Thursday, March 26, 2009

Guest Author Mark H. Phillips

Please help me welcome author Mark H. Phillips. Mark writes mysteries with his author wife, Charlotte, as well as his own works. His new book, The Resqueth Revolution, a sci-fi/horror novel, has been getting great reviews.

Cash Anthony, Director and Screenwriter, said:
If you like to be scared until the hairs rise on your neck when you read science fiction, you’ll love this book. Mark Phillips has created a fascinating, scandal-driven scientist in his character, Steven Marks, and he’s put him in a more-than-adequately evil world. Even the skeptical will be disturbed by dialogue like, “You’ve brought meat.” A great read.
Mark has a BA from the University of Illinois and an MA from Northwestern University, both in Philosophy. Currently, he teaches pre-calculus and political philosophy at Bellaire High School in Houston.

The Resqueth Revolution is both scary and mesmerizing. The opening chapter will capture you. If you’re a wimp like me, though, you’ll lock the doors while you read.

Welcome Mark!

How, When, and Why to Write About Violence – Part 3

We ended our discussion yesterday with the example of the victim-hero and I’d like to continue with a few more thoughts on that before moving on.

This trait of victimization as a necessary prerequisite for justified violence even plays out in our international relations, with sometimes tragic results. Remember the Alamo, the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. I’ve read history texts that make out a semi-plausible case that Churchill and Wilson practically invited the Germans to sink the Lusitania as a way to draw the U.S. into WW I. Robert Stinnett in Day of Deceit amasses considerable circumstantial evidence that FDR knew about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor well in advance from decrypted Japanese transmissions, and deliberately withheld that information from the military in Hawaii. Washington rerouted carriers to put them out of harms way and mysteriously canceled exercises in the areas through which the Japanese navy planned to travel. The implication is that FDR needed a dastardly enemy sneak attack to motivate the American public out of its isolationist inclinations, and that he arranged the situation accordingly. The Internet is full of bloggers convinced that both the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks were false-flag operations perpetrated by our own government to make the public more amenable to our leaders’ agendas.

Whether any or all of these are true or not is irrelevant to my point. Those who write history into existence with their policy decisions and those who distort history with paranoid interpretations are manipulating the same plot devices used over and over in violent fiction.

One last approach to violence is the most disturbing for many people.

There seems an ever-growing portion of our population who simply revel in gore: the fans of the most grisly special effects of slasher and horror films, the fans of the novel and short story subgenre called splatterpunk. This sort of extreme blood lust is exhilaration in violence not very distinct from sexual lust. Many before me have noted that, unlike most other horror films, when the slasher approaches his next young female victim, we often see through his eyes. In a slasher film the director encourages us to identify with the hunter, not the hunted. The filmmakers often portray the female slaughteree as loose or morally suspect in a way that is inviting the killer. It is not at all different from crude rape pornography where the woman “invites” her rape by wearing sexy clothes, or being a haughty tease. Slasher films seem designed to satisfy the vicarious psychopathic revenge fantasies of loser teen boys spurned by the cheerleader. Hollywood, to the consternation of many, is eager to provide such visions to a young demographic with disposable income. It has made billions of dollars mixing sex and violence into ever more exciting/disturbing combinations.

Those of you who believe this phenomenon is a sign that our civilization is tottering may be right. But other generations have had the same reaction to the reading material favored by their own teen psychopaths. Go back and look at the lurid sex/violence combinations of the cover art of the old pulp magazines from the 1920s through the 1940s. Go back and look at the gruesome EC horror comics that were so popular in the 1950’s and caused a nation to crack down on comics in a witch-hunt analogous to McCarthyism. The psychopaths who read that material are your parents and grandparents who wouldn’t be caught dead going to a slasher film. Maybe it’s something that teens grow out of. Maybe it’s something that civilization helps us bury, but is always there waiting to reemerge.

We live in a culture that is still working out its relationship to violence. For all I know it is endemic to the human condition. Perhaps all civilizations, perhaps all individuals within their own souls, must work out the balance between the bloodlust of the savage and the revulsion to violence of the ethically sophisticated. We writers should explore these tensions creatively. Fiction writers must learn to surf the currents of tension within their culture and within themselves. The bigger the tensions the more opportunities to elicit emotion and insight. Want to be a popular writer? Let the current take you in the currently accepted patterns. Want to push the envelope? Then get out ahead of the cultural wave and cut a new swath—you might even get to contribute in some small or even large way to the ongoing cultural solutions to those tensions. Perhaps you will be able to strike a new and more satisfactory balance between the pleasures of the outer civilized citizen and the inner barbarian.

Thank you so much, Mark.

I've only been to one slasher film. Years ago, my now-husband took me to see "Last House on the Left." We didn't stay long before we got up and walked out.

Be sure you go over to Char’s Book Reviews for a give-away tomorrow. You can buy The Resqueth Revolution on Barnes and Noble.Com or, if you prefer, Amazon.

I'm sure everyone noticed that this was Part 3 in Mark's violence series. You can still read Parts One and Two of the complete violence series:
But before you race off to buy your copy, leave a comment or question for Mark.
My first question would be: What do your high school students think about The Resqueth Revolution?

31 comments:

  1. Thanks for hosting me today Helen on your excellent and wonderfully named site.

    Not all slasher films are horrible--several of the Nightmare on Elm St./ Freddy Krueger films have some style, houmor, and pinache.

    I've gotten a lot of positive response from my students, at least those of them that read. A disturbing number of them simply never read for pleasure, and I teach the advanced academic track Juniors and Seniors. They are consumed with the desire to appear literate but not to be literate---they pour endlessly over SAT vocabulary lists, while I, in vain, try to convince them that it would be easier and far more pleasurable to read some Jane Austen or Nathaniel Hawthorne.

    By the way, having mentioned Jane Austen in a comment on this blog about violence, your readers might be interested in this item. I haven't read it yet, but it fascinates me as a cultural phenomenon. There is a new edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice supplemented with new text detailing Elizabeth Bennett's desperate and ultra-violent struggle to fight off hordes of rampaging zombies. If you think I'm kidding, go to Amazon and look for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Maybe that will get my students interested in reading again.

    Mark

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  2. HAD to read this last part of the series after getting hooked on part 1 and 2 :) As usual, very good, very cerebral appeoach to the primal.

    My question is how does your MOM like Resqueth?

    Marvin Wilson
    http://inspiritandtruths.blogspot.com/

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  3. Elizabeth Bennett and zombies -- that's funny. Also difficult to imagine!

    It's too bad that today's high school students feel such pressure to get into college that they bypass reading for pleasure (and knowledge, in the process). If they don't love to read by high school, they may never develop the passion since after high school comes work and that's even more time pressure. This isn't to say they absolutely won't find time to read for pleasure. They may. I hope they do.

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  4. Good question, Marvin! I want to hear that answer, too.

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  5. After a while I think we become more immune to violence in movies. It takes more to scare us. The problem is when people get movies and real life mixed up in their minds.Some people can't separate make believe from real.

    Morgan Mandel
    http://morganmandel.blogspot.com

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  6. Hi Marvin,
    My Mom loved it. She was one of my first beta readers. She's not a science fiction fan, but even she got caught up in it. On the other hand she was ecstatic about that macaroni art I made in the first grade, so she might not be my harshest critic.
    Mark

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  7. Hi Helen,
    I too hope they become readers. We live in such busy times, our critical time to read is too often the thing that gets sacrificed to the exigencies of the moment. I was teaching at a local community college and I had made friends with a number of the literature profs there. One day I was sitting in the teacher's lounge reading Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables (one of my favorite books of all time). Three literature teachers, independently, saw what I was reading and asked me what class I was reading that for. Their underlying assumption was that the only time anyone would read a book they loved and admired was as an assignment for some class. It never occurred to them that anyone would read it for pleasure. I found that so sad.
    Mark

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  8. Hi Morgan,
    Good points. I actually take advantage of the numbing effects of too much exposure. I get so scared when watching horror movies that they are hard for me to sit through. Yet I love them. My solution is to watch a marathon of like ten horror films around Halloween. The first one is hard to watch, but after a while I get so desensitized that I can better enjoy myself. Sick, isn't it?

    People who confuse fantasy and reality can be quite dangerous, but I suspect that there are fewer of them out there than the media would have us suppose.

    Mark

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  9. This numbness also makes teaching more difficult. Kids don't want to sit and learn. They need to be entertained instead. When I was a teacher, I tried to entertain my students while they learned.

    Lynnette Labelle
    http://lynnettelabelle.blogspot.com

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  10. Hi Lynnette,
    I too try to be entertaining when I teach, but it's hard, especially when my subject is precalculus! There are days when I think that the students would still ignore me if I were juggling, standing on my head, and on fire. I just attended training from my school district here in Houston on how to design exciting podcast lessons that the students can download to their i-pods. Perhaps I should add zombies to my podcast lessons?
    Mark

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  11. Marvin,

    Great question! I can attest to the fact that Mom loved The Resqueth Revolution. She read more than one draft, asked interesting questions, and made suggestions.

    I'm not sure if she enjoyed the sci-fi story more than the mystery story in Hacksaw, but didn't make any of those, "my kids aren't supposed to know about such things" commnents like she did for Hacksaw.

    I wonder why she always looked at me when she made those comments? Did she think I introduced Mark to the world we created in Hacksaw?

    Anyway, she loves Resqueth and wants Mark to turn it into a series.

    Charlotte Phillips

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  13. Hi, Mark. Once again, an interesting post. I wish I'd known you taught pre-calc. I could have used your help! My son's struggling with Adv Alg & Calc. I took it in high school, but that was WAY too many years ago.
    As far as the reading goes, I always read to my kids when they were little, but when it became their choice, they always seem to find 'better' things to do. I still read all the time (usually 2 books going at one time). That has rubbed off on my oldest, who is college now. He has discovered reading for pleasure.
    I'm not really big on the slasher movies. So, I can't really comment on the 'lust' aspect of them, but it is obvious in the vampire movies, even some of the very early ones.
    I do agree that we (as individuals & a society) do become immune from the exposure to violence. But I also feel there's a difference between violence viewed on the movie screen & violence witnessed in real life. While most of us can & will simply walk away from a movie & forget the violence the next day, it's much harder to foret violence in your own life.
    Thank you, Mark, for these 3 days of interesting discussion. It's given me a different perspective on how to handle violence in my WIP.

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  14. Hi Queenofmean,
    Thanks, as always, for your insightful comments. I agree about real world violence being different from mere cinematic violence. But there is a spectrum. I find that the more realistic the setting of the movie, the less I am able to watch. I almost cannot watch war movies any more--their reality disturbs me too much. But I know the werewolf picture is only a movie and so its violence doesn't disturb me as much.

    You're absolutely right about sex being linked to vampirism in art right from the start. Explicit vampire erotica is really big right now. There's an excellent anthology of vampire erotica published by L & L Dreamspell called Sleeping with the Undead. I know because, well, I have a short story in there. Beware, it's not for the faint of heart. You have been warned.

    I wish your son good luck with his math. If he has a specific question, have him drop me an e-mail at markandcharlottephillips@gmail.com and I'll see if I can be of assistance.

    Mark

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  15. I agree violence that has happened or could reasonably happen is more disturbing that the 'fantasy' type violence.
    Thanks for the offer of math help. I think my son's biggest problem is he now has a girlfriend. Math? Girlfriend? Hmm, which one is going to win?

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  16. My lovely wife Charlotte wins every time.

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  17. As usual Mark you have out done yourself...I find that I can do without the actual slasher type films but love a good suspense. I don't mind watching people die, I just don't need all the blood and guts. Now Cliff on the other hand won't watch anything that might lean in that direction - says Dark Shadows did him in when he was a kid. Thanks again for sharing these interesting points on violence.

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  18. Thanks Autumn. Charlotte and I are currently working our way through all 1200 some episodes of Dark Shadows. I was addicted as a child, and Charlotte was forbidden to watch as a child. Now we're both addicted and having a nostalgic good time. Does anyone out there remember the other daytime soap that was a direct ripoff of Dark Shadows. It was called Strange Paradise and was set in a voodoo haunted Caribbean milieu. It was a hoot. I'd like to see that released on DVD someday.
    Mark

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  19. All true, but also art imitates life. Is violent cinema/literature dulling our senses to cry out against the violence, or a response to an increasingly violent society? An attempt to desensitize us so we can walk in society rather than cower in a closet? One wonders.

    Either way, one fact remains certain. When looking for sure fire big sellers in cinema, look no further than horror or porn. Or better yet, horror porn.

    --Lisa
    http://authorlisalogan.blogspot.com

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  20. Great comments, Lisa. But, as I argue in my article, past societies were no angels with regards to violence. I've been reading some anthropology concerning pre-civilization hunter-gather societies. In many though not all, the daily exposure to violence was staggeringly large. The life expectancy of Cro-Magnon humans through Bronze Age humans was a depressing 18 years old, and although a lot of that is attributable to disease, injuries from combat was a major factor among males. Modern hunter-gatherer societies in the Amazon basin with little or no contact with modern society often show patterns of daily exposure to brutality that would make a modern citizen blanch. If Queenofmean in the comments above is right about the more devastating psychic effects of witnessing real as distinct from artistic displays of violence, these earlier societies dealt with psychic traumas that would floor us. In medieval times audiences would laugh uproariously at bear-baiting and animals or heretics being burned alive. More recently battles between armies were spectator events. The Battle of Bunker Hill was witnessed by a crowd of well-to-do revelers who assembled on nearby elevations to enjoy the show. Public hangings were social events well into the last century of this country. I half suspect that if I went back in time and randomly selected humans from a wide variety of ages and cultures, they would be utterly amazed at the technology of modern violent movies, but might shrug off the violent content as just the stuff of daily life.
    Mark

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  21. "might shrug off the violent content as just the stuff of daily life." - There are areas here in the U.S. that your statement could apply to as well, not just in foreign countries or in the past.

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  22. It's sad that slasher violence is so popular. It makes me wonder what in our DNA predisposes people--especially kids--to enjoy watching it. Is it repressed anger? I wonder what a psychiatrist would have to say on the subject.

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  23. This was a fantastic blog, I really enjoyed reading Mark's thoughts. Thank you so much for posting them here. I especially enjoyed his views on splatterpunk and slasher films. My husband and I were just talking about subtle differences between horror films and horror novels, and how the gore often has a completely different impact in a novel or short story than it does on screen. I think it's because you control the level your imagination processes when you read, but in a film it's presented to you. If it's really gory in a book, you can tone down the visualization a little, or even increase it if that's your thing. It was interesting to read that Mark thought we were still culturally working out or relationship with violence. It's in interesting concept, considering that historical records link us through the ages to continual acts of gore and violence. Excellent interview. I will have to check out theh other two parts and soak it all in.

    Jenny
    http://theinnerbean.blogspot.com/

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  24. Hi Jean,
    Thanks for your comments. Our whole society may need deep psychoanalysis. Psychology/psychiatry: probably a growth industry for many years to come. But let's put a positive spin on slasher films. Perhaps they are so popular among teen males for the good old-fashioned and entirely laudatory reason that it makes their girlfriends hold their hands and occasionally even welcome a hug.
    Mark

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  25. Hi Jenny,
    Thanks for your kind words. Excellent point about the differences between book gore and cinematic gore. Lack of control makes everything so much more terrifying.
    Mark

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  27. Thanks for hosting me today, Helen. The discusion was a blast. I'll be back to read more of your fascinating blog entries. We received a copy of your newsletter today--the lists of contests will prove most useful. Thanks again.
    Mark

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  28. Mark, your post was thoughtful and very informative. Having you here today was great. Thank you so much for posting and for including Straight From Hel on your book tour.

    Thank you.

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  29. Great post.

    Cynde
    http://cyndes-got-the-write-stuff.blogspot.com/

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  30. Thanks again, Cynde. Have a great writing day.
    Mark

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  31. Thank u :-) look at that emo boy hair on this blog:
    http://emo--boys.blogspot.com

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