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Who is calling that crazy?
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Jul 14, 2016 04:47
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Actually it's not "objectively" about a labour uprising, it's about violent parasitic aliens who kill the workers and use their bodies to incubate their young. The time for the worker uprising was before the corporation sent them all to their doom to "check out" the crashed alien ship basically knowing what would happen. Labour, in this case the colonists who naively believe if they work hard the corporation will give them the promised better world, or wage slaves with no other options, are all literally sacrificed by the pursuit of greater profits. There is no labour uprising, there's a massacre of loyal compliant labour because there is absolutely no reward for loyalty or hard work in the corporate system. That's "objectively" what happens in the movie. If you want to dig deep, and get into entirely subjective interpretations (which exist on a spectrum of reasonableness with no single interpretation being the one and only pure truth), I think a fair interpretation would say the whole movie is a warning to capital. You can work your workers to death, treat them like poo poo, but there's a line. If you cross that line you may have to deal with violence and loss of property. Know the limits of how brutally you can exploit and sacrifice the working class or they'll turn into monsters you'll have to nuke from orbit, which means a loss of labour and means of production. Ripley is also probably ok with this system, it's not great but it works, so long as the company doesn't create monsters she's fine with, much how much of the working and middle class are ok with brutal capitalism so long as they're fed and don't have to deal with any violent mobs. She probably doesn't even think about this though, because she's so immersed in the ideology of the status quo she can't even see it as ideology (which is of course the strongest form of ideology, the person who thinks they are apathetic, simply surviving, going with the flow, who thinks they don't have and are acting on ideology)
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Jul 14, 2016 04:48
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MrMojok posted:Who is calling that crazy? Baronjutter posted:Aliens is the vietnam war, it's extremely clear and they've said as much. Any deep interpretation beyond that is jamming your own extremely subjective and probably borderline crazy interpretation into things. Also, SuperMechagodzilla posted:The Vietnam War wasn't caused by the discovery of an alien spacecraft. If you can't do anything with the resemblance between Dr. Manhattan and the Engineer, there is no hope for anything remotely entertaining to come of this conversation 
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Jul 14, 2016 04:50
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Sir Kodiak posted:I'm pretty sure the Vietnam War itself had themes of class warfare and capitalism vs socialism. Why arn't there any white aliens?
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Jul 14, 2016 05:14
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Hey CD one time SMG tried to troll the transformers thread over in the comic forum by doing his usual schtick on Beast Wars but he hadn't done enough homework on it to keep it up and we ran circles around him while he sputtered and flailed and then we just ignored him until he got bored and left forever. The power is within you, cast off your SMG, you have nothing to lose but your chains.
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Jul 14, 2016 05:17
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Tenzarin posted:Why arn't there any white aliens? 
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Jul 14, 2016 05:18
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Baronjutter posted:Actually it's not "objectively" about a labour uprising, it's about violent parasitic aliens who kill the workers and use their bodies to incubate their young. The time for the worker uprising was before the corporation sent them all to their doom to "check out" the crashed alien ship basically knowing what would happen. Labour, in this case the colonists who naively believe if they work hard the corporation will give them the promised better world, or wage slaves with no other options, are all literally sacrificed by the pursuit of greater profits. There is no labour uprising, there's a massacre of loyal compliant labour because there is absolutely no reward for loyalty or hard work in the corporate system. That's "objectively" what happens in the movie. You are getting some things mixed up here. Objectively speaking, Ripley is 'just crazy'. This objective point of view is provided by the bureaucrats at the very start of the film. What Ripley is trying to assert is the validity of her own subjective stance - the traumatic fracturing of reality, the nightmares that blur into reality, her irrational belief that a single alien can and will conquer the entire Earth.* She does not have an objective point of view. To think otherwise is to fall into the Xenomorph trap of ignoring the artistry of the films, to focus on their canonical plot content. I have just explained to you that I am not 'digging deep'. I am dealing with the textured surface of the film. "The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract its subject from its deepest context of historical reality." What i have written is true. *Also note that in the nightmare, the single alien who can take over the entire Earth is inside her. This is why she refuses to actually go to Earth, despite being just a short distance away. In the logic of the film, Ripley has to 'exorcise her trauma' in order to 'move on' and 'live a normal life'. Why cookie Rocket posted:Hey CD one time SMG tried to troll the transformers thread over in the comic forum by doing his usual schtick on Beast Wars but he hadn't done enough homework on it to keep it up and we ran circles around him while he sputtered and flailed and then we just ignored him until he got bored and left forever. That never happened. I was banned from the entire comics forum because it is a hugbox. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Jul 14, 2016 |
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Jul 14, 2016 05:20
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That never happened. I was banned from the entire comics forum because it is a hugbox. Man I wish I wasn't phone posting, can anyone with search dig this up? It was around the release of the last TF movie or maybe the one before that. He's getting so defensive, this is awesome.
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Jul 14, 2016 05:28
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I actually enjoy a lot of SMG's interpretations and ways of thinking about movies and am always down with anything Zizekish/Hegelian. It's the attitude of 100% correct one and only "true" interpretation that wears thin pretty fast.
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Jul 14, 2016 05:31
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Baronjutter posted:I actually enjoy a lot of SMG's interpretations and ways of thinking about movies and am always down with anything Zizekish/Hegelian. It's the attitude of 100% correct one and only "true" interpretation that wears thin pretty fast. Oh for sure, I liked Prometheus but I gained a much richer enjoyment of it through his insights. On the other hand, he's an utter oval office of a troll and people don't have to take him seriously. ps alien 3 still rules.
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Jul 14, 2016 05:43
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When I was 5 my parents told me to stay in the basement and play with my friends because they were going to watch a movie I wasn't supposed to see. I didn't listen and went upstairs to see what it was they were watching and at that moment witnessed the scene in Aliens where Ripley is having a nightmare about the chestburster doing its thing. Then when I was 10 I stayed over at some redneck kids house and they played Aliens on the TV while they all fell asleep and I couldn't so I just witnessed nightmares for 2 hours until the faint glow of the post-credits television and their lovely shag carpeting was all the comfort I had available to me. I had nightmares about facehuggers for probably two-three more years. It was years upon years later when I discovered the interpretations sexual trauma of phallic aliens and forced impregnation etc of the Alien franchise and what that implied about mankind and stuff. But truly the lowest point of my history with the Alien movies is having to read about this limp-wristed pseudo-intellectual jerk fest about capitalism/communism themes in a movie about rape monsters from outerspace. So in the immortal words of Newt's brother... K...k..kill me...
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Jul 14, 2016 06:09
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:To think otherwise is to fall into the Xenomorph trap of ignoring the artistry of the films, to focus on their canonical plot content.  quote:That never happened. I was banned from the entire comics forum because it is a hugbox.
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Jul 14, 2016 06:10
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Why cookie Rocket posted:Man I wish I wasn't phone posting, can anyone with search dig this up? It was around the release of the last TF movie or maybe the one before that. He's getting so defensive, this is awesome. It's hard to picture a less interesting or relevant task. Please don't import your subforum grudges into the thread.
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Jul 14, 2016 06:11
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Why cookie Rocket posted:Man I wish I wasn't phone posting, can anyone with search dig this up? It was around the release of the last TF movie or maybe the one before that. He's getting so defensive, this is awesome. I didn't remember what you were talking about, at first, so I looked this up. Two years ago, I criticized the transformers toy line, saying the characters 'Optimus Prime' and 'Optimus Primal' are effectively the same character, with 'Malibu Stacey's New Hat' cosmetic differences. You then replied that 'Optimus Prime' and 'Optimus Primal' are canonically relatives and therefore not the same character. This has since, evidently, grown into one of those 'everybody in the theater started clapping' narratives.
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Jul 14, 2016 06:14
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SMG what did you think of Beast Wars?
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Jul 14, 2016 06:14
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MrMojok posted:I don't know which guy you mean, but I'm not agreeing with any of you, except for the one who just said movies can be about different things. What kind of war do you think Vietnam was? Good guys vs bad guys? It was a generation of drafted poors fighting a puppet socialist country, to say "it's about Vietnam" is the laziest loving thing to say. Like, no poo poo it's about a war, but when you go out of your way and associate it with one of the most politically loaded police actions in this country's history, stopping the discussion at "it's about Vietnam" is pretty juvenile, and just goes to show how stupid we let ourselves get as a species. These ideas about movies aren't anything new, but the aggressiveness at anything other than the most basic interpretation is pretty sad.
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Jul 14, 2016 06:18
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zVxTeflon posted:SMG what did you think of Beast Wars? It made interesting reference to King Kong and King Kong Escapes. Xenomrph posted:Yeah I'm not ignoring the artistry of anything, I'm just capable of talking about more than one thing at a time. In a recent post, you explained that a minor inconsistency between Alien and Aliens can be explained away 'canonically', using Prometheus supplementary materials and the plot of one of the videogames. What you lose in the process are many of the creative choices that make Cameron's film distinct from Scott's. The fact that the Mother computer and her 'crew expendable' message are never mentioned is very important in Aliens. It's a meaningful omission - and you are effectively removing that omission. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Jul 14, 2016 |
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Jul 14, 2016 06:30
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wuffles posted:When I was 5 my parents told me to stay in the basement and play with my friends because they were going to watch a movie I wasn't supposed to see. I didn't listen and went upstairs to see what it was they were watching and at that moment witnessed the scene in Aliens where Ripley is having a nightmare about the chestburster doing its thing. Then when I was 10 I stayed over at some redneck kids house and they played Aliens on the TV while they all fell asleep and I couldn't so I just witnessed nightmares for 2 hours until the faint glow of the post-credits television and their lovely shag carpeting was all the comfort I had available to me. I had nightmares about facehuggers for probably two-three more years. Ripley gets defensive when Burke mentions her forklift job. Gorman won't eat with the marines. Bishop is both proud of his artificiality and hungry for human approval. And that's just the first act. The movie is simmering with -isms.
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Jul 14, 2016 06:48
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It made interesting reference to King Kong and King Kong Escapes. Everything else you just said doesn't negate anything I said, either. I mean like yeah I get that you only like to talk about certain things at the expense of everyone else, and would rather do personal callouts (like above) rather than let others talk about what they'd like to talk about. Because like I said, I'm capable of talking about more than one thing at a time.
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Jul 14, 2016 06:50
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Xenomrph posted:I mean like yeah I get that you only like to talk about certain things at the expense of everyone else, and would rather do personal callouts (like above) rather than let others talk about what they'd like to talk about. You are not being silenced. You are being criticized. "When [the company] first heard about this thing, it was 'crew expendable'. The next time they sent in marines. They were expendable too. What makes you think they're going to care about a bunch of lifers who found God at the rear end-end of space?" In Alien3, Mother and her 'crew expendable' message are brought back into the narrative, but there is now absolutely no reference to Burke. Alien3 retcons Burke out of Ripley's backstory in the same way that Aliens retconned Mother. Ripley contradicts everything that we are shown in Aliens, and claims that the company - not a sociopathic rogue employee - deliberately sent the marines to die. This caused a lot of confusion in this thread, as several people - thinking in terms of franchise canon - mixed the two entirely different films together. This is the danger when people get caught in the fantasy of a teleologically-constructed simulated universe that is gradually disclosed to us. In paving over the inconsistencies, you lose Fincher's criticism of James Cameron. Alien3's Ripley remembers what she forgot: that her true enemy is not the alien, or any individual person. It is the company itself.
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Jul 14, 2016 08:16
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ruddiger posted:What kind of war do you think Vietnam was? Good guys vs bad guys? It was a generation of drafted poors fighting a puppet socialist country, to say "it's about Vietnam" is the laziest loving thing to say. Like, no poo poo it's about a war, but when you go out of your way and associate it with one of the most politically loaded police actions in this country's history, stopping the discussion at "it's about Vietnam" is pretty juvenile, and just goes to show how stupid we let ourselves get as a species. These ideas about movies aren't anything new, but the aggressiveness at anything other than the most basic interpretation is pretty sad. But nobody here is going out of their way to associate it with Vietnam. No one has to, because Cameron himself envisioned parts of the film this way from the beginning-- the dudes with everything from nukes to sharp sticks having trouble against an enemy that they can neither understand nor defeat. This is self-evident in the final product and in all stages of production. In addition, he and several members of the production have talked about it. This of course does not preclude discussion about other aspects/readings of the film. No one is "stopping the discussion" here, in CineD. Clipperton posted:Yo Xenomrph: does Weyland-Yutani have any competitors in the canon, or do they have a monopoly on everything and run the government? Ripley's debriefing seems to have a bunch of people from government agencies (ICC, Colonial Administration etc) and they all act indistinguishably from Weyland-Yutani representatives. Xenomrph posted:They have a couple, but WY is arguably the most powerful. Off the top of my head I know of Seegson (from Alien Isolation), and there are others that are hinted at but not outright named. I love how Seegson is a kind of a wannabee-W-Y, but they just fall way short. The location of Sevastopol, way the gently caress out in the outer rim, is bad. They can mine a little unobtanium from the gas giant, but they don't get a lot of business from travelers. They bought this place thirteen years ago, from another company who built it it there twenty years prior to that thinking the mining routes would expand, and their location would be prime. Instead, in time the major spacelanes were routed the other way, leaving Sevastopol even more isolated than it was before. In the last dozen years Seegson has been using it as a research/production facility for its androids. At some point they just concede that they'll never make androids as good/convincing as the W-Y ones, and decide to go completely the other way instead. Hence the fake rubber skin and glowing eyes on all the things, with the understanding-- at least this way, you know it's a robot! Sales are not good, despite creative advertising campaign:  Then, as they are trying to do the responsible thing and shut the whole place down, civil unrest combines with the most horrid, unimaginable interstellar event possible to end Seegson as a corporate entity forever. Remaining assets probably bought by W-Y.
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Jul 14, 2016 08:33
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You are not being silenced. You are being criticized. I didn't say I was being silenced, and the hollow, unnecessary criticism is the problem. For someone who advocates finding new ways to look at movies, you're astonishingly bad at actually letting people talk about what they want to talk about without meaningless "criticism". If people want to look at a particular movie within the lens of how it sits within a broader narrative, that's entirely valid. Not to mention, you were the one who made a point about the series being an interconnected narrative when it supported what you were trying to say, and now you're criticizing that very thing? Like lizardman said, disingenuous. Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 08:41 on Jul 14, 2016 |
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Jul 14, 2016 08:38
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What is truly disingenuous, and what ultimately shows SMG to be a troll rather than just someone with lovely ideas is how he ignores posts that poke holes in his theory and then later reference these rebuttals as if he was the one to mention them without actually having engaged with the criticism. It's all deflection and hedging, hoping that some will agree with parts of his spiel on a technicality so he can keep it going while never actually having a conversation. I wish I had a nuclear option for this thread.
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Jul 14, 2016 13:04
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I'll be honest, I'm not sure who Zizek is or why he is brought up as someone who is an expert on movies.
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Jul 14, 2016 13:37
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I didn't remember what you were talking about, at first, so I looked this up. Two years ago, I criticized the transformers toy line, saying the characters 'Optimus Prime' and 'Optimus Primal' are effectively the same character, with 'Malibu Stacey's New Hat' cosmetic differences. You then replied that 'Optimus Prime' and 'Optimus Primal' are canonically relatives and therefore not the same character. So now you're saying it did happen, that's cool. It's really funny that the couple posts you're cherrypicking to inaccurately summarize (out of a multi-page attempt to take a dump in that thread) is a perfect example of you ignoring the text of a work in a blinkered attempt to stick to what you'd already decided was the truth.
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Jul 14, 2016 13:38
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MrMojok posted:The fact that everyone from Cameron on down repeatedly mentioned the Vietnam influence on the film means it's completely verboten in Cinema Discusso. I always felt that Predator was a superior movie about Vietnam anyway.
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Jul 14, 2016 13:42
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Armyman25 posted:I always felt that Predator was a superior movie about Vietnam anyway. I've never thought about Predator as a Vietnam movie, but as I'm thinking about it I can kinda see how it would work. But if the Predator is the Vietcong, an unpredictable enemy that uses the jungle itself to wage unconventional warfare, then who do the rebels that Dutch and co thoroughly stomp represent?
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Jul 14, 2016 14:10
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Xenomrph posted:then who do the rebels that Dutch and co thoroughly stomp represent? Considering they become largely irrelevant as movie goes on I would go with "America's flimsy excuse for going to war".
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Jul 14, 2016 14:16
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Xenomrph posted:I've never thought about Predator as a Vietnam movie, but as I'm thinking about it I can kinda see how it would work. But if the Predator is the Vietcong, an unpredictable enemy that uses the jungle itself to wage unconventional warfare, then who do the rebels that Dutch and co thoroughly stomp represent? It's not a 1:1 comparison, but think about this. Predator is about team of American soldiers, made up of minorities, immigrants, and rednecks, sent by the CIA/Military on a "rescue mission" to save good Americans from evil Communist guerillas who are being funded and advised by the Russians. The mission turns out to be a lie by the CIA, the one guerilla they interact with turns out to be pretty sympathetic, and they end up fighting an enemy who embodies the local environment, "the jungle, it just came alive and took him." The Americans use overwhelming firepower to no effect, are picked off one by one, and at the end of the day have killed the enemy without really defeating him, and leave the jungle a ruined wasteland while flying away in a Huey, completely devastated by the experience.
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Jul 14, 2016 14:18
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I think Predator is just using the trappings of a Vietnam allegory to tell a story about an alien slasher killer. It's not trying to say something about Vietnam. If it was, though, Dutch and his men are the Vietcong and the Predator is America.
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Jul 14, 2016 14:27
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Armyman25 posted:It's not a 1:1 comparison, but think about this. Predator is about team of American soldiers, made up of minorities, immigrants, and rednecks, sent by the CIA/Military on a "rescue mission" to save good Americans from evil Communist guerillas who are being funded and advised by the Russians. The mission turns out to be a lie by the CIA, the one guerilla they interact with turns out to be pretty sympathetic, and they end up fighting an enemy who embodies the local environment, "the jungle, it just came alive and took him." That's a really cool interpretation, thanks! 
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Jul 14, 2016 14:30
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punchymcpunch posted:If it was, though, Dutch and his men are the Vietcong and the Predator is America. I like that.
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Jul 14, 2016 14:34
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punchymcpunch posted:I think Predator is just using the trappings of a Vietnam allegory to tell a story about an alien slasher killer. It's not trying to say something about Vietnam. Are you sure? I mean, they explicitly reference Vietnam several times.  "Makes Cambodia look like Kansas."
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Jul 14, 2016 14:34
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Sure, but Dutch and his men are the ones making punji sticks and hiding from the better-equipped foreign invader.
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Jul 14, 2016 14:51
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punchymcpunch posted:Sure, but Dutch and his men are the ones making punji sticks and hiding from the better-equipped foreign invader. The style of the conflict is defined by the Vietnam War, but the protagonists move through different aspects of it over the course of the movie. First they embody the overwhelming might of the US's technical superiority, then the jungle comes to life against them, and then finally they, mainly Dutch, take on the role of the Vietnamese themselves. It's not an allegory for Vietnam. There's not a 1:1 correspondence between elements of the movie and elements of the war. Instead different perspectives on the war are explored through the same focal character(s).
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Jul 14, 2016 14:57
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You also have the fact that the American Army started adopting the VietCong's tactics. The Americans started doing more ambushes and patrols and started getting away from conventional confrontations. Since this is a film forum, let's reference The Green Berets, in which it's noted that the Americans have put up punji sticks around their encampment in rural Vietnam. And look at how the soldiers change between the early period of Vietnam, as shown in We Were Soldiers and late period Vietnam, as shown in Platoon They go from being very regimented and uniform to being more individual and adapted to their environment.  
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Jul 14, 2016 15:12
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Armyman25 posted:It's not a 1:1 comparison, but think about this. Predator is about team of American soldiers, made up of minorities, immigrants, and rednecks, sent by the CIA/Military on a "rescue mission" to save good Americans from evil Communist guerillas who are being funded and advised by the Russians. The mission turns out to be a lie by the CIA, the one guerilla they interact with turns out to be pretty sympathetic, and they end up fighting an enemy who embodies the local environment, "the jungle, it just came alive and took him." Thank you for this quick read on Predator - it seems pretty solid to me, but most of the literature I deal with is Ancient Greek so  ruddiger posted:What kind of war do you think Vietnam was? Good guys vs bad guys? It was a generation of drafted poors fighting a puppet socialist country, to say "it's about Vietnam" is the laziest loving thing to say. Like, no poo poo it's about a war, but when you go out of your way and associate it with one of the most politically loaded police actions in this country's history, stopping the discussion at "it's about Vietnam" is pretty juvenile, and just goes to show how stupid we let ourselves get as a species. These ideas about movies aren't anything new, but the aggressiveness at anything other than the most basic interpretation is pretty sad. In Aliens the obsolescence of "good guys vs bad guys" is very clearly pointed out, to wit: "I don't know which species is worse etc." The rest of the Vietnam points you highlight also seem readily applicable to the film, such as the "generation of drafted poors" being the integrated (race, ethnicity, gender) Marines who really stand to gain nothing from defeating the xenomorphs, and the "puppet socialist country" as wave after wave of warrior drones controlled by a much larger organism. I don't think anyone is saying that "Vietnam was a hosed up thing that happened" is the end-all and be-all of the film, though if someone did then you are right that it would be pretty juvenile, i.e. it would be below the level of discussion I had with my dad when I saw it with him at age 10 or 11.
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Jul 14, 2016 15:18
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MrMojok posted:
Where is all this from?
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Jul 14, 2016 16:21
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The game Alien Isolation
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Jul 14, 2016 16:24
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zVxTeflon posted:Where is all this from? Alien Isolation. A big part of the game's plot and overall setting is a Weyland Yutani competitor.
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Jul 14, 2016 16:24
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