educated minds tee off of these kids in particular and off the very concept of a sexuality-averse conservative Christian faith at large by wittily, scornfully suggesting that they need perspective or to wake up and realize their squeamishness is the result of religious dogma and a doctrine that’s becoming obsolete even in the religious community.[5] It’s easy to do that, but it’s also wrong, and that kind of aggressive response tends to only make people of any creed retreat and go on the defensive rather than feel like voicing and further exploring their ideas is safe. 

            While I certainly don’t agree with people who claim that Christians are oppressed in the United States, I do think we don’t do much to not support such claims when our response to those familiar-sounding words of Biblical censure is to mock or insist that they are completely, utterly wrong. Is religion a crutch? Does it serve only to keep people docile to institutions by suggesting that the rewards are coming not in this world (that belongs to the institutions) but in the next for all those who are appropriately penitent? It suffices for the purposes of this argument simply to acknowledge that religion means a lot to people. For many people (myself included), it played a key, foundational role in their lives. They’ve defined themselves by it and shaped their worldviews through it. Demanding that they just give that up and learn better isn’t a productive use of time—particularly in an educational setting. 

            There are certainly folks to the right and left of center politically who would argue that the purpose of college is to “liberalize” students (though they would say as much with very different intentions and intonation). It’s simply true that many freshmen come to college with a more conservative outlook that doesn’t last all four years. Christian films like God’s Not Dead make the case for the right that the left (namely liberal atheists) are out to tempt or coerce their children away from the Truth. That’s simply not the case, though. At least, in my experience, that’s not the case, nor is the purpose of college to “liberalize.” Colleges don’t churn out little Judith Butlers and Friedrich Nietzsches. To my mind the purpose of college is to teach critical thinking and to task students with answering questions more thoroughly while also asking more questions of things they take as certainties (of which religion is only one). Now, uncertainty itself can be a kind of mistaken certainty, but that’s not really the matter at hand. What is is that it’s not all that surprising for the new Duke students who object to Bechdel’s work to do so because it “[conflicts] with their personal and religious beliefs.”[6] It’s also not the college’s job to take those beliefs away from them, strictly speaking, but it is its job to suggest that this is only one of many perspectives on the text and to ask that the concerned parties get beyond knee-jerk reactions of disgust or outrage that they were even presented with this particular work to a point where they can find its literary merits and to understand why someone else might not object to it or might, in fact, object to their objection. 

            In all likelihood, a number of these objecting students will leave college very different from when they entered it. I speak from personal experience, and lest anyone so inclined think that I am a godless, postmodern heathen, I will interject only one personal note here: I definitely came out of college questioning things that I went in believing, but I have a greater appreciation for my own conservative Christian background than I did before because I questioned it and continue to grapple with and try to reconcile a spiritualism that’s very personal and dear to me with other ideas. Sometimes Christianity as a religion seems determined to avoid questions, whereas a belief system like Judaism may embrace them by “wrestling” with texts and ideas and prizing “the ability to question freely and without inhibition [and] the valuing of difficult questions.”[7] At any rate, the ability to question the certainty or least staying power of what one believes may help prevent one from stitching any banners preemptively.

            Case in point: Perhaps you’ve heard of Lexi Kozhevsky, the nineteen year-old who stood in front of police officers in Ferguson and (in)famously said she “would rather get hit by something than let it hit them.”[8] If you haven’t heard of Lexi herself, you’ve probably seen her photoshopped into various other scenarios where she defends everyone from Voldemort’s Death Eaters to the entire cast of villainous characters from Dragonball Z. I’m trying to avoid particular partialities of my own here (that Black Lives Matter, for instance), but I offer up Lexi as so many others have done, albeit with less derision, as an example of the same sort of certainty on display in the Duke case. Although I cannot speak for Lexi’s personal experiences or her background, this is a college-aged kid (someone who would just be starting college), and her casual certainty—“Look guys, discrimination is a thing and I get it, but we need to say with the people who protect us and that’s what I’m doing”—seems like the sort that changes with time and questioning.[9] Or maybe she won’t change. All I know is that I was once a freshman in a class of freshmen who argued with a professor that there was nothing racist about The Lion King, and today I would tell you that The Lion King is a very “problematic” piece—that it represents an extension of a cultural association of evil with darker colors; that the “bad” lions live in the impoverished area of the wilds; etc. People change and grow (and should change and grow), and whether they radically alter what they believe or not in college, chances are they will be better equipped to parse those beliefs on the other side and to at least offer a more nuanced argument than “I’m certain about this and am shocked that you aren’t.” The problem is that sometimes those certainties, when publically aired with confidence, come back to haunt you down the road. 

            Ultimately, it’s simply impractical to say that no one should express themselves or their views until they’re of an arbitrary age or ambiguous level of experience—though there is an argument to be made that entering a new discourse community requires first acquainting yourself with what the pervading trends in that community are before making yourself heard (God gave us two ears but only one mouth, after all). The solution to the particular problem of things people may have once been certain about being brought up as evidence against them in the future likely lies with reworking the toxicity of call-out culture and in questioning at every stage of one’s personal growth the propriety of posting everything you think at a given time in a place where it can be found and returned to you when you are older, wiser, and perhaps justifiably embarrassed to once again see that old, dirty banner you thought you buried years ago.              

Notes:

[1] Ahmad, Asam. “A Note on Call-Out Culture.” Briarpatch Magazine. Briarpatch Magazine, 2 Mar. 2015. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture>  

[2] ourcatastrophe. “On ‘Call-Out Culture’ And Why I’m Not Into It.” browcatastrophe. Tumblr, n.d. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://mewmewfoucault.tumblr.com/post/7909863121/on-call-out-culture-and-why-im-not-into-it>   

[3] Ahmad

[4] Ballentine, Claire. “Freshmen Skipping ‘Fun Home’ For Moral Reasons.” The Chronicle. Duke Student Publishing Company, 21 Aug. 2015. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2015/08/freshmen-skipping-fun-home-for-moral-reasons>

[5] Ibid.

[6] TWC News. “Duke University Summer Reading Sparks Controversy.” Time Warner Cable News. Time Warner Cable Enterprises, 24 Aug. 2015. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://www.twcnews.com/nc/triangle-sandhills/news/2015/08/24/summer-reading-sparks-controversy.html>

[7] Horowitz, Bethamie. “A Tradition of Questioning Tradition.” Forward. The Forward Association, 27 May 2005. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://forward.com/opinion/3565/a-tradition-of-questioning-tradition/>

[8] “Powerful Photo: College Student ‘Protects’ Police from Ferguson Protestors.” Fox News Insider. FOX News Network, 11 Aug. 2015. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. Web. <http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/08/11/college-student-protects-police-ferguson-protesters-powerful-photo>

[9] Ibid.