More thinking for the brain

The Marble Hornets series is in the Found-Footage genre. Its is a relatively recent style of filmmaking, almost exclusively associated with horror, the conceit being all or a large part of the film has been made by the protagonists themselves. It is part of the general democratic urge engendered by capitalist art (albeit harnessed in a non-democratic way) of increasing depth and audience participation.

The thrill of horror and similar genres, such as war or action movies, is it puts you in the midst of the fear and fascination, up against Slender Man or the Cloverfield monster or whatever, but allows you to come through unscathed. When Found Footage works it eliminates the lingering sense that all reasonably sophisticated cinema-goers have, that there is someone behind the camera, a 3rd person, non-participant.

It is still of course a piece of artifice (and therefore, under capitalist conditions, even with the best will, it is a fraudulent democracy). The most obvious difficulty is character motivation. At what stage to the protagonists simply drop the camera and run like all normal human beings would?

The Found Footage genre is usually taken as beginning with Cannibal Holocaust in 1980. Audiences found it so real it was alleged to be a snuff film. But it really took off as a genre in the 1990s. It was in step with movements such as lo-fi (in music) and reality TV. The pursuit of authenticity, keeping it real (or appearing to) was the highest you could aspire. It’s an enduring obsession in a world where public life was perhaps until recently robbed of all co-ordinates; the post-modern age where what mattered was what worked etc. It was left to the letters page of the NME to wonder if a millionaire rapper was representing the streets or if an indie hit celebrated or denigrated working class life. Were they for real?

When we interact with mass media we usually look for the opposite of shock and thrill. When confronted with something new, e.g. the internet, as a society and as individuals, we either reject it wholesale or we try to incorporate and normalise it. If there is a future in going out to the cinema, as opposed to staying in with a movie, it’s in genre that excite, like Found Footage. 

Fear and fascism

I am currently getting into the Slender Manmythos, an online phenomenon that has grown into a full-blown urban myth. It began in 2009 as an online photoshop competition to transform ordinary photos into fake paranormal photos. A character called Victor Surge made two photos of an unidentified man standing near children. He was very tall and had strange, tentacle like arms. Victor Surge added a detailed, thumbnail back story about a library fire. The legend grew from this point:

Slender Man (a.k.a Slenderman) is a mythical creature often depicted as a tall, thin figure wearing a black suit and a blank face. According to the legend, he can stretch or shorten his arms at will and has tentacle-like appendages protruding from his back. Depending on the interpretations of the myth, the creature can cause memory loss, insomnia, paranoia, coughing fits (nicknamed “slendersickness”), photograph/video distortions and can teleport at will.

The Slender Man became The Operator in an online series called MarbleHornets. Slender Man/Operator myth, though mostly bluff, is a superb creation; a tapestry of uncanny fears (at the beginning of Marble Hornets, The Operator is literally outside the house), showing that true horror is also compelling. You fear to look but you cannot turn away. I mention all this partly because I want to but also because I have been thinking more about the psychological basis of fascism.

Fascism makes no logical sense. It is a scavenger philosophy. Its class base, the middle-class, has no consistent point of view within capitalism. But fascism makes illogical sense.

It coheres into a movement on the basis of mythos. A note: the German word for uncanny is unheimlich, which in turn derives from heimlich. Heimlich has two meanings, one of which means homely, comfortable, the other secret or concealed. Fascist movements at their core are often based around esoteric, concealed knowledge.

But fascist movements are stimulated by a return of the repressed, the unheimlich. In 1930s Germany it was a combination of economic depression and the Russian Revolution: amalgamated to produce the myth of a global Jewish conspiracy, a repulsive, lunatic theory, but it founded the Third Reich.

In Britain last year there was a spasm of fear after the riots. Nobody, at least in the cities where they broke out, was surprised by what happened, but that could not suppress the horror, the sense of emergency, nothing could, not more riot police, not water cannons, not even live rounds (as I heard one woman suggest on the number 38 bus, very loudly, into her phone). Something had to be done! So the urban gentry took to the streets with their brooms.

Fear (and fascination - the enemy is always stronger and more vital) is an adrenaline shot for fascism, which can make it tremendously energetic. The repressed element, the working class in its most fearsome, elemental form, had erupted. The ruling class fosters fascist ideas so if at any stage it doubts itself, it has this paranoid, demented force in reserve.