In class we created a list of binary pairs seen in A Head Full of Ghosts. My group felt as if many of those pairs (witch doctor/doctor, possession/mental illness, supernatural/ natural, public/ private, religion/ science) could be equated to the father/ mother pairing. The father felt the best course of action was to rely on the church and religion to help Marjorie while the mother looked for more logical, scientific reasons and responses to her daughters condition. Merry witnessed several hushed (and not so hushed) disagreements between her parents about how to handle Marjorie and what was really wrong with her. While the father ultimately won out (which fits into familial stereotypes), the Barrett parents do differ with regards to normal gender roles.

Society usually places the hysterics and illogical thoughts of possession onto women, while the “white coat” males of science come to the rescue. It is basically the opposite for the Barrett family. The mother scoffs at the fathers escape to religion and would much rather have her daughter see a psychiatrist. Creed’s article also mentions one part of The Exorcist that breaks away from the male/ female norms and also the norms of horror. While most of the tension in the movie tends to be related to a male/ female power struggle the one dynamic that breaks this mold according to Creed is the struggle between Regan and the entity who possess her. Creed makes an interesting argument that the devil inside Regan is in fact female. This is not what one would expect from an evil spirit possessing a young innocent girl.

Another interesting (somewhat unrelated) comparison between A Head Full of Ghosts and The Exorcist is the thought that the cause of possession could be related to parent-child relationships. Creed talks about how the problematic parts of Regan’s relationship with her mother are amplified in her possession.

“Mother’s swearing becomes Regan’s obscenities; Mother’s sexual frustrations become Regan’s lewd suggestions; Mother’s anger becomes Regan’s power” (pg. 39)

I think this could also translate to A Head Full of Ghosts. Without the families money issues and relationship problems Marjorie’s “possession” may have looked very different.

In chapter 17 of  “A Head Full of Ghost,” Tremblay introduces the concept of the Hawthorne effect in where the boundaries of possession and psychosis are blurred even further. If you are not aware of what the effect entails, it consists of a reaction from an individual that changes their behavior due to their awareness of being observed. We witness this through the introduction of reality TV and how it becomes a factor in how the family changes their ways of living.

Initially, the family’s life description can be stated as chaotic and catastrophic. The family was going through a crisis that really looked like there was no hope in resolving Marjorie’s issue. The mother was put into withdraw in neglecting the idea that her daughter was experiencing some form of possession while the father was reluctant in adopting new ideas other than religion. Merry’s naïve character just furthered issues by letting Marjorie tattoo sinister stories into her mind. Most importantly, Marjorie’s mental illness or possession continuing to break down the family. However, it is not until the TV crew comes where we witness a change in character in all characters. Specifically, Marjorie which comes as a surprise.

Throughout the novel, we expect and are gullible to the idea the Marjorie is truly possessed based on her actions, yet when Merry interacts with her at the basement, the “truth” is that she is not actually possessed. I find it very interesting how not only Marjorie but everyone else in the family experiences the Hawthorne effect when they suddenly are aware that their being watched by cameramen. Suddenly, the number of possessed acts that we were being fed in the beginning has come to a stop. There was little to no stories that were being told about Marjorie from Merry about her being abnormal. The majority of the possessed-like events come from the writers from the reality TV and Merry’s willingness to give into the TV’s hunger for content to make things up. Plus, the idea that we find that most possessed tropes to be willing to show their true selves is what makes this idea more confusing.

When we saw The Exorcist by William Friedkin, the main protagonist Regan was possessed by Pazuzu’s demon in which the demon was willing to show their true identity regardless of an audience. Plus, in other films involving the supernatural, the main trope is that the demon continuously attempts to show their identity to those who live in the home. Therefore, I question why Marjorie has not shown more of her possessed character if a demon would want to establish their identity to scare those who are involved and feed off their negative energy. Despite the common tropes, it is still unsolved whether Majorie is truly possessed and as we continue through the story, it becomes less probable that she is truly possessed but rather experiencing a mental illness that is causing her to have a personality identity issue.

During a summer in Maine, my friend who interned at the Farnsworth, which houses one of the largest private collections of New England painter American Wyeth’s works, drove me the back way to see a touchstone of American Pastoralism – the Wyeth house.

The Wyeth House is most notable for its faded appearance in Wyeth’s Christina’s World. The subject of the painting is a woman stricken with polio. As she strains to the insurmountable distance between her and home, we are terrified for her, for her helplessness (Small “The Controversial Story Behind Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World”).

(Here’s a link to more of an in depth explanation of Andrew Wyeth and Christina Olson:
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-controversial-story-andrew-wyeths-famous-painting)

Upon visiting the locale, a tourist might be struck by how small the hill actually is, how seemingly comforting, sunny even, the rolling hills of the Wyeth property are. Gone seemingly is the melancholia, the borderline American Gothicism, that the artistic rendering of the place provokes.

Wyeth’s brush embeds Christina in a different narrative setting. Perspective triumphs. We are in a listless wind with Christina. The house above her looms hauntingly.

Christina’s body is made a subject of this mood. We are made, however problematically, to feel the anguish of her disability. She is a subject of Wyeth’s gaze. We see of her what he desires we see. There is set dressing involved.

In The Monstrous Feminine, Barbara Creed relates Julia Kristeva’s notion of the female abjectivity to Regan of the Exorcist. Creed writes that the “abject represents that which “disturbs identity, system, order’” (Creed 37). This, Creed then relates to the “infantile.” Christina’s shape seems one of the yet developed “crawling” of a child (Small “The Controversial Story”). I insert Creed’s notion of the abject because what is rendered in Wyeth’s painting is a subject of the female abject. Christina is isolated by her abjected, disabled body just as Marjorie’s declining mental illness isolate and render her abject.

This is all to say that perhaps this rumination on the interiority on a female’s illness is why the painting finds its way into Merry’s adult apartment. As the class has spoken about many of the intertext in A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay chooses his cultural references with care and narrative purport (Tremblay 108).

Just as we are wound into Christina’s mental state, so too are we involved in Marjorie’s emerging “schizophrenia” (if that indeed is what afflicts her). The reality or unreality of the T.V show subjects her, her feigned complicity in this (she initially tells Merry that she schemed this for the financial benefit of the family) is shown when she “flips off” the camera wielding Merry (Tremblay 137).

Merry describes Marjorie as the “ghost of the house” in that she “haun[ts] her own bedroom” (Tremblay 138). In the way Christina’s broken frame seems to haunt the home she strains to reach so too does Marjorie become an abstracted presence, a subject of surveillance even in her own abode. I want to ruminate on this idea of being made a “ghost” of one’s own private space. Seemingly, Marjorie’s identity, which was the former owner of her space, is altered, her abject body is made a phantom of her former self. However, this is seemingly a product of the way her identity is constructed through the process of filming. Her reality is made less real by the existence of the other family who acts as stand in personae for her real self in The Possession. Their presence dictates a residual absence, their simulation of Marjorie’s life replaces her private lived experience with a public, excepted, “real,” truth. Therefore, through the processing of subjectivity, Marjorie indeed becomes possessed, but not by a demon necessarily, but of public perception. Simply put, our narrative idea of Marjorie comes to force her into an inescapable personae that even she seems confused by. The audience who watches her comes to be the demon who ultimately possesses Marjorie.

Just as we impose a face to the faceless image of Christina in the painting, so too do we impose a subject position upon Marjorie that assumes an interiority that lessens perhaps her actual identity. Our notions of subject materialize, they shape, they contort, they manipulate, they reduce and deny. They possess.

In reading the section of Trembley’s books assigned for today’s class, one particular scene stood out to me. The incident in the basement, which seems to be the first normal interaction between Merry and Majorie since the beginning of the book, brought to mind the uncertainty of reality and question of reliability as discussed in class. In this scene, Majorie discloses her “biggest secret of all”: she is faking her possession. Her story seems likely, and almost noble, as she is sacrificing herself for the wellbeing of the family and home. However, as Merry points out, the story is not completely air-tight, but rather is Majorie “trying to convince herself that she was okay and in control of what was happening to her and to us.”

This quote struck me for a number of reasons. First of all, it adds to the theme of unreliability in the novel- what is real or not- a trope of postmodern horror. Second, Marjorie’s questioning of her own state of being and subsequent attempt to feign control makes me think about our society’s need for predictability and authority over a situation. This control that we long for often comes in the form of knowledge, disseminated through and digested by technology. Much of our modern day fears, as evidenced through popular horror, stems from the lack of knowledge or understanding of a situation. When we do not have information automatically at our finger tips, or an easy solution is not readily available, we tend to panic. Majorie is quick to defend herself and her self-governance, stating that her behavior is a game over which she has control and design. Her father, unsure of how to explain his daughter’s behavior, turns to the church to “fix” the problem. While dealt with in different ways by the members of the Barrett household, the main source of fear seems to rise from the uncertainty and lack of “diagnosis and solution” to their family situation.

With the aid of technology and global communication, there is often little in this world which we cannot explain or google to find an answer. However, the inconclusiveness and mystery surrounding Marjorie’s ailment, as reinforced by her own failure to understand what is going on, adds to the fear of both the family and the reader.

Just as Marjorie’s father easily adopts the idea of possession and Majorie herself claims that it is all an act, our society tends to jump on the easiest explanation for things to dissolve fear and restore normalcy. Scape goats, while first introduced to me as something from the time of the Scarlet Letter, are still very present in our culture. We have become accustomed to immediate gratification via technology, thus have lost the skill of patience in finding the worthwhile answer. If a solution cannot be reached within a certain period of time, panic ensues and we begin to grab at straws. Technology has been glorified for uniting the globe and providing a medium through which information can be shared. However, with the growing need for immediate gratification and the tendency to jump on the easiest, potentially detrimental, way out, technology may be hurting out society rather than helping.

After recognizing Marjorie’s bluff, Merry says, “in that moment, i was afraid for her instead of being afraid of her.” In this scene, the aspect of fear is not the possession itself, or even the prospect of possession, but rather is Majorie’s inability to grasp and make sense of what is happening to her. Funny how not knowing the facts may be scarier than possession by the devil himself.

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After reading Creed’s article on the sexualization of the feminine in the horror genre, and continuing to read A Head Full of Ghosts, a movie I had previously watched came to mind entitled It Follows (trailer). I believe this movie simultaneously reinforces and rejects Creed’s claims of the horror genre’s stereotypical “feminine evil – beautiful on the outside/corrupt within” in an interesting way.

The movie summed up (with no spoilers) is about a girl, Jay, who inherits a sexually transmitted “disease” that comes in the form of the possessed trying to kill her, only seen by those who have this same STD/curse. She is told from her sexual assailant that the only way she can get rid of the possessed killer is to pass the STD on to somebody else. The catch is that if the person who she passes it on to dies, the killer will come back to get her. The killer can come in any form, a family member, a friend, or a stranger and the only way to identify them is that they walk slowly towards you and try to kill you.

It Follows reinforces Creed’s claim that the horror genre relies on the sexualization of women and the exaggerated duality of their innocent outside and corrupted inside. In the movie, Jay is introduced as an innocent teenage girl just wanting to find a decent boyfriend. Jay meets a boy and the two go on a picturesque date, a movie spiced with sexual tension. The two then spend some alone time together which ultimately leads to a consensual sex scene. Her date then precedes to drug her and relocate her to an abandoned building where he informs her of the STD he has gave her. This quickly moving plot flips Jay into a sexual deviant, more or less suggesting that her consequence of this deviancy is an STD (baffling, I know). Many of Creed’s points are seen/validated in the exposition of this film as the woman’s innocence is contorted and how a strict male gaze is enforced upon her, not only for his benefit but for the audience’s as well.

However, most of film’s remaining plot rejects Creed’s claim by building Jay herself to be the one who tackles her “indirect possession” (that taking the form of the stalking killer) instead of a male force as seen in many horror films. Though Jay eventually enlists the help of her friends, both male and female, it is ultimately her that needs to take on the demon. She is more or less alone in the effort to kill the demon once and for all because she is the only one who can see it. This detail is where I see It Follows rejecting the established horror tropes of sexualized women. Instead of relying on the powerful male presence to defeat evil, Jay uses both male and female friends, and more importantly herself, to take on the evil presented by the film. Whereas The Exorcist and A Head Full of Ghosts have external male powers attempting to defeat evil (religious clergymen), It Follows has a combination of internal (Jay) and external male and female powers combating the possessed.

Spoiler ahead:

Unfortunately, the end of movie finds one of Jay’s friends, male, nabbing the final kill of the demon. It Follows tries to subvert the horror tropes it is critiquing but ultimately relies on them to tie the movie up and bring it to a close. It is interesting to see when horror films try to turn the horror genre on its head by characterizing the female as the one who rids evil instead of a male (see Nightmare on Elm Street or Hellraiser II), but these still rely on some male force to drive the plot to an end. I can see future horror films trying to portray women as the ones who “take care of business” but I have yet to see one that does it one hundred percent without sexualizing the protagonist (a la Kill Bill or Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Let me know if you know of any that do so effectively.