Reflective Post: I Have Questions About the Body, Apparently

Most of my blog posts pick up on small details from the week’s readings and ask questions about them or nitpick or disagree with points the authors are making. In later blog posts, this might be a function of my profound discomfort dealing with technology’s new role in death and mourning – especially as that shades into questioning the role of the body.

For example, I didn’t like Jonathan Sterne’s idea that the voice is less whole somehow if it is no longer linked to the body, so I tried to find fault with his argument. In another post, I likened researchers monitoring Facebook use to scientists performing trials on non-consenting subjects. Loss of autonomy when it comes to the body or extensions thereof (your likeness and name on social media, for instance) upsets me. When I wrote about Dead Set, I was concerned with the difference between seeing and communicating with other people – the importance of physical presence.

This fascination with the body has been evident in other work I’ve done this year (most notably in poetry I’ve written), and I hadn’t realized it was showing up in my academic work until I started reviewing my blog posts.

The other trend I notice is that in my earlier posts, I drew connections between class texts or asked questions of them, while in my later posts, I began making arguments of my own. I think that demonstrates my growing confidence with the class’s subject matter and investment in reaching my own conclusions.

Weighing Dark Tourism

The Yankovska and Hannam article about dark and toxic tourism spends some time examining, or at least talking around, the ethics of dark tourism. It divides dark tourists into two groups — the younger tourists who are thrill-seekers, drawn to the closeness the sites provide to death, the eerie, and the morbid, and the older tourists who visit to learn about and pay their respects to tragedy. There’s no outright condemnation of the former type of tourist, but the language certainly suggests that this type of tourism is lesser somehow, or dirtier.

I think this kind of moralizing is unproductive. It seems most of the tour guides interviewed for the piece agree with me (though I suppose their inclusivity could be attributed to a desire for the visits of any and all tourists for their own monetary gain). What they volunteer is that despite a tourist’s initial motivation for visiting a place like Chernobyl, they go away having learned something.

One tour guide said, “this trip into the heart of the disaster and its surroundings makes everyone more conscious about the consequences and a need to volunteer for the suffered one.” In other words, it’s an empathy booster that could lead to action in the face of the next tragedy, as well as a warning of the tragedies we set up with our advancement.

Another tour guide said, those who visit some of the most gruesome sites “want to understand the price others paid for their life, understand human sacrifice and feel inspired for heroism in their life.” Surface level curiosity about the morbid might actually be a desire for deeper understanding of the human psyche.

In short, I don’t think there’s any reason to try to discern whether it’s right or wrong to visit “dark tourism” sites. They exist in commemoration of events that have transpired, and we have things to learn from any event.

theabstractlando

My best friend Landin is a very talented visual artist and she runs an Instagram page where she posts photos of her artwork. I knew when I was assigned this project that I wanted to kill her, that I wanted to use her Instagram, and that I wanted to exploit her life’s work. I have invented a reality in which Landin has passed, and I have made a website where I sell the art from her Instagram account.

There are two main phenomena I am trying to explore through my project. The first is the phenomenon of art being worth more when the artist is dead. The second is the problematic way people interact with the art of dead artists. My website tries to combine these two explorations by combining two varieties of website: it’s an online store, but also a sort of blog. I will explain the ways I handle my interests first by discussing the store, and then by discussing the blog.

That art goes up in value when the artist dies is something I and I think most other people know to be true, but I don’t think anyone can really explain why. M. D. Edwards knows it’s true in “How Much Is That Painting Worth? An Essay on the Value of Art.” The factors that determine a painting’s worth are numbered, and number four, dropped with really no explanation, is “the time of the artist’s death” (Edwards 10). We all know it’s true. But why? Sure, a dead artist ensures that the art is unique. If Landin isn’t around to produce anything else, every piece she made while she was alive is the only thing of its kind that will ever exist. But does uniqueness alone make art objectively valuable? What if it isn’t aesthetically pleasing to me? Do collectors collect just because the objects are rare? What do they get out of that? If we value art for how it makes us feel, and whether or not we like it viscerally, the way I think most people do, why can we all agree that a piece should be worth more just because the artist is dead?

The idea of selling Landin’s work almost directly from her Instagram account (an atmosphere I try to capture by embedding her posts in my own so that you can see the number of likes they received, when they were posted, etc.) was important to me. I want to emphasize that Landin’s art already has a life online, in the public eye, outside of my website. Potential buyers could have been interacting with the art I’m now selling from the time it was posted on her account, but they look at it through different eyes now because of the way it is packaged. The gallery Landin curated in her lifetime was strictly view-only. There was never any mention of selling her art. The viewing experience of my website, then, is inherently different because of the “Add to Cart” button you see beneath every piece. I invite the viewer to pass judgment on the art in a way Landin never did by providing space to wonder about the art’s value. I comment on how ridiculous the idea of automatic death-value seems to me by valuing individual pieces of Landin’s art somewhat arbitrarily.

As the self-appointed executor of Landin’s Instagram estate, I get to decide how much each piece should sell for. That’s definitely taking advantage – of her creation and of the platform she gave it online. Honestly, it’s taking advantage in a way that might get me arrested in real life, and is maybe not plausible, but it’s in service of an exploration of my second phenomenon.

I think people have much more of a tendency to impose themselves on the art of dead artists than of living ones. Often, I think we take a sort of ownership of dead artists’ work. We feel like what they’ve left behind offers some look into their heads, lives, or experiences. We try to understand the departed through the art they made when they were alive. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with interpretation. Art makes you feel the way it makes you feel, and that’s the point of it. I think the issue is when we decide to align the way we feel with the artist’s intent, or the artist’s subconscious. When we try to construct a narrative about the artist’s emotional life based on their work. It’s intrusive and presumptive, and a dead artist doesn’t get to talk back, or tell us where we’re right or wrong.

I’ve thought a lot about this kind of interpretation of dead people’s art in terms of a photo caption from Bell’s BBC article about death photography. The picture in question shows a blurry man and woman with their dead daughter, who is in sharp focus, and is captioned “Long exposures when taking photographs meant that the dead were often seen more sharply than the slightly-blurred living, because of their lack of movement” (Bell). I think that metaphorically, this is society’s attitude towards the dead. We romanticize dead people’s, especially dead artists’, problems and emotional turmoil, and have a morbid fascination with trying to understand them. We act as though death gives us license to intrude on someone’s life, like their absence brings a sort of clarity. Dead people are easier to understand in their “lack of movement,” because they can’t continue to act. If life is the painting of a mural that continues to get more complicated, then death makes the mural finite, and we can impose an interpretation on the picture we have that won’t be forced to change with new additions to the mural. The problem is that the mural wasn’t necessarily finished. The artist just stopped adding things. There’s no way for us to really know what the final project was intended to look like.

Kris Fallon argues in a chapter of Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism that Instagram defies the database model of photo-sharing that has existed for decades by inherently creating a narrative. Since photos are shared when they are taken, we go on a journey with the sharer. This is what is eerie about the social media accounts of the dead, I think. Like my mural analogy, an archived Instagram page is an abandoned narrative. By coopting Landin’s Instagram and imposing my own narrative on her art, I am inserting myself intimately into her life’s work in storytelling, an uncomfortable colonization.

On my website, I’m trying to overdo the overstepping. Instead of being set up like a typical gallery or online store, it runs like a blog, and I write a short post about every piece I’m selling. Those posts range from trying to find an uplifting theme in a piece that makes it seem heartwarming and likeable to using the art to justify accusations of deep emotional turmoil in Landin’s last few months alive. In one place on the About page, I claim that art with special sentimental value is not for sale or exhibited on the website. I want a visitor to the website to read that message and be confused by the pieces I have included. If I have so much to say about the ones I’m willing to sell, what could possibly be in the pieces I keep out of the public eye?  The point is that I’m interpreting whatever I want to from the art, no matter how shallow, far-fetched, or imagined, and speaking my interpretation like it’s profound truth.

The blog format makes the website more about me than about Landin. I tried to embody the selfish grief Phillips’ grief trolls target. As a blog, the exercise of trying to interpret Landin’s art becomes an attempted definition of my own relationship with her. That isn’t what a website marketed as a space for her honor and remembrance should do. This fault is near what some of Phillips’ trolls argue about people who post on Facebook memorial sites – they aren’t doing it to remember the dead, they’re doing it to draw attention to themselves. My website even has my name in the URL. That began as accidental – I needed it to be an offshoot of my Davidson Domain and I couldn’t figure out a way around the domain name – but I liked the way the problem centered me. I think we as a society are trying to figure out how to make public grief in the age of the internet appropriate. The biggest struggle is navigating how to honor someone with our private accounts, where we are the center of the world, without making the death about us. To comment on this issue, I wanted my website to really be about me.

In short, I want this project to be disturbing, and I want to come across as really wrong and unlikeable for having set up this website at all. I was careful to obtain Landin’s permission before embarking on the project, but it still felt wrong to kill her and manhandle her art like this. I am encouraged by the fact that public, exclamatory, profitable grief like this is uncomfortable for me. I hope the website will be uncomfortable for you.

 

Works Cited

Bell, Bethan. “Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography.” BBC News, BBC, 5 June 2016, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581.

Edwards, M. D. “How Much Is That Painting Worth? An Essay on the Value of Art.” Art Education, vol. 44, no. 1, 1991, pp. 9–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3193261.

Fallon, Kris. “THE PENCIL OF IDENTITY: INSTAGRAM AS INADVERTENT (FEMALE) AUTOBIOGRAPHY.” Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism, edited by Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2018, pp. 9–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1tqx9f7.7.

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online.” First Monday[Online], 16.12 (2011).Web. 27 Mar. 2019

I Don’t Remember Agreeing to be Watched by You

I was taken by the “psychological study” described in Senemar’s article where Facebook researchers manipulated the emotional tone of the posts Facebook users saw to observe how they would respond. This seems like a hugely inappropriate invasion of privacy. Outside the digital world, you have to fill out all sorts of waivers to be a subject in an experiment. As a researcher, you have to be intentional about getting the consent of your subjects, and as a subject, you have the right to say no. It’s very sinister feeling that the only consent Facebook needs to experiment on you is your creating a profile on their website.

I certainly did not read Facebook’s terms and conditions before clicking the button to certify I had when I signed up for the website at age 14. The percentage of users who did has to be incredibly small. But I’m willing to bet that even if I’d clicked on that link and read the conditions I was agreeing to I would have missed the loopholes that allows Facebook to manipulate its users like lab-rats. That has to be something Facebook wants to obscure, because it’s creepy.

Facebook’s failure (or more accurately, “intentional neglect” – they KNOW nobody reads their terms) to explicitly ask users for permission to engage in such experimentation is unsettling because it removes the humanity from the researchers. Being the subject of a test where you can interact with the people manipulating you is somehow less terrifying than being unconsciously manipulated by your computer screen. We can’t see the programmers behind the algorithm that makes everything we see on Facebook sad, and if they never ask permission to do that to us, we’re even further removed from them. Technology does what technology wants. Researchers get to hide behind technology, and it makes them less accountable.

On the Interiority/Exteriority of Voice Recording

Jonathan Sterne’s “A Resonant Tomb” likens voice recording to the embalming of a corpse, a comparison I don’t understand or with which I disagree. Sterne writes extensively about exteriority vs. interiority in methods of preservation – embalmment is concerned with preserving the exterior of the body instead of the inside – and uses this as the primary link between embalming and sound recording. He asserts that while “speech is traditionally considered as both interior and exterior,” recorded voices, especially of the departed, “no longer emanate from bodies that serve as containers for self-awareness,” and by that token, retain “none of [their] interior self-awareness” (290). His argument seems to be that the interiority of a voice lies in its point of origin – if it is no longer linked to a body, it has lost its core.

What about voices we hear when we can’t see the speaker, then? When we are too short to see the lecturer over the heads of the people standing in front of us? Is the speech any less substantial for us than for those who can see the body from which the voice is produced?

Later, examining the painting His Master’s Voice, Sterne writes, “when we see a dog listening to a gramophone, we understand that the important issue is the sound of the voice, not what was said, since dogs are known for heeding the voices of their masters more often than their words” (303). The painting is heartbreaking because we imagine the dog recognizing the voice of his master from beyond the grave, and not understanding his absence. Another of Sterne’s anecdotes mentions a priest who recorded a sermon for his own funeral. He begins to cry at the end of his recording, after preaching, and the sound “caused a shudder of horror among those who were present” (303).

These qualities, I think, are the core of voice, a true interiority that is not lost in recording: our ability to find identity in a voice, and its ability to manipulate our emotions. In Sterne’s closing summary, he writes that voice recording “does not preserve a preexisting sonic event as it happens so much as it creates and organizes sonic events for the possibility of preservation and repetition” (332). Perhaps the emotional burden of hearing the dead priest’s eulogy, for someone hearing it in person before he was dead, would have been different from the burden on someone present at the funeral. In this way, the sonic event has not been duplicated, per say. However, the voice still has the power to affect powerful emotion, which I think is proof of some eternal interiority in sound.

Technology and Humanity in Cell and Pulse

Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell and 2006 American horror film Pulse (a remake of an earlier Japanese film) both focus on apocalyptic technology-borne diseases that threaten to destroy the human race. In Cell, the central blight is a cell-signal broadcasted across the world that turns anyone using a cellphone into a zombie, referred to as a phoner throughout the book. Phoners are radically violent, targeting and attacking the unaffected, and as the novel progresses, they develop supernatural psychic powers which allow them to communicate telepathically with one another and with non-phoners. The central scourge of Pulse is somewhat less defined, seeming to be transmittable through most forms of technology. Via internet, cell-phone, and radio, primarily, victims are possessed by a sort of virus that drives them to kill themselves. The virus manifests as ghostly, human-like figures outside of its technological hosts, so it is able to chase and force itself upon its victims. While the form of illness, spread of the disease, and method of destruction are different in the two works, the real power behind both Cell and Pulse lies in the successful blurring of the line between human and technology.

The first hint of this blurring is apparent even in the language of both texts. The word ‘pulse’ is used consistently throughout Cell to refer to the signal that causes the zombification of cell-phone users. The first line of the novel is, “The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time on the afternoon of October 1” (King 3). While the characters in Pulse don’t use that specific word, it is wired into the mind of the viewer as linked with Pulse’s technology disease as well, being the title of the movie. The word ‘pulse’ is an interesting one because it has both biological and technological associations to the modern audience. ‘Pulse’ can refer to an electrical current or other wave vibration, or it can be a synonym for heartbeat. Cell plays explicitly on this crossover with its cover art; below are two different editions of Cell’s cover, both of which incorporate blood or blood imagery into the scene with a cell-phone, suggesting that the phone itself can bleed.

      

The subtle linkage in both pieces of the fundamentally human with the fundamentally engineered paves the way for more confusion between the categories as the works progress.

This kind of “category crisis” lines up with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s third theses in his Seven Theses on Monster Culture. He writes that monsters “are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (6). The ambiguity of ‘pulse’ and similar words like ‘virus’ contribute to this defiance of classification for the monsters in both works.

In his essay “Terminal Films,” Steen Christiansen uses the concept of a virus to support the point that Pulse explores the boundary between man and machine. ‘Virus,’ like ‘pulse,’ is a word imbued with both technological and biological connotations. It can be a disease spread between computers, or between creatures, but in the normal world, there is no crossover. Christiansen writes that in Pulse, “we see that a digital virus can infect a biological human, suggesting that the boundary between human and code is permeable. Such permeability questions the usual concept of a human being as a bounded entity” (272). Cell and Pulse both wear this boundary thin, but reach slightly different conclusions about the relationship between humanity and technology.

Though the Pulse virus comes from technology, it gets outside of itself in order to infect. The virus takes the shape of ghostly people (as seen below) to gain contact with its human victims; it takes a corporeal form which allows it to run, attack, and hurt those it seeks to infect. In a sense, the technology becomes humanity in order to corrupt humanity.

This becomes a very internal attack. First the virus becomes human, but then it infiltrates another human as it starts to take root. Virus-people get very close to those they want to infect and there is a strange energy exchange between them, like in the picture below. It resembles the soul-sucking of dementors in Harry Potter. Then, the virus enters the body, causing bruising of the skin and dark thoughts, which drive victims to suicide.

So the arc here is that the Pulse virus becomes human, infects a human, and then destroys the human.

Instead of adopting and polluting humanity like the Pulse virus, the Cell pulse robs humans of their humanity. As the phoners develop their psychic abilities, they become pack-like creatures of habit. They share a hive-mind, sleep at the same time, and work towards common goals. They are more like insects, bees, than like humans. The phoners shift to working more and more like technology or primitive lifeforms, like they are following a code that tells them what to do and when to do it. While in Pulse the virus becomes like a human, in Cell the virus makes humans become like technology.

Norah Campbell and Mike Saren, in their essay “The primitive, technology and horror: A posthuman biology,” discuss a concept they call “dirty technology.” “Dirty technology,” they write, “is an aesthetic which combines the sterile, pristine and inorganic efficiency of technology with the visceral, leaking decaying disorganization of animal life” (167). Watching the disintegration of technology when it is linked with life, they say, implies also a disintegration of the borders between technology and humanity. We see this technique at work in Cell in two capacities. First, there is the descent of the human to the sub-human under the effect of the technological disease. Second, there is the decay of the technology itself.

Towards the end of the novel, it becomes apparent that some of the phoners are behaving differently, less threateningly, than others. The characters theorize that there has been a mutation in the pulse which makes its corruption of the mind weaker. This is a prime example of dirty technology: like something organic, the technological villain of the story mutates and changes so much that it could eventually put an end to the threat it has been causing. Cell closes with a quote directing the protagonist how he might save his phoner son,

“Johnny was different from [the original phoners]. Why? Because the worm was still munching, the Pulse program was still mutating? Probably. The last thing Jordan had said before kissing him goodbye and heading north was If you set a new version of the program against the one Johnny and the others got at the checkpoint, they might eat each other up. Because that’s what worms do. They eat” (447).

The protagonist, Clay, then dials 911 and holds his cellphone up to his son’s ear in the hope that the now-corrupted pulse will reverse the effects of the pulse his son endured before. Cell ends on a note of desperate inevitability, then: technology is a problem that, like any human problem, should eventually take care of itself. It might come close to destroying us first, though.

The feeling created by the end of Pulse is a much bleaker sort of inevitability. About 20 minutes before the close of the movie, the two main characters think they have figured out a way to stop the virus with their own technology. Their friend, before his untimely death, was working on a computer program to stop the virus, which he had stored on a secret memory stick. The protagonists race to the computer lab where the virus began to plug in the flash-drive, and for a minute, they think they’ve been successful. The system seems to crash, but then it reboots. As the virus-humans start to take form again, the protagonists get in a car and drive far away, somewhere with no cell-signal or wireless internet, free of the technological blight. This is the final scene of the movie:

“The will to live never dies. Not for us, and not for them.” There is nothing we can do but let our technology come for us. Our will to live is what makes us human, but because we program our technology, it has that same drive.

Pulse does not offer the same hope of eventual triumph for humans that Cell does. Cell seems to wrap up with a conclusion that technology has a sort of life to it that keeps it beyond our control, but it is just sub-human enough that there is hope for us after all. It is like a parasite that can invade us and change the way we act, growing and changing in an almost organic way, but it does not quite get the best of us. Pulse seems to reach the conclusion that someday, we’ll be locked in a stalemate with technology that is just as human as we are. It will take over our cities and drive us away. Both works play with the boundary between humanity and technology, and though both reach eerie conclusions, the scariest part may be that we don’t really know what the technological apocalypse will look like. The humanity of our machines could still surprise us.

 

Works Cited

Campbell, Norah, and Mike Saren. “The Primitive, Technology and Horror: A Posthuman

Biology.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 10, no. 1 (2010): 152–76.

Christiansen, Steen. “Terminal Films.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 25, no. 2/3 (91),

2014, pp. 264–277. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24353028.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, “Monster Theory : Reading Culture”, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/davidson/detail.action?docID=310376.

King, Stephen. Cell. Simon and Schuster, 2006, Ebook.

We’re Not the Only Ones

I want to continue our class discussion of “hypermediation” in Dead Set by examining the closing scene from episode 3. In this scene, Riq and Alex are safe from the zombies for a moment, in the house in the woods, watching the Big Brother live stream on TV. All the other channels are out, but Riq is hoping to catch a glimpse of Kelly to confirm that she’s alive. About two minutes before the end of the episode, he does.

First, he sees four of the Big Brother contestants from this season walk across the screen and says to Alex, “We’re not the only ones!”

She responds, “They’re miles away; we might as well be looking at cartoon characters.”

This exchange could happen under any circumstances between two people watching any television program. Isn’t Riq’s observation the point of television? Whether we’re watching the news, a fictional program, or reality TV, television, like any form of media, gives us figures with whom to empathize, sympathize, and relate, reminding us we’re not alone – “we’re not the only ones.” But take a step back, like Alex, and we realize that whether or not the characters we’re seeing are real, they can’t hear us and we can’t communicate with them. Once we realize this, Riq’s ability to see Kelly onscreen almost distances them further. Now he has proof she’s alive, but for all the efficacy he has in helping her stay that way, he might as well not know.

I was especially struck by this scene because of the way I watch Dead Set on my computer. I pull up the Netflix window, but because the show is scary and I’m a weenie, I don’t blow it up to full-screen. I keep the window open so that I can see my desktop and applications around the program so I can remind myself that it isn’t real when the action gets too intense.  Being aware of the screen on which I was watching Riq watch Kelly on another screen really heightened the drama of this scene: in the same way that Riq can’t help Kelly from his vantage point, I couldn’t do anything to change the ultimate outcome of the show.

Riq takes that problem into his own hands and goes to Kelly. He makes the TV program real so he can affect it. Should we try to affect the truth we find in Dead Set – the zombification of humanity by the media?

What’s Going to Happen in A Head Full of Ghosts

Watching The Exorcist and reading Head Full of Ghosts, I’ve been trying to apply Isabel Pinedo’s frame for postmodern horror. I’ve come to the conclusion that The Exorcist doesn’t quite fit, retaining more elements of classic horror. Because Head Full of Ghosts was published so recently, and because of the genre-mashup we already see within the plot in Merry’s life (her life is literally a horror/reality TV show), I think it should fit Pinedo’s qualifications more closely. So, I have some predictions about Head Full of Ghosts.

First, I want to explain what about The Exorcist departs from Pinedo’s standards for postmodern horror. I think it comes down to two points she identifies the genre fulfilling: the triumph of irrationality and the lack of narrative closure. While The Exorcist follows a system of logic internal to the film (one in which demons are a believable ailment and exorcism a viable treatment), I argue that the protagonists are logical nevertheless. Regan’s mother, when exploring treatment for her, starts with psychiatrist after psychiatrist. When that doesn’t work, she seeks the help of a priest (the next logical step). During the exorcism, even, Father Merrin proceeds calmly through his prayers, performing a pre-planned ritual that should arrive at the desired outcome of dismissing the demon. Though it is Father Karras’ invitation of the demon into his own soul that rids Regan of the burden for good, he’s only in the room because of mom’s and Father Merrin’s logical procession, so logic is not abhorred in The Exorcist by a long shot.

The second departure from the postmodern frame is in the conclusion. Though I’m pretty sure The Exorcist does get a sequel, the plot of the first movie reaches narrative closure. Regan is freed from her demon, who exits into Father Karras, who kills himself. The demon is gone along with him. Regan and her mother move away to start anew, and there is no suggestion in the closing scenes of any loose ends. Here is my prediction for Head Full of Ghosts: we will not see such narrative closure as we’ve seen in The Exorcist.

The adult blogger Merry has herself pointed out the many similarities between her sister’s affliction and Regan’s, so where will the two girls’ plots diverge? Not with the exorcism … we know the reality show centers around the exorcism of Marjorie’s demon, right? So I say the divergence will be with the happy ending, and I think we’ll get to witness that divergence through Merry. She’s already told us she has trouble differentiating her own memories from the populace’s collective conception of her early life via the TV show. I think this is where the lack of narrative closure will manifest. I bet we never get a satisfactory answer to the question of whether Marjorie was mentally ill or possessed by a demon, and I bet the horror of Merry’s life, young and adult, is her inability to discern the answer through examination of her own memories. This will establish the central antagonist of A Head Full of Ghosts not as the ghost in Marjorie’s head, but as the ghosts in Merry’s: the voices of TV producers and audiences who, thanks to the technology that took over her life, had such undue power over the formation of her young memories.