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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • It Follows

    I like that it’s such a simple concept for a horror movie, but it’s still highly engaging for the audience.

    spoiler

    Early on in the movie, it (quite literally) teaches you a set of rules that the monster operates by, and the rest of the film feels almost like an interactive game.

    • the monster is a shapeshifter
    • it has stack (as in the data structure) of targets
    • it’s always walking straight towards the target at the top of the stack (peek())
    • the target can have sex with someone else to make them the new target (push())
    • if the target at the top of the stack dies, the previous target is the target again (pop())

    Beyond that, the writing and cinematography just let the audience play along. The characters are deliberating their plans on how they would deal with the monster, letting you also think about what you would do in their situation. And the camera likes to slowly pan around the people talking so that all the while, the audience is scanning the background looking for the monster. It can look like anyone, and they constantly, and deliberately put extras in the background walking directly toward the camera just to make you go “oh shit! Is that it right there? Hey, pay attention, we need to move!”

    It’s just such a fun, unique experience. I don’t know of another horror movie experience quite like it.
















  • If you don’t like something, that’s fine. They made the product they want, they’re free to do that, and you’re free to not like it.

    Just know that art has always driven social discussion, and it’s always been met with heavy social opposition, just usually in the form of outright censorship. So historically artists had to be subtle in order to be critical without being censored. In order to see more edgy stuff you had to go to small, barely funded art house shows.

    But then the internet happened, and suddenly artists weren’t beholden to a small number of elite entertainment corporations. Art containing more openly progressive ideas can now be shared directly with the masses, the masses are now preferring progressive ideals more than ever before, and naturally corporations making entertainment products now have a financial incentive to cater to that demographic (often called “virtue signaling”). Today you see a mix of corporate pandering and actual art, even within the development teams of a mainstream product like Dragon Age or Disney. Some messaging feels honest, others feel ham fisted because it’s pride month.

    But the censorship of the pre-internet days existed for a reason. A lot of people feel uncomfortable seeing things that challenge their status quo. People tend to seek comfort, and they just want their entertainment to leave them be. But now that corporate censors are less of a barrier, and now that progressive ideals are proliferating, the people themselves are backlashing. They say things like, “it’s way too much woke agenda, I’m tired of it. I want to watch a show without having the story be about woke issues.” I think that’s also normal.

    I think the backlash is two fold: On the one hand, real art challenges the viewer, which can be exhausting when you just want to be entertained before you get a few hours of sleep and go back to work in the morning. But on the other hand, you do have what offen feels like a disengenuous layer of progressive pandering coming from corporations that you never saw before. And no one likes being pandered to, let alone not being pandered to.

    I think this corporate pandering towards progressive ideals is new, the terms we use to describe everything are definitely new, but the tendency for art to expose people to progressive ideals and the tendency for the masses to be conservative and resist change are as old as humanity. And I view the two as a social evolutionary yin and yang, keeping each other in check.