The Mist

I’ve watched a lot of horror films. My Master’s thesis involved horror films and terrorism. I’ve seen good ones, bad ones, funny ones, self-loathing ones, but none of them was an angry horror film. Yeah yeah slasher films are gory, lots of people die very theatrical deaths, the torture films are pseudo-topical, hiding behind the screams; too afraid to ever say the words “Iraq” or “united states government” or “Guantanamo Bay.” Dawn of the Dead was a vicious critique of consumerism, but it was, at its heart, a satire.

None of them, not a single one, comes close to capturing the anger of The Mist. Mr. Darabont is pissed, and he’s not gonna take it anymore.

I talked to the screen at this movie. I made exclamations at the screen. “I’ve seen a hundred movies with you, and you’ve never done that” a friend observed.

This film is about politics, class, religion, reason, authoritarianism, the abyss, fathers and sons, war, and yes, gore. I’m sure some out there will say it is heavy handed; I’d disagree, it’s accurate, deadly accurate. As the Milgram experiment, the SPE, and Nazism illustrate, this IS the way people behave when the shit hits the fan. These are the things they say; these are the things they do.

And the fact that the protagonist’s profession is artist is telling, very telling about Mr. Darabont’s feelings not about art, rather the devaluation of the artist in society; mistrusted for the book learnin’ and their thinking.’ What do they know right? They just draw pictures and make pretty sounds!

A reviewer on chud.com compared this film to John Carpenter’s The Thing, and I think he is dead on. They share a common language of paranoia punctuated with Rorschach monstrosity: in each scene the monstrous is never the same. It is flux. The meaning is always just a little bit different.

Slow Down Cowboys

Saw this over at Americablog.com:

Funny, I always thought being a Republican was a lifestyle choice. Now I see that they're born that way. Still, with gene therapy, anything is possible.

From the LA Times:

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said.


As a lefty I guess I should be beating my chest and handing out "I told you so's" wrapped in red foil snark. Some in the progressive blogosphere see this as a vindication. Proof of..well, everything they hate about conservatism, but I'm not sold. One, this study seems to be abiding but that most convenient of Western World blunders, the dualism. There are only two political ideologies? Wha?
Secondly, when it comes to politics there are really only two tests that matters:

The Milgram Test:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

and this one:
http://www.prisonexp.org/

No one is immune. Over two thirds of subjects failed the milgram. Authoritarianism can co-opt any ideological system