Movies: This is sound of what you don't know killing you.

If you haven't seen J. T. Petty's S&Man yet - yeah, I know, the wacky typographical title is off putting, for realz - go watch it and then come back. 'Cause I'm pretty much just going to bust into it as if you've seen it.

Okay? Here's five random observations about S&Man

1.
In an early moment of of J. T. Petty's horror mockumentary S&Man, the titular filmmaker, the charmingly shy and rolly-polly Eric "S&Man" Rost, takes pains to clear up the pronunciation of his ampersand enhanced name: It's said "Sandman," not "S and M Man." Oddly, one imagines the incorrect pronunciation wouldn't be "S and M Man," but rather "S and Man." To pronounce it "S and M Man," you'd have to take a some alpha-phonetic liberties and slide another M in there. Still, the point is the first hint of the film's larger theme.

Sexual violence and S & M are often, but erroneously, conflated. The latter is a performance of the former intended to give at least one of the participants pleasure. The fact that it has this performative distance, that it is "fake" and understood to be so means that it ceases to be simply fake and becomes real, but in another sense. It severs the performance from the reality it supposedly emulates and gives it a new self-referential meaning, which opens it up to levels of irony, camp, style, decadence, and pleasure, that real violence, in its brutal mute presence, does not contain. S & M is the artistic conception of sexual violence. As such, it is devoid of sexual violence. When you make something art, its entire factuality is contained in the fact that it's a work of art. That's its power and allure. Art and the real exist in two parallel dimensions: mirrors of one another, but incommensurably distinct. Where art exists, we live in its depths. Where the real exists, one confronts the deafening silence of art's absence.

For somebody craving the art of S & M, sexual violence remains a destructive and vile negation. On the other hand if, like Eric, one desires to see real sexual violence, no amount of art could slake one's thirst.

Eric testily points that he's not "S and M Man." He informs J. T. Petty, playing himself as a documentarian, that he's "not into that shit." Of course he isn't.

2.
The thorniest problem of horror cinema is the fact that horrors fans, without much pretext, can enjoy watching simulated atrocities. Outside of horror fandom, this is the core problem that gives the genre, despite it's longevity and profitability, the irremovable stigma of being a dubious sort of art. That is why, unlike sci-fi, romance, or any of the other second class genres which are dismissed merely as wastes of time, horror (like porn) remains a genre that is, for many, fundamentally beyond the pale.

This problem gets repressed within the fandom, but like all repressed facts leads to neurotic quirks. The critical discourse of genre, even when sympathetic, is steeped in the language of guilt and complicity. Catharsis theories, for example, attempt to prove that horror is good for mental health - a claim fans of sci-fi would never have to make because nobody takes seriously the proposition that watching science fiction films might be a sign of poor mental health. The famous last girl theory, with its play of complicity and sympathy, attempts to codify a spectator approach that justifies the viewing of simulated mass murder by showing how the fans "side" with the triumphant last would-be victim. Again, this notion that the viewer is innocent by virtue of wanting the almost-victim to win nods to the universal notion that there's something morally complicated about the pleasures of horror. Why proclaim one's innocence if there wasn't ever a question of guilt?

Folk theories - the sort of home grown explanations common to blogs and the like - are just as complicated. One popular, but kinda silly, folk theory is the Mimetic Argument: Horror films are violent because the world is violent. The idea that horror films reflect reality is, for the most part, transparent nonsense. If it were simply a reflection of the violence of the world that horror fans were after, we could just watch old Bumfights tapes and toss away ghost show hokum like Freddy. The world of the horror film is to real violence what the world of romantic comedies is to genuine courtship. For folks stretching for a little more redemption in their horror fare, there's the After School Special Argument: The violence of horror flicks is excusable, even if it is excessive, because horror films are "about something." Curiously, I've actually seen this taken to its logical conclusion, with one blogger sincerely arguing that actual on-screen violence against animals is okay if the real bloodshed is being done to serve a larger dramatic theme. This, of course, is a dodge. Even the average film-goer would agree that extreme imagery is sometimes artistically justified, the moral pickle is one's enjoyment of said extreme imagery.

3.
Petty's S&Man is the most serious contemporary meditation on the nature of the pleasures of horror cinema. In a pleasant surprise, Petty manages to cut the Gordian knot of voyeurism and film-going, divorcing his answer to the persistent problem of horror cinema's irresistible dark glamour from the po-faced self-flagellations of fright flick slummers, from Peeping Tom to Funny Games. Instead, by looking at the "worst of the worst" - the extreme horror underground of faux snuff fetish flicks - and contrasting them with the possibility of genuine death, Petty suggests the possibility of a radical break between representations and the real.

Throughout the film, Petty contrasts his fictional S&Man with a handful of genuine "characters," all playing themselves. Most notably, the delightfully ineloquent and profane Bill Zebub, auteur behind such horror-inflected fetish stroke flick classics as Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist and Kill the Scream Queen. and the curiously frat-boyish Fred Vogel, the infamous director of intestinal fortitude tests known as the August Underground series. These scenes, part expose and part Spinal Tap-ish satire, are some of the most moving segments in the film. Aside from the gonzo, gross out humor, there are several moments that are genuinely chilling and, perhaps more powerfully, genuinely sad. The scene of Bill Zebub taking a long, drunken night to get a single scene of one of his horror/fetish flicks in the can is one of the best comedic scenes ever placed in a horror flick. With its perfect blend of condescension and compassion, cruel exactness and broad sympathy, it's the best statement about bad art since Burton's Ed Wood.

Thematically, these two filmmakers and their work serve as a counterpoint to the fictional Eric and his films. The anarchic slapstick bad taste orgies of Vogel - who brags with almost John Waterish joy that he's got an actress in his stable that can vomit on cue - and the painfully raw fetish salads of Zebub are displayed in noisy, energetic contrast to the long take, static set up minimalism of the flicks in the fictional S&Man film series.

The S&Man flicks are, actually, really dull. If it wasn't for the almost immediate tip of the hand that gave the dangerous aura of snuff cinema, they'd be memorable for their tediousness. By contrast, the z-grade flicks of Vogel and Zebub are busting with life. The action's hectic - Vogel's clips spill into the film like mutant Marx Bros segments, chaotic to the point of incomprehension and filled with fourth wall breaking bits - and often, once you get past the stomach churning aspects of them, quite silly. More importantly, they - the films and the filmmakers - are products of an artistic subculture. They are reacting to other works and artists, attempting to expand, undermine, or innovate the boundaries of the genre as they know it. In one telling scene, after learning that Vogel employs an actress who is a cutter and who cuts herself in his latest flick, we see get a clip of Zebub working some self-cutting into his latest work.

Though the pleasures, if that's what one calls them, of Vogel and Zebub's work are more extreme than most horror fans care for, the dynamic here is familiar and can be found throughout the genre. Horror is more than self-reflexive; it's a competitive sport. Horror filmmakers are constantly pushing the parameters of previous work in a game of artistic one-up-manship. And it's this relationship, this closed world, that Petty indicates as the source of the joys of horror films. Horror films are not about death or the release of the primal id or the need to psychically unburden one's troubled soul or the latest headlines and echo chamber politics; the joy of a good horror film comes from witnessing the art of the film. Humans respond with pleasure to the well crafted work of art. Thankfully for Vogel and Zebub, the definition of well crafted is pretty flexible. Still, Petty suggests the pleasure of horror spectatorship is located in witnessing the evolution of the subcultural form, of watching something embrace the norms we no and successfully exploit or innovate them.

Eric's work, quiet and seemingly unaware of the audience, is something more like outsider art. He's not a horror filmmaker. His work is about death. It doesn't belong to an artistic community, but belongs to the empty void of fact.

4.
In a brilliantly illuminating role, Dr. Carol "Women and Chainsaws" Clover, playing herself, provides the film's academic gravitas. Seriously, as much as I question her thesis about the whole final girl thing, I could have watched another hour of Clover talkin' head footage: She's that articulate, effortlessly insightful, and genuinely invested in the topic of horror. Somebody shoot the Clover doc, pronto.

5.
Of course, with a thesis that posits an impassable gap between the real and the fake, Petty paints himself into a corner: You can't have Eric the S&Man in the flick as the avatar of reality as you've just proposed that the real needs no avatars and an alleged avatars are, automatically, fakers. (When citing cases of "real horror" it is telling that Petty and Clover both cite instances of genuine violence that, curiously enough, were staged for video or still cameras.) Which I believe explains the somewhat unsatisfying end when Petty seemingly helps Eric off Petty's girlfriend in order to film the death. It's a jarring narrative contrivance, but I think it is meant to appear so. If Petty's right, Eric must end the film being dragged into the clear and unmistakable fictitiousness.

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Movies: Something burrowed, something blue.

A satisfyingly slow-burn and low-key historical horror, J.T. Petty's Western period horror flick The Borrowers eschews tired and familiar Western tropes to create a eco-horror that casts the human impact of Western expansion as an especially grisly form of species-wide suicide. This twisting of the dust-covered but still somehow sacred legends of the West – both the Whig history notions of manifest destiny (with its corresponding "gritty and grim" deconstructionists mirror image) and the more PC contemporary fantasy of pre-white America as agrarian utopia – is all the more clever in that Petty rope-a-dopes nostalgic viewers who basically want fanservice. He repeated feints towards these themes, only to subsume them into the quiet and in doomed vision of the West he envisions: a dispassionate, Darwinian vision that has more in common with the ahumanism of American poet Robinson Jeffers than the heroic Westerns of yore, their wigged out foreign counterparts, or the postmodern navel gazing of most contemporary Westerns.

The Burrowers opens in familiar territory. A frontier family been has vanished with signs of struggle. The assumption is that Indians got them. A posse is formed – combining well-meaning, good-hearted types with hard-bitten, cynical, and potentially unhinged types – to go rescue them. The obvious reference is to Ford's classic The Searchers and its epic plot to reclaim a kidnapped girl from Apaches. But, as will happen throughout the film, Petty picks up the allusion, holds it up the viewers, and then sets it down without further development. He seems to be saying, "We all see this is here, right. Now come on, that's not where we're going." It's a weird sort of un-allusion, one that viewers comfortable with horror's insular in-joke Pavlovian fan reward system may find awkwardly stand-offish. What's the point in alluding to all these great Westerns if you're not going to work within their tropes and explore their space? There's almost a sense of presumptuous disavowal in his approach. In the genre's parlance, Petty strays from the reservation.

As the posse gets to their grim work, similar shopworn tropes of the Western genre appear and fade away. We get the homesteaders versus the military, whites versus the Indians, the idealists versus the "realists." But always, Petty undermines these and then tosses them away. For example, Indians appear on both sides of the U.S. versus native conflict, and these quisling Native American don't actually turn out to be the most cynical First Peoples in the story.

Eventually, the posse realizes that they are not on a trail of a war party. Instead, they're marching deeper and deeper into the hunting ground of a species of humanoid/insectile predators that Native Americans have dubbed "the burrowers" for their unsettling habit of paralyzing their prey, burying it in a shallow grave, and coming back for dinner when their victims have rotted and softened just a bit. This revelation comes a bit too late, however, and the posse members who are still alive when the full puzzle has been assembled are forced to seek aid from a tribe rumored to have perfected a method of defeating the beasts. What they don't know is that the tribe's method is about as palatable as the feeding habits of the burrowers.

We're told by one of the Indian characters that the burrowers were not a problem until the whites killed all the buffalo, allegedly the preferred food source of the burrowers. Now forced to find other sources of sustenance, the burrowers have turned to humans. This is, I think, another of Petty's curious un-nods to convention. Burrowers may have been less of a problem in the days before the extinction of the bison. But I think Petty strongly implies that this, at best, a half-true "just so story." Here's how I reckon. First, the burrowers' method of attack is clearly adapted to humans. The burrowers are nocturnal and show profound patience. Like good pack predators, they follow their prey for long periods of time, waiting until they see a weak, separated, or otherwise tastily inviting target. This is pretty much SOP for pack predators. What's weird about the burrowers is that their preferred method of dealing with prey really only makes sense if you’re a stationary predator (like a spider) or if you're dealing with a species of animal they would search for and then attempt to care for paralyzed members of the herd (an example of which I cannot call to mind because humans are really the only animals that regularly try this). Think of it this way. Burrowers are crappily adapted to hunt bison herds. Every time they strike, they'd send a herd running and be faced with the choice of staying with their paralyzed prey or chasing after the herd. By contrast, every time they hit a group of humans, the humans bunch up and start searching for the missing humans. The behavior of the burrowers suggests that they hunt humans.

Further evidence to the fact that Native Americans and burrowers have been at one another for a long time derives from the Native American response to the burrowers. Late in the flick, it is revealed that a single tribe, the Ute, has developed a method of fighting the burrowers. All the other tribes know this fact, but none have either bothered to develop their own method or copy the way of the Ute. This is because the Ute basically flip the script on pack predator strategy and booby-trap the weakest link in the "herd" (in this case, herd means group of humans). The method works like this. The bait-human is doped. The burrowers attack and are doped as well. With the burrowers now weakened, the Ute use long spears to pin the burrowers to the ground. The pinned and tranquilized burrows are stuck until sunrise, when direct exposure to sunlight does them in. The brilliance of the method is that, done right, it involves almost no direct fighting, minimizing the chances that humans would get injured. Except, of course, for the poor man or woman you've sacrificed as bait. Why do I feel this is evidence that Native Americans and burrowers have been at one another for some time? When burrowers take on humans, it tends to be a pretty one-sided battle. They are the lions and we're the zebras. In order for a David to beat a Goliath, they have to game the salient details of what system they're in while figuring out what details are non-salient to winning the game. In this case, winning equals not getting eaten. The Ute's method works and the posse fails because they make the socially unacceptable choice automatically give up a human life every time they get into a conflict with the burrowers. This is why the other tribes know the Ute can beat the burrowers, but refuse to adopt their system. I think the tribe wide adoption of this sacrifice system would probably take some time. No Ute wants to die any more than a member of the posse or member of another tribe does. Furthermore, fine detail of the system and its standardization suggest regular use, which requires time. Lastly, the dissemination of this information across dispersed tribes would require some time as well. In Petty's flick, the whites might be new to the fight, but the implication is that the fight's been going on for some time.

This discussion of people and monsters as lions and zebras might seem odd, but I think it I embedded in the flicks tone and characterization. In keeping with a sort of ecological mindset, the main characters in this flick aren't individual cowboys and Indians. Rather, the film follows groups: the posse, the tribe, the Army, and so on. This is another clever subversion of the classical Western paradigm and its discontents. If the classic Western is about the Great Man – be it the noble sheriff or the restless anti-hero – and the various spaghetti and pomo Westerns are about what violent jerks Great Men can be, then Petty's evodevo-Western deemphasizes the role of individual altogether. As in the Ute's sacrificial counter-attack move, the lives of individuals account for little. The bloody process of adapting is the star of the movie. If Ford's great Western vista's suggested a monumental stage appropriate to the passions of his titanic characters, Petty's wide-angle landscapes shrink his characters. The landscape suggests their insignificance. They become a near mirror image of the burrowers: marching lines of ants to match the locust-like swarms of monsters. Its perhaps the sweetest irony of the film that Petty dresses this extremely foreign conceptual approach to horror in the sheep's clothing of America's more familiar genre.

I suspect most fans of the Western will treat this with the same befuddled disdain that greets films like Dead Man and Walker. Though, in many ways, The Burrowers will be even worse for them because, unlike those two flicks, there are few visual cues to tip viewers off to the weirdness at the films core. To steal the words of C. S. Lewis, trying to sell this flick to the nostalgist will be trying "to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay." Because, at its base, it isn't a Western. It is a thoughtful, surprising quiet, and pleasantly unsettling horror flick that happens to take place in the old West.

Plus, it contains one of the funniest add-ons I've ever seen. The DVD comes with a little featurette containing an interview with a woman who plays one of the burrowers. This monster actor's praise for Petty's direction is brilliant and suggests how different the art of being monstrous is from any other sort of acting. Be sure to check it out.

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