My Difficult Decision [9.24.06]

[auret]

suddenly they decided to throw all attempts at convincing characterization out the window.... great.

[enigmaticangel]

on the purity bond thing...i know at least some extremist christians who practice them consider most every kind of touching (even kissing) between the sexes to be impure. the point of them is supposed to be "guarding your heart" or something. idk what the bree purity bond is like though.
i assume her parents could be worried she is getting too emotionally attached to daniel and thus downplaying her religion.

i don't know how to respond to other people's messages directly...but i am glad at least one person (morniglory) agrees with my flip-flop theory :-D

[west]

She does a good job of pretending to cry, but if you follow her eyes she is obviously reading off the script. Positioned to the left in most cases.

Typical, if you watch closely.

[whatver]

dharmabum420 said:

Sock puppets are multiple accounts created by the same person for trolling purposes. A straw man is a specific kind of sock puppet, created to dissent with the original poster, boosting the original by acting like an ass with the other. Kind of creepy split-personality stuff.

AFAIK, they weren't invented by the ARG community, I've heard the terms for near a decade.

Not sure if the meaning has changed a bit in the online world, but in traditional intellectual debate a "straw man" is a kind of false example of what you're arguing against. If you're making a point, one rhetorical strategy is to outline a weak opposing argument (the "straw man") and then pick it apart. It's a disingenuous technique which doesn't engage the actual substance of what one's opponent is arguing.

As usual Wikipedia says it better than I can:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

edit: oops, I missed FLWright's post above, sorry for the duplication, but let me add one more thing which is Wiki's entry on sockpuppets (internet): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29 which has a bunch of great definitions for all kinds of straw puppets

[VanillaFlava]

curiousgeorge said:

As an aside (or maybe REALLY OT) the Creators are to be applauded for encouraging this kind of discussion, even if they have not done it intentionally!

Oh, I think it was very intentional. The episodes are not so much built on classic TV cliff-hangers, but more on introducing discussion points. And there is simply nothing like religion to start a heated disucssion on the Internet.

I hope they treat the subject with more respect than the commenters. So far, I think, it is not looking too bad in that department. I am sure, however, that this element was introduced to create debate, rather than to make a point about religion in general.

EDIT: Re: Sock Puppets, I wish I hadn't looked that up on Wiki just now ... sucked 45 min out of my day I think it is a sign of their community, or at least the loudest, most overbearing members, that also seem so paranoid as to bring it up constantly.
I think it is really aggrevating to accuse a poster of doing something like that without any evidence.

[jayhenry]

I wish I had remembered this yesterday. This is a week-old comment from The Creators regarding Cassisiswatching:

Please keep the discussion clean. HyeMew, I appreciate your statement. The series is appealing to people of all ages and we'd like to keep it that way. Although there is plenty of creepiness evolving in our plotline, we will not graphically display imagery such as that in the Cassieiswatching videos. If you want to follow those videos, of course feel free to. Discussing it here is okay, but let's keep it clean and have fun. Thanks for watching!

That's the correct Creators account and all that. They know that the religion is creepy.

She does a good job of pretending to cry, but if you follow her eyes she is obviously reading off the script. Positioned to the left in most cases.

Typical, if you watch closely.

She's not reading off a script. That little eyeroll thing she does is just her way of acting sad. And it's something a lot of real people do when they're sad. Look at how far her eyes move with one sentence of dialogue. If she's reading off a script, the real question is, why was the script printed in 3 inch tall letters.

They're doing multiple takes, there's no reason for her to read off a script.

[VanillaFlava]

Yes, of course it's creepy, and IMO intentionally so. What I like about LG15's treatment so far, however, that it may be ominous, but there is no gross-out or shock factor, and most of what people associate with her religion is actually their own imagination. I hope they keep this tone.

Cassie is obviously much less subtle, and it looks like without anything to go on, they use the random bag of creepy stuff to make their vids effective.

[noasinger]

There are lots of stories and films, also, where "creepiness" is used as a red herring -- THE SIXTH SENSE being one of the most famous recent movie examples. Come to think of it, THE VILLAGE used this as well -- Shyamalan likes to turn the audience's expectations on their ear.

"The Turn of the Screw" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" are two well-known literary examples.

[VanillaFlava]

Good point. Shyamalan is a self-professed fan of Alfred Hitchcock though, and I find most of his stuff really very ... uhm ... inspired by earlier works to say it politely.

I think the best example of errieness used as deception is Hitchcock's 1958's 'Vertigo'. Throughout the first act of the movie you are slowly being lured into a ghost story, then it twists and turns into a thriller about obsession, with a false-bottom ending, only to actually end on a crime story note. That's the most brilliant bit of putting the audience through an emotional roller-coaster ever. And most of it plays on our own pre-conceptions or imagination.

Shyamalan's 'Unbreakable' tries this a little more effectively than 'Sixth Sense' which really just has the big twist at the end. In 'Unbreakable' there are a couple more twists and turns, and some really interesting character development. Like the genre or not, very cool movie.

EDIT: Now, actually come to think of it, there is another similarity between Hitchcock and LG15. The Aleister Crowley picture, for example, seems to be a a bit of an inspiration from Hitchcock's distinction between surprise and suspense:

There is a distinct difference between 'suspense' and 'surprise,' and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, 'Boom!' There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence.

Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table, and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene.

The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: 'You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There's a bomb underneath you and it's about to explode!'

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

-- Alfred Hitchcock as told to François Truffaut in his book, Hitchcock (1967)

Now, we only need to find a McGuffin, and we can officially expose Miles' et. al. Hitchcock movie collection

[dharmabum420]

whatver said:

Not sure if the meaning has changed a bit in the online world, but in traditional intellectual debate a "straw man" is a kind of false example of what you're arguing against. If you're making a point, one rhetorical strategy is to outline a weak opposing argument (the "straw man") and then pick it apart. It's a disingenuous technique which doesn't engage the actual substance of what one's opponent is arguing.

That's essentially what I was trying to say, with less success.

I mention the split-personality thing because most who stoop to such techniques are so bad at it it's very clear they're arguing with themselves, and they just look creepy.

[Tempestarii]

A bit like the Marquis de Sade employing naked and podgy young lady characters to argue his philosophy?

Within one post I can lead a thread to sex...a natural gift

[waffle]

jessica is a really impressive actress

[dharmabum420]

jayhenry said:

noasinger said:

The big conflict isn't shaping up to be evil cultists at all, but religious intolerance.

I'm not so sure about that. If the purpose of these videos was primarily to create a message of religious tolerance, would they really portray the religion as overbearing and weird?

While I'm not sure this is the direction they're taking (but hope they do)... the answer is yes. Resoundingly yes.

It's a standard bait-and-switch Hollywood tactic. The person who seems normal, and well-adjusted, is really part of something horrible. The dodgy outsider is the one who is actually normal and well-adjusted.

The point, with a message like that, is that you can't read a book by its cover. To Daniel and Cassie, products of "normal" public school education and agnostic or superficially Christian families, her religion is weird. Her parents are overbearing.

Ultimately it's revealed that her religion isn't weird at all, her parents are only somewhat protective of their 16 year old hottie daughter (and you don't have to be religious to be protective) because they're worried about drugs and teenage pregnancy, and they have a beef with public school that has nothing to do with weird religion and everything to do with a system which has graduates who have never heard of Einstein, let alone Jared Diamond.

[noasinger]

Or perhaps "weird" remains a good descriptor, but the notion that weirdness or difference necessarily denotes a religion or lifestyle which is evil or problematic, is subverted.

I would find this absolutely hot and fascinating and clever if the plot involves a subversion of people's prejudices. I do worry that it would anger a portion of the audience, but nowadays any position taken in fiction is going to irritate someone.