Comments on Thanks for the Use of the Hall - Archive: Children and Dogs

Ha! That's great. Here's a quotation back at you...

2008-05-26T22:55:00.000-04:00

Ha! That's great. Here's a quotation back at you, from Truffaut's review of Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit, aka Juvenile Passion):

"One would have to say that the greatest filmmakers are over fifty, but it is important to practice the cinema of one's own age and try, if one is twenty-five and admires Dreyer, to emulate Vampyr rather than Ordet. Youth is in a

16:46Did you hear it?16:47Yes, the child.16:53The ...

2008-05-24T22:55:00.000-04:00

16:46
Did you hear it?

16:47
Yes, the child.

16:53
The child?

16:55
Indeed — the child!

17:03
There is no child here...

17:23
But... the dogs...

17:28
There are neither children nor dogs here...

17:31
There aren’t?

17:34
No.

17:37
Good night.

17:40
Good night.

Jaime, David - yeah, filmmakers can contrive ways ...

2008-05-22T20:43:00.000-04:00

Jaime, David - yeah, filmmakers can contrive ways to kill children and animals humorously. Clearly there are multiple factors governing how we respond to that sort of thing.

That's why I tried the thought experiment of recasting a scene with a child instead of an adult, or talked about a queue of victims with a child accidentally included. There are too many variables otherwise.

Because the genre conventions say that you don't k...

2008-05-22T14:56:00.000-04:00

Because the genre conventions say that you don't kill kids in genre dramas (I've done it in comedy -- seems to work!), even if you "tagged" a kid for death with obvious signifiers, the audience still would be shocked becauise it just isn't done.
Massive exception: JAWS.

How would you recast the scene five-year-old or a ...

2008-05-20T20:19:00.000-04:00

How would you recast the scene five-year-old or a kitty? That would take some stretching (in screenwriting and camerawork), and, in stretching, you encompass and neutralize whatever additional dimensionality you call for.

Clark Griswold's cat gets toasted in CHRISTMAS VACATION... yet the ID/protection mechanism isn't given the same jolt as the woman-running-really-fast who gets

Jaime - it seems to me that audiences would be ups...

2008-05-20T08:47:00.000-04:00

Jaime - it seems to me that audiences would be upset if a movie "set up" a child or an animal in the way you describe for adults. If so, there's still a difference to be accounted for, apart from film technique.

(Spoilers for No Country for Old Men coming.)

Llewellyn Moss is an established character with all sorts of emotional pushes and pulls created on his behalf. I

I don't believe in audience empathy. I tend to th...

2008-05-17T19:03:00.000-04:00

I don't believe in audience empathy. I tend to think people have these responses because the grown-ups on the screen have more than likely geared themselves up for being put in harm's way - maybe not by doing anything or acting in a certain way, but the filmmakers have "set them up." Certain scenes in PREDATOR are textbook telegraphed deaths; I remember at one point the camera creates a space

Whitney - I hadn't quite made that connection, tha...

2008-05-17T11:44:00.000-04:00

Whitney - I hadn't quite made that connection, that we might be using identification to project our own death wish. But I don't know if we always choose our victims for maximum identification. Little kids like to torture everything, including insects. I have the feeling that our imagination lets us generalize our desire to hurt and kill over a wide range of targets.

And then it

Should read "audiences COULDN'T accept". D'oh!

2008-05-16T03:50:00.000-04:00

Should read "audiences COULDN'T accept". D'oh!

It has to be borne in mind that however upset many...

2008-05-16T03:49:00.000-04:00

It has to be borne in mind that however upset many audiences will become at the death of a child onscreen, this will in no way compare to the anguish they would feel if they saw a real child really die in a film, or even more so in real life. So there's a hierarchy of reality too. This also applies to the manner of representation. Bob Clampett can show a dog being beaten with a plank in a cartoon

So interesting! I've been toying with this idea fo...

2008-05-15T18:57:00.000-04:00

So interesting! I've been toying with this idea for a long time. Somehow the death of adults might tie into the Freudian death drive. We can identify with an adult on screen, so this works. However, kids are a bit of a mystery to us. Most of us can't even remember when we were that age, so identification is harder.

As for innocence, I once heard the phrase "hierarchy of innocence" that