Havoc wrote:
... You know what? Looking back on Red River now, Brice was so eager to go down to the riverbank with a person he knew, or at least strongly suspected, of being a murderer, to be taught how to become one himself. Talk about a case of genre blindness. Hasn't he read one single crime or horror story? (Of course the characters in horror stories aren't supposed to know they're in a book, so a bit of genre blindness is acceptable, but even so.)...
Spoiled, rich-kid Brice reading books? Brice and the people he used to run with seem like the kind to know more about do-nothing party celebrities and "reality" tv shows about housewives and east coast sex-scenes than anything we'd deem important to survival. Don't know about their history, don't know about the current events changing their world, don't know how things actually work, don't know how the lights turn on or how the water comes to their tap or how food arrives on their plate and a host of other ignorances I see rampant in my own youth culture. Transposing such prevalent values into Mulefoot's work and compounding that with Brice's less-than-average displays of intelligence leads me to think that our date-rapist just blithely walked into the path of the freight truck named Tony Ray thinking that he wasn't going to be hurt by it. The current Brice is older, wiser, and more aware of just how clueless he was.
As for "genre-blindness" in general, open up the paper on any given day and you'll read at least one account of a crime where a victim exhibited such poor judgement. When other people grouse about their problems you, or other third parties, can clearly see the problem and the solution but it either never seems to occur to the aggrieved or the solution is deemed inactionable* because "it's more complicated than that." The audience has the luxuries of time, objectivity, and perspective bordering on omniscience that the characters (not unlike real people caught up in their own situations) do not have. That's why kids still walk down isolated "short-cuts" off of main streets, college girls get drunk at parties and separated from their friends, a homeowner gets out of bed to investigate a strange noise coming from the basement, and hook-ups for one night stands with sketchy strangers happen near continuously.
*not a real word but closest to what I wanted to convey.
I can hardly wait for the version of events that Brice remembers from what happened by the river past the last thing we were allowed to see.
I said, Shotgun!
Shoot 'em 'fore they run now.
Do the jerk, baby
Do the dirty now
_________________
"Y'know, if nothing else, living here has incredibly sharpened my 'Hey, there's someone coming for my dick!' defense skills." -
JET