Pretty Good Movies With Pretty Bad Endings

            It turns out that writing movies isn’t easy.  As anyone who reads this blog -or, more likely, actually watches movies- knows, there are a lot of pretty bad ones out there.  A bad movie in and of itself is pretty innocuous.  After all, truly, truly bad movies are easy to spot, and most people who watch them know what they’re getting into.  Seriously, nobody in 2014 is watching The Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong without some personal culpability for the act.  Watching the movie is the viewer’s crime and punishment rolled into one.

More insidious, however, are movies that start out promising but just can’t clinch the final act.  These are movies that you get invested in, that you want to like, but in the end they just plain let you down.  With that in mind, here’s the first installment of Pretty Good Movies With Pretty Bad Endings.  These are two films that I can honestly say I liked 90% of, and one of them is near and dear to a buddy of mine.  Unfortunately they both have unforgivable endings and must be brought to justice. Needless to say, spoilers abound. 

The Last Broadcast (1998) – Despite being overshadowed by The Blair Witch Project, this was one of the films that sparked the “found footage” revolution in horror movies.  With a budget of reportedly just $900, filmmakers Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler managed to create a film with a surprisingly effective and suspenseful atmosphere.  Shot in the style of a TV documentary (think “Sightings” or “Forensic Files”), The Last Broadcast details the violent deaths of a pair of public access TV hosts (played by the filmmakers) in the remote pine barrens of New Jersey.  The two men were filming an amateur hunt for the mythical Jersey Devil, only to disappear and later be found horribly mangled in a veritable ocean of blood. A local weirdo and self-styled psychic was with the men at the time of their deaths, and given his history of erratic behavior –including no small amount of it caught on film – he was eventually convicted of the crime.

The film’s narrator (remember it’s a “documentary”), in a brilliantly executed “Unsolved Mysteries” style, hints at a supernatural explanation for the killings.  Some of the early evidence seems flimsy and this adds an effective level of verisimilitude.  More than once I found myself forgetting that it was a film and arguing with it as if it were intended to be a presentation of facts.  Slowly, more compelling evidence begins to surface, and the viewer is drawn into the notion that there may be something unnatural lurking in the woods.  It’s a great premise, and it’s a lot of fun watching the mystery unravel…until the last five minutes.

            The third act of the movie constantly references a piece of video from the night of the murders that’s being restored by a media expert.  When it finally comes time to see this image…it’s the documentary host.  Suddenly the film switches to cinematic camera angles and the apparently evil narrator slap-fights the media restoration tech before suffocating her with a piece of plastic.  Then he drives back to the woods and keeps filming the documentary.

Fade to black.

The viewer is left to wonder: Is this guy a serial killer?  Is he working with some supernatural force out in the woods?  Is he the Jersey Devil?  Why the hell is he making a confessional documentary, let alone one that beats around the bush so much?  If he knows he did it, why the hell does he act surprised when it’s him in the video?  What does any of the preceding 95% of the movie actually mean now that this plot twist has come up?

 I'm sure this all sounds like I'm just poking fun at a cheap indie film, but that's just not true.  The Last Broadcast flirts with being great, but the ending is catastrophic.  The sad fact is that the climax of The Last Broadcast effectively renders the rest of the film nonsensical.  The ending of this film would be a howler if it were attached to a bad movie, but given that the rest of the movie is actually good, the boner of an ending is doubly disappointing.

The Lords of Salem (2012) – By far the best of Rob Zombie’s films, The Lords of Salem hearkens back to the weird “coven of witches” genre that briefly existed in the 1970s.  Taking all of the best queues from films like Rosemary’s Baby, and The Wicker Man, The Lords of Salem is a disturbing, uncomfortable film that benefits immensely from its surprisingly effective cinematography. It also has an oddly likable cast, anchored by Sherri Moon Zombie but also including the always-welcome Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead fame.  The film centers on radio DJ Heidi Hawthorne (Zombie) whose life is upended by a mysterious musical album that fills her head with frightening demonic visions. The film becomes increasingly bizarre throughout, and by the end it’s not always easy to tell what’s meant to be real and what’s meant to be hallucinations and fever dreams.


            All of this works pretty well, and the movie is certainly enjoyable, although some of the plot elements are arguably a bit predictable.  The film’s greatest strength is its refusal to go for the cheap scare; there aren’t really any “jump scares” or silly tricks like that to be found.  Instead, Heidi’s world becomes progressively stranger as the evil influences pressing in upon her intensify.  There are scenes in Heidi’s apartment where there are gruesome monsters simply lurking in the background, with no musical stings or camera tricks to call attention to them, while Heidi is seemingly so entranced as to pay them no notice.  This approach feels pretty original and works nicely.

            By the time the end of the film draws near, the viewer probably has a pretty good idea of what the long and short of the climax will be…and then, even as the expected ending comes to fruition, we’re subjected to…a music video?  The viewer is aware that Heidi has become the vessel for the Antichrist, but this is expressed by way of goony montage sequence featuring Heidi writhing around on a stuffed goat, lots of shots of religious iconography being warped with Paintshop Pro effects, and just a smidge too much strobe light.

If the triumph of evil over good really does come down to a bunch of 1990s rock video tropes presided over by some rhythmically masturbating monster-popes, then good needs to redouble its efforts to make sure that never comes to pass.  The trippy ending of The Lords of Salem doesn’t ruin the movie, but it undeniably takes away from it. 

Bronies in the Mist pt III - How Bronies Think They're Perceived By Outsiders

It would not have been unreasonable for readers to conclude from the wrap-up of the previous post that this post would be up relatively quickly.  That being said, I'm nothing if not easily distracted - Between having to go out of town for work and then taking a vacation with the Wife for our first wedding anniversary, it would not be entirely untrue for me to say that I kind of forgot about my Brony research for a while.  That being said, I'm now back again and ready to soldier on.

In Which We Discuss the Wording of Questions and Answers
I've never been a fan of 5-point responses to survey questions.  You know what I mean: "Rate statement X on a scale of 1-5, where 1 means that you strongly disagree and 5 means that you strongly agree."  It's not that I have any evidence to back up my dislike of them, it's just that they irrationally bother me.  Thus, when I was designing the questions used in my Brony study I had a notion that I would leave them largely open-ended, the better to get more precise data.

This was an error.

I say this because many of my survey questions were poorly worded to the point of clearly confusing the respondents.  Furthermore, when I decided that I would use graphs to represent the answers, I found that having that nice 1-5 agree-disagree scale would have been hugely preferable to trying to manually categorize freely worded answers.

For example, the question we'll be discussing to today ought to have been worded thusly: "Bronies are unfairly thought of in a negative light. Do you agree or disagree with this statement?".

It was, unfortunately, worded like this: 'Do you feel Bronies as a group are stigmatized on the internet or society as a whole?"

That's...well, that's just pretty terrible.  In addition to the fact that it's actually two questions ("Are Bronies stigmatized on the internet?  How about in society as a whole?"), it was so open-ended that the responses I got varied in length and content to the to degree that it was not at all easy to categorize them.  Here are two sample responses:

From Respondent 6, a 14 year-old male:

A little.

Certainly to the point, maybe indicating weak agreement on a 5-point scale.

From Respondent 7, a 36 year-old male:

I'm not going to say that. For various perspectives to be optimally told. I could simply say that bronies are the most misunderstood part of the fandom. Hate groups or people are in fact out there. We can be as loving and tolerant all we want but that currently is a fact we cannot deny. But hate is really just living and judging things based upon a lot of things that funnel into this thing called ignorance, and what is ignorance other then ignoring your own insecurities and fear and not thinking.

That's a response that requires a bit more unpacking.

Do Bronies Feel That They are Portrayed Unfairly?
Be that as it may, I have attempted to categorize all of these responses into four categories for ease of graphing.  "No" and "Unsure" seem to me to be self-explanatory.  Looking at Fig. 4 below, you'll then see "Somewhat" and "Yes".  Answers which were placed into the "Yes" category were unequivocal in stating that the respondent felt that Bronies get a bad rap wherever they go.  "Somewhat" implies some degree of equivocation - specifically, a number of respondents stated that they believe Bronies to be looked down upon on the internet, but that the average "real-life" person has no opinion about them.

Fig 4.  n=64

Because of the artificial groupings I had to impose upon the responses in order to graph them, these numbers are necessarily even less scientific than those presented in the previous section.  That being said, I think we can still see that a significant majority of respondents would agree that to at least some extent Bronies are the victims of negative stereotyping.

This is borne out to some degree by the occasional appearance of negative news reports about the subculture in the news media.  For example, a host on a FOX affiliate once famously compared Bronies to "baby lifestyle" fetishists.  Internet humor sites such as Cracked, as well as pop culture oriented sites such as Topless Robot, also occasionally poke fun at the Bronies, although usually in a rather more good-natured way.

Straight From the Brony's Mouth: Bronies Discuss Misconceptions about the Fandom
At this time I think it may be illustrative to allow some Bronies to speak their minds at length.  I had the pleasure of doing in-depth interviews with two of my survey's respondents.  The first was a 20 year-old man who asked to be identified by his forum moniker Antismurf9001.  I asked him what he thought was the most common misconception about Bronies.

Antismurf: While I don't have a huge amount of experience with those that are intolerant of bronies, my guess is that the most common misconception is that we're all homosexuals (which I can confirm to be false, considering that I'm heterosexual).  This is probably a large part of the reason that I choose to not let people know that I'm a brony.

I posed the same question to Ashley, a 20-year Pegasister, and got a similar response.

Ashley: [People assume] That we're all sexually repressed, mentally ill, homosexual, or perverts.  Basically that there's something different or "wrong" about us.  We can't be seen as normal people who happen to be at peace with who we are and who are happy as a whole.

Later on in my conversation with AntiSmurf, we turned the discussion to how expectations of gender roles may or may not color an outsider's perception of Bronies:

Antismurf: I'd say that it's definitely more acceptable for females to like male things than it is the other way around, or at least that's the case in the US....In fact, I'd go so far as to say that women being masculine is now seen as attractive, whereas men being feminine is often the punchline of a joke...It's hard to say whether or not this colors people's perception of Bronies, since there really isn't a masculine element to compare it to.  I can say though, that male Bronies are certainly less socially accepted than female Bronies...Even in the infamous Fox News segment, I believe it was said something to the effect of "Well, I suppose there are worse hobbies for my son to get into...", specifically saying 'son' and not a gender-neutral term such as 'child'.

I asked Ashley a similar question: Does she think that in society it is more accepted for a woman to be interested in traditionally masculine things than for a man to be interested in something that is thought of as feminine.

Ashley:  Yeah, I do feel that. In society, men are supposed to be the head of the household, the strong member of the family who works and holds everyone together. Women don't have that. We stay at home, work, and care for the kids. We're not watched nearly as closely, I think. More people care about what the men do, if they're taking good care of their family and such.

Antismurf also had a message for outsiders who may run into tales of rabidly obsessed super-fans online:

Antismurf: To the non-Bronies, I understand that there are fans that are overly obsessed and/or completely intolerable within the Brony fandom...All I ask is that you please, please, don't assume that every Brony is this way.  I've met some amazing and wonderful people in the fandom, and it really isn't fair to them if you stereotype them as irritants, creeps, child-molesters, and/or jerks.  You don't have to like use, and you certainly don't have to join us, but please don't hate us before you know who we are.

From the interviews I did with Antismurf and Ashley, as well as from the survey responses I received, it seemed pretty obvious that many Bronies chafed at the labels that are sometimes applied to them just because they're fans of a particular cartoon franchises.  Specifically, many of them feel that assumptions are being made about their sexuality or even their mental health due to the "feminine" or "cutesy" nature of the My Little Pony cartoon.

_____
Well, that just about wraps up this section.  I may take a break from the Brony study for a while, although I'm likely to post the full interviews with Antismurf and Ashley at some point.  The fact of the matter is that the bulk of my survey questions were so poorly designed as to be nearly useless for generating meaningful data, so there's not much point in my fist-fighting responses into graphs from which we can't draw many meaningful conclusions.  Regardless, I've had fun working on this little project and I've enjoyed my time amongst the Bronies.  I'm not sure when or if I'll come back to this subject, but I'm glad you chose to join me along the way.
 

Bronies in the Mist pt II - Age & Gender Distribution of Bronies

The first thing I wanted to know as I began to beat a path through the Bronyverse was simple: Who are these guys?  Well, there’s no better way to get an answer than to ask a question, so I posted a (poorly designed) survey on the My LittlePony: Friendship is Magic Brony Forums.  In this post I’ll address the two most basic facets of Brony demography – gender and age.

             

The survey received 49 responses – not nearly the number that I’d hoped for.  At the time of this writing, the membership of the MLP Forum is reported to be 12,753, excluding myself. ¹  This means my sampling size was a paltry 0.38% of the community and is therefore hardly representative.  Nonetheless we shall plunge boldly forward, keeping always in mind that our conclusions must necessarily be tenuous in light of our small pool of responses.

Colts & Fillies – The Brony Gender Gap

In a testament to  my nigh infinite foresight, gender was not a question on the initial survey; it simply did not occur to me that there would be female members of a forum for Bronies.  (Here we see my own preconceptions at work already – hardly promising.)  It was only after the fact that I chose to gather this data, and to accomplish this I used the publically available user profiles of the forum users who responded to the survey.  From this, we see that in 49 respondents we have 41 males, 5 females, and 3 who declined to specify a gender. (See Fig. 1)

Fig 1. - Respondents by Sex.  (n=49)

As you can see from the graph, respondents were approx. 84% male.  Although the sampling size is small, the disproportionate representation of males here is nonetheless interesting.  While I was unable to find data on average gender breakdown of internet message boards, I was able to find a recent Pew study² of overall social media use which indicated that women  are actually somewhat more likely to make use of social media websites than men.  Granted, the Pew studied focused on specific websites such as Facebook and Pinterest and so is only of limited use to us as we compare it to the demographics of a single specialized fan forum, but it still drives homes the striking gender disparity among the Brony survey respondents.

When we add to all this the fact that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is specifically targeted at female viewers, it becomes rather more puzzling that the users of a forum dedicated to the show are preponderantly male.  Perhaps it’s the case that there aren’t more female users of this particular forum because it is specifically known as a Brony forum and females interested in discussing the show assume, as I did, that it is intended solely for male fans.³  I would be curious to know if there are more female users on other MLP forums elsewhere on the internet, but that’s a question for another day.  (At this point it may be worth noting that there does not appear to be an “official” MLP forum anywhere - I looked for one to see if perhaps the  more "traditional" fans of the show are congregated there. There is an official My Little Pony website however, which offers among other things a fetching printable iron-on image of the character Rainbow Dash for free download.)  Of course, it may also be the case that females are simply underrepresented in the sample because of the small pool of respondents.⁴

Looking a Gift Brony in the Mouth – Age Distribution of the Sample

All 49 respondents provided an answer to the survey question “How old are you?”  Of these, 47 responded with a numerical age, while two responded with ranges (for example, “early 20s”).  I attempted to privately contact (via the forum’s personal message feature) both of the respondents who gave age ranges to request clarification – one responded with an exact age; the other did not respond.  Many of the responses did, however, have qualifications or addenda such as stating that the respondent would be “turning 22 in a few weeks”.  In these cases, I used the current age of the respondent at the time of survey, not the projected age.

Fig. 2 - Respondents: Adults vs. Minors (n=49)

           

As can be seen in Fig. 2 above, approx. 59% of survey respondents were adults aged 18 or older.  The lone respondent with a non-specific age is included in this statistic, as they reported  being in their “late 20s”.  I was surprised to see that 41% of the respondents were minors, given the online reputation of Bronies as an older group that remains fairly distinct from younger fans.

Using only responses supplying a numerical age (n=48), we see a strikingly large range in reported ages of some 31 years; the youngest respondents being 13 and the eldest being 44.  The mean age of all respondents was 19.875 – still within the range of my expectations but assuredly at the lower end.  The mean age of female respondents (n=5) was 18, lower than the mean age of males(n=40), 19.8.⁵  However, as we’ll see below, the mean age doesn’t tell the whole story.

Fig 3- Age Distribution of Respondents (n=48)

(Click for larger image)

Looking at Fig. 4, it becomes apparent that the ages of survey respondents largely cluster around the mid-teens to early twenties.  85.42% of all respondents reporting a specific numerical (n=48) are under the age of 25 and 64.58% are under 21.  The mode of all reported numerical ages (n=48) was 14 years. 

Rather than consisting almost entirely of adult males, we see then that this sampling of Bronies is composed largely of teens and young adults.  It appears from the survey data that the mean age of the group is pushed upwards by a handful of significantly older respondents who may be outliers.  A much larger sample size would be highly desirable in order to search more definitively for  patterns of age distribution and to minimize the possible effects of sampling bias; e.g. younger forum users might be more likely than older ones to take a random survey on a message board.

             

To sum up this section, I have to say I was surprised by the demographics of the sample.  I had not expected females to be present at all, so their appearance as even a small percentage of the sample caught me off guard.  It was the age distribution, however, that surprised me the most, as Bronies are typically portrayed online as adult men, when in fact we see that a significant portion of them are in their mid to late teens.

So far I've had my preconceptions of Bronies challenged on both of the subjects I've attempted to measure. That's already pretty exciting and we're still just getting started.  Please join me next time as we discuss the portrayal of Bronies across the web and talk to Bronies themselves about the bad rap they get online.

_______

1.) This is according to a running counter of registered users on the front page of the site.  It was not possible for me to determine how many of these users are currently active in the forum on a regular basis.

2.) Duggan, Maeve and Brenner, Joanna; The Demographics of Social Media Users – 2012. http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_SocialMediaUsers.pdf

3.) I have since learned that adult female MLP fans who associate closely with Bronies are sometimes called “Pegasisters”.  Equine wordplay is in abundance in the My Little Pony community.

4.) I hasten to remind readers once again that these statistics are not meant represent the demographics of My Little Pony fans as whole, merely the demographics of this particular internet forum of self-described Bronies and Pegasisters.

5.) Savvy readers will note that the mean ages of males and females are lower than the total mean – This is because the three “gender unspecified” respondents were aged towards the higher end of the range.

Bronies in the Mist: An Outsider Studies the Internet's Most Misunderstood Subculture

Introduction

Long ago, from the primordial mists of the 1980s, there emerged a toy line and attendant animated series called My Little Pony.  I was a kid at the time, and I remember being aware that this cartoon existed.  I also knew that it was a “girl’s cartoon”, like Rainbow Brite or Jem and the Holograms; there was no doubt in my five year-old mind that I would burst into flames faster than a vampire in a church were I to watch it.¹  I have no firsthand memories of the particulars of the show, but a quick look around Youtube does not reveal it to be a thought-provoking piece of art.

Like almost all 1980s children’s franchises, My Little Pony existed for a while, vanished, and then languished in shadowy undeath for a couple of decades; a lingering specter in the consciousness of former 80s kids.  A collector’s market for the original merchandise existed and periodically a new animated property, such as the Disney Channel’s My Little Pony Tales would make a brief appearance, but the franchise’s best days seemed behind it.

Then something unexpected happened – My Little Pony’s owner Hasbro, which was still counting the money from Michael Bay’s Transformers film and the subsequent surge in that property’s merchandising prospects, decided to resurrect My Little Pony in the hopes of hitting another rebranding homerun.  Animator and director Lauren Faust, who had previously worked on such well-regarded Cartoon Network properties as The Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends², was brought in to develop the new series with an eye towards steering the franchise away from its ooey-gooey, saccharine-soaked plots and clichéd depictions of female characters.  Thus, in 2010, premiered My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

So why in the hell am I telling you this?  My last post was a review of the freakin’ Giant Claw, so what in the world does My Little Pony have to do with anything?  Well..not much; BUT while I don’t have all that much reason to talk about My Little Pony itself, I think there may be an interesting discussion to be had about the show’s unintended fan base.  As anyone who’s been on the internet in the last three years or so is no doubt aware, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, while aimed squarely at young girls, has also attracted a very vocal contingent of adult male viewers.  They call themselves “Bronies”, and they are what I’m interested in discussing.

Maligned in many corners of the web as everything from pederasts to bestiality enthusiasts to just plain weirdoes, Bronies tend to do their, well, Brony-ing largely amongst themselves.  They have their own internet forums and their own conventions.  Some of them, when posting on Brony-friendly forums, even adopt terms from the TV series, such as using the phrase “anypony” instead of anybody”.  It’s hard for an outside observer to get a bead on these guys.  On the one hand, they’re fans of what’s probably the most inoffensive show currently on television and devote lots of effort and creativity towards generating fan content that is often fairly impressive in both scope and execution. On the other hand, a Google image search for My Little Pony will quickly yield results for such creepy items as fan-made erotic artwork bearing titles like My Little Pony: Lingerie is Magic.  Frankly, some of the creepy stuff is also strangely impressive in its scope and execution.

The bottom line is that I want to know who the Bronies are.  How old are they?  Why are they so interested in this particular property?  Are the ones pinning chapter after chapter of erotic fan fiction the norm, or just highly visible outliers who attract unwanted negative attention to the group?  I want to know all that and more.

To that end, I’ve enlisted the aid of a cadre of Bronies over at the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Brony Forums.  They’ve generously agreed to answer my questions and talk to me about life on the inside of Brony culture.  From these surveys and interviews, I hope to paint a more accurate picture of this subculture than was heretofore available to outsiders.  This post is the beginning of  a multi-part essay during which we will try to get a firmer grasp on these often talked about, but rarely talked to web denizens, these Bronies in the Mist.

Hypotheses

To start off, I recognize that the term “hypothesis” may be inappropriate here, as this “study” of mine is almost staggeringly unscientific in nature.  That said, I’m going to cling to the delusion that I’m above using the word “assumption”.  In any event I hypothesize that my survey will show the mean age of self-identified Bronies to be between 19-23 and that the majority of them will have at least some college education.  Furthermore, it is my expectation that slightly less than half (perhaps 40%) will self-identify as members of “Furry” subculture.  I suspect that many of them will report feeling as though their group is thought of negatively and perhaps even unfairly treated by other groups present on the internet and that at least half of them will not be “out”, such as it is, to their non-Brony friends.

In more broad terms, I think we shall see that the perceived biases of others against Bronies will strengthen the in-group commitment of Bronies and that this in-group, out-group interplay will contribute to insularity with the community and may result in some distrust of outsiders.  Likewise, I think we may see that the creative aspect of the group is likely to be highly valued by members and may also contribute to in-group solidarity, i.e. “Look what we have generated.”³

Finally, I’m interested to see if the accepting, friendly message of the Friendship is Magic TV series is personally important to Bronies themselves.  Specifically, I’m curious to see if Bronies consciously see their interest in the show as something of a statement against the increasingly hyper-masculine image of males often portrayed in the media.^4<.sup>

Potential Problems

In advance, I would like to say that I foresee huge problems with any statistics I generate based on what I anticipate to be a vanishingly small sample size of survey respondents.  The forum on which I have posted my survey questionnaire appears to have approximately 1240 members, based on the site’s Member List, and I expect to receive usable responses from less than 5% of them.  This would obviously make it impossible to draw any scientifically meaningful conclusions about Bronies as a whole.

I also expect that there may be some reticence on the part of the Bronies who’ve agreed to speak with me with regard to talking about the less savory aspects of Brony culture.  By this I mean such things as the large amount of erotic fan-generated materials about the show’s characters or the group’s relationship to the Furry subculture.  This may be made all the worse by my decision to administer my initial “survey” as an open thread in a message forum; That is to say, my respondents are aware that their answers are visible to others.

It also goes without saying that I’m wholly ignorant of the principles of this sort of experimental design, so I think we can safely assume that gaping holes in my methodology will erupt throughout the process.   

Regardless of all this, I expect to have a good time exploring the world of the Bronies, I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

______________________

1.) The lone exception to this proscription against“girl shows” was arguably She-Ra.  Since she was He-Man’s sister it was okay to watch her show, although I seem to remember that those of us who did kind of kept it on the down-low.

2.) And also, weirdly, that old MTV show The Maxx.

3.) See Samuel F. Gaertner’s work on common in-group identity.

4.) For more on the portrayal of masculine imagery in the media, I highly recommend Jackson Katz’s short film Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity.