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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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I agree with you but it's not confined to the online right, at least in a different context than literature. Moralism has infected horror movies with fervor lately. All logic and/or narrative is thrown out the window in favor of making sure the point of the movie is stamped onto the screen in big bold letters.

Take "The Substance" there are massive leaps of logic and narrative flaws that abound but, because the movie has a message, it's acceptable and celebrated. It often reminds me of Yud's Universal Fire. "Who cares if it doesn't make sense this story has magic and monsters." Whether it's laziness or a lower bar horror has just become mostly this now. There was a horror movie that I quite liked a few years ago called Relic that essentially just gave up at the end and had a sequence that made no sense so they could spell out what the meaning of the movie was and it almost ruined the entire thing for me because the narrative itself completely collapsed at the very least so they could stamp the message of the movie on the screen for idiots.

I feel bad saying that this is kind of a sexes thing but it kind of is and I don't mean to say that women are bad at making horror movies, they usually make 2/3 of a great horror movie and then the last third is a muddled mess that could probably be saved but because people aren't willing to criticize them about this and the breadth and depth of horror movies sucking beyond this is unimaginable to people who don't follow the genre, then the movies keep spiraling into deeper and deeper into "no plot, only message" until we get something like the Substance where it's filmed and presented like a David Lynch movie except where every single metaphor/motivation/symbolic thing is cudgeled into your brain rather than being mysterious or even hiding the story.

I think it started in earnest with how well the Babadook was received and even though it's a woman writer/director I don't put it on that movie, the fact that the story can be a metaphor is one thing, the problem arises when it's literally the only thing it can be because every other possibility has been burned to the ground with sequences that make no sense. But it's an increasing trend that I hate because it ruins the narrative at least every single time because no one bothers to just weave it into the film they just give up near the end and say, "here's the moral" and then because it's horror most people just clap.

I remember listening to Joss Whedon's commentary on Serenity and through it he kept saying things about the plot to the effect of, "if this were a movie then this bad thing wouldn't happen but it's not a movie." Essentially, the world has to exist in shades of grey and darkness to reflect the reality of the situation, until there is a reflective point and things become black and white, the moral highground is taken and the good guys can win because it is now a "movie." Thinking of this it just made me think of Tarantino's take on how he must write a plot in a meme format compared to that take and him just saying something like, "The plot is this way because it's cool."

I know most people would consider them on par and plebian but the messaging, academics, morals of a piece of art becoming louder than the rest of it just serves to make it worse in my opinion but every time it's done its celebrated and used as a shield in the same way you can't complain about a plot of a fantasy novel because there's dragons, you can't complain about the plot of these movies because it's a metaphor or even a better refrain being that you just don't get it.