Snap, Crackle, and Popular Culture

1. Often people feel that eating a piece of uncooked fish makes them “cultured”; In case your having doubts let me assure you, it doesn’t.

2. If anyone ever asks you to watch Pascal Ferran’s Lady Chatterley (2007), it’s a sick joke- curable only by toxic medicine. Lady Chatterley is a movie for people who have already lived life and are just waiting for that final moment. In fact, when watching this film, it is inconceivable not to listen to the harmony of oxygen tanks breathing life into the audience of geriatrics.

3. In the dark, a hand is a hand. Don’t question it- just let it ride.

4. There is no use for carnivals anymore- not with the circus that’s on television. Life becomes a spectacle and soon enough you’re the main attraction.

Ah, terrible. Just plain wicked though I think I might be able to make a complete sentence this time. Yep, got it. Wait, No- I failed.

I guess my failure to create a complete sentence is really insubstantial when compared to the insurmountable terror that post-nineteenth century humans have been taught to adore.  A terror deeply ingrained in them to the point where the only horrifying experience is the immunity itself, which people neglect to realize.   

The explicit horror that one finds when they realize that they are wearing representations of major sacrifices of labor in order to satisfy an unnatural desire is never enough to overcome that illusion of normal. But a problem occurs, which modern economists don’t make apparent. The natural commodity exchange actually has dual layers of labor. The first layer is the labor in exchange for the medium (capital) used by the dead consumer in order to satisfy his phony desires with unnecessary products.

The second layer exists in the manifested labor used to create that product. Simply, labor is transferred into capital, which is exchanged for a product that is nothing more than the crystallized manifestation of the alienated labor of another. If effect, the individual (using that term loosely) is exchanging her labor for a representation of another’s work.

The misaligned idea is that modern humans consume products in what is known as the commodity culture- a purgatory for fashion fascists. Though the products are as good as nothing because the only thing that is consumed is the perpetual mechanics of the item, the utility.

That utility has a learned appreciation, not an innate sense of satisfaction. Rather, a satisfaction created through misrepresentations, gaudy advertisements, and faux-trends materialized into dramatic avatars of leisure which beget dreams of success built on wobbly stilts.

The inverted dialect is the mass-produced commodity created out of a form- a mold. The “prototype” is a perversion of an idea turned tangible. Assembly lines make this possible- the work of one stands tall in the face of what could have been seen as the work of many. Though the only thing that is reproduced is utility with a minimal investment of labor, a labor that works for itself.

Death is hip, real hip. For more than fifty years, Hollywood studios have been selling the macabre back to a society seeded with shame. Eh, but fuck it, right? People are schadenfreuda hedonists and that shame has developed into an appreciation for the things that our inane 9-5’s cant offer; gore, horror, and blood-thirsty midgets with big sharp knives.

The horror industry is nothing more than a cheap novelty, though it wasn’t always like this. Movies made people WATCH horror, ACCEPT it, and LIKE it; Halloween rewarded us for enjoying it, and soon enough after the first generation of horror fanatics stopped feeling bad for watching things such as Blood Sucking Freaks, this trend immediately made it’s way to the other side of the white picket fences and pristine grass.

Horror gave 50’s school children something to dream about during arithmatic. It gave 60’s adults something to brag about, 70’s mothers something to hide, and the 1980’s a vision of entertainment that has forever changed the existential appreciation humans once had for life. Though modern man has a watered down sentiment for death, our feelings, no matter how realistic the horror flick, will never compare to the minutiae that life was prior to the nineteenth century.

Mainstream horror and terror made people accept death and no longer fear it. What has the world got to offer when the ambiance of death no longer provokes despair?

A good horror movie has more to offer than cheap thrills. A good horror movie leaves you scared to look under your bed and at the same time wanting more (the same could be said for dirty laundry, or Subway’s seafood sandwhich). At first, such a feeling could be eluded by shame, but after the mainstream acceptance of such; people were ready to drown themselves in stage blood and stab their neighbors with realistic looking retractable knives.

Horror movies turned urban legends into visual icons, and said things through images that people were taught not to think. The line of respect and decency grew thin for the deceased and an infatuation with the macabre came about. It’s an ongoing competition of who can offend the most (in the most traditional mindset). Horror and terror destroys taboos, and people love it.

It’s easier to watch things that are fake and pretend they are real rather than live through the real and pretend its fake. After an hour and forty minutes, the spectator knows there is an ending, however in life that equivocated ending is forever. The only reason it’s cool to like death is beacause it’s just another thing people believe sets them apart from the rest.