After reading “Plato’s Cave” from On Photography, I could not help but think about the ways in which photography has revolutionized the way people interact with media today. With technology developing at a quick pace, society has become more dependent on the media in which some people live through the use of media. For instance, people have been able to create careers and full-time jobs using media such as posting simple posts on Instagram or having plain instructional videos on YouTube. Regardless of the media, all of them have a heavy reliance on photography.
One of the main elements that photography is able to do is that it “furnishes evidence (pg.5).” People engage with photographs and publicize them to gain some satisfaction that you are able to show proof of your life adventures. It is as if you need to have photographic evidence to make yourself a more credible individual. Plus, people can use these images to add to their status online by boasting about how “fit” or “fortunate” their lives are. This is one of the many ways how photography has changed the media. It enforces this online culture of rising above one to another in which you gain this elite status. Therefore, you find many individuals investing their time when taking a photo ensuring they have the perfect lighting, pose, colors, contrast, and etc. The culture of photography has become less about capturing moments but rather capturing quality.
However, not all individuals care about the quality, others just care about content. In the article, “Taken From Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography” by BBC News, the idea of taking photographs of the dead seems a bit odd. The Victorians were concerned about getting photographs of their lost ones in order to respect the dead. However, the mourning method does seem unusual in which they preserve the bad part about life which is death. Although in contemporary society we mimic a similar style of mourning by dressing up those who have passed away in their coffin, the idea of preserving a photograph of a lost one when they were not alive seems unnecessary. Why not take a photo of the individual when they were alive and preserving moments of happiness?
It does make sense that this is so odd to me because, in those times, death was a natural reoccurring event that happened in their homes. Therefore, my separation and uneasiness of death allow me to feel this way. However, that does not convince me that taking photographs of the dead is still reasonable. You could say that all the photographs of the dead are just another photograph of something that is absent. Nevertheless, if I were to find myself taking photos of the dead, I would probably be concerned with much of the many things that photography has turned into such as lighting, scenery, etc. I would be concerned with getting quality to create a story from the photograph.
While Scream (1996) and The Cabin in the Woods (2011) both fit Isabel Pinedo’s definition of postmodern horror, these films surpass her examples of Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Nightmare on Elm Street because of their intertextual references and dissection of horror movie conventions. Scream and The Cabin in the Woods are examples what Valerie Wee calls “hyperpostmodernism,” which she identifies as a new phase of postmodern horror. The evolution of this new phase shows that in order to continue providing the experience of fear Pinedo identifies, the horror genre must reject its exhausted tropes and invent new surprising and terrifying elements that do not rely on familiarity with the genre.
Scream and Cabin fit Pinedo’s guide of postmodern horror in places. Her general definition of postmodernism is a system in which “traditional (dichotomous) categories break down, boundaries blur, institutions fall into question, master narratives collapse, the invetibality of progress crumbles, and the master status of the universal (read: male, white, monied, heterosexual) subject deteriorates” (18). Nick Chandler’s article “Subversion of Genre Conventions in Scream & The Cabin in the Woods” offers an analysis of the meta postmodernist characteristics of self-awareness and echoes Pinedo’s ideas. He writes, “The term ‘meta’ is a post-modern idea that a piece of work is self-aware, and subverts mainstream conventions, or in this context subverting horror tropes, all the while making/implying to different texts, otherwise known as intertextual references” (Chandler par. 1). Another term for this is self-reflexivity. Both movies are overtly aware of horror genre conventions and manipulate them so that the movies engage in hypermediation and remind the viewer that they are watching a movie, breaking some of the tension and sometimes becoming comical. Both movies focus on five teenagers that fit stereotypes of the Jock, the Whore, the Virgin, the Nerd, and the Clown/Stoner and have versions of the haunted house where the characters are partying and then the slasher action occurs.
Scream’s self-reflexivity explicitly discusses horror conventions in the script, often through the nerd character Randy. The scene below takes place between Randy, Billy, and Stu – the latter two are revealed at the end to be Ghostface.
Randy says that the cops let Billy go because they don’t watch enough horror movies. He says, “There’s a formula to it. A very simple formula.” The irony of this scene is that Randy maps out exactly what the movie plot is because he knows what to look for. The formula Randy is referring to is the combination of horror clichés, such as the final girl, the cell phone excuse, creepy kids, found footage/diaries, and much more. Some people think they have even calculated a mathematical formula for horror movies based on suspense, realism, and gore. The characters in Scream directly refer to the audience’s expectations and also mention specific horror movies throughout the movie. My personal favorite manipulation is about the trope that the virgin, usually “the final girl,” always survives. But in Scream, the final girl, Sidney, is not a virgin and the virgin is Randy. This scene is an example of how the movie plays with the balance between terror and comedy.
Cabin’s self-reflexivity does not explicitly discuss horror conventions, but instead assumes the audience is aware of the worn-out tropes and weaves in references to a long list of horror movies through the monsters in the movie. This video by GoodBadFlicks explains the references in the movie.
A point that is mentioned in the video and in Chandlers article is that the ancient gods that the ritual is seeking to appeal to is symbolic of the audience. Chandler writes, “It can be interpreted that the ‘Gods’ are in fact the movie viewing audience, and the actions of Hadley and Sitterson are in fact the writers trying to please them, through genre conventions and themes that are universally recognized, e.g. ritual” (par. 6). The following clip is an example of horror movies feel for the necessity of nude shots.
And when they get the shot of the girl’s breasts…
Cabin writers Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon chose to relate the audience’s desire for these conventions to a ritual sacrifice, a relationship that has even been explored by Shakespearean scholars. Derek Cohen’s article on King Lear explains how early modern drama and sacrifice rituals both require an audience, a vulnerable participant, human conflict, and resolution. (385-386). The writers are commenting on how that by including expected and familiar conventions, horror movie creators are sacrificing creating a movie that influences the genre and our culture. Cabin is a pretty boring movie while you are watching the characters get killed one by one, and it is not until the expectations are broken with Marty’s, the Clown/Stoner, survival that the movie becomes interesting. The scientists controlling the ritual explain that Dana, the Virgin, must be the last to die and if she dies before Marty then she is not final girl and the ritual will not be complete. The movie becomes engaging when the horror formula is disrupted. At the end of the movie, Marty and Dana decide not to kill each other and to let the ritual be incomplete. As a result, the gods break out from their dormant state beneath the earth and begin to destroy the world.
Because the movie does not give the audience the horror clichés it wants, the movie as a whole is actually refreshing and blatantly questions the ways our culture crafts horror. Cabin has “changed the way we watch and think about horror movies by treating metaphor as text instead of subtext: It’s an undisguised horror movie about horror movies, much as The Babadook is an undisguised horror movie about being a single parent or It Follows is an undisguised horror movie about adolescent sexuality” (Crump par 4). Speaking about Cabin’s influence on our culture as a whole, Phil Hoad writes, “Whether it’s Cabin’s redneck zombies, or J-horror’s “dead wet girls”, or Indonesia’s pocong (a ghost wrapped in a Muslim burial shroud that often features in its low-budget spookers), they’re expressions of the violence, shame and isolation that underlies whatever collective traumas those cultures are shaped by” (par. 4). The expressions of violence in Scream examines “the issue of trust in romantic relationships, using slasher-film conventions to explore the turmoil of female adolescence” (Wee 57). This is the same idea presented in Jeffrey Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” – “the monstrous body is pure culture” (4). Movies and the culture they are presented in connects back to Wee’s article on hyperpostmodernism, in which she states the Scream films were “specifically created for a generation steeped in pop culture,” and the same is true of Cabin. And as generations and culture adapts, technology also advances, an aspect of late postmodern horror.
Wee writes that “the films reemphasize the vital role that media play in their lives” (52). In Scream, the media take the form of Gale Weathers, a journalist whose career takes advantage of the murders, and the development of new media technologies such as cell phones, cable, and video. The video rental store and the group watching Halloween together represents the community the genre provides. Horror movies are especially important to Billy and Stu since it motivates them to begin the murders – “watch a few movies, take a few notes.” The media presence in Cabin is represented by the constant eye of the science lab who has cameras and microphones all over the cabin. Marty even finds a camera at one point and makes the connection to the lab’s monitoring to reality TV.
In the section on irrationality, Pinedo writes “the trajectory of the classical narrative is to deploy science and force to restore the rational, normative order, whereas the postmodern narrative is generally unable to overcome the irrational chaotic forces of disruption” (22). Cabin plays with this statement directly in the role of the science lab to perform the ritual to restore order to the gods. The scientists use their control of the property to influence the characters decisions, such as releasing pheromones in the forest to prompt a sexual act and increasing the lighting when a character complains that it is too dark.
The technology the scientists have implanted in the house is a sharp contrast to the eerie antique cabin, and the power that the technology has over the teenagers is scarier than the cabin. The lab is symbolic of the classical horror narrative, but the teenagers present the chaos that disrupts the scientist’s deployment of horror tropes. Because of their refusal to behave according to the scientist’s plan to appeal to the gods, they cause an apocalyptic ending. A crucial rule violation in each movie is the refusal to give one final girl. Scream gives two, Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers, and Cabin gives one final girl, Dana, and one final boy, Marty. This is the final attack on genre conventions and a re-writing that questions the biggest horror cliché. Scream suggests the overall importance of female survivors in the face of male suppressors and Cabin seems to suggest that gender and genre conventions as a whole should not matter to the goal of scaring audiences. Cabin continues the conversation that Scream started, and as our culture, youth, and technology continues to progress, horror conventions must also adapt.
On a run with my friend Maura a few days ago, we passed the abandoned cabin collapsed into the mossy thrush that lines Davidson’s cross country trails.
I commented in passing that the sloping log edifice disintegrating into damp soil was a perfect representation of Mark Fisher’s definition of “the eerie”: a family had been once present here, we could see their turned over sink and ice-box. Ostensibly they were now absent, for reasons we were sure were fraught and nefarious.
“I want to take a photo of this but I feel like some spirit would possess my phone or something,” I commented jokingly.
“I found like a 1950’s saddle shoe here once,” Maura said, and then added “empty of course.”
Which provoked a strange thought, “ghosts like are never from like a decade after the 40s though.”
In the media, rarely do you see a ghost that isn’t a small victorian child in white-ish night gown with long stringy hair and empty eyes.
Enter Bethan Bell’s “Taken from life,” in which dead victorian folks are propped up with what I can only imagine are coat hangers and photographed. I was struck by the fact that the images were the crystallization of what my brain thought of when it thought of “ghost.” A ghost had to be someone distant from me in sense of dress and in decade. The more antiquated the more likely to come back haunting.
“Yeah like you wouldn’t see a ghost from the 1970’s. What would they do shake their bell bottoms at you and boo?” I said.
“But you also wouldn’t see like the ghost of a caveman or something” Maura decides.
So evidently one’s perception of “ghosthood” is highly temporal. It has a scopic element that refracts our categorization of who can who can’t be a ghost.
Why particularly are Victorian people so much more likely to be ghosts? Were they sadder, more melancholic, more ashen faced, more hysterical, more generally creepy?
Well, honestly, probably, but also we might find the answer in Jeffrey Cohen’s theses on monsters. Just as monsters are a “cultural body” so too seemingly is our perception of the ghost inflected with cultural anxiety (Cohen 4).
I’m no historian on the late industrial period, nor am I exactly sure why the people of this time are the recycled fodder of many a haunting T.V. show, novel, or film.
Maybe some of this may connect to the insurgence of gothicism that began in the mid to late 18th century, maybe some of this was related to the increase in population, which meant a proportional increase in death, maybe victorian people were really just that more creepy than the rest of us. I can’t particularly point to one reason. But it’s worth interrogating why I can’t fathom someone from the 80s rocking shoulder pads and a bad haircut haunting me.
Memento Mori: remember you must die. Pretty bleak, right? But what makes us think this way?
Death in our society is a complex enigma, considered taboo and accompanied by variety of competing emotions. We rarely speak about death, unless prompted to do so. Death has been dressed up as many other characters, using words such as “passing” and religious justification to make us feel better about it. What’s strange, however, is that while we shield ourselves from the concept of death, our own mortality, and the societal baggage it carries, we love to surround ourselves with the morbid through media.
If you have ever watched Criminal Minds, you know what I mean. Popular TV and film often incorporate and even fixate on the topic of death in their productions, as the audience seems to be fascinated and intrigued by the concept of the death of others. We “enjoy” watching horror movies, where characters drop like flies, or documentaries about serial killers, in which each killing is grotesquely described. The irony, then, appears in our inability to face our own mortality, yet we love to observe the death and dying of estranged others.
While it may seem a far fletched comparison, this pop culture trend of “death in media” is not all that different from the death photography of Victorian England. The use of photography to capture the last image of the deceased, and to immortalize what once was, is just another way in which media exposes human mortality. In Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” she speaks about how the invent of the photo changed the way in which we view the world, as “taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events” (Sontag, 11). In the case of death photography, the picture “confers on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed” (Sontag, 11). This paradox of death photography emerges in the way in which a photo of the deceased both immortalizes those in the picture, while also provided a permanent reminder of our own inevitable death.
Death in popular TV and media has come to serve a very similar purpose as death photography, in that while in viewing the death of fictional characters (or distanced, real people in the case of non-fiction) we may have a little comfort in the reminder that we are still living, but also that these images of death also serve as a memento mori in their own way. There is something inherent in human nature that drives us to fixate on death, despite our society’s backwards inclination to deny and bury death as it comes to actually affect us. The use of media, and the protection of a “lens” gives us a vehicle by which we can safely view death and remember our mortality, while being distanced enough that we still feel comfortable.
When reading an excerpt from James Sterne’s The Audible Past, one is immediately struck by the sophistication of his ideas. In the chapter titled “The Resonant Tomb”, he dives very deep into the history of the gramophone as well as the origins of sound recording utilizing a deeply scientific and anthropological approach. The biggest takeaway that I found from reading such a detailed analysis of sound recording was his differentiation between the interior and exterior. Sterne’s notions of sound recording simply mimicking the exterior aspects of a person as a figment of their physical being while lacking the interior matter or soul of a person is quite striking.
Something that I found a heavy connection with is the piece we read about Hossein Rahnama and his Augmented Eternity program. To me, the idea of sound simply replicating the vocal chords and outputs of a person is very important when thinking about Augmented Eternity because it makes you question what you are really getting. Rahnama has notions of utilizing his program to be a decision making assistant with the sound and makeup of the deceased but Sterne and his argument of the Resonant Tomb disputes this. For Sterne, sound recording is simply just the preservation of an exterior part of a person and because I agree with him, I question the notion of selling a program that can replicate a person’s vocal patterns and voice. At the end of the day, you would really be receiving the an external part of a person while believing to receive the internal component as well. It is due to what Sterne has defined as the Resonant Tomb that it appears that any attempts to replicate simple voices or sound for practical and fulfilling purposes are ill-fated.
An additional point that I found interesting from Sterne comes from page 297 where he speaks to the exteriority of voice recording and its “potential to perform its social function.” This just makes me think of the ways that dead musicians and their voices have been recently repurposed and used by other artists. Examples such as Lil Wayne using unreleased tracks from the murdered XXXTentacion for his song “Don’t Cry” or Justin Timberlake’s re-purposing of Prince during his halftime show spring to mind. Sterne alludes to this idea of voice recording simply being used for social function and I find that he is right on the money. These recordings of the deceased while labeled as touching tribute also have weight of the financial gain that those who utilize them receive. All in all, a recording is simply an exterior fragment of a person who was made of much more internal thoughts and feelings that they can no longer control or represent in death.
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.
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.
I know this idea of grasping for a sort of immortality in technology all too well, I fear. To avoid a sob story of sorts I’ll skip details, but last year my grandmother died after a surgery. While the initial reaction was likely similar to every death of a grandparent who was far away, what struck me when reading A Resonant Tomb was how much it reminded me of my mother as she grieved for the death of hers.
A few days after my mother came home from handling my grandmother’s affairs, my mother approached me with my grandmother’s cellphone, asking how to pull my grandmother’s voicemail message onto a computer so she could save it. My mother is also an aspiring videographer, and wanted to save my grandmother’s voice so she may use it in later videos.
What I think is special about this is we now no longer run into the problem of the phonograph’s lackluster recording quality, as a digital audio file is a bit-for-bit exact copy of the speaker’s voice. Archival-quality recording material is no longer needed, as the voice file could be put onto a CD, a flash drive, or maybe even the cloud. But then this raises a question similar to the one Be Right Back was asking, is this extended preservation good for you?
This ability to hear someone as if they were sitting next to you, despite their death years ago is a definite double-edged sword. A person can be memorialized, using their voice to remind those who love them of whatever goodness they left in the world. A musician’s best music can be immortalized and can influence generations beyond merely the time they were alive. But also this constant, true-to-life reminder of loss could also cause someone to become stuck in a more comfortable past, one where they don’t have to face the harsh realities that await them when they take off their headphones.
When reading “A Resonant Tomb,” with all of the focus on preserving someone’s voice beyond their death, I was reminded of characters in films and television shows such as Cole in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film The Sixth Sense or Klaus in the new Netflix show The Umbrella Academy. Both of these characters can “see dead people,” as Cole says in that famous scene, but what seems to be more frightening to them is not only the visual aspect of being able to see ghosts, but more so the fact that they can also hear these dead people speaking (or weeping or screaming or whatever the case may be).
In Jonathan Sterne’s article, he writes that sound recording was “aiming for the preservation of the voice in such a form that it may continue to perform a social function” (297). This reminded me of the two examples mentioned above since, in the case of The Sixth Sense and The Umbrella Academy, the dead characters speaking to Cole and Klaus are doing so in order to pass on some sort of message to those who are still living or to gain peace so they can move on to the afterlife. Furthermore, later in the reading, Sterne examines the painting His Master’s Voice (aptly, the cover image for this unit of our class), stating that “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” (303). The same is true for both Cole and Klaus; what is alarming is not necessarily what the ghosts are saying, but rather the fact that they are hearing the voice of someone that no one else can. This implies that Cole and Klauswon’t stop being haunted by the dead beings until they rectify their situations and allow the ghosts to be at peace with their deaths.
Finally, on a deeper level, sound is obviously a major part of visual and audio media such as films and TV shows, and therefore the actors who play and voice these characters are embodied and stored in time. After all, no matter how many times you watch a movie or video or how many years it has been since it was created, the people within that video exist within a “carefully bounded frame” of “repeatable time,” in the words of Sterne (310). In this way, sound recording, films, and television gives us the opportunity to relive the past in the present.
Having spent the last several class periods discussing Edison’s spirit phone, Be Right Back, and attempts at immortality through AI, I’ve come to realize that all of our attempts to achieve immortality through rapidly advancing technologies have been fundamentally futile. While we have been trying to use the phonograph, photographs, videos, and now even artificial intelligence to preserve and capture ourselves, none of these efforts have come even close to truly capturing our essence.
This is not to say that we can capture some elements of ourselves and indeed it is becoming easier to capture more of ourselves as technology continues to develop. However, as Sterne describes the phonographic recording as “a resonant tomb, offering the exteriority of the voice with none of its interior self-awareness” and Rahnma describes AI as missing “context,” both hit on the essential failure of technology to holistically capture who we are in our entireties. For example, my roommates and I went down to the Charlotte Fillmore this past week to see one of our favorite artists, Anderson .Paak and the Free Nationals, perform live. Now, if you go on Apple Music or Spotify, you can listen to lots of recordings of Anderson .Paak’s songs, but none of those capture the joy and energy he brings to his concerts. None of the recordings capture the collective experience of seeing Anderson .Paak live and thus none of them have the self-awareness that Sterne describes. We see a similar experience with pseudo-Ash in Be Right Back as the AI robot version of Ash fails to impress Mar because he does not adequately capture the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Ash’s personality. What exists, be it a recording on Spotify or an AI robot of our dead boyfriend, still is not the same as the real, living manifestation.
Rahnma also outlines the limitations of the AI renderings of our personalities, explaining that the digital personas created by AI are useful for counseling but do not capture the context to be legitimate replacements for our actual living selves. The AI rendered persona of a CEO, for example, is still not capable of running a company in the way that the living, breathing human being can. All told, our efforts to capture or preserve ourselves through technology render versions of ourselves that could not hold a candle to who we really are as individuals. Certainly, our efforts have improved as technology has advanced, but even with the most advanced technology at our disposal today, we have still been futile in our pursuit of immortality.
