Happy Thanksgiving MoFos

Bloodfest The Podcast

This is it! The episode of Bloodfest that got us kicked off of Tiktok (the clock app, as the kids call it)! That’s right, we’re too hot for tiktok. This is the episode where we learn what murderous, wisecracking turkeys have to do with G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx! It’s Thanksgiving! So of course we talk about Thankskilling! #Bloodfestthepodcast #bloodfest #thankskilling #thanksgiving #horror #podcast #movies #horrormovies #marx #hegel #funny #dumb Likes, subs, shares appreciated!

Thankskilling Notes:

Hegel: all historical invents and personages appear twice.

To which Marx added, in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

In Das Capital, Marx spoke of “character masks”. People wear a “mask” or persona that is required by their place in society – Marx is speaking specifically to the functions of capitalism, but this thinking applies to all societal functions and spaces. In Thankskilling, every character is a clichéd and worn out trope. We have the JOCK, the PARTY GUY, the SLUT, the GOOD GIRL, the NERD. These caricatures exist is shallow films because they exist in the real world, even if they are less binding there. We can see the college kids in TK as strongly correlated to the high school students in The Breakfast Club. It is note able that a large number of teenagers have seen themselves represented in John Hughes’s treacly output, suggesting that we, at least, believe ourselves to be some form of those tropes.

It seems too obvious that no person is simply and completely the JOCK or the SLUT or any other of these categories. People, even very young people, are much too complicated to fit cleanly on a chart – we exist in liminal spaces, in between groups. And yet, we play those roles or a reaction to those roles. Think here of the STONER or the PUNK demanding that they are unique, and not one of the tropes. Is not the STONER merely another mask that he must wear to fit his place in society?

TURKEY – not a turkey. The turkey is a mask worn by a spirit summoned by indigenous people to exact vengeance on colonizers. Point is driven more firmly (and more dumbly) home when the mask that is the turkey dons a mask made of the skin from the sheriff’s face.

It seems funny to us that nobody notices that this a a turkey wearing a human face as a mask. But, I posit that no one can see that because it is no different than the masks that they are wearing.

The film’s ending hints that it doesn’t have to be like this. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, notes that in America one can play any role – in fact, can forget that they are even playing a role. They can choose their own mask. We understand this when we see that the turkey is not truly dead, but is instead wearing a new mask. Instead of the crude hand puppet we have seen, he is now embodied in a real (if dead, gutted and cooked) turkey, yet still able to fulfil his role as avenger.