Show Don't Tell: A Rule That Isn't Right Even Though It Works

The received wisdom for writing in general is show don’t tell. Even with essays, it is much more convincing to show your work rather than hand out aphorisms (although an argument can be made for a well crafted aphorism). I’ve been interacting more than ever with this truism as I dive back into one of my first writing loves: the screenplay. 

There, the showing rather than telling has a practical dimension, as a screenplay is the means to shooting a film, and if the story does not work through the action and dialogue alone, it isn’t going to work. There is an additional corollary to this rule in screenwriting regarding dialogue. Optimally, it is said, dialogue should not do the work of the story. The images should do that. Dialogue, then, is freed up to do its own thing. The principle, and the terrible filmmaking that arises from ignoring it, really comes to life whenever you watch a movie where one character’s dialogue is relegated to exposition.

It goes something like this:

Character A: As you know, we are siblings, but dad’s death was hard on the family. And we’ve never been the same since.

It is even worse in science fiction, where dialogue is forced to do all kinds of gymnastics. In Gravity (2013), for example, much of the first act’s dialogue is spent telling trained astronauts the basics of spaceflight. [1]

From Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre (1981)

How “Show Don’t Tell” Works In Principle

So as I’ve been getting reacquainted with the screenplay as a form, I’ve also been consuming much of this kind of advice on dialogue. The idea is to talk as little as you need to and move the story ahead as much as you can with action. With little argument, the mind can construct many examples and reasons why this rule is a wise one to follow. By freeing up the dialogue, the story comes alive on its own, and dialogue can come in over that core story as a free floating element, able to characterize and contextualize rather than bear the burden of telling the story.

Of course, no fascistic application of any principle of craft is advised. But this one has a lot going for it.

Yet as I was redigesting this idea in an effort to get back into a screenwriter’s fighting trim, I rewatched the original Scenes from a Marriage (1973) by Ingmar Bergman. [2] The five part mini-series is made up almost entirely of simple scenes, many of them very long scenes, where people (mostly two people) talk to each other. It is an incredible work, one of my favorites of Bergman, and rather than feeling bogged down or tired, Scenes... is thrilling. The close examination of a marriage, predominantly by being a fly-on-the-wall in their key discussions, achieves the highest of dramatic heights.

So then, how does that work? How can one principle be so compelling and yet be unable to explain such a classic of film? And as this got me to thinking, I realized that Scenes… is far from the only film that appears to succeed while diametrically opposing this attitude toward dialogue — it isn’t even the only Bergman film that does this. (For a non-Bergman example, take Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981), a nearly two hour film almost entirely composed of one sit down conversation.) Even Andrei Tarkovsky’s legendary Stalker (1979), which has long periods without dialogue (or much action), many of the greatest insights come from conversation.

One can say that in art, rules are important to learn so that you can learn how to break them, and this is simply an example of a master breaking a rule.[3] While that might be a helpful way of thinking about it, breaking the rule seems to still work, and so what are we really getting at here? 

The real question is this: how do you break “show don’t tell” effectively?

From Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973)

But You Have to “Tell” the Story

Well, I have an idea. Scenes… involves a marriage (obviously), and a marriage is a long term intimate relationship where many of the key moments in the relationship itself are embedded in what the partners tell each other in major conversations. That is, sometimes the dialogue is the action itself. The dialogue is a core element of how these people are relating. 

Many marriages and romantic relationships in general have only a few key components: conversation, sex and divvying up the bills. While you can add in children to the mix, if any are in the picture, these are really just topics of conversation if we only focus on the marital relationship itself.

The purest way to express a marriage dissolving on celluloid is through conversation and sex. In other words, talking is the action for most of this story.

It’s a similar for Stalker, where the information coming in through conversation is a major part of the film. We don’t know what to rely on for the rules or the history of the mysterious Zone or its supposedly wish-granting room. A lot of critical information is only told to us, rather than shown, and often the rules of the Zone are spoken by a character and then later violated in action, proving the character wrong. That reinforces the unreliability, the sense of hearsay, rumor, tall-tales, and truth  all mixed together. This unknowability of the truth is a major theme in the film. So again, the talking is the action that the story is about.

That seems satisfactory.

But even after coming up with this explanation, “show don’t tell” kept bothering me. I couldn’t put it to bed. And so it was on my mind as I continued to watch movies. And I noticed something even stranger.

Perhaps the most unforgivable violation of “show don’t tell” is having a story rely heavily on voice over narration.

Yet I contend that two of the greatest films of all time used it extensively — especially in their most iconic, deliciously masterful sequences.

Tell and Show

I am of course referring to the narrated montages in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) and the opening sequence of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

Casino is particularly flagrant as it falls in and out of voice over all the time. The mafiosi even trade off narration duties a bit, overlaying perspectives. Take the introduction to the gambling industry right after the classic opening scene and credits: 

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We get characterization, oral storytelling, tantalizing hints at a rise-and-fall tragedy, expressionistic pairing of images and narration, and the salacious details of the casino business model.

It comes right out and just says everything. It is more tell than show, as the images really say nothing on their own, they only illustrate what is being said. Plus, it is voiceover narration, seen as the faux pas par excellence among the screenwriting gurus who write all the books with titles like Write a Screenplay in 2 Weeks and How to Make Millions Screenwriting.

The success of this sequence in particular and the film in general gives the lie to the whole “Show Don’t Tell” truism.

Similarly, The Fellowship of the Ring brings us in with an elaborate world building montage for five full minutes. It is the classic speculative fiction no-no of an info dump. And in a three hour movie, it isn’t like they don’t have time for slower world building (in fact, they do a lot of that as well). You could say that the movie simply wouldn’t work without this catch up, and a genius like Jackson knows how to do it without you throwing a fit, but the trouble goes beyond that.

The introductory exposition is incredible. It builds scale (in both time and space), gives the audience (even those uninitiated to the books) a sufficient first look at Tolkein’s Middle Earth, and sets up the stakes that will last for the entire trilogy (the extended edition runs a staggering 11 hours and 22 minutes).

Again, what is incontrovertible is proven to be oh-so controvertible.

I think in both cases, though, something is going on that we forget about with film. Yes it is visual, but it is aural, too. And oral storytelling is the original human artform. Here, the images support the audio the same way the score usually supports the images.

It’s still film, but the primacy of image and sound are inverted from the norm.

One wonders if this isn’t a form that could continue to be pushed further, by more filmmakers creating more films that are essentially campfire stories backed by tremendous imagery and music, only occasionally dropping into scene.

Why not?

Many documentaries essentially do this already. The work of Errol Morris is particularly instructive here. His films, especially works like The Thing Blue Line (1988), blend the storytelling of the interview subjects with bare recreations of the events as described. Along with the incredible strings scored by the one and only Philip Glass, these elements bolster and highlight the narrator’s voice—not the other way around. This all no doubt sounds familiar, as it is the most common form of documentary filmmaking today.

The set of every major Hollywood film from 2009 on.

The True Cost of Showing

So why does any of this really matter? Especially given that “Show Don’t Tell” in filmmaking is borrowed from the world of literature, we should expect it to fit awkwardly at times. That it works as often as it does might even recommend it.

But this rule and others like it point to a deeper problem in today’s film industry. It is a symptom of something that has virtually eliminated the possibility of high quality, big budget Hollywood productions.

Rules like “Show Don’t Tell” are guidelines that give studio executives the ability to grade a script and an edit of a film. Connected to this are the plot beats, story structure, and a number of other artificial grading sticks.

Let’s look at a blockbuster superhero movie franchise from a few decades ago to see why these grading sticks are so aggressively in place now.

Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) was a cultural phenomenon. It was expensive for the time but made up for it by being wildly successful at the box office. In the film, Burton gives us a view of the Caped Crusader with a lot of the director’s trademark style mixed in.

After its success, Warner Brothers green lit the sequel in an effort to print money. In Batman Returns (1992), we see Burton really letting us have it. While the original was a balance between the director’s touch and the needs of standard blockbuster fare, the sequel was far more Burtonesque.

For whatever reason, it was seen as a failure (although it made back its budget easily). Was this “failure” because Burton had more creative freedom (the kind of thing directors used to earn when their films made a lot of money)? Possibly. Whether that made it less successful we can’t really know, but the difference in creative freedom is certainly a noticeable difference between the two.

So if you are a studio mogul looking to write your next big check to a filmmaker, maybe you think twice about giving it to a director who takes risk. And if you want to use a risk taking director anyway for the name recognition, send studio representatives to handcuff them every step of the way.

Fast forward 30 years, and the process of making major Hollywood films (especially superhero movies) has been honed to such a degree that no filmmaker is making really good, interesting big budget films. On the other hand, they also aren’t making really terrible films that completely fall apart. Everyone is make mediocre to fine big budget spectacles.

Now, you might like some of these movies, but compare them to the philosophically complex Robocop (1987) or the visionary Jurassic Park (1993). Those films are both great popcorn movies and great works of art.

In short, studios have made movies much less likely to fail, but the same techniques that do that also eliminate the risk-taking required to make transcendent masterpieces. (Check out my “Scripts for the Ruling Class” for more on this and related points.)

“Show Don’t Tell” didn’t cause big movies to go bad, but it contributes to a view of art that lacks the risk-taking it needs to thrive. Yes, that means more movies will be ruined by telling rather than showing, but that’s the risk it takes to make Casino.

Notes

[1] Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014) are the same movie to me. They came out one year apart and are a part of this budding genre I’d like to call sentiment-in-space. So much of big, commercial filmmaking is about creating a gestalt, an imprint of a film in your head that is more like a movie poster come to life, rather than any actual storytelling breakthrough or insight into the human condition. They can, and sometimes do, do that, but they’re special function, I believe, is this imprint. And these two movies, at least for this viewer, leave the exact same imprint.

[2] At some point, the HBO remake will need to be given some thought. I watched it and loved it, but I couldn’t help feeling that the connection to Bergman’s masterpiece was a hindrance rather than a benefit. The acting, however, was commendable in the extreme. While Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson are superlative, the new duo of Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac met the challenge.

[3] “You have to learn the rules to know how to break them,” is my least favorite cliche in arts education. It is simply wrong. What educators can teach are guidelines that control quality, but they cannot express the entire possible combination of creative decisions that might lead to a great film. It should be something like, “You have to learn the rules to start making things that aren’t half bad. Then, you’ll have experience enough to take the kinds of risk that lead to the kind of aesthetic discoveries that make great art great.” That is, unfortunately, a much worse aphorism.

New Publication in The Rumen

Check out my essay on writing poetry with a group. It was published by The Rumen, a great literary journal.

A Few Unbidden Neologisms

It is the duty of all who make their coin from writing to introduce the cliches that will go on to ruin otherwise competent writing in years to come. It is in this spirit that I offer the following neologisms, with examples and explication. I hope that these will serve the reader well.

It is well understood that once a name is given to something, its appearance becomes easier to spot. When we consider the heavy adoption of new terms over the last several years, this becomes clear.

As an example, the term gaslighting comes to mind. Of course, this term was already around long before it gained broad public understanding and frequent use (it comes from the 1938 stage play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton), but it wasn’t until the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election that the term gained traction—as made evident by a quick Google Trends analysis of the topic. Once it grabbed the general consciousness, we all saw gaslighting wherever we looked.

In opposing political opinions, in the actions of loved ones, in newspaper framing—we were all being gaslit. We might even look back through our lives and realize that we’ve been gaslit all along, just exactly how did these student loans appear around our necks?

Perhaps the earliest form of gaslighting any of us can remember is from childhood, when you were alone in a room with a friend. They farted, and yet they blamed it on you after you pointed it out, your friend boldly claiming in King’s English that, “He who smelt it, dealt it.”

Neologisms give us opportunities to see our lives in new ways. It helps us make clarity out of a random assortment of data. It’s not unlike learning the constellations. Once we have a picture associated with a grouping, we can easily pick out Cassiopeia and Orion and Scorpio. What’s more, we can orient ourselves within them. If we were told to learn where the B-type main sequence star Eta Ursae Majoris (also known as Alkaid) is in the night sky, we would have trouble picking it out from the vast, sparkling lights cast into the black dome above. But when we learn that it is the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper, we can find it almost immediately.

The Phrase as a Curse

Vsevolod Garshin’s Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1884)

However, we must never allow compelling neologisms to become shields from valid criticism and swords against just critics—though we must resign ourselves to the knowledge that the better a term is, the more likely it will be used in the mean art of malicious rhetoric.

If we return to the term gaslight, we will see exactly how the power of a term can become too attractive to those wishing to manipulate a situation. A public becomes so attune to the idea of gaslighting and so averse to those who light the gas, as it were, that we find it difficult to resist the word’s power to reframe our mindset.

Is it gaslighting to disagree with another person’s interpretation of events? Is it gaslighting to cover up an infidelity that a lover suspects? 

In the first instance, possibly, but an outsider could only know that by investigating the heart of the suspected gaslighter, an impossible query. In the second instance, it is very likely gaslighting per the dictionary. But it exists in a drama so ancient as to likely have arrived a few dull years after the advent of monogamy. If we reframe it with the idea of gaslighting, we lose our human understanding of the tribulations that befall human life.

Once upon a time, an adulterer was an understandable human who made understandable errors, potentially forgivable even as we understand why their lover might find those errors impossible to forgive. But when we understand their actions as gaslighting, we only see the adulterer as an abusive monster—not merely one who committed some hurtful acts for reasons we can sympathize with.

To broaden our scope and appreciate the greater implications, we might consider how a neologism might take root and shelter those in power from their just desserts. The term conspiracy theorist comes to mind immediately.

The term, like gaslight, was in use long before it gained its current purchase. What’s more, conspiracy theory once only meant a theory of a conspiracy, not retaining the crystalline fixity it holds in our minds today. Nevertheless, it has come not only to mean a suggested conspiracy of people behind certain events, but one that is prima facie incorrect. To be a conspiracy theorist is to have and (what’s worse) share bad ideas—either from stupidity, credulity, deviancy, or a mixture of some or all of the above.

This is a powerful term because it really holds true for many things we would call conspiracy theories. But, then, does that mean there are no conspiracies? A convenient prevailing belief for those who conspire.

So just as we have outlined the purpose of neologisms, we have also outlined the concerns we might harbor if any were to take flight in the grand conversation.

But we must brave the risks of speech, lest we are silenced.

And so, in an effort to remain talking as long as one can, I propose the following neologisms to be borrowed and used, uncited, to go live their lives free in the world.

Water Politics

Definition: A disagreement in which the underlying position of two sides is intractable because it is ultimately about the well being of the individuals on either side—rather than any rationalizing or argumentation that is put forth to convince others.

Example: “When Jim starts talking about the divorce, I tune out. It’s just water politics.”

Whenever you see a disagreement where the stakes are zero sum and the sides are taken in self-interest, you are witnessing water politics at play. Yes, each side might construct intricate, even elegant moral arguments, but these are all beside the point due to their profound motivation.

In the world, water politics has been used to refer to what you think it might—political battles over water. But here, we use that only as a framework.

The fact is, if an oil company is destroying your water source, you will never be convinced through some historical justification for the march of capitalism and the essential good of private property. Without clean drinking water, you die.

Those dire stakes are what makes real life water politics so intractable for the belligerents. And that is what lends so much power to the neologism.

Ghost Therapy

Definition: Making a psychoanalysis of a broad group of people to undermine their position.

Example: “Ariana says all sports fans are exercising nationalism. I say she’s doing ghost therapy.”

Ghost therapy denounces an entire group of people through the language and reasoning of psychoanalysis. But unlike real psychoanalysis, where an individual is listened to for a long period of time, ghost therapy generalizes over an entire group of people, often without any long-term, sympathetic search to understand them.

When people claim that the Kennedy assassination was carried out by the C.I.A. rather than a lone nut, ghost therapists say they just can’t face the fact that random events might have dire consequences that no one can control.

Ghost therapy is hard to argue with, because it often has some level of plausibility. But no psychoanalysis of an entire group of people is plausible—as the art was developed on an individual basis.

It might be true that some people that believe Kennedy was killed by the deep state hold such beliefs to restore a sense of order to the universe. But that doesn’t mean that sharing that belief means you hold them for the same reasons. 

And for those dying to see it in black-and-white: yes, ghost therapy is a form of ad hominem.

Hot Tag

Definition: When somebody helps you out when you need it most.

Example: “Thanks for the hot tag. I couldn’t have moved all this by myself.”

Hot tag is borrowed from the world of professional wrestling. There, it is used in tag team matches, where one team mate stands in the corner while the other wrestles the opposing team. To enter the match while standing in the corner, your team mate must tag your hand. Then, you switch positions.

A hot tag occurs when the opposing team has absolutely destroyed the active wrestler (legal man). And when it looks all but hopeless, they tag out to the fresh wrestler in the corner.

This is a favorite spot in professional wrestling due to the inherent relief and renewed excitement in the prospect of victory.

In that same spirit, hot tag can be used in exasperation at how helpful another person can be. Maybe you were 50 cents short for a coffee, and the person in line behind you gave you two quarters. Maybe you were woken up by the baby crying, and your partner tells you they’ve got it this time. There are many hot tags in life, and they deserve a term to celebrate them.

And what better world to borrow a term for that feeling from than the exuberant, emotional realm of professional wrestling?

Who Rides the Wagon

[Note: Much of the information presented below regarding Nerthus was gathered from a single source, A History of Pagan Europe by Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick. If this is interesting to you, I encourage you to read the masterpiece that it flows from.]

The Suebians lived along the Elbe in ancient Europe. A Germanic tribe descended from the Irminones, they followed the ways handed down to them through time. They did not write down their own customs, beliefs, or histories — but in the first century CE, the Roman politician and historian Tacitus recorded a Suebian ritual in honor of the Mother Earth goddess Nerthus (Latinized from the Proto-Germanic *Nerþuz).

Nerthus was said to live on her own island, and when the attending priest sensed the presence of the goddess, he unveiled her wagon. He would then lead a team of slaves to accompany the wagon as it circled the Suebi territory, drawn by two choice heifers. Along the way, there would be much celebration for the blessings of bountiful growth that such a visit brought the people and the land, and while she made this wagon ride, all iron goods and weapons were put away, all acts of war abstained from.

But while the wagon procession called for great rejoicing, anyone who dared to look upon the goddess faced the punishment of death.

After the wagon completed its perambulation around the territory, the wagon was brought to the waters near Nerthus’ island where the slaves ritually cleaned the wagon. They were then drowned in the same waters.

W.G. Collingwood’s The Lovesickness of Frey (1908)

Origins of Nerthus

The true origins of the Goddess Nerthus are obscure, thanks to the lack of a written record. She does seem to have profound connections to the Vanir — a group of Norse gods associated with vitality, health, fertility, and divination.

Among the Vanir, Frey (also Freyr) and Freya were said to be the children of the sea god Njörd (Latinized from the Old Norse Njörðr). Njörd lived in what was called the shipyard, and he ruled over the peace and tumult of the waters. He is said to have had a sister-wife who bore him his children, but this wife remains unnamed in the Eddas. Some say she was Nerthus, others are not so sure.

The issue centers on the names of Nerthus and Njörd. They stem from the same name: *Nerþuz. Nerthus is the direct latinization, while Njörd comes from the name’s immigration into Old Norse.

So there might have been a change in sex for the god over time, as well as a change in dominion. Of course there might have been a surviving Mother Earth tradition that borrowed the name at some point. We do not know.

Before moving on, we should mention that the worship and attribution of Frey is quite similar to that of Nerthus (who might be Frey’s mother or a development out of his father). Frey travelled in a wagon and had strong associations with the sea, including a ship that he could fold and put in his pocket when he didn’t need it. Further, it was a strong taboo to commit violence in Frey’s temples, and weapons were not allowed inside.

And while Nerthus was not necessarily a Vanir, Frey certainly was. The Vanir, as we have discussed, were gods of fertility and prosperity. Nerthus, too, was worshipped for such powers. And so, there is still a third possibility: that Nerthus is an entity that spawned (or spawned from) both Frey and Njörd.

The Trundholm sun chariot, National Museum of Denmark

Wagon Ceremonies Across Germanic Groups

The wagon ceremony of Nerthus is compelling and worth tracing out for more connections. It’s simplicity, clarity of purpose, and severity recommend it as one of the great rituals from pagan Europe. Despite this, we have very little record of it, relying singly on Tacitus. And yet, when we keep our eyes open, we find commonalities throughout European paganism.

We find King Athaneric sending a wagon through his territory, carrying the image of a Pagan god that the leader was trying to reinstate after Christianization. The goddess Berencyntia had her image carried around Autun in a wagon to promote the growth of crops. There are also a number of burials that involve the dead buried inside a chariot, as in Dejbjerg Mose in Denmark. And the examples continue.

This prevalence of ceremonial wagon rides is maintained also in the material culture of European pagan societies. For instance, the Trundholm solar chariot, discovered in a peat bog and dated to 1400 BCE. The solar chariot is a gorgeous artifact, a sculpture depicting a horse pulling a wagon that carries a sun disk.

Now, part of this can be explained simply by the ease of travel in a wagon. At the time, it was likely the best mode of transportation. A god or goddess seems a likely candidate to have the best in vehicles. Even still, when ceremonies build around particular items, there tends to be attributions that slowly mount over time, giving guidance for later usage of the symbols. It is that influence over later symbolic use of wagons that we turn to now.

Visconti-Sforza’s Triumphal Chariot card design

Survival in Occult Symbolism

Wagons continue in occult symbolism today, and perhaps if we consider the story of Nerthus, we might better understand the lineage of this image and its full meaning.

The Visconti-Sforza tarot, the oldest known tarot design, has a Chariot card in its major arcana — the Chariot card would continue through the popular Marseilles and Waite-Smith designs and beyond. In the original Visconti deck, the Chariot is driven by two white horses and the driver is a blonde woman in regal attire. While the Marseilles deck also has a blonde driving the chariot, many readers interpret the character as a young male. Still later developments solidified the driver as a man, often a warrior.

Nevertheless, the correspondences in the Chariot are quite interesting. Seeing later iterations, it is clear that while the driver developed away from Nerthus, the symbolism retained similar attributes. For instance, there are several aquatic references in the Chariot of Crowley’s Thoth deck:

Cancer is the cardinal sign of the element of Water (Hence St. John Baptist's Day, and the various ceremonials connected with water.), and represents the first keen onrush of that element. Cancer also represents the path which leads from the great Mother Binah to Geburah, and is thus the influence of the Supernals descending through the Veil of Water (which is blood) upon the energy of man, and so inspires it. It corresponds, in this way, to The Hierophant, which, on the other side of the Tree of Life, brings down the fire of Chokmah.

…His only function is to bear the Holy Grail.

Upon his armour are ten Stars of Assiah, the inheritance of celestial dew from his mother… 

Cancer is the house of the Moon; there are thus certain analogies between this card and that of the High Priestess…

The central and most important feature of the card is its centre — the Holy Grail.

— The Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley (p. 85-6) [Emphasis added.]

As we can see, there is a strong connection between the feminine powers of Binah and the High Priestess, as well as multiple references to water. Crowley emphasizes that the most important element of his Chariot card is the Holy Grail, which is a chalice — another symbol of water.

Bringing Together the Water and the Wagon

Aleister Crowley’s Thoth The Chariot card design

So let’s gather these insights together and think about them. Nerthus was a goddess who lived on an island, worshipped as a Mother Earth or Great Mother figure. Her central ceremony was a wagon ride.

But Nerthus was not created whole cloth, her name suggests a strong connection to the Norse sea god Njörd. She may be a reinterpretation of Njörd or his otherwise unnamed sister-wife. Thus, she has her own connection to the water that we can derive linguistically through her name’s connection to the Vanir. But the connection to water goes much further. She lives on an island, and her wagon ceremony finds its grim finale in the water.

We find that the tarot’s interpretation of the Chariot makes this connection again, with a powerful feminine energy being transported by chariot (which is, after all, a wagon).

These connections are complicated by the fact that the chariot is so often used as a mythological transport for the sun — consider the above mentioned solar chariot or the Greek god Helios who travelled with the sun in his chariot across the sky. [1]

So then, when we find the symbol of a wagon or chariot, how do we disambiguate? Do we simply check for moon/water/feminine imagery or solar/fire/masculine imagery? That would work in a pinch. However, we still need to understand why these dual purposes.

One is tempted to say that the similarity of transport comes down to the paths which the moon and sun appear to take in the sky above. If one is carried by chariot, why not the other? But the wagon ceremonies of Nerthus and related ones in the pagan world occurred on terra firma.

But inside the question is our clue. Chariots and wagons move across the land. They may bring great reward, but these rewards are not permanent and arrive across the earth over time. Celestial cycles are a great example of this, because just as the sun appears to move from the eastern horizon to the western horizon during the course of the day, so too do the bounties of the sun (crops, namely) appear in Spring and increase over Summer until they go dormant in Autumn.

The chariot and wagon are symbols for divine forces that are experienced in waves, in time. Note that Nerthus lived on an island and only began her wagon ride once her attending priest knew that it was “time” for another ceremony. Living in the West after Christianization, it is easy to fall into the idea of a god as non-temporal, as a permanent and ever present fixture of existence. The chariot and wagon present a different form of presence. The god of Abraham can’t really visit you, because he was always there. The goddess who rides a wagon, however, comes and goes.

The chariot and the wagon, then, connect us to an entirely different tradition of relating to the presence of divinity. It is a form that was more or less eradicated by force over the last 17 centuries, surviving through the mysteries of the occult and silent artifacts.

By looking closely at Nerthus, we discover this thread through the Western tradition, a new way to understand the blessings that come to us in time.

Notes

[1] There are a number of other charioteers carrying the sun on its passage through the sky. But there is one in particular that is interesting given its similarity to Nerthus. It comes from the Slavic and Baltic pagans who worshipped a sun goddess named Saulė. She, too, is worshipped for bringing prosperity to the plants, and what is her conveyance? A copper-wheeled chariot. At the end of the day, Saulė washes her horses in the waters of the sea before returning to her home, which is also the land of the dead. The Slavic and Baltic people who worshipped Saulė were much less linguistically related to the Suebi than the Suebi were to the Norse, yet we find a similar goddess. What makes this even more interesting is the relative dominance of masculine forces attributed to the sun across the world.

I Will Follow: Binging Gilmore Girls in Lockdown

Binging a television show during quarantine is a subtle art. The show’s characters need to have an interesting enough life to keep you engaged and give you an escape from your current predicament. While they and their situation must be interesting, it can’t be too exotic, interesting, or enviable, otherwise you risk rendering too palpable the difference between the television show and your life stuck at home.

Those guidelines will keep you within a range of television shows that are comforting, but you need one more crucial filter to find a bingeable show while stuck in your home. That is, the show must have stakes high enough to build tension but not so high that you burn out your attention with one or two episodes.

Only a few shows available on the major streaming services thread this needle. Of those, I have recently been watching through, Gilmore Girls might be the best of the group.

The Girls of Gilmore

Before beginning an analysis of why it is perhaps the best, readily available binge TV, let’s get a synopsis out of the way. How does it work? Why does it work?

Gilmore is essentially a wish fulfillment fantasy of a near perfect mother-daughter relationship. The two main characters Lorelai and Rory are a symbiotic dyad, as much best friends as parent and child. Their bond is deep and good natured and genuinely loving. That bond alone wouldn’t make for great storytelling, so it is contrasted with the mother-daughter relationship between Lorelai and her mother Emily, a cold and controlling woman obsessed with the expectations and mores of high society.

That is all to say that the majority of the show is an examination of intra-female communication. There are boyfriends, potential boyfriends, fathers, and male townies who populate the show as well, but the major characters and connections are all female.

That female-based generational drama is further exacerbated through a class dynamic that runs through the show. Lorelai left the world of her wealthy parents, but daughter Rory — being a privately educated, Ivy League bound teenager — has no need to rebel against her grandparents. That closing of the loop (the granddaughter bridging the family schism between the grandmother and mother) causes conflict and context for much of the show.

The class elements make for smooth going. The problems are by and large non-problems. An entire episode is devoted to Rory’s struggle over which college to attend: Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Lorelai’s origin story is one of a brave rich girl deciding not to be rich. While one could wax Marxian about the ideological effects of encouraging people to sympathize with the bourgeoisie, one can’t say it makes the show bad binging fodder. Returning to the earlier point of not-too-high-but-not-too-low stakes, rich people’s non-trauma based family drama is perfect to hit that note.

After all, we all have families, so we can sympathize with not getting along with our uptight mother or trying to support your well meaning teen through the hard times of adolescence. But the absence of real life-or-death consequences keeps the lid on dangers that might blow out our attention.

Brand New Nostalgia

Gilmore evokes a unique form of nostalgia at this moment. The show was never much of a ratings smash, but it did very well for the second-tier broadcast network the WB (for the show’s last season, the WB reshuffled into the CW). That means most of us weren’t watching it weekly on its first run.

That being said, Gilmore was sent into syndication in 2004, after its third season. And so it became part of the general background noise of daytime and early evening TV in the nearly two decades since.

Gilmore’s mixture of nostalgic familiarity pairs nicely with its season long (and longer) arcs, which most viewers have never examined. So there is this strange feeling when watching the show — it has the comfort of nostalgia with the shimmering newness of something you’ve never seen.

And beyond that strange pairing, the nostalgia it deals in is the latest kind: nostalgia for the naughties.

Ending a relatively brief ten years ago, the naughties are unmined nostalgic territory and are still a ways off from the much upheld 30 year nostalgia cycle. That means Gilmore doesn’t lay in that fatigued pile of the over-sampled, over-referenced pop culture group of the current nostalgia trend (today it seems to be sliding from the eighties to the nineties).

The nostalgia doesn’t end there. As a show focused on the milestones of childhood and parenting, the content is built out of the things everyone can find something to be nostalgic about. To go one step further, the show is set in the sleepy New England town Stars Hollow. Stars Hollow sprouted from the mind of show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino when she visited a similarly sleepy Connecticut town and experienced such overwhelming nostalgia that she pitched the show entirely on the setting. This show is an onion of nostalgic layers, and that onion-like quality is the only reason it makes me cry.

Smart and Funny, but not Overly So

Gilmore is notable for the cracking wise protagonists who chatter incessantly in bubbly repartee in a whimsical small town filled with other clever talking, unbelievably good looking people. At its worst, the characters appear like narcissists who are psychopathically entertaining themselves by running spontaneous monologues. But that is at its worst. For the most part, it hums along with relative ease — just enough references and kind-of-funny-jokes to keep your ears leaning in.

Much like the level of stakes mentioned earlier, dialogue that is frequently hilarious and razor sharp would not be bingeable. It would be satiating. Great TV rides the line between fulfilling and vapid, compelling and boring. It’s middle seat viewing: you’re not laid back as you fall asleep or sitting on the edge. Neither is sustainable.

So it must be noted here, this is not an insult to the show. I’m not saying that it isn’t as smart or funny as the writers think it is. I’m saying that the writers were working on a television show, and that requires a certain kind of writing.

What We Binge

As I continue to watch copious amounts of Gilmore, I ask myself what it is I’m consuming. Why is it so comforting, especially now when in lockdown?

Of course, a major component is the simulation of social connection, of living a life. Without the regular activities that define us, we sit at home drowning in an ego that has nothing to boost it, comfort it, confirm it. It is a feeling of coming apart. While yogis and gurus have long taught us to transcend the ego, no one said that we should dive into the practice of its annihilation without any warning or preparation.

And so, we need to do something to give us a feeling of social reality.

But that only explains viewing in quarantine. What begins to open up in us is the horror of all the viewing we did before we were confined to our houses. Before the lockdowns, we were already sinking into confinement. We were already feeling the need to reach out to comforting media. Think about it: even when we were free to travel and cavort and socialize in large groups, we were already binging television shows.

In that way, Gilmore is not only a view into the needs of our current life in these extreme circumstances — it is a view into what needs we weren’t fulfilling before.

While other forms of escapist media involve danger, excitement, explosions, violence, and other kinds of far out living, Gilmore provides something else. It provides a cozy experience where turbulence, for the most part, comes in the form of everyday inconvenience and miscommunication. It shows us the dream of a life of general comfort, living in a community we know and love and that knows and loves us, being in a perfect relationship with our child or mother — it’s the idyll of being nice people living nice lives.

The enduring popularity of Gilmore is evidence that these humble fantasies are unrealized in us. That we binged this content even before quarantine points to a profound lack of nurturing in our society. We watch Gilmore because we don’t live in Stars Hollow, because we don’t connect fully to our family, because we don’t know the nice life. The question transforms from asking what comfort Gilmore Girls gives us, to why we need its comfort in the first place.

On This Path, Effort: Reading the Bhagavad Gita in Quarantine

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My Flesh Is Afraid: Watching The Seventh Seal in a Pandemic

“God has sentenced us to punishment. We shall all perish in the black death. You, standing there like gaping cattle, you who sit there in your glutted complacency, do you know that this may be your last hour? Death stands right behind you. I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads. Which one of you shall he strike first? You there, who stand staring like a goat, will your mouth be twisted into the last unfinished gasp before nightfall? And you, woman, who bloom with life and self-satisfaction, will you pale and become extinguished before the morning dawns? You back there, with your swollen nose and stupid grin, do you have another year left to dirty the earth with your refuse? Do you know, you insensible fools, that you shall die today or tomorrow, or the next day, because all of you have been sentenced? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been sentenced, sentenced! ”

— Monk in a flagellant procession addressing townspeople

I went to the grocery store yesterday in the small town where I live. News of a coming lock down sent people out for supplies in droves. Standing in the crowded aisles swarming with nervous shoppers, too many to maintain their social distancing protocols, I witnessed the fear that I’ve been fighting in myself. For someone outside of the high risk population, I am not afraid of the virus. I am respectful of the things I must do to not spread it myself, but the virus is not likely to kill me. But looking at the empty shelves, overhearing employees whispering about layoffs, seeing the carts overloaded with staple foods, I became afraid.

The response to the pandemic is pandemonium. The people hoard food, and the stock market crashes. Public officials walk out during their live on-air presentations. We receive images from around the world where public spaces are empty. We read projections, the numbers of those who will die. We stay indoors, forgoing social gatherings. Restaurants and bars close. And all large buildings once full with the living are empty and dim — all except the hospitals that brace for the coming waves.

In all of this, we confront not a virus but the horror of death. That little black bird we always shoo away from our thoughts can no longer be scared off our shoulder. Most of us will survive, but our feigned ignorance of death will not.

That awakening drove the panicked into the grocery store. And as I watched them, I joined them. I thought of our basic needs, searching among the half empty shelves for food. And when I returned home, I knew it was time to watch The Seventh Seal again.

The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab

Things as They Are

“I’m only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes.”

— Painter speaking to the Knight's squire Jöns

The Seventh Seal is Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece. It is, perhaps, the greatest film ever made. It follows the medieval knight Antonius Block who was convinced to go off to fight in the crusades. Ten years later, he returns to his native Sweden only to find it devastated by an ongoing plague. While resting on a rocky shore, Death visits him. After a life without any meaningful act, the Knight challenges Death to a game of chess — it gives him a reprieve, enough time to do one meaningful thing before he leaves.

What follows is a kaleidoscope of humanity, bright with the illumination of plague. We witness the many ways that humans might confront the fact of life and death, confrontations made palpable by the roaming scourge of boils and vomit and swift, agonizing ends.

The Seventh Seal reminds us that plagues rid humanity of any illusions about our time here. Plagues do not change the ultimate forms of existence. They only chant, over and over, what was already true: we were always going to die.

In an early scene, the Knight’s squire Jöns — who deals with the brutality of the battlefield and the black death with humor, drink, and the company of friendly women — follows his lord to a church. There, the Knight contemplates the big questions while Jöns stays back to cavort with the artist painting on the church’s walls.

Jöns looks over the art, noting to its creator that the scenes of dying peasants is depressing. The painter says that it is not the artist’s job to worry about the effect of his art. He merely shows the truth of what is happening. One cannot avoid thinking that such a defense works for the film as a whole, and that here as we talk about plagues during a time of a pandemic, we must remember that it is important to talk about death and allow ourselves to think about it because it is happening. All around us. Yes, of course, it is happening now in the time of a pandemic, but it was always happening.

We are waking up from a long stupor, when death was a private matter suffered inside of houses. Death visited the neighborhood one family at a time. When it knocked on the door across the street, we rationalized it an unlikely tragedy. No reason to worry ourselves with it.

But in a pandemic we are facing this visitor as a collective. Those who are at risk know that they might die very soon. Those who are not at risk know that they might spread death with the shaking of a hand. Just as we were always going to die, we have always been intertwined in the struggle of life.

We take measures now to not spread the illness, doing our part to save others, and others do their part to save us. But we were always doing that. Every time you ate a sandwich or took a shower or drove to the park, you were at every moment silently helped along by the labor of others — those immigrants picking tomatoes in the heat, the bright-vested workers on the roadside fixing the waterlines, the cashier who sells you gas by the gallon.

The artist must show us death so that we remember it. And in remembering it, we might also appreciate life and those who help us live it.

The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab

The Emptiness is a Mirror

“The emptiness is a mirror turned toward my own face. I see myself in it, and I am filled with fear and disgust.”

— The Knight Antonius Block giving confession to Death, disguised as a priest

With death tolls and rumors of supply shortages, we now cannot stop thinking about death. Where once our culture fiercely avoided the topic, it is now the only topic imaginable. What do we see when we stare into it?

We see now that the long secularization of society somehow forgot to weave comfort for the dying. We see now that the youth we celebrate is precious only because it is fleeting. We see now that all the events and activity of public life is reducible to the lonely places we keep our beds. We understand more about our lives now than ever before.

Each character in The Seventh Seal represents a way to handle the anxiety of death, and these coping mechanisms around death are inextricably tied to ways to live. In fact, they are one in the same.

You have the cuckold Plog, who waves his hammer around in empty threats. For him, the performance of masculinity holds the thoughts of death at bay. His wife Lisa seduces the traveling performer Skat, reveling in her power. For her, the performance of femininity calms the thoughts of oblivion.

Mia, the actress, is a loving wife and mother, who takes care of those around her. Jof, the actor, is a loving husband and father, content to revel in his otherworldly visions and outward silliness. The squire Jöns pursues a nihilist’s course of hedonism and sarcastic distance, though he keeps protecting the innocent — belying a more complex machinery at work.

Antonius Block, the Knight, questions everything. When Death himself asks him, “Won’t you ever stop asking questions?” the Knight replies, “No. Never.” He can never stop seeking answers about the existence of God and the secrets behind Death’s shroud. Until the very end, he calls out to God for an answer. The emptiness of a universe with death and no reason for existence is unbearable to him, and yet he faces the horror, he calls out to it.

There is a character who turns from the seminary to looting the dead. There is a girl who materializes the fear of death into her personal lord Satan.

And finally, there is the mute girl, rescued from a rape by Jöns early in the film. The things she has seen in her plague ridden town are so unspeakable that she is rendered unable to speak. Though her actions communicate. When her would-be rapist appears in the forest dying of plague, she tries to offer the man a sip of water. And when Death arrives at the Knight’s castle at the end of the film, she is the only one smiling. She kneels down, as if in prayer, and speaks her only line of the film. “It is finished.”

These characters show us the many forms we take handling the questions of being. Their depictions are neither endorsements nor condemnations. They simply are. And when we see them flickering on the screen against the night in our self imposed isolation, we see ourselves as we brace against the rising tide of a virus.

It is not the time to turn away. It is not the time to forget. The pandemic is a time to face, to discover what it was we were doing all those years before. It is in this discovery that we might find the threads to guide us until our deaths, whether they be tomorrow from the virus or decades from now.

It is in the middle passage of the film when the Knight has supper with the traveling family of performers: Jof, the fool who can see the truth of things; Mia, the practical mother who cares for others; Mikael, the baby who embodies the eternal rejuvenation of children. The family reveals the blessing that is always there, that is forever in reach, to give birth and propel life forward again. It is our one resistance to death, our only path to forgiveness for our failures — we see death but turn to life and say, “Again.”

In all of his wandering, the Knight finally finds a family for whom a kind act could give meaning. Shepherding them away from the plague infested coast fulfills the promise of the reprieve afforded by the game of chess with Death itself.

They dine on fresh picked strawberries and sup of fresh milk. It is there that the Knight understands that this memory, if only this one, can make a lifetime worthwhile. It is when we are together with the hope of a future generation that we can make sense of the mess and struggle of earthly things. And all the while, in the background of this scene, hangs the mask of a skull twisting gently in the breeze. Death watches over everything, even the simple holiness of a shared meal.

And what does that mean for us who now feel death’s presence at the dinner table? Are we to learn the lesson of the Knight? Should we take care to hold the blessed moments carefully?

Death will come, yes. But only after life. And in life — even in a pandemic — there are things that are sweet. Sweeter, even, than strawberries.

“I shall remember this moment. The silence, the twilight, the bowls of strawberries and milk, your faces in the evening light. Mikael sleeping. Jof with his lyre. I’ll try to remember what we have talked about. I’ll carry this memory between my hands as carefully as if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh milk. And it will be an adequate sign — it will be enough for me.”

— The Knight Antonius Block

The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab

The Persistent Occult

“To provide a fixed point as a fulcrum for human activity is to solve the problem of Archimedes, by realizing the use of his famous lever. This it is which was accomplished by the great initiators who have electrified the world, and they could not have done so except by means of the Great and Incommunicable Secret. However, as a guarantee of its renewed youth, the symbolical phoenix never reappeared before the eyes of the world without having consumed solemnly the remains and evidences of its previous life. So also Moses saw to it that all those who had known Egypt and her mysteries should end their life in the desert; at Ephesus St. Paul burnt all books which treated of the occult sciences; and in fine, the French Revolution, daughter of the great Johannite Orient and the ashes of the Templars, spoliated the churches and blasphemed the allegories of the Divine Cultus. But all doctrines and all revivals proscribe Magic and condemn its mysteries to the flames and to oblivion. The reason is that each religion or philosophy which comes into the world is a Benjamin of humanity and insures its own life by destroying its mother. It is because the symbolical serpent turns ever devouring its own tail; it is because, as essential condition of existence, a void is necessary to every plenitude, space for every dimension, an affirmation for each negation: herein is the eternal realization of the phoenix allegory.”

— Eliphas Levi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic

From La historia de la alquimia y los comienzos de la química

Occult means ‘hidden’. And so occultists pursue the understanding of that which we cannot see. The strands of thinking that split and intertwine are head-spinning in number and complexity, but they are all united in this central study. Tarot, astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, ritual magic, kabbalah, and so on — these are only some of the disciplines handling the mysteries within the tradition of Western esotericism. While these all have doppelgangers walking well worn paths across the world’s cultures, what we are concerned with here is its contingent in the West, i.e. European and/or Abrahamic in origin. [1]

The occult rises from its context both in collaboration and contention with its major spiritual and historical forces. In any single tradition of the occult, you will find influences from one or more of the following (this list is far from exhaustive): pagan religions, idealized Egyptian rites, Judaism, Catholicism, Norse religious practice, classical Greek philosophy, current continental philosophy, Arabic culture, the Inquisition, guild ritual, fairy tales, theoretical physics, advanced pharmacology. The practices of the occult are, nevertheless, maligned by many of the institutions it borrows from. Religious, political, and scientific bodies have long struggled against this strange behavior of occult practice. Their leading minds spill considerable ink denouncing it.

But despite these forces that seek its destruction, we cannot rid our society of occultism. We have tried to silence its followers — imprison them, torture them, burn them, shame them, debate them, laugh at them. It continues. It has always continued. By repressing it, it flourishes. By smothering whatever tendrils rise to the surface, we only perpetuate it.

The occult proves difficult to defeat, and perhaps that is because it cannot be defeated. To go a step further, perhaps it survives because it is attacked.

Illustration of Hermes Trismegistus

What We Do Not See

If the occult is the pursuit of what is hidden, we find its practice is often hidden as well. Grimoires are routinely written in cyphers and with intentional blind alleys built into them to repel dabblers. Its organizations shroud their behavior behind closed doors. Witches gather in secret under moonlight. Sorcerers hideaway their spellmaking in secluded studies. The temple is not open to the public; the texts are not handed out for public view.

This secrecy prevents detection while also seducing the curious into bonds of omerta before the keys are handed over, and even these keys lead only to the garden’s gate. Occult organizations do not thrive on mass appeal nor mass enrollment because the legacy itself is an education in sub rosa maneuvers and the careful management of shared secrets.

Thus, outright repression only ensures that the culture inside occultism is maintained. Today, where sacred texts are shared in PDF form and rituals are uploaded on YouTube and tarot decks are sold at Barnes & Noble, the threat to the occult is greatest as the deep appeal is weakest — but even here we see that these open forms will never allow entry to what is actually sought in the occult. These are surface phenomena connected to the occult, certainly, but what it creates is only a new layer. These are new blind alleys to trap the curious diletante while the committed seekers find other ways around.

Woodcut showing punishments for witches from Tengler's ''Laienspiegel'', Mainz (1508)

The Place for Those Hidden From View

Any study of occult history in the West will bring a cast of characters that look much different from the acceptable culture. Leaders in the field have uninterrupted representation of women, immigrants, people of color. That is not to say it is immune to racism and sexism (occultists helped lay the groundwork of Nazism, after all) but that a spiritual tradition hidden from view ends up absorbing those seekers who are not allowed in the legitimate institutions.

As long as the institutions in power create walls, which they must to define their own existence, they will wall people out, which they must to define the group they derive loyalty from. And so, the occult exists as a permanent shadow, made up of counter-institutions pursuing the secret forces. In any time, there are forces allowed and forces forbidden. The occult promises access to that which is forbidden, and will — to differing degrees — be a refuge for those locked out of the acceptable forms of power.

As Silvia Federici describes in Caliban and the Witch, the burning of witches functioned for female spiritual power what the enclosures functioned for social property. Modern capitalism required many such projects of enclosure to create the grounds of private property — apparently the rule of market forces is so “natural” it requires endless tending and state intervention to even get off the ground. This is but one example of how the occult works as an umbrella term for the spiritual realms of those disqualified from the official institutions.

Frontispiece from The Hermetic Triumph (1604)

Circling Back

These are insights. There is no firm link between them. Like the many strands of occult practice and philosophy, no observations are systematically helpful across the board. But these insights are important insofar as any ongoing interest in the occult is important, because one is served in their practice by understanding the hidden dimensions of what they do — the occult of the occult, if you will.

What starts to emerge from these insights is a general gestalt: that if a thing is hidden it will draw a certain seeker and serve a certain purpose. By providing an undercurrent of creative energy, it continually revitalizes the visible spectrum of spiritual life.

The Emerald Tablet (1606)

Notes

[1] We do not need to pretend here that the concept of the “West” is not deeply fraught. We only need to use it to designate that particular nexus of certain forces that are typically identified as the “West,” sparing ourselves the indignity of buying into the whiggish conception of Western Civilization.

The Wells of Horror

The pursuit of understanding the world always turns toward mysteries. But the pursuit of beauty acts as balm for this desire to know. In beauty, the mystery is not pursued in order to break it, it is pursued in order to behold it. Beauty, then, does not try to destroy the mystery to find the truth inside, rather it accepts the mystery itself as the truth. Do not try to solve the riddle, whisper its words and cherish the sounds.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

The Terrible Inheritance

Horror utilizes archetype and symbol more than perhaps any other genre. Its stories are ones of fear, and fear, above all other emotions, is precoded by the collective unconscious. We arrive on this earth with vivid fears. Fears of fanged creatures, of howling in the night, of mist, of spiders, of the dead, of darkness. 

We then continue to manufacture new fears out of the stuff of our lives: the traumas we experience and the traumas we witness. Our fears begin with an inheritance and always accrue with the product of our own hard work. But even these fears often maintain direct lines to more ancient predecessors. This is because the traumas that serve as the raw materials to our new fears are only traumas if they realize a fear already there.

And so provoking fear requires the recollection of an archetype already feared. The archetypes are productive inserts for storytelling, borrowed from our shared patterns of fear.

Plato’s world of ideal forms is a world without articles. You don’t come upon a dog, you come upon Dog. You don’t go to a theater, you go to Theater. There are no specifics, only symbols channeling power through a refraction shaped out of the bends and folds that make up the ideal form. These forms are made out of the same mental stuff, bent into their unique shapes — perhaps fear works like this, too.

Our nightmares are the closest guides to thinking this through. How we conjure up the strangest stories leading a path of anxiety to panic to complete and total fright. In the morning, we sometimes wake to find the events of a nightmare certainly strange, but our response is incongruous. A friend of mine recently recounted a recurring dream he had as a child. In the dream, he rises from his bed and goes to the window to see a deer and a dog looking in at him from beyond the glass, their black eyes gleaming. What an interesting response to this image, fear. And yet, the terror always accompanied the dream with each return. The fear itself tells us something of how to read the message of the dream. The stirring beasts beyond the room in the night. Beasts that also stir within us. That call us to some other nature outside of walls and beds and language. The image does not seem frightening to the waking mind, but the image connects the dreamer to the realm of fear, like a key to a forbidden room or a trap door to the undiscovered basement. The fear itself teaches the dreamer that an archetype of fear is speaking.

But a work of horror cannot bring emotion to inform the text. Rather, the text must draw out the emotion. And so, horror cannot add to fear before establishing it. Horror thus calls into being images of an archetype of fear, and can only augment or modify once the link is established.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

The Kingdom of Repressed Truth

Horror is an aesthetic pursuit. A work of storytelling. Being an aesthetic pursuit, horror operates around its own conception of beauty — here beauty simply means an aesthetic ordering that is appreciated, be it through paralyzing terror, erotic arousal, gentle gratitude, or any number of states of appreciation. [1] As we have discussed, horror creates this beauty by weaving archetypes of fear throughout the other elements of the text. 

Horror trades in the least touched truths, everything that is refused to be true and yet endures. When we sink our fears below the surface of our thoughts, some die, proving to be temporary phantoms of anxiety and paranoia, trifles that come and go. But not all of these fearful thoughts pass forever. Those that do not drown under the water of our unconscious float to the surface again and again, never leaving, never dying. Horror is made up of the things that survive the drowning.

And so any philosophy of horror must hold this position: take account of the unbearable truths, see what you blind yourself to. What unites all horror is that it attempts this one act, returning these dark truths to us.

Horror is the unsettling rise of known and unknown truths from the dungeons where we keep them. Horror is a philosophy, a metaphysics, a spiritual path that speaks to us about the things we struggle to forget. It is therefore a rigorous path, requiring intellectual courage and spiritual bravery. It is the handling of that which must not be handled. Horror reminds us of that which we collectively agree we do not wish to be reminded of.

This path is all encompassing, because the unrefused truths are not disqualified from it, it is the insistence that both refused and unrefused are held together. These truths are brought together in the vessels of their archetypes. The tension arising from that gathering is the magic of horror.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922)

Notes

[1] Not unlike Nehemas’ conception of beauty as a representation of a lack, only because a lack is also pursued.

You Are Self-Helpless

I’m a big believer in the New Year’s Resolution, the art and craft of creating, tracking, and pursuing goals. So as I went over my resolutions for 2020, I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching self-help gurus explain the path to self-mastery.

Dopamine detox, intermittent fasting, time boxing, neurochemical hacking, morning pages, routines of the masters, olympic weight lifting schedules, speed reading techniques, daily meditation and mindfulness, etc. etc.

Through all the confessionals, bullet points, trademarked systems, and personality platforms, one thing holds across it all. There is a persistent internalization of an ideology. To be fair, it is the reigning, defending, undisputed ideology of our time: individualism.

William Blake’s Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils (1826)

What They Don’t Want You to Know!

Let us take for our first example a consistent platitude of the self-help universe. It is at the same time meant to shame and call to action. It focuses the reader/viewer/listener on their life as it is and masterfully contrasts it with the dreams unrealized, the life unlived.

You choose what to do with your life.

To a certain degree this is true. You are choosing to read this post right now (thank you, by the way). Similarly, when you sit in bed and scroll through Instagram for a half hour before bed, you are choosing to do that with your time. What’s supposed to go through the mind of the reader/viewer/listener are images of climbing mountains, travelling to Italy, building a business. It’s supposed to make you feel like, starting now, you can change your life. 

But that isn’t really true.

The self-help space is dominated by a fiction: you are an individual. But you aren’t. You are a node embedded in a network of many other nodes. You are bound by social influences. You are not working the job you want. You are working a job that was available to you, that you must work at to survive. Someone has to do it. That someone is you. You speak a language you were taught or that you learned through necessity. Your entire universe is built out of concepts and historical legacies completely out of your control (it’s out of anyone’s control, which is both encouraging and somehow also unspeakably terrifying).

There are choices you can make, but you are not the sole decider, in many cases not even the primary decider. Your life is built inside of concentric circles of communities. These collective realities circumscribe everything you can ever be, so much so that it is doubtful you can even imagine a state of being outside of these constraints — which helps, as a prison is much nicer when you can’t see the bars.

But self-help can never broach this topic because the entire racket runs on the illusion that your dissatisfaction in life is a result of (to some determining degree) your personal choices. Thus, if you change your choices, you can change your life. But the self-help racket goes even further. It doesn’t just propose that your choices can change your life. It also claims that if you make some set of specific choices, you can reliably conjure the life you want. And what are those specific choices? Why, the ones hiding behind the paywall of course.

That last bit, about the paywall, is the traditional model. With the rise of free content delivered through sponcon and Patreon accounts, an even more perverse model has arisen. Communities of eager strivers now gather around gurus and pay money to support the guru, the discussions around whom focus on how this content has helped the lives of the strivers. These strivers, however, never seem to “solve” their life. They continue to support the guru and consume their content, sure that at some point it will all click. They see other strivers post glowing reviews, and so this striver is assured they will experience these breakthroughs themselves. In the meantime they send money and write their own gushing reports of self-transformation — the only kind allowed in such a community of strivers. Optimism! Optimism! Optimism! The ferocity of these strivers belies, at least to the Freud reading dinosaurs among us, a deep insecurity about the whole thing. So why do they continue their striving? Their monthly tributes? Because their lives are so miserable that this project of turning it around must work. So they white knuckle it. When they see their own suspicions of the program written by others, it must be stamped out. It is the interior battle exteriorized.

It is for this reason I suspect that at this point, no one embedded in the self-help universe is still reading. And so, knowing that only the nihilists are among us, let us speak freely.

William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805)

The Truth!

It is not true to say that you can’t do anything to improve your own life. That is the cultish commitment of the nihilist, the person who has lost too many times to allow themselves to believe in hope.

But, to reiterate, you can change your life. You can quit drinking, helping you wake up happier, better rested, and with fewer apologies to text out while sitting on the toilet for an hour spraying lava into the sewage system. You can read more, educating and entertaining yourself in a way that detaches you from the dopamine zapping, self-esteem shredding hamster wheel of the social media scroll. You can workout and eat healthy, increasing your energy, lifespan, and sex appeal.

Even so, no guru will tell you something you don’t already know about achieving these goals. Yes, you want to get sober, you want to read more and scroll less, you want to get healthier. Yes, you know how to do these things, more or less, and if you don’t already, you are a few bullet-point lists away from knowing the bulk of what there is we know about accomplishing it. And yet, it never happens, at least not permanently. Maybe for a month. Maybe for a year. But after that? You quit drinking and notice your mind is clearer, your belly is slimmer, your wallet is fatter, and your relationships are stronger — but what trips across the mind from time to time? What whispers to you in the midst of work stress or after a fight with your spouse? Drink. And eventually, you do. And when you do, then comes the return of all the problems. And if you don’t? What do you notice? Yes, things are better, but things still aren’t good. If things were going so great all the time, that little word wouldn’t come across the transom.

That is the problem with eliminating problems: they reveal there is no end, that the problem eliminated masked an unending line of problems. Health freaks who hit their goal weight wouldn’t “choose” to go back to their previous state, but they still feel dissatisfaction with life. It is the person who never stops feeling fat who keeps eating salad and showing up for spin class — but that requires still feeling fat. That’s because the problem wasn’t being fat, overeating was a symptom. “Feeling fat” is a socially taught shame that they could use to label that feeling that life isn’t quite what they’d hoped for, that they aren’t as happy as they want to be.

A personal example: I quit smoking for four years. My lung capacity improved. My skin improved. I didn’t reek of tobacco smoke. I saved tons of money. But do you know what never improved? The actual happiness level of my life. I didn’t want to return to the bad parts of smoking, but when I eliminated the bad parts of smoking I never scraped the surface of the real machinery of happiness.

So how do you become happier?

William Blake’s Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (1786)

How to Become Happier!

Well, I’m going to share the secret with you right now. And the secret is…

You can’t.

You can’t become happier. You can live a more meaningful life. You can quit all your bad habits. You can reach goals. You can go to bed with more partners. You can lose weight and build muscle. You can cut out on needless expenses. You can build a perfect morning routine. You can work through past trauma. And all of this will make your life better than it is now. But you can not become happier.

That’s what makes self-help a scam, whether the purveyor knows they are running a scam or not. There is simply no way to marshal motivation, discipline, and popified cognitive behavioral therapy to become happier. If there was, we’d all know about it. There’d be happy people walking around who used to be miserable who also didn’t seem like they were recently addicted to a new drug or locked in the performative joy indicative of cult membership (though, on second thought, maybe drugs and cults are the secret to eternal happiness).

There is good evidence to suggest that major life events, both negative and positive, don’t adjust happiness long term (although it appears trauma might be able to negatively affect happiness long term). But this unchanging happiness state is what we can all observe in our own lives. We have all had major events in life and find that, sooner or later, we return to our home position, more or less.

But there is good news, and it relates to something we talked about earlier. The good news is that your personal, individual happiness is not that important. In the end, the world does not really need you to be happier than you are. And, in a way, that makes it okay to be a person who isn’t very happy. For one, it means you are already there where you’re going to be. You are already achieving the full happiness potential you have. Don’t worry so much about it — there’s no need.

So what do you do with all that desire to act, to break free from the chains of your life? You can call a friend you haven’t talked to in a long time. You can join social and political organizations to help others. You can take your dog on more walks. In other words, you can stop acting like your happiness is the most important thing in the world.

And when you aren’t focused on how well you are feeling, feeling bad doesn’t matter quite as much.

William Blake’s Frontispiece to the Song of Los (1795)

As Through a Glass Oldly: Reflections On Turning Thirty

“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”

— From A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Ever since my 29th birthday, the idea of turning 30 greeted me often. Sometimes I was sitting on my lunch break in the summer heat, bent over in front of the truck’s air conditioner and the thought would arrive, unbidden: I’m going to be 30 soon. Sometimes I was standing in the backyard waiting for my dogs to urinate and it would strike me: I’m going to be 30 soon. Sometimes I was driving across state lines to meet with old friends and my mind would pull a simple phrase out of its bag: I’m going to be 30 soon.

And then, as I slept, it happened. Me. 30 years old.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Bathers (1765)

On Misspending Youth and the Thief of Perspective: a Defense and Polemic

Looking back on my 20’s, I see a young man taking his time. He never saved up and figured out that trip to Cuba he so desperately wanted. He never got around to publishing the books he wrote. He never made the great film or led the general strike. He spent a lot of time reading, playing games on his phone while listening to podcasts. In fact, a notable portion of his time on earth has so far been spent staring out at nothing in particular while a song plays on loop in his head.

I can see my 20’s like this. As a colossal waste of time. I can look back at my childhood plans and all the things I thought I would certainly accomplish by 30, and I can compare this list to my real accomplishments. After that, I can count all the unchecked items on the list. I can then use this number as a kind of inferiority quotient. Not only could I do that, I did — almost every time the idea of turning 30 crossed my mind in the last year.

I called friends who’d turned 30, friends who’d passed that cursed threshold months earlier or years earlier. They all said the same thing. They said it isn’t that big of a deal. They said you’ll feel the same. They said don’t worry about it. And I, in my wisdom, continued thinking of it as a very big deal, assumed that I would feel old and finished, and worried about it quite a lot.

But as my birthday drew closer, I decided on a lark to change strategy. Because why not give it the old college try, while you are still plausibly college-aged? I tried turning the perspective around. Rather than quantifying the hopes unrealized, the unmet expectations, I tried quantifying the opposite. I counted up all the things I did do. The experiences I did have. The adventures I went on, the people I knew and loved, the things I learned, the skills I mastered. What I found is interesting. The child I was had such a small conception of the life I was going to live.

A child doesn’t know enough about the human experience to see all the things they can spend a wish on. I never knew I would have the honor of giving a eulogy, of hitchhiking the country, of organizing a reading group. I never thought to hope that I would learn how to make a cashier’s day a little easier by being relaxed and complementary, that I would have to hold a friend while they cried and figure out how to support them as they recovered.

What I’m trying to say is that life is so much bigger than the viewpoint of the children we used to be. The child I used to be is not the expert on life, is not the final arbiter of accomplishment and value. The goals I made before my twenties were ignorant of an entire decade of life lessons — some of them bitterly, oh so bitterly hard in the learning. Now at 30, I don’t have to compare myself to the demands of a teenager. I don’t have to pass a test made by the kid I used to be.

Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781)

The Poison of Biography

What gives us these strange notions? For one, the younger we are, the less we understand, and the greatness that we have explained to us are of a certain kind. You can tell by the jobs children want when they grow up: astronaut (because space is cool), paleontologist (because dinosaurs are cool), marine biologist (because dolphins are cool), president (because power is cool), teacher (because they’ve actually met teachers), and whatever it is their parents do (because, again, they’ve actually met the people raising them). 

And as we grow, we learn about other notable people, all through the genre of biography. In biographies, stories of people who the culture finds highly accomplished are told in just-so fashion. Moments from their childhood that echo future greatness are highlighted. People are interviewed who sagely nod their head and muse, “He was always meant to play jazz,” or “You could never get her off the tennis court.”

These are fictions built out of the remembered parts of people’s lives. Watching and reading these, a form impossible to avoid in our culture, begins a strange complex in us. Because the truth is, life is not as simple as a single track from inborn talent to vocation to world changing accomplishment. When we are living our lives, we can’t help but notice how different they feel to the great artists, leaders, scientists, and sports heroes that we’ve read about. There is confusion, boredom (oh the boredom!), depression, anxiety. We deal with double shifts, traffic jams, falling outs, arguments, addiction, and bank accounts. That reality will never compare to the lives seen through the lens of biography. And so we are led to believe that our lives are pale shadows of the best lives ever lived.

But we do not have to make this mistake. We can put away these notions of life and look at the time we have spent on this earth (which, to believe my worried mind, is a considerable amount of time). If I have anxiety about turning 30 because I think it is so old, then I must necessarily also admit that I have plenty of life experience. Such experience says this: my thirties will be bigger than I could ever dream they would be standing here at their beginning. I don’t mean bigger as in wealthier, with uninterrupted euphoria, complete with a successful campaign for President and three Super Bowl trophies. I mean bigger as in full of things I don’t even know I don’t know about yet.

Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1799)

On the Art of Goal Setting

So let us put away the past. Let us look ahead to the 30’s knowing that any goals we set will be dwarfed by the experiences that await us.

This becomes a tricky operation. Setting goals helps move us where we’d like to go, but an unrealistic goal leaves us feeling disempowered. We have to be realistic about what we are capable of and what opportunities are available.

For instance, I’m never going to do something for five hours every day even after work. I’m just not. I’m not going to magically acquire the self-discipline. Despite my constant fantasies of winning the lottery even though I never play, I can’t rely on becoming wealthy, should never pin a dream on the hopes of one day acquiring the fortune necessary. I’m not going to suddenly figure out how to do nicotine just a little bit and so avoid the need to quit for good.

The self-knowledge goes on. And while self-knowledge is not always cheerful information, it is much better to have it than to not.

There is a second kind of self-knowledge, a more secretive set of principles working underneath the chatter of consciousness. These principles are like little lanterns in the night to help traverse the path once the sun sets, before the sun rises. Principles like: always follow that pinprick of curiosity, because it is the source of secret wealth. Principles like: if I want to do something but it feels intimidating, then that is precisely what I should do next. Principles like: if a person feels untrustworthy or cruel, they likely are and will be so toward me one day.

While that is not an exhaustive list (merely an illustrative triad), it is enough to pick up on the important pattern: we have great intuitive powers. Intuition is the constant voice of wisdom, but it does not speak in English, or Farsi, or Cantonese. It speaks in feelings, whims, jokes, dreams. It speaks in the language of moods — and not always directly.

And so our goals must align with our intuition, and our plan of action must work with our attributes, not against them. These are things we can’t know until we try and fail a thousand times. And the 20’s serve as the greatest laboratory of our personal science: where we tested thousands of hypotheses and disproved a great many grand unified theories along the way.

Thomas Jones’s The Bard (1774)

And So, I Am 30

But as I write this, a part of me panics about the lateness of the hour on my inevitable march graveward. Because, of course, yes — I am closer to death than ever before. I’m not old, but I’m no longer hand-wavingly young. If there is anything I want to get in order, maybe it is time.

If there is something I feel called to do, now is not the time to wait. If there is someone I need to forgive or make laugh or thank through tears, now is the time to make the call.

We are not waiting for life, we are not preparing for life, we are not in line for life. We are alive. It might have taken me three decades to realize this, but the realization cannot wait any longer. Life isn’t something that comes, it is something that is here. Life is always with you, right up until it isn’t.

Caspar David Friedrich’s Cemetery Entrance (1825)

Landed in the Bitter Oleander

“She Who Takes the Bones”, a short story of mine, landed in the Autumn 2019 issue of the Bitter Oleander.

Click here to purchase your copy today!

In between rides, she walked the roadsides, the drainage ditches by fast food restaurants, the stretch of grass on the southside of the library. Her eyes scanning. Her steps regular, almost bobbing, hands in pockets. The sound of cars driving past. Black birds flying in undulating patterns overhead. Spring fully arrived to that place on earth.

Designing Social Conflict: Vanderpump Rules and Professional Wrestling

Vanderpump Rules is an institution of reality television. It’s a spin-off of another reality television institution: The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The show focuses on the front-of-house staff at an upscale restaurant in West Hollywood called SUR (which stands for, I shit you not, Sexy Unique Restaurant), owned by a gorgeous Brit who acts as benevolent dictator, wise counsel, and momma bear for the characters of the show.

The cast is a group of 20 and 30 somethings who all moved to LA in the pursuit of fame. Throughout the seven seasons of the show, they try their hands at modeling, acting, and singing — whatever might make them famous. They believe they can do it because of their looks. And in a way, they did do it, but by being on a reality show about people who are pursuing fame. (This creates an odd web of psychoanalytic confusion that we won’t be delving into, but somebody should write a book about.) What they find themselves locked in, through circumstance and presentation, is an all too familiar format of “real” continual conflict.

In other words, Vanderpump Rules is professional wrestling. [1]

The Breeding Ground of Controversy

After binge watching every season of Vanderpump, I noticed a striking similarity in the storytelling between it and professional wrestling. In professional wrestling, characters are ordinally aligned based on card position, while laterally aligned based on character (heel and babyface: bad guy and good guy, respectively). Matches are given meaning (or heat) through ongoing interpersonal conflicts (or feuds). Stakes are raised because, as with legitimate fighting sports, there are championship title belts to win and, as with real life, pride is on the line.

Thus, a title match between a heel and a babyface that comes at the end of a long, personal feud will have a greater amount of heat than a match between two babyfaces with no feud and no belt for grabs (that is how things should typically work, never underestimate the power of bad writing to kill fan interest in what should, on paper, be a highly anticipated match). On the other side of matches and, more importantly, feuds is the rise and fall of wrestlers on the card. While it is not always the case that coming out on top of a feud with a bigger star will catapult you to their level or above, it is almost always the case that such a course will have to take place to send you there. Necessary but not sufficient.

Wrestling is able to generate drama with a slowly shifting cast for years and decades on end because the constraint of a sports promotion creates easily understandable characters, conflict, and stakes. To some degree, it writes itself.

Vanderpump functions in almost precisely the same way. Card position is essentially screen time and sphere of social control within the friend group. Heels and babyfaces are clearly defined through presentation and editing, and these definitions can change (as in wrestling) as certain events will cause characters to turn (move from one to the other). Once a character turns heel, by cheating on their girlfriend with a bottle service waitress in Vegas for example, they will be framed in a different light by the producers, and the candid confidential intercuts will show other characters scoffing at the new heel’s deeds. Characters will often feud as well, leading to weeks of conflict, forcing others to take sides and shun/embrace accordingly. And, as in wrestling, Vanderpump has a setting and conceit that naturally breeds drama: the front-of-house at a restaurant entirely staffed by young, attractive people hungry for fame.

Scheana vs. Stassi: a Case Study

To see how this works, let’s look at the central feud of season 1 of Vanderpump Rules. Scheana is introduced as the new waitress at SUR. The only thing current reigning champion Stassi knows about her is that she was the mistress of a married man tangentially related to the main cast. Stassi is in a rocky relationship with the permanently horny Jax, and so her confidence is low and her jealousy is high.

Stassi induces her allies (namely, Katie and Kristen) to turn their backs on Scheana. In response, Scheana begins to provoke Stassi further — one such incident: she applies sunscreen to Jax’s naked upper body, knowing that Stassi and her clique are watching from a distance. This feud developed Scheana as an outsider who is threatening to Stassi’s reign. As the opening season, it also helped describe the group dynamics at SUR. Jax is promiscuous and untrustworthy. Stassi is jealous and dominant. Katie is a quiet, loyal follower of Stassi. Kristen is a loud, emotionally unstable, though still (mostly) loyal follower of Stassi. By the end of the season, Scheana finally reaches out to Stassi after it was revealed that Jax had cheated on her with a woman in Vegas (Stassi’s friends had insisted this was just a rumor until Jax admitted it). This revelation created a rift between Stassi and her followers. Scheana’s embrace of Stassi showed us a new side of Scheana, turning her face. Consequently, Stassi’s loss of her social power base destabilized her regime, dropping her down in status.

As we can see, Vanderpump has incredible similarities to professional wrestling storytelling. Feuds help define and shift loyalties, with the outcomes shifting order on the card. The conceit of the show produces a “drama box” which achieves a unity of opposites (a force that compels the antagonists and protagonists to continue engaging with each other). Stakes are easy to recognize and add weight to the events and the outcome through more or less universally understood motivations.

There are differences as well, of course. In wrestling, all interpersonal conflict is settled in an officiated bout of physical violence, and all roles are clearly defined through a sports analogy. In Vanderpump conflict is settled through manipulation, rumor spreading, and finally squashing the beef through new terms of friendship, and all roles are defined through friend group hierarchy. This difference points, however, to another similarity. Both forms are highly gendered to the toxic subspecies. A chair shot to the head of a rival is a fairly obvious form of toxic masculinity, just as using physical intimacy with a rival’s partner to make your rival jealous is a form of toxic femininity. Both forms are coded in the gender stereotypes of the same culture. Wrestling is Vanderpump for boys; Vanderpump is wrestling for girls. (Don’t yell at me, we all can see the bad gender politics at play.)

“Reality” in Reverse: the New Kayfabe

You might be saying to yourself that while, yes, both reality TV and professional wrestling share certain dramatic contrivances and narrative tropes, the same could be said for any long running sequential storytelling — from soap operas (the most commonly compared media with professional wrestling) to comic books. But the most important feature that Vanderpump and professional wrestling share is this: the insistence of reality in the presentation.

Kayfabe is professional wrestling speak for the canon-world. In kayfabe, what goes on between the ropes is a legitimate sporting contest. What is caught on camera behind the scenes is video footage of true events. Ric Flair is a philandering party boy (this one is actually true). The Undertaker is a man risen from the dead to do battle in the squared circle (this one is likely not true). While kayfabe used to be protected at great lengths (some members of the industry even going so far as to perjure themselves in court to “protect the business”), the last three decades have seen the complete unveiling of the business — i.e. that (I hope you’re sitting down) wrestling isn’t real. That being said, there is still a deep protection of the suspension of disbelief during the show. Wrestling television does not list writer credits at the end of its broadcasts, and at the end of a wrestling show, wrestlers do not step out arm-in-arm with their in-character enemies to bow for applause. (Well, not usually.)

Reality TV has not yet been completely unveiled as an artifice. Despite the clearly scripted nature of events, impossible-to-film situations, and revealing editing gaffes, viewers of reality TV are by and large willing to convince themselves that what they are seeing is filmed reality. Yes, you can find a number of articles that expose reality TV as a form of fictional storytelling, but the audience is still holding onto some shred of hope that it’s mostly true. This is reminiscent of wrestling fans in the 70’s, who would often say things like, “Some of that stuff is fake, but this match is real.” Despite the bad acting and worse writing, viewers of reality TV can still buy into the kayfabe.

Something happens inside the alchemy of a presentation that pretends to be real that does not happen otherwise. Now, most television shows do not break the fourth wall, but the presentation is coded as a written, directed, and acted presentation. When the presentation is coded as a documentary or live sporting event, we get a form of storytelling that seems to be filling a similar role. But what role is it exactly?

The Joys of Trash

Why do we love these forms of storytelling? Because they are gendered in the extreme, they act as both release valves and information receptacles for learning how to perform our genders. Because this form is tacky and low brow, we protect ourselves from over-relating. And because this form is supposedly “real”, we read it as closer to how the world works than other forms.

The social expectations of males are so obvious and up front in wrestling that fans both play through their fantasies of violence and glory while not identifying so much that they become violent and vainglorious. Wrestling exists in a realm so distant from their own lives that there is no fear of learning too well and becoming untenably abusive people. On the other hand, wrestling also gives its fans lessons in the expectations of masculine worlds (expectations that are often coded and never explicitly laid out in the real world, creating a challenge for mastering them). It is through wrestling’s simplified dramatic artifice that fans can distance themselves from the idea that they are confused as to their own masculinity. But among the larger than life characters and the instant feedback of the crowd, they learn about the male world.

Vanderpump works the same way, although here it is flipped to the gendered realm of the feminine. Here we see interpersonal confrontations and disagreements based on the most tenuous grounds and paranoid suspicions — feelings and intuitions we all have from time to time, but that most of us are trained to ignore, redirect, or suppress (deep, deep down). When the characters act on these impulses we forbid ourselves to act on, the private reactions of others in the social group are interspliced moment by moment, providing live social feedback. By watching Vanderpump we can live out the impulses with devilish joy while getting a read on how people would perceive it if we did. And we can simulate it without ever facing consequences (Stassi said it, not me) or fearing that we will succumb to them in our own lives. The setting and presentation are far enough from our experiences to distance us from repeating that behavior, though similar enough to translate.

Both formats inform our gender performance and provide release valves. There are conflicts in everyday life where you might like an open licence to commit violence against your boss or to spread destructive rumors about the person dating your ex. As adults, we know that we should not do these things, but we can’t help wanting to do these things.

That release valve is precisely why wrestling and reality dramas are so dangerous to the middle brow mind. They are considered low brow because the characters in them are uncultured, dramatic, highly reactive people. Their behavior just would not do at the country club. They represent all of the drives and impulses suppressed by the WASP, middle class culture that turns its nose up so high on approach. Middle class repression dismisses these forms because it is so afraid of the drives and impulses they depict and even celebrate.

When we enjoy trash TV, we are enjoying the undeniable, ever present features of human psychology that bourgeois values shun. Trash TV is necessarily working class culture. That is not to say that all working class people enjoy it and all middle class people loathe it, but rather these highly charged reactions are driven by class dynamics and class experience.

To top it all off, enjoying these forms requires admitting to some level of credulity. Critics will point to pro wrestling or Vanderpump and exclaim, “You think this is real?” So nervous are they to be considered duped by trash TV, that they have to insist that enjoying it requires buying into the kayfabe, making sure no one believes the same is true for the middle class critic. In fact, these are easily enjoyable forms even (and in some cases especially) if you know they are fictional presentations. But again, the middle class anxiety around appearances can not bear to be mistaken for believing these programs are real.

Thus, there is a kind of reverse-class gate keeping going on. These are cultural spaces structurally made to repulse (and so exclude) anyone with the middle class attitude. It is the popular made exclusive for the populous. It is the mass keeping out the few. And above all: it’s really fucking entertaining.

---

Notes

[1] Yes, I am aware that WWE produces reality TV shows starring female members of its locker room. These shows cater to a female audience and are broadcast on networks grasping at the female demographic. I am using Vanderpump Rules for comparison because: (A) it isn’t produced by a wrestling organization and so the similarities are less expected, and (B) Vanderpump Rules is an incredible show that I would much rather talk about than Total Divas or Total Bellas.

Tarot and the Use of Art & Symbol

“Tarot reminds us that as we shuffle on through life, we have the tools to know ourselves and find purpose — because, despite the challenges we face, we have art to guide us.”

Click here to read my latest piece on the Tarot.

Toward a Diagnostic of Self Diagnosis

We were at a BBQ out on a friend’s farm, sitting on the porch surrounded by half-empty Miller Lite tall boys in the early night. I offered a new acquaintance some of my kratom. They declined with a slight frown, saying, “No thank you, I have an addictive personality.”

I’ve heard that phrase many times in my life, always someone self identifying with it. Once said, it comes heavy laden with assumptions. Images of long nights in years gone by, struggling to free oneself from the clutches of this or that bad habit. Alcohol, cigarettes, pornography, cocaine, binge-watching Netflix, coffee enemas, Candy Crush, whatever it might be — this person has seen inside themselves as through a glass darkly. And after one (or many) dark night(s) of the soul, they emerged with a hard earned truth of themselves that they carry as a sword and shield against temptation.

“I have an addictive personality.”

What that means, whenever you hear someone say it, is rather up to the speaker. It is a medicalized term, borrowed no doubt from someone else equally unqualified to diagnose as the speaker is. Are some people more likely to become addicted? Maybe. Does becoming addicted make you more susceptible to become addicted to another substance? Maybe. Is there even a coherent enough shared understanding of what addiction is to go around labeling behaviors as addictive according to a checklist? Maybe.

But in each case, of course, maybe not.

Barnett Newman’s Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue IV (1969-1970)

Diagnosing the Problem

So I’ve turned to analyze myself, not to see whether I have an addictive personality but to suss out why I hate the phrase itself. I am not angry so much at self diagnosis per se. After all, any trip through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or to a psychiatrist’s office teaches even the most obtuse observer that diagnosing mental illness is not an incredibly certain sphere. As long as the appearance of symptoms are generally maladaptive (i.e. they get in the way of living a full and productive life, whatever that could mean — maybe just living your best life or simply doing you) and you check enough boxes under an illness heading, you have that mental illness. 

There is no brain scan to determine if you either: A) tend to be a homebody during the winter, or B) are afflicted with seasonal affective disorder. There isn’t even a clear idea of how such a scan could possibly function. [1] Scarier still, some mental illnesses could plausibly be diagnosed in two people who share few if any symptoms. This leads to the sensitive-guy wisdom that “No two depressions look the same,” which is dispensed with knowing empathy and yet should create a shuddering chill. If two depressions can be so different, why would we consider them the same thing?

Dogged defenders of the DSM will point out that a multi-form mental illness like depression has specifiers to classify and subclassify, to whittle down to a much more specific diagnosis.

Others will point to experiences in their life with people suffering mental illness and recall how you can clearly tell that something is off. And that is true with some mental illnesses that express themselves with extreme behaviors that are more or less the same across the entire diagnosed population.

So I highlight those countering points for two reasons. For one, they happen to be true and point to the fact that the medicalized approach to mental illness is reaching at something — there is a there there. For two, if I don’t bring them up, I can’t neatly clip those points out of the discussion for my own intellectual convenience. I’m not here to complain about any and all medicalization of mental illness as if all psychiatry is a scam diverting us from going clear and reaching full OT. What I want to highlight is that the medicalisation of mental health has trickled into the general population and lends scientific wording to a potentially poisonous way of being. Not only that, but the trust people give to scientific claims passes over the bridge of this borrowed wording and nestles inside concepts that lead people to trap themselves in self delusions.

Deep breath.

To put the problem simply: when we borrow wording from science to describe our self-conception without the rigor of good science, we can end up trusting these self-conceptions with the same trust we place in good science. To put the stakes simply: our self-conceptions are often damaging, and it is difficult to overcome a self-conception (even a clearly damaging one) when we believe it to be rooted in hard, scientific Truth™. [2]

Barnett Newman’s Adam (1951-2)

The Symptoms

When someone thinks about themselves as an addict, they typically think in terms of the “alcoholic” inside Alcoholics Anonymous jargon. Namely: once an addict, always an addict. If it keeps someone from ever smoking another cigarette and falling back into a pack-a-day habit after years of abstinence, fine. But it happens to not always be true. Much, much more importantly, this attribution of a fixed diagnosis to a not-necessarily-fixed psychological tendency is paradigmatic of the lay discussion on mental illness. The equation (where a scientific sounding label equals an inescapable truth of who a person is and could ever be because science says so) at some point leaked out into the self-conception of so many of our psychological experiences.

How many people in your life have self diagnosed social anxiety? Why is that so bad? Because once someone “has” social anxiety, it is a feature of how they function and an inescapable one at that. 

There is a parallel line of thinking in our culture where we are expected (rightly, in most cases) to be understanding and considerate of neuro-divergence. While well intentioned, the introduction of this belief stirred into the medicalisation of our own self-conceptions creates the real witches brew. A self diagnosis is not only a way to set proper expectations of yourself but also a claim for special consideration on behalf of the community. The social group is now responsible for managing any personality trait or habit that you have self diagnosed as mental illness — regardless of the validity of your self diagnosis.

It’s time to compare two examples. 

Someone notices that they have trouble making new friends after college. In the years after school, their reduced socializing led to nervousness when interacting with new people. This person might then decide to do something about this, to solve their problem because it is their problem. They swallow hard and step into the line of fire and withstand the anxiety of social interaction with new people until they learn how to make friends as an adult. 

But if someone in the same situation decides that they have developed social anxiety disorder, then the issue of dealing with these feelings transforms from a personal responsibility to a social one. “You have to put up with my social anxiety and create spaces where I can interact and/or benefit at the same level as those without it,” says so much of the contemporary discourse. The person with social anxiety disorder can not be expected to easily and openly interact with new people, nor are they expected to change this feature of themselves.

To a certain degree, of course we should make efforts to craft social spaces that are welcoming to all people. We should aspire to make all people feel comfortable and to take them as they come, and we can change the way things are done to be more inclusive of the neuro-atypical whenever we can. That being said, we are all of us variants from the “typical”, lacking in certain life skills. In some, these variations are in the extreme. And it is hard to see how we can optimize social spaces for all people without reducing the benefit of the spaces for the vast majority.  

If we want to take part in the social realm (not just for socializing but also participating in public life) then we have to, as much as we can, adjust ourselves to fit the social. The nature of the social realm is that it is not personalized. Demanding a personalized experience of the social is not possible for all people because the social has to take into account so many different human needs, many of them contradicting across individuals. And so, while the social realm should make an effort to be inclusive, likewise individuals should make an effort to fit into the social realm. That the fits are not always perfect is sub-optimal but unavoidable.

Barnett Newman’s First Station (1958)

Environmental Factors

It is not the responsibility of the social realm to be a good fit for any single individual, but by framing certain unpleasant features of your inner life in a pseudo-scientific medical diagnosis, then demands for special treatment can be made on the wildly prevalent grounds of identity politics around neuro-divergence. So micro-group visibility and acceptance and access is then weaponized around personality traits that are, in many cases, fixable through personal action.

When such a critique is given, many will protest that it is easy for people without mental illness X to dismiss the experiences of people with mental illness X. Almost anyone can see their point. If you don’t struggle with something everyday, then you probably have difficulty understanding the scope of its impact and the contours of dealing with it. And the phrase “It’s all in your head,” is cold comfort and inappropriate. But this argument, while obviously true so far as it goes, is pushed against any unevenness whatsoever based on self-reported symptoms. This puts the entirety of the burden on the social realm rather than on the individual. In some cases this is justified, but how do we determine which self diagnoses are legitimate and which are traits that could be fixed by taking personal responsibility over resolving them? The current discourse protects both cases.

That renders the responsibility a deeply personal one because you are the only one with access to the experiences of your own mental health (in most cases). So the culture must insist: the individual has responsibility to fit into the social realm. The burden to integrate and participate in the social realm is on the individual in the last instance. [3]

Barnett Newman’s Concord (1949)

Treatment Protocol, or: Circling Back

“I have an addictive personality,” is not, in my experience, as undermining of social life as its self diagnosing cousins, but it does share a root system. If thinking of your personality as “addictive” helps steer you clear of destructive behavior, it is probably best to stick with the phrase, no matter who it irks at the BBQ — even if it irks the guy who is going to go home and write an essay about how this kind of thinking is destroying the fabric of collective human enterprise and the possibility of world-historic transformation of society.

In that sense, the negative reaction I feel when I hear that phrase is really just a symptom of my own pathological pretentiousness. But that kind of makes you think. Though this is not accepted in the DSM (yet), it is a form of neuro-divergence and should be respected. It is all too easy to wave away my symptoms if you don’t experience pathological pretentiousness — must be nice. If you find yourself at a social gathering with someone who suffers from pathological pretentiousness (especially of the contrarian subtype) it is very inconsiderate to go around saying things like “I have an addictive personality,” based solely on the fact that you can’t go a single morning without your cup of coffee and you played too many video games in freshman year to the detriment of your GPA.

I digress.

The solution to this problem is fundamentally too personal to find a clear path. On the one hand, neuro-divergence should be respected and handled with empathy and a great deal of listening, and social spaces should be as welcoming as possible. On the other, this creates a moral hazard where people can self diagnose their way into special treatment that hollows out the collective element of social life and puts undue pressure on the social realm to cater to individual needs at the expense of group needs. How do we insist on the importance of one side of the scale without neglecting the other?

I suppose we can borrow the rule of thumb used in the diagnosis of mental illness: are the symptoms maladaptive?

Barnett Newman’s Onement I (1948)

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Notes

[1] The reader will shout at the screen that the difference is: how do the symptoms affect your life. But feeling like staying at home can affect your life negatively without being some inescapable disorder with no solution. This thread of treatability is picked up later on in the essay.

[2] We will set aside for now the incredibly interesting tangent of why and how we place our trust in science, as this is a topic already well-tread in critical theory. Needless to say, I’m making no value claim on trusting science as a discourse one way or the other but simply noting that we do, as a culture, place trust in science — or at least sciencey sounding claims.

[3] Now that liberal activists and left-liberal activists have so thoroughly taken up identity politics as the primary vector of social action, the entire purpose of changing the social realm to meet the specific needs of a micro-group becomes centered as the entire struggle itself. The social realm must integrate and eliminate all unevenness of entry for a particular micro-group so that said group can participate in… eliminating unevenness of entry for itself. We now have a snake making dinner of its tail — which is probably a self diagnosable disorder.

In the absence of a class revolution as the primary goal, the majority of US leftists (who long ago replaced class with identity as the revolutionary subject) serve only this ouroboros. Centering class as the primary political battle line is derided by identity politics as class reductionism. The thinking goes that if you are talking about class, you aren’t talking about sex — which makes you sexist. You are not talking about race — which makes you racist. And so on. 

Identity politics thereby makes class the only lens through which politics are not able to be defined. By this fancy alchemy, class conflict is impossible, because no forward movement is allowed until every single person, no exceptions, is in on the game. No identitarian struggles are to be left unstruggled before any steps may be taken toward broad, collective interests (i.e. class interests).

The Intoxication of Class: An Analysis of The Devil Wears Prada

The Devil Wears Prada (Dir. David Frankel) is a 2006 comedy/drama of some note. In the world of (the unfortunately named) “chick flick” genre, it stands as a major achievement of the oughties. It is remembered for its defense of fashion culture, Meryl Streep’s performance as a coolly sociopathic magazine mogul, and the archetypal struggle between generations, mothers and daughter, values, and class.

The film should also be recognized for its non-self-congratulatory escape of most chick-flick tropes. It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors and in fact fails the reverse Bechdel (there are no scenes with more than one speaking male character — ever). It is a female dominated movie about a traditionally female world, and thus it is able to side step the patting-yourself-on-the-back-for-having-a-strong-female-character that was prevalent for the second half of the last decade and follows us up to this present day. In a similar vein, it is a film about women where they aren’t shoehorned into acting “masculine” in order to be respected.

But these aren’t the reasons we’ll be diving into the film today, though they are perhaps reasons why the film should be analyzed further. What concerns us here is a major emotional feature of the film: the experience of rising in social class as an intoxicating experience and its connections to the female in our culture.

Hello, it’s the future calling, they want their Bechdel-test-passing script back.

The [Discrete] Charm of the Bourgeoisie

When the film begins, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is a recent journalism grad who, after diligently chasing down any and all job openings in New York publishing, has finally decided to try her hand at being an administrative assistant to the most powerful person in fashion Miranda Priestly (an odd entry level position, but there it is). This is despite her goals of doing “real” journalism and finding fashion a ditzy girl’s game. At this point, Andy is poor, dating a line cook, hanging out with other friends who hate their j-o-b-s and who early on in the film toast to the notion of “jobs that pay the rent.”

Andy gets the assistance job, obeying every whim of Runway magazine’s leader Priestly (played famously by Meryl Streep). And the whims are, from the beginning, regularly impossible for all but the most intrepid and dedicated assistants. Andy begins her journey wearing the frumpy uniform of Northwestern University smart people who see themselves as above fashion, a uniform she pulls over her porcine size six body. But after a couple of rants about the importance of fashion made in her direction, and after the realization that Priestly will never acknowledge Andy’s successes as long as Andy refuses to respect fashion, the young protagonist dons the Versace and Jimmy Choos to fit into this new role, even working herself down to a size four (which gets her a celebratory toast from Runway’s art director).

This metamorphosis creates the strongest emotional tones in the entire film. Andy emerges confident, sexy, powerful. This is euphoric. Andy, along with the viewers, drink in with delight the shocked look on her coworkers’ faces (who only minutes of runtime earlier were snickering at Andy as a walking, talking faux pas). This new wardrobe prints the ticket for her acceptance into the fashion world. Now she has respect as she runs errands for Priestly that trace through the world of high society, including a “real” journalist who tries to bed the well dressed Andy and even asks her to send him some of her writing. It appears that by shedding her old self who was too focused on “real” journalism to be concerned with petty things like style, she acquires the tool to enter the realm of “real” journalism — that tool being style.

In summary, fashion (the ultimate class signifier) gives her purchase into the chic realms of the culture-generating bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile, hangouts with her old group of friends take on an increasingly bitter tone. They resent her constantly being late due to work, leaving early due to work, not showing up at all to her boyfriend’s birthday party due to work. So for a while the film jumps between the swirling adventure and excitement of the fashionista set to the resentment of the working class who stupidly continue in their proletarian existence without understanding the hard work Andy does.

The climax, of course, is that Priestly’s sociopathy knows no bounds, and when Andy finally confronts this in an extraordinary manner, she abandons Priestly and reconnects to her boyfriend. Thus, she realizes that there are things more important in life, yadda yadda, so on and so forth.

At the end, as she is interviewing for a “real” journalism job (though still dressed to the 9’s, proof not all was for naught), her prospective employer tells her that Priestly faxed a resounding endorsement (not all for naught indeed). Despite everything, the mother figure really did respect daughter though she did not openly admit it, and through the power of the mother, Andy gets what she wanted all along. [1]

The Moral of the Story

The Devil Wears Prada is not about the cruelty of the fashion world and the importance of staying true to who you are. It is about the necessity of the fashion world (including the cruelty of it) and the importance of adjusting who you are to meet its expectations. By impressing the fashion world (mother), doors will open up for you. But that isn’t even the true moral of the story.

Film is an emotionally resonant art. And the emotions it creates stick with you long after the nuts and bolts of the plot and what the plot is “trying to say” dim in the memory of the viewer. The memory of the emotions might fade and simplify, might coalesce around a general feeling, but that simplified feeling imprints. That’s why you remember how exciting Indiana Jones is even though you haven’t watched it since you were eight years old.

For the majority of The Devil Wears Prada, the emotion is one of intoxication felt when entering the realm of high society. While the particulars of the story locate the viewer inside fashion, it is still a move into the world of the bourgeoisie. That is the main emotional impact of the film, and also the promise of the trailer, which focuses entirely on the protagonist’s makeover/ascendancy and the charismatic dictatorship of Priestly (there are maybe two or three seconds devoted otherwise). That is because the draw of the film is entirely in the vicarious glee we viewers feel to witness a commoner like us (albeit a well educated commoner) gain access to the upper echelon of society.

Andy’s newfound powers after her makeover are one expression of the thrill, but consider the love of Priestly’s character. She is cold, demanding, unapologetic. The entire office trembles at the news that Priestly will be arriving early one morning, and they scramble to reshape the space to her exacting preferences. An entire industry watches her face for the smallest tics (raised eyebrow, pursed lips) to determine the trajectories of careers and the trends of the upcoming season. Priestly’s role is not to show the rise to power, it is to show unbridled power long since secured. Viewers love her character because there is nothing quite so intoxicating as imagining yourself with such control over the world around you all while immaculately dressed and quaffed. She shows us who Andy could become if only the pesky little cinematic necessities of having a protagonist “grow” and do the “right thing” didn’t make up the last reel. She is the way we get to eat our cake and stay a size four. Andy takes us from where we are to where we want to be, and while she has to “grow” and give up the pleasures of the life we want, we get that story of keeping the life too, in the form of Miranda Priestly. In one of their final exchanges, Priestly tells Andy that she sees a lot of herself in the young assistant, an implicit promise that if we don’t like the ending, we could imagine ourselves continuing on with the devil and one day filling her Prada.

In this way, the film is a female power fantasy. It’s about the intoxication of class in our society from a female perspective.

Here is where one could insert a rant about neoliberalism and how its subjects are psychically led on through their miserable lives by the empty promise of class mobility. Perhaps. Maybe there is something to that. But I think more than this, there is a deep truth about class being explicated here. Sexiness, power, influence, glamour are not being lied about here (of course there is a class mobility lie here, though Andy is from a prestigious university anyway). These are desirable states, and these are the definitional grounds by which class operates on the level of personal expression (of course, every good little Marxist knows class operates fundamentally around ownership of the means of production, but let’s hold off an analysis of Capital Volume I for a different 2000 word blog post). The Devil Wears Prada offers people who do not have access to those states some spectral whiff of the good life. Furthermore, it does so by giving Andy the most stereotypical female form of ladder climbing: she succeeds as the over-achiever — but one who actually gets somewhere through that form of hard work.

Andy’s character is that same gold star, all A’s, nervous energy fueled female character we’ve seen time and again, but her success as the tenacious secretary builds a bridge over to the opposite form of female success in a patriarchal society: sexual desirability and fashion sense. What if wearing Dolce & Gabana was the homework assignment? What if knowing the history of cerulean blue fabrics was the essay topic? What would a 4.0 grade point average look like in that world?

The original Andy, with her sterling academic record and college paper journalism, is blocked off from a major element of female expression and the female sphere in our society (i.e. fashion). But it is through the very same tenacity and direction that got her one kind of success that she is able to have it all. And what is her reward for conquering both roads to feminine success? Membership in high society.

The Devil Wears Prada is, purposefully or otherwise, about the limitations of female power, the taking of power in ways culturally codified as “feminine”, and about the intoxicating rush of jumping class division and gaining that feminine form of power. While the film may not necessarily critique the limitations of female roles inside of our society nor the class divisions (a division it sends its protagonist magically hurtling over), it does trade in these facts about our society. No, it is not a proletarian feminist film. But in its lack of critique it ends up accidentally saying a lot of what a film with such political goals might, only with inverse values. And, but inverting the values, ends up accidentally revealing a lot more about the dominant ideology than any politically-motivated film could.

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Notes

[1] It is interesting that, given Priestly’s role as the mother-figure, Andy’s success in college is related to approval from the Father. But for Andy to fully self actualize and thus succeed in “real journalism”, she needs to return to the Mother’s realm of the feminine (fashion) and get approval. Once she has both of these, she can proceed through the door to her “real self” as a “real journalist”.

Scripts for the Ruling Class

I recently made the mistake of reading critical reviews of Ari Aster’s film Midsommar. I’ve written about this movie before, and as you might have gathered from my words about it, I loved it. Some critics did not. And that’s okay. It isn’t imperative that everyone recognize undeniable artistic genius when they see it. What I noticed about these criticisms, however, was something that creeps up constantly in the gargantuan amount of video essays and blog posts about film pumped out every month: using studio expectations of what films need as the yardstick for whether a film is good or bad.

“Grim, grisly and downright sickening, Midsommar is a feel-bad horror film about suicide, mercy killings, insanity, graphic nudity, religious hysteria, and the kind of grotesque imagery that exists for no other reason than shock value. Director Ari Aster’s delusional fantasy films contain enough imagination for today’s pretentious critics to label him a ‘visionary,’ but not enough substance or ideas for the real world to regard him as an artist of true and lasting value...

This film seems endless, with all of the horror restricted to beginning and end sequences...”

— Rex Reed for The Observer, who thinks a discussion on the psychological and social implications of a post-Enlightenment society aren't substantive enough for a film. Also, horror must have the gruesome shocks coming on schedule.

[Note: I’m not going to address how many critics completely misread the pagan community Hårga in Misdommar. That is another discussion altogether, and my previous writing on the film (linked at the beginning and appearing directly below this post) covers enough of the topic that going into audience reception of Hårga would retread too much to make it worth anyone’s time.]

Edward Hopper’s New York Movie (1939)

The Producer’s Voice in Our Heads

Anyone who has written a screenplay, and therefore sought out advice on how its done, knows how cynical a market it is. Almost all screenplays purchased and produced in the United States adhere to a uniform plot structure, with each plot point appearing on or near the same page in each script. Protagonists encounter a call to action, refuse it, become convinced, reach a midpoint where there is no turning back, hit a wall and decide they can’t reach their goal, are forced to return to their journey, and make a final push in the climax. Protagonists need to have agency and must develop. All major plot twists need proper set-ups. Etcetera, etcetera, so on and so on.

Many of these story features work well most of the time. That’s why this structure has become industry standard in Hollywood: if a screenplay fits into that mold, it will work as a story.

Of course, the problem of demanding this strict format industry-wide has clear implications. Slowly, films produced move more and more into a center line, and most films become simple reskins of the same story. This is all bad and terrible and what not, but that’s not what we are concerned with here. What I’m even more concerned with is how this is generating a language inside of the viewers themselves that limits their ability to see films that decide to work in a different way.

When these rigid expectations are broken, middle brow viewers who are half-trained in this notion of film believe those breaks to be mistakes rather than choices. The consumption of criticism that is built around these studio expectations ends up constituting the filter by which the consumers of this criticism begin to process films. It is a case of viewers who are both too well and not well enough educated in the discourse.

From Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)

The Cost of the Profit-Driven Discourse

Going forward, the depth of this mistake might be hard to see. But considered against works from the past, we see how quickly these concepts break down. Take for instance, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, one of the greatest films ever made (and a film I will likely write about in the future). Almost all of the decisions characters make in the film that have any real impact or consequence happen before the beginning of the film, with a small number of exceptions. Large swaths of runtime are devoted to situating the viewer in the mysterious Zone or the future Russia. Pipes dripping water, a train rumbling, people smoking outside a bar, water running over abandoned items both sacred and profane. Time is devoted to putting the viewer in a place. No, nothing is happening. There is no character development going on. There is no conflict. There are only compelling images that relate the world and reflect the truth of ours.

That isn’t a flaw. It isn’t that Tarkovsky didn’t know what he was doing. It isn’t that they wanted to stretch a thirty page script into a three hour movie. This tonal decision does not fit into Hollywood’s strictures of what a film needs to be doing, but it leads to a film far greater than just about anything Hollywood can achieve using its current system.

Akira Kurosawa on the set of Ran (1985)

Perversity Into Maturity

And this seems almost naive to write about, but a strange phenomenon is occurring alongside and in tandem with the one described above where a cynical outlook on how a screenplay ought to function according to film producers is now considered the adult one. The over-correction against romantic notions of art as an intuitive process that flows from the muse through the artist and into the world has reached an apex where any defense of intuition and non-systematic filmmaking is seen as childish, naive, not serious. It is seen as somehow shrewd to know that a film needs these certain elements, that a film couldn’t be good without them, that their lack can only exist as a flaw and not a feature.

The truth on the other side is that filmmaking is a unique art form in that it often requires huge sums of money and large groups of people to accomplish, and therefore it is not reasonable to expect all of those resources to go into a project that relies on trusting an individual’s artistic vision. Here opens a side argument for the artistic productivity of state funded film programs with missions focused on cultural production and not high returns, but for our purposes here it is to elucidate just what inside this line of thinking is true, because that truth gives the mindset power. But when carefully looked over it is clear that the purpose of these rigid guidelines is a pecuniary one rather than an aesthetic one.

Of course, everyone is allowed to like what they like, and if you prefer films that stick to this Hollywood style, that is A-OK. But it is this reverse use of the style that is troubling. To see people being trained to dismiss films solely on the basis that they break from this style is a part of a continuing devolution and middlebrowing of our culture. And sure, something like character agency can help you identify why you aren’t connecting to a story, but to seek it out as an item on a checklist and docking points whenever a film leaves it unchecked is the exact perversity outlined above.

I Want That Horror: Ari Aster's Midsommar

[Spoilers, spoilers, my god the spoilers!]

The Promise

Several years ago, Beyond the Black Rainbow waylaid me with its exacting eye for evoking nostalgia and dictating pace. Panos Cosmatos outperformed on his feature length debut, and while the film was imperfect, the imperfections did not appear to live inside the essence of the film but rather somewhere in the translation between mind, set, and editing bay. And so, won over by Cosmatos’ vision, I waited eagerly for his next film.

I waited eight years.

Cosmatos returned with Mandy, which was certainly worth the wait, but in that time I’d lost the thread.

When I saw Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary last year, it seemed a similar promise was made to the audience. Aster’s work was magnificent: detail oriented, restrained, brutal, intelligent, and stylish. But I withheld my optimism, having learned from Cosmatos that waiting with bated breath for too long leads to suffocation.

Less than a year later, while I was sitting in the theater for Jordan Peele’s Us, the Midsommar trailer rolled before my eyes. Aster’s second film would be about a pagan cult, and knowing what I knew about his abilities from Hereditary, Midsommar seemed a possible contender for my favorite horror movie of all time.

Going into the movie last weekend, I believed it would be a brightly colored horror tale in the spiritual vein of Wicker Man. I was very wrong.

I found, instead, an uncompromising vision of utopia.

When commenting on Midsommar, Aster called the film “perverse wish fulfillment.” He was referring to Dani’s (the protagonist’s) inclusion into a collective, power over her emotionally absent boyfriend, and discovery of meaning. [1] But it is also wish fulfillment for those exhausted by the rational, Enlightenment, neoliberal order. The commune in Midsommar is aggressively in the opposite direction: group oriented, intuitive, and warm. And while the visiting Americans find their customs and rituals terrifying, I found them appropriate. Life is violent, pain and suffering are real, and while our current order needs us to not dwell so much on that and get on with our shopping, the commune of Hårga integrates these realities into a system of living that solves so many existential and psychological problems we suffer today.

Below I’ve pulled a few features of the commune that strike me as particularly satisfying.

Magic & Ritual

Hereditary’s command of an occult cosmology was perhaps the best ever committed to cinema. The film never fully confronted whether the strange phenomena were in the origin of characters’ psychosis or actual magic. And while buying into the magic still made for a compelling allegory for mental illness running through generations of a family, the story was itself a well crafted horror about a neopagan cult, and at that level it managed to reveal the beliefs and activities of the cult only in the details the protagonist was likely to encounter. Despite only glimpsing slivers of the whole, the viewer had a sense that there were guiding rules to the universe of the magic, that while we never get to read the tomes that the cult adhered to, there were such tomes to be read.

That is all to say that Hereditary was a masterpiece of restraint. It never overstepped, never dropped into exposition, never overexposed. Instead, the trust a viewer places in the film is constantly validated, and as it is validated it deepens, and yet again that deepened trust is validated further. Each time is like a step deeper down into the basement, where you find that while you cannot see everything, you know there is something that could be seen, if only you had a flashlight.

Midsommar was again about a pagan cult, but a cult of a different kind. Instead of a coven of witches operating in secret among us, it is a long running society, isolated in Sweden, allowed to continue its ancient pagan practices into our current day of smartphones and social media (both of which are critical features in the first act before the main characters leave the urban United States for Hårga’s midsommar festival they hold every 90 years). They perform rituals not to take control of occult forces but rather as part of their culture. While there are love spells and other potions, the desired ends are gained within the texture of the community. Psilocybin is taken to “open up” to the influence of nature and the community. Love potions are made and surreptitiously served to prospective lovers along with social pressure and ceremonial sex involving a group of encouraging onlookers ritualistically celebrating the creation of life.

We are shown this relationship between desired change and chemicals outside of the pagan community. The protagonist Dani is prescribed and takes Ativan (lorazepam, a benzodiazapine) to manage the extreme anxiety she feels as a result of the murder-suicide of her sister and parents. This is a person who wants a change to occur (end the anxiety attack) and consumes a drug to create that change (a GABAergic induced calm). But in Hårga, social roles, expectations, ritual, and the use of mind altering drugs create a complex web of meaning and context in the lives of its members, while in our society an expert prescribes pills to mechanistically adjust neurotransmitters, dampening symptoms that render the patient less productive.

Let’s look at another example. When Dani weeps in grief for her family, her emotionally distant boyfriend holds her on the couch but does little else. When she is brought to tears in public, she runs for the bathroom, chokes down her sobs until she regains control of herself and can reemerge in public where extreme emotional outpouring would be shameful. But in Hårga, she weeps when she finds her boyfriend mating with another woman. She tries to flee to a private space (the shared bedroom, now empty and therefore somewhat private), but a group of women join her and weep with her, mimic the contours of her sobs in genuine empathy. The room fills with their unified cries. The tears are not shameful, there is no need to keep them private. The feelings are not something to run from but process, and you never have to process them alone. In Hårga, your pain is not yours to bear, your pain is ours to bear.

By situating the individual inside of the collective, by situating relationships between individuals as a product of collective will, the existential questions of freedom and responsibility that plague our society and fill our psychoanalysis sessions have no oxygen to breathe. There is no need to “cure” issues of isolation, alienation, or meaninglessness. There is no need to “discover yourself”. The psychological lacunae where these arise in our own society simply do not appear in Hårga.

Freedom From the Fear of Death

The turning point in the film for the protagonist and her companions, where they finally peak into the dark side of the Hårga commune, is when they witness the ättestupa ceremony of senicide. At the age of 72, after completing four 18-year cycles of their life (one for every season), elders leap from a precipice to their death. This makes way for new generations and eliminates material burden on their community, but what I saw was something else that was far more important: it transformed the act of death.

In light of ongoing developments in medicine, people in our society live longer and longer lives, with more and more years tacked on at the end of their run filled with brutalizing and humiliating games of needles, pill swapping, and a bed-ridden lifestyle (complete with regular bedpan drama and scheduled sponge baths). This “progress” reduces death to the final failure of trained professionals and the subject in question. Everyday survived is a victory, and every tomorrow is another field of struggle. All of us who’ve witnessed our loved ones follow this wretched path have said more or less the same thing: I don’t want to die that way.

So why do people keep dying that way? Because the only other option is an acceptance and embrace of death. And why do we not choose that? Because death is the greatest conceivable terror.

That there are societies where elders do willingly pass on (the senicidal ättestupa ceremony in Midsommar is based on a number of similar practices in ancient Nordic cultures, precipice and all) suggests that death could be something embraceable, something that isn’t the greatest conceivable terror.

Again, the key is embedding the individual inside of a societal context where the concerns of the individual are maintenance issues for members of the whole. Sprain your ankle? You want to heal, not because you need to go back to work and pursue your career but because there is food to be harvested and the community needs food. That shift in perspective effects every kind of illness, including the ultimate injury: death.

If your focus is not on yourself, if your entire life is not framed with you in the center, then your death is not the end of the world. It isn’t the end of anything. And if your death helps maintain the health and vitality of your community and its part in the balance of the living world, your death is not an injury at all. It is healthy. It is an act of communal hygiene.

Are we too late for this phase shift? Perhaps. Maybe there is already too much individualism embedded in my own psychology to move over to this way of thinking. But do I wish I had this mindset? Do I wish I’d never had this monster of the fear of death allowed inside, to make a home in my heart? What do you wish?

Pagan Dreams

The last point I’ll share here is a constiutive part of all the wonders of the Hårga commune. That is the society’s ability to create meaning and wisdom out of human experience.

As with many human societies, Hårga values intuition, ritual, symbol, dream, and myth as ways to pattern human experience into fractal reflections of the universe itself. And that is, I believe, the greatest loss humanity has suffered with the rise of Enlightenment thinking. The rationalist, scientistic perspective has reduced the world, our home, into a Rube Goldberg designed trammel of Archimedes. A byzantine construction made from trillions of forces and countervailing forces, all organized and pumping along to do nothing in particular. That idea has not only infected many of our philosophers and theologians (if it stayed in the academy it would hardly be worth noting, as an entrenched conviction that life has no meaning is the normal way to respond to spending your life in the academy). No, that idea has integrated itself into the entire fabric of our society.

The ultimate wish fulfillment in Midsommar is the possibility of a community where my own experience appears rich with meaning, is integrated into the fabric of everything that is important and holy. Life in our society has been drained of meaning (hence Dani’s sister decided to commit suicide), and we are told to create our own meaning. That is supposed to be true freedom.

What we find in this “freedom” are not subjects soaring on their own construction of life’s value, but ever rising rates of depression and anxiety, suicide, and opiate addiction. Meaning is not something that one person can create alone. Meaning is socially constructed. And if you want to experience that meaning, you need to visit Hårga.

Citations

[1] http://collider.com/ari-aster-interview-midsommar/

The Collective Wound: Godzilla and the Collective as a Character in Japanese Filmmaking

Gojira (Dir. Ishirō Honda) is not only the first Godzilla film but also one of Japanese film’s first expression of the horror of nuclear warfare. The film began production immediately after the end of US occupation. During the occupation direct references to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasake were censored in Japanese media. [1] But tensions were still high, and Toho Studios pushed for a film that could speak to the tragedy without directly visualizing it. The kaiju monster Godzilla — through character design, plot references to the Lucky Dragon No. 5 disaster, and visual evocation of photojournalism covering the bombings — embodied the collective anxiety and horror without depicting the trauma itself. [2]

Gojira is the source of so much pop culture iconography, but the film’s effect is unexpectedly dark, haunting. This is not a man in a suit play fighting with a giant moth on strings, as one might come to expect from later incarnations. The 1954 Godzilla is more Lovecraft than kitsch.

What we feel at the end of Gojira, as the monster disintegrates at the hands of the Oxygen Destroyer (along with the self-sacrificing scientist who created the weapon), is a membership in the collective who listen via radio to live reports of Godzilla’s death and soon set themselves to piecing their country back together.

This is not a Hollywood moment, where almost all screenplays are written according to a strictly codified sense of what makes an individual grow as an individual. For most Hollywood studios with their bastardized-Joseph-Campbellian rubric, a film works if the viewer feels connected to the hero to such a degree that the hero’s transformation feels like a transformation in the viewer. But for the audience of Gojira, the film works because we come away feeling like a member of that collective who withstood the kaiju and defeated it, and who must now face the reality of so many dead, so much to rebuild.

One could say this is because of a societal difference, that Japanese culture is less individualistic, or that the wound of Hiroshima and Nagasake and the end of the empire was a collective wound. Given the amount of great Japanese cinema focusing on individuals, the latter argument has a stronger pull, but here we are less concerned with why the film is made this way or what cultural factors play into it. Rather, let us look at how the film draws the viewer in as a member of the collective.

To tell the story, Honda relies on seeing the events through several lenses, each viewpoint expressed by a main character. This is a technique we’ve come to expect from mega-disaster blockbusters (just think of the multiple converging hero journeys at the heart of Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow, both filmed by Roland Emmerich who directed 1998’s US Godzilla). A major benefit of the technique is that it works: watching many people from all places and stations of a society reeling from the central crisis makes that crisis feel big and widespread.

The conflict is also mostly one sided. While most films involve an antagonist who interacts with a protagonist — or at least gives the protagonist some way forward — Gojira’s conflict mostly centers around a rampaging kaiju who can’t be stopped. Characters look on in horror or flee for their lives while Godzilla destroys large swaths of various Japanese cities. When the military finally tries a counter-offensive, they are only halfway successful. It is not until scientists collaborate across disciplines and convince the government to back their plan that the protagonists really have much to do. Even then, one has to commit suicide.

What does this passivity look like? Shots of crowds fleeing the rampaging Godzilla. Shot after shot. If we need to raise the stakes for a particular city crushing event, we close in on a weeping mother comforting her crying child as the flames that eat the city around them light their tear-covered faces. Again, these are techniques that are now, some sixty-plus years later, part and parcel of big budget disaster filmmaking.

This cinematic depiction of crowds has a difficult relationship with the medium’s attention to individual protagonists. Master Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is famous for his battle scene depictions of serpentine units of soldiers moving as one through space, as individual characters read the events on the battlefield and react. But a unit of soldiers isn’t quite a crowd. Both are composed of many people who move together with somewhat uniform purpose, yet depicting one should not have the effect as depicting the other. Units of soldiers move together based on commands from a specific, knowable point. When many soldiers act as one, it is a sign of supreme social order. Crowds, however, move together as one during a breakdown of order, as in people fleeing Godzilla.

The end of Do the Right Thing (Dir. Spike Lee) uses a crowd made up of individuals that we have come to know through the events of the film, but once inside a crowd, there is a new tension rising as we see characters moving together, not according to some plan but according to shared experiences, shared frustrations, a shared target. By seeing the crowd coalesce around a common enemy, we see the rise of a new character (the crowd itself) and a sinking away of the individual characters that make it up. This is a very American film with a very similar collective feeling, if only for its climax.

So here we have two examples of groups of people moving together depicted in cinema. Both the well trained unit of soldiers and the mass crowd threatening to riot. But Godzilla films have people fleeing together in the act of escape and mourning together in the wake of a catastrophe. Thus, what a film like Gojira tries to accomplish is a much more complex emotional arc in these crowds, and by keeping with the crowd for a greater portion of screen time, by centering the trauma of Godzilla’s raid on Japan in the collective experience, the film brings us along that same arc as a member of that crowd.

Gojira is a masterpiece on many fronts, but its focus on a collective wound is perhaps its most profound. Given the filmmakers’ inspiration, it seems the most fitting honor.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru