As part of a month long celebration of all things scary, SE&L will use its regular Monday/Thursday commentary pieces as a platform to discuss a few of horror’s most influential and important filmmakers. This time around, how Italian horror maestro Dario Argento made his name in two competing concepts of fear.

Dark and mysterious are the twin paths Italian director Dario Argento travels on. It’s a duality that has come to define, and in some cases, confine, one of macabre’s most meaningful artisans. Down one road lies the realm of the human soul, a place easily perverted by the notion of man as the most monstrous, destructive force in all the world. It is here where his giallo efforts exist, films based on the famous Italian pulp paperbacks known for their yellow – or ‘giallo’ – covers. From the animal trilogy The Bird with Crystal Plummage, Cat O’ Nine Tales and Four Flies on Flies on Grey Velvet to efforts like Tenebre, The Stendhal Syndrome and The Card Player, these reality-based thrillers have used the cat and mouse game of killer and cop to completely reinvent the notion of crime and punishment. His cinematic specifics have gone on to influence filmmakers the world over. 

Down the other trail, however, is a place even more enigmatic and disturbing. It is here where you will find the surreal supernatural efforts that have come to form the foundation of Argento’s sizable legend. While there are those who swear by his crackerjack murder mysteries, citing their power as both inventive narratives and examples of nuanced craftsmanship, it is his jarring juxtaposition of light and dark, real and unreal, good and evil that has had the true lasting effect for the filmmaker. Using the central theme of Thomas DeQuincey’s Three Mothers (Tears, Sighs, and Darkness) and mixing elements both actual and avant-garde, Argento strove to give horror a vibrant, visual representation. He didn’t just want knives and blood to be the basis for all fear. No, along this motion picture pathway, the recognizable and the dreamlike exist in a near incestual bond, unholy and slathered in sin.

Discounting his efforts for Italian television, it is amazing to note that the ratio between Argento’s tripwire whodunits and his paranormal pictures is almost three to one. He has only made three wholly supernatural cinematic statements – Suspira, Inferno and Phenomena (released in the US as Creepers) while the rest of this oeuvre is overwhelmed with death, dismemberment and detectives. When fans and scholars discuss his films, they too diverge along predisposed conduits, some certain that its his giallos that will live on long after his spook shows have faded, while others champion the challenges raised by the auteur’s otherworldly epics. To the fans of films like Inferno or Phenomena, Argento represents a real leap in style incorporating substance. He manages to make the macabre both beautiful and baneful, luring in audiences with his gorgeous visuals while simultaneously scaring them to their very core. It also helps that, with only three real examples to go on, the horror hits far outweigh the murder mystery missteps.

Indeed, when viewed linearly, Argento has gone from exciting to erratic when it comes to his signature serial killer sagas. Recent efforts like The Card Player and Sleepless have been considered inconsistent among critics and fans alike, and many feel the need to go back as far as Tenebre to find a pure examples of his hyperstylized human horror show. This, unfortunately, leaves out one of the director’s best efforts – 1987’s Opera. Using the majesty of the classical music format as an amazing backdrop for his slasher like leanings, this story of a cursed production, and the murderer enforcing the fear, is seen by many as Argento’s last legitimate stab at giallo excellence. Everything that’s come since – his American thriller Trauma, his Black Cat part of the Poe piece Two Evil Eyes, even the sensationally sick and somewhat sloppy Stendhal Syndrome – is viewed as lesser examples of his one-time artistic acumen.

But perhaps the most telling argument against his later works is the abject brilliance of the movies he made in the past. It is usually difficult for a trendsetter to stay ahead of the fad or frenzy they have created. The most popular superstar or commercially viable format only need to overstay its cultural welcome a month or two too long and it’s a trip into oblivion or outright hatred. Many artists faced with this dilemma simply give up, or revisit the circuit of golden oldies, recycling their greatest successes until there is no longer a paying audience. Reinvention, sometimes viewed as the key to continued longevity, can help, unless your experimentation is so wild and uncharacteristic that you lose the core audience who followed you up until this point.

Such was the case with Argento in 1975. He had created one of the most successful strings of films in the history of Italian cinema: the unintentional Animal Trilogy. With achievement came the deluge of copycats and imitators, each taking Argento’s use of the camera and convention breaking to try to repeat his success. His career sat at a crossroads, in more ways than one. An attempt at a comic western (The Five Days of Milan) had failed, leaving the reigning king in a dangerous state of audience languor. He needed something both to challenge his skills and to regain his crown as the king of the thriller.

As usual, it was a dream—about a medium reading the mind of a psychopath—that brought about the idea for another terror tale. But this would be a crime story like none other before or after, a gruesome saga of a disturbed mind on a murderous spree to cover up the past. The screen would be filled with blood, deep red rivers of gore. Style would be heightened and the experimentation with angles, techniques, color, and sound would be as important as the emphasis on story and acting. This would be the birth of a new style of giallo, one filled with artistic as well as criminal elements. And it would mean the reawakening of Argento, not just as a commercial director, but as an important cinematic visionary. In reality, the film did indeed mark a turning point for the director. It bridged the gap between previous real world based movies and began the ascent into the realm of the fantastic and the frantic. Profondo Rosso, otherwise known as Deep Red, would mark the true origins of his style and the sense of horror that would herald and haunt Argento the rest of his career.

Frankly, there is no better Italian thriller, giallo, detective, horror, or slasher style film than Deep Red. It resonates with all the visual excesses and subliminal undercurrents that Argento would later explore to their maximum capacity. It is a tour de force of camera, composition, and film craft skills. It is such a benchmark of smart, passionate film construction that it surpasses expectations and thwarts potential imitations. In his rethinking of the psycho killer genre, he focuses less on the slayer and more on the climate of fear. He wants the threat to come from the unknown, not some clear-cut origin. Because Argento is one of only a handful of horror directors who appreciates and uses the apprehension of the unfamiliar to provide mood for his movies and motivation for audience dread, his films are viewed as disturbing and uncomfortable. But this does not mean they are unsuccessful. Indeed, Deep Red is a terrific thriller, and finally confirmed Argento’s genius to those outside the foreign film market.

Success drove the director to push even further. He had even greater ambitions. Since he first read about them in a collection of essays entitled Suspiria De Profundis, Dario Argento had been fascinated with the Three Mothers, the imaginary rulers over the dominion of pain and suffering. Conceived as a complement to the entire Graces/Furies/Muses notion of mystical, powerful women, their origins do not derive from some ancient teachings or cultural folklore, but from the hallucinatory mind of an opium addict. Seeking inspiration and a chance to move away from the genre that made him a superstar, Argento took the tale of the Maters Suspiriorum, Tenebrarum, and Lachrymarum as the logical components to a trilogy. Each film would deal with a different Sorrow. Each would focus on a different location. Inferno, Argento’s equally artistic and brilliantly confusing 1980 follow-up to Suspiria, focused on Death herself, the Mother of Darkness. But with the success and acceptance of his experimentation within the conventional mystery drama of Deep Red, Argento wanted to branch out and tackle true supernatural horror. Suspiria is that startling starting point.

Understand this is Dario Argento’s version of the supernatural we are discussing, one rooted deep in European manners and superstition. In Argento’s world, ghosts do not kill people, knives do. As he views the paranormal, it manifests itself in everyday, mundane brutality. Possession may lead to illness, or even death, but more times than not a victim will be cut, or hung, as a means of quenching paranormal bloodlust. Suspiria is a horror film unlike any other in that it ventures far away from the standard “old dark house” or “living creature” notions of terror to invent a world where setting, style, and sound are more frightening than the bloody victim on the floor. In Dario’s realm, death is a release, an explosion of bound tension and a surrender of will. His work is the natural link between classical, gothic horror and the existential terror of post-modern cinema. Argento is truly one of Italy’s best, most misunderstood, and underappreciated directors. His influence on American horror is evident. Just look at any film by John Carpenter, for example, and you will see the trademark frequencies found in Argento’s cinematic stockpile.

It’s more than his avant-garde style that confuses and angers people. He is not willing to play fair and is more interested in how a film makes you feel than how it resolves its plotline. Something can be beautiful, and confusing as hell, but as long as you see the grace in its presentation, the meaning is unimportant. Argento confounds the fan looking for cold-blooded killing (though he does provide many sequences of graphic mutilation) or expecting the conventions of a standard horror ideal. Suspiria is the best example of this conundrum. While it is a film about witches, we hardly see any of their activities or rituals until the end. While it is a film about the power of black magic, the death is all common and realistic (except for a demonically inspired animal attack). Indeed, Suspiria is its own self-contained universe, a place where palatial settings mask hordes of meat-rotting maggots, or beautiful stained glass becomes a deadly pointed weapon of destruction. Viewed as a trip in to Argento’s private realm, it is easy to see why many call it a masterpiece. Suspiria takes convention and tosses it into a room filled with barbed wire fencing, letting it struggle to survive the oncoming visual and aural onslaught.

With this one two punch, Argento cemented his moviemaking mythos, and forged the dueling avenues that his erratic career has had to maneuver. Every proceeding film now had a major tour de force benchmark to be held up against. Whenever he tried another crime thriller, Deep Red became the critical focus of the comments. If he branched back out again into pure horror, the hallucinatory genius of Suspiria cast a shadow over the entire enterprise. Interesting enough, said film would also follow any giallo effort, arguing that Argento should stop wasting his time with such procedural parlor tricks and get back to finalizing the Mothers Trilogy (fans will be happy to know that he has plans to make the third and final film, hopefully for a 2007 release). Like the burden that any artist carries when they are compared with their past, Italy’s premiere fright master has been both lauded and lamented for his choices, unable to escape the opinions of fans, and fellow filmmakers, when it comes to his often confusing career moves

So now that our corridors have names, now that Via Suspiria and Via Profundo Rosso are labeled and legitimized by the numerous viewers who’ve traveled down their complicated and occasionally confusing logistics, it is safe to say that Dario Argento remains a true motion picture enigma. He is one of the few remaining filmmakers from decades gone by that can still rely on their reputation to sell a story. He is one of the few directors who still gets fans in a frenzy when a new project is announced, providing them with instant recall of journeys both grand and grating on the twin roads of his aesthetic’s twofold directions. Though his track record has been anything but flawless, he does have more classic cobblestones and masterpiece mortar than many creators can claim in several lifetimes.

Perhaps this is why we are willing to accept his bifurcated approach to the art of cinema and leave it at that. Though he hasn’t always definitively delivered, he’s proof that the voyage is sometimes as important, and more interesting, than the final destination. It’s what makes Argento stand out in an arena filled with pure motion picture pretenders. It’s what keeps him vital, and viable, in the ever changing world of fear. And with two distinct ways in which to achieve his ends, it’s clear why he remains so important. While said dualism may be disturbing to those looking to easily classify their creative icons, it sets Argento apart from his Italian brethren. It’s what makes him the true maestro he has managed to become today.

Cato Instituter Will Wilkinson makes a valient attempt to argue against the zero-sum nature of status games—comparing ourselves to others and deriving our satisfaction from that rather than the utility of whatever we possess or are capable of. The essence of his argument seems to be positionality is inevitable, but we can always change the game we’re playing until we find one we can win.

Crucially, there is no limit to the possible forms of excellence. So, while the number of positions on any single dimension of status may be fixed, there is no reason why dimensions of status cannot be multiplied indefinitely. It does not in fact require a violation of mathematical law to produce more high-status positions, for it is possible to produce new status dimensions.

This seems to ignore the fact that some status games are more significant than others and that ultimately society confers significance on these things; it’s not a product of an individual’s force of will. I really want to believe that Wilkinson’s right about this:

We are not destined to want fancier cars, bigger houses, and more upscale outfits, nor are we helpless to feel diminished by those who out-consume us. We can opt out by opting in to competing narratives about the composition of a good life. And we do it all the time. We can, like Gauguin, quit law and family to paint naked natives in Tahiti. Or, better, we can move the family to a quieter place where houses are cheap and schools are good. (‘Is this heaven?’ ‘No, Iowa.’) If we are aggrieved by the rigours of the rat race, the answer is not the clumsy guidance of a paternal state. The answer is simply to stop being a rat.

But the problem is not that we internalize the rat race and are unable to let it go and be happy. The problem is the races we want to run are not necessarily recognized as relevant socially, and ultimately, the pursuit of social recognition is not a race we can easily opt out of, no matter how libertarian we seek to become.

No matter how hard I might want thorough knowledge of 1960s rock music or Dylan albums or 18th century novels to be an important status signifier, in the eyes of most everyone I encounter or ever will encounter, it’s not and it’s not going to be. So I can be king of an insignificant hill, put my blinders on, block out the rest of the world and be satisfied with that—or as Wilkinson spins it, “The cultural fragmentation some critics lament is precisely what liberates us from unavoidable zero-sum positional conflict. Surfer dudes don’t compete with Star Trek geeks for status.” Apparently you use the Internet to discover a niche in which you can dominate and excel. In his view, the benefit of technology is precisely the alienation and isolation it produces—it allows you to construct a fiefdom in which your own predilections and proclivities are the defining traits of importance and influence. But if you are the only resident of that fiefdom, you only influence yourself. This solipsistic game gets boring, just as playing chess versus yourself does. Of course positional conflict isn’t unavoidable. It only becomes so if there are actually others present to position yourself against. If you want to take part in an intensely competitive society like ours in a meaningful, recognized way. If you change the rules of the game to make social recognition an insignificant by-product to the pursuit of the joy of winning, rather than its very essence, then yes, status games are not zero-sum. They are just pointless. And I generally disagree with the logic here—I think zero-sum positionality infects these niches once we import the urge to dominate them for status purposes. Under the spell of capitalism’s standard operating procedures (creative destruction for growth, etc.) we bring the fashion imperative to spheres of culture that were once immune to it; and then suddenly it’s not about the thing itself but where you stand in relation to others on the competitive field supplied by that thing. That thing recedes in significance, and becomes interchangable with any other.

Still, Wilkinson’s ideas, if not feasible as an overall strategy, do make for good tactics for resisting positionality in everyday life, for imagining alternatives, for trying to conceive other means for deriving recognition. They sound a lot like the ideas the downshifters put forward. (To get utopian for a moment, these individual efforts are likely the minucule building blocks for building a different kind of society, one less reliant on the fashion and novelty within consumerism for perpetuating economic growth. Wilkinson’s right that a paternalistic state wishing competition into the cornfield and guaranteeing equal outcomes isn’t the solution.) The key is to oppotunistically seize on those moments wherein one escapes the pressures to rank oneself and is lost in an activity. Every week I get together with friends and we play music in a practice space we rent. It doesn’t matter, to me, if anyone else ever hears the music we make, beause right now it’s an oasis for me where those pressures of positionality are suspended, held at bay. Suddenly I’m in a world where collective action is all; in our all too temporary society of three there is for those two hours no distinction between personal and social goals, and recognition is as immediate and reciprocal as a picked-up change, an established groove that’s otherwise inexpressible and intangible.

Addendum: At Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell takes similar issue to Wilkinson’s argument: “Wilkinson’s claim implies, unless I misunderstand him badly, that it doesn’t matter very much to me if I’m a despised cubicle rat who can’t afford a nice car and gets sneered at by pretty girls, because when I go home and turn on my PC, I suddenly become a level 75 Night Elf Rogue who Kicks Serious Ass! Now this example is loaded – but it’s loaded to demonstrate a serious sociological point that Wilkinson doesn’t even begin to address. These indefinitely proliferating dimensions of status competition are connected to each other in their own implicit meta-ranking, which is quite well understood by all involved.… In short, people are highly aware of the relative rankings of their obsessions.”

Whenever the calendar rolls over to a certain 31 October, fright fans break out their bountiful opinions and wax poetic and prosaic about the best and worst horror films ever made. While it may seem like nothing more than a rabid fanboy pastime, that fact is it’s not that easy a task. Like comedy, terror is in the heart of the beholder, too personal to be easily agreed upon. What some find frightening gives others a case of the uncontrollable giggles and its rare when fear can be universally applied. It’s just too individualized. As a result, making any list of yeas and nays allows for lots of second guessing and subjective stipulations – especially in the arena of b-a-d. Many can’t get past the numerous nonsensical sequels that endlessly pour out of the studio system, pointing to franchises gone god-awful as their primary examples of tepid terror. For others, it’s the offerings of the past, the low budget efforts of dollar driven distributors that did little except waste 80 minutes of the drive-in owners or matinee movie audience’s running time.

As a result, SE&L is taking a slightly different approach toward prioritizing the legacy of fear. This will not be your typical ‘worst of’ horror movie list. SE&L did not consider the lengthy, and rather lamentable, legacy of ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Roger Corman and his many mediocre monster mash-ups will find no careful consideration here, nor will any effort involving giant insects, radioactive non/humans or other examples of backwater b-moviemaking. Nor did we delve into the plethora of pathetic product that arrived in video stores once the VCR became the principal source of home entertainment. Picking through the sludge put out during that age of analog abominations would be similar to shooting undead fish in a broad-based barrel. No, the approach taken here is far more mainstream. By avoided the usual spastic spook subjects (Ed Wood, Manos: The Hands of Fate, anything featuring Arch Hall, Jr.) SE&L circumvented the whole ‘crap vs. kitsch’ debate. Instead, the focus now will be on those real films that actually thought they’d end up as some manner of frightmare myths.

The main element here is that each entry on this list THOUGHT it was going to be some kind of horror classic. They positioned themselves as remaking, reimagining or revisiting ideas that had been very successful in the past. Certainly a couple could be called out and out cash grabs, chances to bilk the box office out a few more dollars before pushing straight to cable. But it’s clear that, for the most part, these were serious, straight motion pictures designed to play as accomplished companion pieces to the rest of the genre. Naturally, they failed so miserably that their collapse becomes celebrated and over time, cemented their position as one of the cinema’s outstanding stumbles. After much deep thought and soured soul searching, these are the efforts that SE&L feels best exemplifie the worst that post-modern horror has to offer. Without further ado, here are the Top 10 Worst Horror Films of All Time, beginning with the biggest bumble of them all:

1. Exorcist II: The Heretic

Buried somewhere inside this absolutely pointless sequel to horror’s preeminent fright fest is a decent idea. Following up Regan’s irregular path into adolescence while the church investigates Father Merrin’s death is a parallel scenario that has a wealth of worthwhile possibilities. Sadly, director John Boorman decided to concentrate on the more psychobabble claptrap concepts inherent in the screenplay. Throw in some random locusts, a lot of Studio 54 style strobe lights and you’ve got cinema’s most stupefyingly bad scary movie.

2. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

As irritatingly incomprehensible as the first film was (too much cursing combined with nausea-inducing POV camerawork) this scripted follow up was much, much worse. Though famed documentary director Joe Berlinger (Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) would argue that excessive studio interference would ruin his original vision, it is hard to imagine how any initial ideas could make this movie work. It seems purposely lost inside it own insular devices. On the plus side, this completely crappy follow-up more of less killed the Witch franchise for good. Thank heaven for small miracles.

3. House of Wax (2005)

A group of grating plot contrivances discovers a ghost town made mostly out of dumb ideas…oh yeah, and paraffin. Lots of bad movie clichés ensue. While this incredibly amateur movie has its fans, most macabre mavens simply sniffed the aroma of Paris Hilton’s stunt casting and realized the awaiting repugnance. Granted the original material was no great spook shakes, but even Charles Bronson’s wooden acting in the 1953 feature was miles ahead of a certain spoiled socialite’s braindeath as bravado turn. Even the meltdown finale couldn’t save this stool-scented slop.

4. House of the Dead

Based on a popular video game, featuring those familiar scarefest sacrificial lambs (the zombie) and helmed by that talentless Teutonic hack, Dr. Uwe Boll, what could have been a semi-competent cult effort turned out to be one of the genre’s most mindless missteps. With sequences that seem stolen from a hyperactive TRL‘s monster music video and poorly conceived creatures that look like Cirque du Soleil artists gone gamy, Boll manages to set the entire undead film back decades with his poisonous pacing, directorial dumbness and overall lack of thrills.

5. Maximum Overdrive

We all know how misbegotten the original idea was (Stephen King as fright writer ≠ Stephen King, filmmaker) but few have really remembered just how horrendous this mess of a movie really was. It’s not that the Master of Horror is utterly and hopelessly incompetent behind the camera – in fact, his opening montage of machines going gonzo is pretty well realized. No, it’s everything after technology starts attacking that begins to fester and, ultimately, fail. A wailing Yeardley Smith provides the final nail in the klutzy King adaptation coffin.

6. Nightbreed

Legend has it that Clive Barker conceived his second feature film, based on his intriguing novella Cabal, as “the Star Wars of horror movies”. What it ended up being was an unqualified disaster, with substantial studio meddling and massive budget problems contributing to the world’s first eerie ipecac. Unable to decide if it’s a monster movie, an ambitious piece of beast-based mythos, or simply a slice and dice serial killer film, Barker braves all three. The ridiculous results, including the horrendous performances by all involved, speak for themselves.

7. The Fly 2

David Cronenberg’s first Fly was such a memorable masterpiece, a perfect marriage of material and maker that only a Hollywood halfwit could think that a sequel would succeed. Even worse, they decided to junk everything that made the original so special – concepts like script, emotion, intelligence and characterization – and replaced them with Eric Stoltz and a mutant puppy dog. Right. Only a Chevy-sized can of DDT (or a second sex scene with Daphne Zuniga) could have killed the creature feature franchise more expertly than this deadly drone.

8. Amityville 3-D

Sometime between 1982 and 1983, the geniuses behind Tinsel Town’s beans decided that that old warhorse from the ‘50s – 3-D – was ready for its motion picture comeback. As one of the several multidimensional efforts to make use of the tired cinematic turd, this third look at the Lutz house got even stupider and more incomprehensible. Nothing more than a lot of camera pranks perpetrated on an already blasé audience, the lack of any authentic connection to the so-called “real” events that occurred in the notorious locale made the film all the more laughable.

9. Van Helsing

How do you undermine the legacy of all the classic Universal monsters? Why, you give unlikely blockbuster director Stephen Summers a Mummy‘s worth of money and enough CGI to choke a ghoul. Then you let him raid your catalog of timeless terror icons and retrofit them into some stupid adventure yarn starring everyone’s favorite Downunder dude Hugh Jackman. While many consider this confused combination of the Gothic and the groan-inducing as merely a faux horror film, the dread one experiences while watching this carton creature creation is real enough.

10. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

Otherwise known as how Sheriff Hoyt got his perverted groove on. You know you’re in trouble when a prequel (Strike 1), setting out to reshape and redefine one of horror’s premiere figures (Strike 2), instead spends all its time presenting the tale of how some ancillary character became a gun-toting goon. (Strike 3). When Marcus Nispel took on the daunting task of remaking the Tobe Hooper original, he brought as much artistic and narrative invention to the mix as possible. All this dreadful retread offers is pathetic, predictable pointlessness passing itself off as dread.

A stalwart article in the Guardian about prizes and the arts: And the Winner Is?. Jason Cowley examines the system of awards in the UK arts, extending not just to music but also literature. And what do the prizes provide the winners? Fame, recognition, money, opportunities- you know, all the crass things that a real artist isn’t supposed to be concerned with. And surprise, surprise- many of the similarities between the arts are that merit doesn’t always drive the decision- there’s a lot of politics involved, even in the ‘fine’ arts. It also provides some comfort for anyone not anointed by this committee or that society. Hey, you can toil away in ongoing obscurity with thousands of others!

I wish I could remember where I saw it, but I read somewhere that Borders, the book-store chain, was seeking new growth opportunities in opening smaller stores (”Borders Express”) that sound a lot like the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers mall storefronts that the big-box retailer originally stole market share from. Originally, in what was the opening fusillade of the long-tail revolution, big-box stores opened to suit the modern customer whose needs—yours, mine—were far too recondite to be served by some puny mainstream mall store with its limited selection and plebian emphasis. At Borders I could expect to buy books by Althusser and Badiou; not so at Waldenbooks, where they were crowded out by the likes of Danielle Steele and John Jakes. The zeitgeist through the late 1990s was in keeping with this; customers needed superstores to accomodate their esoteric, unique-seeming needs in just about everything—books, music, electronics, housewares, hardware, bedsheets, containers, gourmet foods, you name it. And the mother of all superstores, though approaching it from a different ideological angle, is Wal-Mart—Wal-Mart doesn’t cater to our special needs so much as provide one-stop shopping and a sense that the prices are unbeatably low, and these two things compensate for the inconvenience of dealing with the carnivalesque atmosphere, the crowds, the understaffed cashier lines and so on. (It was left to Target to merge the Borders ideology with the Wal-Mart ideology, and provide spruced-up commodities and designy versions of utilitarian goods that invited us to imagine ourselves as curators of our own personal household museum.)

But perhaps the zeitgeist is changing, and consumers don’t want big-box stores anymore. Perhaps there are cyclical movements in shopping environments as there are in fashion, and the particulars are ultimately just as arbitrary. We prefer something different for the sake of its difference after a while, and this plays out in the sudden exhaustion of a huge company’s business model. The WSJ has a front-page article today about Wal-Mart, for the first time in many years, scaling back its expansion plans, as it appears it has saturated the market.

Wal-Mart’s modest shift in strategy suggests the giant discounter, which has been increasingly constrained by its own size, may be heeding Wall Street’s urging to pay less attention to growth and put more emphasis on returns. “This tells me that Wal-Mart is willing to look at their business model from a fresh perspective,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher. “They are not just mindlessly continuing on the same focus that they’ve had for years.” The shift is also an acknowledgment of the pressures that have buffeted Wal-Mart from all sides this year.

So the relentless effort to drum up negative coverage of Wal-Mart is possibly starting to trickle down to average Americans, some of whom are now willing to work a little harder to avoid the Wal-Mart stigma. This is the consequence of the company’s trying to expand into suburban, culturally more-liberal areas: “As it ventures beyond its rural base into urban markets, such as San Francisco’s Bay Area, Boston and Chicago, Wal-Mart also is encountering heavy resistance from community activists and local politicians who object to its low wages and other employment practices and say it poses a threat to local businesses.” The poltical blowback is an externality that perhaps hadn’t anticipated, and suggests why our collective whining isn’t entirely trivial. It may have the larger impression of creating a negative brand impression that makes it way back and erodes the company’s core customer base.

Also, it may be that the company has filled the country with all the Wal-Marts it can handle, and now the tide must recede. “In regions like the South, where it already reigns, its new stores are increasingly siphoning sales away from older ones.” It’s comforting to imagine that there’s a limit to how far the blandification of America can go, that this could mean the transformation of country roads into strips of giant warehouses of retail goods with their attendant parking lots might be coming to an end. But that’s just a fantasy—whether the boxes are big or small, the stores need will need brand names to comfort wary consumers and guarantee their feeling of having participated in something larger. The days when local idiosyncracy was generally tolerated has long since passed.