When is too much too much?

This old-school Mario commercial creeped me out as a kid. It'd be fine if the guy just burst and we heard an exploding noise. That would just be silly. Instead, stomach viscera comes shooting out, splattering surrounding restaurant patrons. Whose bright idea was it to rip off Monty Python to sell video games to children?

Photoshop pukes up the Internet.

...and by 'the Internet,' I mean 'a whole lot of candy kid and 4chan memes.'

Hi-res here. (via Geekologie via Matt)

Neutrality.

At first I thought once and for all that the Internet was the gift that keeps on giving, but then I found this:


Some things are too good to be true. (via tiny picnic)

Feline apathy.

A classic from MTV's Cartoon Sushi. A little old lady bites the big one before feeding her beloved kitty. Apropos of my previous post. You should probably just skip that first minute and a half of "Beat the Meatles" nonsense, although it did remind me that this exists:

Holy Meryl!

She still looks great, sure, but it doesn't seem fair that I was born too late to know what a stunner Meryl Streep truly was in her hey-day.

Killing kittens.

Mahatma Gandhi used to say that "you can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members." Gandhi was pretty damn wise, even if the idea of a society having distinctly "weakest members" is an inconvenient reminder of the fact that the same guy who basically invented civic disobedience was also an unabashed caste system apologist. In any case, lift those words out of the context of the Indian resistance to British colonial powers and you have a canny summary of the rhetorical method in any number of anti-establishment texts. Swift took on the voice of an imagined British aristocrat with an utter disregard for the lives of Irish children in "A Modest Proposal." Sinclair muckraked the shit out of the American meat-packing industry's exploitation of immigrant labor in The Jungle. Michael Moore spends most of Sicko hearing the stories of middle-class Americans getting the business end of health insurance providers' greed. Tales of systematic mistreatment are at their most potent when they focus on the have-nots, especially here in the US, where envisioning ourselves as having pulled ourselves up by the straps of our boots is a permanent part of our collective consciousness. And who am I to defect, when the banality of upper-crust woes has barred me to this day from getting all the way through any Austen? The bell curve of wealth may belie our inherent spiritual equality and all that "We Are the World" bathwater, but it's still tough to care about Emma FINALLY realizing that, duh, Mr. Knightley is the one she wants, when not too far from the flowing pastures of Hartfield in south London some Cockney bastard son is shimmying his way up to the slave wages and tuberculosis at the top of suburban smoke-stacks. Materialist tunnel-vision or an attempt to cover my liberal arts laziness with delusions of enfant terrible grandeur? Either way, I can't deny the influence of Gandhi's words on modern moral representation, and neither can you.

Check it out: is there any foreshadowing of pathological violence more common than cruelty towards animals? It seems like conventional wisdom puts the kid who pulls the wings off flies on a one-way ticket to being the next John Wayne Gacy. No reasonably innocent act of burning ants under a microscope is likely to escape a tongue-clucking or two from the daytime television crowd. Hell, I was a pretty good-natured kid, but the moment I grabbed a softball bat when I just couldn't take my siblings' pestering anymore, my older sister told me with disgust that I was destined to be a serial killer when I grew up. The causality isn't without merit, coming as it does from the myriad research that makes careers out of empiricizing the obvious (and that's hardly an insult; if you think that we pay scientists to blow our minds, then I'm going to have to ask you to leave my electoral region, please, because you clearly don't value education). Psychiatrist John M. Macdonald identifies a triad of childhood behavioral characteristics that often emerge in profiles of eventual killers, consisting of "firesetting, cruelty to animals and enuresis [bedwetting]". (Bedwetting? An impulse-control thing, claims my older sister, who is now a social worker.) He provides some examples of animal abuse from psychotic adults.

One man derived satisfaction from telling his wife again and again of an incident in which he assisted in the birth of a calf by hitching the cow to a post and tying a rope from the presenting legs of the calf to his tractor. He gunned the motor and eviscerated the cow. (Macdonald 1963)

Holy cow. But seriously, is anybody getting flashbacks to standing in some trendy bookstore at St. Mark's Place perusing one of those Vice photo anthologies and becoming totally fixated on that one photo of a pregnant steer who collapsed from heat stroke and whose fluids had bloated her carcass so much that her fetus burst out and lay lifeless on the ground beside her, still attached by its umbilical cord? Because I am. It made me think of that scene in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, when Ace pulls an apple out of some guy's stomach through his esophagus, cheery pseudo Afro-pop stomping on the soundtrack, and then proceeds to deliver a baby by pushing down on the mother's stomach, causing the infant to fly out and land in the overjoyed father's hands. Anyway, my point is that taking pleasure in the pain of animals is part and parcel to doing the same with people.

You've heard of the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs, right? Long story short: three teenagers got together one day and decided, hey, let's launch a killing spree in the middle of rural Ukraine, nobody will catch us, we'll get nostalgic about it when we're old, it'll be great. Throughout 2007 that's exactly what they did, killing 21 different people, completely unprovoked, ranging from children to twenty-something drunks to a pregnant woman whose unborn child was cut out Nanking-style. Eventually they got caught and some footage from different junctures of this massacre surfaced during the trial. Some of it would go on to gain viral notoriety as "3 Guys 1 Hammer," which you can go ahead and Google on your own (hint: it's not on YouTube), because one time is enough when you're watching some guy's pot belly getting punctured with a screwdriver for 12 straight minutes with little discernible on the soundtrack beyond the non-selectively recorded wheezy gurgling of slashed vocal chords. Another much tamer video was basically the cameraphone equivalent of the part in a James Bond movie when the villain explains his dastardly plot as a laser beam gradually approaches our hero's genitals. In this one, an interesting item hangs in the background:


(Spoiler alert: it's a cat.)
There's so much we can take from this.
1) Chronologically, this took place prior to the killing of humans, corroborating Macdonald's triad.
2) ...and these motherfuckers knew it. Why else would they not only make a point of coyly including this detail in the composition, but also put the body in a noose, preventing suspicion that it was simply roadkill?
3) The kill is barely discernible under family-friendly fuzzing, an act of censorship that demonstrates quite clearly to the potency of this image. Mission accomplished.

The question remains: BUT WHY? Why is cruelty towards animals such an unequivocal signifier of human debasement? It seems that the term 'humane' is used just as often, if not more, to describe the treatment of others species than other humans. In fact one of the big animal rights organizations out there is called the goddamned Humane Society. I'm not sure I really get it. People are so mean to each other, every single day. People get mugged, raped, tortured, castrated, disemboweled, and killed all over the world with every passing second, yet we never quite shuffle these behaviors under the category of cruelty. My older sister, who is probably about as wise as Gandhi, confessed once that she would more easily understand wanting to kill a child than wanting to kill a pet. This struck me as abhorrent and I lorded it over her because I'm her brother and that's my job, but in retrospect her point is well-taken. It's so much easier to imagine that a child deserves to be punished than an animal, based on a basic assumption of potential for intelligence if not intelligence itself. Back in eighth grade this vegan chick vilified meat-eaters in my language arts class, citing as scientific fact that beasts, unlike humans, have no concept of the time-line of suffering - when they begin to hurt, they don't anticipate that it will ever end. A bolt of lightning to be sure, but fact? How could anyone ever arrive at this conclusively? But that's just it: it's impossible and that doesn't matter. The notion that our pets are dumber than we are is at the root of why we want them as our pets. Violent assault is the last resort of the natural struggle, the ultimate outcropping of the need to establish dominance and superiority, acceptably preceded only by the acknowledgment that whatever you're fighting has the potential of being on even ground with you. Fuck with a mountain lion, and he'll stand tall above your lifeless corpse. Animal abuse, then, is like marrying an Untouchable in Hindu society: a corruption of a widely understood hierarchy of power.

For some reason, though, we all prescribe to this gracious permission of animals' savagery, and then anthopomorphize them in our minds when it comes to reciprocating our affection. "It just doesn't make sense. We fed him everyday, we put a roof over his head, we give him vaccinations and cut his balls off so he can avoid any awkward illegitimate children, and he kills the neighbor's cat, bleeds it dry all over the patio and takes a dump on my brand new cashmere sweater. WE DID SO MUCH FOR HIM AND THIS IS HOW HE REPAYS US?!" I guess that's where the phrase "don't bite the hand that feeds you" comes from. What a stupid phrase. Of course he's going to bite the hand that feeds him. He's a fucking dog. This guy I was talking to recently made the point that the only reason we can domesticate cats is that they're so small. If we had a pet puma that bitch would kill the whole family, ransack the cupboards, break all the windows and leave. That's why cats are so much better than dogs. They just don't give a fuck at all. I'll keep an open mind about dogs, though. I'm sure they can be just as punk rock. That's probably the best part of Amores Perros: Echevarrío returns to find that the dog he just saved has slaughtered all the other dogs, and is shocked and appalled. And thus, his optimism about the essential goodness in nature is gone. How touching.

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

"SAY SHALOM TO MY INTERPLANETARY MINDFUCK!" (via STREET BONERS and TV CARNAGE)

Hype is a bitch.

After nearly a decade of eluding me, a DVD copy of Amores Perros finally ended up in my hands this weekend. It came via my parents' Netflix queue, but they passed it on to me after the first ten minutes proved "too violent." Two glasses of Old Grand Dad and soda later and I don't really know what all the fuss is about.

Of course, I do know what all the fuss is about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Mexico City is sunburnt and smoggy and made up of overlit groceries, dilapidated dens and the broken gravel of undermanaged streets. Greasy faces glisten in naturalistic lighting. Scenes of urban despair are glimpsed through open blinds when not rushing by from the back of a speeding car. Lovers make love on washing machines and stab their enemies in long, tense, bloodsoaked takes. It is sexy, urgent, and appealing.

That's just the problem, though. Kitchen-sink realism makes the melodrama palatable to audiences whose supposed distaste for bullshit would reject the same thing under the spit-polish sheen of daytime Spanish-language television.

Of course realism, like punk, is just a style, and isn't handcuffed to any particular structure. Because it originated on film as an opposition to the fairy tales of Hollywood, though, it remains tied to the objectives of investigation and exposure at its roots. The effect is like a friend telling you an O Henry story as if it actually happened. A movie like Amores Perros can have it both ways, earning the admiration reserved for "raw" representations while pledging allegiance to mainstream myths.

To the credit of Iñárritu - and his fans, for that matter - these stories, outlandish as they may be, aren't trite. It wouldn't be fair to accuse Amores Perros of parading out the same tired old stories in new clothes. Rather, it's a deficiency of the storytelling itself that I take issue with.

The character development in this film is jarringly malnourished. This can be a hard claim to quantify, so let's instead look at the methods that stand in for it. Gael García Bernal's lovesick slacker nurses a serious crush on his sister-in-law, which we sympathize with...why? Because she's pretty (she is)? Because her husband treats her like dogshit (he does)? Because Bernal's life is so dismal that desperate passion is not only understandable, but necessary (who fucking knows)? Or, because his brother's callous infidelity and sidejob robbery establishes distinct parameters of Good and Evil (bingo)? The venerable Emilio Echevarrío plays a gun-for-hire squatting with an army of mutts, whose longing to reconnect with his daughter is evoked via conveniently systematic revisions to a photo album. If there were only three things I learned from John Hillcoat's lifeless adaptation of The Road, they were: 1) Viggo Mortenson is one of the great actors of this generation, 2) only the Coen Brothers should be given Cormac McCarthy treatments, and 3) there's nothing more banal than evoking memory via remnants of "the good times," especially photographs. As if to add insult to injury, the third act ends with the kind of anti-hero moralism that made that "if you aren’t back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead" scene in Fight Club such a cringe-worthy experience: the would-be assassin puts two combating lovers in a room together, instead of killing one at the behest of the other, and urges them to work it out. If only. Meanwhile, back on Earth, we wonder if it's really going to take nothing more than a shave and a haircut to worm one's way from homelessness back into your middle class brethrens' lives. The second story I won't even address, as it was too flimsy even to consider during the film's testimony of its status as worthwhile art.

Then there are the dogs. They provide the emotional fulcrum for each discrete narrative, representing the opportunity for freedom, the reason for escape, and objects of nurture. In all three stories, these roles are undercut by Iñárritu's loyalty to brutal realism (one dog gets shot, another devoured by rats under the floorboards of a fancy condo, and another, finally, kills all the other dogs in Echevarrío's stable after he nourishes it back to health). The lesson is that life is tough and our romantic inclinations rarely pan out when faced with the whims of primal nature. Fair enough, but is this really so profound? I suspect that it's this realism that makes it so, in the eyes of so many. Because we see these soap operas play out through the glamorous grit of a Banksy mural, they tickle our desire for the real, and fill in the gaps left open by the oversights of the script. Implausible or not, these look like Real People, and sound like Real People, and therefore must in fact be Real People with Real Problems. My problem isn't so much that Amores Perros isn't great cinema, it's that it sells itself on seeming like great cinema. It's the trendy version of the same thing Ron Howard has been doing for years with his high-gloss, middlebrow Academy bait, and because it gives independent filmmakers access to depth without its achievement, it has ignited a wave of similarly lauded descendants: City of God, No Man's Land, Crazy/beautiful, Crash, and of course, Iñárritu's 21 Grams and Babel.

But back to those dogs. They're easily my favorite part about the film, perhaps because of the sheer excess of those dog fight scenes. No expense is spared in depicting the visceral inhumanity of this gambler's sport, and the images crackle with the rage of someone who witnessed such things with his own eyes on one too many occasions. Unfortunately, it's the blood, and not the righteous indignation, that's easier to imitate.

Corrosive Curiosity.

Stanley Fish waxes inquisitive on the (ig)nobility of inquisitiveness:

When God told Adam he could eat of all the fruits of the Garden of Eden, but not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he placed what has been called a “provoking object” in Adam’s eyes. The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything. Such a being would imagine himself, God-like, standing to the side of the universe and, armed only with the power of his mind, mastering its intricacies. Those who engage in this fantasy, says Thomas Aquinas, think “they are doing something great, if with surpassing curiosity and keenness they explore the whole mass of this body which we call the world; so great a pride is thus begotten, that one would think they dwelt in the very heavens about which they argue.”

Another churchman, Lorenzo Scupoli, put it this way in 1589: “They make an idol of their own understanding” (“Knowledge puffeth up,” I Corinthians 8:1). Pascal said it succinctly: “Curiosity is only vanity.” Jonathan Robinson, writing in this century, makes the same point: “What we are talking about is the desire to satisfy our curiosity on any and every conceivable subject that takes our fancy” (“Spiritual Combat Revisited”).

Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge’s boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H. to digitalize just about everything. “The computer revolution,” he announces, “holds out the prospect that the digital library could be become an international citadel for the pursuit of curiosity.”

That’s exactly what Paul Griffiths, professor of divinity at Duke University, is afraid of. Where Leach welcomes the enlargement of curiosity’s empire, Griffiths, who is writing a book on the vice of curiosity, sees it as a sign of moral and spiritual danger: “Late modern societies that are fundamentally shaped by the overwhelming presence of electronic media and the obscene inundation of every aspect of human life by pictures and sounds have turned the vice of curiosity into a prescribed way of life” (“Reason and the Reasons of Faith”). The prescriptions come in the form of familiar injunctions: follow the inquiry as far as it goes, leave no stone unturned, there is always more to know, the more information the better. “In a world where curiosity rules,” Griffiths declares, “unmasking curiosity as a destructive and offensive device . . . amounts to nothing less than a . . . radical critique of superficiality and constant distraction.”

I probably don't need to specify that I read and blogged this between swaths of note-taking at my morning poetry lecture.

(Full text here, via The New York Times.)

This Is SO Much Better Than Pixar.

Uncanny Valley, anyone?