“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”  So opens H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”  To quibble with Lovecraft about horror is surely a sucker’s game, but I think he’s only half right here.  Lovecraft’s own stories all have a central “unknown,” but the best and scariest of them are always the ones where the big reveal comes not as a shock but as a confirmation, not a “WTF?” but an “I knew it!”  So I’ll emend his definition:  The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of that unknown which we realize, in the moment of unveiling, that we knew all along.  Of course, it’s a tricky line to walk, which is why truly successful horror is such a rarity.  Telegraph it too much, and the audience will laugh at you.  Too little, and you end up with the Double Shyamalan, a twist ending that’s so out-of-left-field that the audience simply rejects it.  To get it right, you have to get your audience to realize the secret subconsciously while remaining consciously oblivious.  Now, I’m not going out on much of a limb by saying that the subconscious plays a role in horror.  Most scholarly analyses of horror claim that the supernatural unknown illustrates a Freudian concept known as “the return of the repressed.”  What the rational mind refuses to deal with – sexual desire being the big one, although in Lovecraft’s case it was racism – will bubble back up again as a bug-eyed monster.

Curious what all this has to do with Ghostbusters?  Me too!  Let’s click through to the next page together, friends.

Videogames lead a strange dual life.  On the one hand, we have what some writers have labelled the Ludic element, that is, the game as a pure game, a  systems of rules which can be manipulated, interacted with, mastered, and won.  On the other, you have narrative, a concept with which I assume you all are familiar.  Most pre-electronic games are purely ludic (chess pieces lack interiority).  Toys, on the other hand, encourage narrative:  you cannot win at dolls, but you can tell hella stories about them if you like.  Videogames tend to combine the two, at least to some extent.

Different genres have different relationships with narrative. On the high end, you have RPGs, which require gobs of it.  Platformers usually just have a sentence or two, like “Our Princess is in Another Castle” or “BANG! End of Rescue Attempt.”  Sports games are usually narrative-free… except for fighting games, which usually require a rudimentary sense of plot and character. (I’m sure many of us have fond memories of the geopolitical intrigue of Street Fighter II, or the overheated soap opera of Dead or Alive, or Little Mac’s boxing journey through the land of racist stereotypes.) And it is a fighting game that provides us with the boldest and strangest narrative in the history of gaming. I’m talking, of course, about Super Smash Brothers for the N64.

Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself — such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance.

–Jean Baudrillard

Let’s play a game:  I’m going to say something ridiculous, just for the fun of it.  Okay, here goes.  “The Terminator franchise will come to an end with the upcoming Christian Bale movie, Terminator: Salvation.  It will be the very last Terminator story ever told in any medium; the franchise will die when the credits roll.”

So why is that so absurd?  Obviously a franchise is endlessly renewable as long as a corporate entity believes the property has value, and yet franchises do die.  There is nothing inherently ridiculous about the claim that there will not be another Ghostbusters movie.  The two that already exist present us with closed narrative forms, both individually and as a unit.  If another Ghostbusters movie were to be created, it would be a resurrection of a dead property.  The same is not true of the Terminator, which, as of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, exists outside of time.

Or: Holy plaisire du texte, Barthes-Man!

The plot of The Dark Knight, like that of Batman Begins, is honestly kind of shapeless and waffle-y. And yet, as Memento proves, Nolan is capable of writing narratives that are drum-taught and mongoose-agile. Why is he churning out these behemoths? Why, despite the wafflage, are they so dang good?

To answer this, I’d like to take a minute to consider Batman as a piece of storytelling, to consider the properties of the tale as it’s told. You’re probably taking it as given that there are spoilers for The Dark Knight ahead. But I should warn you that there are also spoilers for Batman Begins, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Forrest Gump, the Superman comic books, and The Hunt For Red October. Be warned.

In his famous – for a certain value of “fame” – book S/Z, Roland Barthes strip-mines Balzac’s Sarrasine, wringing every scrap of meaning out of the text and classifying his findings into five narrative codes: Hermeneutic, Semic, Proairetic, Symbolic, and Cultural. The wikipedia definitions of these codes are pretty solid as of this writing (I mean, they could be “Taco! Taco! Taco!” by tomorrow), but they’re easier to understand when you see them in action. Like after the jump! Convenience!

There’s a new McDonalds ad that kind of weirds me out. Sadly I haven’t located the video online – post a link in the comments if you can find it.

Anyway, this is the latest in their campaign based on the idea that the food items on the dollar menu sit around all day having meetings that revolve around who is eligible for membership in the dollar menu. Generally these ads are stupid, but inoffensive. The new one, well… here’s a rough transcript.