Sexuality in Horror and Halloween

As a newcomer to North America I’m still learning about Halloween culture. I spent most of my life in Australia, where the holiday is rarely observed. You might get a single pair of kids dressed up knocking on your door expecting sweet food, and you’ll have to run around the kitchen searching cupboards and drawers for something they might enjoy. Nuts? A block of cheese? An apple? It is certainly not something that most people prepare for. So my understanding of it was founded entirely on film and television shipped over from the States. I understood it to be a time where people dress up with the apparent goal of frightening others. Parents frighten children. Children frighten parents. Older siblings frighten younger siblings. Infants don’t know what’s going on. If children come to your door and curse you with “trick or treat” they’re basically holding the upkeep of your home exterior to ransom. Give us candy or the house gets it, they say, a carton of eggs and roll of toilet paper at the ready.

Thankfully, by the time I came to North America, people have grown up enough not to be such vandalising dicks any more. However I still experienced my own Mean Girls moment when confronted with just how sexual the whole event is. Being actually frightening is almost shameful and it’s unusual for a girl not to dress as “sexy whatever”. I understand that adults want to distance themselves from the childishness that they engaged in as children. And I understand that Seattle is, for whatever reason, a pretty prudish place and Halloween presents a once a year opportunity for girls to dress as slutty as they want without fear of social prejudice.

For me, Halloween is supposed to be, and is for young kids, a time for being spooky. A time for fear. Now I’m going to talk about movies.

We’re all aware of the common trope in slasher films of hypsersexualisation of women. There’s excessive nudity to the point of blatant sexist objectification. You could argue that the primary audience of these films is adolescent males and for that reason the filmmakers add tits to cater to that demographic, which may be true in some cases. However, there’s also the observation that in many slasher films the sexually promiscuous are usually the first to die, presumably as some kind of punishment. This makes sense in films and stories released in a time when sexual promiscuity is heavily scorned by society but I’d like to think that the liberal sensibilities of modern filmmakers have matured to a point where we don’t need to punish people for being sluts. I mean, having a monster whose motivations are unexplained - who is basically acting as a piece of hazardous environment rather than a character, like a wild animal - mindlessly attack whoever is the first to take their clothes off sounds a lot like the absurd rape-victim-blaming attitudes held by folks who apparently never left the dark ages. I’d like to stay away from that discussion because I believe it’s already been done, and I just hope that if horror genre continues to kill sluts first it will do so for reasons other than attempting to curtail society to dress more conservatively and have less sex.

Note that above I’m talking about slasher films. The type of film that Cabin In The Woods sends up. Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, etc. I don’t strictly consider these films horror, they are a distinct genre or a subgenre of that. Actual, scary horror films sometimes also use sexuality though usually to enhance the discomforting effect. Rather than dismissing sexuality in horror as simply tacked on objectification, or some kind of social engineering I believe that sexual themes absolutely enhance the horrific experience. It’s (unfortunately) normal in society for humans to be uncomfortable with some aspects of their own sexuality and this discomfort can be exploited by crafty storytellers. Alien was loaded with imagery and themes suggesting bodily invasion, rape, and slimy penises, and this compounded to unsettle male and female viewers alike. I think part of the reason it was so effective was that it wasn't blatant, but just suggested. The idea of an enemy binding itself to your face, smothering you, shoving its appendage down your throat and into your belly, depositing a seed which then grows within you against your will, was allowed to slither about beneath the surface of our consciousness while we watched some space-miners get killed.

I’m also reminded of Hellraiser which was more explicitly about sexuality, specifically BDSM. For many, restraint or even pain during sex is a very alien idea. The acts themselves may even contain an element of fear. Bondage is something that necessarily requires a certain level of trust to be enjoyed, but when that trust is absent it becomes threatening and frightening - perhaps still sexy to some but scary nevertheless.

This is why, for my future Halloween costumes, I will be incorporating themes of bondage and restraint and those other aspects of sexuality that most people view as uncomfortable, combining the almost requisite sluttiness with discomfort and fear.

A Dark Room, interactive narrative, metaphors

A buddy introduced me to an online game called A Dark Room, which basically killed my entire day - I just sat on my bed playing it. That first sentence was written three hours before this one. I had to stop writing to play the damn game. Finished it. 

The first few minutes of this game are super interesting, arresting, even. You get a stark white screen with a timeline of events described in text, “the room is cold. the fire is dead.” You have a single button: “light fire”.

“the fire is burning.”

Things continue in this text-based, minimalist control fashion for a while, with no instruction on how to play the game or even what sort of game it is. There are occasional random events if you wait long enough. The fire will die down, you hear a scratching sound behind a wall. You’re soon introduced to a new character called “builder”. You stoke the fire to warm her up. Before long the game balloons into a survival, resource collection type thing, with combat and exploration.

During the first part of the game I wasn’t sure how much of a “game” it actually was. It seemed more like a linear narrative relying on attentive prompts by the player to direct and advance the story. Would such a thing still be considered a game? Temporarily forgetting about my “every game is a race” argument from Race Design Theory, what differentiates a game from any other narrative text is the capacity for interaction. David Cage and his company Quantic Dream attempt to produce games that blur the line between games and movies, however they are unequivocally video games. The player is given choices which affect the action and storyline. Occasionally, during the early ‘training’ stages of QD games, the player is asked to control the player in menial tasks, without any decision-making on any level. If the text were to be made entirely of these interactions from the player it could be argued that it would not longer be a game at all, however this is pointless and irrelevant, as this text would basically be reduced to a movie that pauses itself and requires the viewer to continuously perform some simple and menial action to unpause and ‘advance’ the plot. That would be silly.

Consider also choose-your-own-adventure books, in which the reader (or player) does have some degree of influence over the story. They might contain multiple endings, or multiple paths to the same ending. If this sort of narrative were presented on a computer screen it might be labeled (or mislabeled) a video game. The prevalence of ereaders ie. Kindle, nook, with the capacity for in text hyperlinks further blurs the line between computers and books, between video games and novels. Admittedly the CYOA genre (if it is indeed a genre, otherwise, medium) has declined in popularity seemingly in time with the public acceptance of video game culture. Despite the fact that video games have existed in some primitive form or another since the 50s (debatable), one could say that these types of books were a precursor, at least in the popular sphere, to modern video games.

As were tabletop role playing games, and board games before them. TTRPGs generally follow a common structure involving one Game Master directing the action based on some prewritten script. Again, I ask where the boundary of the video game definition lies - what is the minimum amount of digitisation needed? There are online platforms for existing typically offline games, such as online casinos or scrabble clones played via Facebook. Are we supposed to call these video games or digital versions of traditional games? I don’t believe that there is a difference.

A significant portion of modern video games fall under the category of simulations of offline games (i.e. the FIFA series, aforementioned scrabble and online casinos,) while a wider category includes simulations of other offline activities (i.e. flight simulators, tactical combat, auto racing,) and all of these are merely approximations of their real-world counterparts. As technology increases they will obviously grow more and more accurate - I guess asymptotically. As they do so, performing given actions in the game will become more procedurally similar to performing them in the real world. Digital virtual cockpits will more and more resemble actual cockpits. Regardless of this, though, at any level of sophistication and accuracy these simulations will always remain such. They will exist solely as metaphors in the same way that their primitive predecessors did. By these predecessors I am talking about this:

Very early video games such as Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! are (by today’s standards) too far from real life to be considered accurate in any sense. Some might argue that to call Punch Out! a boxing simulator would be an insult to the sport of boxing. Nevertheless, it is in some way a simplified, primitive version of a hypothetical ‘perfect’ boxing simulator (perhaps utilising some futuristic The Matrix-style virtual reality) and therefore acts as a metaphor for boxing in the same capacity as the perfect simulator would.

The next point I would like to make concerns the fundamental structure of early video games, and, by extension, modern ones. Punch Out! is not that far removed from other games of its era, for instance Space Invaders. If one were to compare player inputs (control button sequences, timing, etc) from both games they might be indistinguishable - the only real difference between the games is their graphical presentation. In one a man moves around a boxing ring, executing specific attacks at specific times while evading opponents attacks. In the other a spaceship moves around a 2-dimensional space, performing the same (or at least comparable) timed attack and evasion maneuvers. Rather than presenting these games graphically as they are, let us imagine a text-based version. Obviously it would have to be slowed down since we can’t read as quickly as we can interpret images. It might look something like this:

Opponent moves left 2 spaces.

Opponent moves forward 1 space.

Opponent attacks.

Player takes 1 damage.

Note that this reads similarly to a TTRPG GM’s narration. The antithesis to this point revolves around complexity: Modern games of the same type still follow the same structural pattern, albeit with slightly more complexity. Space combat games now successfully utilise 3-dimensional movement rather than two. Boxing simulators now use a wide range of moves. The ways in which games handle dealing and receiving damage varies in complexity - compare different health systems across various popular modern shooters.

Obviously not every video game in existence, when reduced to this data-centric form, will be indistinguishable. Most puzzle games, for example, do not have enemies. Perhaps in the future someone, maybe myself or maybe not, will construct a list of categories of games which when described this way will be incompatible with each other - a list of fundamental genres.

5 out of 6 for A Dark Room. A strong first product by Doublespeak Games and a thoughtful reminder that games don’t need to be flashy to be great or interesting.

Race examples, analysed

All competitive races can be analysed in terms of these components. A 42 kilometre marathon is much the same, all that differs is the challenge (42km as opposed to 100m). a typical horse race is again similar, except with differing restrictions as well as challenge. Jockeys will be disqualified for attempting to complete the race on foot. An interesting alternative is the La Mans 24 Hours – an other similar 'endurance' motor races. This race has competitors attempt to cover as much distance as possible within the given 24 hour time period, it therefore sees the roles of challenge and medium reversed from those of a typical motor race, such as the Formula One Grand Prix. Where a Grand Prix's challenge is distance and medium is time, as in a 100m sprint, the challenge of Le Mans is time, and the medium is distance. In other words, racers must traverse the 24 hours while achieving the greatest distance possible relative to other competitors. The restrictions in both races are similar. Ultimately, the challenge of a race is fixed while the medium is not. In scientific terms, the challenge represents the independent variable while the medium represents the dependent variable -the thing that is measured.

The challenge:time format of race design can also be observed in some eating contests, where competitors attempt to consume as much as possible within a given time. Also compare a surfing heat, (or skateboarding, BMX, wakeboarding, as well as a multitude of other “extreme sports”). In these events competitors are given a limited time to perform as many tricks as possible, or as well as possible, and receive points for the overall quality of their heat. Note that these events are not judged by average speed, as conventional races are. Extreme sporting heats are instead judged by average quality (quality over time). This is a similar format to that used in competitive dancing as well as singing contests. A surfing heat is scored by points over the heat period. Due to the sport's reliance on nature and high degree of luck with regard to desirable waves appearing within the heat, a contestant may find themselves forced to sit on their board waiting for an appropriate wave, effectively wasting time. This is equivalent to a sprinter standing still. The competitor is reducing their available challenge space, resulting in a worse medium result. This means that their average score – measured in time/distance or points/time – must be higher for the remainder of their run/heat in order to successfully compete with those opponents who did not waste time. Although races are usually thought of as a contest for the highest velocity, they are not generally scored as such. Velocity is measured by distance/time, whereas races are typically scored by time/distance. Inverting this equation results in the winner being he with the lowest score, which is precisely how conventional races are scored. In these cases the challenge is again time, however the medium is points from tricks or quality. Each competitor must reach the end of their time limit (their heat) while amassing as many points as possible. If teams in the Le Mans 24 Hours are awarded one point for every meter the car travels, the challenge-medium relationship would be identical to that of a surfing heat, in the end. Of course, the means to achieving those points – the restrictions – are different. These heats also follow the time trial format where each competitor performs separately. Only one competitor has access to the surf (or racetrack in the case of motor racing qualifying time trials) at a time. This is primarily to avoid competitors interfering with one another.

Consider a race in which contestants must consume a given quantity of hot togs in a short a time as possible. There is no need for this race to be organised as a time trial since each competitor has access to his own pile of food and cannot interfere with other competitors. There is also no need for a time trial format in the 100m sprint, as each competitor is confined to his own lane and cannot legally interfere with others because of this separation I would class both the eating contest and the 100m sprint as time trials, although the term is now less relevant. Each competitor is segregated from others within their own sub-challenge-space. That is, each sprinter must traverse the distance of their own lane, and each eater must consume their own bowl of hot dogs. These are in contrast to races where competitors share the challenge-space, such as the Tour De France, or Grand Prix. In these events the other competitors become a part of the challenge; they become obstacles to be negotiated in a similar way to hurdles.

The next competition to be analysed is a boxing match. Fighters must score the most points within a given time frame, so the challenge of boxing is time, while the medium is points (or knockout). The idea that boxing and surfing heats may be discussed as races may be met with some opposition, however they both involve some contest of speed: measured in points over time. These events are races precisely as much as the Le Mans 24 Hours can be considered a race.

All events discussed so far have used time as either medium or challenge, and therefore have been some contest of speed. However a more abstract notion of speed can be imagined, using some other measure instead of time, for example, turns. Vegas rules solitaire, otherwise known as patience, removes time from the contest, allowing the player to deliberate and carefully consider each move. This places the pressure on efficiency of turns, rather than of time. Solitaire contains a challenge of putting all cards away in the required order and manner, and the medium of turns. Many tabletop and board games share the medium of turns. The goal to complete the objective in the least number of turns is similar to the format of a 100m sprint.

Solitaire's most defining feature as a race, and as suggested in the name, is the lack of opponents. Because of this it is one of the few games to be scored absolutely, rather than relatively. As may be becoming apparent, the components of challenge, medium, and restrictions apply to what are commonly considered to be games, rather than races. It is here that I would argue that they are the same – that every game is a race.

Take the game of Chess. The great difficulty in chess strategy arises only because your opponent and his pieces exist as part of the challenge-space. Their moves are calculated in order to inhibit your ability to reach your goal – checkmate. They can do this by directly inhibiting your attack (i.e. playing defensively - removing attacking pieces from the game, having their king “run” from attacking pieces), or by forcing you to postpone your attack in favour of defence (playing aggressively).

Tournament Poker is an interesting game under this analysis. Ignoring bluffing and betting (that is, within a single hand) the medium of poker – the thing that is measured and compared between players – is hand strength. However when betting is included, and when the entire game is looked at as a whole, the medium is net money. The challenge-space again involves other players as obstacles, but these players also comprise the actual challenge-space. The single challenge of tournament poker is to be the last remaining player.

Pho Hong restaurant review

Pho Hong: the small Vietnamese restaurant tucked in between Asian grocers and other foodsellers of varying cultural origins on the stretch of Fraser street between 43rd and 49th. My housemates and I thought it might be a nice place for a beer, or rather, the most likely place to sell beer. In my experience the Vietnamese enjoy drinking the liquid, and this venue was open until 10pm - later than any of its neighbors.
"PHO HONG. VIETNAMESE CUISINE - BEEF NOODLE SOUP. LICENSED" it says out the front. A sign on the door says "cash only."
Promising.

We walk in and it's pretty empty. One guy sitting at a table for two. A couple somewhere. A waitress approaches us and asks, "three?"
"Three," I say, holding up three fingers, and she directs us to a table for six. We sit.
The waitress places six chopsticks, some napkins, and three cups of tea on the table, then disappears again. We chuckle at the fact that she brought us tea when we have zero intention of ordering meals. We look at the menus, the specials page buried under the plate of glass on the table, the regular menu a sheet of laminated pink paper. On the back, under "Beverages:", down the bottom of the page, Local Beer $4, Import Beer $4.50. Good prices, although the lack of an actual list of local or import beers is dubious. Although we've already eaten dinner I decide to order something small, "COMBO A" for myself and my male housemate to share. The female housemate settles on a pear-shaped ice cream dessert.

Again the waitress appears and begins taking our orders. The housemate to my left goes first.
"I'll have this pear desert, and one of your local beers," she says.
The waitress scribbles something down on her notepad and looks back up at the housemate. She just stares, waiting for something.
"Can you tell me what they are?" the housemate says.
"Budweiser and Canadian," says the waitress.
"I'll have Canadian."
"That's it, ice cream and beer?"
"Yep! Thank you."
The waitress writes that down and then looks back up at the rest of us. She doesn't make eye contact, and her gaze is sort of floating around between me and the other guy.
I guess I'll speak.
"I'll have Combo A to share between us," indicating my other housemate.
She doesn't write anything down, just continues looking at me.
"Combo A? Can I have that? To share?"
"Yes."
"Okay. And a Canadian, too, please."
The four of us are silent and unmoving for a short time, and then the final one of our table speaks, the one I'm sharing with.
"I'll just have the Canadian."
The waitress leaves.

We talk among ourselves in hushed voices about how strange that interaction was. Why didn't she talk? The couple sitting at a table nearby - the only table with more than one occupant - gets up and leaves.
Then we realise that the place is almost totally silent. This was why we'd been so hushed, that natural thing we instinctively do in quiet places - be quiet ourselves. There's no music, despite the speakers around the place. Nobody is speaking. The guy at the table for two is checking his phone. A girl at the far end deep in the place is using a laptop. We're the only people making any noise at all, so we stop, and sit there in silence, looking at each other and around the place, waiting for it to end.

The waitress bring us our beers with glasses, and the pear ice cream, and leaves. We're thankful for something to occupy ourselves. The dessert looks like Salvador Dali's version of the neat and symmetrical thing in the picture-menu. It's deformed, lopsided, misshapen, and when my friend tries to cut into it with her spoon she actually has to cut, sawing with the spoon like a knife. It's solid and there are ice crystals on the surface.
I'm sitting next to a wall, so right by my head is this big floral print on canvas in what looks like a window frame. There are faux-windows everywhere, in fact, the opposite wall is a row of small alcoves with candles inside and wooden slatted window shutters on either side. Red brick walls. The ceiling has some kind of droopy texture - like far too much paint has been slopped on there and started to drip into little mini spiky stalactites as it dries. There's a section of the place with a lattice on the ceiling covered with creeping vines which are probably plastic. I'm getting a real Italian vibe, maybe Spanish. I'm not good with vibes.

After a few minutes of silence one of my tablemates whispers, "why isn't there any music?"
Nobody responds.
Then we hear a short ditty from somewhere in the room, a little microtune lasting about two seconds. It's annoying and strange, like a sound from a crap video game. Is it from the man with the phone? The girl with the laptop? Or some other source? It happens every few minutes.
"I want to leave right now," says one housemate.
"Me too," says the other.

Finally our food arrives.
One skewer of pork and one of chicken, and a spring roll sliced into quarters. We divide this between ourselves according to who wants what, and it tastes disappointing. The meat is tough and flavourless. The spring rolls are the best bit, followed by the steamed rice.
The food is gone quickly for two reasons: there isn't much of it and we are anxious to leave.
The beers are still half-full but that's no matter. We down them.
Let's pay for this and get out of here, we say, and so we wait for a while but the waitress is having a conversation with someone at another table. When she's done she walks past us back to the kitchen, and I hold out my arm waving at her saying, "excuse me, hey, hi," but she doesn't notice and walks right on by.
"Well then," I say, "I guess we pay over there."
So we walk over to the back of the restaurant, where the waitress is doing embroidery or something on one of the tables, and the girl who was on the laptop gets up and operates the cash register. Now she can't find our bill. There's a collection of them spread out on the desk. I don't know why there are more checks than there are patrons. The girl has a Vietnamese conversation with the waitress who's sitting nearby. And eventually they figure out which table we were sitting at.
It comes out to around $30. We pay (cash) and bug out.

One of the strangest dining experiences I've had. So awkward it's surreal.

The race, deconstructed.

Throughout this analysis of those components that make up a race, I will refer to a classic, Olympic-style,100 metre sprint foot race as a reference point. The 100 meter sprint involves multiple competitors each traversing a fixed distance in as short a time as possible. More accurately, each competitor is judged relative to each other competitor. The actual times recorded do not matter absolutely. 

A time trial race is no different other than that the competitors complete their run separately. After each competitor has attempted the trial their completion times are compared in much the same way as in a traditional simultaneous race. Some events will allow competitors to make repeated attempts. This is an advantage of the time trial format over traditional format, in that if one competitor has a “bad run” in a traditional simultaneous race it would be unfair on the other competitors to request the run void and have it repeated. Conversely, a time trial format allows these individual repetitions so that each competitor may achieve their best time. This, however, in a way misses the point of traditional races – after all, the logical extension of repeated individual time trials is simply to compare each competitors historical best times, resulting always in only one winner: he who holds the world record for that event. 

Relays are another interesting variation on typical athletic sprints. Although at any one time each runner is competing against each other runner, all are part of a team, and the race is actually composed of teams competing against each other. The passing of the baton and switching of pressure from one team member to the next is merely an obstacle that the team must overcome as part of their traversing the distance. In this way a relay is similar to a hurdles event in that competitors (either as teams or individuals) must negotiate a fixed number of obstacles during the course of the race. These obstacles – the individual hurdles – are actually a part of the race track. Without them the race would not be classified as a hurdles event. They are integral to the race. In this case the combination of track distance as well as the hurdles themselves forms what I will call “the Challenge”. It comprises the goal activity to be undertaken. In a 100 meter sprint the Challenge is “run 100 meters”. 

The second component of a race is what I will call “the Medium”. This is the thing that is measured. In the case of hurdles and 100 meter sprint, the medium is time. Each race must contain these two things in some form or another, however as will be shown below, they are not restricted to spatial/temporal dimensions. There is a third component which I call Restrictions. These entail any additional rules the race may have, most often specifying the type of locomotion. Competitors in a 100 meter sprint are restricted from riding bicycles or driving automobiles, they must cross the distance required – complete the challenge – on foot, and I expect there are additional restrictions on footwear and clothing, which all fall into this category. The restrictions component exists merely to differentiate existing conventional races which, at their core, share identical challenges and mediums (usually some distance and time, respectively). Ultimately, restrictions are a part of the challenge, however they have been separated here when dealing with traditional races. The category is irrelevant when discussing games and contests not usually described as races. 

Compiling these three components, a 100 meter sprint can be said to have a challenge of 100 meters, in the medium of time, with any number of restrictions regarding garment, vehicles, age, gender, gait, etc.

What I liked about Stalker

If you haven't seen Stalker, that's fine. There's no harm in reading this, but don't deprive yourself of the film. As I say, it's a polarising movie, I think you'll either really like it or really dislike it, but the benefits of liking it are greater than the detriments of disliking it. That said, it's like 3 hours long so buckle up. It's the sort of film that has an intermission. 

Stalker was loosely based on a book called Roadside Picnic, and was screenwritten by the same brothers who wrote the book. The videogame, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., is even more loosely based on both the book and the film. Each is very different from the others: where the book pretty much says "yeah, it was aliens," the film stays away from any sorts of explanations as to the origin of the Zone, and focuses more on the characters' trek through the Zone. Oh yeah, it's about an area of land called The Zone, cordoned off by the military, where treacherous invisible things can hurt you, but there's a magical thing in the center that grants innermost desires. That pretty much applies to all three versions. Now I have to confess that some of my understanding or interpretations of the film might be influenced by the book and even by the game.

Enjoy some music:

Some people really, REALLY, like this movie. Some people say that Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is the best film humans have come up with, but I think there's no doubt that it's a polarising thing. In fact I'd bet that most people would watch it, hate it, and say "I don't get it". I'll straight up admit that I don't get it, or I didn't get it when I first watched it. Or, perhaps, that I didn't think I got it.

It always concerns me when books and movies come across as highly intellectual, because I worry that I'm not smart enough to comprehend it. They make me feel dumb. But I think there's two types of thing that can have this result. On one hand, take Lynch's Mulholland Drive - At the end I didn't get it. There were layers of symbolism and metaphors that I'm sure will become clearer the more you watch it over and over. On the other hand, there's Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles, or Stalker, where at the end you might initially be confused, but repeated readings/viewings aren't necessarily going to help. The point of these things, I think, is the journey, whereas the first category is more about gaining a holistic view of the whole thing and then stepping back and analysing and understanding it. I enjoyed the Wind-up Bird book right until the end, where I said, "well what was the point?", then I eventually decided that there isn't a point. It's not about where it ends up, it's about the stuff that happens along the way. Similarly, when I watched Stalker and thought I didn't understand it, what I really didn't understand was why people raved about it so much. My problem, I think, was that I was looking too deeply.

Sure there's probably metaphors in the book that I missed, but that's always okay. You shouldn't have to pick up every metaphor in a thing in order for it to be entertaining, and I think that's where Stalker succeeds. It looks good on the surface: it's got very pretty images, which go well with a high quality soundtrack to really put you in the scene. And another way it does this is through pacing. It is without doubt a boring film. Shots will linger on nothing very interesting for a very long time, which sounds like a bad thing. A lot of people would see that as undesirable, but films like this don't do things like that by accident. I believe it hangs on these images for so long to sort of help you tune out of your real life, and take in the beautiful scenery within the film. This is also something that I think is meant to emulate what the characters are going through, and has to do with being outside and in nature. The main guy, the Stalker, really loves the Zone. He keeps going back there despite the danger, and the first thing he does when he gets there is goes and chills out in the bushes, because he feels at home there. Now it's worth noting that the film depicts everything outside of and untouched by the Zone firstly in dull sepia tones, and secondly as highly industrialised yet decrepit and uncomfortable, and maybe the Zone is the closest thing left in the fictional world to just nature. Flora has been allowed to overgrow, a dog runs wild, and human structures are falling apart from disuse. It's a land that nature has reclaimed, despite its decidedly unnatural origins and threats. I like the idea that the Stalker has developed some emotional or even spiritual connection with the Zone because it reminds me that we can or should similarly develop and foster our own connections with the natural world. Being outside and away from civilisation and technology is really nice and cathartic, whether that be a pulling force, our natural inclination to be outdoors in our primal element, or a push to get away from modern city life. When you are outdoors, camping or hiking or whatever, I don't know about you but I can easily sit down and just appreciate the environment for quite some time, and I think that's what the long shots in the film are really about. Just chilling out and appreciating nature. I think that's the effect the film's trying to give you.

This nature thing really appeals to me. Stalker's about a whole lot more than that, it's got lots of themes and references to religion and faith, but that just doesn't interest me when I watch it and it's not what I take away from it.

Three out of three and a half stars for Stalker.

Riddick, Sexism

The new Riddick film is okay. It's like a cross between Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick, which may seem like an obvious or stupid thing to say, but those two are clearly very different films. Pitch Black is a small, self-contained horror story, and Chronicles is an epic, planet-hopping adventure. In Pitch Black some people die. In Chronicles, political regimes change. The new one is again a self contained story, set on a desolate faraway world (which is implied to be Earth, maybe), filled with predators that want to eat people. Unlike Pitch Black, the plot has nothing to do with darkness, rendering Riddick's eyeshine irrelevant. The biggest problem I had with the new Riddick film was the character himself. I felt that it was a different character to that seen in Pitch Black, in the video game, and even in the  Chronicles of Riddick. He was cruder, ruder, and more actively a dick. Before, my understanding of the character was that he would more or less keep to himself unless provoked, and then would just kill a guy and walk away. But in this one he seemed almost sadistic, allowing or causing people to suffer more or less needlessly. Maybe I fundamentally misunderstood the guy from the beginning.

There was one line in particular which really irked me, and I'm going to go ahead and tell you, don't worry about spoilers because it's not that big of a deal. So Katee 'Starbuck' Sackhoff is the only female in the film (besides another who's there for about 2 minutes, I'm pretty sure just so they can say "look, we have TWO girls!") So Starbuck's the only girl, and she's a bad-ass mercenary, so naturally she's a lesbian, (as revealed in the clumsiest way possible,) and there's this bit where Riddick's tied up and he's telling the mercenaries about exactly how he's going to kill them when he gets out of these chains, (with no throwback reference to killing guys with a teacup in the 2nd film) and then he says, "And then I'll be balls deep in...[whatever the girl's name is]". Excuse me, Riddick? You're not one to talk about women that way. "But only because she asked me," he says. And what's worse is that by the end of the film, she inexplicably switches sexual orientation and propositions him. This is all covered here in a review by Theresa Delucci. I've never linked anyone else's work in a blog post before. Do I have to inform them? I hope she doesn't mind. Anyway that basically says everything I was disappointed with in the film re: sexism, especially in contrast to Pitch Black, which basically was great in it's portrayal and inclusion of women.

But fair portrayals of women in film and literature is something I've been thinking about lately. I don't know if this film upsets me because it's actually pretty bad or because my gaze has changed. Now, I'm very much against vomiting up angry, socio-politically charged hatred and signing off with the horrendously nerdy "/rant", so I'l try to keep this fairly objective.

There's no doubt that most protagonists are male, and that's not a bad thing. There are a couple of reasons as to why this is, the most convincing of which is something I read recently, but have since, unfortunately, forgotten. Whatever it was, it wasn't misogynistic in any way, it was just a straight up logical reason. Anyway, forget that because I'll never remember, instead we'll look at some others. There's the one about marketability, and this, as I see it, has two ideas. One is that moviegoers are more likely to be male, and therefor want male characters to identify with. I think that's even more bullshit than the idea that gamers are overwhelmingly male (an idea heavily disputed by those above-mentioned rants). Two is that both male and female audiences prefer male protagonists, as this study suggests. Some people might say that most screenwriters and authors are male, but that, too, I disagree with, since even a lot of things written by women have male protagonists. One theory is that female characters often act emotionally, and therefor become unpredictable driving forces in stories, whereas male characters are often reactionary to other things happening in the plot (possibly including female characters), and so the audience naturally identifies with them. Who knows.

There's this thing called the Bechdel test, which asks whether a thing contains a conversation between at least two women, about something other than a man. So, first of all you have to have enough females in the story that at some point two will be alone and talking, and then they have to be interesting enough that they have things to talk about besides men. Apparently a lot of films fail this test. So this is something that's on my mind when doing this stoner film script (that I haven't properly started yet. I'll get started once this other book's done). I'm going to actively work into the story a conversation satisfying this test, but is that tokenism? I think only if it doesn't seem organic, which, hopefully, it will. That's something I've realised about my writing: I'll have my plan of all the things I want to happen in the story, and if one of them doesn't seem to easily and organically arise, it gets cut, too bad. There's this female character in this (idea for a) film, who initially appears sweet and innocent but turns out to be a bit of a psychopath, kind of like Soap from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, except actually violent. This would of course still be funny if it's an initially innocent seeming male character, but I think it's even funnier because she's a girl. I don't know if that's being exploitative or not. I'm also concerned about girls always appearing as love interests. I considered having one of the two main stoner characters, who are housemates, being female. But I think that would be difficult to have a man and woman live together in a story without any romantic or sexual relationship, even though it happens all the time in real life. Unfortunately readers like romance, I've been told, so rejecting the idea of romance for the sake of romance could leave you with a story which some audiences might consider boring.

As far as I'm concerned, I stick with male protagonists because, truthfully, I'm afraid of messing up a female - not being one myself - so I stick with my boring, blank slate character, reactionary males. How women appear is constantly on my mind when I do my stories. Same with other historically oppressed groups. In Wilkinson IV there was a black guy, a Russian, and two women, and I was paranoid about accidentally coming across in some way racist or sexist. I still am now, although, I guess I won't ever screw the sexism thing up as badly as Riddick did.