“My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I'm pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.”
-George A. Romero
"I became a prostitute and walked the streets in low-cut tops and high-heeled shoes owing no one an explanation, and I kept and spent every penny I earned. I hitchhiked, I was raped, I hitchhiked again. I wrote a first novel and published it under my own, clearly female first name, not imagining for a second that when it came out, I’d be continually lectured to about all the boundaries that should never be crossed...I wanted to live like a man, so I lived like a man."
-Virginie Despentes
Art is the most dangerous weapon in any radical's arsenal. I say this a lot, and I try to live by it with my journalism-defying gonzo prose, but no weapon is more radical than cinema. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a camera is a fully automatic assault weapon firing off a million words a second and revolutionaries have long wielded cinema at the powerful with a vengeance.
From Luis Bunuel to Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the steps of Odessa to the Battle of Algiers, cinema's power to obstruct and redefine the zeitgeist in undeniable. It's impact so deadly that counterrevolutionary forces have invested billions perverting its power with the celluloid empire of Hollywood. But radicals persist and the Weinstein Class continues to chase their audience rather than lead them. Sadly however, many radicals do as well.
The biggest problem with radical cinema is the biggest problem with radical anything and that is a severe lack of populism. I love the latest five-hour Dogma diatribe as much as the next pretentious asshole, and I mean every word of that sentence with all my heart, but there is no denying that the avante garde pretty consistently fires its ammunition a mile above your average post-working-class door dasher's head.
With that being said, the recipe for reaching the uninitiated masses isn't to water down the message. It's to deliver it in language too immersively visceral for anyone to ignore. Antonin Artaud once achieved this with his Theater of Cruelty, but George Romero achieved the same results much more recently with good old-fashioned blood and guts.
The American grindhouse has long been a playground for fomenting radical notions among thrill seeking proles with a few bucks to spare and a taste for something right to the point. The high-brow critics call this exploitation cinema and wag their bony fingers at such fare for indulging in spectacle and bad taste and they aren't totally wrong.
The problem is that modern late-capitalist civilization has reduced us all to a slumbering horde of flesh-eating zombies and the spectacle of "bad taste" or transgressing our prescribed bourgeoise sensibilities is the only thing that will ever wake us. I know because it has before and not that long ago. The neon bathed grindhouses of pre-Giuliani Time Square achieved this goal with a rash of garish subcultural revolutions while Godard sold out and every new wave became assimilated into Spielbergian Hollywood dreck.
In no arena is this truer than with the genre of horror cinema which was transformed forever in 1968 with the no-budget, black-and-white, zombie shocker, Night of the Living Dead. Repulsed and possessed by raw footage of urban race riots and the Vietnam War, George Romero decided to use B-movie tropes like braindead monsters and apocalyptic crises to point out how grotesque humanity had become.
Trapped in an isolated farmhouse surrounded by the walking dead, a small cross section of everyday Americans quickly become the most dangerous monsters on screen, torn apart by petty differences like skin color and age. The movie ends with the lone surviving hero, a Black man played by Duane Jones, being gunned down by the National Guard sent to save the people already dead because they refused that Black man's help.
This movie shocked and appalled the studios and the critics but it ignited a revolution of low-budget gore fests with something dangerous to say. Shocking movies like Wes Craven's Last House on the Left and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre practically invented the much-maligned slasher film in an attempt to comprehend the rising tide of violence among Mayberry Americans who cheered on My Lai and Kent State but couldn't seem to grasp the fact that they had invited such demons into their white-picket Lalaland with their imperial sins.
The new American Frankenstein monsters weren't green ghouls held together with stitches and bolts. The new American Frankensteins weren't monsters at all. They were handsome young White men like Ted Bundy who killed their daughters for sport and wholesome reverends like Jim Jones slinging the Gospel with a side of spiked Kool-Aid.
Directors like Wes Craven and John Carpenter responded at the grindhouse and what walked out into the light of day and became a part of the American cultural tapestry wasn't just Michael Myers, it was Laurie Strode and the cult of the final girl.
Much like with Romero's Living Dead, the most radical thing accomplished by the first red wave of American slasher films was to simply shift the roles cinema had assigned us. The heroes of seemingly macho murder films like Halloween and the Texas Chain Saw Massacre weren't cops or cowboys, but teenage girls who survived the sadism of perverted masculinity and lived to tell the tale.
Many of these stories were rife with sexist tropes but what isn't in American culture? The important thing wasn't just that their films convinced white male audiences to identify with women being preyed on by other white men, it was a sense of catharsis given to millions of women and girls who lived in terror beneath a culture that had long rendered them voiceless and invisible prey, walking through poorly lit parking garages with their keys clutched tightly between their fingers.
It is not a coincidence that the horror movie genre has a significantly larger female audience than the often equally violent action film genre. It is also not a coincidence that the most radical among these films continue to be condemned by mainstream society as the most unforgivably offensive films committed to celluloid.
I speak of the so-called rape/revenge genre long reviled by pedophile coddling critics who unironically seem to have a much easier time identifying with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski than a girl with a gun and a man on her back. These stories go back to Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring but exploded out of the 1970s with the early films of Wes Craven like Last House on the Left and the Hills Have Eyes.
These early revenge sagas largely delt with family retribution and the fine line between conventional society and unhinged savagery, but the template would eventually evolve into a story arc where a female victim of sexual violence becomes the protagonist of the narrative by surviving the unsurvivable and confronting their abusers directly without the aid or even the permission of a matriarchal legal system.
As a transgender victim childhood sexual abuse, I found my pain validated in these supposedly exploitative stories of explicit sexual violence and I also found myself in the ferocious eyes of many different kinds of survivors, from the daughter of a rape victim who gave birth to her child in prison after slaying one of her attackers in Lady Snowblood to a mute molestation survivor sold into sexual slavery in Thriller: A Cruel Picture.
These movies and others like them were banned by supposedly progressive social democracies across Europe and protested by second wave feminist gadflies but their impact as well as the impact of slasher films and splatter flicks more generally has slowly come full circle and flooded the arthouse as well as the matinee with buckets of blood.
This high artistic reproach to shock cinema began in the late nineties and early 2000s with an equally reviled wave of boldly transgressive cinema in Europe labeled the New French Extremity by its appalled detractors. These films, modern classics like Irreversible, Trouble Every Day and Romance, became notorious for pushing the envelope on the acceptable amount of sex, violence, and sexual violence allowed in ostensibly arthouse films, but many of them were defined by intimate explorations of femininity and sexuality using the storybook of the American grindhouse, and many of its directors were women.
Thus, you had sex worker turned feminist academic Virginie Despentes' and porn star Coralie Trinh Thi's 2000 shocker Baise-Moi (French for 'Fuck Me'), based on Despentes' novel of the same name, in which not only are the protagonists brutally abused sex workers, but they carry out their revenge using the sexual violence of their attackers against largely random men before ending up drowning in a bottomless abyss of nihilism as the camera lingers with an unflinchingly sadistic female gaze.
It was a shocking and downright repulsive spectacle, but it was necessary to kick down the door for women and other marginalized genders by daring to weaponize horror cinema.
Directors like Julia Ducournau who has boldly explored the outer limits of the female body with Cronenbergian masterpieces like 2016's Raw and 2021's Titane, and Coraline Fargeat, whose explicitly feminist rape/revenge masterwork, Revenge (2017), set the stage for her 2023 Academy Award nominated indictment on showbiz sexism, The Substance, which also gleefully toyed with its own monster movie campiness like a grindhouse drag show. All a part of a much larger revolution uniting the arthouse with the grindhouse while giving Marvel a run for its money.
I can't help but to believe that George Romero and Virgine Despentes are owed a debt of gratitude for creating a market for horror movies as far-out and downright avante garde as Begonia, Mandy, Antichrist, Skinamarink, and Backrooms, not to mention opening up the playing field for distinctly Queer directors like Jane Schoenbrun and Rose Glass, telling our stories, drenched in our blood, on the grindhouse walls. But we can go so much further. We can break the rest of the rules too.
For at the end of the day, this blog post itself is a rape/revenge story. One in which the raped doesn't just include Catholic transgirls but Palestinian women and Zaydi children. One in which revenge means bringing the gore of the American Empire home and using it to convert passive observers into fully engaged participants forced to choose between the predators who rule them and the final girls who can castrate the powerful and leave them bleeding in a ditch with a little help from a sympathetic audience no longer afforded the privilege of standing by until the credits roll.
Let the seas run red with the blood of the unavenged. Let the undead revolt and inherit the earth. It's time to tell the stories they don't want you to here and this time you can't just tell yourself 'It's only a movie' because this time it's right outside your door.
Be afraid, dearest motherfuckers, be very afraid.
Blood, Guts, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post
* Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush
* You Have Killed Me by Morrissey
* I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill
* I Blame Myself by Sky Ferreira
* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads
* Rape Me by Nirvana
* Oblivion by Grimes
* Me and a Gun by Tori Amos
* Jennifer's Body by Hole
* Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl by Yeule
No comments:
Post a Comment