Christopher Campbell Meets Theodor Adorno

“Aja hits us with a cres­cendo of may­hem that just keeps on going and going and going. What sep­ar­ates this sequence, in which the film’s pre­his­tor­ic fish go to town on hun­dreds of party­ing co-eds attend­ing a wet t‑shirt con­test, from the rest of the obvi­ously silly movie is how real and trau­mat­ic it appears. I’m not alone in noti­cing the change in tone.

I’ve seen com­ments on the web liken­ing it to watch­ing foot­age from an actu­al dis­aster. Sure, there’s some level of humor to be had in watch­ing a girl fall into two halves while being car­ried out of the water, but in con­text I am slightly dis­turbed. I think part of it comes from how extens­ive and expli­cit the viol­ence is in this blood­bath. First of all, we see less of the car­toon­ish CGI piran­has at this point. It’s mostly just the vic­tims, many with patches of skin and limbs miss­ing. Second, there are a lot of deaths and injury that come not from the fish but from oth­er humans in pan­ic. Also, we see more sur­viv­ors in crit­ic­al con­di­tion who’ve nearly escaped, even if for just seconds on a boat or beach where they’ll prob­ably bleed to death, scream­ing and cry­ing and twitch­ing from shock, as though we’re see­ing the after­math of a bomb­ing or plane crash or earth­quake. I can appre­ci­ate the need to remind people that in cer­tain trau­mat­ic dis­asters even sur­viv­ors are often left in bad shape, phys­ic­ally and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally. I just wasn’t expect­ing such a remind­er with a B‑movie about killer fish.”
— Christopher Campbell, “Piranha 3D”: When Horror Turns To Trauma, Spout blog,August 23, 2010

“After the break­down of the detect­ive story in the books of Edgar Wallace, which seemed by their less ration­al con­struc­tion, their unsolved riddles and their crude exag­ger­a­tion to ridicule their read­ers, and yet in so doing mag­ni­fi­cently anti­cip­ated the col­lect­ive imago of total ter­ror, the type of murder com­edy has come into being. While con­tinu­ing to claim to make fun of a bogus awe, it demol­ishes the images of death. It presents the corpse as what it has become, a stage prop. It still looks human and is yet a thing, as in the film ‘A Slight Case of Murder,’ where corpses are con­tinu­ously trans­por­ted to and fro, alleg­or­ies of what they already are. Comedy savours to the full the false abol­i­tion of death that Kafka had long before described in pan­ic in the story of Gracchus the hunter; for the same reas­on, no doubt, music too is start­ing to become com­ic. What the National Socialists per­pet­rated against mil­lions of people, the parad­ing and pat­tern­ing of the liv­ing like dead mat­ter, then the mass-production and cost-cutting of death, threw its pre­fig­ur­ing shad­ow on those who felt moved to chortle over corpses. What is decis­ive is the absorp­tion of bio­lo­gic­al destruc­tion by con­scious social will. Only a human­ity to whom death has become as indif­fer­ent as its mem­bers, that has itself died, can inflict it admin­is­trat­ively on innu­mer­able people. Rilke’s pray­er for ‘one’s own death’ is a piteous attempt to con­ceal the fact that nowadays people merely snuff out.”—Theodor Adorno, “Knackery,” Minima Moralia, first edi­tion 1951, trans­la­tion E.F.N. Jephcott, Verso, 1978