The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in any genre. It raises important questions about what it means to be human, and it leaves them dangling in the air, just daring the audience to answer them. And it does so in the context of a science-fiction, summer-blockbuster, mock-documentary-cum-action film which should be a natural draw for audiences across the board.
Which may sound like a recommendation. You need to see it if you haven’t already, right? But, uh, well… No.
Why not? Because of the ick factor: surgical close-ups; exploding bodies; individual and societal violence (and threat of same)… Some people might even be put off just by the, well, icky appearance of the aliens, who look like viscous love children of THE alien from the Aliens films and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.
The ick factor all by itself can discourage someone not only from seeing a movie but from starting — or completing — a book. A movie which crossed a threshold for me was one called Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel: I never had a sense of what the courts refer to as “redeeming social value.” It was just one ugly damned film, ugly — icky — not just physically but spiritually, if that makes any sense.
Books really have to work to discourage me, maybe because I tend to read books based on someone else’s recommendation and/or what I’ve been able to glean from jacket copy, reviews, and so on. That said, I’ve never been able to finish a book by Gilbert Sorrentino called Mulligan Stew. Despite all the quite justifiable praise the book has received, with comparisons to At Swim-Two-Birds and such, and despite how much I… admired what Sorrentino was doing, it just plain creeped me out. Can’t explain it. I’ve never gotten rid of my copy, either, because I keep thinking I need to read it. Just… can’t. It’s complete psychological ick for me.
As a writer, what does the ick factor mean to you?
Suppose you came up with a lightning-bolt of a story idea which, to explore fully, required you to write scenes you knew would be beyond the pale for a big class of readers you hoped to appeal to. Would you do it anyway? Would you tone it down, thereby diluting its impact but making it more acceptable to more readers? Is your internal mandate to Write What You Must so strong that you’d never dial back your plot’s or your characters’ intensity, disgustingness, evil, depravity, ick?
Or would you never even undertake a story with important but icky elements in the first place?
Given that icky things (and people) happen to people every day, often in ways and for reasons important to understand (or at least not ignore), should those things be off-limits?
_____________________
P.S. For what it’s worth, I think I get around the ick factor by compartmentalizing: When I come across (most) godawful moments, characters, and entire scenes, I immediately stuff my responses to them into a dark closet.
This may or may not be a predominantly male trait. And it may or may not be a good knack to have: a facility for isolating emotional responses may make for a strong-stomached reader or viewer (like, “yay me!”), but it may also make one less able to summon up empathy, even sympathy, for other people’s pain and difficulty (silence, and a certain shame-faced looking in the other direction).
DarcKnyt says
This is a tough question. As a horror writer wannabe, I’ll have to touch on a certain amount of ick just to elicit horror responses. How much is too much, though?
I’ve had rules for my writing of ick for the most part, but lately, I’ve been wondering if having that imaginary fence around my creativity is holding me back, keeping me from reaching the depths of horror I want to shake out of my audience. But then, I have the luxury of knowing the audience itself is seeking ick, and expects it.
How much? Very hard question to answer.
Very hard.
cynth says
When I was in my Stephen King reading manic days, I read his book Pet Semetary. There was a scene that stopped me cold and I put the book down and left it where it was for a very long time. I remember King commenting himself on that particular scene, it creeped him out! He had to walk away from the story because it made him feel sick. But it was integral to the plot, he felt so he made himself go back and finish it. That is what I guess those of us who can write “icky” stuff must do. Compartmentalize the scene in a part of our minds, so that describing it becomes something we have to do to almost exorcise it from ourselves and place it in the outside, where it feeds the story without gumming up our inner workings.
Think of those Laurel Hamilton books I suggested to you before. I don’t read them anymore, they got too icky for me, but I guess that is where the characters have to go, so you go with them.
marta says
Hmm. Well, there is a scene in AS Byatt’s Babel Tower that I would unread if I could. I read it 12 years ago and still haven’t recovered.
Then there were the excerpts I read from American Psycho. Bad dreams for a week.
But a writer has to go with the story… and know one’s audience. I don’t think the writers mentioned above shouldn’t have written what they wrote, I just wish I had realized I wasn’t the audience.
I’m a wimp.
marta says
P.S. I’m interested in District 9, but I’ll never see it. Too much ick.
The Querulous Squirrel says
I just read an article in the Atlantic on torture under Bush that I’d like to unread. There is one torture scene in particular that I can’t get out of my head, that I think I will never get out of my head, actually, two scenes, of torture that never occurred to me, making me realize how much our bodies and senses can be turned against us, how lucky we are to be simply sitting in a chair comfortably with a laptop. That this wasn’t even fiction made it all the more horrific. I’ve written “fiction” about the Holocaust based on real events that have horrified readers in writing workshops, making several very angry at me for exposing them to such horror, which I thought I’d toned down, certainly compared to what I just read in The Atlantic. It’s all relative. How much the reader can detach, tolerate.
fg says
Urgh, I’m trying to eat my breakfast over here. As the aliens googly wet eyes were revealed while the browser struggled to open the image my stomach turned.
Thanks.
But really, I find some of the most iky things to be human bodies particularly in old age. There is something extraordinary about old bodies, beautiful yet strange, awful yet this stage somehow reveals best to me our beauty. If one could write about that thoroughly yet gently I think it could be a world class read. I know this has been covered by writers from the little I have read but has it been taken to its creative limit?
Froog says
I think the power of horror lies far more in the anticipation and the recollection than in the actual moment of revelation (which may be a key part of the mechanics, a jolt to the nervous system triggering shock, disgust, nausea – but it’s only a very small part of the total effect). Two movie scenes illustrate this particularly well for me (SPOILERS – and ICK – below, for Reservoir Dogs, Pride and Glory).
I recall when I first went to see Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (at a relatively thinly-populated afternoon showing) one guy walked out of the cinema during the infamous torture scene. Actually, it was right at the end of that scene: the swing doors swished shut behind him barely a second or two before Tim Roth brought it to a halt by gunning down the psychotic Michael Madsen. I’m sure that guy who walked out is convinced to this day that the scene is even worse than it was: he probably believes that he actually saw the captive cop being burned alive – an action that was threatened, but not in fact followed through on.
I just watched a surprisingly good cop drama called Pride and Glory, which contains two of the most distressing torture scenes I’ve ever seen on film. In one, you only hear muffled sounds of an interrogation as another character approaches up a stairwell, and then get only a brief, relatively non-graphic view of the aftermath – it’s mostly about suggestion. In the other, Colin Farrell, trying to extract information from a drug dealer, bursts in on his family Christmas dinner and threatens to run a steam iron over his baby. It doesn’t happen; and, being a family man himself, when he gives the unharmed child back to its mother, he’s quite apologetic about it; but seconds before he had been raging, absolutely psyched up to do it – and the audience weren’t sure if he’d do it or not. The horror lies in the realisation that, in certain circumstances, an ordinary man, a fairly decent guy with kids of his own, can cross a line and commit the most unspeakable atrocities.
Two books which really tread the line on the ick factor are Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory and Tom Baker’s (yes, the Dr Who actor) The Boy Who Kicked Pigs. The first, I think, works brilliantly, although it is often very uncomfortable reading. The second, which tries to take the macabre to extremes for humorous purposes, goes way too far and becomes incongruous (but I think it was conceived as a deliberate experiment that way: to see how far one can push the boundaries on this, and then go that bit further).
Jules says
I’ve just gotta see this. Why haven’t I even heard of it? Sounds like something my husband would particularly love.
Jules, who will answer your email soon
John says
Darc: Yeah, for horror writers the ick seems to have elements of both “prerequisite” and “straitjacket.” Your horror audience will expect it, some may even demand it, but at some point you may find yourself thinking, Hmm… Is this story worth being seen by a wider audience? And then you’ve got what I think is known technically as a “dilemma.” :)
cynth: I think I might have read that about King and Pet Sematary. Seems to me he actually locked the book away in a trunk or something after it was completed, like, “This is too sick even for ME.” But the reading public moved on, nudged in no little part by King himself, and eventually — while still extreme — it fell into the merely “intense” category.
I did read one of the Laurel Hamiltons — the first one, I think. That didn’t grab me in the same way that, say, my first Janet Evanovich did. Both of them seem to write primarily with women readers in mind, but JE’s books may be more naturally appreciated by guys.
marta: It’s hard for me to imagine a too-intense scene written by A.S. Byatt. I’ve tried several times to read Possession and don’t think I encountered a single scene or chapter that threatened to keep me up nights. (I know — shouldn’t judge a writer on the basis of a single work. Still…)
Squirrel: Scenes of torture: one form of ick which The Missus absolutely draws a line at. And it’s frankly one form which requires me to muster all my compartmentalizing instincts to get through. Those Saw movies? Neither of us will ever see one. The filmmakers surely won’t miss us, and that certainty alone gives me the creeps to be human.
fg: Yes, why hasn’t someone invented a “Breakfast” add-on for browsers? Heh.
The BBC site has an interesting quiz which lets you rate around 20 photos for how much disgust you feel at the thought of touching certain things, standing near certain people, and so on. Probably not for those with a sensitive ickometer!, but here it is.
John says
Froog: I believe you’re probably right about recollections of ick surpassing the ick itself — especially for audience members who just knew something was about to happen, turned their heads in order not to see it, but got some auditory confirmation that it happened exactly as they’d imagined.
In the 3rd Harry Potter book and movie, there’s a scene in which a gryphon is — or is not — executed by decapitation. In the movie, the hooded executioner is seen from a distance — from the kids’ perpective — partially obscured by some crops in the field where the gryphon is tethered. He raises his giant ax overhead and swings it full force down and forward. You can’t see what’s actually happened, but you can hear the sort of wet thumping sploosh! you’d expect, and a murder of crows flies up yawping into the sky.
People who’d already seen it once and/or read the book knew what had happened: the gryphon had already been released, and the executioner in disgust and disappointment had merely split a pumpkin. But the kids in the film don’t know that at the moment, and their dismay found echoes among all the gasps of those in the theater who didn’t know the story. (And some who did, but were nonetheless shocked by how “graphic” it seemed.) I bet that scene figures in more nightmares than the actual deaths of any of the characters on-screen.
I knew of Pride and Glory but had forgotten about it. Thanks for the reminder and recommendation!
Jules: The makers of District 9 came up with a pretty good trailer, the short version of which saturated TV over the summer (especially on cable channels like
SciFiSyFy) and emphasized the action-y elements. When you first saw it, you’d think something like, Oh, great, another alien-invasions shoot-em-up… But then there was one head shot of one of the aliens, addressing the camera in what looks vaguely like a 60 Minutes interview, saying, “We just want to go home.” That didn’t fit at all into the conventions of the genre!I suspect you may have missed the trailer because you don’t spend nearly as much time watching TV as I do. :)
For the record, here‘s the one-minute TV trailer, from YouTube [embedding disabled, hence just a link].
marta says
I know it is hard to believe about Byatt. I read Possession and so walked into Babel Tower unsuspecting. And while in this scene you don’t get the actual murder of a certain character, you do know how she is going to be killed and I was really sorry I’d read it. Which was the point of the scene… well, you’d have to read the book.
recaptcha: ing werewolf
Jules says
Ooh! Thanks. Will go watch the trailer and share with The Husband.