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freddy krueger as viral meme
The other night, C. and I watched Freddy Vs. Jason. I'll say right up front that this movie is not a particularly good one, even when compared against earlier installments in either franchise.
But I've been flipping through my old copy of Metamagical Themas lately, and revisiting ideas about viral sentences and self-replicating structures, and so what struck me as interesting is the way that Freddy Krueger, in this film, functions as a viral meme, and a lethal one at that.
At film's opening, Freddy lacks the ability to kill or to enter people's dreams, because the residents of Springwood no longer fear him—they either are actively working to repress their memory of him (in the case of the adults), or they have never learned of him in the first place (in the case of the teenagers). The town of Springwood is essentially organized in a large-scale program of "informational hygiene" to keep the Freddy meme from re-infecting the town: the police don't mention his name, even among themselves; all references to previous murders are excised from the local library's archives; children who do dream are held in an institution, where they can be heavily medicated, and kept from circulating among the information system of the outside world. As long as this program can be maintained, the people are safe...
But, inevitably, someone escapes from the institution, and begins to spread rumors of Freddy's return, and the Freddy meme begins to replicate, in the self-amplifying manner of positive feedback: the more people speak of him the more afraid they get, and the more afraid they get the more they speak of him. (A second feedback mechanism also speeds this along: the more afraid they get the more he has the power to appear menacingly in their dreams, which of course causes them to become even more afraid, etc.)
Say what you will about the rest of the film, but this idea struck me as nicely elegant. (Another horror film that uses an elegant feedback mechanism is David Cronenberg's early They Came From Within, which features a venereal parasite with a unique evolutionary advantage: it represses higher brain function and acts as an aphrodisiac. Release it into a system (a high-security apartment building, in the film) and you can imagine how everything will spiral very quickly into chaos.)
I could probably write something about how you could also think of Freddy as a creature of living information, a sort of bastard cousin to the famous plasmate which slumbered in the buried library of codices at Chenoboskion until 1945 C.E., but, uh, I think I've been geeky enough for one day.
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Thursday, March 11, 2004
10:31 AM
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