Author: olliccione

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I Appear to Love the Internet, Pop Culture, and Criticizing Things

Reviewing my posts over the past semester, I’ve found three main themes: 1 – I love technology, especially the Internet, and seem to think people unfairly criticize it, 2 – I tend to apply what we learn in class to other pieces of art or pop culture I enjoy, and 3 – I tend to question the representation of marginalized groups in what we read/watched.

In “The Legitimacy of Online Relationships,” “Are parasocial relationships inherently inauthentic?,” and “A Love Letter to Technology?” (3/8 total posts), I took a definitive stance on technology, particularly as a tool for facilitating social connection.  I admit I may be a little biased.  I spend a lot of time in Internet communities, and they’ve allowed me to make friends who share the same identities or niche interests I do.  I defended the validity of parasocial relationships and the potential for authentic celebrity Internet presences.

This is how I tend to characterize the arguments of people who are negative about the Internet/technology… (image accessed )

Because I feel online relationships and interactions are so frequently devalued, I came across as an unequivocal supporter of them.  As a result (and it pains me to admit this), I think I ignored some of the nuance in the issue.  In my opinion, technology is fantastic and people criticize it because a – it’s new, and people hate change and 2 – they want to feel superior to the mindless lemmings who dare to use Google.  But right there, I’m making an incomplete and ungenerous generalization.  As much as I love technology and the Internet and the opportunities it provides, my posts suggest that I may need to take a break from being so defensive and acknowledge that just as technological development isn’t all bad, it isn’t all good, either.

The other theme that appeared in my posts is that I love pop culture and like to bring it into these discussions.  Whether it’s Rosemary’s Baby, zombie tropes, or bad video games, I can’t refrain from applying these concepts beyond the class.  Sci-fi and horror are two of my favorite genres, so I really had a lot of fun learning about them and getting the opportunity to watch The Exorcist for class.  I think my excitement about the subject is pretty evident in these posts.

A third and final theme I noticed was that I was often critical of the representation of women, mentally ill people, and minority groups in our assigned texts.  I think this criticism is a lot fairer than my staunch defense of technology.  I’m still not sure how I feel about Marjorie being characterized as violent as a result of mental illness, as I talk about in this post.  I had plenty of criticisms of Dead Set’s treatment of its black, gay, and female characters.  As I mentioned earlier, I consume a lot of sci-fi and horror, and I think I go into these pieces expecting the mentally ill to be vilified, women’s sexuality to be condemned, and black and gay characters to be seen as expendable.  That being said, these representations are rarely black and white.  I think particularly in reference to Marjorie, I was asking questions far more than making accusations.  Nevertheless, I can’t set aside my critical lens when consuming media.

Overall, I don’t think I looked at what we read or watched for class from an apolitical, detached perspective.  I definitely analyzed pieces with my own agenda.  I don’t think that’s inherently wrong, but I think especially in the case of defending technology, I may want to be a bit more conscious of nuance and different perspectives.

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A Love Letter to Technology?

I find modern literature (and perhaps society at large) generally disdainful of technology.  People want to dismiss the Internet, and social media in particular, as creating a less focused and present, and more superficial and inauthentic society.  I strongly, strongly disagree with this position.  Internet culture is not without its faults, certainly, but just look at this image.

A screenshot I took of all the languages available for instant translation on Google Translate (translate.google.com)

I can translate English into languages I’ve never even heard of instantly and at not cost to me.  I can meet someone in Zimbabwe over social media, and then can talk to them by translating English into Shona (a language I only just learned of) with speed and ease unprecedented in all of human history.  How is that anything less than exhilarating?

One of the things I’ve so enjoyed about Station Eleven is how it reminds me how awe-inspiring modern technology truly is.  Contrary to a lot of the current discourse, Station Eleven celebrates the miracle of technology, be it airplanes (pg 247) or the Internet (pg 202).  But what really struck me was two scenes on pages 208-209.

In the first scene, Miranda goes to Starbucks for a decaf latte and compliments the barista’s green hair.  In the second, she visits Arthur in his dressing room and he makes her a cup of tea with his electric tea kettle.

There’s nothing inherently remarkable about these two interactions, but juxtaposed with the primitiveness of the post-Georgia Flu world, I found myself in awe of them.  This awe may be partially because they center on three things I really enjoy (coffee shops, bright hair, and electric kettles), but nevertheless, Station Eleven is really good at making you appreciate technology.

We have shops where you can go and get a cup of coffee in under five minutes.  We have electricity to keep those shops running.  We have running water to make the drinks.  We’re able to import the non-native coffee bean in such enormous supply that it’s very easy and cheap to obtain.  We have factories that produce bleach and hair dye, and I can buy both of these for relatively little money.  I have access to a car to take me to the beauty supply store to buy the materials, so that the seven mile journey is but a small errand.  I have an electric tea kettle, and can have boiling hot water whenever I want it.  I have a variety of tea bags in my room.  I think you’re getting the point.

One of the things I am most enjoying about Station Eleven is how it makes me look at the world through new eyes.  By so vividly crafting a world without technology, St. John Mandel changes the way I see even the most mundane aspects of my life.  That’s not something I can say of many writers.

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So Bad It’s Good?

Dr. Ford in the English department has talked about how he’s very interested in the “aesthetics of badness” and I confess that I am too.  Awful films or TV shows can be so enjoyable in that so-bad-it’s-good way and often develop serious cult followings.   But this doesn’t seem to be the case with the E.T. Atari game.  So I’m interested in what distinguishes good-bad from bad-bad.  To illustrate, I have two pieces of E.T. media to share.

(E.T. Atari let’s play video by YouTube user J.C.’s Channel.  Click the title and it will take you right back to the source)

(The musical masterpiece “ET Where R U” from “Themes for Television, Sports, & Aerobics,” directed and produced by George H Semper.  Again, the title will take you right back to the source.  The song has a really long intro, so skip to 2:45 for the good stuff.  I’m using the term “good” loosely here)

Initially, I thought that maybe any video game with bad, clumsy game play would be despised.  I’m not much of a gamer myself, but I imagine there’s a great degree of frustration when playing an unnecessarily difficult game.  However, I did a bit of research on the best worst video games, and plenty of games made the list that were criticized for having really terrible game play.

So instead, here’s my conclusion.  We can appreciate art for two reasons: 1. it is a good piece of art or 2. it makes us feel good.  To be enjoyed, you have to meet only one of the categories.   I will admit freely that the first Captain America movie is not a good film from a critical standpoint, but it brings me joy.  Similarly, I appreciate Logan as one of the best superhero movies ever made, but I have no intention of ever sitting through it again, because it was extremely depressing.

So “ET Where R U” is an awful song.  It doesn’t meet criterium one.  But it’s just absurd enough to be really funny, therefore meeting criterium two, and therefore gets to be good-bad.

Just watching the play-through of the ET video game is maddening and frankly, pretty boring.  And from an aesthetic, artistic standpoint, it’s just not that good.  So, meeting neither criteria, it’s bad-bad.

I could see, perhaps in an alternate universe, the ET Atari game being a cult classic as a good-bad game if it were any fun to play.

To illustrate my point, here’s yet another YouTube video of some “so bad they’re good” games.  The difference between the ET video and these games is clear.  They’re garbage, but redeemed because they’re funny or enjoyable.  ET, unfortunately, is just plain bad.

(Accessed from the WhatCulture Gaming YouTube channel)

 

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The Phoenix Project

Check out the site here!

 

Artist’s Statement

Other than a short epilogue in which everyone has gotten married, had children, and is appearing to be living happily ever after, J.K. Rowling gives us little insight into the state of the Wizarding World after Harry Potter defeats Voldemort. As is the case among fans, I imagined a possible future for the universe. In this future, the events of the series are taught in a History of Magic class, and I theorized about the reactions of the muggle born students upon learning about the people who had died fighting to ensure their place in the Wizarding World. Therefore, my Haunted Media Artifact is an in-universe memorial page, The Phoenix Project, created by these muggle born students for those who died fighting Death Eaters in Harry Potter.  In crafting my project, I combined elements of parasocial relationships, online memorial pages, and Internet trolling to reflect the complexities of online grieving.

Civil Rights in Harry Potter

I am currently in the middle of a Harry Potter re-read, and am struck by how integral civil rights are to the overarching plot of the entire series.  Although I struggled to find much scholarship on it, the central conflict of Harry Potter is a fight against racial supremacy.  While the struggle is represented allegorically through pure blood and muggle born witches and wizards, it is clearly speaking to a history of civil rights battles.  In the Harry Potter universe, the slur “mudblood” is meant to denigrate the less privileged in society for their lineage.  Authors, particularly ones as masterful as J.K. Rowling, are deliberate in their every move.  Rowling invented a racial slur for her universe to emphasize that racism operates within it just as it does in the non-magical world.  Voldemort rises to power by demonizing a disadvantaged minority group and asserting his, and his followers’, superiority over them.  Under his rule, muggle borns cannot work in the Wizarding World, have their wands confiscated, and are liable to be jailed.  In this re-read, I have found myself focusing on Hermione’s experience of racism in the Wizarding World, and I have thought a great deal about the experiences of muggle born students in such a hostile environment.

Parasocial Relationships

My project was heavily influenced by the concept of parasocial relationships.  Coined by Horton and Wohl , parasocial relationships are bonds people feel with public figures despite not knowing them personally (215).  While Horton and Wohl’s paper focuses mostly on television personalities, the concept of parasocial relationships has extended far beyond that original limited scope.  These relationships, as we have seen with the amount of beloved celebrities who passed away in 2016, can be quite intense.  In crafting my project, I wanted to draw on the idea of bonds with public figures.  I imagined that in the Wizarding World, muggle born students would feel a particular affinity with those who had died fighting for muggleborn equality, and therefore created a backstory involving four original muggle born characters.  Many of the characters who died in the Second Wizarding War were not famous at the time of their death, but like we have seen with scores of celebrities or public figures, from Bob Ross to Emily Dickinson, fame is frequently achieved posthumously.  In our digital age, parasocial relationships are easier than ever to achieve.  While the internet does not exist in the Wizarding World, and these figures would likely only appear in history textbooks, muggleborn students would have grown up with exposure to the internet.  It is therefore their experiences with forming parasocial internet relationships, not only the importance of muggleborn rights, that make them particularly apt people to create such a project.

I acknowledge that it is probably unusual to form a parasocial relationship posthumously, I think it could be possible, particularly in the Wizarding World, where death operates somewhat differently than it does in ours.  Pictures move in this universe, so it would be easier to understand and connect with someone deceased.  Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape both have talking portraits hung in the Hogwarts castle, allowing students to interact with them in a very life-like manner.

Website Design

In crafting the memorial page, I took some cues from existing online memorial pages, but also endeavored to depart from certain elements.  As Brubaker et al. observed, online memorial pages usually include an obituary component as well as a memorial guestbook (154).  I included both of those elements in my website, with individual biographies for the deceased and a guest book that allowed users to leave messages.  In crafting those messages, I followed the observations Brubaker et al. had made that people who knew the deceased tended to address their comments to them directly, while those who did not know the deceased personally generally addressed the creators of the website (155).  Also, acknowledging that some people do come to online memorial pages simply to wallow in false grief, I added a few inane comments. I also added messages from internet trolls, as they tend to be a common presence on online memorial pages, but I will address those comments in depth later in the statement.

While I did model my page using the general template of online memorial pages, I also wanted to depart from some elements I did not like.  As Graham et al. found in exploring Australian memorial websites, some, such as the popular Heaven Address, contained “Featured” and “Most Visited” profiles (43).  This design struck me as disrespectful and inappropriate.  The idea of competing for online popularity even in death seems almost sacrilegious.  Additionally, I found the world cloud component of the Heaven Address memorial pages as somewhat too silly for my website.  The notion that death, particularly as casualties of war, deserves a certain seriousness drove the design of my website.  I attempted to balance an attractive aesthetic with a degree of solemnity.  While the color palate of Heaven Address is bright, featuring white, yellow, and green, my website is predominantly black with white text and some light red accents.  I chose to emphasize black because it is the traditional color of mourning.  This choice naturally lent itself to white text to make the website as easy to read as possible.  However, in an effort to add visual interest to the page, I added some light red, which looks nice but maintains the seriousness I meant to convey in the site.

The choice of fonts was also very deliberate.  I spent a good deal of time playing around before deciding on which three to use.  All three fonts were deliberately sans serif, because I wanted a minimalist, elegant look to convey solemnity.  For titles, I chose a font called Marzo, a thin, almost spindly font.  I wanted something eye-catching for the titles, but did not feel that playful fonts with curlicues or fun shapes seemed appropriate, so this unusual but simple font seemed like a good middle ground.  For the paragraphs, I chose Avenir Light, which was simply a plain, sans serif font that worked well for bodies of text.  For other elements and accents, I used a font called Lulo Clean.  I did not want all the sans serif fonts to look too similar, so this font was chosen in contrast to Marzo.  While Marzo is thin, Lulo Clean is an all-caps, blocky font, which provided a good visual contrast without being too decorative.

Trolls

            No corner of the Internet is complete without at least a few trolls, and as we have found, memorial pages in particular tend to attract a certain vitriol from anonymous Internet users.  Combined with the fact that this page is commemorating people who died fighting for equality, trolls seemed inevitable.  As Whitney Phillips found, trolls tend to target those whose grief they view as inauthentic.  In general, trolls do not target the families of friends of the deceased, but rather mourners who never knew the deceased and yet still grieve publically.  My memorial page is crafted by those who never knew the deceased, and therefore could be seen by trolls as simply an attention-seeking, tacky, unnecessary online grieving display.  According to Phillips’s research, my website would be the perfect place for trolls.

The anonymity afforded by the website also opens the door for vicious, inflammatory comments.  Haines et al. found that anonymity allows users to feel more comfortable expressing support for questionable or socially undesirable positions or behavior (779-780).  In the real online world, there is no shortage of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted sentiments, particularly on platforms like Reddit or Tumblr, where one can remain anonymous.   As The Phoenix Project allows anonymous commenting, it seemed in-keeping with online culture to sprinkle in a few pure-blood supremacist comments along with the usual sensationalist trolling.

Conclusion

            As with anything, our conception of death and methods of grieving are changing with the rapid expansion of technology.  The Phoenix Project was meant to integrate several components of that changing landscape.  I focused primarily on the idea of parasocial relationships with the dead, especially in light of the broader social context of the Harry Potter universe.  I was very deliberate in the crafting of this memorial page, and tried to embody some of the best aspects of online culture—the accessibility of information and the ease of communication and community-building—while avoiding those elements—an obsession with popularity and the commercialization of nearly anything—that I find distasteful.  I wanted to depict the potential value of public grieving sites in uniting people and creating a sense of community while still acknowledging the presence of grief-policing trolls. Ultimately, while The Phoenix Project, and those memorialized within it, are entirely fictional, I hope it provides some real insight into how the Internet challenges some of our attitudes surrounding death

Works Cited:

Brubaker, Jed R., Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Grief and Mourning.” Information Society 29.3 (2013): 152-63.
Graham, Connor, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin R. Gibbs. “Gravesites and websites: a comparison of memorialisation.” Visual Studies 30.1 (2015): 37-53.
Haines, Russell, Jill Hough, Lan Cao, and Douglas Haines. “Anonymity in Computer-Mediated Communication: More Contrarian Ideas with Less Influence.” Group Decision and Negotiation 23.4 (2014): 765-86
Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social
Interaction.” Psychiatry 19.3 (1956): 215-29.
Philips, Whitney. “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online.” First Monday 16.12 (2011): n. pag. Web.
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Are parasocial relationships inherently inauthentic?

 

The part of our reading I found most interesting was the part addressing parasocial relationships with celebrities.  Of all the celebrity deaths of 2016, the one that provoked the greatest display of public mourning in my corner of the Internet was easily Carrie Fisher.  Just scrolling through her Tumblr tag for about five minutes, I came across these three posts.  Clearly, all three of these people feel a deep connection to her, whether as a motivating force or a parental figure (two posts refer to her as “space mom,” which is a common title of hers on the Internet).

Screenshot of a Tumblr post (shslsarcasticidiot.tumblr.com/post/159147131965/scrolls-through-the-carrie-fisher-tag-to-force)
Another Tumblr post (priceforrottenjudgement.tumblr.com/post/159091343154/im-still-not-over-the-death-of-carrie-fisher-and)
People really miss Carrie Fisher… (madeleinedevalois.tumblr.com/post/159055295573)

 

Sherlock describes these relationships as based on “false feelings of authenticity and intimacy” (168), and I want to push back on that assessment a little bit.   She quotes another scholar who claims that an online or public presence is “an artificial build-up of ‘personality'” (168).

Carrie Fisher’s online presence is hilarious and authentic.  Her tweets do not look like they have been approved by a publicist.  I’ve included one of my favorite’s below.

A particularly hilarious tweet from Carrie (twitter.com/carrieffisher)

Either Carrie has a crazy good publicist who manages to craft a perfectly unpolished, authentic presence on Twitter, or she’s just tweeting away of her own accord.

Additionally, she’s written two memoirs that honestly document her experiences with mental illness and addiction (I only read part of Wishful Drinking, and that was years ago, but I remember that it was extremely funny).

Do these Tumblr users have an actual, mutual relationship with Carrie Fisher?  Of course not.  But I think it’s unfairly dismissive to claim every celebrity’s social media presence is inauthentic.  I think Carrie sparked such an enormous display of grief not only because she portrayed such an iconic character, but because she was unapologetically herself.  She aged unapologetically.  She was mentally ill unapologetically.  Seeing someone own everything about themselves, even the messy parts, allows us to do the same.  I think about the following tweet a lot in reference to celebrity deaths.

This tweet sums it up pretty nicely (www.vox.com/2016/1/12/10755600/celebrity-death-grief)

In other words, I’m not trying to claim that parasocial relationships are the same thing as true, mutual relationships.  But I do disagree with this somewhat dismissive, cynical view of celebrities’ personas as inherently crafted and inauthentic.  Sherlock acknowledges that these feelings are not necessarily false “just because they are based on a falsity” (169), so she does acknowledge the significance of these relationships, but I don’t believe that they were were necessarily based on a falsity in the first place.  I think what makes Carrie Fisher, and others like her, stand out is the authenticity of their public personas.

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The Legitimacy of Online Relationships

What struck me most about these articles, especially the New York Times one, wasn’t the concept of digital death, but the concept of a digital life.  I think people in general are very quick to dismiss any online relationship as superficial or shallow.  But this quote “Cyberspace When You’re Dead” really struck me – “But online [Tonnies] wasn’t some guy with a lot of strange ideas.  He was himself.  And he attracted an eclectic group of similarly minded friends.”

I think something unique about the digital age is the ease with which we can find like-minded people, and, often, friends.  Never has it been easier to find support groups, fan communities, or any number of specialized social groups.  Over the past few years, I’ve especially noticed LGBT youth turning to social media to find friends and mentors.  Both the privacy and ease of access of social networking sites makes them very useful for people who otherwise feel isolated or marginalized.

I admit that I might be a little biased – I’ve been involved in online communities for almost half my life and have had some really wonderful experiences there.  I’ve recently found a Facebook group for cosplayers with disabilities where I’m not only getting practical advice on costume and prop construction, but also forming relationships.  If you imagine it as a Venn diagram, the intersection of cosplayers and people with physical disabilities is very small.   So the idea that I instantly got  a dozen responses within a day of posting my initial question is staggering.  Like Tonnies, I immediately found similarly minded people who I never would have known if not for the internet.  On a similar note, a friend of mine is getting married in May to a man she met years ago playing an MMORPG.  Their relationships was entirely digitally mediated, whether through FaceTime or emails, up until a year ago.

The header for the Facebook group for this unique, specialized social community (www.facebook.com/groups/physchallengedcosplay/)

When discussing his interactions with Tonnies’s friends, Walker explains “each expressed a genuine sense of loss; a few sounded grief-stricken even more than a year later.”  To me, those don’t sound like superficial relationships.  Caring about what happens to your online accounts after you die indicates that the content on them matters in more than a fleeting, tweet-about-the-weather sort of way.

I acknowledge shortcomings of online friendships – the lack of eye-contact, for instance, which research has shown plays a big role in facilitating social connection and bonding.  But what I took away from this article is that online friendships are valuable.  Our online presences are part diary, part photo album, part correspondence – a unique confluence of expression and interaction.  Not all tweets are valuable necessarily, but online interactions are not inherently worthless because they happen digitally.  I know it’s trendy to denigrate all online interactions and behaviors, but I can’t imagine Tonnies’s “grief-stricken” friends would agree.

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How Far Will We Go to Exist Beyond Death?

youtu.be/gx9eDoS76LM

Audrey Hepburn: Galaxy Chocolate Commercial, Adpressive, youtu.be/gx9eDoS76LM

Hearing the voices and seeing the images of the dead is so commonplace today that I struggled to understand how it was viewed in the Victorian times.  Listening to The Beatles or Buddy Holly or watching Robin Williams films isn’t the least bit eerie to modern media consumers.  In trying to relate to uncanny experience of hearing a dead person’s voice when recording was first introduced, I thought of two recent representations of dead celebrities.  The Audrey Hepburn chocolate ad and the Tupac hologram both created quite a stir for their representations of the dead.  Tupac appeared to perform live years after his death, and a young Audrey Hepburn once more graced our screens in footage that wasn’t recorded during her lifetime.

We don’t think twice about listening to the voices of long-dead musicians, but the technology that created Ash in “Be Right Back” strikes us as definitively wrong.  Tupac and Audrey exist somewhere in between.  The question I’d like to pose is this: Will we ever draw the line at reanimating the dead, or are we engaged in an unstoppable progression towards Ash-like technology?

I obviously can’t predict the future, but I think it’s likely that recreating dead celebrities on screen will only become more commonplace.  I don’t think Ash tech is that far off either.  Enormous technological advances that may seem to defy nature (such as hearing the voice of someone dead), eventually become normalized.  I think, therefore, that while Ash tech may initially seem startling, it could very likely become integrated into our lives the way recording technology has.  These two representations make it clear that existing beyond the grave is becoming more of a possibility each day.

Tupac Hologram Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre Perform Coachella Live 2012, westfesttv, youtu.be/TGbrFmPBV0Y

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Comparative Horror Analysis: Slender: The Eight Pages and The Blair Witch Project

(Don’t mind my Facebook profile picture – I linked my accounts)

Works Cited:

Biancorosso, Giorgio. “The Shark in the Music.” Music Analysis 29.1-3 (2010): 306-33. Web.

Galloway, Alexander R. “Origins of the First-Person Shooter.” Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press, 2006. 39-69. Print.

Kirkland, Ewan. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture 4.2 (2008): 115-26. Web.

Myrick, Daniel, et al. The Blair Witch Project. Special edition. ; fullscreen version. Santa Monica, CA: ArtiEntertainment, 1999.

Slender: The Eight Pages. v 0.9.7. Parsec Productions. 2017. Video Game.

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Zombie/Horror Tropes in Dead Set

We’ve discussed the trope of the Final Girl a few times in class – basically, she’s the last survivor of the horror film (typically, but not always, a slasher film).  Conveniently, she’s usually a virgin (unlike the sexually active women, whose deaths many scholars interpret as punishments for sexual transgressions) and brunette (again, possibly interpreted as displaying more innocence/less sexuality).    Although she doesn’t fit the paradigm exactly (she’s not a virgin), when Kelly was trapped in the diary room after the rest of the characters had died, I immediately thought “Final Girl!”  While Kelly isn’t a virgin, she’s certainly less sexual than the other female characters, who are built like models and appear to rely on their looks and sex appeal as reality TV stars.  Kelly is the most rational, down to earth (read: masculine) woman on the show, so it’s fitting for her to assume the role of the Final Girl.

The term “Final Girl” was first coined in 1992 by Carol J Clover in this book. Source: amazon.co.uk

After I finished the last episode, I went to tvtropes.org to read up on the Final Girl  (that’s where I learned the bit about her usually being a brunette, which I had never heard before).  If you’re a regular consumer of media/pop culture, tvtropes.org is a very easy rabbit hole down which to fall.  As I usually do when on the website, I found myself with about a dozen tabs open, reading up on different tropes and seeing how they fit Dead Set.

I’ll come out and say it: I don’t think Dead Set  was a particularly original zombie show.  The reality TV element was interesting, and it was certainly enjoyable and well-written, but especially after seeing how many major horror tropes it fits, it strikes me as pretty standard zombie fare.  Here are some horror/zombie tropes I found while browsing tvtropes.org, and how they fit  Dead Set. (Tropes are all linked to their pages on the website both for citation purposes and in case you’re interested in doing any further reading).

The Zombie Apocalypse trope page reflects many elements seen in Dead Set: the collapse takes place quickly, people lose their humanity in the fight for survival, and there isn’t a happy ending.

The tropes entitled Black Dude Dies First and Bury Your Gays are pretty self explanatory: Angel, a black woman, is the first of the housemates to die and become reanimated, and Grayson follows not soon after.

Not Using the “Z” Word is another standard zombie trope displayed in Dead Set.  The characters never say the word “zombie” and act as if they exist in a world without them (like we mentioned in class).  This trope is an awfully common one called Genre Blindness.

Room Full of Zombies occurs, unsurprisingly, when a character enters a room flooded with zombies, like Kelly does when exiting the diary room.  The trope of Our Zombies Are Different, in which zombies depart from the usual shambling, reanimated corpses, covers the zombies’ speed.  The zombies also fit the tropes of Flesh-Eating Zombie and Plague Zombie.

I could keep going, but this post is already long enough.  What I’m trying to illustrate is that in terms of plot and characterization, Dead Set doesn’t strike me as very original.  While I didn’t find the show predictable, it was certainly familiar, and didn’t depart much from the mainstays of the zombie genre.

(If you’re looking for a somewhat weird, extremely creative and original zombie movie, I recommend Pontypool. It’s on Netflix, it’s pretty short, and it’s like no zombie movie you’ve seen before.)

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Victim or Villain: Marjorie’s Mental Illness

The other day in class, when Dr. Sample asked which of us thought Marjorie was actually possessed, I said “I hope she is.”  I felt that way for two reasons.  The first is that demonic possession is cool and scary and very entertaining to read about.  I find supernatural horror incredibly fun.   But the second is that if Marjorie is simply mentally ill (which is the conclusion I’ve arrived at upon finishing the book), I look at the entire story differently.  Instead of a creepy tale of demons and magic, we’re left with an incredibly sad story of severe mental illness wreaking havoc on a young woman and her family.   (That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy this book – it was an incredibly fun read – but I found myself disturbed by Marjorie’s story).

Beyond being let down that this novel is more tragic than terrifying, I’m also conflicted about Tremblay’s portrayal of mental illness.  On one hand, I find it falling into the tired and problematic trope of mentally ill people as monsters.  But on the other, I think it raises awareness of the gross mistreatment of people with mental illnesses.

Statistically, people with mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it, and any violence they do enact is most likely self-directed.  Nevertheless, mass media consistently portrays the mentally ill as murderous.  The recent movie, Split, drew a lot of criticism for sensationalizing Dissociative Identity Disorder and suggesting it to be a cause of violence.

James McAvoy as the DID patient in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2016 thriller, Split. Source

So Marjorie’s threats to her sister and graphically detailed attack on the priest during the exorcism somewhat strike me as playing into that stereotype.  She rips a chunk of flesh out of a man’s forearm with her teeth.  That’s a pretty horrifying, animalistic sort of violence.

However, I also see this book as a critique of the treatment of the mentally ill.  Marjorie is clearly unsatisfied with her care from Dr. Hamilton, whom she describes as having “the fastest prescription pad in the east” (124), and her illness is not discussed candidly among her family members.  Marjorie’s illness is treated as shameful and taboo, and she therefore lacks the familial support to recover, noting that her illness was probably caused by stress in the first place (124).

Therefore, despite Marjorie’s display of violence during the exorcism, I found that scene to be the culmination of the misunderstanding and mistreatment she faced during the novel.  Already seriously ill, she was restrained (as the mentally ill often are) and left cold and frightened.  Marjorie had, in comparison, far more abuse inflicted upon her than she inflicted upon others.

The true horror of A Head Full of Ghosts is not Marjorie’s illness, or even the shocking revelation in part 3, but a depiction of the very real cruelty, misunderstanding, and abuse people with serious mental illnesses experience all too frequently.