Silent House is certainly a horror film through and through, right down to its embarrassing psychologizing explanation at the end. At the same time, though, it presents itself in a way that begs for a reading against the usual modes of valuing a film, so I totally fell into its trap.
The film, shot in such a way as to convey the sense that it is in "real time," is at least as much a riff on Russian Ark as it is on Paranormal Activity, even if the technical achievement is really just a fabrication. And instead of the awesome technical spectacle that Russian Ark provides, we have what is more or less High Tension with less Halloween worship and more formal spectacle. Elizabeth Olsen's acting is pretty fantastic -- and I say this as someone who has no capacity to judge acting ability whatsoever, in addition to having terrible taste & not being able to recommend things to save my life -- but overall, to say the movie drags is sort of a terrible understatement.
But then, there is that one sequence. And god, is it good. When the genre busts right the fuck out of the editorial constraints and stains the walls and the camera and everything, for just a couple minutes, is a delirium of bleeding structures and visually unlocked trauma and just a giant fuck you to the rule-obsessed cretins who appoint themselves gatekeepers of genre.
Unfortunately, it then slinks back, asking their permission for inclusion, with a finale that is well done, for what it is, but betrays the possibility of that sequence in favor of The Motivating Power of Past Rapes and the safe Strong Female Character. Hooray.
What I think is worth preserving about this movie is the way that for it to work requires a mode of reading that is both counterfactual and past-tense; there is not really any critical attempt, at least that I am aware of, that tries to make sense of what having seen a movie achieves, as opposed to actively seeing or going to (in the future) see, barring the way that they pile up on one another in lists of influence. Because of the way the film presents itself as being in a sort of covert dialogue with other films -- the decision to "hide" the cuts cannot possibly be seen outside of the cultural dialogue which would have you believe that movies like Transformers, with their rapid-fire editing (allegedly; I haven't actually seen any of those either) are the latest and truest manifestation of the Death of Cinema -- in conjunction with how, well, boring this film itself really is, for the large majority of its running time, encourages a sense of the film as a thing that had been watched, as opposed to a Viewing Experience. Thematically, that this film's narrative is structured around trauma and how its intrasubjective shattering plays out then makes at least a little more sense, even if it isn't especially well handled. It is basically psychoanalytic in this sense, figuring trauma as not so much an event as a locus, a post ex facto origin story which collapses both development and motivation into a singular symbolic inscription, and which will be symbolically reenacted until the individual makes an appointment to sit on the Magical Ahistorical Couch to work it out from the stranglehold of the Imaginary into the Symbolic & thus be able to sort of purge it.
Uhm, anyway. All these things combined seem to me to suggest, again, that where the film works is not so much in its experience as in how it lingers, and what about it does. So the fact that I now think, however many months later, about that fantastical sequence in terms that don't rely whatsoever on the way it works in relation to the whole, where whole is generally understood as the experiential aspect of the formal, leaves me with the sense that there is something lingeringly worthwhile about the film, even if it isn't good in the way we tend to value these things.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Sunday, December 16, 2012
2012 in Film: Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
Okay, so it is maybe a bit unfair to lead off with this one. Particularly because I just had a review of it published over at Strange Horizons. But, it being my favorite movie that I saw this year, and since it seems to be in an accidental intimate dialogue with most of the things that fascinate me these days, I am going to suggest that those of you who are interested take the time to read that review, because what I am going to try to do here is draw out some of the stuff I found interesting about the film that I didn't talk about there.
So to begin, the stuff about video games. Specifically how games themselves are structured to absent the protagonist. There are obvious echoes here with my concept of Fantastical Materialism, and the way in which Miéville treats his generic creations with a materialism generally absent even from things like "hard sci fi" and how it then results in an absence of interiority in his characters. An easy reading of this would then be to say that all video games are therefore Fantastical Materialist, and then (hopefully) to throw the idea out altogether, given how video games actually act (both formally and culturally; either way one doesn't tend to see much materialism (except maybe in the moralistic sense) therein). There are other consonances; video games tend to be difficult, if not impossible, to allegorize -- even games like Eternal Sonata, whose premise boils down to "yr anime chopin" (also it is a wonderful game) or Bioshock, with its preachy boring anti-Randian premise saturated through its whole structure, aren't in practice reducible to these meanings -- as well as tending to require, for reasons both formal and of perceived consumer prejudice, much more clearly defined internal worlds & therefore fidelity to what occurs within them. They also almost never indulge in the "it was all a dream!" frame, which, despite being almost exclusively thought of as a form of lazy writing, is basically a way of conflating content to form by breaking the frame. Because the dream-frame is predicated on the idea that the text is a product of a specific interiority, and video game protagonists must be stripped of their interiority, the frame doesn't fit; the few counterexamples I know of, where a game does do this, perform it for much more material purposes than it gets used for in film, as in the end of Super Mario Bros. 2, where the game itself was a reskinned version of a non-Mario game and as such had almost nothing to do with the previous game, even in terms of mechanics, and so the dream-frame presented in the credits offered more of an excuse/apology to the player, a "get out of canon free" card, than a way of pretending that Mario is well-developed enough as a character to have a subconscious. That Silent Hill provides one of the only other examples is also telling, given that it is one of the only video games that engages with interiority whatsoever.
Of course, what these consonances achieve in video games is basically the opposite of what they achieve in Miéville's novels; instead of reconfiguring the ideological base of the form in which they act, they serve to lubricate the transferance that gamers like to call "immersion," which is itself the primary ideological vehicle of the form. The player doesn't need to have an objective interiority structured for him; this is the primary material difference between a player and a reader. The gamer is immersed exactly to the degree that her subjectivity can be made to fill the void that the character/protagonist creates; where the reader identifies, the gamer inhabits. Both are implicated in the production & reification of bourgeois subjectivity, because of the difference of form.
I should note here that I am using too broad a category for the thing I am describing. This obviously breaks down in a lot of places; for our purposes, though, I suppose I am using "video games" as shorthand for the "narrative component of character-driven video games."
All of this, of course, is an extrapolation on my claim that what Silent Hill: Revelation 3D does is to invert this relationship, in the same way that the Silent Hill games do. Which is to say that instead of operating in a form in which idealism & bourgeois subjectivity are predicated on the creation of a central character as void to be occupied, it operates in a form in which the central character produces these same ideological effects by presenting to us a subjectivity which is in the process of being constructed, and uses our and their visuality to short circuit the viewer into identification. By basically not having any characters, and by treating the plot as a paranoid conspiracy/mythological structure become material, it recreates the sensation of estrangement from form that makes the games as effective as they are.
Also, I don't really know where this fits but the video game-y stuff in the movie is so good, Heather checking her inventory in the motel room especially, oh my god that made me real happy.
Now that I have said something that makes this seem like a review or whatever, lets telescope back out and talk briefly about how this lack of characterization intersects with the fact that this is a movie in which the both the protagonist and antagonist are not only women, but the same woman; the villain is also a woman; the main infodump is given by a woman; and the men are either dudes in distress (Harry), totally ineffectual afterthoughts (Vincent), creepy stalkerish detectives (that dude who was a creepy stalkerish detective), or dumb fucking monsters (Leonard, Pyramid Head). Like how the romance arc ends with Vincent awkwardly kissing a really distracted and at best vaguely interested Heather, who isn't necessarily repulsed by him but is a bit busy living out her recurring nightmare, and even the way the scene is shot seems to be aware that this is more them enacting certain social assumptions than True Love.
The question, to which I have no answer, is how treating a film which is ostensibly in the horror genre and which is stacked with female characters as a shining example of an approach toward genre that moves away from the centrality of characters, might create apace for that wretched form of academic misogyny that hides behind interpretive frames to perpetuate male supremacy. Because Heather does spend an inordinate amount of time yelling "dad" into the haunted corridors of the town, and the climactic fight scene does involve a dude (albeit a monstrous one) stepping up to protect a woman from another woman (albeit a monstrous one) & ultimately decapitating her. So while there isn't so much of the shitty moralism of a slasher film, the problem is still very much there, and I worry that claiming the actors aren't characters as such could be used to justify them.
That the film simultaneously reifies & (possibly) subverts social roles, then, is an argument that is not so much in its favor -- even those moralizing slasher films often do the same thing, and whether we take this as a horror or weird film, the sexual politics of the genre provide a legacy which requires much more critical engagement.
So to begin, the stuff about video games. Specifically how games themselves are structured to absent the protagonist. There are obvious echoes here with my concept of Fantastical Materialism, and the way in which Miéville treats his generic creations with a materialism generally absent even from things like "hard sci fi" and how it then results in an absence of interiority in his characters. An easy reading of this would then be to say that all video games are therefore Fantastical Materialist, and then (hopefully) to throw the idea out altogether, given how video games actually act (both formally and culturally; either way one doesn't tend to see much materialism (except maybe in the moralistic sense) therein). There are other consonances; video games tend to be difficult, if not impossible, to allegorize -- even games like Eternal Sonata, whose premise boils down to "yr anime chopin" (also it is a wonderful game) or Bioshock, with its preachy boring anti-Randian premise saturated through its whole structure, aren't in practice reducible to these meanings -- as well as tending to require, for reasons both formal and of perceived consumer prejudice, much more clearly defined internal worlds & therefore fidelity to what occurs within them. They also almost never indulge in the "it was all a dream!" frame, which, despite being almost exclusively thought of as a form of lazy writing, is basically a way of conflating content to form by breaking the frame. Because the dream-frame is predicated on the idea that the text is a product of a specific interiority, and video game protagonists must be stripped of their interiority, the frame doesn't fit; the few counterexamples I know of, where a game does do this, perform it for much more material purposes than it gets used for in film, as in the end of Super Mario Bros. 2, where the game itself was a reskinned version of a non-Mario game and as such had almost nothing to do with the previous game, even in terms of mechanics, and so the dream-frame presented in the credits offered more of an excuse/apology to the player, a "get out of canon free" card, than a way of pretending that Mario is well-developed enough as a character to have a subconscious. That Silent Hill provides one of the only other examples is also telling, given that it is one of the only video games that engages with interiority whatsoever.
Of course, what these consonances achieve in video games is basically the opposite of what they achieve in Miéville's novels; instead of reconfiguring the ideological base of the form in which they act, they serve to lubricate the transferance that gamers like to call "immersion," which is itself the primary ideological vehicle of the form. The player doesn't need to have an objective interiority structured for him; this is the primary material difference between a player and a reader. The gamer is immersed exactly to the degree that her subjectivity can be made to fill the void that the character/protagonist creates; where the reader identifies, the gamer inhabits. Both are implicated in the production & reification of bourgeois subjectivity, because of the difference of form.
I should note here that I am using too broad a category for the thing I am describing. This obviously breaks down in a lot of places; for our purposes, though, I suppose I am using "video games" as shorthand for the "narrative component of character-driven video games."
All of this, of course, is an extrapolation on my claim that what Silent Hill: Revelation 3D does is to invert this relationship, in the same way that the Silent Hill games do. Which is to say that instead of operating in a form in which idealism & bourgeois subjectivity are predicated on the creation of a central character as void to be occupied, it operates in a form in which the central character produces these same ideological effects by presenting to us a subjectivity which is in the process of being constructed, and uses our and their visuality to short circuit the viewer into identification. By basically not having any characters, and by treating the plot as a paranoid conspiracy/mythological structure become material, it recreates the sensation of estrangement from form that makes the games as effective as they are.
Also, I don't really know where this fits but the video game-y stuff in the movie is so good, Heather checking her inventory in the motel room especially, oh my god that made me real happy.
Now that I have said something that makes this seem like a review or whatever, lets telescope back out and talk briefly about how this lack of characterization intersects with the fact that this is a movie in which the both the protagonist and antagonist are not only women, but the same woman; the villain is also a woman; the main infodump is given by a woman; and the men are either dudes in distress (Harry), totally ineffectual afterthoughts (Vincent), creepy stalkerish detectives (that dude who was a creepy stalkerish detective), or dumb fucking monsters (Leonard, Pyramid Head). Like how the romance arc ends with Vincent awkwardly kissing a really distracted and at best vaguely interested Heather, who isn't necessarily repulsed by him but is a bit busy living out her recurring nightmare, and even the way the scene is shot seems to be aware that this is more them enacting certain social assumptions than True Love.
The question, to which I have no answer, is how treating a film which is ostensibly in the horror genre and which is stacked with female characters as a shining example of an approach toward genre that moves away from the centrality of characters, might create apace for that wretched form of academic misogyny that hides behind interpretive frames to perpetuate male supremacy. Because Heather does spend an inordinate amount of time yelling "dad" into the haunted corridors of the town, and the climactic fight scene does involve a dude (albeit a monstrous one) stepping up to protect a woman from another woman (albeit a monstrous one) & ultimately decapitating her. So while there isn't so much of the shitty moralism of a slasher film, the problem is still very much there, and I worry that claiming the actors aren't characters as such could be used to justify them.
That the film simultaneously reifies & (possibly) subverts social roles, then, is an argument that is not so much in its favor -- even those moralizing slasher films often do the same thing, and whether we take this as a horror or weird film, the sexual politics of the genre provide a legacy which requires much more critical engagement.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
2012 in Film
I am going to try something that I haven't ever really done on this blog before: regularly scheduled updates. Every day for the next sixteen days I hope to post a review of one of the films I saw in theaters this year. Some of them will be very, very short; others will probably be of about medium length. I doubt any will be particularly long. What follows is a list of all the films I saw & will review, in order of their release date according to Wikipedia.
I will begin tomorrow with Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, and hop around the list from there. Some of these movies were absolutely wonderful, others wretched. As someone who has impeccably shitty taste & a total inability to recommend things well, these reviews will almost certainly tend more toward the analytic/critical than the normal recommendation-based model. There really is no particular reason for me to do this, no grand critique to be made through themes or whatever. I just kind of want to.
Quickly, I would like to mention that I will not be reviewing those stupid movies that everyone seems to have wanted to have a go at; The Dark Knight Rises and Cloud Atlas and The Avengers. I didn't see them, first of all; and second, who cares. I think the fact that I avoided these films contributed as much to my enjoying my year of theater-going as much as anything else. So if you want to read about how Batman's a plutocrat or zombies are proles are whatever, feel free to look elsewhere.
- Norwegian Wood
- Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
- The Secret World of Arrietty
- John Carter
- Silent House
- 21 Jump Street
- The Hunger Games
- The Cabin in the Woods
- Safe
- Men in Black 3
- Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
- The Amazing Spider-Man
- Looper
- Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
- Wreck-It Ralph
- Rise of the Guardians
I will begin tomorrow with Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, and hop around the list from there. Some of these movies were absolutely wonderful, others wretched. As someone who has impeccably shitty taste & a total inability to recommend things well, these reviews will almost certainly tend more toward the analytic/critical than the normal recommendation-based model. There really is no particular reason for me to do this, no grand critique to be made through themes or whatever. I just kind of want to.
Quickly, I would like to mention that I will not be reviewing those stupid movies that everyone seems to have wanted to have a go at; The Dark Knight Rises and Cloud Atlas and The Avengers. I didn't see them, first of all; and second, who cares. I think the fact that I avoided these films contributed as much to my enjoying my year of theater-going as much as anything else. So if you want to read about how Batman's a plutocrat or zombies are proles are whatever, feel free to look elsewhere.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Screens & Diners
So, in that last post, I claimed Cher Lloyd hadn't done anything to interest me recently.
It, of course, figures that she has had a single on the radio which I rather enjoyed, without realizing it was her. And, even more, that she released two entirely different videos for it - the version "featuring Astro" and the "US Version."
The version featuring Astro is an orgy of screens, with an iPad, photographs, fashion magazines, and whatever the fuck else turning into active/interactive fields in which there is a partial fluidity, which seems predicated on how bet Cher Lloyd can play out fantasy revenge scenarios regarding the boy who she sings about wanting back. A sort of strange fusion of Avril Lavigne's video for Girlfriend.
with that seminal moment of my childhood from Dre & Eminem's Forgot About Dre (at 1:12).
I don't really have more to say about this version; I'm much more inclined to kick the ball down the court to Giovanni or Rob, knowing that the likelihood of them writing about it is pretty much nonexistent.
What I have to say about the "US Version" of Want U Back is equally sparse.
This one's clearly Kelis' Milkhshake
spliced with bits of Gaga's Paparazzi.
Or, I guess, Telephone, but like honestly, who cares.
Of course, there's also the connection with this phenomenal video (even if it is a boring cover of a boring song) for Across the Universe by Fiona Apple.
It, of course, figures that she has had a single on the radio which I rather enjoyed, without realizing it was her. And, even more, that she released two entirely different videos for it - the version "featuring Astro" and the "US Version."
The version featuring Astro is an orgy of screens, with an iPad, photographs, fashion magazines, and whatever the fuck else turning into active/interactive fields in which there is a partial fluidity, which seems predicated on how bet Cher Lloyd can play out fantasy revenge scenarios regarding the boy who she sings about wanting back. A sort of strange fusion of Avril Lavigne's video for Girlfriend.
with that seminal moment of my childhood from Dre & Eminem's Forgot About Dre (at 1:12).
I don't really have more to say about this version; I'm much more inclined to kick the ball down the court to Giovanni or Rob, knowing that the likelihood of them writing about it is pretty much nonexistent.
What I have to say about the "US Version" of Want U Back is equally sparse.
This one's clearly Kelis' Milkhshake
spliced with bits of Gaga's Paparazzi.
Or, I guess, Telephone, but like honestly, who cares.
Of course, there's also the connection with this phenomenal video (even if it is a boring cover of a boring song) for Across the Universe by Fiona Apple.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Articulating Absence: Ghosts in Disney Theme Parks
I came to this post, at a blog dedicated to exploring Disneyland's Haunted Mansion ride, through JR's tumblr. The image there has a sort of sweet humor, its text (divorced of whatever context it initially appeared in) seeming beyond (in)sincerity. There's no reason to doubt that these diagrams are anything but in earnest, and yet, who has ever heard of a ghost ascending stairs that don't exist? Flying, certainly, but plodding up a no-longer-existent staircase?
Having never (at least that I can recall) actually been in Disney's Haunted Mansion, I'm not going to contribute to the debate about whether the attraction is more amenable to what HBG2 refers to as the "Spirit Possession paradigm" or the "Parallel World paradigm," but I would like to briefly discuss how these "paradigms" don't quite work, in my view, and again try to advance the way in which I've been prone to thinking about ghost stories for a little while now.
Here are HBG2's working definitions of the two paradigms:
Spirit Possession:
Parallel World:
I've been meaning to write, for a couple of years now, a coherent argument regarding representations of ghosts. The closest I've gotten is almost certainly the final paragraph of my post Unified (Gar)Field Theory; there are fragments in this comment I left here and a lot of this post, from the 14th paragraph until the weird occupy stuff at the bottom, but both of these are very specifically arguing about ways of reading the Haunted House, and so don't so much present a theory of ghosts as elaborate on a theory that I still have yet to present. For the record, my theory basically revolves around a reading of John Carpenter's The Fog, which has always seemed to me to be a film about the ways in which space itself attempts to become linguistic. Obviously this is something that needs a significant amount of explanation, that I'm just not going to be able to provide here.
Back to the two paradigms, though. It is fairly unsurprising when, at the end of the post, HBG2 concludes that, "P[arallel] W[orld] and S[pirit] P[ossession] are not mutually exclusive theories." In the context of the discussion he's intervening in around the Haunted Mansion, this is meant as a way to hold open ambiguities; he, like many interpreters and critics, wants to open up the possibilities of enjoyment of this ride, instead of foreclose them, and having (apparently) competing lenses allows this. To my mind, though, the reason that his two paradigms aren't mutually exclusive is kind of a lot easier -- it's because they're the same thing.
Well, not exactly. The "Parallel Worlds" theory is a lot more appealing to me, for instance, because the "Spirit Possession" theory smacks of that intolerable misunderstanding of ghosts as the products of "unfinished business." There's really no excuse for so direly misinterpreting what it is about ghosts that makes them compelling as that catchphrase does. It makes ghosts nothing but a narrative function, a conflict, a pending resolution, masquerading as an ontology. But the "Parallel Worlds" theory does this too, albeit in a slightly more clever way, reducing ghosts to the psychological or metaphysical. No matter which of the theories you choose, what you ultimately advocate is an understanding of ghosts as presences. Which is all well and fine, I suppose, if you want your frights wrapped in a nice little blanket of affirmation of your belief in immortal souls, or whatever. But that's fucking boring.
As I said in the Garfield post, "ghosts are absences of space, absences within space, that structure the space." The "Structuring Absence" theory of ghosts, I would argue, applies broadly across all ghosts, and touches on what is truly interesting about them. Because the second you start to think of ghosts as presences, and specifically as individualized presences, you lose the way in which they function not as the story, but of it. It is the story which shapes itself around the ghost, not the ghost which is the story -- unless we're talking Casper here, in which case we're just talking about the ghost as a purely aesthetic object.
The further I try to go here in articulating the idea, the more unmanageable this is going to become. So I'll try to just lay out a few ideas, necessarily underdeveloped, that I think are absolutely necessary to support my claim at a very basic level, and leave the heavy shit for later. I'll also try to tie this back into the Haunted Mansion post out of which this whole thing began, if only for my own sake.
It is, for me, impossible to overstate just how important the idea that Ghosts Are Space is. Because, for one thing, this goes very much against most of the received narrative wisdom of ghosts, which argues incessantly that ghosts are dead folks. And so they surely are, but they are dead folks in a very specific way, which is to say in their relation to space. Because ghosts haunt; in ceasing living, they cease to take up space, and instead constitute it. Whether they are rattling teacups or murdering interlopers, whether are motivated by redemption or revenge, what makes them ghosts is that they articulate a space. I actually kind of like "Articulating Absence" as the name for this theory of ghosts. Maybe we'll stick with that one.
That is precisely what ghosts do: they make a space speak, and they provide it with joints. They hinge space. The ghost is that space which fits together in such a way that its parts may move, and which through voice can define itself.
And so, to return at last to the Haunted Mansion. Despite never having been on the ride, it's my contention that the reason that the two proposed paradigms overlap so neatly is that they are both, as are most understandings of ghost stories, theories of the ghost as narrative function (which, to be entirely fair, is HBG2's entire point; I'm not so much arguing against his ideas here, at least I don't think so, as trying to use them as a springboard to talk about something else, as if that weren't obvious enough already). I am proposing, instead, that the psychological and metaphysical readings of ghosts that renders them narrative functions is wrongheaded, in that it doesn't come close to capturing the stuff that makes ghosts interesting beyond the particular narratives in which they are embedded, and that an alternative theory of ghosts is needed, which properly situates ghosts not within the psychological, but within the topological. Simply put: for the Haunted Mansion and for every other ghost story, it is not a question of whether the ghosts "possess" spaces, or whether it is a question of how they view spaces; the ghosts are themselves the spaces, or at least the absences which articulate them.
Having never (at least that I can recall) actually been in Disney's Haunted Mansion, I'm not going to contribute to the debate about whether the attraction is more amenable to what HBG2 refers to as the "Spirit Possession paradigm" or the "Parallel World paradigm," but I would like to briefly discuss how these "paradigms" don't quite work, in my view, and again try to advance the way in which I've been prone to thinking about ghost stories for a little while now.
Here are HBG2's working definitions of the two paradigms:
Spirit Possession:
Quite simply, wicked spirits are out to get you. They want to take possession of your body. Failing that, they'll take an animal or even a building, but they want to move up to humans if they can.
Parallel World:
[G]hosts may continue to inhabit the world that was there, regardless of what is found there now.
I've been meaning to write, for a couple of years now, a coherent argument regarding representations of ghosts. The closest I've gotten is almost certainly the final paragraph of my post Unified (Gar)Field Theory; there are fragments in this comment I left here and a lot of this post, from the 14th paragraph until the weird occupy stuff at the bottom, but both of these are very specifically arguing about ways of reading the Haunted House, and so don't so much present a theory of ghosts as elaborate on a theory that I still have yet to present. For the record, my theory basically revolves around a reading of John Carpenter's The Fog, which has always seemed to me to be a film about the ways in which space itself attempts to become linguistic. Obviously this is something that needs a significant amount of explanation, that I'm just not going to be able to provide here.
Back to the two paradigms, though. It is fairly unsurprising when, at the end of the post, HBG2 concludes that, "P[arallel] W[orld] and S[pirit] P[ossession] are not mutually exclusive theories." In the context of the discussion he's intervening in around the Haunted Mansion, this is meant as a way to hold open ambiguities; he, like many interpreters and critics, wants to open up the possibilities of enjoyment of this ride, instead of foreclose them, and having (apparently) competing lenses allows this. To my mind, though, the reason that his two paradigms aren't mutually exclusive is kind of a lot easier -- it's because they're the same thing.
Well, not exactly. The "Parallel Worlds" theory is a lot more appealing to me, for instance, because the "Spirit Possession" theory smacks of that intolerable misunderstanding of ghosts as the products of "unfinished business." There's really no excuse for so direly misinterpreting what it is about ghosts that makes them compelling as that catchphrase does. It makes ghosts nothing but a narrative function, a conflict, a pending resolution, masquerading as an ontology. But the "Parallel Worlds" theory does this too, albeit in a slightly more clever way, reducing ghosts to the psychological or metaphysical. No matter which of the theories you choose, what you ultimately advocate is an understanding of ghosts as presences. Which is all well and fine, I suppose, if you want your frights wrapped in a nice little blanket of affirmation of your belief in immortal souls, or whatever. But that's fucking boring.
As I said in the Garfield post, "ghosts are absences of space, absences within space, that structure the space." The "Structuring Absence" theory of ghosts, I would argue, applies broadly across all ghosts, and touches on what is truly interesting about them. Because the second you start to think of ghosts as presences, and specifically as individualized presences, you lose the way in which they function not as the story, but of it. It is the story which shapes itself around the ghost, not the ghost which is the story -- unless we're talking Casper here, in which case we're just talking about the ghost as a purely aesthetic object.
The further I try to go here in articulating the idea, the more unmanageable this is going to become. So I'll try to just lay out a few ideas, necessarily underdeveloped, that I think are absolutely necessary to support my claim at a very basic level, and leave the heavy shit for later. I'll also try to tie this back into the Haunted Mansion post out of which this whole thing began, if only for my own sake.
It is, for me, impossible to overstate just how important the idea that Ghosts Are Space is. Because, for one thing, this goes very much against most of the received narrative wisdom of ghosts, which argues incessantly that ghosts are dead folks. And so they surely are, but they are dead folks in a very specific way, which is to say in their relation to space. Because ghosts haunt; in ceasing living, they cease to take up space, and instead constitute it. Whether they are rattling teacups or murdering interlopers, whether are motivated by redemption or revenge, what makes them ghosts is that they articulate a space. I actually kind of like "Articulating Absence" as the name for this theory of ghosts. Maybe we'll stick with that one.
That is precisely what ghosts do: they make a space speak, and they provide it with joints. They hinge space. The ghost is that space which fits together in such a way that its parts may move, and which through voice can define itself.
And so, to return at last to the Haunted Mansion. Despite never having been on the ride, it's my contention that the reason that the two proposed paradigms overlap so neatly is that they are both, as are most understandings of ghost stories, theories of the ghost as narrative function (which, to be entirely fair, is HBG2's entire point; I'm not so much arguing against his ideas here, at least I don't think so, as trying to use them as a springboard to talk about something else, as if that weren't obvious enough already). I am proposing, instead, that the psychological and metaphysical readings of ghosts that renders them narrative functions is wrongheaded, in that it doesn't come close to capturing the stuff that makes ghosts interesting beyond the particular narratives in which they are embedded, and that an alternative theory of ghosts is needed, which properly situates ghosts not within the psychological, but within the topological. Simply put: for the Haunted Mansion and for every other ghost story, it is not a question of whether the ghosts "possess" spaces, or whether it is a question of how they view spaces; the ghosts are themselves the spaces, or at least the absences which articulate them.
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