Tuesday, October 26, 2010

NPR: Halloween Horror Movies Fueled By Collective Fear of Conservatives

If you ever needed another reason to defund NPR - as if the firing of Juan Williams, and that elitist bitch walking down 7th avenue with an NPR tote bag wasn't enough - here's what passes for deep thought at the taxpayer-financed network: Horror films as metaphors for fear of a Republican planet.

I sh*t you not:

This fall, there are nearly 10 horror films in wide release. And what do today's scary movies reveal about American fears? The social and political dilemmas we face today parallel the concerns of the Vietnam era. Let Me In is a vampire film that, on the surface, is about the horror of adolescence — but remember that vampire stories are often metaphors for life's transitions and the difficulties we have with them, and the sadistic bullying and torture depicted in Let Me In (to say nothing of the Saw franchise) begin to evoke the human-rights abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The Resident Evil franchise, meanwhile, has used zombies to address collective anxiety over the military-industrial complex, terrorism and the host of viruses and cancers we've yet to contain.

But zombies and vampires are malleable metaphors; they've symbolized anxieties over wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, environmental holocaust, and technological disaster. And critics and filmmakers both have deployed zombie films as Marxist critiques of capitalism, with the consumer excesses of capitalism symbolized by the mindless, insatiable undead.


Vietnam, military-industrial complex, Marxist critiques of capitalism - really, has anyone outside of perhaps the Obama administration, even used these phrases in the last 10-20 years? And vampire movies as subtle metaphor for Abu Ghraib and Gitmo?

Please. As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And to the teenage/tweenage audience that gobbles up this scary stuff at Halloween, outrage at George W. Bush and conservatism is somewhere at the very, very bottom of things that they giving a flying f*ck about...

But apparently, at NPR, that's all they ever think about. Explains the Juan Williams debacle. Explains the above article. And explains why every penny of public funding these ideological, intellectual lightweights receive must be cut off.

And the sooner the better. What's next after trying to ruin Halloween? Stealing Christmas? Oh, wait...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What NPR did to Juan Williams

by ThinkAsTheyDoOrElse

Dark humor: a bird, a wind turbine, Pop Goes the Weasel music, introduced by News Hour sound alike music J


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6opUqt8pV3c