Personal computing discussed
Moderators: askfranklin, renee, emkubed, Captain Ned
Jason181 wrote:You're taking your dream tour of the (nonexistent) central offices of TechReport, when you hear screams in the lobby. The outbreak has begun. The stench of fear is thick, time is short, and panic is setting in. You can only bring one TechReport staffer with you. Who will it be? Post why in the comments!
trackerben wrote:That seems inconsistent with the standard plot of horror movies. As a rule of thumb, the zombie apocalypse is not a venue to illustrate the camaraderie of us vs the undead. Rather, it's commonly used as an external device to explore groups under stress and the breakdown of social norms. This explains why in just about any zombie or monster film you have:I was reading Goldman about the horror/zombie cultural phenomenon, which he thinks became popular because death is a social thing, and the we-vs-zombies trope mirrors our anxieties about mortality and our need to fight it. What could be more sociable than survivors finding fellowship among the already dead? So I turn over to TR and what do you know, I see this invitation for real living persons to keep away those fantasy undead. The analysis nailed it perfectly!
Darkmage wrote:That seems inconsistent with the standard plot of horror movies. As a rule of thumb, the zombie apocalypse is not a venue to illustrate the camaraderie of us vs the undead. Rather, it's commonly used as an external device to explore groups under stress and the breakdown of social norms. This explains why in just about any zombie or monster film you have:
- a struggle for dominance/leadership over the group,
- some member attacks/betrays the other members of the group and
- some nitwit refuses to notify everyone that he/she has been infected and will (at some key point in the 2nd reel) attempt to eat the rest of the survivors.
...It also explains why you rarely have climactic scenes at the end of the movie where the remaining survivors rally together as a cohesive team to defeat the threat (Think of the finale in movies such as The Avengers, The Transformers, The Expendables, Serentity, etc.) The whole point about a horror movie is survival and how slim the chance of survival becomes as the list of victims narrows. Victory in a horror movie is accomplished by a tiny fraction of the original cast, sometimes only one individual. Sometimes not even that.
superjawes wrote:Sorry, but I just don't see much need for tech journalists in the post-zombie apocolyptic world. They generally have poor eyesight and atrophied muscles, which makes them a liability. Add in the fact that they usually have pasty skin, too, and frankly they've got more in common with the zombies than with us.Of course, 62% of respondents would rather use all of you as zombie bait.
Sorry, but I just don't see much need for tech journalists in the post-zombie apocolyptic world. They generally have poor eyesight and atrophied muscles, which makes them a liability.
trackerben wrote:Which to my mind is moving the goalposts from "finding fellowship" (your original paraphrasing of the article) to "or the lack [of fellowship]". Fellowship to my limited vocabulary is not comprised of words like "Dominance/Succession", "Struggle", "Stress" and "Betrayal".Groups. Stress. Social norms. Struggle. Dominance/Succession. Members. Betrayal. Notification/Communication. Survival. All items highly associated or uniquely descriptive of social behavior, i.e. fellowship, or the lack thereof.
Darkmage wrote:trackerben wrote:Which to my mind is moving the goalposts from "finding fellowship" (your original paraphrasing of the article) to "or the lack [of fellowship]". Fellowship to my limited vocabulary is not comprised of words like "Dominance/Succession", "Struggle", "Stress" and "Betrayal".Groups. Stress. Social norms. Struggle. Dominance/Succession. Members. Betrayal. Notification/Communication. Survival. All items highly associated or uniquely descriptive of social behavior, i.e. fellowship, or the lack thereof.
In any case, debating the paraphrasing of a movie genre commentary is abstract enough without a link to the original analysis by Goldman. Hast thou a link for us?
trackerben wrote:Erm. It sounds like you are describing a more rich and complete account of the social experience than just fellowship. Perhaps you were accidentally over specific in your word choice. Zombie movies are definitely a study of social interaction with a lot of room for dynamics along multiple axis (survival, moral, attractiveness, intelligence, etc.). A zombie movie with only ugly plot elements (betrayal, dominance struggles, stupidity and violence) would be a pretty terrible movie. Without at least some move along an axis in a positive direction, the audience won't identify with the characters and won't be invested in their fate.I hope I've not scattered meanings here. I meant that the full social experience is not just the situation within fellowship, it includes its finding or loss within the experience of some or all of the behaviors and attitudes proposed. But if this sounds confusing, I can limit my terms for fellowship to just the experience within the circle of it.
trackerben wrote:You mean he's a journalist?Be a little wary and discerning though, much of what he touches on is best discussed at R&P. Mr. Goldman is not your typical NYC financier-philosopher for he is always supremely confident about his knowledge claims.
Darkmage wrote:trackerben wrote:You mean he's a journalist?Be a little wary and discerning though, much of what he touches on is best discussed at R&P. Mr. Goldman is not your typical NYC financier-philosopher for he is always supremely confident about his knowledge claims.
Having read the article... well, he has a new perspective. I think he makes a mistake in reporting on the popularity of horror movies and then narrows his focus to zombie movies without justifying such a switch. I also think he completely ignores the tendency of Hollywood to pounce on an idea and run it into the ground. Horror movies have always had a strong following and their appeal has been explained much better than the weird religious parallelism he indulges in here.
As a rule of thumb, my impression of the symbolism behind horror movies were basically Vampires => Fear of the Predator, Werewolves => Fear of the Sickness and Zombies => Fear of Age. Zombies are analogous to the inexorable march of old age, coming for us all. Sure, you can avoid one or two bits of age. Replace a hip here, get some exercise there. But soon there are more of them. And then still more. They never come faster, they just come in bigger groups. No matter how hard to try to hold off the deterioration of you... eventually, old age/zombies will catch up to you. And then comes that fatal bite - as that doctor's test comes back positive. You can imagine the dawning horror of the victim who realizes their death is working through their bloodstream, their refusal to admit their shortened time, their denial of the inevitable process, the lies they tell to avoid confronting the end. Zombies are just old age creeping up on us all.
The author touches on this at the very end of his article. But I don't think he quite gets it.
trackerben wrote:Which is pretty much what I just said. Cool.I also think he underestimates Hollywood's capacity to overexploit its saleable themes.
trackerben wrote:Faithful generations of the past not liking horror movies doesn't quite explain the explosion in All Things Zombie in the last ten years. If his article was an explanation of the rise of the horror genre itself, I might be more charitable. But he's describing a multi-generational shift in culture and using it to explain a quarter-generation trend in media.But lets not forget that this is a profit- and entrenchment-seeking industry which is happy to supply a demand which was not there before. As Goldman points out, the more faithful generations of the past were not as cynical as today's decadents and were far less interested in invented horror, and there was far less demand then.
trackerben wrote:I don't think it's necessary to go back to priests and burial rituals in order to explain the appeal of The Walking Dead. Goldman's conceit is that he's trying to link ancient cultural trends to a media fad. He can throw up a lot of chaff explaining to us why zombies resonate in our culture, but he fails to explain why we're suddenly swamped in zombies as opposed to ten years ago. Better people than he have explored these themes, surely.Goldman points to the Judeo-Christian principle that authentic members of the divine Corpus, or at least clerics ministering openly, must be bodily whole and unblemished as both example and promise of future reconfiguration. The invented narrative of the Undead is in opposition to this concept. The logic is simple if you validate the premises. People who lose sight of their traditional culture will be drawn by consciousness of their own mortality into morbid fascination with the themes of the older, baser general culture of death which celebrates and socializes its events and imagery.
Darkmage wrote:Faithful generations of the past not liking horror movies doesn't quite explain the explosion in All Things Zombie in the last ten years. If his article was an explanation of the rise of the horror genre itself, I might be more charitable. But he's describing a multi-generational shift in culture and using it to explain a quarter-generation trend in media.
Darkmage wrote:I don't think it's necessary to go back to priests and burial rituals in order to explain the appeal of The Walking Dead. Goldman's conceit is that he's trying to link ancient cultural trends to a media fad. He can throw up a lot of chaff explaining to us why zombies resonate in our culture, but he fails to explain why we're suddenly swamped in zombies as opposed to ten years ago. Better people than he have explored these themes, surely.
Zombies are analogous to the inexorable march of old age, coming for us all.
codedivine wrote:
codedivine wrote:
codedivine wrote: