Running Mazes and Monsters, which touches upon some personal problems but not very directly, so it's sort of a good, how do I say it...a movie that's good for processing some uncomfortable thoughts without risk of excessive emotional involvement. This isn't exactly Madoka Magica. All the same, there's an emotional center to this infamous scare movie about tabletop gaming, loosely based on an irresponsible book about James Dallas Egbert III (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeon_Master) in which an unscrupulous private investigator claimed that Egbert's mind had been fuddled by role-playing games and LARPing in the Michigan State University "steam tunnels". In the movie, Egbert is transmogrified into an emotionally fragile young man named Robbie Wheeling, who's tormented by guilt about the disappearance of his older brother Paul. Robbie was the last one to see Paul before he vanished and now he blames himself.

Turns out Robbie's had a problem with getting fixated on games, and it happens again at his new college. A spooky LARPing session in some nearby caverns prompts an emotional breakdown and then...a spiritual experience! Robbie had been role-playing a "holy man" and he experiences a vision of being assigned a quest to seek his brother in New York. Now...if Robbie had been able to detach himself from this experience a bit and think about it instead of leaping into impulsive action (haha I've never done THAT!) then maybe he'd have realized, in a more dispassionate and reasoned way, that he had unfinished business with the memory of his brother and at some point he needed to deal with it instead of doing the normie thing and suppressing it. This spiritual crisis, depicted in Mazes and Monsters as horrific or pathetic, a heartbreaking lapse into insanity, actually makes sense.

But normie American culture has forgotten how to deal with ecstatic experiences. Only a few such experiences are permitted in respectable American society, especially if you're living up to conventional masculinity. I could probably tick off on my fingers all the things an American male is allowed to be ecstatic about—sex, violence, money, sports, drink and drugs, certain permissible sources of entertainment...what am I missing? And basically nobody is allowed to have a mystical experience in polite society. There's mystical Christian sects and cults and other such groups on the margins but they're not respectable. Perhaps running into a meeting-room and screaming What if we put LLM superintelligence into washing machines?? is supposed to be an ecstatic experience.

The point is, there's hardly any acceptable way for a normie American to experience a sudden disruption of their life. Nobody is supposed to change much, and sudden changes are always viewed with distaste—even a dead family member isn't supposed to knock you down for too long. As for transformative life change? Forget it! Unless you want to convert to extremist Christianity or an e/acc cult or a crypto scam or something else that's useful in business, you have no options. And even the e/acc cult, though relatively acceptable as cults go, is likely to mean losing a lot of friends.

No wonder gender transition sticks in the craw of conventional American society. The Christian moral panic isn't 100% wrong, you know...they're correct to sense a transformative energy, a magic in the trans community that is fatal to their shrunken and limited worldview, and thus they hate trans people with unholy passion. So many of their other hatreds coalesce into this central hatred. Trans persons are creative, and they hate free creativity. Trans persons are often highly skilled or educated, and they want to hoard all skills and education for their exclusive use. But above all they hate the prospect of change, for their most powerful emotional weapon is: You're stuck here. They have made the whole world into a jail and, like all jailors, they're terrified of escape.

Mazes and Monsters is terrified of escape. The movie is remarkable for somehow managing to evoke a sparkle of urban magic and the richness of imagination even when the movie's overall lesson is CONFORM. One of the college kids, at the start, is restless with his parents' demands on him—go to MIT, go into industry, be somebody!—because he'd like to make video games. By the end of the movie he's learned his proper normie lesson: games are for people who are sick in the head, and money is more important than creativity. As he drives off into the sunset he's bragging about how he's going to make a million dollars in software. What sort of software? (Shrugs) Who cares. Whatever sells, I guess.

(spits)

~Chara of Pnictogen

There's a complicated idea that I've been struggling to piece together the last few days. It amounts (I hope) to a general hypothesis to explain what I've seen of the contemporary state of human communication, at least that narrow slice of it I've seen from about four decades of life as an inhabitant of the U.S. living on the West Coast and using the Internet. During that time, I feel that I've witnessed a startling phase change (I'm trying use a neutral word here) in how people talk to each other, how they use words, and the ways they attempt to convey their ideas. I grew up surrounded by old people and musty books and therefore I learned to talk and think after the fashion of my RL father and his scientific friends, and the professors I admired from my own college education. I learned a sturdy vocabulary of scientific and academic concepts which I was able to mentally arrange according to the principles I learned from my humanities curriculum. The European Classical and mediaeval tradition divided up human knowledge into a number of "liberal arts", to which further disciplines were added as they evolved. In other words, I have internalized a set of abstractions about human knowledge rooted in the traditions of European academia, principles that I have hitherto accepted on faith.

Now I've come to think of those same traditions of European learning as hidebound, inflexible, ill suited to encompassing the full range of human experience—all the same, it's what I spent a lot of time learning, and it's given me something solid to stand on when mixing it up with The Discourse. I treasure my abstractions. We have all worked patiently on establishing our principles as firmly as possible, interconnected with everything else, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to argue with any conviction.

There's just one little problem with this long labor of ours: in the modern landscape of American political discourse, it seems almost pointless. Well, "pointless" isn't quite the word I suppose. But we keep running into people who seem incapable of abstraction. And yet they worship abstractions. Consider how "Free Speech" has become such a potent slogan among right-wing Internet partisans, and yet hardly anyone who talks of "Free Speech" seems capable of discussing the concept, or able to use it as anything more than a memetic slogan. It's like they know "Free Speech" is important and powerful and effective as a symbol, but they've no coherent notion of what it means beyond pure self-interest.

Abstractions have become...separated, somehow. They've parted company from the symbols that would normally represent the abstractions. Undoubtedly this has come about from too many decades of oversaturation with the trivializing culture of business and marketing, which freely mixes and matches symbols and abuses them. Anything can be a brand, any combination of things can be an even hotter brand, and the only measure of success for a symbol of collection of symbols is how memetic it is. How fast does it spread? How quickly does it catch the public interest? Meanwhile the meanings attached to the symbols wither up and die. Perhaps they're condemned to Hell like the rest of us, and forced to watch an endless cycle of Jordan Peterson monologues.

I don't think the Christians—meaning the political Christians here, the ones who advertise their Christianity, I'm not referring to Christendom generally—really believe in God or Jesus or even Heaven. I suspect their most enduring belief might be antisemitism, which is as old as Christianity after all. I think about how they're more and more desperate to push physical evidence that the United States is a "Christian nation" into public view. Why would they need that, if they believed in anything abstract?

Mandating the Ten Commandments is an especially nasty touch because Christians don't bother to follow them! They don't really think they're binding on themselves, but they want to club people over the head with some ancient stone tablets. They need to have concrete things to believe in, things they can hold and touch and see on the news, the older the better. The anti-Catholic ones still secretly need the Pope and the Roman Church in sneaky ways, for example—they may denounce the Pope as the Antichrist but they still lean on Catholic doctrines about sex and pregnancy, they still love Catholic symbolism and tradition in an aesthetic way, and they watch a lot of horror movies drawing from Catholic lore.

How does one believe in abstractions in the first place? I can say, "I believe in the abstraction known as justice" or "I believe in the abstraction called chemistry" or whatnot. But how firmly seated are those abstractions? However hard we work to place our knowledge on the firmest possible footing, at some point the interconnections between concepts fade away into mist and speculation on probabilities. We are limited by finite, mortal experience. At some point everything comes down to "I remember this book" or "I recall this famous experiment" or "I have seen this for myself" or similar.

If abstraction has disappeared from general human communication (from the perspective of a U.S. Internet user) then...how can it be reintroduced? It seems pretty useless to base arguments around abstractions such as "freedom" and "human rights" if these concepts have no actual hold on the mind of anyone important. Perhaps we need some new fables, some...reverse trolley problems. "Trolley problems" are designed to destroy abstract principles by purporting (through implicit violence) to show how they can always be sliced in two by practical necessity. It's a dirty business and I don't doubt that overexposure to trolley-problem "logic" has shredded the tech world's ability to understand ethics. So...how to put things back together again?

~Chara of Pnictogen

The Omen triggered us worse than I expected it would. We tend to feel fairly safe with movies we've already seen a couple times but sometimes a particular scene or moment really jumps out on a particular viewing, without having done so before.

One thing I've come to appreciate is that "cheesiness", the mere fact of being a cheap-looking or ineptly made movie, isn't any sort of protection against this sort of thing. If a scene is emotionally wrenching, it doesn't have to be well-acted or handsomely staged. Two actors shouting lines at each other, without backgrounds or props or scenery, would be enough to grab the emotions.

There's this too: mainstream American entertainment is heavily censored de facto by long-standing industry conventions. There's a huge range of stories that you will NOT ever see in a Hollywood feature film or a prestige show on U.S. television. Historically therefore stories about upsetting or controversial topics, especially anything pertinent to social realism and social justice, has been condemned to marginal media: "B-movies", direct-to-video, Internet video, and so forth. (These domains have, however, been aggressively colonized by reactionary and extremist Christian propagandists.) In other words, movies about emotionally fraught topics are likely to be cheap and amateurish. Otherwise, they wouldn't get made at all.

"Bad movie culture", which became a big thing in 1990s Internet days and renewed the popularity of Michael J. Nelson and other persons associated with MST3K, now seems a bit like a right-wing psyop to me. I don't think there was any actual conspiracy, mind you, just a coalescence of motivations. Right-wing "humor" is abusive and petty anyway, so making fun of cheap-looking movies would be up their street. They'd be drawn especially to be making fun of anything that stirred up powerful emotions. Hence the "bad movie culture" that I observed during this time condensed around a set of reactionary values: worshipful of "classics" and their emotional flatness relative to "art-house" movies, contemptuous of anything that was "political" or which was "manipulative" (i.e. too emotional), and obsessed with technical perfection.

I'm glad there's a lot more loving commentary on old cheesy movies (q.v. Diamanda Hagen and many other YouTube presenters). I hate to admit how many times I watched rubbishy Cinema Snob or Nostalgia Critic videos for some glimmer of MST3K nostalgia vibes, usually when I was so miserable that only meager and mean-spirited entertainments seemed tolerable. It's far more rewarding to watch "bad movies" like they were anything else, and then they're a source of pleasant surprises.

~Chara of Pnictogen

So...let me ask an easy question.

Let's say you were in a car with a young kid like Damien Thorn here, and you didn't know who he was. Let's say you were the limo driver and you'd never met Damien before. You drive towards a church, and once you arrive and the kid gets a good look at the church, the kid starts screaming their head off.

What would you, the disinterested limo driver, think was going on? I feel that the most reasonable conclusion myself was that the kid had been traumatized at church. Abused, assaulted, whatever. And now they were being made to go back to the source of their misery.

I think that's reasonable, don't you? Well...polite American society does not see it that way. They have been conditioned to regard all churches as intrinsically trustworthy. It's a continuing source of guilt to lapsed Christians and people who maybe absorbed a little passive Christianity at home, and so are vulnerable to wondering, "Am I just maybe missing out on something here?" The United States has its civic religion in which Christianity, even if not honored in any meaningful sense, still gets pride of place and an implicit "pass". If they're a pastor or a priest you're supposed to trust them with your children.

This film here, I think, partly explains why that attitude persists: "Christian horror", horror films which exploit Christian lore and which may be pitched towards Christian audiences who like to see Evil lose to Good on screen, has functioned partly as a screen for Christian child abuse. The protagonists of Christian horror films are very often children, for Christian audiences see children largely as icons and idols of innocence and frailty—or they flip that round and depict children as uniquely suited to be vessels and vectors of diabolical evils, because children are easily tricked. The heroes of these Christian horror movies are often required to inflict pain and injuries or death, usually invoking God or Jesus in the process, because it's the only way to destroy Evil.

I find myself thinking: I've now seen three films that fit the Demon Child trope: Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, and The Omen III (in which Damien Thorn's all grown up and now he's a sinister corporate superstar played by Sam Neill.) I have no idea how many cheap imitations of these movies exist in the shadowlands of Christian media, where there's a thousand fly-by-night producers of cheap entertainments, most of which attempts to mimic the styles and themes of whatever's popular outside the hardcore Christian milieu. Christians have embraced popular entertainment in a big way, but in their own way, designed to appeal to reactionary Christian values but otherwise just as cynical and trashy as any cheap novelette from a grocery store.

So...how many movies and books exist where the explanation for "child screams upon seeing a church" is "demonic possession" or something similar?

~Chara of Pnictogen