7 ms·
Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s or Your PhD Program?
- dfxm12 3y agoAlso on theme this week: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-sea...
- ad404b8a372f2b9 3y agoIt was going so well before the sexist and racist shoehorning of 9, especially considering the whole plot of Hereditary is that the matriarch's goal was to murder and sacrifice her entire family.
- gainda 3y agothe demon Paimon wanted ( and got ) a male host
- ad404b8a372f2b9 3y agoI was trying not to spoil too much but the demon Paimon is a demon not a mediocre white man, the supposedly contemptible white male dies in pain and horror and his body is then used against his will, hardly a triumph.
- gainda 3y agofor the purposes of satisfying the conditions this article is trying to adhere to it doesn't matter that it's the demon in the body now instead of the man, it matters that the male body was chosen over others. however, if we do consider the demon, the movie has this to say about it: 1. A sentence underlined in pencil reads: "Paimon is Male, thus covetous of a male human body." 2. ... We’ve corrected your first body and give you now this healthy male host. ... maybe the author is trying to say something about the demons masculine preference (it is covetous of, not dependent on - it was in Charlie first) & how that relates to theirs and others experiences in academia when it comes to preferential treatment; and that just male-ness seems to be important absent of any other qualifiers? after all the women in the movie more or less do all the work to appease Paimon - wouldn't the greatest reward as a devotee be to act as his host? maybe i'm crazy but it's been interesting to think about. [ quotes from script: https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/hereditary-2018.pdf https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/hereditary-20... ]
- busterarm 3y agoIt's the same braindead mode of thinking that led Disney to re-interpret Snow White with the men in the movie being creepy and to deemphasize the main plotline where the stepmother is evil and sees her step-daughter as her competition. Men, especially white men, are by-default bad and women have no agency unless they're overcoming men.
- jncfhnb 3y agoTo be clear, you’re talking about Snow White and the huntsman, in which Snow White isn’t even the main character in favor of action huntsman Chris Hemsworth?
- busterarm 3y agoNo, I'm talking about the still unreleased live-action remake and what their lead actress has said about the movie.
- Tao3300 3y agoOnce upon a time, a woman accidentally pricked her finger over some fresh snow. Observing the sight, she thought, "how gruesome! But Snow White seems like a nice name, nevermind this completely irrelevant scene of blood on snow..."
- jncfhnb 3y agoAttacking Greta Gerwigs’ first worked-on film after Barbie for “not doing feminism right” before you have seen it is a hot take!
- busterarm 3y agoIf you think a two-hour Mattel commercial is where the feminist discourse is right now, then feminism is off in the wilderness. Then again, women are still overwhelmingly the largest consumer spending group and the CEO of Mattel is still a man. Referencing the Barbie movie wrt feminism is about as laughable as the people who think Star Trek is some post-racial utopia -- even though the bad guys are still mostly dark-skinned and virtually every alien race is a monoculture.
- gwervc 3y agoExactly. The previous points were interesting and I was about to share the article to an East-Asian friend that started a PhD recently. But being a White guy that point would just make it awkward to share it with her.
- jncfhnb 3y agoWhy?
- dagenleg 3y agoI don't see how yours and your friends ethnicities matter here?
- kenjackson 3y agoI can see it. Especially if he does have some romantic interest in her. There’s the worry if the subtext is that the reason I’m sending this whole article to you is about #9. Just not enough upside for the potential downside.
- saagarjha 3y agoNobody said anything about a romantic interest. Most people’s relationship with people of the opposite gender are not romantic at all. Why would this be relevant to bring up?
- em-bee 3y agoit would be a factor in the level of awkwardness. with casual friends a bad reaction would be much less of an issue.
- kenjackson 3y agoIt's relevant to bring up because he said it would make him feel awkward to send it. You'd be right if he didn't think it would be awkward to send and he had no romantic interest, even less awkward if he knew she had no romantic interest. But at this point the only thing we know is that he did feel awkward about sending it. Hence the relevance.
- 08f152b0ba 3y agoYes. I was having fun, and I thought the author was obviously having fun, until that bit of joyless boilerplate.
- mellosouls 3y agoMeh it's ok, the default white-man-bad trope is indeed tiresome and unimaginative but a slight fail in the context of a clever article is really not a big deal. It's also ok to poke fun at us now and then as well.
- Tao3300 3y agoAt this point I just chuckle through my moustache and recall the times it happened to me as I swirl some brandy and admire my hunting trophies from my studded leather armchair. Harrumph!
- kaycebasques 3y agoI chuckled out loud at that interpretation of Hereditary. It's a good point that the matriarch was horrifyingly evil but come on... that guy was by far the most boring character in that story. Also it's hilarious to think of anybody as coming out "on top" in that situation. And let's be open to the possibility that it feeling like a trope might be an indicator of the situation being truly widespread. When you hear lots of people saying the same thing there's basically two responses: "oh, they're all infected by the same meme" or "hmm... maybe they all really have gone through similar situations..." Most disturbing movie I've ever seen, by the way. Gave me nightmares for a solid week or two. For about 2 years after I would randomly flash onto a couple vivid scenes and it noticeably affect the rest of my day.
- kenjackson 3y agoI have the same feeling with other horror movies. Which is why I stopped watching them around age 10. Is this the reaction you are going for? Or do you find them otherwise so enjoyable that this is the price you’re willing to pay?
- hotnfresh 3y agoHorror’s a wide genre. There are tons of sub-genres that can be anything from cheer-at-the-impressively-gruesome-practical-FX over-the-top-kills slasher, to Star Trek levels of symbolism and metaphor that aren’t meant to be “read” literally, to art film stuff that uses horror tropes and elements but may not even be scary, to cringe-to-your-bones body horror, to deep existential horror that makes all but the most jaded kinda wish they hadn’t watched it. And more. Also, outright comedy horror, which works so well because scares are often adjacent to laughter. Similar tension release, which is what a lot of fans are there for.
- htrp 3y ago> 7. A barely articulated sense of dread follows you wherever you go. Others cannot see it, and it may exist only as a curse, but it often manifests as the presence of an old white person. This one could just be life in general
- hotnfresh 3y agoThat one’s all about living with trauma (sexual trauma, especially, but it generalizes decently) and dealing with that alongside lingering childlike immaturity and innocence (that little-kid-like picnic scene in that one kid’s back yard, oof, that hit hard) and accepting and empathizing with that trauma in one’s friends and partners, so yeah, it’s kinda just about life.
- some_random 3y agoIt's fascinating to me that universities largely escape criticism for how incredibly toxic they are for pretty much everyone but those at the top.
- ineptech 3y agoParticularly when juxtaposed with public schools. It seems like partly a difference in values and partly an accident of history that teachers of children have a powerful union and a lot of societal support, but many teachers of adults need to rely on welfare programs.
- niek_pas 3y agoI feel like people outside universities just don't care (because why should they?), and people within universities, at least the one's I've been in, are very, very, aware of this toxic culture, but pretty much powerless to do anything about it.
- ja9YQRDMquYtguP 3y agoI'd also add that within universities and national labs, survivorship bias obscures these problems to many higher ups. Many simply have no experience with the problems, or even worse, they dismiss the problems as trivial based on their own success stories of climbing the ladder. From their perspective, it is hard to see how these problems could be fatal to your career, since they are the survivors and never have encountered anything fatal to their career by definition.
- waterheater 3y agoAny attempts of reform are immediately met by faculty calls for the protection of academic freedom. They believe their position is so special, they're beyond reform efforts. I remember when faculty tenure review at a major academic institution was being modified to newly include "student success activities" as part of the review process. Essentially, tenured faculty would now be assessed on how much they positively impact the lives of their students. The amount of pushback from faculty on this new criteria was insane and demonstrated the self-centeredness of most tenured faculty. The crying about "academic freedom" would make your head spin.
- waterheater 3y agoIt's difficult to make ranging generalizations about academia for the same reason it's difficult to make them about society at-large: massive variation of experience. Still, we can try. A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical." I agree. Academic research is not expensive. Today, most research performed in academic environments is about building things. Why? Federal grants (NSF, NIH, DoD, etc.) drive the vast majority of academic research efforts these days. The department with the most federal grant dollars pay their students the best, so you can easily have a history doctoral student getting a $20k/year stipend while a biomedical engineering doctoral student getting a $39k/year stipend. Most (not all) university research being performed today should be performed in structured, professional research institutions, not in academic research labs led by a professor. A good deal of faculty dislike working on federal grants, but financial pressures from the university demand their participation in the system. This situation creates a feedback loop of frustration, narcissism, and negativity. Perhaps the federal government is exploiting the academic environment by using it as a source of cheap labor. Problem is, the output is often shoddy and takes way longer than it should. Similar to the hospital systems, there's little incentive to fix it from the inside because many people financially benefit from the broken paradigm. If you're unfamiliar with the Dark Triad [1], it's a psychological theory of personality included three traits: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. I've been left with the impression that the modern academic environment naturally selects for Dark Triad personality traits. A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, and (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
- ja9YQRDMquYtguP 3y agoI was about to post something similar. A lot of the issues emerge from bad incentives. As the saying goes, "form follows finances", and once you understand the finances here, you can understand how it can go wrong. In short, the funding agencies incentivize PIs to just get as much funding as possible and to assign the research to lowly paid students and postdocs. Students and postdocs largely have no funding of their own and are in a vulnerable position here. The PIs have little time to conduct research of their own since they have to spend a lot of their time writing grant applications, etc. PIs who can get the most funding are rewarded the most in this kind of system, since ultimately they are not conducting the research themselves and what matters in the short term is getting a lot of peer-reviewed papers published to appear productive (quantity over quality). It also leaves them with a lot of power over their subordinates, who depend on the PIs for almost everything and cannot readily disagree without jeopardizing their careers. That said, in my experience, most PIs behave honorably and are decent people, but given the incentives I just discussed, the current system readily attracts PIs who are only good at getting a lot of funding (and not that good at research, experimental design, interpersonal relations, personnel management, developing a unique and narrowly-focused research program, etc.). I intend this criticism to be directed towards the system as a whole and not at any one individual. I think that if the system were different, even the problematic PIs would behave better.
- m3047 3y agoIt's the footnotes which complete it...
- tnecniv 3y ago8 / 10 applied to my PhD life. As a postdoc, it now feels like somewhere around the 7th sequel to Friday the 13th. Boring and tired, but the writers haven’t gotten bold enough to get really wacky and send me to space yet.
- shard 3y agoMany also apply to life at certain multinational conglomerates. Although I suppose the pay is better than PhD life.