A NightMeh On Ugh Street

     

Despite having one of my favorite movie posters ever, A Nightmare On Elm Street has not aged well. As a kid I went on movie binges and would essentially rent out entire franchises and watch them over a weekend. Nightmare was one of these binges and as 12 year old I was pretty freaked out by Freddy and his weird jokes, but not so much anymore, now having a background in film and video production all I could do was laugh at how screwy the lighting was and the odd editing especially the whole booby trap montage. But there is something about Freddy that sets him apart from the other slashers, his methods and origins.

Nightmare is essentially a sins of the father (in this case mother) story. Freddy is a monster created by the parents of the Elm Street kids and like all parents in 80`s movies they half ass it and Freddy inexplicably manifests as some dream wraith. Nancy our protagonist and final girl is the only one in the movie capable of using her brain and through a combination of trial and error paired with the local library's selection of booby trap manuals ( fun for the whole family!) is able to cast Freddy back into hell or wherever he goes when he turns to sparkles. She embodies traits that I think we all wish we could have if in her situation. She has guts, brains and the ability to improvise. She takes the much more powerful Kreuger and uses his arrogance against him, Freddy knows he has the upper hand that's why he he's jokey and "haunts" his victims before killing them, he likes to play. This comes from his method of attack, he attacks from a victims subconcious mind a place where the dreamer is nearly helpless if they are not disciplined. Unlike, say Jason Voorhees who is a juggernaut. Voorhees generates fear through his ability to take nearly unlimited damage, even decapitation doesn't keep him dead for long. Freddy is fear, he manifests in the subconcious he uses all of his victims inner most fears against ( more so in later films however). That's why Freddy often times has very rapey sexual bent.  He is the Freudian combination of Eros and Thanatos take for example this kill Nightmare 4 Waterbed Kill he exploits the teenagers sexuality as a lure.

Overall I don't have much to say about Nightmare other than what was discussed in class. I got so distracted with all the groan inducing moments in the film. Plus I think Freddy really under utilizes his powers, He has in theory the best advantage for a killer, no one believes he's there and he strikes completely in an asymmetric manner. Dreams are powerful and Freddy just resorts to a boiler room ?

And a child will lead them: Wargames and the child tactician

                                                   ...And a child will lead them.

Wargames is a classic despite some truly cringe worthy film making and acting ham but still we fondly return to the film. There is something resonant about the film something that sticks with people who (especially gamers) see this soft sci-fi version of Enders Game and that's because we have been living in Wargames for decades now.

Technology is the backbone of warfare, World War 2 mechanized war and advanced the art of killing with mobile infantry, tanks and atomic weaponry. Twentieth century warfare was all about engaging your enemy in rural and urban environments and engaging in close quarters combat. Warfare since it's inception has been a physical affair but with the advent of computers and their radical evolution in the twenty first century is changing the face of warfare and thusly a new breed of soldier and commander is arising.

Video games especially real time strategy games have made entire generations of children into fledgling military commanders. First person shooters especially ones with co-operative play and headset communication can teach basic unit tactics like door breaching and infiltration. Hypothetically if a young adult or child who often plays real time strategy games logs into their favorite game and plays it believing it is just a game but thousands of miles away that child is actually commanding forces in decisive combat situations but without the pressure of life or death, that player depending on skill level could perhaps develop new asymmetric warfare tactics not rooted in centuries of warfare training because they are simply having fun. Mind you video game technology is not yet that advanced but things like remote drones armed with hellfire missiles do strike at targets half a world away while being piloted from safely inside U.S. borders, operators watch from a camera mounted in the drone assess their targets and strike much in the fashion one would play any jet fighting video game.

This distancing of the soldier from the act of killing makes the soldier calm, rational and most importantly not dead. A drone operator flies a sortie in the afternoon, pops off for lunch then flies another strike mission over Pakistan or surveillance over the U.S ( yes drones are legal in American airspace, yes it`s creepy). Wargames illustrates the gameification of warfare, W.O.P.R runs millions of simulations before realizing that nuclear war is a zero sum game, but imagine if W.O.P.R ran a ground invasion with each unit and soldier able to receive and transmit data back to the machine so it could calculate the most optimal solutions for victory. W.O.P.R would be much like the video game player, objective, focused and removed from problematic moral issues like acceptable losses.

Despite being a brutally efficient system the child general or the digital general both lack ethics. Situations arise in war that carry great ethical weight and a system removed from consequence would not blink in the face of nerve gassing children or slaughtering civilians. War is tricky, nuclear war doubly so.

But I think I would make a pretty good fighter pilot, hook me up to W.O.P.R with a PlayStation controller boot up an A-10 Thunderbolt close air support fighter and let me at it.

                                      ( A-10, it`s pretty cool, like a flying shark, with a chain gun, you know                                            you want to take it for a spin)

More Human Than Human, That is Our Motto

                                    BLADE RUNNER 

                                                A Cyberpunk Nightmare

  Ridley Scott's cult masterpiece Blade Runner is one of my all time favorite films. I love the dirty cyberpunk future that Scott lays out for his audience. Los Angeles,2019 seems torn directly from William Gibson's NeuroMancer, a novel credited with launching the Cyberpunk genre. In Gibson's novel the protagonist is first met in "Night City", a city closely resembling that Blade Runner's L.A. 

Cyberpunk is an often derided subsection of science fiction and is a close cousin of Steampunk, A Victorian alternate history filled with Clockwork creations and space faring zeppelins. Cyberpunk stories are usually set in near future urban centers filled with synthetics, Asiatic cultural influences and a grim outlook on what it means to be a human living on the cusp of a post human world. The cities of cyberpunk range from "Night City" a grungy crime ridden slum to the high rises of Akira's Neo-Tokyo. Urban design is a staple of the genre but to actually live in a city like Blade Runner's Los Angeles is an entirely different matter. The reading talks about urban planners yearning to bring the design elements of the film to life, given enough time I think every major city will be a smog ridden ( if they aren't already, cough cough Beijing) fire spewing , over crowded sprawl. If these planners found the city of Blade Runner aesthetically pleasing they are morbid in my opinion, the film is like watching mankind's funeral, an entire world dead at our feet and like maggots on the corpse we too rot in  the city , bitterly persecuting our last hope for survival like the post-human Replicants .The city of the film only exists as a fungus leeching up all that is left of the human world and assimilating it into the post-human sprawl.

       ( Healthy Living In the World Of Tomorrow!)

                   

This leeching of the old-world is also a staple first pioneered by Ridley's film. The idea of the future for decades had long been one of glistening Hyperborian cities in the clouds devoid of decay,poverty and war except conflicts from thinly veiled space communists. Cyberpunk sees the world as a decaying carcass, long ago killed by human ambition and folly take for example this video from The Animatirix http://vimeo.com/26654247. Cyberpunk shows us a telling vision of a future in which the worst in mankind is expounded through technology. Nature is often destroyed, humans either fear or persecute synthetic life forms or alien races and everybody is searching for meaning in a world so convoluted that little out side money, drugs and violence drive them. The genre sees humans reaching their full potential by becoming gods through corporations like Tyrell and Weyland-Yutani that create new post-human life forms like Replicants or Androids like Ash or Bishop from the Alien films. These post-human organisms are often struggling as humans do with finding meaning in their lives and in the case of Roy, can confront their "Father" or creator. Roy for example rises up through the Tyrell ziggurat and essentially kills his human God and claims control over his last moments. Often times beings like Roy or Major Kusanagi in Ghost In The Shell are more "human" than those who are completely biological. In saying they are more "human" I mean that they strive more actively for meaning, they empathize far more strongly with their comrades and have a poetic outlook on their lives be they good or bad. Cyberpunk highlights that humanity's defining characteristic is it's inhumanity, humans are downtrodden, weak and hateful or worse completely apathetic. Assuming Deckard is human he is a perfect example that apathy. He doesn't even want to do his job anymore, he's just doing it because his boss has him in a twist, he really doesn't care about Roy or Pris, he's just waiting around to die in L.A.

BladeRunner is a film about how everyone is screwed, by life, by their creators and by circumstance. As a formative influence in Cyberpunk this motif has carried through much of the genre to this day. Cyberpunk shows us the next step in Darwinism, human beings becoming post-human cybernetic constructs and organisms or creating a race of sentient slaves that one day become our natural predators as they are faster, stronger and equally or more intelligent. The image of Deckard hanging by broken fingers above the world his species built and destroyed is perfect for describing the tone of the genre