Artist's Statement

I did a project in which I taught a theory unit to my advanced class.  I had to write an artists statement to explain my purpose.  So here it is.

It is a foolish endeavor to try and teach children without morality.  Often, in academic settings we eschew morality in favor of objectivity.  Seen as incompatible with the academic nature of the educational system, morality is relegated to the family and the religious institutions.  It is well documented that morals were taught in school for hundreds of years and modern separation of morals and education is just that: modern.    When morality was given over to the religious types and parents, education robbed itself of its most powerful weapon.  That weapon, Morality is closely connected with the very human sense of justice.  What is right and wrong is the same as what is just and what is unjust.  By divorcing morality from education we have also severed ties with a sense of justice.  Many have spent the last century chasing after what is just.  Materialists like Marx are just as guilty as any.  By identifying inconsistencies and injustices in the market, Marx is making a value judgement.  The exploitation of the worker by the bourgeoisie is unjust.  This making of the value judgement is found in almost all theories.  The critical theorists, political economist, cultural theorists, Gender studies, Post-colonialism, postmodernism; they are all looking at injustice.  Whether it is the oppression of the colonized people, or misogyny, or coercing people into a hyperreality, various theorists are identifying a universal definition of justice: that exerting one’s will over another is unjust.  It is wrong.  It is not Moral. It is, though this is anathema to say so, a sin.

Unfortunately, in public education we have fallen off of both sides of the boat.  We refuse to teach morality because of the perceived religious implications and we avoid teaching gender theory, post-colonialism, etc. because of their political association.  So what to we teach?  We teach the bare facts (so-called, as it is virtually impossible in a history course).   We teach purely academics.  In math there are no moral implications.  There is no justice in physics.  English classes sap the sense of justice from any text by focusing on grammar, syntax, personification, metaphor, and the 5-paragraph-essay.  In music it is about vocal support, rhythm, dynamic, and pitch.  In dance it is about steps, technique, and movement.  Even in theatre we focus on vocal production, diction, objectives, tactics, motivations, tableaux, blocking, and any other thing but avoid the truth that is in any discipline, the justice, the morality.

As one who teaches. I find that there must be a balance.  I cannot change the world, I likely cannot even change the school culture.  But I can change what I do.  I can look for ways to teach justice and injustice to my students, and thereby teach morality.  In public school I am forbidden to teach from religious sources (ill-defined) but I can look to academic sources.  I can look to those men and women who have defined and responded to the various injustices of life.  I can teach from Mulvey, Irigaray, Sartre, Marx, Bhaba, and Baudrillard.  I can look at the way that these women and men faced the oppression of their era and devised a means of identifying and navigating that injustice.

In that sense I am interested in teaching students about these theories and how to apply them in their own individual lives.  Many of my students are hooked and signed it at all times.  These are kids who go to the movies several times a month, watch TV several times a year, and view videos on the internet several times a day.  Media is woven into the fabric of their lives.  It is their lives.  So I look at these critical theories and I look at the media and I try to make the two converge in a way that with have a moral outcome with my students, so that they can identify and navigate the oppressive forces that they come to.  I believe that much of media, and particularly narrative media (films, TV shows, etc.) are teaching tools.  They can, when approached with the proper mindset, open visions of the world as is and as it could be.  When asked if life imitates art or art imitates life, I say both.  That is verily true.  

So I have by way of the adjoined lessons created a plan to teach these moral principles to my students.  I want them to be able to identify injustice in the world through media and injustice in media.  I have found in my study of Roland Barthes’ work that there are Myths; second order semiological systems that co-opt  the familiar and use it to promulgate false or oppressive ideology.  When Barthes discusses myth, he uses static visual signs.  While I certainly don’t disagree that those signs are effective, I find them inadequate in the media saturated world of my students.  In narrative media, thousands of images are played and as a result, there exists a plethora of potential second order semiological systems.  If a picture is worth a thousand words a film is worth millions.  So I have determined there are certain aspects of the form of film that are worth discussing in association with Myth.

In Mulvey’s groundbreaking work Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema she identifies a nearly universal mode of representation that promotes an oppressive ideology.  She identifies what she calls the Gaze that is the way in which spectator’s view the film.  Through a simple editing technique called “shot/reverse shot” a single character shows their power over another character.  The eye moves from left to right across the screen and the character whose eyes look in that direction has power over the character(s) whose eyes look contrary.  This is called the “look”.  He who possesses the look is the subject, the active driver of the plot, he who holds the power.  This represents a form of oppression, an injustice.  Since film is a man’s medium, the look is given to men.  Man is the subject and woman is by default the object.  The object is to be taken or destroyed by the subject.  The man is oppressive by his look to the woman.  

This then connects with the audience.  The audience can interact with the film in two ways.  They can posses the look themselves by gazing at the characters on screen directly.  In this sense the woman becomes a fetish, whose body is looked at with scopophilic desire.  Since she cannot be taken or destroyed by the audience in this way, she becomes part of the spectacle.  Her body is to be looked at.  She is object to the audience’s subject.  The second means is when the audience looks with the subject.  The subject becomes proxy for the audience and the spectator’s see themselves in the film as the subject.  This way the audience is able to look with, and be active, and have the opportunity to take or destroy the object.

This all works to create a myth.  Instead of the sign simply representing two people talking, and maybe one having power, it tells us an ought.  Myths define values, the values of a false ideology.  So this use of the form of shot/reverse shot supports the look which then connects to the myth that men ought to take or destroy a woman.  That women are by definition passive and fetish.  This is powerful because the film, as a sequence of millions of images; as a collection of hundreds of narcissistic and fetishised experiences, builds a wall of myth that is difficult to overcome.  Students can, however be taught to recognize the form and the myth it represents and therefore learn to combat that myth.

Edward Buscombe discusses in his work The Idea of Genre in American Cinema the concept of inner and outer form.  He argues that genres are defined by the outer form i.e. setting, costumes, tools.  I would add that certain cinematic elements are necessary as well e.g. framing, movement, angle, lighting, etc.  This outer form reveals the inner form.  The inner form is the message, theme, ideology of the film.  Genres, because of the unique outer form, talk about the same inner form.  I believe that the inner and out form can be a sort of myth.  The lighting of horror is often dark and mysterious ostensibly to convey the fear of the unknown.  But that sign can be transformed into a myth.  That myth is that death is a dark and mysterious thing that should be feared.  In this sense, genres then become a sort of repository for the mythology of our culture.  If we want to study certain myths then we look to the genres that have become their home through the outer form.

There are certain myths that become trans-generic.  These myths are often those that most strongly associate with oppression.  The myth that the nature of the woman as passive and as an object to be taken or destroyed seems to cross genre boundaries due to its being best conveyed through the form of the shot/reverse shot and the Gaze.  Since this form shows up in virtually any genre it is a myth that is trans-generic.  There are subtle novelties in the myth from genre to genre but ultimately it remains fairly stolid.  Whether it is in Star Wars (1977) when Luke saves Leia (Leia lying on the bench/Luke’s face/Leia on the bench again) or Dracula (1931) when the Count kills the poor flower girl (Dracula’s face/Flower girl/Dracula consuming the girl) the myth is the same.  Women are to be acted upon by men.  Though one is to save and the other is to destroy, the genres hold the myth, and then share it.

As a teacher I believe that I have the moral obligation to teach students to recognize this oppression, this injustice , this sin.  I cannot merely look at techniques, or skills, or analyze objectively trying to figure out what a play or film ‘means’.  I must show them that there are institutions that have a certain stake in maintaining the hegemonic structure.  These institutions use the form of film, like the shot/reverse shot, to share the mythology that maintains that structure.  The have developed genres as holding places to create the illusion of novelty so that the myth appears to be distinct, occluding it from view.  Though there be myriad myths the one that I have focussed on in my unit is related to the role of women.  Women have been oppressed by the hegemony for thousands of years.  Film has been used to maintain that by way of its myths.  

I believe that my students can understand this system of oppression.  They can once they are made aware of the system identify and navigate the myths that they face every day of their lives.  Will they stop watching? No.  I haven’t.  But they can defend themselves and perhaps even combat the myths that they see.  No child should be sent out into the world without the tools to deal with the challenges to face them.  They need to speak the language and recognize threats.  They need to know the truth and fight the lies.  They need to stand in the face of injustice and say, “I know you.  And you won’t get away with this.”  To abandon this responsibility is more than negligent.  It is unethical.  It is immoral.  It is sin.

I am a teacher of truth. I teach morality in public school.

At the end of the project they made a film representing what they had learned.  Here it is:

A Shift in Focus

Now that my two semesters of theory and history are over I am adding content to this blog relative to some of my other writings for my other courses.  First off will be my responses to films in my beloved Horror class.  So enjoy!

Me+Horror=?

I have been an avid lover of the dark and the macabre most of my life.  For as long as I can remember I have had a perhaps unnerving fascination with death, monsters, ghosts, and things phantasmagorical.  It would be no lie to say that my mother encouraged this in me.  I have a picture at home of myself at age 5 holding up a drawing I had just done of the grim reaper in his cloak moving through a forest with glowing hands.  This photograph has a caption in my mother’s hand: “Bobby is an artist!”  This was indicative of my interest.  I would often sit on my mother’s lap in church and she would show me how to draw spooky or gruesome things on the program.  My favorite is a disembodied eye-ball with the trailing retinal nerve pierced through with a nail.  I am sure that my school teacher’s worried looks came as a result of my copying my mother’s work in the margins of my worksheets.  

This fascination followed me as I grew.  I am sure that my lack of playmates at recess was due at least in part to my wandering about the schoolyard as a slobbering beast of my own design, the which had long sharp nails that folded back on hinges and stored his dagger by stabbing it into his own leg as he had no sheath.  Clearly horror would be my friend when no one else would.  I loved the old universal monster films.  My favorite was The Mummy.  I watched it over and over.  I loved it and so did my Mom.  She would tell me about going to the movies as a child and see the latest horror flick.  She often would tell me of the one movie that really scared her The Crawling Eye.  One Halloween my grandmother came to visit and had a copy of that movie that she had found in a bargain bin at Walgreen’s .  I however thought that it was cooler than scary.  

And so my love affair with horror continued until death came to visit at the age of 13.  My mother had been sick for some time and finally succumbed to cancer at the age of 40.  She left 6 boys from 4 to 16.  Horror in film took a back seat as the horror of my real life took charge.  I don’t remember watching a lot of horror through high school, though the horror in my mind did occasionally surface in macabre poetry and journal entries that garnered more worried looks from teachers.  I didn’t need to watch horror.  It was inside of me every day.  It was in that empty seat at the dinner table. It was in every coo-coo lady that tried to replace my mom. It was in the awkward silence from my peers.  I didn’t need to take it in.  I needed to get it out.

So I drew more pictures.  I drew death.  I drew violence.  I drew upon the grotesque that my mother had taught me.  My monsters became more sophisticated but had essentially the same aesthetic that was found in that crude drawing from my 5-year old self.  I took art and used that as an outlet for my internal horror.  Instead of drawing the girl lying on the bench for figure drawing, I drew her impaled with her tortured spirit  fleeing the corpse.  Instead of drawing the forced 2 point perspective of our school building, I drew it collapsing and burning with the flaming corpses of the students lying in a heap.  I drew decapitation, evisceration, dismemberment, combustion, disintegration.  The common theme was death.  I was less interested in monsters and more in the horror of the end.

Gradually I left that behind.  I became interested in Theatre.  Death followed me there.  No longer were monsters present, nor was death a gory splatter; it was the quiet real death of Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables or Eugene’s older brother in Look Homeward, Angel.  It became more like the real death that I saw and less like  the horror I felt inside.  This also gave me the opportunity for real friends.  Drama students are great that way.  They accept you precisely because you are kind of freaky instead of in spite of being so.  So they helped fill that void in my life.  Eventually, time faded the sharp pangs of death and horror that I felt and I became a successful, contributing member of society.  I became a drama teacher and dove into the myriad possibilities of my career.  I bought a home.  I had a family.  But time, I learned, does not cure the pain, I just covers it with more stuff, more life, more busy-ness.

Around age 30 I found that I still had problems.  The beast had slumbered long enough and was ready to come out.  I became afraid again.  The funny thing about the monsters and horror of my childhood was that I loved it and I was scared.  I loved it until I woke up at 3:00 am thinking that a giant tongue was going to come out of my closet and suck me in.  Then I was afraid.  In my thirties I became afraid in the day.  Death took my mom.  He could also take me.  I was scared of that.  So, I had horror in my life.  I didn’t need horror movies.  I was scared enough.

There were a few exceptions.  I loved zombies.  I was fascinated by the things that they could represent.  I was intrigued by connections between the work of George A. Romero and the likes of Brecht or Marx.  I was fascinated by how people trapped in a mall with zombies could have so much in common with two men waiting by a tree for some guy named Godot.  Maybe the distance between the Undead and    Hamlet was far less then I thought.  This was a ticket in.  If there was a place for zombies in my theatrical study and praxis, then maybe there was room for something else.  I was given a Film class to teach at the high school and once semester I had a few weeks left for a unit so I taught horror.  I went back to my childhood.  We watched Dracula and Frankenstein.  We watched King Kong and the delightful House of Wax.  I realized something as I took my students through those films: there was a catharsis for me.  Not only did it connect me with my memories of my mom, but it helped me to accept death, to see it as something that happens to all.

So I became a lay student of horror.  I would read about it when I could, to see what other writers were saying about the genre.  I watched what I could (which wasn’t much as my family are no fans of the genre).  I found that it was a rich genre of meaning for me.  I still liked scary movies, and monsters, and, honestly, death.  How could I?  I hated death.  Death stole my mother and would eventually steal me.  What could he possibly have to offer me?

So I wrote a play.  It was about a youngish married man whose best friend is death.  Only he sees death and it is unclear if death is real or imaginary (which doesn’t really matter anyway).  The mostly sit and chat about movies and music, but they never talk about why death is really there, why he took the protagonists mom. These scenes are interspersed with classic poems about death and scenes that ape portrayals of death in the media (zombie films, police procedurals, Tarantino, etc.)  The play ends with a replaying of the death of the protagonists mother and the protagonist taking out his revenge on death.  The play helped me to understand my experience with death and by extension, horror.  The fictional portrayal of death is a way of coping but not really dealing with death.  Or perhaps better, it is a bridge to healing.  Sometimes the horror of death is too real for the mind to deal with.  Sometimes the terror of loneliness cause by death is too hard.  Horror helps to cross that gap by giving us a false representation to grab onto until we can reach the real fear.  I think that is why my mom liked it too.  She also lost her father to cancer at a young age.  Her fascination with horror and the macabre was her bridge to healing.  I think that it has been mine.

Five years ago, I would not have been able to handle a class that focused on horror, and not just the campy B-film stuff.  But my experiences of creating, writing, reading, and viewing helped me come to a place where the horror on screen connected me to reality, bridged the gap of pain to catharsis.  The films that I have viewed in my horror class have not destroyed me.  They have not numbed me to reality.  They have taken me to a place of healing and provided a connecting piece to my childhood, to my fears, to death, to my mom.  That little boy with the picture of Death never knew that his childhood fascination would end up being a doorway to survival, but sometimes the surest path to change is what looks the most dangerous and destructive.  The fear and dread of horror can lead us to seek for connection and love; for hope and healing; for eternity.

Personal Narrative and Personal Experience: The Nexus of Reflection

As I read Brahm Stoker’s Dracula, I was struck by many things.  First of all is its perspective of the first person.  The reflective nature of the text as a collection of letters, journal entries, transcriptions of recordings, memoranda, and minutes from meetings lends a particularly personal sense to the entire piece.  The reflective nature of the individual articulations give the reader a sense of how the characters pieced together the events of their experience.  Then, of course, each character’s experience is pieced together with the others.  This mosaic of experience lends a sense of reality to the text, or  at least, believability.  This is a similar approach used by Max Brooks (a historian by trade) in his novel World War Z.  The oral history approach to horror makes the danger more present and more personal.  The limited view of the events gives greater threat to the villain and we as readers know no more than the protagonist(s).  This highlights the power of the unknown in the text and heightens the fear.

Fear that is personal is far more moving and motivating than that with the protective distance of the 3rd person.  I found that I became very involved in the events that effected Mina Harker. The remarkable terror of her experience with Dracula, the which is one of the most arresting moments in the book, conveys the sense of horror of the loved ones of the attacked.  This case is not told from Mina’s perspective, but by those men that love her and want to protect her.  This is akin to catching a man in the act of rape, and the victim is one’s own wife.  The horror of this moment is so resplendently described by Stoker that it is difficult to get through.  When my wife an I were first married we lived in a very unsafe apartment complex in a very unsafe part of town.  We often heard men running after each other down the hall swearing and threatening.  A man was found bloodied on the doorstep.  A woman stopped us before entering our apartment to warn us that a rapist was going around and had already raped 3 girls.  Also, on one occasion we locked ourselves out of our apartment and the neighbors were more than willing to show us the ‘tricks’ to get into any of the apartments in the building.  Needless to say, I was terrified of any time I had to leave my wife alone, even if it was only to take out the trash.  I would often have horrifying visions of opening the door to my apartment only to find someone attacking my beloved. The clear description of Dracula grasping Mina’s wrists and forcing her lips to his bleeding chest hearkens so clearly to rape and my own fears that I found myself leaping through the pages to the rescue.  I continue to have these fears as I now have children, 3 of which are girls.  Knowing that a man in a grey Grand Prix was recently driving through my neighborhood after school trying to pick up kids doesn’t make things any easier.

Aside from the very personal fear of these vampires coming after those I love, I found the final chapters of the book, that describe in languid detail the travel to the castle of Dracula, personal and destructive.  Mina’s slow transformation into a Vampire reminded me of the slow and unstoppable consumption of cancer.  My mother was diagnosed with a fairly aggressive cancer at age 38.  I was 11 at the time.  Over the next two years she underwent surgery which removed 2/3 of her colon, part of her stomach, and her uterus and ovaries.  She reported for chemotherapy every 2 weeks.  The first few days after chemo were the worst and she could hardly get out of bed. Gradually she would feel better until she had to go back again.  This experience seemed like unto what is described with Mina.  She grows pale and ill and the men worry over her, then one day she seems cheerful and back to normal.  The cheer is always with the dread of what is to come.  As they draw closer to the mountains Mina grows worse.  She sleeps most of the time and when she is awake is not entirely herself.  The treatments that they perform on her (hypnosis) grow more and more ineffective.  As my mother drew towards the end of her life she spent more of her life asleep.  The chemo was deemed ineffective and she was taken off and put on hospice care.  It seemed to me that she was away more than she was here.    When she was awake she did not entirely seem herself.  She grew pale and thin and rarely talked and when she did, she did so in a far away voice like from a television in another part of the house.  

The difference between Mina and my Mother is that for Mina there was hope.  It was just a matter of time.  But for my mother, eventually there was no hope.  It was just a matter of time.  So in this case the reflective, personal nature of the narrative combined with the personal experience of mine reflected in the text.  This made for a powerful cathartic experience, yet also incredibly difficult.  So, in a sense, Mina never was in danger of becoming a vampire, she always had a reflection.

Castrated Form and Anxiety in Woyczek

I was first introduced to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck as an undergraduate.  I read it for my Theatre History class and again in my Dramatic Literature class.  For the second class, I had the opportunity to perform a severely truncated version of the script, looking at the text through psychoanalysis.  This performance emphasized the use of the phallus.  Also, during my undergraduate studies I was asked by a friend to be in his Mask Club production of Woyzeck to replace an actor who quit.  His production, his own translation, emphasized the terror and anxiety of mental illness.  As I was reading this play again for this course, I was struck by the anxious state of the text.  Since the play is a cobbling together of remnants found among Büchner’s notes and papers it has a decidedly non-linear structure.  The scenes are fragments pieced together in whatever way the translator deems fit.  This non-linear structure hearkens to both previous incarnations of the production in which I was involved.  The two types of anxiety represented in those productions, castration anxiety and mental illness (most likely schizophrenia), become one in the chaotic non-linear structure of the play.

Linear narratives are the mediated form of the phallus.  The structured form, indicated by a clear beginning middle and end, or more accurately exposition-inciting incident-rising action-climax-resolution, that moves in one direction, are indicative of patriarchy, the hegemonic system of oppression of women.  So the traditional structure of the narrative is an extension of the patriarchy in its rules and organization and in its very form, as a phallus.  The structure of Büchner’s piece is far from linear.  Even when translators foolishly attempt to force it into a linear structure by “ordering” the scenes, it is full of gaps, spaces, and jumps.  This irregular structure could be viewed as representing our titular Woyzeck’s own madness. In another way it represents a subversion of the patriarchy and, thereby, a castration of the male form. 

With regards to the patriarchy, the play has no numbered scenes (though the translation I read had numbers) and many scenes seem to start in the middle somewhere.  Even in the order that I read, the scenes did not seem to follow a narrative.  If anything, they were episodic, like theatrical Expressionism, being a collection of scenes as incidents in a characters life, but lacking the cause and effect relationship of “one thing led to another” necessary for linear structure.  The canon of theatrical literature, particularly from the 1830’s, does not include narratives of this type.  It is subverting the system, creating a mania that cannot be resolved, only accepted.  This system is often associated with the patriarchy.  Helene Cixous called for an “écriture femenine” in response to the maculinized theatrical form, which includes the linear structure.  This approach appropriates non-linear forms under the umbrella of feminized writing and in that way, Woyzeck is structurally a feminine piece.  It tears down the patriarchal demand for linear structure and replaces it with this hysterical

 form.  This subverting of the Hegemonic system is a source of anxiety for those in power.  The entire purpose of creating a codified system is to maintain power.  This de-masculinization of the linear structure attacks that power and strikes fear into the hearts of men.

Freud speaks of much of the anxiety (if not all) as being related to the fear of castration.  Men fear the loss of the phallus and approach the threat of castration by either destroying the threat, oppressing it, or subsuming it.  A woman represents the threat of castration since the phallus is replaced by what Mulvey in her 1975 work Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema calls “the bloody wound”.  In the case of Woyzeck, the phallic form of linear structure is castrated and we are left with the bloody wound of its chaotic episodic structure.  This absence reminds the man of the castrated phallus and fills him with anxiety.  The play makes him afraid, less-so for the content (albeit terrifying) but for the form which becomes a sign marking absence, absence of the phallus.

Ultimately Woyzeck is a truly terrifying work.  It taps into that anxiety of loss of the phallus and also the loss of the power structure in the patriarchy by way of its hysterical and emasculated form.  Perhaps there is something to be learned from this.  Perhaps modern horror would be more successful with our desensitized audiences by castrating the form instead of upping the gore or skin (which Mulvey would argue perpetuates the male gaze, what with the fetishism and all).  The gore of the castrated form might however be too much to be profitable and would alienate male clientele.  Needless to say, there is much to be learned about the nature of horror from a mass of shuffled papers discovered in a desk drawer in the early 1800s.

We Made this Monster: Colonialism in Frankenstein

It is no surprise that Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein  begins with an expedition into a dangerous and unknown place.  The concept of the enlightened white man conquering the dangerous wild was a commonplace idea around the turn of the 18th century.  The notion that we are to conquer the other is a theme that plays itself out in Shelley’s novel.  More specifically, in this colonialist system other nations and cultures outside of the western european culture are deemed inferior and in dire need of colonization.  Indeed they want to be colonized.  Also prevalent at this time, is the romantic notion of the noble savage, that those cultures that are less civilized and closer to nature represent a higher ideal.  The monster represents both the noble savage who should be left on his own and the inferior culture that must be colonized and civilized.  Equally the duality of his character is represented as both good and evil.  This duality of character makes him more reflective of our own selves than if he had been homogenized.

The novel is constructed of three narratives.  Walton the sea captain bookends the majority of the story with a series of letters.  Within that bookend are contained the two narratives that I will discuss here.  There exists the narrative of Frankenstein who represents the colonizer.  Within his narrative is the monster’s narrative who represents the colonized/noble savage.  In this way Shelley allows us two perspectives.  We hear Victor’s story of the creation of the monster, which is to mirror the colonization of the native people.  The monster is initially imagined to be a thing of beauty as the naive European imagines the native culture to be.  Only upon life arriving in the body of the creature does Frankenstein see horror in his creation as the European recoils from the harsh realities of difference in the new colonized culture.  Victor abandons his creation leaving it in a space that is not efficacious, a space of neither fitting in the world of the living or the dead.  This is akin to the european nations colonizing the African Continent and then after creating their monster, abandoning them to govern themselves.  Colonization changes the very nature of a culture and creates a dependency on the colonizer.  When the colonizer leaves the native culture is left changed from its origin and dependent with no one upon which to depend.

This leads us to the monster’s narrative.  When we hear his voice, we are meeting the noble savage.  His intentions are pure and his desires are honestly saintly.  He tells us of his experiences as he tries to navigate this new world, a world made ever alien by the colonizer’s presence.  His experience with the expatriates in the cottage represents a common experience for many colonized nations.  The natives see the colonizers as a source of power and attempt to adopt the ways of the colonizer.  The monster learns the language, reads the books, and learns to empathize with the french expatriates.  He looks up to them, admires them, and decides to be like them and befriend them.  In much of post-colonial literature this is called a mimic-man (some could compare it to an Uncle Tom).  The monster’s experience turns south and follows the pattern of colonialism when he makes his move to join the cottage family.  They reject him, beat him, and abandon him and their home.  Mimic-men can never truly join with the colonizers they will always be an other.

The monster cannot go back.  He has learned the language, learned the culture, and yet is still an other.  He abandons his desires to be like the colonizer and instead adapts the culture to his own use.  He uses his language to persuade Frankenstein to serve him and also to get his revenge.  Many colonized nations rebel against the colonizer, using their own tactics against them.  But this is where the monster transgresses the noble savage.  He has abandoned his pure nature and ceases to be good.  He murders and pillages.  But he is also psychologically destructive and manipulative.  His relationship to the colonizer is based upon revenge and destruction, but upon the death of his creator/colonizer he is not jubilant but mournful.  The colonized wanted to be colonized all along, and now has nostalgia for his oppression.

The duality of the creature creates an apt mirror for ourselves.  Instead of simply showing that we humans are capable of great evil, instead of saying that we are the monster, who the monster is changes.  The colonizer is the monster, the destroyer, and we are that monster, not the corrupted noble savage.  However, the narrative is ultimately told through the voice of the colonizer.  We hear the monster’s story but only as told by the colonizer to the succeeding colonizer (Walton).  So ultimately the noble savage is the vilified and the colonizer is exonerated.  So we shake our heads and cluck our tongues about the horrors of colonization, but distance ourselves by emphasizing the atrocities of retribution perpetrated by that noble savage and that is the true horror of it all.

The Horror of Survival

There is a sense of horror that comes from being left alone.  When I was in the first grade  there was a fire drill near the end of the day.  Our fire alarm sound exactly to same in my mind as the bell for the end of school.  The bell sounded and I began gathering my things.  I put on my backpack and looked up.  I saw my peers gathering at the back of the room and heading out the back door.  I thought that it was odd, but I knew what I was doing even if they were crazy.  I walked down the hall toward the front of the school and noticed that there was no one in the hall with me.  This I marked as being even more odd than that which my peers were doing when they were exiting the back of the room.  When I walked out the front door all of the busses were there but no students were anywhere to be seen, instead all of the drivers were standing in the doorways of their respective busses.  They looked at me strangely.  The world changed.  I realized that I was alone and no one was there with me.  I ran back into the school and I saw my principal.  I ran to him, wrapped my arms around his legs and buried my sobs in his ample belly.  He patted me on the head and escorted me back to my class.  The students we back in their seats and my teachers smiled at me.  “Did you think it was the end of school?” No, I thought it was the end of the world.

I felt much the same way as I watched the BBC production Threads.  There is something to being left behind.  When we live while others die, we feel a sense of loneliness and guilt.  This is often rendered horror or terror.  In Threads this is played to dramatic effect.  While the film seems to focus on many different people, Two families plus the leaders of the town in which they all live, it ends on one.  The relationships of the families are rich and unique and the end is empty as our survivor is alone.  This is the horror of survival.

Immediately after the bombing of the town, we see many of these people struggling to survive.  Ruth and her family hole up in their basement trying to subsist on what they have stored.  Jimmy is assumed dead as he was outside when the bombs struck.  His parents are trying to survive in the lean-to that they have constructed in their flat.  His mother is severely burned on one side of her body and suffering greatly.  As they try to find water and food they have a sense of hopelessness.  It is clear that they do not know why they are bothering to try to live.  Eventually she dies and he goes out in search of food and water.  Ruth leaves the shelter of her basement in search of Jimmy.  She does not find him and upon returning to her house hears the buzzing of flies in the basement and concludes that her family is dead.  

From here the film focuses on Ruth.  We see others briefly but they soon succumb.  It is clear that the only reason Ruth has for survival is for her baby.  Society has collapsed and their only purpose is to go on living.  They farm, but struggle to make it last.   We see Ruth stealing and working the black market for food.  Eventually the baby comes.  But it is not a moment of joy. It is a time filled with terror and loneliness.  She delivers alone and holds her baby as she sobs.  They are not sobs of joy, but of sorrow.  She cries because life goes on, not because it ends.

She eats rats. she labors in the fields. she steals, but it is all for naught.  Eventually she collapses in the field.  Her daughter seems unsure of what to think of her mother’s imminent death.  She only can say few words.  Notably she calls her Ruth, not Mum, and tells her that it is time to work.  Their language has degraded to mere practicality.  Ruth reaches up and grabs her daughter’s hand.  A sign of affection.  A sign that her daughter does not understand.  She dies and her daughter rummages her bedclothes for necessities and moves on.  

So Ruth survived the holocaust, but for what?  She was alone and though her daughter was with her, survival held no joy, no relationship.  Her daughter lives on and subsists without culture or family.  She makes ‘friends’ who help her steal but one is killed (whose death is hardly regarded) and then she is raped by her other ‘friend’.  She is left alone.  She lives and then feels the pains of labor.  She goes to the hospital and says, “Babby. Coming.”  She is rejected.  She is expected to deliver alone, even as her mother did.  This is a horrible prospect for her.  She does deliver in the hospital, but the silence accompanying the child's birth belies the truth of still-birth.  The child is wrapped and handed to her.  She looks on the child in horror and the shot freezes and ends.

This final shot portrays the horror of survival.  She lives but she is ultimately left alone.  There is no child to carry on.  But is that even to be desired?  Humanity lives, but all is lost.  TO what end do they survive?  For what purpose is it to live, when all hope for meaningful relationship is lost.  The humans are together, but they are alone.  The nuclear holocaust destroys individual live and the life of society.  Without society, we are all alone.  The film portrays this as the final horror of survival and they are right.  Without love, what does it mean to live?

Beggars and Zombies: The 3 Penny Opera and its Echoes in Land of the Dead

In George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead we are introduced to a world where humanity has lost and what is left is hardly worth the saving.  One could argue, for what ought they be saved?  It is fairly clear that the point of Romero’s work in this case is to be critical of George W. Bush’s America.  There was and is much to be critical of in America due to the policies of those in power, though it is somewhat unfair to lay the blame so heavily on one man, particularly when that one man comes from a long line of men who have little real power to make America the way that it is.  In reality it is a collective effort of generations of people to engrain an ideology that ultimately is so damaging to the weakest of us.  It is interesting to look at what Romero does with his film in comparison with another set of artists 70 years before, dealing with many similar conditions.  In 1931, Georg Pabst released his adaptation of Bertold Brecht’s play The 3-Penny Opera (which was itself an adaptation of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera).  While Brecht was none to happy with the final result of the film, it does have at its core some important commonalities that can be related to Romero’s film.

In Romero’s film there is an isolated area of Pittsburg where a largish population lives.  The population is divided into haves and have-nots.  The haves live in a high-rise called Fiddler’s Green and spend their days in consumption of goods.  The main floor of the building, the foundation you might say, is a shopping mall full of high end retail and restaurants.  The have-nots live in the squalor of slums and make most of their living through black-market trading and other illegal activities (e.g. prostitution, smuggling, zombie fighting, etc.)  They have no hope of making it into the Fiddler’s Green regardless of their financial status.  Even though Cholo has saved much money and served the ruler of Fiddler’s Green, he has no hope of ever being allowed in.  There is a small group of men and women who essentially loot the abandoned towns around Pittsburgh to bring in the goods for the sustenance of the city.  Outside of the realm of the city is populated by zombies who more or less continue as they would have had the lived.  They are led by a large african american zombie in coveralls.

In Pabst’s film we see some similarities.  Set in London it represents a world in which the poor have no recourse.  There is a class of people who have all and control all.  However, they play a much smaller role that in Romero’s film.  They are represented by the coronation of the Queen, which is significant by the end of the film.  It largely focuses on the relationship between the thieves and the beggar’s.  The thieves are lead by Mack the Knife and the Beggar’s by Peachum.  One can draw a comparison between the Thieves in this film and the Looters in Romero’s film.  The beggar’s can be likened unto the zombies.  In Romero’s film it is discovered that the Zombies are making their way to the city as they have learned to solve problems (like how to cross water).  The Looters have decided that the best plan is to take advantage of the system and get out.  They see the Zombies as an inevitable tide of destruction.

The climax of both films is remarkably similar.  In Romero’s film the Zombies break their way into the city.  They are introduced to the scene shambling down the street and soon attack the poor of the city working their way to Fiddler’s Green where they rapidly and voraciously consume the citizens who so readily were engaged in consumption.  In Pabst’s film Peachum has his Beggar’s march down the street during the coronation of the Queen against the wishes of the Thieves.  Their march is very like the zombies of Romero’s film.  Shambling en masse with a dead look in the eyes, many with missing limbs.  They do not attack the upper class other that with their abominable sight and stench.  

These two moments connect to the ultimate purpose of Romero and Pabst/Brecht’s films.  According to Karl Marx, to whom these two auteurs ascribe in many ways, the rising up of the proletariat is an inevitability.  Judging from the course of history, the oppressed only stay oppressed for so long then they will rise up and destroy their oppressors establishing an new order.  The zombies/beggars coming into the city is a sign of that inevitability.  Whether they are responding to a stale monarchy that has maintained its power through financial means or a post-apocalyptic world where no crisis has gone to waste to solidify power, the oppressed will rise up.  They will find a means to exact their revenge.

Perhaps the comparison between these two films is guilty of reading against the grain, but the similarities in the shot of the beggar’s and zombies marching down the street are too striking to be ignored.  It is true that Brecht might be more of a traditional Marxist than Romero, or that Pabst might be too dissimilar from Romero to say they saw the same solutions to a world of problems.  But they did identify the same sense of inequality, and they showed that inequality through many of the same means.  In that sense I think that Brecht would agree, and maybe be a little proud.

We are the Zombies and we are Shaun

A few years ago, a friend of mine invited me over to watch a Zombie movie.  I was excited as I considered myself a zombie fan and was looking forward to what he called a zombie comedy.  We settled on his couch with the appropriate quantity of salty snacks and the movie began.  Within the first five minutes, I turned to my friend, Shaun being his name, and said, “This is the best movie that I have ever seen.” There was something about the intertwining of the lines, the cuts from scene to scene, the bricolage of images and styles and genres, that simply spoke to me.  Throughout the course of the film I was tickled, horrified, bemused, engaged, challenged, and moved to tears.  Thus was I introduced to Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead.  The film plays with so many different things that it is difficult to narrow down any one thing that the film is trying to say, so I will look at some ideas that the film touches on and discuss how that effected me.

First, is the opening credits.  After a fairly engaging opening sequence clearly establishing the main players of the film, Wright places the credits.  A clear shift in tone is made as, instead of the very human characters that we saw in the first scene, we are shown everyday humans acting like zombies.  A group of men is seen shambling toward the camera in time with the music.  THere is a group at a bus stop staring blankly ahead, who all glance at there watches simultaneously.  The in the shopping center, staring at nothing as they scan their items in tandem.  These images do a number of things.  IN one sense they are saying that the real zombies are us (we?).  Our modern life has made us into zombies blindly following a set of procedures and practices without any thought (false consciousness perhaps? or maybe Simmel’s blasé?)  This is very apparent in that the protagonist is seemingly unaware of the difference caused by the zombies.  As an audience we recognize the affect of the zombies in the film but Shaun seems unaware.  He is so zombified by the plugged-in repetition that he doesn’t notice a bloody hand-print or even that he slips on blood.  The most remarkable example is the couple necking outside of the Winchester.  Before Ed and Shaun go into the Winchester we see the couple necking outside.  When Ed and Shaun leave hours later we see the same couple ‘necking’ more furiously.  When they react and then turn from the amorous couple, the head of the man in the couple is chewed off.  Or perhaps when connected to the television story at the end of the film we see that the living zombies of the beginning are no different than the living dead of the end.  They maintain their primal instincts which consist in playing video games, pushing shopping carts, and humiliating themselves on television game shows and talk shows.  These tasks seem no different than the ones that were shown in the opening credits; mundane, repetitive, and escapist.  It seems that one of the many issues being discussed is that we are the monster, and that the monster is far more subtle and dangerous that we ever realized.

What I find most interesting in the film is its ability to take a horror sub-genre like a zombie film, and layer it with socio-political commentary (which is not entirely unexpected), and then fill it with emotionally resonant human characters.  Shaun is no hero.  He is in every sense of the word, average.  He has not the marquee good looks.  His job is no heroes duty.  He has no real skills.  He is quirky and bland at the same time.  His girlfriend is certainly average by film standards (granted that in the real world she would be quite lovely).  He has friends and family whose relationships all feel authentic.  This is where the real brilliance of the film takes place.  It is a comedy.  While tragedy, to which horror is most closely related, has heroes that are by necessity larger than life and better than ourselves (thank you, Aristotle) comedy is about the common man striving to be better than he is, and failing.  Shaun wants to be better.  He has an ideal that he strives for, but he fails.  This is comedy.  And if comedy is about us and what consistent failings we do have, then by placing comic characters in a horror context we identify more with the fear, terror, and sorrow they feel.  They are us, so we feel more poignantly the loss that they feel.  I recall the first time seeing the film, having my heart rent by death Phillip, Shaun’s step-father.  In a straight horror, the death would have been sad but not with the depth that it has in this case.  We all laughed at the imagination of Shaun’s plan to save his Mom and kill Phillip. Their matter-of-fact discussion of planning his death is hilarious.  Laughter has the power to endear us to people and comedy is about us, so when the reality of the horror of death sets in, we are caught off guard.  We feel the sorrow and loss of Shaun as we would feel it because he is us, and not as in tragedy someone better than and therefore removed from us.  Phillip’s death is the death of our own imperfect relationships.  Similar situations have been portrayed but without the same effect in more serious zombie films and it is due to not framing it as a comedy.  There is an old theatre saying, “They will only cry as hard as they have laughed.”  And this holds true in this film.

There is much more that could be discussed regarding this film, but the layering of sociopolitical commentary and poignant personal emotion into this horror film sets it above many other films of its ilk.  In many ways, it could be the zombie film that finally gets it right.  George A. Romero’s films are too serious and films like Return of the Living Dead or Zombieland are too silly.  This film marks a master of genre fusion  who understands his craft and his audience, and most importantly, the things that matter enough to make it work.  This is no piece of fluff that is to be seen and dismissed.  It is so much more.  It is us.

Uncanny Freaks

The Uncanny is that which is familiar seeming unfamiliar.  One of the powers that horror has for us is to make normal and often pleasant things terrifying.  That sense of dread that fills us, is when we recognize the thing and then we realize that that thing that we recognize is simultaneously not the thing we thought.  Many horror films have made use of this concept.  Dracula looks like a man, a dashing debonaire man, and yet he is also a ghoul.  The physical twisting of his hands and the slow methodical movement exacerbate this sense that he is not what he seems, yet he still looks human.  Boris Karloff’s reanimated mummy is little more than a shriveled old man.  Yet there is something about his voice, his movement, that is alien, uncanny.  Zombies, that have proliferated our cultural conscious are exceptionally uncanny.  They look like humans, yet they move and sound inhuman, and in fact their behavior is terribly inhuman.  In Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, this is demonstrated by the titular Shaun’s inability to clearly recognize the difference between living and dead.  This familiarity discomfits us because we want to believe that evil is easily recognizable.  We want evil to be alien to us so when it is too close to what we know and love it is threatening.  Recently a co-worker of mine was arrested for sexual abuse of a student.  As I spoke with my own students, they expressed shock and confusion.  The man was as normal as all of us and yet he was “evil”.  This threatened their sense of safety.  The familiar became unfamiliar and they were scared.

While films often use visual cues to make the familiar unfamiliar, they can make the audience believe that the unfamiliar is familiar and no longer a threat.  In Frankenstein, the monster looks very different than human, yet in various moments he behaves as a human might (more interestingly as a child who is even less threatening).  This makes the uncanny familiar and we empathize with the monster.  Then he does something horrible and monstrous and we are again discomfited.  The move from the uncanny to the familiar to the uncanny again is an extremely effective means of extracting horror from a narrative.

Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks uses this method to great effect.  When we are initially introduced to the various circus freaks we find them revolting.  They are like humans, yet different enough to be unsettling.  A man with no arms or legs or a woman who looks like a child yet an adult or a half woman half man all have a familiarity to what we expect a person to look like yet they are different and that difference disturbs us.  After showing off this freak show to frighten us with their uncanny nature, Browning invites us to see their humanity.  He shows them living normal lives, eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.  We see their very human emotions and relationships.  But most of all we see them being persecuted by ‘normal’ folk.  This makes the uncanny familiar.  It connects these people with us.  They have lives like we do, love like we do, talk and play and dream like we do.  And they suffer pain, jealousy, and heartache as we do too.  This brings them into the realm of familiarity and we are at peace with them, we feel for them.  

This is when Browning turns the screws.  Due to a betrayal the freaks band together to seek revenge on the two ‘normals’ that have been bullying them.  During a torrential downpour the wagons that carry them from site to site crash.  At the same time the betrayal of the woman is reveals and the freaks pursue her into the rain.  There are several shots of them crawling through the mud brandishing weapons.  The lightening strikes and the thunderclaps and they no longer seem human.  That which was uncanny and made familiar becomes once again uncanny.  They are freaks made human made monsters.  We are all the more terrified by this transformation.  We are betrayed and angry, yet filled with fear.  

The world of horror is the world of the uncanny.  Directors who can manipulate the uncanny are the most successful at filling audience with dread.  Tod Browning shows his mastery of that craft in his film Freaks.  Perhaps the greatest effect of his film is the conflicting feelings of guilt that this use of the uncanny produces.  We initially feel guilty for judging the freaks harshly.  Then we feel guilty for not recognizing evil when we saw it. Then we feel guilt for hating the bully and also hating the freak.  That combination of the bully and the freak in one mirrors the uncanny and the familiar in one.  And that is true terror.  I am the bully and I am the freak.

Loss in Finality: the Vanishing of the Known

I find that a fairly good test of the quality of a horror film is if I wake up the next morning thinking about it.  Even better is if it still sits with me several days later.  Perhaps more difficult is trying to uncover what it is exactly that makes the film stay.  What is it that makes me look across the table at my wife and think of the film, and sense danger.  In my experience, I have seen that the most unsettling and therefor most enduring horror experiences are those which are unknown.  Our minds are far more adept at creating fear than any film ever could.  Jean-paul Sartre in his piece Why Write indicates that there is a dialectical tension between the reader and the writer.  The writer creates and imperative (the words on the page) and the reader then uses those imperative to construct meaning, becoming a writer in their own right.  This wrestling back and forth between the reader and the writer creates a space that can be filled.  The best writing intentionally leaves space for the reader to then use creatively.  In this sense great horror leaves space for the viewer to fill with their worst fears, that which personally scares them, instead of a generic fear represented broadly.  This is why so many films fail upon the reveal of the monster.  It can never live up to the pictures in our head.

The Vanishing is a remarkable film on two counts: it leaves plenty of space for the audience to create, and it discusses the power of the unknown.  Throughout the course of the film there is ample space for us to create meaning, to fill the space.  While some of these moments do not represent any real departure from standard horror tropes (e.g. initially we do not see where she went or how she was captured) the sheer endurance of that empty space becomes the individuation of this film.  We are introduced to the murderer early on.  We see him plotting the murder going into the minutest detail of the act.  Even after we see the moment of capture, we never are shown what happened to her.  Our protagonist, Rex, agrees to take the sleeping pill and then wakes up in a coffin, being buried alive.  The empty space left by the director between the falling asleep and the waking up has to be filled by us as an audience.  We don’t just connect dots, we fill space.  This leaves us also with a more chilling vacancy.  The murder does not reveal what happened to Saskia.  He simply says that he will show what happened.  When the protagonist asks if he raped her, his response is mildly rebukive.  He is not to tell, he is to show.  When Rex awakens in the coffin it also leaves a space for us to fill regarding Saskia.  Yes, we realize that he buried her alive.  That is clear.  But what is empty for us to fill is how she responded when she awoke.  The terror she felt, the anguish, the regret, the thrashing, crying, pounding. Her last words.  Her last thoughts are all left silent.  That silence is our to fill.  And we fill it with the worst that our imagination has to offer.  The worst that can happen is not death, it is the horrific anticipation of death.  Since that is hidden, then we are free to fill that space with our own anxious anticipation.

The film also comments on the nature of the unknown.  Rex is left with nothing but the stories in his head about the final hours of Saskia’s life.  He is obsessed.  He cannot live, or go on living without knowing what happened.  His final plea is know.  He knows that getting her back alive is impossible, but he can have something of her back if he just knows what happened.  It is likely that he knows that his own life is forfeit.  He likely knows that his knowledge will result in his own death.  That is the risk that he is willing to take, he will face death for the sake of knowing.  Yet for all he comes to know, he can’t know everything.  He can’t know her last moments.  His sacrifice becomes a mockery, a simulation, which reflects an absence rather than a thing.  It shows that he really can’t know what happened because he can’t ask her, and neither can we.

That is why The Vanishing works so well.  It uses the unknown to instill in us our own greatest fears.  We know not what the day may bring.  So when I look at my wife or children and I think of this film, that fear that I sense is in knowing what I don’t know.  That fear that, more than losing them, I could lose my last moments.  The thought that those moments could be filled with horror and pain and aloneness are the grandest fears that I have.  That is why it sticks, and it always will. 

The Art of Distance in Horror

In Bertold Brecht’s seminal work Mother Courage and Her Children, in scene ten,  Ann Fierling (named Courage) and her daughter Kattrin stop their cart in front of a peasant’s hut.  From inside the hut they can hear the song of what can be assumed to be a mother singing a lullaby to her child.  They pause to listen before continuing on and the scene ends.  This scene represents the power of a moment in a work of art to draw one in and alienate one at the same time.  The song, the pause, seem to indicate a significant moment and yet it leads to nothing.  It is just another moment in a long string of them.  As an audience we believe it is significant to plot and lean in, but then it serves it not and we pull back.  A parallel can be drawn between this moment and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter.  In it, we see a very similar scene as to what occurs with Mother Courage and her Daughter.  John and Pearl have long been fleeing Mr. Powell for some time in their skiff.  They alight near a farm house and see a light in the window.   They hear the song of a woman, likely a lullaby.  They stop and listen for a moment.  We are drawn in as an audience, believing that this is the moment perhaps of salvation for these children.  But instead, after listening, John ushers them into the barn to sleep.  We pull back to think about what just happened.

Interestingly, there exist other parallels between both the style and content of the two pieces when taken in the context of verfremdungseffekt.  Brecht believed that to make an audience think about the events on stage, the play ought to distance or alienate them from the action (I find alienation a problematic term, so I will use distancing instead).  Brecht applied various means to bring about this effect including, but not limited to: revealing the apparatus, breaking the 4th wall, music/singing, mimicry (in place of inhabiting the character), stark juxtaposition of dramatic and comic moments, and narration that reveals the end from the beginning.  When used appropriately these elements pull the audience out of their quasi-hypnotic state and allow them to think about the events and judge them.  This helps the audience not assume inevitability of events (which we can easily trace back to Greek Tragedy).  The audience then thinks that since the events are not inevitable, other choices could have been made.

Within the film there are several instances and elements that utilize this verfremdungseffekt to distance the audience from the action and allow for reflection.  One of which is the use of expressionist lighting.  While it might seem contradictory to conflate one stylistic choice with another, it is not a far cry to claim that the use of that lighting within a non-expressionist piece (structurally or theoretically) draws attention to the apparatus.  This is especially true considering the inconsistency of utilization of said apparatus.  This expressionist lighting used in specific scenes of horror, like the murder of the mother, in contrast to realistic lighting in other scenes (including night-time ones) makes the audience aware of the use of lighting.  This pulls us out and we then can reflect on what is being said about the events happening, instead of what is going to happen.

Another instance is in the representation of the mother’s corpse in the car in the water.  Rather than a dreadful image of a mutilated corpse, we are shown a peaceful, and, in fact, beautiful image of the mother, bathed in shimmering light and water as her hair and dress flit picturesquely in the current.  This juxtaposition in what is seen with the content of the moment pulls the audience out once again.  Death is portrayed almost as an idealized beauty rather than the horror that it is.  We can then reflect on the nature of death and even murder.

This moment can also bring to mind Helene Weigel’s famous silent scream.  When Mother Courage’s son is brought to her dead, she is unwilling to show her emotion, her terror, at the sight of his lifeless body.  Weigel turned her head and screamed without sound.  This was to show the emotion of the moment and was a means of revealing the apparatus, showing the artifice.  The silent peace of the dead woman in the river, is a torsion of Weigel’s silent moment of terror.  Once again, the intent is to distance the audience, in this case to think about death in another way.

Perhaps the most interesting moment of distancing is in the confrontation between Mrs. Cooper (a Mother Courage in her own right) and Mr. Powell.  There is legitimate tension as he sings outside the house and Mrs. Cooper sits with her shotgun in the house.  The children sit on the the steps and the oldest walks over to Mrs. Cooper with a candle, the light of which obscures the view of Mr. Powell.  When she moves away from the window it reveals that Mr. Powell is no longer sitting outside the house.  This moment creates intense suspense.  The audience is drawn in, asking what will happen.  The voice of Powell is heard in the house.  Chaos.  A shot is fired.  Then occurs the break, the distance.  Powell runs hootin’ and hollerin’ from the house into the barn.  Instead of a dramatic death, or violent retribution, the response is intensely comical.  The audience pulls back and laughs.  This distance incites reflection on the rightness of individually meted out justice.  

It might be a fool’s errand to seek correlation between Brecht and a horror film from the 1950’s, but perhaps there are things to be learned from the connections to be made.  Perhaps there is more of horror in Brecht and more of Brecht in than previously realized.  The film is effective in both providing thrills and causing reflection, which is precisely why this correlative relation matters.

Ghosts of Oppression: Ugetsu, The Uninvited, and Night and Fog

In the intensely shocking short Documentary Night and Fog, we are taken through the horrors of what we, as human beings, are capable of.  It is one thing to hear of or read about the atrocities of the Holocaust, and an entirely different thing to be shown them.  We are cast down into the pit of guilt and responsibility, shaken by the true terror of annihilation and desecration.  But we hear at the end of the film repeated the phrase “I was not responsible.”  That is where the horror bludgeons us.  Those whom we desperately want to blame are passing it on.  In the end, who is left to blame but a shadow, a reflection, a ghost.

When taken in conjunction with Ugetsu  and The Uninvited, this trilogy of Ghosts speaks of the terror of reality: People are, often, horrible to each other.  While obviously taking a different tone and style from each other, the three films show the grand injustice and depravity of humanity.  Night and Fog displays it as the main focal point of the film.  It is a film of degrading injustice.  In its blatant indictment of the Nazi regime there is the tacit complicity of all humans.  While not perhaps on this scale, this sort of destruction exists historically and consistently.  In Ugetsu we see this destructive nature as part of a larger hegemony and formal institution.  The Shogunate in Japan was an institutionalized oppressive structure that was destructive to the lives and livelihoods of the majority of the Japanese people.  The peasants were subject to the daimyo but received little to no benefit from that relationship.  Often the oppression would lead to death, with the inter-warring states of the various Daimyo destroying and pillaging that which stood in their way.  Additionally, the plight of women was of the depth of sorrow.  The two spouses of the two main men suffer greatly due to the hegemonic system of oppression in their state.  The wife of the would-be Samurai is raped, not by marginalized bandits or outcastes, but by the samurai.  The system places the samurai above the peasant women, and therefore, dehumanizes the women, leaving them to used and discarded.  The woman has been raised and therefore buys into the system which states that a raped woman is of no value to her husband.  She abandons hope and becomes a prostitute.  Her counterpart is murdered by ronin samurai on the road so that they can steal her provisions.  This, while horrific to us, is acceptable in the system.  

In The Uninvited we see the horror of humanity played out in contrast to the nature of system.  Though many theorist lump the family into the hegemonic systems designed to maintain our capitalist structure, I consider the family a structure that has endured various structures and systems regardless of the economic base.  The family is deemed  by many in religious circles (of which I consider myself a part) a fundamental good and a source of love and support within the horrid world.  This assumption about the family is contrasted in The Uninvited with individuals who abandon the appropriate role in the family structure for self serving means.  The two ghosts represent two versions of the mother.  The true mother is loving and kind and the false mother is vengeful and retributive.  This binary of motherhood becomes the commentary on the potential for good and evil within the family structure.  A mother who is hateful and vengeful to her child is the source of horror, while the mother who is loving and caring is the source of peace.  Murder by the evil mother is the individualized expression of the same thing that motivated the Holocaust and the oppressive Shogunate: otherness.  The false mother viewed the true mother as an other and therefore worthy of death.  In ghost form she views the daughter as an other and tries to enact that judgement as well.  

In these films, we realize that the perpetrators of these horrors are not others, they are reflections of ourselves, shadows, ghosts of the evil mother, the daimyo, the Kapo.  These are the ghosts that haunt us, more than those who suffered and died at their hands.  For in these ghosts we see that which we could do, and have done.  We make a person an other, and then they are a thing, and we claim we are not responsible, it is the institution.  But we are the institutions.   We made the ghosts.  And we need to face them. 

Frankenstein: Love of a Lifetime

As a child I was always fascinated with monsters.  I loved anything with monsters, the creepier the better.  I would, instead of playing with friends, wander about the recess play yard pretending to be a monster.  They never scared me, rather they were my friends.  I loved monsters in movies.  The best part of any movie was the monster.  I loved the trash compactor scene in Star Wars because of the monster.  I loved Mumra in Thundercats.  I loved Skeletor in Masters of the Universe.  But my favorite monsters were the Universal Horror monsters.  At our local library there were a selection of books from the classic monster movies with a truncated version of the plot and movie stills.  I would check out as many of these as I could each time I went.  I would pore over them every day until regretfully I had to return them to the library.  Our home video collection contained many of these classic monster movies and I watched them repeatedly.  As I look back, I wonder at what my family must have thought of this little toe-head who was obsessed with monsters.  I wonder a little at it myself.  Villains are so much more interesting than heroes and monsters are even more so.  Movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Invisible Man give us monsters that are uncanny and yet relatable.  Of these Frankenstein is the best.  What makes the monsters of Classic Horror so interesting and powerful is that they are empathetic.  I remember my mother complaining about the monsters of 80’s horror as lacking the pathos of the classic monster.  We need to feel that we have something in common with the monster.  The monster is a reflection of our own selves, that which we are most afraid of, our power to destroy.  This is why Frankenstein is so effective.  The film presents a monster that is destructive of life and also a victim of circumstance.  That is how we see ourselves.

There are two moments that I would like to discuss in this regard.  The first is near the end of the film.  As Victor and his bride are preparing for their wedding word arrives that the monster has infiltrated the house.  Victor locks her in the bedroom for her safety.  The monster comes in through the balcony window.  He confronts her and snarls.  It is clear that his intentions to her are violent and sexual.  While this is in itself horrifying, it also speaks to our darkest desires.  The sexual act in its perfection is a moment of unity, love, and devotion, however the mirror of this is desire for control and consumption.  We recognize in this moment our dark (Freud would say repressed) desire to consume, or use the other through sex.  We condemn the monster and simultaneously feel indicted by our reflection in him.

The second event is the most tragic and pathetic.  In the scene with Maria and the monster we see reflected our duality as lovers and destroyers.  The monster finds the child Maria playing by the lake and she invites him to play.  He obliges and they throw flowers into the lake.  The monster is jubilant in this simple moment.  When the flowers are gone, he opts for Maria and throws her into the lake.  Immediately realizing the error of his ways the monster flees and the girl drowns.  Our relationship with children is one that is uniquely trusting.  We love them and serve them and care for them.  We also lose our tempers or simply screw up out of ignorance.  Regardless of the innocence of our actions, they can have lasting destructive consequences. (e.g. Suzy is pretty, Sarah is bright).  We feel enormous guilt for our actions and simultaneously want to absolve our guilt.  We flee and leave the child to drown.  So upon seeing the monster do the same we feel empathy for him for we see ourselves reflected in his actions.

This is why the monsters of Universal worked so well.  It was a villain we could root for and still seek retribution.  We want the evil to be punished but are sorry that it has to happen to them.  This comes from our dual desire for justice and mercy.  We want the monster to stop being bad, but we want forgiveness for our similar sins of destruction.

Scopophilic Convergence

      In 2008, then Presidential candidate Barak Obama had a picture taken of him that was eventually turn into his ubiquitous Hope poster.  This poster became synonymous with his campaign.  For good or ill, people remembered his campaign for the poster; muted red, white, and blue, a face looking at something in the distance, and the simple word ‘Hope’ emblazoned across the bottom.  The poster was designed by a street artist and became the icon of the election.  Countless media outlets showed the poster and image when talking about the soon to be president.  But something interesting has occurred.  The image has taken a life of its own.  In 2012, a Provo High School student created a T-shirt that aped the Obama poster but with his own face in its place.  He gave these shirts away to the students as part of his bid to win student body president.  He won by a landslide.  If you want you can go to http://www.obama-me.com and make your own photo into an imitation of that poster.  Various websites have adapted that concept into a means of distilling a face into a single idea.  One such replaces Obama with a skull and the word ‘Hope’ for ‘Fate’ perhaps making a commentary on the expected doom of the Obama administration.  Others have taken that image and applied it to completely unrelated things, like an image of Flappy Bird, or crazy ol’ Nick Cage (with a simple ‘Cage’ at the bottom’).  What was once a very specific image for a unique purpose has grown to pervade multiple media as it has been appropriated and adapted by consumers.  This example represents the idea of convergence.  According to Jenkins’ work Worship at the Altar of Convergence, Media convergence is when “Old and new media collide, grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media consumer and the media producer intersect in unpredictable ways.” (2)  No one probably expected that a poster of a presidential candidate would eventually evolve into a poorly rendered graphic of a bird from an addictive app.  Yet these things are inevitable when media convergence occurs.

      The Star Wars Uncut project represents another interesting example of media convergence.  Firstly old and new media have collided.  The film consists in almost 500 15 second cuts of Star Wars Episode IV: a New Hope that were then taken by fans of the film and re-shot using whatever means they had available.  Then the clips were sent in and edited together with the original sound track as a connecting thread.  What resulted was the film as a mass of individual perceptions and interactions with the original text.  The film is the old media and the new work is new media.  They converge in the space and create something very interesting (albeit, difficult to watch) that while it has the impression of the original text, is also something new and unique.  It also shows the convergence of grassroots and corporate media in that the film.  The original film coming from the corporate and the uncut from the grassroots.  The individuals who made the cuts of the film received no remuneration for their efforts and is therefore done out of the powerful desire of the individual to connect themselves with the project.  Unpredictably, the film has won awards for its work as an interactive experience, representing the ability of the consumer and the producer to intersect.

      There is something about this that is disconcerting.  For thousands of years media consumers have only been engaged with the text on one end.  Projects like this allow consumers to engage on the producer end of the project.  However, the place of the consumer has always been as audience.  In connection with Mulvey’s work from a few weeks ago, it was made clear that the role of the audience is to look at fetishized gaze, and then look with the protagonist through their narcissistic gaze.  This creates a strong connection to the subject/object relationship established by certain cinematic elements.  What seems to happen is when the consumer (audience) is given the power to produce and adapt the text, he or she does not know how to navigate the subject/object relationship, or rather they go nuts.  

In Star Wars Uncut, there are several scenes in which Princess Leia is portrayed by one of these fans in which her clothing bears little to no resemblance to Carrie Fischer in the original film.  In many cases the actress is significantly less dressed than Ms. Fischer.  The most extreme example being with the recut trash compactor scene shows a man and a woman in a bathtub, with the woman in a bikini.  The bikini has nothing to do with the scene, and relates in no way to what Ms. Fischer is wearing in the original film.  The makers of this recut scene have replaced the character in the original with a more extreme sexualized object.  As with the fetish gaze, the plot ceases for the purpose of looking at the female form.  This seems to be the case several times as the consumers take the subject of the audience and treat them to a more sexualized object.  This indicates that when consumers are given the reigns, they do what they know how to do, look at the object.

      They also know how to look with the protagonist.  Interestingly, in most cases this gaze becomes homoerotic.  If the sexualization of the object is part of the narrative, the object is the receiver of the gay gaze (gayze?)  In one striking animated sequence, C3-PO is shown rubbing his body with oil and wearing a red g-string (all dialogue in sequence is from the film).  He gazes at Luke with lust and thrusts his pelvis rhythmically ultimately removing the underwear.  I this case, the audience gazes with instead of at.  The result a homoerotic sexualized gaze, though in this case the placement of the characters implies a shot/reverse shot of placing Luke in the power position that could be a lack of cinematic prowess on the part of the maker.  There is no scene playing out a sexual relationship other than those that already exist in the original unless they are homoerotic.  So either we are looking at the body of the woman or looking with the man at the man.

      This is seen in many instances when a consumer takes the work of the producer and adapts it with their own articulation.  Many fan-fiction sites focus almost entirely on changing the object of the sexualized gaze or inventing new ones. It is not likely that anyone predicted that that would be the result of this kind of convergence, but it is not surprising as the role of the consumer has always been to gaze with scopophilic pleasure at and with the characters on screen.  There are other ways in which the consumer converges with the producer, but this is obviously the most striking, and perhaps concerning.

The Inter-webbed Mental Pattern: How the New Mental Thought Process Affects Reception Of Cinematic Content

     I am naturally resistant to technology.  This is problematic for me as I am surrounded by it everyday.  I use it.  It has saved my life.  Why do I resist?  What is my fear of this ubiquitous resource?  Perhaps it is my inability to adapt to what McLuhan calls the “change of scale, or pace, or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (130 emphasis added) I adapt poorly to change.   Be that as it may, the changes that have come to the way we think as a society as a result of pervasive internet, computer interface, and cell phone use are significant.  The pattern of human thought has been influenced by the media by which narratives are shared.  With the advent of the epic poem, the Greeks began to formalize how stories are told.  This medium led to the creation of the tragic form and the medium of theatre.  But what remained constant was the linearity of the narrative.  This linear nature of storytelling continued for centuries in Europe and was present in myriad media: novels, oral ballads, plays, etc.  These media affected the way people thought about their world, the mental pattern.  Time was a line.  Lives were a line.  History was a line.  Relationships were a line.  All with a beginning, middle, and end.  We start in one place and finish in another.  We are moving forward, progressing, as a society.  One could argue that Hegel’s dialectic approach to history existed as a result of the mental pattern created by the linear form of narrative media.  What has happened to us in our modern day is that computers and the internet have changed our mental pattern, the way we think about the world.  

     The internet is not linear.  It is a complex web of interrelated texts and images that is navigated by a user.  While plays force the audience to engage with the text in the order that it is given, the internet affords the subject the freedom to engage at will. They can stop or start whenever they want to, or consume the media in whatever order and to what extent they feel motivated.  The effect on the mental pattern is two-fold: 1) The subject is no longer on the outside of the story looking in, watching and following but never directing.  He or she is now in the center looking out.  A play is like a transparent sphere into which the audience looks.  The internet places the audience inside the sphere and they look out into the universe.  This has the effect on the mind of making the audience believe that the world is there for them, that the world should react to their whims as individuals.  ‘My views are important, and all should respond accordingly.”  2) The linearity of thought is replaced with inter-webbedness.  No longer are audiences at the mercy of time, but time bends to our wants and desires.  We do not follow we lead.  The story is about us.  Multi-tasking, shorter attention spans, and impatience could be considered results of this mindset.

     The interactive documentary Hollow at hollowdocumentary.com utilizes these shifts in mental pattern to teach audiences about the struggles of the poor in the southern United States.  Instead of a traditional documentary that must be engaged on the director’s terms, which supports the ancient outside-looking-in philosophy and linear thinking, Hollow is an interactive experience which utilizes the capabilities of the internet to tap into the non-linear inside-looking-out mental pattern.  One can scroll any direction to view photographs or video or access links to other information.  Some videos show automatically, while others must be click to begin.  Their is layering and more than one media can play at a time.  Music from the film can be downloaded and drop-down menus  give access to news stories and factoids.  Much of these individual articulations are used in traditional documentary film (see Supersize Me) but the important distinction is that the user/spectator manipulates the text and images as they wish.  If one is watching a video about a woman who plays banjo for fun, he or she can stop and go back or forward and read a drop-down about the murder of the Mayor or download a track of her band playing a song.  This power of choice and manipulation supports the new mindset that the spectator user is the center looking out into the world.  They are in control of what happens.  

      This interactive approach to documentary could be counterproductive to the creators intent.  Since the medium is what changes the thought process, this medium works against any real change.  Without linearity there is no deadline, time does not factor in as having any real influence.  The documentary doesn’t follow that line and therefore doesn’t end.  Without the end, there is no threat, the audience does not feel any urgency about the problems presented by the documentary.  The content has no sufficient force to outweigh the influence of the medium.  

     Additionally, placing the user/spectator at the center reduces the importance of the message.  It also feeds the impatience of the user/spectator, as they don’t have to finish anything that they don’t want to.  With traditional film, the relationship between the creator and the audience is built on the audience watching for as long as the creator has their film going.  The film is the center, with us on the outside.  But with this documentary, no such relationship exist.  The artifact does what we want, so the message can be easily and readily ignored.  It implies a lack of importance to the content.  Film feels that the content is so important that we must watch all of it.  No such claim is made by this interactive medium.

Ultimately, the most moving and engaging aspects of this interactive experience are the short video clips about people.  This is essentially because for those moments the interactive experience ceases and it moves into traditional linear narrative.  Unfortunately, as soon as the clip is done it is brushed aside for something else.  That is what the real danger is.  The medium of the internet does not encourage the high valuation of content by the viewer.  By giving the power of selection to the viewer, they are implying a superior position to the viewer and devaluing their content and perspective by comparison.  The medium of the internet, by its nature, invites it content to be treated lightly.

     Perhaps my aversion to modern technophilia is that it does nothing to account for the potentially detrimental effects that the media can have on the relationship of the audience to the content.  It plays to the greater weakness of my nature.  I have been diagnosed ADHD (surprise!) and my natural tendency is to slip from one thing to the next.  I love linear narrative because it forces me to narrow my focus and give value to one thing, media like the internet feeds my weakness (though some would argue that it is not).  More importantly, artist who use the medium for the sake of the medium (to be current, perhaps) may find that the message they intend is undermined by the medium itself, like LDS religious filmography encourages linear thought about gospel topics when  circular or circuitous thought might be best (the course of the Lord being one eternal round and all).  The medium is the message and can overpower any overt message of content or form.