cinema history class: the american nightmare

Session: Documentary Month, Week 2
Movie: The American Nightmare (2000)
Directed by Adam Simon
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

In some ways, The American Nightmare picked up where The Horror Of It All left off. It also was an interesting contrast in that it didn;t try to be some grand survey over a large genre. So the movies that were discussed -- notably Night of the Living Dead and Last House on the Left got a lot more attention.

I liked that, but...There was too much politicizing. For example, John Landismade a big deal about racism as he saw it in Night of the Living Dead. He drew parallels between the scenes of posses trying to hunt down the zombies and the then-recent footage of Southern sheriffs with bloodhounds enforcing segregation. You know, you can find parallels between any two things if you look hard enough, but that doesn't mean the parallel was intentional or should be taken seriously. To make matters worse, Landis had fun talking about the overweight sherrif and the rolls of fat -- clearly reveling in the invoking the stereotypical fat Southern racist. As long as he's being all social justice warriorry, he should police his own looksism.

Another thing that annoyed me about this film was the way they identified (or in some cases failed to identify) the talking heads. Now, I'm a big believer in documentaries doing all they can to let me, the viewer, know who's talking. As long as a talking head is onscreen talking, his or her name should be displayed. I don't like it when, as they all-too-often do, show the name a little bit at the beginning, and then never again. But this was even worse. At the beginning, they showed a talking head. Then, when he was offscreen, they displayed his name. Then another head. Then another name, etc. And that's how they introduced it all to us. By the third (or so) person, I was getting confused -- does the name go with the face that appears afterwards? Or does the face go with the name that appears before. And what's more, some talking heads were never even identified. Some yutzo talked about the horror movie  at his bar mitzvah reception (Seriously -- WTF?), and we never even were told who he is.

Now, that last point -- identifying talking heads -- led to some of the liveliest discussion we've had. Joe agreed with me, but Sean feels that it somehow detracts if the name is displayed too much. Seriously -- I don't understand his perspective. Even if you don't need the name to be displayed the whole time, does it actually detract from the experience if it is? I don;t think so. Sean does. Whatever.

But getting back to Night of the Living Dead, we were supposed to see the ending as somehow racist because Ben, the black character, gets shot by one of the authorities after surviving the night. And then his body is disposed of as if it were just so much trash. Gimme a break. Anyone viewing the movie fairly sees that as a tragedy -- kind of an ironic Black Mirror type of ending. He survives the horror only to be mistaken for a zombie and killed like one. But it's clearly about being mistaken for a zombie. It's not some statement about racism.

And that attempt to read some grand statement into a movie (and other attempts like it) just hurt this in my mind.

On the other hand, there were some elements to appreciate. I loved the way this started, interspersing scenes from horror movies with scenes from real life. It forced the viewer to try and discern what was real and what wasn't. In fact, there was one scene where a voice said something about the President calling for a nuclear bomb to be brought in over "the town." When that came on, I was surprised -- I don't remember hearing about our actually bringing nukes to Vietnam. Finally, I realized that that was a scene from The Crazies. I felt wonderfully fooled.

It was also really interesting hearing Tom Savini talk about his experiences in Vietnam, and how they affected his makeup artwork.

SO, yeah...a mixed bag.