the Richard Larson blog

Lynch and genre:

For me, the heart of the greatness of Mulholland Dr. is the famed Club Silencio sequence, which provides the blueprint for enjoying (and understanding) the film as a whole. This is the moment where David Lynch steps into the film and announces, "Here I am," where the magician reveals his secrets. He's reminding us that we're "just" watching a movie, that everything we're seeing is fake, "an illusion," and yet no less affecting for its artificiality. This scene is the film's aesthetic and thematic core because Mulholland Dr. is a tribute to the beautiful lie of movie magic. The preceding two hours were a mélange of self-conscious genre references (noir, Western, mystery, sexploitation, melodrama, action) but Lynch doesn't mock or parody these genre clichés; instead he glories in the endless capacity for creativity and emotion still contained, waiting to be unleashed, in even the most hackneyed Hollywood scenario.

[Ed Howard at The House Next Door]

Ummm... I can't wait?

The future of genre short fiction:

Yep. That sounds about right.

Publishing short fiction online is also, with or without market considerations, one of the smartest things a new writer can do, as long as s/he trusts the quality of the work to find an audience. The fact that this will become the norm for all short fiction for genre readers, name-brand or otherwise, is not entirely unrelated.

[Jonathan Wood]

The Uninvited

Movies like The Uninvited really piss me off. As an American remake of a Korean creepy-sisters horror film (Kim Jee-Woon's A Tale of Two Sisters), the movie is predictably bland and redundant, recycling cliches without even trying to do anything even remotely interesting with them, but what's not so predictable is how obnoxious the whole thing feels to an otherwise enthusiastic fan of horror film. The whole notion of co-opting narratives from successful Japanese genre films and removing all the subtlety, stepping up the cheesiness and adding an explosion or two, hastily repackaging the product for seemingly undiscerning American audiences, is incredibly insulting, especially as a prominently recurring trend. I refuse to believe that anything more than a language barrier would keep the American movie-going public from preferring Ringu to The Ring, The Grudge to, well, The Grudge (the American version of which was particularly obnoxious because of the inclusion of the Sarah Michelle Gellar character, a white woman lost to the "otherness" of Japan almost as though we ourselves would be lost without someone present who looks sort of like us), on and on into a seeming oblivion of contemporary horror remakes. The consistent dumbing-down of these "translated" works has essentially robbed their audience of its agency, leading us to believe that we're developing at least a sort of corollary participation in the foreign genre conversation when in fact we're being read the abridged, just-for-kids version. All that these films are ultimately good for is inspiring certain portions of their audience to seek out the source material and wonder why anyone felt the need to mess with a perfectly good thing instead of pouring energy into widening the audience of the original.

Review of The Gargoyle

My review of Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle is now up at Strange Horizons.