Ostensibly, we don't live in the same world we did even a few years ago, and it doesn't look like we're going to stop changing any time soon. In this sort of climate, can we even agree on much anymore? It seems like everyone is going their own way.
But I do believe there are things we can still come together over. Most notably, we can agree on where reality ends and where fiction begins.
Or can we?
I often wonder about the line between reality and fiction and where it really exists in the stories we tell. Of course one understands that the events we see in the stories we read or watch aren't physically occurring around us at that moment in a way that we can participate in, but there are parts of them that stick with you no matter what happens.
By the same token, advertising and word of mouth reputation can also alter your perception of stories before or even after you've already seen them. This is, after all, why advertising, propaganda, and word of mouth, are so important to sell stories to others. It's difficult to get someone interested via blurbs or elevator pitches, regardless of what experts may tell you. You need to sell "experiences" and "feelings" and such immaterial things, not the stories themselves.
What matters is selling you, not so much reaching you. As someone who has watched a lot of b-movies over at Cannon Cruisers for the last few years, I've slowly realized the difference between what a story offers versus what you are told a story should offer is often immense. Throughout the 20th century, it took a lot of trial and error to get it right.
For an example of this, take 1980s action movies, supposedly stupid films filled with poorly written dialogue that you are supposed to laugh at for being bad. But if you actually watch them you will find this is revisionism crafted by irony-poisoned hipsters.
Action movies tend to be stories where heroism is rewarded, and the heroism is depicted as being larger than life, which requires larger than life action to match. You'll also find the "dumb" one-liners you laugh at actually are funny and clever, meant to make you laugh to begin with. At some point what you were being sold by those you trusted ends up being very different than what you are getting. Take a look at many internet critics from the '00s mocking Schwarzenegger's Commando over things that are meant to be funny to begin with. It is bizarre.
One would then have to question how many other things we have partaken in have been sold to us wrong. Perhaps we have also engaged with stories that were not presented as what they truly are and ends up successfully driving us off in the process?
I say this because of the obvious dumbing down of popular entertainment into fabricated genres that has been occurring over the past century. You need to check certain boxes to be placed into certain shelves in the correct stores. We've actually gone over this subject before. This obsession with classification overrides actual storytelling intent and leads many creators distracting themselves from what is more important in the creation process.
There is no medium or genre that has escaped this problem, just individual creators that know how to work around these unnecessary expectations.
So let us go into a story that falls into this exact crevice.
One such story I wish to talk about is 1984's b-movie favorite, Savage Streets. This film stars Linda Blair in her second most famous role, and for good reason, though I would argue she only really becomes the central character by the end. However, this is a movie that, in this writer's opinion, has negatively suffered over the years due to what it was sold as being and what others still praise it for. Truth be told, if you've seen it then you probably know what I mean. Savage Streets is not really what you would expect it is based on its reputation among exploitation film fans and those who love so-called trash cinema.
First, let us describe what the movie is actually about before we touch on things like reception or general advertisement required to sell it. The story is actually not that straightforward, despite what the poster at the top of the post or the taglines will have you believe.
Savage Streets is about a group of young urbanites in early '80s New York, all of which have no future or respect for the hopeless world they live in. We follow a group of men and a group of women as they collide and their worlds melt down into nothing.
The story starts as we center on the lone father figure in the movie, an inept middle-aged boomer who impotently wags his finger at his emasculated son not to go out on a school night. The son rolls his eyes, sneaks off and changes into his leather jacket, joining his cool friends for a night on the town. From there we see what the world he is truly living in feels like.
And this clueless kid's experience is pretty much our position going into this movie. We are watching a lost, amoral generation navigate a cruel and uncaring world, flailing in their attempts to interact with and understand the madness around them.
This setup tells us everything we need to know going forward, about the city, about the characters, and about what kind of story this actually is.
Our group of male punks soon comes across the equivalent fiery group of modern women and the two exchange heated words after the former almost accidently runs over the deaf-mute sister of Linda Blair's character. At this point it is established these guys aren't all there, but also that the women are kind of lost themselves, drifting about life without any aim. They hate and disrespect each other, though not for any reason in particular.
Eventually, however, they will push each other to the point that one of them will go too far. And then it all goes to hell.
But despite what the poster at the top of the page says, this isn't really a revenge story. It actually shows us both groups like they're gangs ready to clash with each other repeatedly, only instead we see them disintegrating in real time as things continually go bad for them.
Without any glamor was see an uncaring world step aside as one group moves to more vicious acts such as rape and murder, doing them as naturally as they breathe without anyone stopping them. It just so happens that each victim in this spree is someone Linda Blair knows intimately, but she doesn't learn this until near the end of the movie. Until then, the movie is focused on the disintegration brought about by a lack of love or Justice from or towards anyone involved. Things are constantly happening, and getting worse, until a boiling point is eventually hit.
By the last half hour, she has hit her limit, learning from one of the turncoats what truly happened to those she loves (who is then unceremoniously murdered by his own supposed friends) and fresh in the knowledge that the law and all authority figures will not help her, she sets out to take the perpetrators down herself.
This happens around an hour into the movie and what follows is the entire climax. As I said, revenge only really comes into play late.
Now compare this with a Death Wish-style revenge movie. They don't work like this one does, because they aren't the same type of story. The inciting act happens within the first half hour, and the rest of the film is spent seeking Justice for wrongs until the final showdown at the end. It is a very different set of events.
But Savage Streets doesn't do this. It is more interested in the disintegration that leads one to become that type of person that would murder Paul Kersey's family in Death Wish. What kind of a world fosters this sort of behavior? This is a generation with nothing and nobody--no hopes and no dreams and nothing to aspire to besides another dopamine hit before the inevitable overdose. Our main character has nothing she wants to do except live with her friends and family in peace, but she can't have even something simple like that. The world will not allow it.
By the time she goes out for her revenge in the last half hour it isn't quite like Paul Kersey snapping, but more like a long series of events resulting in a downhill slide into a bog of poison. This is what causes her to throw off all care and concern for herself and the law to do what needs to be done. This actually makes the last leg of the film more cathartic than it would be in a proper revenge movie, because it isn't about the revenge itself at this point. It is about doing what no one throughout the movie would do--set things the way they need to be and fix the damage. No one stepped up, leaving this fatherless hopeless case to put aside her ego and embracing her anger with the world into the right channel needed. You aren't necessarily cheering for revenge--you're cheering for this madness to be put right. And by the end, it is.
So while it does have revenge as a plot element and is a movie about Justice, I would be hard-pressed to advertise it the way the movie studios did when it came out. I wouldn't even sell it the way the film's fans do now. This isn't Death Wish and neither is it a "femme fatale" movie with a sexy lead in revealing clothing showing bad men how good women are. Sure, this was directed by the man behind Friday the 13th Part V, but it has little in common with that sort of sleaze. There isn't any sort of triumph at any point in the story.
Linda Blair essentially traps the three (that's right, there are only three) villains using her wits, twisting their vices against them, and surviving by the skin of her teeth. The entire climax is portrayed as, and is, an incredibly stupid thing for her to do on her own, almost ending in her gruesome death. She doesn't celebrate her narrow victory.
But if she didn't act to begin with then who would have?
We all know that it would have been no one. The entire movie proved that to us over and over. They would have continued to escalate in their insanity, hurting more innocents along the way to get their braindead pleasures of vice. Justice needed to be dealt out swiftly and unmercifully to those involved, and it was.
Even the finale of the movie ends with the above graveyard sequence to honor those who died due to this carelessness of modernity. There is no real victory here because none of this should have happened to begin with. Unlike Death Wish, however, Linda Blair at least as her remaining friends and family to help her through this trying time and they can hopefully move on from this. Though, of course, left unsaid is that little prevents this insanity from occurring again in the future.
Because this is the modern world.
I should also go into how one of the taglines is about "the battle of the sexes" or something silly like that. It truly isn't. This would imply each side consisted of one sex purposefully doing battle with the other, when the truth is that there is nothing of the sort happening. Weak people are responsible for letting this craziness happen to begin with.
There are male characters on the good side, some of which even fist fight against the villains at one point. The villains openly assault and violently threaten males all the time just as they do women. It just so happened that it was a female at the end of her rope that they (inadvertently, I might add) antagonize in their spree of terror. Their uncontrolled chaos of malice, lust, and greed, is what eventually led to their downfall. And they were rewarded by the world for being this way, until someone finally acted with Justice against them.
That there were no strong or competent adults to stand up against any of this is the actual tragedy of the picture. Everything would have been prevented with something substantial beyond finger-wagging at those darn youths to just be normal, dang it. The entire movie is about decay, so fat chance of that happening.
But none of this sells movie tickets, does it. You can't exactly fit all of this into an elevator pitch or a catchy tagline.
I would wager if you watched Savage Streets it was either like I did when it was on a late night station back in the day and got absorbed in the lunacy, or because you bought it based on the advertising and were either pleasantly surprised or horribly disappointed with the final result. This is because it isn't quite what it is sold as.
To get straight to it: Savage Streets isn't a gritty action movie. It isn't a "feminist" statement, or whatever that means among modern film snobs. It's not really exploitative: the rape scene is definitely not for the squeamish. It's not really a revenge movie or a thriller either. It's just a story about the youth generation struggling for air and failing in an amoral world of material pleasure-seeking. There is no glamor here.
So how would you even sell something like that? Not only that, but how do you explain it to someone else who might want to know if it's for them? Going on past experience this isn't really the type of thing that comes across easy.
There are times when a short and simple sales pitch is a good thing, but sometimes you need a bit more than that. Sometimes you just can't sell something others might want to buy. That's just the way it is, I suppose.
And we really should be doing more than just selling stories, anyway.
I'm not going to say Savage Streets is one of the best movies ever made, but I do have to say that recently re-watching it for the first time in a dog's age made me appreciate it much more than I did when I was younger. It isn't the sort of film it was being sold as and I couldn't quite understand that at the time.
But now I'm older and am far more used to the tricks and strategies behind basic storytelling and can see the intent for what it really is, I can say it deserves the cult status it has attained. Even if I think it still sold incorrectly most of the time. However, it could never be anything more than a cult favorite, purely because it can't be elevator pitched. This is why they resorted to selling the last half hour as the whole movie.
What else could they do?
It's also a movie that could only have been made at the time it was made. The 1970s were too nihilistic to allow movies where Justice wins gets made, and when they actually did were called "fascist" and any number of juvenile names by elitist snobs who tried to bury them. The 1990s were the age of edited down films which meant it would have been gutted entirely of what it was. Post-Cultural Ground Zero? Forget it. Not in a million years would this ever get made. They would have put everyone in this movie on a list.
Through the packaging of 1980s grit, everyone involved in this piece made a flick that couldn't have existed at any other time without diluting the impact of the story they wanted to tell, of a modern world of madness where Justice is needed more than ever. And it isn't quite like anything else you'll see, even from its time period.
Whether the story it tells is up your alley or not is tough to decide. It is a cult classic for a reason and requires a certain taste for a certain type of move. Though I can say that I like it I don't know how I could possibly recommend it. The movie is a tough watch.
Nonetheless, it is one where the reputation of the piece does not really do justice to what the product actually is, which is the larger point of today's subject.
Not everything can be "sold" or even really marketed as what they really are.
The question arises then about how much out there might we have missed out on because we were sold a false, or misleading, bill of goods? How much of this is also more about perception than it is simply selling things to the wrong audience? Not everything can be sold in today's world, and yet everything has to be sold in order to be successful.
How much of life have we missed out on because we were given the wrong directions to the wrong location? There isn't any way to know how much we could have lost, of course, but it is definitely more than nothing. There is no way we would have seen it all. We can't.
Sort of like last week's New York Ninja, the truth is that we haven't seen it all. There is a lot out there we haven't seen, and will never see.
But I'm not so certain this is an entirely bad thing.
The fact that there is so much out there we will never see or experience, things that might have been great in life, speaks to just how much there really is in this world we will never truly get to do, even if we spend the rest of our mortal lives living to the fullest and doing everything we can. No matter what you do, there will also be an incalculable number of things you will never get to do. There is always more out there waiting to be discovered.
I suppose this post just exists to muse on the sort of thing one might miss by looking at, or being sold things from the wrong, or a different, angle. Perhaps it would do us good to always keep an eye and ear out for that which we might not otherwise consider, one foot in the hope of the unknown and the other in the knowledge that we will never see the full picture. You never know what you will find and where you will find it. Sometimes going outside of yourself can be exceptionally rewarding, sometimes not. I suppose this is a case where it was the former for me.
When I was a kid I thought horror was just slasher movies because of everything shoveled onto my plate when I was younger. I avoided the genre until I went out of my comfort zone and found not only horror that was out of that sector, but also some films in that category that are very much worth watching beyond the drek I had been continuously exposed to. I even covered some of them on Cannon Cruisers.
The point is that you never know what you're going to find out there. As long as you keep looking, who knows what you can come across?
To take a scene from a different, though similar in a lot of ways, movie:
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| "Integrity" is more than closing yourself off to the world around you |
In the world today it is considered being "inclusive" and "welcoming" to create communities around the most trivial things and invite everyone in, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. Sometimes you need to find inaccessible spaces to challenge yourself and expand the scope of your world, to keep it growing. It won't always work, or be successful, but it is always worth trying. You won't always be the person you are today.
The world is an unpredictable, bizarre, and savage, place where anything can happen at any moment. You can hide from it, or embrace the weird and learn from it. Who really knows what will happen next? Definitely not you or me.
The boxes and categories made up during the last century are already falling by the wayside, having long since worn out their usefulness. Soon enough they will be far away in the rearview window before they are forgotten. When that happens will we still be clinging to these failed attempts at filing reality away, or will reconsider the way we see everything? Eventually, we are going to have to make that choice.
One day this will all be over and done. When that happens, where will we be, and how badly will we find ourselves lost at sea? And what will we use to guide the way forward as the current ways die around us?
I don't know, but here's hoping it's something better than the world we're leaving behind. There is so much ahead that it is hard to take in where we are right now. It's a savage planet, but that doesn't mean we have to be at the mercy of it.
We can go far. So let's go there. What's the worst that could happen? All we have to do is keep our perception sharp and our expectations open. That's enough for me.
I'm ready and waiting to see what this new world has waiting for us ahead. Aren't you?
For an even weirder world of mystery, check out Brutal Dreams! Where darkness rules and the light is little more than a flicker in the mist.
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