2009-10-26 18:09:49

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: A FAN GETS IRRITATED, AND I WONDER WHY

Filed under: Movies, Paranormal Activity
Posted by: John

Okay. For those who don’t know, the most interesting phenomenon in movies right now is the success of Paranormal Activity, a home-made ghost story filmed for an alleged $15,000 and bought by a studio for $300,000. It now looks like the movie will make more than $100 million in theaters. Its success has some of the flavor of The Blair Witch Project, but with the added sweetness of Steven Spielberg’s involvement.

But this isn’t a post about the movie. I haven’t see the movie yet. Instead, housebound, I’ve spent the last hour bathing in the comments of people who loved and hated the movie over at Nikki Finke’s Deadline/Hollywood blog.

If you have any interest in the magic or money of the movies, and you haven’t indulged yourself in the comments section of her blog, do yourself a favor. It’s delicious in the same way an Apple Pan cheeseburger is delicious. Two-thirds iceberg lettuce, but juicy as can be!

To me, it’s both a commuter train wreck, filled with car after car of rage, self-loathing and wounded pride, and a fantastically spirited and diverse conversation among people who argue from very different vantage points passionately about the art and the industry. Just when you think it’s getting really civilized, it turns really ugly.

For all I know, people in the movie business hold it in contempt, but I really enjoyed the back and forth about the Saw franchise, the dance between lovers and haters of Where The Wild Things Are, and the repeated invocations of the Twilight movies. I appreciated the fact that club-wielding horror genre fans seem to be smacking it out with people who sound as if they actually work in the business.

Having said that, I couldn’t help noticing, as a non-participant, how annoyed, how downright surly, some people get and for no apparent reason. The comments section of Deadline/Hollywood feels like a microcosm of the mood of the entire blogosphere—so much rancor over so little real territory fought in a vast, nebulous expanse.

For instance, here’s one guy on the subject of Paranormal Activity:

“Paranormal Activity is an independently financed film that purports to depict an actual amateur chronicling of demonic-domestic infestation. Did the haters of this film actually walk into it expecting Scorsese-caliber cinematography and acting from the Daniel Day-Lewis school of frothiness? “It looks like a youtube video.” Well, yeah, it was supposed to have been filmed by a guy who bought a video camera to chronicle the supernatural shenanigans that were plaguing him and his chick. If you’re going to discredit the film on the basis of sub-par production values, you only reveal yourself to be a petty blogger bellyacher who lives to undermine the enthusiasm for films that catch on through grass-roots channels. The film’s power is derived from a presentation that keeps it tethered to reality. You crybabies can whine all you want about this power doesn’t exist because the film’s popularity spreading like wildfire is proof positive that you’re wrong. If it were as bad as you people claim it never would’ve emerged from the horror festival circuit to become a global sensation. Thankfully the backlash against the film has been limited to a vocal fringe minority of cyber-losers who just want to look hip and edgy by rejecting the new big thing in pop culture. You could walk into any showing of this film in the country right now and monitor a packed audience reveling in the experience of being freaked out on a level rarely seen in a day and age where mtv editing techniques are the go-to technique to elicit fear.”

I especially like the way the comment starts out with a sort of faux-academic tone of objectivity before descending quickly into trash talk. Haters!

Now, of course, this could be the director venting incognito at his critics, or maybe someone at Paramount, but let’s suppose it’s not. What interests me is this almost kneejerk sense that your enemies are out there in the ether, they are elitists or trolls or proles, and they despise you without knowing you, and you somehow make yourself look smarter by identifying and flaming them before they can flame you.

There’s a pre-determined, preemptive quality to so much of the argument. The irritation doesn’t feel grounded in real emotion anymore. It feels conditioned by a habit of years. It’s simply how one communicates; just as nineteenth century educated Russians frequently slipped into French, our twenty first century American bloggers often slip into spite.

So it’s possible that somewhere buried in this endless debate about the Saw franchise we might find an important clue to the simultaneous democratization and degradation of our political culture occurring online.

For the record, I haven’t yet found that virtual Rosetta Stone, but in the meantime, it’s just entertaining as hell to watch invisible sock puppets rend each other with nouns.

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