WENDIGO (2001), Directed and Written by Larry Fessenden

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"You know, a lot of people make up stories to make sense of the world. It's a big world, after all, and nobody really understands how it all works.... That's what myths are: they help us talk about stuff.... It's important to know that they're just myths, they're just stories. You'll end up being very disappointed when things don't come true that you're wishing for."

After I saw WENDIGO for the first time last night, I went online to check reviews. These were almost universally negative, which took me by surprise and saddened me.

The trouble, I think, is that WENDIGO comes with expectations of its being a horror film, when it actually works better as a film that, like THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, like THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, looks at the fears of a child too keenly aware of the fears of his parents, of the world around him, yet a child unable to fall back on experience or on mature insight to understand these fears. And so the child mythologizes: a method of coping that leads to complications of its own.

For most of the story, WENDIGO focuses tightly on this chilhood perspective, and in my view, succeeds. The hyper-awareness of a child, which, for an adult, might seem like paranoia, is conveyed well by dark rooms in an unfamiliar house, by shifting trees and gusts of snow, by the sudden dead stillness of a frozen landscape, by the barely-understood comments and conversations of parents who must deal with fears of their own.

WENDIGO captures these ordinary yet heightened aspects of life with good attention to detail, with dramatic set-ups and pay-offs that seem down-to-Earth yet unsettling. At the climax, however, its tight focus on the child and on his family shifts to something else, and this, I think, is a mistake: it jettisons the intensity of that narrow focus, and it also drags in traditional horror images that the film lacks technical resources to pull off. I regret this choice: it might not kill the film, but it does harm it.

In the final moments, WENDIGO returns to its narrow, subjective focus on child and family. The result is an ending that carries emotional weight, that succeeds on its own terms, that made me glad to have spent my time with a film that many despise as a waste of time.

WENDIGO plays by its own rules, pays attention to its own concerns, and if you can accept this, then I can recommend it.

A Few Thoughts on That 2024 Paris Olympics Fiasco

In politics, in social commentary, in relationships, religions, and philosophies, freedom of expression becomes not only essential, but foundational; this applies even more to the arts. (Pardon me for that offensively vague and often useless term, "art.")

Yet if I support self-expression for artists, I also urge their self-awareness. On at least a surface level, artists must understand their own motives, their own messages. They must accept responsibility for what they do and say; they must never hide behind excuses of innocence or ignorance.

In short, artists cannot run away from values and principles.

If their only values are the values of the neoliberal marketplace, then I submit that they have no values. If their only principle is to scream out, "Here I am," then I would urge them to shut the hell up. Yet I suspect that most people would indeed stand for some principle or value beyond a purely egoistic need for self-display; to uncover what that principle or value might be calls for self-awareness and self-reflection, but above all, for self-honesty.

What these values might be will depend upon the artist, and even within a single skull, these values might clash, but conflict has always been the rocket fuel of art.

But what if an artist finds value in shattering idols, in tearing things apart, in smashing the stupid complacency of the audience? There is indeed value in screaming, "Fire!" while the world around you burns, because too many people never feel the heat until the final moment, and fool themselves into thinking that they alone will never be seared by flame or suffocated by smoke. The world is full of sleepers, and so we need alarm clocks.

Setting off alarms can lead to resentment, even hatred, for artists by their own generation, but so what? Artists thrive on controversy. What kills them is the silence of apathy.

Sometimes, though, artists cry, "Fire!" not to warn people, not to wake people up, but merely to offend. Again, offense is better than apathy, but is it sufficient to justify deliberately offensive art?

In this case, too, I see no excuse for self-ignorance. Artists who strive only to offend must accept the same responsibilities of artists who strive to set off alarm bells.

One responsibility is the consideration of context. An openly sexual display might not raise eyebrows in a nightclub or in a film for adults, but when that display is presented to a global audience, and what is more, to a global audience of children and their protective parents, no artist can claim the excuse of, "I didn't expect people to react this way!"

A second responsibility is the consideration of broad impact. Religions, like political ideologies, are necessary targets for satire, but when offered to a global audience, mockery can create a tsunami backlash.

This becomes a third responsibility. Artists must expect and accept this backlash as part of the deal: "You sneer, and people will sneer back. Loudly." Artists should have no more freedom to censor critics and an angry audience than the critics and the audience have to censor the arts.

Artists cannot afford to be hypocrites, or self-righteously complacent pawns of the corporate media, or snobs trapped within a bubble of perpetually-reflected worship by the professional managerial classes. With freedom of expression comes freedom of response, and the two must never be cut away from each other. When an audience is no longer allowed to reply, to shout, to argue back, then the arts will rot.

What We Have Become, I Despise

The Israeli genocide is vile enough, but the hypocrisy and cowardice of our Western governments, their mindless justifications for genocide, their penalization and brutalization of people who speak out against genocide, infuriate me.

On certain days I do my best to remain observant and objective, as if I were nothing more than some detached witness to historical forces. Yet deep down, I seethe and mourn. That supposed Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," has never carried such a sting for me.

I've never felt at home with our smiley-faced corporate culture that treats us like idiots, with its assumptions and rationalizations that prioritize the death of mind and heart over life, but the past ten years have been worse than ever.

What we have become, I despise. What we do, I hate.

In A Time Of Genocide, The Masks Fall Off

The current genocide has exposed many priorities of our Western governments, but has also revealed a truth about our intellectual and social conflicts: people seem less interested in principles than in group loyalties -- in short, instead of arguments, we have knee-jerk tribalism.

A key revelation, here, has been the brutal attack on students who protest not only against genocide, but for freedom of speech and conscience. The right-wing groups who railed against woke censorship and cancellation in universities are now celebrating corporate censorship and governmental cancellation. Instead of applauding students for going beyond mere virtue-signalling against abstract enemies like "racism" or "the patriarchy," these pundits and politicians attack the students who have chosen, instead, to confront real enemies with real power to hit back: corporations, corporate-funded institutions, and authoritarian governments.

We need to look at what is actually happening. I reject hollow and safe displays of woke purity, but what students are engaged in, right now, is rebellion with genuine stakes. When cops invade universities to crack skulls, protest is no longer theatre, it is politics; when protest involves fundamental issues like genocide and the freedom to shout, "No," it goes far beyond mere divisions between "us" or "them."

This fight matters not only to students, but to anyone who rejects mass murder and the mass cancellation of dissent. Right or left, rich or poor, we all stand to lose this fight if we draw back into worn-out but comfortable cocoons of political tribalism.

To hell with "us" or "them." We need the solidarity of principles.

I Will Not

I WILL NOT,
by Mark Fuller Dillon.
Thursday, May 02, 2024.

You want me to march for fascism, but I will not.

You want me to kill for zionism, but I will not.

You want me to worship neoliberalism and the dictates of the market, but I will not.

You want me to spy on my neighbours, to denounce them for crimes of thought and speech, but I will not.

You want me to abandon solidarity with people I have never met, never known, but I will not.

You want me to lock human beings into smaller and smaller cages of identity, but I will not.

You want me to deny the biological reality of two sexes, but I will not.

You want me to erase the biological existence of women, but I will not.

You want me to deprive women of women-only spaces, but I will not.

You want me to denounce men for normal, non-violent, non-abusive sexual desires, but I will not.

You want me to believe that men must behave like this, that women must behave like that, and that human sex roles are not social constructs, but I will not.

You want me to reify sexual stereotypes through chemical castration, through female genital mutilation, but I will not.

You want me to declare that the colour of my skin reveals more about me than my character, my ethics, my hopes and aspirations, but I will not.

You want me to set the mechanical mindlessness of algorithms above human skill, above human imagination, but I will not.

You want me to hate your economic rivals in other countries as if they were existential threats, but I will not.

You want me to pretend that I am not an animal, immersed in, and dependent on, the natural world, and you want me to poison, to deplete that world for your profits and your power, but I will not.

You want me to forget the past, but I will not.

You want me to cancel the future, but I will not.

You want me to abandon nuanced thinking, calm debate, the open discussion of ideas, but I will not.

You want me to denounce, to shun, to cancel people of good will who disagree with me, who live by different values than mine, who see the world in different ways than I do, but I will not.

You want me to curse my cultural heritage, which I perceive clearly in its limitations and strengths, its cruelties and goodness, its negative and positive implications, as a past of unmitigated evil, but I will not.

You want me to remain silent while you lie, cheat, rob, and kill, but I will not.

You want me to obey you.

I will not.