IMPERATIVE CATEGORIES

The categories I introduce today have become more or less "imperative" because I've reviewed so many items on this blog that at times I myself lose track of some of the more obscure items I've covered. Hence, fourteen new categories will be added to new and old reviews over who-knows-how-long-a-time, so that I can easily remind myself which musty old Eurohorrors or chopsockies I've analyzed. These will be in addition to those already established, most of which involve my NUM formula or theories about the four mythoi of fiction. Most of the new subject headings should be self-explanatory, concerning various departments of popular culture or phenomena therein. Two or three new headings build on things I've written on the other blogs, but I won't trouble to delineate those since they concern my overall critical theory and will be of no use to the casual reader.

A PAGE TELLING HOW TEN BECAME TWELVE

So I just spent the whole afternoon purging this blog of the tags for both the naturalistic and uncanny forms of the former trope-category "outre outfits, skills and devices." In their place, I've substituted six separate categories, respectively the naturalistic and uncanny forms of "outre outfits," "superlative skills," and "diabolical devices."

Over the years, I began to become dissatisfied with this portmanteau category. I've done it with other categories when I thought there was a necessary connection between at least two trope-subtypes. For instant, the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ is a dream in the mind of a focal character, while the movie of PRINCESS BRIDE is a fictitious story that never pretend to be anything but such. Yet both the "delirious dream" and the "fallacious figment" work on the spectator in the same manner, IMO-- both in the uncanny and naturalistic modes.

I know exactly why, when I formulated the ten tropes back in 2009, I *thought* there was a necessary connection between uncanny and naturalistic versions of "outre outfits, skills, and devices." I saw them all as projections of a given character's power, and I'm sure two of my main models were Batman and Tarzan. The first is defined by what I now call "an outre outfit" and "diabolical devices," whereas the latter is defined by "an outre outfit" and "superlative skills." If I gave it enough thought I could probably think of a character defined by all three as well.

However, the awkwardness of linking the three tropes together is that it can be difficult to sort out which ones are being indicated. For instance, Poe's story "The Pit and the Pendulum" is all about a diabolical device, and that device defined the power of its villainous makers, what Poe calls "the black-robed judges," though these characters are never seen, only spoken of. And given that the compound contraption of "pit-and-pendulum" is all that defines them, it seemed increasingly inaccurate to associate such characters with characters that sported unusual attire or skills.

And that's how my ten tropes morphed into twelve. I don't intend to correct any of the earlier reviews that used phrases like "outre skills" or "outre devices," but will just move forward from now on.

A PAGE OF NON-EMPIRICAL RATIONALE-RUMINATIONS

Having received a comment about defining the terms herein, I see there's no single page that really covers them all, so here goes:

Like the header says, my first priority is to talk about how the elements of various types of shows tend to fall into one of three phenomenalities: naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous. I recently conceived of them as three concentric circles. The innermost circle is the sphere of everything we pattern directly on perceived reality, both in cognitive and affective terms. The midmost circle is about the same size, because it reproduces all the same cognitive patterns, but the affective patterns suggest the larger-than-life without actually violating the limitations on what the audience dominantly believes to be naturalistically possible. The third circle, the marvelous, is actually as close as we can get to an infinitely expanding sphere, since the creators of the marvelous combine cognitive and affective patterns both from perceived reality and from conceived reality.

Mythicity denotes how well each story deals with symbolic discourse. I distinguish four levels-- poor, fair, good and the very rare superior (BLADE RUNNER, for example).

What I term the Fryean mythoi are four patterns of storytelling I adapted from the works of Northrop Frye, and these are based on what sort of conflict is most important to the story: that of the adventure, the drama, the comedy and the irony. Again, almost impossible to sum up without reference to the other blog.

Having heard that Joseph Campbell's heirs might be a bit on the litigious side, I might someday have to drop the references to his work. But to me his best insight stems from his "four functions," which were meant to address the types of knowledge encoded in myths: cosmological (dealing with physical reality), metaphysical (dealing with whatever is believed to underlie physical reality), psychological (dealing with the individual's internal dynamics), and sociological (dealing with the dynamics of the society). I've termed all of these "epistemological patterns" because they deal with analyzing the nature of knowledge in fiction-- which is, to be sure, not homologous with the nature of knowledge in philosophy and other forms of alleged non-fiction. In some ways I think the insight might be even more relevant to literature than to religion, myth and folklore, but since Campbell didn't choose to devote much attention to literature I decided to apply his criteria here for the sake of an experiment-- even if it means I can't ever reproduce the experiment, say in book-form.

DOWNSIZING AGAIN

Hmm, just two months ago I changed to reviewing three films per full week each month.  Yet even that is keeping me away from some of my other projects.

Starting with February I'm going to be looser about how many films I review per week.  I'll shoot for at least two, though there may be times when I get caught up on a project as with the recent NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET reviews.  But my FANTASY FANE blog is wilting away for lack of attention, and I really need to devote more time to it.  I said at the start of this blog that I knew it was entering an arena amply crowded with hundreds of other film-review blogs.  My main purpose was to use films to work out aspects of my lit-crit theory-- and while there will always be further aspects to explore, they'll just have to wait awhile.

Possibly I may alternate "loose" months with "tight" month this year as time permits.

SLIGHTLY GREATER DOWNSIZING

A little over a year ago, I downsized my frequency of reviews down from "one for each day of the month" (which started in Oct 2011) to "one for each weekday of each month."  Since I feel that I've covered a lot of the essential ground I needed to cover to explicate my Ten Tropes, and the movie-blog takes away from a lot of other things I'd like to do, my new minimum will be no less than three reviews for each full five-day week on the calendar of a given month.

I may end up doing more than twelve reviews at any given time, but starting this month twelve will be my current minimum blog-rate.

SLIGHT DOWNSIZING

With the completion of my reviews for September, I've completed a full year of my current regiment, which, as announced in October 2011, was to supply a "month's-worth" of reviews for metaphenomenal (or somewhat related) works for each ensuing month.  Assuming I didn't miscount, each month should review as many movies (or TV compilations) as there were days that month.

But it is somewhat of a strain, since I manage two other blogs, one of which I've barely worked on these past months.

Having achieved my "personal best," then, I'm downsizing the frequency of reviews.  I've seen some blogs that confine themselves to posting once every weekday. I may not do a post on every weekday, but at present I'm planning to do as many reviews a month as that month has weekdays.

In addition, this will help me to quell the insane completist part of me that wants to chime in on every single metaphenomenal film/teleseries I see, regardless of whether there's really much to say about them.  Just as one's body can always devour calories far more easily than it can exercise them away, one can always see more sheer *stuff* than one can find time to review.  As much as I like the idea of doing my own compilation of What's Metaphenomenal and What's Not, I probably never will.  At best this blog is, like many such, a diary of thoughts theoretical and otherwise.

TERMINOLOGY UPDATE

Over on this post at the Archetypal Archive,I've formulated a category I term "the combative" to denote those types of narratives that emphasize the Kantian quality of "dominance."

I won't explore any of that here, but I decided that over the next week or so, I'll add four new labels that pinpoint when this quality appears within (respectively) the four mythoi of adventure, comedy, drama and irony.

I don't expect to making reference to the term within the context of reviews here; it's strictly for use on the Archive.  The four new labels will be

Combative Adventures
Combative Comedies
Combative Dramas
Combative Ironies

LECTURE TO AN EMPTY HALL

Just by way of keeping track of some alterations in my terminology...

Up to this point I've been writing labels for each of my ten tropes without specifying whether or not, "amphibians" that they are, a specific use is either "naturalistic" or "uncanny."  Last weekend I decided to correct this.  Now all ten will be labeled with either the letter "n" or "u" to signify their status.

An example can be seen in this double-review of NABONGA and THE SAVAGE GIRL.  Both films show female jungle-castaways palling around with apes, and so both participate in my category, "astounding animals."  However, SAVAGE GIRL never passes beyond the most mundane level of this foundling-myth, as I observed:

...despite her being loosely patterned on other, more extraordinary jungle foundlings, Nameless Girl doesn't measure up as an uncanny heroine despite wearing an "outre outfit," and the natives in her bailiwick lack any exotic tropes, despite the script's hilarious allegation that they practice "voodoo."

By contrast, though Doreen, the heroine of NABONGA, isn't much more exotic than Nameless Girl, she at least seems to have some perternatural bond with the ape Samson, which puts her a little closer to the Tarzan myth.  Samson himself seems a little more unusual too:

...Samson, because he is at once an ape and yet seems like something more as well, does qualify for the trope of "astounding animals," and shifts this otherwise routine film into the realm of the uncanny.

 As I've retrofitted the review now, SAVAGE GIRL has (n) versions of the two tropes "astounding animals" and "outre outfits skills and devices," while NABONGA has (u) versions of the same, in that both Samson and Doreen's outfit carry a valance that I recognize as uncanny, or metaphemenal only in the affective sense.

Before my weekend revisions, the name of the second trope was "outre outfits skills and weapons," for this category was designed principally to account for the affect produced by heroic figures who were not marvelous and yet were more than simply naturalistic, such Tarzan and Zorro.  I recently decided, however, that such heroes may on occasion use "devices" that are not technically "weapons."  For instance, if some James Bond imitator makes use of a remote spy-eye that's a little ahead of the technology of the time, that item would not be a weapon as such.  Yet it could, under the right circumstances, confer a degree of the uncanny upon the spy's adventures, even if that spy never shared Bond's arsenal of exploding cufflinks and so on. 

I also revised the category formerly listed as "enthralling hypnotism and stage magic" to read "enthralling hypnotism and illusionism."  I was specifically thinking of a handful of movies which sometimes invoked "stage magic" as an element of the uncanny, though of course not all movies containting stage magic invoke these elements.  I decided that "illusionism" was a better term, for there are also films in which characters may create illusions through methods allied to the methods of stage magicians, without the former actually being anything like stage magicians.  It seems to me that I've seen a few "ninja films," for example, in which the ninjas are shown to be masters of illusion rather than possessing any genuine magical powers.  Thus a ninja-film that used illusion to stimulate the aura of the uncanny would be an uncanny expression of this trope. 

LURKERS ON TWO THRESHOLDS

The "lurkers" of the title are the same as the three categories of phenomena for which the blog is named: the ATYPICAL, the UNCANNY, and the MARVELOUS. The two "thresholds" are the interstitial areas between "atypical" and "uncanny," and between "uncanny" and "marvelous." The interrelationship of the three is as linear as time's winged arrow; if there's a way the line can turn into a circle, I don't see it.

I first outlined the particular of "the AUM formula" on my companion blog THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE. Anyone interested in the finer theoretical points can check out all the essays filed under that subject. On this blog I'm concerned with explicating the theory in terms of particular works, mostly (if not exclusively) movies.

Few if any works in other media make for better illustrations of a theory than a movie does. Novels (graphic or otherwise), serial comic books and strips, serial television-- all of these require much more time-commitment than your average two-hour movie, which in most cases is the equivalent of a novella projected on what Bruce Kawin called the "dream screen" of the human consciousness.

My attempts to label works as either atypical, uncanny or marvelous stem from my long-held opinion that there ought to be a good phenomenological basis for labelling a work as "fantastic" or not. In brief, the three categories break down thusly:

MARVELOUS-- those works that break with causality and rational phenomena in some way, be it in a major or minor manifestation of "metaphenomena"
UNCANNY-- those works that acknowledge causality in a cognitive manner but edge into the world of the metaphenomenal in an affective sense
ATYPICAL-- those works that conform to causality and rationality in both cognitive and affective departments

More often than not the category of the marvelous will be pretty self-evident, though there are a few times where its separation from the category of the uncanny is debateable. The more problematic threshhold lies between "A" and "U," because they share elements of "realistic content" (to extrapolate from C.S. Lewis) that can have "realistic presentation" in the case of the Atypical, but "irrealistic presentation" in the case of the Uncanny.

These elements, in turn, I have categorized into ten archetypal arrangements. I won't detail those ten here, but will explain each, over time, by particular example.

These ten "biphenomenal-curious archetypes" would make a worthy subject for an academic book. Since I've no interest in the academic world as such, the only way such a book *might* see print would be if this blog somehow attained some incredible, and perhaps unholy, popularity. The chances of that being infinitesimal, the main purpose of the blog is for me to sort out my thoughts on these matters.

Two other concerns of literary morphology will be mentioned in my short analyses of films: the concept of *mythicity* and the concept of *the Fryean mythos.* The theoretical underpinnings of these concepts will also be found on THE ARCHIVE. Sometimes these concepts may be heavily referenced; sometimes they may be noted in passing.