Liking Things for the Wrong Reason

[Bransle]

Even if people with taste are rare, mostly everyone has to pretend one. Everyone needs to have an opinion of something, everyone has to both dislike and like things and do so on a defining way. The appearance of taste is, also, relatively easy to pretend on any social setting, as it only requires a repeat of commonly accepted statements with an affected attitude. All in all, this has lead to more and more people "liking" things (or, we could put it, "being fans" of things) in a purely destructive way: and as a result, I think everyone knows of some autor they like degrading themselves into a meme due to the audience that latched upon them, or of some "classic" being appreciated for reasons that are just projections of their small-minde readers, or conversation about some cultural topic being diluted by the same few statements to the point nobody can take the thing seriously anymore. This kind of "wrong appreciation" worse than any negative and unfair criticism: I consider it leeching. It unfairly takes out the life of something in order to engross the "fan".

I would wish to use this thread to comment on this trend and offer examples of it, hopefully with the intent to avoid them ourselves. I will start with some obvious ones, because I am more interested on what other people have to say.

• So Bad... it's Good: This was specially common a few years back, when everyone seemed to be a fan of MST3K, but perhaps not that much anymore. In many cases it's just simply bad things, so bad it's bad, but it's most insidious when used for ahead of times things with some apparent shortcomings (I talked about Deadly Premonition suffering because of this) , or otherwise very personal kind of films with value because of it (Tommy Wisseau's The Room). The fundamental idea behind is that you shouldn't take any of this seriously, and every appreciation you have of something comes from the critic as a sort of last-minute pity after he saw through all its badness.
  
• It's Bad... on Purpose: Related to the last one. Imagine saying, and probably someone has, that El Greco painting figures with such odd-proportions was "bad on purpose". It removes the artistic intention a particular choice of style may have, and instead gets the tag of "bad" from the get-go and only through critical appreciation it can be redeemed. This then was taken as one of the holy secrets of auteurship by people that, by heart, create as if they were in the fanbase of their own work, and begin seeing things that are, indeed, bad on purpose. But that only achieves the goal they set up to do: creating something that's "bad".
  
• It's a Satire! Once you said that something is satire, any sympathy that the author had for its subject, or if not sympathy, deeper appreciation for it, vanishes. Satire, born once of seeing something from a position of superiority towards a subject matter, caters then to a lower instinct: people sneering from below at something they will never reach. A complete inversion.
  
• It's good because it has the ideas of another, unrelated author in them: Clearly seen with "vulgar" authors suddenly attached "deleuzean", "bataillean" analysis and how some Anime is nice because it, actually, is based on the ideas based on... All in all, it's again erasing the author, erasing all depth, in order to submit it to something the fan already knew beforehand, and once again, he's the one who allows meaning to exist in this piece of work.
  

[Guest]

It's a good thread and a good list, I will add one that I don't how to coin well in a sentence:

It's good because it satisfies arbitrary thing that made X (approved piece of work in this field and this social circle) good. I have seen people talking about leitmotifs in such a way, where essentially they just say "it uses lietmotifs so this is good." Maybe it is more like "I recognize something that is supposed to be good, and this makes the thing good."

People use the same thing to dismiss works. "It's too anime" for example.

Presently, there is a large contingent of people who believe they know what the platonic good of "gameplay" is. They apply this framework to everything, and it is very silly. Many of the things they praise, they do so mechanically, with no feeling at all (because no feeling exists.) Such are the wages of such thinking.

It can be generalized to the basic bias: X is good structure, so if Y does not contain X then it is bad. People did this for a while with stories and the Hero's Journey for a while as well, brutally crushing things to fit that mold.

[Bransle]

It's a good thread and a good list, I will add one that I don't how to coin well in a sentence:

It's good because it satisfies arbitrary thing that made X (approved piece of work in this field and this social circle) good. I have seen people talking about leitmotifs in such a way, where essentially they just say "it uses lietmotifs so this is good." Maybe it is more like "I recognize something that is supposed to be good, and this makes the thing good."

People use the same thing to dismiss works. "It's too anime" for example.

Presently, there is a large contingent of people who believe they know what the platonic good of "gameplay" is. They apply this framework to everything, and it is very silly. Many of the things they praise, they do so mechanically, with no feeling at all (because no feeling exists.) Such are the wages of such thinking.

It can be generalized to the basic bias: X is good structure, so if Y does not contain X then it is bad. People did this for a while with stories and the Hero's Journey for a while as well, brutally crushing things to fit that mold.

Yes! I think that writing (and every other art, perhaps, but it's more easily seen in writing) has become too much focused on trying to fit the rules "discovered" by writing gurus - not even writers, mind you - and whose limited standard has been accepted as a fact. You see less people talking about the writing than about something they call the "storytelling" - such a dreadful word. It's all about "structure" and "fleshed-out themes" and "pacing" and "caring about what's happening" and...

[kirukuni]

"Camp" isn't real in the same way that "So bad it's good" isn't real. They're spooks invented by jews and fat failures who went to "school" for movies.



The entire idea of a formal metric for goodness decided on by serious people behind closed doors is spectacle. It lets jews convince people they actually enjoy the serious movies for serious men they make, because watching them means you're intelligent and understanding of the current cultural mood. You know that, really, breaking bad is something of a morality play, and therefore you enjoy it, because you can explain this to someone at a later date. Sontag is engaging in this standard-setting because she is a gay faggot nigger commie egg-shriveled bitch.

Everyone here agrees with this.

However:

The reason why I focus on these two quotes in particular is because they're really the only lasting ones of influence within the essay (other than the ones accrediting homosexuals to the creation of Camp, which immediately prompts the praise of troons and such). Because high culture is wedded to truth and seriousness, Camp being later described as having "a sensibility of failed seriousness" shows it can never be inducted into a high culture. In earlier times, the abortive work would exist only in the temporary thoughts of a generation, and the artist himself must overcome being forgotten with something greater. The poorly-defined "aesthetic" of Camp can be best characterized as a leveling of standards. This is the only real influence the essay can have, and this form of aesthetic evaluation has spread to a coterie of YouTubers and """media-literate""' commentators.

"Camp is bad because it's not like what I've been told is high culture." is retarded. You've gotten your ideas about these things from people who were told what is good by a female english teacher who was told by a female english teacher who was told by a female english teacher. Have you ever read any of the things that are high culture? I don't mean things that you were told were high culture. I mean things that were a part of western culture when it was still vital and natural. Things that people from the year 1900 not named james joyce cared about?

They're all fucking funny and enjoyable. They have silly moments. They appeal to bathos because they want to be something good. Bathos is in "high culture" because good things are good, and bathos is naturally funny and a part of human experience.

From The Confusions of Young Master Torless:

In the evening Törless stayed in the classroom; Beineberg and Reiting had disappeared off somewhere, probably to the attic hideaway; Basini sat in his seat at the front, hunched over a book with his head resting on his hands.

Törless had bought himself a notebook, and carefully arranged his pen and ink. Then he wrote on the first page, after some hesitation: De natura hominum. He thought he owed the philosophical subject-matter a Latin title. Then he drew a large, artistic flourish around the heading and leaned back in his chair to wait for it to dry.

But it had dried long since, and he had still not picked up his pen again. Something kept him fixed motionless to the spot. It was the hypnotic atmosphere of the big, hot lamps, the animal warmth emanating from that mass of people. He had always been receptive to that state, which could intensify to a feverish physical feeling that was always connected with an extraordinary level of mental sensitivity. And the same was true today. In the course of the day he had worked out what he actually wanted to write down; that whole series of experiences, from the evening at Božena’s to the indistinct sensuality that had recently come upon him. If it was all set down in an orderly fashion, one fact after another, he hoped that the correct, intellectually legitimate version would yield itself of its own accord, just as an outline emerges from the confusion of a hundred intersecting curves. And he wanted nothing more than that. But so far he had felt like a fisherman who might be able to tell from a twitching on his net that a heavy prey has fallen into his trap, but for all his efforts is unable to haul it into the light.

The main character has feelings. He is overwhelmed by them, for he is a sensitive young man, and has decided he will write a Very Important Essay about them. He has no idea what to write, so he draws an extremely large and formal flourish of a title that doesn't mean anything. He watches it dry. He still has no idea what to write, but he knows it must be important. He gets stuck for some time jerking himself off over how deep this essay is going to be.

This is very funny. This is "failed seriousness." This is Bathos.

This is similar to Spongebob joke.



Spongebob is, of course, not high culture. It's gay nigger fagshit that steals a few good jokes. However, your conception of culture isn't rooted in your actual experience of it. It's rooted in an image of it given to you by a failure of a woman. It's rooted in a woman who had someone tell her that Shakespeare was very serious and she must memorize a list of symbolism contained within it so she can get her good girl points, then list this symbolism to a child so they can get their good girl points.

Secondly, is Camp a leveling of standards in the first place? Is any media that doesn't aim to be the perfect form of an idea or situation Camp, and thus gay nigger communism? I don't think I would call Barbarella or old (good) James Bond a leveling of standards. They feel like the kind of old, blonde, and excellence-loving media that a frog poster on twitter would sperg about, if anything.

[Guest]

Regarding good films: A good film is a film that fulfills its intentional end by evoking a "feeling" in the audience. That may be entertainment, it may be catharsis, whatever. Early Jackie Chan films are objectively good because they are very straightforward in what they set out to do and how they achieve it.

Enjoying something because it fails its end (The Room) is the same as laughing at lolcows. It's petty, lowly behaviour. I won't say you can't enjoy it but if you actively pursue this feeling through action, it betrays a lower taste in your character.

[anthony]

Secondly, is Camp a leveling of standards in the first place? Is any media that doesn't aim to be the perfect form of an idea or situation Camp, and thus gay nigger communism? I don't think I would call Barbarella or old (good) James Bond a leveling of standards. They feel like the kind of old, blonde, and excellence-loving media that a frog poster on twitter would sperg about, if anything.

What does this remind me of? Oh, now it's come to me.

---

Nobody gives a shit about Justin Lin. This stuff took off because of the online world and online people, the only real ones. That's how we got to the stuff that's actually worth your attention. This.



As entertaining as I find Lyra, far more than Wolfe did his targets, I have to disagree with the above. Like the pop-art comic panels films like Resident Evil and Catwoman are enjoyable. And they're enjoyable not because they're actually hyperkinetic visual meditations upon Lacan and late capitalism. They're enjoyable because they're about cool thin white people in impossible outfits fighting monsters and cool soldiers by firing two handguns in slow motion.




Heil Hitler.

This is not the peak of film for me, but it is something I can watch. I consider its existence a more or less healthy thing. Like seasonal anime. I'm fine with it because even at its most simple, base, and outright retarded, it is never wrong. These are all things a sane person can like. There's only so much going on, but what's there is true to human nature and at least competent. Very often executed with far more flash and craft than is necessary. Like Catwoman a lot of what's interpreted as retarded in Resident Evil is just Americans being completely bewildered by European sensibilities and assuming everything they're not used to is a mistake.

To not get off track I'll get us back to Kirukuni's comment.

Secondly, is Camp a leveling of standards in the first place? Is any media that doesn't aim to be the perfect form of an idea or situation Camp, and thus gay nigger communism?

There are a lot of problems around this discussion. First is what Camp even is. If we actually read Sontag we'll find her notions more complex than suggested in our brief excerpts here and so personal and of their time to probably be not really worth consideration here. The problems of our time are not found here: https://monoskop.org/images/5/59/Sontag_...n_Camp.pdf

Is Barbarella Camp? After having read this thing I honestly can't say. I feel like Sontag would probably call me Camp. But she's dead and I'm not so let's move on from her. I think it's far more helpful to talk generally about Jewish-American memes and how they've made people stupid. As you do in your own post.

Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds — in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it...In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.

I actually agree with this line of Sontag, just I would say that there is more beauty , truth, and seriousness in Resident Evil: Afterlife (read entirely free of Deluezian subtext) or Promare than 99% of what is considered prestige filmmaking in America. We don't need retarded qualifiers to like Paul WS Anderson movies, anime, italian genre work, etc. It's just good. The people look good, they want to do things I find cool, there is not constant shirking of stakes and motivations to appease the cool nigger policeman who lives in the heads of the creators. These are works which honour human nature, culture, and history. Even if in relatively simple forms. High culture is too loaded a term to be useful. Works of high spirit maybe.

This is how we ordinarily value works of art. And this is how I value Danger Diabolik! Nothing more to it.




This is high culture in the sense that, again, true, beautiful, serious. I repeat myself not only because it's 2am, I think this is important. It's that simple. Why every American movie isn't cool like Danger Diabolik isn't because Diabolik is running on some weird sigma scale of goodness that totally subverts normality. The subverted scale is the American (Jewish) standard. The Jews want you believing that a true, beautiful, and serious experience means social realism works about ugly people in ugly places talking at each other. Europe gave us the cinema of the look. America gave us the cinema of issues.




This is truth, beauty, and seriousness in the mind of a conscientious American Jew. An old tradition by this point. Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kramer, Alan Pakula, a lot of insufferable people spent their whole working lives inflicting this garbage upon the world. American English teacher brain is when you think this is good. It's like your vegetables. Awful but *good* because of its moral character and possible unseen benefits. If it's good for you it feels kind of bad. Good for you.




The Jewish vision of culture is you trapped in a room forced to watch this and The Pelican Brief until the end of time.

[Adamant]

Not to diverge from the topic of cinema too much, but Anthony's post reminds me of the different reactions to other media treated similarly to 'camp' by the majority of the audience who are unable to appreciate it for the right reasons, and what came to mind as the best example is MGR Revengeance (even though its been talked about to death).

To the unreflective audience, the opening mission where Raiden flips over a gigantic Metal Gear Ray relegates the game into schlock like God of War, and so all dialogue is reinterpreted as melodrama, all events are unable to be taken seriously. Yet you can tell people who've played the game and like it want to enjoy it but mentally sabotage themselves by enjoying it for the wrong reason, with several levels of misunderstanding that contribute to it. The first is the divorcing of 'good' and 'cool' as Anthony was describing, where overtime a more logocentric concept of good, of 'ideas and themes' being 'transmitted' is seen as the point of 'good' media, and in a twisted inversion the very features of the medium (film/TV/games) they are choosing to experience is considered superficial or serves the ends of the ideas which can be communicated in words rather than actually experienced. To experience requires effort and thought and people who enjoy a message wrapped in a thin medium do not want an experience, because at no point are their selves involved, if they even have a self to begin with. Cinema of the issues being held as the standard of 'good' is outsourcing thought.
And of course this outsourcing of thought pairs nicely with the analogy of something like a self-punishing super ego. In this case it takes the form of a voice which says "it's cool but not good or deep" or "it's cool, but more importantly it was also 'good' and deep" and over time that thought calcifies and it never occurs to them that something is good in the genuine sense because it is cool first.
So when something like MGR makes an effort (perhaps a misnomer because it's done so effortlessly) to show that 'cool' action and a 'good' story can and should cohere, the people who enjoy it for the wrong reasosn mistake the aesthetics of cool for shallowness in story. So instead their raging screenwriter-brain super ego is bearing down on their genuine instinct to enjoy this game by adding qualifiers like "I love how over the top the dialogue is!" or "Wow these action scenes are so wacky and insane, those crazy Japanese have made it just like an anime!".

MGR is about superhuman warriors who live to fight, and the only chance they get to talk to each other they spend monologuing because they have each developed distinct ideas about what fighting means since they are so alone in their superiority when compared to their enemy's and their own footsoldiers. At least that's one of the things its about, and as intellectualised/verbalized this description is, it should be completely unnecessary because everytime the player killa an enemy for health and fights a boss it's right in front of their face.
Ask them to compare it to something like the Last of Us and they will stumble to explain how it is better because of some moments designed by Druckmann's screenwriter brain to look and sound like a prototype of the very HBO series it would eventually become. A term once in currency was 'ludonarrative dissonance' and when MGR provides a solution to it an unthinking audience, the people who enjoy it for the wrong reason scoff because one boss talks about the word 'meme'.

What does all this enjoyment for the wrong reason amount to? Well in relation to the issue about camp and gays mentioned earlier, something similar where a group that doesn't deserve to have this game style themselves as its big fans. MGR suffered from success to a limited degree in the sense that years after release a new wave of tranny fans became attracted to it, heralded by streamers and voice actors, who themselves were attracted mostly because of its 'meme' status. These people identify with the parts of the game and characters they have mentally reduced to mere melodrama or exaggerations, and so the whole thing is hollowed out, because they believe they are getting enjoyment from something that is frivolous and so feel free to up the frivolous flamboyant ante, entirely missing the point of what the game is trying to do to create the sense of 'cool'.

[anthony]

Not to diverge from the topic of cinema too much, but Anthony's post reminds me of the different reactions to other media treated similarly to 'camp' by the majority of the audience who are unable to appreciate it for the right reasons, and what came to mind as the best example is MGR Revengeance (even though its been talked about to death).

Metal Gear is a series which literally culminates in war becoming a worldwide entrepreneurial franchise in which all players willingly participate and self proclaimed superfans will summarise Metal Gear in a line as being about "the disenfranchising nature of war". The American Jew who wants to make Metal Gear Solid AND Mobile Suit Gundam into movies believes they're both anti-war works.

https://ew.com/movies/jordan-vogt-robert...dam-video/

For him, Gundam is about "the disenfranchising nature of war," even beyond what he calls "the amazing, hyper anime kinetics and operatic ballet that is the action" that he hopes to translate on screen in a way no one has yet. It's about "dealing with the brutality of war, fighting another generation's war and how relationships and love and conflict grew out of that," he adds. "It's just an incredibly rich franchise through and through."

This sounds a lot more like an enfranchising experience to me. Nothing grew out of the opportunities I was presented by life. I was watching that garbage Wagner documentary recently (RIP) and one of their old officers was talking about how he was invited to join to deal with his depression.



This is the enemy. If he looks familiar it's because he jewed his way into Japan with the trannylation subversive waves and got into Death Stranding as the visual model for the 'Film Director' character.



Triforce Tattoo Americans...

Something I've kind of wanted to say here and in the horror thread is that "action" is arguably the most misread and misappreciated media. At the heart of the thing we're indulging a fascination with violence and all related phenomena and experiences. It's undeniable that the world comes to life when violence is a serious possibility. That is of course what Metal Gear and Gundam are about. In his own quotes Vogt-Roberts (jew faggot) can't help but let this get out. Gundam is an extremely lively world. People die, but they also live. And these phenomena cannot be separated. Countless members of the Gundam cast find themselves and leverage their talents through their war experiences, and more importantly (and obviously) the human race is finding itself through these wars. Humanity's violent and ambitious drive into space is awakening new latent potential on a physiological level. In Gundam humanity becomes superhuman by exercising instincts and acting on desires which the average western viewer is conditioned to see as evil.

If this kind of Japanese media is not outright pro-war, at the very least the view on war is that it is enfranchising. Not only would I call that an appropriate word. I would say it might be the appropriate word. Is war a total good in Gundam? Not really. Things can go wrong for humanity, things can go horribly wrong for individuals, the effects can be dysgenic, etc, but they can also go right. And either way things are far more lively. The world is filled with potential. What does it really mean to believe in violence? I think it's being open to these possibilities. I don't really know if there's a satisfying principled stance against violence which isn't ultimately self-annihilation. Especially not one that can be taken while enjoying action media. You're either a pervert who gets off on lurid cautionary tales, or you're some kind of psychotic hall monitor who dreams of increasingly idealised scenarios in which you can use justifiable reactionary force against those who would initiate violence (those who actually want things), in which case action becomes the kind of ultimate reactionary story form in which people are endlessly executed for rocking the boat regardless of motivation. If you remember my Amarna1 James Bond post you know this is basically how I see America and American action (post Quantum of Solace James Bond is American, but that's another thread). Here's a better example.



Doesn't get much more hard man than Clint Eastwood, does it? And here he is telling his boss that he can't just SHOOT nigger serial killers who the justice system misses. That means you are insane and will inevitably kill normal innocent people because asdfzszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The first movie got this right. Harry recognises the limits of his job and shoots the bad guy, then throws away his badge. But because Clint Eastwood is a True American he has to become a cop again and assure you that the real radicals who believe that was the right thing will be put down with extreme prejudice, because that was just some kind of moment of extreme passion and poor judgment.



In Italy they made a whole genre out of Dirty Harry. Note that this is basically the ending to Dirty Harry but far more brutal and less ambiguous. And there is no sequel in which Inspector Grandi is penitent and turns his attention towards those who hate crime too much. This is just how the movies go. You gun down assholes in broad daylight because that's badass. These movies and the culture around them is a lot more complex than this, Italy has as much actual communism as fascism, but back to the point above, this is a culture that's alive. In these movies people shoot out their differences. In Magnum Force Clint Eastwood shoots away difference so that the world can go to sleep and rot to death.

Now back to where we started, Hideo Kojima is not an idiot. He doesn't just do "action" because he likes explosions. He's obviously a very thoughtful man when it comes to violence. And Metal Gear Solid 4 was a creative expression of everything I've been saying about action for the last couple of years way back in 2008. And of course if you really know your stuff you'll know that it's a kind of thematic repetition of the post-ending plot to Mobile Suit Gundam. When it takes action to put the human spirit down, the sleepwalking world will turn on its own enforcers. James Bond had to die, Indiana Jones got retroactively killed and replaced by a woman with a time travel plot (they reshot that ending because they realised they got ahead of themselves), the heroes of the Gundam Allies basically get arrested, America tears down statues of whites who fought to abolish slavery, etc.

Hideo Kojima's original ending to Metal Gear Solid 4 was going to be Snake and Otacon turning themselves in to ZOG after saving the world from Liquid's plan to shatter global hegemony and start an age of competition and warfare, and meekly accepting their own executions. He doesn't say it explicitly, but I think at his most extreme moments that's what Hideo Kojima thinks of his average western "fan". In his lighter ones Death Stranding comes to mind. Competence creates a need for you, leading to better people being shackled and bled to hold the world together and please everyone. Death Stranding is still a rather antisocial work if you think about it, but at least he's not obviously thinking about killing normal people in that one.



I don't know who wrote the lyrics for these boss themes but they're fantastic. Obviously we're not actually meant to think they're cool. That'd scare the whores, and cool nigger of course, can't forget him.

But more obvious than the lyrics are the boss speeches themselves. You can miss the lyrics because you're busy in your life of death struggle against a fellow superman, so it's all laid out quite plain in the conversations before the fights. Each one being a kind of Goering v Nuremberg Prosecution encounter in which soft, naive American idealism falls flat on its face over and over again before historically informed and consistent realism towards politics and human nature which is ultimately resolved by force.

This is how it's always gone of course. These beliefs never had a leg to stand on. There is no intellectual or philosophical tradition, no roots into history, it's a belief which emerged from the death of history. And it's something a lot of Japanese clearly hate. So they make art and media about history restarting and powering through all of this. And because we're all human we all love this. But because some of us are American there is lots of corrupted misreading, misinterpretation, and outright subversion and cultural warfare (conscious and unconscious and in between) to suppress the instincts behind this. Even from "fans".

Gamergate is still not over. No more localisers. No more DEI. No more foreign producers. No more notes. No more video essays.





"It's not over yet."

[kirukuni]

My original post was meant to cover something that involves Sontag:

"A woman exists."

[ꦈꦒꦲꦸꦫꦲꦺꦴꦗ꦳ꦲ]

🅷🅸-🅵🅸 🆁🆄🆂🅷 🅷🅰🆂 🅱🅴🅴🅽 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅾🆄🅳🅴🆂🆃 🅴🆇🅰🅼🅿🅻🅴 🅾🅵 🆃🅷🅸🆂 🅾🅵 🅻🅰🆃🅴.

🆃🅷🅴🆁🅴 🅸🆂 🅽🅾🆃🅷🅸🅽🅶 🆃🅾 🅳🅸🆂🅲🆄🆂🆂.
🆂🅾🅼🅴 🅿🅴🅾🅿🅻🅴 🅼🅰🆈 🅽🅴🅴🅳 🆃🅾 🅳🅸🅴.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

"It's a deconstruction of/tribute to <X>!", where X is often its own genre

Getting the references makes people feel smart so they say they liked it because they want to signal how cultured they are. Excessive focus on other works is a form of pandering and often leaves a work feeling aimless and nihilistic even if you're filled in on the context. Great works that create something entirely new are often described in this way, but that's because the new thing had merit, not because they referenced the old thing.

An example of a movie that leans too heavily on metacommentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_..._Hollywood

People pretend to like this movie because they see a bunch of actors they know and references to other movies and real world events and want their friends to know that they "got it". The movie isn't coherent on its own whether or not you're familiar with these references and it doesn't tell a proper story (the first half of the movie and the characterization of the protagonist has no relevance to the ending, which is arbitrary violence), it's just a series of events occurring in a way that pleases the audience.