momcore

John Rogers calls it "momcore": that particular genre of mainstream entertainment that encourages its consumers to live in constant fear. The example Warren Ellis uses, when he's in rant mode, is the "CSI" episode where someone gets sodomized with a violin bow; Rogers talks about The Bone Collector, where a woman's boiled alive; and I always think of the episode of "Castle" where the murder of the week is a woman found dead on a children's playground, wearing some S&M gear and covered in a thin coat of caramel.

Last time I was at my own mom's house, she watched an episode of "The Blacklist," where James Spader watched from inside a bulletproof panic room as his friends and associates were executed one by one. I came to a bizarre realization: she's more into horror than I am, and I am really into horror. It's just in a format that's more acceptable to her.

Basically, momcore's set when the credits are rolling. The cops have shown up, somebody's picking up the body parts, and the killer's either escaped or is ostensibly dead. Terrible things have happened and now it's down to our new protagonist--the profiler or detective--to figure out what.

It doesn't map onto horror exactly, but one of the other things about momcore is that in order for it to exist, it needs to portray the "normal" world as a much worse place than it actually is. If you look at the raw stats, the crime rate's falling, violence is down, and we as a species are actually doing okay, but the news and momcore insist that Earth's atmosphere is made up 20% oxygen, 40% nitrogen, and 40% Scary People Who Want You Dead. It's actually worse than the typical horror setting.

There's also an element of randomness in parts of momcore that's truly disturbing when you compare it to horror. One of the things that's always leapt out at me about slasher movies in particular, at least ones that use the classic formula, is that it's all about consequences: you can often tell who's going to live to the credits by what they're doing when they're introduced, and a fair few of them begin with a group of people who do something really stupid. The Hatchet series spends the first ten minutes of each movie establishing why you should not go into the swamp, and then the rest of the movie is what happens when you go into the fucking swamp. (Spoiler: dismemberment, usually.)

Momcore, on the other hand, doesn't establish that sense of due consequence. Part of momcore, in fact, is the fear of a capricious and uncaring universe smacking you down for no reason other than that you're there. The Jack Reacher movie, for example, involves a mystery where a sniper kills an extra few people besides his target simply to confuse the investigation. They have nothing to do with the issue at hand and they're just outside on the wrong day.

There's an intersection between these that someone--hopefully me--could figure out how to exploit and in so doing make fighter-jet money. I need to figure this out.