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I think people are missing the real satirical thrust of the movie. As horrible as Baron Biffords is as a poster, he is right in the sense that Dredd's ultraviolence is not presented as tremendously shocking. It's mostly dispassionate and impersonal, and the presentation is fairly indifferent too. These are people whose lives have already been wholly devalued - and, in that way, they simply long for death. The 'joke' of the homeless dude being crushed is that he is 'already dead', already reduced to a pile of meat long before the door hits him. Consequently, the 'joke' is how completely unshocking and unsurprising it is. The same is true of nearly all the violence. Dredd himself isn't really satirized, because he's simply doing his best to maintain order in a situation where all human life is devalued - including his own. So, the film isn't (just) satirizing the war on drugs - it's more specifically satirizing the liberal promotion of drug use as 'freedom'. Note how, on Slowmo, language breaks down and everything loses its meaning. It's an embrace of the void. This is a world in which the only imaginable freedom is death. You see this also in how people try to get real amateur footage of the mutilated corpses on their phones, to post on the internet. People are bypassing the symbolic to experience the brutal abjection of death, for pleasure. "The authentic XXth century passion to penetrate the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate "effect," sought after from digitalized special effects through reality TV and amateur pornography up to snuff movies. Snuff movies which deliver the "real thing" are perhaps the ultimate truth of virtual reality. There is an intimate connection between virtualization of reality and the emergence of an infinite and infinitized bodily pain, much stronger that the usual one: do biogenetics and Virtual Reality combined not open up new "enhanced" possibilities of TORTURE, new and unheard-of horizons of extending our ability to endure pain (through widening our sensory capacity to sustain pain, through inventing new forms of inflicting it)? Perhaps, the ultimate Sadean image on an "undead" victim of the torture who can sustain endless pain without having at his/her disposal the escape into death, also waits to become reality." (Zizek) That seems like a pretty spot-on description of not only how Slowmo is used, but also of the character whose eyes are removed but is nonetheless forced to continue seeing with augmented vision. His robotic eyes look painful from how unnaturally large they are. There's obviously a 'pleasurable' dimension too. In the apartment shootout, from the perspective of the Slowmo'd gangsters, the events are obviously beautiful. The slow motion emphasizes the ripples in the flesh, and so-forth. The violence doesn't register as really happening to 'people', but to squishy bags of anatomy. (Hence the persistent imagery of disfigurement.) The satire is that the film makes this look great! Take more drugs! Accordingly, the real target of satire in the torture scene isn't Dredd, but Anderson, whose liberal compassion leads her to devise new forms of 'virtual' torture. The satire of the film is that Dredd's gradual compromising of his ideals is presented as a good thing. It's taken for granted that Dredd must 'become more human' and 'grow as a person'. I propose the opposite: that Dredd fails in resigning himself to mere humanity. People breathe a sigh of relief when he 'only' tasers two children. In doing this, the film has gotten the audience to embrace the use (and inevitable proliferation) of 'nonlethal' weaponry. It's covertly gotten presumable lefties to say 'hooray, tasers'! (Note that it's Anderson who asserts, early on, that there's something more to Dredd, beneath the mask. Something that makes him human...) A Dredd who rigidly adheres to protocol at all costs would eventually find his own corruptible system wanting and fight to alter it - taking the system more seriously than it takes itself. A Dredd who bends the rules where necessary in specific instances out of liberal compassion is ultimately helping to entrench the problems. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Jan 16, 2013 |
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Jan 16, 2013 01:39
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Jedit posted:Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy this rarest of sights - a SuperMechaGodzilla post that is 50% right. With the exception of the "liberals think drugs are freedom!" crap and the obligatory quote from an inferior modern philosopher, I agree with much of what is presented here. I'm thinking mostly of those who hold legalizing weed as their pet issue. In the context of American society, after all, legalizing marijuana means commercializing it. It's not going to do anything about the real ills of the prison-industrial complex, and so-on. It's downright incontestable that the film presents Slowmo as a loving awesome drug. But then, note how the Slowmo scenes are directly equated to Anderson's moment of rest in the skate park. Drug use is pleasant, but a false freedom - a way of making life 'tolerable', without actually improving anything. The skate park is a beautiful dead end. Nonetheless, there's something poetic in the imagery of people finding splendor in what little time they have, as they are pulled by gravity towards their inevitable death. The tricky part is that, while the sentiment here is pretty sincere, it's not quite good enough.
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Jan 16, 2013 10:08
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It's important to remember that there's a difference between 'just' and 'lawful'. Dredd acts lawfully in every situation, while it's often ambiguous as to whether his actions are just. But Dredd isn't a sadistic character, and the point of using the incendiary round has more to do with distracting the guy than it does with inflicting police terror (besides the hostage, no-one actually witnesses the event). This seems like a similar situation to the taser scene, where folks would breathe a sigh of relief at the guy being 'merely' shot in the head. Again, Dredd is actually a fairly sincere hero in the film, the satire being that things have to be pretty hosed up to reach that point. In this specific case, the problem isn't Dredd himself, but the fact that he's sent in without backup or oversight. He follows the law even though there's nothing compelling him to do so. While he is personally incorruptible, the system is not.
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Jan 16, 2013 22:01
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Riflen posted:You seem to be being deliberately obtuse, or are very unfamiliar with the Judge Dredd universe. They are judged guilty of attempted murder of a judge as well as accessories to Ma-Ma's crimes. The sentence is death. Dredd's duty is to carry out the sentence. He's not just going to walk off and go "Welp, they're probably dead". An interesting detail in light of this: as Ma-Ma is falling from the balcony at the end, she turns to see the theatre lobby Dredd had carpeted with white phosphorous. - and one of the perps is still wandering around, badly burned.
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Jan 16, 2013 22:54
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I'm starting to think the best joke in the film is in how Anderson spares that one guy, because she sees that he was forced to do bad things and is therefore a victim. It shows how myopic she is - because which of the criminals wasn't forced into a lovely life of crime by their dire situation? But that one gesture nonetheless makes her instantly 'the good guy' to audiences, after killing/torturing her way through half the building.
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Jan 21, 2013 20:58
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:I said this in the general chat thread, but I'm convinced there's a liberal and a pinko reading: the liberal sees Anderson as softly-softly revisionist, slowly moving the system into a more humane approach -- or at least a more efficient system needing less torture, 'collateral damage,' etc. (or is it more humane as a consequence of this?) -- whereas the pinko is more likely to say 'gently caress this, the system is hosed and any moralism atop it is contemptible fraud.' The basis for the pinko stance is that there is very little antagonism between the 'fascist' Dredd and the 'liberal' Anderson. They are literally partners in a team, working great together.
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Jan 23, 2013 23:48
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counterfeitsaint posted:Just watched this. I was expecting a cheesy-as-gently caress, libertarian, authority-worshiping wank fest of a movie. Did not leave disappointed. A libertarian film would praise Mama for fighting the state's attempt to regulate her free enterprise. Don't watch films.
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Feb 14, 2013 12:49
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Although what he is saying is not inaccurate, B. Bifford is 'lying in the guise of truth'. It doesn't matter if the people actually are violent, torturers whatever. These selective bits of truth are used to justify and uphold a system of oppression. This is another way of expressing H. G. Frankfurt's definition of bullshit. Bullshit is fake but not necessarily wrong. When Anderson attempts to read Dredd's mind and encounters, beneath everything, an unspeakable void - this is the capricious abyss beneath the 'rational' order, where the whole Law is founded on the mad declaration 'it is because I said so!' Hence, "I am the Law!" The crucial thing is that Dredd actually is the Law. But he is the Kantian concept of it, where: "... the law is no longer regarded as dependent on the Good, but on the contrary, the Good itself is made to depend on the law. This means that the law no longer has its foundation in some higher principle from which it would derive its authority, but that it is self-grounded and valid solely by virtue of its own form. [...] Kant, by establishing THE LAW as an ultimate ground or principle, added an essential dimension to modern thought: the object of the law is by definition unknowable and elusive. ... Clearly THE LAW, as defined by its pure form, without substance or object of any determination whatsoever, is such that no one knows nor can know what it is. It operates without making itself known. It defines a realm of transgression where one is already guilty, and where one oversteps the bounds without knowing what they are, as in the case of Oedipus. Even guilt and punishment do not tell us what the law is, but leave it in a state of indeterminacy equaled only by the extreme specificity of the punishment." (-Deleuze) You can kind-of see this in the opening images of the drones scanning everyone, the assertion that crime is the norm and so most people are already guilty. So, when Dredd re-invents his universal Law for each particular situation in the battle, this is not some suspension of the normal rules - it's the rules working exactly 'as they should'.
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Sep 8, 2013 14:53
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oohhboy posted:They might have well shot FR in Black and White since they almost eliminated every other colour. O/B is a super lazy way to make an image "Pop" because they are contrasting colours and people are a little orange hence the opposite is "Blue". It is almost universally a negative as it is done in post and only serves to destroy colour. It also has a nasty side effect of making CGI more obvious since it brings out mismatched elements because of the "Pop". There are good uses of Orange and Blue is when it is baked into the scene like in "Drive" or using unusual film stock in Three Kings. John Wick also does this well by enhancing only the blue so you don't have white people turn into Orange people and when orange does show up, there is a reason for it. The video game equivalent of this is the "brown" filter in an attempt to make everything gritty. Memes have tricked you into hating a primary color.
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May 21, 2015 23:46
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