Rather unsurprisingly, almost all of my blog posts reference or are centered around the social implications of our readings. Starting with the male gaze in The Exorcist and ending with issues of capitalism in how we consider dark tourism, I consistently turn to the humanities point of view when thinking about the death of technology. Some readings, however, got me out of my comfort zone and thinking about the more basic, moral implications of technology.
My second to last blog post focused not on any one injustice, but on my discomfort with a digital archive post-death, citing such “efforts as narcissism.” My post before that considered Zora Neale Hurston’s work in light of our discussion of anthropological sound. My post wasn’t overtly about sexism or racism, but I wrote it in response to the problem I had with Jonathan Sterne’s article, which I didn’t feel properly addressed either the implications of white anthropologists recording non-white subjects or the existence of non-white anthropologists, working with the same technology at the same time. By the time I got to my last blog post, I was able to directly speak on my own role in the phenomena we’ve read about. Though I believe we (as people, as Americans, as technology users) have been consistently implicated throughout the course, it took me until the last round to reference my own life and personal involvement in dark tourism.
My blog posts seem to mirror very well my comments in class as well as my interests beyond the class. The articles we’ve read have given me a lot of insight into issues surrounding technology, from reality TV zombies to repair culture, but I find them most useful when put into conversation with larger societal issues. What has been the point of these readings if not to apply them to our contemporary moment and the things we care about? That sentiment, I think, is what my blog posts are really trying to get at.
The first things that this article made me realize is that I have actually participated in quite a lot of dark tourism. Yankovska and Hannam’s use of the term ‘ghost town’ struck me, because I have specifically toured ghost towns in the Southwest with my family. Most of them follow the same general narrative – a mineral or metal was found, a mining community built up, the mineral was mined out, the mine closed, and the people left. Some ghost towns we visited had people living off the tourism, but others were truly abandoned. Rather than focus on the technological failure that Chernobyl embodies, these ghost towns represent the death of civilization because our technology works too well to fulfill our capitalist needs.
Another experience I’ve had with dark tourism took place while my sister and I were visiting Berlin in our teens—we were having lunch with one of my mom’s friends when we mentioned we were going to visit the graves of the Grimm brothers. My mother’s friend informed us that her husband was buried at the same graveyard. My sister and I were immediately contrite, uncomfortable in how we had conceptualized a space as a fun tourist destination, when in reality, it had a concrete impact on someone’s life. My sister and I knew how difficult the husband’s death had been on my mother’s friend and her son, and we felt we trivialized that pain in our quest for a cultural and historical experience. I’m sure I could tie that feeling to the toxic tourism in Chernobyl, in that visceral gut reaction of disgust regarding anyone who would participate.
Though the article does not engage with it, I found several implicit mentions of exploitation in the concept of Chernobyl tourism. The economic position of the tour guides combined with the assumed wealth of the tourists puts the tour guides in a very uncomfortable position. They have to present their pain and loss to the tourists who exploit it either for a thrill or for pity. The article mentions ‘environmental tourism,’ a specific form of tourism that I think is especially ripe for exploitation. The bourgeoisie is able to visit spaces of environmental and social degradation, imagine the catastrophe, and then leave, providing little economic or social compensation for those who must remain behind.
My project was born, rather fittingly, out of a twitter thread on the Christchurch shooting, as well as our conversation regarding online mourning. The thread stood out to me in the fact that it did not name the terrorist, but rather gave a tweet to each victim, filling the timeline with information about the deceased without even referencing how they were killed. Normally, we know so much about the terrorists themselves rather than the victims, and it was refreshing to see such an inversion. The thread got me thinking about what other victims could use such a treatment, what people have been buried by history in favor of their killer. My mind immediately turned to serial killers. As a casual true crime fan, I’m guilty of preserving the legacy of a murderer and paying the victims only lip service. I know the names of many serial killers, and not a single name of one of their victims or even what their victims looked like.
As I began to work on my project, I became interested in why we, as a culture, are so obsessed with serial killers. Many theorists have already turned their attention to this question, thinking both about actual serial killers and media depictions about serial killers. I think it is important to state that “killing is invested with a high degree of sexual significance” (Hantke 179). While this significance is usually expressed through a man killing a woman, reinforcing and reenacting the trauma of misogyny, the sexual significance can be found in crimes committed for and against any gender. Our obsession with serial killers mirrors our cultural obsession with sex, reified by the sexual crimes many serial killers include in their modus operandi. The voyeuristic element of serial killer entertainment should not be overlooked either, as “we were seduced by being permitted to see, while we were assured of our safety by being kept from seeing it all” (Hantke 178). We are protected by the knowledge that we are not the serial killer’s victims and reclaim power through that—perhaps indicating why so many true crime fans are women. Perhaps we are also interested in the idea of a troubled psyche as “the serial killer is far more fantastic than the murderer in conventional detective fiction; one is ostracized for what he did, the other for what he is” (Hantke 181). Serial murderers represent to us both a taboo and an intellectual conundrum, two ingredients which are sure to lead to cultural obsession.
The media depiction of serial killers naturally follows our obsession in a way that begins to feel wholly American. Not only have “Americans, in particular, developed a fascination with both real and imagined stories about serial killers,” but the overwhelming majority of serial killers have been active in the United States (Roy 90). Perhaps the tensions between individual and community that the American Dream fosters has created a perfect environment for our obsession to flourish. Linnie Blake argues that
mass cultural representations of mass, multiple or serial killer as a means of exploring the contradictions that lie at the heart of culturally pervasive models of American national identity […] set out to explore ideas of murderous criminality as a psychological dysfunction predicated on the individual’s inability to reconcile his personal perceptions, motivations and desires with the democratically agreed empirical norms of the cooperative and conformist society that surrounds him. (Blake 103)
One might even argue that the American Dream is actually realized in the actions of the serial killer as “these criminals give a certain subjective clarity, a certain down home, grassroots ‘I can kill too’ – and therefore ‘I too exist’ – scenario to what has become an increasingly abstract, fragmented, and dysfunctional project: the American Dream, freedom as the Founding Fathers conceived it” (Conrath 145). Is serial killing an inherent part of the American experience? Blake argues that serial killers are only the latest iterations of our violent and exploitative history; “he is a monster who evokes the complicity of the American people with the nation’s history of genocidal slaughter while retaining a certain aura of individual freedom existing putatively beyond the bounds of civilised life” (Blake 112). Blake’s point is emphasized by the fact that many victims of serial killers are in some way marginalized or exploited, which the murderer is able to take advantage of.
When creating this project, I was conscious of the notion that “in some ways any form of media coverage of serial killers glorifies hatred and violence in their most extreme forms” (Roy 90). Despite purposefully not putting any mention of the serial killer onto my twitter, all the victims were still connected by a thread, and that connection was an unnamed person who killed them. Media has created a fascination with serial killing which has in turn lead to a “wound culture: the public fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (Seltzer 3). As mass media has become more pervasive, so has the graphic presence of serial killing. “If television is the social subconscious, a sort of serialized super ego that reflects our hopelessly linear cultural stasis, then the serial killer, who functions in the same mode of repetition, is the most logical, dysfunctional, psychotic extreme of which we, serialized victims, are capable” (Conrath 149). Just as serial killing is uniquely American, so too is it uniquely ties to mass media, feeding off the media frenzy to fulfil the cyclic nature of the news. By refusing to name the serial killer which tied the victims together, along with only including information about the victims unrelated to how they died, I hoped to break the cycle of media glorification of serial killing. There were many difficulties, mainly involving how few information we have on the victims I was looking at.
Serial killer narratives, much like horror films, “can help us to articulate the fear of transgression” (Hantke 193). We’ve dealt with such transgressions in class, both regarding horror as well as in the space of grieving. “RIP pages are often open to anyone interested in participated, making them ostensibly private but effective public social spaces” (Phillips 2). By focusing on how the victims died, we as a culture are taking a personal/private event and turning it into a public spectacle, adding to the transgressive and taboo allure of serial killers. “Serial killing has its place in a public culture in which addictive violence has become not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where private desire and public space cross” (Seltzer 3). Mourning and remembrance on social media involves taking something private and making it public, which becomes exacerbated and twisted when the deceased is dead at the hands at someone famous. Their death is further publicized and then made all about their murderer. While “most memorials mentioned survivors of the deceased,” memorials for victims of serial killers talk almost exclusively about how they died and the serial killer, rendering the actual victim a mere plot point (Graham et al 39). Graham et al refers to personal memorial sites for a friend or family being “performed online with a potentially sizable living audience,” but the idea of a performance of grief is also weighty when considering all of the sites which I found that were ‘dedicated’ to the victims of serial killers, while in fact only spoke of the manner in which they died (Graham et al 50). Though such performances are not limited to famous murders not just our country, “we here in the U.S., as families, as communities, and as a nation try to forget death and the dead, try to forgo mourning by ritualizing it” (Naas 86). Prior to the Christchurch shooting, every news outlet seemed to cover tragedy the same way—by focusing on trying to figure out the mentality and life of the perpetrator and potentially lionizing one or two of the victims while ignoring the rest. I wanted to break out of this cycle intentionally, and I believe I was able to do so by highlighting victims who are already highly marginalized and erased by the media.
The first victims I looked at were killed by Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys in the Wisconsin area in the late 80s and early 90s. The majority of men he killed were black or brown and many of them were picked up outside of gay bars. Due to the fact that his victims were queer men of color, it took a very long time for the police to take the crimes seriously and catch Dahmer. In fact, at one point, a 14 year old boy escaped Dahmer’s apartment and the police were called, but the police believed Dahmer’s claims that he and the boy were lovers and so they let Dahmer take the boy. Konerak Sinthasomphone then became his 13th victim. Sinthasomphone was victimized by Dahmer, who knew no one would believe him, and marginalized by the police. “The media discovered that Glenda Cleveland, the mother of one of the girls who had called the police on Konerak’s behalf, had followed up on the case when she heard news reports that a Laotian teenager was missing by calling law enforcement authorities to report what she and her daughter had seen. No officer ever returned her calls” (Roy 105). Dahmer understood that as a white man, he had power over his victims and exploited that. And still, it is Dahmer’s face we recognize in photos, not Sinthasmphone’s. Indeed, Jody Roy further explains this point;
Yet what did we ever really know about his victims? At most, we remember Hicks as the first, Konerak as the one who nearly survived, and Edwards as the one who brought a halt to Dahmer’s killing spree. But that is virtually all we know about them, and even that is tenfold more than we know of the other fifteen lives Dahmer brutally cut short by feeding his insatiable hunger for perverse sexual fulfillment. (Roy 107)
The only things we know about the victims are the aspects of them which are central to their death. How can we remedy this? Narratively, “we need only to glance at the standard spin on the Dahmer story to realize that Jeffrey Dahmer himself is cast in the role of active character” (Roy 11). Clearly, we need to reframe the story that the news media is telling. By casting Dahmer in the lead role, we further remove agency from his victims. By reporting on the full life on the victims, rather than how they met their demise, we can humanize the victims instead of the killer.
I chose to put photos of the victims in my tweets, believe I would be able to further humanize them. Sontag identifies photographs as tools of power, though she places the power in the photographer’s hands, rather than in the hands of the subject being photographed. While I agree that in many cases, “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed,” Sontag fails to acknowledge the cultural power of the iconic (Sontag 14). Most people could recognize Jeffrey Dahmer from a picture, or at the very least Charles Manson, but it is unlikely that they could identify any one of Dahmer’s victims. By granting Dahmer iconic status, we have granted him influence which we have denied his victims. In this way, photos of the victims are not artifacts of violation, but rather a response to Dahmer’s cultural legacy. Because my main focus has been Dahmer, I feel I must mention his own photo collection of his victims—by refusing to acknowledge those pictures in my project, I hope to reinscribe agency to the victims by portraying them as they wish to have been seen, rather than how their killer wanted them to be looked at.
My second twitter thread contains victims of a serial killer who has yet to be identified, known as the West Mesa Bone Collector. Very few people know about this tragedy, both because there is no serial killer to glorify in the news, and because his victims were predominantly Latina sex workers. I found very little information online, both about these victims or Dahmer’s, to the point that I was unable to add any additional information to some of their memorial tweets. I did, however, make a point to only include positive information, not in an attempt to erase their lives, but in an attempt to lift up what other outlets ignore. I hope the positive spin did not reduce them, but rather counteracted what the media has done. I left the Twitter itself rather blank, allowing people to inscribe whatever identity they wanted onto the writer. The grey background allows the photos to really stand out, giving readers something to focus on without getting distracted, as they might on Facebook. Twitter felt like the right medium for this project given the limited information that I had, as well as the fact that I hope Twitter continues to be a space to honor victims, as it was for the Christchurch shooting.
Works Cited
Blake, Linnie. “All Hail to the Serial Killer: America’s Last Frontier Hero in the Age of Reaganite Eschatology and beyond.” The Wounds of Nations, Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 101–20.
Conrath, Robert. “The Guys Who Shoot to Thrill: Serial Killers and the American Popular Unconscious.” Revue Française d’études Américaines, no. 60, 1994, pp. 143–52. JSTOR.
Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 37–53.
Hantke, Steffen. “‘The Kingdom of the Unimaginable’: The Construction of Social Space and the Fantasy of Privacy in Serial Killer Narratives.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 1998, pp. 178–95.
The commercialization of digital remains has become increasingly clear as we continue to probe various articles regarding online memorials and grieving. Who is benefiting from data remaining online? Once the bereaved stop paying, the data will, in many cases, disappear. While I understand why someone would want to keep a dead loved one’s Facebook page for a few years to grieve and return to when wanting to hear the deceased’s “voice,” does the page have to continue for longer than a generation? Before we or the government figure out how to deal with digital remains, I think we first have to decide if such data is an inheritable object or a memorial, since I think the transfer of ownership has a large impact on what happens to our data.
If the deceased is no longer benefitting from the existence of their digital life, why should money continue to be paid to tech companies? The attitude of tech companies is likely similar to their reaction to the Gonzalez case, in which Google refused to accept how indexing and providing certain data is a kind of power that goes beyond just “creation” of data. What ideological goals can companies have outside of pure capitalist gain? If our data doesn’t belong to us, that seems to make the quest for a digital afterlife much more unattainable.
The bots, of course, are the most troubling part of these articles, similar to how we were troubled by Be Right Back. What if data that the bot is working with is racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive? How do we apply ethics to such a situation, even if the deceased’s loved ones still want to interact with the bot. What if the bot reads racism, sexism, etc. onto the online identity of a person, which may not be accurate?
All of these questions lead me to think that a digital legacy, outside of those special cases like Tonnies, might be best to just fade into oblivion. I certainly have not created enough online to put in the effort into ensuring its survival for long after I die, and I wonder how much of such efforts are narcissism.
Sterne casually mentions early on in his chapter the way in which a recorded voice is abstracted from the body, similar to our definition of the abject as something which once belonged to the body now existing outside of it. Though I don’t think we consider the recorded voice to be abject at this point, the idea of a voice recording existing while the voice box which gave rise to those sounds rots in the ground merits further contemplation.
I was originally very skeptical of voice recordings aimed at an imagined future audience, mainly for reasons of human pride and narcissism I feel must be inherent in such a recording. However, I remember in one of my classes last semester we listened to a recording of a black Southern woman as part of our examination of Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work. Hurston (one of Franz Boas’s mentees) recorded this woman herself, and the existence of this recording allows us to now examine Hurston’s use of dialect in comparison to how people actually spoke (and find that Hurston’s work was incredibly accurate and thorough). Some of Hurston’s recordees had also been enslaved and the phonograph gave them a method in which to tell their own story on their terms. As with Fewkes’s research, there is a sense of time stripping away this opportunity. Hurston’s method was to use her positionality as a Southern black woman to ingratiate herself into the communities where she was performing ethnographies, so I wonder how her recordings compare to those of Fletcher and Fewkes in terms of constructed and only external nature. Regardless, when we consider anthropological work, clearly the voice beyond the grave has intellectual and academic merit beyond self-important postulating.
To say that sound reproduction is both hypertemporalized and detemporalized, as well as storing time itself is very theoretical, but makes me think of how I use song recordings to tell time in my life. For example, when I shower, I track how long I take by how many songs I’ve listened to (assuming most songs are between three and four minutes as has become the standard) (another interesting investigation might be into why this time length is so popular). I also demarcate certain periods of my life by what song I was listening to on repeat (do not ask about the month where all I listened to was Landslide). I wonder how we can connect the despacialization of sound/communication as introduced by the telegram and phone and the detemporalization of sound as introduced by the phonograph.
Both In the Mouth of Madness (1995), directed by John Carpenter and The Cabin in the Woods (2012), by Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, display an overt awareness of the fact that they are horror films. Newer horror films, in order to be successful, must be aware of the films that have come before them. Both Mouth of Madness and Cabin fit Kimberly Jackson’s definition of metahorror: “their self-reflexivity is part of their construction, […] they expose the limits of the narrative structure in which they operate; […] they are at once definers of the genre and moments or examples of it” (Jackson 11). Metahorror is a reaction to the oversaturation of the genre, often commenting not just on conventions but also on the role of technology in the horror film. With this focus on self-reflexivity, it appears that horror has moved away from what has made horror so appealing in the past: jump scares, suspense, gore, and the reinforcement of normality—all of which allow for a cathartic experience. Postmodern horror films can still frighten, however. Both films include gruesome violence, which Isabel Pinedo argues is in line with postmodernism’s intent to imagine “the fragility of the body by transgressing its boundaries and revealing it inside out” (Pinedo 21). So, though an ironic distance is created between the events on screen and the viewer, it gives the viewer space to reflect on deeper fears, rather than reestablishing the norm.
In terms of theory, postmodernism is “self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining,” and committed to “doubleness, or duplicity” (Hutcheon 1). Postmodernism is borne out of our desire to decentralize previously wholeheartedly accepted acts of life and ways of thinking (though in attempting to decentralize these, may accidentally be reinforcing them). Postmodernism underlines “in its ironic way the realization that all cultural forms of representation—literary, visual, aural—in high art or the mass media are ideologically grounded, that they cannot avoid involvement with social and political relations and apparatuses” (Hutcheon 3). Underlying postmodernism is the assumption that “we can only know the world through ‘a network of socially established meaning systems, the discourses of our culture,’” which rings especially true when looking at the popularity of films such as Scary Movie or Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, which rely on an established knowledge of the horror genre to have meaning (Hutcheon 7). Postmodernism calls into question all that which people had taken for granted, from social order to the existence of reality outside of representation.
Even the name of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness is self-reflexive and reflects a postmodern playfulness and self-awareness as John Carpenter is a prominent horror filmmaker in his own right (Pilipp 56). As the credits roll before the film starts, book jackets for the novel In the Mouth of Madness are being printed off in the background.
The film acknowledges the construction of the novel which it centers on, hinting that viewers might do the same for the film they are watching. The story of the film follows a cynical detective (a very film-noir character, making scenes shot at night, with chiaroscuro lighting and an emphasis on water in the streets, much more purposeful) as he tries to find a horror book author, Sutter Cane, similar to Stephen King.
Postmodernity illustrates a return to the individual rather than the pre-WWII belief in humanism and collective progress, so it seems fitting that the protagonist of Mouth of Madness would be so reminiscent of a noir hero, a genre focused on self-reliance and isolation (Jancovich 84). Cane believes that the stories he has written are true and that the events will unfold as he describes if people read the book. It is the readers that give the work its meaning, which makes Cane’s readers complicit. The role of the author becomes complex; was it as Cane said, that “they were telling me what to write. Giving me the power to make it all real,” effectively erasing the need for an author? (Mouth of Madness) Outside forces are driving Cane, who eventually is able to control John Trent, the main character. Throughout the film, viewers have to question what parts of the film are “real” and which are related to the novel. The lines of reality and fiction can be blurred due to postmodern intertextuality; “as a result of this fusion (or substitution) of fiction and (for) reality on the part of the viewer, Hollywood has developed a new fad: the tendency of movies to be increasing self-referential, drawing attention to themselves as productions or employing cross-references to other movies” (Pilipp 55-56). The film closes with Trent going to see the film version of the novel he has been forced to set upon the world—he is the star and it is also directed by John Carpenter.
Trent sees his mediated image on the screen, just as audiences watch through their screens. The references that the film makes to the novel and film which take place inside of it force audiences to ask about their own role in the production, and whether they are unwittingly part of a representation of reality.
Intertextuality in Cabin is in many ways more overt, directly referencing monsters and tropes from the horror genre under the guise of business discussions in the corporation headquarters. Hadley and Sitterson are presented as ‘authors,’ yet their characters, and even occasionally the surroundings, elude their control, despite their best efforts. The intended audience within the film is the ancient ones who require sacrifice in the form of performance, much like reality television (Woofter 269). Horror film audiences are put in allegiance with the old gods, as unsympathetic viewers who just want to see gore and death before going on with their lives. Cabin postulates that “the horror genre—caught in its own vacuum of prepackaged, ritualized formula—must self-destruct before it can be ‘reborn’” (Woofter 270). Cabin both celebrates the degeneration of generic formula and critiques it, participates in the generic conventions even as it subverts them. Though most of the meta commentary takes place in the control room by the higher ups, there are times when the college kids realize something is amiss, such as when Marty questions the decision to split up. Because American culture has been so inundated by horror film conventions, it is difficult for an audience to take a traditional horror film seriously and audiences might find characters more appealing and intelligent when they are aware of the situation they are in and the potential absurdity of the plot that surrounds them.
As the previous sections focusing on intertextuality have hinted at, one of the core tenets of postmodern horror is the transgression between reality and fiction, often highlighted through the use of intertextual and self-referential references. Very early in Cabin, it is revealed that there is something monstrous at play, depriving viewers of the gradual reveal. Moments after the characters enter the arena of the cabin, a bird flies into the electrical grid which separates the real world from the virtual, survival-gaming space, which alerts viewers that what hides in these woods (such as a zombie redneck torture family) does not matter.
Instead, pleasure is derived from the voyeurism as we see these characters manipulated and begin to conform into the roles the genre has prescribed for them. “Thus begins a process by which Cabin continually attempts to dislocate both viewer identification and the pleasurable contemplation of attractions by constructing a rather chilly spectatorial position that can derive pleasure solely by looking askance at the proceedings” (Woofter 272). Critics of the film have claimed this apparent distance diminishes the effect of the horror and all the scares are ironic, and therefore safe. But consider that “it is the function of irony in postmodern discourse to posit that critical distance and then undo it,” and Cabin only loses its effect when audiences do not think to reflect the film onto their own lives (Hutcheon 15). This voyeuristic tendency is heightened by “the control-room types behaving how Whedon and Goddard seem to feel horror audiences behave: by ogling the victims’ half-naked bodies, laughing and shouting at their suffering, betting on futile choices they will make, or ignoring them altogether while they go for more beer and chips” (Woofter 276-277).
Some horror is created by reflecting this image onto viewers and reminding them of their role as witnesses to horrific acts which create a mixture of pleasure and unease. The scenes of slaughter themselves are never played for laughs, only becoming humorous when contrasted to the work scenes which remove the viewer from the narrative.
Cabin aligns itself against reality TV, and “draws upon a contemporary discourse that considers visual representation as offering neither infallible access to nor insulation from the real” (Woofter 273). Marty’s skepticism of what is real about the situation reflects the skepticism of reality TV as well as subgenres which utilize observational documentary tactics, such as found footage horror.
Reality is created by the media through which is represented, and the simulacrum replaces the real. If one Hadley and Sitterson are the ‘authors’ of the narrative surrounding Marty, it draws the audience’s attention to the constructed nature of all those genres which we consider more ‘real.’ In terms of the style of the film itself, “in postmodern fiction, too, the documentary impulse of realism meets the problematizing of reference seen earlier in self-reflexive modernism” (Hutcheon 29). ‘Real’ is created through systems of meaning and representation and postmodernism questions what real is and how we come to understand it (Hutcheon 33). In the meta sense, Cabin forces its characters to reconsider what they’ve considered real—especially concerning the premise of the horror genre, which in turn begs viewers to consider the horror films they have seen more closely. The aesthetics of a slasher movie (lack of establishing shots to create confusion, cluttered and dark mise-en-scene, and POV shots from the killer’s perspective) are contrasted with the scenes from the control room, a boundary which is crossed when the monsters are let loose.
When Dana and Marty storm the corporate headquarters, the control room becomes part of the simulation it was trying to control, further confusing the line between reality and representation (Jackson 27).
What the film might lack in traditional jump scares and heightened suspense, it makes up for in commentary on the fabric of our reality and what myths we have either accepted or rejected as truth. “As postmodern man confronts the horror of his own technology turned against him, his survival depends on his ability ‘to realize that the Other is part of the Self,’” and that those that work in the corporate headquarters and even the old gods are just as much a part of humanity as he is (Magistrale 13). The cabin, traditionally considered scary due to its isolation and lack of civilization, instead becomes frightening because it is heavily monitored, the inhabitants manipulated, and the line between reality and representation is trespassed by indifferent overseers. The plan of Hadley and Sitterson only works if the five youths believe they are acting on their own free will—a frightening notion, since most people believe that their choices are always their own.
The transgression between real and fictional is just as striking in Mouth of Madness, though less focused on the end of the horror film genre and more focused on the power of the audience. In the film there is a revolution against humanity itself, and it begs us to “question our own unconscious fears, beliefs and prejudices, not only in terms of the desire that instigates them, but also in terms of the repercussions for society in general” (Belville 17). What is scarier—that Cane’s work is not fiction or that our reality itself is fiction? Just as readers give a book meaning, so does humanity when it chooses to believe in reality. The loss of self (“I’m losing me”) and of perceived free will scares Trent as much as it should frighten viewers (Mouth of Madness). Many “postmodern horror films are about alienation—from oneself, from other people, from the social mainstream, from God Himself” (Magistrale 127). Trent is certainly alienated from other people and the social mainstream, and as the film progresses, from himself and his ability to understand his own mind. Even though it is doubtful Trent was religious, he seemed to buy into the idea that he, along with all other people, were given free will at some people, and thus becomes alienated from God when he realizes he is still being manipulated.
Postmodern horror manages to frighten audiences “by destabilizing the trust we place in our perceptions or by questioning the laws of nature, horror movies move […] towards the potentially nihilistic irrationality favored by Nietzsche, wherein we no longer have solid foundations for understanding the world around us” (Syder 82). Rather than focusing on fears which take place in this reality which audiences accept, postmodern horror focuses on the fear that reality is just another representation. In postmodernism, “to be terrified is to be in a state of hesitation or suspension,” which often related to the unimaginable, just as both the endings of the films deal with the unimaginable. The self is also unimaginable, as Trent discovers (Belville 24 and 28). If the postmodern audience believes that “authority is the problem, it cannot be the solution, and […] this leads to a displacement of the traditional authorities from the role of the hero,” and in fact, places authority into the seat of the villain (Jancovich 85). The protagonists of both films are outside of systems of authority and problems arise when stable foundations declared by authorities begin to falter. Both horror movies do not have narrative closure, ending with hints at apocalypse or simply the knowledge that the evil remains to repeat its original crime (Jancovich 86). Horror films have always played with societal fears, and as those fears have evolved, so too have horror films. While monsters and jump scares may provide temporary fear, it is our deeper fears about our place in the universe and relationship with technology that postmodern horror films play and confront us with.
Works Cited
Belville, Maria. Gothic-postmodernism : Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity, Editions Rodopi, 2009.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism, Routledge, New York, 1989.
Jackson, Kimberly. “Metahorror and Simulation in the Scream Series and The Cabin in the Woods.” Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 11-30.
Jancovich, Mark. “Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, and Paranoia.” Horror, B.T. Batsford Ltd, London, 1992, pp. 83-117.
Magistrale, Tony. Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film, International Academic Publishers, 2005.
Pilipp, Frank. “Creative Incest: Cross-and Self-Referencing In Recent Hollywood Cinema.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1, 1999, pp. 55–64.
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.
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Oftentimes in our discourses and media we act as if technology is objective, and it is only how it is used that makes it “good” or “bad.” This mentality falls apart very quickly when considering algorithms, such as the ones used on reddit, or camera technology, as the article I found discusses. In many cases (despite the important contributions of women and people of color) technology has been created by and for white men. This article from the Daily Beast investigates the consequences of facial recognition not being designed to recognize people with dark skin, and what that means in a society which criminalizes black people at a higher rate than any other race or population. In the past, activists have argued for a higher visibility for black people by technology and those who create it, but Zoe Samudzi believes that increasing visibility for black people in regards to facial recognition will only end in further surveillance and marginalization of an already discriminated against population.
Of the media and scholarship we’ve looked at in our class, only Dead Set explicitly includes race, through their inclusion of non-white characters. The way the cameras look at Angel, the only black woman in the house, is explicitly different than how other characters are viewed. Patrick, the producer, who is in charge of what parts of the house the public gets to see, throws several racially charged insults at Angel’s image on the screen, marking her mediated image as fundamentally different than the other characters. The cameras, both used by ‘Big Brother,’ and those used by the actual crew of Dead Set were created to be used on white skin, because the creators never thought to consider that black people might be on film someday. While the film industry now has methods to adjust the camera for darker skin, the default continues to be white skin.
In our discussion of tech vs human, I think it is important to racialize in what ways people have not been considered ‘fully human’ and how that has consequences. The Monster Theses which we read acknowledges the relationship between the monster and the human ‘other.’ One way in which we might explain this phenomenon is that monsters are created to enforce ideology which marginalizes groups of people, based on the principles of white supremacy. Studying monsters without considering race would be severely lacking—much like Marjorie and Regan’s danger comes from the fear of young women’s sexuality, so too does the fear of the monstrous eventually uncover racism which is embedded in our culture.
The end of the Bishop’s chapter leaves us with the anecdote of a student who post 9/11, “claimed he had be emotionally prepared for the tragedy, not by his family, community, or government, but by the zombie movies of which he had long been a long-time appreciator” (Bishop 36). This sentiment can be easily tied to the inclusion of survivalist fantasy elements in many zombie films, which give viewers the strange sensation of believing themselves capable of surviving an apocalypse because they’ve seen someone else do it on television. The characters of Dead Set mirror this mentality in the last episode, when they toss ideas around about how to kill Patrick. They have detailed and logically sound ideas, but they got all of them from the media. None of them have been in such a situation before, but they feel they have expertise because they watch television. Important to note here is also that it is Kelly who is the most effective leader and zombie killer post outbreak. Unlike many of the other characters, she is portrayed as much more working class, and her likeability is posited against the uselessness of Patrick and the show contestants. Although many of them are also seemingly lower and middle class (though again, the British cultural context is missing from my comprehension) the fact that they applied to be on a reality show and are making money by indulging their own vanity and fulfilling the voyeuristic desires of the British public. The end of Dead Set depicts the remaining show’s contestants being literally what consumed by their fans, furthering the metaphor which ties zombies to the ravenous media public. Are the media creators (Patrick, Kelli) then the creators/originators of the zombie virus?
I’m also interested in the camera work of Dead Set, outside of just the usage of the Big Brother cams. For example, often when characters are sneaking around, the camera will turn the corner for us, showing the audience directly what the character would see. This technique serves to pull the viewer into the plot and amps up the suspense, rather than distancing. Additionally, the close up shots of dead corpses and zombies eating flesh is revolting, but keeps me interested in the narrative. Other times, the camera uses distancing techniques, such as during a kill, the camera gets fake blood splattered on it. The shot reminded me that what I was watching was being filmed, and immediately pulled me out of the action.
A Head Full of Ghosts was able to cram a whole lot of theoretical concepts about the male gaze into one paragraph of text on “Karen’s” blog post on page 95. Laura Mulvey, author of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” believes that there is “erotic pleasure in looking at another person as object,” which can begin to explain much of the filmic choices regarding Regan’s treatment in The Exorcist. As soon as Regan starts exhibiting symptoms, she is continually in rooms where she is surrounded by men while sedated or tied down. In one scene in the hospital, Regan’s hospital gown is pulled down to her chest, emphasizing her pubescent state as she is experimented on by male doctors. There is another shot of her being sedated by male doctors and a shot fixes the audience’s gaze upon them as if we were looking from Regan’s point of view and we see her being crowded and overwhelmed by men as she cries out for her mother. We see Regan powerless as men hold her down, emphasizing how both they and the camera consider her an object.
Mulvey expands on this: “there are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion.” The men on screen, the camera, and then we the audience all participate in objectifying Regan, which is what Nancy accuses viewers of The Possession of doing as well. When the person watching the screen is a woman, she still partakes in the male gaze, but internalizes the cinematic message of how men view women, further objectifying herself. As John Berger says, “men dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of.”
While the in-text narrator is a woman, the author of the novel is a man, writing about how “Nancy” perceives the male gaze which depicted her sister. Similar to Regan masturbating with a cross, Marjorie’s masturbation scene (both in the novel and in the description of the show turn “the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (Mulvey). How does Tremblay’s self-awareness of the tropes surrounding (young) female sexuality mitigate the fact that these scenes still invoke the anxieties our society feels towards girls who are not asexual beings?
There are probably hundreds of articles and think pieces about how The Exorcist functions as screen onto which we project our fears of female sexuality, yet the ending, as Nancy notes, is inherently conservative. Two white men save Regan, and there are other horror films that deal with female sexuality as monstrosity in ways which does not necessarily reinforce the image of white men as savior and conversion therapist (Jennifer’s Body, Ginger Snaps, The Craft). I hope Tremblay’s awareness of these tropes mean that this novel will not end similarly to The Exorcist.
While reading Nancy’s blog post, I was struck by Tremblay’s choice to write about a television show, rather than either make one or write the novel without it. There is an inherent loss when writing about the cinema, just as there is an inherent loss when filming the written. As Edward Branigan reminds us: “the analyst must recognize that the very fact of talking about narration requires re-presentation of it by verbal or other means which my capture only some of its features,” therefore diluting the intended effect. Perhaps what matters more is Nancy’s reaction to the show—if we want the visual, we should watch The Exorcist.
