Weapons as Cinematic Profilicity
The chaos-cancelling effect of horror comedy
An increasingly quantized world is perceived through increasingly quantized perception. Before digestion is complete the next item on the menu arrives. Each moment a planned execution, an activity, a lexical atom. Through the presence of bifurcation, isolation is born into possibility and ultimately into expectation. Once submerged within isolation the myopic boundary is erect, dislocating one from the conceptual understanding and awareness of the greater whole, embedded within the array of microcosma.
We see this represented in our world. New genres are no longer created, they are increasingly conjoined from existing cultural strata. Sometimes disparate subjects combined, sometimes the old combined with the new, a zombification. The processes of unearthing and fusing become central to creation. Our acceptance of the perception of the atomicity of the original forms, their givenness, is mediated by our existential isolation. We become given forms to ourselves, atomic - and yet this does not suffice. Faced with our own complexity and ansenqualia, we subdivide ourselves into profiles.
Our many shells divorced from their core, the sensation that replaces our former wholeness is a manifestation of that same isolation. An advanced loneliness or indescribable longing when by ourselves or even in the presence of others. We are driven to fill this absent self but are transfixed by our predicament - there appears no whole self to return to. We fill our time with activities, pursuits, passions, partners, careers, hobbies, pastimes and with each one further subdivide our existence, tangling ourselves in butchers twine. We dissociate into other lives, temporarily supplanting our experiential chaos with a more predictable and mediated chaotic format. Always finding new bottles to fit our mind in, searching for that feeling of being sufficiently contained, comfortably isolated from the real. Always apart, always a part.
Ever fragmenting, we fall apart as we cohere, a thousand selves for a thousand different figment lives, a million days lived in kaleidoscopic time. Memories fail us, only faint archetypes remain cognitively present in the wake of our dissolution, guiding us to ill-defined and often blindly constructed conclusions.
Our selves fitted so tightly to so many timelines we no longer have a center from which to navigate the ambiguity of the real. Our chaos becomes manifest in word and action, invoking a world as schizophrenic as our mind. Our eyes glaze over, staring not into the real but into the dark and warm abyss that lies unreachable at the source of our incoherent demands and whims, always scratching our way towards. Total unchecked irreverence and nonself-centeredness permeates our interactions with the real world.
The very idea of coherence fails to materialize. We retreat to the fictive worlds that comprehend our sliver selves, a gaze ever outward, seeking oneness in the other and finding only noise.
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Weapons is another example of our addiction to separation and recombination. It is not enough to have a horrifying experience, it must be combined with splashes of comedic flair to remind the audience that this is something different. Perhaps it is more that, in the age of profilicity, it is no longer sufficient to authentically present a story. Applying ironic comedic distance from your own expression serves the dual purpose of safeguarding your ego from the possibility of your work being regarded as cringe and that of isolating the film from itself, allowing the modern viewer to feel safe in viewing it as a meta-object, much like themselves. So much as it attempts to present itself directly, the film then attempts to view and comment on itself, in doing so gifting a parbaked commentary to the viewer. This is not so much a critique of the film as an acknowledgment that this has become an increasingly necessary component of successful film-making for the masses.
It’s not so much that Cregger is employing these methodologies intentionally to deceive or control the viewer. Rather, the fact that comedians-turned-filmmakers (see Jordan Peele) have become a trend at all is indicative that something about the popularity of their filmmaking method demands an explanation.
The ultimate aim of this analysis is to ask: what comes next? As we continue to subdivide ourselves how do we avoid falling deeper into chaos and detachment from reality? In my personal experience the answer has been simply to spend more time in the real world and less time online, and to spend a larger portion of that time online constructing goods for others to enjoy rather than consuming as much as I was before. I don’t think this is the answer for everyone though. I hope for a future where we build technology to enhance our connection to the real world rather than to take ourselves away from it, otherwise I see no alternative to chaos stemming from the very foundation of the human experience.
Related Reads:
Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio - Identity After Authenticity
Christopher Mastropietro, Filip Miscevic, and John Vervaeke - Zombies in Western Culture