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Posted on September 17, 2024

The Provocative Choices of Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice

Guest Post

By Harry Gay

*Spoilers*

Conversations around sexual assault and gaslighting have become high visibility topics in the past few years with several high-profile cases of domestic and systemic abuse. It is within a post-#MeToo climate that films like Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, dip their toes into the miasma of various court cases, legal decisions, celebrity accusations and arguments over memory, consent and power clinging to the air in the last decade. The film attempts to waft its way through, sometimes successfully and other times not.

Blink Twice follows Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawcat), two working-class women invited to tech CEO Slater King’s (Channing Tatum) private island for a seemingly endless summer of debauchery and hedonism. What begins as frivolity soon turns to nightmare as the women on the island discover that they have been violently abused by their male comrades and made to forget these encounters through an amnesiac fluid hidden in their perfume. It is only through violent revenge that they are able to free themselves from their abusers’ clutches, but Frida’s decision to keep King alive as her slave in Blink Twice‘s denouement complicates what is a fairly tight revenge thriller.

Posted on September 10, 2024

Liquid Visions: Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat by Philip Brophy

Guest Post

by Patrick Zaia

Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat was the debut featurette of Australian polymath Philip Brophy. Released in 1988, the film is an experimental and essayistic exploration of the body, specifically the physiological reality of the body as a messy soup of urges, sensations and emissions – “a soft machine” as William Burroughs famously described. When the film premiered at the Sydney Film Festival it proved to be incredibly divisive, with some critics dismissing it as boring and juvenile while others praised Brophy’s project as audacious and fascinating. One of the film’s most notable defenders was the revered critic David Stratton, who vividly described it in the press as “ a film with balls!” Because of its provocative content and polarising character, combined with the film’s relative obscurity, Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat has garnered a thrilling aura of mystique and intrigue in certain circles of underground film and art culture. This alluring spell of anonymity, however, was ruptured roughly a year ago when a copy of the film suddenly surfaced from the tumultuous depths of the internet, appearing (of all places) on the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Finally, Brophy’s fluidic vision of the body is available for public consumption.

Posted on September 7, 2024

Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema, by Thomas M. Puhr

Guest Post

Below are the opening pages of a fascinating 2022 book by Thomas Puhr, Fate in Film, about determinism in film–much of which is horror, including Under the Skin, Hereditary, Midsommar, Us, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, and Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games. We highly recommend.

INTRODUCTION

“You’ve Always Been the Caretaker”

When introducing compatibilism, my undergraduate philosophy professor drew a crude maze on the blackboard with a stick figure at its entrance. She traced the figure’s possible paths with diverging sets of arrows and explained how it had, say, a choice between left or right at a given T-junction (free will), but was prohibited from continuing straight (determinism). As this simple exercise illustrates, compatibilism’s deliciously ambiguous response to whether or not we have free will can be boiled down to: “Well, sort of yes, sort of no.”

Posted on August 19, 2024

Terror In the Eyes: Jaws, Godzilla Minus One and Horror

Guest Post

Kevin Cooney

Godzilla Minus One (2023) altered many fans’ perceptions of the eponymous kaiju. Gone was the childhood joy of watching a man in a rubber suit wreak havoc on meticulous scale models, now overshadowed by a new sense of awe and dread. No longer was the irradiated monster humanity’s savior. Instead, Godzilla emerged anew as a horror villain, a mindless, destructive force with a consistent, murderous, unblinking gaze. However, the human characters have often dominated the conversations about Minus One. Those trauma-laden survivors of war, who must now face the incomprehensible terror of the towering monster, usher Godzilla Minus One back to its horror roots. To understand Minus One’s horror, we need only turn to Jaws (1975) to see how fear and dread reflected in the eyes of characters elicit shock in the viewer.

Posted on July 30, 2024

Horror’s Effaced Protagonists

Guest Post

By JDC Burnhil

What qualifies a protagonist as a protagonist?

The answer may vary depending upon whom we ask, and for what purpose. At one extreme, we find a very simple set of criteria, offered for functional purposes by author Robin D. Laws: “Any figure who the viewer wants to see succeed, both because they empathize with the character and because the character appears early on and in a large number of scenes, qualifies as the protagonist.” These characters “become the focus of our hopes and fears”, making the ups and downs of those characters’ fates impactful to the audience (Laws, ch. 1).

Yet Laws himself acknowledges that others have more rigorous demands for granting “protagonist” status, that “some [sources] argue … that the protagonist is the character responsible for the instigating action that sets the story in motion” (ch. 1) This is by no means the sole or most stringent set of criteria; to give an example from the other extreme, Michael Mackenzie explains why, in one of the two subtypes of giallo film he identifies, he deliberately chooses to not refer to the main characters as protagonists: “… the protagonist is considered to be the primary active force in any dramatic work, propelling the plot forward through their actions … the spectator typically shares the point of view of the protagonist … these conventions do not apply to the main … characters of the F-giallo …” (112-113). Others make the overlapping demand that a protagonist must have agency, and if this is not the case, “Your Story Is About the Wrong Character” (Ashkenazi).

Putting all these together leads to a puzzling picture: a corpus of works that conventional wisdom suggests are written in a “wrong” fashion, about the “wrong characters,” and yet they evoke substantial audience response. After all, it’s unlikely that Mackenzie would have had two dozen F-gialli to write about (228-232), if being centered around a non-“protagonist” had been a barrier to pleasing the audience; the environment from which the giallo emerged saw relentless copying of successes, not of failures.