What if what seemed to be a steaming loaf of cinematic indie garbage was actually a brilliant statement about the system?!
Let us make one thing perfectly clear: we have never watched and will never watch Dutch import film The Human Centipede. And we don’t really care about the time-honored tradition of actually consuming the product you’re reviewing, because this one is really gross. Fortunately we’re also not journalists, so we have no shame about this. And yet through osmosis we have absorbed enough to generate this hot take. (Our illustrator Pester Pooch did watch trailers to prepare for this assignment, even though we warned him, and shortly regretted it.)
For those out of this poop loop, the movie is roughly about some mad scientist or something who sews a bunch of people together surgically, hopefully while sedated, in the manner suggested by our illustration but with less hilarious results (right).
Now, the natural reaction of a healthy and balanced mind to turdcore of this caliber is physical revulsion and withdrawal. There seems to be little to justify manifesting this sordid fecofantasy into reality on the material plane. (Technically movies now exist on a digital plane but a trendy franchise could easily bleed over into merch, maybe even Human Centipede action figures and lunchboxes!)
But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if THC is actually a spot-on analogy of our modern world? Our proctological protagonists find themselves shackled into a system of control and dependency, not unlike the average wage-slave stuck in the corporate world, merely gears in a bigger machine, grinding them down and reducing their lives to rank and repetitive tasks. There’s little freedom or choice, and there’s little to no upward mobility, and - just like THC - sometimes even your meals are pre-determined.
But sorry to say many people today have little to no instinct to be free. They savor the security of their coghood and the promise of getting greased at dependable intervals. They have no higher ambition in life than to take crap from the guy above them while likewise taking a nice, relaxed dump on the guy below them, and they’re happy with this arrangement.
And while the victims in our film managed to make muffled protestations and do some general flailing (we assume, again, didn’t watch it), these ones just relax and enjoy the dehumanization. They love nothing better than to have their entire existence macroorganized and micromanaged by some - any - figures of authority willing to oblige.
And the quacks running this experiment love it too. The labor force make perfects pets, er, laborers. No resistance, few arguments, nice slavish docile submission. You know come to think of it, that’s exactly the kind of atmosphere we could benefit from here at Flip City. Perhaps stitching our staff of writers and artists to each other end-to-end would be a good way to keep our staff in line as well as emphasize loyalty. Maybe this could work out to be a smart, cost-efficient and savvy move for an ambitious, up-and-coming L.L.C.??
Is that what it takes to be successful and get things done and in a post-Covid 1.0 economy? Do we need to literally sew our whole crew
together?! Oh, we editors wouldn’t be exempt. We’re just up at pole position,
after selling Flip City out to a multinational investment firm with a
vested interest in running our brand into the ground. Yes, we’re all
in this together guys, so watch out, Dave MacDowell, ‘coz you’re right
behind us and we had chili for lunch!
- The Editors
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