A Nightmare of Elm Street

I can remember seeing my first slasher film when I was about five years old. I was at my babysitters house and her older teenage son would sit in his room all day watching Friday the 13th films. I can remember sneaking up to his room and peaking my head in his room just as Jason's machete decapitated his next female camping victim. Of course back then this scared the ever living shit out of me and it gave me a serious case of nightmare fuel, but now I watch slasher films and there is no more nightmare fuel. There are just laughs. I find this very interesting how something so traumatic as a child is reduced to a joke when you hit a certain age, and I think it all has to do with this standard formula to these types of films. If you've seen one you have seen them all.

Don't get me wrong I appreciate what slasher films have added to horror cinema, but come on Hollywood, can't we try something new and original? The answer to that is usually no because these films are making huge sums of money even after 7 sequels. People are still cramming into the theater to see the newest Nightmare on Elm Street film, sequel, prequel, remake even though they without a doubt know how the film will begin and end each time. This baffles me to no end. Everyone of these slasher films are the exact same, but people are still shelling out hard earned money to see them. I mean I guess I see the appeal, like my dad always says, "It's not a horror film until a girl is running around in her underwear." I noticed a few people in class had a problem with the sexual imagery in these types of films, but guess what folks this is Hollywood, where the rules are made up and celebrity sex tapes get more coverage on the news than a natural disaster. Sex sells in this industry so of course there's going to be attractive topless girls running around because that's what gets teenage boys into the theater. At the end of the day Hollywood is a business and when you have a good thing going that's raking in the money you don't change it.

Where topless girls running around helpless for a big ol' scary man may be seen as anti-feminist these films, at least the way I see it, are still pretty empowering to woman. Like the article says, some movie goers tend to walk out as the "misogynous misfit" kill the helpless females and male audience members are cheering that on. "What they don't realize is that these same men cheer on the heroines, who (end up being) as strong, sexy, and independent as the earlier victims, as they blow away the killer with a shotgun or get him between the eyes with a machete." (237) It's such a strange role reversal to go from cheering on the serial slasher to rooting for the repressed book worm to kick his ass back to the Hell he came from. Isn't it a good thing to see a strong female character stand up to the wrongs that are plaguing her to win in the end. To overcome pain and suffering and sexual advances only to destroy her would be tormentor in the end? I think it is.

In the end all of these films are the same. They have the same tropes, the same characters, dialogue, and gallons of blood. In a film where bloody sexual violence may be seen is the only premise to the film, it is good to see a redeeming factor like showing an empowered female character in the end that everyone is rooting for because in today's Hollywood those types of films aren't seen very often. Thanks Freddy!

The Look of the Future

Ridley Scott is one of the greatest directors when it comes to tackling the genre of science fiction. I mean Alien, Blade Runner, Prometheus, all cinematic classics when asked about top science fiction movies (maybe not Prometheus, but let's pretend for a minute.) The reason Ridley Scott gets so much praise is because he is so damn good at giving a glimpse of what the future will look like. What Ray Bradbury did with words in describing the future, Ridley Scott does with film and set design. Blade Runner has set the president when it comes to how others now perceive the future. No more EPCOT shinny metallic and glass buildings and space suits and everyone holding hands as we build a futuristic utopia. No in Blade Runner Ridley gives you the truth, the future will be dark and polluted, there will be building on top of building on top of building so that nature is obsolete. Nothing is shiny and everything is dirty, and grimy. This is our future.

A lot of people who see Blade Runner say how beautiful the opening shot is of futuristic LA. They cat take their eyes of it, it's like eye crack!!!! Even in the reading author Norman Klein opens with the discussion of Urban Planners talking about how they want to see an LA that resembles Blade Runner in the future. I just don't get the thought process behind this and I have no clue how people who get paid money to plan cities think that this is a good idea, it blows my mind. In Ridley's future LA there are no parks or trees, or even birds because everything is dead because of how polluted the world is  which probably has something to do with those "mesmerizing" towers that spew fire into the sky and God knows what other future chemicals. So there's no nature, the world is so overly cramped with buildings on top of one another that people are packed together like sardines in a tin can, the world is separated into the new mammoth sky scrapers on top with the old LA decaying in the bottom. WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO MAKE THERE CITY LOOK LIKE THIS, just ask Detroit if this is a good idea.

Norman Klein sums this feeling up really well in his article by comparing the futuristic LA to his home of South Brooklyn during massive building in New York. "I see a world where no one has time or a place to sit longer than a few minutes, where the streets are endlessly milling. I see the high urban decay of Coney Island in the early fifties...It was unsafe, a place to watch one's back. It was not homey, not what made a community." Is this a world people want? Where there is so much going on and so much over crowding that no one can sit down and enjoy a nice lunch for more than five minutes? I plan on moving to LA after graduation to start my life and I would like to one day call that city my home, but if people still want the city to look like Blade Runner then count me out because that's not a home I want to live in.

ET: Space Jesus

Okay, first things first, ET is hands down one of the scariest things on the planet and I have no clue why so many kids loved him so much. He looks creepy, he's all touchy feeling with kids, and you can see his heart. I first saw this movie when I was much younger than I am today. I believe I got the VHS copy for Easter and only played it once because like I said this glowing fingered alien scared the Hell out of me. It befuddles me to think that this film is the second highest grossing film OF ALL TIME! How did this happen!? Why did this happen!? How has Spielberg's wrinkly alien gotten more views than a Kubrick or Scorsese film? I just didn't get it, but after reading the reading and discussing in class I now know why, it's because of Jesus.

When I was younger I never ever had it cross my mind that this movie was a religious allegory for Jesus Christ. That is probably because I was 7 and didn't know what the word allegory meant, but that is besides the point. Even over the years watching clips, or parts of the film when flipping through channels, I never once picked up on the whole ET is Space Jesus, and now that I have it is blowing my mind! Of course a film that portrays the same ideals as the Bible does in 1980's Reagan America would gross so much because that is what was in in America at the time. Right-Winged, Conservative, Christian, America thanks to good old Ronald. People ate this up like it was cocaine laced chunky monkey ice cream. It appears that many Americans liked what Reagan was shoveling and I think Steven Spielberg knew his audience.

Yes, ET was written by Melissa Mathison who attend Catholic School, and yes this script heavily follows the Heroes Journey which very closely resembles the story Jesus, but I think a lot of the imagery (Why did the spaceship make a rainbow at the end? Does it run on love and unicorns?) and name choices ( I mean for crying out loud the Elliot's mother's name was Mary! He literally could have chosen any other name.) and set design chosen (The "Enter" sign on Elliot's door is like entering into the Kingdom of ET.) by Spielberg was just to play up to the time in which America was in. Spielberg was smart and made a movie about a space version of Jesus in a Reagan America and people ate the up and at the end of the day Spielberg made a bunch of cash.

Like author  Frank T. Tomasulo wrote in The Gospel According to Spielberg in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, "(Holy Word and Hollywood Film) reinforce and reify, even create, an ideology at one with the prevailing political climate.... Steven Spielberg's simultaneously interacted and collaborated with their immediate sociopolitical circumstances, while also drawing on timeless, "Universal" images, characters, and themes in an effort to efface all contemporary ramifications to the New Right and Moral Majority." Spielberg was playing to a mass audience and it worked. The rest is like the say, in the books and Spielberg's wallet. Sometimes it seems just seems to easy to play with people's minds. 

I'll leave you with this tid-bit to cool off your minds after realizing that Spielberg manipulated you into liking a creepy, touchy feely, wrinkly, drunk alien because you know the story of Jesus.