Author: Frances K R

Like one who on a lonesome road/Doth walk in fear and dread

Moving into what I guess is close to the last stretch of Fallout: New Vegas – I’ve finished the first three DLCs, and while there’re probably still a ton of quests I am really wanting to see the Battle of Hoover Dam.  (With the Boomers.  I’m actually trying to figure out if I can set the game up to play the final scenes on our TV.)  And after 250 hours, well, I do want to see the end of the game.

So anyway.  I started on the Lonesome Road[1] this weekend.  It’s actually probably my least favourite of all the DLC–I think it might be my least favourite part of New Vegas as a whole–and I finally realized why.

The Mojave of F:NV is a gently rounded post-apocalyptic chunk of the south-western-ish US; generally this means a lot of visual brown, a bottlecap-based economy, a Mad Max fashion sense, and settlements that are mostly still-standing remnants of what went before.  Two hundred years smooths a lot of the jagged edges off, after all.

The Divide may have been like this as well.  But then the bombs went off, and they did that in your lifetime.  Probably no more than twenty years ago at most, and myself I’m getting more of a “maybe seven or eight” feeling.  It’s a hectic, jagged, clashing sort of place–grim and dark and smokey, with you picking your way through jagged gouges in the earth and hurrying through the patches of radiation, hoping not to get shot at, blown up, or chewed on.  It has one of what I think is only two timed events in the game, and the one it has is by far the more dangerous.  Everything’s tilted and falling sideways and off-balance and occasionally chunks of the surroundings fall on you.  It’s a distinctly uncomfortable place to be.  Everything is jarred and shattered.

It’s not a fun environment to play in–really, without ED-E’s story I’m not sure I wouldn’t have headed back out of the DLC–and after a while, I concluded that this is okay.  The fragmented feel makes sense, and I’ll treat it as deliberate, because this is what it’d be like right after.  The Fallout games haven’t ever dealt with this; the earliest one took place over a century after the bombs fell.

It’s interesting.  It really echoes the begin again/but learn how to let go theme that all the DLC have been running with.  And it adds something to the rest of the setting; that tired or miserable as the Mojave can be, holy hell people have come a long way to building things back up.

—
[1] Naming your DLC with excerpts from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is cheating, in terms of marketing, and I am a sucker for it.

Settling on Sundays.

I want to say it’s been a long day, but it really hasn’t.  It’s been mostly a very pleasant day.  I’m just tired drained.  I’m anxious about work, and hoping it’ll be done soon.  And I ache, and I don’t know why I’m still hungy.  I made a decent dinner, even if it ended up taking nearly two hours from start to finish, and I was getting upset at trying to juggle everything.

I just want a day to stay home and sleep.  Instead I’m going to turn in early enough for a full night’s rest, show up cheerful and enthusiastic about the job tomorrow, and quietly count down the days until I’m done.  I believe this is called being a grown-up, or something, and is closely tied to finding work and making people not curse your presence.

(Meantime, the friend I’m writing a story with has been busy lately (which is fine!) and so have I, but from the time we’ve had to talk I can’t help but feel that while being busy she’s getting more actually done.)

Despite coordinating schedules, I am actually too worn to pay attention to American Horror Story or Walking Dead, so we’re catching up on Supernatural.  It’s nice to sit back and watch characters deal with a monster of the week, and I like the openly fake psychic who is pleasant and reasonable about her job.  It’s still clever rather than creepy, though, and I can’t remember when it last managed to be creepy–

(That said, the meta-commentary about brothers working together made me laugh.)

I suppose it’s hard to sustain tension, which is an essential element of creepy, when you know characters are either going to survive (Winchesters, Bobby) or else can’t be expected to be there for longer than an episode (everyone else).  Should keep that in mind when writing, I suppose.

I’m rambling, I know.  I think I’m about due to turn in.

Contemplating the gentle pillow of the keyboard.

I am tired.  Or possibly sleepy.  Headed out for dinner and there was a milkshake… I think it was a milkshake the size of the meal itself.  Which is sort of scary.  On top of a mostly empty stomach, I am feeling like I’m heading for a food coma.

(Sleeeeepy…)

Uhm, right.  Focussing.  Focussing through the yawning.  There was some geeking about Fallout: New Vegas at dinner, and acknowledgment of the generally wonderful storyline of Vault 11–wonderful in the sense of institutionalized ritual sacrifice, unnecessary murder, horror, and social experimentation.  Currently the favourite in terms of non-necessary main-game stories, but since it’s Fallout: New Vegas, there might be something else we’ve forgotten about.  I mean, I’m up past 240 hours and I don’t think I’ve visited half the places on the map yet…

It occurred to me, just now, that I first played a Fallout game in the late 90s.  Not quite half my life ago, but edging up there.  And I’m still interested in it; in the world, in the in-game history, in the characters (oh, lord, the characters) and factions, in the little background ties and references between games.  In how someone–several someones–managed to make a world so incredibly rich and then stand back and not explain it all.  I mean, I’m sure of several things, but I don’t think I’ll ever get proof, and…

Dammit, if I came up with something that neat, I’d want to tell people about it.  How do the designers manage to not?

Meeting a classic.

I’m a bit swamped/sick/exhausted right now, so I’m dusting off some old notes–my initial impressions from watching Night of the Living Dead, the original.

I actually only saw it six years ago–I’d read Russo’s novelization, which pretty near exactly follows the screenplay–and it was interesting to note what does and doesn’t show up. The word “zombie” doesn’t appear; they’re “ghouls”, “flesh-eating ghouls”, or “flesh-eaters”. They’re afraid of fire, and dislike particularly bright light, which never really seems to show up later (although the modern The Walking Dead does mention that walkers seem to be more active after dark). They seem to kill you first and eat you once you’re dead, rather than start chowing down while you’re still warm and screaming as in the later movies. They can use tools, crudely–a couple of them pick up rocks to break windows, and a couple pick up a club or a knife (actually, a trowel, but the intent’s there). This, to my mind, is something Dawn and Day did better than Night; the zombies in them don’t use tools, which makes the slow almost-recognition they display towards certain objects much creepier.

Apparently only the unburied dead rise–the radio broadcast uses that particular adjective at one point–which while it’s fairly conventional is something that’s rarely specified in zombie movies (to the point that I for one hadn’t consciously noticed it before). And the first one you see is pretty quick, although his fine motor control is for shit–he’s walking slowly at first, but he manages a shamble that could match a decent jogging speed for a while chasing Barbara. They’re all stumbling around very slowly by the end of the movie, though. Maybe he was particularly fresh at the beginning, or maybe they just can’t see very well in the dark and move slowly as a result…?

A couple of the events in the movie happen very abruptly; there’s a little dramatic build-up, and then a sudden resolution in which the movie generally does not behave the way polite convention indicates the movie is supposed to behave. It’s not quite disconcerting enough for me to call it shocking, but I think it might have been if I didn’t already know how the movie was going to run, and I sure it would have been if I deeply expected movies to follow polite convention. (If I ever get a week to spare, I’ll sit down with a bunch of mid- and late-sixties horror movies to get into the mindset, and then watch Night of the Living Dead and Westworld and anything else I can find that includes scenes which specifically break with the conventions of the time.)

The actual scenes of the zombies eating were much better than I expected. I thought I’d be interested–this is, after all, pretty much the zombie movie–and maybe a little squicked. It was interesting and squicky.

It was also creepy. I did not expect that. I am glad it happened, though. It was fairly standard presentation, I guess–level, detached shots of humans eating human bits, unflinching presentation of girlfriend gnawing flesh off former boyfriend’s hand, clinical and helpless protrayal of horrific events, uncaring universe, etcetera. (Best example I’ve seen of this is still the end sequence of Hannibal.) The scenes were pretty dark, which is a little unusual and probably helped the creepiness factor, putting together a relatively rare combination of indifferent horror with the viewer’s imagination needing to be involved to identify all the elements of the scene.

(Sidenote: dammit, creepy can’t be that hard to produce if they were doing it in ’68. Why am I not getting more creep in my horror movies? Why am I so often stuck with something that gets a twitch or a yelp or a flinch instead of that feeling that my skin is trying to crawl off my spine so it can leave the room where the scary pictures are showing? Come on.)

On a related note: I need to watch a little more of John Carpenter’s stuff. He’s prone, I think, to very static shots with very little movement in the frame, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s just me anticipating that something will happen that makes this disconcerting, or if he’s actually doing something with the composition of the scenes or the pacing of the movie.

Back to the secrets of houses, and the horror therein.

Finally catching up with American Horror Story.  Not tonight’s episode, but last week’s.  Nonetheless, spoiler break, since I have no idea if anyone else is lagging as much as I am.  (Apparently it’s being broadcast later in some places?)

I am rather pleased with how the reveal about Tate was handled over the last few episodes. Continue reading “Back to the secrets of houses, and the horror therein.”

Walking amongst the Dead

Yeah, there’s been more Walking Dead than American Horror Story lately.  The light of my life has laid hands upon Skyrim, and I’m holding off on watching new episodes without him.

Daryl’s my favourite character[1], although I think that’d change if we saw more of Glenn.  Stupid situation or not, something to be said for a guy who manages to lasso a zombie while being in serious danger of being dropped on it.  And is not charging merrily forward on the “OMG sex” bandwagon (pet peeve; have had too many people drop the “if a guy does not immediately jump at offers of (straight) sex, there is something wrong with him” line lately).  And sticks his neck out for utter strangers on a pay-it-forward theory.  And (practical or not) cares about how the formerly living dead are treated…

…

…okay, now?  Now I’m annoyed we haven’t seen more of Glenn.  Daryl’s cool, and Rick’s decent, but Glenn’s kind, and while I can understand that not being hugely valuable I think it’s important.  (How much has he been around this season?)  It’s not like it’s a case of people just needing to do anything they have to to get over the next hill; there doesn’t seem to be any greater social structure or network left.  If people who are scrabbling for their lives aren’t kind, it’s not as if people who aren’t scared and in danger will pick up the slack.  If people who are scrabbling for their lives aren’t kind, then no-one is kind, and that is a sad sad world.

I confess, in a fit of being horribly unjaded and sympathetic towards people who have had their lives fall apart, I like most of the characters.  Actually all of the group from last season except Carl and T-Dog and Sophie, who really seem the least fleshed-out; they’re watercolour sketches.  (Also I’m disappointed we haven’t seen more of the Greenes yet.)  I’d probably be a lot less sympathetic if I had to deal with the characters (see: Shane), but I like watching them.  It’s easier to put up with and watch their human failings from the safety of my living room.

Andrea makes me the most uneasy–I can see how she’s gone from having something to prove to having explicitly failed to prove it and, having been guilted out of a clean and relatively painless suicide, has sort of given up on these silly things like “group bonding” and “relying on others”.  She’ll still learn from them, which is practical, and I think she might still feel mild affection towards some of them, but in a really fundamental sense she seems to have checked out, and it makes me sad.[2]  And I get being upset–furious–at being guilted out of a clean and painless and easily-managed death.

At the same time… well.  A solid chunk of her is looking to kill herself.  I’m trying to figure out where to stand between the “ohgod I’ve been there, no-one can blame you for wanting this but that doesn’t mean a sane you would want it, please please don’t” and the “you know, even us stressed and crazy people can actually manage to make real and valid decisions about what we want to do with our lives”, and…

Been on both sides of that.  Like I said… uneasy.

—
[1] “Copperhead Road” ninja.
[2] Actually, looking back on last season, it also annoys me that the characters who chose to kill themselves were two women and one of those edumacated guys.

That? That ain’t no miracle, that’s just the way things are.

I get that zombie stories are usually natural-disaster-survival stories. How far would you go, what would you get stripped down to to avoid getting stripped down to the bone, all this. But it amazes me how throughly that’s integrated into the in-character perspective of the stories, how they’re seen as nothing more than an emotionally charged mechanical threat.

I mean, this is a genre that involves dead people getting up and walking and then (usually) falling over when you damage a particular chunk of their body which by virtue of being dead they are not using for its intended purpose. That doesn’t happen. There is no currently plausible scientific mechanism by which it can happen. Viruses (virii?) do not do that, bacteria do not do that, radiation does not do that… And yet so few people in these stories ever suggest a fantastic explanation, a supernatural or super-scientific cause. The closest you get is the line “When there’s no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth,” and that is treated more as an expression of the unknowable monster we are helpless against. Not as a cause to hit the Orne Library and look up “Property Expansion, Infernal”.

I am not saying this is a bad thing, mind. Around the time you start digging into the exact structure of an archetypal monster, you start off the line of approach that leads to “Ah, well this is just a condition,” and take that too far you get “A misunderstood condition, which in actual fact is manageable,” and then you are telling an entirely different kind of story and a lot of the power to horrify seeps out of the monster.[1] But it’s kind of surprising that the characters never try to attribute causes. “Dead people walking around” is not the kind of thing you would expect people to shrug off with “just a disease”[2]; that’s an explanation that’s so facile and blatantly unlikely…

I mean, you wouldn’t expect people to handwave it with “Just a disease” if everyone who died got up and grew wings and flew away. I know people are probably not up for deep theorizing, what with trying to avoid being eaten, but there are times when the characters have a chance to talk and humans try to explain things. Put labels on them.

I mean, I understand that generally, attempts to explain the zombie apocalypse don’t matter.  That’s a basic conceit.  And yet, in a story about surviving a natural disaster, you could expect to touch on people’s attempts to explain it and thereby cope with it in more contexts than just watching them scrabble for answers while falling apart.

—
[1] I mean, consider the vampire. Yes, the basic idea of the monster is horrific, but at this point I think some variation of the phrase “he’s not sparkly, he’s a real vampire” would creep into a lot of explanations of that. And when the sparkle gets so deeply associated with the perception of the monster, when it becomes not only familiar but banal, the story-telling power of the tool is weakened.
Of course, you can also say that the association of “destroy the head, and it’s okay” with the zombies is an idea with a similarly neutralizing effect on the horror of the monster. Associates them with a purely mechanical solution, takes the focus away from what they are… And I suspect this shorthand, this taking the focus away from the zombie, is what allows zombie stories to be about people.
Okay. Footnote getting way too long, back to text.
[2] Or radiation from a downed satellite, or whatever.

Missing Cassandra.

Happily rewatching the first season of The Walking Dead, which led to my discussing it when I was out with a friend yesterday afternoon.  And so the topic of zombies in general entered the discussion, and we circled around and back to it a couple of times, as you do.

Something consciously occurred to me which has never occurred to me before.  Back up a bit; I’m going to make a generalization about horror movies, and that generalization is someone knows what is going on.  Someone knows the what, and if people in general are beginning to be aware of the what, someone knows the why.  There’s a spooky caretaker or a horror movie geek who knows the slasher rules[1] or a PTA conspiracy or a brilliant and insane cannibal[2] who knows the secret.

Because there is a secret.

You don’t get this in zombie movies.  There is hardly ever any struggle to figure out what’s happening or desperate effort to explain to people, and when it does show up, it’s a brief thing–a panicked phone call to a disbelieving 911 line or something, lasts maybe forty seconds and then everyone gets back to falling apart or surviving.  Because in zombie movies, the how and the why don’t matter, so the secret has no power.  It has no weight.

This is rare in horror movies.  Combined with the lack of any kind of mystery, you get an utterly mechanical threat–something that is really rare in horror movies.  The only thing you need to know about zombies is to shoot them in the head, and that’s not even the kind of thing that you wouldn’t try if you needed to stop a crazed human attacker.

The light of my life makes a fairly convincing argument that the zombie movie is basically a natural-disaster movie.  I think he’s right, but until the discussion yesterday I hadn’t begun to actually see what it doesn’t have that most horror movies do.  Between the utterly prosaic threat and the ubiquitous spread of same, the element of the unknown is practically non-existent.  It’s seeing the situation for what it is that’s truly horrifying–

Huh.

How very Lovecraftian.
—
[1] I love ya, Randy.
[2] Come on, Hannibal Lecter so fits.  I didn’t see it for ages, because the setting is so atypical, but he is absolutely the Spooky Stranger Making Pronouncements who Understands the Nature of the Threat and who can tell the protagonists what they need to know to defeat the monster.

Lest we forget

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

– Wilfred Owen