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Had and still have my hands full repairing somebody's much-loved family heirloom aran sweater, which adds a physical obstacle to the frustration of Not Writing Anything. Stuck on trying to articulate thoughts on indigeneity and monstrosity for post on horror westerns, trying to remind myself it doesn't need to be a properly structured and supported essay. Keep imagining and reimagining scenes for fic and even massaging them into phrases but the prose invariably slips away when I try to record them in any way. Most of these scraps of inspiration are bits of funny (to me) dialogue without context. The rest are pretty much all UST build-up or the talky bits before the porn but I have no will to write the rest of the story, either plotty business connecting the ones that are part of larger narratives or the rest of the sex scene for the ones that lead on to that rather than leaving the characters lusting (and yes, I could publish those pieces on their own, but avoiding awkwardness with written fade-to-black can be tricky and if they get any comments at all on AO3 they'll be demands to continue, plus I have to actually write something before I can publish it). Feeling as thwarted in my creative pursuits as the characters are in their sexual/romantic ones.
This week's unplanned media kick has been horror movies in which children are threatened or threatening. I've watched Insidious 1-3, Sinister 1 & 2, and Silent Hill, and rewatched The Omen and The Babadook (and Splice, if you want to count that here, although I'd say despite its issues with reproduction and parenting it's not as much doing with children per se). Not many big thinky thoughts about this yet; only mentioning it as an excuse to say:
1. Silent Hill makes absolutely no sense and probably wouldn't even if I had known more about the games it's based on than "everything's foggy", "the one with Pyramid Head?", "something about a missing girl", and "bandage-mummy-faced Slutty Nurse cosplays", BUT it's interesting that all of the important decisions and actions are made and taken by women (the decisions and actions in question are almost universally stupid or nonsensical, but they're the only ones that matter). The stuff with Sean Bean and Kim Coates is ultimately irrelevent to the "plot" and the menfolk-townsfolk are generic henchy prop-people, almost perfect inversion of the sexy lamp test. Interesting also to look at the other films in the same light (womp womp): The Omen and Sinister films are pretty lampy in their treatment of adult women (not quite so simplistic as a binary division into evil or nagging shrews and fainting damsels but really not good, especially for the Sinister films appearing almost forty years after The Omen) while the Insidious trilogy are fairly balanced in terms of a gendered distribution of agency.
1a) Happy that Silent Hill features a hot butch motorcycle cop, sad that ( spoiler ). Would prefer story with no stupid ghost town where Radha Mitchell and her kid are actually on the run from Sean Bean and hot butch motorcycle cop tries to apprehend her but then helps her, with or without hooking up.
2. The Babadook totally deserves its status as one of the biggest buzz-generating indie/horror films of 2014, because it's really well done. I recommend it heartily but with a massive side order of trigger warnings (spooky shit and a few jump scares, bugs, tooth/mouth injury/body horror, violence towards animals, actual plot summary stuff behind cut: ( short version = widowed mother of neuroatypical 6-year old is either being targeted by a malicious supernatural entity or having a total mental breakdown. )) My one ridiculous quibble is that the pop-up book looks professionally printed and bound, and I would like to have seen Amelia (a writer before Samuel was born) check the front matter for publication details even if their weren't any or they lead to a publishing company that doesn't exist or something.
3. Struggling to articulate this . . . I'm curious about how many of the people directly responsible for these films are parents and how many aren't and how all their fears of and for children inform their work?
This week's unplanned media kick has been horror movies in which children are threatened or threatening. I've watched Insidious 1-3, Sinister 1 & 2, and Silent Hill, and rewatched The Omen and The Babadook (and Splice, if you want to count that here, although I'd say despite its issues with reproduction and parenting it's not as much doing with children per se). Not many big thinky thoughts about this yet; only mentioning it as an excuse to say:
1. Silent Hill makes absolutely no sense and probably wouldn't even if I had known more about the games it's based on than "everything's foggy", "the one with Pyramid Head?", "something about a missing girl", and "bandage-mummy-faced Slutty Nurse cosplays", BUT it's interesting that all of the important decisions and actions are made and taken by women (the decisions and actions in question are almost universally stupid or nonsensical, but they're the only ones that matter). The stuff with Sean Bean and Kim Coates is ultimately irrelevent to the "plot" and the menfolk-townsfolk are generic henchy prop-people, almost perfect inversion of the sexy lamp test. Interesting also to look at the other films in the same light (womp womp): The Omen and Sinister films are pretty lampy in their treatment of adult women (not quite so simplistic as a binary division into evil or nagging shrews and fainting damsels but really not good, especially for the Sinister films appearing almost forty years after The Omen) while the Insidious trilogy are fairly balanced in terms of a gendered distribution of agency.
1a) Happy that Silent Hill features a hot butch motorcycle cop, sad that ( spoiler ). Would prefer story with no stupid ghost town where Radha Mitchell and her kid are actually on the run from Sean Bean and hot butch motorcycle cop tries to apprehend her but then helps her, with or without hooking up.
2. The Babadook totally deserves its status as one of the biggest buzz-generating indie/horror films of 2014, because it's really well done. I recommend it heartily but with a massive side order of trigger warnings (spooky shit and a few jump scares, bugs, tooth/mouth injury/body horror, violence towards animals, actual plot summary stuff behind cut: ( short version = widowed mother of neuroatypical 6-year old is either being targeted by a malicious supernatural entity or having a total mental breakdown. )) My one ridiculous quibble is that the pop-up book looks professionally printed and bound, and I would like to have seen Amelia (a writer before Samuel was born) check the front matter for publication details even if their weren't any or they lead to a publishing company that doesn't exist or something.
3. Struggling to articulate this . . . I'm curious about how many of the people directly responsible for these films are parents and how many aren't and how all their fears of and for children inform their work?
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