Hannibal Lector Goes Meta

So Kevin Bacon is doing TV now and that's sadly the only reason people are checking out The Following. 'Cause it's a good show on just its non-Kevin Bacon aspects. For the most part...

The gist of it is that James Purefoy - of Marc "Kill and Fuck Everything!" Antony fame - is a deranged professor who not only turned serial killer, but has got himself a whole cult. Kevin Bacon is the haggard ex-Fed with a drinking problem who brought him down before and now has to do it again, even though Murder Antony is back behind bars.

That's just the first episode. Purefoy's character is one of those diabolical masterminds only ever encountered in fiction and each episode is Bacon and his Fed-pals trying to figure out his next move. It manages some nice suspense in the process without drifting too much into melodrama. Things even deviate from Purefoy's master plan enough to maintain a sense of realism.

Though the suspense and mystery is pretty thriller-by-numbers. What makes The Following stand out is that cult aspect - Purefoy's minions, even the lucid ones display a reverent obsession with him, not unlike the actual obsession people with no lives develop for high-profile monsters. The national fascination with serial killers is here taken to the extremes of literality, as Purefoy's fans become his eager helpers, doing his bidding while he twiddles his thumbs in jail and smirks at the FBI.

Where it falters is in how it frames Purefoy's madness. He venerates Edgar Allen Poe and all of Gothic Romanticism, styling his murders and rationalizations after Poe's writing. If you've been through a college level lit course on the subject, you're laughing your ass off right now. I like Poe and all, but he's nowhere near as unnerving as The Following gives him credit for - and he was one of the few lights in the whole corpus of gothic fiction that isn't either painfully melodramatic or unintentionally hilarious. The Castle of Otranto, the novel that signaled the birth of the gothic genre, begins with a giant helmet falling out of the sky and crushing some guy. Better not let Purefoy see any Looney Tunes or he'll start murdering people with anvils...

But that's admittedly a personal gripe and is overshadowed by the best thing about this show - it understands the importance of actual mystery. Purefoy's ultimate endgame is anyone's guess and each episode has more confederates bursting out of the closet to do something terrible and make Bacon start drinking again. It really taps into that vein of white hot paranoia in this country, along with how these conspirators have clearly confused great with ghastly. If you can get beyond the Lit 101 nonsense, it's not a bad way to spend a week night. It's a damn sight better than that mess Dexter...

(Almost) No Exit

Visioneers is one of those at once heartening and depressing films because all you can think about when it's over is what it could have been. It could've been so much meaner, so much funnier, so much more true.

Because it gets closer to all of those things than anything else out these days. It presents a very familiar dystopia - the white-collar office world and suburbia. Being nice to people you hate all day long to a soundtrack of upbeat propaganda, only to come home to a sexless marriage and bad TV.

And whatever the hell this is...

And Visioneers does all of that brilliantly, up to a point. Oddly, where it falters is in the comic exaggerations - people great each other with company slogans and the company salute, a gratuitous and eventually pointless middle finger. They're asigned huge teddy bears to simulate affection and are expected to record such for marketing purposes. And they get the bears in the first place because there's an epidemic of people up and exploding.

Visioneers can't decide if it's an annihilating satire or a slapstick farce. It could be either, as evidenced frequently by the crushing doldrums of the protagonist's daily life and by some great asides, like a show about some mulleted '80s Action Hero with a porn 'stache who beats up old ladies for freedom. But it's trying to be both which just doesn't work. And nowhere is that more obvious than in casting Zach Galifinakis in the lead.

Galifinakis isn't a bad actor but he's a very particular actor. He works best as the unhinged foil like in The Hangover or like in every other film he's ever done. Making him the Everyman center of Visioneers not only doesn't fit, it curtails his good qualities even in the dream sequences where he's George Washington.

...No, I'm still trying to figure out the first picture.

And there's hope. It defies the logic the film builds over its entire run, but Visioneers ends on a hopeful note. That we can escape this poshlost nightmare world by getting in touch with ourselves and with each other and some other hippie self-actualization crap. To borrow a sentiment from Hunter Thompson, it just didn't get mean enough for me.

The Blockbuster of O

I haven't seen Zero Dark Thirty because Kathryn Bigelow is a hack and I don't believe in encouraging hacks.

Or zombies.

That said, I will comment on an aspect of it that's spent a good month in the news - torture. Specifically the efficacy of torture as presented in Bigelow's bin Laden death porn flick, at least as I understand it. Seeing the worst excess of the Bush years up on the silver screen has gotten all the Very Serious People scratching they're chins and asking "Maybe this torture thing maybe sorta works?" And that just begs for a thoughtful and in-depth answer:

It don't.

Torture doesn't work. Not for actionable intelligence anyways. If you want to be like the Russians in Chechnya and just menace the hell out of everyone until they're too terrified, then it works. If you want to leave a mangled calling card in Baghdad and the Zeta-controlled parts of Mexico then hell yeah it works! Not to scare anyone off of course, just to show that you're the meanest monster on the block.

But information? You never get that through torture because the poor bastard will say anything to get you to stop. Usually. The opposite end of the spectrum is the guy you can waterboard over and over and over who won't change his story. That's what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did, took the worst the CIA could give him and convinced the glorified bagmen that he was telling the truth. "Anyone would break after that!"

Maybe. Maybe not. Because torture doesn't even make cold-blooded sense. The amount of time it'll take to first break someone and then shift through what truths they may have actually spilled in the inevitable fog of "I'll tell these sick fucks anything if they'll just take the electrodes off my balls!" you could've just done the good cop/bad cop treatment. Hell that's how we really found bin Laden! The FBI got a hold of the guy who knew the driver who knew the snitch that spilled the beans on the Hotel bin Laden in Pakistan.

And that doesn't matter to torturers and their apologists. Because it's not really about gathering intelligence at all but about power. Getting off on the control they have on another human being. It's hardly a unique pathology, but it's shameful that anyone still bothers to rationalize it. That whole "ticking time-bomb" scenario? Bullshit. And thank god for that, 'cause with how long it takes our "interrogators" to get to their paingasm, the bomb would've gone off ten times!

So if you must go see Bigelow embarrass herself more, keep in mind that when the brave heroes of Zero Dark Thirty get to wailing on prisoners, it's not out of any necessity but because they enjoy it. The sick fucks...

The Devil in Ms. Johnson

I love the found-footage horror genre. I think you should love it too. And part of that love involves recognizing when it's time to take one of these films behind the barn and put it out of its misery...

The Devil Inside is just begging for a trip behind the barn. It probably never had a chance, as it tries to mix the current Paranormal Activity style with the classic Exorcist. And in the process, it can only present the worst of both.

See, back when The Exorcist came out, the country hadn't suffered through decades of Protestant hooey mucking up everyone's daily lives. Religion at the time, especially Catholicism, had this nice alien quality that added to the horror of demonic possession. Because there's always more horror to be found in The Other and director William Friedkin was irreverent enough to maintain a degree of mystery and ambiguity about the story.

He also smacked a priest around. Because Friedkin don't give a shit!

And that's where The Devil Inside fails right out of the gate - it presents the Christian cosmology as a definite. The rest of the film is then just the main Everywoman getting to grips with this Truth in time for the finale.

Now that still wouldn't make for a bad film. Everyone likes a good crisis of faith. But she gets two sidekicks - Father Limey and Father Balding - who act as evangelical cheerleaders. The main thrust of the film feels less "Booh!" and more "Come to Jaysus!" as these two dildos - and anyone else to appear onscreen with a white collar - repeats the old saw about how science doesn't have all the answers so there. It's obnoxious and it's just not representative of the long intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church.

I had hopes for some ambiguity early on during an "official" exorcism class in Rome. The priest leading the discussion even played devil's advocate - hardy har har - by pointing out all the various mental disturbances that could appear to be possession. I particularly liked that every reference to multiple personalities used the correct clinical definition of Dissociative Identity Disorder. But it all falls apart as Everywoman and her Laurel and Hardy exorcists faff about trying to use video of Mama Everywoman as proof to the Vatican that demonic possession exists. They also win her over by exorcizin' a girl they had locked up in their basement.

Which I admit made sense for this character...

I'd still like to see the old '70s possession story done in the new found footage style. The Devil Inside isn't that, because for all it's effort it only manages to shout "The power of Christ compels you!" at the audience. This is America, we've got enough Christ.

The Truth About Immigration

Stop talking about immigration. Yes you - the screwhead reading this blog! Because you don't know the first damned thing about it. You're more ignorant of the American naturalization process than you are of market economics. And that's pretty fucking ignorant.

Let me explain. Immigration in the United States is assumed to be something easy, maybe even like those Ellis Island arrivals the movies told you about. Some family named Kaputnik waits in a line until the customs guy can assign them an appropriately American surname - like Carl Jr.'s - and then they're sped merrily on their way to take low-paying factory jobs and lose a limb for Freedom.

That's what you think it's like, isn't it? Well you are R-O-N-G wrong! First of all, you have to fill out an application. And attach your original birth certificate, proof of existing citizenship, and a police record even if you don't have one. And fork over a couple hundred USD in processing fees. "Give me your tired, your hungry, but fuck 'em if they can't pay!"

Wait three to six months for processing and congratulations, you're a cit - Ahahahaha! Sucker! You thought it would be that easy!?

Next up, the medical exam. Which can only be performed by an American doctor at the embassy in your home country and sucks for you if that means an extra plane ticket. Oh, and to help you adjust to the American healthcare system this doctor expects cash or he'll tell America you have leprosy or something.

So, you applied and got probed and spent a lot of dollars you probably didn't have in the first place being a desperate immigrant and all. Now you're all ready to be an Americ - Nope! Now you get to do interviews. Mostly overworked State Department drones checking to see if you're a terrorist. Or a sex-trafficker. Or a communist.

But suffer through that last indignity and you are finally an American! Sort of! You're in on an immigrant visa - after a year and several thousand dollars of effort - and maybe you'll get to do that little citizenship test and take the pledge with all the other Indian programmers. What, you thought I was explaining that process? Just getting into this overblown gated community is hard enough!

So the next time you feel like sounding off on "Why can't these durn Mexicans come here legally?" - don't. You moron.

In Defence of The Filibuster

Senate Democrats have finally found their balls but regrettably are still without brains, which just makes them Republican-Lite. Case in point - they're going after the filibuster.

That'll warm the hearts of all the muddling yuppies who make up their base, since those mean Republicans have been abusing the filibuster to block Obama's agenda. Not like the man could use the most powerful office in the world as a bully pulpit, ramming through the changes this country desperately needs. Not like Democrats could call the GOP's bluff, bring in cots and agree to hold the session until everyone has had their stupid say and a vote can be taken. Not like they could actually find their balls, rather than this big show that they did.

Strom Thurmond filibustering the Civil Rights Act by reciting the names of all his black mistresses.

But what really rankles is the hypocrisy of this whole circus. I know we're not supposed to remember anything from more than two years ago in this country, but I distinctly recall Republicans getting worked up over Democrats pulling the filibuster over and over in 2005. Not that it really stopped the madness, since all legislative action in the Bush years was conducted in back rooms at 2 in the morning. Still, the GOP was threatening not just the "changes" to the filibuster rules the Democrats are suggesting, but scrapping them completely!

It didn't happen of course. So now the Republicans get a turn playing spoiler. A case could be made to do away with the filibuster because none of these creeps want to share. Like taking a two away from children who just won't stop crying whenever someone else gets a turn.

But that would deprive us of the filibuster's true value - punishing U the voter! You elected these cretins, you took all the moaning about "socialism" seriously, you get to have a deadlocked legislature while crooked banks shake you down. Democracy is an organic process requiring constant, thoughtful engagement on the part of the citizen so it is only just that when said citizen has his thumb up his ass, democracy devolves into a sideshow.

The filibuster is an archaic and easily abused piece of parliamentary procedure that stalls the wheels of government and you deserve every second of it. Because you're an asshole.

Finally! Genre Fiction That Doesn't Suck!

I heard about Dan Simmons about seven years ago. Through Wikipedia of all places. It had nice things to say about Hyperion and I thought, "I should read that sometime."

Sometime never came but I did finally read another, and likely better, work by simmons - Ilium. A re-imagining of Homer's Iliad on the planes of Mars, presided over by posthuman "gods" residing atop Olympos Mons and narrated by a resurrected twentieth century Homeric scholar with a healthy repertoire of snide comments regarding the epic goings on.

And it works. Not completely but enough that the few falterings don't matter. Despite clocking in at the standard sci-fi/fantasy page count - somehwere in the region of paperweight - it never once feels slow or like it's just padding itself with needless noodlings in its own setting. Y'know, like some other work out there...

The scholar - Hockenberry - is the primary character and so gets to narrate his own segment of the story. There's also a bunch of pampered transhumans back on Earth embarking on a journey out of innocence and sentient robots around Jupiter's moons who launch an expedition to Mars because of all the wonky quantum physics the Olympians keep stirring up.

Why the Olympians are doing this is one of the big questions here, and it synchs up with those Earth manchildren trying to find their own answers. And something to do with Shakespeare's The Tempest being re-enacted in a low orbit city with Caliban himself. It's really a big mash-up of the most recognizable classics in literature and it's amazing not that Simmons could write it - any dolt on the internet can - but that he writes it so well!

And it all comes down to character. Hockenberry is the star of this show with his wit and drive for self-preservation - an alien quality to the ancient Greeks and Trojans. But he's nearly overshadowed by, of all things, a giant robot crab from Io named Orphu who spends most of the novel disabled and only able to chatter on the radio with his Europan aquanaut buddy as they sail a makeshift raft down the Valles Marinaris. This is the part that actually explains what the hell is going on and it never feels like an infodump but rather an organic progression of the narrative.

All of which allows Simmons to accomplishes the one thing genre fiction still does better than "serious" fiction - getting U the reader to cheer for fictional people you only know in text form. When holes in space-time open up, exposing the home of the Olympians now so hated by Greek and Trojan alike, Hector and Achilles charge through the abomination of physics together, looking to kill themselves some gods. It's one of those moments that makes you jump up and go, "Yeah!" to the confusion of everyone else on the Metro.

I could explain why those two famous blood enemies have joined forces against their own pantheon - with some sneaky help from Hockenberry - or you can just read the damned book yourself. You won't be disappointed, which is a stunning rarity in today's literary market.