Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s or Your PhD Program?
mcsweeneys.net
mcsweeneys.net
I remember when faculty tenure review at a major academic institution was being modified to newly include "student success activities" as part of the review process. Essentially, tenured faculty would now be assessed on how much they positively impact the lives of their students. The amount of pushback from faculty on this new criteria was insane and demonstrated the self-centeredness of most tenured faculty. The crying about "academic freedom" would make your head spin.
Then there’s the issue of the fact that the core requirement of the PhD — developing a new idea with merit — is just hard. It takes a lot of time and work to do that in the best circumstances. I liked my department and my advisor and felt that they did the best job they could given their resources, but I was still pushed to my breaking point at times.
however, if we do consider the demon, the movie has this to say about it:
1. A sentence underlined in pencil reads: "Paimon is Male, thus covetous of a male human body."
2. ... We’ve corrected your first body and give you now this healthy male host. ...
maybe the author is trying to say something about the demons masculine preference (it is covetous of, not dependent on - it was in Charlie first) & how that relates to theirs and others experiences in academia when it comes to preferential treatment; and that just male-ness seems to be important absent of any other qualifiers? after all the women in the movie more or less do all the work to appease Paimon - wouldn't the greatest reward as a devotee be to act as his host? maybe i'm crazy but it's been interesting to think about.
[ quotes from script: https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/hereditary-20... ]
Men, especially white men, are by-default bad and women have no agency unless they're overcoming men.
Then again, women are still overwhelmingly the largest consumer spending group and the CEO of Mattel is still a man.
Referencing the Barbie movie wrt feminism is about as laughable as the people who think Star Trek is some post-racial utopia -- even though the bad guys are still mostly dark-skinned and virtually every alien race is a monoculture.
It's Gerwig who claimed the movie is a feminist film and the critical reactions to the movie with regard to feminism are very mixed.
Totally not relevant to the discussion.
This is an argument that you put in my mouth.
I just said that the comments from the production-side of the movie were braindead and sexist.
This is all a conversation that _you_ wanted to have.
It is in fact, a humorously ironically relevant argument.
Only if you're in that middle-class, ultra-consumerist "girl-boss" demographic that the movie is marketed/trying to appeal to. That message is largely lost at the margins, as is typical in "pretty, white feminism". You're ignoring the elephant in the room -- any empowerment message takes a back seat to the goals of selling tickets and "buy our shit".
Which is fine, because it's a goddamned studio film. Studio films aren't supposed to be what the movie they thought they were trying to make is.
It ends up being so paint-by-numbers that it subverts whatever they might have wanted to do.
But that is not a blanket excuse to diminish everything it says.
My read was similar to yours. At least on the film I felt they actually wanted to make and instead only got to hint at. While the primary storyline is there about a woman’s struggle to promote feminism only to be told she’s disparaging the cause of women; I think the second story is more pessimistic. The scene where the men ask for a share of the political power and are explicitly denied is jarring and frankly outrageously unattended to in the end of the film.
The Ken’s are a metaphor for women and the feminist movement. The Barbies are the men. Which kind of fucking brilliant imo. But they decided to water it down and make the ending about Barbie’s individuality and a joke about her vagina.
On the most abstract level, trashing your moment in the sun to ditch your actual plan and instead make a joke about your pussy is pretty meta feminist though. /s?
That’s... not true of the franchise as a whole, or even any of the individual series.
So, this is hardly creating confidence in your reading of the other works under discussion.
Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.
All of these _villain races_ (which already is a wow conceptually) are portrayed as being dark-skinned.
The list of other prominent villian species is quite small, especially when you have to exclude the Borg, Changelings, Tholians, the Breen.
And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.
These all look “dark skinned” to you?
(No, only Vulcans and Bajorans got that treatment...)
The range and distribution of coloration for races that are mostly antagonistic vs those that are mostly found aligned to the protagonists, at least geo... well, astropolitically, doesn't seem that great, well, except maybe for a bias in the use of blue specifically for Federation aligned races.
That they looked identical (except for the ridged Romulans) because of their shared origin was a quite important point from their introduction.
Appeared in eight of 79 episodes of TOS, and weren't, as a group, “bad guys” (heck, even though they were antagonistic to the Federation , they weren't even the bad guys in some of the episodes thet were in in TOS) in later (in setting) series.
As a series, they are a little more dense in Enterprise, and in Discovery, deapite being setup in the pilot as the main adversary, they end up not being that even in the seasons set pre-TOS (the first season prime adversary is... the alternate Universe Terran Empire.)
> Romulans,
The Romulans are, like Vulcans, predominatly white; exclusively so on screen in TOS, though later shows had occasional non-White Vulcans and Romulans.
> Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.
Not particularly dark skinned.
If you actually look at who the bad guys in episodes (not who the Federation or United Earth’s astropolitical opponents are) if there is one where skin color is even a concept (often there either isn’t one, or its not a being where skin color is an issue), they are usually White.
> And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.
A bad argument made for decades doesn't become better for it.
Just not enough upside for the potential downside.
> I think you need to do some research into how "white people" willingly denigrate themselves and contribute to their own mental health crises.
Thanks for the suggestion. I am aware of this idea but am open to looking at the situation more from this lens. What resources do you recommend for learning more?
A first step is considering that difference can be accepted. "The Illusions of Egalitarianism" by John Kekes is a good place to start in understanding where an egalitarian approach falls short. Because many people in the world are religious, and religious belief shapes much action, you might also want to understand differences between religions, so I recommend "God Is Not One" by Stephen Prothero.
The subject of white denigration is itself polarizing among "white people", which demonstrates a certain white fragility, I suppose. One polarizing book which examines white denigration relative to other groups is "White Identity" by Jared Taylor. In my experience, polarizing books usually get at important points without fully arriving at the main conclusion, so I would recommend you read it carefully yet avoid prejudgement one way or the other until the very end. While I've skimmed its content out of curiosity, I haven't given it a careful read myself, so I'm not endorsing all its conclusions. That said, the main points appear well-sourced (over 1200 citations).
Grasping social understanding is important to understand the relationship between stereotypes and accuracy. On this, I recommend "Social Perception and Social Reality" by Lee Jussim. A key quote from that book is: "[According to the social science literature,] When a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs, perceivers’ expectations lead them to treat targets in accord with those expectations, and targets respond to that treatment in ways that confirm the originally erroneous expectation."
Hope this helps.
And let's be open to the possibility that it feeling like a trope might be an indicator of the situation being truly widespread. When you hear lots of people saying the same thing there's basically two responses: "oh, they're all infected by the same meme" or "hmm... maybe they all really have gone through similar situations..."
Most disturbing movie I've ever seen, by the way. Gave me nightmares for a solid week or two. For about 2 years after I would randomly flash onto a couple vivid scenes and it noticeably affect the rest of my day.
Also, outright comedy horror, which works so well because scares are often adjacent to laughter. Similar tension release, which is what a lot of fans are there for.
This one could just be life in general
As a postdoc, it now feels like somewhere around the 7th sequel to Friday the 13th. Boring and tired, but the writers haven’t gotten bold enough to get really wacky and send me to space yet.
A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical."
I agree. Academic research is not expensive. Today, most research performed in academic environments is about building things. Why? Federal grants (NSF, NIH, DoD, etc.) drive the vast majority of academic research efforts these days. The department with the most federal grant dollars pay their students the best, so you can easily have a history doctoral student getting a $20k/year stipend while a biomedical engineering doctoral student getting a $39k/year stipend. Most (not all) university research being performed today should be performed in structured, professional research institutions, not in academic research labs led by a professor.
A good deal of faculty dislike working on federal grants, but financial pressures from the university demand their participation in the system. This situation creates a feedback loop of frustration, narcissism, and negativity. Perhaps the federal government is exploiting the academic environment by using it as a source of cheap labor. Problem is, the output is often shoddy and takes way longer than it should. Similar to the hospital systems, there's little incentive to fix it from the inside because many people financially benefit from the broken paradigm.
If you're unfamiliar with the Dark Triad [1], it's a psychological theory of personality included three traits: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. I've been left with the impression that the modern academic environment naturally selects for Dark Triad personality traits.
A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, and (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some.
In short, the funding agencies incentivize PIs to just get as much funding as possible and to assign the research to lowly paid students and postdocs. Students and postdocs largely have no funding of their own and are in a vulnerable position here. The PIs have little time to conduct research of their own since they have to spend a lot of their time writing grant applications, etc. PIs who can get the most funding are rewarded the most in this kind of system, since ultimately they are not conducting the research themselves and what matters in the short term is getting a lot of peer-reviewed papers published to appear productive (quantity over quality). It also leaves them with a lot of power over their subordinates, who depend on the PIs for almost everything and cannot readily disagree without jeopardizing their careers.
That said, in my experience, most PIs behave honorably and are decent people, but given the incentives I just discussed, the current system readily attracts PIs who are only good at getting a lot of funding (and not that good at research, experimental design, interpersonal relations, personnel management, developing a unique and narrowly-focused research program, etc.). I intend this criticism to be directed towards the system as a whole and not at any one individual. I think that if the system were different, even the problematic PIs would behave better.
I have a strong feeling that academic research will lose its way since financial incentives attract money-driven faculty and disincentivise the pursuit of fundamental, academic research questions.
On the other hand, you'll get poorly-baked fundamental ideas from the faculty, like the idea that Wikipedia is the best source of knowledge because social consensus is the best way to figure out the truth, an idea which is explicitly advocated by a tenured faculty member at a major university and is clearly false because people are capable of lying. Empirical validation of mathematical models is actually the best way.