Today I read the
next fifty pages of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.
O’Neill continues to do some interesting things with the theme of belonging. At
one point, Chuck Ramkissoon explains to Hans his theory of cricket as the
original American game. Chuck’s rejection of the American perception of cricket
as an immigrant sport is consistent with his (over)investment in his image of
himself as American. Hans is not persuaded by Chuck’s theory, which suggests
that Hans’ identification is with the immigrant as a dispossessed and rootless
figure, but also as a quintessentially contemporary figure. For example, when
Chuck takes him to a colonial Dutch cemetery, Hans feels no connection to these
early Dutch settlers just because of their shared nationality. In a similar vein,
once Hans moves back to London and is reunited with his English wife, he feels
no particular sense of homecoming, partly because his Dutchness is more
pronounced in England by virtue of the fact that this Dutchness excludes him
from any sense of Englishness. In an interesting moment in this section of the
novel, the subject of 9/11 comes up again and Hans fleetingly identifies
himself with a virtual community of those who were impacted by the witnessing
of this event. Almost immediately, however, Hans admits to himself that this
essentialist claiming of an identity based on a shared experience is spurious
in his case. Given Hans’ repeated rejection of different kinds of belonging, his
friendship with Chuck becomes ever more important to both Hans and the novel as
a whole because it seems to be the one constant during such a changeable period
in his life.
I also
finished Valerie Wee’s Japanese Horror
Films and their American Remakes. In this final section of the book, Wee
discusses Kairo/Pulse and Chakushin ari/One
Missed Call. The chapter on Kairo/Pulse
is one of the strongest in the book because Wee accounts for the differences
between the two films by stressing the industrial context of the remake’s
production. Whereas Kairo has a
philosophical and art horror feel to it, Pulse
instead resembles much more closely the conventional Hollywood approach to
horror (i.e., more violent and bloody special effects) because it was produced
by the same studio that made the Scream
franchise and for the same type of young American audience. I can’t help but
wonder whether this kind of industrial perspective could have been applied
fruitfully to other chapters in the book (the chapter on Ju-On and The Grudge
springs to mind in particular). The chapter on Chakushin ari/One Missed Call was also very interesting for the way
in which Wee stressed the fact that these films are recycling not only elements
of early Japanese films, but also the films discussed earlier in this book; in
other words, these two films are reflections and self-conscious reworkings of
the success of the recent surge of supernatural horror films that is the book’s
subject. Acknowledging this fact helps to further undermine the binary
distinction between original and remake, a binary that must be problematized
thoroughly for any interesting work on adaptation to be done.
I also
watched the first Resident Evil
movie, an embarrassing gap in my movie viewing that I was happy to plug. I will
always have a soft spot for films that the critics hate and audiences love,
partly because I’m a contrarian, and partly because I think it’s always useful
to be reminded of the extent to which critics and audiences look for and expect
different things from film. Critics look at the Resident Evil franchise and see only bad acting, simplistic plots,
and loud and empty special effects. It’s not that the critics are necessarily
wrong when they say this: as much as I love Michelle Rodriguez, for example, I’d
be lying if I said she has a wide range of facial expressions. Indeed, it tells
us a lot when her best acting comes after she’s been turned into a zombie. The
point the critics miss, however, is why these things guarantee the movie’s
success, rather than dooming it to failure. I look at Resident Evil and see a film designed carefully with a very
specific audience in mind. It’s a film reduced economically and skillfully to
its constituent elements and that’s exactly why the franchise has been so
successful. Rather than being puzzled by its popularity, we should instead try
to explain that popularity as carefully and in as much detail as we can,
without relying on the usual truisms about the limitations of mass audiences. http://kotaku.com/5634542/let-milla-jovovich-explain-the-resident-evil-film-franchises-popularity
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