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Can people who have seen this tell me if it's scary, and, assuming it is, what sort of scary it is? Movies with creepy jump scares and stuff gently caress me up so bad that I can't even bother watching them, even if they have almost zero scares, so long as the tension is high enough (for example, I made it 45 minutes into Black Swan and then had to stop watching) but other sorts of horror don't mess with me at all (Cabin in the Woods, Alien, Slither, etc. are fine despite ostensibly being horror movies). I want to watch this movie but not if it will destroy me for the rest of my life. When I "watched' The Ring back when I was much younger (in theaters) I spend 99% of the time (literally) with my eyes closed and I was still freaked the gently caress out for a week. So, help a buddy out? Can I watch it?
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2017 03:30 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 22:21 |
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Hey everyone, remember me? I'm the guy from page 1 of the thread asking if it's too scary for me to watch. Anyways I saw it (the answer is "no," turns out I'm slightly tougher than I thought) and it's a real good movie. I don't have much to add, since so much has been covered already, but here are some points: 1. glam rock hammock's take in the OP and i am the bird's posts and Lil Mama Im Sorry's posts are all real good. 2. I might be forgetting (I read this thread over a couple of days) but I think a lot of the most blandly obvious symbolism hasn't been brought up at all, so I figured I'd throw it in here just in case anyone missed/forgot it: the white-rear end sports stuff, like the lacrosse stick the sketchy son uses to attack Chris and the bocce balls that Chris uses to attack the sketchy son; Rose keeping the whites and the coloreds segregated from each other when she's eating her cereal and drinking her milk; apparently the Japanese guy had the only yellow bingo card (someone else said this to me, I don't recall that). 3: SuperMechagodzilla posted:That's the problem: multiple people ITT have insisted that the movie is an allegory, so it shouldn't be taken too seriously. Like we don't need to actually pay attention to the specifics of the narrative because we 'already knew', in advance, that white liberals are bad. So watching the film becomes an exercise in self-congratulation: "thank god that I'm not like them." Peele possibly didn't realize that Rian Johnson dropped an extreme burn on this film. You point out that they're actively encouraging their alt-right son to lynch random black men and say "ah hah, if this is literal they can't seriously be liberals, and it can't be a metaphor because liberals... something something" but no, that second option, the metaphorical one, is exactly right. Liberals don't do enough about the alt-right or about any goddamn thing. That's what the film's saying. Liberals just take a different route to literally auctioning off black people: one that's less focused on how black people are bad and more focused on how awesome they are and thus on how you gotta steal those bodies, because black people have the best bodies. 4: Again, one for SMG - how do you read that scene in the film when the grandparents are warmly greeting all the people who are arriving for the party? It's a quick shot, so maybe you missed it, but it struck me as being somewhat in tension with a lot of what you're saying about the grandparents.
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# ¿ Apr 2, 2017 18:56 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The message of the film is straightforwardly that 'white culture' and liberalism are incompatible. True racially-white liberals, in the ideology of the film, are those who are self-conscious / disdainful towards white culture in a way that goes beyond the Rose character. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Again, the film implies that the true superhuman can be produced by putting black brains into white bodies. The whole brain/body dichotomy is used to express the difference between culture and race (respectively). Eliminate race and preserve culture.
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# ¿ Apr 4, 2017 15:23 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:No. I am referring to the film's entire narrative of the black race being, straightforwardly, infected with an unnatural 'white mentality' - white culture. SuperMechagodzilla posted:No-one. The cult attempted to create superhumans by infecting the black race with white culture, but failed. The cult only produced lame, sad people who dress poorly. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Since white culture is the enemy, eliminating white culture is an implied solution. SuperMechagodzilla posted:You're getting mixed up between the ideology of the villains and the ideology of the film. The villains do not wish to eliminate race. They desire black bodies because they fetishize race. Their victims are infected with an unnatural 'white mentality'.
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2017 15:26 |
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I think I am a little lost. Are you saying the film is saying that white culture and liberalism are incompatible because white liberals like the film? But white liberals like lots of films without this demonstrating that white culture and liberalism are incompatible. So what I'm looking for is a reason that this film shows white culture and liberalism to be incompatible. I don't see what all your stuff about how white liberalism is ostensibly colorblind, or your what all your stuff about exploitation, has to do with white culture. Can you explain that more clearly? People are not saying the servants are fine because it turned out they are white inside, people are saying the servants are fine because it turns out they are old people who enjoy puttering around in the yard, there is the scene of them greeting the guests as equals, etc. Also, is there a reason you're only replying to a few (or one) of my questions each time? Is there something about some of my other questions that explains why you're ignoring them, or is just random happenstance?
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# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 02:27 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:No. I wrote that the film presents white culture as a threat to the liberal multiculturalism. Consequently, there is effectively no criticism of liberalism in the film. (There is only criticism of white culture - e.g. "stuff white people like.") Consequently, liberals love the film. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Since you are having difficulty following the argument, I am clarifying the key misunderstandings as a way of minimizing redundancy.
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# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 06:07 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, now I'm restating myself again. But, again, there is only one character in the film who scoops out brains - and he does it so that brazenly racist Republicans can take the bodies. You may have noticed that he himself did not take a body. These details that you are omitting are important. So, perhaps when you say "liberal," you don't mean it in the sense that a critical theorist or that any other academic would mean it, but rather you mean it in the colloquial sense: liberals are Democrats who like Obama and Hilary and Bernie and hate Bush and McCain and Trump and whatever. If that's what you mean by "liberal," such that by default Republicans can't be liberal, then I would be interested in why we're assuming that all the party guests aren't liberals. Certainly nothing they say excludes them from being liberals, at least as far as I can tell - in fact, to the extent their words give us any clues at all, they sound closer to liberals than Republicans. I can't imagine a Republican, at least a stereotypical one, asking "is being black an advantage or a disadvantage in America?" I thought the Republican line is something like either "race doesn't matter" or "it's an advantage because of racist programs like affirmative action." I can't think of a (stereotypical) Republican copping to blackness being a disadvantage. Maybe the idea is that all of this is irrelevant because anyone who bids on a black guy in an auction so that they can steal his body is by fiat not a liberal unless explicitly proven otherwise. But that's simply to assume that the movie is not a critique of liberalism (against all evidence to the contrary) because surely liberals can't be as bad as the movie says they are. But they can be! At least as far as the movie is concerned, they can be exactly as bad as the movie says they are. To sum up then, it would help if you'd talk about two things. First, what do you mean by "liberal?" Who is a liberal and why? Second, why exactly are the party guests not liberals? SuperMechagodzilla posted:The head villain is one of only four white liberal characters in the film. Meanwhile, the protagonists are also liberals. Both Chris and the father are diehard Obama voters. Consequently, the film is about a conflict within liberalism. Consequently, the film does not criticize liberalism itself. It is about the threat of corruption 'from outside' (specifically, the corruption of the liberal multiculture by 'white culture' - specifically, from the father's misguided collaboration with the Republicans). Perhaps your point is that although it's possible for a film about a conflict within X to criticize X, this is not an example of that. Chris is the hero, Chris is a liberal, so liberalism can't be bad. But not all liberals can be swapped out for each other. There's a key difference between Chris and the other liberals in the film that make them not interchangeable. Chris, remember, is black. And the other people in the film aren't. So, we might want to keep this in mind. SuperMechagodzilla posted:There is absolutely no talk of egalitarianism in the film. SuperMechagodzilla posted:To be very clear: you say the film is against liberalism because it says orthodox racism is bad. But your premise is faulty; liberals already agree that orthodox racism is bad. Liberals already understand that you don't walk up to a black dude, grab his muscles and ask if his cock is huge. Hence, "thank god I'm not like them." Malignant racism is when you hate a person because they belong to a certain race, you have negative judgments about a person because they belong to a certain race, you think averse treatment is licensed because someone is a member of a certain race, etc. This is a category the KKK falls into. They hate black people, they think black people are lazy violent thugs, they think black people should be run out of town, etc. With the possible exception of the son, I don't think anyone is explicitly malignantly racist in this film. If you wanted to, you could read malignant racism into a number of the characters, but this sort of racism is extremely unfashionable these days, such that white liberals tend to try to avoid this sort of thing as much as possible. They castigate themselves if they find themselves tempted by malignant racism, disclaim any malignant racism that might be attributed to them, go out of their way to criticize malignant racists and distance themselves from malignant racists, fly off the handle if you accuse them of malignant racism, etc. So I don't think there is much cause to attribute any malignant racism to anyone except in the pedestrian sense that they go around scooping out the brains of black people, but as you point out, there's only one guy literally doing the scooping, and even he seems to be doing it on the basis of something other than hatred or other averse feelings towards a race. Admiring racism is when you admire a person because they belong to a certain race, you have positive judgments about a person because they belong to a certain race, you think beneficial treatment is licensed because someone is a member of a certain race, etc. This is a category of racism that many white liberals fall into. They admire black people (but for racist reasons, like their "natural athleticism" or their "huge cock"), they have positive judgments about black people solely because they're black, they (perhaps) think black people should get benefits just because they're black (which is why people don't like affirmative action, and which is why sophisticated defenses of affirmative action rely on a history of discrimination against a race rather than just someone's race in order to explain why benefits are justified), etc. Most of the white people in this movie display lots of admiring racism. Uncaring racism is when you don't care what race a person is, and you act in a way that ignores their race. This can be racism when this kind of thing systemically impacts people of a certain race non-accidentally. So for instance if I cut after school programs not because I hate black people but because I think they're a waste of money, but all the white kids in the suburbs have lots of other options whereas black kids in the projects end up with nothing to do, then I have acted in an uncaringly racist way. There is a good amount of uncaring racism in this film: I think the blind art dealer is supposed to be an example of someone who is just an uncaring racist as opposed to an admiring racist, although there's certainly a reading according to which he's lying about not seeing race and according to which he thinks Chris's eye is somehow better because "black." The "thank god I'm not them" reaction you mention, when we're talking about white liberals, is most commonly deployed in response to being presented with depictions of white people being malignant racists. You're suggesting that it can also be deployed against the other two kinds of racism. That's true, and as you've noted, it's pointed out well by the Rian Johnson tweet. But white liberals can say whatever they like! Lil Mama Im Sorry has pointed this out already. The question is whether the movie licenses their saying that sort of thing. Do you think the movie licenses it? Why or why not? My own view is that the movie licenses it if, in fact, white liberals aren't guilty of the sorts of things the movie charges them with. It's true if they aren't guilty of literally grabbing black people, asking about dick size, etc. You seem to think white liberals would never do that sort of bullshit, but you're ridiculously mistaken. Ask a black woman how often people try to touch her hair or spend some time talking with a black guy who's on Grindr. The movie also only licenses this view if white liberals aren't guilty of metaphorically scooping the brains out of black people and stealing their bodies. But they (and really I should be saying "we," since I'm a white liberal) are guilty of precisely this (metaphorically). So the movie is not letting white liberals off the hook. To some degree, when we (white liberals) like the movie, we're either disingenuous (when we say "I love the movie, but that's not me") or pretty unhappy ("I love the movie, but it's right that I'm effectively a murderer who bids on black people and steals their bodies"). That's my reading of the movie. I'm not super sure what your issue is with it. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Apr 6, 2017 |
# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 15:59 |
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i am the bird posted:Was there textual evidence that Chris is a liberal, diehard Obama voter or are we assuming this because he's black and because white people tried to bond with him over Obama? SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is a concrete example of what's going wrong here. You are mixing up my description of the film's liberal ideology of the film with Zizek's communist (critique of) ideology, when the film is obviously not communist. You are also treating all the causcasian characters as interchangeable for some reason (because academics?), so that the characters who sell and the characters who buy are all identical. edit: maybe for the sake of being slightly less "AND NOW IT'S OVER," the real reply to your argument here is that it can be a race thing and a liberalism thing at the same time. The salient difference between Chris and the others is his race. That doesn't mean anything that results from this difference is just about race. To think this would be to make the same mistake that people made back before anyone had ever thought about intersectionality.
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# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 20:25 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Why does the film end with "no one will ever believe us"? Also, for the sake of clarity, would it kill you to cite Zizek a little more specifically than just "(Zizek)"? Like, could we get page numbers and book titles or whatever?
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# ¿ Apr 8, 2017 15:52 |
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Escobarbarian posted:Tycho, just wondering, were you aware of SMG before this thread? Anyways, I like SMG's schtick, it's interesting, etc. but sometimes he's super wrong about stuff for whatever reason (maybe he just Googles Zizek quotes and tries to come up with a reading that makes them relevant), like in this thread.
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# ¿ Apr 8, 2017 22:56 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Ok. But this means you are not actually disagreeing with my analysis of the film; you're simply of the opinion that the cynicism and paranoia are very good. SuperMechagodzilla posted:You're, again, endorsing the liberal ideology of the film while celebrating the attack on those corrupt liberals who touch black people without permission or whatever ("thank god I'm not like them!"). SuperMechagodzilla posted:You've vocally rejected progressive politics, in favour of a postpolitical pragmatism/realism - where proletarian solidarity is "naive" and the best we can do is raise awareness and foster tolerance for when the next outbursts of Dorneresque violence unavoidably occur. So Get Out is to be celebrated because it helps white audiences to 'feel their pain' (Bill Clinton). SuperMechagodzilla posted:I was already aware of this stance. I just rejected it as false. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Apr 9, 2017 |
# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 15:09 |
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Wait, was that the BECAUSE FOURTEEN YEAR OLD BOYS LIKE IT thing? BravestOfTheLamps posted:Isn't this the exact argument used to deny the existence of racism? I.e., it's in the past and doesn't affect every part of society?
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# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 15:56 |
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poo poo sorry, that sentence should read "classism isn't the beginning and end of every question." I'll edit it now. edit: wait a second motherfucker, that's not what I wrote. I wrote "class warfare," not "racism"! I didn't say class warfare was only in the past or that it doesn't affect everyone, I just said it doesn't explain everything. Really just read The Second Sex, that book has a great explanation of this with respect to gender. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Apr 9, 2017 |
# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 16:03 |
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Reminds me of this poster from the Slevin thread, back when SMG's avatar was Louis-Dreyfus with a cigar:
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# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 20:54 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I have been critiquing the liberal ideology of the film, while your response has been that people who identify as liberal sometimes do bad things (microaggressions!) that go against the ideology. You are criticizing individuals, not performing any sort of ideological critique. Liberal multiculturalism is already about a hypersensitivity to even minor forms of harassment. SuperMechagodzilla posted:You seem to be having trouble with the concept of ideology in general. When I critique the liberal ideology, you respond the 'post-ideological' assertion that everything about the characters' worldview is totally natural - "genuine and honest", "reasonable", etc. - while also putting this in postmodern, 'post-truth', relativistic terms. While you yourself do not share with the paranoia, you respect it as an essential part of black male culture or something. (The whole point of liberal-multicultural tolerance is that you can do anything, and so long as you do not harass...). I don't think it's an "essential" part of "black male culture," whatever you mean by that. I just think it's a warranted response to growing up as a black guy in present day America. Do you contest that claim? Do you think that, if you were walking down the street and met a black person who thought stuff like "white people are out to get me," he'd likely just be one of those crazy, overly-paranoid guys, or that he'd have a point? Note that you're not alone if you'd answer the former: that's a super common response to paranoid black people. But the movie wants you to answer the latter, because the whole story is one according to which that guy you meet walking down the street is literally telling the truth, and in fact if anything he's sugar-coating it. I do think "the whole point of liberal-multicultural tolerance is that you can do anything, and so long as you do not harass..." is not a bad way of summing things up, and none of the people in the film think they are harassing anyone, which means I'm right, right? Your point here has to be that the people in the film do harass Chris and others, so they can't be true liberals, right? And my point has to be that they don't harass Chris, so they can be true liberals, right? (Note here that "harass" should probably be in square quotes, because as far as the people in the movie are concerned, asking about his dick or admiring his muscles isn't harassment - indeed, it's admiration!) SuperMechagodzilla posted:In this view, my belief in the truth of egalitarian struggle is political. Not only is antiracism viewed as a relic of the time before history ended, it's a dangerous intolerance - a totalitarian imposition. What you promote instead is a postpolitical gradualism. SuperMechagodzilla posted:So, again, you do not actually disagree with anything I have written. You simply agree with the film that liberal capitalist democracy is the best of all possible political systems, and these terrorist attacks and whatnot are simply minor SuperMechagodzilla posted:It was not all in Chris's head. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Apr 10, 2017 |
# ¿ Apr 10, 2017 15:02 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Let's focus on this for a second.
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# ¿ Apr 10, 2017 22:59 |
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Jesus, okay, so now I realize that when you wrote "You're, again, endorsing the liberal ideology of the film while celebrating the attack on those corrupt liberals who touch black people without permission or whatever ("thank god I'm not like them!")" there was literally nothing of your own reading of the film in there, that was entirely just meant to be a reconstruction of what I think. Your reconstruction was so bad I didn't realize it was supposed to be one: I thought it was your own description of what was going on. I think this whole thing is a dead end. (For the record, yes, that's what I'm doing, but no, that's not what I'm doing, insofar as "endorsing the liberal ideology of the film," on your view, carries a lot of baggage with it that I don't think is properly part of liberalism, which is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, no, I don't think those people are corrupt liberals, they're just liberals.) If you want to keep talking, there's plenty of stuff in all my posts that you haven't responded to yet, and I'd be interested in continuing to talk about the rest of it (although tomorrow I go out of town for a week so I likely won't stop by for a while). TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Apr 11, 2017 |
# ¿ Apr 11, 2017 00:16 |
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i am the bird posted:The key is Root, though, who accepts that race is a construct and refuses to believe racial myths; and yet, he profits directly from them. He's the most important character in the film. Why? Because he's the representation of the belief that the construction of race creates racism rather than the other way around. If he denies racial biotruths, he can't be racist, as if racism is about belief rather than action. But just like Root's color-blindness (literal blindness, in fact!) is racist for the reasons you talk about, Rose's preference is both explicitly racist (she hunts down black people so her dad can scoop their brains out) and a metaphor for racism more generally, because her attraction takes the form of treating people as objects (trophies to be won and captured in snapshots, generic categories to be Googled for, like "NCAA prospects," and so on). Perhaps more crucially, she is also a stereotypical "ally." She purports to (and in fact does) understand what's objectionable about people asking Chris about his dick, saying "my man" to him, and so on. She's woke enough to know what sorts of things constitute microaggressions, why and why Chris would be pissed off about them. She goes out of her way to defend Chris when the police officer stops them. But, of course, it turns out that this just makes her worse, not better. Her understanding is what makes her feigned love convincing and also maybe keeps Chris from being so uncomfortable as to make him want to leave even earlier. The argument with the cop was a way to keep people from realizing where Chris disappeared to. And obviously all the understanding of microaggressions in the world is no help if you just sit idly by while your psycho brother commits actual aggression. So, I think Root and Rose are the two best examples of the movie's critique of liberal racism: Root is colorblind and Rose does get racism and does legitimately want to spend time with black people and so on. But all to no avail.
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# ¿ Apr 18, 2017 06:06 |
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No, Chris's photography does the opposite. It frees people. That's literally what it does in the movie. He takes a photograph and it frees the people who are trapped inside their own bodies. So that's what separates Rose's photos from Chris's photos. Hers trap people. His free people. She is an oppressor. He is a liberator. I do like your point about Chris's photos being lovely. I am not sure I like that reading, because it might just be "this is a movie, we have to just tell you they're good and you take our word for it." But it is definitely very tempting. The story might be about how Chris goes from a lovely trendy photographer who takes "good" photos that simply serve to trap him further in the white supremacist society that values the photos and the person who takes them (only instrumentally, of course) to an actual photographer who takes "bad" photos (the first is a surreptitious shot that he doesn't get to frame correctly, the second is literally just a shot of the dude's abs or whatever in order to trigger the flash) that liberate him and others. I also don't think I said that Rose's secret intentions trump her actions. Her actions are all bad. Her concern for the police officer's harassment of Chris is really just an attempt to make sure nobody knows where he has disappeared to. She doesn't take any good actions. I don't know if I'd say it's unfathomable that Rose is merely a stupid person who likes Chris for his mediocre photography. I fathomed it for a bit and then I decided it wasn't a great reading because it doesn't do a good job of accounting for (for instance) what she saw in the other people, why she's Googling NCAA prospects, what's up with the way she eats cereal, or really any goddamn thing about this movie. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Apr 19, 2017 |
# ¿ Apr 19, 2017 16:47 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:"White liberal allies are bad because... they google black porn and then lobotomize blacks." SuperMechagodzilla posted:However, it is an almost textbook example of fantasies about the excessive jouissance of the other (in this case, the racist other). edit: gently caress I didn't even write "her cereal" in the first place! I said "the way she eats cereal." Jesus Christ dude. edit #2: I've decided you were attributing the reading to the movie, not to me, which makes more sense (I'm leaving the previous stuff I wrote as the billionth reminder to myself in this thread that I should be fairer to you). Also, you're basically right, I think, except that you take the othering to be exclusive of the critique of liberalism I'm attributing to the film, rather than part and parcel of it. There's a tendency to view othering as a boogeyman, which I think you're picking up on. I'm not sure that's a fair tendency. Sometimes othering is called for because the other is the other. SuperMechagodzilla posted:And this is why you are getting sidetracked talking about how Rose is an oppressor because she traps men inside photos(???) and, again, offering no actual criticism of liberalism. I'm not sure I get your "(???)" after my talk of Rose trapping people in photos. I mean, that's what she does! The people in her photos are the people she's trapped. They're of course not literally trapped in the photo in the sense of being contained in the Polaroid or whatever. But they are trapped, and they are in the photo, and they are trapped in virtue of having ended up in a position such that those photos were taken. Chris is the opposite. His photos free people. Of course, they are not literally free in the photo, etc. But when he takes his photo, he frees them. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Apr 20, 2017 |
# ¿ Apr 20, 2017 02:47 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:In other words, the straightforward meaning of the film is that "woke liberals are bad because they are against belief in the illuminati conspiracy". That's much more accurate than what you've written, but still a very poor criticism of 'woke' liberals (unless you're already into David Icke).
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# ¿ Apr 22, 2017 21:28 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This falls apart at the point where you must explain how the brain transplant conspiracy is a metaphor for stuff that happens. Like, with specificity. Not just 'a bad thing.' We've already pretty much covered the white characters. There are the specific ones, like Root, who is colorblind but complicit with horrific acts; Rose, who is the woke ally but actually bad after all; the brother, who is actively practicing racist violence but tolerated by his family because he's family and because it serves their interests; the dad, who thinks he's in the clear because he loves Obama even when he himself is doing awful stuff. There are also the white masses, who see themselves as in the clear with respect to this whole process because they do it out of admiration (for muscles, for the size of one's dick, for the trendiness of one's skin color). In their view, they're doing a favor, because by scooping out the black brain (the part that's not good) but keeping the black body (the part that is good), they help both people reach their full potential. Black people have potential, but only physically, culturally, etc. - not as individuals in control of their own lives. What they need to unlock their potential is some white people in charge. So, it's a metaphor for why it's okay for white liberals to be in charge of black people, even if you can ostensibly point to "bad effects" (like brain scooping out, metaphorically, or all the poo poo that actually goes on in America, actually) of white liberal rule. Why is it okay? Well, because it's not like black people can be in charge of their own lives. Their skills lie elsewhere. But of course they have many skills - it's not like we're being racist or anything. We think black people are better in lots of categories! We're just helping them reach their full potential. So, that's how the metaphor works for them. The metaphor also works for Chris and the other victims. They are trapped in the sunken place. The sunken place is marginalization and an inability to change things even though you know exactly what's wrong and can see it happening. You have a premonition that it is coming up, but when you actually end up marginalized you're surprised (Chris does not want to get hypnotized, but all of a sudden, it's happened, and he's in the sunken place.) We could go on and on about the metaphor, but that's only tangentially related to the main point, because we're trying to figure out a different metaphor, the brain transplant one. The metaphor there is permanently being trapped in the sunken place. That is, permanent marginalization. I could write out a long explanation here, but if you can't really understand why the idea of black people being permanently marginalized could even conceivably be a criticism that a film could make of white liberalism, I'm afraid I don't know what to say. There's another aspect of the metaphor, too. In addition to marginalization, there's quite a bit of violence, displacement, etc. The victims are kidnapped, violently assaulted, experimented on without their permission, never get to see their families again, etc. If you don't think any of that can be a good metaphor for what actually happens to black people in America, then, again, I'm afraid I'm not super sure what to say here. Also, Max Rockatansky for sure hates Jews. It's all there on the screen man.
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2017 02:18 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Your writing is incredibly vague. SuperMechagodzilla posted:White liberals are "actually bad", "complicit in horrific acts", "doing awful stuff", etc. They have "interests" -but It's unclear what any of this means, despite the vague allusions to abduction and medical experimentation. SuperMechagodzilla posted:The more lucid statement that "the sunken place is marginalization" was copied directly from Peele's twitter, without elaboration. ("I don't know what to say.") SuperMechagodzilla posted:Your other lucid statement, that the relationship between father and son represents a liberal tolerance for hate crime, was copied from me - specifically my example of a hypothetical crappy argument. Without elaboration. ("Again, I'm afraid I'm not super sure what to say here.") SuperMechagodzilla posted:You have made only one specific claim: that white liberals "[view] the black brain as the part that's not good" (???) and, consequently, strive to control blacks like drones. What real-world phenomenon are you referring to here?
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2017 16:33 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:So: how, specifically, is the fact that Rose dated Chris for two months and then used him to show off to her parents, while secretly arranging to sell his talent to an art dealer... how is this a metaphor for mass incarceration? Keep in mind that Rose's big character trait is that she hates cops. More broadly I am not sure you are being honest when you ask how a movie about black people being taken from their families and sold for profit by influential people who run things but who also see themselves as not doing anything wrong in the first place is a metaphor for mass incarceration, a system that takes black people from their families and locks them up in for-profit detention centers on the basis of laws passed by influential people who run things but who also see themselves as not doing anything wrong in the first place. Sometimes I reflect on the fact that whenever you give me poo poo about my reading of the film, you still haven't explained to anyone in this thread what reasons you have for thinking Chris views selling out as worse than what happened to Trayvon Martin. Like, most of the trolling accusations you get are just from people who don't like a reading of a film that's not as bland as, say, my reading here, but sometimes it does seem like you're trying to get a rise out of people. For instance: SuperMechagodzilla posted:Why is it bad that Bernie Sanders is jewish?
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2017 02:10 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Chris is not taken from his family. His family is dead. No characters are taken from their families in this film. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Unlike the prison-industrial complex, the Armitages' organization is explicitly illegal. You yourself acknowledge that Rose works to deceive police because she is part of an illegal organization. However, it is, in the end, a metaphor, so it's true that as you point out, nobody is literally sent to a for-profit prison for life on a shoplifting charge thanks to three strikes laws or anything like that. But I don't think this impugns my reading. SuperMechagodzilla posted:The Armitages do not strive to incarcerate anyone, beyond the fact that Chris is haphazardly tied to a chair in a rec room for a couple hours. Chris is not accused of any crimes. There is no pretence of justice. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Bernie Sanders is Jewish. In your previous post, you accused him of being a racist and a white supremacist for no clear reason. SuperMechagodzilla posted:In the film, Andre getting attacked by a suburban vigilante is directly equated to Chris having his talent purchased by Root. Chris and Andre share an identical fate. It's true that from Root's point of view, Chris's talent is the key feature, not his race, but of course the whole point of Root is that what purports to be individualistic, non-racist treatment can in fact be racist not because of some hidden motive (Root is honest about just wanting Chris's eyes, and who cares about race) but because of its systemic results (Chris is just one in a long line of victims who share nothing except skin color, as he realizes most strikingly as he leafs through the photos). Chris's anxiety, then, is not over selling out. Would that he were afforded such specificity with respect to how the Armitages are treating him! No, his concern just turns into bare survival, not being trapped forever in the sunken place and so on. That kind of destruction is visited upon Andre and the rest of the victims, and is a worry for Chris, not because of any particular talent, but because of race.
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2017 03:26 |
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I said come in! posted:Saw Get Out last night, really glad I did. I went in with no idea about the premise. This was an incredible film that I loved and had me completely focused from beginning to end.
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2017 15:15 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 22:21 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:As Tycho has made abundantly clear, the film's criticism of liberalism (such as it is) is exclusively a self-criticism You're also putting tons of words in my mouth about other stuff but I think at this point I've realized it's probably futile to bother responding point by point.
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# ¿ May 1, 2017 05:51 |