“Two Headed Shark Attack”, “Psycho”, and “Black Lives Matter”
I watched two horror movies yesterday, "Two Headed Shark Attack" and "Demon Island" where a point came where I was rooting for the monster to kill the teenagers. Some of you are aware of my thinking on this matter. For those who are not, let me lay it out.
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In "Psycho" director and screenwriter (I'm not certain whether this was true of the book as well) you were given a putative heroine (Janet Leigh), the center of empathy and humanity, and then…well, lets just say that identification goes down the drain.
You then are left having been fully emotionally invested in the story, with no one to empathize with. I suggest that we search for something, someone, to be the center of good…and settle on Norman Bates. He LOVES his mommy, and however strange he is, we have to identify with SOMEONE. Right?
And this is one of the ways that movie "elevated" its genre and became an all-time classic. This trick created an effect (IMO) as powerful as the more famous later "twist", a hidden secret of psychological storytelling that was absolutely master level.
And this leads me to a thought about the two-pronged impact of disproportionate black death and dehumanization in cinema, something I've written about many times. And by the way, don't comfort yourself thinking "that's just Hollywood." Without white audiences enjoying this trope, it would have died out long ago. If that stings, all I have to offer is the thought that, were conditions and history reversed, black audiences and artists would do the same thing to white characters, and enjoy watching it, and be in denial about the implications.
I digress.
The question of who LIKES it, is obvious. But there is another aspect which is hidden, and just as important. And it is this: Black audiences are being trained to identify with white people MORE than they do black people, because if they identify with the black characters, they get the pain of disproportionate death, or exclusion from that delicious "breeding circle" (black characters being disproportionately too fat, old, young, gay, asexual, or dead to be reproductive competition).
In other words, and I mean this as an unconscious and powerful by-product rather than a deliberate attempt, these movies encourage black audiences to consider white people more human, better, smarter, sexier. It isn't just feeding white audiences their red meat, it is also programming black audiences to devalue themselves, to have a bit of an aversion to their own appearance.
Remember the Brown vrs. Board of Education thing where black children preferred to play with white dolls, and the board was finally awakened to the damage of segregation?
Yeah, its like that. Again, NO part of me thinks this is deliberate. Its too subtle. Frankly too smart, and more vicious than most people really are. But it satisfies some tribal urge to "survive, reproduce, and control" at the unconscious level. And is therefore more difficult to root out.
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So…as I love love love horror, SF and Action movies, but can't ignore the fact that I can predict that black characters rarely, VERY rarely, make it to the closing credits (that honor generally goes to a white woman of childbearing age, or a breeding couple). When I see all the black people, or the only black man, kicked out of the "breeding circle", rather than switch my empathy to the white characters, I switch it to the monster and enjoy the carnage.
True story. This is why I laughed at the end of "The Mist". The audience did not appreciate it.
