When looking back at all of my blog posts, I noticed that I seemed to be drawn to discussing similar ideas in all of my posts. Though not always obvious, after thinking about the discussion in my posts I realized that I was drawn to the idea of otherness.
In my first post, I wrote about different forms of possession were presented in Black Mirror and in The Exorcist. Regan becomes an other by being possessed by a demon while the robot-Ash is an other by nature of his technological creation. I discussed how both Regan and Ash are classified as being others through their bodily secretions–or lack thereof, in Ash’s case–and through their use of sexuality. Somewhat similarly, in my second blog post, I discuss whether Merry could be considered a reliable narrator in A Head Full of Ghosts after learning of her double otherness. Merry is the only child in the world of the story, and she was the only one to survive her poisoning the family spaghetti sauce with potassium cyanide (though I’m still not sure if I believe it), forcing the adult Merry to be an other for all her life, due to the tragedy she has lived through.
I continued my theme of writing on otherness in my third blog post. In this post I posed a question in regards to one of Carly Kocurek’s assertions in “Who Hearkens to the Monster’s Scream? Death, Violence, and the Veil of the Monstrous in Video Games.” I disagreed with Kocurek in her belief that otherness (to use her vocabulary monstrousness) causes immediate vilification of video game characters, and posed that we might actually feel sorry for some “other-ed” video game monsters.
I then had two blog posts that dealt with an otherness of perception. In one post, I argued that memorialization on websites is not beneficial because it encourages loved ones to hold on to a static image. Similar to what happens with Martha in “Be Right Back“, I argued that these websites prevent people from moving on after a loved one is lost. Looking at this post in relation to all of my other posts, I believe that I settled on this assertion because the virtual presence is in fact a false remembrance: it is an other, unable to express ideas, thoughts, and feelings behind actions. Similarly in the other post, I discussed how televised celebrity funeral should perhaps not be viewed as beneficial. I asked this question after reflecting on how the perception of a celebrity by the public could be other to the family’s perception and vice versa.
In some ways, I did find it surprising that 5 of my posts were able to relate to the same overarching theme of otherness, especially when I looked at the various topics I discussed: “Be Right Back,” A Head Full of Ghosts, possession, celebrity funerals, and online memorials were all able to unite under the umbrella of otherness. However, I am not too surprised. I tend to enjoy looking at marginalized groups and trying to tell their stories. I think this is what drove me to look for and write about otherness so much in this class: I want to hear the stories that are different from my own, and draw attention to the outsiders. In regards to death and technology, I think there is a huge potential for people to become others simply by the separation that takes place between the living and the dead, and the lack of face-to-face interaction due to the influx of new forms of technology. I think that this is a cool idea worth more exploration: how does death or dying turn someone into an other? How do people dealing with death or dying turn into an other? How do they cope with the feeling of otherness? Does technology lead to more or less otherness?
I don’t want to leave out my last 3 blog posts. Towards the end of the semester, I focused less on otherness and more on fears associated with death and technology. I’ll give it a try to relate these three posts to otherness here. I wrote about the fear associated with ethical robots, the fear of globalization, and how we will be remembered after death. I suppose the fear of globalization relates to the fear of those outside our own borders. The otherness of other nations, other customs, other germs, other immunity stems the movies that play upon this fear of the interconnectivity of the world today. After we are gone, we are immediately an other as we are no longer living, so that could be how otherness ties into my post on how we should be remembered after we are gone. As for ethical robots, were these machines to be created they would exist as an other between two worlds: not quite machine, but not quite man either.
I guess, in reality all of my posts were about otherness. They varied in whether the otherness was in reference to death, or a result of technology. It is interesting to go back and see how I was drawn to these ideas subconsciously, but I think they are a large part of what makes studying death in the digital age so compelling. We have technology that truly changes the way we see the world of the living, so perhaps it is changing the way we see the world of the dead as well. Maybe the ideas and concepts that I found to be other will become the norm in the future, and our ideas will become other-ed. Just like how death photography seems so other to us nowadays.
Looking back through my past blog posts there were two themes that I seemed to revisit time and time again. The first was privacy and the digital world. The second was what defines us as human.
I tended to look at the idea of privacy in relation to the digital world by inserting myself into situations we read about and attempting to see how I would feel. A Head Full of Ghosts first sparked my thoughts on this issue, and I tied those ideas to an article I had read about a TV show that broadcast a man’s death in the ER without his family’s consent or knowledge. That blog post can be found here. After I considered how I would feel in that situation, I came to the conclusion that this was a particularly cruel thing to do because of loved ones that might see it. I wrote that many of the materials we had looked at thus far in class, “provide examples of how technology has the potential to create digital ghosts, but also how these reminders of the dead can “haunt” living friends and relatives without their consent and in a far more vivid way than was possible prior to recording technology.” I revisited this idea most clearly when I created a digital will for myself and detailed the experience in another post, found here. Here, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t particularly care what happened to my digital possessions unless they would help friends and family grieve. In that case I thought they should have access to them. Finally, I revisited this theme with a blog post on the way the stories of people’s deaths are often used in campaigns without their consent. That post can be found here. Just like in my first post, I put myself into the shoes of the woman who I wrote about and found, “While undoubtedly these campaigns have the potential to make a positive difference in many lives, I can’t imagine I would particularly want details of my private struggles to be used without giving it the ok.”
Since I was little all over the place in these blog posts, I tried to sum up my final thoughts on privacy in the digital age. Personally, I wouldn’t want anything I hadn’t shared with the online world during my life to be shared after my death. Moreover, I was primarily concerned with how the sharing of these things would impact those I loved. While I didn’t realize I had focused on this issue so much in my blogs until after I finished writing it, I also looked at privacy in my final project in relation to how it is portrayed in Station Eleven. By the end of the semester I had settled more firmly on the idea that the extent to which the digital world invades our privacy is not great. I concluded, “Mandel’s treatment of remembering in Station Eleven at least forces us to question if the extent of information provided by the digital age can be just as much a burden as it is a gift in remembering the dead.”
The second issue that I addressed frequently in my blog posts was what makes us human. In my first blog post, found here, I commented that zombies seem to be particularly horrifying because superficially they maintain much of the appearance of their human counterparts. At that point, I had difficulty coming up with a concrete definition of when something stops being human (and in retrospect I never really came up with a detailed definition). I revisited this idea when I looked in depth at an episode Dead Set. That blog post can be found here. I wrote, “While I watched, I felt as though this set the characters up for a rather bleak outcome no matter what: either they died because of their humanity, or in fighting “the other,” they lost what made them better, or at least different, in the first place.” From this, it seems that in part, I define humanity by the ability to empathize. I reiterated this is my second project, where my podcast used an episode of Supernatural in parallel with a Dead Set episode to look further into this idea. In that project I extended my claims further to the idea that, “empathy for the monstrous is what makes us human, though…this is not the easiest path to follow.”
To provide a final conclusion or sorts to these thoughts, I attempted to synthesize what I have learned from the two themes that I addressed the most frequently in class. I’ll be the first to admit it was kind of a stretch. But anyway, here it is: if I choose to define humanity by our potential for empathy, then technology has the ability to increase our humanity via facilitating human connection and understanding (an example of this is in my third project, Pictorial Memorial) or it can threaten it in a number of ways such as the numbing flood of excess information or even the invasion of privacy as I detail in a number of my blogs.
My snapchat project is the only one that didn’t get any love in this post, so here’s a cool selfie from my title page to finish out my digital studies career.
I would like to examine two postmodern horror narratives that engage with young women struggling with mental illness—specifically, schizophrenia—and how their status as both female and schizophrenic is depicted through their respective narratives. Furthermore, I want to consider how their digital agency—and how that digital agency is figured—compounds and contradicts the narrative’s status as a horror narrative. That is to say, what are these horror narratives saying about preteen girls with schizophrenia? How does digital media facilitate violence in the narrative? The two horror narratives I will look at are HBO’s documentary Beware the Slenderman, and Paul Tremblay’s novel A Head Full of Ghosts.
HBO’s trailer for Beware the Slenderman.
Beware the Slenderman
In June of 2014, two twelve-year-old girls stabbed their classmate and friend 19 times, leaving her for dead in the woods. The victim, named Payton (but confusingly nicknamed Bella by her friends), survives after being discovered by a cyclist. Regardless, Morgan and Anissa, the two girls who stabbed her, were charged as adults with attempted homicide.[1] Their motivation for the stabbing? A popular internet-generated horror meme called Slenderman. Earlier this year, HBO released a documentary about this story, called Beware the Slenderman.
Andrew Peck, a folklore scholar who is the go-to expert on Slenderman, had already published his studies on Slenderman, sometimes stylized as Slender Man, by the time of the murders. According to Peck, Slenderman is “A faceless, tall, eerily long-limbed humanoid clad in a black suit [that] emerged in an online forum as a pair of photoshops and a half-dozen lines of text.”[2] It originated on June 8, 2009 when SomethingAwful.com forum member “Gerogerigegege” created a discussion thread called “create Paranormal images,” inviting other users to create and share mundane images that had been manipulated to appear paranormal. Users began writing stories to accompany these images and suggested that the images were real by linking them to personal experience.[3] According to Peck, “Locating authenticity in ‘reality’ reflects one of the earliest shared expectations that emerged around Slender Man legend performances.”[4] In other words, the best Slenderman narratives were those that took place in our world, but held on to the sense of ill-intentioned mystery.
A digital version of a presentation Andrew Peck gave on Tall, Dark, and Loathsome.
According to legend scholar Bill Ellis, “Legend performances typically place events in the group’s [the “Something Awful” forum where Slenderman was conceived] conception of the real world while also challenging the boundaries of that world.”[5] When it comes to the case of Morgan Geyser, these boundaries were challenged to begin with: Morgan was beginning to show the signs of schizophrenia at the time of the murders. None of the subsequent news coverage, nor the first hour and twenty minutes of HBO’s documentary on the matter, bridge the topic of Morgan’s mental illness. The narrative structure of Beware the Slenderman is problematic because our discovery of Morgan’s schizophrenia operates as the narrative sucker-punch, co-opted into the twist at the end of the documentary as opposed to a sustainable explanation for her behavior throughout the film. Indeed, in one courtroom clip, the psychiatrist on the stand explains that “Believing that Slenderman is real is a delusion [symptomatic of childhood schizophrenia.]” He goes on to say, “What’s unique about Morgan’s case is that a severe course is so predictable.”[6] Morgan’s father also has a severe kind of schizophrenia, and even still her parents had neglected to keep an eye out for problematic behavior, or even to inform Morgan that her father also had schizophrenia. This information was unloaded upon Morgan at the hospital after the stabbing.[7] The majority of the narrative, however, would have you believe there is no such scientific explanation for Morgan’s actions.
The draw of Beware the Slenderman has its basis in Creed’s theory that “Possession becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant feminine behavior which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, abject—and perversely appealing.”[8] Though Anissa and Morgan were not “possessed,” as it were, they were motivated by a demonic, mysterious figure all the same—or so the narrative of Beware the Slenderman would have you believe, seeing as the narrative of mental illness is largely absent. Creed writes that “Central to [possession films] was a strong sense of the vulnerability of the body and its susceptibility to possession.”[9] HBO’s official description of the documentary plays into this idea of vulnerability:
It was a local story that horrified the nation: two 12-year-old girls lured a friend into the Waukesha woods, where they proceeded to stab her 19 times in an effort to appease a faceless mythical entity known online as ‘Slenderman.’ This sobering documentary delves deep into the story and examines how an Internet urban myth could take root in impressionable young minds.[10]
Their “impressionable young minds,” (female minds) are the nexus of this vulnerability, the place where the seed of Slenderman could grow until it became too much to bear. These 12-year-old girls in the suburban Midwest commit unthinkable evil, inspired by digitally mediated horror narratives, and represent the intersection of “the major boundaries […] between innocence and corruption, purity and impurity.”[11] Ostensibly, this evil is a product of the internet.
Throughout the documentary, the internet and its digital mediations, specifically iPads, are demonized, especially by Anissa’s father. Morgan is depicted as the mastermind, and Anissa the friendless sidekick, willing to do anything. Indeed, much of the film is spent describing Anissa’s lonely, outcast status and how relieved her parents were when she found Morgan as a friend. He blames the iPad for his daughter’s “corruption,” as it were. Anissa’s independence in the digital world facilitates her penchant for violence—Anissa’s disturbing YouTube history is revealed in Beware the Slenderman, and the montage is among the most harrowing moments of the film.[12] As Peck explains it:
Of all the details of this gruesome story, the involvement of the Slender man resonated most in subsequent news coverage. The relative obscurity of the character and its de-contextualized association with the stabbing served to kindle a classic moral panic narrative. Headlines and sound bites focused on the dangers of unsupervised tween media use and the corrupting allure of the dark corners of the internet.[13]
A former FBI investigator, who happens to be female, described the case of the Slenderman stabbings as “very unusual — not just because is involves young females, but the brutality of it.”[14] Think of Creed and the monstrous woman—indeed, girl—and how “Horror emerges from the fact that woman has broken with her proper feminine roll—she has ‘made a spectacle of herself.’”[15]
To what extent can the internet be blamed for Morgan and Anissa’s actions? A recent study conducted by John A. Oyewole found that “at an average of 53.0% for males, and 53.3% for females across all ages, at least half of audiences who get exposed to violent media contents will develop a tendency to imitate such media contents.”[16] In fact, Oyewole mentions the Slenderman stabbing by name as an example of this statistic.[17] This statistic fits into the documentary’s message, which I believe prioritizes the demonization of the internet over a narrative of mental illness awareness.
From the original “Something Awful” forum. “‘We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horri ed and comforted us at the same time . . .’ 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.” Posted by Victor Surge, June 10, 2009.
A Head Full of Ghosts
Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts approaches the issue of schizophrenia in a less opaque way than it is presented to us in Beware the Slenderman. Indeed, the back jacket of the book intones, “The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s bizarre outbursts and subsequent descent into madness.”[18] Marjorie’s “descent into madness,” then, is at the forefront of Tremblay’s presentation of the narrative. The ambiguity of Marjorie’s schizophrenia relies on its “off-screen” (literally) nature—the drama having to do with her diagnosis and institutionalization does not take place in the house, nor does it operate as a plot factor in the reality TV show being filmed.
There are many moments when technology both mediates and facilitates the performance of Marjorie’s possession, which she claims is for the benefit of her father, who is really the sick one.[19] If you read the novel with the assumption that Marjorie is not actually possessed (which is certainly a possibility), Marjorie’s digital agency is crucial to her performance of possession: she gleans the knowledge she needs to fool the clergymen and viewers of the TV show from the internet. During the exorcism, the following exchange takes place:
Marjorie: I’m looking shit up on the Internet, looking up the same stuff over and over, and I memorize it because I’m wicked smart, because I have to fill my head with something other than the ghosts.
Father Wanderly: I suggest that you no longer allow her access to the laptop until after the rite has been performed successfully.[20]
This exchange demonstrates two things: one, that Wanderly’s belief in her demonic possession is too deep to accept this rational answer to her struggle with the “ghosts” (her schizophrenic delusions, perhaps); and his unwillingness to acknowledge Marjorie—the “you” here is her parents. Afterwards, when the adults are discussing Marjorie’s knowledge, one of the producers defends the internet standpoint: “She could’ve made the connection on her own. Or maybe she Googled my T-shirt, found Lovecraft and Yidhara on Wikipedia. Not a huge leap, there, I don’t think—“[21] Merry, writing as her blog persona, compounds the idea that the internet is the logical source of her knowledge, explaining that “John Barrett duly informs us that Marjorie claims she never heard of the Internet or the library [sic] doesn’t know where she heard the stories or the song […] but swears she hadn’t learned of them or heard them from outside sources.”[22] Her sarcastic strikethrough reads clearly: digital agency in the form of internet access facilitates Marjorie’s convincing performance of possession, as the adults around her refuse to believe she could pull such a thing off—consider this frenzied exchange after her performance:
“—even if she had looked it up on the computer—“
“—no way she could’ve memorized it all—“
“—a girl like her can’t speak as eloquently as she did—“
“—a girl wouldn’t ask the questions she asked—“[23]
Merry’s persona explains this phenomena well: “…Marjorie’s knowledge of the rite is again [sic] presented to us as proof positive of her possession. This is one of the most misogynistic aspects of the show: not only is it impossible for a silly girl [sic] to know what the patriarchy knows[…]we’re supposed to actively fear that she has acquired that knowledge.”[24]
Paul Tremblay is aware of the figuration of mental illness is his novel. Goodreads user Shiv Eloise asked of Treblay, “Where you at all considering what harm you might cause by linking schizophrenia and possession?” Tremblay responded curtly:
Harm? No. If anything, I wanted some readers to realize that religious figures have used and conflated the symptoms of various mental illnesses as (bogus) signs of possession for hundreds of years. On the other side of it, I certainly wasn’t intending to vilify people who suffer from schizophrenia. That’s not in the book either.[25]
The thread discussion continues regarding the debate between the merits of each side: religious “fanatics” mis-assigning possession to mental illness, and the potentially negative figuration of schizophrenia as the product of the devil’s spirit. Tremblay’s dismissive line, “That’s not in the book either,” makes me wonder to what extent Tremblay had considered the reception of his book—and if, as an author, he should even be asked to consider that. Regardless, the link between schizophrenia and possession in the book is obviously very strong—it drives its entire sense of ambiguous malaise. Furthermore, Marjorie’s digital agency mitigates her isolation even as it also operates as a mechanism for her to convince the adults she is really possessed: “Marjorie kept texting, fingers crawling over the phone’s keyboard screen while she talked at the same time.”[26] Marjorie navigates her schizophrenia by manipulating digital media to her advantage; it enables her to trick the bumbling adults around her that she is truly possessed.
Synthesis
We can pinpoint digital agency as the catalyst in each of these schizophrenia horror narratives. In Beware the Slenderman, Anissa and Morgan are motivated by the internet-made Slenderman, whose ambiguous digital presence is a perfect storm when combined with Morgan’s childhood schizophrenia. Indeed, Anissa’s father would rather blame technology than his daughter’s own troubles, and Morgan’s parents did not pay enough attention to their daughter’s slow disappearance into a virtual obsession with Slenderman. In A Head Full of Ghosts, internet access enables Marjorie to perform her possession in the face of her schizophrenia. On the structural level of each of these narratives, schizophrenia is figured problematically. Beware the Slenderman saves the reveal of Morgan’s mental illness for the end of the film, problematically placing her condition and her parents’ treatment of it as a plot twist. When it comes A Head Full of Ghosts, the author is ultimately unconcerned with thoroughly explaining the link he provides between mental illness and possession. We should think further about how the representation of schizophrenia, especially in young women, motivates and operates postmodern horror narratives, and what both the construction and reception of these narratives says about mental illness in the digital age.
[15] Creed, “Woman as Possessed Monster: The Exorcist,” 42.
[16] John Ayodele Oyewole, “Gory Attractions in the Threshold of the Contemporary Media: The Level of Influence on Young People,” in International Journal of Arts & Sciences 9.3 (2016): 334.
[17] Oyewole “Gory Attractions in the Threshold of the Contemporary Media: The Level of Influence on Young People,” 334.
[18] Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
One of the aspects in A Head Full of Ghosts that I have found to be the most compelling is the choice of the narrator being Merry Barrett. Something that we touched on in our earliest classes was whether Merry is a reliable narrator for the events of the novel. I do not feel that we spent enough time on this debate, especially after Merry’s big reveal to Rachel about how her family died in chapters 25 and 26.
In chapter 3, Merry says, “my memories mix up with my nightmares, with extrapolation, with skewed oral histories from my grandparents and aunts and uncles, and with all the urban legends and lies propagated within the media, pop culture, and the near continuous stream of websites/blogs/YouTube channels devoted to the show…so all of it hopelessly jumbles up what I knew and what I know now” (Tremblay 13).
This quotation called into question whether or not Merry is a reliable narrator, through Merry’s own admission. Throughout the novel, I forgot that Merry said this, and became fully trusting of her recounting. This trust was most likely brought on by Merry’s narration switching from her 23-year-old self to her 8-year-old self so seamlessly (even though, in the diegetic world, the 23-year-old Merry is saying what we are hearing the 8-year-old Merry says). However, once Merry revealed that she was the one who slipped the potassium cyanide into the pasta sauce that poisoned her sister and parents, this quotation popped back into my mind.
I am not sure that Merry made up the fact that she was the one who put the potassium cyanide in the sauce; I definitely do not think that someone would lie about that fact. Yet, I am not sure that I trust Merry admitting to the poisoning either Merry, however, goes on to say that, “I’ve never told anyone what I’ve admitted to you. The police, psychologists, my aunt; no one” (Tremblay 281) Merry thus shows that she has been lying for many years.
For some reason, this called a lot of the narrative into question—at least for me—that we are given because it is given to the reader by Merry, someone who I find to be an unreliable narrator, much like Pi from Life of Pi or Huck Finn from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Can we trust what Merry has told us? Can we trust a 23-year-old woman recounting something that happened when she was 8? Even if it was something so traumatic, I think the answer is no.
Pi from Life of Pi is a great example of an unreliable narrator. Which version of his story is true?
Works Cited
Tremblay, Paul. A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2015. Print.
Throughout A Head Full of Ghosts, I had always thought that adding “The Last Final Girl” blog chapters, which analyze the show and surrounding events directly, put more space between myself the reader and the supposed real events recanted by Merry in the book. I was still unsure of what purpose it served within the story of A Head Full of Ghosts as a whole, other than to give us information about the Possession’s actual television episodes. I had been wondering why Tremblay would create this alias (Karen Brissette) for Merry to write about the show, instead of just having her recall the episodes as they pertained to events that happened, drawing conclusions, comparing, and contrasting the two side-by-side, rather separating them.
Towards the end of the book, I learned of what happened to the family during the end of the show and post-production, i.e. the poisoning. With this new information, I realized just how painful all of the memories related to the show must be. It began to make more sense to me why Merry would create an alias to write about the show as if she had not experienced it. It seemed to me like she was trying to convince herself that she had not lived those experiences, and I think Rachel puts it perfectly when she asks Merry how she found the “distance” (pg. 257) to write about the events of the show. I believe that the blog was a way for her to create that distance. In the blog “Karen,” while speaking about the dinner on the show the night of the exorcism, writes “Mmmm . . . Chinese Food. . .” as if the Merry behind those words had not recalled never being able to stand the taste of the Chinese duck sauce because of that night.
Merry writes the blog as Karen, in order to create a much-needed distance between herself and the events related to the show, in order to help her forgetfully remember the traumatic experiences.
Creeping Vines on Brick Wall. Source: https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/creeping-vines-brick-wall.html
Marjorie warns Merry throughout the book that the person who is actually possessed is their father, John. In Marjorie’s “growing-things” story, John slowly poisoned their mother to death and was in the process of killing Marjorie. His last victim would be the young, innocent Merry. Marjorie insisted that the “growing-things” story was true stating, “That one’s mine. That one is – real. You still can’t ever forget that story, little Merry,” (Tremblay 125).
When the new night routine is set up, Marjorie spends the entire night watching John through the open door. Marjorie reveals, “I think he might be the one who’s possessed… Hasn’t he been acting so strange? So over-the-top religious now, and always so angry? I’m scared. I think he thinks about doing bad things, really bad things, like in the growing-things story I told you,” (184).
Like the creeping vines in Marjorie’s “growing things” story, John chokes the life out of every person in the house. He becomes possessed with such religious fervour, that he exploits his daughter’s illness and tears the family apart.
“The Shining” (Here’s Johnny Scene). Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ABIIZV3vA
John is depicted as irrational, violent, and on the verge of mental collapse. “He grew scarier by the day,” Merry recollected, as John turned to religious zeal to deal with his oldest daughter’s illness (192). Was he exploiting Marjorie to make money to support his family? Did he truly believe that his daughter was possessed by a demon?
When the family members were offered the chance to give individual commentary on camera, John “didn’t talk to the camera. He orated. He gave pep talks about how our family would overcome. He proselytised, working in Bible references,” whenever he could (188). John became deranged and was living somewhere between fiction and reality. He had no control over what was happening to his daughter, yet he tried everything he could to control it. There is no real explanation for Marjorie’s illness, but John is convinced that he can save her. His zeal fills him with energy and power, often erupting into violent outbursts and even resulting in an untimely arrest.
On the other hand, the mother, Sarah, slowly deteriorates. “She looked older with her puffy, bloodshot eyes. She gave me an unsure, sad smile. I thought about telling her that her teeth looked really yellow, that she was smoking way too much,” (140). Sarah collapses into a heap of guilt and becomes less emotionally stable, because she didn’t stand her ground against her husband’s wish of performing an exorcism and broadcasting it. As a result, she is alienated from her husband, Merry is bullied at school, protestors are lining the sidewalk, and Marjorie is disappearing altogether. The once put-together and sane mother continues to break down with each passing page, as if she were being slowly poisoned to death and buried alive beneath the weight of it all.
The cameras broadcasting Marjorie’s illness act as a public execution. Marjorie’s social life is completely dead and she is cut off from the outside world. Girls from her school start up an Instagram page and post images of Marjorie with disgustingly sexual captions and screenshots. Marjorie is unable to function even remotely as a normal teenager, and she is held prisoner in the hospital wards and church sermons. I have not finished the book, but I predict that the worse is yet to come.
Marjorie never asked for any of this. John is the one who offered up possession and exorcism as feasible diagnosis and treatment. John is the force behind it all, the one who pushes the family to the edge of destruction.
Marjorie as the Monstrous-Feminine
In addition to understanding the vines, this post intends to explore the relationship between Marjorie and Regan from The Exorcist. There are a number of notable similarities between the two characters. A few tie back to Barbara Creed’s “The Monstrous-Feminine.”
“While the theme of spiritual decline is central to The Exorcist, it is secondary to the film’s exploration of female monstrousness and the inability of the male order to control the woman whose perversity is expressed through her rebellious body,” (Creed 34). Throughout the novel, John unsuccessfully attempts to control Marjorie’s illness. Unfortunately, he has zero control over her illness and even less control over her body as a whole. For example, when the family and crew bring Merry upstairs to confront her sister for the first time, Marjorie is topless. John wants Marjorie to cover up in front of the cameras, but he is unable to do so without the risk of interfering with Father Wanderly’s work. An almost incestual act has been involuntarily committed by John. The idea of control is central to Tremblay’s work, because there is a total lack of control. The father, the male figure, is trying to control the daughter’s body to no avail. John is unable to come to terms with this fact, and destroys his family in the process.
There is a graphic association of the monstrous with the feminine body (37). Marjorie’s body transformation mimics that of Regan. This includes the red marks on her stomach, the green vomit, the dingy hair and deranged eyes, and the multiple voices that are somehow still her own. She possesses a “body in revolt” (40). The source of this revolt, however, is unclear.
While Marjorie represents Regan, Merry represents Regan’s mother. Merry is the only one who could pacify Marjorie as well as bring out her demons. Merry is the closest person to Marjorie, and Marjorie often confides her deepest secrets to her.
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.
As I have continued reading A Head Full of Ghosts, the evolution of Marjorie’s schizophrenia constantly changes how I view the horror in the book. Throughout the story, Marjorie has been the cause of the majority of the terrifying events but the lens through which I view these has shifted from fear to pity. My perspective shifted in chapter 16, simultaneously with Merry’s view of her sister, when Marjorie explains, “I’ve been faking it… What do you mean why?… then I started hearing the voices, stress induced probably, yeah, but still it sort of freaked me out… I decided I’d just keep pushing it, see how far I could go… You guys should be thanking me. I saved the house. I saved us, all of us, and I’m going to make us famous” (124-25).
As artist Louis Wain’s schizophrenia progressed, the image of a cat becomes more difficult to discern.
Marjorie’s elaborate story comes across as fake and her pretense of control makes Merry realize she “was afraid for her instead of being afraid of her” (125). Merry’s pity humanizes Marjorie. Marjorie is no longer some wild animal, lurking around the house, whose behavior is erratic and unsettling (to say the least). Now that she has talked about her behavior and has some memory and understanding of the damage, Marjorie is elevated from her status as a rabid, mindless, demon-possessed monster to a human recognizing her behavior as her own (not the act of a demon). As readers, we can now evaluate future scenes and recall previous scenes and question how Marjorie’s strange behavior is influenced in combination by her schizophrenia, her own theatrics, and her own fears. Terrifying as reading these scenes may be, imagining being Marjorie is much more painful.
