Deconstructing The Lulz

heksenhaus replied to your post: Also, on a further note about Anti-Christ, the one…

like, i mean, at it’s very heart the film basically says that men are predators who seek to abuse and then reinforce their abuse by blaming the victims of it. so i’m really sort of troubled by your reaction to the film.

Also:

you sort of completely misunderstood the movie if what you came away with was ‘women are evil’

[Spoilers and stuff ahead, FYI]

I mean, I’ll be the first to say that I probably did misunderstand the movie in a lot of ways. I’ve never been one that’s watched movies really critically, and that’s part of the reason I took this one up (that is, to try and be more critical in watching films). So, it’s not really an aesthetic exercise I’m used to, so I probably missed a lot.

That said, I don’t really see where you got the whole ‘men are predators’ vibe out of it? I mean, it seemed to me kind of like Gainsbourg’s character had that desire to make her thesis about how the portrayal of women as necessarily ‘evil’ was off-base and misogynist (which, i mean, it is obviously), but then when she confronted ‘Nature’ as some pure force, she was made to disagree with that opinion. It’s like that confrontation caused her to betray the trope of women being the best caretakers for children (in that, the first time she was out in Eden, she ended up hurting her child, even if it was done mindlessly). And it was right after that conversation that Gainsbourg’s character began to become excessively violent and sexual. It kind of reminded me of that old trope in Ancient Greek plays where women embodied excessive sexuality and madness, and how that characterization of women tended to get associated with something ‘bad’ or ‘evil’.

But I just meant that that was one line of interpretation introduced late into the film that I thought was pretty bad. Now that you’ve said this though, I can see how you could view the movie in the opposite way (during the first panic attack where they had sex, Defoe’s character said that the sex was probably the worst thing he could do to her, as if it was her fault he had to go to those ends; during the above mentioned talk about ‘Gynocide’, it was Defoe’s character that yelled at Gainsbourge for thinking about things wrong; etc.). And I think which way you interpret the film really changes the character of the final scene with the women crawling through the forests toward Defoe. 

I don’t know. Now that I’m working through this in words, I’ve kind of written myself up against a wall. I guess I’ll have to try and think about the movie some more (though, I’d definitely welcome your input, since you seem a lot better at this sort of thing, to be honest).

heksenhaus replied to your post: heksenhaus replied to your post: Three random…

i get quite a bit more from the brassier than you do, but i can see how his tendency toward a sort of… bombastic accelerationism can wear thin.

Yeah, I guess it’s not so much that I don’t like Brassier, but that I don’t understand why he’s getting as much attention as he is (especially since the tendency seems to be heading towards a lot of people saying “I don’t like SR/OOO,exceptfor Brassier”).

I just didn’t see what was all that new in it honestly. After his meditation on Nietzsche, he seemed to pretty much say “and I agree, as long as I thrown in this more modern stuff about heat death in as well”. Admittedly, it might have helped if I were better versed in the other thinkers of the book (Badiou, Laurelle, even the Churchlands), so I may have to revisit it once I understand them a lot more.

heksenhaus replied to your post: Three random philosophy things: Ray Brassier’s…

yeah, thacker’s wonderful.

I think he’s pretty good read in opposition to Brassier. Not in the substance of their ideas, but simply in that they’re both trying to engage with ‘dark’ thoughts in philosophy.

Personally I just feel that Brassier gets caught up in the bombasity of his thought (“Look at my vocabulary. Look at how brilliant I am. Watch me reinvigorate the idea of nihilism [sort of]”) whereas Thacker’s just doing a lot of good work in just engaging with the history of philosophy and such. I also just think he’s a really erudite thinker, and is fantastic at getting really complex ideas across (I also just generally enjoy books that have a lot of good diagrams, as Thacker’s does).

heksenhaus replied to your post: heksenhaus replied to your video: Huoratron is…

naw, think more charles ives and frank zappa. it’s a concept that’s existed in music for… a lot time at this point, and some asshole last year thought he was clever enough to come up with it. see also all the times people say ‘futurism.’

Ah, makes sense. It was a pitchfork essay, so…

I really hate when music journalists do that though. They should know enough about the history of music (and the history of the discussion on music) to not make mistakes like that. At least then we wouldn’t have people like me totally misusing the term :p

heksenhaus replied to your video: Huoratron is seriously one of the best artists…

ehhhhhhhhh that’s not what maximalism is.

Yeah, I couldn’t really find another term for it though that put up some kind of distance between the sort of ‘loud for loud’s sake’ type of brostep that Skrillex and Rusko are making and whatever it is that Huoratron is doing. And I want to compare the two, because I know they’re closely associated (Huoratron did a remix of one of Skrillex’s songs on one of his albums (ep’s?), and it was basically the only thing worth listening to on it). So, there’s that.

As I understand it, Maximalism is associated with, like, Rustie and stuff? I don’t know. I pretty much read a single article about it, and it was the term that popped into my head when writing that.

Whoops.

heksenhaus replied to your post: hiii

FUCK YOU I WRITE POETRY, TOO, BUT UNLIKE DAVID I DON’T ID AS A POET BUT AN ARTIST BECAUSE I’M THE WORST AND IT’S THE WORST.

Haha, sorry, I really had no idea. I started following you because of theory stuff in your conversations with hollov. I didn’t even know you created electronic music and stuff for a while after following you.

You should post some of it though sometime. I bet it’s fantastic.