The Gross Over-Simplification of Films- In today's example, I'll be covering the shock/gross-out horror film of the year, The Human Centipede. For all the hype that surrounds this movie no one seems to be focusing on anything deeper than the shit-eating. Now, I'm not here to tell you that people don't forcibly eat shit in this movie; I just think the film as a whole goes so much deeper than that.
See, horror films are a type of coping mechanism. They allow us to address our deepest, most unsettling fears in scenarios with no actual impact on our own lives. This approach allows us to distance ourselves from our concerns, thus enabling us to consider them more objectively. In this particular example, it means the difference between having to think about forced fecal ingestion at a distance as opposed to having a plate of poop dropped in front of you and a gun put to your head. But these seemingly specific concerns often betray deeper, more subtle fears.
After the advent of nuclear weapons in our society, for example, we saw a new wave of movies about radioactive monsters. People weren't actually afraid of radioactive monsters (although they should have been), they were just scared of nuclear weapons. Radioactive monsters just happened to be a fun manifestation of that fear. The Hunan Centipede, then, isn't really about how afraid we all are of eating poop; it's a movie about science run amok. Medicine without morals. The crazy, Nazi-type doctor is really just a big metaphor for genetic experimentation, or stem-cell research, or abortion or something. He's not just about scat fetishism. Now just to be clear, does this mean that I feel that stem-cell research, abortion, and medical advancement are a threat to our society? Fuck no. But then again, I don't stay up at night having nightmares about shit either.
So for how worked up people get about some icky red and brown bits, I do have to say that I love...
Missing the Fucking Point Completely- Did anyone ever stop to consider that the concept of a "human centipede" isn't even half as terrifying as a real centipede?
I don't care how many screaming Asian men and trashy white bitches you stitch together, it will never be as horrifying as the real thing. Oh sure, I've heard people try to tell me that the common centipede is actually quite beneficial to humans. "They eat other bugs!" people keep shouting at me as I stomp them out of existence with a prejudice rarely seen outside of gang warfare. I don't give a shit. They're gross, they're fast, they're poisonous (even if the smaller ones can't pierce human skin), and goddammit, they're up to something. Something sinister. Would it be too much to assume that they could be learning from our own propaganda and reverse-engineering it into something even worse: THE CENTIPEDE HUMAN? I don't think so. So everybody calm down about feces and Nazi-doctors and focus on the real problem: bugs living among us as people. Please feel free to suspect your loved ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment