We just fired up the fall semester here at CMU, so we’re in that segment of the term when students and professors alike try to get a feel for their classes. Those vibes, however, are incredibly elusive in the first few days, as we’re all trying to get our sea legs.

One of the reasons I’m terribly fond of teaching textual and rhetorical analysis is that vibes can make for fairly reliable guides. As a genre, rhetorical analysis generally assumes that we are eminently rational creatures and think our way through every case logically, but most of us start with how things feel and then work our way toward articulating our thoughts about a thing. It can be a kind of deceptive, self-reflexive sort of processing, but it’s illuminating nevertheless.

Tuesday nights are Horror Movie Nights here at the Abbey, as my fiancee heads out to spend time with her friends and I’m left to amuse myself with a Panera salad and some delicacy that Shudder has on offer. Last night I double dipped, starting with I Am Lisa and then moving over to Black Friday to cap off the evening. In I Am Lisa, the vibes felt a bit off, so I fast-forwarded through a bunch of atmospheric aerial shots (one even-handed critique of the movie I might offer is that it felt a little padded, like content had been stretched here and there to reach an attractive runtime). The film is founded in a broad tropic pattern I tend to enjoy–the revenge flick in which the victims get what they deserve–so I was favorably disposed toward the movie from the preview. Alas, the vibes were off, and it took me a little processing time to reason my way toward that feeling.

The genre tends to have catharsis built in, so I often think of it as a lay-up. The screenplay I’ve been chipping away at for the past few months shares some of the same DNA. The catch with Lisa, however, is that the protagonist and her allies experience qualms about the revenge process that feel out of keeping with the spirit of the plot. In short, Lisa (and by implication, her family) is horribly wronged by a corrupt sheriff and her equally corrupt family; the sheriff’s daughter is a small-town drug dealer and a bully, and her son is the deputy and a bully himself. We get a clear sense that a pattern of obvious corruption has long been established and accepted in this little community; when Lisa falls prey to the sheriff and her friends, we start hankering for overdue retribution.

The movie, however, never seems to commit fully to letting the viewer enjoy it. Lisa is beaten, bloodied, and literally hauled out into the woods to be left for the wolves. Because genre, however, she manages to fend off a special sort of wolf before being rescued by a friendly woman who happens to be the sheriff’s sister–who susses out pretty quickly what happened to Lisa. At that point our feelings are already aligned; we know what we want to happen, and we kind of want to enjoy the justice of it. But Lisa and her bestie instead wrestle in very human ways with their ethical reservations about revenge. The patterning is reasonable–her vengeance plays out in about the order we’d expect, with the sheriff saved for last–and there are hints that the writer and director get it. Lisa, for example, defers her vengeance on the sheriff’s daughter, who catalyzed all the events in the film, because she’s in a drugged stupor and would not be able to appreciate what was happening to her. What eventually becomes of the sheriff is fitting but not quite satisfying. Lisa overplays her hand and winds up being an accomplice to the sheriff’s demise rather than the prime mover. We get what we want at the level of plot, but the vibes aren’t entirely satisfying. It’s not quite cathartic.

Black Friday is something of a puzzle, but it seems to know the overall vibe it’s after and eventually get there. In some ways it’s a riff on Slither, an alien zombie invasion coinciding with a Black Friday sale at a toy store. The cast includes horror heavyweights Bruce Campbell and Devon Sawa, both of whom turn in winning performances, and the supporting cast is better than serviceable. The zombie content is fine fun, with good special effects and brisk pacing, but right in the middle of the movie there’s a pause that calls into question a great deal of the surrounding activity. Campbell, as the regional manager, makes clear that he loves his job largely because of the feeling of consequence it affords him. One of the newer employees, Chris, is finally able to unload on the store manager and his colleagues in a fairly sustained critique of corporate culture. Special invective, however, is slung at Sawa, who plays Ken, the coolest guy in the store and the devoted father of two cute kids introduced at the start of the film–his motive for trying desperately to survive the zombie attack, unsurprisingly. At the end of the midsection Sawa gets leveled: Chris mocks him for his seeming commitment to being the coolest guy, the woman he apparently flirts with, Marnie, admits she doesn’t know him well enough to take his flirtation seriously, and even his commitment to his daughters is put under the microscope–as if Ken has some special claim to survival that the others don’t have. The idea of coworkers as family is detonated, and we had into the culmination of the zombie attack with a much clearer sense of what we want–the just victimization of the managerial set, the escape of Marnie (who the workers generally agree is too kindly for the store, and for whom the viewer receives enough evidence to arrive at the same judgment), and the redemption of Ken, who seemingly suffers a zombie bite and opts to fend for himself while his coworkers escape. The tone of the movie is nicely balanced, in that the ironic/comedic beats never undercut the imminent threat posed by the alien zombie horde. And we eventually get what we want and a hasty conclusion thereafter.

I generally start any given semester with a good feeling about how my classes are going to go, well before the classroom dynamics actually emerge. The semester feels really promising in prospect, with a goodly gaggle of new and familiar faces as well as an ongoing project, Chancers, to keep me reliably busy all term, so part of my job is to bring that vibe with me to the classroom and sustain it as well as I can.