This isn’t exactly a review of the documentary Into the Abyss. For one thing, I am only a bit over halfway through it. And for another, it’s not the sort of thing that lends itself to review.

The basic idea is that legendary awesome German person Werner Herzog interviews the people involved with a triple homicide that took place in Conroe, Texas back in the early 2000’s. He talks to the killers, the families of the victims, the police officers who investigated the crime, and others.

The interviews are extraordinary. They are candid, honest, brutal, stark, succinct, and very human. I have no idea what magic Herzog uses to get such perfect footage. I literally cannot imagine how it could be better in terms of the demands of the documentary he was making.

The story could not be more bleak. Two teenage boys decided they wanted to steal a red Camaro (what is it about rednecks and Camaros?). First, they were going to con their way into the home of the person who owned the car and steal the keys and drive off. (Criminal masterminds, they were not. )

But that didn’t work, so they decided they would just kill the person instead. The person being a middle aged housewife who was in the middle of making cookies when she died.

Then then wrapped her in a sheet and dumped her in a lake. But oh no, when they drove back to the gated community where she lived, the gate was locked and they couldn’t get in.

So they murdered her son (and his friend) for the clicker to get the gate to open.

This could not possibly be a better example of the hard cold reality of the banality of brutality. There is absolutely nothing to admire or respect in the crime, nothing glamorous or daring or even intelligent.

It’s just two dumb boys with terrible backgrounds who decided they wanted that red Camaro.

And what do you know, they were between the ages of 18 and 25. (Want to know the real cause of crime? Males age 18-25. )

In every interview segment, you can just feel the bleakness of life in Conroe. This is a place where men going to jail is a regular occurrence. People treat it like it’s just one of those things that can happen to people. So is violence. One guy told of getting stabbed with a screwdriver all the way to the handle and not even bothering to go to the hospital after because he had to get to work.

And he talked about it in such a casual way, too. Like it’s just one of those things.

It is pretty much exactly what happens in the inner cities of the USA, except it’s in small town America.

You know… Real America.

I come from a place not entirely unlike Conroe. Summerside had its share of young men without futures because their chances of employment were so damned slim and their unstable upbringings have made them ill-prepared for life and full of anger at absent fathers and negligent mothers anyhow, so when they get jobs, they can’t keep them.

There’s not nearly as much violence and death, but then again, we’re not Americans. We’re not that crazy. My home town averages one murder per decade.

Honestly, most people just plain don’t have the ambition.

So I feel like I at least partially get Conroe and its residents. I know how that kind of life drives young men crazy. How they get stuck in this state of arrested development, never able to become real men because they can’t support themselves and the humiliation of that drives them into excesses of drugs, drinking, spousal abuse, child abuse, and all the other consequences of “working class” life.

It’s tough to be a working class person in a place with no work.

As you can tell, this is a very dark, depressing subject, and the documentary is certainly taking an emotional toll on me. And yet, I have to admit, I am really enjoying it.

And that’s…. not exactly normal. Part of it is simply my fascinating with crime and its roots. There is so much I want to know about this senseless act. What drives someone to say “Well then, we’ll just go kill her.”? And why these guys? What is it about them that made them capable of something so senseless for so petty a reason? There are a lot of alienated young men who are out of control in the world, but most of them wouldn’t kill anybody in cold blood like that.

But they wanted that shiny red Camaro. I am sure that in their minds, they felt that once they had such an awesome car, everything would be great. That is how young people think. Once you have a car like that, you will be invincible in your awesomeness. All your peers will be impressed, you will get girls, and life will be sweet.

So there is my fascination with crime. And in general, I am attracted to the dark like a reverse moth. I feel like I am the sort of person who can go to the dark places and do what needs to be done. Think the thoughts that need to be thought but that most people would rather not think. Examine the darkness and learn its ways so I can protect people from it. Etcetera.

But also, I think I find things like this documentary cathartic, and hence almost soothing. Something about going deep into the heart of darkness and dealing with the world’s pain and suffering helps me to externalize my own inner blackness.

Art can do that. It can express your inner thoughts for you so that you don’t have to remove that thorn from your side yourself. The natural desire to avoid things that are depressing or sad might just keep you from an experience that will really help you in the end.

Anyhow, that’s my ramble through the brambles for today. Seeya tomorrow folks!@

Tonight, I am going to talk about the movie District 9, but first a few notes.

First, to make this an official Tardy Review, the movie came out in 2009, so this review is 5 years tardy. TR = 5.

Also, as the movie is five years old, I am not going to worry about spoilers. So if you have not seen the movie and do not want anything spoiled for you, spin on.

That business taken care of, let’s get down to the review.

I loved it. It’s a great movie. It kept me glued to the screen the whole time. And that’s not accident, the movie is brilliantly written and produced to be both a very cool (if fairly obvious) science fiction allegory about how we treat refugees and other minorities (damn thing is set in South Africa, for crying loud) and a pretty bitchin’ science fiction action flick with an everyman hero of the “Avatar/Dances with Wolves/a million other movies” type.

You know, starts off with the same prejudices as the average Joe, circumstances force him to work with The Minority, he learns to see them as people and identify with their plight, and he becomes the hero that will save them from the Bad People.

This is always meant well, but it still comes across as slightly racist. Oh, we were all helpless victims until the Great White Hero, the only person in the world with agency, came to save us!

And these were, arguably, the most pitiful of all selected minorities because they are bug eyed aliens who look like the Predator’s uglier little brother. They clearly wanted to make them as visually alien as possible in order to force the audience to identify with their plight and their “humanity” without any visual assistance.

And I really respect that. It really appeals to my deep humanism. It is one thing to identify with the plight of the aliens in Avatar, who are more or less blue-skinned people.

It’s another to identify with the plight of freaky gross insect-ish aliens like this guy :

By the way, just an aside, the movie says there is inter-species prostitution in that world. Now I am a super freaky guy up for all kinds of things, but holy shit, who the hell wants to fuck THAT?

Anyhoo, it’s a great movie. The social commentary aspect is done very well, with a great attention to the details of what happens when people (be they human beings or an entymologist’s wet nightmare) are put in slum-camps, made to live in metal shacks, treated like they are all subhuman criminal scum, given absolutely no way to work for a living and improve themselves, and are expected to just do nothing all day and be glad they are not dead and not cause any trouble.

That just plain does not work. We need freedom, a place in society (besides the very bottom), meaningful employment of our time and energies, and above all, dignity.

When denied that, we react against the conditions of our lives. In other words, cause trouble.

So I quite liked the admittedly fairly heavy handed social commentary via science fiction allegory in the movie. If I agree with the message and it is handled with enough skill to not be TOO abrasive, I do not demand subtlety in my allegorical works. Writers don’t have to hide the message under five layers of obfuscation in order for me to feel like they are treating me like an adult. I am fine with “message” fiction.

Besides, I have a lot of ideas I want to get across in my own works and I might very well want to use fairly obvious allegories to do it. Burying them deep sounds like a lot of work.

How obvious is this movie? The bad guys are called MNU, which stands for Multi-National United. They might as well have just called it EGC…. Evil Greedy Corporation.

But besides being some fairly good allegorical science fiction, like I said, the movie is also a pretty damned good science fiction action flick. The villains are very villainous, the hero, despite being prejudiced at the beginning, is very relatable, and all the bad guys die satisfyingly horrible, gooey, gory deaths.

Damn I am getting bloodthirsty as I get older. It’s not good enough that the bad guys lose, they have to die, and they have to die really fucking hard. SPLAT.

Spoilers ahead! One thing that bugged me is that they never explained how a million buggy aliens with awe-inspiring technology came to be stranded, half-starved, in a mothership hovering over Johannesburg.

It can’t be that their ship malfunctioned, because the good guy alien and his kid start it up and leave at the end of the movie without any problems. Yet at the start of the movie, the aliens are all malnourished and weak and can’t even communicate to the Earthlings right below them. We have to go up there ourselves and cut our way in to find them.

Maybe something happened to their food supply. Having warp drive does not necessarily means they have replicator technology. Maybe they just plain ran out of food, and with the last of their strength, they programmed their ship to find the closest planet that could support their kind of life.

But then again, as the fabulous Felicity would say, I am probably putting more thought into it than the writer(s) did.

It occurs to me, though, that a lot of movies are being turned into television series these day, and I would love to see District 9 turned into a series. I really enjoyed the Alien Nation series. It is exactly my kind of science fiction, the kind that examines society and how it changes.

Admittedly, it would be hard to write one that takes place entirely inside an alien concentration camp. It would have to take place three years after the movie, when the good guy alien comes back from the home planet and Things Change.

Maybe there would have to be some kind of tense truce between the humans and the aliens from the home world, and our heroes would have to balance one alien faction’s desires for revenge on the humans who treated millions of them SO BADLY against the human beings who want to go to war no matter how suicidal that might be.

Yeah, I can see that working.

Anyone know how to pitch a series to HBO?

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!