Category: Group A

Throughout the entirety of Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” episode, I was immediately transported into the horrid situation of a loved one leaving my presence.  As much as I would want this loved one back, it would never be the same, even if it was through artificial intelligence or the replication of their social media platforms.  While a woman and her husband are happily married with a kid on the way, the husband spends too much time on social media during a drive, having technology literally being the reason he is killed.  However, as the woman is talking with more and more people, friends introduce her to this new concept where the dead can be replicated through taking text messages, emails, social media platforms, etc. to try and mimic the emotions and communication methods this loved one exhibited.  The funny part is, technology was the reason the husband died, but was simultaneously the only reason he lived again.

By analyzing this situation, it was interesting to observe how social media can be our institution of survival as well as death. Even if social media were able to revive one’s online self into the physical self, who’s to say this person is the same or different while they were living?  As much time as people spend on social media, I personally argue that the social media presence in all of us will never live up to who were are as a person, our emotional styles, and our communication styles.  However, since watching this episode, I have thought much more in depth about if I were to die today, how people would really remember me, and could my social media accurately replicate who I was/what type of a person I was.  Even furthering this thinking, how I would personally remember my close friends, and if their social medias accurately replicated their online persona in real life.  The image of weeks 1-6 on the Death in the Digital Age blog accurately pictures anyone briefly idolizing technology, whether or not they’re missing it or loving it.

Like most episodes of Black Mirror, what I found the eeriest was the sheer possibility of the technology in “Be Right Back.” The whole time, I couldn’t help but think that it would be nice to be able to pretend to talk to a loved one after they are gone, especially if the death was sudden. The sudden death of a young person leaves so much up in the air and it can be hard for the people in their lives to define their relationship with the deceased enough to mourn properly. Martha and Ash weren’t married (I’m assuming) but they were obviously very involved. Feeling suddenly isolated in the world, Martha’s desperation to talk to Ash seemed justified (especially after she found out she was pregnant – a nice touch on the part of the producers to further rationalize her desire). The result was that as I watched it, I really emphasized with Martha and didn’t think that the idea was that absurd until I saw just how horribly it could go wrong (which is probably the ultimate goal in the production of every episode).

However, the episodes seemed to date itself with the technology it scrapes to build a profile of Ash. If someone wanted to learn how someone thought, talked, and felt, Facebook and emails would not be the way to go. I’m formal over email and only use it to communicate with adults when I need information. Like many of my peers, I rarely post Facebook updates. Nowadays, if someone wanted to really get to know me, they could do so pretty well by scraping my texts. My generation constantly text/instant message each other, often about similar topics and with similar tones as we converse in person. The whole point of social media now seems to be projecting a person that is better than who you really are: more thoughtful, articulate, funnier. Intimate digital communication mediums are where true personalities can come across and that’s what I would like my persona to be built after when I die.

Ash embodies remediation, a term that appeared in Ewan Kirkland’s article “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations,” and was defined as “digital media’s deployment of old media formations in constructing new media” (115). In the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” the real Ash at the beginning of the episode is the ‘old media’ and the new robot Ash is the ‘new media’. Basically, he is a digital zombie. But the problem presented in the episode is the difference between digitized memories and memories that social media never experienced, such as Ash’s memory behind his childhood photo which was sad and connected to his brother’s and father’s deaths. But when zombie Ash sees it, he calls it funny. Social media cannot fully replicate Ash because it works on the assumption that people put their whole lives on social media, which is impossible. Even with the addition of Martha’s personal messages and videos, the artificial intelligence cannot account for Ash’s life before social media which founded who he is and moments not captured between Ash and Martha, represented by zombie Ash’s inability to react when Martha places his hand on her chest. As Kirkland writes, “the lack of ‘the real’ in digital media represents a central problematic for horror video games whose affect depends on evoking a tangible experience of imperilment, embodiment, and spatial depth” (116). Zombie Ash struggles with the same problem. Part of “the lack of ‘the real’” is the navigation between 2D and 3D, which Kirkland gives the example of video games making the connection between the player and the avatar body by using “erratic uncontrollable avatar movements combined with joypad vibration” (117). The joypad vibration is the physical connection between the player and the avatar body and attempts to cross the border from 2D to 3D, but still lacks the real. Ash’s avatar body is physically present in 3D and has the visual details of the human body like pores and lines, but his skin is smooth. When Martha asks him how he is so smooth, Ash replies, “It’s texture mapping. The really tiny details are visual, 2D.” He then tells her to touch his fingertips, and she feels no fingerprint. It is the little details like that and breathing, sleeping, and eating – the lack of the real – that remind Martha he is not Ash.

The synthesis in Monster Culture (Seven Theses) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is very tightly packed. For a moment I just want to unwrap some of what he made me think about. Throughout his argument my mind was brought to the idea of “the Other”. The outsider, or complete opposite, from the human self. I started to think about the idea of calling another human a monster, but even more so the idea of monsters embodying human difference. Particularly in the last four theses of his argument.

Cohen uses examples of beasts and creatures: godzilla, nosferatu, alien. While monsters can be literally different in form, they also all personify a difference from one’s self, which is a lot of what Cohen is getting at. Just as someone can be scared of monsters, it seems fair to say that humans are scared of difference; scared of change.

Cohen’s argument of portrayal, monsters linger in difference, demonstrates humans’ more artistic rendering of the fear of the Other. “In medieval France the chansons de geste celebrated the crusades by transforming Muslims into demonic caricatures whose menacing lack of humanity was readable from their bestial attributes; by culturally glossing ‘Saracens’ as ‘monstra;’ propagandists rendered rhetorically admissible the annexation of the East by the West.” (8) His example of caricaturization makes me think of political cartoons. Especially in his brief discussion of “political or ideological difference” as being “much a catalyst to monstrous representation on a micro level as cultural alterity in the macrocosm.” (8) A dehumanizing representation of humans, especially those whose arguments and decisions are not in line with your own.

In his thesis regarding monsters policing the borders of possible Cohen explains “the monsters are here, as elsewhere, expedient representations of other cultures, generalized and demonized to enforce a strict notion of group sameness. The fears of contamination, impurity, and loss of identity that produce stories like the Genesis episode are strong, and they reappear incessantly.” (16) As a religious text, the Bible is something many philosophers seem to turn to in analyzing social patterns. Some of the earliest examples of embodied fear or difference with consequence. It’s through this example that I started to think about how we use the word monster in the modern world and how human a monster can be.

I had one thought that sums up his section on fearing the monster being an embodiment of desire. In putting another down one is attempting to raise oneself. Humans pick on others out of jealousy and envy.

In defining monsters as mystical, I agree with Cohen’s final argument – that more fantastical monsters exist through knowledge and in the mind. But I find his concluding statements about monsters one last reference to the idea of monsters as an embodiment of the fear of difference. “Monsters are our children… These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place.” (20)

Paul Tremblay’s Head Full of Ghosts left me wondering how we were supposed to read Margerie’s character. Was she an innocent teenager gripped by a dangerous mental illness, or a monster living among us? In this blog post, I will evaluate her against Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses). All seven points and their summarizing quotations come from this essay.

Thesis I: The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body – “An embodiment of a certain cultural moment” (4).
Female sexuality is a cultural moment that Margerie is aware of and capitalizes on. She makes people uncomfortable by appearing in a sports bra and her possession often takes on sexual forms, such as in the masturbation scene (86). Margerie is also tech-savvy and uses the internet to further her creepy knowledge-base and our media-saturated society to try and expose her father.

Thesis II:  The Monster Always Escapes – “No monster tastes of death but once” (5).
This one seems to discount Margerie as a monster. She does die, seemingly for good. However, in our technological society, dying is a complicated act. Margerie has stopped living and aging, but she lives on through mediated representations of herself (although, was the Margerie that was captured on cameras and will eventually be captured in the book is arguably not the “true” her but just a part she was playing). She also lives on in Merry’s memory, which at times seems almost obsessive. 

Thesis III: The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis – “a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (6).
Like other stories of possession, a Head Full of Ghosts relies on the of categories to create fear. The possessed is a female child, seemingly the most innocent example of humanity, yet they act in horrible ways that disgust us. Margerie also blurs the boundaries between sane and insane, well-meaning and malicious. She is a daughter, sister, student, devil, sadist, and family annihilator all-in-one – i.e. a monster.

Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference – “monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual” (7).
As Cohen says, “the woman who oversteps the boundaries of her gender roles risks becoming” a monster (9). Margerie is seen as too smart for “a girl like her” and is seen as aberrant because of this (179). Her mom, the fellow female, points out that a young girl is definitely capable of possessing her knowledge about seemingly obscure topics. The priests, however, are attempting to other Margerie in order to turn her into a monster that they can exorcize.

Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Border of the Possible – “the monster prevents mobility…delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move” (12).
I had a hard time mapping this thesis onto Margerie until I focused on the line that stated that all monsters are living a “double narrative” – the one about how they came to be and another about the cultural utility they serve. Margerie certainly has a double narrative, at least by her own account. She claims that she wanted to pretend to be possessed in order to expose her dad’s real sickness, but the ending of the book suggests that she was actually sick, therefore her cultural utility was showing just how delusional and manipulating individuals can be.

Thesis VI: The Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire – “the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing” (17).
Merry looks up to her sister and seems to have a complicated relationship towards her possession. She continues to love her sister for the majority of the book. When Margerie’s room became off limits, Merry snuck in while everyone was asleep, obviously unable to resist what was forbidden.
In a different vein, Margerie pokes at a weak spot of the priest’s: an interest in kiddie porn. After an episode that we assume portrayed a reenactment of Margerie’s violent masturbation and Margerie’s discomfort when the priest touches her chest, she seems to be aware of and resisting her own possible taboo appeal.

Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold…of Becoming – “monsters are our children…they ask us to reevaluate…they ask us why we have created them” (20).
Perhaps Margerie was created to show us how technology ruins our lives, or how mental illness is a serious issue that can debilitate a person. She isn’t given the help she needed and everything went awry in the end, teaching us that money is not the answer, that reality TV isn’t reality, and that mental illnesses can’t be cured with exorcisms.

By Cohen’s definition, Margerie is indeed a monster, but I think that it’s important to remember that she was turned into one by society and that underneath of it all she was just a sick young girl.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory, 1996, pp. 3–25., doi:10.5749/j.ctttsq4d.4.

Tremblay, Paul. A Head Full of Ghosts. William Morrow & Company, 2017.

Cohen defines the monster as a representation of culture and uses medieval, Biblical, and Greek myths to fuel his “monster theory.” The ideas in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” are reminiscent of Paul Tillich’s essay “The Religious Symbol,” in which Tillich defines “symbolics” as “a general science of the self-expression of all groups, tendencies, and communities” (4). Cohen’s chapter feels like a branch from Tillich’s essay in that the monster is a specific form of the symbol used to embody abjection to “the other.” Cohen emphasizes sexuality, disability, and race as specific areas of anxiety to our culture. Tillich goes onto say that symbols may change unconsciously as cultures change, and thus create myths, which are used to explain one culture’s interpretation of existence (Tillich 9). Cohen references multiple myths in this chapter to show how many monsters appear throughout the history of storytelling. While Cohen includes that monsters represent a “certain cultural moment,” I wonder what he would think about a monster’s implication of that culture’s existence?

Part of the anxiety of monsters is a fear of the foreign or racial fears. On page 11, Cohen writes, “The political-cultural monster, the embodiment of radical difference, paradoxically threatens to erase difference in the world of its creators… Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality…” This language reminded me of James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew,” in which Baldwin is explaining blackness in America to his nephew, but it was published in his book The Fire Next Time and meant to be read by both black and white. He writes, “…The danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations” (par. 9). This quote echoes Cohen’s statement that monsters threaten to destroy the world of its creators, who “have been mainly European [and American] and male” (Cohen 15). Cohen also mentions a fear of darker skin, and Baldwin’s language easily depicts the black man as a monster destroying the white man’s world, and even defying laws of nature or disrupting the order of things.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “A Letter to My Nephew.” The Progressive. Dec. 1, 1962. Web.

Tillich, Paul. “The Religious Symbol.” Daedalus, vol. 87, no. 3, 1958, pp. 3–21. JSTOR. Web. 

Monsters are a topic that’s not frequently discussed, however Jeffrey Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses) allows for a more in-depth way of thinking about a universally unknown lifestyle.  One of the things that stood out to me was was Thesis VI, stating “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire,” because of it’s spooky ties to any postmodern novel, article, film, etc.  The entirety of postmodernism is to lure people in with the fear that they wouldn’t be able to face in reality.  Having people understand that this is within a Hollywood setting and not a household setting allows for some ease when discussing this culture. Along this idea, it’s important to understand that directors and authors are thriving off of this so-called “monster culture” because people are anxious about their worst fear, however they desire fear the most.

Cohan’s last quote of this thesis asks, “Do monsters really exist? Surely they must, for if they did not, how could we” (Cohen 20)? He is insisting that we are the ones who are most fearful of the monster itself, yet we are the creators and the true monsters of everything.  It’s fascinating to analyze Cohen because he dissects that none of this fear and none of this anxiety would even be present if it weren’t for humans craving fear, as well as being the main producers of it. When comparing this ideal to postmodern horror, humans are not only metaphorical producers, but they’re literal film producers as well, assigned with the job to stimulate the fear that other humans have created.

With the interesting point of humans being the real monsters, I found a powerful image that summarizes everything previously said.

Isabel Pinedo and Tasha Robinson tackle similar subjects in the genre of horror. Pinedo’s Recreational Terror provides a more in-depth look at the themes in classical and postmodern horror films, while Robinson’s Modern Horror Films Are Finding Their Scares in Dead Phone Batteries focuses on the use of one trend in particular: the useless cell phone. These two articles provide a great backdrop for one another and highlight one of the key changes of society in the twenty-first century.

Cell phones have played an interesting role in the horror genre since their creation and massive proliferation.  Their faulty use in horror films has gone from being a trope to a cliche, but has recently seen some innovation in their use, as pointed out by Robinson in her article for The Verge. In Pinedo’s article, she mentions how many great horror films invoke a sense of fear by disconnecting the protagonist from the rest of the world. This was done by use of a foreign setting in the classic horror films, but the postmodern era saw more blurred connections between the subject and the rest of society.

Cell phones help to create a weak connection to the rest of society in horror films. Simply removing them by clever use of plot devices allowed many of the early postmodern films to help create this feeling of isolation. This is the kind of isolation that comes in The Strangers, Get Out, or Jeepers Creepers. This was how the broken cell phone trope became cliched, however, but filmmakers in the twenty-first century capitalized on increased smartphone and cell phone ownership rates.

Pinedo’s article, though thorough, only covers trends up until the mid 1990’s. What she did not get to include in her article was the rise in smartphone prevalence and subsequent rise in technology based horror films during the twenty-first century. The anthology series Black Mirror immediately comes to mind when thinking of the next step in subversion. The show doesn’t treat technology as a trope to be played with, but it treats technology as an antagonist of sorts. This kind of opens up a conversation about how our technology really does affect our psychology with regard to how we think about and interact with death.

Tasha Robinson, in her article titled “Modern Horror Films Are Finding Their Scares in Dead Phone Batteries” for The Verge, describes cutting connection as a way of “establishing sympathies.” Part of the neurological science behind horror, and what can make it so scary, is the connection to the main character. The fact that 95% of the people watching these movies have a cell phone, gives the producers of these films something to tug at. While every viewer might not react in the same way, there are certain strings which I think manipulate people and make them malleable. This, mainly, being the fear of not being able to use your mobile device in case of an emergency! For this could be one of the main reasons that phones were created in the first place: to give the ability to call for help and get information while on the go. I mean, she points this out (and ties this idea together) as well, that “[the producers] aren’t just tapping into a tired cliché. They’re channeling the low-key real-world anxiety of needing a phone for a specific purpose and suddenly not being sure whether it has the juice to perform.”

And it’s not just cell phones – it’s things like power or a working car. These, among others, being “clichés” that producers work with in establishing sympathy. All technologies that I think we can mostly agree are taken for granted. It doesn’t surprise me that as we use things like Instagram, video chats, or cell phones, that they get integrated into the films. Especially as the majority of the population begin to use these digital technologies on a day-to-day basis.

Horror films are all about taking an aspect of real life and turning it on its head. You’re supposed to get close to the characters so that everything that happens to them feels like could happen to you. Establishing sympathy.

One last thing I want to expand upon is that not only does technology reshape the horror genre, but it’s starting to change how we receive it. I’ve encountered posts on Instagram and Snapchat with snippets of horror movies made specifically for the platform. They revolve around texting or using some app on your phone that producers are using to connect you to the character even more literally. And I think being able to use the medium you’re scaring someone on to be the subject you scare them with is not only meta, but a clever way to strengthen the impact of the scare.