While DEADGIRL wasn't as shocking, sick, or astounding as I was lead to believe, it was still a twisted, somewhat disturbing, EXTREMELY dark film. While vaguely hinting at the zombie genre, it's more a bleak coming of age drama. Getting past the shocking, misogynistic imagery, I saw a comment on the dark side of humanity, and even moreso, the extremely sick, dark, fuckedupness of masculinity at it's basest. Whether it's self inflicted pain, fag bashing, date rape, or having sex with an undead "corpse", the lengths a man/boy will go to in proving their masculinity are always a driving part of the dark heart of this world. We all have come across men that view women as beneath them. This film shows what happens when you strip away personality, choice, and humanity from a woman and she truly becomes nothing more than a piece of meat. Is an undead girl still a person? If she can't die, feel pain, sadness or be dehumanized...is it still wrong? While a lot of people may view this movie as nothing more than exploitation wrapped in a pseudo message, I honestly felt like it managed to sidestep being shocking for the sake of shock and actually managed to say something. This is not something i would recommend to most people, nor that I could probably have watched with most of my female friends, but naive or not, I honestly feel that this film had a valid message and reason for being made, and it, mostly, succeeded.
I remeber the first time I saw a picture, rather, an illustration of a post Civil War lynching. I was horrified. I couldn't understand how "civilized" society could allow such gross violence. My poor mama had to try and explain that "back then" African Americans were veiwed as property - peices of meat, not human beings. Dehumanizing. You ask your mom, "Why didn't anyone stop it?" Painfully and carefully my mom tried to explain that in the past African Americans weren't accepted as "real people", therefore lynching wasn't punished as murder. "But IT IS," I cried. I couldn't wrap my mind around that concept. My teacher-mom went on to try to educate me on the history and perspective of that time, but I just kept shaking my head at her.
ReplyDeletePerspective is EVERYTHING. If homosexuals are "hell-bound evil perverts", they aren't entitled to civil rights. If Jews are "a plague", its okay to exterminate them. If slaves aren't "real people", lynching can't be muder. If a body's just a soulless peice of meat...
I'm always shocked and confused at the many ways one human being can rationalize domination of another.