I’ve been quite busy lately, and one of the things I turn to during my break is Hardwarezone. While the stabbing incident was originally reported there were already fair buzzes of few, if positive and amusing posts about it, so I bookmarked the thread for a rainy (post) day. It seemed like a good idea to try it now that another bit the dust last night.
It’s good retrospection for the involved: it’s surreal; we commiserate vicariously with its characters; the jokes are delivered rapidly in between classes, so one’s mind is still active enough to go straight back to work once the fifteen minutes are up. But it wasn’t just amusing. I also found it satisfying for a reason quite unrelated to my poor empathy skills.
I don’t know how well I can articulate my satisfaction, but I’ll have a go. I think I’m satisfied by said double-minded predicaments, be they exists, that are simultaneously hilarious and quietly horrifying. The guy who stabbed the professor is, at best, portrayed as a difficult person to be around since he falls cleanly into the mold of a distressed gaming geek, frowned upon by insular societal values. He also models, in an exaggerated way, the gap between inner and outer selves that we’re all to some degree familiar with, and the trouble that occurs when elements from one self seep into the other. This subtle mix of unpleasantness and familiarity means that such sob stories might make good material for a tragedy, if you tone them up a bit.
Prudence on the funny side of the line separates laughter and sadness, but it retains its interest in unpleasantness as a kind of muted contrapuntal melody. (If a musical person like me is reaching for musical comparisons then obviously I can’t be explaining it well!) I’ve tersely mentioned the central problem of Widjaja's double entrendre, but tragedy’s also present in quite peripheral touches: his sudden nonplussed lack of concern for his studies, the excursion of the knife, the evil professor's 'contractual' obligations and his downfall in the last act, for example.
Some of these things are things we might worry about laughing at. A certain type of comedy, evidently a type I enjoy, uses that worry productively, just as a contrapuntal melody isn’t just there, but actively contributes to the overall effect. Is this one of the features of black comedy? Death is cynical, but it can’t be serious in the way that black comedy can be: it can’t let its audience feel anything, because a moment’s serious consideration of its plots would be insupportable.
That might, however, be because it’s more parodic than satirical: black comedies obliquely relate to a genre of fiction brought to life while Death exaggerates a universal human experience and so has more potential to make us ask questions of ourselves. Satire is (hopefully) funny, but traditionally it’s meant to inspire reform too. Perhaps the more purely parodic something is (and life is pretty devoted to parody) the less it’s able to provoke us. I’ve just started to realize the assignments are piling up on top of one another, and while it does gently play with the 'I'm dead' meme, its thought-provoking ingredient is its satirical angle on our stressful (and quite useless) culture and life spent piloting a desk.
There are no real psychologists. Not in our world at any rate, due to the nature of what constitutes 'real'; they have no real way of prediction, and they must seek to pacify the patient's (think Dexter) discomfort in other ways that harness the patient's will per se. Here’s some trivia for you: The official tally of the number of suicides in Japan topped the 32,000 mark for the eleventh year in a row. Just last month the news reported that a mother who'd become disillusioned with life jumped under a train with her seven-year-old son, a terrible and needless waste.
If the notion of death is bound to ambient imagination, then voices are bound to the one’s imagination. With this in mind it is a fairly easy, if somewhat arduous task, to imagine how the stabbing incident is presented – the mind supplements the role of getting the stabber into the shoes of his (bleak) future, and the voices in his head easing the effort of connecting with reality. Stabbing someone in the back, literally for starters, is off-the-cliff, and not the parallel-world faux-zombie-kill labellings more ignorant people are wont to inflict on just about any person these days – a genuine one that, as far as non-delineated and loosely-defined boundaries of how one's head works, carries the well-worn stigma of unnecessary rationalization and wish fulfillment; as far as it’s concerned, that label is accurate.
But all of this is really irrelevant when you look at the portrayal by the media. Needless to say, such a story in such a setting with such a premise sans information would inevitably skyrocket or read like the most wincing pre-adolescent – if twisted, due to adolescents usually not having such complex tastes–wet dream. I suspect that this theoretical inability to supplement the imagination beyond what is not provided, given such a genre and premise, stems from the fact that there is nothing sufficiently grounded in reality that would otherwise make the task of imagining such a realistic reality (or ‘a reality steeped in realism’) a lot easier; dumb elites do not exist, and even if they did, it’d be pretty hard to think of them in the way that’s required here. The incidents are here to lend an otherwise-unreachable tone of reality to it, enabling you and I to look past the distractingly obvious premise, or the detoxified interpretation of the idea, and into the heart of the story.
Media portrayal in this sense is nothing more than lending urgency to one situation, perhaps poignancy to another, or even a simple sense of heartfelt condolences towards the victim so drowned in formaldehyde. For while I could do with an option that absorbed every word in print or otherwise excised them altogether, the reports did what my mind could not, and made everything a lot more convincing as a result.