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GrandpaPants posted:One thing that I heard over at NPR is that the box of photos may not have processed as a "She's in on it" realization because it may have manifested as a "gently caress, I'm a fetish object" fear that underlies many interracial relationships. It was a perspective that I didn't think about, but I thought was interesting. It's actually the other way around. The movie is not about about the real-world threat of body-snatching surgery cults. Chris' girlfriend 'merely' has a fetish, but he processes this as her being part of an international conspiracy. The film literalizes Chris' irrational fantasies about 'becoming white' - that getting a better career, marrying into wealth (and so-on) will compromise his 'essential blackness' and turn him into just another white dude. Chris sincerely believes that 'selling out' in the photography world is as bad as getting Trayvon Martin'd. Of course he's being blinkered and self-important. The truth is that Chris retreats into conspiracy theory as an alternative to class consciousness. The entire ending of the film is this blue pill/red pill false dichotomy between remaining subordinate to 'the man' (the police car) or perceiving the world as a reptilian vampire conspiracy (the nutty friend's car). Shouldn't the response to his friend's "I told you so!" be that, no, he got it wrong? The women were not hypnotizing men into having depraved sex orgies. What if we choose neither car? What happened to Andre? The unfortunate thing, in most responses to the film, is that the Chris character is understood in this apolitical, apsychological way. He's just 'the good guy' passively reacting to what's in front of him, even at the end. He's not understood as fighting for anything, even though he inherently is. To the point: the film does not satirize liberalism. It straightforwardly dramatizes a conflict within liberalism, between 'hip' Obama supporters and 'lame' Obama supporters (aka Hillary supporters). Meanwhile, the working class - i.e. grandma and grandpa - are lying dead at the side of the road.
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Mar 13, 2017 19:05
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Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:[wide-eyed and tonguing my vampire fangs] Grandma and grandpa, despite being 'secretly white' are still treated exactly like black servants. The confusion as to what race they are - "I'm the dude playing a dude disguised as another dude." - is a distraction from their class. Chris' reaction when this servant starts crying is to dismiss her as crazy. He later doesn't understand why she reacts badly to losing her home and job.
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Mar 13, 2017 19:36
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Hat Thoughts posted:By Chris "selling out" do u mean that Stephen Root (being an admittedly talentless photographer but wealthy/succesful art dealer) taking him over would suggest that he became a white wealthy talentless guy? In the logic of the film, he would literally have the brain of a white person, losing his talent in the process. Chris believes, to some extent, that his talent comes from his blackness. It's important to keep in mind the photographs in those early scenes. It's fairly generic 'urban' imagery: a pigeon flying between skyscrapers, a chained pitbull in front of a brick wall, a vulnerable child on a city sidewalk.... Chris fears that, in making too much money, he will lose the ability to capture these things. Moreover, he would be producing inauthentic images for 'the man'. The truth is, of course, that Chris was 'a sellout' from the beginning, making his modest success with palatable images of children and animals. Like, those are what he uses to convey 'the black experience': children and animals. Think about that for a second. Chris absolutely doesn't fear going unrecognized or unappreciated - white liberals eat this stuff up. What he's afraid of being embraced by the wrong people and, moreover, that he will like it.
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Mar 13, 2017 23:36
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i am the bird posted:Chris is black; ipso facto, his photography is about 'the black experience.' Cool cool cool. Great point. No, the film itself is doing that. My oppositional reading of the film follows two steps. The first is to highlight the subjective nature of the events. The sunken place is not real; it is a nightmare hallucination where Chris imagines himself reduced to a disembodied gaze while his mind 'turns white'. Chris himself believes in this ineradicable black essence, the source of his power, which is synonymous from the 'eye' that Root wishes to obtain. The second step is to point out that Chris is wrong. There is no essence that's being repressed; he simply imagines it. The fear of 'turning mentally white' is actually his fear of becoming upper-class, being embraced by these lame old people. Put together: the film is about a mediocre artist who fears that success will expose him as a hack, so he escapes into the fantasy of a mind-control conspiracy - the same way he escapes the truth of his responsibility for his mother's death by fantasizing that the TV 'entranced' him. The discomfort of the party scene is specifically that these idiots genuinely want to be his friend, and he's going to have to interact with them regularly. The idea that they're all villainous cultists comes as a relief.
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Mar 14, 2017 04:03
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:"Tribalism" is just as likely to promote cooperation and trade. Tribalism, for example, is useful socially when you can use it to join two peoples together through a series of marriages. Racism specifically originates from justifying inequity. It's a reification of an advantageous social and economic arrangement. What stokes racism is arguably irrational, but you can track the development of racism over the past half millenium and it's remarkably consistent despite the fluidity of its categories. It's important for people understand the terms they're using, otherwise you have people calling antiracism 'racist' because egalitarianism is insufficiently multicultural - which gets things backwards. Multiculturalism has always been a decaf alternative to true equality. Or, as you've addressed, you have the conflation of racism with tribalism or basic prejudice. Prejudgment happens all the time, but Racism is a specific ideology, which originated as a justification for the slave trade. There was no racism before the concept of race. That's why we specify 'racial prejudice', to distinguish it from other sorts. Also, it's worth noting that 'reverse racism' does not exist except in the sense that, for example, white liberals praise other races for their beautiful cultural practices and so-on, while remaining ignorant or indifferent to injustice, inequality.
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Mar 14, 2017 21:40
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UFOTofuTacoCat posted:I do have one goonsay question about the movie: When Chris is watching the briefing video by Grandpa, Grandpa says that he tested/perfected the procedure on his own flesh and blood and and shows a shot of the whole family. What are we supposed to believe about that? It's exactly what he says: the nuclear family is itself not 'natural', was a creation of the patriarch(y). The inconsistency is, however, an ideological symptom. Why do only the working-class conservative characters appear as freakish mixed-race abominations, with mismatched bodies, prominent scars, and a weakness to light? Simply because Chris has less sympathy for them. Whatever bad the white Hillary supporters may do, they remain less alien to him. It's the same as asking what happened to Andre. If we take the film's plot to its logical conclusion, the last scene should have been Chris and Rod flashing Andre so that he can join their avengers initiative. However, if this were to happen, the metaphoric narrative of the film would break down completely. Chris' and Rod's worldview depends on them being dismissed as crazy - the idea that they're powerless against a vast conspiracy is, again, comforting. But the truth is that Rod blatantly savotaged himself when he went to the cops. He could have simply said that he found the missing person, and the cops would quickly discover that Mr. Logan King is suddenly twenty years younger, and the wrong race. That's got to look like some sort of fraud. And what happened to the original white Logan? It's going to look like the wife did a murder. The truth is that there never was a 'white version' of Logan. There was only ever one character - Andre/Logan is listed in the credits as Andrew Logan King. One name.
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Mar 15, 2017 16:27
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Annointed posted:SMG they're rich as gently caress white folk literally silent bidding on Chris' body in a slave auction. The auction scene is intercut with Chris describing how he's been having weird thoughts ever since his hypnosis. This visual storytelling conveys that the auction is 'just' another weird thought - that Chris felt like he was being put up for auction. The old people are certainly rich and racist, but the point of the film is that Chris can only make sense of these bad things in terms of conspiracy theory. The idea that there is a grand conspiracy is more comforting than the reality that racism is systemic, and that these individual people are merely well-meaning idiots.
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Mar 15, 2017 18:21
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Annointed posted:Chris went through the gauntlet of white people fetishizing him and could have been in serious trouble with the cop in one of the first scenes. Yes? Those characters are racist in a boring, familiar way that Chris has learned to put up with. There's no shocking subversion here, where the white people are revealed to be racist. When the one guest asks 'is it true what they say?', we all instantly know exactly what she means. The fact that these people are racist is the basic premise. The expectation that they will be racist is established in one of the earliest lines of dialogue. People are celebrating the film's premise that racism exists, and missing there's a whole surreal film after that. This entire film is about how the protagonist attempts to combat racism, and that's where it gets loopy.
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Mar 15, 2017 18:53
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2ill posted:No, that's wrong. Chris is actually up for auction, he is actually bought and sold, he is actually captured, and that old man is actually lobotomized with the intention of actually taking control of his body and making Chris a passenger in his own brain, rarely or barely in control. In fact, Chris doesn't even see the auction. It's one of the few scenes shot entirely outside of his perspective and he goes entirely uninformed by it. The Brian O'Blivion reference should have clued you in that "your reality is already half video hallucination. If you're not careful, it will become total hallucination." We're talking about a film where the protagonist travels to an alternate dimension inside the floor and so-on. The dialogue outright states that Chris is questioning his reality after the hypnosis, and the formal qualities of the film back this up. The film even includes the cliche "it's a in his head" ending - where all the evidence of the gremlin on the wing is conveniently destroyed & there are no other eyewitnesses. The only twist is that, instead of being sent to the loony bin, he willingly jumps into the car with his loony friend.
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Mar 15, 2017 21:02
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TheHan posted:Except for Andre, who was definitely kidnapped and definitely had his brain scooped. To say that it's all in his head would completely invalidate a large part of the commentary, as any criticism of white people could be dismissed as Chris's paranoia. The idea is that these are actual things whites people do taken to the ultimate extreme, not "niggas be crazy". Chris is already dismissed as paranoid - that's the whole point of the ending - and, in fact, he is paranoid. The fact that he's paranoid is independent of whether or not there actually is a conspiracy. Note how Chris is pathologically jealous before even finding out that his girlfriend cheated. This example is straight out of Zizek: "recall Lacan's outrageous statements that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological." The same is true of the paranoia. Even if Chris's claims are factual, his paranoia is still pathological because it represses the true reason that he needed there to be a conspiracy - to sustain his liberal-ideological position. Keep in mind that it cannot all be in his head. Pure ideology is impossible. And, again, the film begins with the premise that racism does exist. The film is about 'a man who goes crazy', but it's also very much about the forces that made him go crazy. The same is true of The Terminator. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Mar 15, 2017 |
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Mar 15, 2017 22:54
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Groovelord Neato posted:in the fictional world of the film, the silent auction actually occurs. The 'sunken place' is presented as equally (un)real as Chris' memory of his mother's death, or anything else that happens. The film depicts a reality: Chris' reality. This reality is different from that of (for example) the cops, who are presented as incapable of perceiving things the same way. When Chris struggles to articulate his bad feelings about this trip, we cut to people silently plotting against him. That's the logic of the film. We see Chris' world, but truth is what cuts across the multitude of worlds. It's necessary to do the difficult task of seeing things from the perspective of 'Grandma Georgina'.
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Mar 15, 2017 23:55
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JawnV6 posted:At no point does Chris interact with cops either. I did not write that the cops interact with Chris. I wrote that they are presented as incapable of understanding Chris' perspective. That is the point of the ending.
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Mar 16, 2017 01:30
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Groovelord Neato posted:but they are mostly incapable. The fact that racism exists is, again, a basic premise of the film. We encounter an unambiguously racist cop in the first ten minutes. It's part of the setting: 2017 America. The actual film is about how the protagonist understands and attempts to combat racism. Compare these two phrases: A) "The war on terror is racist." B) "The war on terror is racist because jet fuel can't melt steel beams." Which one is more accurate?
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Mar 16, 2017 02:26
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Groovelord Neato posted:that isn't analogous to anything i said. You replied with 'but police are racist in real life', which is a non sequitur - unless your point is that the film (about a conspiracy by white people to make themselves 'cool' by transplanting their brains into the bodies of virile black men) is simply realistic - simply real. Even then, I've already implicitly asked you to define 'realism'. The trouble here is, again, that Chris is being automatically approached as an apolitical and apsychological figure - a 'rational actor' of sorts, who sees things as they really objectively are. That's to say that he's unlike the ideological baddies (whose vision is 'distorted by prejudice') or the ignorant muggles. Of course, what I've just outlined is the opinion of Stephen Root's character - his idea that blackness gives Chris a superior 'eye'. He's not like those white dummies; he's inherently better because he's 'from the streets', or something. Root is, of course, a genuine reverse racist. I, on the other hand, interpret Chris as being a human. He's flawed. He's a liberal who perceives black conservatives as freakish aliens, for example. He's jealous, paranoid, self-important, a conspiracy theorist, and not especially great at his job. That's the fun of the film, given that it's not the least bit scary: the character study. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Mar 16, 2017 |
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Mar 16, 2017 04:48
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RBA Starblade posted:Actually, the twist at the end of the episode is that the damage is visible and the narration makes it clear that it is real. In the film, it's even more explicit with claw marks seen by maintenance crew. Well no; Nightmare At 20,000 Feet is not about the threat evil gremlins pose to our nation's aircraft. It's about a harried buisinessman, recovering from an earlier nervous breakdown, choosing to quit his job and leave his wife rather than go back to 'the way things were'. The ending narration is a sort of forced 'have the cake and eat it too' resolution that establishes the possibility that the wife and job will bend to accommodate his new personality. We can even read it as the protagonist's own internal monologue. Unoriginal Name posted:The idea that Chris is afraid of white people influencing black people into losing their "blackness" is pretty clearly true, even if their method of doing so is presented in a very literal and terrifying sense. Andrew Logan very obviously stands for Chris' fear of what he will become after twenty years of marriage. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Mar 16, 2017 |
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Mar 16, 2017 23:19
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i am the bird posted:And this is just loving crazy. The film itself directly links Trayvon Martin (the opening scene) to fear of becoming a lame retiree (Andrew Logan). In the fantasy of the film, Martin never died; he just moved to Florida and took up lawn bowling.
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Mar 16, 2017 23:28
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Hmm. The most/only disturbing part is the film's reduction of the 'authentic blacks' to a series of interchangeable Facebook selfies - whereas the 'fake blacks' are idiosyncratic but allergic to smartphones.
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Mar 17, 2017 03:47
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Magic Hate Ball posted:SMG's "thing" is presenting his opinion as fact and being extremely standoffish (K Waste as well, but not as intense and with more bro phrases). No; my "thing" is writing truthfully and accurately. I am very upfront about this. Everything I have written in this thread is both true and accurate. If I have written anything inaccurate or false, it should be very easy for you to point it out.
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Mar 17, 2017 13:22
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UFOTofuTacoCat posted:https://twitter.com/JordanPeele/status/842541070151897088 "This utter passivity is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active, self-positing subjects - it is the ultimate perverse fantasy, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the Other's (Matrix's) jouissance, sucked out of our life-substance like batteries. [...] This is how we should turn around the state of things presented by the film: what the film renders as the scene of our awakening into our true situation, is effectively its exact opposition, the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being." -Zizek I'd been working up to the Matrix comparison in my posts; Matrix is likewise a libertarian film about a troupe of conspiracy theorists fighting the reptilian plot. Like Morpheus in Matrix, Chris needs the fantasy of his utter powerlessness as an escape from authentic freedom - freedom as responsibility. "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer." The idea that there is an 'Other Of The Other' (a grand conspiracy) is a retreat from the truth that the Big Other doesn't exist.
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Mar 17, 2017 14:05
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:You're right, that doesn't sound standoffish at all My truthfulness and accuracy is consistently, immediately, perceived as a grave danger. You should ask yourself why you feel this way.
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Mar 17, 2017 15:29
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:no it isn't. I asserted that everything I have written in this thread is both true and accurate. That's a pretty basic statement. I am being truthful. I am not engaged in deceit. In response to this, you immediately declared me unfriendly. Why do you feel that I am unfriendly?
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Mar 17, 2017 16:26
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Because you routinely act like a tedious prick who considers everyone beneath you. I do not consider anyone beneath me. I am neither above nor beneath. I do not actually exist.
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Mar 17, 2017 16:39
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Unoriginal Name posted:Your assertion that something is true does not make it the truth. If I have written anything inaccurate or false, it should be very easy for you to point it out.
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Mar 17, 2017 17:06
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Lord_Magmar posted:See the problem with this is if anyone did try to point out that you've written anything inaccurate or false you would turn around and explain exactly why their interpretation of your writing is inaccurate and false and thus you yourself remain completely truthful and accurate, because anyone suggesting you are anything but are clearly wrong and have failed to understand your explanation/meaning effectively. You lack confidence. You fear that others will not understand what you do - or, worse, that they will understand it too well. I do not share this fear. Unoriginal Name posted:It is not possible for us to judge the accuracy of your stated opinions regarding a movie. If that is the case, then I have routinely accomplished the impossible.
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Mar 17, 2017 18:46
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Groovelord Neato posted:you were wrong about the twilight zone episode. Well no; for that to be the case, you would have to successfully argue for the objective existence of evil gremlins. So, in an exemplary case of life imitating art, you find yourself pointing to the marks on the plane and saying "see?! Look at these markings! Only a gremlin could have created marks like these! Don't you see?!" Plus: you heard a disembodied voice - and this voice reassured you that, though you might sound crazy now, history will vindicate you. I did not bring up Nightmare At 20000 Feet arbitrarily. The title tells you explicitly that it's a dream - a nightmare. And a nightmare is, by definition, the horrific realization of a fantasy. Get Out is likewise a film depicting a nightmare scenario. It is explicitly Chris's nightmare - the realization of Chris' fantasies - fantasies of his own powerlessness, of his girlfriend's infidelity, of his 'selling out', of his losing his essence and 'becoming white', and so-on. And like the protagonist of Nightmare, Chris chooses to remain asleep because he sees no other alternative. He only perceives two choices: red pill or blue pill - returning to the oppressive normalcy or retreating into fantasy. The tragedy of the film is that Chris cannot imagine a third choice.
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Mar 18, 2017 23:56
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Annointed posted:"A terrifying or very unpleasant experience or prospect." Well no, Webster; you haven't actually provided an alternate definition. You've only (over)simplified the definition that I've already used, by omitting the reason why a nightmare is terrifying/unpleasant. You know, the psychology. Again, there is a concerted effort to render Chris apsychological and apolitical. People believe Chris does not have fantasies. It's frankly a bizarre objectification.
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Mar 19, 2017 01:53
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I am the ultimate killing machine.
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Mar 19, 2017 01:56
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King Vidiot posted:Nightmare at 20000 Feet, sorry to tell you this, involves a literal gremlin who literally bites through the engine of a plane. The episode ends with an inspection of the plane where they find claw and scratch marks. [...] Saying that a fantastical situation in a fantasy or horror or sci-fi movie is "in a character's head" is the laziest, base-level reading you can make and doesn't really add anything to the understanding of the work. You've made a mistake here. I've already written that it is not all in Chris' head. He is reacting to actual horrific things, but badly. Understand that my reading is based on hundreds of horror films, each depicting a variation on the same basic narrative: The Terminator: a homeless veteran convinces a waitress that robots are secretly out to get her. All the evidence is destroyed, and she goes 'off the grid' because the cops think she's crazy. William Friedkin's Bug: a homeless veteran convinces a waitress that robots are secretly out to get her. There is no evidence. The cops think they're crazy. They immolate themselves. The Matrix: the internet convinces an office worker that robots are secretly out to get him. He goes 'off the grid' and vows to find evidence. The cops think he's a crazed terrorist. Nightmare At 20,000 Feet: a businessman is convinced a gremlin is secretly out to get him. The cops think he's crazy, and he's sent to an institution. The evidence remains unrecognized at the end. The Autopsy Of Jane Doe: a father and son are convinced a witch has sent zombies to get them. They die, and the witch uses magic to erase all the zombie evidence. The cops conclude that the family went crazy and did a murder-suicide. Devil's Due: a man is convinced that a cult is secretly out to get his pregnant wife. The wife is killed, then the cult steals the baby and destroys all the evidence. The cops arrest the man for his wife's murder, concluding that he went crazy. The Blair Witch Project: some kids are convinced a witch is out to get them. After they disappear, the police drop the investigation because the evidence shows nothing. A movie studio makes a paranormal documentary about the event. You can go on like this. In every case, people are fighting this evil conspiracy, but all the evidence is conveniently destroyed, suppressed, or not yet uncovered. Now, my reading of these films is based on dialectical synthesis: Thesis: there is a gremlin. Antithesis: gremlins don't actually exist. Synthesis: the gremlin is there despite not actually existing. i.e. the gremlin exists insofar as people believe that it does. The gremlin theory - like any conspiracy theory - provides a minimal amount of 'cognitive mapping' to make sense of why bad things happen to good people, and planes fall from the sky, etc. This is the point in practically every horror film. Chris is reacting to something out there - something genuinely evil - but he doesn't fully understand what it is. He can't wrap his head around it. Racism is horrific, but Chris retreats from the true horror of racism by escaping into a more comfortable conspiracy narrative. The true horror is that there is no conspiracy. These bad people that Chris killed genuinely cared about him. They wanted to be his friend. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Mar 19, 2017 |
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Mar 19, 2017 08:46
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HellCopter posted:You can apply "it didn't really happen" to nearly 80% of fiction. You have become confused. I did not write "it didn't really happen." I wrote that something did happen, but that this something is presented to us in a highly subjective way. The gulf between the objective and subjective is the entire point of Get Out. The cops just can't understand what it's like to be black. "The sunken place means we're marginalized!" Peele is straightforwardly arguing that the 'sunken place' - marginalization - is real. The conceit of the film is that the magic hypnosis causes Chris to perceive 'the sunken place' as a literal alternate dimension outside objective reality. So, put simply: Chris's post-hypnotic hallucinations are 'more real' than the banal normalcy of the party. Chris now experiences his particular situation as horrific, and (in horror movie terms) goes through a very messy breakup with his girlfriend. Chris' altered state of mind 'frees' him from his decent job and his cozy apartment, so now he can go 'off the grid' and become an anti-cult terrorist or whatever. It's a Fight Club narrative. It's a Terminator narrative. All the films listed are very different. In Terminator, the evil robots are 'real' but can only be perceived by schizophrenics. In Bug, there are no actual robots; the characters are 'merely' sciziophrenic, reacting badly to basic social and economic hardships. The point of viewing these films in tandem is to demonstrate how they take different approaches to an identical topic: capitalism, madness, the nature of reality, etc. The robots are real despite not actually existing. Bug is simply a more-bleak Terminator with a detached perspective, where the robots beat the schizophrenics in the end. sean10mm posted:SMG: The white people were the real victims in Get Out! You have poor reading comprehension. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Mar 19, 2017 |
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Mar 19, 2017 17:18
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Vegetable posted:This movie is a thing of marvel for making people cheer for a TSA agent "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you can now see Catherine Keener had to die; she was going to use her enchanted teacup to send my client to the Ghost Dimension. She's like a witch, or something." The entire movie is about tricking audiences into supporting really stupid ideas.
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Mar 19, 2017 18:16
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JawnV6 posted:Why does Rose call her white-assimilated ex-boyfriend who aspired to be their gardener Grandpa? As the father explained earlier in the film, the family kept Walter and Georgina around after the actual grandparents died, to fill the void. Walter thus became Rose's surrogate grandpa. (In other words, incest subtext.)
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Mar 19, 2017 18:52
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800peepee51doodoo posted:OK so you're back to the "it was actually all in the protaganist's mind No; Rose literally slept with Walter because he was a professional runner, like her grandpa was. It was literally a way for her to keep her grandpa alive.
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Mar 19, 2017 21:07
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" fan theory bullshit.
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800peepee51doodoo posted:By scooping out his brain and surgically implanting her grandfather's brain, literally transferring his personality into Walter's body. If you are saying that this did not happen and that it is the delusional perception of Chris, then you are literally saying "its all in his mind, maaaaan" and flying off into idiot fan theory nonsense. That's the most boring analysis possible. No; it is not all in Chris' mind. The Rod character perceives events in roughly the same way, although he sees a mind-control sex cult - not a body-snatching immortality cult. So it's in multiple characters' minds, and they all disagree in subtle (and no-so-subtle) ways. Are you familiar with Rashomon? The vital fact is that no two characters perceive the events in the same way - not even Chris and Rod. It's like the gulf between 9/11 Truthers who believe the the government used cruise missiles disguised as planes vs. 9/11 Truthers who believe the government used real planes supplemented by thermite charges planted inside the buildings. These theories are reality for millions of people. But all these 9/11 Truthers struggle with the actual truth that the US government was somewhat responsible for the attacks, but unintentionally. There was no illuminati/reptilian plot. The attacks happened not because the government controlled everything, but precisely because they were not in control. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Mar 19, 2017 |
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Mar 19, 2017 22:54
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Martman posted:I think SMG has found a weird way to say "movies use metaphors" that just triggers people hard. It's his teacup. It's even more basic than that: People use metaphors. Chris and Rod (and all the other characters) think metaphorically. This is why Rose calls her ex-boyfriend '(grand)daddy'. As someone pointed out earlier, Rod blatently uses his semi-serious jokes about 'white lady sex cults' to express his jealousy over Chris' relationship. He legitimately fears that Chris will choose Rose over bros, and stop hanging out with him - so Rod's subtly trying to sabotage things with his comments. And the thing is that he's not even entirely conscious of what he's doing. Rid really does believes in illuminati sex cults - but this belief came from somewhere. Rose is, likewise, not entirely conscious of the fact that her fetish for black men is just a 'safe' expression of her more taboo fantasy of loving her family members (that's the dark twist on the phrase "black people are like family to us"). But to Chris and Rod, of course, Rose doesn't even have a fetish. They perceive her as an asexual, insectile predator with no personality of her own, whose only motivation is to ensnare men with 'marketable' body types. (Yes, they're a bit misogynistic.) So when Rose accuses Rod of trying to seduce her, we can safely say she actually believes it. She's simply mistaken Rod's desire for Chris as a desire for her. But, because Rod is a misogynist, he perceives Rose as this calculating bitch mastermind. This is not a flaw in the movie; they've done a good job creating these deep, layered characters with complex interrelationships. The problem is that this complexity doesn't translate into any political - antiracist - point. People just double down on their prexisting beliefs, and you end up with the claims ITT that a disbelief in chemtrails is racist.
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Mar 20, 2017 01:19
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800peepee51doodoo posted:Well, I'm not sure that it can say anything meaningful about racism if the white people aren't doing something nefarious because the alternative is that some black guy flipped out and murdered a family because he felt uncomfortable at a party. The true horror is exactly that: that racism has caused Chris to lose his sanity. The horror is that the true threat is so pervasive, so monolithic, that he can only lash out at bad targets. The horror is that, if the film is accepted uncritically, - as Hundu notes - it is strongly against race-mixing.
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Mar 20, 2017 04:09
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Bill Dungsroman posted:Things you do to your friends: Racism is an ideology. It is not caused by demonic subhumans who murder for fun. That's a fantasy. Nice people perpetuate racism. The opening scene sets the psychological groundwork for the film. It establishes Chris' anxiety: "do they know I'm black?" He fears being chased out of the neighbourhood by orthodox klan-style racists. That's a twist. The title has a double-meaning, as highlighted by the deliberately-misleading billboard ads.  The entire point of the film is that Chris actually does belong in the neighborhood, welcomed by the racists with open arms. They welcome him into their home, give him approval to date their daughter, and offer him a job. His black friends are the ones who tell him to resist temptation and get out. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Mar 20, 2017 |
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Mar 20, 2017 16:37
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If you believe that you can't be racist because you're a nice person, then you are the target of the movie's satire. If you saw the movie and still don't realize this, that's a clear indication that the movie has failed in some way.
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Mar 20, 2017 16:52
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Bill Dungsroman posted:But that isn't Chris. It's the other guy. You're getting confused. "It's all real" vs "it's all in his head" is a pseudodebate invented by people who aren't reading carefully. My point is neither of those things. My point is that it's all in a movie. In the movie, the opening scene sets the tone. Then you get a short opening credits sequence, and then we go to a scene of Chris feeling anxious. The formal qualities of the film - in this case, the editing - link these two scenes. We in the audience are put in suspense by the opening scene, so that we feel Chris's suspense about meeting the parents. In the later scene, Andre stands for Chris' fear of what marriage will do to him. The Andre's character's entire role in the film is be this sort of urban legend that haunts Chris. "Did you hear about what happened to Andre? He was walking through the suburbs and some Klansman grabbed him." "Did you hear about what happened to Andre? He married a white lady and now he acts like a zombie." The message to Chris is consistently "don't be like Andre". Andre himself is less a fully-fledged character than he is Goofus-like negative example, a Wile E. Coyote surviving endless mishaps.
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Mar 20, 2017 17:34
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HellCopter posted:If this is all a made-up conspiracy taking place inside Chris' head, what do you make of the scene where he is literally strapped to a chair while the antagonists explain their literal evil plan to him? 1) The conspiracy is not all in Chris' head. It's in Chris', Rod's head, and your head. 2) Rose explains what happened, from her perspective: Chris got all paranoid and stormed out of the house. Rod believes she's lying, but that is only his perspective. The Basement is literally the same as The Sunken Place. Chris is trapped, motionless, staring at a tiny screen. Like The Sunken Place, the Basement is subjectively real, but not objectively real. It's alien abduction imagery, satanic panic imagery. The ending of the film is literally Chris breaking out of the Sunken Place - which is not an objectively-real place, but a state of mind. It's his rebirth as a conspiracy theorist.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:19
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800peepee51doodoo posted:You're gonna have to derive that equation, professor. Hundu and I are not joking. The film straightforwardly depicts Rod's strong stance against dating white women. "I told you so!" The monsters in the film are literally abominable Frankenstein'd mixtures of white and black parts. (This entire sci-fi plot is taken from the second Hammer Frankenstein movie.) SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Mar 20, 2017 |
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Mar 20, 2017 18:23
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