Today I read the
next fifty pages of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.
At one point, O’Neill’s protagonist, Hans, describes himself as a “political
and ethical idiot” and he’s not far wrong. Political opinions in the
conventional sense, especially concerning America’s post-9/11 conduct, are
instead given to Hans’ estranged English wife, Rachel, and it seems to me that
O’Neill goes out of his way to make these opinions sound strident, clichéd, and
even slightly hysterical. Hans’ almost total absence of political views is
especially striking given his job as a financial analyst of the oil industry, a
job with rich potential if this really were a post-9/11 novel, but with which O’Neill
does practically nothing. In other words, it seems O’Neill is deliberately
staying away from the truisms of a post-9/11 novel and doing something else
instead. But what? One clue comes from the fact that Hans lives in the Chelsea
Hotel, famous for its long history of bohemian residents. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/10/chelsea-hotel-oral-history
O’Neill portrays the 21sy century version of the hotel in the same vein, with
Hans joining an eclectic array of eccentric individuals all of whom are
disaffiliated, in one way or another, from the American norm. This suggests
that O’Neill’s larger theme is the need to belong or connect with others, a
need that Hans feels acutely but is unable to satisfy due to a lack of
imagination and a lack of energy. Perhaps Chuck Ramkissoon and cricket will
fulfill that needs for Hans?
I also read the
next fifty pages of Valerie Wee’s Japanese
Horror Films and their American Remakes, in which Wee discusses Honogurai mizu no soko kara/Dark Water and
Ju-On/The Grudge. A couple of notes
about Wee’s method might be in order at this point. In each chapter, Wee
elucidates the similarities and differences between the original and the remake
and I think she has a tendency to understate the similarities and overstate the
differences. For example, she’s quite right to say that the similarities
between Honogurai and Dark Water can be ascribed to the pervasive
influence of patriarchal thinking in both American and Japanese culture, an
influence that determines the films’ treatment of divorced mothers raising
their daughters, but to say this is not to say very much. It might be more
productive to approach these similarities in generic and narratological terms;
in other words, what are the constituent elements of horror films that tend to
be present in both original and remake, and why are these elements considered
to be indispensable? In terms of stressing differences, my argument with Wee is
not that such differences don’t exist, because they do; rather, my argument is
that these differences do not always have to be the focus of the critical
narrative. I would also add that only certain types of difference seem to count
for Wee and that if one were to consider these films’ intertextual relations
more broadly, a different type of analysis would result. For example, how can
one properly evaluate Sarah Michelle Gellar’s performance in The Grudge without mentioning Buffy?! http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/10/24/buffy-star-faces-fear-in-horror-remake/
Perhaps
inevitably, I also watched the next film in the Paranormal Activity series, the imaginatively titled Paranormal Activity 3. Although this
entry in the series is subject to the law of diminishing returns that impacts
all franchises, it still has its strong points. One of my favorite things about
this series so far is the fact that it’s organized as a series of prequels,
with 3 being set in 1988. This is an
interesting choice partly for technological reasons, in that the technology of
camera surveillance gets less
sophisticated as the series progresses, a
fact that dictates how each film is structured, and partly for narrative
reasons. Because earlier parts of the story are filled in with each new movie,
the audience also gets to revise its opinion of events and characters from the
earlier movies. For example, what we find out about the childhoods of the
sisters in this episode changes significantly our view of the sister’s
situation in the first two films. To be precise, we understand that they have
been pawns in someone else’s game for a very long time, so that our view of the
decisions they make when they’re adults, decisions that we assume are a product
of free will, we now understand were anything but. This is a great example of
the narrative complexity that cam emerge from genre films when they are
considered together as a series rather than as single films. Not coincidentally,
3 was the highest-grossing movie in
the series so far. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1673022/paranormal-activity-3-box-office-record.jhtml
Oh, and because
I’ve mentioned horror parodies in previous posts, if you want to see one of the
worst films ever made, check out this Paranormal
Activity parody currently streaming on Netflix! http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70291837?strkid=1531562959_0_0&trkid=222336&movieid=70291837
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