post #35: elevated horror anad the people who make it as it is
[this as in response to this review of Backrooms and susbequent conversation about it; as had started as was going to just be a comment dropped in Letterboxd native comment section, but I think it's ended up becoming a bit long for that context so I moved it here
Obviously am aware that Letterboxd comment box is not best place to mount / continue discourse. Yes, and anyways-
I think like with regard to developing an analysis of, why is modern (/elevated/ --which to some extent is most all there is--) being / become as it is? How do we keep ending up with these colorblind casting messes such as Backrooms such as I Saw TV Glow etc.? Etc.
Well on this last question, one shared point is obviously the A24 of it all. To which, while Backrooms is, as I understand it, Parson's first movie, I Saw TV Glow is being Schoenbrun's second fiction feature film (in horror mode). To which, their previous piece was We're All Going to the World's Fair. While I definitely still have some problems with that film, I think it's also observably the case that it and I Saw TV Glow are very much different films and the scale / scope / nature of their problematics is thus being quite different too. Focusing on this example, a question can be, why was I Saw TV Glow the movie Schoenbrun made after World's Fair?
While I'm sure there may be other ways of narrating / answering this, the what I will offer / highlight is the international / independent film festival of it all. The fact is that World's Fair found success at these film festival stages (e.g., Sundance) and, at least based on my understanding, this success parlayed into A24 / studio attention which then developed or resulted in I Saw TV Glow. In other words, I argue that the system of the film festival is what is essentially problematic here. The incentive structure is such that it is set up to scout out potential talents and route them away from making whatever World's Fair was into making an I Saw TV Glow and then at the same time using this transformation and genealogy to smokescreen justify the fact of I Saw TV Glow's okayness. This is a way of at once setting the bar for normalcy while also snuffing out any even vaguely radical potentialities for these future filmmakers. (The dupe, I mean to intone is at once on the audience and on the artist; the audience is told, you need to accept this as normal since look at the receipts of where it came from; and the artist is told, you need to accept this as normal since look at the success we're giving you).
Of course Parson's case is different and it's important to acknowledge that as such. He also has a backround in filmmaking and the like, but his route was not through festival spaces. Nevertheless, I argue a similar routing pattern may be applied; to whatever extent he was making I guess maybe interesting stuff in his web series or wherever else, his being given the funding and opportunity to make this piece into a feature film is again an act of routing that ought to be named as such. I mean one big difference can be as simple as, the short films are having a critical frame of government agencies, where they are essentially the bads of their world. Even though this critique is vague and I argue still having political issues, it's that in the film we get here, well, we don't even get this. The movie is essentially a personal drama mining whatever shitty self-help pop psych type stuff the A24-guided modern horror genre has been so inculcated into.
Which is to say that while both of these films have problems and while I definitely take issues with the ideologies and so forth presented in the works produced by both of these artists etc., I think it's also going to be productive (and in the long run necessary should, again, this be developed into a more comprehensive analysis) to take mind to the incentivize structures of distribution/production companies. It's also being the case that even as A24 has a particular track record of fuckery, that this pattern of studio stymying is very much endemic to the film world to begin with. Neon is similarly problematic, I'd argue. I mean you don't end up with a mess like Longlegs just by stumbling into it. (That as a movie which has an essentially anti-trans politics; and which is also foregrounding police / cop narrative).
I have strong faith in the legitimacy of this frame as a method of explaining things. Of course, lacking in my current analysis is a strong empiricism to my claims. This would be the subject of a future more rigorous project, but, again, my prediction is that with data you would only find more of the same (at least based on how I'm understanding these things to operate and how I'm understanding empire's method of counterinsurgency to function and how I'm understanding the political issues of funding to be through the work of such scholars as Gabriel Rockhill, e.g., his book Who Paid the Pied Pipers of Western Marxism). That being said, I would genuinely welcome and encourage someone to engage with this research process as I would be interest in what the more specific finding as surfaced / revealed by evidence / data would end up being. I might look into this myself in the future, but yeah I guess for now, I have a couple of other things I need to work on more readily.