Friday, February 4, 2011

This Is A Picture Of Two Women Acting Normal

Here's a question:

If, as we've been told, we've been wrong, wrong, wrong, and there are no cults (or even cultish thinking) within what's been called "mainstream" society, why is the Sundance Film Festival all of a sudden filled with movies about the phenomena?
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's little sister, Elizabeth, starred in Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene, a nonlinear thriller about a traumatized, voluptuous escapee from a Manson-esque sex cult. It was picked up by Fox Searchlight,...

The boom-time mania on the ground was matched by a different kind of collective lunacy on screen. Cults and other spiritual rebellions were a big theme this year — not only in Martha and the Lost-like Sound but also in Vera Farmiga's crowd-pleasing women's picture Higher Ground, Kevin Smith's scattered genre-fuck Red State, and Miranda July's spacey-comic The Future, which, like Jeff Nichols' humorless Take Shelter, turns the angst of frustrated 35-year-olds into fodder for surrealism.

When asked about this mystical trend at a Q&A for Sound, Marling noted that "a cult is an instant way to find meaning." Or, to quote the narrator of The Woods, Matthew Lessner's psychedelic satire of hipster back-to-nature idealism, "It felt good to believe in something other than myself. And I figured, at the very least, it would make for a killer blog entry." The only Sundance film about cults that could actually have life as a cult film, The Woods has the greatest comic insight into why our current culture might inspire a search for meaning in the first place.
So what's our answer to the question?

Y'all are in major denial.

5 comments:

  1. How does a boom in mainstream movies about cults prove that the public is in denial about cults?

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  2. The question should be "How does a boom in mainstream movies about cults in mainstream society prove that the public is in denial about cults?"

    Because there's no discussion, or concern, what-so-ever about cults working in mainstream America - only denial it's happening and the claim people are just being "spiritual". Movies are finally reflecting back on society that which it cares to avoid, but can't any longer.

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  3. I'd like to join a cult only I can't find one bent on conquering the Earth by using pods to create soulless human duplicates.

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  4. BTW, the one on the left has a goodlooking face but she's kind of heavy.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Here, I do not actually consider it is likely to have effect.

    ReplyDelete

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