The sadistic delay

Note: In this post I am using the term "he" instead of "he or she," because it's quicker and because the post more generally involves the actions of male characters than female characters. I am not trying to sideline women. Thank you for your understanding.

I was watching a movie last week -- I don't remember which and it doesn't matter, as you will discover in a moment -- in which a good character survived as a result of a delay in killing him by a bad character. 

I am going to call that moment "the sadistic delay," and I'm going to explain what I mean by that.

(But first: The movie in question wasn't Dune Part Two, but I thought an image of Feyd-Rautha would at least give the post a sense of immediacy. Plus he looks really badass, and whether he's actually guilty of this behavior or not, he's just the sort of villain who would be.)

A "sadistic delay" occurs when a bad character has the opportunity to kill a good character, but does not because he's got to savor the moment before applying the kill. He may only savor the moment for a few seconds, but in doing so, he botches his advantage and allows a third party to save the day, or even the prospective victim to save himself.

This is because bad people like killing too much to do it quickly.

And this has led to the survival of numerous heroes throughout the history of cinema.

Now, when a good character kills, he kills with a grim determination and plenty of regret. He capitalizes on his advantages and kills quickly. And afterwards, it is clear he is disturbed by having had to do this. But the previous transgressions of the the person he killed, in probably a kill-or-be-killed situation, meant there was no other choice.

A bad character?

He gets a sadistic grin on his face. He raises his weapon higher than it needs to be raised. He might throw a bit of triumphant shade at his prospective victim. He might even laugh.

And in that delay, which can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes if he wants to deliver a pre-kill victory speech, he usually lets his entire motivation in the movie go unrealized. (Though really, villain speeches are a different category of screenwriting transgression that numerous others have already written about.)

And yet this villain will do the exact same thing next time, if he survives this interaction. 

It's funny how hacky screenwriters can be when they want to be. They're so worried about making sure we know this is a bad character, that they will not resist any opportunity to remind us of this. The other 32 terrible things this person did in the movie? Maybe they don't mean anything if he doesn't preemptively gloat at the key moment of the narrative.

And this can pop up in the most ridiculous of scenarios. A villain can be getting beaten terribly in a battle, having lost most of his army or other support structures, and to any impartial observer would appear to be on the verge of utter defeat.

But if he thinks he has a moment where he is absolutely sure to finally kill this hero who has been getting the better of him?

Cue that sadistic grin and that sudden unwarranted confidence that totally misunderstands the dynamics of the current situation.

Because this person has a taste for killing, and perhaps this will be the most satisfying kill he has ever performed.

I say, savor it after the fact when you have already nuked the city or gotten the magic amulet. There will be plenty of time to gloat later on.

And they tell us villains are supposed to be smart. 

An unsquashable cinematic trope for male characters

When I was about 16 I got a taste for racquetball. Through my church youth group we had adult
mentors that were selected from the church community, and mine belonged to a racquetball club. He may have only taken me to play once, but it was probably twice. In any case, I had enough of a blast that when I went looking at colleges the next year, I wasn't as interested in whether they had a good English program as whether they had racquetball courts on campus.

The answer, in most cases, was no. Most colleges I looked at had squash courts. I didn't know what the difference was, and think I still don't. However, it does seem like squash is the slightly more common sport.

Though I don't think either of them is that common anymore. It could just be that I'm not in a squash place in my life anymore, or a racquetball place, or a place involving an indoor court with white walls, two racquets, two men, and a small rubber ball. But I don't know anyone who plays either of these sports, and I don't think it's only because they aren't in those places in their lives either. It seems like an activity that reached its peak in 1989 and has played a diminishing role in the zeitgeist ever since.

Except at the movies, where it still serves its role as a trope for getting men together one on one for private conversation, and possibly confrontation.

Reminding me of this fact was Tamara Jenkins' Private Life, which I saw on Wednesday night. Racquetsquash (that seems like a good way to indicate my ambiguity about which is which going forward) hardly seems like what should be prompting me to write about this film, which I thought was excellent and has many qualities that would be better suiting for praising than nitpicking. But what can I say, this was what occurred to me, and I need to keep feeding this blog beast lest you stop coming to this site altogether.

In a movie that is otherwise an incredibly true and realistic portrait of a couple trying to adopt, artificially inseminate, in vitro fertilize or in some way or another produce a child, two men engage in what I considered to be a very anachronistic game of racquetsquash. The sport fits a lot more logically in the other films that came to mind, such as Splash! and Wall Street, which are just a few of the many in which men have convened in a small court to bond, communicate, or butt heads. If this were the old days and it weren't the Christmas season, I'd probably have scrounged the internet to find a dozen other examples for your edification.

But in 2018? Are men still getting together to smash these small balls at each other, almost like boxers going at each other for 12 rounds?

That's when it occurred to me that this is a trope, used as much for it symbolic value as its relation to the real world. As it has typically been used in the movies, the racquetsquash court provides a small, enclosed environment in which friends can be real with each other, telling each other the unvarnished truth about whatever is bothering them, or frenemies can try to intimidate one another into submission. It's either a safe space like the confessional, or a pressure cooker -- and the sweat pouring from their brows tends to indicate the latter. In either case, it's a place where men can be alone to blow off steam or bounce around ideas, and where they can't be overheard.

Interestingly, there wasn't much of either of the traditional uses of racquetsquash in Private Life. And perhaps that's an indication of how much we've seen scenes like this in the movies, that they've developed a third usage: connector scenes. Perhaps racquetsquash scenes are so familiar to us now that they can operate just as a comfortable bridge from one scene to another, with maybe a little exposition or moving forward of plot mechanics.

If it weren't after midnight four days before Christmas, I could probably produce some additional thoughts on this. But I'll leave off here.

And as for my own love affair with racquetsquash? I actually haven't played again since those one or two times in high school. Though would still love to, for just plain physical reasons if not metaphorical ones.

I'll finish by giving Private Life its due: It's fantastic. See it exclusively on Netflix, and add it near the top of your own 2018 list, as I have.

The unsatisfying Final Girl switcheroo

Oh Zombeavers.

You could have been the next Piranha. Instead, you were the next Piranha DD.

Just having bad animatronic zombie beavers isn't quite enough to make a bad movie transcendent. It also needs to be funny -- or, much funnier than this one was. Strangely, it is quite funny in its first 20 minutes before the titular creatures show up, but once they make their first appearance, the script loses all sense of how to plumb the natural ridiculousness from the situation. What could have been a cult movie ends up being just another movie that earns a low star rating, just another schlock horror that doesn't hit beyond its awesome title.

But I'm here today to talk about a different kind of disappointment to be derived from Zombeavers, one that has to do with its adherence, or lack thereof, to narrative conventions in general and genre conventions in particular.

Namely, the girls they cast were in all the wrong parts, and then, the wrong girls ended up dying in the wrong order.

ZOMBEAVERS SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

You are surely familiar with the horror trope of The Final Girl, such an established trope that it can (and should) be capitalized. She is the one guaranteed survivor of some kind of alien, monster, undead creature or serial killer. It is perhaps the most reliable and consistently applied trope in all of horror.

Zombeavers has three candidates for the correct Final Girl, and the one it chooses is the worst of the three.

Let's take a look at this cast. I'll provide photos so you get a bit better sense of what I'm talking about.

First there's Rachel Melvin as Mary. She is the most obvious choice for The Final Girl, as she is the sweetest and probably the most established as an actress. She's the first listed in the cast, anyway, and she was in last year's Dumb and Dumber To, where she was very sweet. Mary is the one whose family owns the cabin where they are having a girls weekend. (It's only a girls weekend because one of the girls was cheated on by her boyfriend, but more on that in a minute.) Mary is also the most chaste (she won't take off her top to go swimming) and she's the one who establishes the rules of no texting and no talking about boys. Plus, she's got that cute little button nose.

Then there's Lexi Atkins as Jenn. Atkins is a comparative unknown -- although there's a hyperlink to her page in the wikipedia cast for this movie, she doesn't actually have a page yet. Jenn is the girl who was cheated on, who might also be a good candidate as The Final Girl because of her betrayal. Having a zombeaver kill her off would just be piling on her existing misery. Atkins is pretty sullen, which is understandable for a girl whose heart was just broken. But she doesn't exude any likability, which could just be her inexperience as an actor. Anyway, you have no desire whatsoever to root for her. Her blonde hair also usually labels her as someone unsavory, by traditional Hollywood metrics.

Finally we have Cortney Palm as Zoe. She also does not have a wikipedia page. She's the slut. We know this because she is the only one who does take her top off when they go swimming. She's constantly making rude jokes and generally being ribald. And when her boyfriend inevitably appears (after all, you need men to knock off with impunity in horror movies), they have the most carnivorous sex. The sexual carnivore is usually the first to go in a movie like Zombeavers, because horror tradition dictates that a woman must be punished for acting on her sexual desires.

So let's examine where things start to go wrong -- not with the beavers, but with the narrative.

The first sign of trouble is when it's revealed that Mary is the one who induced Jenn's boyfriend to cheat on her. Jenn doesn't know this, but the arrival of the three boyfriends -- including Jenn's ex, who is trying to make amends with her -- means that it's about to become public knowledge. What's weird about this is that Mary is incredibly sweet, by all outward appearances, and she has already shown her purity by not taking off her top and by banning the use of cell phones. Yet she's the one who stabbed her good friend in the back.

An easy way to fix this would just be to swap these two roles. Atkins profiles more as a cheater and Melvin profiles more as an innocent. Why not just reallocate the resources you have to get the actors in the right roles?

Even keeping in mind that Jenn is the one cheated on, though, we still have a problem because Jenn is actually the first eliminated from contention to be The Final Girl. She is bitten by an undead beaver (off screen, which is one of this film's many curious decisions) and is the first to try to chomp her friends and convert them. (When bitten by a zombeaver, humans sprout beaver teeth -- a funny idea with a not-all-that-funny execution.) So insult is added to injury, or injury to insult, when the poor betrayed girl (who is the wrong actress cast in the first place) is among the first victims.

The film makes a misstep, as I've already mentioned, by having Mary be the one who betrays her friend. Well, then it makes matters worse by interrupting the crisis with an impulsive episode of bathroom sex between Mary and the guy she cheated with. This scene is included primary so a zombeaverfied version of Jenn can come in and bite his dick off, which I get. But it makes Mary even more terrible, when she should be sweet, and also makes her just seem stupid, when she was previously the one who seemed to display the most intelligence. I mean, who pauses from an ongoing zombeaver crisis to have sex?

Mary is not killed in this scene. She and Zoe both escape as Jenn, the rest of their men, a pair of older neighbors, and a local hunter are all picked off by the beavers. We know of course that two girls cannot survive, so maybe the movie is finally trying to reestablish Mary as The Final Girl, even though she's not the pure character we once thought she was. But then Mary is the next one to sprout beaver teeth -- even though we didn't see her get bitten either.

So Zoe gets to be The Final Girl. The one who should have been killed first.

Of course, there actually isn't a Final Girl, because right before the credits roll, Zoe gets splattered by a truck whose driver is texting. (Every zombie movie, by tradition, needs to have some social commentary, so I suppose this qualifies as this movie's version of that.) This scene also ties back to a joke at the very beginning of the film.

So after you've written all this, Vance -- you still call me Vance in these hypothetical scenarios -- wasn't it kind of pointless? Mightn't they have actually saved the worst death for the worst character?

No, because even if you are going to kill The Final Girl in a Final Joke, she's still The Final Girl. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

You could argue that the filmmakers are consciously breaking the rules as a means of freshening things up or even as a means of surprising us. And there can certainly be good reasons to consciously break the rules. However, Zombeavers is the kind of movie that proves why the rules exist in the first place. The progression of character deaths is unsatisfying here, and that contributes to an unsatisfying entire final 45 minutes. That's breaking the rules for the wrong reasons, in my book.

Anyway, one area where I do agree with you: That was probably way too much to write about Zombeavers.