Ethics Review: Blade Runner 2049; Slasher, season 3, Solstice

Welcome to the ethics review!  The focus is not on the overall quality of the movies, but on the cultural messages they send. 

SPOILER ALERT FOR BOTH REVIEWS

SPOILER ALERT FOR BOTH REVIEWS

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

 

This is a beautifully filmed, utterly creative movie that received rave reviews from critics for magnificent original ideas, dialogue and settings.  It profoundly continues the Blade Runner milieu, allowing us to glimpse some scary futures.  Watching BR49, we ponder the very beingness of AI (artificial intelligence); how it transforms the basic fabric of reality; and we witness how easily we become addicted to AI, when it salves our fragile need to avoid loneliness and achieve intimacy and acceptance.

This being an ethics review, I am going to focus on the movie’s racism.  Two points lead me to this conclusion.

First, all the main characters are White.  Second, there are two secondary Black characters, both of whom fit racist stereotypes.  One of them is the most wicked person in the movie.  He runs an orphanage where many hundreds of children are utterly terrified of him, while they are forced to perform slave labor in subhuman conditions.  This is graphically brought out in an alarming, heart wrenching scene.  The other Black character is a marginalized fixer who can ‘get you anything you need’.  Both characters feed into ‘Black as criminal’ stereotypes.

Someone might say, “The movie is just portraying the effects of racism; that doesn’t make it racist.”  This is a totally absurd argument.  It’s like saying, “We are going to represent underrepresented voices by making them entirely disappear.”

There’s another ethical failure in the movie.  It normalizes child abuse by making it a mere accessory to the plot.  No one in the movie helps the hundreds of enslaved, terrified children presented in graphic detail.  They are left in slavery by the protagonist, a White man focused solely on his own agenda.

Any movie where you’ve got graphic scenes of children being abused or enslaved, and the movie just goes, “meh,”--that’s a major ethical failure. 

BR49 is a brilliant film.  However, in at least two ways, it sends horrendous cultural messages.

 

Slasher (Netflix series), Season 3, Solstice (2019)

 

I stopped watching at the beginning of episode five of Solstice.  I read a synopsis of the rest of it.

In contrast, I watched all of season 2, Guilty Party.  I cringed a few times. But the violence, though utterly horrific, never became disturbing beyond the pale.  A few of the characters were slow-tortured to death in vicious ways, but it didn’t seem gratuitous.  They had done something utterly wrong themselves--in fact, they tortured someone to death.  So you get the awful revenger killing the awful perpetrators in awful ways.  Okay, fair for the genre.

Also, in season 2, I didn’t see a pattern of sexism or racism.  However and importantly, the last kill in the final episode of Guilty Party was racist.  A Black man is forced to hang himself in a noose.  This was completely inappropriate and stains the whole season indelibly.

In Solstice, there’s no holding back with ethical failures.  Totally innocent people are killed in the most hellish ways possible--slow tortures as opposed to quick slays.  Most of the kills are of this nature.  Disgusting without any attempt at feasible justification.

There is also misogyny and racism.

 ‘Slow torture’ is a big deal.  It is distinguishable from the sort of kills you see in, say, Friday the 13th, where Jason takes out victims within seconds.  Slow torture adds a whole new level of diabolical sadism.  It emanates utter hatred, cruelty and infinite rage.

Is this entertainment?  Or is it an expression of what we are becoming in the United States?   There is so much hate and weapon-wielding across our nation.  We’re on the verge of a civil war.

Solstice says, in effect, ‘Let’s stoke that hate.’

Horror movies are supposed to be cathartic.  You encounter the darkness and leave with relief, knowing it’s just entertainment.  You can process your nightmares out. 

Solstice disturbs without catharsis.  The overarching theme behind season 3 is simply this:  a murderous hatred for humanity.

The killer is a god; can carry out slow public kills with impunity, even in broad daylight.  The killer appears with perfect surprise in perfect ambush with perfect strikes.  There’s a sense of unstoppable divine judgement. 

And why is humanity deserving this divine judgement?  In terms of the characters in Solstice, there’s a lurid emphasis on people as petty, selfish, hedonistic, unkind and uncaring.  Combine this cynicism with an invincible god-killer, and you get the message that humanity sucks--and deserves to be brutally slain.

There are kind, good characters in the movie.  Let’s talk about that.  The kind characters, if not tortured, are all prime suspects to be the killer.  They are also either Black or Islamic.  It’s a strange situation.  Apparently we are supposed to feel bad, at the end of the season, when we wrongly suspected some of these kind characters.  Does that make us racist?  And yet, sure enough, Solstice is one of those unusual horror movies where the killer isn’t White.  In fact, three of the four characters of one non-White race turn out to be on the ‘bad’ side of the horror-movie fence.

Season 2, Guilty Party, at least had the decency to spare one person for moral reasons.  Indeed, the killer intentionally lets her live--because she is decent.  Imagine that.

Solstice has no such stopping point.  It’s like the writers and producers got together and said, “Let’s see if we can make our audience revel in the extreme torture of people whose only crime is to have common flaws.

A biology teacher is dissected alive in her classroom.  Why? For the crime of teaching students to dissect embalmed frogs.  A high school student's face is fried off slowly by dunking her over and over in acid.  A woman is hung upside down from a tree and then has her throat slit, because she dared to organize an event to mourn someone murdered by the killer.  The only Asian character, who witnessed her parents die in a car crash when she was a young child, gets drilled through the head.

There’s a lack of even a shred of justification or ethical relief in Solstice.  It’s about hate for humanity, especially women, and inflicting it full stop. 

 

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