Planned obsolescence is a phrase I first encountered long ago (well, more than a decade ago, at least) when I got my first iPod. I was obsessed with the little metal brick and its clean, white wheel to navigate the menus. I took that iPod everywhere with me, and so I was understandably upset and a bit confused when, after taking as good care of it as a 10 year old can, I discovered the wheel no longer scrolled up, only down. I was told by my dad that the device was simply too old, that it was bound to break eventually. I remember this notion striking me as odd and even unfair, and I definitely did not understand right away why planned obsolescence existed. My dad, being the cynic that he is, explained that it was largely for the corporation (Apple, in this case) to make money more regularly from their customers. If your device that you love and become attached to breaks, you will not hesitate to spend another several hundred dollars to replace it. Beyond this, its not even possible to repair your own device when it breaks without voiding the warranty, essentially making the device worthless if anything else does wrong. I didn’t grapple with this notion as much, as I was young and not able to fix the device myself anyway. With time, I either forgot about planned obsolescence or just grew comfortable with the concept. Furthermore, I don’t know what say I have as an individual about the matter.
Reflecting more on that idea and that experience now, I realize that I was right to be upset, disappointed, angry even that we are not allowed to fix our devices when they break or even expect them to last more than a couple of years. It is crazy that we spend thousands on computers and phones, hundreds on watches and other devices, none of which are designed, let alone can be expected, to work as planned for any significant period. Jackson asks ‘how are human orders broken and restored (… and who does this work)?’ (223) The answer of course is people, but specifically the people who are involved in both the formation of the order, and those who are a part of its function. Jackson also wonders ‘who fixes the devices and systems we “seamlessly” use?’ (222). The answer, if you ask me, should be the same- that is, it should be both the corporations who are responsible for the formation of the devices and systems (because they are knowledgable and have the means) and the people who interact with the devices and systems everyday (because sometimes it is just easier, cheaper, and more simple to solve the problems as they arise, when they do). It seems to me that once you purchase an item, it is yours and you should be free to at least follow preset instructions to try to fix it if and when it breaks. Finally, it is ridiculous that we should allow products to be built specifically with their destruction date in mind. This is a horrible waste of material resources, power, and time that could all be cut if devices were just made to last, and especially to be easily repairable.
If we could make cars in the 60s that were relatively fast, stylish, effective, cheap, and comfortable and they were easy to repair and keep running for at least 60 years, it seems just as possible to do so with our electronic and other devices. If we can shift our way of thinking to this mindset that Jackson supports where we focus on the longevity and repairability of our things, we might just save a lot of trash, pollution, and energy while also improving customer satisfaction at the same time.
The articles from Wednesday, and particularly some of my class mates’ blog posts touch on the commodification of death in our society. It is clear that celebrity deaths more often than not lead to more ‘fame,’ whether it be more followers, more hits, or more streams. However, I’m not sure this is really so much a marketing tool, as Richy brought up, as it is an artifact of our digital society. While increased ‘fame’ for someone like Nipsey Hussle is definitely a good thing, he is certainly an outlier in this regard. Nipsey stood for a lot of things, most notably changing the ways in which we struggle to see eye-to-eye with one another, and he spread this message through his music and many other efforts. In the case of, as a random example, Mac Miller, he didn’t necessarily have such a stance that was worth increased fame. Of course it is sad to lose such an artist, but Mac Miller having more streams on Spotify doesn’t impact society in a greater way.
In terms of dealing with images of a person and uses of their likeness, I think that people’s likeness, including but not limited to cartoon renditions and physical images, should belong to them. In the case of dead celebrities, I believe that their estate should be allowed some say over how the deceased’s likeness is used. The problem with this is that its just not feasible, with the way the internet works, to fully control something like this. The way I see it, the estate should have the right to sue in cases of unauthorized use AND misuses of the deceased’s image. However, it is important that these suits aren’t carried out just for monetary profit, but rather to maintain a person’s image in their absence.
Further, to respond to one of Tess’s questions, I don’t think there’s a difference between calling them images or biometric data or likeness, but I see where the confusion might lie. At the end of the day, these are all ways to describe the same information that is unique to an individual and therefore carries tacit connections with that person, no matter what. Like I said before, though, I’m not sure exactly how this should play out legally, but fundamentally I’d like to think that I get some say in the way that pictures of me are used.
Life and death go hand-in-hand together, no matter what.Borrowing the saying common in George R. R. Martin’s continent of Essos, “Valar Morghulis,” or in English, “All men must die.”It is certain that everyone you know, have known, and will know, will die.In doing so, we will all leave things behind: husbands and wives, children, pets, money, houses, trinkets, and more.Humans have, more-or-less, learned some effective ways of coping with such losses, methods that are employed all over the world, tracing back tens of thousands of years.Whether it be burial rites, a cremation ceremony, or a funeral at sea, we know very well how to handle the physical process of death and what to do with the dead.However, the practices get more complicated as they begin to relate to how to handle grief, bereavement, possessions left behind, among other things.When technology was simpler, and humans lacked platforms to easily and quickly share thoughts, stories, and emotions about the dead, as well as mementos of their time on Earth, the grieving process was much more formal and involved wakes, masses, and long periods of time and energy spent by a community to support those in mourning.As Graham, Arnold, Kohn, and Gibbs mention in their article on the subject, “the gravesite memorial uses its carved stone, inscriptions and position in place to imply a mode of relations that is modern, structured, objectified, formal and intransient: the dead remain spatially sequestered, socially dead and bureaucratised.”Now, with the advent of the internet, not only is the process of dealing with the digital footprint of the deceased a complicating factor, but also the internet provides a powerful, but double edged tool to help people deal with their emotions such as grief and sorrow.We use the internet to both ease and speed the process of mourning by creating an image of the person we want to memorialize that is “subjective, personal, and fluid” (Graham et al).In this way, we revitalize the dead by continuing to interact with their photos, videos, quotes, and stories, but we also distort the idea of the deceased in very individualized ways.I wanted to examine this dual nature of the internet as both a wildly progressive aid in processing emotions and supporting others going through loss, as well as a public space, susceptible to the whims of relatively anonymous users and domain hosts who might seek to cause more harm than good (or at least benefit themselves) in such trying times.
In order to analyze the internet and its role in grief and bereavement process, I created an online memorial page for Stephen Hillenburg, the creator and original animator/director of the hugely successful cartoon, Spongebob.Hillenburg passed away in 2018 due to ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease) complications, and is enshrined in most young American’s minds as someone who contributed greatly to their childhoods.These two qualities, his recent, real-life death and his notoriety make Hillenburg an ideal candidate for online memorials, and indeed he does have more than one made and maintained in his name.For my purposes, it was useful to be able to appropriate some of the content from those pages, as well as to imitate other, similar memorial websites for celebrities.Furthermore, I thought it pertinent to create my memorial page for Hillenburg using an available site that exists with the sole purpose of hosting online memorials.
In perusing my options, I came across a couple of decent looking host sites.The first I used is called forevermissed.com.I began to make the page, started adding photos, and then found myself cutoff by the paywall- this site wanted me to choose between paying $6 every month, paying $48 every year, or paying $95 one time in order to have access to all the features the site offers.I then found qeepr.com, what is essentially a mix between Facebook and LinkedIn, but for dead people.Qeepr offered full functionality of all features for free, but did not allow me to play music or leave candles or flowers for the deceased.This got me to thinking about the nature of these sites.We generally assume that websites exist because they generate revenue, even if it’s just enough to cover the costs.But neither of these sites have any ads.Qeepr will sell you a QR code that links to your Qeepr page, printed on a keychain that costs $70.Between that and the $95 fee for premium features on Forevermissed, I can’t see a huge opportunity to make sales.Given at least some costs for maintaining servers as well as continuing to control the domain, I would assume that both of these sites have sufficient revenue streams – but I can’t believe it comes from selling keychains with a QR code on it.So, it might be logical to conclude that there is another revenue stream for these sites, and it is probably related to the collection and selling of user data.However, this is pure speculation, and not a rabbit hole I have time to dive into.
Memorialization used to be a process only available to the upper echelons of society, important politicians, rulers, military leaders, and occasionally members of popular culture.Sometimes a family could memorialize a passed patriarch, but for the most part only very prominent figures could captivate the audience necessary to truly be memorialized.However, the internet has changed all of that, as technology is wont to do.With the ease of accessibility, online platforms provide opportunities for anyone to have a digital gravesite for as long as the host site stays up.As Kylie Veale puts it in her paper, “Online Memorialization,” “Memorials manifest online as a result of one or more of four motivations: grief, bereavement and loss; unfinished business; living social presence; and/or historical significance.”However it is important to note that these driving factors are only reasons to make the sites, and that it is only possible to have such a tool available to help deal with loss and grief because of the internet itself.
We can see common qualities of memorials in the posts on Hillenburg’s Qeepr site.Most often, we see people “invoking remembrance” (Veale) by harking back to their childhood watching and learning lessons from Hillenburg through Spongebob and his friends.Other times, there are posts that demonstrate commonality and kinship among visitors.The idea is that we are all in this grieving process together, and these posts serve as a reminder of that and as support towards and empathy with other mourners.The issue with the internet, however, is that while such offerings of empathy, kinship, support, and remembrance are quick and easy to share with the page, so too are messages of hate, mockery, judgement, and trolling.
On Hillenburg’s Qeepr page you will find almost as many trolling and grief policing posts as you will true memorial messages.These messages usually mock the dead or those grieving them publicly.The internet all of a sudden becomes a less appealing place to share somewhat personal feelings when you are vulnerable to ridicule just for sharing heartfelt condolences.In some cases, trolls get to work “within minutes of [the deceased’s] death” (Phillips).The ease and simplicity of access that is such an advantage is easily flipped on its head, and well-known deaths become occasions for meme production, attention grabbing, and popularity contests.As we shift away from long-standing traditions surrounding death and mourning, we have to create new norms in order to help guide us through grief, especially those of us experiencing it for the first time.As Meghan O’Rourke says in her memoir, The Long Goodbye, “Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say.”But now, we have come into a new space for mourning in which we lack guides and expectations surrounding what to do or what to say, and this allows for grief policing, or people telling others that they are mourning too much, in the wrong way, or for the wrong reasons.Unfortunately, these types of people subscribe to “the notion that there is but one way to grieve, and that deviation from that way is wrong” (Garber).While it might be true that many people over-perform their grief online, there is a time, a place, and a way to confront people about that, and grief policing is not the most productive method.These reactions to death, and subsequently reactions to those reactions, are just new rituals that need some time and practice in hammering out the details, the expected and accepted practices.Until they are more clearly defined or defended, online grieving spaces are going to be subject to some trolling.
Online memorials are complex artifacts of our technological time.On the one hand, they are the logical progression of the grieving process that is a communal experience of human (and not even just human) life and death.Shared experiences of remembrance, kinship, and support in response to a tragic loss are made easier, more accessible, and far faster in our modern age, and Hillenburg’s Qeepr page reflects these effects.On the other hand, the nature of the internet is vast, free, and open to input from those who might not agree with everyone’s personal but public expression of grief.The fact that anyone can sign on, make an account with anyone’s name, and laugh at, judge, and try to police other people’s feelings is also prevalent in Hillenburg’s Qeepr page.The abundance of trolls contrasted with the sincere, kind messages of remembrance and condolence is a powerful image, one that describes, but hopefully does not define our generation’s mentality towards death and the public expression of emotion.In the end, this digital memorial site illustrates the potential for progress, as well as the potential for more suffering, both brought about by the very nature of the medium.I believe that as we continue to explore the digital realm and become acquainted with its nuances, we can find ways as a society to continue to support each other and share thoughts and emotions in difficult times, allowing for free speech and not cutting each other down for speaking our minds.Truly, “all men must die,” and online memorials and other digital interactions with death begin to show us what comes next for those of us left behind.
References
Veale, Kylie. “FCJ-014 Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead.” The Fibreculture Journal 3 (2004): 1-18.
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 12, 2011, doi:10.5210/fm.v16i12.3168.
Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: a Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37–53., doi:10.1080/1472586x.2015.996395.
Death, especially of a loved one or a public figure, has always been difficult for people to deal with, and always will be.Living in this world and surviving to old age means a person will see their grandparents, their parents, beloved pets, idols and role models all die, and such losses usually require a grieving process.Everybody copes from their own traumas in their own ways, but technology has opened a door to a vastly more public sphere of mourning than almost ever before.
The death of loved ones, while traditionally a private affair that would be told to those who were close enough to the individual to need or deserve to know, is now often shared like a family newsletter.On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, there are countless posts mourning the loss of loved ones.Would you want such a public display of the event of your death? Shared to thousands of people, many of which you probably don’t know?That isn’t a very appealing thought to me, but there are some benefits of this novel and nuanced grief platform.There is a sense in which Facebook and other social media sites make your mourning, your call for support, more immediate than even an email or a letter.In sharing with everyone at once, we intentionally, if subconsciously, abuse people’s Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).This usually leads to a greater influx of messages of condolences, which have some comfort to add that is, importantly, very easy to give.
But as we know, the internet is also filled with people who dedicate themselves to antagonizing other people, even over such sensitive topics.We all know what trolls are, but where do they come from?Why is grief trolling worth anybody’s time?Phillips mentions a troll she met in her research who says that a “standard response to criticism of trolling is an emphatic HEY GUYS THE POWER BUTTON IS RIGHT THERE.”Yes, a solution to avoid trolls is not entering the public spaces where they have some rights to say what they want.But grief and mourning pages on Facebook and other relatively, for lack of a better phrase, family-friendly platforms seem like the wrong hill to take your stand for free speech on.Do these trolls and their motivations say something about our society?Are we just becoming less empathetic?I don’t think we know enough yet about the situation to say, but there is clearly a big shift happening in the way we experience loss as a culture, especially the way we express our feelings and share our condolences.
The horror genre is an extremely nuanced literary, cinematic, and electronic game genre that has evolved incredibly quickly, literally before our eyes, in the last 40 or so years.The more recent works of horror are often categorized as postmodern, or late-postmodern horror, and can be defined by a few key characteristics as described by many academics and critics.Isabel Pinedo, one such academic, lists some of these characteristics in her work, Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.Her work functions based on five notable points, including “violent disruption[s] of the everyday world…” and “transgression[s]… of boundaries,” (Pinedo, 20).I will borrow these two, as well as focusing on the role of technology and the implementation of media to analyze and compare two works.First, I will take a look at Dying Light, a survival horror video game released in 2014 by Techland in conjunction with Warner Bros.After providing some introductory information, I will detail some examples in which Dying Light can be seen to clearly fit the category of postmodern horror.Next, I will do the same for Black Mirror, season 3, episode 5, Men Against Fire, available on Netflix.Finally, I will compare and contrast some of the major aspects of each ‘text.’We will come to see how these two ‘texts’ intersect, overlap, and fit the same genre, despite their obvious differences.
Dying Light, published in 2014, in some ways rides the coattails of some very influential works in the survival horror video game arena, including classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but no doubt holds a light of its own.The game is played in first person perspective, and opens to your character, named Kyle Crane, booting up some augmented reality heads-up-display in the back of a military aircraft.You are informed that there is a virus outbreak in the fictional city of Harran, and that an agency called the GRE has hired you to extract some information about the toxin, ostensibly in order to engineer a cure.The virus outbreak, you quickly learn, has turned most of the population of the city into zombies.One of the very first things you hear is that your GRE-provided radio is “your lifeline, do not lose it,” else face isolation in this apocalyptic city.This is the first instance we see of technology being equivalent to safety, to an advantage that is too valuable to lose.This trope will be continued, as we will see later on.
When you parachute into the city, your parachute gets caught on an awning and a group of thugs finds you, injuring you badly and leaving you to the zombies.This opening scene violently disrupts whatever expectations either the player or the character had of typical opening sequences in video games, as well as the orderly, tactical, composed feeling you get from the military aircraft and careful parachute ride down to the ground.
(Watch to 4:45)
Being immediately attacked by groups of both “normal” humans and zombies right off the bat “violates our assumption that we live in a predictable, routinized world by demonstrating that we live in a minefield” (Pinedo, 21).Lucky for Crane, he is saved by a group of survivors that happen upon him just at the right time.However, to reinforce this violent upheaval of the norms of the civilized world, the creators of the game remind us quite vividly that no one is safe in this world- though the zombies don’t kill Crane, we see one of his rescuers tackled and eaten by three zombies as Crane and the other survivors narrowly escape out a back door.Right from the beginning, Dying Light pulls no punches whatsoever.It is important that the player be shocked as they are thrown into the thick of things with very little warning, as this contributes greatly to both the horror and survival aspects of the game.
Eventually, Crane makes it back to the headquarters of this group of survivors, a place called The Tower.In The Tower, people feel safe.The doors, windows, and walls are all barricaded and the fortress can only be accessed by a series of acrobatic jumps and climbing that the zombies are incapable of.Unfortunately for the group, there are infected left in the building, and we are reminded once again of the fragility of safety in such a world when several more survivors are infected within the walls of The Tower itself.Not only do we see the borders of one of the few remaining sanctuaries being literally and metaphorically torn down, we get to watch characters conversion from human to zombie.The newly infected are aware of their fate, which necessitates some difficult actions on the part of Crane, including killing his new friends before they have fully transformed into the zombies that plague them all.The psychological aspect of being forced to kill something that is not entirely your enemy, and that you remember only as an ally in your struggle to survive is a significant factor in the horror and drama players experience.Zombies, being the monsters, “violate the boundaries of the body through the use of violence against other bodies and through the disruptive qualities of [their] own bodies” (Pinedo, 21).Further, to see this disruption of the human and the natural only builds upon this violation and transgression of boundaries, “dissolv[ing] binary differences” (Pinedo, 21) between the proverbial ‘us’ and ‘them.’
Now that we know how we are hunted and haunted by these zombies that fill the streets, there must be a way to combat them.Indeed there is, but the suggested strategy in Dying Light is not to fight your way through endless hordes, beating them back or gunning them down by the dozens or hundreds.Instead the game focuses more on the survival, scavenging, and crafting side of things.Rather than finding a machine gun with a thousand bullets in every building, Crane is forced to loot the world for materials to build more tactical weapons with.
As the game progresses, Crane uses his intellect, military training, and tips from other survivors to combat the zombies with various technologies, from electric spike traps to toxic knives.Furthermore, the zombies are significantly slowed and weakened by ultraviolet light, including from the sun.Crane uses this knowledge as well as his technological prowess to make use of powerful lights to slow the zombies that are inside buildings or out at night.Here we see again the role of technology as a savior, as a weapon against the darkness to help the hero complete his quest.Technology, as demonstrated in Dying Light is an important part of postmodern horror, but can take very different forms as we will see in Black Mirror.
Last but not least in Dying Light is the implementation of the medium itself: video games.The game is presented in first person, and offers the player lots of choice and freedom, as the game is open world and guided only by markers on a map as well as voices over the phone.The inherent nature of such open world, first person games is that they use immediacy to help the audience participate in the horror of the game.Everything you see, you see through Crane’s eyes.Not only are you controlling Crane’s actions and choices, he is also controlling the bounds of your perspective and experience of this open world.By removing the lens of a camera floating over Cranes shoulder, the game employs immediacy and “dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the racing car or standing on a mountaintop” (Bolter, 64).In this way the player is dragged further into the game, immersing him or her in this violent and strange world,and enhancing their experience of fear and horror.
Black Mirror more often than not toys with these same principles of violent disruption, the role of technology, transgressions of boundaries, and immediacy to more fully captivate the audience with horror.In Men Against Fire, we follow Stripe, a soldier in a semi-dystopian future.Stripe and his fellow soldiers are all equipped with a neural implant, called MASS, that provides augmented reality and facilitates communication amongst the military.Early on, we see Stripe and his squad hunting for “roaches,” which are said to be mutated humans with diseases, disfigured genes, and monstrous appearances.
Furthermore, the military is far better equipped, with high-tech guns, drones, and other tech such as “the boomer” which uses sound to quickly map the house they plan to infiltrate.Technology is presented at first as equivalent to power, control, and superiority in this battle between the established and funded military and the underprivileged roaches.
In his first encounter, Stripe kills two roaches, one with a quick, cold shot to the head, and another in a much more intimate fight which ends with a knife in the chest of the roach.However, in this struggle, the roach is able to produce his own technological weapon, one that uses light and sound to apparently disorient the soldiers, and Stripe clearly is affected by this device.It turns out that this device actually impairs the function of the MASS implants, which has massive implications.Stripe’s orderly, military world in which he follows orders and gets his job done is violently disrupted when he encounters more roaches.At first, Stripe sees the roaches as he did before: disfigured, unable to speak, and enraged. However, Stripe feels the effects of the device from earlier and the roaches transform into normal looking humans right before his eyes.This makes Stripe hesitate, as the boundaries between ally and enemy, between right and wrong dissolve.No longer is Stripe set out to systematically kill an enemy he cannot relate to.Instead, he is faced with helpless civilians, scared and wanting nothing other than to be left alone.It’s revealed to Stripe that his MASS implant is abusing its augmented reality capabilities, that roaches are not in fact monsters, but are instead targets of genocide following a world war that broke out ten years ago.All of a sudden, right becomes wrong, wrong becomes right, and Stripe’s entire world is flipped on its head.
One of the most effective ways this episode immerses the audience in the story is immediacy.Similarly to how video games are often inherently immediate (first person perspective, agency of action, etc.) Men Against Fire employs first person perspective and intimate shots of tense scenes to remove the filter of the media itself between the story and the audience.Stripe’s dreams are seen through his eyes; we never get a glimpse of him or anything else, and are equally rudely removed from these dream states alongside him.When Stripe is fighting his first roaches, we see most of the encounter, and most importantly both deaths through his eyes.As Stripe’s MASS implant begins to glitch, we get to experience the visual and auditory errors that he does.Throughout the episode, we, the audience, are very intentionally shown this world and its events through the main character’s eyes in order to bring the story more directly to us and to help us empathize more deeply with Stripe’s confusion and disorientation.
As time progresses, new technologies allow for expressions of common literary themes to be developed upon and introduced to the consumer in fascinating new ways.Video games, being one of the newest forms of media available, is a fascinating avenue down which to assess and analyze the employment of defining characteristics of genres, especially as they compare to more conventional media such as television.Postmodern Horror relies on shock value, psychological terror, and immersion into the story to scare the audience, to make them think, and to make commentary about the world we live in.Both Dying Light and Men Against Fire share many of these commonalities, and yet utilize them in differing ways.In Dying Light, technology serves as a connection to allies and especially as a tool for survival.However, technology also serves as a reminder of the constant struggle and conflict Crane finds himself in: nothing and nowhere is safe, but technology can be employed to at least diminish dangers.On the flip side, In Men Against Fire, technology is the deceiver, altering reality and hiding the ugly truth, helping soldiers avoid the ethical dilemma of murdering innocent civilians based on their genetic makeup.Though these two ‘texts’ make use of technology in nearly opposite ways, they reinforce the danger and abnormality of the horrific world in which the audience finds itself.Finally, immediacy is crucial in both works.Without the implementation of first person perspectives and intimate portrayal of violent and life-threatening situations, the audience might feel more of a disconnect between them and the characters, diminishing the sense of fear so central to these narratives.While video games afford much more autonomy and thereby greater connection to the character, Black Mirror surely doesn’t miss their opportunities to achieve “a similar effect: the impression of an encounter with the real” (Kirkland, 117).Both of these works conform with many of the typical characteristics of great postmodern horror texts in their own ways to create thrilling, immersive experiences of terror within a compelling narrative, and both deserve to be played and watched long into the future.
Bolter, Jay David. “Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2000, pp. 62–71., doi:10.1177/135485650000600107.
Booker, Charlie. “Men Against Fire.” Black Mirror, season 3, episode 5, Netflix, 21 Oct. 2016.
Kirkland, E. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 115–126., doi:10.1177/1555412008325483.
Pinedo, Isabel. “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 17–31., www.jstor.org/stable/20688091?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents.
Remediation is quite common in video games today, especially in horror games: points-of-view from camcorders, necessitating the use of torches to light dark spaces, requiring the player to find and listen to old cassette tape recordings to put together the story, etc.However, one of the most common applications of remediation we see in games is the use of maps.More specifically, games in which the map has to be unlocked by segment.Maps are a major avenue for remediation in almost every story-based game, particularly in the horror/survival genre.Usually, the player has to adventure out into the more dangerous sections of the map in order to unlock the radio tower, to climb to the top of the tallest cliff and survey the area, or to find scraps of map in chests just beyond bosses.This form of remediation helps greatly with immersion into the game and its environment, which in turn tends to increase the quality of the game and the player’s enjoyment upon playing.
In games such as Left 4 Dead, the map, though still accessible through a push of a button on the controller, begins as a blue or black or white sheet, sometimes with the boundaries of the in-game world drawn on, sometimes with no information whatsoever.Normally, to progress in the story line, the player will be drawn far from the original zone of the game, usually the easiest zone, on an adventure to find someone or something.However, before you can even delve into the details of the story events, you usually have to search through chests, backpacks, desk drawers, cabinets, and sometimes even the corpses you have laid in your wake.In other games, like Legend of Zelda, the player has to climb great towers, with enemies and obstacles around the base and sometimes even going up the tower itself.Once at these vantage points, a piece of your map can be cleared off, stitched together, or otherwise added to your collection so that you can actually see where to go and what will be between you and your destination.
This type of directional security is something my generation has grown very accustomed to- whenever a person in their twenties is going somewhere new, what do we do?We pull out our phones or our GPS devices to produce a comforting voice and continuous directions, even accounting for traffic and total travel time.However, in these horror-survival games, the use of older style maps and remediation serves to entrench the player in their environment.It is easy to look down at a map every two minutes to ensure you’re on the right course.It is much harder to have to find a visual waypoint in your field of view, track it through the environment, and struggle to find your way in a new and usually monster-ridden environment.That a player has to find map segments or scraps makes that player identify just that much more closely with the character they are playing.In this way, remediation is an effective tool to boost appeal, interest, and thereby sales in video games, particularly in the survival-horror genre.
Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts obviously has many parallels with William Blatty’s The Exorcist, and often points quite directly to the influences of one of the best movies from the 70s.Of course, there are some key differences, but for the most part, I, like Sidney and probably many others, had certain expectations about the exorcism scene itself in A Head Full of Ghosts.There is lots of similar imagery, from the young teenage girl as the focus of the exorcism, to her being tied to the bed, to the spectacle of it all.However, the two works definitely have their own takes on the nearly-identical situation they work themselves up to.
In The Exorcist, the event is a spectacle simply due to the medium in which it participates:by very nature, movies have audiences, for whom they must perform.In this sense, much of what happens in The Exorcist’s exorcism can be seen as a performance, putting on a show for the priests but most importantly for the American people, sitting in theaters or in their homes consuming this digital media.Though much of what goes on obviously pertains to the plot, to the movie itself, lots of the details of the scene seem to be “pointed at the camera” so to speak.We see this vile, ill young woman, tied to a white bed in a monochromatic room, surrounded by priests, literally vomiting, screaming, floating around, (and maybe there really is more to it than this, but) largely for show, whether there really is a demon or not.Furthermore, as others have pointed out, Regan does not really seem to fully understand what is going on or what is coming her way leading up to and during the exorcism, as she is unaware of the audience she is truly performing for.
In Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, Marjorie’s position is different.The whole time, Marjorie is likely doing research about possessions, exorcisms, priests, reality tv shows, family issues, you name it.Due to the time period, she has easy access to the wealth of human knowledge that is the internet and clearly has the opportunity to use it to gain more intel.In A Head Full of Ghosts, the audience of this exorcism scene is not us, the readers, real living people.Instead, contrasting with The Exorcist, the book implants its own medium to deliver this imagery to the general public of its reality.For Marjorie, her show to put on is primarily for her family, though.In addition, Marjorie knows that she is performing, can see the cameras and the mics and their operators in the room with her, whereas Regan could not.Marjorie even gets a mini pep-talk from Merry to reinforce this concept, with Merry telling Marjorie that she will do fine, as though she has to worry about her personal performance through all of this.
I’m not sure if I’m being a cynic or not, but I frankly don’t buy that Marjorie’s not faking or exaggerating whatever true, well-founded claims she might have of mental illness, physical illness, psychotic break, or any other explanation.There is something too suspicious about the way Marjorie seems to taunt people, especially Merry and thereby us, the readers, with the truth.However, I don’t know that Marjorie herself even knows whether or not she is possessed.It seems to me that her one last form of control over this whole situation and seemingly her whole life, is this final, crucial piece of information at the center of the entire narrative, and that she is willing to fight to the end to keep that truth swimming in mystery and confusion.Furthermore, Marjorie knows to make use of the spectacle by, in her own way, performing for her family and for the camera, whereas Regan truly comes off as an unsuspecting victim, forced to perform on a camera neither she nor the priests know is there.
