Gothic Nostalgia: The Uses of Toxic Memory in 21st Century Popular Culture 3031438523, 9783031438523

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PALGRAVE GOTHIC

Gothic Nostalgia The Uses of Toxic Memory in 21st Century Popular Culture

Edited by Simon Bacon · Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon

Palgrave Gothic

Series Editor Clive Bloom, Middlesex University, London, UK

Dating back to the eighteenth century, the term ‘gothic’ began as a designation for an artistic movement when British antiquarians became dissatisfied with the taste for all things Italianate. By the twentieth century, the Gothic was a worldwide phenomenon influencing global cinema and the emergent film industries of Japan and Korea. Gothic influences are evident throughout contemporary culture: in detective fiction, television programmes, Cosplay events, fashion catwalks, music styles, musical theatre, ghostly tourism and video games, as well as being constantly reinvented online. It is no longer an antiquarian pursuit but the longest lasting influence in popular culture, reworked and re-experienced by each new generation. This series offers readers the very best in new international research and scholarship on the historical development, cultural meaning and diversity of gothic culture. While covering Gothic origins dating back to the eighteenth century, the Palgrave Gothic series also drives exciting new discussions on dystopian, urban and Anthropocene gothic sensibilities emerging in the twenty-first century. The Gothic shows no sign of obsolescence.

Simon Bacon · Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon Editors

Gothic Nostalgia The Uses of Toxic Memory in 21st Century Popular Culture

Editors Simon Bacon Poznan, ´ Poland

Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, ´ Poland

ISSN 2634-6214 ISSN 2634-6222 (electronic) Palgrave Gothic ISBN 978-3-031-43851-6 ISBN 978-3-031-43852-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: “Fog Over Whitby Harbour” by Madeline Potter. Reproduced with the permission of the artist. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

Books really are nothing without all the hard work and goodwill of all those taking part. And this is at every stage of the process from proposal, through the review period and on to the final manuscript and so includes all those that began the journey with us but were, for various reasons, unable to complete it with us. Not least as the past few years have felt particularly difficult, and while one of the messages of this collection is that the past was never as rosy as we’d like to remember, the world since Covid-19 began has taken on a texture all of its own. For this alone, it is appropriate to give a special thanks to all those that remained with us throughout and also joined in at the last minute to ensure that the book came out. With this, we would like to thank all those groups on Facebook and Twitter (while it’s still here) that shared our original CFP and subsequent calls for papers on certain topics, in particular the International Gothic Association, MLA Gothic Studies Forum, SCMS Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group, and the Ganza Online Biennial Conference and their members. We would also like to thank the often unsung Reviewers whose thoughts and comments have helped make this a better book and also the team at Palgrave, especially Lina and Alice, whose help and support have been invaluable throughout. On a more personal note, we would also like to thank our two children Seba and Maja for being a source of constant nostalgia for when they were younger yet also tempering that with hope and expectation for the future as they both become the amazing adults we know they will be, and also Mam and v

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Tata Bronk for their continual and ongoing support. Separately, I (Simon) would like to thank Kasia for being the reason that anything and everything gets done in my life and that I love you more than I’ll ever be able to say, my forever Mrs. Mine.

Contents

Introduction Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon

1

Frameworks of Gothic Nostalgia and Toxicity 1408 and the Structure of Haunting Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

15

Toxic Nostalgia in Contemporary Horror Brandon R. Grafius

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Toxic Nostalgia in the Wake of the Postmodern Turn Matthias Stephan

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Deepfake Sockpuppets: The Toxic “Realities” of a Weaponised Internet Katy Wareham Morris

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The Toxic Screen The Nostalgia of Setting, Sex and Sound in the Wicker Man Films Lauren Rosewarne

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CONTENTS

The American Dream and American Nightmare: The Toxic Pursuit of Nostalgia and Happiness Presented in Poltergeist (1982) and Poltergeist (2015) Robert Mclaughlin

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“You’re Too Focused on Where You’ve Been”: Uncanny Nostalgia in Mary Poppins Returns Daniel Kasper

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Pulling Our Strings: The Gothic Nostalgia of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria J. Simpson

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“I Just Wanted to Preserve It Just as It Is”: Gothic Nostalgia in The Watcher Abel F. Fenwick

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Identity Prevention Is Better than Cure: Anachronistic Therapists and Toxic Wellness Catherine Pugh

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Patriarchy Then and Now—With a Twist: The Postmodern Horror of Alex Garland’s Men M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh

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“But now, yeah, I’m thinking I’m back”: The All-Consuming Gothic Nostalgia in the John Wick Franchise Simon Bacon

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Gothic Nostalgia in Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room Martyn Colebrook Toxic Ableism and Gothic Nostalgia in Fanfiction About Mermaids Martine Mussies

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Environments Of Greed and the Undead Past: Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad as an Exercise in Toxic Nostalgia Aparajita Hazra

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CONTENTS

Soviet Nostalgia in the Vampire Trilogy A Tale of the Soviet Vampire by Aleksandr Slepakov (2014–18) Patrycja Pichnicka-Trivedi “Oh No! Not Again!”: Toxic Nostalgia and British Antisemitism in Ghost Stories by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson Vicky Brewster

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Extremist Nostalgia: Mike Ma’s Novellas as Twenty-First-Century Far-Right Gothic Helen Young

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Simon Bacon is an independent scholar based in Poznan, ´ Poland. He has written and edited 25+ books including Becoming Vampire (2017), The Gothic: A Reader (2018), Eco-vampires (2019), Toxic Cultures: A Companion (2022), Nosferatu in the 21st Century (2023), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2 volumes, 2023), and The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (2024). M. Keith Booker is a professor of English at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He is the author of dozens of essays on literature and popular culture and is the author or editor of more than sixty books on literature and popular culture. Horror film is among his central interests. Vicky Brewster is a final-year Ph.D. candidate at Swansea University studying English Literature. Her thesis is titled “Ghosts, Clones and the Self: Hauntings in 21st Century Fiction”. She has been published in a LIT Journal special issue on twenty-first-century horror trends and has upcoming essays in Future Folk Horror (ed. Simon Bacon) for Lexington and Past As Nightmare (ed. Daniel Renshaw) for University of Wales Press. Vicky is also a freelance editor of long-form fiction, and runs the Gothic writing retreat, The Writing Haunt. Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon is an assistant professor at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, ´ Poland. She teaches the History of English Literature at AMU; however, since 2015 her xi

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research has been devoted to old age as defined and (re)presented in English culture and literature, especially in the long eighteenth century. She has published age stereotypes, age decorum, memory and nostalgia as well as various geragogic processes in epistolary and dramatic accounts of ageing. Martyn Colebrook is an independent researcher. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Hull in 2012, focusing on the novels of Iain M. Banks. He has written numerous articles, chapters and co-edited The Transgressive Iain Banks (2012). Other subjects of study include Don DeLillo, Gordon Burn, Paul Auster, J. G. Ballard, and Kevin Barry. Isra Daraiseh is an assistant professor of English at the Arab Open University in Kuwait. She is the co-author of the books Tony Soprano’s America: Gangsters, Guns, and Money (2017) and Consumerist Orientalism: The Convergence of Arab and American Popular Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism (2019), as well as a number of essays on British, American, and the Middle Eastern literature and popular culture. Abel F. Fenwick is a recent graduate of Royal Holloway University of London and winner of the Martin Holloway prize. Abel’s research interests include the interplay of gender, trauma, and class in the long nineteenth century, intersections she plans to explore more fully during a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature. Upcoming publications include chapters on the complex legacy of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and HBO’s Oz. Brandon R. Grafius is an academic dean and associate professor of biblical studies at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit. His most recent book is Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us (Broadleaf Books, 2022). His monograph Concerning Dust and Ashes: Transcendent Terror in the Hebrew Bible is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Aparajita Hazra is a dean of Arts and professor of English in Diamond Harbour University, India. She has served as a dean of Arts and the head of the Department of English in SKB University. She has acted as the director of the Centre for Women’s Studies and the director of the Centre for Foreign Language Studies there. A gold medallist and a national scholar, she has contributed numerous articles on literary topics in various

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national and international journals. She has presented papers and delivered talks as Resource Person in national and international conferences in India and abroad in France, New Zealand, Macau, Malaysia, Canada, Ireland, Georgia, Thailand, and Scotland. She has edited and written many books including: The Brontes: A Sorority of Passion (2012), Her Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2020), and The Gothique: Myriad Manifestations—A Study of the Various Forms of the Gothic (2023). Daniel Kasper is a lecturer of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. He studies the Gothic from 1789 to the present, with special emphasis on Dracula and the work of Shirley Jackson. Robert Mclaughlin is the Digital Centre manager at South Staffordshire College whose specialism is in media and film theory with an emphasis on industry contextualisation, business and marketing. His academic areas of research are in media theory where he has written academic papers on VHS Culture, hauntology, and children’s horror. He has published a monograph though Auteur/Liverpool University Press focusing on Stephen Spielberg and Tobe Hooper’s 1982 classic Poltergeist and has written extensively about films animation, horror and cult television having work cited in The Guardian, Daily Express, and Forbes on areas focusing on the weird and unusual side of film and television. Martine Mussies writes about The Cyborg Mermaid for The Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University. Next to that, she is working on a project around King Alfred of Wessex in fanfiction, with support of Leiden University. Besides her research, Martine is a professional musician and illustrator. She studies neuropsychology at the University of Chicago via e-learning. Her interests include autism, Japan, languages, martial arts, medievalism, music(ology), and science fiction. More @ www.martinemussies.nl. Patrycja Pichnicka-Trivedi is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Warsaw writing her thesis on the representations of Otherness in popular culture. She has participated in national and international conferences, and was chosen as a finalist in the Prof. Jerzy Buzek competition for Scientific Debut 2019. She has also been published in the journals, “Kultura popularna”, “Praktyka teoretyczna”, and the Polish Journal of Political Science and in several collections. She is a member of WEIRD Fictions Research Group and Nonanthropocentric Cultural Subjectivity. Besides

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popular culture, she is interested in intersectional studies, biomedical anthropology, posthuman studies, and postcolonial studies. Catherine Pugh completed her Ph.D. at the University of Essex and is now a writer and an independent scholar. Primarily writing about horror and science fiction across cinema, television, and theatre, she is particularly fascinated by ideas of monstrosity and mental illness versus literary madness. Her research interests concern disability, mental illness/ “madness”, metamorphic monsters, and horror landscapes. She has contributed to various collections including: At Home in the Whedonverse: Essays on Domestic Space, Place and Life; Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the Television Series and Comics; Vying for the Iron Throne: Essays on Power, Gender, Death and Performance in HBO’s Game of Thrones as well as online journals including Studies in Gothic Fiction and Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies. Lauren Rosewarne is an associate professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of 11 books on gender, sexuality, politics, and the media. More information can be found at: www.laurenrosewarne.com. J. Simpson is a researcher, academic writer, journalist, and critic based in Portland, specialising in the Gothic, “dark”, experimental, and avantgarde with a focus on horror/SF, folklore, and paganism. He has published essays with Little White Lies, Suspira Magazine, PopMatters, Lost Futures and has numerous forthcoming essays on the Gothic scheduled with Palgrave. He has delivered presentations on Lynchian music for the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and Gothic Afrofuturist music for Sheffield Gothic, as well. Matthias Stephan teaches at Aarhus University, Denmark and researches postmodernism, its implications in Gothic, sf, and crime fiction, and their intersections in considering global climate change. His work has appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Scandinavian Studies, Coolabah, and English Studies. He is the author of Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2019), general editor of Otherness: Essays and Studies, and coordinator of the Centre for Studies in Otherness.

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Katy Wareham Morris is a senior lecturer in Media and Culture at the University of Worcester. Her research interests include intersectional identity politics and digital humanities. Katy is currently completing critical/ creative Ph.D. research in digital literature, play, and queer potentialities. Her latest poetry pamphlet, Violet Existence, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. Her research on transmedia autobiography was published in 2021, as was her research on the transformative potential of spoken word (2021). Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is a professor of English at Central Michigan University, USA. He is the author or editor of twenty-seven books, the most recent of which are The Monster Theory Reader (2020), The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition (2020), Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale: Podcasting Between Weather and the Void (2018), The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (2018), and Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety (2023). Visit him at Jeffre yAndrewWeinstock.com. Helen Young is a senior lecturer in Literary Studies in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia, teaching literary theory, historical fiction, and fantasy. Her research interests span popular culture, histories of race and racism, medievalism, and political extremist fictions. Recent publications have appeared in Continuum and Humanities (with Geoff Boucher), Studies in Medievalism, and Literature Compass (with Stephanie Downes) and include Global Medievalism: An Introduction (with Kavita Mudan Finn, 2022).

List of Figures

1408 and the Structure of Haunting Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Room 1408 is All There Is. 1408, directed by Michael Håfström (Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer: 2007) Enslin in the Ninth Circle. 1408, directed by Michael Håfström (Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer: 2007) Katie and Enslin Amid the Ruins. 1408, directed by Michael Håfström (Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer: 2007)

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Introduction Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon

The early twenty-first century is an age marked by extremes finding form in populist politics, climate change denial and religious and ideological fundamentalism amongst others. Much of this can be seen to be fuelled by a call to return to past values, often purposely miss-titled as “traditional values”, when times were supposedly simpler and racism, misogyny and homophobia were deemed acceptable, at least by those not affected by them. This is a toxic nostalgia that imagines a hyper-normative history that is waiting to consume the present. It is no coincidence that these “hungry ghosts” of an imagined time find resonance with the Gothic which equally speaks of a past that often not only haunts the present but will not let it escape its grasp. This collection will look at the confluence between various kinds of toxic nostalgia and popular culture to suggest the ways in which contemporary narratives have resurrected ideological

S. Bacon (B) Poznan, ´ Poland e-mail: [email protected] K. Bronk-Bacon Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, ´ Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_1

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monsters from the grave to gorge on the present and any possibility of change that the future might represent. Some of the terms mentioned above need to be looked at in more detail to understand what this collection is about and where it will be taking the prospective reader Firstly, nostalgia itself, both as a standalone concept but also in its relation to the Gothic; and, secondly, how this intersects with the idea of “toxic” and its manifestation as being dangerous for an evolving present. What will also arise within this is the notion of haunting and what one might term “hungry ghosts”. As intimated above, such hungry ghosts also speak to a kind of negative spectrality which purposefully refutes resolution and reparation to not only disrupt the present but drag it back into the past. Nostalgia is nothing new. Since its designation as an actual medical condition in 1688 it has changed from an acute personal affliction to a national malady (the change from an individual to a communal affliction is important here and will be addressed later). Interestingly, the original diagnosis saw it as a condition that only affected those that were away from home: students from Berne studying in Basel; servants that had relocated to France; and German and Swiss soldiers serving abroad. It was an almost morbid longing for home that caused “nausea…pathological changes to the lungs, brain inflammation, cardiac arrests, high fever, as well as marasmus and a propensity for suicide” (Boym 2001, 219). Johannes Hofer, the diagnosing doctor, saw it as a “demonstration of patriotism …[of those] who loved the charm of their native land to the point of sickness” (219). Hofer (1934) loosely conceived of nostalgia as a desire for freedom, of being able to leave the oppressive state that currently held one captive and to return to a place where one could be who one really was. (Interestingly, this did not always revolve about missing loved ones but rather the environment of “home” itself.) Two hundred years later, during the American Civil War, military doctor Theodore Calhoun configured nostalgia very differently. For him it was a weakness of character, almost a wilful self-imprisonment that was “unmanly” and “unprogressive” (Beck 2013), and best dealt with by ridicule or being involved in active combat. Much of this kind of reasoning correlates with ideas around hysteria and the feminisation of the male body. Of course, within this, there is also something of a yearning for a return to a form of manliness that contemporary times seem to lack, though, interestingly, Calhoun suggests that city-dwellers are less prone to the affliction than those from rural settings (Clarke 2007). Alongside

INTRODUCTION

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this, Calhoun saw nostalgia as inappropriate behaviour for citizens of a young and virile land, and one that was soon to be struggling to free itself of the ghosts of the past to claim its place in the future. As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, Svetlana Boym observes it becoming a time when nostalgia was no longer seen as a medical affliction that required a specific, pharmaceutical cure, but more of a miasmic condition of the mind; hypochondria or melancholia that had more temporal than geographical dimensions. Indeed, before Sigmund Freud began analysing such conditions, the Gothic imagination was already giving form to the darker, unhealthy side of the longing for the past which equally encompassed a fear of the future. The Romanticism of the wildness of the past unfettered but the enlightened civilisation of the nineteenth century saw a Gothic imaginary in which loss and absence became a way to release this emotional excess from nature and former times into the now of the modern world. As such, the anxiety or horror at the heart of nineteenth-century Gothic narratives are not in their fear of change per se, but rather in the dangers of this kind of nostalgia that resurrects a time which one will subsequently have no control over. This can be seen as the driving impetus of many of the most well-known Gothic tales from the nineteenth century, such as Frankenstein (Shelley 1818), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson 1886) and Dracula (Stoker 1897). In Frankenstein the scientist’s mistake is not in trying to replace God and pushing science too far, but rather in constructing a monstrous future through cobbling together bastardised pieces of the past, resuscitated limbs of outdated information, moulded into a monstrous whole that takes on a life of its own, beyond its creator.1 In a similar vein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde creates the figure of an ambitious physician who seems to embody the dangers of uncontrolled science, yet what occurs is the embodied release of a monstrous nostalgia for a time before civilisation which wrecks the potential of the future. Dracula slightly modifies this from science to the capitalist imperative that drives it and shows how the nostalgia for colonial accumulation invites in monsters that will literally consume it. As such, one can argue that the fear of the decline of the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century was fuelled by the anxieties around a toxic kind of nostalgia, around a more vibrant, hyper-masculine past that was configured as conquering

1 In this sense, Frankenstein is the perfect story for Brexit Britain.

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the world; a monstrous memory that saw the present as emasculated and open to invasion by reverse colonialism. It is in this sense that one can start to frame such forms of nostalgia as being excavated from the grave due to the discontent of a given society with its present. Much of this is seen in Benedict Anderson’s (1983) idea of imagined communities (see Anderson 2006), not just in the sense of nationalism and created communal identities, but in the appeal to the past to justify it. Sigmund Freud, though more on the individual scale, tended to view such things in terms of “screen memories” and, whilst not labelling it as nostalgia specifically, this usefully describes a way in which we imagine our history - giving it detail and meaning that it most definitely did not have at the time. More importantly, it is often created to cover actual events and/or justify subsequent behaviours and identity positions.2 In this sense, the idea of “screen memories” can be a useful way to view certain kinds of nostalgia to negate or cover up the more undesirable aspects of a historical event or the past, and, as such, it is a critical part of how the “desired” past can have ramifications in the present. As we have already touched on the negative aspects of nostalgia and how this can be central to some Gothic narratives, it is time to more clearly introduce the notion of toxicity and the toxic past. Toxic nostalgia is both a broad idea as well as a very specific one. Not unlike nationalism, it contains many different interpretations, whilst being very specific on an individual level. As an explicitly psychoanalytical concept, it is more akin to trauma or an unresolved past event that causes us to repeat bad or obsessive behaviours, often in regard to relationships or stressful situations which restrict our “freedom” in the present (Mönnink 2017). In more cultural terms, it can be: the prejudices of old age forcing a return to the prejudices and “traditions of earlier times” (Norris 2018); general resistance to inner city rejuvenation and clearing “slum” areas (see Williamson 2019); adult anxiety over what is best for teenage children, especially in relation to sex and relationships (Abraham 2011); or even the proliferation of “vintage” photographs on social media (Jurgenson 2011). Of more importance here is toxic nostalgia’s relation to the more recent, and arguably sinister, cultural wars which sees the past not just as an individual screen but as a communal canvas upon which 2 There are obvious connections to ideas around melancholia and trauma here, and whilst not without some relevance, it is beyond the scope of the current collection to fully explore their implications.

INTRODUCTION

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one can paint whatever images are desired by those with the power to distribute them widely and effectively (see Bacon 2022). Many examples are seemingly low key, such as the sanitised version of World War II presented in Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston: 2011) or even Don Draper (Jon Hamm) in Mad Men (Weiner: 2007–15) who flaunts a photo of his family to sell an idea when, in reality, he has no such family (Scott 2012). However, others are more pernicious in their consequences, particularly in relation to public health and recent events around the global pandemic, where many point to a time where they could smoke, drink, carry weapons (US), drive gas-guzzling cars and where life—if you were part of a certain privileged demographic—was thought to be good (this is often seen as being the 1950s [Clemence 2020]). This golden era is equally seen as a time of greater individual freedom, largely in relation to the austerity felt and imposed during and immediately after World War II, and acts as a touchstone for those who felt such hard fought for freedoms are being taken away. The associated issue to such a vision of the past as being a lost utopia (or imagined community) is that it carries with it the ideological mores of its time in relation to racial, sexual and homophobic discrimination. Such toxic and discriminatory constructions of the past inevitably see the weakening and/or loss of such patriarchal, heteronormative views—or “traditional” values—as largely being the cause of the nostalgic utopia being lost in the first place. The case of the UK leaving the European Union (Brexit) exemplifies a similar kind of nostalgia but one that harks back even further to ideas around the British Empire which offers a similar screen that purposely obfuscates the genocide, enslavement, exploitation and discrimination perpetrated in the name of imperialism. Here then is the nostalgia for a non-existent version of a nation that “ruled the World”—as evinced by Britain also “winning” the two world wars in the twentieth century— and the idea that the UK would be better and stronger without being structurally and economically linked to the EU (Earle 2017). Unsurprisingly, the evidence after the event has proved this to be incorrect (see Commentary 2023; Smith 2023). Indeed, not unlike America’s nostalgia for its dreamed-of golden age of the 1950s, it is the relaxing of “traditional” values and greater integration that are at the root of the perceived fall from grace in the early twenty-first century. In many ways the most disturbing aspect of this process of writing over of history and creating a palimpsestic screen that the nostalgic yearnings of the future can be written on is the negation and replacement of fact, in which truth is

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necessarily questioned and destabilised to give veracity to the monstrous present that it creates.In this way, truth becomes a matter of belief and emotions rather than a rational proof. This also speaks to the Gothicising of the present reality which is no longer separated from the dead and where ghosts and monsters are allowed to roam freely. This becomes even more dangerous when such views are picked up, disseminated and promoted by political and governmental powers that use such frameworks to gain and consolidate control (Goldberg 2019). Consequently, it is often through popular culture and the monsters and monstrous creations it produces that physical shape is given to discontent with the present. Simultaneously, these same monsters also manifest the destructive effects of toxic nostalgia on communities and even the nation itself. In fact, it is the manifestation of these monsters, many of which will be discussed in the essays below, that gives shape and meaning to the imaginary, and often toxic, past, seeing it become a differentiated and autonomous entity—a Gothic monster, not unlike Cronos, that gives validity to its imaginary status by consuming the truth of reality. As will be seen in some of the texts and films looked at in this collection, when toxic nostalgia becomes a separate malignant entity, it is no longer controllable and gains a life of its own beyond those that think they have control over it. Here then the past stares back at the future; the past that itself was once objectified returns that gaze objectifying the future as a thing it can control or even destroy. In many ways, then, this Gothic, toxic nostalgia acts not unlike a hungry ghost in being a spectral presence from the past that cannot find rest and, ultimately, seems intent on consuming all those that would try to appease it. In such a reading, non-toxic nostalgia is a recollection of the past which allows for recognition, acceptance and reparation with the past evils of colonisation, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, etc. Appropriately enough, this insatiable imaginary past is not containable across time or geographical borders, as seen in films/franchises, such as Ringu (Various: 2002–17), Ju-on [The Grudge] (Various: 2002–present), and It Follows (Mitchell: 2014), or on a more apocalyptic scale in World War Z (Forster: 2013), Bird Box (Bier: 2018) and The Silence (Leonetti: 2019), which show a monster created by a monstrous past that inevitably consumes the future. More specific examples of the kinds of Gothic monsters created by the toxic nostalgia of an imagined past will be described in the summary of the collection below.

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Hauntings, Toxicity and the Gothicisation of the Present The collection is divided into four sections that respectively focus on theoretical frameworks, media, identity and environments which will begin to detail how the various monsters of toxic nostalgia contaminate, haunt and gothicise the present either in an attempt to replicate itself or to, often literally, consume cultural integration and the recognition and acceptance of difference. More so, many of the essays talk around and to environments and ideas that are seen to utilise approaches and methodologies that are inherent to Gothic nostalgia, though are not necessarily named as such. Ghosts and haunting being a good example of this which often embody a destructive past (toxic memory) in the present. Also of note are the kinds of “Gothicising” that occurs in the various studies here where Gothic tropes of doubling and the uncanny—for instance where imagined pasts are nostalgic doppelgängers of the actual historical one— destabilise environments and those within them. Such destabilisation is implicit to Gothic nostalgia where the intrusion of the past, as the dark double of the now, questions the nature of the world we currently live in and our own place within it. There is much here to suggest Kelly Hurley’s (1998) idea of the abhuman and bodies in flux that are “moving away” from nostalgic notions of the static and unchanging body. This “moving away”, or the “ab”-ness as a property of a person, place or category can be very useful as nostalgia, especially when of the toxic variety, is a kind of ab-reality or the abreal, just as in the post-truth era learning and facts are contaminated by the abtruth, becoming a gothicised and destabilised environment where nothing and everything might be true depending on one’s affective response to them—the Gothic being necessarily sensational and emotive of course. Part I: “Frameworks of Gothic Nostalgia and Toxicity” begins to layout some of the ways in which we can conceive of ideas around haunting and nostalgia and apply them to certain aspects, genres and media of popular culture, such as the Horror genre, streaming services and social media, the last two achieving particular prominence and importance to popular culture during the recent pandemic due to various bouts of local and national lockdowns and quarantines. In the first essay, “1408 and the Structure of Haunting”, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock uses both the novel and the film 1408 and considers how spectrality and the unwanted presence of the past in the present become toxic and

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destructive. Further, in a certain way, such all-consuming presences are not the ghosts of the past but of the futures that will never happen. The next chapter, “Toxic Nostalgia in Contemporary Gothic Horror”, by Brandon Grafius, describes the affinity between certain kinds of toxic nostalgia and recent Gothic Horror films and TV series. Looking at examples such as The Village (Shymalan: 2004), Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers: 2016–present) and It (Muschietti: 2017), the author details how the narratives confuse both “good” and “bad” nostalgia, which in itself creates a Gothic present. “Toxic Nostalgia in the Wake of the Postmodern Turn”, by Matthias Stephan, discusses the recent rise in currency of streaming services such as Netflix and their increasing importance in commissioning and producing films and series. Many of these productions rely on a rather incoherent use of nostalgia, and the author uses the example of The Americans (Weisberg: 2013–18) to show the toxic qualities of its creation of a very particular American past. The last essay in this section, by Katy Wareham-Morris, “Deep-fake Sock-puppets: The Toxic ‘Realities’ of a Weaponized Internet” moves from fictional narratives on the screen to fictionalised material on social media. The author describes how images and news footage are doctored and altered to create false narratives of both the present and the past, Gothicising the now, so that reality is lost to the abtruth causing the destabilisation of meaning and knowledge. Here historical fact is but a nostalgic dream, and all memory has the potential to become toxic. Part II: “The Toxic Screen” focuses more specifically on the idea of films and the Gothic, though also on the way that they likewise provide “screens” to cover up the toxic past and hide the Gothic monsters of discrimination and prejudice. An integral part of films, and more so in the twenty-first century, is the necessity for sequels and franchises with their inherent requirement of the repetition of characters, tropes and production methods—often presented by way of the “Easter egg” which is a moment of focused nostalgia designed for “fans” of the genre, franchise or character. This in itself is a form of uncanny mirroring or doubling that haunts every subsequent iteration of a text with its toxic potential expressed when original meanings are diverted (perverted) into new kinds of undesirable messaging. Accordingly, this section begins with a comparison of an original and its sequel in “The Nostalgia of Setting, Sex and Sound in the Wicker Men Films” by Lauren Rosewarne. Here, the author compares the highly acclaimed British Folk Horror classic, The Wicker Man, with its American sequel that appeared some 33 years later.

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Nostalgia for the original appears in short supply in the remake, though each speaks to a different time and a different, if similar, culture. Toxicity most strongly appears in audience appreciation of the 1973 and their unrealised nostalgic anticipation felt for the later film. “The American Dream and American Nightmare: The Toxic Pursuit of Nostalgia and Happiness Presented in Poltergeist (1982) and Poltergeist (2015)” by Rob Mclaughlin again deals with an original and its sequel. Although there was similar critical disappointment in the remake as with 2006 The Wicker Man, Mclaughlin focuses on the cultural anxieties that informed each of them to show how the kinds of neoliberalism that possessed the first film still haunt the second one. Following this is “‘You’re Too Focused on Where You’ve Been’: Uncanny Nostalgia in Mary Poppins Returns ”, by Daniel Kasper, which continues the focus on sequels but here on how the remake is literally overwhelmed by nostalgia for the original film. In part, this is due to the strength of fan adoration for the first Mary Poppins film and the length of time it took for the second film to come out, though the most toxic part of the process is the lapses and “holes” in the sequel which stand out even more due to the detail of the rest of the film. The final instalment of the studies on sequels is J. Simpson’s “Pulling Our Strings: The Gothic Nostalgia of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria” which, not unlike The Wicker Man, looks at the remake of a cult classic, though unlike it, the later version of Argento’s film was much more appreciated on its release. As with the comparison between Poltergeist and its remake, Simpson considers the comparative cultural settings of both versions of Suspiria, though here with a more feminist slant and the changing positions of female agency. This part closes not with a remake, but a series—although its creator has a past that most definitely impacted on the reception of the series—as seen in Abel Fenwick’s essay, “‘I Just Wanted to Preserve It Just as It is’: Gothic Nostalgia in The Watcher”. Fenwick also situates his study in the cultural setting of his chosen series, The Watcher, but in terms of twenty-first-century manhood in contemporary America and the Radcliffian ghosts that “haunt” the coveted family home of 657 Boulevard in New Jersey. Part III: “Toxic Identities” focuses on nostalgic views of the past that continue toxic, discriminatory ideologies around heteronormativity and privilege, often Gothicising identities in the present in order to sustain themselves. “Prevention is Better Than Cure: Anachronistic Therapists and Toxic Wellness” by Catherine Pugh considers historical representations of therapists and those suffering from mental illness who are under

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their care. On film in particular, such characters have been imbued with almost supernatural or superhuman abilities which equally impact on the representation of those who are being treated by them. However, although modern day methodologies have moved on considerably, a form of toxic nostalgia for genre tropes, especially within Horror, still sees psychologists and analysts as “mad scientists” of some kind and their treatments accordingly as either barbaric or miraculous. “Patriarchy Then and Now — with a Twist: The Postmodern Horror of Alex Garland’s Men” by M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh picks up the psychological thread in terms of one person’s trauma and how it is represented on film, in this case, the highly debated Men. Here though, trauma and the kinds of toxic memory that accompany it, concentrate around everyday violence and aggression experienced within patriarchal society. Simon Bacon’s “But Now, Yeah, I’m Thinking I’m Back”: “The Allconsuming Gothic Nostalgia in the John Wick Franchise” focuses more closely on patriarchy and masculinity through the highly popular action hero played by Keanu Reeves. Here, the eponymous John Wick also suffers a traumatic event, but one that actually reminds him of who he is and will continue to be. Of note here is how the nostalgia the audience feels for the actor playing Wick feeds into the perception of the character’s decent into a violent (toxic) form of male identity. “Gothic Nostalgia in Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room and The Second Cut ” by Martyn Colebrook similarly considers masculinity and a dark underworld of violence, but in this instance it is that of Glasgow in Scotland and one of pornography and male queerness. Here, a form of toxic memory maps queerness into the environment of the city providing a form of continuance through the darkness. Queerness continues in “Toxic Ableism and Gothic Nostalgia in Fanfiction about Mermaids” by Martine Mussies who focuses more fully on audience engagement and fan participation with texts, in this case those featuring mermaids. As uniquely hybrid and queerly disabled creations, the half human, half fish/other, who often have to forgo speech, limbs and movement on land, provides a figure of creativity and empowerment to those producing art and fiction. However, nostalgia plays a vital role in this more-than-human engagement with the other, and as Mussie’s explains, not all of it is as positive as it thinks it is. The collection ends with Part IV: “Environments” which shifts focus more to the idea of environments exploring how historical, toxic visions of the past can have huge ramifications in how we construct the present in relation to both the individual and national domains. The first essay, “Of

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Greed and the Undead Past: Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad as an Exercise in Toxic Nostalgia” by Aparajita Hazra considers the way that the national identity of India continues to be influenced by toxic nostalgia for aspects of its colonial past under the British Empire. More so, it feeds into its own pre-British past to produce monsters that embody the worst of the old world and that of contemporary India. National identity continues in Patrycja Pichnicka-Trivedi’s essay, “Soviet Nostalgia in the Vampire Trilogy A Tale of the Soviet Vampire by Aleksandr Slepakov (2014–18)”. The author considers present-day Russia and its dependence on a certain kind of nostalgia for, what is internally cast, as its Soviet Imperial heyday. Here, Toxic nostalgia is used not only to help keep its own people inline but to facilitate and justify new violent and military aggression across Europe and the world as a means to return to the “good old days”. “Oh No. Not Again!”: Toxic Nostalgia and Antisemitic Recursive Memory in Ghost Stories” by Vicky Brewster also features a form of nationalism, but that as configured antisemitism. Using a familiar feature of this collection, where trauma is used as the instigator of narrative progression, the text chosen uncovers the hidden forms of easy antisemitism within British culture. Nostalgia here is so deeply ingrained within a national culture that it is not aware of its own racist toxicity. This kind of “easy” racism is superseded by full blown far Right extremism in “Extremist Nostalgia: Mike Ma’s Novellas as 21st Century Far-Right Gothic” by Helen Young. In a world seemingly post-#MeToo and BLM, Young describes how the author of two popular self-published novels, purposely utilise negative nostalgia around the erosion of national identity and the replacement of whiteness to promote armed rebellion and the creation of state-size republics across North America. These final essays bring the book to a close on what seems a rather negative note, though one that maybe all too clearly describes the cultural, historical moment that we are living in. The past, or at least a version of it, is constantly represented as a means to destabilise the present and creating an abtruth environment that is rife with the ghosts of a time when the world was believed to be simpler and more innocent; these spectres from the past have a life of their own that will wreck division and destruction on the future—the “rose” colour of such nostalgia comes not from the distance from which one is looking at it, but rather the unseen blood that was spilt in its original creation. This is clearly seen in such nostalgic imaginaries as the Empire and returning to the “greatness” of the past that ignores the suffering, exploitation, discrimination and murder they

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were created upon. This is slightly more complex in relation to examples like Mary Poppins or John Wick which use actual embodiments of the monstrosity of the past to convince the present that they have slain toxic ideologies it represents. Yet, as detailed above, slaying the beast, more often than not, reinforces those exact same kinds of toxicity. Something of this can be seen in relation to the use of toxic nostalgia in recent political debates and ongoing culture wars that rely on the use of imagined histories. The hidden monsters they raise, the spectres of nationalism, genocide and death, can seemingly only be killed by other monsters. But rather than dispelling them, it only gives them affirmation which destabilises the truth of the present even further. As such, it is because of such forms of toxic nostalgia, as listed above, that we can say we truly live in Gothic times—a time where the past is never allowed to die and the future will never truly live. This collection, then, is all the more timely because the results of using such toxic views of the past to gothicise the present are seen and felt in our everyday lives. Consequently then, this collection should be seen as part of an ongoing critique of and conversation about the uses of Gothic nostalgia to reveal where and how it skews cultural discourse and propose ways in which the monsters of the toxic past can be defeated without giving them new life in the process of doing so.

Frameworks of Gothic Nostalgia and Toxicity

1408 and the Structure of Haunting Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Stephen King’s short story, “1408”, initially included in his 1999 audiobook, Blood and Smoke, and subsequently incorporated into his 2002 collection of dark tales, Everything’s Eventual, was not intended to be a short story. As King explains in the brief introductory note to the story, he wrote the first few pages as an appendix for his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) with the idea of leaving it unfinished and using it as an example of how a story changes from one draft to the next; however, the story, as King puts it, “seduced” him (457), and he ended up completing it as his take on what he calls the “Ghostly Room At The Inn” horror trope (Ibid). The story is about author Mike Enslin, who writes bestselling books about haunted places despite himself not believing in the ghosts. The skeptical Enslin then spends 70 minutes being tormented by supernatural phenomena in Room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel in New York City before escaping and giving up writing altogether. “1408”, although completed as a short story, nevertheless remained unfinished—at least for director Mikael Håfström and screenwriters Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszenwski. Håfström’s greatly

J. A. Weinstock (B) Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_2

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expanded cinematic adaptation of King’s short story, released in 2007 and starring John Cusack in a tour-de-force performance as protagonist Michael Enslin, indeed in interesting ways becomes a film about completion of a story as it meditates on time, mortality, grief, and belief. In keeping with King’s work in general and what Douglas E. Cowan refers to as King’s “dark theology”, 1408 the film raises questions vexing about if consciousness persists after death; whether a benevolent God exists; if so, why bad things happen to good people; and how human beings can persist and love in the face of death and tragedy. In the end, it asks what completeness looks like after one has experienced a profound loss and if grieving can ever be finished.

King’s Quarrel with God In King’s short story, as Michail Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis mentions in “Claustrophobic Hotel Rooms and Intermedial Horror in 1408”, the absence of a backstory for Enslin is notable. “What is striking”, notes Markodimitrakis, “is the lack of information about the protagonist of the story and his general whereabouts” (2017, 32). The reader learns that Enslin had a brother who died of cancer but, as far as Enslin’s history is concerned, that is about it. In Håfström’s adaptation, Enslin’s backstory is fleshed out substantially more. Crucially, we learn that he and his wife, Lily (Mary McCormack), had a daughter, Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony), who died young of an unspecified disease (likely cancer); that the grief-stricken Enslin, reminded of his daughter every time he looked at his wife, went out one night for a pack of cigarettes and never came back; and that he now lives in California estranged from his wife in New York. We further learn that Enslin had youthful literary aspirations and published a novel titled The Long Road Home featuring a contentious relationship between the protagonist and his father that the film suggests reflected Enslin’s own before his father’s death (hotel manager Gerald Olin, played by Samuel L. Jackson, surprises Enslin by having read the book and observes “I rather thought the father was a bastard”).1 And, in keeping with “1408” the short story, we know that cynical Enslin now publishes guide books to haunted places such as Ten Nights in Ten 1 This element is developed more fully in director’s cut of the film, which features a scene in which Enslin accuses his father of not caring about him and his father replies this is because Enslin is a “bullshit writer”.

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Haunted Houses and Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards —although a sparsely attended book signing signals that he is less successful as an author than his short-story counterpart. What this cinematic backstory for Enslin effectively establishes is his motivation in pursuing purported ghostly phenomena: unresolved mourning and a related crisis of faith. Enslin at the start of the film is lost as a consequence of his daughter’s death and, as the film will literalize later, “at sea” and unable to find his footing. The film opens with him on a ghost-hunting expedition arriving in the pouring rain at the Weeping Beech Inn, while the car radio, curiously, features in the film’s background a Christian evangelist preaching a Jonathan Edwardsesque fire-and-brimstone sermon that acts both as foreshadowing and as metaphor: “The Lord has told me that the open gates of Hell are yawning up widely in our path”, exclaims the preacher. “Yes, the flames of perpetual damnation are ever ready to grasp our souls. We know the way of the righteous man. Yea, we know the prayer of the righteous man. I’m telling you that the Lord has spoken. Yes, the Lord has spoken to me”. Unlike the preacher, the Lord has not spoken to Enslin; however, he is already in his own personal hell and fire will be both his and the film’s ultimate destination. What quickly becomes clear is that, like so many characters in King’s fiction, Enslin has been traumatized by the death of his child and, as a consequence, is searching desperately for some meaning in life—in particular, a sign of the afterlife. At various points in the film, Enslin is vocal in his denial of God’s existence. As part of Room 1408’s torture of Enslin, he becomes witness to heart-wrenching flashbacks to his past on the room’s television. Among these is one in which he and his wife seek to comfort their dying daughter with the thoughts of heaven and God, despite Enslin’s own doubts. Enslin later resents his own capitulation to convention and platitudes, seeing it as a form of weakness and telling his wife angrily before leaving for cigarettes and not returning, “We should have helped her fight! Not filled her head up with bullshit stories of heaven, and clouds and nirvana”. This skeptical position is then replayed with Dolphin Hotel manager Gerald Olin while the latter is trying to dissuade Enslin from staying in Room 1408: “Do you know why I can stay in your spooky old room, Mr. Olin?” asks Enslin. “Because I know that ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties don’t exist. And even if they did, there’s no God to protect us from them, now is there?” Enslin mounts his protest concisely in another flashback—this time to the

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moment he and his wife received their daughter’s terminal diagnosis. Lily, distraught, suggests that diagnoses can be wrong, that they can look into other treatments, and that there are “miracle cures”, adding “Oh God. Please, something”—to which Enslin responds nihilistically, “What kind of a God would do this to a little girl?” “What kind of a god would do this to a little girl” is a variant on the question posed again and again in King’s writing in what I have come to refer to as King’s quarrel with God. Repeatedly, King uses the death of a child to raise precisely the questions that plague Enslin: What kind of a God would allow such horrific things to happen to little children and good people in general? Does God exist at all? If so, what explains the existence of evil? Is there a heaven? Life after death? Or is it all just “bullshit stories of heaven and clouds and nirvana” that we tell ourselves to avoid having truly to grapple with loss and to confront the prospect of our future non-existence? Indeed, the comfort Enslin and Lily attempt to offer their daughter regarding heaven, despite their own misgivings, reprises the same discussion that the un-subtly named Louis Creed has with his daughter Ellie as they contemplate the death (and unexpected reappearance) of their equally un-subtly named cat Church in Mary Lambert’s 1989 adaptation of King’s Pet Sematary (1983): “Some believe that we just wink out like a candle flame when the wind blows hard”, explains Creed to Ellie. But he adds that, in contrast, “I think we go on. Yeah, I have faith in that”. Another example is King’s more recent novel, Revival (2013), in which the wife and young son of Minister Charles Jacobs are killed in a car accident, precipitating his break with the church and attempts to confirm the existence of—and to contact—the afterlife. For over 50 years now, King has been asking these same questions about the existence of God, the afterlife, monsters, and evil, which is why Douglas E. Cowan thinks of King as “America’s dark theologian”. For Cowan, King’s horror stories walk “alongside religion” and “emerge from the same place in the human imagination” (2018, 9). They address the nature of belief, “the limited and provincial ways we understand the unseen order and our relationship to it” (7), and theodicy, “our ongoing attempts to understand suffering in the context of belief in a loving God” (29). King’s resolution of these questions is often to affirm the existence of the transcendental—of a plane of existence beyond our mortal ken—but to recast it almost entirely in a demonic register. Evil is present and active; good is distant and weak. The universe is far larger than we

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imagine, but safety is precarious and, if there is any saving to be done, we must do it ourselves (if we can) because nothing else is going to do it for us. For his part, Mike Enslin in the film 1408, despite his strenuous protestations that God does not exist, would desperately like to be convinced otherwise. Akin to Minster Charles Jacobs’s experiments with “secret electricity” in Revival, Enslin is, at least subconsciously, seeking to jumpstart his own faith with the EMF meter and full-range spectrometer and infrared camera with which he travels to investigate allegedly haunted sites. He spends nights in haunted rooms and haunted graveyards and haunted castles because, as he explains in response to a question at his book signing, “nothing would make me happier than to experience a paranormal event, you know, to get a glimpse of the elusive light at the end of the tunnel”. “So you’re saying there’s no such thing as ghosts?” responds the questioner. “I’m saying I’ve never seen one”, replies Enslin, before adding cynically, “but they’re awfully convenient for desperate hotels when the interstate moves away”. This comment will in fact come back to haunt Enslin, so to speak, later in the film when he is taken to task by a phantasmagoric version of the Dolphin Hotel manager Olin. Early in the film while trying to dissuade Enslin from staying in Room 1408, Olin had characterized Enslin as “a talented, intelligent man who doesn’t believe in anything or anyone but himself”. Appearing in Room 1408’s mini-fridge, a tiny Olin reprises this comment, berating Enslin, “On, that’s right. You don’t believe in anything. You like to shatter people’s hopes”. Olin then offers a pithy meditation on both the dread and desire of the supernatural: “Why do you think people believe in ghosts? For fun? No. It’s the prospect of something after death”. “How many spirits have you broken?” then asks Olin, with an interesting play on words. Enslin’s response, “she was in so much pain”, answers a different question, but in a telling way: at least one spirit has been broken—Enslin’s. Motivated by grief and anger following his daughter’s death, his books on haunted places are both angry denials of life after death and desperate attempts to believe in it. Mini-fridge Olin’s sardonic reply, “I’m sure she’s smiling down on us right now”, then precipitates a fit of rage from the distraught Enslin, who takes out his anger on the appliance, shouting at it as he shakes it, “what do you want from me?!” 1408 here addresses directly why we love our ghost stories and why they frighten us. The ghost, as the presence of death made manifest, testifies to the persistence of spirit. Ghosts present to us “the prospect

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of something after death”, a continuation of consciousness on another plane of existence. And, if ghosts exist, why not God and heaven and heavenly union with lost loved ones? At the same time, however, the ghost is a monstrous violation of rationalist conceptions of the universe. Neither living nor dead, the ghost undermines conceptual categories in threatening ways. It is unstable and untrustworthy—is it a hallucination? A demon? An undigested bit of beef, as Scrooge dismisses the ghost of Marley early in A Christmas Carol ? And, inevitably, the ghost is a memento mori, a reminder of our own future death. Among the visions that Mike Enslin has in Room 1408 is one with his wheelchair-bound father in a cold, sterile space. “As you are, I was. As I am, you will be”, his father tells him—old, feeble, forgotten, and dead.

You Are Here: Trauma, Grief, and Repetition These theological questions about theodicy, ghosts, and the afterlife, however, form the backdrop for 1408’s more specific and immediate focus: grief. Mike Enslin at the start of the film is a man who has suffered an incredibly traumatic loss—the death of his daughter—and is in the grips of unresolved mourning. He has disconnected from his wife, moved across the country, and now travels from place to place writing books that flirt with the supernatural only ultimately to reject it, undermining the faith of his readers. As mini-fridge Olin puts it, Enslin no longer believes in anything. Or as his wife, Lily, puts it when Enslin manages to reach her via his computer, pleading for help to escape Room 1408, “It’s like seeing a ghost”. Enslin understands that his daughter is dead, and yet cannot accept it; what he does not comprehend is that he, too, is “dead”—lost, alone, cynical, and apathetic: a ghost of a man. Room 1408 brings all this to the surface through a process of traumatic repetition. In the room, Enslin is literally trapped in a nightmare that repeats, pushing him toward suicide as his only form of escape. The nightmare begins with the clock radio switching itself on, starting a 60-minute countdown, and comically playing The Carpenters’ 1970 hit, “We’ve Only Just Begun”—the blandly serene delivery contrasting ironically with the darker overtones of the onset of the Room’s torture. The irony is then heightened by lyrics emphasizing to a bereaved man a theme of togetherness and “life ahead” (irony then further compounded by awareness of Karen Carpenter’s tragic death related to anorexia nervosa—a form of suicide). As Cathy Caruth famously explains in Unclaimed Experience:

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Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), the traumatic experience is a kind of missed event—an experience so overwhelming that it bypasses the usual mechanisms of narrative memory. The traumatic event is “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (1996, 4). Enslin finds himself in the grips of just such a nightmare as he is confronted with flashbacks to his daughter’s diagnosis and death. He cannot mourn his daughter’s loss fully because the traumatic loss is not yet fully available to his conscious mind. He knows it, he understands it, but on some level he has failed to process it—there has been no “working through” of the loss, only a kind of entombment of it in the psyche. As suggested by an insightful piece of trivia on the IMDb listing for 1408, it is possible to see Enslin more or less moving through what Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross defined in On Death and Dying (1969) as the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—and we can also see these stages mapping onto what we might consider the elemental eco-system of the film (see “Trivia”). At the start of the film, as has already been suggested above, Enslin is consumed by denial—he is a man who “[doesn’t] believe in anything”. This is less immediately about Katie’s death (although he clearly has not fully come to terms with it), then it is about God, heaven, and the supernatural in general. In his estimation, it is all just smoke and mirrors, as King might put it, to manipulate the rubes. Anger, however, lurks just beneath Enslin’s surface as he condescends to hotel proprietors and fans who attend his book signing with thinly veiled impatience. Reviewing his night at the Weeping Beech Inn into his hand-held recorder after his stay, he changes his “Shiver Scale” rating from “six skulls” to five with a malicious “screw ‘em”. When asked by a fan about the scariest place he’s been, he first responds sarcastically, “I’ve never heard that question before”. And in his conversation with Olin about Room 1408’s tragic history, his impatience is almost palpable as he assumes the manager’s concern is insincere. “You ought to shave your eyebrows and paint your hair gold if you’re gonna try to sell that spookhouse bullshit”, Enslin scolds Olin. Brooking no refusal, Enslin insists on staying in Room 1408, and his anger bubbles over almost immediately when strange things begin to occur. After chocolates mysteriously appear on his pillow, Enslin angrily accuses Olin of being behind it, even as he rebukes himself for having let

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Olin’s rehearsal of the room’s tragic history get under his skin. “You’re gonna have to try harder, asshole!” he shouts up at a ceiling vent, assuming he is being observed. And then he chides himself for letting himself get spooked: “We came here to get a story, and we don’t rattle, do we?” he seeks to reassure himself—a line he will repeat at the end of the film after he has “gone down the rabbit hole” and remerged changed by the experience. Appropriately, Enslin’s anger stage is mirrored by the malfunctioning climate control in his room, which makes it unpleasantly hot. Initially while surveying the room upon his arrival, Enslin had quipped referencing Dante’s Inferno to his voice recorder regarding the artwork, “Some smartass spoke about the banality of evil. If that’s true, then we’re in the seventh circle of Hell”. And, indeed, Enslin is right as the room becomes his own personal seventh circle. Dante’s seventh circle, wherein the violent are punished, includes a boiling river of blood and fire for those who have committed violence against others, suicides transformed into trees and besieged by harpies, profligates attacked by dogs, and blasphemers and sodomites trapped in a desert of burning sand and plagued by burning rain. Enslin is an angry man and a blasphemer (“there’s no God … is there?!) being pushed by the room that turns uncomfortably hot toward suicide. Sweating profusely, he calls the front desk requesting maintenance assistance: “Room’s on fire!” he exclaims, foreshadowing the film’s conclusion, while also recalling the evangelical radio preacher’s vivid depiction of the “the flames of perpetual damnation” from the start of the film, which serves to reinforce the personal Hell association. After a maintenance person, refusing to enter the room, assists Enslin from a distance at resetting the room’s thermometer, the supernatural torment begins in earnest. The clock radio begins a 60-minute countdown and one of the hotel windows smashes closed on Enslin’s hand. Cleaning the wound, he is scalded by hot water exploding from the faucet. When the phone rings with a cheerfully bland female voice curiously giving him a status update on a sandwich he never ordered, he waves the white flag, shouting to the phone, the voice, the hotel, Olin, and the universe, “Listen to me. You win. I’m checking out. I’m hurt”. When the voice continues blandly detailing hotel services, Enslin turns to threats, yelling “You’re an idiot! I’m gonna sue your ass! I’m gonna take legal action! What’s wrong with you?” Placed on hold and then disconnected, he quickly gathers his things, mumbling “you win, you win”, only to find himself locked in the room.

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That there is no escaping from this personal hell is then confirmed by the middle portion of the film. First, Enslin, calling for help out his window, has his movements mimicked by a figure across the way—he cannot escape himself; then, after being forced to witness a flashback of a tender moment with his wife and daughter on the TV and watching various ghostly figures jump from the window of his room, he encounters the confused specter of his father in a transformed bathroom—he cannot escape his past. As cracks ominously begin to appear in the wall—as the pressures of the past threaten to break through and overwhelm Enslin— he makes a daring attempt to escape by going out the hotel window and walking on the perilous ledge toward the next room, only to discover the room is not there (see Fig. 1a). As the camera quickly pulls back for the audience, we see that, indeed, there are no other windows anywhere (see Fig. 1b). In a moment of macabre humor, the room shows Enslin on the obligatory fire escape plan on the back of his hotel room door that the rest of his world is gone. “You are here”, it reads, with the room surrounded by blackness (see Fig. 1c). Here is all there is and, as the following flashback to Katie’s death then confirms, Enslin’s “here” is there, in the past, with the traumatic death of his daughter that hauntologically undoes his present, robbing him of any possibility of a future. He cannot escape himself, he cannot escape the past from which he has tried to run, and, as a result, there is no future other than repetition of the endless present. Trapped in the room though, which doubles for his unconscious, the past is becoming more insistent for acknowledgment. The only way out is through. Here, Enslin rapidly shifts from anger briefly to bargaining and then to depression as the room, matching this shift in the grieving process, grows colder and colder. First, Enslin reaches out via his computer to the wife he abandoned, begging her for assistance—an act driven by necessity, but also an attempt at reconnection. Then, after an abortive attempt to escape via the hotel air ducts, he has his encounter with mini-fridge Olin, shouting desperately, “What do you want from me? What do you want from me?” In an extremely telling moment, Enslin, exhausted, overwrought, turns to the nightstand bible, again saying “you win, you win”, only then to find the pages of the Bible entirely blank. Whether Enslin is capitulating to the Room or to God—or if the two are somehow intertwined—is unclear, but it is at this moment that the anger leaves Enslin and a sense of despair takes its place as another flashback shows his griefstricken rejection of God and heaven, and his abandonment of his wife,

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Fig. 1 Room 1408 is All There Is. 1408, directed by Michael Håfström (MetroGoldwyn-Meyer: 2007)

following their attempts to comfort their dying daughter. Highlighting the fact that Enslin is still caught in that moment in the past, the room’s fax machine impossibly transmits Katie’s dress. There is still no God for Enslin, no heaven, no afterlife, only the bottomless depths of omnipresent loss. When we next see the room, reflecting Enslin’s depression, the heat of the seventh circle of hell has been replaced by the frigidity of the ninth—the level of Dante’s Inferno furthest from God. The floor and

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furnishings of the room are covered with snow and frost and a frozen white fog fills the air as the thermostat improbably registers the temperature as 5 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (see Fig. 2). Huddling for warmth wrapped in the bed’s comforter and burning pages and pictures from the dossier of the room’s tragic history given to Enslin by Olin, Enslin again makes the Dante analogy explicit, as he mutters to himself, “Now this is level nine, the deepest level of hell, furthest removed from all light and warmth”. Frost coats his hair and face as trembling he attempts to warn his wife away from coming to the hotel, only to have the Room express to her what he cannot: “I know we haven’t talked a lot since Katie died, but I need you sweetie. … I need to talk to you about Katie”. Enslin shouts not to listen, that this is a trick, that Lily shouldn’t come up to the room, but he is the trick and the Room is the truth. And then the walls collapse. After Enslin’s connection with Lily is broken, Room 1408 literally becomes a demolition zone. It rocks as though buffeted by explosions or an earthquake. Plaster rains down on Enslin as the ceiling cracks open and walls collapse, and the room—mimicking the transformation of a piece of artwork on the wall featuring a ship on the ocean—transforms into a ship tossed on an angry sea. When Enslin lashes out at the now-animate painting of a foundering ship—which is what the room has become, and which is what he himself has been—striking it with a table leg, the wall crumbles entirely as a flood of water comes pouring in, engulfing Enslin, who sinks into the depths of himself, only to resurface in fantasy. As he swims back to the surface, he reemerges back at the scene of an earlier

Fig. 2 Enslin in the Ninth Circle. 1408, directed by Michael Håfström (MetroGoldwyn-Meyer: 2007)

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surfing accident in which he almost drowned. With Lily then by his side to help with his recovery, he recounts to her his experience in 1408, giving Lily the opportunity to make the psychological focus of the film unmissable for the viewer who might not have been paying attention: “I think it’s pretty clear”, she tells him. “I think in the dream the room’s your subconscious and it brought up a lot of stuff. That’s a good thing for you”. Lily then goes on to offer Enslin a path to recovery: “Maybe you should write about it. … Seriously, it sounds like you’re ready to deal with this stuff”—which, in this fantasy, he does. But the fantasy is just that: a fantasy of recovery—a form of evasion in which Enslin can side-step the hard work mourning the loss of his daughter and his grief. Like the hotel room, this fantasy world crumbles, too, and Enslin, despondent, finds himself back in amid the devastation of the room. Like Michael in The Godfather, Enslin screams “I was out! I was out. Please, God. I know I was out”. But the room has pulled him back in—or rather, we know that, despite the toothpick from his fantasy that he pulls from his mouth and considers, he never was out because there is no out from oneself. In a scene then available in the director’s cut, a cabinet door swings open and a fire kindled within reveals it to be a crematory oven with Katie’s coffin being consumed. “That’s my kid”, he sobs. “That’s my kid”. Enslin is then confronted with a freestanding door—the last door that must be opened to transition from depression to acceptance. It swings open at Enslin’s request and, across a great distance of blackness—as the evangelical preacher from the start reprises his sermon—something hurtles out of the darkness, colliding with Enslin and causing him to gasp as the past opens up. And then Katie is there with him, wondering why he abandoned her and if he still loves her. Enslin attempts to comfort her, holds her—only to have her taken away from him again as she dies in his arms (see Fig. 3). The trauma repeats, but this time Enslin acknowledges it fully. Only through its repetition as nightmare has the affective experience of the traumatic event forced its way into consciousness. Bereft again, Enslin wages war on the room, smashing what he can and collapsing, only to have the room magically return to its pristine state and the clock countdown resetting to sixty minutes again. Seated by the window, Enslin answers the phone, asking the Room why it doesn’t just kill him. “Because all guests of this hotel enjoy free will, Mr. Enslin”, replies the blandly cheerful voice, which then advises him that “You can choose to relive this hour over and over”—repeatedly losing his

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Fig. 3 Katie and Enslin Amid the Ruins. 1408, directed by Michael Håfström (Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer: 2007)

daughter—“or you can take advantage of our express checkout system”, which would be to commit suicide. “By the way”, adds the Room, “your wife just called. She’ll be here in five minutes and we’ll send her straight up”. Mike Enslin, however, decides to pursue a third course. Rejecting both traumatic repetition and suicide, he concludes to burn the whole thing down. “I have lived the life of a selfish man”, he confesses, sounding like the evangelical preacher on the radio at the start. “But I don’t have to die that way”. Using a bottle of scotch given to him by Olin as a bribe not to stay in the room as a Molotov cocktail, he sets the room ablaze. “Go to hell!” he shouts as the bottle shatters against the wall and the bedroom is engulfed in flames. Having been to hell and back himself, he then seats himself back down and, having made some kind of peace with his past, with himself, calmly accepts his fate—his lighting of the cigarette he told Olin he carried “in case nuclear war breaks out” an acknowledgment of the fact that his world ended when Katie died and he has finally emerged in a new one. The film famously has multiple endings. In the director’s cut, Enslin does not survive the fire. Following his funeral, Olin seeks to return some of Enslin’s belongings to his wife, including his tape recorder. After she rejects the offering, he plays the tape recorder to himself in his car and Katie’s voice is heard, verifying Enslin’s experience as something other than a hallucination. Olin is startled by a horrific vision of a horribly burned Enslin in his backseat before driving off, and the film ends with a spectral Mike Enslin smoking a cigarette in the burned-out Room 1408 before responding to his daughter’s call to join her. Too much of a downer for test audiences, the ending was redone for the film’s general

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release and features a surviving Enslin who has written the book that he had previously fantasized and has reconciled with his wife. As they are packing up his things preparing for a move, he plays the tape recorder and Katie’s voice is again heard on it, much to his wife’s dismay. (There is a third ending in which Enslin plays the tape recorder, but is the only witness to Katie’s voice on it.) Both the general release ending and the ending to the director’s cut offer consolation to the audience by affirming the reality of Enslin’s experience, but they do so in different ways. In the director’s cut, which, despite test audience displeasure, is arguably more optimistic than the general release ending, Enslin’s spectral reunion with his daughter seems predicated on his decision to burn the room down. He has committed suicide, yes, but as an act of freewill rather than at the behest of the Room and the result has been a kind of liberation that affirms the reality of the afterlife. It turns out that heaven is not just bullshit after all. To get there though apparently requires an act of belief in something larger than the self—an opening outward beyond the closed room of endless pathological mourning. The general release ending, in contrast, is in some ways more satisfying, but also more somber. The experience of truly grappling with loss and mourning rather than evading it has renewed Enslin—his acceptance of Katie’s death has allowed him to reconcile with his wife and to move beyond pathological grief by writing the book in fact that he composed in fantasy. However, Katie’s voice on the tape recorder asking her father why he has abandoned her and if he still loves her not only suggests the continued hold of the past on the present, but also raises questions about the nature of the afterlife, suggesting something darker than clouds and rainbows (a prospect King explores much more fully in Revival ). In both cases, however, Enslin shifts away from nihilism and the locked room of grief toward embracing the prospect of some form of connection with others and continuation of consciousness after death.

The Ghostly Room at the Inn In director Håfström’s hands, King’s ghostly room at the inn story transforms into the story of the ghostly room within, our uncanny intimacy with something at the same time unknowable—the unconscious that is ours, but that exerts itself in Julia Kristeva’s formulation as “the stranger within” (see Kristeva, 1991). Enslin’s first assessment of Room 1408 is as something comfortable: “a prosaic sense of the familiar. ‘Yes, I’ve

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been here before. It’s safe’”. His evaluation shifts later, however, after the Room begins to exert itself. Speaking affectionately to his voice recorder (in a meditation that draws directly from King’s headnote to the story in Everything’s Eventual ), he muses aloud: “Hotel rooms are a natural creepy place, don’t you think? I mean, how many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many of them lost their minds? How many of them … died?” The familiar place become strange; the safe space become threatening—the very definition of Freud’s unheimlich. How many of them died? In Enslin’s case, just one: his daughter. How many of them lost their minds? Again, in Enslin’s case, just one: himself, unable to effectively work through her loss and complete the process of mourning. After moving through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, his walls crumble, he is flooded with and overwhelmed by the grief that he has kept in check, failed to acknowledge, repressed. He almost drowns in it and then attempts to evade it again, to retreat into the fantasy of having worked through loss without actually doing so. But the unconscious will not be fooled as 1408 makes plain the psychic structure of haunting: The ghost of the other is the projection of the self. On the one hand, the ghost is a fetishistic wish fulfillment that disavows absence and loss; on the other hand, the ghost is the threatening projection of guilt— of having failed in one’s responsibilities, of having left something undone, and of having not done enough. In Olin’s characterization of 1408 to Enslin, it is quite simply “an evil fucking room”. And it is because it— the unconscious—is the repository of our worst nightmares and tabooed desires. That is what Mike Enslin encounters in his 60 minutes in the hotel room: the daughter he cannot let go, the grief he has kept at bay, and the profound loss underlying both. Enslin, it turns out, has been trapped in room 1408 ever since his daughter’s death, and his salvation— whether in the sense of reuniting with his daughter after his death or reconciling with his wife and moving on—depends on a kind of testimony (the narration to his tape recorder, the writing of his manuscript) that begins to resolve the traumatic repetition of the missed event by giving it a shape. It is in the uncannily familiar/strange, safe/threatening space of the hotel room, the unconscious, the space where the missed experience of her death, the impossibility of her death resides, Enslin is forced to confront what haunts him most: her death, his survival, his guilt over her death and his survival, and, finally, his grief over her loss—all of which is presented as the precondition for overcoming his own ghostly

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alienation from himself, others, and the world. His journey within the film is from denial to acceptance.

Works Cited 1408. 2007. Directed by Mikael Håfström. Beverley Hills: Metro-GoldwynMeyer. “1408 Trivia.” IMDb.com. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450385/trivia?ref_ =tt_trv_trv. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cowan, Douglas E. 2018. America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King. New York: New York University Press. King, Stephen. 2002. 1408, 457–510. Everything’s Eventual. New York: Pocket Books. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Markodimitrakis, Michail Chrysovalantis. 2017. “Claustrophobic Hotel Rooms and Intermedial Horror in 1408.” In Pennywise Dreadful: The Journal of Stephen King Studies 1 (1) (November): 30–40. Pet Sematary. 1989. Directed by Mary Lambert. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures.

Toxic Nostalgia in Contemporary Horror Brandon R. Grafius

In many ways, the Gothic mode seems inherently hostile to nostalgia. If by “nostalgia” we understand a pleasant reminiscence of the past, a fond longing for days gone by, the Gothic instead presents us with a past that’s full of half-buried secrets and hidden passageways in the homes we thought were safe. Nostalgia offers a past that is safe and comforting; in the Gothic, the past is dangerous, and always threatening to break into the present to demand accountability. In his overview of the aesthetics of the Gothic mode, Xavier Aldana Reyes has remarked: “The past is an unfair, brutal place, one that is defined by threat and the possibility of return: of secrets, of curses, of the supposedly dead and of the actually dead (spectres)” (2020, 18). But this might be a more complicated relationship than it seems. This essay will explore two distinct usages of nostalgia in Gothic cinema. The first is a disguised longing for a recent past, with all of the danger that this recent past provides—as well as the confidence that this danger can be overcome. While the past might be a dangerous place, it is a dangerous

B. R. Grafius (B) Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_3

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place that provides the opportunity for camaraderie (often through bikeriding), saving the world, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. And perhaps, most importantly, it is a past where the dangers emerge from an evil that comes from outside of the community, not from systemic injustices or other social realities of the bygone era. Horror cinema of this variety, perhaps best encapsulated by Stranger Things (Duffer and Duffer: 2016–present), Andrew Muschietti’s two-part adaptation of It (2017 and 2019), and The Black Phone (Derrickson: 2022), demonstrates Frederick Jameson’s well-known critique of the nostalgia mode; a critique that will be explored below. On the other hand, there are also Gothic films that use nostalgia as a way to offer a critique of this imagined past, also demonstrating Jameson’s dichotomy between nostalgia and utopian thinking. When communities project their hopes for the future onto a return to an imagined past, they are bound to fail. The ways in which this critique of nostalgia has been incorporated into the Gothic mode is demonstrated in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2003 film The Village.

Frederic Jameson and the Nostalgic Mode The starting point for much contemporary discussion of nostalgia in film is Frederic Jameson’s 1981 article “The Shining.” Jameson connects contemporary genre film with Adorno’s idea of the “pastiche,” which Jameson dismisses as nothing more than “celebrations of the imaginary style of a real past” (1981, 115). But in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Jameson finds the conventions of the ghost story used as a means to critique the shallow nostalgia present in so many genre films. Instead of taking pleasure in the reminiscences of a longed-for age, The Shining invites viewers to critique why we feel drawn to this imagined past. In Jack Torrance’s longing for the ballroom grandeur of the 1920s, Jameson finds the “the glossy simulacrum of this or that past is here unmasked as possession, as the ideological project to return to the hard certainties of a more visible and rigid class structure” (1981, 123). Most genre films—perhaps American Graffiti (Lucas: 1974) is the most obvious example (Jameson 1992, 19)—disguise this longing by dwelling only on the surface textures of the past; its fashion, its pop culture; while leaving out its politics and the uncomfortable portions of its social relations. In contrast, Jameson argues that The Shining emphasizes what is usually left out of the genre film’s recollection of the past, thereby introducing the nostalgic mode but

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focusing the viewer’s attention on the uncomfortable, often overlooked implications of this nostalgia. Jameson further explored nostalgia in his lengthy monograph Archaeologies of the Future, in which he implicitly contrasts nostalgia with utopian thought (Jameson 2005). In contrast to the depthless retreat into an imagined past that Jameson finds in the nostalgic mode, Jameson finds utopian thought as being open to a newly imagined future, a future not constrained by either the past or the present. The utopian imagination is able to create truly new visions for our lives and for the world; the nostalgic mode is a retreat into past systems that have already proven to be failures. But because the nostalgic mode is blind to anything but an era’s surface gloss, it is unable (or unwilling) to recognize these failures. This straightforward dichotomy has been problematized in much subsequent discussion on nostalgia. Nicola Sayers, for example, uses the work of Ernst Bloch to argue for a redemption of nostalgia through a focus on the ideological elements that are (at least sometimes) present (Sayers 2020, esp. 64–73). In Sayers’ reading of Bloch, nostalgia is actually a means of reclaiming what was good about a past era, and incorporating these positives into the future. And in a very different vein, psychologists have long been interested in the personal benefits of nostalgic thinking, finding that it leads to an increased sense of belonging and self-worth, among other noted outcomes (Routledge 2016). Perhaps most provocatively, Alex Link has suggested that Jameson himself, while dismissing the gothic mode as hopelessly lost in nostalgia, participates in his own “Postmodern Gothic,” an indeterminacy and need to introduce uncomfortable ideas before explaining them away that reminds Link as nothing so much as a Radcliffe novel (2009). But contemporary horror films can frequently be read through the dichotomy that Jameson established, participating in either the surface-level indulgences of the nostalgic mode, or using the limitations of nostalgia as a way to critique an unhealthy connection to the past—as well as a damaged relationship to the present. The next sections will use this lens to briefly introduce several contemporary films and television series which participate in Jameson’s nostalgic mode, before turning to a more in-depth reading of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village as an example of a film that uses its characters nostalgic impulses as a means of social critique.

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The Nostalgic Mode in It and Stranger Things The connections between the Netflix series Stranger Things and Andrew Muschietti’s two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s It have been wellnoted. In addition to the shared presence of actor Finn Wolfhard, the two series share a mid-80s milieu and numerous scenes of a close-knit group of kids (overwhelmingly boys) riding through the neighborhood on bicycles. The influence of Stranger Things seems strong enough to have caused Muschietti to change the time period of It —Stephen King’s original novel, published in 1985, was set in both 1955 and 1985; the newer adaptation has been updated to settings in 1989 and 2019, such that the novel’s halcyon days of youth are now represented by the 1980s. Both of these series lean heavily on this period nostalgia, serving to connect their target audience to memories of childhood. Joseph M. Sirianni writes of Stranger Things: “The fashion, the set design, the score, the bikes, all serve as memory pathways that has established the series’ reputation for being an [sic] 1980s time capsule” (2019, 186, emphasis in original). While not directly referencing Jameson, this statement seems like it was written to support Jameson’s critique of the nostalgic mode: all of the markers of nostalgia mentioned are surface markers of culture, with no reference to the politics, economics, or sociology of the era. Jameson’s critique rings quite true: By focusing on these surface affects of a particular time period, the socio-economic injustices required to create these polished surfaces are effectively erased. Sirianni nods to this omission later on in his essay. After listing a series of “social plights” present in United States during the years in which Stranger Things is set, Sirianni notes that the series “chooses to forgo any direct mention of them. Instead, the show focuses on the cultural impact of film during that time” (2019, 189). Sirianni quickly moves on from this observation and returns to describing the world of Stranger Things as “a place of wonder, excitement, fantasy, and adoration; all by the way of nostalgia” (2019, 197). Jameson’s critique is an obvious rejoinder to this nostalgic mode, which can only achieve these affects by ignoring the period’s very real “social plights.” To introduce his critique of Stranger Things’ shallow nostalgia, Zachary Griffith explores the cross-marketing campaign employed by Eggo waffles in response to their prominence in the series. He remarks: “This is Stranger Things in a nutshell. The series’ nostalgic appeal derives from its seemingly faithful recreation and reassembly of a variety of tropes and aesthetic norms common to 1980s

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media, a hyper-recombinatorial approach to the past, in which the past is configured merely as a particular confluence of genres, tropes, and styles” (Griffith 2022, 4). It is nostalgia entirely rooted in surface style, precisely what Jameson railed against in his 1981 essay. Andy Muschietti’s overwrought two-part adaptation of It has a similar ideology at work. While the film introduces a number of social plights affecting the seemingly placid town of Derry, including incest and homophobia, all of these ills are chalked up to the malevolent influence of Pennywise, the true evil. Evil is not rooted in the American Empire, or capitalism, or even the human heart—it is in this amorphous being that has been haunting Derry for millennia. In fact, this being can only be defeated by good friends banding together, presenting a true narrative of Americans pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. As Scott Poole summarizes, about clown horror in general but with at least one eye on It, “The inhuman face of the psychotic clown acts as a symbol for the American acceptance, indeed its obsession, with unpredictable violence” (Poole 2019, 19–20). In It, this acceptance of violence is rooted in a deeply nostalgic worldview; one that seems to imply that small-town America would be a perfect place if only those evil clowns would just go away. Both Stranger Things and It function as what W. Scott Poole has referred to as “horror stories that allow us to forget” (Poole 2022, 24). This might seem an odd claim to make for entertainment that is all about remembering, but the key is to focus on the substance of what is remembered, and what it obscures. Poole writes, “…some of our tales of terror are more oblique because we’d rather see ourselves as the shining city on a hill and not a global behemoth. So we tell horror stories that allow us to forget, that tell us of monsters beyond our borders and heroes that destroy them for us” (ibid.). Poole identifies Jaws as the archetypal horror film of the American Empire, a type of film in which, instead of being the aggressors in wars fought overseas, “Violence is done to us and we fight back and we win…By the time the credits roll, these films assure us that everything is okay” (2022, 25). In many ways, it is the heavy focus on nostalgia that encourages this troubled relationship with the violent realities of American Empire. What is most important about this era is the bikes and pop culture distractions, not the wars that were being funded through our tax dollars. And when evil emerges to threaten small-town America and its way of life, it is nothing that cannot be beaten back by deeply committed friendship (And perhaps some government-instilled super powers). As used in Stranger Things and It, the nostalgic mode is

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an opiate that dulls our senses to the true violence of the era, and our shared political past.

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village as Critique of Sociological Nostalgia However, Jameson’s analysis underestimates the potential of the Gothic mode to provide a critique of the nostalgic mode. Jameson writes that “the horror film…finds itself reduced to the empty alternation of shock and of the latter’s absence” (1981, 118), which he demonstrates with a brief dismissal of The Exorcist (Friedkin: 1974). For Jameson, The Shining is unique in its ability to recast the Gothic mode as a critique of nostalgia. But Robin Wood’s reading of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper 1974; Wood 2018, 94–101), and Wood’s larger project in his oft-cited “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” clearly demonstrates that the horror genre has been frequently employed as a means of critiquing the bland, comfortable nostalgic mode that Jameson criticize. The source of horror in this ’70s grindhouse classic is Leatherface and his family, including the family patriarch who was formerly employed as a slaughterhouse worker. As the work dried up and moved elsewhere, the family adapted their means of surviving and eating. It’s nostalgia recast as cannibalism, a critique that seems well in line with that of Jameson, and in many ways anticipates both the argument and the imagery of Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism (2022), released almost fifty years after Hooper’s film. Featuring far less cannibalism, but still with the subtlety of a slaughterhouse sledgehammer, is the critique of nostalgia presented in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (Apologies in advance—as with most of Shyamalan’s films, it is impossible to discuss in any depth without giving away the twist at the end, Fair warning). The film is set somewhere and sometime that seems vaguely like Colonial America, in a small, remote village in the midst of a forest whose origins are equally challenging to pin down. Their lifestyle seems like it could be Puritan, or perhaps Amish, but it is hard to tell. Of course, this lack of specificity is revealed at the end to be intentional; rather than being a period horror piece, as the film leads the audience to believe, the titular village is actually an intentional community in early twenty-first-century America, founded by a group of people with a vision of absconding from the violence of the modern world.

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From this initial setup, it is clear that nostalgia drives the plot of the film. The founders of this community longed for a simpler, less violent time, one in which community is restored, the people rebuild their relationship with the land, and the scourges of modern technology are abandoned. Gender hierarchies seem to be firmly in place, and the only images of marriage we are presented with are highly traditional—at least, what has come to be called “traditional” today. It is a vision of America made great again, though hearkening much further back than the 1950s. But of course, all is not well in the imagined past. While much of the early scenes seem deeply idyllic, particularly the montage of village life and the small ways that the people savor their interactions with both each other and the land, it does not take long for a darker underbelly to reveal itself. One of the elders has recently lost his child to illness; the headstrong young man Lucius Hunt is convinced that he can make contact with “the towns” to obtain medical supplies, which might help to prevent future deaths of this nature. By the end of the film, we learn that this lack of medicine is an intentional choice on the part of the village’s founders, one which they have come to second-guess. But more troubling is the continual threat of “those we do not speak of,” monstrous presences that live in the woods just outside the village’s boundary. The villagers are reassured by the elders that these creatures have not crossed into the village for many years, and that the occasional offers of animal sacrifice the villages heave into the woods are enough to maintain an uneasy, yet stable, truce. But the fear is constant and intensifies when animals start being found mutilated and murdered. Of course, by the end of the film (or, rather, in the final third, owing to the film’s rather odd structure of multiple reveals), we realize that these creatures are a myth, created by the village elders to secure the boundaries and ensure that no one is tempted to break through their community’s isolation. Only these elders know the true state of the world; the rest of the village, those who were born into the community, are left in ignorance as to the world outside, and the intentional choices that the elders have made to live in this manner. The community can only be held together by fear. What at first seems like a retreat into nostalgia is revealed to be an authoritarian regime that believes it can only endure through continued deception. The deception goes even deeper than just elaborate stories (complete with the color red as an attractor for the beasts). The beasts themselves— occasionally glimpsed by the villagers in times of upheaval and strife—are

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the elders themselves, wearing costumes that seem like a cross between a two-legged porcupine and a Medieval monk. From the time the villagers are young children in school, they learn of “those we do not speak of,” internalizing that they are only safe within the boundaries of their village, and that the outside world is dangerous. The village elders have made a conscious choice: this deception is worth the cost of keeping themselves and their loved ones safe from the violence of modernity. Throughout the movie, we are given hints of the traumatic violence these elders experienced in the outside world which led them to establish this new community—and which, for them at least, validates the cost of the deception they must perpetuate to keep the community together. Each of them has lost a family member to violence, frequently in ways that start to make the viewer question the timeframe in which the film is set—or at least wonder about Shyamalan’s attention to detail. They have experienced fathers who were shot to death while in bed after a business deal went wrong, sisters who were attacked in alleyways, and other violence that seems distinctly modern in its character. The foundation of their retreat into a self-created world is the belief that this violence is connected to modernity, and that escaping into the past will also allow them to escape modernity’s violence. But from the opening scenes of the film, we begin to see the cracks in this façade. It opens with village elder August draped over his son’s coffin in grief, with the rest of the villagers looking on from a distance. August’s son has been lost too soon. Lucius Hunt, a young man who knows nothing of the village’s true nature, appeals to the elders to allow him to travel to a nearby town for medicine. While unaware of the deception that is being perpetuated on the majority of the residents, he seems to know that his village does not have access to medical advancements that are known to others. His request is denied; the elders know that allowing him to travel to another town would destroy what they have built. But the trade the elders have made gradually dawns upon them all through the course of the movie: they have traded the violence of modernity for premature death by other causes. Instead of succumbing to violence, their loved ones now succumb to disease and infection. “We may question ourselves at moments such as these,” says elder Edward, as the villagers gather for a communal meal after the funeral. “Did we make the right decision to settle here?” After a brief pause, he leaves the question unanswered, and concludes, “We are grateful for the time we have been given.” As the trade they have made in their choice to escape into

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nostalgia becomes clear, including the lies they must continue to tell to continue living in this manufactured nostalgia, the decision seems less and less defensible to everyone involved. Nostalgia is a nice place to visit, The Village seems to say, but not somewhere we can live.

Make the Village Great Again In many ways, the community of The Village shares much in common with the nostalgic drive of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Many journalists and scholars have written about the centrality of nostalgia to Trump’s appeal; Bryan Price describes this impulse as “a revanchist need to reclaim the hegemony of a largely patriarchal whiteness lost to liberalism’s meddling desire to topple it” (2018, 104). In his supporters, Trump activates the yearning for a lost time when life was simpler; and, deeply in line with Jameson’s reading of The Shining, a time when race, gender, and economic hierarchies were clear and unchallenged. In the introduction to her influential volume The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguishes between restorative and reflective nostalgia. For Boym, “Restorative nostalgia…attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home…Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition” (2001, xviii). Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging, and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.” In this distinction, one can almost see Jameson’s dichotomy between nostalgia and utopia. And, similarly to Jameson, it is easy to see which side of the divide Boym finds most productive for human flourishing. Continuing to explore this dichotomy, Boym asserts that “Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals” (2001, xviii), a claim that has only come to see more deeply true in the decades since Boym’s monograph. Francesca Polletta and Jessica Callahan see a similar connection between conservative political movements and nostalgia, arguing for the importance of narratives in tapping into this nostalgic yearning, particularly the power of narratives to “allude” to other narratives (2017, 393). By communicating with his supporters in a closed feedback loop, which includes the conservative media universe, Trump was able to connect the various threads of these stories into a singular worldview, one which persuasively tapped into the nostalgic impulse for a large number of Americans. The MAGA movement has

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created its own village, with “those we don’t speak of” lurking just outside the walls. Jennifer Cowe, citing the work of Smith and Campbell, argues that most “academics and laymen” view political nostalgia in similar terms as those which Boym laid out: either “Reactionary nostalgia” (similar to Boym’s restorative nostalgia), often viewed as the “realm of the political right,” which is “steeped in romanticized visions of a more peaceful time in which different communities were content in their place,” or “Progressive nostalgia,” which points “towards a reckoning with the past in all its complexity” (Cowe 2022). However, for Cowe this oversimplifies the issue; political movements participate in both of these impulses to varying degrees. This seems like a wise caution, and it is possible to see both of these impulses at work in the community of The Village. They clearly wanted to retreat from the modern world, into a “lost home” of safety and simplicity. Boym’s description of this yearning as being “transhistorical” seems remarkably appropriate for the vaguely colonial, but difficult to pin down timeframe of The Village, a squishiness which is obviously intentional once the twist is revealed. Less important than recreating the specifics of this lost period of history is recreating the emotions associated with this lost time. The villagers are not worried about any sort of historical accuracy, about recreating the technology, communal life, and general living conditions of a particular, specific time period, and the film’s production design reflects this—it is far different than the exhaustive attention to period detail paid by a film like Robert Egger’s The Witch (2015), for example. Instead, they are recapturing their own sense of security through a dramatic recreation of an imagined amalgamation of a wide range of past times and practices. The lack of historical specificity only serves to underscore the true purpose of this nostalgic community and emphasizes the drive to recreate an imagined past, rather than an actual one. In some ways, this indicates that the nostalgia which drives the characters in The Village is of a different kind than that of Stranger Things or Muschietti’s It. In those works, the time period is hyper-specified and exhaustively recreated through clothing, music, and a range of other cultural references—down to the editions of Dungeons & Dragons manuals used by the kids of Stranger Things. These details make the time period precisely, in sharp contrast to the vaguely colonial period of The Village.

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One obvious difference is whether the nostalgic impulse is located within the viewers or the spectators; in The Village, it is nostalgia experienced by the characters and held up for critique by the film—a diegetic nostalgia. In contrast, Stranger Things and It have an extradiegetic nostalgia, experienced by the viewer rather than the characters. As such, it is a nostalgia that is fully embraced by these two series, rather than revealed as an impossible escapist fantasy as in The Village. The Village critiques this nostalgia, while Stranger Things and It embrace it as a source of pleasure for their audiences. But this key difference emphasizes the connection between the nostalgia chased by the elders of The Village and the audiences of Stranger Things and It and acknowledges they are of the same type of restorative nostalgia. In particular, the transhistorical nature of the community in The Village helps us to notice that the polished, detailed 80s surfaces of Stranger Things and It are actually transhistorical themselves, in spite of the abundance of period details. These period details can be so overwhelming in their intensity that they serve to draw attention to what Jameson has called “celebrations of the imaginary style of a real past” (1981, 115), which gradually veers into a style that is dominating enough to threaten the reality of this past. The details are recollected so relentlessly that they topple any sense of the reality the details are intended to recreate. None of us experienced the 80s as intensely as the decade is depicted in Stranger Things. Even more importantly, the emphasis on surface style, to the expense of social and political realities, gives a transhistorical sheen to these narratives, pulling them out of the daily realities of life during the time period they purport to recreate. Boym sums up this seemingly paradoxical quality of nostalgia: “In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the idea of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space” (2001, xv). So while Stranger Things and It may be rooted in the memories of a specific time, and lavishly strive to recreate these memories, both of them actually serve to pull the 1980s out of history, and place them within the realm of mythology. Just as the elders of The Village sought to move themselves and their community out of time, Stranger Things, It, and other similar works of nostalgia seek to pull a similar act of deception on their viewers, replacing history with mythology. While it does not necessarily lead to the melodramatically horrific consequences experienced by the community of The Village,

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this kind of deception encourages a shallow relationship with history and frequently impedes our ability to offer an honest assessment of our past.

Conclusion: Nostalgia and History While Jameson’s foundational critique of the nostalgic mode in cinema is well over four decades old, the dichotomy he identifies between films that use nostalgia to offer a shallow, ahistorical view of a timeless past as opposed to films that use our impulses towards nostalgia to critique the past (and, by extension, the present) is still a helpful interpretive lens. While Jameson might not have dug deeply enough to see the frequency with which the Gothic mode has been used for a powerful critique of economic and social realities, his analysis still identifies a distinction between films that are aware of their rootedness in history, and those that try to obscure the realities of the history they purport to portray through a fixation on surface glosses and pop culture trends. But as Bohm has pointed out in political movements, films are also seldom rooted exclusively in one of these impulses or the other; while I would argue that Muschietti’s It mistakes the source of these traumas, the films make an attempt to portray the cruelty and damaged lives that lurk beneath the nostalgic surface of Derry. And in a similar vein, while Stranger Things presents a days-gone-by daydream of bicycle riding and basement RPGs, it also suggests that our government does not always operate honestly, and that real danger can break through this bubble. The mistake lies in these narratives’ inability to connect these evils with the historical reality of the time in which they were set. In both parts of It, the evil lying beneath Derry finds its source in an undying malevolent being; capitalism and other systems of oppression, social realities of racism and sexism, and all other manners of everyday evil are given a pass. The elders of The Village make a similar mistake as It and Stranger Things encourage from their viewers: they believed that the violence and cruelty they experienced in their own lives was the unique result of their particular times, and that a retreat into the imagined past would allow them to escape these specifically modern problems. These elders might have read their modern context correctly—the violence they experienced was the result of the systems of oppression active in the world in which they lived—but they were not able to hold the same accurate understanding of the past.

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Avoiding either of these mistakes requires an honest accounting of both our past and our present, one that is able to recognize the flaws in our society and our world. We risk repeating these same mistakes when we imagine they were not there in the past and seek to retreat into a fabricated time when these evils did not exist. The Gothic mode has the potential to indulge in this fantasy, allowing its viewers to escape into an ahistorical past that provides just enough danger to be overcome. But, as films such as The Village demonstrate, it can also offer a powerful critique of this impulse, demonstrating that the past is a far more dangerous place, in a number of ways, than we like to admit.

Works Cited Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2020. Gothic Cinema. London: Routledge. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Cowe, Jennifer. 2022. “Past Perfect(ed): Future Nostalgia and the Fight Against Trump’s America in Netflix’s Hollywood.” European Journal of American Studies 17 (2). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.18287. Fraser, Nancy. 2022. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—And What We Can Do About It. London: Verso. Griffith, Zachary. 2022. “Stranger Things, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics.” Journal of Film and Video 74 (1): 3–18. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/851919 It, Part 1. 2017. Directed by Andy Muschietti. Burbank: New Line Cinema. It, Part 2. 2019. Directed by Andy Muschietti. Burbank: New Line Cinema. Jameson, Frederic. 1981. “The Shining.” Social Text 4 (Autumn): 114–25. Jameson, Frederic. 1992. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Jameson, Frederic. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Link, Alex. 2009. “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots.” Gothic Studies 11 (1): 70–85. Polletta, Francesca and Jessica Callahan. 2017. “Deep Stories, Nostalgia Narratives, and Fake News: Storytelling in the Trump Era.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5 (3) (October): 392–408. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41 290-017-0037-7. Poole, W. Scott. 2019. “‘Let’s Put a Smile on that Face’: Trump, the Psychotic Clown, and the History of American Violence.” In Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, edited by Victoria McCollum, 19–31. London: Routledge.

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Poole, W. Scott. 2022. Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Price, Bryan D. 2018. “Material Memory: The Politics of Nostalgia on the Eve of MAGA.” American Studies 57 (1): 103–15. Routledge, Clay. 2016. Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource. London: Routledge. Sayers, Nicola. 2020. The Promise of Nostalgia: Reminiscence, Longing and Hope in Contemporary American Culture. London: Routledge. The Shining. 1980. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Burbank: Warner Bros. Sirianni, Joseph M. 2019. “Nostalgic Things: Stranger Things and the Pervasiveness of Nostalgic Television.” In Netflix Nostalgia: Streaming the Past on Demand, edited by Kathryn Pallister, 185–202. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. Stranger Things. 2016–present. Created by Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer. Los Angeles: 21 Laps. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 1974. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Toronto: Vortex. The Village. 2003. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Burbank: Touchstone Pictures. Wood, Robin. 2018. “An Introduction to the Horror Film.” In Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 73–110. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Toxic Nostalgia in the Wake of the Postmodern Turn Matthias Stephan

The twenty-first century has been fraught with polarization and a cultural war about the foundations of modern society. The postmodern turn, in literature, architecture, film, and throughout Western culture eroded confidence in what were previously considered shared core values, questioning their epistemological underpinnings and challenging whether those existed at all. As the playful nature of the postmodern narrative wanes, in its wake, as Jameson (2003) contends, we are left with the underlying structure without a strong belief in its foundation. Those residual cultural values are reinforced through the nostalgic trend of past decades, partly because they reinforce what Matt Hills (2012) calls a selfnarrative. It is in this cultural moment that the FX series The Americans emerges, a spy series set in 1980s Washington at the end of the Cold War, and focalizing on the life experience of two active Russian spies. According to Svetlana Boym, nostalgia “is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed” (2001, xiii). Nostalgia can be a dangerous preoccupation, especially when used in what Boym calls the ‘restorative’ variety, which seeks to reestablish the past, as described,

M. Stephan (B) Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_4

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directly into the future scenario, often eliding any problems or complications to the self-identity presented in this nostalgic narrative. She argues that this is “characteristic of ‘national and nationalist revivals all over the world,’ which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths” (Boym 2001, 41). This is particularly problematic, because, as Bauman notes, “what we as a rule ‘return to’ when dreaming our nostalgic dreams is not the past ‘as such’ — not that past ‘as it genuinely was” (2017, 10). I have previously argued that if one used Svetlana Boym’s “reflective” nostalgia, one could create positive connections and include positive affects with our increased awareness of diversity (Stephan 2019). However, not all media works in that vein, and society (from Trump and Brexit, to the rise of the right-wing narratives) is, in some circles, actively working against these developments. Boym’s other formulation of nostalgia, “restorative” nostalgia reinforces that exactly, often eliding the differences and diversity of the past, and selectively producing a future which champions this “idealized past.” Those restorative nostalgic narratives reinforce a version of memory which renders people unable to recognize or accept the contemporary reality. Whether manifested in a distrust of technology in the face of the speed of its development, a hyper-reality, or the rejection of scientific development and social change, these narratives prove toxic to contemporary society and foment ongoing culture wars and populist politics on a global scale. This chapter explores the rise of such toxic nostalgic narratives, often focused on a return to the seemingly black and white world of the Cold War, and how the appeal to 1980s nostalgia has broad reaching implications for contemporary televisual narratives, and the establishment of a particular self-narrative. While there are a number of cases that one could consider, from 24 (2001–2010) and Homeland (2011–2020), to film adaptations like Ready Player One (2018), this chapter focuses on readings of the television series The Americans (2013–2018). The paper first analyses the development of the series, and its use of both totemic nostalgia and nostalgic narratives in its construction. It then looks closely at three main cases—Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell), Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), and Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich)—as it considers the series’ use of toxic nostalgia in promoting a lost idealized narrative, and how the attempt impacts the characters as shown through both its plot structure, character development, and depiction of the motivations of its main characters.

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The Americans Revolution In 2010 Anna Chapman was arrested and subsequently pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to act as a foreign agent—essentially she was a Russian spy. She was returned to Russia in a prisoner swap with 10 other Russian assets later that year. There were Russian spies among us, infiltrating US society just like in the best spy novels, like those Joseph Weisberg read as a child and inspired him to become a CIA agent in the early 1990s. As LaRocca notes, he said in interviews that “I wanted a job where I could be a Cold warrior” (2020, 159), even as the Cold War was officially ending. Weisberg would go on to both write his own spy novels, and, in 2010, in the wake of Operation Ghost Stories as “an FBI investigation revealed 10 Russian spies had been living undercover in suburbs nationwide for more than a decade, Weisberg leapt at the opportunity to write a TV series based on the scandal” (Waxman, n.p.). That series is The Americans. Yet, Weisberg did not create a show that mimicked a twenty-firstcentury spy scandal, rather he deliberately set the show in the past. This both follows the trend of nostalgic narratives but also capitalizes on the association of spy shows with the iconic images of a bygone era. Through this chronological placement, Weisberg connects the show with the 1980s both in its totemic nostalgic connection to the setting and tone, but to the emotional, social, and political reality of the era. As Weisberg notes in an interview with NPR’s “All Things Considered”, “When we started this show, the Soviet Union was gone. We were not in any kind of serious conflict with Russia. And it seemed like a good time to tell a story about those old bygone days” (LaRocca 2020, 162). Thus, The Americans is set in the 1980s, moving the narrative from the contemporary anxieties of the post 9/11 world to that of the Cold War anxieties of us vs them, the West vs the East. One could argue that there were practical reasons for the move—associating historical spycraft with an era that did not include ubiquitous screens, instant communication, and a surveillance society makes the practicalities creating a spy series possible. Yet, part of it, according to Weisman, was to make the show salient for its audience, in 2013. “People were both shocked and simultaneously shrugged at the [2010] scandal because it didn’t seem like we were really enemies with Russia anymore. An obvious way to remedy that for television was to stick it back in the Cold War” Weisberg states in an interview with Time (Waxman, n.p.).

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While it is true, as Peters argues, the Cold War also contained anxieties that “the ‘enemy’ can be anyone” (2021, 211) which was even more salient in the wake of 9/11, as clearly presented in shows like Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), the focus on Cold War narratives had significantly fallen between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2010s. As Prorokova-Konrad notes, “the emergence of films about the Cold War in the 2010s is a particularly curious phenomenon, considering that after the end of the Cold War the number of films that referred to Russia/Russians […] ‘declined significantly,’ and that the issue of the Cold War has literally ‘vanished’” (2020, 17). Yet, despite the beginnings of a Cold War resurgence, Weisberg had seemingly apolitical expressed motives. In the Time interview, he claims “at first, the ’70s appealed to me just because I loved the hair and the music. But can you think of a better time than the ’80s with Ronald Reagan yelling about the evil empire?” (Waxman 2013). One cannot deny the power of the totemic nostalgic resonance of the 70s, but the 2010s have seen a surge in the revival of 80s aesthetics not least in revivals like Ghostbusters and original programming like Stranger Things (2016–present). As Peters argues, “the presence of Cold War rhetoric in the media have transformed these concepts from what was arguably a more abstract glimpse into 1980s history into a concrete reminder that the sociopolitical issues of the past can always return to the present if we aren’t careful” (2021, 215). The political turmoil of the 1980s, itself a reflection of the 1950s (Dwyer), returns to haunt us again in the twenty-first century—and as often is the case, life also seems to mimic art. Parallel to the diegetic narratives of the television series, Russia itself began to act on its own nostalgic narrative, which sheds light on the process both within and about the show itself. LaRocca notes that: since the diegetic time of the show (namely, the “old” Cold War, or more specifically, the end of the old Cold War) stand in parallel to our time, we should take seriously the creative decision to avoid direct commentary on, or criticism of, the prevailing winds in the revitalized chill between the global nation-states that figure so dominantly in the show”. (2020, 162)

Thus, importantly, I will keep separate the analytic points about the use of nostalgia extradiegetically, made here in this section, and those interdiegetic uses of nostalgic narratives discussed later in the chapter. There are those in both the United States and the former Soviet Union that are nostalgic for the days of the Cold War. Oana Popescu Sandu

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discusses the role of nostalgia in both the East and the West. She notes that “Svetlana Boym has theorized nostalgia for the East as a search for the stability, daily rituals, and perceived social fairness of socialism in response to the tumultuous and uneven ideological, social, economic, and cultural transformations after 1989” (Sandu 2022, 613), basing this on new Russia’s nostalgia for “its former superpower and empire status during the Cold War” (614). Similarly in the West, “the Cold War has become a nostalgic catch phrase for a variety of relationships, attitudes, and feelings that denote the U.S. national self as strong and superior in its self-righteous relationships with the former socialist countries” (614). Both of these narratives strive for the ontological security that is found with a clear indication of one’s place in the world, status which has been eroded in the wake of the postmodern turn, the collapse of the psychological bulwark of the narratives of the Cold War, and importantly represent longing for what Boym calls the “unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that have become obsolete” (2001, 10). Furthermore, neither of these narratives need necessarily be based on realistic portrayals of the past. Sullivan, in considering the Soviet nostalgia of contemporary Russians, finds “that a considerable portion of Russia’s citizens are nostalgic for the Soviet past,” though that is more prominent in “the elderly and the poor … than the young and wealthy” (2022, 24). At the same time, they are not eager to return to the reality of “Sovietstyle communism” (7). When we long for the past, we do not long for the actual past, but for an idealized version of it. We long for the emotional connection, the feel and sentiment we associate with our lives at that time, free from the anxieties of the present, the modern (or postmodern) society in which we find ourselves. Fred Davis argues that “nostalgic feeling is almost never infused with those sentiments we commonly think of as negative” and even those “tinged frequently with sadness or even melancholy … only serve to heighten the quality of recaptured joy or contentment” (1979, 14). Essentially, nostalgic narratives can serve to reinforce a version of future anticipation of the realization of those unrealized dreams of the past and project them onto the future. Those nostalgic memories need not even belong to the individual themselves, but can be transmitted across generations. Matthew Leggatt, in discussing Cold War nostalgia quotes Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev from 2016 stating “we are rapidly rolling into a period of a new Cold War” when discussing the wake of Russia’s position of antagonism with NATO in the wake of the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the ongoing crisis in

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Ukraine which started with the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Medvedev continued those remarks stating “I am sometimes confused. Is this 2016 or 1962?” (134). As Leggatt notes, Medvedev was not alive in 1962, and thus any position of nostalgia for the Prime Minister is a matter of collective memory, demonstrating nostalgia stretching across generational lines, or as he states “the comment seems particularly resonant of a nostalgia stretching beyond personal memory” (2017, 134). Medvedev’s position, which is also echoed in statements by Vladimir Putin, hinges on a positive reflection of the Cold War—a time he does not see as a negative in Russian history. The “new Cold War” is positioned as a return to glory, and the stated reasons for the current crisis in the Ukraine is also connected to a nostalgic longing for the era of empire—a nostalgia I describe as toxic as it occludes the realities of the era and only recalls (and reinforces) a sanitized narrative to support future actions. While one could question Putin and Medvedev’s sincerity in claiming this historical narrative, this toxic nostalgic narrative is also found in The Americans, where reliance on such narratives reinforces unhealthy reliance on nostalgia— Boym’s restorative nostalgia—which serves as an underpinning for the self-narratives of the three main characters under consideration, Elizabeth, Philip, and Stan. Each case will also focus on ancillary characters who serve to put into relief the toxic narratives that support each characters vision of their own role and history.

Elizabeth Jennings and the Idealization of the Soviet Union The titular characters of The Americans are the Jennings—Elizabeth and Philip—two deep undercover KGB agents from “Directorate S” active in 1980s Washington, who are seemingly leading ordinary American lives. One of the challenges the show presents its US audience is negotiating one’s sympathy for these characters—identifying with characters with different nationalist and political interests, but also characters who routinely act against a “traditional” moral code, and even at times against generic expectations derived from the Cold War spy tradition. Despite the tendency of audiences to identify with the main characters of a series (as well as the charisma and acting acumen of both Russell and Rhys), it is the motivations of the characters that provide the main challenge. The character of Elizabeth Jennings is the primary driver of the ideology of the couple, and it is her fundamental beliefs that keep the couple going.

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This is presented from the first episode, which sets up the dynamic of the questioning loyalties of these characters as a core motif of the series. In “Pilot” the Jennings are meant to capture defected Russian colonel Nikolai Timoshev, who has been in the US on a speaking tour. The presence of Timoshev leads to Elizabeth and Philip discussing their own role in the US and the possibility (brought up by Philip) of their own defection. This conversation reveals the initial motivations of both Elizabeth and Philip, and the episode involves flashbacks to the 1950s and their own recruitment. This nostalgic look back at their past involves confrontation with Elizabeth’s rape (at the hand of Timoshev years prior) and Philip’s reaction to it (to which we will return in the next section). For Elizabeth, this scene reveals the lengths she has already gone in furtherance of her motivations, and the dedication to her self-narrative and its connection to an idealized version of the Soviet project. This is reinforced in later episodes, most clearly in “Stingers” (season 3, episode 10) after their 14-year-old daughter confronts them and learns of their “true” roles as Russian spies. In conversation, Elizabeth states, “We serve our country” adding “most of what you hear about the Soviet Union isn’t true..” Perhaps more clearly, she goes on to state “But we also serve the cause of peace around the world … We fight for people who can’t fight for themselves.” One could challenge this position in numerous ways, but for Elizabeth she has based her self-narrative on this positioning of the Soviet Union and operates to defend it in a consistent way. This nostalgic narrative, a story based not on a realistic, fact-based history of the Soviet Union and its actions and operations but on her reliance on an ideal version of communism, becomes a toxic driver for her throughout the series. In considering a nostalgic narrative Muller notes “Linda Hutcheon theorizes what she terms the ‘generalization’ of nostalgia in terms of Immanuel Kant’s recognition that in desiring to return home the nostalgia sufferer desires not to return to a particular place but to a particular time, a time which for Kant is a time of youth” (Muller 2006, 748, italics in original). However, for Elizabeth it is not a return to a positive past experience but rather for an idealized version of her past as she would have liked it to be, and which she argues (to herself) that she is helping to create for the future (for herself and the world). Muller further states that “for Hutcheon the aesthetics of nostalgia might … be less of a matter of simple memory than of complex projection; the invocation of a partial idealized history merges with a dissatisfaction with the present. And it can

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do so with great force” (2006, 748–749). This projection based on her nostalgic longing for the “unrealized dreams of the past” forms the core of Elizabeth’s self-identity. According to Richard Jenkins “self-identity is a distinctively modern project within which individuals can reflexively construct a personal narrative for themselves which allows them to understand themselves as in control of their lives and futures” (2004, 35). In the wake of the postmodern turn, it is possible to read self-identity as not necessarily grounded in universal or even common values, but in ascription to a chosen set of values. However, this essay argues that Elizabeth’s reliance on this nostalgic narrative proves toxic for her and those that surround her. Her passionate and unwavering adherence to this constructed self-identity perhaps makes her an ideal KGB agent, but also leads to her performing questionable acts and has a less than favorable end for her character—at least one that does not fit with her own self-narrative. Additionally, there is a contradiction between her nationalism (“we serve our country”) and her positioning herself as serving a larger cause of world peace (“we also serve the cause of peace around the world” and “we fight for people who can’t fight for themselves”). While those causes are admirable, the framing of this argument, within Cold War discourse, relies on binary thinking, one which necessitates glorifying one cause at the expense of the other—and one which therefore requires not seeing any positive qualities in the opposing side. As a KGB agent, Elizabeth acts as a nationalist first, at the expense of her altruistic and peace-oriented aspirations. The binary frame allows for Elizabeth to align her actions with other players who are also positioned as, vaguely, anti-American and thus ideologically aligned with her cause. One such character is Gregory, introduced in season 1 (“Gregory,” season 1, episode 3), a civil rights activist from Philadelphia. Elizabeth recruits him to work for the KGB after meeting him at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference meeting, and their connection relies presumably on the alignment of their mutual causes, as well as their romantic entanglement (which jeopardizes the Jennings’ marriage). In another flashback scene, it shows the importance of Gregory in Elizabeth’s development (essentially her first boyfriend), and the emotional connection within the Jennings’ marriage (to which we will return in the next section focused on Philip). However, Gregory’s arc also shows the challenges of the binary logic—as Gregory’s exposure as an agent leads to the KGB deciding to extract him to Russia. While this seems designed to protect him (in contrast to other characters

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in the arc like Joyce, who are simply, and seemingly easily, sacrificed for cover or convenience), Gregory has no interest in living in Russia. The assumption that alignment with Elizabeth’s self-narrative, or working for the KGB, would also imply a desire or interest in living in the realities of 1980s USSR seems ideologically driven and proves toxic to Gregory. He ends up killed in a run-in with the police, maintaining his cover in an apparent “suicide by cop,” nominally sacrificing himself rather than live in Russia. His nostalgic ideal does not align with the self-narrative of Elizabeth. As Giddens notes, “self-identity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of traits, possessed by the individual. It is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography” (1991, 53, emphasis in original). Gregory’s biography did not connect with a Soviet identity, but rather with a challenge to the way the United States treated its Black population. Thus “returning” to the USSR was not a nostalgic return, and since his romantic involvement with Elizabeth had ended (in her turn toward her husband) as well as there being no indication she would accompany him, there is no motivation for Gregory to leave America. Gregory is not the only asset that Elizabeth turns using seemingly aligned causes. She is also willing to sacrifice Lucia, a Nicaraguan Sandinista with whom she had a personal connection, when it better served her grander narrative. She also recruited Hans, an economics graduate student from South Africa, based on his disgust for America’s support of South African apartheid. While the motivations of each of these characters is loosely connected to Elizabeth’s larger stated motivations, they do not align with the specific framing of the KGB operations nor within the reality of possible outcomes of which Elizabeth was aware. In order to maintain her role, she creates a toxic self-identity based on her idealized nostalgia for a Soviet role in the world. This fits with Giddens’ understanding of social identity where, “A person’s identity is not be found in the behavior, nor — important though this is — in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going ” (Giddens 1991, 54, emphasis in original). What proves toxic, in this nostalgic identity, is the casualties that she is willing to sustain. Hans, like Lucia and Gregory, also meets a tragic end, exposed to a lethal virus on a mission (“Amber Waves,” season 5, episode 1). While Elizabeth does not have a direct hand in his exposure (it is an accident), she shows no emotion in eliminating him, when it could have easily been done by others. He was expendable,

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not only in terms of the mission, but in his identity, in furtherance of her own narrative. As Bauman argues: the sole task left to the recruiters is to brainwash the recruits into believing in the meaningfulness of the form and time of dying they suggest — the task made all the easier to perform by the soldiers who, well before joining them, had already been convinced of the meaningnessless of life. (2017, 44)

Pickering and Keightley argue for a positive framing of nostalgia: Nostalgia can then be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past, but also as a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present. This opens up a positive dimension in nostalgia, one associated with desire for engagement with difference, with aspiration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking in modernity. Nostalgia can be both melancholic and utopian. (2006, 921)

It could be considered that it is with this frame of mind that Elizabeth participates in recruiting her daughter, Paige, as a second-generation operative. Paige is, in many ways, similar to her mother: intelligent, strong-willed, and insightful. Introduced to the church choir by a friend, she attends the progressive Reed Street Church, being drawn to religion and its charity and human rights message despite her parents’ aversion to religion and suspicion of Pastor Tim and his motives. Her attempts at secrecy, and growing insight and maturity, eventually lead to her suspicion of her parents and their revealing their true identity to her. There is ideological alignment between the Reed Street Church, and the progressive religious left, and Elizabeth’s stated goals, revealed in that same conversation. Yet, it remains clear that Elizabeth’s loyalties align more with her KGB role than this charitable vision. Rather, the challenge to their secret identity leads to tension in the family, as Paige confides her parent’s secret to Pastor Tim. Pastor Tim’s long arc reinforces the tension with Elizabeth’s toxic self-narrative and her ideological progressive nature. While the long arc includes plans to eliminate Pastor Tim, and accusations that they had done so, this particular arc ends with the relocation of Pastor Tim and his wife to Argentina, arranged by the KGB handlers. This is also facilitated by considering Pastor Tim’s uneasiness with the US position in El Salvador, potentially positioning him in binary agreement with the

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Jennings’ despite their many other disagreements. It exposes the ways in which such loyalties can be exploited by a binary logic. Mimicking her own experience, Elizabeth introduces Paige to her KGB agent at the age of 16, and Paige’s arc is left undetermined at the end of the show, as she does not travel with her parents back to Russia—like Gregory she has no nostalgic longing for a country she did not grow up in—but also returns to her KGB handler, leaving her eventual decision unclear.

Philip Jennings, Protector of the Family and Its Values In contrast to Elizabeth, Philip’s motivations are less ideologically driven. From “Pilot” his main driver seems to be the construction of an authentic marriage with Elizabeth. His choice to kill Timoshev, avenging the rape of Elizabeth during her training (seen in a flashback), demonstrates that his loyalty is to her and cements their relationship. Prior to this action, he had been considering whether the American experience was more positive and whether defection was a possible way out. This was furthered by the seemingly positive response that Timoshev had—book tour and an improved lifestyle. His commitment to Elizabeth meant that he allowed her ideological motivations to drive his own actions, despite his own personal misgivings. Thus, her toxic nostalgic narrative carries forward into his actions. However, there are two specific arcs that expose the tension in Philip’s adherence to this narrative, and through relief demonstrate its toxicity. These are the arcs of Martha Hanson (Alison Wright) and Kimberly Breland (Julia Garner). In a long arc, Philip recruits FBI secretary Martha Hanson, playing on her loneliness and relationship issues, but also her desire to protect US national interests. He does this by posing as a counterintelligence officer investigating her office, which provides a cover for the ongoing secrecy of their actions. When her role is exposed, rather than eliminating her, he works to extricate her and help her to defect to the USSR. Unlike Elizabeth’s conversation with Gregory, Philip is conflicted in his loyalty to Martha. He works to ensure a more positive outcome for her, though it remains unclear if that objective is achieved. The scenes of her return to the USSR provide contrast within the series between the treatment of Timoshev in the United States and Martha’s return to the USSR. In the Soviet Union, she received no accolades or special treatment, though some effort is made to allow her dream of becoming a mother

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by adopting an orphan. Philip’s motivations seem to be to “do right” by Martha, despite having worked to undermine her role with the FBI—in other words, his loyalty to his mission, and the ideological underpinnings of the “KGB illegals” is not the driving force of his self-narrative. This is also exposed in Philip’s relationship with Kimberly Breland, the 15-year-old daughter of the head of the CIA’s Afghan group. He is charged with infiltrating and bugging the home of Kimmie’s father and uses seduction to do so. His moral compass, however, is challenged when the role moves from flirtation toward the need to have sex with a girl his own daughter’s age. This positions a set of American values against those expressed by Elizabeth in recounting her own nostalgic narrative. In one of the last episodes, after Paige had been recruited but was having second thoughts, Elizabeth again proclaims: I wasn’t brought up like you were. I had to fight. Always… If I had to give up everything so that my country would survive, so that it would never happen again, I would do it gladly. We were proud to do whatever we could. Sex? What was sex? Nobody cared. Including your father. (‘Jennings, Elizabeth’, season 6, episode 9)

LaRocca suggests that this provides, among other things, “a comparison between what might be called Russian sentiments versus American sentimentality about sex” (2020, 175), though I think that plays into the construction of the binary of West versus East and stages the United States as morally superior (at least on American terms). The context of Elizabeth’s statement is less about Russian values, and more about the survivor mentality of her personal story, which she uses to construct her toxic self-narrative. It is too easy to paint Elizabeth’s sentiment as speaking for Russians, though LaRocca’s suggestion (in his focus on motherhood) that this is an important separation between Elizabeth and Paige, between mother and daughter, is well-taken.

Stan Beeman, Champion of American Values The final case for consideration is of FBI agent Stan Beeman, who moves in across the street from the Jennings in “Pilot” and becomes the main ideological antagonist throughout the series. Beeman is also positioned as the representative of American values and righteousness from the beginning. He moves to Washington after an undercover assignment

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exposing white nationalism in Arkansas and is shown as a professional, well-respected agent in the office. As the show develops, however, Stan’s positioning of loyalty to his job—the FBI—comes into contrast with his own personal sentiments. This can be seen in parallel to the story of the Jennings, but also exposes how Weisberg presents the two grand narratives of the Soviet and American experiences, both through the nostalgic setting of the 1980s at the height of the Cold War. Beeman’s blackmail and recruitment of Nina Krilova, a Soviet embassy clerk is also in keeping with his role at the FBI. However, Stan ends up in a romantic relationship with Nina, which compromises both his role and his marriage. Despite this compromised position, which has Stan actively working with KGB operative Oleg Burov to try to save Krilova (unsuccessfully), Stan never loses his position at the FBI, nor are the positive connotations of American identity challenged in the scenario. Rather, it is seen as Beeman’s personal challenges, negotiating his own failed marriage rather than identifying him with his national identity—as is done with Elizabeth. In the end, Beeman is charged with taking care of the Jennings’ son Henry, with whom he has formed an attachment. Beeman’s moral compass is not questioned, nor is his willingness to protect the innocent Henry, despite his parent’s loyalty to the USSR. While this provides tension in the show, it does not discredit an American-centric narrative, rather it reinforces a moral binary that positions the USSR (and modern Russia) and the US at odds, and reinforces Elizabeth’s toxic self-narrative as reflective of the one, while Beeman’s personal failings and his own selfnarrative as not impacting our understanding of the positive connotations of the other.

Conclusion: Toxic Nostalgia in The Americans Boym argues that “a cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images – of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life” (2001, 7). How then does this work in a televisual space in which the concept of home and abroad, past and present, and dream and everyday life are all called into question? The Americans deliberately problematizes the concept of home by focalizing the story through two characters who are both home (in Washington) and abroad (of Russian origin), telling a story that speaks to the present of the 2010s through the past (via its nostalgic placement in the 1980s). The characters operate on the basis of a dream, leading double

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lives of everyday ‘ordinary’ American citizens and instantiate a dream world of spycraft and Cold War sentimentality. The show is both based on reality, with Nick Carbone in Time quoting FBI counterintelligence assistant director Frank Figliuzzi in describing the subjects of “Operation Ghost Stories:” “the Russian operatives, including redhead “femme fatale” Chapman, were equipped with the latest technologies: encrypted transmitters and wireless computers. The spies “were very tech-savvy, very intellectual.” Even the Russian agents are described with language that belies their contemporaneity (“tech-savvvy”) and their connection to a realm of fiction and fantasy (“femme fatale”). The Americans draws on Jonathan Simon’s notion of “willful nostalgia” which “refer[s] to a nostalgia for a past that one has only glimpsed in films and other cultural products, but not actually experienced firsthand (or even second-hand via the stories of one’s ancestors)” (Bergin 2012, 90). It projects to its contemporary audience the world of spies and recruitment from a country they could not have known, to present the inner operations of the KGB and FBI—entities to which few have insider access. In so doing, it positions us as insiders and draws us into emotional connections. Bergin argues, following Simon, that “films and other cultural products can make individuals nostalgic for societies and values to which they have no direct connection is germane” (2012, 91), which is as true for the audience of The Americans as it was for Medvedev in his own nostalgic construction of the role of Russia in contemporary global society, as described by Leggatt. Prorokova-Konrad suggests that in looking at Cold War nostalgic narratives, “the question for us, then, is how a show that is squarely focused on the ‘first’ Cold War might have something to say to our current reckoning with the ‘second’ Cold War” (2020, 22). As I write this, the world is again engaged in a conflict pitting NATO against Russia, in a conflict that does not involve formal declarations of war or armed conflict between superpowers. As I have noted, the show relies on versions of “restorative” nostalgia, one of Boym’s conceptual frames, which positions Elizabeth’s self-narrative as a version of restorative nostalgia, concretizing her trauma and forming her identity in reaction. Platt argues that post-Soviet nostalgia, from the 1990s onward, operates in two modes. “That past was either an object of traumatic memory that demanded continued recognition and working through, or it was an object of nostalgic reminiscence. For most individuals, perhaps it was

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both of those things …” (230). So, perhaps the contemporary experience is different from that Weisberg presents, and we can hope that our current ‘second’ Cold War doesn’t maintain the toxic nostalgic frame of Elizabeth. As Deborah Tudor notes the “vanishing of the historical world into one of images is also a formative element of the postmodern condition” (2019, 334), which may allow us to write our own relationship with the past—constructing a version of the 1980s and the Cold War that does not replicate binary thinking, but challenges us to work with the gaps and contradictions of our historical past to seek to finally realize the “unrealized dreams of the past” and successfully “project them onto the future.” We need to do so, lest we find ourselves haunted by this kind of toxic nostalgia, already too prevalent in today’s society.

Works Cited Bauman, Zygmunt. 2017. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bergin, Tiffany. 2012. “Identity and Nostalgia in a Globalized World: Investigating the International Popularity of Midsomer Murders.” Crime Media Culture 9 (1): 83–99. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Boym, Svetlana. 2007. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” In The Hedgehog Review, Summer. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-uses-of-the-past/articles/ nostalgia-and-its-discontents. Accessed 6 June 2023. Carbone, Nick. 2011. “FBI Releases Russian Spy Ring Videos and Photos, Starring Anna Chapman.” In Time, November 1. https://newsfeed.time. com/2011/11/01/fbi-releases-russian-spy-ring-videos-and-photos-starringanna-chapman/. Accessed 6 June 2023. Davis, Fred. 1979. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. Cambridge: The Free Press. Dwyer, Michael. 2015. Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hills, Matt. 2012. “Psychoanalysis and Digital Fandom: Theorizing Spoilers and Fans’ Self-narratives.” In Producing Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory, edited by Rebecca Ann Lind, 105–22. Oxford: Peter Lang. Jameson, Frederic. 2003. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jenkins, Richard. 2004. Social Identity. London: Routledge.

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LaRocca, David. 2020. “Of Mothers and Motherlands: Figurations of Parenting and Patriotism in The Americans.” In Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsessions with Russia, edited by Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad, 159–82. Minneapolis: University of Mississippi Press. Leggatt, Matthew. 2017. Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror: The Melancholic Sublime. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/978131541 1491. Muller, Adam. 2006. “Notes Toward a Theory of Nostalgia: Childhood and the Evocation of the Past in Two European ‘Heritage’ Films.” New Literary History 37 (4) (Autumn): 739–60. Peters, Ian. 2021. “Contradictory Reminiscences: Post-9/11 Cold War Nostalgia, The Americans, and Deutschland 83/86.” In Was It Yesterday?: Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television, edited by Matthew Leggatt, 211–27. New York: SUNY Press. Pickering, Michael, and Emily Keightley. 2006. “The Modalities of Nostalgia.” Current Sociology 54 (6): November, 919–41. Platt, Kevin M. F. 2019. “After Nostalgia: A Backward Glance at a Backward Glance.” In Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies, edited by Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos, and Ksenia Robbe, 224–34. Routledge. Prorokova-Konrad, Tatiana. 2020 “Introduction: Cinematic Reimagining of the Cold War in the 2010s.” In Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsessions with Russia, edited by Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad, 3–26. Minneapolis: University of Mississippi Press. Sandu, Oana Popescu. 2022. “New Cold War Nostalgia in Recent U.S. Cultural Productions: Retro and Irony in the Transnational Postsocialist World.” Comparative Literature Studies 59 (3): 612–30. Stephan, Matthias. 2019. “Branding Netflix with Nostalgia: Totemic Nostalgia, Adaptation and the Postmodern Turn.” In Netflix Nostalgia: Streaming the Past on Demand, edited by Katheryn Pallister, 25–39. Lanham: Lexington Books. Sullivan, Charles J. 2022. Motherland: Soviet Nostalgia in the Russian Federation. London: Palgrave. Tudor, Deborah. 2012. “Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism and Media. Paper 4. https://opensiuc.lib.siu. edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=gmrc_nm. Accessed 6 June 2023. Waxman, Olivia B. 2013. “Q&A: The CIA Officer Behind the New Spy Drama The Americans.” In Time, January 30. https://entertainment.time.com/ 2013/01/30/qa-the-cia-officer-behind-the-new-spy-drama-the-americans/? iid=ent-main-lead. Accessed 6 June 2023. Weisberg, Joseph, Creator. The Americans, 2013–18. Created by Joseph Weisberg. Los Angeles: FX.

Deepfake Sockpuppets: The Toxic “Realities” of a Weaponised Internet Katy Wareham Morris

Deepfakes combine the latest in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create hyper-realistic audio-visual forgeries. Deepfakes materialise from a specific type of deep learning—hence the name—in which sets of algorithms compete in a generative adversarial network or GAN (Goodfellow et al. 2014). Deep learning is a form of AI in which sets of algorithms (or neural networks) learn to simulate rules and replicate patterns by analysing large data sets. The generator algorithm creates content modelled on source material, which is already readily available (social media content, e.g.), whilst the discriminator algorithm seeks to detect flaws on the fake. This is an iterative process allowing for rapid improvements which address the flaws, meaning the GAN is able to produce highly realistic fake video content. This field of AI continues to advance at a rapid rate thus it is ever easier to create sophisticated and compelling videos. This has sparked concerns from politicians and international organisations about how these types of videos may be weaponised for malicious ends.

K. W. Morris (B) University of Worcester, Worcester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_5

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Early deepfakes manifested in the form of “false pornography” faceswap: female celebrities’ faces superimposed into sex videos without their consent (Harris 2019). Although social platforms reacted to this type of sexually exploitative material and banned it from platforms, the novelty of the technology has not gone away; face-swap images proliferate the internet, with this type of software available as free open-source downloads and hundreds of “how-to” videos on YouTube even a beginner is able to create and deploy a sophisticated deepfake. Other forms of deepfake benefit from convincing audio track and lip-synch and real-time facial re-enactment often referred to as “puppetmaster” (Appel and Prietzel 2022). For this to work the data input to create the synthesised image involves head positions, eye movements and facial expression, for example, typically generated by someone sat in front of a camera (Kim et al. 2018). This type of deepfake is also paired with a “voice” either an impersonation or a fully synthesised imitation of the subject’s. When these audio-visual components are brought together through skilful post-production techniques the resulting video is incredibly convincing, almost undetectable. Agarwal et al. (2019) call to attention that even with the aid of advanced forensic technology it may be almost impossible to identify this type of deepfake, making images of well-known people unstable and unhomely. Consequently, any image might be that of a double or doppelgänger of the original, a computerised ghost haunts and Gothicises all forms of communication devices. Deepfake technology has infiltrated various contexts: the media and creative industries, for example, in the film industry (Golding 2021; Cameron 2021); in marketing and advertising (Kietzmann et al. 2020); in galleries and museums (Mihailova 2021); as well as in political spheres and international relations (Chesney and Citron 2019). Coats (2019, 7) points out that in 2019 the US intelligence community declared that opponents and competitors would attempt to use deepfakes to augment political campaigns, whilst Chesney and Citron (2019) acknowledge that deepfake applications have the potential to diminish democracies. This paints a scary picture which becomes even more noxious in the context of instantaneous digital dissemination through a variety of networks and platforms, afforded by web 3.0 functionality and user interaction. Much of the media content of the last century remained the prerogative of the trusted media companies and professionally trained and qualified journalists. Yet social networking platforms have ensured that the, now rather

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nostalgic, definition of “news” and its circulation have changed (Turner 2010). One of the symptoms of the postmodern condition is the public’s loss of faith in traditional ideologies or value systems. This feeling can be evidenced in the public’s attitude towards professionalism journalism also: audiences have lost faith and interest in the traditional forms of journalistic output (Waisbord 2018). This may be because there is increasing concern about the concentration of power in the mainstream media industries, whilst emerging platforms of journalism draw on the voices of the public itself. The asymmetrical distribution of power, that sees the media in control not only of the flow of information but effectively of the whole of the symbolic economy, is regarded as elitist, anti-democratic and as contributing to the running-down of the public sphere (Freedman 2018; Pickard 2018). New and emerging platforms of journalism include various citizen and public journalism projects, which serve different political and commercial agendas. These may include the news blog, and “alternative” news sites which are just as happy to publish an interesting contribution from an amateur member of the public as a more conventional journalistic article from a freelancing professional. However, the increased volume of “news” does not necessarily mean that journalism is better, more reliable or more diverse in its political perspectives and sources of information. In fact, the opposite may be the case. Vousoughi et al. (2018) found that much of the content on social networking sites and messenger applications was unverified with people most likely to share negative or novel information; ominously false political stories were particularly effective in being spread. It is clear then that deepfakes contribute to the broader problems of fake news and disinformation which manifest within a post-truth society. Fake news blends traditional news elements with sensationalism, misinformation and bias (Mour¯ao and Robertson 2019), whilst post-truth acknowledges the erosion of the very foundations of a liberal democracy, where the institutions which have previously constructed the world are disrupted due to declining trust in expertise combined with the rise in digital media (Harjuniemi 2021). Due to the unparalleled sophisticated realism, speed, scale and ability to personalise disinformation, deepfakes contribute to this “epistemic crisis” (Dahlgren 2018) with the potential to destabilise public engagement and therefore democracy.

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The realities of a post-truth society also bring into question whether knowing and discovering a deepfake is even worth cogitating when everything can be perceived as biased and the traditional models of truth-telling are shattered (Waisbord 2018). The likelihood is that these videos will be watched and shared due to the fact that they are deepfakes. This is because audio-visual content is more visually arresting (Fallis 2021) and “seeing is believing” (Goldberg et al. 2019). It is arguable that flaws in audio-visuals due to technological glitches such as asynchronicities, unnatural movements or rendering lag, may disarm the potential threat. However, the research shows that users ascribe accuracy to deepfakes even when imperfect (Kobis et al. 2021; Dobber et al. 2021). This constructs a kind of Gothicising of truth where it is no longer stable, and even “facts” become porous. Indeed, there is a correlation here with Kelly Hurley’s idea of the abhuman body (1996) which is caught between categories and constantly on the verge of being something else, so that deepfakes and AI create an environment governed by “abtruths”; facts that become doppelgängers or strangers to themselves. As noted by Appel and Prietzel (2022), detection is also based on content and context, but when taken out of context as a result of peerto-peer sharing and, when it is possible to personalise disinformation (Diakopoulos 2019), the manipulation is even more insidious. Deepfake glitches may evoke suspicion but the nature of this technology demands that it becomes more sophisticated and less detectable with each new fake, whilst both content and context are likely to become more malleable and indeterminable on increasingly larger scales. Even when relevant information is available to detect the deepfake, individuals tend to rely on associative processes and intuitions, rather than engaging in arduous cognitive processing (Pennycook et al. 2016) to make sense of what they are seeing. Perhaps this is also because of the current mainstream popularity of deepfake technology which is linked to free applications and entertainment (e.g. Face-swap montages videos on YouTube or the @deeptomcruise account on Tik Tok which has nearly 4 million followers): deepfakes are perceived as harmless “fun”, something to marvel and playfully experiment with, connected to the participatory, creative nature of internet cultures. Whether politically motivated or not the evidence is substantive: deepfakes have the potential to shape audience’s thoughts and behaviour (Dobber et al. 2021). Deepfakes represent the next generation of digital media manipulation and disinformation: a form of online propaganda cognitively more

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arresting than other text or image-based fake news, and designed to improve in quality with each new fake. In order to begin to understand the full potential of this technology, we must, as suggested by Bode et al. (2021), investigate how deepfakes might align with and set in motion cultural divisions. One existing malicious strategy for online deception and manipulation likely to intersect with deepfakes is that of “sockpuppet” accounts. Kats (2020) provides a succinct definition of sockpuppets: “a fictitious online identity created for the purposes of deception”. He goes onto acknowledge that they are also sometimes referred to as “sybils”; this is the case particularly in academic literature (see the work of Yang et al. 2014; Morstatter et al. 2021). This is not a new phenomenon, and there is a long history of fake accounts on the internet. However, this particular type of deceptive account is recognised for their association with malicious intent and content and the number continue to grow. Sockpuppets are created in large numbers by individuals or groups and they have a particular reputation for creating false opinions. These sockpuppet accounts engage in “online astroturfing” (Zerback et al. 2021), a communicative strategy to create the impression that a particular opinion is widely supported. It is a deliberately persuasive form of disinformation, combining both media and political techniques. Manufactured user comments, under the guise of the sockpuppet account, are constructed to appear authentic and populate high traffic news sites and social networking platforms. Indeed, the audience are completely unaware that the sockpuppet user is bias, being sponsored, being malicious, or all of these (Zerback et al. 2021). The astroturfing comments created and disseminated by sockpuppet accounts have several characteristics which make them appear realistic and believable: they are personal, which attracts audience attention and makes persuasion more likely (Taylor and Thompson 1982). The opinions articulated are planted within the mind and memories of the audience and are therefore more likely to affect judgement (Zillmann 1999; Domke et al. 1998). These “people” appear to be fellow citizens, similar to other social media users, who are often perceived to be more trustworthy than politicians, for example (Lefevere et al. 2012); this perceived trust and similarity facilitate the persuasive effects (cited in Zerback et al. 2021). The audience are more likely to accept what is being posted due to the realistic manifestation and lack of definitive framework of knowledge for making sense of individual posts, which is also applicable to digital content in general oscillating in the

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post-truth environment. Even if suspicions are raised, certain influences or agendas suspected, the audience cannot be entirely sure and have no definitive way of finding out. This type of disinformation strategy has been acknowledged widely within the context of Western elections (Kovic et al. 2018) with evidence of targeted campaigns directly connected to the 2016 presidential election in the United States, for example (Bessi and Ferrara 2016). Kats (2020) notes that the top-performing fake news stories at the time of the election generated more engagement than real news stories, with the fictitious stories amplified by sockpuppet accounts. It is therefore worth recognising how these sockpuppet accounts might work in tandem with deepfakes as a coordinated strategy to generate and perpetuate toxic propaganda online. When thinking of the political threat of deepfakes, we might automatically think of how key figures or world leaders might be impersonated by “bad actors”. For example, in 2022 a deepfake of President Zelenskyy was released in which the subject can be seen and heard to tell troops to “lay down their arms”. Although it remains unclear who created and deployed the deepfake, it was boosted on Russian social media Facebookequivalent, VKontakte and hackers were able to get it live-streamed on a Ukrainian TV channel, Ukraine 24. The deepfake created a convincing lip-synch, yet the video distorts President Zelenskyy’s head and overall proportions; despite this poor quality, the video still gained traction and world leaders, academics and legal professionals warned of the unknown harm that the future of this type of video might create. When we think of how this type of video might work together with sockpuppet accounts this type of video becomes more subversive, even more threatening. Sockpuppet accounts have been used to praise, defend or support a person or organisation, as a way of manipulating public opinion. Research has shown that Russia’s elite, who are closely linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), are key sponsors of this type of activity (Zelenkauskaite and Bualduccini 2017); the IRA being linked to sockpuppet accounts mimicking support for Russian policies (Kovic et al. 2018). Sockpuppet accounts are also employed as a way of circumventing restrictions, suspensions or bans (often referred to by technologists as “block evasion”). In this example, sockpuppet accounts might be utilised by the TV station hackers as a way of maintaining attention on the livestream after the event; they may continue to share and draw attention to the deepfake even when it has been debunked; they may continue to

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question the news stories publicly debunking the video. These sockpuppet accounts make it more difficult to control the spread and engagement with such deepfakes, making it almost impossible to manage damage limitation. In this sense, there is not just a malicious double(s) of ourselves but an entire virtual abtruth environment built to destabilise the real world. Certain types of sockpuppet accounts are utilised as a coordinated strategy for strengthening certain views or opinions which can make the opposing viewpoint appear inane or corrupt. One sockpuppet account may be created purposefully to appear unintelligent even bigoted, whilst another sockpuppet account is utilised to refute the “obviously” ludicrous opinions of the instigator. In the case of the Zelenskyy deepfake, this type of coordinated strategy might work to suggest that there is a strong and vitriolic anti-Russian sentiment, whilst the other accounts refute this overtly xenophobic attitude. The intended effect of this might work to undermine more reasonable and justifiable arguments made against the Russian invasion. In this sense, the sockpuppet accounts work to cast doubt and uncertainty, rather than proactively advocating for or against President Putin. Chavoshi et al. (2016) found that sockpuppets post regularly with a sustained pattern of behaviour unlike regular users, the agenda is to create digital “noise”, streams of conflicting digital information and threads, which are difficult to navigate, trace and fact-check. This misinformation pollution, operating within the post-truth context defined earlier in this chapter, casts doubt on all content, with some users not concerned with finding the “truth” anyhow. It is worth noting here how the deepfake works as an arresting audiovisual disinformation thread, whilst the sockpuppet accounts work to bolster the reach through misinformation that masquerades as “debate” within the digital public sphere. This malevolent partnership has the potential to mask or deceptively account for technical glitches; further complicate content interpretation through increasing confusion and argument around the purpose, meaning and scope; and, further obfuscate the potential to debunk at the point of initial dissemination through deliberate social spread in order to purposefully decontextualise. This type of toxic partnership contributes to the complex and problematic regulatory and legal frameworks which arguably do or do not apply to deepfakes, sockpuppet accounts and their combinations. Diakopoulos and Johnson (2021) point out that who to pursue and assignments of blame are often obscured because of a lack of transparency about who

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is responsible for what. Where did it come from? How do we know? Is the deepfake created and controlled by the same people or organisation as the sockpuppet accounts? How can this be evidenced? What is the main priority: the deepfake or the sockpuppet accounts? Which is more damaging? And the list of questions go on. It is alarming to consider such a powerful, anonymous and tactical enemy (or enemies). The potential of the deepfake sockpuppet combination amplifies the already identified intent of these types of malicious digital content; that is not to necessarily convince the world of President Zelenskyy’s surrender but to propagate seeds of doubt, which may result in a longer term, more widespread feelings of fear and confusion. This again creates an environment of abtruth that destabilises all notion of veracity and establishing fact as an affective rather than rational term. One outcome, associated with deepfakes in particular, and likely to reach more sinister conclusions when affiliated with sockpuppet accounts, is that of the “liar’s dividend”. The non-partisan agency, Future Advocacy, who highlight the impact of deepfake technology, define this particular outcome as “a phenomenon in which genuine footage of controversial content can be dismissed by the subject as a deepfake, despite it being true”. This provides another “opportunity” for sockpuppet accounts to work in tandem with deepfakes: in this instance, the sockpuppet accounts could incite discussion and incredulity towards real digital content with the motive of casting doubt regarding its authenticity. In the example already used, this would take the form of astroturfing threads from sockpuppets intent on debunking the debunking of the Zelenskyy deepfake. Trump supporters have also been linked to sockpuppet astroturfing which aims to protect Trump by accusing the media of using deepfake technology to discredit or implicate Trump. In cases such as these, the sockpuppet accounts would utilise the form and mode of address already established through previous posts to cast doubt without controversy or sensationalism, perceived simply as chat “typical” of this user. Both deepfakes and sockpuppets create uncertainty, skilfully manipulating information and data which is recognisable and often relatable to the average user. Sockpuppets enhance the potential harm of deepfakes by supporting the latent intentions through sustained and consistent astroturfing comments, which are made available across multiple digital channels and platforms. This exposure ensures that these messages are cognitively easily to retrieve thus increasing perceived validity (Tormala

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et al. 2002), with the effect of blurring the boundaries between genuine, authentic content and that which is maliciously engineered. Although this chapter has thus far discussed the potential of deepfakes and sockpuppets to compromise world leaders and undermine political campaigns, it is widely acknowledged by researchers in the field that the aim of these forms of digital disinformation is not easily identifiable; indeed there appears to be no central aim. The examples previously identified serve to remind audiences of geopolitical conflicts, but to also draw from memory historic, cultural and social frictions in order to contextualise these narratives; to “help” the audience understand who might potentially be behind them, whilst concealing the true instigators. The consequence of these technologies then is to not prioritise one conflict over another, but to needle at existing, long-standing tensions and divisions. This content is officious, but also subtle; it is consistent and systematic without being “seen”; it is sophisticated yet flawed, which seems to increase its believability. To pervade the internet in this way, is to weaponise it. We know that deepfakes will become more sophisticated and thus their partnership with sockpuppets is likely also to develop in complexity. Deepfake imagery of sockpuppets could literally bring these accounts to life. It is possible to create images of people who do not exist with control over emotions, hair, gender, age and skin colour (Karras et al. 2018; Choi et al. 2018). This deepfake sockpuppet does not need to be a recognisable person to be relevant or convincing. This chapter acknowledged the rise in citizen journalism, which confirms that deepfake sockpuppet analysts, commentators, journalists and supporters could all plausibly exist and attract followers. Rather than astroturfing commentary, the deepfake sockpuppets could start posting their opinions to Tik Tok or Instagram motivated to share their story, experience and opinions like anyone else. This potential makes it clear that weaponised content does not have to be overtly political, but can mimic grassroots activism. In this case, deepfake sockpuppets do not have to harm or discredit real people by impersonating them, or by making controversial statements; the harm they cause is generated simply by being their “real” self—a doubling of identity that Gothicises and makes uncanny all that it interacts with. There is now a well-known case of a deepfake journalist sockpuppet that was able to publish six international articles and editorials (Satter 2020). Even after an investigation by Reuters, the “person” behind the deepfake sockpuppet could not be identified. As one of the tactics

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highlighted earlier, the account assimilated to the context and audience appropriately: Oliver Taylor is a Jewish university student who loves politics and coffee; he has a Gmail account and telephone number. These details next to the photograph of “Oliver” help to create the recognisable citizen which, as mentioned earlier, helps to construct a plausible representation; the deepfake sockpuppet Oliver Taylor, is just a regular guy, a political journalist interested in anti-Semitism and Jewish geopolitical affairs. Reuters first became aware of Taylor when an academic, Mazen Masri alerted them to an article written by Taylor published in an US Jewish newspaper, in which Masri and his wife, Ryvka Barnard were accused of being “known terrorist sympathisers”. The couple were shocked by this allegation and confused as to why they were being singled out by this man. Yet there is no record of Oliver Taylor anywhere, not even a digital footprint. The papers who published “his” work could not confirm his identity. Masri had suspicions about Taylor’s profile photograph which led to a sophisticated forensic investigation exposing it as a deepfake. Even when the papers removed Taylor’s work, they still received emails from the associated account asking for them to remain online on the understanding that many journalists use pseudonyms; need-less-to-say, Taylor could not verify his identity. This example points to the potential damage of the deepfake sockpuppet marriage. Masri and his wife were likely targeted because of their associations with Palestinian rights and liberation movements. The source of the “attack” is still unknown. No egregious deepfake video of a known world leader making controversial claims. No obvious astroturfing threads from Taylor. Instead plausible, international journalism, almost imperceptibly pointing towards one of the most well-known, hotly debated and volatile geopolitical tensions. This demonstrates what is to come in the future of disinformation propaganda: totally convincing, totally untraceable identities manifesting in various forms on various platforms—literal “ghosts” in the disinformation machine. The case of Oliver Taylor is now over three years old; Oliver Taylor of today might be sharing his commentary as deepfake video. More advanced, large-scale coordinated astroturfing sockpuppet supporters might be working to corroborate Taylor’s story, even identity. Whilst the Taylor case drew minimal social media attention, it still existed to distort public opinion and cast doubt on the integrity of young journalistic hopefuls looking to break into the industry. Today, it may have caused even greater harm to the targeted subjects, the audience and

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social institutions. Deepfake sockpuppets with the ease and freedom to operationalise various types of audio-visual and digital media forms will amplify these categories of harm. The technical capability to personalise deepfakes could lead to a profusion of “real”, unidentifiable sockpuppets activated through more narrow non-public (for example, chat) channels. This type of sharing has already been demonstrated through the harmless sharing of face-swap filter results, for example. In the future sockpuppet accounts will infiltrate chat groups and disseminate deepfakes either of “themselves” so as to create a conclusive “real” life or, of the unknown, entirely fabricated journalists or commentators they believe are worth sharing with their friends, as they somehow represent them. As with memes (see Yoonn 2016; Williams 2020), this type of content is likely to replicate racist and misogynist stereotypes masked as parody or satire. As a site of ideological reproduction deepfake sockpuppets will surely contribute to the perpetual mockery of people of colour and women, denying structural racism and patriarchy through the forms and conventions of comedy. Not only that, but as with any media representation it is imperative to interrogate not only who is visible, but who remains invisible. There is a long history of racial bias in the film industry and recognised built-in bias in the field of AI (see Levy 2018; Levin 2017). These value systems are often prioritised and embedded into the coding of these technologies as well as their outputs. Deepfakes “read” human facial expressions, yet the people coding the algorithms are in the majority white and the data training the algorithms are likely to be based on white faces that dominate media spaces. Ayers (2021) examined the practice of playful face-swap videos and noted the dominance of white, male faces and noticeable lack of face-swaps across racial categories. This reveals the persistence of historical pre-existing racial frameworks which reinforce boundaries for some identities over others, thus reinforcing the prevalence of white representation. Moreover, deepfakes might be excused for exaggerating racial stereotypes by scapegoating a lack of technical efficacy. Whilst deepfake sockpuppets might perform stereotypical characteristics, emotions or personality traits which are then veiled by the “fact” that this is not an offensive caricature but a “real” person. Again, in both cases preexisting social tensions are likely to be exacerbated. Bianchi et al. points out that AI image generators are “extremely limited in the world they will create” (2022, 10). Although it is possible to consider the potential deepfake technology might afford marginalised identities such as the

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LGBTQIA+ community, the discussions around valuable, democratised, personalised production might be optimistic, as the reality is deepfake production is labour intensive, time-consuming and demands skill; a deepfake sockpuppet even more so. In 2023, popular podcaster Joe Rogan was the subject of a deepfake on TikTok; in the video Rogan boasts about a “libido booster for men”. He then gives information about the product and where to buy it. This deepfake is a significant example because Rogan has a following in the millions and represents a hegemonic masculine ideal. He is a white man with a muscular physique known for his passion for martial arts and UFC commentating; in the video he is facing the camera and he is clearly recognisable. Rogan is from New Jersey, a place stereotyped for being straight-talking; he is also of Italian heritage, the combination of the two being typically characterised as upholding strict patriarchal, heteronormative values. The topic of the video reminds the intended audience of stereotypical norms associating sex with a male prerogative, due to their naturally voracious appetite for it. Rogan is a comedian well-known for his indelicate humour with sexual themes and innuendos; his reputation establishes that he is comfortable talking about sex. To further authenticate the video, Rogan’s colleague can also be seen in the video. It is clear that an endorsement from Rogan was intended to boost sales with a commercial intention, although men like this do not typically confirm any sexual weakness in public. However, it is made legitimate through Rogan as role model, as spokesman for the type of men who identify with him, by drawing upon the stereotypical masculine ideals he epitomises: if Rogan needs to use this product and it works for him, it’s ok for me too and it’ll work for me. Earlier this chapter explained how perceived trust and similarity can make this type of communication more persuasive. It was not Rogan, of course. The creators of this deepfake made a strategic choice when choosing to manipulate this footage. The deepfake was posted and promoted by a TikTok user, whose account consisted of testimonial clips from supposed consumers. Not surprisingly this account is no longer accessible; most likely a sockpuppet account. Although the video was removed from TikTok and the original account banned, the deepfake was shared via Twitter and instantly went viral, this is despite the quite obvious re-editing of existing podcast episode footage and fallible lip-synch. Rogan’s colleague publicly debunked the video. This example exemplifies how deepfakes working strategically with sockpuppet accounts have the power to harness

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outdated cultural shorthands—the nostalgic view of traditional values and “simpler” times—by means of creating convincing and persuasive content. Although not Political, this content reinforces norms and expectations associated with gendered traits and behaviours. It also fortifies who is able to take up space in the public sphere: the opinions of white hegemonic men are valuable and valid. Rogan has been publicly criticised for his racist, misogynist views and for challenging known facts such as those associated with the COVID-19 vaccine, yet this reputation somehow chimes with the deepfake video content. The ideological signifiers are subtle, and the representation is consistent with most of what is known and expected of Rogan, yet the possible questions around his own libido pique interest as the piece of the puzzle that does not quite fit. This engages the audience’s attention: the sophisticated yet flawed manipulation of Rogan’s popular reputation seems to increase its believability, even more so when it is recontextualised and rapidly disseminated via Twitter. This is a good example of “persona plagiarism” (Diakopoulos and Johnson 2021, 2082), which focusses on the source rather than the content of a message. An unknown has manipulated Rogan’s image and voice to create the TikTok deepfake, which serves the motivations and goals of the unknown. This video and therefore the motivations and goals too, are attributed to Rogan. However this is further complicated by the fact the deepfake was posted by what was likely a sockpuppet account. As it is impossible to know whether the TikTok account is genuine, credit it misdirected towards the well-known, recognisable celebrity, that being Rogan. Whether the video is received and interpreted positively or negatively is of no consequence as any outcome is misattributed to Rogan without his consent. Earlier this chapter drew attention to the fact that assigning blame is often undermined due a lack of accountability on the side of technology giants, geopolitical organisations and legal systems. Previously, this chapter argued that deepfake sockpuppets manifest latent cultural and social frictions as a way of encouraging engagement. This example demonstrates how a popular and controversial figure like Rogan can be the victim or manipulated as a subtle political weapon, reminding the audience of what these types of men do and do not say, reinforcing well established toxic nostalgic narratives. Indeed, previous research confirms that current usage of deepfakes is currently overwhelmingly gendered and sexualised, with much of the harm directed towards women (Ajder et al. 2019). Although a commercial incentive, there is arguably a subtle nod to the incel; consistent and systematic without being

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“seen”. The content of the deepfake may be perceived as relevant to incel beliefs and interests and as such may be scrutinised more closely by that audience (Petty et al. 1983). This type of deepfake sockpuppet represents Rogan as promoting a libido booster on TikTok for commercial reasons, which is further reinforced by the sockpuppet TikTok account pointing to who is behind the video yet acting as a decoy ensuring the real instigators remain unidentified. Perhaps most importantly, the audience are left questioning why a man like Rogan would need to use this type of product anyway, which subtly taps into the incel belief that the white male existence is under threat: if a man like Rogan needs this product then something must be wrong with the world. This example also highlights the exploitative nature of deepfake technologies, where privacy is invaded for source material and the human image is commodified. Rogan’s image, background and reputation are manipulated and perhaps defamed for commercial gain and consumer appeal without consent. It has been clear from the early days of deepfakes in pornography that more needs to be done to regulate and “police” creative integrity (Cook 2019): one should have the right to control their own face, defended as vehemently for the public as it for politicians, stars and celebrities. As the tools and applications of this technology become more sophisticated and even more widely available, creative, legal and ethical concerns around manipulation of performance and resemblance should be carefully deliberated. Whilst there also needs to be initiatives which improve awareness and understanding of the progressive and persistent nature of deepfakes due to rapid developments in the field of AI. Addressing media literacy will help with detection, enabling the public to identify technological glitches—the ghosts in the disinformation or abtruth machine—or at least pay closer attention. Specific deepfakes and associated sockpuppet accounts should be identified and made public so that people are able to see for themselves how the technology is able to improve and may go some way to “pre-bunking” future iterations. Although this increased knowledge might also serve to increase the potential of the “liar’s dividend” whilst also contributing to the wider context of “truth decay” (Chesney and Citron 2019). As a result, all media content is to be doubted and social institutions are destabilised. We might also remind ourselves of the commercial gains to be had from these technologies, which might also provide a convincing rationale for why tough laws or policies and effective debunking strategies are prohibited.

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This chapter has sought to investigate how deepfakes, sockpuppets and deepfake sockpuppets can harm the public and social institutions such as politics and the digital public sphere more generally, through the creation of an abtruth environmental of fear, reputational misattribution and undermining trust. This chapter has explained how these technologies operate undetected as many internet users do not have the forensic technology nor media literacy to identify the forgery. Even global news agencies and their editors do not have the expertise of global intelligence agencies who might be able to detect algorithmic glitches or weaknesses. This has meant that these non-existent, untraceable personae have manifested as international journalists generating publishable content, with the intention of distorting public perception and discourse. This chapter also argues that deepfake sockpuppets are deployed as the cutting edge in toxic media propaganda to undermine cultural and political relationships and campaigns—often by Gothicising or making toxic individual or cultural memories—whilst also undermining the internet as a source of reliable factual information. This has the startling potential to weaponise the internet, moving to an abtruth position where nothing is “true’” and maybe that does not matter.

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The Toxic Screen

The Nostalgia of Setting, Sex and Sound in the Wicker Man Films Lauren Rosewarne

The 1973 film The Wicker Man and its 2006 remake provide a fascinating tale of contrasts. Whereas the original was loftily praised in the sci-fi film magazine Cinefantastique as “the Citizen Kane of horror movies” (Bartholomew 1977, 27), the remake was derided as “shockingly bad” (Mathews 2006), as “a boring, fright-free catastrophe” (Floyd 2006), and received a host of Razzie awards. As is typical in discussions of remakes, the more beloved the first film the more savage the criticism of the second (Rosewarne 2020), and in the case of Neil LaBute’s 2006 Wicker Man, the derision continues well over a decade on in infinite memes—the scene of Nicolas Cage screaming “not the bees!” lives on in infamy—and the film appears on many worst ever remakes lists. Critical reception provides an obvious point of divergence but this chapter is more interested in comparing each film’s incorporation of the Gothic nostalgia themes of this anthology. The 1973 Wicker Man presents a specific kind of nostalgia for an imagined past: a bucolic setting that is geographically remote and untainted; sex as manifested in both a past with a natural and shame-free approach

L. Rosewarne (B) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_6

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to eroticism, and with more clearly defined gender roles, and sound comprised of real and imagined folk songs evoking a bygone era. It is these issues I focus on in this chapter. I begin with a brief overview of the relationship between nostalgia and remaking in broad terms and then focus on these ideas as specifically related to the Wicker Man films. This chapter then turns its attention to the setting, sex and sound focuses as vehicles for on-screen nostalgia.

Nostalgia in Filmmaking Nostalgia is not about depicting history or about accurately capturing a time or place. In film, it is about an idealised look backwards: it is about conjuring a yearning for something, a somewhere or even a someone—be they real or imagined—and such nostalgia can be evoked through a range of storytelling devices. Nostalgia, of course, is not always presented to arouse pleasant feelings. Often, and certainly so in Gothic narratives, it can be a device used to unsettle whereby the familiar conceals the sinister. While nostalgia can be detected across all kinds of films, there is a very specific role for it in remaking: reproduction is always, at least in part, an act of looking backwards. Elsewhere I present a taxonomy for understanding the industry of reproduction, proposing six explanations for why films are remade: to make a bigger or better film, to make money, to exploit nostalgia, to offer an American version of a foreign production, to be creative, and to harness trends (Rosewarne 2020). While the aims of making a bigger and better film, delivering an American version of a British story, and doing something new and creative with a narrative are all explanations for the why of the 2006 production, nostalgia has the most relevance to this chapter. Just as nostalgia plays a part in all remaking, it also plays a part in all genres: for a story to exist within a genre, it participates in a conversation with similar films, referencing themes, tropes and plots of predecessor productions. It is thus no surprise that it is a theme in the original Wicker Man as well as in its remake, detectable through its presentation of setting, sex and sound.

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Nostalgia as Motivation for the Wicker Men During a mid-1970s appearance on the New Orleans television show Critic’s Choice hosted by Sterling Smith, the director of the 1973 Wicker Man, Robin Hardy, explained why he thought that the film had captured audiences: “I think this film awakes in people a kind of tribal memory. It’s full of echoes from our past, from our childhood”. Without using the word “nostalgia”, Hardy references the idea that storytellers can use things from, and references to, the past to draw in an audience. The Wicker Man was Hardy’s directorial debut but there are two aspects of his previous work that hints to him likely having a distinct awareness of the power of nostalgia. First, Hardy once made a living from producing television commercials: advertising is a medium where nostalgia is used liberally as part of consumer manipulation techniques (Muehling et al. 2013; Rosewarne 2013; Pichierri 2023). Further, in the aforementioned Cinefantastique article, Hardy divulges having also produced religious affairs programmes; another realm where nostalgia has a distinct role in manipulation (McCutcheon 1997; Hamner 2011; Xia 2022). Nostalgia for the original film also appears part of the driver for Nicolas Cage producing and starring in the remake, with him using the word homage when discussing the project: “I think it’s a homage. It’s a way of us saying this is a wonderful film” (Lambie 2010); “It’s not us saying that we are better. If anything, it is a tip of the hat” (Lyons 2006). Whether calling a film a homage actually makes it one is a conversation for another time, but the idea of Cage’s nostalgic sentiments at least hints to the 2006 film having a relationship with its source material beyond just a shared title. This is actually something rare: more common is a cast and crew in fact distancing their production from a predecessor in order to thwart accusations of being derivative (Rosewarne 2020). In practice, each film approaches nostalgia quite differently: the remainder of this chapter focuses on three themes which work to showcase nostalgia as well as deviate from it.

Setting: An Idyllic, Unspoiled Paradise Bucking the trend for horror films to be set at night and the terror to be connected to what lurks in the shadows, the 1973 Wicker Man is set mostly in the daytime—being among the foundational films in the “daylight horror” subgenre—the remote location, in line with many

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Gothic narratives, is what gives rise to the sense of threat: that places and people who are isolated and away from the gaze of the mainstream have heightened capacity to be dangerous. Place-based nostalgia has been analysed in a range of ways: from the yearning of a landscape unspoiled by construction (Bonnett 2015), to a longing for a place before migration or gentrification (Ramsden 2016). In the 1973 Wicker Man, it manifests as a means to create a narrative that is both contemporary but also somehow untouched by modernity. In the aforementioned Critic’s Choice interview, Hardy spoke of the importance of the film’s island setting: “we needed an island which is a microcosm in which this exciting story could take place”. He again addressed the importance of the setting in a 2013 interview with The Guardian: Setting it in Scotland was crucial: “in the early 1970s, Christianity was still widely practised, and it had a very puritan aspect. It might not have been as believable set in Woolwich” (Simpson 2013). Early into the narrative, the central role of the landscape is made clear. Protagonist Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), flies in over a series of sparse, remote islands off the coast of Scotland before landing on Summerisle: settled, green, unspoiled. While the extent to which burgeoning environmental concerns were of interest to director Hardy is unknown, it was something—albeit in nascent form—in the zeitgeist during the time of the film’s production. Certainly the idea of the island representing the rural and primitive and Howie representing the mainland’s urban modernity is a key theme source of conflict (Keetley 2021), and in the half-century since its release, looking at the film through an environmental lens has become of increasing interest (Hughes 2015; Keetley 2021). More so however, the broader role of nature—reliance on nature, communing with nature, even worshipping nature—is central to the original film. The idea of nature—and the “natural”—is a central tension in the narrative whereby the Summerislanders concept of the natural jars markedly with the devout Christian, Sergeant Howie: as discussed by Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc, “For Howie the society is inconceivable and blasphemous, for the audience it is a fascinating insight into half-forgotten ritual” (Odell and LeBlanc 2010). Such ideas of halfforgotten rituals are, of course, central to the plot: as Christopher Lee told film critic Bruce McCabe, “There is nothing in the film that hasn’t happened in the British Isles” (in McCabe 1980). Such a comment reminds audiences that the filmmakers consciously drew from the pagan history of Britain. While they made no claims of having produced a

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historic film—and the finished product is obviously a tapestry of preChristian rituals from various periods—nonetheless that it draws on the nation’s legacy lends the inclusions some nostalgia, albeit remote familiarity, to audiences. In the Critic’s Choice interview, Hardy talks about how interesting he found the echoes of primitive practices in modern life and how this was something he wanted to explore: “… we go to church on Sunday and we forget that Sunday was originally a day when we worship the sun, we didn’t go to church… We knock on wood because we want to ward off evil. The film is full of the symbols of that wood…”. Throughout the film, audiences are given insight into the nature of the religious practices of the island. Fertility is key and thus many rituals centre around this. People have sex in the outdoors, women dance naked and jump over fires, schoolgirls are educated about the importance of the phallus. Men and young boys dance around a maypole, seemingly cognisant of their role in reproduction. While fertility is obviously relevant to the human population, it also has relevance to the crops that sustain the Summerislanders. We know, for example, that the island was settled by the grandfather of Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), the current leader of the island. The grandfather, an agronomist, was apparently attracted to the “unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm gulf stream that surrounded it” and on which he engineered a resilient apple. Of course, as we discover across the course of the narrative, the crops on the remote island have, in fact, failed. Here, the cost to living in such a remote place is highlighted: as beautiful and unspoiled as it is, the population is at the mercy of their environment. The very culmination of the narrative— Sergeant Howie used as a human sacrifice—centres on their belief that their gods must be appeased. At several points in the narrative, Howie’s perception of the unnaturalness of the practices of the island are showcased. Early on he’s aggrieved at the ribaldry within the tavern, the sexual escapades happening in the open, and the presentation of a young man to the landlord’s daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland) for deflowering. On his visit to the school, he is appalled that the students are being taught about the maypole as a phallic symbol. So appalled in fact, he threatens to report the “degeneracy” he’s witnessed to “the proper authorities”. Later, when pleading for his life, Howie begs Lord Summerisle to see that failure of the crops is not about a lack of devotion but rather about the limitations of the island itself: “Can you not see? There is no sun god. There is no goddess of the fields. Your crops failed because your strains failed. Fruit is not meant to be grown

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on these islands. It’s against nature! Don’t you see that killing me is not going to bring back your apples?” Summerisle is also full of reminders of the kind of setting tropes common in other Gothic stories. Familiar albeit ruined churches for example, serve to signify that Christianity has been toppled and Paganism now dominates. A graveyard—normally a place thought of as a consecrated space—is where Howie spots a naked woman sitting astride a grave: she is writhing, clutching the headstone and making noises reminiscent of both agony and sexual ecstasy. The familiar is made eerie and unsettling. In another scene, the island’s schoolboys participate in a maypole ritual complete with song and dance. While the song is centred on fertility (discussed in the next section)—and while the people of the island have accepted it as a phallic symbol—the maypole and the associated dancing can also be construed as conjuring nostalgia for earlier forms of entertainment in Britain’s history. In the Critic’s Choice interview, Hardy spoke of how “people are fascinated by their collective past, particularly when they can find it all around them in the present”. As examined later in this chapter, the choice of music in the film evokes similar sentiments. One scene that showcases the capacity for place to appear both innocent and reminiscent of childhood but also with a foreboding edge is when Howie visits the Post Office/May Morrison Sweets store. At a distance the shop looks like any other with brightly coloured treats in the window, with schoolboys walking past. It is only when the window display is shown in close-up that it’s evident that we see sugar skulls and human and ram skulls made of chocolate. There is what appears to be a chocolate baby and another seemingly made of fondant. The display is almost reminiscent of modern-day Halloween celebrations but something seems a little odd. Later in the film details of the May Day celebrations are disclosed, and the role for these items is revealed. The 2006 remake is an American production and as is typical when films are remade stateside, they get Americanised, something achieved through changes including American casting and American locations (Rosewarne 2020). The Scottish setting is thus replaced by an island off the coast of Washington State. Mirroring Sergeant Howie’s journey to the island, the protagonist of the remake—police officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage)—flies to the island and a panoramic view similar to that provided in the 1973 film is offered. Similar to Hardy’s approach with the 1973 film, LaBute—also making a contemporary film—had to find a setting that made it plausible to think the population had not been

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influenced by outsiders: “We wanted to do for today’s audience what the original film did for many of us—create a world that felt new and unseen before now” (Eat My Brains 2006). In LaBute’s film, the setting evokes nostalgia on several levels. First, as a remake it references the remote island setting of its predecessor. As in the 1973 film, the remake includes a maypole—albeit unused—as well as church ruins, a crypt and an overgrown graveyard. The 2006 film in fact, ratchets these motifs up through a scene of jars containing, among other things, preserved foetuses, and other body parts. Such features both reference the first film—and thus can be construed as evoking nostalgia for the predecessor—but are also the kind of things commonly used to unsettle in Gothic narratives. Second, this is achieved through referencing the American history of witchcraft. As discussed in the next section, the 2006 film presents the religious practices of Summersisle as matriarchal. While the women are never referred to as witches, their leader Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn) briefly mentions that her Celtic ancestors “unfortunately … settled near Salem”. While this is not elaborated on, “Salem” is synonymous with witch trials. Relocating the narrative from Scotland to the United States meant that rather than Celtic mythology being the focus of the island’s backstory, instead, it has a more distinctly American focus with the paganism being centred on women and, presumably, witchcraft. Nostalgia can be for a forgotten time or place and also for past cultural products, including media. In Christmas films for example, it’s often common to see characters watching Christmas films: that nostalgia can be connected to past experiences of consuming media itself (Rosewarne 2017). Witches and witchcraft have long had a place in American popular culture, but in the 1990s—and thus, in the lead up to the production of the Wicker Man remake which was understood as a long-germinating project—there was a resurgence with several popular witch-themed productions including The Witches (1990), Hocus Pocus (1993) and The Craft (1996), as well as the television series Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–2003). While indeed the 2006 Wicker Man can be seen to be conjuring similar setting-based nostalgia to the 1973 film as related to some of the tropes of Gothic horror but that it also offers an additional kind of nostalgia related to media. As will be explored later in this chapter, the same ideas can be witnessed in use of music in the remake too. This is in part because of its existence as a remake and its inevitable conversation with its predecessor, but also because of the long

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history of witch-themed media and audience familiarity with the threat of women in remote locations interested in the occult. While there exist the crone and hag-like witches of fairy tales and films like Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Witches, in more recent years witches have had a make-over and today it is more common to see a witch presented as sexually enticing. This idea provides a useful segue to the next section where I focus on the use of sex as a nostalgic device in both Wicker Man films, albeit in significantly different ways.

Sex: Gender Roles and Erotic Displays Comparing the 1973 and 2006 films on the basis of sex is not an easy task given the many threads to this topic. This section therefore, has consciously narrowed the discussion to three themes: gender roles, erotic content and sexualisation, connecting each to the evoking of nostalgia. Gender Roles Having had half a century to make its mark on the landscape, one of the lenses in which the 1973 film has been analysed is through feminism. This essay is interested in the different messages about gender roles that the films deliver. A pining for “traditional” expressions of masculinity and femininity are common talking points for conservatives whereby a nostalgia is exhibited for a time when men were men and women knew their place. Both the 1973 and 2006 films give mixed messages regarding gender roles. Partly this—like most films—is because characters are not intended as a “everyman” or “everywoman” and thus there is, of course, deliberate nuance in their characterisation and the storyline. This is also attributable to genre: these are not films that are intended to be realist snapshots. More potently however, this is because of the distinct settings of both films. Film and television have a long history of presenting people who live in isolated places as eccentrics. Add to this, the island’s religious beliefs and the population’s faith-based education, obviously there are unique dynamics at play. The residents in both films are participants in paganism, with varying links to the specific worship of fertility gods. The 1973 film’s fertility rituals, some of which have already been mentioned, highlight the allimportance of reproduction for both men and women. While there are subtle ways that women are shown to be the more dominant force in

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this realm—that Willow, for example, is the island’s seductress, and that more broadly women are the physically dominant force in the sex acts that Howie witnesses with each sitting atop her male partner—there is nonetheless a sense of whole-community support for the fertility worship, albeit with little information in either film about who does the childrearing. The 2006 film conveys similar ideas, albeit with much of the eroticism eliminated and instead the focus being on the visibility of pregnant women: that as in America’s long history of puritanical media-making, the characters will be pregnant but the journey to conception will be eschewed. Gender however, plays a substantially more overt role in the 2006 film. One way that a remake justifies its existence and makes an adaptation seem modern and relevant is to update the way gender is tackled: there are, for example, a slew of reproductions that could be classified as “feminist remakes” (Rosewarne 2019). In some regards, the 2006 makes overtures in this regard. The Lord Summerisle of the original has been replaced with Sister Summersisle, in line with the trend for remakes to undertake a sex swap as a tactic of modernisation. Some analysis has interpreted such a swap as feminist in nature: “the title of ‘sister’ rather than ‘lord’ hints at a more peaceful society in which the women work together, instead of a patriarchal society like the one depicted in the original film” (Adney 2012, 115). Conversely, it can be argued that a sex swap alone is insufficient to earn the “feminist remake” label (Rosewarne 2019), and that a matriarchy alone does not constitute a progressive or feminist narrative. That said, in some small respects, there are some signifiers that the 2006 film aims to present a more progressive society. In the 1973 film, we do not see whether it is men or women doing the physical labour of the island— we do not see toil outside of the home at all—so we must speculate as to who is doing all the work. In contrast, in the remake we see both men and women working outside doing manual labour. Such progressive overtures however, fail to adequately conceal the more overarching regressive aspects to the remake’s narrative, albeit aspects with nostalgic undercurrents. Arguably then, and in line with much contemporary anti-feminist rhetoric, the remake actively idealises a pre-feminist era and can be interpreted as a treatise on the perils of women in power and the emasculating consequences for men. Among the first Summersislanders that Malus encounters are two men carrying a bloodied sack. The men do not speak at all. Malus later offers to

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help some men move some logs and asks, “Can’t you talk?” and receives no reply. In another scene, he approaches men in the tavern and asks for help and he is mostly ignored. Whether any of these men can physically speak or not is unclear. In the original, we at least know the men can speak—can sing!—and have not been physically impaired; in the 2006 version, the men are unable or unwilling to do so. Such a presentation evokes contemporary perceptions by some conservatives—generally white, cis-gendered men—about them being symbolically “silenced” and “cancelled” in progressive societies. That it is Malus’ daughter, Rowan (Erika-Shaye Gair), who sets ablaze the wicker man to sacrifice her own does seem like an unsubtle illustration of a society where the “natural order” is disrupted to a tragic extent and where man-hating is rampant. Worth noting is that there is a gender role similarity in both films that taps into a storytelling trope: the idea of men sent to save women in peril. In both the 1973 film and the 2006 remake, a policeman is lured to the island to save missing girls. Of course, we need to acknowledge that both films in fact lampoon this trope: in both narratives, the girl never went missing at all; her disappearance was a ruse concocted to lure the man to the island and, ultimately, to his death. Both films present a subtle critique of the consequences of men positioning themselves as saviours, although, of course, how we interpret each man’s fates problematises these presentations. Sex is undoubtedly going to play a part in films where there is fertility worship. It is, therefore, no surprise that in the original film—where pagan faith is at the centre—eroticism plays a substantial role. Eroticism In Christopher Lee’s comments to the Boston Globe, he describes the 1973 film as “romantic, erotic” (McCabe 1980). In his interview on Critic’s Choice, he says something similar: “it’s a very erotic film”. Lee, of course, does not really need to state this explicitly: sex is all over the 1973 Wicker Man. Part of the clash of cultures and values in the 1973 film is Sergeant Howie, a virgin who is saving himself for marriage, juxtaposed against the rampant “free love” of the island. While Howie is clearly tempted by Willow, the film’s “Goddess Aphrodite”—and in several scenes—seems physically and sweatily pained by his arousal, ultimately he is disciplined by his faith. While the film’s eroticism can be illustrated in a range of

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ways, perhaps the best example—which incorporates much in very few minutes—is the “Gently Johnny” scene. After having just witnessed the live outdoor sex displays, an appalled Howie has retreated to his room. Seated at his desk, from outside Howie hears Lord Summerisle call up to Willow—who is alone in her room next door. Lord Summerisle is, seemingly, delivering a young man, Ash Buchanan (Richard Wren), to Willow for his deflowering. Downstairs in the bar, Paul Giovanni leads a singa-long to “Gently Johnny”—a song narrating a tale of seduction. While Willow and Ash consummate upstairs, their lovemaking is audible to the audience but also to everyone else in the tavern—including patrons and participants in the sing-a-long—as well as to poor Howie who is forced to kneel by his bed and pray away his excitement. Lord Summerisle waits outside for the completion of the sex act, watching two snails copulate and musing about how preferable the lives of snails are compared to those slavishly devoted to Christ. Such a scene—not explicit but highly erotic— is illustrative of the film’s open approach to matters of sexuality, alluding to an idealised time seemingly before the restrictions of Christian worship and the associated shame. The 2006 film eliminates much of the Pagan vs Christian themes and thus with this loss is much of the eroticism of Pagan culture that characterised the 1973 film. In the remake, for example, unlike his predecessor Sergeant Howie, Officer Malus in the 2006 film is clearly not a virgin as he fathered the “missing” child at the centre of the narrative. Malus generally, in fact, is not presented as a religious character at all, and certainly not portrayed as a representative of the Christian faith, unlike Howie. While a nod to the 1973 film plays out with the schoolgirls learning about phallic symbols in the classroom, rather than threatening to report the teacher to the authorities as Howie does, Malus just chuckles and says, “Schools really changed since I was a kid”. Malus increasingly finds the practices of the island problematic, but it doesn’t appear to be because they conflict with his personal belief system, as opposed to just being weird and unhelpful to him in his journey. In Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes (2019), this author discusses the ways sex is used in film remaking to modernise a narrative. While often we think of “sexed-up” remakes, in fact, on occasions remakes have reduced sexual content. The 2006 film is one such example where, in line with its Americanisation, there is plenty of violence—Officer Malus punches several women out cold, and attempts to defend himself with a gun—but there is no sex or nudity.

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In the original’s “Gently Johnny” scene, it’s worth noting that despite it being very erotically charged, there is no nudity or explicit content: explicit scenes transpire before and after but outside of the snails, the eroticism in this scene is not overt. This is mentioned because often when the “sexiness” of media is discussed, invariably the expectation is the display of women’s bodies; the “Gently Johnny” scene showcases that this is not the only way sexiness is portrayed. Having said that, there is indeed lots of female nudity in the 1973 film and it is therefore, worth briefly discussing it. Sexualisation In the original, there is nudity aplenty. The nudity however, is almost exclusively female—bare breasts and bare bums—and in one memorable scene, Willow does an erotic slapping song and dance routine powerful enough for Howie to “feel” from his own room next door. The scene is distinctly voyeuristic and while of course, it can be interpreted as Willow using her sexual powers to test and manipulate a man, for the audience it is still a scene of a naked woman cavorting. While there have been attempts to read aspects of the story as feminist or, at least, revisionist (Totaro 2012), equally the film can be viewed in line with the post-Hays Code films that shook off the shackles of a puritanical public policy through displaying women’s bodies. Feminists have indeed criticised such liberation movements being hinged to sexualising and objectifying women. While there are concerns with sexualisation and objectification accusations—on one hand, ultimately every body is turned into an object when they are filmed, and equally claiming a naked woman is only valued for her capacity to titillate lacks story-specific nuance— nonetheless, as with most films that show women naked, there are no scantily clad men (Rosewarne 2013). While a deeper feminist analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is nonetheless worth making the point that there is of course, a nostalgic quality to such presentations evoking the manner women have long been displayed throughout the history of art and popular culture and which is characterised by the male gaze. While the overt eroticism of the original film is mostly eliminated in the remake, nonetheless there is still a narrative role for sexuality even if not displayed. In the remake for example, women’s sexuality is presented not for pleasure but rather exclusively for manipulation. Just prior to his sacrifice for example, Sister Summersisle explains to Malus the inevitability

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of his demise: “Your fate was sealed many years ago when she chose to be with you”. The inference here, is that many years ago Sister Willow (Kate Beahan) actively sought out Malus, seduced him, got secretly pregnant by him, and then later lured him to the island for sacrifice. Such an idea is bolstered in the film’s theatrical version which includes a “6 months later” epilogue that could appropriately be labelled as a “honey trap” scene: Sister Willow and Sister Honey (Leelee Sobieski) position themselves to be picked up in a bar by two men, one who is training to be a police officer, thus implying that history repeats itself and that the women have secured future sacrifices. While such scenes do not display women’s sexuality with any detail, it is nonetheless important to the narrative. Such scenes tap into modern misogynistic narratives about women using sex to exploit men. When Malus knocks out Sister Beech (Diane Delano), punches out the Sister guarding Rowan or kicks Sister Honey in the head, and when—as he is being sacrificed—he screams out “You bitches!”, it all seems like unsubtle commentary on the film’s view towards women or, at least, the women within the narrative. That the 2006 film reduces the sexual content can be theorised in several ways. American puritanism when adapting foreign content often leads to the removal of some of the sexiness to cater to assumed American sensibilities (Rosewarne 2019). There is also the capacity to view the deleted content as being about presenting a more progressive narrative: that stories around gender can be told without the display of breasts. Another perhaps obvious explanation is accessibility. Danielle Ryan in Paste Magazine, for example, suggests that “America’s The Wicker Man removed content to ensure a more lucrative PG-13 rating” (Ryan 2015). Here, the drivers are not political but rather to ensure the film is able to be seen by as many viewers as possible.

Sound: Giovanni vs Badalamenti and the Music of Summer(s)isle Much has been written about the role of music in conjuring feelings of our real or imagined past (Garrido and Davidson 2019; Burns 2021). Folk music plays a very specific role in this: every culture has a long history of folklore being told through song and Anglo-Celtic culture is no exception. A discussion of the music of The Wicker Man (1973), therefore, demands a conversation about nostalgia because the choice to populate a contemporary film with folk songs was, of course, deliberate.

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A theme throughout this chapter is the way the 1973 film—through approaches to things such as setting and sex—is the audience being lulled into feeling like they “know” this narrative and feel comfortable within it, only then for the horror aspects to feel more jarring. Music is used in the film in the same way. Writing about one of the final scenes of the original film, for example, Fergal Kinney discusses in The Guardian: “It’s one of the most disturbing juxtapositions in British cinema: a gigantic wicker figure blazes in a moment of shocking violence as a semicircle of people smilingly incant a traditional English folk song” (Kinney 2023). Fusion is a key theme in the film: the 1973 Wicker Man blends genres, the narrative blends different pagan practices and the music blends different styles and eras. The songs played, for example, are new—written and performed for the film—but they are songs that sound distinctly old, something discussed by the film’s associate musical director, Gary Carpenter: Musically, there are hints of traditional Irish music, Pentangle, Benjamin Britten and so on. The decision to generate a faux folk narrative drawn from many traditions was a conscious one paralleling the film’s non-site specific conceit—you know, sort of Scottish but not a Scotland that really exists! (Colton 2018)

This nostalgic sound is achieved by the instruments and the vocals of course, but also the incorporation of cultural artefacts such as the poetry of Scotland’s Robert Burns in the “Corn Rigs” track, along with pub-style sing-a-longs. This bricolage of sorts is undergirded by Giovanni being an American and thus an outsider to the Scottish folk sound he was tasked with (re)creating, thus bolstering this “faux folk” idea. Of the many differences between the 1973 and 2006 films, the divergent use of music is clear. It is not as though music was absent from the remake: in fact, the film was scored by acclaimed composer Angelo Badalamenti. But unlike in the original film, in the remake the songs were quite literally background music. And just as the more beloved a film the more heavily criticised the remake, so too is the film’s music: the passionate love for the 1973’s soundtrack rendered the Badalamenti score as just another thing perceived as wrong with the remake: “Buzzing bees and echoey children’s voices compete for soundtrack space with Angelo Badalamenti’s pedestrian score” (Scott 2006), and “The evocative folk music, which steered Robin Hardy’s version away from conventional horror, is replaced by a portentous score by David Lynch’s

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house composer Angelo Badalamenti” (French 2006), for example. While appraisals of music are always subjective and the negative evaluations of the Badalamenti score are likely a consequence of the reverence for the 1973 film’s music, regardless of whether it is considered good or bad, the sound of the 2006 film is fundamentally different to the original. Unlike the first film where the songs were every bit as important as characters and where, for many in the audience, individual memorable tunes will be key takeaways, the 2006 film does not have any memorable tracks. Perhaps more noticeably, the folk music is entirely gone, replaced by an orchestral score. This swap means the capacity for nostalgia to be evoked is markedly altered. This does not mean nostalgia is wholly absent, but is harnessed in other ways. Earlier, it was shown how nostalgia can be triggered through the rekindling of memories of past media consumption. The Badalamenti music, for example, is reminiscent of the kind of suspenseful soundtrack audiences are familiar with in cinema. Badalamenti had previously created the scores for horror films audiences may have seen previously—notably many of the distinctly mysterious and surreal films of David Lynch—and thus while the remake may not evoke the same nostalgia of the 1973 film, there is nonetheless the capacity to remind audiences of previous cinema going experiences and the sense of mystery and surrealism felt.

Conclusion In the 1973 The Wicker Man, the nostalgic themes are front and centre. Central to the narrative are themes of bygone eras and a longing for a past. Also, with half a century to make its mark on the landscape, the nostalgic themes feel more pronounced because the film does doubleduty of offering a modern-day viewer the nostalgia of a time before the narrative, but also a nostalgia for popular culture produced after 1973 of which was strongly influenced by the Hardy film: think Midsommar (2019) as a recent example. All remake exist in the shadow of their predecessor, and with an original as venerated as Hardy’s and thus, LaBute’s production was always going to struggle. While the nostalgic themes in the remake are not as pronounced as the original, nostalgia is unavoidable. As discussed in this chapter, to some extent all genre films have the capacity to stir nostalgia in that they are in dialogue with similar films. For a remake, this kind of nostalgia is particularly pronounced as the dialogue exists with the genre but more specifically the predecessor production. The renamed main character, Edward Malus, for example, appears to be

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a reference to the actor, Edward Woodward, who played the protagonist in the 1973 original. Several lines of dialogue from the first film are repeated in the 2006 remake, and some scenes are duplicated in whole. While a small amount of nostalgia as related to setting is shared with the original, sex and sound are two areas where the films diverge and where audiences are reminded that the “folk horror” or “gothic horror” label ascribed to the original doesn’t quite fit the remake in all its Nicolas Cage “not the bees” glory.

Works Cited Adney, Karley. 2012. “Film: Horror.” In Encyclopedia of Gender in Media, edited by Mary Kosut, 114–16. Los Angeles: Sage. Bartholomew, David. 1977. “The Wicker Man.” Cinefantastique 6 (3): 4–27. http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Wicker_Man/Cinefantastique% 20Vol%2006%20No%203%20(1977)%20Wicker%20Man.pdf. Accessed 28 July 2023. Bonnett, Alastair. 2015. The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss. New York: Routledge. Burns, Jehnie I. 2021. Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation. Lanham: Lexington Books. Colton, Lisa. 2018. “Medievalism, Music, and Agency in The Wicker Man (1973).” In Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen, edited by James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker, 213–28. New York: Routledge. Eat My Brains. 2006. “Exclusive Interview: Neil LaBute on The Wicker Man.” September 1. https://www.eatmybrains.com/showfeature.php?id=53. Accessed 27 July 2023. Floyd, Nigel. 2006. “The Wicker Man.” Time Out, September 6. https://www. timeout.com/movies/the-wicker-man. Accessed 24 July 2023. French, Philip. 2006. “The Wicker Man.” The Guardian, September 4. https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2006/sep/03/horror#:~:text=The%20evoc ative%20folk%20music%2C%20which,image%20in%20the%20whole%20film. Accessed 28 July 2023. Garrido, Sandra, and Jane W. Davidson. 2019. Music, Nostalgia and Memory: Historical and Psychological Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hamner, M. Gail. 2011. Imaging Religion in Film: The Politics of Nostalgia. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hughes, Williams. 2015. “‘A Strange Kind of Evil’: Superficial Paganism and False Ecology in The Wicker Man.” In Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and Williams Hughes, 58–71. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Keetley, Dawn. 2021. “Dislodged Anthropocentrism and Ecological Critique in Folk Horror: From ‘Children of the Corn’ and The Wicker Man to ‘In the Tall Grass’ and Children of the Stones.” In Gothic Nature 2: 13–36. Kinney, Fergal. 2023. “Lusty Singalongs and Brexit Portents: The Eternal Flame of The Wicker Man Soundtrack.” Guardian, June 21. https://www.thegua rdian.com/music/2023/jun/20/lusty-singalongs-and-brexit-portents-theeternal-flame-of-the-wicker-man-soundtrack. Accessed 28 July 2023. Lambie, Ryan. 2010. “Looking Back at Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man.” In Den of Geek, December 12. https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/lookingback-at-neil-labutes-the-wicker-man/. Accessed 27 July 2023. Lyons, Charles. 2006. “Updating the Weird Horror of Wicker Man”. New York Times, August 31. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/movies/06lyon. html. Accessed 24 July 2023. Mathews, Jack. 2006. “‘Wicker’ Just Doesn’T Cut It.” In New York Daily News, September 2. Accessed 24 July 2023 from ProQuest. McCabe, Bruce. 1980. “Love or Hate it, ‘Wicker Man’ Makes You Think.” Boston Globe, May 11. Accessed 28 July 2023 from ProQuest. McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. Muehling, Darrel D., David E. Sprott, and David E. Sprott. 2013. “The Power of Reflection: An Empirical Examination of Nostalgia Advertising Effects.” In Journal of Advertising 33 (3): 25–35. Odell, Colin, and Michelle LeBlanc. 2010. Horror Films. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books. Pichierri, Marco. 2023. Nostalgia Marketing: Rekindling the Past to Influence Consumer Choices. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ramsden, Stefan. 2016. “‘The Community Spirit Was a Wonderful Thing’: On Nostalgia and the Politics of Belonging.” In Oral History 44 (1): 89–97. Rosewarne, Lauren. 2013. American Taboo: The Forbidden Words, Unspoken Rules, and Secret Morality of Popular Culture. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Rosewarne, Lauren. 2017. Analyzing Christmas in Film: Santa to the Supernatural. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Rosewarne, Lauren. 2019. Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosewarne, Lauren. 2020. Why We Remake: The Politics, Economics and Emotions of Film and TV Remakes. New York: Routledge. Ryan, Danielle. 2015. “10 Great Foreign Films with Horrible U.S. Remakes.” In Paste Magazine, February 24. https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/ 2015/02/10-great-foreign-films-with-horrible-usremakes.html. Accessed 10 March 2018.

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Scott, A. O. 2006. “Learning All About the Girls and the Bees.” New York Times, September 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/movies/learning-allabout-the-girls-and-the-bees.html. Accessed 28 July 2023. Simpson, Dave. 2013. “How We Made The Wicker Man.” In The Guardian, September 25. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/sep/24/howwe-made-wicker-man. Accessed 25 July 2023. Totaro, Donato. 2012. “Robin Hardy: A Chat with the Wicker Man.” In Offscreen 16 (5). https://offscreen.com/view/robin_hardy. Accessed 25 July 2023. Xia, Weiqian. 2022. “Christian Religiosity, Religious Nostalgia, and Attitudes Toward Muslims in 20 Western Countries.” In Sociological Forum 37 (S1): 1414–35.

The American Dream and American Nightmare: The Toxic Pursuit of Nostalgia and Happiness Presented in Poltergeist (1982) and Poltergeist (2015) Robert Mclaughlin

Introduction A recurring thematic foundation of horror films is in the provision of a text being viewed as an outlet by which writers and directors can present commentary on contemporary, current or individual social fears and imprint these issues onto its audience. Genre movies, especially horror texts have had to adapt to meet the needs of their ever-evolving and cannier audiences—with a requirement to modify and readjust contextual narratives to become more inventive when encompassing notions such of geography and location to instil a sense of fear within its viewership (Kallitsis 2018). The location and settings of horror texts need to express accessible points of identifiable cultural terms and characteristics, representative of their time to create the notion of fear in an audience (Tudor 1989). An example of this within horror is very evident in the 1950/ 60s cycle of films when the antagonist expressed through invasive forces or external presences encroaching on “Main-Street USA” and involved

R. Mclaughlin (B) Arden University, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_7

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abduction, brainwashing or loss of individuality—all of which were the evident fear of post-war American cinematic audiences of communism, wrapped in thinly veiled disguises of alien invaders. However, this wider concept of film as a way of representing societal fears has in many ways been superseded by film studios production of horror by the notion of nostalgia and the nostalgia of modernism—which has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. The retroactive exploitation of prior or existing Intellectual Property/ Licensing has become so commonplace across cinematic productions that most films released tie in with an already existing franchise and with it an already established audience. Gathering and producing content from preexisting Intellectual Property is, through a lens of a financial perspective common sense and this continual need for tap into the notion of nostalgia and specifically nostalgic horror for material and content familiar to an audience. A studio that updates, recycles and remixes established properties and creates both materials based on this is very much “guaranteed” an audience who consumed not only the original (and are more than likely well-versed in the “lore” of that specific property) but is also willing to see a new take on this repurposed content. As such this drive for the recycling of the nostalgic provides filmmakers and studios with an abundance of easily profitable ways to adapt prior successes as a narrative framework to create new content to reflect contemporary fears. With this continued attempt to either replicate, update or mirror established material, consideration is not always taken in the wider context of the original film’s critique or social and economic context. Many remakes have seen highly successful contemporary reinterpretations of pre-existing properties with The Evil Dead (Alvarez: 2012 and Cronin: 2023), Rabid (Soska Sisters: 2019) and Halloween (Carpenter: 2022), all seeing critical and financial success at the box office. However, not all “Post-modern antiques” (Fisher, 2012) provide the same new and innovative perspectives on the original text, with some films deemed surplus to requirements or indeed missing the social and political subtext of the original film completely, falling short of mapping the same themes and transposing these into a contemporary text. One example of this is Poltergeist (Kenan: 2015), a text that falls very much into this definition. The original films legacy influences music, television and indeed film decades later by its continual reference in popular culture with The Chicago Film Critics Association noting that it is “one of the scariest films ever made” and the AFI (American Film Institute)

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putting the film in its list of the top “100 years, 100 thrills” list. However, critics have noted that the 2015 interpretation was an unnecessary remake with (Tallerico 2015) “Nothing about ‘Poltergeist’ feels fresh or new”. It is difficult to compare the 2015 with the long-gestating original screenplay by Stephen Spielberg which satirises the beginnings of Reaganera neoliberal politics, although the remake does provide some relevancy as a text displaying how neoliberal politics continue to have agency on the collective imaginations and stories of contemporary filmmakers. Indeed, some of the themes present do provide some commentary on the changing environment of the American Middle/Working class, the change and evolution of the family dynamic and how technology and the environment are still themes relevant for debate within horror. Poltergeist superseded the horror/fantasy films present in the early to mid-1980s which have been dubbed as the “suburban horror cycle”—a set of films that were coded to encompass and represent the portrayal of a modernised family environment (Murphy, 2009). The thematic importance of the setting and environment of Poltergeist is wrapped up in the “newness” of early 1980s suburban America and the toxic consumerdriven concepts that underpin the “American Dream” of this time. The framing of this concept via the drive to make profit and surface-level consumerism of goods is a divisive factor within the text and a theme that underpins the satire of the original. While the 2015 Poltergeist fails to successfully portray the same depth of social commentary of “modern America” as the original, it could be debated that the 2015 reinterpretation, while perceived as a thinly nostalgic “cash-in”, does provide evidence in attempting to interpret the same themes presented in the 1982 original version rather than just jump scares and CGI. Similar contemporary selective nostalgic texts such as Stranger Things (2016) while commended for portraying a more successfully rounded interpretation of social and political issues of the 1980s still provide significant mimicry for the nostalgic “rose-tinted” memories of this time, mostly to sate current audience’s requirement for nostalgia and indeed merchandise sales. While the 2015 remake of Poltergeist does tap into the past decade’s wave of 1980s nostalgia, the text also provides an updated take on some of these more complex thematic issues addressed within Stranger Things, such as the nostalgia for a time, that was full of corporatisation, colonialism and a disregard for the past.

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The Call of the Artificial Light In the attempt to re-create the perfect suburbia of the upper and middle classes within the narrative, both texts portray the paternal figures using commercial and consumer goods as physical substitutes to support the underlying decay of strong social bonds. These superficial supporting mechanisms are imprinted on both families through their exposure to mass media, Steve and Diane Freeling (Poltergeist 1982), come from the first generation of Americans to have grown up with television sets as an integrated part of the home while the Bowens (Eric and Amy—Poltergeist 2015) are the first generation to grow up with internet technologies as part of everyday life, consequently the use of media and specifically television is portrayed in both films as a toxic interloper, a device that is malevolent and corrupting but happily accepted into the family home. Jeffrey Sconce notes that television seems to have the capacity to “generate (its) own autonomous spirit world” (Sconce, 2000) and with the television as a conduit, not an object the antagonists of the films use both Carol-Anne—1982—and Madison—2015—as an audience to communicate with. This manifestation of the Poltergeists talking to an audience on a personal level and of the message they provide to the children can be seen as what television has been doing for the past seven decades—to entice and lull the viewer while passing across promotion and propaganda on the behest of vested interests. Once this communication channel is established and their target “market” engaged and sold the hidden agenda of those on “the other side”. In a similar way that advertising works the audience is hooked and the consumers who have happily invited the toxic influence of television into the home are sold something they did not know they wanted in the first place. This presentation of a desired superficial reality provided by television to nurture and pacify hides an innate fear of the viewer being sucked into or abducted to this “other side” and—metaphorically—taken away to the other side of the television glass with no means of escape. This notion of being trapped behind the television screen (and indeed mirrors) is a horror trope that plays into very modern fears that deal with body image, reflection/perception, image manipulation, distortion or the bastardisation of personal or online social presence (catfishing, gas-lighting, et al.) in much the same way as the “invasion, replication or mind-control” messages that were prevalent within the paranoia-focused body-snatching horror of the 1950s and 1960s.

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In both instances of the film, the directors vilify the presence of television and imply the toxic influence it has upon American culture and American youth. Within the original text, we clearly see Tobe Hooper’s use of television as a way to present satire of America’s reliance on consumerism, with the broadcasts shown within the original text purposely presented to be brash, bold and consumer-led, a nod to the prowess of television within the home.

The Decaying of the American Dream With television as a toxic conduit, there has to be a message to “sell” and the original film immediately makes it obvious that it’s going to be based on lies, as seen when Mr Teague and Steve Freeling walk across the hilltop of the valley overlooking Cuesta Verde proud of their achievement in building the suburban “American Dream” built on hundreds of dead bodies. Initially, the walk takes the couple past the white picket fences—one of the symbols that defined this promotion of the American Dream, however as the walk continues, it is revealed that the fence becomes decayed and in ill repair and is there to represent the boundaries of a graveyard—a wry nod by Tobe Hooper on primacy of the new in American consumerism. This, of course, is to reinforce the notion that in always attempting to attain the new, the past is forgotten and buried … but not deeply enough. According to (Brehmer, 2018), the original Poltergeist provides commentary on the tribulations of early 1980s American middle-classes suburban life, colonialism and the perceived breakdown of the nuclear family unit via the damaging excesses of capitalism and consumerism. Furthermore, it symbolises the corruption of the American Dream felt by American society post the political driven conflict seen within Vietnam. Kellner confirms this and notes the 1982 film was released into “an atmosphere of fear and trembling in the age of Reagan” (1983)—a time when the notion of consumerism became rampant in an attempt to bury the recent past. This is also tied to a return to the lost American values of “conservativism”. These notions of consumerism and conservativism are two points that appear in both versions of the film—they are concepts that embody the notion of the “American Dream” and indeed the notion of the “American Nightmare” where these wider social and political environment racism and bigotry of the 1950s and the vast recession and debt

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of the 1980s are happily ignored in the attempt to attain the perceived values of the “American Dream”. This finds form in a neoliberal fantasy being lived by the Baby Boomer generation in 1982 and is presented in numerous ways, from the initial gathering of the Freelings’ friends who are representations of themselves—middle class, early to middle-aged conservative white males—who are invited over to “watch the game” while consuming junk food and beers. Of note is that this is the same boomer generation that protested Vietnam, fought for civil rights for oppression and for the liberation movements in the 1970s, but the pursuit of the American Dream has seen them “selling out” to a comfortable life in the suburbs housing promised by the conservative sway of Ronald Reagan. In this pursuit of happiness, there is little room for respect for tradition, prior generations sacrifices or the toll that rampant consumerism has on the environment. The original Poltergeist presents a thin surface of middle-class respectable lifestyle choices built on enslavement, trauma and invasive suburban growth. The motifs of forgetting and burying the past, building over what came before and lack of acknowledgement are strongly connected to this American suburban lifestyle via its elements of gentrification and modern convenience living. This presentation of the surface tension of modernity and the decay of the ‘old’ just lying underneath the thin veneer of respectability all too ready to overflow into the new is a key point of the text—from the physical cutting of the earth for the swimming pool to the literal dead rising from the ground, to the poltergeists ‘punching’ through to this reality, and the breach between the spirit world and ours through Carol Anne’s closet the text provided numerous examples of the breach between the natural/unnatural, old/new, and the physical and the spiritual. This lack of respect of what came before is shown repeatedly throughout Poltergeist—the affluence, wastefulness and lack of appreciation of things and material goods by a generation bought up content, middle-class and wanting for nothing—the abandoned children’s bikes, the excesses of food at the breakfast table, the toys and consumables scattered through the house show a disregard for order and the excess of consumerism where things are not seen as precious and very much as disposable. The literal “history” of America within the text is being built over and replaced with the toxic pursuits of new wants, desires and aspirations driven by and catered to by soul-less companies, conglomerates and commerce.

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The film is also significant in the continued propagation of the notion of a cinematic “Haunted Indian Burial Ground” motif. However, the Freeling house is not actually built on sacred Native American land at all. Plot-wise, this is factually misconstrued due to a minor plot detail— the Freeling house was built on a graveyard and the connection to Indian burial grounds comes in part through Teague’s speech to Steve in the film in the scene where they are both looking down on the estate from the hills overlooking the estate and he notes “Besides, it’s not ancient tribal burial ground, it’s just people”. Coupled with a perceived disrespect for traditions and lack of respect for the dead, those who disturb (intentionally or not) are punished for transgressive behaviour which sees the symbol of this consumerism, the suburban home itself and everything within it—is destroyed as a morality tale to not continually covert consumables over the ideals of family, respect and tradition. According to Michelson, the mid-twentieth-century consumer represented by both the Freeling and later Bowen families is not driven by genuine need, but by the “need to need” (2018). It is this kind of consumerism and drive to want that underpins soul destroying qualities of the perceived grasping for perfection which both families, in their own way, live—an innate focus on striving for a perfect lifestyle that will never quite be perfect enough. It is this insatiable “need to need” that feeds the notion of commercialism that is so relevant within 1980s cultural representation and again mirrored in the 2010s. This disregard for tradition is present in both films where material goods and the pursuit of high-end gadgets and gizmos are gifted as a way to appease and satisfy this need to need—material goods purely presented as representations of wealth and status to compensate for the lack of traditions or deeper and more mindful aspects of modern life which have been relegated through the drive and promise of expansion, for bigger housing developments, bigger televisions, bigger pools, bigger bank balances. As such, it is this removal of the aspects of contentment that the families represent, both interpretations of Poltergeist show characters with a buy/consume/dispose mentality that was imprinted on them by their parents and cultural and political environment which by the 1980s came to represent the very epitome of consumerism and a set of values which relegated all other forms of “value” as a secondary concern. The “enchantment through wealth” motif is essentially a modernisation of the magic of fairy tales, myths and morality tales with traditional items being replaced by the new “glamour” of consumer culture. This

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modernising of traditional story tropes is suggested by Sipos to have evolved into “techno-myth” (2010) with the re-appropriation and reinterpreting of traditions and mythologies providing a way to link to our past that again highlights the superficial nature of Westernised American culture. As a result, Americans and suburbanites within 1980s texts are in a manner portrayed as a swath of consumers rather than individuals, driven by consumerism, with the parents presented in a hetero-monogamous relationship and the family presented as one of atypical conservative values with an implied need for social conformity—all of which resonated with the audiences of the ‘Reagan-era’ political environment.

Nuclear Toxic Waste Families Neither family in the films are portrayed as inherently bad, vindictive or trying to play the system for their own gains. On the surface, they are both archetypal families with average problems in a relatable environment for most of the audience watching the film. Within both screenplays, there is no attempt to present the audience with reasons to see the families as antagonists or to pass judgement on their respective lifestyle choices and actually reinforce their inherent normalcy. Robin Wood suggests that the typical American family, as represented by the Freelings and Bowens are presented as a “cellular construction, institutionalised by capitalism and patriarchal relations and values” (1986). Steve and Diane, from 1982, are coded as affluent parents being and part of the “Baby Boomers” post-World War II generation. These individuals grew up in a time that saw an increase in affluence and a general better standard of living for all due to widespread government reforms which included subsidies in essentials such as housing and education. Poltergeist (2015) then presents viewers with the results of how the next generation has built on this earlier affluence in terms of better conditions and environments. Yet, this is not quite the case and that the original suggests the prestructured conventions of the conservative nuclear family stereotype are more disjointed, fragmented and more reflective of their audience rather than the stylised pre-conception. Families split by divorce, “latchkey kids” with both parents working—to sustain the level of income and lifestyle required for the settings of these films. For example, Michael, Elliott and Gertie in E.T. (1982) are raised by a single mother, a trope that was not uncommon at the time—Fright Night (1985), Lost Boys (1987) and Near

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Dark (1987) all feature single-parent families. Consequently, the families in Poltergeist with their bickering, disagreements and arguments while not presented as perfect are seen as being “normal” and more so in the face of the paranormal and exploitation by toxic corporation and greed is one of the successes of both texts. Both the Freelings and Bowens are portrayed as rounded, three-dimensional characters, they are not action heroes or extraordinary in any way, possessing atypical features that make them no different from anyone else—they are for all intents and purposes perfectly normal people living perfectly normal lives. Yet, both interpretations of Poltergeist with the loss and return of a child provide the perfect environment to explore what “family”, in their respective contexts, means and how the cathartic processes of grief and joy they experience during the finales of the narratives represent a new, mindful, respectful middle class who have gone through the process of recovery and where normalcy, of a kind, is once again re-established. Though a comparison between the two films tends to complicate that as although the first film posits that pre-conformity has won and solved the underlying social, economic and political issues they are still there 23 years later in the remake as Steven is reduced to door-to-door sales as the reality of the change in circumstances reveal themselves financially. More so, he is also returning to battle and overcome the fundamental enemy from the original film—the corporatisation of America. What both narratives do in response to this is show that even the safest, most “normal” spaces of the American Dream, the family home, are not safe. This is shown in how the “cookie-cutter” replication of the perfect new suburban home full of consumable goods becomes toxic and to be unliveable through its change from a normal to a paranormal space. Schneider notes, citing Jentsch, that houses, and the space of the home are intended to provide sanctuary for the middle classes and through a nostalgic lens deemed to be places in which “we should not be frightened” (1999). The changing of the “homely” to the “unhomely” then draws out themes such as social anxiety and eventual degradation, using the lens of haunted or lost futures presented in the houses and the families within them—the offered security of the American Dream as a cover for the inherent Nightmare lurking just beneath its surface.

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The Representation of a Wider Toxic Suburbia The artificial social construct of suburbia seen in television, advertising and film holds very little in the form of the actual social realism of the times they are trying to emulate and rather present a conforming, conservative and even oppressive take on the 1980s, and the nostalgia for the 1950s it was trying to emulate (Jackson 2000)—Spielberg is renowned for his passion for 1950s Americana and idealised representation of the perfect America. While the family homes in both narratives are built on a cemetery/ sacred burial ground, there is a purposeful intent in them to depersonalise the houses the families live in. Both family environments are depicted as just one of many similar homes, a purposefully “random” house on a random street situated within vast suburban housing estates. This notion of normalcy then creates narratives of the paranormal designed specifically with modernity in mind with their narratives of intrusive malevolence manifesting a critique of the dynamics of social and political toxicity within which they are situated. The 1982 version quickly establishes the notion of the new suburbia with the establishing shots of the film panning across the suburbs of sunny California. These manicured lawns and identical houses are instantly recognisable as a kind of Spielbergian “hyper-reality”—a sanitised interpretation of an idyllic American middle-class environment. With the sun shining in a perpetual summer, children playing outside in safe surroundings while Caucasian white/middle-class families live their lives in large houses indulging in communal activities and hobbies. Although Poltergeist (2015) shows a slightly more realistic suburbia (lower-middle class demographic), both films reveal the shadow-side of this idyllic suburban life in their portrayal of prefabrication and endless repetition of the wider suburban sprawl which devours the “idyllic”—nostalgic—small-town Americana of yesteryear loved so much by Spielberg. This encroachment is to the detriment of individuality with the setting highlighting the desire to insulate oneself and one’s family from everyone and everything else. In the suburban sprawl, nobody wants to stand out, everyone just wants to fit in, and in presenting this Hooper and Spielberg provide a canvas that is purposely aesthetically generic and emotionally barren. This emptiness of space and place presented within both texts is the catalyst for the paranormal adversity which both families endure. It is

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not so much the supernatural entities that are the main protagonists of the film but rather the continued expansion and development needed for space, homes and suburban environments presented through the lens of laissez-faire attitude of free economics and the weakening of regulations to allow for exploitation, corner-cutting and malpractice by corporations and unseen faceless organisations that disregard the environment for the pursuit of enterprise, expansion and profit. Reading Poltergeist (1982) through lens of Hooper’s prior film and social/political allegiance suggests that the film actually represents the disjointedness of a modern family perverting the notions of white middleclass conservative perfection and showing instead a post-modern nuclear family with the Freelings being a point of satire—a wry and cutting commentary on the domestic and social decay of the “American Dream” which while not completely lost by the late 1970s could be argued to have become corrupted; a mass-produced sellable aspiration which is reflected back into the family environment and social makeup. The huge undertaking of home construction in California’s Simi Valley—mirroring that seen in Hooper’s Poltergeist—was created via the building programmes instigated by Ronald Reagan during his tenure of the governor of California which as Beauregard observed is framed “as if Americans have struck a Faustian bargain in which progress has been traded for self-reflection, compassion, and a sense of history” (2006, 271). This migration to these new environment was also driven by the political conservative rhetoric of the time to incite the concept of unknown fears as a way to retreat towards pre-conformity and a “safe” environment harkened back to those instilled in audiences in 1950s— as seen in Invaders from Mars (Menzies: 1953), and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Siegel 1956). This vast building programme was explicitly present within the original movie with the trailers of the film highlighting the vast swathes of housing being built and the notion that the events of the narrative could happen to you as a prospective “Boomerl” looking to move to such places. With Reagan winning the Presidency the year before the first film was released, the prevalent ideas of de-regulation to increase productivity, generate wealth and profit represent one of the key plot points of the original text and indeed the aftermath of this in the remake. Since Reagan idolised the fifties, his campaigning and presidency promised a return to these prosperous times—further suggesting a return also to the anxieties that plagued them.

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While the 2015 remake establishes the need for social housing after the earlier economic downturn, this theme of conservative ideal is not quite so prevalent within this version. What is visible is that the sunny valleys of early 1980s California are replaced with similar vast housing estate that is far less an environment of aspiration. Whereas the Freelings are depicted enjoying the open spaces, sun and opulent environment of Cuesta Verde, the Bowens need to find and establish a place to live (due to financial ruin), which takes them to a dour, dark and foreclosure-hit neighbourhood, moving somewhere they can afford out of necessity—an obvious comment on the run-down nature of the American Dream. While the Freelings’ initial social and financial position at the beginning of the original film is presented as being on the ascendency the second film, Poltergeist II: The Other Side (Gibson: 1986), in many ways mirrors the Bowens own predicament being one of joblessness, social decline and a family having to compromise to make ends meet. While Teague was the face of the corner-cutting and profit-driven real-estate company and essentially the architect for the main antagonists for the original, Steven Freeling is shown repeatedly on the telephone during the second film arguing with faceless bureaucracy as he attempts to get payment from the insurance company who are unwilling to take his claim and that they cannot quantify that the Freeling house—for which they are seeking payment—has “gone”. This example of process-driven faceless corporation again shows the toxicity of modern living with respondent on the phone using pre-scripted answers and only accepting a set of pre-determined circumstances or answers to process a claim successfully. Any deviation from procedure and conformity—you cannot claim for a house that is not there—is rejected. The Freelings by not conforming (or having a claim that cannot easily be managed) have themselves become “The Other”, they like the later Bowens are “locked” out of society, they are now on the outside of a corporatised system and for every argument or justification are not able to back in and to once again return to pre-defined social norms—they have literally been othered by their encounter with the Other. The modern reinforcement of the key themes of the original is evident via the unhealthy and toxic practices of the protagonists within both texts—the addiction to and pursuit of (no matter the costs) consumerism. The need-to-need drives both the Freelings and the Bowens have in their goal to achieve the idealised American Dream of the perfect nuclear family in the perfect family home.

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The loss or reframing of Reaganist conservatism through a contemporary lens, a theme that both films address is how the once nurturing space of the family home, promoted since the 1950s as suburban idealism, can also be seen as becoming spaces deemed to be “unhomely”. In his work Danse Macabre (1983), Chaston describes the home within these films as a negative space, calling them “the archetype of the Bad Place”. By setting both version of Poltergeist in a relatable suburban context, they create an initial “safe” environment for the audience—one that is recognisable, welcoming and “homely”. The two versions of Poltergeist purposefully depict the environment in which both families (the Freelings and the Bowens) live—exist or “transit”—within the pre-constructed “non-place” of suburbia and as Schneider notes “we should not be frightened here” (Augé 1999). As such when the intrusion of the paranormal into this space and environment by the uncanny occurs, the home is no longer presented to be a safe space. The comfortable surroundings of the homes occupied by the families are transformed to become one of the prisons in which the inhabitants are trapped and collected consumer goods within these spaces turned into weapons. The house becomes an opposing space, confining the family within its walls—there is no need for Gothic tropes of barren moors, isolated castles or impenetrable locations when the family are restrained and confined—Gothicised—by the very nature of an environment of their own making.

Toxic Legacies While both interpretations of Poltergeist provide commentary on issues relevant to their times and context of release, the current cinematic trend of fetishising 1980s nostalgic Americana (a very niche and specific version of the1980s) mirror what Brehmer (2018) notes happened in the 1980s as well with an attempt to return and mimic the 1950s. Within both narratives, the perception of this illusion of a perfect family set in a perfect suburbia is a sham, an unfounded social construct of an idealised environment based on prior perceived interpretations—via television, advertising and political ideals. The original 1982 version of Poltergeist, for example, shows the Freelings’ attempt at the white picket-fenced idealism presented via the nostalgic/idealistic view of a 1950s “family”. The presentation within both texts of Reagan’s failed 1980s American Dream being lived by and embraced wholeheartedly by the Boomers generation within the original and Generation X within the remake show that within a time frame

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of 2 generations and 4 decades, the “greed is good” mentality still has a detrimental and toxic influence on home ownership and the family environment. However, the 2015 remake does provide some agency for social and political commentary as the film provides evidence that suburban horror, neoliberalism and the social shift of the 1980s still “haunt” horror filmmakers in the twenty-first century and provide a modern reinterpretation of the “lost futures” created by Reagan-era neoliberal economics. The narrative of both films while showing trauma and tragedy (but no death) concludes with a morality message and ending which sees a family happy and reunited but the wider toxic social and political status quo remains. As the initial film provided numerous sequels is questionable that the initial fears presented in the first film are ever vanquished, and that the underlying aspects of the perceived “horrors” of American life still linger into the twenty-first century and, possibly, beyond.

Works Cited Augé, Marc. 1992. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Beauregard, Robert A. 2006. When America Became Suburban. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brehmer, Nat. 2018. “How Poltergeist Destroyed the American Dream (And Why That’s Great).” In Wicked Horror, June 28. https://wickedhorror. com/features/retrospectives/how-poltergeist-destroys-the-american-dreamand-why-thats-great/. Tallerico, Brian. 2015. “Review: Poltergeist.” In RogerEbert.com, May 22. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/poltergeist-2015. Fisher, Mark. 2012. “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66(1): 16–24. Jackson, Chuck. 2000. “Little, Violent, White: The “Bad Seed” and the Matter of Children.” The Journal of Popular Film and Television 28 (1): 64–73. Kallitsis, Phevos. 2018. The Discourse of Urban Regeneration and Gentrification as Devices of Fear in the Horror Genre. (Portsmouth School of Architecture. Paper presented at International Visual Association 36th Conference) Kellner, Douglas. 1983. “Fear and Trembling in the Age of Reagan: Notes on Poltergeist.” Socialist Review (13): 121–31. Michelson, Sarah N. 2018. “Terror in the Cul-de-sac: The Suburban Uncanny in Late 20th Century American Horror.” Honors Thesis Collection—Wellesley College. https://repository.wellesley.edu/object/ir823. Murphy, Bernice. 2009. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Poltergeist. 1982. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Beverley Hills: Meter-GoldwynMeyer. Poltergeist. 2015. Directed by Gil Kenan. Beverley Hills: Meter-Goldwyn-Meyer. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press. Tudor, Andrew. 1989. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford: Blackwell.

“You’re Too Focused on Where You’ve Been”: Uncanny Nostalgia in Mary Poppins Returns Daniel Kasper

An audience does not wait over a half century for a sequel to a beloved film for many other reasons beyond nostalgia. A desire to return to our childhood sense of magic and wonder might well be the defining desire we have for any Disney property, from the films to the toys to the parks, but it is especially acute a desire in Mary Poppins Returns, from the title on through. This chapter argues that the nostalgic elements of the film so thoroughly call-back to the original that the sequel becomes an uncanny, Gothic film that revels in a desire to never move beyond the past. This critique first demonstrates how the film functions as a nostalgic retread of the original film; it then demonstrates how that nostalgia becomes infected with an uncanny unease at its own repetitive nature; and it finally points to the fundamental limitations of nostalgia as emotional catharsis for the audience. The nostalgic quality of the film is one of the most consistent notes across a very mixed set of film reviews, from those critics who enjoyed it (Owen Gleiberman calls the film “a rapturous piece of nostalgia” that is “nearly fetishistic” and “madly obsessive” in its desire to “mak[e] you feel

D. Kasper (B) University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_8

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happy in the guileless way a movie still could back in 1964”) to those who lambasted it (Charles Bramesco argues that the film’s “vocal emphasis on the beauty of nostalgia” highlights a tension between “our dimming sense of childlike amazement” and Disney’s “campaign to mechanically extract every available dollar from our earliest memories”) (Gleiberman 2018; Bramesco 2018). Some even note that “[Disney] has been raiding its vaults to tap into its audience’s entrenched nostalgia” as the “latest craze” of its output, comparing the film to recent live action remakes of The Lion King and Alice in Wonderland (Castillo 2018). Such an impulse does not seem strange, given that the sequel “has set the record as the longest gap between a live-action film and its sequel” (Bilyeau 2019). With such a long stretch between films, “the result is a sequel…that is essentially a remake” (Escapay 2018). It is, however, still worth articulating how the film’s nostalgia manifests itself specifically in order to account for how allpervading it is. Thus, what follows here is a quick synopsis and song list of both films so that the repetitive calling-back of the second to the first can be more readily seen. Mary Poppins opens by setting the 1910 residential London scene (“Overture”) with Bert busking and noticing the imminent arrival of Mary Poppins seated in the clouds above. Mrs. Banks returns home (“Sister Suffragette”) only to find the nanny giving notice because Jane and Michael have run away again; then Mr. Banks, warned by the Admiral that rough weather is coming, returns home (“The Life I Lead”) to find the children still missing and rings the police to find them. They are at that moment returned by a constable. Mr. Banks decides to take on the task of hiring a new nanny, and the children write him their own advertisement (“The Perfect Nanny”) which he rips up. The next day, a gust of wind blows away all the other applicants, allowing Mary Poppins to hire herself as the nanny. She begins by having the children clean up their toys (“Spoonful of Sugar”), takes them on an animated outing into Bert’s chalk-drawing (“Jolly Holliday” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”), and finally sends them to bed (“Stay Awake”). After rescuing Uncle Albert from the ceiling (“I Love to Laugh”), Mr. Banks remonstrates the children for their foolishness and Mary Poppins for taking them on ridiculous adventures; she counters by convincing him to take the children to work with him (“A British Bank (The Life I Lead)”). In convincing the children that going to the bank is a good idea (“Feed the Birds (Tuppence)”), Mary Poppins also sets in motion the conflict

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about tuppence between the children and Mr. Dawes, Sr. (“Fidelity Fiduciary Bank”) that will lead to a bank run, causing the children to flee into downtown London. The children run into now-chimneysweep Bert (“Chim Chim Cher-ee”) who brings them home, only for them all to be gusted up the chimney to the London rooftops (“Step in Time”). Mr. Banks returns home just as the chimneysweeps have nearly destroyed the house; and in the aftermath, Bert reminds him that fatherhood is more important than any other legacy he could leave (“A Man Has Dreams”) only for Mr. Banks to be summoned to the bank to be fired. As Mr. Banks is humiliated by his previous employers, he finds the tuppence Michael gave him as an apology and realises the absurdity of the situation. He starts laughing and recounts several of the stories that the children have told him, including a joke that makes Mr. Dawes, Sr. begin to float away. Mr. Banks returns home, he fixes the children’s kite, and the family is finally whole (“Let’s Go Fly a Kite”). Mr. Banks is rehired as a senior partner in the bank because of what Mary Poppins has done for his children; Mary Poppins leaves, her work done. For most Americans, this sequence of events is quite familiar—it is so associated with memories of my own childhood that it is essentially printed on my psyche. That means that when I first watched Mary Poppins Returns (hereafter Returns ) with my mother in a cinema on Boxing Day 2018, I could feel the originals uncanny haunting of the sequel film. In Returns, Jack sets the London scene (“(Underneath the) Lovely London Skies”) now twenty years later. The Admiral remains watching the weather, and the Banks household is once again disordered, although it’s now under threat of foreclosure from the same bank. Michael’s wife has recently died, and therefore nobody has been paying the bills. Jane and Michael remember that their father has left them shares in the bank that will avoid foreclosure, so they begin to search for the share certificate (“A Conversation”) and find their childhood kite; meanwhile, the second generation of Banks children (John, Anabelle, and Georgie) have begun filling in for their mother’s absence and head off to the shop. A sudden gust of wind takes the discarded kite into the air and Georgie chases after it; the other children follow; Georgie is saved from flying away in an east wind by Jack; and when they pull the kite back to earth, Mary Poppins comes with it. She quickly re-establishes herself in the Banks household, shocking Jane and Michael with her return, and drawing the children into familiar adventures in cleanliness (“Can You Imagine That?”) and, with Jack in place of Bert, an animated adventure in their mother’s Royal Doulton

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Bowl (“Royal Doulton Music Hall” and “A Cover is Not the Book”). This latter adventure ends with an animated wolf, badger, and weasel carting up all the Bankses’ belongings and taking off into a dark forest, incidentally kidnapping Georgie and creating a carriage chase with the other children over the edge of the bowl—they awake in the nursery as if from a nightmare. Mary Poppins comforts them about the nightmare, the loss of their mother and the potential loss of their home (“Where the Lost Things Go”). In the morning Mary Poppins, takes the children to meet her cousin in order to have the bowl repaired (“Turning Turtle”) and brings Michael’s forgotten briefcase to the bank, where the children recognise the new chairman as the wolf from their adventure in the bowl. They confront the chairman in his office as a thief; Michael is embarrassed by their actions and Mary Poppins’s apparent lack of attention; the children and nanny are sent home. The children get lost in the fog and are only returned home by Jack and the other lamplighters (“Trip a Little Light Fantastic”) to reconcile with their father. After the family has packed up the entire house, Michael realises that Georgie has used the share certificate to patch the kite, and the family races across London to get the share to the bank’s office before Big Ben strikes midnight, and in order to gain more time, the children, Mary Poppins, and the lamplighters first darken Big Ben and move the clock backwards. Michael and Jane successfully fly the kite through the chairman’s window just before Big Ben chimes midnight. Unfortunately, because the share certificate is missing a piece, the bank chairman claims that it is invalid, and that he owns their home. Finally, Mr. Dawes Jr arrives, revealing that the tuppence that George Banks deposited at the end of the original film has grown enough in the last twenty years to cover the loan. The family is allowed to keep their home and celebrate with a trip to the fair (“Nowhere to Go But Up”) and Mary Poppins, having set the family to rights, takes her leave again. The parallels between the original and Returns range from repetitive plot beats (the arrival of Mary Poppins in a windstorm, a trip into the animated fantasy, a visit with an ill and eccentric relative, a trip to the bank that becomes a comedic-Gothic excursion into working-class London), the return of multiple characters (Mary Poppins and the Banks children, of course, but also the Admiral, Ellen, Mr. Dawes Jr, and the four animated penguins), thematically equivalent songs (“Can You Imagine That” for “Spoonful of Sugar,” “Royal Doulton Music Hall” for “Jolly Holiday,” and so on, under consultation from original composer Richard

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M. Sherman), and even jokes (Mary Poppins again has her bottomless carpetbag and an independently moving reflection; Michael is told that he is not a codfish and Jane still has a tendency to giggle; the cockney accent is purposefully bad). This is in addition to the central plot-moving motif of the kite, which begins the film in disrepair, mirroring the dissolution of the Banks family after the recent death of Michael’s wife and the between-films deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Banks. The kite then pulls Mary Poppins down from the sky and is patched by Georgie, who uses one of Michael’s drawings to do so, which at once signifies the sacrifices that Michael is making for his family and the possibility of repairing the fissures in the family’s life. It finally offers the last-ditch, impossible effort to keep the house from being foreclosed on, where Michael and Jane literally fly the kite into the banker’s window in order to beat the approaching midnight when the loan expires—a deliberate echo of the kite bringing the family back to prosperity at the end of the original film, but of course here incapable of making them economically whole. Because the kite is at once a symbol for Michael and Jane’s relationship to their late parents, for Michael’s deferred dream of being an artist due to the lack of economic opportunity, for the connection to childhood whimsy that Mary Poppins represents, and for the capitalist mechanism of investment, interest, and mortgages, we might consider it to be an overdetermined symbol in the Freudian sense. The movies use of the kite as a central plot-mover is also inherent to the film’s position as a sequel to the first film. These are knowing choices on Disney’s part; the film functions as a love letter to the original, as explicitly noted by Lin-Manuel Miranda. If the purpose of a sequel is to produce more of the same, but different, Returns handles that task quite well, even to the point of reviewers like Albert Ray Escapay or Monica Castillo comparing it to Disney’s recent strategy of remaking its animated features as live action. This repetitiveness is excused in a Vanity Fair article as deriving from P. L. Traver’s own tendencies with the Mary Poppins series of books (Robinson 2018). Nevertheless, the use of the kite as a central element of the film represents one of the major departures from the original’s plot structure. Returns is much more heavily plotted than Mary Poppins in the sense that most of the children’s adventures are directed towards a central problem and antagonist, rather than acting as episodic outings with only emotional connections to bind them together. Just as an example, where in the original film the children meet Uncle Arthur simply because he is ill and in need of assistance, the children in Returns seek out Cousin Topsy to

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make enough money to pay off the loan. Joanna Robinson notes that this sequence “seems the most copy-pasted from the original” even to the point that “the resulting lesson for Banks children is the same” as in the original film and even the P.L. Travers books (Robinson 2018). The film’s focus on creating this plotted through line adds to the uncanniness of the repetition—that is, uncanny in Freud’s sense of “an unintended recurrence of the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects” (Freud 1955, 237). That is, the diversion with Cousin Topsy is uncanny for the viewer because it is the same situation as with Uncle Arthur—in order to heal both “Second Wednesday” and the laughing sickness, the children must use Disney magic to go on to the ceiling— but radically different in its details. The most pressing difference in this case is the children’s active desire to seek out Cousin Topsy rather than being swept along by circumstance. What’s more, the children’s attempt to use the bowl to save their house in Returns ends in failure because the bowl is itself priceless—i.e., not worth money—while in the original film, Jane and Michael’s simple enjoyment of the jokes told during the tea party on the ceiling is what gives Mr. Banks his epiphany in the original film. This points to the fundamental problem of the film: the audience always already knows what’s going to happen. We know that the children in Returns are visiting Cousin Topsy because it is required on two levels—first, the insistence on the plot of Michael’s bank loan and, second, because our nostalgic desire to recreate the original film creates expectations that must be met. The two different impulses towards resolution combine in this film sequence to give us something which is similar to, but nevertheless quite unlike, our memories of the original film. The film’s intertwining of plottedness and nostalgic repetition is likewise seen in the motif of the kite. By placing the kite into similar/ dissimilar contexts from the original film’s use of it—repaired by the father to reconnect with the children versus patched by the children in order to heal the father, emotionally and economically—Returns rewrites it into an uncanny object. This is clear from the kite’s own seeming animism, which was entirely lacking in the original film. After Michael throws the kite in the trash, it begins to move in the wind as if of its own volition; it follows the children on an errand, only to nearly pull Georgie away into the sky; and at the film’s emotional climax, it flies through a glass window to menace the banker with its own importance as a share of the bank. Thus, the kite enacts another element of Freud’s uncanny, which he quotes from Ernst Jentsch: “whether a lifeless object might not in

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fact be animate” (Freud 1955, 226). Of course, objects moving on their own are not inherently strange when Mary Poppins is around; the selfcleaning nursery of the original film, with a troop of stop-motion toys and clothing, does not create a sense of the uncanny in the audience. But even though Returns attempts to recall this same sense of wonder when Mary Poppins makes Jane and Michael’s mess of papers fly into the trash can, the intrusion of the original kite onto the present of Returns can only be an uncanny reminder of the inevitable march of time. What’s more, if we define nostalgia as Jacques Lacan does, as “bind[ing] the subject to a lost object, through which every searching effort is exerted” (Lacan 2021, 7), then the kite’s position in the film becomes readily understood. As the lost object that will make the family whole again and as a representation of the time which has passed between the two films, finding the kite becomes a search for the nostalgic return to the past as well as a solution to the problem presented by the plot. And this point can only remind us that Returns is very insistent on the passing of time: the Admiral is certain that Big Ben is running fast; characters have aged even as Mary Poppins has not; and the film’s villain carries a ticking pocket watch, counting down until the house becomes lost property. The film is so insistent on its own time displacement and anxious about its own nostalgic return to the original that it then becomes uncanny throughout, repeating film sequences with just enough difference to become aesthetically uncomfortable. Keeping these points as well as the larger repetitive nature of the film in mind, I next want to examine two sequences in further detail to demonstrate how the film’s nostalgic impulses become first aesthetically Gothic and then emotionally toxic. The first is the animated fantasy that takes place on the painted side of a porcelain bowl and the second is the mad dash to turn back the clock face of Big Ben. At first blush, the animated sequence that takes place on the painted side of a porcelain bowl might be an odd place to look for the Gothic. With its bright colours, funny animal characters, and pair of joke-filled songs, the sequence is a direct analogue to the chalk-painting excursion from the original film, and its inclusion was one of the earliest elements imagined by director Rob Marshall. As he said, “I knew I wanted to see that same hand-drawn animation that I grew up with” and lacking it would be a disappointment, so much so that several Disney and Pixar animators were brought out of retirement to work on the sequence

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(Snetiker 2018). But more than simply recalling the original film’s whimsical adventure, the Royal Doulton Bowl becomes as space where the Gothic anxieties that the children are experiencing are made manifest and lay bare the limits of the nostalgic return for them and for the viewer. The Gothic is embedded in the sequence through its basis in the novel Mary Poppins Comes Back. In a chapter titled “Bad Wednesday,” Jane is drawn into the Royal Doulton Bowl after having a tantrum, where the inhabitants of the bowl try to trap her in the past. Mary Poppins enters the bowl to save her, leaving behind a scarf that then permanently appears as part of the bowl’s painted scene. In her work on the Mary Poppins novels, Giorgia Grilli compares this chapter, tellingly, to the work of E.T.A. Hoffman as “depict[ing] the dissolving of barriers between fiction and reality,” (Grilli 2007, 58), although in the context of this chapter, the connection with Freud and the uncanny is much more pressing. The terror that Jane feels in the possibility of being trapped is often shared by the child readers of the story, as noted by Victoria Coren Mitchell in a BBC documentary about P.L. Travers and her work: “It chilled my blood when I was a child, and the truth is it still does now” (Thompson 2013). And there remain echoes of this original chapter in the version we get in Returns, especially in the tantrum that the three children have that cause the bowl to chip, the leaving-behind of Mary Poppins’s scarf holding the carriage together, and the kidnapping of Georgie by the villain who lives in the bowl. Nevertheless, the sequence plays much more clearly as an inversion of the chalk-drawing adventure in the original film, which has no antecedent in the novels. Even in the smallest verbal references, we have that insistent echo: in the original, Mary Poppins warns Jane and Michael not to fall and scuff the chalk-drawing, whereas in Returns the children are told not to go over the edge of the bowl. As before, Mary Poppins and her lower-class companion exchange tongue-twisting patter songs, although the relative simplicity of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” gives way to a Hamilton-inspired fairy tale burlesque show. And where we had a dramatic fox hunt atop merry-go-round horses in the original, we now have a rather sedate carriage ride at the beginning that ends in a dramatic, steam-powered chase to save Georgie from the wolf. And it’s the combination of these three elements that transforms the animated fantasy sequence into a Gothic nightmare. The wolf’s two companions, a weasel and a badger, are animated representations of the two lawyer characters who announce at the beginning of the film that the Bankses are being foreclosed upon, and, during the

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burlesque show, they steal all of the family’s personal property as an allegory for the bank taking ownership of the house, poignantly even taking Georgie’s beloved stuffed giraffe and then Georgie himself. The audience is cued to examine the wolf on two levels by the actions of Mary Poppins and Jack. For the one and only time in the film, Mary Poppins does not greet the wolf by name—that is, in a fantasy where Mary Poppins knows literally everyone that she speaks to, including a draft horse, she does not identify the wolf for the audience. But, given that her and Jack’s musical number is literally about looking beyond the surface of things to their true nature, and that the wolf carries the same pocket watch as the bank’s chairman, even young children in the audience can make the connection before the children in the film do. We thus have in Returns the same Gothic dissolving of fantasy and reality that Grilli above notes in the Travers books, and which echoes the inability of the Freudian subject to differentiate between dreams and reality in moments of the uncanny. Real life is intruding on the animated fantasy in a way that is wholly different from the original film, where the animated sequence is only lightly deployed in the plot (by introducing Mr. Banks to the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, which he will, like the joke learned at Uncle Arthur’s tea party, deploy at his firing). Finally, however, the intrusion of reality becomes too much for the animated fantasy to bear, and the children go over the edge of the bowl in pursuit of the wolf; they awaken in the nursery as if from a collective nightmare. In consoling the children, Mary Poppins sings them a lullaby, but whereas the original chalk-drawing adventure ends with wet feet, requiring some delicious medicine from a magical bottle, Returns has to contend with the death of the children’s mother. Again, we have this insistence on things which are lost and how they are never really lost at all; the connection between the material objects that the children are worried about losing and the mother which they have already lost is made clear, after the original tantrum over what to do with their mother’s priceless bowl that began the adventure in the first place. Again, the plot of the film is central to every action of the film, without any opportunity for whimsy or adventuring for its own sake, and that adventure is consumed with replacing that which is lost or that which we are in danger of losing. The ostensible goal of the plot is fulfilled in the second sequence I want to examine. Just at the moment where the family has packed all of their belongings from the house, Michael realises that the kite holds the certificate of shares that are the only proof of George Banks’s part ownership

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of the bank and which will cover the full cost of the loan. This certificate only exists, of course, because of the final moments in the original film, when Mr. Banks is rehired as a senior partner while flying a kite in the final scene; the kite is therefore fashioned as the emotional and economic health of the family unit. But it will not matter unless the certificate itself is brought to the chairman’s office before Big Ben strikes midnight—an impossible task due to the distance involved. The children however have learned that the impossible is entirely possible, so long as you believe, so while Jane and Michael rush to the bank, the children, Mary Poppins, and Jack must rush to the clock tower. The repetition of the scene on the bowl here is fairly straightforward—a speeding chase against time to save the objects stolen away by the wolf—but now of course within the live action of Gothic London. The plan succeeds with great drama, although Mary Poppins cannot help complaining that the lamp lighters act as if they have never climbed up the London skyline before, as she did with the chimneysweeps in the original film. Jane and Michael are even able to use the uncanny animism of the kite to their advantage, solving the problem of locked doors by flying the kite through the chairman’s window and fulfilling the contract. Alas, the plan still does not succeed because Georgie has not used every piece of the certificate to fix his kite, leaving the certificate useless. Without every piece, the chairman declares the certificate void and claims ownership of the house. The symbol of the nostalgic past comes into the present distorted, missing key elements and failing in its deployment against the unending growth of capital. Such a failure is foreshadowed in Georgie’s own use of the certificate to repair the kite, of course; in order for the holes in the kite to be patched, he cuts apart a pencil drawing of the family that Michael had done on the back of the certificate. This distortion is inherent to the nature of nostalgia itself; as Linda Hutcheon argues, “nostalgia…may depend precisely on the irrevocable nature of the past in order for its emotional impact and appeal” (Hutcheon and Valdés 2000, 19, emphasis in original). Likewise, Lacan points out that though nostalgia is intent on returning this lost object, “this re-finding…is impossible, precisely because it is not the same object and never can be” (Lacan 2021, 7). The kite that we fly in Returns is not and cannot be the kite that we flew in the original due to the accumulation of time that has left its mark on the paper. No matter how much we may wish to, we cannot turn back the clock—even Big Ben is only returned to the proper moment of the present. Nevertheless, the failure of the kite to resolve the plot functions as a way of fulfilling the other

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nostalgic impulse of the film, which has far more power to affect the audience: the return of Mary Poppins. This is the fundamental reason for the two late cameos by Disney Legends: Dick Van Dyke appears as Mr. Dawes Jr, in what is essentially a version of his appearance in the original film as Mr. Dawes Sr, to recreate some of his dance moves as the original Bert; and the late Dame Angela Lansbury’s appearance as The Balloon Lady who sings the finale song with the Banks family. The problem is in the function of these two characters. Whereas Karen Dotrice, the original Jane Banks, makes a small appearance mid-film that is completely incidental to the plot, Van Dyke’s appearance is integral to the plot resolution; he arrives just in time to dismiss the villain of the film from the bank and to remind Michael of the tuppence that his father invested for him in the final minutes of the original. George Banks’s exhortation to “guard [the tuppence] well,” has, in the intervening decades, paid enough dividends to cover the price of the loan and save the family home. Coupled with Mary Poppins literally turning back the clock of Big Ben, the offered solution to all of our troubles is to retreat back into the past—and the arrival of Van Dyke (who has also been an active presence in the Broadway stage show) can only underscore this essential argument. With this sequel, we cannot in any real fashion move forward, because nostalgia always means returning to the past. The family cannot actually solve their own problems, even with the help of Mary Poppins, because to do so would preclude the need for Van Dyke to save them. There’s a deeper difficulty in the inclusion of Lansbury, however. Certainly, with her recent death in 2022, it is in some sense fitting that she could be celebrated as a Disney Legend in this film. Her iconic turn in Beauty and the Beast and her Mary Poppins-esque role in Bedknobs and Broomsticks make her a reasonable choice for a cameo in any Disney film— and her stardom in general means that she even appeared in a posthumous cameo in Rian Johnson’s 2022 film Glass Onion. In practice, however, the viewer has been primed by Van Dyke’s appearance for a cameo by Julie Andrews—and what better role than singing the finale? According to Variety, moreover, rumour was that the role was offered to Andrews, who declined, saying that she did not want to steal Blunt’s thunder in a rather telling turn of phrase: according to Blunt, Andrews said “I don’t want it to be that [Emily]’s playing Mary Poppins the whole way through but then I come in and there’s like oh, but there’s the real Mary Poppins ” (Lang and Malkin 2018, emphasis in original). An additional reason for

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Andrews to decline is the loss of her singing voice during throat surgery in 1997. This functionally amounts to little more than Hollywood gossip, but it seems clear from outside that Andrews was offered the role as a singing one and then declined; it was reported in Variety that, though Andrews was “never pitched” a specific role, she was considered for the part which ultimately went to Lansbury (Lang and Malkin 2018). That is, Lansbury only becomes attached in February 2017 (Viagas 2017), after Andrews was offered and declined the role and Van Dyke was confirmed in 2016. What is more, Andrews does end up doing some voice work for Aquaman, which coincidentally premiered against Returns —a strange position to take for somebody trying to not upstage Blunt. Regardless of the actual details of this replacement—it is not unusual for an actress to be replaced when she declines a role, after all—there is a large effect on the final film that’s worth unpacking here. It is clear that the entire energy of the film is a nostalgic return, which has in some ways become increasingly Gothic as we try to recall a film from five decades ago. The inclusion of The Balloon Woman is intentional for the film. Not only is she mentioned at the very beginning, when the runaway kite summons Mary Poppins from the sky, but she is also based on a character from the original novels. In effect, then, the film works as if the return of Mary Poppins is its entire reason for being, but the return is refracted through a haunting relationship with the previous film. Whereas Andrews is conscious of the fact that the film attempts to rely solely on nostalgia for its energy—not wanting the appearance of the “real Mary Poppins” to undermine the film at the end—the production team seems to miss why this is a bad idea and creates an uncanny cameo rather than alter their original vision. That is, the one-to-one replacement of one beloved acting legend for another emphasises the sense that what we are watching is not something new so much as it is an attempt to capture something which we are long passed. Bramesco argues, further, that Lansbury’s “presence and the momentousness appended to it make no sense, because this role was very clearly conceived for Julie Andrews” (Bramesco 2018). Her inclusion thus exposes the artificiality of the cameo mechanism and the impossibility of the nostalgic return. In essence, the replacement of Lansbury for Andrews is another reminder that the nostalgic object can never be found again, and that nostalgia is instead the impulse to take a wholly different object and proclaim that it is the original. That it occurs during the finale song, “Nowhere to Go But Up,” which is written to evoke the

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original’s finale and emphasises the fact that Mary Poppins is about to fly away again, only underscores that fleeting nature of childhood whimsy. In essence, then, Mary Poppins returns to take the children of the film, both the literally grown-up Jane and Michael and the metaphorically overgrown John, Anabelle, and Georgie, back to the state of childhood that the figure of Mary Poppins represents, and do so as a way of bringing the adults in the audience to the same place of imaginative freedom. But if we came to this film looking for Mary Poppins to actually return, we are necessarily disappointed, and the choice to replace Andrews draws attention to that disappointment. Instead of a return of the original that we lost fifty years ago, we have to make do with a replacement that Disney assures us is just as good. What we are left with is a conclusion that undermines the film’s own stated purpose of extolling the value of childhood imagination—we cannot create anything new; we can only retreat to the familiar, now made uncanny and Gothic. When all Disney can offer us is a dream that we have already had before, we can only find ourselves lost in a nightmarish fog, so intent on the past that we cannot find a way forward. And in that sense, Disney’s own lack of imagination is thrown evermore starkly into relief.

Works Cited Bilyeau, Nancy. 2019. “Mary Poppins Sequel Sets Record for Longest Gap Between the Original Film.” The Vintage News. January 13. www.thevintag enews.com/2019/01/13/mary-poppins-returns/. Accessed 2 March 2023. Bramesco, Charles. 2018. “A Spoonful of nostalgia helps the calculated Mary Poppins Returns go down.” The AV Club. December 13. www.avclub. com/a-spoonful-of-nostalgia-helps-the-calculated-mary-poppi-1831031216. Accessed 2 March 2023. Castillo, Monica. 2018. “Reviews: Mary Poppins Returns.” Roger Ebert. December 19. www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mary-poppins-returns-2018. Accessed 2 March 2023. Escapay, Albert Ray. 2018. “What’s To Happen All Happened Before: Mary Poppins Returns (2018).” Alby Seeing You. December 31. www.albyseein gyou.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/whats-to-happen-all-happened-beforemary-poppins-returns-2018/. Accessed 2 March 2023. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. “The Uncanny” (1919). Vol. 17, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Stratchey. London: Hogarth Press LTD., 218–52.

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Gleiberman, Owen. 2018. “Film Review: Mary Poppins Returns.” Variety. December 12. www.variety.com/2018/film/reviews/mary-poppins-returnsreview-emily-blunt-1203085530/. Accessed 2 March 2023. Grilli, Giorgia. 2007. Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins: The Governess as Provocateur. New York: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda, and Mario Valdés. 2000. Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue. Poligrafías. Revista De Literatura Comparada 3: 18–41. Lacan, Jacques. 2021. The Object Relation: The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book IV , translated by A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lang, Brent, and Marc Malkin. 2018. “Mary Poppins Returns: Why Julie Andrews Turned Down a Cameo.” Variety. November 30. www.variety.com/ 2018/films/awards/mary-poppins-returns-julie-andrews-1203065856/. Accessed 2 March 2023. Robinson, Joanna. 2018. “Is It Really Fair to Call Mary Poppins Returns Derivative?” Vanity Fair. December 20. https://www.vanityfair.com/hol lywood/2018/12/is-mary-poppins-returns-based-on-the-books.Accessed 2 March 2023. Snetiker, Marc. 2018. “How Mary Poppins Returns Pulled Off that Animated Sequence.” EW . December 18. https://www.ew.com/movies/2018/12/ 21/mary-poppins-returns-animation/. Accessed 3 March 2023. Thompson, Andrew. 2013. The Secret Life of Mary Poppins: A Culture Show Special. Produced by BBC Scotland Arts. Performed by Victoria Coren Mitchell. Viagas, Robert. 2017. “Angela Lansbury Confirmed for Mary Poppins Sequel.” Playbill. February 17. https://www.playbill.com/article/angela-lansbury-con firmed-for-mary-poppins-sequel. Accessed 2 March 2023.

Pulling Our Strings: The Gothic Nostalgia of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria J. Simpson

The Gothic makes the invisible visible. As a genre, it draws forth the hidden forces that shape our lives, whether they be psychological or cultural or even supernatural. The image of a lone female protagonist wielding a candle against the darkness is a fitting one and Gothic Nostalgia offers a window into how a culture, at a particular moment, feels about and engages with the past and its own history. Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is unique in that it is a remake of a Gothic text. As such, it functions as both Gothic text and an example of Gothic Nostalgia, a mirror of a mirror, reflecting back the fear and anxieties of our present moment while still telling a dream-like tale organised around like classic Gothic characters, archetypes, tropes, and themes. This makes Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 classic a unique reflection and commentary on the present day, expressing both the desires as well as the anxieties of an increasingly uncertain age. Argento’s Suspiria was Gothic but not nostalgic. There is nothing to indicate that it was not set in the present day of 1970s West Germany. As such, it functions as more of a Fairy Tale or surreal Freudian fever

J. Simpson (B) Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_9

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dream. As a result, Guadagnino’s remake also functions, at least on some level, as a Gothic Fairy Tale. It is an example of both Gothic and toxic nostalgia due to its setting in the past and its remake status and, as this essay will argue, Guadagnino’s version is a definitive Gothic Nostalgia text that interrogates and satirises certain aspects of toxic nostalgia while still not being entirely free of its influence. Guadagnino’s Suspiria roughly follows the same loose plot of the original which it then greatly expands upon and deepens. It tells the story of Susie Bannon (Dakota Johnson), an American dancer who comes to West Berlin to study at the Markos Dance Academy under the tutelage of Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). When Susie arrives, she finds the school in a panic in the wake of the disappearance of another student, Patricia Hingle (Chloë Grace Moretz), after telling her psychologist, Jozef Klemperer (also Tilda Swinton) that the dance school was run by a coven of witches. Susie quickly establishes herself as an Ingénue and rising star. While rehearsing, another student, Olga (Elena Fokina), becomes agitated and threatens to leave. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a mirrored room where she is bewitched, her body badly broken in response to Susie’s powerful dance sequence in the other room. Her twisted body is disposed of by the coven wielding large, cruel iron hooks. Afterwards, the coven conducts a vote to see who will lead the dance school, either Madame Blanc or Mother Markos, the ancient witch the academy was named after. Markos retains her control, and one of the witches commits suicide. Meanwhile, Susie is selected to dance the lead in the academy’s next performance, a piece called “Volk”. Shortly before the debut performance, Susie’s friend Sara (Mia Goth) discovers Patricia’s mutilated body. She tries to run away but the coven summon a pit, where Sara falls and breaks her leg. She proceeds to dance on her broken leg, anyway, under the witches’ thrall. In the film’s final, incendiary climax, the coven initiates a ritual with the intention of transplanting Mother Markos’ spirit into Susie’s body. During the climax, it is revealed that Susie is actually Mater Suspiriorum, one of “The Three Mothers” that Patricia was investigating before her disappearance. Instead of the victim, Susie becomes the executioner, brutally slaying anyone loyal to Mother Marcos, sparing only those loyal to Madame Blanc.

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Suspiria (2018) as Gothic Nostalgic Text As a genre, the Gothic emerged as a response to The Enlightenment, an unconscious expression of doubts about the limits of logic and reason and the so-called “myth of progress.” The Gothic emerged as a Romantic resistance against the secularity and materialism of modernity. As the push towards technology and empiricism has increased, so has the Gothic, seeing peaks during times of uncertainty and particularly materialist eras— a perennial returning of the repressed, a drive towards the sublime, even if such “beyond human” desires lead to terror and annihilation, or what we might call the “negative sublime”. With its almost entirely female cast—teeming with feminine archetypes like ballerinas and witches; its mysterious, cloistered setting; its romanticised setting in the recent past; and its proliferation of secrets—Suspiria is a very Gothic text. Consequently, Suspiria undermines the patriarchal status quo that places “logic” and “reason” at the top of an imagined hierarchy. The Gothic, along with the feminine archetypes so often found in the genre, interrogates that supposed superiority, demanding a reckoning with the earthly and embodied as well as the emotional and intuitive. In Suspiria, although set in a world dominated by male, military, aggression as shown in its Cold War setting, it is women who have all the power, as illustrated in the scene where the coven bewitches two detectives investigating Patricia’s disappearance, emasculating them by mocking their genitals and making kitty noises. In situating his version in the near-past of 1977, Guadagnino accentuates the Gothic nature of the narrative. The Gothic is intimately concerned with rewriting and recontextualising the past, as observed by Isabella van Elferen: “The Gothic gaze into the past is not passive, and does not result in mere mirrored images. Gothic nostalgia is a gesture, a movement, an act, and one that intervenes with the structure and nature of the thing remembered” (2007, 3). Elferen goes on to talk more, at length, on Gothic Nostalgia and the role it plays in the Gothic genre, dividing its relation to the past to either nostalgia or perversion while resisting any attempt at historical accuracy. “The Gothic shows reality in uncanny mirror appearances: it thematizes the past in the present, the other in the self, transgression in nostalgia— Jekyll and Hyde symbolize the good and evil sides of one single person, Dracula is not alive nor dead, but undead, and contemporary Goths feel nostalgia for Victorian aesthetics but pervert them by adding fetishistic

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elements” (2007, 5). She then cites Gothic analyst Anne Williams about the historic rupture implicit in the Gothic. “Gothic fiction offers its readers an imaginative space that both insists on ‘reality,’ on historicity, on materiality, and at the same time liberates the reader from the constrictions of that history” (Williams qtd. in Elferen 2007, 5). Possibilities and potential pour forth from this uncanny rupture. Guadagnino’s Suspiria engages in both nostalgia and perversion, although not as much as you might expect from a remake. It illustrates the potential as well as the risks of each approach. Furthermore, it exemplifies the two main modes of nostalgia, according to critical theorist Svetlama Boym (2021). Restorative nostalgia is the drive to recreate the past while reflective nostalgia is content to let the past lie. The former is the most similar to nostalgia’s original interpretation as a mental illness, the most susceptible to seeing history through rose-coloured lenses. The latter listens to and learns from the past while acknowledging you cannot go home again. Further, Suspiria’s Gothic rewriting, along with its preoccupations with mirrors and doubles, speaks to a kind of Gothic postmodernism, as noted by theorist Joost de Bloois that reveals a craving for solid signifiers, for solid ground and concrete meaning in an uncanny age. De Bloois positions this uncertainty, this unknowability, in Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, claiming that the Gothic’s primal state is one of rupture and becoming. He writes, “To use Jacques Derrida’s expression from Specters of Marx, the Gothic has replaced ontology (and its firm belief in a solid common ground of all phenomena) by ‘hauntology’—the permanent intermediary, floating being of the revenant (that simultaneously has been—for it is dead—is—without being fully present—and is arriving—from the afterlife, from what remains to come” (de Bloois 2007, 45). Further, de Bloois observes: The Gothic thus a fundamental double-bind: it constitutes an irreparable rupture with an epoch that held confidence in the unmediated relation to an origin of reference (to use Derrida’s vocabulary once more, that held confidence in unmediated presence) the Gothic imbues language and meaning with difference and meaning with difference and tries to conjure the anxiety stirred by that very same action. Ghosts, vampires and monsters; the uncanny, the spectral and the haunting: as personae and

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figures of thought, they emerge from the epistemological slit from origin that is “uncannily attractive to us and in us ” (ibid).

De Bloois goes on to cite Michel Foucault, from “A Preface to Transgression”, where he talks of our inescapable pull towards repetition and doubling: This age of commentary in which we live, this historical redoubling from which there seems no escape, does not indicate the velocity of our language in a field now devoid of philosophical objects, which must be constantly recrossed in a forgetful and always rejuvenated glance. But far more to the point, it indicates the inadequacy, the profound silence, of a philosophical language that has been chased from its natural element, from its original dialectics, by the novelists found in its domain (Foucault 1999, 64).

According to Foucault, “ours is an age of rewriting, of redoubling (one could add: an age of the doppelgänger, and the uncanny): it seems to be haunted by the profound nostalgia of a time when its language, and its relation to language, was not as troublesome as it is today” (de Bloois 2007, 47). Suspiria is a good example of what is possible when you engage healthfully with the past. Guadagnino realised there was another story lurking beneath Argento’s original surreal nightmare fever dream. The myth and lore of The Three Mothers is some of the richest and most fascinating in horror history, but it is a bit confused and scattered in Argento’s original trilogy of films, spread out as it was over 30 years. Guadagnino’s film delivers the folklore of the Mothers of Sighs, Darkness, and Tears as one elegant, sinister history, whereas they can appear fragmentary and extraneous in Argento’s series of films. Alongside this, the 2018 remake has the benefit of the original’s success, guaranteeing a knowledgeable, nostalgic, audience allowing the director to spend less time on backstory and myth building and focus on his own story.

On Toxic Nostalgia in Suspiria The dark side of nostalgia is more symbolic in Suspiria, becoming a psychotropic allegory of leaving the collective unconscious unexamined and unexplored. The film’s climax is a modern ballet named Volk, a title

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with several layers of allusions to the German Nazis as well as implications for the populist movements that have been plaguing the twenty-first century. The term “volk” refers to völkisch, a people’s movement from the early twentieth century that paved the way for Nazism, and a term first popularised by Friedrich Nietszche. The dance itself even has ties to the Third Reich. David Kajganich, the screenwriter for the 2018 remake, cites the Weimar-era choreographer Mary Wigman as the inspiration for the movie’s choreography. Wigman was best-known for her three versions of Hexentanz, or “witch’s dance”, with the final performance being officially endorsed by the Third Reich. The witchcraft theme appealed to the Nazi’s fascination with the Occult and an appeal towards a romanticised pre-Christian past. These connections are made overt in the film itself, as it is implied the Markos Dance Company continued to perform during the war, a representation of powerful German womanhood. The Nazi themes allude to a nostalgic drive towards pre-industrial society, as noted by Frances Fukuyama in the footnotes of his influential The End of History, citing Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair: The latter traces a number of Nazi themes to a nostalgia for an organic, pre-industrial society, and a broad unhappiness with the atomizing and alienating characteristics of economic modernity. Khomeini’s Iran can be seen as a parallel case: Iran after World War II underwent a period of extremely rapid economic growth which completely disrupted traditional social relationships and cultural norms. Fundamentalist Shi’ism, like fascism, can be seen as a nostalgic effort to recover a form of pre-industrial society through new and radically different means (Fukuyama 363).

Psychiatrist David Viscott defines toxic nostalgia as “a subtle mixture of feelings, attitudes, perspectives and needs of different ages all showing themselves at once as the unresolved past attempts to define the present” (Viscott 1997, 299). On a more cultural level, toxic nostalgia invites nationalism, tribalism, xenophobia, and all manner of normativities, as noted by Simon Bacon in the opening essay to the collection Toxic Cultures: nostalgia that accentuates and often promotes ideological viewpoints that are excessively heteronormative, patriarchal and nationalistic—such toxic nostalgia can be seen to have energised the populist movements behind Brexit and Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign (my emphasis).

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By its very nature, of course, nostalgia is an idealised vision of the past, often to justify the mores of the present day. Here, though, history is recreated or certain aspects of it are exaggerated to influence future actions and decisions. Toxic nostalgia at best promotes delusion, but it can be used to manipulate and mislead those less likely to question the motivations of others who employ it in their vision of “what the people want” (2022, 6).

It is unresolved trauma and unexamined systems and privileges. If left unprocessed, it is allowed to metastasise, as symbolised by the character of Pennywise in Stephen King’s It, as noted by film theorist Daniel P. Comora in his essay “Toxic Nostalgia in Stephen King’s It ”. Not only does Pennywise represent the Loser’s Club childhood trauma, it also symbolises the town of Derry’s collective unconscious—all the buried racism, homophobia, child and sexual abuse that have so often refused to stay dead and buried and “come back to life” in the Gothic. Comora concludes his essay with a cautionary quote from film analyst Anthony Sacramone—writing on one of the most egregious examples of the other end of the toxic nostalgia spectrum, Ready Player One, “[o]ne of the functions of nostalgia is to be very selective. It keeps the good stuff and buries the bad—or buries the bad in a pit of hope that the worst is not yet to come” (Sacremone qtd. in Compora 2022, 261).

Suspiria as Gothic Fairy Tale With its witches and ballerinas; its cloistered domestic setting; its doubling and dream logic and preoccupation with feminine themes, tropes, and archetypes, Suspiria operates just as much as a fairy tale as a Gothic text. This does not mean it is whimsical and escapist, however. Psychologist and Jungian analyst Grace Edwards Lee notes that: Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of the collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore, their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche. In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious cultural material and

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therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly (1981, 26).

Fairy tales are, metaphorically speaking, the stuff that dreams are made of, the raw clay of our subconscious and imagination. As such, fairy tales offer the clearest and least distorted picture of our unconscious fears, hopes, dreams, and desires. This in no way suggests that fairy tales are apolitical or separated from day-to-day reality. Fairy tales, similar to Andrew Smith’s comments about ghosts, that equally exist in a dream-like state and “haunt” our waking hours, “Ghosts are historical beings because they are messengers about the preoccupations of a particular age” (2007, 163). Speaking more specifically on the politics of fairy tales, Jack Zipes writes how all the “loveable” characters and stories came from the real world full of real, political, problems, noting “if we reflect for a moment about the issues at stake, it becomes apparent that these enchanting, loveable tales are filled with all sorts of power struggles over kingdoms, rightful rule, money, women, children and land” and that: in essence, the meaning of the fairy tales can only be fully grasped if the magic spell is broken and if the politics and utopian impulse of the narratives are related to the socio-historical forces which distinguished them first as a precapitalist folk form (Volksmarchen) in an oral tradition and which then gave rise in Germany at the end of the 18th century to a bourgeois art form (Kunstmarchen) that has its own modern literary tradition (1975, 116).

Guadagnino’s film is a fairy tale for our specific moment—a not-sonostalgic Cold War-era feminist fairy tale. Here, the fairy tale is not so separate from reality though. Instead of bring sequestered away in a forest, as in the original, the ballet academy is instead a stone’s throw from the Berlin Wall, further invoking the ghost of World War II while, simultaneously, conjuring another revenant, the spirit of Communism. The concrete reality of the Berlin Wall invokes Derrida’s influential essay on its downfall, and the resulting psychic malaise of the triumph of the spectacle and late-stage capitalism, with its völkisch resonance “The spectral rumor now resonates, it invades everything: the spirit of the ‘sublime’ and the spirit of ‘nostalgia’ cross all borders. One hears, Marx quotes, ‘millions of spirits speak through the mouths of people’” (Derrida 1994, 169).

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The spectral slash of The Berlin Wall is a haunting visual shorthand, reverberating with Gothic significance. It is a striking visual metaphor for the disenchantment, Communist Nostalgia/Soviet Nostalgia that has since erupted into geopolitical turmoil in the years since Suspiria’ s release, anticipated by movies like Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Russians are not the only ones mourning the decline of the Soviet Union, either. The fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to psychically represent the triumph of Neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism, which is the central argument of both Spectres of Marx and The End of History. For all of its obvious and deadly issues, Communism did symbolise an alternative, of sorts, to the all-consuming maw of capitalism. For Western discontents, there was the daydream of escaping into East Germany/GDR—a different sort of Gothic Nostalgia, in the yearning for a simpler, more straightforward world. As noted by Finnish psychologist Atte Oksanen, “Even the former GDR had musical subcultures, including a strong punk scene but also a Gothic and wave scene. … The vigour of the dark scene (schwarze Szene) in Germany shares similarities with the rise of Gothic music in the late 1970s. In the face of mass unemployment, especially in East Germany, and the troubling past with its totalitarian regimes, the escape into dark themes, mysticism and individualism cherished by Gothic culture seems an understandable identity option” which has arguably suffered since Westernisation where, according to Oksanen, “there is a lot of discussion regarding the end of subcultures in the face of late modern mediated societies” (Oksanen 2007, 127). The original Suspiria was implicitly inspired by fairy tales, as well, largely in its production and set design. Film critic and Argento biographer Maitland McDonagh quotes “we were trying to reproduce the color of Walt Disney’s Snow White; it has been said from the beginning that Technicolor lacked subdued shades, was without nuances like cut-out cartoons” (2010, 144). This referentiality to cartoons and early cinema indicates that both versions of Suspiria function as postmodern fairy tales, as well as Gothic. It’s also illustrative of how modern media are the fairy tales, myth, and folklore of our day. Their Gothic and postmodern status in no way prevents both versions of Suspiria from also functioning as traditional fairy tales, though. The prevalence of threes/trinities and the continual references to Mothers in the Suspiria universe demand some sort of reckoning with Pagan, Occult, and folkloric roots. There are three Mothers, three houses, and even three movies in the original series. 2018’s Suspiria takes the symbolic

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numerology even further, with Tilda Swinton playing three roles— Madame Blanc, Jozef Klemperer, and Helena Markos. These trinities are an inversion of the Christian Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, returning the three to its Pagan, pre-Christian origins, alluding to powerful feminine trios like The Three Graces, The Three Furies, and The Three Fates. They dismantle the patriarchal Judeo-Christian constructs in favour of more natural forces, like the three phases of the moon, restoring power, respect, agency, and even fear to women and femininity. The everyday, humdrum reality of 2018’s Suspiria is perhaps one of its most striking aspects. By placing its psycho-spiritual allegory in the thick of a bleak urban landscape instead of a dark, magical forest, Guadagnino seems to be saying that these hidden, occult forces are closer-to-hand, more prevalent, and more central than ever. It is an interesting point that the collective imagination, hopes, and dreams are so much less Technicolor as they were in the 1970s, and so much more drab and dreary almost 50 years later. It is arguably even more alarming that many of the struggles alluded to in Suspiria—most notably, women’s empowerment and autonomy, class tension, income inequality, and collective guilt—are still in question if not, at times, moving backwards. With his Suspiria, Guadagnino draws out these hidden currents for analysis and deconstruction. While making an overtly political movie, full of important conversations, he defies soapboxing and moralising. While it may be a fairy tale, it is still a Gothic fairy tale. And like many such stories that focus on the female coming of age, the two versions of Suspiria can be read as prolonged, phantasmagoric evocations of womanhood—specifically the transition from girlhood to adulthood. Despite its relentless depictions of female strength and power, some argued, at the time of its release, that it could not be a feminist film, in light of The Love Witch’ s Anna Biller’s admonition that a feminist movie should “have the express purpose of educating its audience about social inequality between men and women (and, I would argue, not take pleasure in the voyeuristic degradation or destruction of women)” (2018). Suspiria does not linger long on gender inequality—for the most part, men simply do not exist in the world of Suspiria. As far as depicting degradation or destruction of women, there is plenty of that. In this case, it’s women causing the mayhem, being both the actors and the ones acted upon. In Suspiria, women have all the agency. Perhaps more than anything, Suspiria is an allegory for Susie’s sexual awakening, even more so than Argento’s version. It is heavily implied that

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she is still a virgin, memorably stating “it felt like what I imagine it must feel like to fuck”. To make it clear this comment was not merely meant to serve the male gaze, Madame Blanc archly inquires, “you mean fuck a man?” to which Susie replies “I was thinking more of an animal”. By the end of the film, Susie fully inhabits her self-knowledge and sexual power, orgasmically crying out towards the film’s blood-soaked climax, “I know who I am!” She has become Mother Suspirium, the bringer of Death.

Pulling Our Strings: We Are All Olga (And Also Maybe Susie) In one of Suspiria’ s most stunning, striking sequences, Olga finds herself trapped in a mirrored room. Elsewhere, Madame Blanc charms Susie’s hands and feet before asking her to dance the lead in Volk. As Susie leaps, twirls, spins, flails, and flings her arms, Olga is pulled, prodded, and flung—a grotesque meat-marionette with invisible strings left broken, hideously contorted, drooling and weeping, creating one of the film’s strongest metaphors for the state of contemporary life. The Gothic makes the invisible visible. It illuminates the dark, the lost, the buried and hidden. It makes the subtle too obvious to ignore, pulling out hidden currents and forces into the glaring light of day so they can be reckoned with. Thanks to powerful technology, constant connectivity, and more information than any other time in human history, we’re delving even deeper into the darkness. We have the capability to engage in deep, important, nuanced conversations about privilege, about the systems that support us and keep us alive and how we might be implicit. Yet, armed with this knowledge and insight, we most often choose to do nothing. Self-knowledge does not automatically lead to self-wisdom. We might know our buttons are being pushed, that we are constantly being manipulated, and most likely for the benefit of someone who stands to gain from our isolation and upset. Despite all of this awareness, we still choose to like, respond, retweet, and be distracted from action. We allow ourselves to dance to another’s tune, and occasionally strangled, on invisible strings. Luca Guadagnino asks difficult questions in his masterful, thoughtful, artful vision about agency, complicity, and self-interest. The Gothic, as Tyler V. Deal argues:

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draws forth disturbing truths about the human psyche, allowing the reader to face the uncomfortable boundary of the unconscious, without necessarily resolving any fears. However, these fears may be necessary for the individual, culture, and society to examine in order to advance beyond the world’s instability. The influences which shaped these authors to create horrific narratives were not only constructed from their own psyche but, more importantly, came from society and the culture of the time (2020, 73).

The issues raised by Suspiria were important in 1977 and they were just as important in 2018, and they still implore us to be aware of the toxic nature of outworn ideas and who is actually pulling our strings.

Works Cited Bacon, Simon. 2022. “Introduction.” In Toxic Cultures: A Companion, ed. Simon Bacon, 1–16. Oxford: Peter Lang. Billers, Anne. 2018. “Le’t’s Stop Calling Movies Feminist.” Anna Billers Blog, February 5. http://annabillersblog.blogspot.com/2018/02/lets-stopcalling-movies-feminist.html. Accessed 30 April 2023. Boym, Svetlana. 2021. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Compora, Daniel P. 2022. “Toxic Nostalgia in Stephen King’s IT.” In Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT , ed. Whitney S. May, 149–164. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Deal, Tyler V. 2020. “Disturbing Insights: Revealing Hidden Fears in Gothic Literature.” Hohonu, Vol. 18. University of Hawai’i at Hilo, 73–76, hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/Distur bingInsightsRevealingHiddenFearsinGothicLiterature.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2023. de Bloois, Joost. 2007. “A Postscript to Transgression: The Gothic in Georges Batalle’s Dissident Avant-Gardism.” In Nostalgia or Perversion?: Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century Until the Present Day, ed. Isabelle van Elferen, 44–48. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge. van Elferen, Isabelle. 2007. “Introduction.” In Nostalgia or Perversion?: Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century Until the Present Day, ed. Isabelle van Elferen, 1–11. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Foucault, Michel. 1999. Religion and Culture, trans. by Jeremy R. Carrette. New York: Routledge. Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.

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Lee, Grace Edwards. 1981. An Introduction to the Psychology of Fairy Tales [dissertation]. Northridge: California State University. https://scholarworks. calstate.edu/downloads/41687m40t. Accessed 6 June 2023. McDonagh, Maitland. 2010. Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds the Dark Dreams of Dario Argento. University of Minnesota Press. Oksanen, Atte. 2007. “Hollow Spaces of Psyche: Gothic Trance-Formation From Joy Division to Diary of Dreams.” In Nostalgia or Perversion?: Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century Until the Present Day, ed. Isabelle van Elferen, 124–136. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Smith, Andrew. 2007. “Hauntings,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 153. Viscott, David S. 1997. Emotional Resilience: Simple Truths for Dealing with the Unfinished Business of your Past. Crown Trade Paperbacks. Zipes, Jack. 1975. “Breaking the Magic Spell: Politics and the Fairy Tale.” New German Critique 6: 116. https://doi.org/10.2307/487657.

“I Just Wanted to Preserve It Just as It Is”: Gothic Nostalgia in The Watcher Abel F. Fenwick

Introduction Despite spending two weeks in the streaming service’s coveted mostwatched spot and attaining an impressive 273 million viewing hours during that time (Economic Times 2022), Netflix’s The Watcher— which depicts a fictionalised version of the true story of a couple plagued by threatening letters from someone known only as the “Watcher” (Wiedeman 2018)—has proven to be somewhat of a cultural flash in the pan. While its reception was deeply divisive among media critics, a through line between both positive and negative reviews of the show suggests the reasons why (Tassi 2022, Di Joy 2022, D’Addario 2022). Stuart Heritage’s review of the show for The Guardian perhaps best encapsulates the preconceptions attached to Ryan Murphy’s name, asserting that the writer and director dealt solely in “real life stories [or] horror” (Heritage 2022). Despite being tagged under the categories “Mystery programs” and “TV Thrillers” on Netflix itself, a trailer featuring all the musical hallmarks expected of a horror film (Lepore 2014) and explicitly linking Murphy to his past role as “The Creator

A. F. Fenwick (B) Independent Scholar, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_10

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of American Horror Story” (Netflix 2022) only furthered the expectations of “all scare, all the time” (Tucker 2012) filmmaking attached to his name. Such expectations meant that fans and critics familiar with his work came away from The Watcher as disappointed as the newcomers hoping to watch a grounded series “Based on the Shocking True Story” of the real-life Broaddus family (Netflix 2022; D’Addario 2022). While The Watcher may have failed to provide the stylistic hallmarks required by both the horror and true crime genres, this essay will argue that the show succeeds as a work of Gothic television. From red herrings to latent incestuous urges (Botting 1996, 5), the show employs Gothic tropes from a variety of subgenres then confidently subverts them. As well as employing hallmarks of European Gothic literature such as “torturous, fragmented narratives relaying mysterious incidents, horrible images and life-threatening pursuits” (Botting 1996, 2), the show visually links itself to American Gothic traditions by dressing antagonists Pearl and Jasper in clothes resembling the Grant Wood painting of the same name (Heritage 2022; Budds 2022). If read against the checklist of tropes listed in Bernice M. Murphy’s seminal The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture, furthermore, the show is revealed to be an almost textbook example of suburban Gothic, wherein a family “falls into debt and financial entanglement” seeking a “safe place for children” (2009: 3), which is quickly revealed to be anything but. Perhaps the most important Gothic trope employed by Murphy is that of the haunted house, the undermining of which reveals the true Gothic concerns which underpin the series. From unexplained incidents such as “instruments playing themselves [being] used to indicate ghosts” (Van Elferen 2007, 2012, 67) to a convoluted tale of cult activity in the basement of 657 Boulevard, the idea of the house being haunted by something supernatural possesses the series. By the fifth episode, however, the viewer and the Brannock family discover physical evidence linking the ghostly incidents to very human interference. Ryan Murphy’s choice in the show to link no less than nine people to the “Watcher” letters highlights the importance of their common obsession: 657 Boulevard, a house which, this essay will argue, is haunted only by its status as a locus for nostalgia. Throughout the narrative, in attempts to preserve their own ideas of what the house represents, a series of individuals engage in what Isabella van Elferen terms gothic nostalgia—autonomous and often threatening acts which seek to drive out the new owners and in doing so,

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maintain the “structure and nature of the thing [they personally] remembered” (2007, 3). To both the residents, neighbours and admirers of 657 Boulevard, ownership of the house represents control of an idealised past which, while having never existed, is worth committing unspeakable acts to reclaim.

“It’s This Dumbwaiter, You Know. It’s a National Treasure”: 657 Boulevard as Nostalgia for Other Times The first—and perhaps the most plausible—suspects are the members of the Westfield Preservation Society, whose unusually vested interest in maintaining the historical features of 657 Boulevard are responsible for the majority of The Watcher’s scares. And it is their innate sense of ownership of the building that is seismically disturbed when the Brannock family usurp that by moving into the house. From the very first moments they appear on screen, the clothing worn by Jasper and Pearl Winslow foregrounds their role within the series: an embodiment of Gothic nostalgia which marks the pair out as relics of a bygone time. The “green vertical stripes [and Sunday shirt] without its collar” (Hoving 2005, 26) worn by the man and “prudish collar [with Italian] cameo” (2005, 39) adopted by the female sitter of Grant Wallis’ American Gothic are painstakingly recreated by the show’s costume department, a visual reference immediately acknowledged by critics (Budds 2022; Heritage 2022). This perhaps too on-the-nose costuming serves a dual purpose. As well as marking the pair out as “tintypes frozen in the past, positioned as vanguards of local culture”, as critic Angelica Villa (2022) argues, the choice to wear historic dress within the 1920s building signifies that the “house and couple are utterly unified” (Hoving 2005, 20), foreshadowing the emotional connection the house and siblings share. Despite an admission that officially, the organisation’s scope only involves “preserving […] the facades of historic buildings” (“Haunted”, season 1, episode 7), the Westfield Preservation Society’s quest to oust the Brannock family is triggered by a threat to remove the house’s dumbwaiter: a “national treasure” (“Welcome, Friends”, season 1, episode 1) which also represents a source of deep personal nostalgia for the Winslow siblings. Like all the show’s Watcher suspects, the first introduction of the family is during the premiere episode’s open house scene, where Pearl is shown trying to keep her brother out of the house’s dumbwaiter long enough to get him to return to their home. Repeated uses of the word “treasure” are used throughout the first episode to emphasise the dumbwaiter’s historic

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value to the new owner, with references to an astonishing fourteen meetings held by the Westfield Preservation society about the feature further compounding the dumbwaiter’s importance. This emphasis also functions as a form of foreshadowing for one of the series’ more Gothic scares. Later in the episode, both the viewer and the Brannocks’ youngest child are frightened by the sudden appearance of Jasper from within the dumbwaiter, a shock which leads to a furious Deanforcibly removing him from their home. While certainly a strange and, arguably, “grotesque” (Spiegel 1972), figure, Jasper Winslow is initially portrayed as “harmless” and child-like. Although his presence in the dumbwaiter is unexpected enough to cause both the family and the viewer to jump, and his usage of the word “boo” furthers the child-like aspect of his character, marking the incident out as a juvenile prank rather than an act of malice. Understanding the harmless nature of her brother’s behaviour, Pearl is appalled by the violence with which Dean expels and then threatens him, leading to the following exchange: Pearl: All the previous owners were just fine with him doing that. Every owner for the past 60 years. To a person, that dumbwaiter was their favorite part of the house. They loved that dumbwaiter. And they loved that Jasper loves playing in it. And that’s why the Preservation Society works so hard to keep it. Dean: Look, I don’t know many people with a dumbwaiter, but I don’t know anybody who’d be okay with a stranger breaking in and riding on it. Pearl: That’s what’s wrong with the world these days. The word “neighbor” just doesn’t mean what it used to. (“Welcome, Friends”, season 1, episode 1)

Pearl revealing personal relationships with sixty years’ worth of previous owners assigns an astonishing sense of chronology to her argument, establishing a link to 657 Boulevard almost as old as the house itself. This timescale also goes some way to contextualise Jasper’s strange behaviour, proving it harmless if, admittedly, somewhat unsettling. The later revelation that Jasper’s strange behaviour is caused in part by posttraumatic stress disorder allows him to “transcend his deformity and [instead represent] suffering innocence” (Spiegel 1972, 429), completing the arc Alan Spiegel argues allows Gothic’s grotesque figures to gain their audience’s sympathy. The revelation that the house’s dumbwaiter offers a singular source of comfort for a deeply traumatised brother marks it out as an object of personal nostalgia for Pearl important enough to perhaps

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supersede its much-discussed historic value. By attempting to oust Dean before he can remove the dumbwaiter, Pearl hopes to instal a new and more understanding neighbour, allowing Jasper and herself access to the physical manifestation of their nostalgic past. Her criticism of societal values changing over time, however, reveals a secondary Gothic concern: a dangerous conflation of “personal nostalgia for her dwindling childhood [and a] broader national nostalgia for a seemingly more prosperous, productive [and] meaningful” (Kirkland 2021, 120) historic past. The Westfield Historical Society’s push to preserve the historical features of 657 Boulevard comes from a similar urge to represent an idealised history of America, a “nostalgic representation of a more natural form of dwelling” (Jameson 1991, 170) entirely defined by Pearl’s idealised memories of “community”, craftsmanship and neighbourly connection. The nostalgia which leads the Westfield Historical Society to create an idealistic, artificially constructed past, however, is shown to trigger a very real nationalistic urge to defend it. Fears of a loss of identity incurred by forgetting America’s historic past are expanded upon further in an extraordinary speech by the Westfield Preservation Society’s third member William “Bill” Webster: How long have I been a member of this group? Five, six years? A decade? I lost count. When did it start happening? All the change? This compulsion to pervert the very things that surround us, that do not need changing. Was it the computer? Was it when we removed the human soul and put a machine in its place? I don’t know. I don’t know, but it is maddening. The banality of it. To stand there, while 3,000 years of culture are just flushed down the toilet as if there’s nothing to be done about it. I say there is something to be done. We must muster up the courage to say “No, I do not consent to this.” That’s the voice that will echo the loudest. That is the cry ... that will reverberate through generations. (“The Gloaming”, season 1, episode 6)

Although more subtly expressed than the examples listed in Sandrine Sanos’ groundbreaking The Aesthetics of Hate (2012), Webster’s speech contains a veritable checklist of far-right talking points. His reference to “3000 years of culture”, while deliberately vague, could either refer to the onset of Christianity or the Athenian democracy which heavily influenced the American political system: two core American values far-right nationalists frequently proclaim to be under threat (Mondon and Winter 2020). Furthermore, while the idea of a singular national culture defined

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by “inherited taste and aesthetic appreciation” (Sanos 2012, 112) which must be defended from “perver[sion by] external forces” (2012, 103) is utterly inapplicable to American history, its usage by the Westfield Preservation Society allows them to “displace the long-standing anxieties regarding [self], nation and civilisation” (2012, 90) onto an external threat. As well as taking legal action against people attempting to trim the branches of the town’s chinquapin trees, the group also engages in illegal actions such as the destruction of windows they feel are wrong for a historic property and, in perhaps the show’s most shocking moment, the killing of the Brannock’s pet ferret. While this animal cruelty is never shown on screen, descriptions of Jasper taking a “hammer and [smashing] every pane in every window” echo the gruesome description of the ferret’s “crush[ed] skull” and emphasises the violence with which the organisation pursues their goal of keeping their town “the way that it ought to be”. By expelling the “yuppies” who pose a threat to the town’s historic architecture and conservative social fabric, the Westfield Preservation Society can reinstate 657 Boulevard’s historic features, preserving the house as a monument to a Gothic past which never truly existed.

“We Used to Call It ‘Rocket’. Now It’s All French”: 657 Boulevard as Nostalgia for Other Values The Watcher’s central plot, which focuses on an affluent family moving to the suburbs to pursue a nostalgic idea of the American Dream, reflects wider societal concerns about housing in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic. While the pandemic is never explicitly mentioned in the series, the release of The Watcher in October 2022 meant the memory of lockdowns enacted across the world would have been fresh in the minds of most viewers. The pandemic, reflects journalist Joy Lo Dico, changed the priorities of wealthy city-dwelling Americans, leading them “to find a better house, preferably detached and somewhere salubrious, and certainly out of the filthy city” (2022). Though thematic links between urban spaces and contagious disease have underpinned works of Gothic literature since Dracula (Botting 1996, 127), Dean’s description of the city as a “sickness” that he must protect his family from is instilled with extra meaning in the immediate aftermath of a global pandemic. Nora’s later reflection that “The air. It’s different here. I can breathe”

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while likely intended to reflect upon the change in pace of life between New York City and the suburbs, further reveals the Gothic spectre of the pandemic which haunts the series. Dean Brannock’s desire for his “kids to have their own rooms [and] a yard that’s big enough for them to play in” again reflects a yearning for physical space made acutely topical in the aftermath of the lockdowns, and furthers an idealised view of the suburbs as “a bucholic refuge from the overcrowded and polluted cities” (Murphy 2009, 3) held by many middle-class Americans. The wave of middle-class migration to the suburbs triggered by lockdown, however, had the effect of “overheat[ing]” (Lo Dico 2022) the housing market, sending house prices soaring and making it ever more difficult to afford the area’s property. Despite being unable to afford it, Dean buys the house anyway, justifying his purchase to a sceptical banker with assurances that the area is so safe, “people don’t even lock their doors”. This boast is entirely unsubstantiated, and later rendered terribly ironic when the frequency of intrusions into their home lead to the family installing a security system. It does, however, express Dean’s belief in the American Dream, an idealised and nostalgic view of the suburbs as a seat of middle-class prosperity which blinds him to the recklessness of his financial investments. In attempting to secure a safe haven for his family, Dean bankrupts them, trapping them in a suburban Gothic nightmare where the very conservative values he ought to preserve by moving there are used as a weapon against him. To more fully understand the nostalgic ideas the house symbolises for Dean, we must first unpack the tangles of masculinity, society and power which have traditionally marked home ownership out as the true epitome of the American Dream. Excepting architectural features such as the dumbwaiter common to Gothic narratives, Murphy’s presentation of the house itself is surprisingly free of Gothic characteristics. The house in Gothic fiction often functions as a physical reflection of the psychological, with the twisted and misshapen “architectural space [representing the disordered] psychological mechanisms” (van Elferen 2007, 226) of its owner. Although the structure of 456 Boulevard is revealed to contain secret tunnels, their presence actually counts as physical evidence of people entering their home, discounting the idea that the threatening incidents are an invention of Dean’s increasingly disturbed psychological state. While the house cannot be argued to represent Dean, it does represent something to Dean far larger than a simple haven for his family. The house in Western culture is still symbolic of the social attainment, and in

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the United States in particular that of the American Dream, defined by Marilyn Chandler as: a freestanding single-family dwelling, which to many remains the most significant measure of the cultural enfranchisement that comes with being an independent, self-sufficient (traditionally male) individual in full possession and control of home and family […] Behind the myth lies the enduring idea that a man’s house represents his self […] and becomes, as it grows into a home, a direct extension of that self into the enduring media of wood and stone. (1991, 1–2)

By purchasing 456 Boulevard, Dean is able to relocate his family to a suburban area away from the city and all the threat of contagion it poses. As well as a physical space he can reshape it in his own image, as moving to Westfield also allows him to assert his patriarchal ideals more fully upon his daughter, neutralising the threat of her budding sexuality (Botting 1996, 5) by relocating her to a geographically remote area. By moving to the suburbs, Dean hopes to position himself head of a “normal family”, a phrasing which coveys nostalgic ideas of social conformity maintained by close relations with neighbours and underpinned by strong patriarchal control (Murphy 2009, 69). This attempt to enforce his personal ideas of traditional values upon the present, however, brings him into conflict with both the future represented by his daughter and the Gothic past his neighbours will go to any lengths to maintain. Dean’s unsuccessful attempts to pursue his nostalgic suburban dream eventually cost him everything, from his mental health to his job and nearly his marriage. In spite of this, he maintains an inexplicable nostalgia for 456 Boulevard: a “mystification” of his lost home which manifests itself in a “yearning for what [he cannot admit to himself he] has destroyed” (Rosaldo 1989, 69). The extreme anxiety Dean feels over his unaffordable and uncontrollable home is shown to impact every aspect of his life, from being fired from his high-paid job to a severe decline in his mental health. Recognising this, his wife Nora sells the house, forcing him to go to therapy in a move that seems to have gone some way to save their marriage by the opening of the final episode, “Haunting”. The present tense used in the episode’s title, however, proves deeply telling. This sale—a course of action necessary to ensure the physical safety of the family—is not without protests from Dean, who begs her to take the house off the market until he can prove the identity of the Watcher. This

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quest continues to haunt him even after the house’s sale and reflects the deep-rooted psychological disturbance caused by the loss of 456 Boulevard. If financial cost was the only attachment Dean felt towards the house, an LLC buying the house for just under offer would have resolved it. Losing his home, however, represents a failure of the wider American Dream and causes him to undergo a deep-rooted crisis of masculine identity. Far from enjoying power over both his family and his space, Dean ends the series as an unemployed “parasite” dependent upon his wife’s single income, with even his prized butcher block torn out by the house’s new owner. Daniel D’Addario is right to identify themes of “trauma and dislocation” (2022) in the show’s last episode, with Dean’s own admission that he “couldn’t sleep” due to recurrent thoughts about possible suspects implying incidents of traumatic repetition. Rather than admit his own financial mismanagement and personal failings played a role in the loss of 456 Boulevard, however, Dean places all the blame upon the figure of the Watcher, an external agent who “ripped [away]” a perfect way of life from him and his family—an idealised life his wife is quick to remind him they “never had”. Like the Westfield Preservation Society before him, Dean seeks to vanquish an external scapegoat and restore the physical features he installed in 657, attempting to restore both house and psyche by reclaiming the physical representation of the nostalgic past. The series concludes with Dean adopting the mantle of the Watcher himself, “haunting” the exterior of the house and lying to his wife about his therapy working. His actions reflect the toxic nostalgia of a broken man, one so utterly consumed by the idealised past the house represents that his actions destroy all hope of a future with his family.

“Your Home Gave Me Comfort from Afar, Something I Could Dream About”: 657 Boulevard as Nostalgia for Other Lives Perhaps the most obvious proof of the toxic nostalgia attached to 657 Boulevard comes from the narrative of Roger Kaplan, a local teacher who proudly displays a life-long obsession with the house despite having never actually lived in it. Although introduced to the viewer early in the show’s first episode, Roger Kaplan only emerges as a suspect in the fifth, “Occam’s Razor”, after the Brannock’s neighbours reveal that they also received anonymous letters with the heading “Ode to a House”. By

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researching the term online, the couple’s eldest daughter Ellie discovers a Facebook group set up by Westfield High School alumni, who share the anonymous letters they mailed throughout the neighbourhood as part of a creative writing assignment. The face of the teacher who sets the task, Roger Kaplan, is immediately familiar to Nora, who remembers him from the deliberately off-putting question he asked at the open house. Due to this longstanding pattern of behaviour and physical evidence of another threatening letter using “the same writing style, same typeface [and] even the same paper stock”, Kaplan quickly emerges as the most plausible suspect. As well as physical evidence tying him to the threatening letters, his narrative contains far less supernatural elements than that of the other Watcher suspects Mo and Mitch. His motivations do, however, seem far more “bizarre” than those of the Westfield Preservation Society, especially given the fact that he never resided in 657 Boulevard. The justification offered by investigator Theodora Birch, however, reveals the origins of his obsession with the house: “He lived in a tiny apartment with his mother, who was divorced […] a poor kid from a broken family. And here he sees his friends, no different from him, living in these mansions that would have seemed like Shangri-la to him” (“The Gloaming”, season 1, episode 6). While the use of “Shangri-la” here is more likely meant as cultural shorthand for “an earthly paradise [and] place of retreat from the worries of modern civilization”, it is important to acknowledge the origins of the phrase: that of a fictional “fairy-land” (1936, 144) in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. 657 Boulevard and 89 Maple Grove Lane represent dreamlike or fairy tale spaces to Roger, idealised locations which functioned as havens offering him a chance to escape from the realities of his mother’s low economic status and “shameful” divorce. Although the nostalgia he experiences differs from the historical recollections of the house felt by Dean, Pearl and Jasper, it is portrayed as no less intense and its manifestation perhaps even more personal. During an interview with his ex-wife Trish, the history of both Roger’s obsessional love for the house and the personal difficulties which kept him from owning it are discovered: So he grew up wanting to be an architect, go to architecture school... But he couldn’t afford it. He was poor. So, instead, he goes to community college. Does night classes at Rutgers, and then gets a job teaching English at Westfield High […] But then one day, 89 Maple Grove Lane came on the market. […] The agent told him to write a letter to the sellers, tell

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them how much he loved the house, how much it meant to him ever since he was a child, that he would take better care of it than the other buyers, even though their offer wasn’t as high. […] They went with a higher offer. (“The Gloaming”, season 1, episode 6)

This pattern of financial difficulties stopping him from possessing his idealised home recurs throughout Roger’s life, denying him both the affluent upbringing enjoyed by his peers and a home to raise a family in. While such disappointment would upset anybody, the revelation he “wasn’t that upset when his mother died” reveals the level of the allconsuming nature of his devotion to 657 Boulevard and 89 Maple Grove Lane. His decision to channel this emotional turmoil into an assignment where his students “find a house [they love and] write a love letter to it” further paints his pursuit of the homes he loved from childhood as obsessional. The only detail that throws any doubt onto the large amounts of evidence linking Kaplan to the Watcher is the fact that “Roger writes to the house [whereas] The Watcher… He, she, they, write to the homeowner”. However, his personification of the property only serves to prove the intensely personal nature of the attachment Roger feels towards both homes: Dear 55 Oak Terrace. Why don’t you ever write me back? I’ve spent so much of my life loving you, admiring you, and what do I get in return? Nothing. I’ve given you my love, my longing. What is it that you want then? My anger? I promise, you don’t want that. You’d be very sorry to know what that looks like. (“The Gloaming”, season 1, episode 6)

Roger’s pursuit of 657 Boulevard represents, as Svetlana Boym succinctly summarises, “a nostalgic desire to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time as space” (2001, XV). By owning the home that symbolised a fairy land in which he could escape his own family’s financial hardship and broken marriage, Roger, like Dean, can achieve the American dream and come to terms with his own past: an obsession which drives him to haunt the house in the present day and, predictably, in any future in which he does not attain it.

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Conclusion Ryan Murphy’s choice to forgo the supernatural in The Watcher may have confused critics and disappointed fans expecting more of his trademark horror. By revealing 456 Boulevard to be just a house—a neutral space haunted only by the personal issues projected onto it by others— The Watcher is free to perform the time-honoured Gothic function of reflecting the audience’s own anxieties about society back at itself (Botting 1996, 3). While the mixed nature of the show’s critical reception has been established throughout this essay, the astonishing viewership statistics racked up within the first two weeks of the show’s air date express the show tapping into a seemingly popular area of concern. While the narrative of a family pursuing the “suburban dream without fully considering whether they can actually afford to do so” (Murphy 2009, 112) has been a mainstay of the suburban Gothic since the release of The Amityville Horror (Rosenburg 1979), the increasingly volatile state of the contemporary housing market means that the threat of “negative equity stalk[ing] the shadows” (Di Joy 2022) poses as great a threat to the safety of the family as any supernatural presence. The true Gothic “monster” that haunts The Watcher, therefore, is that of wider cultural anxieties over home ownership in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street crash. Dean’s choice to incur financial ruin pursuing the nostalgic idea of suburban life reflects the fraught choices faced by the younger generation. Despite the Brannock family being firmly situated within the American middle classes due to Dean’s job as a lawyer, even he is shown to struggle to get a mortgage due to poor credit. While mentions of a bankruptcy which nearly caused the Brannocks to divorce “ten years” before the events of the series are never truly expanded upon, the time frame ties them neatly to the 2008 housing crisis. While the three-million-dollar cost of his own house does somewhat undermine his argument, Dean’s lament that American culture encourages “everybody [to buy] a house they can’t afford” is a surprisingly insightful synopsis of the struggles faced by individuals of all classes in the current housing crisis. Dean’s decision to engage in “home ownership as a completion of the rites of passage into maturity” (Chandler 1991: 16) at the detriment of his own finances in an increasingly nightmarish housing market is shown to endanger both the physical safety of his family and the survival of his marriage. Even after having lost it all, however, his desire for the ideal suburban life symbolised by 657 Boulevard leads him to engage in acts of gothic nostalgia

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and become the newest Watcher, actively trying to scare away the next dreamers unlucky enough to move in.

Works Cited Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London: Routledge. Budds, Diana. 2022. “The Watcher in The Watcher Is (Probably) a TradArch Guy.” Curbed, October 21. https://www.curbed.com/2022/10/net flix-watcher-ryan-murphy-mia-farrow-historic-preservation.html. Accessed 23 July 2023. Chandler, Marilyn R. 1991. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. D’Addario, Daniel. 2022. “‘The Watcher’ Sucks the Suspense from a True-Life Horror Story: TV Review.” Variety, October 13. https://variety.com/2022/ tv/reviews/the-watcher-netflix-review-ryan-murphy-naomi-watts-bobby-can navale-1235402553/. Accessed 23 July 2023. Economic Times. 2022. “‘The Watcher’ Season 2 Officially Announced by Netflix.” November 7. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/int ernational/us/the-watcher-season-2-officially-announced-by-netflix/articl eshow/95364839.cms. Accessed 23 July 2023. Heritage, Stuart. 2022. “The Watcher Review—Ryan Murphy Serves up a Seven-Hour Whodunnit About a Typewriter.” The Guardian, October 14. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/14/the-watcherreview-ryan-murphy-serves-up-a-seven-hour-whodunnit-about-a-typewriter. Accessed 23 July 2023. Hilton, James. 1936. Lost Horizon. London: William Morrow & Co. Hoving, Thomas. 2005. American Gothic: The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece. New York: Chamberlain Bros. Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Lepore, Olivia. 2014. “Movie Trailers: Appealing to Millennials.” Unpublished MA thesis, University of Minnesota. https://conservancy.umn.edu/bit stream/handle/11299/166758/Lepore,%20Olivia.pdf;sequence=1. Accessed 23 July 2023. Lo Dico, Joy. 2022. “The Real Horror in ‘The Watcher’? The Overheated Property Market.” Financial Times, October 13. https://www.ft.com/content/ 269f61c4-a46c-4017-b561-96742f803177. Accessed 27 July 2023. Kirkland, Ewan. 2021. Videogames and the Gothic. London: Taylor & Francis. Mondon, Aurelien, and Winter, Aaron. 2020. Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream. London and New York City: Verso Books.

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Murphy, Bernice M. 2009. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Netflix. 2022. “‘The Watcher’ Trailer.” Netflix TUDUM , September 25. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/videos/the-watcher-trailer. Accessed 23 July 2023. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Sanos, Sandrine. 2012. The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Spiegel, Alan. 1972. “A Theory of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” The Georgia Review 26 (4) (Winter): 426–37. Tassi, Paul. 2022. “Netflix’s ‘The Watcher’ Is Not Worth Your Time.” Forbes, October 17. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/10/17/ netflixs-the-watcher-is-not-worth-your-time/?sh=9707e562af96. Accessed 23 July 2023. The Watcher. 2022. Created by Ryan Murphy. “Welcome, Friends”, Season 1, Episode 1, October 13. Los Gatos: Netflix. The Watcher. 2022. Created by Ryan Murphy. “Occam’s Razor”, Season 1, Episode 5, October 13. Los Gatos: Netflix. The Watcher. 2022. Created by Ryan Murphy. “The Gloaming”, Season 1, Episode 6, “The Gloaming”, October 13. Los Gatos: Netflix. The Watcher. 2022. Created by Ryan Murphy. “Haunting”, Season 1, Episode 7, October 13. Los Gatos: Netflix. Tucker, Ken. 2012. “American Horror Story.” Entertainment Weekly, May 16. https://ew.com/article/2012/05/16/american-horror-story/. Accessed 23 July 2023. Van Elferen, Isabella. 2007. “Introduction: Nostalgia and Perversion in Gothic Rewriting.” In Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century Until the Present Day, edited by Isabella van Elferen, 1–11. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Van Elferen, Isabella. 2012. Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Villa, Angelica. 2022. “The Watcher Taps into the Art World’s Class-Anxious Caricatures.” ARTnews, October 21. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/ reviews/the-watcher-taps-art-world-class-anxious-caricatures-1234644021/. Accessed 23 July 2023. Wiedeman, Reeves. 2018. “The Haunting of a Dream House.” The Cut, November 12. https://www.thecut.com/article/the-haunting-of-657-boulev ard-in-westfield-new-jersey.html. Accessed 28 July 2023.

Identity

Prevention Is Better than Cure: Anachronistic Therapists and Toxic Wellness Catherine Pugh

Horror as a genre traditionally has a deep distrust of psychotherapy and other types of “wellness” therapies. Part of this stems from its innate suspicion of anyone in authority and of the scientist in general. In horror, power almost inevitably corrupts and the pursuit of knowledge can corrode even the most virtuous into immoral, cruel and monstrous beings. The archetype of the “mad scientist” has been written about extensively (notably by Andrew Tudor [1989] and Christopher Frayling [2006]), but there is limited critical engagement with the role of the psychotherapist in horror texts, despite the similarities between them. In the context of this paper, psychotherapy is the umbrella term applied to psychiatry, psychoanalysis or any other kind of wellness counselling; any kind of treatment between a patient and a therapist for psychological distress. Typically, this either takes the form of a psychiatrist and a patient who has been declared mentally ill (or, more often, its literary equivalent “mad,”) or a patient plagued by supernatural events who everyone else believes to be paranoid. These patients tend to be diagnosed with a fictional form of schizophrenia—which appears to cover a whole range

C. Pugh (B) Essex, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_11

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of vague symptoms and has become the more contemporary version of shorthand insanity or literary hysteria. Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) has more recently become a frequent trope in psychological horror or thrillers, with at least one of the resultant identities revealed to be malevolent. Anxieties about psychiatry and those who practice it, therefore, have long roots in storytelling that still negatively affect how they areconsidered today in real-life and in fiction. Archetypes of the “mad scientist” and uncontrollable lunatic still prevail in twenty-first-century texts, colouring therapy as something dangerous and uncanny; something with the potential to fundamentally alter identity and reality. Fears about cruel and arcane treatments still linger; sickening memories of past dehumanisation, abuse and neglect consistently resurface as threats to twenty-first-century psychic agency. These threats manifest in the brutality of treatments, their juxtaposition against contemporary ethics or settings, or reformation as dubious—even alarming—“wellness” treatments. Nostalgic yearning for a return to so-called “traditional values” becomes tainted; a return to a state of “wellness” through traditional methods (whether this involves psychiatric treatments or a Western appropriation of “exotic, spiritual” practices) can easily be corrupted into its macabre counterpart. Virtuous, competent and ethically sound psychiatry is exceptionally rare in the Gothic and horror genres, with most practitioners proving to be ineffective at best or—more often—corrupt, abusive and insane. However, even experienced, well-meaning treatments tend to fail in horror and science fiction, with “good” but futile practices used to destabilise the authority of the psychotherapist and institution. The threat of the evil psychiatrist has changed from a physical invasion (lobotomy, hydrotherapy, electric-shock therapy) to a psychological one, including neuro-linguistic programming, mind-control, and manipulation, paralleling real-world shifts in intervention from surgical, to chemical and later psychotherapy. In the twenty-first century, a culture of toxic wellness has developed alongside progressive psychotherapy, altering perceptions of both physical and mental health. This toxic wellness incorporates longheld negative nostalgia and anxieties of psychotherapy and psychiatry, particularly the fear of a dehumanised subject or programmable person. Although physical attacks on the mind and body are still employed in these attempts to destabilise identity (usually to induce altered states where the patient is more compliant through chemical or hypnotic

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means) the emphasis is on neuro-linguistic programming and psychological manipulation—the toxic versions of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy— currently considered in Western cultures to be the most successful and recommended treatment for real-life psychiatric disorders—is derived from the works of Freud and functions in a similar way to psychoanalysis, although in the former the emphasis is on the patient’s relationship to the world rather than their individual relationship with the therapist. Using concepts such as free association and transference, it is an extremely detailed form of “talk therapy” that attempts to unravel unconscious or long-buried feelings and experiences in order to better understand current emotions and behaviour. In horror, the therapeutic aspect of psychotherapy can be weaponised: instead of offering introjection, insight and understanding, psychotherapy is used to cultivate uncertainty, helplessness and compliance. Fictional psychotherapists are sometimes granted the ability to alter the world, or at least change a patient’s perception of it. Dr. Hannibal Lecter is able to induce a man to suicide simply from talking to him; Dr. Hal Raglan’s method of psychoplasmics in The Brood (1979) can physically alter the body, while the Analyst from Matrix: Resurrections (2021) adeptly employs psychology to manipulate every aspect of Neo’s life, including his environment. Dr. Ellie Stapler, the psychiatrist in Glass (2019), supposedly specialises in treating patients who believe they are superheroes and has a long record of successes, even managing to partly convince the “unhealthy”/superpowered characters in the film that they in fact have no abilities. Gabbard and Gabbard suggest that part of the cultural suspicion around psychiatrists is that they “can so easily be regarded as supramedical mind readers who understand the dark workings of the human psyche in a way inaccessible to others” (1999, 175), explaining that, “such powers are frightening, and people may devalue or ridicule them in order to deal with their anxiety over these perceived super-human powers” (ibid.). However, Dr. Stapler and the Analyst view mental health in terms of conformity to a polluted hegemony. Much like nineteenth-century psychiatry, which was frequently exploited in order to contain and control marginalised people such as women, homosexuals, the poor, people with disabilities and people of colour, these fictional therapists trap their patients in a repressive and authoritarian world under the guise of wellness by pathologising curious or rebellious behaviour.

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This Gothicising of the therapist through a dark nostalgic turn can also be found in Masha Dmitrichenko, the founder of wellness retreat Tranquillam in the television series Nine Perfect Strangers (2021), who also appears to be able to alter reality through what she calls “shared psychosis hallucination.” The effects of these treatments seemingly include the temporary resurrection of the dead, although it is left deliberately ambiguous whether this is real or the result of drugs and suggestion. Masha’s programme involves the covert use of psychotropic drugs alongside relaxation therapies and the careful staging of traumatic moments in order to encourage clients to confront undesirable emotions and memories. The clients are made to dig their own graves before resting in them, they are starved and eventually locked in what they believe to be a burning room. Masha tells them to “stay in the pain,” an echo of Dr. Raglan’s (The Brood) insistence on confronting trauma by going “all the way through it.” Both Raglan and Masha’s techniques require the patient to be pushed beyond their physical and emotional limits in order to provoke a cathartic moment by causing their trauma and pain to physically manifest. Psychotherapists here have the ability to change reality, create and erase memories, exacerbating a culture of mistrust around the profession: nothing they say can be trusted, and there is a great danger in sharing vulnerabilities or allowing them “inside your head.”

The Bad Therapist The vast majority of therapists in horror and science fiction are malevolent, abusing their authority and abilities in order to exorcise complete power over their patients/clients. Many are killers, cannibals and predators, more concerned with their own selfish desires than healing, a trope started by figures such as Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari], 1920) (in the mind of his patient, at least), and Dr. Murchison (Spellbound, 1945), and continuing more recently with Dr. Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991, Hannibal, 2013–2015), Drs. Arthur Arden and Oliver Threadson (American Horror Story: Asylum, 2012–2013), and Dr. Victoria Siebert (Side Effects, 2013). Others are simply depraved or sadistic (The Wolfman [2010]; Cult of Chucky [2017]; Ratched [2020]), while some show cruelty through being obtuse or ignorant; fully embedded in the “rational” world, they are incapable of appreciating otherworldly events, and therefore, everything the patient says or does becomes pathologised as mental illness or madness

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regardless of the truth (The Invisible Man [2020], and the Terminator franchise [1984–present]). Unfortunately, this can occur even if the therapist is ultimately benevolent or neutral (12 Monkeys [1995; 2015], K-PAX [2001], Case 39 [2009], and American Horror Story: Murder House [2011]). Echoes of the “mad scientist” filter through the veneer of psychology as these characters conduct unethical, often violent, surgical or psychological experiments on their charges under the protection of absolute power (Raising Cain [1992], American Horror Story: Asylum, Get Out [2017], Riget [The Kingdom] [1994–2022] and its American remake Kingdom Hospital [2004]). Supposedly therapeutic treatments are repurposed as tools for punishment or behaviour correction, notably Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). If this does not succeed in cultivating compliance, strong sedatives and lobotomy create the ultimate somnambulist, incapable of disobedience or individuality. The techniques that Dr. Stapler (Glass ) uses in her attempts to “treat” superpowered characters have direct correlations with the kinds of violent treatments associated with fictional horror asylums, namely lobotomy (Elijah Price), hydrotherapy (David Dunn) and ECT (Kevin Wendell Crumb). This repurposing of traditional treatments for nefarious purposes resonates with toxic ideas about the mentally ill and long-lingering memories of institutional abuses. There is a long history in real life of practitioners or institutions exploiting the mentally ill for their own satisfaction or gain. In the 1770s, Bethlehem Hospital in London charged a penny for the public to visit inside its walls and observe the patients. Treatments and surgery were also open to the public and proved extremely popular. In 1798 John Haslam published the case histories of several of his patients, “not in order to advocate a therapy […] but as preliminaries to autopsy” (Ingram 1991, 64). Instead of documenting treatment, Haslam, “concentrate[s] instead on the behaviour of his cases, and sometimes on their supposed motives. There is never any question but that this patient is mad: beyond that Haslam has little interest” (ibid.). In Paris during the late nineteenth century the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot: presented his ‘cases,’ typically women diagnosed with hysteria, in weekly lectures to audiences of both medical professionals and the general public. He also sketched and photographed his patients, often during hysterical seizures, in order to render their illness visible for a larger audience. (Smith 2011, 166)

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Experimentation on the mentally ill has an equally insidious history. A notorious example, Project MKULTRA, was a covert program directed by the C.I.A. and the United States government which ran from the 1950s to the 1970s. Project MKULTRA researched various methods of conditioning, aiming to find effective ways to alter brain function and influence the mind in order to gain complete control over the subject. Theoretically, this allowed the subject to be trained as an assassin, to forget their actions/secret information or, alternatively, as a method of extracting information during interrogation. The project experimented with psychotropic drugs and other chemicals, abuse, torture, hypnosis and long periods of isolation and sensory deprivation (see Streatfeild 2006; Collins 1988; Scheflin and Opton 1978). The majority, if not all, test subjects had not been informed or given consent and many were left with permanent damage. In addition, patients at various institutions (notably the Allan Memorial Institute) were experimented on under the guise of treatment. A key practitioner was psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, who developed “annihilation” to destroy identity and “psychic driving” and “depatterning” to rebuild it (see Giannini 131–32; 148–49 for analysis of Cameron’s “treatments” and corporative interests). “Annihilation” involved a series of sustained high doses of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), resulting in “substantial, and sometimes complete, memory loss. Cameron’s patients were shocked until they no longer knew who they were, where they were, or why” (Streatfeild 2006, 223). This process often regressed the subjects to “the state of pre-school children […] patients became incontinent, sucked their thumbs, cried and had to be fed” (ibid.). The “unhealthy” memories thus eradicated, “healthy” memories were implanted through psychic driving: patients were immobilised, sedated into lengthy, drug-induced comas (including the use of LSD, PCP, the poison curare and the “truth drug” sodium amytal) while being forced to listen to pre-recorded messages on an endless loop. This research led on to Cameron’s work on depatterning, the aim of which was to deconstruct the subject’s personality, thereby allowing the establishment of a new identity (Streatfeild 2006; Collins 1988; Scheflin and Opton 1978). The fictional evil horror therapist consistently uses depatterning techniques in order to create programmable people, overwriting the identity and will of a person in order to create a compliant, obedient subject who may not even remember their actions (The Manchurian Candidate [1962; 2004]; Shutter Island [2010]; A Cure for Wellness [2016]; Get Out [2017]). This technique essentially

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creates a type of mental non-space (see below); a holding ground for the suppressed original identity to wait that is manifested in Get Out as “the Sunken Place.” Toxic attitudes towards marginalised peoples continue to bleed into contemporary psychiatric and/or wellness treatments. Throughout psychiatric history, mentally vulnerable and traumatised people are considered prime candidates for reprogramming, not only for the psychic opening created by their conditions, but for the ease with which they can be disposed of afterwards. However, “bad” therapists in horror are split between practitioners who intentionally attempt to harm other people, and those who are simply incompetent or inadequate, particularly when dealing with the realities of a fantastical threat. As Gabbard and Gabbard observe, there is a long-standing tradition in horror, science fiction and fantasy films— including Dracula (1931) and Cat People (1942)—where the rationality and authority of the psychiatrist is rendered impotent against the supernatural, as “the scrupulously rational and earthbound work of psychiatrists make them the perfect foil for the generic conceit of the unknown, the unseen, and the unimagined” (Gabbard and Gabbard 1999, 23). However, a Gothicised nostalgia for the simplified film psychiatry of 1970/1980s horror still rears its ugly head. In these texts, insanity tends to be shorthand for evil, often as a result of abuse (typically by the mother). Those who do acknowledge the existence of supernatural or unnatural forces, such as Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) in Halloween (1978), compromises the authority and knowledge of the psychiatrist or other therapist by reducing the villain’s actions to “evil” or supernatural entities. As Gabbard and Gabbard explain, “When Pleasence identifies the killer as the Devil, an unchanging source of evil, Halloween has compromised the one figure who should be able to understand the forces of repression that drove a child to murder his sister” (Gabbard and Gabbard 1999, 24). They go on to argue that “Although the plot suggests that the psychiatrist is uniquely aware of the nature of evil, Halloween’s subtext reveals that the psychiatrist is just as out of touch with the important issues as were his cinematic predecessors who denied the existence of vampires, invisible demons, and invading armies from outer space” (ibid.). Both horror and film psychiatry are obsessed with bad parenting as a springboard for psychosis, but while in other genres, “[p]sychiatric disorders are caused by bad parents, and cure is effected by convincing the blameless offspring that he must forgive either his father or mother” (Gabbard and Gabbard 1999, 33), horror adds evil and trauma

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to the list of potential reasons for insanity. Rather than forgiveness as a tool for healing, the patient must fight the embodiment of their illness/ evil/trauma in the form of their other personalities. Evil offers the same paradoxical framework for psychiatry that bad parenting does: the patient has no responsibility for their actions or managing their illness, but they are equally the only ones with the ability to help or cure themselves, through the cathartic moment or sheer willpower (see also Gabbard and Gabbard 1999, 33; Carol Clover 1992).

The Good Therapist Examples of “good” therapists appear throughout horror or science fiction, although their number is limited and their practices are often futile. Generally speaking, these genres endorse moments of catharsis through physical confrontation; for trauma and mental illness to be embodied into a literal monster than can be physically attacked and defeated, a stance that naturally destabilises the authority of any therapy that relies on introspection and time. Furthermore, despite the competence and knowledge of these therapists, they often fail or are summarily dispatched. The “good” horror therapist is therefore considered “good” because of their intentions and actions rather than the success of their treatments—something that is reflected in their tendency to focus on managing their patients’ conditions rather than curing them through a cathartic moment. Gabbard and Gabbard note that generally the socalled “talking cure” is the treatment favoured in film, with particular emphasis on “the cathartic cure, the sudden and dramatic recovery from mental illness” (1999, 28), noting that “the formula lends itself well to the building of dramatic tension and its climactic release” (ibid.). The convention appears to stem from Freud’s theory of derepressed memories (despite Freud himself later expanding this framework), arguing that hysterics suffered symptoms caused by repressed traumatic memories that could be uncovered through hypnosis and discussion. When it works, the cathartic moment in film resolves all, leaving the patient unlikely to regress, but nevertheless indelibly touched by the experience. The cathartic cure, then, is embedded in cultural memory through both psychiatry and story—like the ghosts of Gothic melodramas, once the mystery is solved the protagonists can move on. In Split (2016), Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) sees therapist Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley) to treat his Dissociative Identity

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Disorder (DID). Prior to the beginning of the film they have been successfully managing Crumb’s DID for several years as well as advocating for research into the physiological changes he goes through (showing belief and respect for the supernatural aspect of his condition despite pathologising it). However, during a session she realises that one of the undesirable/malevolent alters (“Dennis”) has been impersonating the dominant desirable/benevolent alter (“Barry”). Fletcher is intelligent and astute enough to make this discovery, as well as locating the young women that Dennis has kidnapped including “Final Girl” Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy). Before Fletcher is killed by the extremely dangerous alter known as “The Beast,” she is able to inform Casey how to summon Crumb’s original personality, saving her life. Narratives involving DID invoke the Gothic almost by default, invoking motifs such as doppelgängers/alters, temporal and spatial distortions, struggles for power, entrapment and doubt. Mental illness (or its literary equivalent) becomes synonymous with the supernatural; reality is always in question and the narrative is littered with unexplained events. This frequently involves therapists who are particularly sensitive to the problem of evil; one of the patient’s alters is inevitably malevolent, prompting discussion of where evil resides, where it begins and ends. The uneasy and complex relationship between evil and madness in horror is summed up at the end of Shutter Island, when protagonist and DID patient Teddy asks his psychiatrist “Which would be worse: to live as a monster or to die as a good man?” shortly before he is lobotomised (and therefore eradicated). Whereas twentieth-century therapists were more concerned with the erasure or containment of the undesirable identity, twenty-first-century texts incorporate the innocence of desirable identit(ies); the emphasis is on management and rescue rather than incarceration and removal. Raising Cain (1992) features police and psychiatrists attempting to reign in their DID patient, whereas in Shutter Island, Identity (2003), The Ward (2010), Split and Glass, therapists attempt unusual “hail Mary” methods in an attempt to save the original identity (although, in Glass it is later revealed that this was ultimately for nefarious reasons). The horror therapists’ doubt means that they are very rarely the person to successfully confront either physical, psychic or psychiatric danger, but they can act as a conduit for potentially life-saving knowledge. Although Fletcher recognises Crumb’s supernatural powers (his ability to turn into the ultra-strong and virtually invulnerable Beast, who can climb walls,

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bend bars and survive bullets), she cannot accept them as supernatural, instead arguing that they are part of his condition. However, therapists who accept or are aware of unnatural forces are better able to help their patients, whether the supernatural events are real (The Sixth Sense [1999]) or really are manifestations of illness and trauma (The Haunting of Hill House, “Touch” [2018]). In television series Lucifer (2016–2021), the Devil, Lucifer Morningstar (Tom Ellis), frequently visits psychotherapist Dr. Linda Martin (Rachael Harris) for treatment. Although Lucifer tells the doctor the truth about his origins, she initially does not believe him. However, rather than dismissing his supposed evil as Dr. Loomis would, she is still able to treat him by working with what she considers to be the metaphor of “The Devil” and his powers. Her willingness to work within the patient’s framework and terminology (and, by extension, with the supernatural, although she does not realise it at the time) allows her to offer insight and advice rather than the superficial platitudes normally given by the disbelieving horror therapist. Later, when the doctor discovers that Lucifer has in fact been telling the literal truth, she finds it easier to work with him, knowing that he speaks in facts rather than metaphor (once she is over the shock, of course) and offers stability and safety, allowing Lucifer to further develop psychologically and emotionally.

Toxic Wellness Texts such as 2016 film A Cure for Wellness and television series Nine Perfect Strangers feature wellness retreats primarily catering to the wealthy seeking peace and alternative healing rather than treatment for specific disorders. There is a focus on diet, exercise, rest and rejuvenative treatments, although altered states are encouraged and induced through sensory deprivation, hypnotism, meditation and drugs (it should be noted that in these texts, medication and other reality-inducing substances are frequently administered covertly). There is a strong emphasis on rejuvenation and rebirth, as well as Nature and holistic treatments. Great importance is placed on a return to traditional, spiritual treatments—but combined with the wealth of the patients it creates an uneasy balance between denial and decadence that invoke deep-rooted social memories of both psychiatric and colonial abuses. Wellness becomes toxic by creating a culture of physical and mental health in crisis; patients or clients

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desire to stay, believing that they are emotionally and therefore physically unwell—despite it not always being clear what form this ill-health takes—and can be healed through the unusual or destructive ministrations they are offered. Some clients have suffered genuine trauma, while others express something closer to dissatisfaction or ennui. In either case, there is a powerful desire for self-improvement and enlightenment, an intensive quest for meaning and happiness reminiscent of pre-twentieth century visits of the wealthy to baths, spas and rural retreats for curative remedies, rather than the hospitals and asylums that ostensibly treated these conditions during the same period. The marginalised and disenfranchised were subjected to incarceration, intervention and re-conditioning in asylums, whereas the wealthy and powerful could afford wellness. Health, particularly mental health, could therefore have a wide range of meanings and consequences depending on social conditions—a problem that continues into the twenty-first century even with advances in treatment, attitudes and social care. Despite the reputation of the Victorian asylum for brutality and distressing living conditions, there were attempts at a refocusing, of trying to heal through compassion and beauty. The Retreat, a Quaker asylum built in the mid-1790s in the United Kingdom, was known not only for its humane practices (limiting the use of restraints and emphasising rehabilitation through kindness and domestic activities) but also for the attractiveness of its surroundings. The building and airing courts were designed to be beautiful as this was thought to have high therapeutic value. Asylum designs moved away from prisons and workhouses, instead becoming modelled on the country house estate with landscaped gardens. Just as more contemporary wellness retreats champion healing through beauty, luxury and holistic treatments, asylums such as The Retreat had: living conditions [that] were more comfortable than in the average working home […] Modern facilities abounded and included water closets, running water, gas or electric light, clothes, and warm, clean, spacious and ornamented surroundings. A constant supply of wholesome and varied food was provided, with beer, cocoa and tea to drink. (Rutherford 2013, 29)

Toxic wellness offers a counterpoint to the traditional Gothic asylum or victim of unethical psychiatry. In horror, psychiatric disorders and clinical therapeutic spaces are the domain of marginalised people. However, “wellness” also ensnares the rich and hegemonic; victims of toxic wellness

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can be affluent white males, targeted specifically for their wealth, privilege and power. There is a prevalent assumption that, especially compared to the clinical environment of the psychiatric unit, the luxurious and tranquil aesthetic of the wellness facility—as well as its expense—signals its innate integrity. Only the affluent can afford this level of wellness; therefore, it must be desirable and successful. Bronwen Calvert speaks of the same kind of aesthetic in the television series Dollhouse (2009—2010), arguing that those in control of the show’s mind-altering technology “laud its advancement and benefits because its ‘clean’ appearance allows them to view it and its uses as altruistic ‘helping’ and ‘doing good’” (Calvert 2010, 7). These kinds of environments suggest dark and secretative abuses underneath a façade of tranquillity, and it is no coincidence that many of these retreats are run by people who inevitably have a dark secret and/ or ulterior motive. Much like suburban horror, genre-savvy audiences are distrustful of the seemingly perfect or banal. This idyllic yet discomforting aesthetic suggests the threat of the non-space, where identity is temporarily relinquished. While non-spaces are typically entered into willingly (supermarkets, hotels, waiting rooms and so on), at their extremes they carry the danger of complete depersonalisation and conformity, bringing to mind images of zombies, pod-people and robots. Dollhouse features such a wellness-focused non-space, a home to programmable people known colloquially as “Dolls”: volunteers who are paid to have their minds wiped and temporary bespoke identities imprinted on behalf of wealthy clients. When in their non-active state, these Dolls live a peaceful and child-like blank existence in the Dollhouse: an open-plan, spa-like sanctuary: designed to stimulate an atmosphere of peace and tranquility […] The use of wood, muted color palette and soft recess lighting suggest comfort, luxury and natural beauty. A strong sensation of Zen is implied; the Dolls practice yoga by a small pool, eat nutricious, healthy food, exercise, get massages, paint, and cultivate bonsai tree. (Pugh 2017, 48)

The staff insist that this is for the well-being of their “Dolls,” but others find the somnambulists disturbing (“When does the hankering for tasty brains kick in?” asks one character [“Omega”]. As the series continues, various abuses in the Dollhouse are uncovered; the supposedly open,

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natural and peaceful sanctuary is revealed as a space of voyeurism, secrets and violence. The non-place can offer pleasure by putting identity and temporality on hold (e.g. with meditation or relaxing therapies): “Subjected to a gentle form of possession, to which [the subject] surrenders himself with more or less talent or conviction, he tastes for a while — like anyone who is possessed — the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing” (Augé 2008, 83). However, this dissociative anonymity simultaneously creates the threat that the individual will disappear by provoking a crisis of identity. Upon entering a non-space, a person “becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver […] obey[ing] the same codes as others, receiv[ing] the same messages, respond[ing] to the same entreaties” (ibid.). With no identifying signifiers or temporal boundaries, the individual is in danger of becoming lost—something that horror wellness exploits, intentionally or unintentionally creating compliant somnambulists similar to Caligari’s Cesare. In these wellness or treatment facilities, identity is put on hold: everyone dresses similarly (white and/or loose clothing, dressing gowns; clothing that is also associated with asylums and/or hospitals) and follows slow, repetitive and frequently synchronised movements (particularly during activities such as tai-chi, yoga or water aerobics). In 1973 David Rosenhan published his paper On Being Sane in Insane Places, an experiment whereby several pseudopatients feigned symptoms of schizophrenia in order to enter psychiatric hospitals. Once admitted, these pseudopatients resumed their normal behaviour and made notes on their environment and their treatment by members of staff. This consistently resulted in the pseudopatients’ continual treatment for their non-existent pathology, including forced medication, invasions of privacy and the pathologising of everyday behaviour. Rosenhan specifically notes that “[p]owerlessness was evident everywhere” while “[a]t times, depersonalization reached such proportions that pseudopatients had the sense that they were invisible” (1973, 256) with non-medical staff easily able to access the patients’ quarters, possessions and medical records. Rosenhan continues that staff attributed all behaviour to the supposed pathology of the pseudo-patients, including those stimulated by the hospital environment itself. For example, Rosenhan speaks of a psychiatrist escorting several young residents when they came upon a group of patients sitting outside the cafeteria entrance half an hour early: “he indicated that such

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behavior was characteristic of the oral-acquisitive nature of the syndrome [schizophrenia]. It seemed not to occur to him that there were very few things to anticipate in a psychiatric hospital besides eating” (Rosenhan 1973, 253). Like the Dollhouse or the spa from A Cure for Wellness, the staff at these psychiatric facilities could only consider the pseudo-patients within the framework of illness, and therefore, non-compliance or individuality was recontextualised as symptoms. Rosenhan notes that, “Once a person is designated abnormal, all of his other behaviors and characteristics are colored by that label. Indeed, that label is so powerful that many of the pseudopatients’ normal behaviors were overlooked entirely or profoundly misinterpreted” (1973, 253). He goes on to explain: Nursing records for three patients indicate that the writing was seen as an aspect of their pathological behaviour. ‘Patient engages in writing behavior’ was the daily nursing comment on one of the pseudopatients who was never questioned about his writing. Given that the patient is in the hospital, he must be psychologically disturbed. And given that he is disturbed, continuous writing must be a behavioral manifestation of that disturbance, perhaps a subset of the compulsive behaviors that are sometimes correlated with schizophrenia. (1973, 253)

Despite the pseudopatients resuming their normal behaviour after admittance, there was an institutional “[f]ailure to detect sanity” (1973, 252). Rosenhan posited that this may have been partly due to: […] physicians operat[ing] with a strong bias toward what statisticians call the type 2 error. This is to say that physicians are more inclined to call a healthy person sick (a false positive, type 2) than a sick person healthy (a false negative, type 1). The reasons for this are not hard to find: it is clearly more dangerous to misdiagnose illness than health. Better to err on the side of caution, to suspect illness even among the healthy. (ibid.)

However, in horror narratives, this can easily translate into an environment where everyone is automatically considered unwell, or made to believe that they are unwell, whether this is physical or psychological. In these places, the authority figure is absolute, while the label of “insane” or “unwell” automatically strips the individual of any and all rights, powers and autonomy. Although she is a hallucination, a character in Shutter Island embodies protagonist Teddy Daniels’ (Leonard DiCaprio) fears of

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this, warning him that even as “an esteemed psychiatrist from a respected family” she was still declared insane and committed to the island’s asylum: “People tell the world you’re crazy and all your protests to the contrary just confirm what they’re saying […] Once you’re declared insane, then anything you do is called part of that insanity. Reasonable protests are denial. Valid fears: paranoia.” The pseudopatients were instructed to dispose of their medication, but “frequently found the medication of other patients in the toilet before they deposited their own” (1973, 256). However, this non-compliance mostly went under the radar, with obedience prioritised over what was considered healthy: “As long as they were cooperative, their behavior and the pseudopatients’ own in this matter, as in other important matters, went unnoticed throughout” (ibid.). Rosenhan asks, “do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?” (1973, 251). In horror and science fiction, the psychiatric or wellness institution has the power to destablise autonomy, transforming any person into patient, subject to object, once they are within their walls, including those that work there (from “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” [Edgar Allan Poe, 1845] and its various adaptations, to Gothika [2003], and Shutter Island). Patients themselves can assimilate into the compliant but “mad” or “unwell” role through the influence of the environment instead of or as well as chemical or surgical intervention. For example, in A Cure for Wellness, protagonist Lockhart eventually succumbs to the indoctrination of the treatment and the environment itself, in the same way that Rosenhan argues that labels by mental health professionals can become a self-fulfilling prophecy to a patient who “accepts the diagnosis, with all of its surplus meanings and expectations and behaves accordingly” (1973, 254).

Conclusion Despite progressions in attitudes and treatment towards mental illness, the memory of traditional, arcane practices lives on, polluting the popular imagination and reinforcing Gothic, toxic, themes. Old stereotypes and fears continue in portrayals of both patient and therapist, embodied in their monstrous counterparts, to the point where the state of wellness, as a contemporary practice, is itself under threat. Distrust in therapy has led to a disillusion in wellness that has permeated through film and television;

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the memory of brutal psychiatric treatments and their Gothicised cinematic representations still linger into the twenty-first century producing a culture of toxic wellness that appears artificial and even repressive. It may seem reductive to simply split therapy, psychiatry and wellness in horror into “good” and “bad,” but, like the mad scientist archetype, these characters manifest the simultaneous dangers and mythical power of hidden knowledge. Ever since the grotesque Dr. Caligari was revealed to be a manifestation of a mentally ill patient’s psychiatrist, cinema has fostered a deep distrust of therapy and its practitioners. The real-world implications of their fictional portrayals in general are concerning: therapists are considered inherently evil, ridiculously incompetent or idealised healers. They are mystical, omniscient and dangerous, drawn from a poisoned well of collective cultural memories, to the point where even positive portrayals result in a toxic ideal. Gabbard and Gabbard write that: Patients who have seen dramatic results from the cinematic version of the cathartic cure often expect similar results in their own psychotherapy. Numerous patients come to psychotherapy fully expecting to immerse themselves in detective work, collaborating with their therapists to uncover the single repressed traumatic memory that has created all their symptoms. (1999, 178)

They note that some patients express disappointment in the lack of drama throughout the therapeutic process, wishing for a “blinding flash of insight” (ibid.) to punctuate their recovery. Texts set in other mental health facilities such as asylums are primarily bare and clinical and/or dark and dirty, yet wellness facilities are clean and open, with a focus on wholeness and alternative or complimentary therapies, as well as Nature as a healing entity. However, the crux of toxic wellness is not whether or not it works, but the disturbing and discomforting juxtaposition of perfection and tranquillity versus trauma, visibility and secrets. Toxic wellness manifests in the horror of treatments that demand an intense confrontation with mortality, identity and trauma, alongside a willingness to sacrifice or relinquish identity. As the fear and repulsion of the alternative is unacceptable, subjects become so obsessed with the unachievable state of “wellness” that they make themselves vulnerable to erasure; the “gentle possession” of the non-space is

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corrupted by the destabilisation of reality, whether this involves questioning beliefs, confronting unwanted truths or the breaking/creation of a delusion.

Works Cited Augé, Marc. 2008. Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. London and Brooklyn: Verso. Calvert, Bronwen. 2010. “Mind, Body, Imprint: Cyberpunk Echoes in the Dollhouse.” Fantasy Is Not Their Purpose: Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, special issue of Slayage 8 (2–3). Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, Anne. 1988. In the Sleep Room. Toronto: Key Porter. Frayling, Christopher. 2006. Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. Gabbard, Glen O., and Krin Gabbard. 1999. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Arlington: American Psychiatric Press. Ingram, Allan. 1991. The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge. Pugh, Catherine. 2017 “Broken but Home: Institutions, Control and the Nonplace in Dollhouse.” In At Home in the Whedonverse: Essays on Domestic Place, Space and Life, edited by Juliette C. Kitchens, 48–67. McFarland & Co. Rosenhan, David L. 1973. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179: 250– 58. Rutherford, Sarah. 2013. The Victorian Asylum. Oxford: Shire Books. Scheflin, Alan, and Edward Opton. 1978. The Mind Manipulators. New York: Paddington Press. Smith, Angela M. 2011. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Streatfeild, Dominic. 2006. Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Tudor, Andrew.1989. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Patriarchy Then and Now—With a Twist: The Postmodern Horror of Alex Garland’s Men M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh

Alex Garland’s Men (2022) is one of the most talked about films of recent years, partly because of one particular seven-minute sequence and partly because the whole film poses so many interpretive puzzles for viewers and critics to attempt to solve. The film is strongly centred on its principal character, Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), a young women who has recently suffered a terrible trauma. In an attempt to regain her bearings, she retreats from her home in London to try to find some peace and tranquillity by renting a lavish manor house in an English country village. This move initiates a confrontation between modernity and tradition that is crucial to the film’s commentary on patriarchy. Meanwhile, what happens to Harper in the countryside provides the stuff of the film, but precisely what that stuff is remains a matter for considerable conjecture. Men is a strongly postmodern work of art that carefully defeats any final and definitive interpretation, though it is constructed in such a way

M. K. Booker (B) University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA e-mail: [email protected] I. Daraiseh Arab Open University, Al-Ardiya, Kuwait © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_12

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that this interpretive uncertainty actually becomes a thematic part of the film, mirroring the uncertain state of Harper’s traumatised mind.

The Interpretive Instability of Men Like many horror films, Men features a number of seemingly impossible events, leaving us to wonder exactly what we are to make of them. One strategy would be to read the events in an essentially allegorical manner. Realising that what we are seeing on the screen is not literally possible, we just suspend our disbelief, go with the flow and then try to figure out what the events we are seeing are supposed to mean in terms of the real world. This strategy, of course, is common in horror films, reflecting the decades-old insight of Robin Wood that horror films in general provide a mechanism for dealing with the repressed anxieties brought about by life under “patriarchal capitalism” (Wood 2003, 63–65). According to Wood, the concept of repression is closely linked to the concept of “the Other,” which “represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with” (65). In the case of Men, the most obvious “Other” for Harper is, well, men, or at least men with toxic and nagging patriarchal attitudes toward women. However, in this complex film, there is also another sort of anxiety layered on this primary one, which emanates from the realm of folk horror. Harper is a very modern woman and travelling into the countryside might seem a potential trip to an idyllic past, but there is also a nagging suspicion that the primitive locals in the country might be dangerous. Alternatively, we can opt to go for the interpretation that the impossible events we see in the film are being filtered through the consciousness of Harper, whose perceptions of reality are distorted by the trauma she has experienced so recently. In light of what we see in the film, and especially in the last half hour, the first of these two interpretive strategies suggests that perhaps all (or at least most) men are pretty much alike, in the sense that they have all been pushed by the patriarchal system in which we all live into similar fundamental attitudes and patterns of conduct. Meanwhile, the second interpretive strategy would suggest that, based on her experiences and with good reason, Harper has concluded that all men are basically alike—to the point that she hallucinates them all even looking alike, from a nine-year-old boy to a white-haired vicar. Men appears to begin as a standard work of psychological drama. Still recovering emotionally from the suicide death of her husband James

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(Paapa Essiedu), Harper retreats to the English countryside, driving from London to the village of Cotson, in Herefordshire, thus geographically traversing a large area of “middle” England. She seemingly traverses the history of modern England as well, arriving at the country house where she is to stay, hoping that the peaceful atmosphere there will help her to recover from the trauma and grief of her husband’s death—exacerbated by the fact that she has not been entirely successful in sloughing off James’s attempts to make her feel responsible for his decision to kill himself. Geoffrey, her jovial and seemingly harmless landlord, informs Harper when she arrives that parts of the building are almost 500 years old, perhaps predating Shakespeare. The house thus dates back to the origins of modern Britain, so that staying there is like a trip back in time. Geoffrey, the first of the local men encountered by Harper (all of whom will be played by Rory Kinnear), is “very, very country” Harper tells her friend Riley (Gayle Rankin) in a Facetime call soon after her arrival, suggesting Harper’s clear sense that “country” people are different from herself and her accustomed circle. This trip back in time is filled with cultural memories and it is clear that Harper arrives at Cotson Manor with very specific expectations, partly conditioned by those memories. Given that the film itself specifically evokes Shakespeare, it seems justified to turn to him as he wrote some of the best-known descriptions of the beauties of England, perhaps the most familiar of which occurs in the famous “this earth, this realm, this England” speech delivered by John of Gaunt in Act II, Scene 1, of Richard II . At first glance, this speech seems to provide a perfect description of what Harper hopes to find in rural England. However, things are not always what they appear to be in this film. We should remember that these lines are spoken by John (uncle of King Richard II) as he lies dying in the play—and that his full speech is a sort of eulogy for an England he also believes to be dying. Thus, Shakespeare, in a play written around 1595, looks back to a man who died in 1399 and was already at that time bemoaning the lost good old days of England. Nostalgia, we are thus reminded, has been around for a long time and is very much a part of the English national identity. We get a nice capsule summary of what Harper had hoped to find in the countryside in an early scene, roughly half an hour in, in which she plays Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor (No. 20) on the house’s baby grand piano. This extremely peaceful and soothing music is then accompanied by a montage of idyllic shots of the countryside that presumably

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lies around the house, beginning with the leafy limbs of the impressive apple tree out front and including suggestions of waving fields of peaceful bluebells. All of the images suggest the kind of tranquillity that Harper is seeking. They also suggest the fertility of nature as well as the fertility of Harper’s imagination, given that these images emanate from there rather than from actual observation. Then Harper hits a wrong note, mutters “Fuck!” and the sequence of peaceful images comes to a screeching halt. The abrupt end to this sequence serves as a reminder that Harper is not likely to find the peace she seeks in this setting. In fact, by this time, Men has already provided a number of generic clues to let us know that we are watching a horror film and to build a horror film atmosphere. For example, almost immediately after arriving in Cotson, Harper goes for a walk in the scenic surrounding woods, coming upon an old railroad tunnel, which leads to another hint of horror in the film. Harper sings several notes in the tunnel, enjoying the echo, but then appears to see a man at the end of the tunnel, though the view is not terribly clear. He appears to get up and move toward her, causing her to flee in terror. In the midst of her flight, she comes upon a derelict structure, which she begins to photograph; she then realises that a naked man is standing in front of the building. Many reviewers have interpreted this man as the one from the tunnel, but a close look shows that the tunnel man had been fully clad. He never shows up again and was possibly imagined by Harper. The naked man, though, shows up when Harper later scans her photographs of the building and will later be arrested by police when he comes to Cotson Manor, so we can be reasonably sure that he actually exists in the world of the film. Harper returns to the house and, the next day, attempts to regain her composure in that piano scene. After the scene ends, however, we see her remove a large kitchen knife from its rack in order to slice a grapefruit in half. It is a red grapefruit, so cutting through it is looks a bit like cutting through flesh, adding an extra bit of suggestiveness to this slicing. Meanwhile, the camera lingers just enough on the knife to lend it an air of significance and to suggest that this knife might be important in the course of the film. It is, after all, very much the same sort of knife that often does mischief in horror films, perhaps most famously when Norman/Mrs. Bates wields just such a knife in the famous shower scene of Psycho (1960). And this ominous note is immediately increased when the naked stalker shows up (and is subsequently arrested) at Cotson Manor.

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The ominous note of this knife scene, followed by the arrival of the stalker, contrasts sharply with the peace and beauty of the preceding piano scene in a way that is typical of the texture of this film, which contains a number of such striking disjunctions. The resultant disjointed atmosphere subtly creates uneasiness in the audience that enhances the impact of Men as a horror film. More importantly, though, it reflects the disjointed state of Harper’s traumatised consciousness. For example, from the looks of the trees we see around the house and on Harper’s drive to it, the time seems to be autumn, perhaps even late autumn. Yet the bluebells that we see in abundance in the film actually bloom (like most wildflowers) in the spring. Similarly, the lush greenery that we see in Harper’s (imagined) views of the area around Cotson Manor seems more characteristic of spring than of the end of the year. The suggestion here would seem to be that much of what we see in the film cannot necessarily be trusted—mostly because it is so thoroughly filtered through the perceptions and imagination of Harper, who thus functions in the film as a sort of unreliable narrator, but also because Garland plays games with the audience as well. One of the first hints of horror that we see in Men occurs when (about eleven minutes in) Harper first calls Riley on Facetime via her iPhone, but the call suddenly breaks up and Harper suddenly sees a fragmented, distorted, screaming male face (perhaps that of James) on her phone. There are several things to note about this scene, and the first of which is that the face on the phone does seem the stuff of horror, even though calls do break up and even though Harper’s interpretation of what she is seeing can be explained in a straightforward way as a result of the trauma she has experienced via James’ suicide. This moment thus plants a seed that something truly horrifying might be on the way. Further, because we might be seeing the screen from the perspective of Harper it also reminds us of how strongly she is situated as the point-of-view character in this film. Throughout Men, most (but not all) of what we see is filtered through the consciousness of Harper, and this moment with the phone perhaps provides a clue that her perceptions might be distorted by her own fragile psychological condition. The fact that Harper’s perceptions are unreliable complicates our interpretation of what we see on the screen considerably, but Garland makes the rhetoric of the film even more complex by sometimes playing with the perspective of the audience apart from Harper. We sometimes see (and know) things that Harper does not, which adds a sort of dramatic irony that provides an extra layer of complexity to our interpretation of the film.

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The Mythic Resonances of Men Men is filled with mythic resonances that add a sense that it is addressing fundamental issues. When Harper first arrives at Cotson Manor, she sees a stately apple tree standing just outside, heavy with apples, again suggesting that it is autumn. She then picks and begins to eat an apple— in a movement the Edenic resonances of which are quite clear. But then, if these resonances were not clear enough, Geoffrey later sees that she has been eating the apple and pretends to be appalled; he tells her that these apples must not be eaten and that they are “forbidden fruit.” When Harper begins to mumble an apology, he smiles and admits that he was merely joking. He invites her to eat all the apples she wants because otherwise they will simply rot and attract wasps. In itself, the moment does not seem particularly significant; however, in light of later developments, the scene seems perfectly to encapsulate a major motif in the film, in which a seemingly beautiful and idyllic surface can conceal quite a sting. The mythic resonances of this “forbidden fruit” begin a constellation of mythic images that significantly contribute to the overall meaning and feel of the film, even if (as with most things about this movie) their actual meaning is not necessarily clear. Most of these mythic images are Christian, perhaps the most important of which involves the suicide of James, who throws himself from an upper storey window and violently hits the pavement below, his ankle broken and his hand pierced by a spike on a metal fence, very much in the place where the iron nails were supposedly driven through the hands of the crucified Christ. In addition, the dead James is left sprawling on the fence, his arms spread wide, in a posture that cannot help but evoke the image of Christ crucified. This Christ imagery is not gratuitous. Via flashbacks occurring in the memory of Harper, we also see much of the lead-up to James’ suicide, making it clear that he attempted to manipulate Harper into abandoning her plans to divorce him by threatening to kill himself if she proceeded. He suggests that it will be as if she killed him herself, a characterisation that she refuses to accept, saying that his death is the last thing she wants. James responds, “It’s not the last thing, because you wanna divorce me … more than you wanna keep me alive! How is my life worth so little to you?” Frustrated by his solipsism, Harper screams, “Because I have a life, too! I have a fucking life!” James’ suggestion that he simply has no choice but to die because of Harper makes his death a sacrificial one somewhat in the mode of Christ, who supposedly had to die because of

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the sins of ordinary humans. By extension, this parallel then suggests that Christianity might be a key purveyor of the kind of patriarchal ideology that has driven Harper to her current state. Later in the film, the local vicar quotes William Butler Yeats’s 1924 poem “Leda and the Swan,” which is based on a story from Greek mythology that goes back even further than Christianity. Importantly, the poem is about the rape of the woman Leda by the god Zeus, who has taken the form of a swan. The poem itself, though, also has apocalyptic resonances, in keeping with Yeats’s notion, most famously expressed in “The Second Coming” (1920), that an era of history was coming to an end, with a new one about to begin. In particular, the rape of Leda results in her impregnation and in the subsequent birth of Helen of Troy, leading to the epoch-changing events of the Trojan War. Yeats’s expectations are coloured by his somewhat problematic interest in Theosophy and other questionable forms of spiritualism, and he is vague about the nature of this coming transformation. However, it is clear, given Yeats’s general anti-colonialist stance, that there is a political dimension to the coming transformation of the world that will likely include the end of British colonial rule in his native Ireland.1

The Folk Horror of Men (or Not) Partly because of all these mythic resonances, most reviewers seemed to have identified Men as a work of folk horror, often to the film’s detriment. One of the more negative (and sarcastic) reviews of Men, by novelist Jeff VanderMeer (on whose book Garland’s 2017 film Annihilation was based), starts from the premise that Men is a work of folk horror. In particular, VanderMeer notes the film’s many folk horror cues—such 1 There are, incidentally, a number of resonances of colonialism in this film, adding to the overall suggestion that the British past was hardly a peaceful and idyllic time to be looked back upon with nostalgia. Meanwhile, the often observed structural parallels between patriarchy and colonialism (for two rather different approaches, see Moane 1999; Anderson 2020) mean that Men’s features toward colonialism add important resonance to this film. In addition to this Yeats poem, there is the fact that Harper is played by an Irish actor who speaks the part with her natural Irish accent. James, meanwhile, is played by an actor whose family is from Ghana, another former British colony. Also, the Sheela na gig figure that appears in the film is most commonly found in Ireland, but mostly in areas of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland, while they are seldom found in areas that remained unconquered at that time. On the Sheela na gig, especially in Ireland, see Kelly (1996).

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as the Green Man carving that Harper finds in the local church—but believes that they are not used effectively. According to him, “these nods are so cursory or cliched that Men feels more in conversation with horror films generally than with the classics of British folk horror, which derive a sense of dread from the eccentricities of people who adhere to rituals-gone-wrong (or oh so right)” (VanderMeer 2022).2 VanderMeer might have a point if Men were truly a work of folk horror and not the complex postmodern game that it is. In point of fact, the nods to folk horror in the film are mostly red herrings that tempt us (wrongly) to interpret the film as folk horror. In addition, these hints of folk horror provide reasons for Harper to be alarmed, exacerbating her already fragile emotional state and adding to her increasing paranoia. After all, since the British folk horror explosion of the 1970s, the conventions of folk horror, that are themselves a form of genre nostalgia, have become quite well known, and Harper would presumably know them as well: modern person travels to a remote area that is disengaged from the modern world, encounters pre-modern locals who practice ancient religious rites, bad things ensue (largely because of the drastic difference in the cultural values of the modern visitor and the primitive-leaning locals). Given all that has happened in the film, it makes perfect sense that Harper would be alarmed when she comes upon the seemingly ancient carving of the Green Man in the village church in Cotson. In Men, however, Cotson is not really all that remote: it is supposedly just off the M4 motorway and has all the modern conveniences (including modern police who are just a 999 call away3 ), even if television and cell phone reception might be less

2 Most reviewers seem to have regarded Men as a work of folk horror. In contrast to VanderMeer, though, Calum Russell regards the film as a folk horror “masterpiece” (Russell 2022). 3 Importantly, the only seemingly “normal” people Harper encounters while in Cotson are the 999 operator (voiced by Garland regular Sonoya Mizuno) and the policewoman who answers the call (played by Sarah Twomey), suggesting that her perceptions might be affected by her gender-based expectations, especially as the policeman who answers the call seems just like all the other men in Cotson.

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than ideal.4 Cotson Manor even has Wi-Fi. In addition to staying reasonably well in touch with her friend Riley by cell phone, we see Harper making a call back to her office in London, employing an iPhone and Apple Air Pods, to report her analysis of some business data via the Apple laptop computer that sits atop the table in front of her. We will even see that she brushes her teeth with an electric toothbrush while in Cotson. Harper is a modern woman who is a bit out of her element in this rustic setting, as one might expect from folk horror, but she has not really left the modern world, which has already touched everywhere in England, leaving no truly pre-modern refuges. The locals in Cotson might seem a bit “country,” as Harper somewhat superciliously puts it, but they do not seem to have any organised religious rites other than Christian ones (and there is no evidence in the film that they practice anything other than a purely conventional Anglicanism). Thematically, the hints of folk horror in Men serve to make us expect that Cotson is fundamentally different from London, which makes it all the more powerful when the film ultimately demonstrates that the power of the patriarchy transcends whatever other differences there might be between the giant city and the tiny village, so that, in this sense at least, the two cultures are very much the same. Turning to the past to escape patriarchy is a doomed enterprise, both because patriarchy itself is strongly rooted in the past and because, in our postmodern world, it is very difficult to find any place that has not already been transformed by modernity. The Green Man carving Harper sees appears on the front of the baptismal font at the front of the church. The Green Man is a relatively positive pagan nature symbol, linked to fertility and rebirth (as in the coming of spring), representations of which can be found in much of Europe, dating back to the early medieval period. However, given Harper’s experiences and state of mind, anything associated with men is potentially alarming, and she does seem alarmed by this carving. Interestingly, though, the back of the font bears a carving of a female symbol, the Sheela na gig, which is somewhat more enigmatic than the Green Man.

4 Cotson is identified within the film as being located in the county of Herefordshire, which is indeed one of the most rural counties in England. However, the actual filming was done in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire and in the village of Withington (a suburb of Manchester), standing in for Cotson. The M4 motorway, incidentally, does not pass through Herefordshire.

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Again of ancient pagan origin and widely dispersed throughout Europe (though most common in Ireland), the Sheela na gig has been interpreted both as a symbol of feminine power and as a symbol of feminine threat. Meanwhile, it might seem incongruous to find these pagan symbols in a Christian church, but both of these images can, in fact, be found in churches all over Europe. Perhaps the images are displayed in an unusually prominent position in this church, but the real point is that they are not really as shocking as they appear to be—to Harper, to audiences, and to most reviewers of the film. They clearly suggest to us that we are watching a folk horror film (or to Harper that she is in a folk horror film), but Men is more properly considered a work of psychological horror in which folk horror images add to the psychological pressure on the protagonist but do not foreshadow the coming of sinister folk magic. The grotesque display of female genitalia on the Sheela na gig seems a bit sinister in the context of the film, contributing to the air of menace that gradually grows throughout the film and foreshadowing that late seven-minute sequence. Crucially, though, Harper does not see the Sheela na gig, which remains hidden from her view, so it has no impact on her psychological state. As a result, the Sheela na gig plays no further direct role in the action of film. The Green Man, however, plays quite a prominent role, and the fact that Harper seems disturbed by it lends credence to the notion that the later appearance of the Green Man (into which the naked stalker ultimately seems to transform himself) is almost certainly a figment of Harper’s imagination, not to be taken as actually occurring in the world of the film. As Harper sits in the church, she flashes back to the aftermath of the moment when she was punched by James. In the flashback, she then furiously throws him out, leading to his immediate suicide. The memory calls her to break out in wailing, attracting the attention of the vicar, though he does not approach her at this time. When she walks back outside, she encounters Samuel sitting on stone steps in a mask of a blond woman (perhaps Marilyn Monroe). The vicar approaches as Harper declines Samuel’s offer to play hide-and-seek. Sent on his way by the vicar, Samuel tells the vicar to fuck off and calls Harper a stupid bitch. Harper then sits with the vicar and tells him the story of her breakup with James, a large processional cross is seen in the background, as if ready to be borne. As she tells the story, she suggests that James might have slipped trying to climb down to the balcony to get back in their apartment, though she does not really seem to believe that explanation.

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She says she is haunted by the belief that he saw her on his way down. “I see,” says the vicar. He puts his hand on her knee and says he knows she must feel an awful sense of guilt. “You must wonder why you drove him to it,” he says, adding later, “Men do strike women sometimes. It’s not nice, but it’s not a capital offence.” He suggests that she should have given James a chance to apologise. She angrily tells him to fuck off and stalks away, shocked at his sexist suggestions, which set up the later scene in which the vicar appears in an even more sinister light as a gross sexual harasser and potential rapist, while also making available the interpretation that the vicar’s later appearance is merely Harper’s fantasy as she unravels, triggered by this earlier shocking actual encounter.

Patriarchy and the Men of Men The central conceit that drives Men does not become obvious until Harper encounters the boy Samuel outside that church, having already been unnerved by the pagan image of the Green Man. Through the magic of digital editing, the face of Kinnear (whom we have already seen as Geoffrey) is placed on the body of a child (“played” by nine-year-old child actor Zak Rothera-Oxley). Importantly, though, Garland has opted to minimise the digital tinkering with the image, so that both the body and the head remain their actual sizes, which means that Samuel’s head looks unnaturally large. He also still looks roughly the age of Kinnear (a man in his forties), creating an even more unnatural effect. This essentially Brechtian imagery demands our attention and our interpretation, ensuring that we understand the boy to be played by Kinnear and causing us to ask why this is the case. Then the vicar appears and is clearly also played by Kinnear, which probably finally clues in anyone who had not noticed already that the naked stalker had been played by Kinnear as well. By this time we begin to suspect that the message conveyed by this contrivance is that all men are alike—or, as one reviewer put it, all men are evil (Schindel 2022). It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, but this theme of the interchangeability of all men is further reinforced soon afterward when Harper, needing a drink after her encounter with the outrageously sexist vicar, staggers into the local pub, where she finds Geoffrey having a pint while working a crossword puzzle. She also encounters the barkeeper, another townsman and the policeman who had been involved in the earlier arrest of the naked stalker. All of these men are, of course, played

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by Kinnear. Meanwhile, Harper learns from the policeman the delightful news that the stalker, concluded to be harmless, has been released. Harper, of course, is horrified, while the men all seem unconcerned, if not downright amused, while Geoffrey tosses in the bonus comment that the stalker was probably a “gyppo”—a more racist version of the already racist term “gypsy.” This gathering of men, all played by the same actor, drives home the fundamental “gimmick” of the film. Again, this conceit can be read as an allegorical enactment of the fact that virtually all men, at least some extent, are shaped by patriarchy in ugly and damaging ways. It is, however, probably a more efficient recuperation of the events of the film to read this scene in the pub as an indicator that Harper herself has been pushed by the patriarchal attitudes of the men she has encountered thus far to expect all men to exhibit similarly reprehensible behaviour. Indeed, almost everything that happens in the film from this point forward is coloured by Harper’s trauma, which causes her (with good reason) to expect men to behave badly and to perceive them as meeting her expectations. Disgusted by the men in the pub, Harper stumbles back to Cotson Manor in the dark, feeling as if something might be following her on the way. We (but not Harper) catch a distant glimpse of what appears to be the stalker standing in the graveyard of the church as she passes by. Back at the house, Harper calls Riley to relate her latest encounters, declaring that she is ready to get in the car and drive home to London. Riley insists on coming to Cotson instead, declaring that, if necessary, she will take the axe she sees behind Harper in the video call and chop the stalker’s dick off. We are thus tipped off that the axe (another iconic horror-movie weapon) might soon become important, as we had been earlier with the kitchen knife. The call keeps cutting out as Harper tries to give Riley directions to the house, so Riley suggests that she just message her. Harper sends her location but gets a response that is another one of the many very odd moments in this film. The reply she receives on her phone, clearly not from Riley, echoes the earlier comment of the boy Samuel: “I ALREADY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE U STUPID BITCH.” This surprising moment is surely Harper’s hallucination, no doubt tied to the fact that her phone played a key role in her final encounter with James, leading to the all-hell-breaks-loose final half hour of the film when are forced to abandon all hope of a naturalistic interpretation and go with either the purely allegorical interpretation of the movie as enacting the

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consistently patriarchal behaviour of men or with the interpretation that what we are seeing is Harper’s trauma-distorted perception of men. Of course, there is no reason why both of these strategies cannot be simultaneously effective. Indeed, one of the secrets to the success of Men is that it can work on multiple levels at once, each one of its multiple possible interpretations actually reinforcing the others rather than contradicting them. Nevertheless, the sheer craziness of the film’s final sequence surely suggests that the trauma-based interpretation is more strongly indicated by the events of the film. After the strange intrusion into her text messages, Harper undergoes (or imagines that she undergoes) a nonstop barrage of alarming threats. The outside lights start flashing. She looks out and sees the policeman. She goes out to question him. He refuses to reply, then the lights go out. At this point, the apples suddenly all spontaneously fall off the tree, providing another signal that we have left the realm of reality. As another man charges at her, Harper runs back inside and locks the door, grabbing the kitchen knife to which our attention had been called earlier. Someone bangs on the front door. The kitchen window breaks and something seems to come through the window into the kitchen. Then Geoffrey appears and finds an injured crow on the kitchen floor. He wrings its neck to put it out of its misery. Then he prepares to go check the outside. He has not thus far seemed to be the heroic type, but he now announces, “Damsel in distress, I’m just the fellow.” Then he turns to Harper and says, oddly, “You have precisely the qualities of a failed military man,” taking her aback until he explains that his father told him that when he was seven years old. The implication here is clear: patriarchal attitudes are passed down from one generation to the next, with men being forced into pre-determined patterns of behaviour, even if it goes against their natures. Men is a thoroughgoing takedown of patriarchy that includes a critique of the negative impact of patriarchy on men, as well as women. As bell hooks puts it: The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. (2018, 81)

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Geoffrey goes out to look around, with Harper following behind. The lights keep going out. Harper sees the stalker, now with thorn-like spikes protruding from his skin. He blows a cloud of dandelion seeds at her, echoing the dandelion seeds that we have been seeing throughout the film. Distorted memories of earlier events, including the carvings, flash through Harper’s head as she seems to have some sort of unidentified psychic experience, triggered by the seeds. It is a classic folk horror moment, reinforcing the idea that Harper’s hallucinations are exacerbated by her own expectations of folk horror—but also that our own perceptions are conditioned by similar expectations. For example, these flashes include things (such as the Sheela na gig and the stalker beginning to decorate his face as the Green Man) that Harper herself did not experience and that were seen only by viewers earlier in the film. In the midst of these strange visions, Harper drifts back into the house as if in a trance. From this point, many of the scenes in the house are tinted red, like the flashback scenes in Harper’s London apartment, suggesting that the events shown are literally coloured by Harper’s trauma. The stalker/Green Man looks through the mail slot on the front door, then slowly sticks his hand inside. Still seemingly in a trance, Harper slowly extends her own hand and touches his. Suddenly, he violently grabs her wrist—except that the hand that grabs her wrist is clearly the hand of a black man, presumably James, again suggesting that what we are seeing is distorted by Harper’s trauma. This quick moment also makes it very clear that the hands we are about to see in this sequence are related to James’ wounded hand. Indeed, Harper stabs the hand with the knife, wounding it in a manner reminiscent of James’ hand that was impaled on that fence. As she breaks free, the hand is slowly withdrawn, splitting open as the knife hangs on the slot. Meanwhile, Samuel is now shown in the kitchen, having put his mask on the crow (which now seems unaccountably alive), in another moment that seems reminiscent of folk horror but that really just shows us that folk horror is on Harper’s mind, because at this point most of what we see is surely occurring only in Harper’s mind. “You really hurt me,” he says, showing Harper that he now has the same wounded hand as the man at the door, now clearly split all the way up past his wrist. It is less bloody than one might expect and dangles limply, very much like a rubber prosthetic; it again looks very unrealistic, calling attention to its significance. As with the rendering of Samuel’s face, the rendering of this and

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the succeeding split hands has been fairly crudely done, calling attention to itself in a Brechtian manner. After another man bursts in with the same split hand, and Harper retreats to the bathroom, she is approached by the vicar, now also bearing that split hand. What follows is a crucial sequence that in many ways encapsulates the overall themes of the film. The vicar, a figure of conventional authority, begins that quotation from “Leda and the Swan,” announcing that he is the swan, which is tantamount to an announcement that he intends to rape Harper. He begins to make obscene statements, asking Harper when she lost her virginity and then suggesting that he can picture it vividly, “legs open, vagina open, mouth open. I have decided that you are an expert in carnality.” In a version of the typical misogynist notion that the sexuality of women gives them inappropriate power over men, he claims she has planted images of her sexual exploits in his mind: “This is your power. This is the control that you exert.” Now the vicar switches modes, returning to poetry and quoting from a poem entitled “Ulysses and the Siren,” by English Renaissance poet Samuel Daniel, a close contemporary of Shakespeare.5 This story, of course, is a classic expression of the threat posed to men by feminine sexuality, and the vicar then declares, making clear the misogynist nature of this story, “You are singing to me. Not as Ulysses but as sailor. To dash me to pieces on the rocks of this.” He then grabs at her crotch and continues to make obscene remarks. She puts the knife to his throat. He stands and grips her throat with the split hand. He then moves as if to rape her, but she stabs him, presumably killing him as he falls to the floor. Harper, now clearly in shock, apparently runs to her car and attempts to drive away, but hits Geoffrey as he stands in the drive. He arises and pointedly calls her MRS. Marlowe, then he takes the car and tries to run her down, eventually crashing it. She collapses to the ground, sobbing. The stalker approaches, now fully masked as the Green Man. As he attempts to walk toward her, his ankle breaks, likes James’. He drops to the ground, now clearly pregnant. What follows is the film’s most talked about sequence, a spectacular display of body horror that begins as the “Green Man” graphically gives birth to a bloody Samuel, 5 Shakespeare and Daniel mutually influenced one another. Particularly relevant to this rape-themed scene is the fact that Daniel’s long poem The Complaint of Rosamunde is generally acknowledged to have been an important influence on Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (Brown 2009, 194–95). Rape culture has a long history.

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beginning a sequence of such births that culminates when Geoffrey gives birth to James, who emerges with broken ankle and split hand. This sequence of births again reinforces the notion that patriarchal attitudes are passed down from one generation of men to another, as each generation of potential patriarchs gives birth to the next. James, of course, is the end of the sequence, the entire tradition of patriarchy, complicated by colonialism and racism, having combined to make him the troubled man that he was. This imaginary James staggers to the couch and collapses on it. Harper sits beside him, still holding the axe. He describes his injuries and says, “This is what you did.” She asks him what he wants from her. “Your love,” he says, pleadingly. “Yeah,” she scoffs, out of patience with his needs, and we see nothing else of this scene. Suddenly, pleasant guitar music begins, leading into “Love Song” by Elton John.6 The film’s title shows on the screen for a moment, and then Riley arrives. She sees the crashed car, then walks rapidly toward the house. The door is open, the walkway to it smeared with blood, though it is not entirely clear that Riley sees the blood, because she does not react to it. To complicate matters further, we get one last fertility image in the film as we see that Riley is in an advanced stage of pregnancy, something that had not been obvious earlier in the film. She looks around and sees Harper sitting on some stone steps outside the house. Harper is lost in thought, looking at a sprig of leaves that she holds in her hand. She looks up, sees Riley and smiles. She is possibly in shock. She still has blood on her, or at least thinks she does. The film ends enigmatically at this point, leaving us to ponder exactly what to make of what we have just seen. As Desta puts it, “Men’s moral and philosophical aims have a choose-your-own-adventure quality to them,” leaving a great deal of room for interpretive choices (Desta 2022). Both of Garland’s earlier films, Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018), ended with a vision of a possible radical transformation of the world, with female (though not necessarily human) agents at the centre of that transformation. Men is so constructed that no final, comprehensive interpretation is possible: what we have offered in this essay is a series of possible interpretations of various moments and motifs. It should be clear, though, that this film does not depend on definitive interpretations in 6 The same song also plays at the beginning of the film, in a version recorded by Lesley Duncan, who wrote the song, a rather conventional pop love song of a type that obscures the gender issues addressed by this film.

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order to convey its multiple messages, which include the fact that patriarchy exerts a toxic effect on the behaviour of men and the experience of women, as well as a commentary on the fact that modernity has thoroughly transformed the Western world (and most of the rest of the world) leaving little room for an escape into a simpler past (which would not be any better in this sense, anyway). The thorough nature of this transformation, though, makes it all the more striking—as illustrated in this film—that patriarchal attitudes and behaviours, so strongly rooted in the past, have nevertheless survived intact into the modern world. As a result, perhaps an even more radical transformation—such as the possible technological singularity of Ex Machina or the possible alien apocalypse of Annihilation—might be needed to put patriarchy behind us once and for all.

Works Cited Anderson, Kevin B. 2020. Class, Gender, Race and Colonialism: The “Intersectionality” of Marx. Québec: Daraja Press. Brown, Georgia. 2009. Redefining Elizabethan Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desta, Yohana. 2022. “Men: Let’s Unpack That Disturbing, Disgusting Ending.” Vanity Fair, May 20. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/05/ men-ending-alex-garland. Accessed 7 September 2022. hooks, bell. 2018. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow. Kelly, Eamonn P. 1996. Sheela Na Gigs. Origins and Function. Dublin: Town House and Country House. Moane, Geraldine. 1999. Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Russell, Calum. 2022. “Men Review: Alex Garland’s Intricate Folklore Masterpiece.” Far Out, June 5. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/men-review-alex-gar lands-intricate-folklore-masterpiece/. Accessed 4 September 2022. Schindel, Daniel. 2022. “All Men Are Evil, According to This Film.” Hyperallergic, May 23. https://hyperallergic.com/734306/men-horror-movie-alexgarland/. Accessed 3 September 2022. VanderMeer, Jeff. 2022. “Men Is a Mess.” Gawker, June 7. https://www.gaw ker.com/culture/men-is-a-mess. Accessed on 3 September 2022. Wood, Robin. 2003. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond. Revised and expanded edition. New York: Columbia University Press.

“But now, yeah, I’m thinking I’m back”: The All-Consuming Gothic Nostalgia in the John Wick Franchise Simon Bacon

Introduction The story of John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a familiar one. A man with a dark, dare we say Gothic, past who wants to give it up and start a new life with a woman (this is traditionally a patriarchal-heteronormative story after all). However, the woman dies and Wick is left with a dog, Daisy (Andy the dog). In the first film, John Wick (Stahelski 2014), the dog is simultaneously a symbol of the new life he wanted and the fact that he will never have it. This becomes literal when figures from his past come into Wick’s new life and kills the dog. At its most obvious level this is Wick’s past returning to consume not just his present but the future he had yearned for and while being explicitly Gothic in nature seems to contain little nostalgia, at least on his part. Yet, as will be shown here, it is not just the world of his past that requires his return to it, but that Wick himself subliminally yearns for it and feels only truly himself in the past. Furthermore, as argued here, it is the Gothic nature of not just that world of the past but of Wick himself that makes this inevitable.

S. Bacon (B) Poznan, ´ Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_13

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This sense of inevitability is highlighted at the start of the first film which actually begins with a scene from its end marking it a point that is totally unavoidable, destiny even, with all its Gothic implications. Once we are told this ending is inescapable, we are then taken to the events that have already occurred, that will power Wick’s trajectory towards it. Here we see him mourning the death of his wife. She was the reason that he “retired” from his former life and embarked on a new one which has been cut short by illness—she, we are told had come to peace with her own impending death and has asked John to do so as well. In an attempt to keep her husband facing forward his wife arranged for a puppy to be delivered to him to both remember her and give him a reason to continue in his new life. There are a couple of points here worth looking at a little closer before moving on, and these are Wick’s retirement and what his new life is.

The All-Consuming Past As the film continues we discover that Wick was a hit man, but not just an ordinary one. In fact the entire underground world of organised crime seems to know him, often referring to him as “the boogeyman” or “Baba Yaga” who is unstoppable and unkillable—this establishes an almost supernatural status to him and one which will be explored later. This background is confirmed by one of his former employers, Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), who set him an impossible mission which he somehow completed—we discover in subsequent films this might have required help from others. This legendary status that Wick enjoys is reinforced throughout the franchise where anyone who is anyone in the world of paid assassins and the nefarious organisation The High Table either knows him or is aware of his reputation. This makes the idea of “retiring” rather spurious and Viggo’s explanation that after the completing of the impossible job Wick was allowed to retire because of a woman is equally unbelievable. Yet it seems that he might have been retired for some amount of time as Viggo’s son, Josef (Alfie Allen), seems blissfully unaware of who Wick is or what he did for his father—it is later suggested that Wick was “out” of his all-consuming past for about 5 years. Another important point to Wick’s retirement is that it seems to come with very little emotional or moral cost in that he appears to feel little or no guilt in killing the people he has for very large amounts of money (though we are led to view this in the same way we are told to see “Vegan

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Vampires” that only kill animals or “bad” people so that murdering those that are deemed morally less or not human in some way carries no ethical weight or currency and causes no subsequent sense of guilt or need for atonement—there is a sense of the Gothic here in being beyond or outside of normative values). This leads into his “new” life which is idyllic, guiltless and seemingly untainted by his old life: both parts seem oddly dreamlike with his past the nightmarish reflection of his dreamy present. The “new” life is itself a composite creation as it is largely in highly nostalgic flashback to his time with his wife which is viewed as both idyllic and melancholic, the latter when she is dying. In its construction the time with his wife—we never see how they met or how much she knew of his “profession”—is painted as a reward (the love of his life, his destiny and possible salvation) but her being taken away is a punishment (his penance for all those whose loved ones he has killed). In fact this duality is also seen in their/his house. The building is representative of this new life in that it is new house rather than a refurbished one. Large, light and airy it is set in extensive grounds, a point that makes it representative of the fantasy bubble that Wick himself seems to have constructed in his retirement, a bubble of the present that the past will inevitable burst. Indeed Daisy, the innocent looking beagle puppy bequeathed to him by his wife, similarly embodies the fairytale nature of Wick’s “new” life—the dog he has in the later films, a Pit Bull Terrier, is far more “realistic” in regard to his old life—that is built on the rose-coloured nostalgia of his time with his wife and completely ignores or represses his life before that. It is only when we see John venture out from this bubble that the past starts pouring back in and destroying the new life he had carefully created (curated). It is a pivotal moment in the franchise as Wick’s new life is already nostalgic; it is filled with a yearning for the life he had with his wife which he can never recapture. This sees it as part impossible dream of the future, which recalls Frederic Jameson’s (2005) notion of the opposition of nostalgia and utopian thought—one being a retreat into the past and the other a future beyond it—except here the perfect future Wick yearns for is a return to a time before his present. What he gets of course is a recurrence of a past from even further back: a kind of traumatic return to a time from before the trauma of his wife dying—one would be tempted to see the ensuing violence as a kind of working through the processes of grief yet its texture is of something else more along to refinding, re-remembering, who he really is.

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Returning to the story, John goes to a garage with Daisy to buy fuel for his car. The car is not any car but a classic mustang—unsurprisingly, in light of what happens next, it is something from Wick’s previous life—and it arouses the interested of a young Russian mobster called Josef, the son of Viggo. John gives Josef short shrift over his interest in buying the car and leaves the young man and his friends at the garage. This is not the end of it of course as they follow John back to his nostalgic bubble of light, and appropriately for representatives of the Gothic past, enter it under the cover of darkness, kill Daisy, knock Wick unconscious and steal the car— in many ways it is the past reclaiming its own as this car is part of the past and has no place in the new life Wick created. This act—not unlike the knife stabbing the portrait of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde’s novel—let’s the past flood back in and Wick re-embraces the darkly Gothic world of intrigue, violence and sudden, often brutal, death. This change is shown in a conversation he then has with Viggo later in the film: John:

Viggo: John:

When Helen died, I lost everything. Until that dog arrived on my doorstep... A final gift from my wife... In that moment, I received some semblance of hope... an opportunity to grieve unalone... And your son... took that from me. Oh, God. Stole that from me... Killed that from me! People keep asking if I’m back and I haven’t really had an answer. But now, yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back. So you can either hand over your son or you can die screaming alongside him! (Emphasis in original)

Once his nostalgic bubble has been burst, and revealing the inherently precarious nature of it, John then takes a sledgehammer to the floor of his house and unearths a chest of guns and gold coins revealing that it was actually built upon the literal dead body of his former life. John’s return to his old life might not seem particularly nostalgic but it is one that, to him is familiar and necessary—this can be seen to conform to the idea of classic nostalgia as noted by Svetlana Boym where the pain caused by loss signifies the need to return to the past and to the familiar (2001, 4–7), if not necessarily the precise details used to describe it. Necessity is an important point on the construction of John Wick himself and the nostalgic drive that motivates him. Firstly, as seen in his conversation with Viggo, he sees himself as a man who has no other recourse than what he is about to do: it is not by personal choice but because he has been forced to by outside pressures—this oddly points

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to the trope of ordinarily mild-mannered characters who are pushed too far (The Incredible Hulk e.g.)—and posits the Everyman status that is increasing established for Wick in the series. It is this necessity caused by being pushed too far and beyond the limits of what is bearable—first by an individual (Josef in John Wick) and then the system (The High Table in subsequent episodes)—that resonates with many peoples experiences of life in the twenty-first century where it is the pressures of work, of those felt to be unacceptably encroaching on our lives and our freedoms, of government decisions, of secret cabals that are seen as the reasonable cause for our extreme, abusive and/or violent reactions. In this sense John Wick’s necessity is what powers populist politics: he gets things done because he has to. The second point around necessity is found in the ease with which John reassumes his former profession. As noted previously, we are told the John has been retired for some time, but he appears to have forgotten none of his skills or methodologies. Indeed, even going with the idea of habit memory from processes he has performed over and over again he immediately achieves the thoughtless ease of someone at the top of his game—any professional going back to a physical job they once did knows the kinds of inherently entangled emotions of pleasure and nostalgia that arise from one’s body and mind slipping easily into former patterns of movement and thought and indeed Henri Bergson spoke of this in his work on Bodily, or Recollective memory (see Bergson 1911). John then, of necessity, returns to his former life, not just because he feels there’s no other option, but because it is where his body and mind feel most at home: back in the past before his new life (and wife) died. Johns new, old home, is one which is founded on a return to the past and fuelled by a Gothic excess that finds expression in violence and death which sees John kill all of Viggo’s men, Josef, and finally Viggo himself. The Gothic nature of this is seen in how beyond normal the performance of John’s kills are. Obviously the nature of such movies requires the spectacular in its action scenes and the John Wick films purposely play on this and so we see John repeatedly shooting people at close range, pushing and punching blades, pencils and other objects into people’s bodies: the very presence of John Wick makes the bodies of others precarious and porous and liable to be penetrated, broken and exploded. He literally kills people by Gothicising their bodies; making them so abnormal from their original normative position that they can no longer exist alive in this world. The culmination of this process sees John attempt to return to his old, new life and he gets himself a another puppy—after patching up a knife

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wound in his stomach in a nearby animal, shelter—but this one is not in the same cuddly ilk as Daisy was, this time it is a Pit Bull. This is not a pet so that he can grieve for his wife “un alone” but a companion on his return to a life of violence. The subsequent instalments of the franchise make the thinking behind this choice explicit and also more fully establish the Gothic credentials of the underworld he is re-entering and of John himself.

Re-finding Yourself in the Underworld The first movie in the franchise begins to establish the nature of the world that John came from. We see Viggo as a Russian mob boss who used Wick to kill one of his competitors and establish a territory for himself where, we assume, he runs much of the illegal goings on such as drugs, weapons, prostitution and protection rackets. This in itself paints a fairly popular image of a kind of criminal underworld that operates beneath the normative (legal) world above it. However, as the film progresses we are given a glimpse of a much larger and far darker or occult picture of what is really going on, which happens when John goes into the Continental Hotel—though arguably we have had an earlier intimation of this when Wick called a “clean up” team to dispose of the bodies of a group of Viggo’s men he had killed. The Continental is run by Winston (Ian McShane) who is part of a nefarious group called The High Table. The Hotel acts as a meeting point and safe-house for gang bosses and assassins and strictly no violence is allowed to take place on its premises. To break this rule means excommunication and certain death to the one that has done so. In this sense The Continental is a Gothic space that is beyond the laws of the normative world outside yet is also an extreme form of those laws in that is a place that is ruled by the laws of honour and exchange: if you make a pledge you must honour it and if you do not, the one you have dishonoured has the right to exact payment however they see fit—in this way Josef killing John’s dog was breaking the pledge that his father Viggo had made and consequently The High Table would not intervene in that. This exchange of tokens, signifying a favour owed, also acts as hard currency in this world. Consequently the rules of the hotel look back, in a rather nostalgic way, to the chivalric code of the Middle Ages which sees those abiding by the regulations as honourable and/or warriors in some way. As such the hotel is a serene mask overlaying a world of violence and death, but also acts as conduit between the

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world of light and the everyday, and the dark, occult realm of the criminal underworld—this idea is reinforced by the hotel concierge being called Charon (Lance Riddick) who then literally ferries the guests to and from the underworld to the real world. The nature of this underworld is given more concrete form in the second instalment of the franchise, John Wick: Chapter 2 (Stahelski 2017), when a favour is called in which requires John to kill someone. This favour, a blood oath, is demanded by Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) to kill his sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini) who is about to be coronated as the new leader of The High Table in Rome. John has no option but to comply and undertakes the assassination at the coronation that is taking place in an ancient palace in the capitol where the Gothic nature of the opulent, ruined setting reaches its apotheosis as John escapes through underground tunnels and caves as though escaping the labyrinth—a literal embodiment of Fred Botting’s description of the Gothic as typified by the play of light and shadows, subterranean realms, obsession, passion, violence and the supernatural (2013, 2–3): though trying to escape the land of the dead he brings it with him out into the real world where the bodies pile up around him as he escapes back to New York. The true scale and nature of this underworld begins to become apparent once John reaches New York where Santini has put a 7 million dollar bounty on John’s head and every assassin in the area tries to kill him. He makes it to The Continental where he meets Santino. However, John, realising he has been double-crossed and played by the dishonourable Santini breaks the code and kills him in the Hotel. With no other option Winston has to excommunicate John meaning that every assassin everywhere (and it literally is everywhere) will try and kill him—as another flashback/nostalgic moment the call Winston makes is to a very old fashioned looking telephone exchange which is run by teams of people who, though dressed as though from the 1930s are highly tattooed and pierced again seeing the present in the past and collapsing temporality as if in a dream (or traumatic) realm. In a seminal scene to the overarching narrative we see John and his dog meeting Winston in Central Park where he tells Wick that he will give him a one hour head start before the contract on his head will become live. But to prove the scale of the situation John is in, Winston signals to all the assassins in the park to stop moving and absolutely everyone in sight freezes. It is a chilling scene, not just in its intended excess of symbolising just how far reaching this underworld is, but in how it actually suggests that we are all assassins for money and that while we might pretend we

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are doing it for noble reasons, an ancient chivalric code, or just out of a sense honour and traditional values, we in fact all have a price and will kill anyone for money. This moment does not so much expose the extent of the influence of The High Table but the nature of twenty-first-century neoliberal society itself. Here then, The High Table is shown as not the secret cabal that oversees the esoteric world of assassins and organised crime, but the global, wealthy elite that control the world through the provision and withholding of money and of course violence. John is then configured as something other than The High Table. Where they are about artifice, the enforcement of laws that benefit themselves and are ultimately dishonourable, John is authentic, a man of natural honour and one who is constantly wronged: they are the inherently corrupt system and John is the Everyman giving it to the “man” on our behalf. And of course he loves his dog. However, as intimated above, Wick is a more complicated figure than that and is equally as Gothic as the world he came from. The first instalment of the franchise shows us a man who cannot escape the past. At first this seems to be just because of his recently deceased wife, but we slowly discover it runs much deeper than that. As the film begins we see John crashing an SUV and staggering out of the wreckage clutching a wound in his stomach—it is not necessarily from the crash. Wounds, breaks and bodily damage will become increasing familiar in the series, as will John’s seemingly supernatural ability to not be killed by them.1 Now on the ground he pulls out a phone and watches a film of his wife; if he thinks he’s dying then his dead wife is the last thing he wants to see. There is a sense that he realises the only way he will ever be with her again, and he deeply longs to be, will be by his own death; he would never take his own life but his excessive disregard for his own safety is driven by his subconscious desire—his drive to death—to be reunited with his wife. What we see then is a man who is simultaneously in the moment (he knows how to stem the flow of blood from his stomach) and not present at all: he is temporally porous—this is different to the kind bodily abnormal spoken about by Kelly Hurley (1996) but speaks to the ways that a temporal out-of-placeness, or the temporally weird affects the physical body. This kind of Gothic porosity, of a body that is permeable

1 Unfortunately John Wick’s undead status is a topic beyond the scope of this paper.

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and is constantly penetrated and transformed by the past, increases in the figure of John Wick the more we see him. As the film of his wife plays on his phone Wick passes out and wakes up in the past. It is the day of his wife, Helen’s funeral, and even there he is thinking back to earlier times with her: even when in the past he is dreaming of times further back creating layers or levels of nostalgia— indeed there is a sense that nothing in the series of films is in fact real and is all just John’s subconscious trying to work through the trauma of his wife’s death, or even something further back and that for him, a man who by necessity has to be hyper-aware of the present, nostalgia is his way of being in the world. These layers of the past, both literal and psychological, form a kind of purgatorial space for John; layers of hell that take him further and further away from the “heaven” of his time with Helen. And in this sense his re-involvement with Viggo, D’Antonio and The High Table are ever deeper circles of the underworld whose depths he needs to plunder to find redemption or salvation to be with Helen again. Consequently, it is at Helen’s funeral, which is itself the entry level to John’s purgatorial nostalgia, where he meets an old friend Marcus (Willem Dafoe) who he knows from his days as an assassin and who forms a link to the lower level of the past and the underworld that is pulling him back. The pull becomes unavoidable with the appearance of Josef, who, as mentioned above, just happens to be the son of the person who allowed John to retire in the first place. It seems appropriate then that the person who let Wick escape the underworld is responsible for bringing him back into it and symbolic that his death at John’s hands is the act that sets the former assassin on his path to the depths of this nostalgic purgatory. D’Antonio, who was also involved in the impossible kill that allowed John to retire, is then responsible for taking him to the next level of the underworld and his involvement with The High Table, and then eventually the Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon). Each level becomes increasingly dreamlike and hallucinatory with John’s body becoming increasingly Gothicised through the amount of damage, and disfigurements it undergoes and cyborgian with its guns, knives and protective clothing that evermore become part of who he is. Each “chapter” of the franchise sees this destabilisation of John’s body increase. In the first we see John suffer multiple severe beatings, a deep cut from a broken bottle, and more significantly a knife wound that he allowed/caused to happen to adjust his position in a fight so he could then use the knife to kill his attacker,

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Viggo. This sees John’s body as something other than “normally” human and more than human where wounds and penetrations are not damaging but often times transformations to allow it to become a better weapon. This has two significant affects on the nature of John one diegetic and the other extradiegetic. The one that takes us outside the narrative itself is divided between the genre that John Wick’s exploits relate to, and the actor who plays him. Here Wick, as the narrative continues is more obviously correlated to the role of an action hero, though one that was not as young as he once was. Consequently, John’s role as the Everyman who is coerced by outside influences to take on a much larger group of killers connects him to such figures as John McClane (Bruce Willis) in the Die Hard movies and even John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in the Rambo/ First Blood films. Both of these feature (former) professionals—McClane is a cop and Rambo a discharged soldier—fighting against a considerably larger amount of trained soldiers/killers. And more specifically these series feature the actor as they age.2 Wick, like both McClane and Rambo, survives much physical violence and many life threatening injuries and wounds though maybe unlike them he is shot at point blank range many, many more times which, even though it is explained via a tailored bulletproof suit, constructs him as superhuman, unkillable or even undead in some way—this idea of Wick being a revenant and risen from the grave and unable to die until his quest is completed gains increasing credence as the series plays out with his ability to survive fatal wounds parallels him quite closely to Eric Draven (Jason Lee) in The Crow (1994). Of importance in these comparisons is how figures such as John McClane and even Eric Draven are shown to be just in their cause; they have been drawn into a conflict not of their choosing but feel honour-bound to complete their task and consequently we can forgive them for the violence and deaths they inflict as being deserved in some way. Wick’s purposeful correspondence—affective resonance—to these characters reinforces the sense he is justified in what he does, and indeed his older body plays into this as does the fact that he fights, shoots and kills hordes of assassins much younger than himself. However, as noted above, although Wick might be a former professional in the same way that McClane was, and was wronged in a vaguely similar way to Draven (Eric’s fiancé was raped and killed by a gang of men who then killed him while only Wick’s dog

2 The Die Hard series ran from 1988–2013, and the Rambo series from 1982–2019.

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was killed), he was until relatively recently a paid assassin who killed for money and suffers no remorse or guilt over that.3 Yet, this lack of guilt is also downplayed in the film by the choice of actor playing Wick himself. Keanu Reeves is an actor held in a very particular regard by his often adoring fans. Not unlike Bruce Willis who played McClane, Reeves’ offset character is one that is used to inform his on screen persona and how he is to be interpreted (consumed) by the audience, and in recent years he has been shown to be almost more than human in his non-star-like (prima donna) qualities, good deeds and general likability. As such, this then very much plays into how Wick is perceived by the films audience so that his mourning for his wife, his wish to start a new peaceful life and his attachment to and death of his dog (which is a symbol of all of that) becomes ample justification for his subsequent actions.4 The audience goodwill that Reeves engenders, much of which is tinted with a large amount of nostalgia to many of his earlier roles, then sees Wick as a predominantly positive character and also builds into our purposeful suspension of disbelief in how he remains alive in the franchise, or is in fact brought back to life by the adoration of those watching. Something of this informs psychoanalyst Ernest Jones description of how vampires are brought back from the grave by those who love them (1951, 17–19), and in this sense Wick is kept alive by the belief and love of his audience. This is maybe made no more apparent than in the bullet proof suit John wears. In the first film Wick is just wearing his normal clothes and so his fights tend to be more physical and bodily (torso) penetrative—hence his stomach wound from the bottle and the unique “self-stabbing” solution to the final fight with Viggo—but in the second, Chapter 2, he flies to Rome to complete the job he has been given to fulfil a blood oath, and there is measured for an ordinary looking tailored suite (jacket, waistcoat and trousers) which is made from bullet-proof material. The subsequent fights in the film and particularly those during his escape from the “coronation” are very much more centred on guns and shooting his victims in the face or head. But it also means he becomes 3 It can be argued that at least he’s only killing other assassins like himself yet it also sees him kill people that would appear to be former colleagues or even “friends” (a very difficult term to apply to any of the relationships in the franchise). 4 It is of note that during the franchise a YouTube/Instagram clip of Reeves talking to Drew Barrymore about having to be a fighter to be a lover was/is very popular. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFrGYB8inoY.

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literally impervious to all gunfire and without any kind of impact when he is shot either—ordinarily with bulletproof vests the impact of being hit by a single bullet often knocks the wearer over—making him seem impervious to gunshots and distinctly not-human. In fact, the second film fully establishes Wick’s Gothic nature and the abhuman nature of his body that is simultaneously impervious to bullets yet splitting and doubling himself in the maze of mirrors at the end of the film—labyrinths play a large role in the film appearing twice (both above and below ground) signifying John’s psychological journey/state, he continued descent deeper into hell, and the puzzle of the nightmare he cannot escape.

The Past Is Never the End As discussed above John Wick is a men who has lost his future, or at least what symbolised it for him, to the forces of the past. Indeed, the new life that Wick had constructed for himself was even built upon the foundations of that past. The inevitability of its return to haunt his present was in part due to the fact that Wick had never processed or accepted the nature of what he used to do and that he was as Gothic as the world he had left behind. Within this, John’s quick return to the intricacies for his former way of life are beyond bodily memory and become more a way of becoming, re-remembering, his true self—a similar scenario is seen in the film Assassin’s Creed (Justin Kurzel 2016) where Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender) re-remembers his former life as an assassin through the choreography of killing; the better he becomes the more he re-remembers himself. John’s past, as a hired killer for and in the (criminal) underworld and as an accepted and natural part of it—as evidenced by how many parts of it recognise him upon his return—mark him out as otherworldly and beyond (below) the normal world. Indeed, Wick is, in many ways, even more excessive than the Gothic underworld he has been reborn or resurrected back into and which sees him almost as immortal as Death itself. John’s nostalgia here is not just for a place and time which he is familiar with but of one where he was in control, and it is his wish to regain this control—or at least the nostalgic illusion of it—that leads him further and further into the downward spiralling labyrinth of his past. Unsurprisingly, the dreamlike and nightmarish quality of this past increases the deeper he goes so that he begins to lose any real sense of why he started the quest in the first place other than to gain control through the death of

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others. Consequently, and as we see in the films, John’s form of nostalgic quest is never-ending, for as soon as he finds his past, he needs to find a better past before that one. The franchise then reveals how nostalgia is not just a yearning for an imaginary time when things were simpler, easier, more innocent, but a refusal to life in and be part of the present. The kind of acceptance of the past as being as bad as now is constantly rebuffed by John as he shoots, stabs and kills any representatives of his former life almost as soon as any of them challenge his view of the world. Consequently, he will only ever find peace in the world once he has killed everything in it, or it has killed who he has re-remembered he was.

Works Cited Assassin’s Creed. 2016. Directed by Justin Kurzel. Century City: 20th Century Fox. Bergson, Henri. 1911. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: The Macmillan Company. Bottling, Fred. 2013. Gothic (The New Critical Idiom). London: Routledge. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Hurley, Hurley. 1996. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the fin de siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jameson, Frederic. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. John, Wick. 2014. Directed by Chad Stahelski. Universal City: Summit Entertainment. John, Wick: Chapter 2. 2017. Directed by Chad Stahelski. Universal City: Summit Entertainment. John, Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum. 2019. Directed by Chad Stahelski. Universal City: Summit Entertainment. Jones, Ernest. 1951. On the Nightmare. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Gothic Nostalgia in Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room Martyn Colebrook

The Scottish author Louise Welsh’s crime novel, The Cutting Room, was published in 2002 to immediate critical claim and commercial success. Her follow up, The Second Cut, was published in March 2022 and continues her engagement with the Gothic in a manner which suggests “nostalgia” or “longing”. The Cutting Room explores the queer Gothic spaces of contemporary Glasgow through the lens of mystery, the abject and the uncanny. Drawing pointedly on older Gothic texts, Welsh updates these to the twenty-first century, reflecting on the impact of globalisation on the Gothic city. In particular, Welsh’s novel examines the monstrous element of Glasgow as a response to its globalised heteronormative dimensions and to its consumer capitalist agenda. The text makes clear that capitalism and nostalgia (the two being uncannily intertwined), rather than a wrongly defamed queer community, causes critical distress. By contrast, the queer underground itself takes on a more liberating significance, attached to a challenge to the norm and to a sentiment of openness and reciprocal pleasure. Eduardo Garcia’s work discusses the motif of the labyrinth in Welsh’s fiction and his identification of the viewer

M. Colebrook (B) University of Hull, Yorkshire, England e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_14

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dynamic and the cinematic dimension to Welsh’s work correlates with existing critical analysis by Gavin Miller in which he discusses the “aesthetic depersonalisation” (2006, 72) of the individual in Welsh’s fiction through such a medium or framing device. As Garcia suggests: “The readers of the novel, on the other hand, could be said to be maze-viewers as, in the act of reading, they are getting a wider picture of the events. The aspect arises from the events being narrated through the characters’ eyes” (Garcia 2015, 7). The significance of this and the Gothic nostalgia is immediate in the title—the “cutting room” being a pun on the place where unnecessary bits of film are edited and the room where the transgressive acts are carried out. In this case, the main character Rilke starts his labyrinthine journey when he feels the need to answer the question of the truthfulness of the photographs taken in Soleil et Désolé. Here is a place in Paris where, during a time just after World War II’s conclusion, the proprietors and customers gathered in a place which “catered increasingly for a clientele interested in sadism…[with] the prettiest torture chamber in Paris” (Welsh 2022, 289). Gothic thrives in times of crisis and in the post-war era where social cohesion was fractured and the consequences of global conflict emerged in periods of transgressive behaviour and deprivation, the actions and appetites of a discrete and usually wealthy group of individuals could be satisfied—hence the use of the word “catered”—in the darker parts of Paris which turned such activities into an aesthetic or an art form. The dynamics of death, power and physical violation converge at a point which is not a fin-de-siecle but certainly the end of a particularly traumatic period in European history. According to Punter, “Gothic takes us on a tour through the labyrinthine corridors of repression, gives us glimpses of the skeletons of dead desires and makes them move again…the phantoms, vampires and monsters of the Gothic are for the most part recognisable embodiments of psychological features” (Punter 1996, 188). The motif of the repressed and the return of the repressed characterise the method by which Welsh structures her plot, “dead desires” being equally applied to the need to investigate the dead girl in the picture but also the manner in which Rilke fails to suppress his own attractions and sexual needs, using a series of encounters with casual partners to reinvigorate his own sense of self. The novel begins its journey into the past with the unintended discovery of a photograph. Rilke is asked by an elderly woman, Miss McKindless, to clear out the belongings of her brother who has died recently. Miss McKindless is obdurate in her request for Rilke to carry

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out the auction and, separately, burn a select group of his belongings. Amongst the possessions which are destined for the furnace, Rilke discovers a series of photographs which depict a young woman who has been tied up, whipped and had her throat cut. Rilke sees it as his duty to establish the validity of the photograph. That the photograph is discovered after being hidden away in a loft, just within touching distance of the curious, it is apparent to the reader that there is a historic artefact underpinning the narrative and plot and it is arguable that “[T]he past is so near that it is almost present and only needs to be unearthed” (Garcia 2015, 29). The highlighting of this phrase is a deliberate and conscious reflection of Louise Welsh’s own view of her practice as a novelist. In an interview with Eduardo Garcia, she reveals that “I am quite interested in gender, sexuality… and the Gothic is always engaged with those subjects […] I don’t particularly want to write about the supernatural elements, but the engagement with the past, the atmosphere, what’s around the corner, that sort of stuff is pleasant to my taste” (Garcia 2014, 206). This highlights the multiplicity of the text and the intersection between Welsh and the idea of nostalgia for the Gothic, and particularly her desire not to write about the “supernatural” but an engagement with the past, namely the near history which is the fundament upon which The Cutting Room and The Second Cut are based. As Rilke walks through Glasgow, he muses that: “Surrounded by all the vice of the city, cruelties under my nose, and all I had thought about was the past. History tells us why things are the way they are. It shows the constancy of human nature. Unfortunately. It doesn’t tell us what to do about it” (Welsh 2022, 271). Rilke’s focus on the past, namely the activity in the photograph, has caused him to neglect his concern for the present and the “vice” and “cruelties” which occur around him on a daily basis in the city. The photo is indicative of the current state and how human nature’s perpetual need for the transgressive and the illegal will continue but it offers no clue as to how this could be resolved or prevented. In this respect Rilke is unable to perform the role of the modern hero and must defer to the machinations of the State which, in its characteristic way, persecutes him as often as it assists him. As Scaggs indicates, “Gothic nostalgia pines for the past, for a lost era of romance and adventure. It is obsessed with objects rather than with images, with physicality rather than with representation” (Scaggs 2000, 53) and it is the photograph itself which becomes fetishised in The Cutting Room as

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well as seeking resolution to the physical violence which has been meted out to the subject. The reader is introduced to Rilke, protagonist of both novels, at the beginning of The Cutting Room as he travels to a job in his capacity as an auctioneer, a role he has served for 25 years. He quips: “I’ve twenty-five years at the auction house, forty-three years of age. They call me Rilke to my face, behind my back the Cadaver, Corpse, Walking Dead. Aye, well, I may be gaunt of face and long of limb but I don’t smell and I never expect anything” (Welsh 2022, 2). Aside from the flash of humour, Welsh presents a figure redolent of a Gothic character—Garcia comments that Rilke is “is a Walking Dead, he is a Nosferatu impersonator” (Garcia 2014, 206), a pallid, middle-aged nightwalker whose participation in the economies of after dark extends to soliciting homosexual relationships in parts of Glasgow where such practices are still frowned upon, as well as the darker practices he encounters in his day-time work. Welsh has commented further that “In Rilke I was thinking mostly of people like Marlowe or Melmoth the Wanderer, who is the night surveillant: they walk alone in their societies” (Garcia 2014, 206) and the characterisation means Rilke becomes emblematic of the individual who remains an outsider and operates in the liminal spaces where the Gothic flourishes. The longing for a protagonist who can slip between the cracks but also embodies the Gothic principle of parody or humour is apparent with his naming but also his performance. A similar comparison can be made with Adia Kovalyova—the Ukrainian girl—she resembles a modern, updated version of Emily St. Aubert in Ann Radliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), secluded in a brothel from which she cannot escape. In this respect, it is apparent that the characters became kind of monsters, but in the same novel, the prostitute is a ghostly presence, as she is haunted by the house and simply cannot go out. Besides, nobody can see her from outside. The inability of Kovalyova to be “seen” in society, her invisibility is a characteristic of her profession and her function, disenfranchised from all conventional economic structures and hidden behind a structure where she must undertake the role assigned to her. The “monstrosity” is extended to the customers who have used her services, not just those who trafficked her and engaged in the “flesh trade” which, as Rilke discovers, is hidden in plain sight but away from those who enforce laws. Upon meeting Miss McKindless, Rilke startles her unintentionally, observing that: “I had no wish to frighten the old lady—there’s a spectral aspect to me. It’s not for nothing they call me the Walking Dead”

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(Welsh 2022, 17). The repeated self-identification with the ghostly is at odds with Rilke’s desire not to frighten Miss McKindless but it also highlights why his characterisation as a private detective as opposed to, for example, a police officer is effective. As Gavin Miller asks “is he therefore unlike the private detective—an agent of law and retribution—who steps in where the state cares not to tread?” (Miller 2006, 84). Welsh concurs, declaring that ‘‘I guess if I had to class myself, I would say Gothic, which comes for me before the crime” (Garcia 2014, 206) and thus, despite the correlation between Gothic and Crime, the latter is of less importance to the author hence the identification of elements in her work which appear more relevant to or sympathetic for the Gothic. The private detective is a transgressive figure who can access areas of society through unofficial channels which border on the grounds of legality and is seen as a last resort away from the official tools of law enforcement. Rilke’s occupation involves intelligence gathering and traversing the gap between the wishes of his paying customer and the moral imperative he feels for excavating and unearthing the history of the dead girl in the photographs. When Rilke is presented with the contents of the box that Miss McKindless wishes to be disposed of, it is narrated thus: “The personality I had missed below stairs, confined to the attic like a mad Victorian relative” (Welsh 2022, 20). Upon discovering a collection of first editions of erotica from the Olympia Press, Rilke equates this with a well-known trope of Victorian Gothic fiction and, given the correlation between the Gothic and crime fiction, it is possible that there is some nostalgia here for the “locked room mystery” which came to dominate the popularity of the earliest crime fiction genres. Furthermore there is the transgressive aspect of the photographs in which the camera man positions the body as the site of consumption and violation, the individual subject is rendered as a mere object of aesthetic pleasure and voyeurism for the audience whilst the violence meted out remains an exemplar of the dynamics associated with power, control and coercion. As Hay contests, “Modern ghostly figures do not signify what can be experienced directly, a lived relationship to the past; to make present that absence” (Hay 2011, 18). And thus, as readers, we are perpetually presented with that which is mediated, that from which we are removed, scenarios from which the reader has to observe and consume but also understand how the violation takes place in a particular visual space whereby the subject becomes the consequence of forces which are beyond the control of the observer but in which the observer becomes complicit.

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Rilke maintains a platonic and occasionally intimate relationship with his employer, Rose, who he suggest: “Four centuries ago […] would have been burnt at the stake and some days I think I would have been in the crowd cheering the action along” (Welsh 2022, 11). The comedic aspect of Rilke’s disposition makes his feelings towards Rose clear, focusing on the days when she presents a challenging figure in the business and particularly when this vitriol is directed towards Rilke himself for his actions. Presenting the auction room prior to the sale of McKindless’ items, Rilke notes that “The room had the dead feeling common to public buildings when empty of people. Without the activity of a sale it was a ghost of itself, an echoing shell” (Welsh 2022, 12). The absence of people presents the room as a site where objects of historical significance are sold and conveyed in exchange for money. The hive of activity gives the room presence and life but otherwise it remains a place of memories and history, a funereal atmosphere. As Rilke observes the photographs found in McKindless’ box, and upon looking at the man within them notes that ‘‘Dark eyes stared malevolently from the past. I felt that, had I met this man, I would have known myself in the presence of evil” (Welsh 2022, 39). The focus is firmly on the presence of what has gone before, the atavistic and haunted self which brings malice to the forefront. The “dark eyes” from the photograph add further emphasis to the intensity and the feeling of being “in the presence of evil” and hints at the sensation of the uncanny, a sensation of recognising that inhuman quality associated with someone who relishes going down into the darkness. A new worker in the auction house presents himself to Rilke whose natural suspicion is immediately aroused: “White cap, white top, blue sweat pants. I think of him as a ghost. A whey-faced spectre” (Welsh 2022, 27). The pale face and predominantly white attire correspond to the manner in which an apparition would present themselves whilst the “whey-faced” demeanour emphasises how young the individual is in comparison with Rilke. Furthermore, that “whey” is the liquid that remains after milk has been curdled and strained also highlights the manner in which he is an afterthought, an unwanted or useless residue which happens to remain after the main produce has been created. One particular quality of the Gothic which is present in Welsh’s oeuvre is that of the melodramatic or over the top, parodic atmosphere which accompanies key interactions within a text. Rilke meets Derek, a young employee at the bookstore who he asks for help in establishing the authenticity of the photos, in a bar on the proverbial dark and stormy

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night in Edinburgh, the atmosphere anticipates the sexual tension and charge which follows. Rilke describes the weather as follows: “In the air somewhere there was a crash of thunder, three short beats and then a flash of lightning and the smell of cordite” (Welsh 2002, 77). The foreboding and pathetic fallacy occurring in this scene is indicative of an event where evil lurks around the corner or is associated with the character that Rilke is meeting, the thunder, lightning and cordite (the latter could just as easily be sulphur) add to the atmosphere. When Rilke comes face to face with the other male, the sexual desire becomes apparent: “I wanted to lick his white teeth, bite his lower lip until it bled red blood, warm and sticky, coating his mouth like cherry lip-gloss” (Welsh 2002, 77). The biting of the lower lip in search of “warm and sticky” red blood presents Rilke in the guise of a vampire feasting on the virginal lips of his younger prey; the need to “lick his white teeth” intensifies the purity and over the top description of Rilke’s blood lust, and the feasting on a body which is lifeless and pallid but the blood is still warm in the aftermath. Similarly, as Rilke and Rose attend an event at the exclusive Chelsea lounge they arrive in a taxi during which Rose plays the “Taxi Driver” game, attempting to persuade the incumbent cabbie to repeat lines from the film. Rilke notes the driver observing Rose, distracted and ‘‘willing to risk a crash, blood and carnage and the death of us all, for a glimpse of her trembling cleavage” (Welsh 2002, 99). The “trembling cleavage” is resonant of the damsel in distress and terror from a horror film or the object of desire. Welsh repeatedly frames these scenes as though they are cinema, creating a dynamic between reader and character in which we are a witness or voyeur, unwillingly complicit in the acts which are taking place. That the driver is willing to risk “crash, blood and carnage” depicts him as a man driven wild by the feminine wiles on display, unable to contain his feelings and willing to sacrifice those around him for the pursuit of a woman. During a particularly erotic encounter with a young man he meets in Ushers Bar, Rilke recalls other sexual encounters in order to orgasm: “Memories of encounters honed into fuck-triggers. I imagined myself in a movie I’d seen […] Here it came … a wound, red and deep and longing […] the slash of blood across her throat” (Welsh 2002, 153). Here he is positioned as being in the film, the subject of the viewer’s voyeurism, performing for the camera which depersonalises him in the act. He juxtaposes the imagined pleasure of raping a young boy in a dark tunnel with the dead body of the young girl in the photos; a dual

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scenario in which power is the connecting force and in which the respective bodies are violated by others. As Rilke moves to leave after the act, he notes “the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping of the veil” as though sex is an act which allows him to escape from himself, drop the façade he presents to those around him whilst the animalistic impulses come to the fore. As Rilke returns to his flat and ponders, he notes that “my body seemed the repository of a dead man. I could think and smoke but all feeling was gone. Inside was nothing. Beneath my slack skin was a skeleton framed by blood and gore. I possessed the required internal organs but the soul was missing” (Welsh 2002, 154). The use of “repository” suggests a place where historical documents are stored; Rilke’s memories and experiences contained within but where the life in the body has been removed. He is able to function through mental and physical processing but gains no sensation (pleasurable or otherwise) from the acts, purely a body. The blood and gore hanging on his body indicate that he has a physical presence but he has been depersonalised, the animus removed and the spectral having come to dominate the physical. Rilke resembles an empty vessel, a life oriented around work, drink and casual sex which numb him from pain (whether historical or current). As Garcia suggests “Rilke may look like an empty, soulless Walking Dead, but he is now inhabited, so to speak, by the ghostly memory of all those anonymous victims of irrational—or perhaps too rational—violence” (Garcia 2014, 206) thus he becomes the repository mentioned before, embodying the histories of others and those who he seeks to avenge. Through his pursuit of the girl in the photograph and her photographer, Rilke allows the reader to experience his own personal challenges vicariously whilst attempting to find some form of spiritual redemption from his own actions. Chapter 13 titled “Steenie” sees Rilke attend the bookshop where he consults with the local expert in his ongoing quest to identify the mystery behind the photograph. Rilke looks in the rear view mirror, seeing “the man of three days ago was gone, in his place a troubled spectre. The broken nights and drunkenness had taken their toll: every debauch was etched on my face” (Welsh 2002, 167). That Rilke has been replaced by a “troubled spectre” further emphasises his status as an embodiment of the supernatural although it is the observation that “every debauch was etched on my face” appears to be a reference to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) given that the eponymous subject of the Victorian Gothic novella displays the effects of Dorian’s own debauchery.

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Whilst the chapter is prefaced by a quote from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2003), the more prominent Gothic influence would appear to be James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Steenie is a “stalwart elder of the Free Kirk” (Welsh 2002, 169) and seemingly an extreme juxtaposition to his brother John, a purveyor of pornography and willing indulgent in the exploitative side of Glasgow’s commercial trade. As Rilke follows Steenie into the labyrinthine parts of the book shop, Steenie attacks him without warning or precedent. As he recovers, Rilke discovers a set of papers which contain a mixture of religious doctrine, homophobic slurs and stereotypes, a “faggot fatwa” (Welsh 2002, 180). As they discuss the papers, Steenie reveals that the late Mr. McKindless was a customer of the bookshop and his brother, John, sold him pornography. Steenie accuses Rilke of wishing to “corrupt my brother” (Welsh 2002, 182) and desires to see Rilke harmed. He views Rilke’s visit to the bookshop as a sign of persecution and justifies his work as that which God wants. The fundamentalist language contained in the papers and Steenie’s mania echo the style and principles of James Hogg’s narrator whilst McKindless could feasibly be regarded (in his own mind, at least) as a justified sinner who has tapped into the desires and needs of others and provided the objects for their appetites. Rilke’s pursuit of McKindless and the story behind the photographs positions him paradoxically as the “focus of morality, the mythic hero. He is the controlled centre surrounded by chaos” (Munt 1994, 1), despite the ineffectual nature of his heroism that Miller identifies in the ease with which Rilke decides not to inform the police about the “photographs, the library, McKindless’ visit to Anne-Marie’” (Welsh 2002, 251–52). When Rilke visits Anne-Marie to discuss her encounter with McKindless, she reveals that he made her sit next to him and look at an album full of photos. She realises “he was getting a kick out of showing them” and McKindless is able to establish a power dynamic by making Anne-Marie an unwitting accomplice in his activities through enforced voyeurism. He poses questions to establish if she is experiencing discomfort—“You’re not enjoying this, are you?”—and making this a question as opposed to a statement enhances the levels of control McKindless creates. By making Anne-Marie answer the question and admit her feelings, her admission renders her complicit since she had the theoretical option of denial but chose to reject that opportunity. As Rilke probes further as to the arrangement of the corpses in the photograph, Anne-Marie explains:

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“For the most part they were just naked, or half-naked women looking”— she missed a beat—“languid”. “Languid?” A deep intake of breath. “They were posed like corpses” (Welsh 2002, 218).

That they are “languid” indicates that they had, previously, moved or been animated. By posing the bodies like corpses intensifies the symbolism in the scenario because it transgresses the boundaries between a bodies simply lying prostrate, as though unconscious or dead, and a body which has been deliberately moved or positioned to appear as though its life has been taken. The latter dehumanises the posterity afforded in a natural death, consciously constructing a narrative which has the potential for following an act of violence or murder. As Anne-Marie describes the point at which she posed naked for McKindless, she recalls “I felt cold, really cold. Goose bumps” (Welsh 2002, 219) and the sense of discomfort and being unsettled is replicated in her physical reaction, his physical effect on her is almost supernatural in terms of her fear. The Gothic narrative “precludes unity and instead functions to confuse characters’ fears and desires in a space which is alienating in its complexity” (Leavenworth 2006, n.p.). Garcia further argues that, by focusing on the individual experiences of terror in Gothic texts, the distinction between maze-like locations, such as crypts and castles, and more figurative sites, such as a character’s tortured psyche, disappears. Upon discovering the body of Miss McKindless, Rilke describes her thus: Miss McKindless lay dormant. A negative of the women I had met three days ago. Her lips were bloodless, pale and vanishing. Skin bleached powdery white, except for around her eyes where a waxy indigo smeared the lids above and below. […] The coffin-shaped hump of a neglected grave mound (Welsh 2002, 200–1).

The significance of the word “negative” further emphasises the recurrent symbol of the camera and the viewing of characters through a lens. Her “bleached skin, powdery white” and “lips […] bloodless” give her the characteristics of a woman attacked by a vampire, drained of life, a waxwork model rather than a human, the “neglected grave” indicates the

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manner in which she has been discarded, not afforded a burial and brutally cast aside by her attacker. As Rilke is forced to confront the horrors which lay hidden from him, he realises that: What I had been avoiding was the truth. Like a child hesitating before a keyhole, I wanted to discover hidden secrets, but was frightened that the knowledge, once gained, wouldn’t be to my liking and could never be lost. Accentuating the fear was a delicious anticipation, the thrill of terror before the plunge. It was the thrill that scared me most (Welsh 2002, 226).

The hidden secrets which simultaneously torment and tempt Rilke characterise the manner in with the Gothic is seen as a response to the individual and societal quest for knowledge. Once obtained, it cannot be removed or unseen and thus the terror becomes manifest in whichever form is considered most reprehensible to the “seer”. The dichotomy of pleasure and pain, terror and thrill, reflects the manner in which Gothic nostalgia registers an anxious wish to recoup the last moment in Western history when the supernatural was knowable (Miles 1991, 77). Once knowable or experienced, the supernatural can be contained through the benefit of being understood, that which is unknown presents a perpetual sense of terror since it roams free and presents a threat to the rational. Sage points out that the Gothic narratives collapse into motif: an endless labyrinth who disorientating spirals, instead of obeying that horizontal syntagmatic selection from the rules of narrative which allows readers to feel on their pulses an experience of biography or history, seem to follow the vertical architectonics of allegory; and by doing so, arrest the flow of time and imprison it in the quiet space of the past (Sage 1996, 24).

There is a lot to unpack in Sage’s observations and the confluence of the past and the present in Welsh’s novel presents a structure where the reader is perpetually led astray by distractions or down blind alleys; clues which do not present an immediate solution to the mystery but are mere breadcrumbs on the path to the conclusion. The non-linear narrative which is determined by the retrospective focus on the photograph in itself presents a nostalgic engagement with the Gothic to the extent that Welsh’s own novelistic architecture comes to echo that of her geographical setting—the inimitable contrast between the past and present in the city of Glasgow,

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where the legacy of history remains perpetually within sight but on occasion obscured and reinterpreted. However, the journeys into the past and the recovery of the memories of those who have been buried turn ordinary places and people in the novels into unconventional—or perhaps not so unconventional—Gothic places and monsters. When characters in—and readers of—Louise Welsh’s novels research the past in order to reconstruct it, they all undergo a process of abjection whereby, according to Hogle: the most multifarious, inconsistent and conflicted aspects of our being in the West are “thrown off” onto seemingly repulsive monsters or ghosts that both conceal and reveal this “otherness” from our preferred selves as existing very much within ourselves (Hogle 2001, 295). This projection reveals the monsters hidden within the individuals, and the method by which a reader or character utilises or demonises an “other” in order to throw off the shackles of alienation which is all too apparent in the plight of the individual, the nightwalker, in the modern urban, post-industrial city. For Edmundson, “Gothic nostalgia is concerned with the incessant pull of the past and trying to keep alive something that we know we should let go of” (Edmundson 2021, 13) and the mission upon which Rilke finds himself indicates the pull given the subject of the photographs is deceased. His determination to bring the subject of the photos back to life by way of uncovering the history demonstrates a desire to reanimate. Welsh has spoken about her lack of subtlety when it comes to naming characters and the deployment of specific images and tropes in her work, suggesting that, “It is true. Some of those things, as calling and comparing Rilke to Nosferatu—it’s quite conscious, isn’t it? In a way I’m quite unsubtle” (Garcia 2014, 206). Interestingly Welsh believes that, in the true principles of genre fiction, that there is an agreed contract between writer and reader in terms of the expectations from a novel and this is further emphasised with the knowledge a novelist assumes about their audience. Welsh suggests “You know that your reader knows these images so well… This idea of an old city in which all the different pasts lay on top of each other, and you can almost see and at the same time travel there” (Garcia 2014, 206). The multiplicity of the text is a replication of the multiplicity of the urban environment, and the layers of history which are traversed underfoot and adjusted as each individual conducts their own walk around the city. This sense of liminality in the city becomes apparent, particularly when considering the different examples of invisibility which are highlights in The Cutting Room. Individuals who are prevented from operating

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in society or have been excluded by socio-economic determinants, nationality, criminality or the multifarious other mechanisms by which people “disappear”. Welsh concurs, stating that there is truth in the “idea that we walk the same streets as each other but we don’t necessarily see the same things and that there are criminal things that we ignore or depravation that we ignore and you get used to it” (ibid). The idea of “unseeing “suggests Rilke may, on occasion, move into the territory occupied by dystopia or speculative fiction, where the poverty or social disenfranchisement are a verisimilitude to which the conventional reader is regrettably all too conditioned, both in and outside the arena of fiction.

Works Cited Edmundson, Melissa. 2021. “Many (Un) Happy Returns: Haunted Memory and Nostalgia in the Final Season of Supernatural.” In Monstrom, January. Issue 3.2. https://www.monstrum-society.ca/uploads/4/1/7/5/41753139/edm undson_-_monstrum_3.2.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2023. van Elferen, Isabella. 2012. Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Garcia, Eduardo. 2015. Deep Into the Labyrinths in the Novels By Louise Welsh. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Garcia, Eduardo, and Louise Welsh. 2014. Louise Welsh, then and there. In Atlantis 36 (2): 205–218. Hay, Simon. 2011. Conclusion: Ghosts and History. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. Hogg, James. 1824. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green. Hogle, Jerrold E. 2012. “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter. Oxford: Blackwell. Leavenworth, Van. 2010. The Gothic in Contemporary Interactive Fictions. Umeå: Umeå Studies in Language and Literature11. Mighall, Robert, and Robert Louis Stevenson. (Ed.). 2003. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror Penguin Classics. Revised edn. London. Accessed 27 February 2003. Miles, Robert. 1991. The Gothic Aesthetic: The Gothic as Discourse. The Eighteenth Century 32 (1): 39–57. Miller, Gavin. 2006. Aesthetic Depersonalization in Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room. In Journal of Narrative Theory: JNT 36 (Winter): 72–89. Munt, Sally. 1994. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London: Routledge.

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Punter, David. 1996. The Literature of Terror: The Modern Gothic, vol. 2. London: Longman. Radcliffe, Anne. 2008. The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794]. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Sage, Vic. 1996. “The Politics of Petrification: Culture, Religion, History in the Fiction of Iain Banks and John Banville.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited by Vic Sage and Allan Lloyd-Smith, 20–37. Manchester: Manchester UP. Scaggs, John. 2000. Who Is Francie Pig? Self-Identity and Narrative Reliability in the Butcher Boy. In Irish University Review 30 (1): 51–58. Welsh, Louise. 2022. The Second Cut. Edinburgh: Canongate. Welsh, Louise. 2002. The Cutting Room. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Toxic Ableism and Gothic Nostalgia in Fanfiction About Mermaids Martine Mussies

Gothic texts have long been fascinated with disability and bodily differences (Anolik 2014). The portrayal of disabled characters in Gothic literature is often stigmatising and negative, reinforcing ableist attitudes and stereotypes. Within the construct of society’s institutions by and for the typically abled, a person with a disability is explicitly framed as the Other, which distances people with disabilities from individuals who are not disabled. In this chapter, I refer to this ableism as “toxic”, for I agree with Simon Bacon (2022) in that this word “truly captures the Geist of the 2010s and 2020s, expressing the many forms of negativity, pollution and disillusion that typify the ongoing denial of ecological, environmental, ethnic, gender and sexual inequalities, state violence and even the notion of truth itself” (1–2). Within these structures of toxic ableism, the Other is often symbolised as a Frankensteinian creature. These Gothic mashups are misfits within their societies: their dislocation is analogous to the position of “the disabled woman” in real-world patriarchal communities/ societies. Moreover, they also question related issues around oppression, linked to able-bodiedness, gendered beauty, boundaries between life and

M. Mussies (B) Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_15

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death and the duality of human nature. These issues are also at stake in the online corpus of mermaid fanfiction. In the interdisciplinary field of fan studies (at the crossroads of the humanities and social sciences), mermaid fanfiction is still an understudied phenomenon. Its societal relevance lies in the exploration of the emancipatory potential of fan art narratives to investigate whether—and if so: to what extent—mermaid fan art in a broader sense can help us to imagine relationships beyond sexism, transfobia, ableism, racism, ageism, pretty privilege and related forms of oppression. This chapter aims to make a tentative beginning by exploring and exposing three examples of the corpus of mermaid fanfiction with a focus on the intersection of Gothic nostalgia and toxic ableism. It will examine how Gothic tropes reinforce negative attitudes towards disability, and whether authors of online mermaid fanfiction are changing this. As such, this chapter also demonstrates how mermaid fanfiction can serve as a tool for thinking, by regarding the new mermaid’s identity markers as one of mermaids’ standardised features: the mirror. When using the computer screen as a mirror, I aim to mobilise it not as an outdated aesthetic of representation, but as a lens to look at societal norms which also has implications for other dimensions of oppression. Through the many references and associations used, fanfictions about the mermaid become collages of elements. This online stitching together of different stories—and in our examples even different species—is very similar to a practice that gained popularity around the time that Frankenstein was conceived: taxidermy (Mussies 2018). In 1842, for example, P. T. Barnum displayed at his American Museum in New York the socalled Feejee Mermaid, a mummified monkey with a fish’s tail, which Barnum had bought from Samuel Edes, an American sea captain, who had in turn bought it from Japanese sailors in 1822 (Levi 1977, 150). The popularity of taxidermy as a decorative art-form in the Victorian period, for instance, in the anthropomorphic creations of Walter Potter, ran alongside the emerging science of vivisection, satirised most notably by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). As Kelly Hurley has argued, the human-animal hybrids that occur in the late Victorian Gothic of writers such as Wells and William Hope Hodgson are thoroughly postDarwinian by displacing the imagined wholeness of the human body in favour of “chaotic bodies” that denote “indifferentiation and abomination rather than integrity and perfection” (Hurley 1996, 103). Despite their more Romantic associations, mermaids retained a source of fascination during the fin de siècle—Georges Méliès’ short film, The Mermaid, was

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released in 1904—in part because of their archetypal status as a humananimal hybrid and in part because of their dual sinister nature: the sirens, vampires and succubi that occur within the decadent art of the period (Dijkstra 1989). This mirrors the described processes that are taking place at the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, in which the archetypal status of the mermaid can be—but is not always—used as a metaphor for the misfit that reclaims agency. While taxidermy was often regarded as a male practice, the present-day acts of collaging also mirrors a female one that gained popularity around the same time. During the Victorian era, women often created scrapbooks as a means of recording and preserving history. These scrapbooks, filled with printed materials and personal items, allowed women to engage in intellectual pursuits and express their creativity. Remixing and repurposing these materials, women actively participated in the creation of knowledge and history—personal, political and historical (Hess 2022). Scrapbooks created by women often focused on topics related to their own lives, such as fashion and social events, as well as larger historical and cultural events, such as political movements and literary works (Guest 1996). Today, Victorian scrapbooks created by women are valued for their historical, artistic and literary significance as they offer unique insights into the lives and perspectives of women during this time period (Hunt 2006). Akin to their Victorian ancestors, by their creations, present-day authors of fanfiction actively participate in shaping the cultural and intellectual landscape of their era.

Toxic Ableism in Gothic Texts As Kylee-Anne Hingston (2019) explains, “depictions of illnesses, deaths, accidents, and characters with deformities or chronic invalidism are central to a plethora of nineteenth-century novels” (2). As such, Gothic literature often features characters with disabilities. In early Gothic literature, disability was used to create a sense of horror or dread. In the words of Grace Lapointe (2021): “When I found disabled characters in literature, non-disabled characters viewed them as uncanny, grotesque, monstrous, or symbolic”. The disabled characters were often portrayed as monsters or villains. For instance, in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), the monster is depicted as physically deformed and grotesque:

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His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. (Shelley 1891, 78)

The appearance of the creature causes others to view him as a threat, leading to his isolation and mistreatment by society. Throughout the novel, he is rejected by his creator, Victor Frankenstein, and by society at large, due to his physical deformity. The monster is repeatedly shunned and attacked by humans, who fear him because of his appearance. Although the creature itself was never actually dead before its creation— though arguably his constituent parts were—this resonates with ideas around the Undead. The natural human fear of death is then portrayed as a violent and dangerous Undead, which further fuels the fear. Just like the Undead, the Frankensteinian creature defies the laws of nature, which is unsettling and challenging to human beliefs and understanding of the world. The fear and rejection drive the monster to become increasingly violent and vengeful, ultimately leading to the tragic conclusion of the novel. This portrayal of the monster as physically deformed is an example of the use of physical difference to symbolise social otherness in Gothic literature. The monster’s appearance sets him apart from human society and marks him as an outsider, an object of fear and revulsion. This portrayal reinforces negative stereotypes of disability as a threat, perpetuating ableist attitudes towards disabled individuals. However, it is also worth noting that the novel can be read as a critique of the societal rejection of the marginalised, including disabled individuals. By portraying the monster as a sympathetic character who is rejected by society solely because of his appearance, Shelley highlights the destructive consequences of ableist attitudes and argues for a more inclusive and compassionate society. Numerous writers, artists and filmmakers have expanded on Shelley’s monstrous concept to express their own experiences of social isolation and to make their own statements (Mussies 2018). Similar issues are at stake in “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson. Mr. Hyde is portrayed as a twisted and deformed creature, with a hunched back, hairy hands and an overall repulsive appearance. This physical deformity is often interpreted

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as a manifestation of his evil nature. Throughout the novel, Mr. Hyde represents the darker side of Dr. Jekyll’s personality, a side that he has repressed and hidden from society. As Mr. Hyde becomes increasingly dominant, he becomes physically transformed, suggesting that his physical appearance is a reflection of his increasingly immoral and depraved behaviour. The depiction of Mr. Hyde as a twisted and deformed creature is a common trope in Gothic literature, where physical deformity is often used to symbolise moral corruption or supernatural evil. This portrayal of disability as a sign of moral weakness or evil is an example of ableist attitudes, which perpetuate negative stereotypes of disabled individuals as inherently flawed or evil. However, it is worth noting that some readers and critics have also interpreted Mr. Hyde’s physical deformity as a metaphor for the societal repression of marginalised individuals. In this reading, Mr. Hyde’s deformity represents the physical and psychological toll of living on the margins of society, where one is forced to repress one’s true nature in order to conform to societal norms. In contemporary Gothic texts, disabled characters are often portrayed as helpless, weak or dependent. For example, in Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” (1959), the character of Eleanor Vance is portrayed as mentally unstable, leading others as well as the reader to view her as unreliable and delusional. This portrayal is enforced by the sublime performance of Victoria Pedretti, who played this character (as well her alter-ego The Bent-Neck Lady) in Netflix’s 2018 series Hill House. Fortunately, there are also more positive examples, such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel “House of Leaves”. The novel is a complex, multi-layered work that defies easy categorisation, but it can be described as a postmodern Gothic novel that explores themes of madness, isolation and the limitations of language. Danielewski’s portrayal of Billy in “House of Leaves” challenges negative stereotypes surrounding disability in Gothic literature. Despite being wheelchair-bound, Billy is depicted as intelligent, resourceful and emotionally complex, and his disability is not the defining aspect of his personality. Throughout the novel, Billy actively contributes to the investigation of the mysterious house, challenging the idea that disabled characters are passive or helpless. By creating a multidimensional disabled character, Danielewski promotes a more nuanced understanding of disability in literature and pushes back against ableist attitudes. As already touched upon with Netflix’s Hill House, Gothic films and series can perpetuate ableist attitudes. The portrayal of disability in these

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media is often used to create a sense of horror or to serve as a plot device. For instance, in the 1960 film Psycho, Norman Bates’ disability (as well as his cross-dressing) is used to suggest that he is mentally unstable and potentially dangerous. Besides the sense of horror, disabled characters are often portrayed as pitiful or tragic, reinforcing the idea that disabled individuals are helpless and dependent. A related pitfall in the portrayal of disabled characters is “inspiration porn”, a term that is used to describe the exploitation of people with disabilities for the purpose of inspiring or motivating others. This often takes the form of images or stories that depict people with disabilities as heroes or role models simply because of their disability, rather than for their accomplishments or contributions. These images or stories are often used to make able-bodied people feel good about themselves or to make them feel grateful for their own abilities. It also reinforces harmful stereotypes about people with disabilities as being inherently inspiring or admirable, rather than recognising them as fully-fledged individuals with their own unique strengths, talents and challenges. In recent years, fanfiction has become a popular way for fans to challenge and subvert the negative tropes surrounding toxic ableism in the context of Gothic nostalgia. Fanfiction writers have been rewriting Gothic literature and popular culture to create positive representations of disabled individuals, challenging the negative stereotypes that have been perpetuated in the original works. One way that fanfiction writers are challenging toxic ableism is by creating disabled characters who are not defined by their disability. These characters are fully fleshed out and multidimensional, with personalities and interests that go beyond their disability. In this way, fanfiction writers are challenging the notion that disabled individuals are helpless or pitiful. Another way that fanfiction writers are challenging toxic ableism is by subverting the traditional Gothic tropes that have been used to stigmatise and marginalise disabled individuals. For example, in fanfiction, disabled characters are often portrayed as heroes or as powerful and capable, challenging the idea that disability is a weakness. Fanfiction writers are also exploring the social model of disability, which views disability as a social construct rather than an individual failing. By portraying disabled characters as active agents in their own lives and by showing the ways in which society can be disabling, fanfiction writers are challenging ableist attitudes and promoting greater disability awareness. In addition to promoting positive representations of disabled individuals, fanfiction also provides a space for disabled individuals to tell their

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own stories. Fanfiction writers who are themselves disabled are able to write about their experiences in a way that is authentic and empowering. This creates a sense of community and solidarity among disabled fans, challenging the isolation and marginalisation that disabled individuals often face. This is reminiscent of Megen de Bruin-Molé’s 2019 description of the way monsters work in mashup texts. Portrayals of monstrous communities as well as narratives that feature cross-genre elements offer opportunities to explore various forms of marginalisation, in which the burden of Otherness is absolved.

Disabilities in Mermaid Fanfiction The figure of the mermaid has often been associated with the disabled community due to the way both are Othered and seen as not fully human (often as less than human, sometimes as more than human). European mermaids seemed helpless at the mercy of the vagaries of life, tossed about by the choices of male figures in their respective narratives (Mussies, 2023). In traditional folklore, mermaids are often depicted as having a disability in the form of not being able to walk. In Andersen’s 1837 version, the mermaid is disabled by her human surroundings when she is mute. Similarly, disabled people are often seen as abnormal or not fully human, and have historically often been excluded from mainstream society and relegated to the margins (Andersen, 1893). However, in recent years, there has been a movement to reclaim the figure of the mermaid and the disabled body as powerful symbols of identity and agency. In their fannish rewritings, the authors inverse many Romantic mermaid tropes to empower the mermaid and to confirm the connection between the mermaid and oceanic awareness (Mussies 2022b). This reclaiming process seeks to challenge the dominant narrative that otherises and marginalises these identities, and instead, embraces the unique beauty and power of all bodies and experiences. In my (alter) ego-inserting fanfiction, “The Cyborg Mermaid meets King Alfred” (2019), I described Tamar, a “mermaidy” protagonist who happens to be in a wheelchair, but is defined by her interests, goals and personality. She is portrayed as determined, ambitious, witty and capable. With this writing, I hoped to challenge the negative stereotypes and tropes that often define disabled characters in popular culture. For me, working on this piece raised important questions about the representation of disability and difference in popular media. By portraying Tamar as

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a complex and multidimensional character, I aimed to promote disability rights and inclusivity. Through my writings, I also confront my own “misfitting” as an autistic individual (Mussies 2022a). The physical interaction between Tamar and Alfred further underscored my longing for a positive representation of disability. Rather than recoiling from Tamar’s blue skin or split tail, Alfred gently touches her cheek and strokes her skin. This action demonstrates acceptance and understanding, signalling that Tamar’s differences are not something to be feared or avoided, but rather celebrated. I am far from the only (disabled) person dealing with personal issues by rewriting tropes through online fanfiction. Recently, I stumbled upon a personal narrative that depicts a 15-year-old French girl’s experience with depression and how writing fanfiction has helped her cope with her mental health struggles.1 The narrative highlights the subjective experience of depression in adolescence, including feelings of sadness, hopelessness and a loss of interest in activities. Furthermore, the author’s reluctance to discuss her disabling condition of depression with friends and family highlights the stigma surrounding mental health issues in adolescence. The author suggests that writing fanfiction can be a protective coping mechanism for depression. Writing fanfiction enables the author to escape the real world and create a world of her own, which can help regulate negative emotions and enhance feelings of control (Mussies, 2019). The author’s self-expression through writing fanfiction aligns with previous research that has shown that expressive writing can be an effective way to cope with stressful experiences. Additionally, the narrative emphasises the importance of social support in mental health coping. The author mentions connecting with other fans who enjoy the same TV shows and books, which has provided her with a sense of community and belonging. Social support has been shown to be an important factor in promoting mental health and buffering against the negative effects of stress. Overall, this personal narrative provides insight into the potential of creative expression and social support as coping mechanisms for depression in adolescence. Fanfiction is providing a platform for fans to challenge and subvert the negative tropes surrounding toxic ableism. This also happens in the context of Gothic nostalgia, a romanticised and idealised vision of the 1 With the author’s permission, I have republished her writing on my website: http:// martinemussies.nl/web/writing-fanfiction-to-cope-with-mental-health-issues/.

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Gothic genre, that often perpetuates negative stereotypes and tropes related to disability. These stereotypes include the portrayal of disabled characters as helpless victims or evil villains, and the idea that disability is something to be feared or pitied. Fanfiction provides a platform for fans to challenge and subvert these negative tropes by allowing them to take control of the narrative and create their own stories that depict disabled characters in more nuanced and positive ways. By writing fanfiction that explores disability in a more complex and thoughtful way, fans are able to push back against the harmful stereotypes that have historically been associated with the Gothic genre. For this chapter, three examples of Mermaid fanfiction have been selected. In combination, the three of them provide a good picture of the variety within the corpus, which is situated on a spectrum from confirming the above-mentioned disability tropes on the one hand, to rewriting them on the other. The third case study was chosen as it exemplifies many works of fanfiction about mermaids. The story follows fairly closely the canon established by Andersen/Disney and adds few original components. Nevertheless, I chose this example as a case study because it is written in German and contains many Gothic elements, especially in the description of the sea witch’s cave, and because for once the identity marker of the defined disability is not the wheelchair—as in much fanfiction and also in cosplay—but the mermaid’s muteness, in line with Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy tale. Another criterion for the selection of these three case studies is that the authors have clearly been inspired by Gothic themes. This is already reflected in the pseudonyms under which they have published their works of fanfiction online: Lilith Ravenwood, Evangeline Blackwood and Anna von Meeresgrund. These names are suggestive of Gothic themes and associations, such as the supernatural, darkness and mystery. The name Lilith has biblical origins and is associated with a figure who is often depicted as a demon or a seductress in Gothic literature. The surname Ravenwood evokes images of dark, foreboding forests and the supernatural creatures that might inhabit them, which is a common theme in Gothic literature. Evangeline Blackwood has a name that is also suggestive of the supernatural, with the first name Evangeline meaning “bearer of good news”, which could be interpreted as a nod to a character with divine or magical powers. The surname Blackwood further adds to the eerie associations, as it suggests a dark, mysterious forest or thicket. Anna von Meeresgrund has a name that is associated with the sea and suggests a character

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with an otherworldly or mysterious quality. The surname von Meeresgrund, which translates to “of the sea floor”, adds to this association, as it suggests a character who is intimately connected to the depths of the ocean. This connection to the sea is a common theme in Gothic literature, where the ocean is often seen as a symbol of the unknown and the supernatural. Whereas in most traditional text traditions the distinction between creators and audience (e.g. authors and readers) is crucial, fanart such as fanfiction blurs these boundaries. Various fans often work together on one work, recreate each other’s works and act as stand-ins (e.g. ghost-writers) for each other. This dynamic complicates the relationship of the authors to the text, of the text to the readers and thus of the authors to the readers. Although published and cited, an online text will remain potentially unfinished. Similar to a video game, in which players co-write their stories by the in-game choices they make, in fanfiction there is no final version, as everyone can add their own associations. The fans engaging in fanart are thus participating in a form of what Axel Bruns (2008) calls a “producer community”, in which users become producers of content, and use and production are intertwined, so that the old distinction between producers, distributors and consumers no longer applies. To clearly indicate which versions (snapshots) of the fanfiction work in question I am writing about in this chapter, I have made copies of the texts on my own domain, as solidifications in time to refer to.

Case Study #1: “Mermaid in a Wheelchair” (2020) The 2020 fanfiction “Mermaid in a Wheelchair” was published by an author under the pen name of Lilith Ravenwood.2 The story tells of Luna Hyde, a girl born with a disability that left her unable to walk and her journey of self-discovery. Luna’s disability made her feel isolated from her peers until her father gave her a monofin for her birthday. The monofin gave Luna a sense of freedom, and she became a confident and independent mermaid. As Luna’s confidence grew in her swimming abilities, she discovered a sunken Gothic castle and started to explore its depths. Luna found hidden rooms and passageways, and she became fascinated by the stories of the people who once lived in the castle. Luna started to collect 2 With the author’s permission, I republished her story on http://martinemussies.nl/ web/mermaid-in-a-wheelchair/.

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antique objects and create Gothic-inspired jewellery designs that became a way for her to express herself and showcase her creativity to the world. The name “Luna Hyde” may have been chosen to reflect the Gothic and mysterious themes of the story. The name “Luna” is often associated with the moon, which is a symbol of mystery and magic in many cultures. The name “Hyde” may be a reference to the character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Gothic novel. The duality of this character, with one persona being respectable and the other being monstrous, may reflect Luna’s own journey of self-discovery and empowerment. Additionally, the name “Hyde” could be interpreted as a play on the word “hide”, as in hiding or concealing one’s true self, which could also be a relevant theme in the story. The narrative offers a refreshing perspective on disability, challenging the negative tropes and stereotypes that often surround it. Through the character of Luna Hyde, the story presents a strong and capable protagonist who refuses to be defined by her wheelchair. One of the most significant ways that the story subverts negative tropes surrounding disability is by presenting Luna as an independent and empowered character. Rather than being portrayed as helpless or dependent on others, Luna actively seeks out new experiences and discovers her own unique talents and passions. By emphasising Luna’s agency and autonomy, the story challenges the common perception that people with disabilities are passive or unable to fully participate in society. Luna’s wheelchair serves as a catalyst for her exploration of the underwater world and her discovery of the Gothic castle. Moreover, her disability is not the focus of the story; instead, it is merely one aspect of her character that does not define her or limit her potential. Furthermore, the story also subverts the trope of “inspiration porn”, which often portrays people with disabilities as inspirational solely because of their disability. In the story, Luna is not a source of inspiration simply because she uses a wheelchair. Rather, her talents and accomplishments are the source of inspiration. Luna’s monofin and jewellery designs inspire other characters and readers, regardless of her disability. The story promotes disability inclusion by showcasing Luna’s inclusion in her community. Despite initial exclusion by her peers, Luna’s talent and determination earn her the respect and admiration of her classmates. By portraying Luna as an active member of her community, the story challenges the common perception that people with disabilities are isolated or excluded from society.

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Case Study #2: “The House of Mermaids” (2022) The second case study of this chapter is the short story “The House of Mermaids” by Evangeline Blackwood.3 The story is about a girl named Pearl, who was left as a baby on the doorstep of a brothel named “The House of Mermaids”. The names of the main character and the brother seem to be taken from the 2012 novel Elijah’s Mermaid by Essie Fox, but the narrative and atmosphere are vastly different. In the fanfiction, Pearl is raised by Madam Beryl, the owner of the brothel. Pearl is shunned by the other girls due to her small deformity but gains popularity when rumours of her being a mermaid spread. However, Pearl overhears a plan to sell her to a collector of rare specimens, and she escapes using her strange affinity for water. Pearl finds refuge on a sailor’s ship, but her legs begin to fuse together, and she discovers that she is a mermaid. With the help of her mermaid powers, she rescues the girls at the brothel and learns that she is Madam Beryl’s daughter. Pearl decides to start a new life on the open seas, using her powers to help others and prevent exploitation. The atmosphere of this story can be characterised by a sense of unease, a feeling that something is not quite right, or a feeling of dread or foreboding. This sense of discomfort is often created through the use of ambiguity and uncertainty, as well as through the suggestion of hidden or secret knowledge. This fits in with the concept of the Uncanny. First introduced by Sigmund Freud (1919) as ‘unheimlich’, literally ‘unhomely’, the Uncanny refers to a feeling of discomfort or unease that arises when something is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The Uncanny is often associated with Gothic literature, as it frequently employs unsettling or eerie elements to create an atmosphere of discomfort and anxiety that fits the narrative of this story. A rather dark example of mermaid fanfiction, it explores themes of sexuality, pornography, child exploitation and disability, highlighting the intersectionality of these issues in a Victorian-era setting. However, her deformity makes her an outsider and a target for exploitation. Despite her intellect and resourcefulness, she is treated as an outcast because of her physical differences, and her disability is portrayed as a barrier to her acceptance and success. This attitude is reflective of the ableist norms of the time, which viewed disability as a flaw or defect to be corrected or hidden. Moreover, the story perpetuates Gothic nostalgia trends, which romanticise the past 3 Republished at http://martinemussies.nl/web/the-house-of-mermaids/.

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and presents a sanitised, idealised version of history. These also often erase or minimise the violence, oppression and inequality that were pervasive in the past, and it often reinforces traditional gender roles and heteronormative ideals. In “The House of Mermaids”, the setting and characters are presented in a nostalgic and romanticised manner, with the brothel depicted as a place of exoticism and forbidden pleasure. However, this idealised portrayal ignores the harsh realities of child exploitation and sex work, as well as the ableist and sexist attitudes that were prevalent at the time. The ableist portrayal of Pearl’s deformity as a source of shame and exclusion is evident throughout the story. Despite being brought up in the brothel, Pearl is treated as an outsider by the other girls due to her physical differences. This exclusion exemplifies the ableist social norms that surround her: Pearl’s deformity is seen as undesirable and shameful, causing her to be shunned by others. This portrayal reinforces the idea that people with disabilities are inherently different and should be excluded from society. Furthermore, the story uses the ableist trope of “otherness” to suggest that Pearl’s deformity is linked to her being a mermaid. The idea that disability and difference are tied to supernatural or monstrous qualities has long been used in Gothic literature. By portraying Pearl as a mermaid, the story perpetuates the idea that disability is linked to abnormality and danger. This portrayal is particularly problematic as it reinforces the idea that people with disabilities are not fully human and are therefore a threat to society. “The House of Mermaids” also portrays the commodification of disability, where Pearl’s deformity is seen as a valuable commodity that can be sold to the highest bidder. This portrayal reinforces the idea that people with disabilities are objects to be exploited rather than individuals with agency and autonomy. The story also suggests that able-bodied individuals have the right to own and control people with disabilities, perpetuating the idea of the “ableist gaze” in which people with disabilities are objectified and reduced to their disability.

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Case Study #3: “Die stumme Meerjungfrau” [The Silent Mermaid] (2023) This German fanfiction, hereafter called “The Silent Mermaid”, was published under the name Anna von Meeresgrund.4 The tale is about a young mermaid who is unable to communicate verbally due to her lack of a voice. She lives in a stunning coral reef and catches sight of a handsome prince passing by on a boat, which ignites an instant attraction within her. However, the mermaid is faced with the challenge of expressing her feelings towards the prince, given her inability to speak. In her quest for a solution, the mermaid seeks the help of an old sea witch known for her mystical powers. The witch offers to grant the mermaid a voice in exchange for her tail fin. Desperate to convey her love to the prince, the mermaid agrees to the witch’s deal and acquires the ability to speak. However, she is left unable to swim without her tail fin. Upon meeting the prince, the mermaid discovers that he is set to marry another woman, leaving her heartbroken. She flees back to the sea and falls into a deep sleep inside a shell. Several years later, the prince discovers the mermaid and awakens her from her slumber. The mermaid tells the prince about her past, and he realises that he has been in love with her all along. In line with Alan Bryman’s 2004 thinking about “Disneyization”, in this fanfiction, the prince then marries the mermaid, and they live happily ever after. In contrast to the happy ending, the story contains several Gothic elements, which contribute to the overall tone of mystery and darkness in the narrative. One of these is the setting. The coral reef, the sea witch’s cave and the prince’s castle are all described in a way that evokes a sense of gloom and foreboding. The sea witch’s cave, in particular, is so elaborately outlined that it looks like this description was added later, cut and pasted like in a collage or scrapbook. It is presented as a dark, eerie place that adds to the story’s ominous tone: The sea witch’s cave was a dark and eerie place. The entrance was surrounded by creeping shadows and hissing sounds echoing off the craggy rock face. Inside the cave there was no trace of light, except for the faint glow of phosphorescent algae clinging to the walls and rocks. The floor was littered with eerie objects: skulls of sea animals, rusted anchor cables, and broken ships. The echo of soft footsteps reverberated through the

4 Republished at http://martinemussies.nl/web/die-stumme-meerjungfrau/.

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cool walls, and the air was filled with the smell of salt, decay, and dark magic. The sea witch’s cave was a place of evil and mystery, shunned by the inhabitants of the sea.5

Like the figure of the mermaid herself, the addition of the skulls of the sea creatures also fits the popularity of taxidermy, as a collaged element of the Gothic fascination with the Uncanny and the Undead. Another Gothic feature is the supernatural element present in the story. The sea witch possesses mystical powers, and the mermaid’s transformation from a sea creature to a human-like being is an example of supernatural occurrences. The mermaid’s inability to speak also adds an eerie quality to the story, as it creates an air of mystery and otherworldliness around her. This portrayal reinforces the idea that individuals with disabilities are somehow different and alien from the rest of society. Moreover, following Andersen’s original, the narrative implies that people with disabilities should sacrifice their identity and conform to the norms. The theme of sacrifice is also a Gothic trope in the story. The mermaid is willing to give up her tail fin and her ability to swim in exchange for the chance to express her love for the prince. It further highlights the idea of giving up something vital for the sake of something else and this being a necessary part of a characters life journey. The story’s ending is not only Disneyfied, but also Gothic in nature. The mermaid’s long sleep inside a shell made of seashells, and her eventual awakening by the prince, is reminiscent of the Gothic trope of death and resurrection. The sleep of the mermaid was very long, as is evidenced by the repetition of the words “years passed” (“Jahre vergingen”) in the story.6 This idea of being brought back to life after a long slumber is a common gothic theme, which adds to the story’s overall sense of mystery 5 Die Höhle der Seehexe war ein düsterer und unheimlicher Ort. Der Eingang war

von kriechenden Schatten und zischenden Geräuschen umgeben, die von der schroffen Felswand widerhallten. Im Inneren der Höhle gab es keine Spur von Licht, außer den schwachen Glanz der phosphoreszierenden Algen, die an den Wänden und Felsen hafteten. Der Boden war mit unheimlichen Gegenständen übersät: Schädel von Seetieren, verrostete Ankertrossen, und gebrochene Schiffe. Das Echo von leisen Schritten hallte durch die kühlen Wände, und die Luft war erfüllt von dem Geruch von Salz, Verwesung und dunkler Magie. Die Höhle der Seehexe war ein Ort des Bösen und der Geheimnisse, der von den Bewohnern des Meeres gemieden wurde (all translations from German by this author). 6 “Jahre vergingen, und die stumme Meerjungfrau schlief weiterhin in ihrer Muschel aus Meeresschalen, die sich sanft mit den Gezeiten bewegte. Jahre vergingen…”.

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and darkness. Moreover, as her long sleep was under the sea, this reflects the trope of the drowned woman. As Valerie Meessen (2016) explains, the fascination with the image of the drowned woman in the arts has not been limited to the Victorian era, but has continued to persist throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In many instances, female suicide by drowning is associated with themes of unrequited love, sexual transgression and fallenness. The representation of the drowned woman in the arts can either revel in the beauty of her death or attempt to empower her figure. The workings of patriarchal ideology in the Victorian iconography of female suicide by drowning highlight the darker aspects of the way in which these representations have relegated women to the realm of the dead. In this case, related to the fairy tale of Snow White, there is a clear gender aspect as well, as it is the character of the handsome Prince who wakes our protagonist from her ever during sleep.

Conclusions The Gothic genre has often perpetuated ableist attitudes through the negative portrayal of disabled characters in literature, film and popular culture. These portrayals reinforce negative attitudes towards disabled individuals. Present-day fanfiction is providing a platform for fans to “rewrite the stories”, by challenging and subverting the negative tropes surrounding toxic ableism in the context of Gothic nostalgia. After examining the three case studies, however, it is evident that modernday enthusiasts of mermaids do not always utilise the opportunity to construct a more inclusive and diverse representation of the Gothic genre that accurately portrays the life experiences of individuals with disabilities, as demonstrated through the analysis of the three examples of mermaid fanfiction. The three stories reflect Gothic themes in their name-givings and associations, such as the supernatural, darkness and mystery. While fanfiction can offer an opportunity to challenge negative tropes and stereotypes surrounding toxic ableism in the Gothic genre, not all present-day mermaid enthusiasts utilise this platform to create more inclusive and diverse representations of disability in Gothic literature. The 2020 fanfiction “Mermaid in a Wheelchair” offers a positive and empowering portrayal of disability. Through the character of Luna Hyde, the story challenges negative tropes and stereotypes surrounding disability and promotes inclusion and empowerment for people with disabilities. In contrast, “The House of Mermaids: A Gothic Mystery” (2022) portrays

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disability in a toxic and ableist way. In the narrative, protagonist Pearl is born with a small deformity that causes her to be shunned by her peers in the brothel. As she grows older, she begins to notice strange things happening to her body whenever she is near water, leading to rumours that she may be a mermaid. The reactions of Pearl’s environment thus reinforce the idea that people with disabilities are different, abnormal and a threat to society. It also perpetuates the idea that disability is a valuable commodity that can be sold and controlled by able-bodied individuals. The use of gothic nostalgia further reinforces the ableist portrayal of disability, romanticising, fetishising and exoticising it in a way that obscures the reality of ableism and exclusion faced by people with disabilities today. This portrayal reinforces the idea that disability is a thing of the past, something that can be exoticised and celebrated in a nostalgic way, rather than a contemporary issue that requires social change and inclusion to work towards a more inclusive and equitable society. The mermaid in “The Silent Mermaid” (2023) can be seen as fitting the romanticised view of disability present in gothic literature, which often portrays disabled individuals as tragic and misunderstood figures, as her inability to speak is portrayed as a source of sadness and longing. This romanticised view of disability can be harmful, as it reinforces the idea that disabled individuals are somehow less than able-bodied individuals. As two out of these three case studies have shown, fanfiction can contribute to toxic ableism, as it reinforces negative stereotypes and attitudes towards disabled individuals. Disability is not something to be fixed or erased, but rather an inherent part of a person’s identity and lived experience. Promoting acceptance and accommodation of diverse abilities, rather than assimilation into able-bodied norms, can foster a more inclusive and equitable society that values the contributions and experiences of all individuals, regardless of their abilities.

Works Cited Andersen, Hans Christian. 1893. The Little Mermaid and Other Stories. London: Lawrence and Bullen. Anolik, Ruth Bienstock. 2014. Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. Jefferson: McFarland, Inc, Co. Bacon, Simon. 2022. Toxic Cultures: A Companion. Oxford: Peter Lang. Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.

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Bryman, Alan. 2004. The Disneyization of Society. London: Sage. Danielewski, Mark Z. 2000. House of Leaves. St. Louis: Turtleback. de Bruin-Molé, Megen. 2019. Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Dijkstra, Bram. 1989. “Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-deSiècle Culture.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1): 100. Fox, Essie. 2012. Elijah’s Mermaid. London: Orion. Freud, Sigmund. 1919. The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217–256. Guest, Raechel Elisabeth. 1996. Victorian Scrapbooks and the American Middle Class. Newark: University of Delaware. Hess, Jillian M. 2022. How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hingston, Kylee-Anne. 2019. Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Hunt, Leigh Ina. 2006. Victorian Passion to Modern Phenomenon: A Literary and Rhetorical Analysis of Two Hundred Years of Scrapbooks and Scrapbook Making. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Hurley, Kelly. 1996. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Shirley. 1959. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking Press. Lapointe, Grace. 2021. “Reading Flannery O’Connor as a Millennial, Disabled Writer.” BookRiot, April 1. https://bookriot.com/flannery-oconnorableism/. Accessed 6 June 2023. Levi, Steven C. 1977. “PT Barnum and the Feejee Mermaid.” Western Folklore 36 (2): 149–54. Meessen, Valerie. 2016. “Post-mortems: Representations of Female Suicide by Drowning in Victorian Culture.” MA Thesis, Radboud University. https:// www.totzover.nl/media/filer_public/47/c0/47c0ed4f-1923-49d3-a3f7-4c2 059c62514/meessen_valerie_2017_post-mortems_ma.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2023. Mussies, Martine. 2018. “Frankenstein and The Lure: Border Crossing Creatures Through a Feminist Lens.” Foundation 47 (130): 47–58. Mussies, Martine. 2019. “Queering the Anglo-Saxons Through Their Psalms.” Transformative Works and Cultures 31: 9. Mussies, Martine. 2022a. “Fandom and Neurodiversity.” Henry Jenkins Blog. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2021/12/24/fandom-and-neurodiversity. Accessed 6 June 2019.

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Mussies, Martine. 2022b. “Posidaeja and Mami Wata: The Online Afterlives of Two Mermaid Goddesses.” Shima 16 (2): 186–96. Mussies, Martine. 2023. “Reclaiming the Feminine: #Posidaeja: Efa (2021).” In The Deep: A Companion, ed. Simon Bacon. Oxford: Peter Lang. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 1891. Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. London: George Routledge and Sons. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1886. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. Wells, H. G. 1896. The Island of Doctor Moreau. Portsmouth: William Heinemann.

Environments

Of Greed and the Undead Past: Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad as an Exercise in Toxic Nostalgia Aparajita Hazra

This paper will discuss an Indian film that makes chilling use of the Bhayanaka (Terrifying), and the Bibhatsa (Odious) Rasa, with an ample quotient of the Adbhuta (Marvellous) aiding the ultimate effect, thereby situating the film in the Indian equivalent of what the West has known as the Gothic ever since Horace Walpole brought out The Castle of Otranto in 1764. The film is Tumbbad, an Indian/Swedish Hindilanguage period horror film directed by Rahi Anil Barve and released on 12 October 2018. The film, loosely based on a story written by Marathi writer Narayan Dharap, premiered in the critics’ week section of the 75th Venice International Film Festival and was the first Indian film to be screened there. The film itself is set against a colonial temporality that harks back to India’s days of harrowing ignominy under the British Raj. The fictional time span of the film ranges from around 1918 and spans a period to approximately 30 years before Indian Independence, and brings the readers to a juncture soon after 1947. This chronicity allows the film ample scope to look askance at a number of deviant aspects of Indian life of the time, as it stood in the interstitiality between a deep sense of

A. Hazra (B) Diamond Harbour University, Diamond Harbour, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_16

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nationhood on the one hand and the ignominy of a colonised existence on the other. The film takes on the garb of a Gothic film with a slow and insidious onslaught of fear. But alongside the horror it also makes a silent commentary on how the Brahminical ways perpetuated caste hierarchy, and how the colonised Indians abetted the imperialism and feudalism of the coloniser in various ways. As the film comes to an end, at a time soon after the Independence of India, one has the niggling feeling that the same hierarchical structure of power has lingered, with only new heads at the junctures. The storyline is simple but intriguing. Tumbbad is the name of a small place tucked away somewhere in Maharashtra, a state in the western part of India. Legend in the film has it that the primary goddess of the earth— who remains unnamed, but reminds the discerning viewer of Gaia—gives birth to 160 crore sons, all gods. But her firstborn, Hastar is greedy. He grabs all the gold his mother had, thereby metonimising the greed evident in the plundering of all the riches in the world. As he reaches out towards the other dearly coveted thing in all creation, food, all 160 crore of his brothers wage a war against him. His mother scared for his safety and well-being takes him back into the safety of her womb, giving in to the condition set by her other sons that the accursed Hastar will never be worshipped anywhere. But the Rao family in Tumbbad, unwilling to let go of their worship of the Hastar, an Indian Mammon of sorts, build a shrine to him. The other gods, infuriated, curse the entire land of Tumbbad with incessant rain. In Tumbbad, which is grey, dismal and continually wet, is the Wada or mansion of an affluent man, called Sarkar (Master) in the film, whose riches come from worshipping Hastar and gathering gold coins from him. But he dies, without divulging the secret process of procuring the gold coins from Hastar to the widow (played by Jyoti Malshe) who looks after him, and probably gives him sexual favours as well in the hope that she might be given a gold coin that gleams in the hands of the bizarre statue of Hastar that the old man has in his room. But the elder son of the widow, Vinayak, not sated with one coin, wants the entire treasure for himself. The widow has the task of feeding a decrepit old woman called Daadi (Grandma in Hindi) by the boys, Vinayak and Sadashiv, a woman now reduced to a grotesque and deformed uncanny figure in the liminality between death and life, who, one comes to understand, has been cursed into this form by Hastar for her greed, and remains chained in the dungeons, growling and chittering ghoulishly every time she wakes

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up. She needs to be put to sleep every time she wakes with the words, “So jaa, warna Hastar aa jayega” (go to sleep, or else Hastar will come over). The fearsome and mutated body of Daadi, almost Lovecraftian in its grotesque monstrosity, instead of some external place, becomes the abhuman site for the Gothic haunting per se, as it is reminiscent and nostalgic of its transgressive past, fraught with greed and overreaching lust for wealth. The first part of the movie ends with the widow, in a tragic turn of events, losing her younger son Sadashiv to a tragic accident and leaving Tumbbad with the one gold coin she had managed to take from Sarkar’s house after his death. Well aware of this curse of gold, she makes her only remaining son Vinayak promise that he would never come back to the cursed Tumbbad, though one understands that the boy had other plans. The second part leaps across time to 15 years later, when Vinayak as a grown man with a family of his own is seen going back to Tumbbad to the old dungeon where he finds the grotesque but still alive body of Daadi, now with a tree growing through her body, and yearning for Mukti or salvation. From her, in return of granting her peace and liberation by cremating her body, Vinayak extorts the secret method of procuring gold coins from Hastar from inside the bowels of the earth. He learns that one has to climb down a long rope ladder deep into the earth through the opening of a well in the grounds of the Wada until one reaches a cave—the metonymised womb of Mother Earth, picturised in the film as red, veined and pulsating—which is where Hastar lives, replete with infinite gold tucked inside his loincloth, but still eternally hungry for the food that he was not granted. Vinayak learnt the trick of making dolls out of dough of wheat and offering them to Hastar. As the devilish eerie figure of Hastar wriggles down the walls of the womb to pounce upon the dough with the rapacious voracity of eternal hunger, Vinayak would lunge at his loincloth, spill the coins, scoop up as many as he could within the time that Hastar was busy eating, and clamber back up the ladder and jam the stone lid on as fast as he could. He made it a habit to go back again and again to feed Hastar’s hunger for food to satiate his own hunger for wealth. As his physically challenged son Pandurang grew up, and grew up even greedier than his father, he accompanied Vinayak in negotiating the demon for gold. The end comes, when, out of excessive greed, Pandurang tried offering many wheat dough dolls to Hastar to keep him engaged for longer, in order to buy more time to snatch more gold. What he had not anticipated was that Hastar split into multiple

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bodies to eat multiple dough dolls at the same time. Understanding that escape was difficult for both of them, Vinayak tries distracting Hastar, or rather the multiple Hastars by tying the dolls to himself, while Pandurang escapes to safety. As his blood curdling scream rings through the opening as Hastar tears him apart, one understands that Vinayak has literally been consumed by greed.

Monsters in India Here, one needs to understand the structure and rubric of Indian teratology. Monsters in India, in Hinduism to be more exact, are not exactly the way the West understands the concept. In Hinduism, Monsters are not unitary like Satan alone. Narendra Nath Bhattacharya in the Introduction to Indian Demonology observes that “Christianity inherited the demonological tradition from Mesopotamian, Greek and Hebrew mythology but it was in the New Testament that the company of evil spirits was synthesised into a single Satanic figure, leader of the demonic troops of the fallen angels” (Bhattacharya 2000, 20). In India, the teratology of monsters is just as elaborate as the pantheon of gods that Hinduism boasts of. The monsters can be Daityas, Danavas, Rakshasas, Pretas, Bhootas, etc. And gods and “monsters” (for want of a better word) are very closely related. The Puranas—the Bhagawata Purana, to be exact—relates that Kashyapa and Pulatsya were both sons of the great Brahma. Kashyapa had three wives—Aditi, Diti and Danu. The gods or Adityas were the sons of Aditi, while the monsters called the Daityas were sons of Diti while the monstrous Danavas were sons of Danu—all born of the same father (Bhagavata 7 . 2–9). More confounding still is the fact that in Hinduism, these “monsters” are often stronger, more ethical and accomplished than the gods are. There are numerous examples and anecdotes in the Vedas, the Puranas and the Epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata of incidents revealing the scandalous nature of the gods while the so-called monsters suffer as a result. Thus, the monsters can be physically jarring to the eyes, but they are not always an embodiment of evil. Evil as an objective concept does not exist in Hinduism, and it is only how life is led and the consequences thereby. Good and evil are context-sensitive and connote the relative understandings of life and the illusory (Maya) as the duality of knowledge and ignorance, where one cannot exist without the other, thus related in a very close bond with each other in Creation which is Anadi (that which

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has no beginning) and Ananta (that which has no end) as vouched for in the Nasadiya Sukta or the Song of Creation, the 129th hymn in the 10th mandala of the Rigveda (Vidyalankar 1972:39). That is the concept that drives the narrative trajectory in Tumbbad. And that is why Hastar per se is not a demon, he is a god born out of the Mother goddess Earth. But he is a god with deviant ways, as is not uncommon for gods in mythology. The real demon is inside man. It has to be kept carefully leashed inside the soul, or all hell breaks loose. Once the soul is tainted, it has to be put away for good as the abject, the interstitial object beyond meaning—the othered object that is not the “self”. That is exactly what Tumbbad allegorises as a film and as such resonated with the format of ancient texts like the Panchatantra (c. 200 BCE) or the Jatakas (between 300 BC and 400 AD), where grotesque creatures were used to scare the human mind into attaining transcendental virtues to escape the endless cycle of rebirth known as Samsara.

The Demons Tumbbad is a movie about demons. Not least in the figure of Hastar the evil demon-god who is internally demonic through his excessive greed, but also thanks to the Swedish digital techniques used to create his malevolent features. However, this does not stay limited to Hastar’s bizarre features but spills on to the grotesque and diseased forms of those touched by him and left yearning for Mukti or release from life and its sufferings. The figure of Daadi with red, sore, torn skin over her disfigured body, chained like a wild animal, who growls and howls, and her attempts to eat young Vinayak when she broke free, also promotes the characteristics of Bhayanaka (Terrifying) and Bibhatsa (Odious) and ultimately the unheimlich of the Gothic. The look of the idol of Hastar, the squat, stone figure with bulging eyes, a gaping mouth and a very evil look in the fixed expression, complete with the menacing grin, is a concentration of the terrible and fearsome in the narrative. More so, it is Haster’s embodiment as a never satiated human greed that has passed through the ages and which fuelled the colonisation of India, and then the land and the people themselves as they moved towards independence. The most Gothic aspect of him then is not his own appearance as a cursed abhuman devil, but his manifestation inside man—the greed, the avarice and the corruption and voluptuous lechery that accompany it. The insatiable greed of Vinayak was what brought him to his gruesome end. But

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before that the film takes care to expose the disgusting human being he had become. He turned himself into a drunken lout who disrespected and battered his wife, kept a mistress in his loft and shirked any hard work for a living other than climbing down the rope to Hastar for the coins every time he needed money. And this greed was handed down generations. One hears Vinayak’s mother repeatedly hurl invectives at the lecherous father who had sired Vinayak—though he is never seen in the movie—and later, Vinayak hands this greed down to his son, Pandurang. And one notices that the greed seems to increase in intensity with every generation.

The Gandhian Principle Set in the colonial past of India, the film, under the subterfuge of a Gothic narrative, pivots on Gandhian principles, thus harking back in nostalgia to the importance of the preachings of Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the process of the independence movement in India. Mahatma Gandhi had preached Ahimsa (non-violence) and had spoken of renouncing greed and working selflessly for the country. The rich should ponder well as to what is their duty today. They who employ mercenaries to guard their wealth may find those very guardians turning on them. The moneyed classes have got to learn how to fight either with arms or with the weapon of non-violence. For those who wish to follow the latter way, the best and most effective mantram is:(Enjoy thy wealth by renouncing it). Expanded it means: “Earn your crores by all means. But understand that your wealth is not yours; it belongs to the people. Take what you require for your legitimate needs, and use the remainder for society”. This truth has hitherto not been acted upon; but, if the moneyed classes do not even act on it in these times of stress, they will remain the slaves of their riches and passions and consequently of those who over-power them. (Harijan, 1-2-1942, 20)

The film begins by quoting the Mahatma: “There’s enough to satisfy our needs, not greed”. One remembers Gandhi explaining his theory about the dichotomy of greed and need in man in the chapter on Fundamental Law of Nature in his work Trusteeship:

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I suggest that we are thieves in a way. If I take anything that I do not need for my own immediate use, and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else. I venture to suggest that it is the fundamental law of Nature, without exception, that Nature produces enough for our wants from day-to-day, and if only everybody took enough for himself and nothing more, there would be no pauperism in this world, there would be no man dying of starvation in this world. (Gandhi 1960, 2)

Tumbbad hinges upon the pivotal clou of greed in man and epitomises the anxieties of being drawn into the web of greed and vice as the ghastly form of Hastar, while the greed-ridden self becomes the site of horror as the diseased, deformed wreck that dealing with Hastar reduces one to. The “Double” or the Doppelganger has always been an important signifier of the Gothic. There can be various kinds of doubles, but the kind where something monstrous in their own nature turns a human into the abhuman “other” is common. And Tumbbad makes optimum use of this trope.

Greed in Tumbbad Greed comes in various levels in Tumbbad and in many senses in the narrative symbolises how the past consumes [the lives of] the present. There is the extreme greed of the central character, Vinayak. That greed, in turn, seems to be a vice handed down by his ancestors just as he hands it to his son. Then, there is the greed of Madhav, the unscrupulous local opium dealer. He sold his widowed daughter-in-law off to Vinayak for money. As the film progresses in the second section, one gets to know that Raghav was a dealer of opium for the colonisers and was embroiled in money problems with Sergeant Cooper, a British officer of the Raj. He is a money-minded materialistic schemer who wonders where Vinayak gets his coins from and why he gets them only a few at a time. When he sets out to investigate, Vinayak secretly lures him into the well, knowing full well that Hastar will prey on him. Then, there was the greed of the colonising British. History vouches for the fact that the opium trade was a cornerstone of the revenues that the British gleaned during their regime in India. Historian William Dalrymple observes that the British East India Company “ferried opium to China, fighting the opium wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics” (2019,

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78). Thousands of Indian farmers were forced into opium growing, though the price they received for each seer (an Indian unit to measure mass) of opium produced was not even enough to cover the cost of growing the crop and preparing the goods. Yet the British East India Company earned fortunes by exporting the opium to China, the biggest consumer of the narcotic crop, especially after the trade routes opened out more for them after the two Opium Wars with China. The greed of the British opium traders plainly fed off the helplessness of the Indian farmers and addiction of the Chinese. History records that around 1729, the Yongzheng emperor (1722–35) banned the sale and smoking of opium in his country. Again, in 1796, the Jiaqing emperor made opium importation and cultivation illegal (Martin 2011, 156). Yet, the British Raj, unstoppable in the greed for money, continued the trade by distributing it among “country traders” or private traders who had license from the East India Company to carry goods from India to China. These country traders sold the opium in China, and the gold and silver from the sales were then handed over to the East India Company. The opium trade continued to flourish in the land. Exports increased from around 4000 chests a year at the beginning of the nineteenth century to more than 60,000 chests in 1880, meaning more and more revenue for the Raj in India. However, while the British made money, the Indian farmers got poorer. As Bauer notes, “Poppy was cultivated against a substantial loss. These peasants would have been much better without it” (2019, 50). This underpins much of the symbolism in Tumbbad, not just in the figure of the opium dealer but in Vinayak’s relationship with Hastar, to whom he goes back again and again to collect gold.

Horror and its Signification for India The horror in Tumbbad comes chiefly from three things—the grotesque figure of Hastar, the grisly conditions of the bodies of those touched by Hastar and the never-ending greed of man. This said, one has to remember that Indian horror cinema is different from the horror cinema of the West. Horror has often had a very close relationship to religion, around which hinges its central conception of good and evil. But, the teratology of the West, especially that of Christianity, hinges on Satan as the unitary concentration of evil forces. But in Indian religions, as mentioned previously, the concept of evil does not exist as such. More so, in Hinduism, which seems to be the primary religion referred to

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in Tumbbad, it is all about Karma—deeds that will reap good if the deeds are good in life or will bring devastation if the deeds are bad. Consequently, the creatures of abjection in Indian films thus are often metonymised forms of bad deeds or vices—when they are not wronged souls come back for revenge. Hastar in Tumbbad is also a mythological god—though evil—who seems to be a take on the Hindu god of wealth, Kubera, and he epitomises the vice of greed or avarice. And anyone who dares to associate with him turns into a revolting, decaying, dehumanised, putrid mass of flesh. Tumbbad, as a film, makes use of body horror as an affective response in its portrayal of Hastar as the epitomisation of greed and also those human beings, who, having fallen a prey to greed—literally touched by Hastar—are turned into grotesque monsters themselves. Their skins are flayed, torn, riddled with boils and protuberances, their eyes are no longer human, their voices hoarse and gurgling, their hands and feet like claws, these once normal, healthy human beings are reduced to a subhuman existence. The filmmaker purposefully sets the putrid, deformed bodies of those touched by greed in stark contrast to the healthy, muscular body of Vinayak before he gets tainted by his associating with Hastar.

Hinduism and the Body Bharve, as director of the film, makes it a point to hark back to basic tenets of Hinduism that would positively strike a chord with the Indian audience. In Hinduism, the purity of the body has as enormous an importance as has the purity of the mind. In the Vedic culture of Yogic Tantra, the supreme objective is to attain Kaivalya or the separation of the Spirit from Matter. The practice of Kaivalya is imperative for the attainment of Moksha or liberation. In order to liberate the self, the Yogic aspirant needs to hone the Samskaras or mental impressions through the fourfold method of Sadhana or penance through spiritual discipline: Puja (worship), Patha (study), Japa (incantation) and Dhyana (meditation) (Kindler 2020, 62). In order to prepare the body for Sadhana, one needs to have seven qualifications. The first qualification is to be Daksha or intellectually capable. The second is to be Shuchi or pure. The third qualification is to be Jitendriya, i.e. having mastery over all the senses. The fourth is Sarvahimsa Vinirmukha or the art of being nonviolent and peaceful. The fifth qualification is to be Dvaitahina or a nondualist who believes in the unitary existence of God. The sixth is to be Astika with

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the acquisition of Jnana or knowledge of the scriptures while the seventh and last qualification is to be Brahmanistha, Brahmavadi and Brahmaparayana (devotion to the Supreme Brahman, inducted to His path and seeking refuge in Him). The presence of these seven qualifications enables one to proceed towards the seven primary victories that make a human being pure and liberated. The first primary victory or Jaya is Bhuta Jaya or victory or mastery over the five Tattvas or elements of air, water, fire, earth and ether. The second is Prakriti Jaya or control over all creative principles. Here, one has to understand that in common parlance Prakriti might mean Nature, but in yogic signification it means anything that is made of the elements. Babaji Bob Kindler, the founder and spiritual Director of the Ramakrishna Sarada Vivekananda Association, explains in his book, Footfalls of the Indian Rishis: …the word “nature” in Vedic religion and philosophy does not apply to the five elements only, but to all that is contained in the realms of name and form. Gross objects, for instance, are a combination of the five elements; a primal and anterior quintuplication process has formulated them. And so, after mastering the five elements, the sincere tantric aspirant has a good start at viewing the world of objects with a mind to fully master them. In the cases of most people, the objects have mastered them. (Kindler 2020, 63–64)

Tumbbad exemplifies the lack of Prakriti Jaya to the hilt, thereby signalling the moral and spiritual downfall that is so unwelcome in Indian philosophy. Moving on with the other victories that Advaita Vedanta and Sankhya Darshana uphold, apart from Bhuta Jaya, Prakriti Jaya, one is expected to practise Vikarana Bhava or “perception without the senses” (Kindler 2020, 64), Indriya Jaya or the mastery and control over the mind and senses, Manojavittvam, mastery over the powers of the mind, Pradhana Jaya, control over the primal principle, and lastly, Sattva Purusha Nytakhyati, the knowledge that soul and matter are different. These essential victories, once attained, are what lead on towards Kaivalya. According to the Indian Shastras of the Vedanta, the accomplishment of the soul comes through the six spiritual treasures known as ShatSampati—Sama or inner peace, Dama or self-control, Uparati or selfsettledness, Titiksha or forbearance, Samadhana or concentration and

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Shraddha or faith. Tumbbad, in its portrayal of the central character of Vinayak, shows the upsetting and disregard of all six of the Shat-Sampati as the primary reason for his annihilation, so much so that the film almost takes on the thematic structure of a moral catechism. It can then be seen that Barve, as director, through the mythopoeia woven into the film as the pivotal legend of Hastar and the curse upon Tumbbad, seeks to draw deliberate allusion to the ancient fables and parables like the Panchatantra or the Hitopadesha or the Buddhist Jatakas. As such, this thematic structure not only increases the Gothicness of the narrative, but in creating the bizarre, diseased body, exaggerated by the grotesque decay and deformities, it is a symbolic desecration and profaning of what is held to be sacred and pure. The scarred deformed, vilified body is an organically established cultural catechism against greed—which is a vice of the soul. It is also a deliberate exercise in othering the errant body into abjection to cast it out and away from the subject position. The desecrated body becomes an epitomisation of what should not be and becomes the site of impurity and abjection. The body which is vilified by sins—the sin of greed in this case—is turned into a monster. Tumbbad, obviously made from with religio-mythological perspective in mind, images the spiritual anxieties of a sin ridden life through the monstrous bodies in the film. In Hinduism, every impurity needs to be cleansed through ritual, and so the burning of the monstrous body in Tumbbad is a symbolic restoration of the sacral, the pristine, thereby making allowance for Mukti or liberation of the soul from the punished state.

Conclusion What is intriguing about Tumbbad is his temporal setting. One wonders why Barve chose the colonial period of India to showcase this parable of greed, so to speak. It almost seems like a negative nostalgia—an almost stubborn unwillingness to forget (and therefore, forgive) the trauma of the past. There is a tacit unwillingness to let go of the grudge that he works into the rubric of the film—the grudge that the British caused India, a then flourishing land, to hurtle down into the nadir of poverty, famine, ignominy and self-deprecation that led it to forget its roots, it’s values and it’s spiritual way of life. As Shashi Tharoor, in his book, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, reminds us that before the arrival of the East India Company, India had been enjoying a quarter to

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a third of world trade. Hindus and Muslims were close to each other without rancour. The education system, which Macaulay so brashly denigrated, was doing just fine. Yet, 150 years of British rule later, the Indian GDP rose a meagre 14% while the British GDP shot up an enormous 347% (Tharoor 2018, 76). Jacques Derrida, while talking about the atemporality of Marxism, claimed that it would “haunt Western society from beyond the grave” (1994, 53). Similarly, the ghosts of the past never die. India, even after 71 years of independence, has not quite been able to get over the 200 years of colonial subjugation by the British Empire. Shashi Tharoor recounts how Britain drained India from being a nation of “artisans, traders, warriors and merchants, functioning and thriving in complex and commercial networks, into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders….there are no victimless colonial actions. Everything the British did echoes down the ages” (Tharoor 2018, 79), and as Mark Fisher says, “The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered” (2014, 28). Tumbbad, by linking the opium trade and the economic downgrading of Indian small traders to the British, tacitly edges in an indictment of sorts against the British Raj, which through its mindless impoverishing of the Indian economy acted as trigger for Indians to try earning money by hook or by crook. The situation was a potential reference point for the story of an Indian middle class man like Vinayak to hurtle down the maverick path of greed and reckless unscrupulousness in the desperation to amass wealth in any way possible. One could say that it is a kind of toxic nostalgia that makes Indian cultural texts—be it in literature, theatre or cinema—and rake up its colonial past, thereby colouring the present with it or possibly warning that its ills are just as alive today as they have ever been. The closure of the past trauma never happens. Films like Tumbbad only articulate the unrepresentability of past trauma and grudges in inchoate terms of figurative expression.

Works Cited Bauer, Rolf. 2019. The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-century India. Netherlands: Brill. Bharata Muni. 1950. The Natyashastra: A Treatise on Hindu Dramaturgy and Histrionics. Trans. M Ghosh. Calcutta:The Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal.

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Bhattacharya, N.N. 2000. Indian Demonology: The Inverted Pantheon. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers. Dalrymple, William. 2019. The anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe .2005. Approaches to Acting: Past and Present. Bloomsbury Academic. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf: Routledge. Fisher,Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. UK. Zer0 Books Freud, Sigmund. 1953. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. trans. James Strachey. Vol. XVII. London: Hogarth. Gandhi, M.K. 1960. Trusteeship. Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Publishing House. https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/journals-by-gandhiji/harijan. Accessed on 21 February 2023 Kindler, Babaji Bob. 2020. Footfalls of the Indian Rishis. USA: Sarada Ramakrishna Vivekananda Associations. Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Martin, William Alexander Parsons. 2011. The Awakening of China. Singapore: Tredition Classics. Swami Abhedananda. 2018. Vedanta Philosophy, Adelphi Press. Tharoor, Shashi. 2018. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. USA: Scribe publications. Vaidika Samsodhana Mandala. 1933. Rgveda. trans. F. Max Muller. Oxford. Vidyalankar, Pandit Satyakam. 1972. The Holy Vedas. India: Penguin Random House. Werner, Karel . 1977. Symbolism in the Vedas and Its Conceptualisation, Numen.

Soviet Nostalgia in the Vampire Trilogy A Tale of the Soviet Vampire by Aleksandr Slepakov (2014–18) Patrycja Pichnicka-Trivedi

In the year 1981, in the Soviet sovkhoz near Rostov-on-Don appears a Vampire. His appearance is an infringement on the social order. By official social Marxist-Communist Soviet doctrine, it is an infringement of the natural order as well—communism being the quintessence of the modern rationalism, the very existence of a metaphysical creature was a breach. Actually, the appearance of a vampire was a violation of the social order in every narrative, including the classical liberal capitalist Western nineteenth century and later ones. But in those ones, the appearance of the vampire broke the order and served to re-enact it at the same time: the act of killing the vampire was an act of performance of the social order (see Chaplin 2017). But the Soviet order relies on the vampire

The two last parts of the trilogy were read by me in the manuscript forms provided by the author himself, for which I express my sincere thankfulness. Within this article, they are referred to as, respectively, Slepakov 2018a and Slepakov 2018b. P. Pichnicka-Trivedi (B) University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_17

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never existing. “There should not be vampires. Among all other things, vampires should not exist in any way” (Slepakov 2014, loc. 119–20).1 For the narrator, the emergence of the vampire is linked to the collapse of the Soviet Union: just like the vampire should not exist, the Soviet Union should have never ended. And yet the vampire came to its (non)life and the USSR collapsed around ten years after it (Sleplakov 2014, loc. 146– 47). It collapsed despite the vampire’s own efforts to save it that brought only a short-term success. This article analyses Aleksandr Slepakov’s trilogy A Tale of the Soviet Vampire into its socio-political context and within the existing social, political and cultural discourse. It will argue that this Gothic Vampire narrative contains elements of Soviet nostalgia that can be regarded as toxic. Toxic nostalgia is defined first in the context of Soviet-as-imperial and second in the relation to the Zygmunt Bauman’s conception of retrotopia (2017). This concept embraces the longing for the past that contains projects for re-forging this past into the present and the future. The trilogy is composed of three books: Love Outdoors, The Great Reptile, Vampire Specnaz,2 also known, in the collective edition, as The Whole Story of Frolov, the Soviet Vampire, 2018. The narrative will be analysed using cognitive methods, especially the reconstruction of cultural mental spaces (Lakoff and Johnson 1980a, 1980b; Fauconnier 1995, 1997) and the resistant reading technique described by Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch (Jenkins and Tulloch 1995). Gothic narratives are perfect for expressing imperial desires, fears and anxieties, and Russian Gothic narratives have not been an exception (see Sobol 2020). With their prolific repertoire of returning from the grave, the walking undead, haunting ghosts and mystical places, they are marked with history and memory. Sometimes it is in relation to trauma (see Bacon 2014; Westengard 2019), and sometimes it is nostalgic, especially expressed by the figure of the Good Monster.3 Such a figure usually becomes the hero and represents the forces of Good. For some narratives, those forces are imperial values—imperial order can therefore be enacted by a structure that profoundly differs from the classic narratives, 1 All the translations are done by the author of the article. 2 Specnaz is a commonly used abbreviation for Russian special forces. 3 It is especially the figure of the Vampire that has evolved from the abject, the villain,

the monster, into a hero, sometimes called the Good Guy Vampire (Carter 1975, 1987, 1988, 1989, 2001).

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and nonetheless, the narratives preserve their fundamental meanings. If in the classic Gothic novel Dracula by Bram Stoker the evil monster comes to threaten (reverse; see: Arata 1990, Gomez 2016) the imperial order (and is tamed), in newer narratives a good vampire does not threaten but helps to save or restore said order. Gothic narratives can very well express imperialism in to the future (imperial ambitions) and of the present. If Dracula was the touchstone of nineteenth-century British imperialism, such works as Stephen Sommers Van Helsing (which accompanied the war in Iraq [Ni Fhlainn 2019, loc. 6430]), or again True Blood series (2008–14), can be regarded as representative for twenty-first-century American imperialism. However, Gothic narratives are perhaps best fit to express imperial nostalgia. The Clay and Susan Griffith trilogy Vampire Empire (2010–12) could be called a nostalgic steampunk retro-fantasy about the British Empire for example. While this proves that imperial nostalgia is by no means foreign to diverse national Gothic narratives, Russian culture seems to be especially prolific in them. Mark Lipovetsky and Alexander Etkind argue that “haunting” caused by Gothic elements in Russian contemporary literature is a sign of an un-worked past (Lipovetsky and Etkind 2010). The un-worked are both the traumas of historical catastrophes and the historical triumphs, including those of an imperialistic nature. In fact, un-worked traumas are compensated with the exaltations of triumphs, and the perceived loss of “greatness” starts to be seen as the trauma itself. Historical discourse becomes extremely bi-polarised and revolves around the archetypal repetitions of the “Time of Troubles” and triumph (Carleton 2011). The Soviet times associated with triumph which took place in World War II are undoubtedly representative of the latter. Logically, the collapse of the Soviet Union is a repetition of the seventeenth-century smuta, a period of chaos and degeneration (Kazharski 2019). While nostalgia for old Soviet times embraces many elements (social justice, sense of stability, low rate of unemployment, etc.), what seems to dominate is social and national strength, on both the internal (social solidarity, unity, order) and the external levels (the power of the Soviet state). On the other hand, Soviet times are by no means the only era that imperial nostalgia can embrace. Elena Tanicheva in her novel Evil Blood (2011) refers to the pre-Soviet Russian empire. In the annex, she

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describes sympathetic members of the Council of the Vampires of Russia.4 She argues that the vampires have never recognised the establishment and the collapse of Soviet Union, and for them Ukraine, the Baltic states and a part of Finland are all parts of the Russian Empire. Therefore, the eleven members of the Council are the Princes(ses) of Novgorod, Kiev, Saint-Petersburg, Archangielsk, Yekaterinburg, Lviv, the Tobolsk, Moscow, Tallin, Smolensk and Kazan. All of them are shown as being Russian (russkie). Imperial nostalgia is toxic because, as the ongoing war in Ukraine has proven, it can easily slip from the past to the present and into the future. Longing for the past becomes the dream of the present and the plan for the future. Searching for the roots of Russian fascism, Mark Lipovetsky (2022) writes: “Soviet nostalgia has replaced the search for ideas about how to develop the country, instead of the future offering an imaginary and therefore enhanced past”. To describe this phenomenon, this paper uses Zygmunt Bauman’s (2017) conception of retrotopia. As Marcin Napiórkowski summarises, retrotopia is a “political philosophy recognising the primacy of celebration and re-actualisation of history over the march to the future” (Napiórkowski 2019, 231).5 Retrotopia promises security, “With all its defects, past is however a domain of stability and control” (Napiórkowski 2019, 234). According to Timothy Snyder retrotopia turns into a historical necrophilia.6 Consequently, analysing the narrative representation of Soviet retrotopia, through a story about a vampire who rises from death, is rather apt. The Vampire is literally such a figure in Slepakov’s novels: he is a Soviet Hero of World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War, and the object of Tamara’s necrophilic love. Slepakov’s books are by no means the only narratives that contain elements of imperial and/or Soviet nostalgia.7 His trilogy however is

4 The only exception is, quite significantly, the “sadistic” prince of Tallinn, the ruler of the Finnish land. The ruler of Moscow is also defined as capable of cruel acts but only when important decisions need to be taken. 5 Translations of the author of the article. 6 He writes about the “nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history. Russia must

conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin says, because of a baptism a thousand years ago, or because of bloodshed during World War II” (Snyder 2022). 7 Beside the texts I have already quoted, imperial nostalgia can be found even in rather unexpected places, like in the postmodernist narratives of Victor Pelevin (see: Livers 2010).

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exceptional for several reasons. It is fully dedicated to Soviet times; that is, all the action takes place in the 1980s. Contrary to that, other vampire novels (written by Sergei Lukyanenko, Oleg Divov or Victor Pelevin) are set in current times and Soviet times are rarely mentioned. The placement of the action in 1980s makes Slepakov’s trilogy similar to Alexei Ivanov’s novel Pischeblok (2019) and KinoPoisk series that adapted it (2021). However, Pischeblok portrays Soviet times in a very ambivalent way. The nostalgic images of Soviet childhood, in Pisheblok, collate with the fact that the evil vampire who represents the Soviet ideology is undoubtedly shown as evil. Finally, what makes this even more interesting is the fact that Slepakov’s books have drawn relatively little attention from scholars. This article is divided into three parts. Firstly, it describes the specific context of the neo-imperial neo-Soviet nostalgia in Russia, focusing especially on the traumatic experience of transition and the peculiar position of Russia as a “secondary”/ “subaltern empire” (Tlostanova 2008; Morozov 2015). Next, it will analyse A Tale of the Soviet Vampire, concentrating specifically on the nostalgic (retrotopic) elements of the narrative. Finally, it will conclude with reflections on the toxicity of the Gothic nostalgia which the analysed material demonstrates.

Difficult Transition and the “Secondary” Empire Situation As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes (2019) demonstrate, the transition has been difficult and disappointing for post-Communist countries. The initial trust in liberalisation/capitalism/westernisation was soon broken. The capitalist ideology presented itself as transparent, neutral and nonideological but made people feel lost and deprived of ideological meanings. Prices rose as high as 2600%, inflation and unemployment rose, real wages dropped, and so did the financing of social service, heath care and education. The birth rates dropped, while poverty increased and so did criminality. The 1990s were the age of a mafia boom and of corrupt privatisation of state property. In Russia, it was also national pride that suffered because of the rapid decline of the country’s international standing. The importance of fantasy and science-fiction writing for the imperial discourse has been pointed out many times, to the point of calling the war in Ukraine a “Sci-Fi Writers’ War” (Young 2014; see also Sorkin 2016). See also: Khapaeva (2019).

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Slowly, the nostalgia after communism grew: “If in the 1990s, the prerevolutionary era was by and large understood to be the ‘lost Russia’, then in the 2000s a nostalgia for the Soviet era was added to this. Nonetheless, the latter, contrary to expectations, merged with the former, giving rise to occasionally whimsical hybrids” (Dobrenko and Lipovetsky 2015, 5). Lipovetsky writes about “[t]he ‘Soviet nostalgia’ megaproject. What started out in the 1990s as cheerful banter (Old Songs about What ’s Important ) and ironic historiography (Namedni. Nasha Eraby Leonid Parfyonov) took on the function of a ‘social contract’ and a ‘utopian horizon’ after 2014” (Lipovetsky 2022). Nostalgia joined longing for the lost empire with the individual longing for more security. Disappointment with the transition leads to a nationalist (re)turn. It combined well with Communist nostalgia, not least as Eastern European systems joined communism with a nationalist stance. The nationalist return had its colonial aspect, both discursive and practical: Russia dominated inside the Russian Federation, and outside it, over the newly-made states that had previously been parts of the USSR (Kakı¸sım 2019). In Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974) world-system theory, and Irvin Schick’s (1999) world-archipelago concept, Eastern European countries are not the most peripheral ones, but also they are not in the core (see Kiossev 1995). Russia (or the USSR, with “Soviet” actually standing for “Russian”) has been called a Secondary Empire (Tlostanova 2008, 2012, 2015a) or a Subaltern Empire (Morozov 2015), as an empire marked with colonial difference towards the West. Madina Tlostanova calls it “imperial difference”, “secondary imperialism”: Imperial difference refers to various losers which failed to or were prevented by different circumstances and powers from fulfilling their imperial mission in secular modernity taking as result various second-class places. Importantly, they were intellectually, epistemologically and culturally colonized by the winners and developed a catching up logic, an array of psychological hang-ups, schizophrenic collective complexes, ideologies of the besieged camp or alternatively, victory in defeat and consequently lapses into imperial jingoism and revenge. (Tlostanova 2015a, 46)

She also used the metaphor of Janus (“Janus-faced Empire”), as in the not-quite-Western, not-quite-capitalist empires of modernity, for instance the Ottoman Sultanate or Russia as a paradigmatic case of such a Janusfaced racialised empire which feels itself a colony in the presence of

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the West and plays the part of a caricature civiliser mimicking European colonisation models and missions in its own non-European colonies. The external imperial difference which was coded as colonial in the West generated Russia’s secondary status in European eyes and consequently, an open or hidden orientalisation. At the same time within Russia itself, there is a specific version of secondary Orientalism as a direct result of secondary Eurocentrism (Tlostanova 2015a, 47). Russia was symbolically colonised by the West, or rather self-colonised by the inferiority complex. At the same time, it was a coloniser of her own, Asian and Eastern European, colonies. Those subalterns were assigned with “secondary colonial difference”. A primary colonial difference separated them from (Westernised in comparison to them) Russia. A secondary colonial difference, mediated through Russia (itself non-fullyWestern), separated them the West (Tlostanova 2012). The Russian discourse and the Russian (re)construction of identity have been characterised by mimicry, subversion and the need of recogˇ nition (Canji and Kazharski 2022). “Europe was both the subject of criticism and a civilizational superego: for the self-colonizing imagination it was not only a primary character on the world scene, it was this scene itself, the recognition-granting gaze” (Kiossev 2011). Russia constantly needed to put itself into the Western gaze to assert its imperial status. The embracing of the hegemonic Western vocabulary has been both a ˇ performance of submission and a recognition claim (Canji and Kazharski 2022). In the process, the vocabulary happened to be applied in a way that actually challenged Western rules. The Russian colonial discourse mimicked the Western one in a Bhabian way. The relative Westernisation of Russia was used by it as a colonising tool: a reason, an excuse and a means to colonise Russian colonies. To legitimise its own domination, Russian used the argument of its greater (Western) civilisation (when compared to its colonies). Paradoxically, the colonisation of further Others actually performed the global supremacy of the West, and therefore Russia’s own colonised position as non-fullyWestern. Colonising and/or discriminating further Others was to produce community with the West. Tlostanova notices that even in the heyday of constructing Soviet resistance to the West in terms of (class and ideology) opposition, in the colonies,

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the discourses of the civilizing mission, development, progressivism, and Soviet Orientalism clearly demonstrated their links with Western colonialist macro-narrative (…) Russia strove to build, however unsuccessfully, its own global model, its own modernity sharing the main vices of the Western original but positioning itself as an independent alternative project. (Tlostanova 2015b, 272–73)

“Interestingly enough even today’s decidedly jingoistic forms of Russian scholarship actively engaged in and by official propaganda, are mostly non-original and stemming from previous Western conservative and essentialist (rather than constructivist) sources (Dugin 2014)” (Tlostanova 2015a, 50). With that, one needs to remember that Russia also casts itself as a leader of the non-Western world, including its Muslim or Buddhist parts. This is a counter-European identity discourse, based on resistance towards Western domination, and an affirmation of the Russian Otherness. There are obvious problems with such a resistance. Firstly, a resistance based on the re-appropriation of one’s othering identification done by the dominator remains problematic. Secondly, in terms of Russian domination, it is again just another face of the colonisation discourse: just replacing the term of domination by that of leadership and the term of Westernisation by that of opposition towards the West. Resistance to Western domination, struggles for independence, national self-assertion and de-Westernisation turn into demonisation of the West and dictatorship (Tlostanova 2015b, 273). The decolonial discourse is appropriated by the power. Essentially however, two points remain: 1. Russian domination in the non-Western world; 2. as defined by the positioning of Russiatowards the West. This discourse is new-old (pan-Slavic Eurasian) and visible specifically after Putin’s “return” to (presidential) power and his (re)turn to non-Western politics. Narratively, it is visible in Pelevin’s or Slepakov inclusion of Asian, shamanist and Buddhist elements into their narratives about Russianess.

A Tale About the Soviet Vampire Ivanovich Frolov has become vampire, having died of a peculiar death: overeating caused by his extreme voracity. The collective immediately, organically, feels that something is wrong: “Whoever has ever been in the village, understands: if anything happens, it is in the air, and everyone feels

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it” (Slepakov 2014, loc. 750–51). The holder of the common wisdom is Elisaveta Petrovna, a sort of the village wise woman. She recognises the vampire first, even though Frolov strongly changed after rising from the grave: he became a handsome middle-age slim man. She keeps calm, talks to him and gives him “life” advise. She mediates between the vampire and the community. The modern narrative (as best known from Stoker’s Dracula, with its distinctive division into the Solar Heroes (Hunters)/The Crew of Light (Janion 2002; Craft 1984), the Victim and the Vampire Monster) seems to overlap with the folkloric story and even gives primacy to the former one at the beginning. Just like in the folkloric tales, the community deals with the vampire. Actually, the potential Solar Hunters all seem to fail in the first instance: the local doctor, the intelligentsia and the partorg, the local party representative. He prefers to deny the existence of the vampire (and yet himself takes precautions such as eating garlic). When the community comes to him to find protection, he claims that the Soviet Communist Party will not accept the existence of the mystic creature and therefore prohibits everyone in the village to believe in the existence of the vampire as well. He threatens the village with the repercussions of insubordination: the Party’s terror. The Solar mission that the journalist and the poet try to undertake in order to “save the world, save our country, nation” (Slepakov 2014, loc. 3539–40) is ridiculised. However, the narrative proposes its own mixture of popular wisdom and Soviet ideology, its own version of communism. Despite the local partorg speeches, the Party sends a true Solar Hero, a Soviet major Ershov, who turns out to be an actual guardian angel, to combat the crisis. He forms the Crew of Light (The Ershov Group); composed of the local policeman, the major himself and the army speleologist. Their mission is to go to the world of death to rescue the contemporary Eurydice: Tamara, Frolov’s human lover, who had accompanied him to the underground realm. They witness that vampire is in fact a Solar Hero as well: this former Great Patriotic War soldier voluntarily crosses the river of death to restore the social and natural order. In the Afterworld, he becomes again a Red Army soldier who fights the Nazis. He guards the river shore and does not let other beings cross it and come to the world of the living. The second and third books bring narrative in its modern structure (with a distinct heroes figure) to the political and geopolitical international level. The fight between the heroes and the villains over society, as

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symbolised by Tamara’s body, continues. Society needs to be protected and guided by the proper leaders and the bad (potential) leader is the main villain of the whole trilogy. General Snigiryov’s imperial fantasies are shown as exaggerated madness, caused by sick ambition and paranoia. The narrative is put on the background of actual historical events (the birth of “Solidarno´sc´ ” and the eve of the declaration of the War State in Poland). It shows Snigiryov claiming that what happens in a country of supposed or actual Soviet influence (Poland) concerns the Soviet Union; that is, every move towards Poland’s independence is an actual attack on Soviet borders. Therefore, he plans a war in Poland, as well as the military annexation of the Indian peninsula, through Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is cast as villain of the narrative, but even the good heroes (Frolov included) see Poland as the zone of Soviet influence. The struggle of the Polish people to get independence from the Soviet Union is nullified within the narrative. Even the good heroes consider the situation as being a question of rivalry between America and the Soviet Union, and national sovereignty is not even an issue. The Soviets seem to lose it to the Americans, and in consequence, Poland questions the Warsaw Pact which threatens to disintegrate. Therefore, an intervention is needed, and the question is only if it should be a political one or if it needs to be a military one. Good heroes do not like the idea of making war against Poland, but they are ready to resign themselves to it if it proves “necessary”. One of the plan-B positive heroes is general Wojciech Jaruzelski8 himself, the head of, the then, Polish government who is shown as sharing such views. He thinks that his own nation started to strike because the people had been mislead by silly, radical and whimsical intelligentsia, and the two of them have been manipulated by foreign Western agents. While, facing the tragic choice between opposing his ally (the USSR) and his nation, he chooses to protect the latter, but nonetheless refuses to give power to this mindless crowd. He will only give up power once all disorders are ended. He also recognises the arguments of the USSR: after the experience of Nazi invasion, it is a question of national safety for the Soviet state, and a question of memory, as many Soviet people died to establish their security against the West. He even recognises that those are the same political circles that lead the Nazis, and that lead the cold war against the

8 Contrary to Polish historiography which tends to see Jaruzelski in the negative light.

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USSR now. It is also no coincidence that Snigiryov comes from a family of Italian descendent, which makes this figure linked to Western fascism. Frolov, called up from the death realm, takes the mission in Poland and, due to parting with the native land (soil), he becomes monstrous. That is when the (Russian) people are finally compromised and the heroes/leaders definitely prevail as the saviours. The whole village comes to kill their vampire. They ignore Petrova, and on their way, they want to burn Tamara as a witch. The situation (and Tamara) is saved by specnaz and the tank division, the Solar Heroes, and Soviet power. Finally, Frolov is appeased by the soothing presence of Tamara and the homosocial company of his camrades-in-arms, the two Soviet colonels. He is then exorcised by major Ershov and father Hilarion. The narrative is clearly nostalgic for the old Soviet times. Situating the action in and around Rostov-on-Don, which is very close to the Ukrainian border, and the narrator presenting himself as Cossack are significant. Everyone and everything is described as Soviet, and “Soviet” is treated as specific identity (homely, “own”, in opposition to the rest of the world, especially the West). Therefore, Soviet identity is reconstructed, or maybe nostalgically (re)created (as it is disputable if such an identity actually ever existed) within the narrative, and it encompasses all the people presented, even the vampire: be they from Rostov, Novosibirsk (Siberia) or Moscow. However, Soviet identity is implicitly (even if not explicitly) Russian: in ethnicity and in language. And when Snigiryov makes his plans of transforming the country (abolishing communism), the plans refer explicitly to Russia. The West is generally represented as the enemy, especially the United States. It is the new enemy, historically parallel to the old one, Germany, still associated with the Nazis. Frolov has no hesitation to help the specnaz to prepare for eventual confrontation with the West, who also prepare some special powers on their side. This attitude overlaps with the aforementioned inferiority complex, as the narrative and its protagonists cannot help noticing every now and then that “western” means “better”: better clothes, better mugs and better military devices (especially British and American ones). However, this complex is entangled with resistance in its very core: the same items that rise envy and admiration are also critically dismissed as overrated (e.g. French champagne is judged sour by the model Russian woman Tamara) and unneeded. The real force relies on the Sovietness (indeed in Russianness), of the Soviet people—the best resource of the Soviet Union. No super equipment, just

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like no magical powers, can match the quality of the Russian Heroes. This is specifically highlighted in every confrontation of the specnaz with general Snigiryov’s forces: their sophisticated high-quality Western equipment meets with Polish sneakers and locally produced training suits of the specnaz soldiers, and every time the heroes win just because they are better fighters. The other, non-Western and non-Russian nations are looked upon with a colonial gaze. Even though Tamara comes from Novosibirsk, Siberia, her father is Russian and her mother Jewish, the Jewishness of her mother serves to obliterate the actual ethnic diversity of Siberia rather than introducing it. Indigenous and/or Asian people who are presented as positive, like Buriat Zhugder Gungaevich, the servant of the Russian specnaz colonel, are Russified persons. Yet, the narrative still underlines his oriental difference in a stereotypical way. He walks and breathes lightly and silently, bows, supports peaceful solutions and is a highly spiritual seer, a shaman like his mother and grandmother, and folk healer as well. His father was a Buddhist lama. His mother was an animistic believer. The villains call him by ethnic slur churka [chock], but even the narrative itself notices his “mongoloid race” (Slepakov 2018a). The good heroes treat differences between diverse Siberian people with a sort of disregard: Stepan does not see great difference between Buriats and Kalmyk. It is also noteworthy that when the vampire turns into a real monster, his face becomes oriental: his skin is “pulled” back, his eyes gets small and hide in the layers of skin, and his teeth get uncovered (Slepakov 2014, loc. 3747–48), presenting a caricatural picture of someone of East Asian heritage. In the third book, two other positive figures, Georgian lieutenant Cakadze and general Martirosyan, are introduced, the latter one small, bandy-legged with big Caucasian nose. The rest of the ethnic Others are rather negatively represented. The Azers or the Turks are shown as stereotypical Muslims: rapists of even little girls and human traffickers. Georgians are only slightly better: they harass women and flaunt their money earned on financial speculation. Armenians are thieves. All of those people, despite the fact that some of them are actually Soviet citizens, are treated as Others. While Zhugder is the right-hand of the good colonel, the red-haired (a feature generally considered as a sign of bad character) Kramer is the right-hand of the (bad) general Snigiryov. Despite his German-sounding name, he comes from a small town in Ukraine. His name most likely refers to the Ukrainian alliance with the Nazi

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during World War II, and more so, as Snigiryov is a sort of fascist figure and has Italian roots. Kramer has always been interested in occultism, which is linked to him being Ukrainian—in Russian literature Ukraine is traditionally presented as a place of monsters and superstitions (Sobol 2020). Kramer yearns for power and admires Snigiryov with a mixture of fear, shame and pleasure (Slepakov 2018a), therefore in an abject (homo)sexual way. His figure brings together medical (he is considered having mental health problems), sexual and ethnic Otherness. Although Kramer is configured in many ways as an Other, his allegiance to the Soviet Union is never questioned: he is an inferior Russian but Russian nevertheless. He is also the only actor about whom the name “Ukraine” is given—linked to the fact that he is a villain, and his birth in Western Ukraine. Other actors who come from other parts of Ukraine are positive and the name of Ukraine does not even appear when they are described, just the names of the cities. Colonel Il’ya Borisovich Vahnyuk and his wife come from Sevastopol. One of the tank soldiers comes from Mariupol, a city that is referred as the renamed Zhdanov. The situation of countries such as Poland and Finland forms a third ambivalent, liminal case and completes the mental mapping of the world. Finland’s products are judged by protagonists as almost Soviet. So are Polish sneakers, in line with the famous saying Kuritsa ne ptitsa, Pol’sha— ne zagranitsa [A chicken is not a bird, Poland is not a foreign country]. Their products are better (Polish jeans, Finnish suits), yet not totally Western (like French suit worn by Snigiryov). The narrative is also conscious of the hostility of the Poles towards the Russians and of the fact that Poles consider themselves better and more Western (European) (Slepakov 2018b), and yet the heroes continue to see Poland as necessarily being a Soviet possession. The narrative seems morally very monist in an almost Hindu/Buddhist or animist way, and in contrast to Western modern dualistic stances. The giant Reptile/Crocodile/Lizard/Dragon that seems a threat in the narrative is revealed to be a necessary element of the world. It has a double function: as both an embodiment of evil and also a “cure” for it. The Crocodile/Dragon and the Vampire are not evil, because they become/ turn out to be Solar guardians of the borders. Frolov saves his country and guards the threshold of the realm of the death. The Dragon is just one of many giant lizards that guard the borders between the world of humans and the underworld of the giants that should remain secret for humanities own good.

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Conclusion The narrative reflects the dominant stance in Russian internal and international politics. Small(er) states (such as Poland in the narrative) are naturally part of the empire’s zone of influence. Even the good heroes consider the situation as being a question of rivalry between Super Powers (America and the Soviet Union) and not a question of national sovereignty. This discourse garners much internal paranoia and finds its expression in recent events such as the invasion of Ukraine. This paranoia is visible in Slepakov’s novels: the heroes, even though reluctant towards a military intervention, are at the same time scared that such an intervention will not be enough. They see the changing international situation as a new type of war where every economic and political step taken in Europe is one in the invisible secret war between the two great world powers. The thought that smaller nations can act in their own interests never occurs. Indeed, military intervention into “small nations” is normalised: by expressing the fear that Polish problem is not a local political crisis that can be solved by tanks, the good heroes casually admit that in case of the local political crisis a military intervention is a normal solution. On the occasion of the Polish “crisis”, the dangers of giving power to the people (referred as crowds or masses) are made clear and Jaruzelski’s reasons reflect Soviet thought: Firstly, masses are simply unable to express their needs and interests. Second and lastly, doing it would mean to let disorders reign. The people need protecting from themselves, even against their will, for the good of the nation, because their madness is obviously incited by the seduction of foreign agents. Governors know better than the masses. Soviet power does not represent tyranny, it represents order. However, the true Soviet Heroes understand that people need some chaos and know how to channel it. According to the narrator (Slepakov 2018b), a little bit of chaos is needed to release the emotions and bring relief. A stable, resilient, strong society relies on the balance between order and chaos. The narrator claims that those are the real oppositions, not tyranny and democracy, that are two totally irrelevant terms. The order, as the narrative sees it, is made with violence (tanks). The occasional eruptions are controlled and catalysed by those in power and in fact replace democratic practices. Alongside this, leaders of the Soviet Union are never villains but are mislead by the mistakes or misdeeds of subordinates. This includes Josef Stalin, who is acquitted by God himself at the end of the first book, and

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Leonid Brezhniev, who is presented as a sympathetic old man, intelligent, insightful and almost clairvoyant. In contrast, the critics of the Soviet government are presented as the intelligentsia following an intellectual fashion. Finally, the actual elite is the militia: police and especially the (Red) Army (for the position of the militia in Russia see: Motyl 2016). The policeman Igor becomes the guardian of the underground. Former soldier Frolov saves his country (and Poland as well) and guards the threshold between the realm of the death and the living. In the afterlife, he joins the Red Army and stops a legion of demons from crossing the river of death and attacking the living. Major Ershov is an actual guardian angel, and at the end of the story, it is the army (tank division) that saves everyone. It is also important that their actions are secret: tank operations, specnaz vampire unit, the second “job” of policeman Igor, they are all kept secret from the public, for the public’s own good. Slepakov’s books are, first of all, good stories: gripping plot, interesting actors and fast action. They also contain many imperial and nostalgic elements. The elements of cultural resistance are noteworthy propositions of the alternative non-western philosophical viewpoint. Even Soviet nostalgia contains elements that are not necessarily toxic, like the sense of duty, best embodied by Tamara’s parents, who have worked hard their whole lives for the good of society. Imperial ambitions (as embodied by Snigiryov) are criticised. Yet, as noted by Ewa Thompson (2022) in the interview with Kasia Krzyzanowska: ˙ “the critique of one [form of] imperialism, does not mean the general resignation from Russian imperialism or nationalism.” Those are ideas shared by the ruling party and by the opposition equally, and Thompson quotes Navalny’s support of the annexation of Crimea and Solzhenitsyn’s support of Putin in the final years of his life. Just like the latter criticised Soviet totalitarianism because it was Soviet, and not really because it was totalitarian, Slepakov criticises a certain type of fascism, as represented by his main villain. And yet his apologia of the Soviet Union (despite all its noted flaws) bears strong features of the imperial dream, or nostalgia, about a strong, solid society, with order above freedom, and keeping safe the zones of influence. Those dreams, of an imagined past or hoped for future, whether the author intended it or not, perform the socio-political retrotopic reality in which the full-scale invasion on Ukraine became possible.

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“Oh No! Not Again!”: Toxic Nostalgia and British Antisemitism in Ghost Stories by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson Vicky Brewster

Nostalgia is commonly conceived of as a positive affect. Writing on another horror text, Stephen King’s IT (1986), Daniel Compora writes, “For some people, connecting with the past is a pleasant experience that awakes forgotten memories of a happier, more innocent time” (Compora 2022, 149). Similarly, Sedikides et al. chart the changing conception of nostalgia through the ages, stating that “By the mid-twentieth century, psychodynamic approaches considered nostalgia a subconscious desire to return to an earlier life stage” (Sedikides et al. 2008, 304). However, nostalgia can pass over into a realm that creates negative affect in the person experiencing it, or can trap an individual in falsely happy memories of the past. Developing this concept, Compora goes on to write, “though nostalgia can be a useful force in helping people confront their pasts, it also has the potential to be toxic, destroying meaningful relationships and limiting one’s potential” (Compora 2022, 153). The Oxford English Dictionary defines nostalgia as a “Sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; [also] sentimental imagining or evocation of a

V. Brewster (B) Swansea University, Swansea, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_18

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period of the past” (OED Online, emphasis original). Toxic Nostalgia, then, can be imagined as a kind of nostalgia, a sentimental longing, that is toxic to the individual experiencing it. As will be demonstrated, the movie adaptation of the play Ghost Stories (Nyman and Dyson 2018)1 is full of nostalgic nods to a British horror past, particularly evoking the 1970s and 1980s, the period in which the co-writers were growing up and first experiencing horror texts. This was also a period, however, in which antisemitism was relatively normal in Britain, and in which Jewish creative influence was absent from British horror cinema. Nyman and Dyson in the play Ghost Stories sought to bring together a nostalgia for the 1970s, while also demonstrating that, for Jews, there is an aspect of this nostalgia not reflective of the reality experienced during this period. The Ghost Stories, then, is a text displaying the tensions between nostalgia for a time that has been and an artistic style that is born from a “sentimental longing”, while redressing the toxic elements of a nostalgic recalling that erases prejudice and representation of certain races, specifically antisemitism and Jewishness. Besides the common parlance as a negative or damaging version of nostalgia, Toxic Nostalgia is also a term used in psychiatry to refer to the phenomena of “a subtle mixture of feelings, attitudes, perspectives, and needs of different ages all showing themselves at once as the unresolved past attempts to define the present” (Viscott 1996, 279); to express how “old attitudes were suddenly precipitated … as if a prefabricated mental state had suddenly been superimposed on the present” (Viscott 1996, 5). This psychiatric definition of Toxic Nostalgia is also expressed in Ghost Stories which follows Professor Goodman, a paranormal debunker, who brings the audience through three separate ghost story cases in an effort to provide a mundane explanation for the supernatural phenomena. Throughout these disparate stories are echoes of Goodman’s own history, relating to his memory of the worst thing he ever did: stood by as some childhood bullies made a disabled schoolmate, Callaghan or “Kojak”, play a cruel game that resulted in his death. In the final act, Goodman is 1 This essay focuses on the play, Ghost Stories ([2010] 2019), which was first performed in 2010 but was not published as a book until 2019, and its film adaptation, Ghost Stories in 2017, and released as a DVD with commentary in 2018. As such when talking about the play, Ghost Stories ([2010] 2019) will be used and when mentioning the film Ghost Stories (2018) will be used as mention of the film is limited to the commentary which is by the two writers and which sheds light on both the play and their motivations for the project as a whole.

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drawn out of the rational story with abrupt surrealism, made to relive this memory and then revealed to be “locked in” a coma in a hospital bed following a failed suicide attempt, reliving the same sequence of events over and over again. Goodman attempts to hide in the rational recollections over which he has control, but his unpleasant memories constantly and consistently intrude into this place of mental safety, “resurfacing” and “superimposing” upon his mental state. This article will explore both these definitions and demonstrate how Toxic Nostalgia particularly applies to representations of Judaism and antisemitism in Ghost Stories (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019) as a representation of twenty-first-century British Gothic and horror fiction.

Nostalgia that is Gothic The clearest nostalgia felt by Ghost Stories ’ (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019) creators is a nostalgia for the golden age of British horror cinema and television. Much of the directors’ commentary for Ghost Stories (2018) features both directors referencing various other British horror television and film texts of the 1970s and 1980s, including The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973), Sleuth (Mankieqicz: 1972), Lawrence Gordon Clark’s series of Ghost Stories for Christmas (Clark 1971, 78), The Woman in Black (Wise 1989) and the episode “During Barty’s Party” of TV series Beasts (Kneale 1976). Furthermore, during casting processes the co-directors went through a process of imagining who they would cast in certain roles if they were producing an Amicus film in 1973, and envisioned the production as being like a Tigon Studios film, a British horror studio often confused with Hammer Horror in the 1970s (Nyman and Dyson 2018). The nostalgia the creators experience clearly harkens to a time that was fundamental in establishing their opinions on what good British horror should be. However, these texts equally harken to a time when “Jews have been written out of the histories of film and television in the United Kingdom and its constituent nations” (Abrams 2016, 3–4). Nathan Abrams links this erasure to promoting “so-called English identity and values” (7), suggesting that Jewishness itself is incompatible with Britishness and texts that position themselves as British. Similarly, Donald Weber attributes this erasure to a British Jewish desire to “keep Shtumm”, a “British Jewish self-consciousness: the long-nourished habit, on the part of British Jewry, of keeping quiet, of remaining hidden, of not calling

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attention to itself” (2016, 158), which has been born from a “pressure of what might be called ‘Anglicization’” (2016, 159). Nyman alludes, in the directors’ commentary, to Jewish creators behind the scenes of 1970s horror cinema, but the contents of these horror texts do not include Jewish representation, or acknowledge the antisemitism that was rife in Britain during this period. In this respect, the casual antisemitism featured within the text, appropriate to a setting contemporary with many of the nostalgic horror texts mentioned, is a reclamation of the Jewish experience during the creators’ formative years. Although a period is not specified as the setting of any of the ghost stories, or Goodman’s memory of Callaghan’s death, Callaghan’s green parka coat is typical of 1980s fashion, and the photograph and film excerpts at the beginning of each version of Ghost Stories (Nyman and Dyson 2018, 2019) display typically 1980s fashions and hairstyles, positioning the text squarely in this time bracket. The National Front graffiti that appears in Tony Matthews’ ghost story and Goodman’s childhood memory is also dated 1981, perhaps suggesting that these stories occur in a shared time period, or that they are both the product of Professor Goodman’s imagination and memory which is stuck in or shortly after 1981. There is an aspect of Ghost Stories (Nyman and Dyson 2019) that seems to actively reclaim the British horror genre for Jewishness or to reinsert Judaism into British horror. For example, the co-directors were inspired by the stories of popular horror films of the 1970s such as The Exorcist (Friedkin 1974) and The Omen (Donner 1976)2 which purported to be so inspired by evil, they called in priests to bless their film sets. In their commentary, Dyson and Nyman joke about the Jewish producers organising Catholic priests to create a story of sensationalism around the productions, viewing the process rather cynically. However, these stories prompted the directors to organise a rabbi to bless the Ghost Stories production on the first day of filming (Nyman and Dyson 2018). This performs both an act of nostalgia for the golden age of horror that inspires Ghost Stories (Nyman and Dyson 2018), but subverts the expectation or assumptions about a Catholic priest as a denomination particularly associated with horror film productions and the act of exorcism so often 2 While there are numerous articles and sources available to suggest a priest blessed the set of The Exorcist after a fire on the set, I have found no reports of The Omen receiving similar treatment, but both films are referenced as such by Nyman and Dyson, perhaps erroneously.

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associated with the horror film, using instead a rabbi. Although Nyman and Dyson do not observe Kosha or the Sabbat, Nyman says that “being Jewish matters to us a lot” (2018) and this altering of a “Christian” tradition to a Jewish ceremony acts as a subversion in two ways. Firstly, it takes an apparently Christian tradition to add a credible sensationalism to the reputation surrounding a production and changes it to a quiet ceremony appreciated only by the filmmakers and not mentioned beyond the directors’ commentary and the occasional Q&A. This suggests a more genuine, more authentic framing of the event, even if it was originally conceived of as a joke. Secondly, the film again asserts a Jewishness that is not necessarily relevant to the film or its content, but is present and presented in a somewhat Gothic form. In Ghost Stories (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019), Professor Goodman is trapped inside his own recollections. Although it is not made explicit if the three primary ghost stories are genuine memories or a fantasy on Goodman’s part, they are tainted by and always circle back to the central negative memory. If the primary stories are read as memory, they showcase Goodman’s glory days, memories in which he is in control, providing help to others, and in which he can, in a somewhat superior fashion, give rational explanations for the irrational. Such memories exemplify nostalgia as a “sentimental longing for one’s past” (Sedikides et al. 2008, 305) and “facilitate continuity between past and present selves” (Sedikides et al. 2008, 306). These nostalgic memories inevitably collapse into a strong negative memory, which may be the reason Goodman attempted suicide. Sedikides et al. theorised that there is also an aspect of “redemption” to nostalgia, created by a juxtaposition of positive and negative elements (2008, 305). While this juxtaposition exists in Ghost Stories — the controlled memories of helping or rationalising the horrors of others juxtaposed with Goodman’s own very mundane horror—this does not create any redemption for him. Quite the opposite, as it is implied Goodman has responded to these negative memories by attempting suicide, overcome by guilt. Although Compora is writing about another Jewish character in IT (King 1986) (itself an example of the 1970s and 1980s “golden age” of horror), his words strongly apply also to Goodman: his “inability to reconcile his past trauma with his adult self leads him to kill himself” (Compora 2022, 155). The reasons for suicide can be read in many ways, but the implication from Compora is that it is performed to avoid responsibility, and the possible redemption of

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this character facing his fears back in his hometown, being a hero like his childhood friends. Although there is no redemption possible for Goodman, whose childhood peer died and is beyond saving, suicide is still presented as an attempt by him to avoid facing his fears. However, the act of suicide has had the opposite effect, trapping Goodman with this memory on a loop. Carlson writes that the haunted stage is exemplified by “the past appearing unexpectedly and uncannily in the midst of the present” (Carlson 2003, 1), and this is demonstrated in the display of Goodman’s memories. In the movie Ghost Stories (Nyman and Dyson 2018), Callaghan’s ghost haunts and oversees everything Goodman does, as a lone, hooded figure appearing in the background, and in the play (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019), the members of the tunnel game which killed Callaghan haunt every story. Goodman has no power to change the memory, because it is a memory, not a story. Ghost Stories is also haunted by the memory and, indeed, actuality of antisemitism. This is clearer in the film adaptation, in which the ghost stories and Professor Goodman’s memories feature the graffiti of the National Front, a far-right fascist group who were antisemitic or, the term they preferred, anti-Zionist, who operated in the 1980s. In highlighting and explaining the inclusion of this graffiti in the directors’ commentary, Nyman lists a number of contemporary organisations with similar ideologies to the National Front and says, “The hatred hasn’t gone away; just changed the initials” (Nyman and Dyson 2018). Dyson adds that this kind of organisation is a “charming British institution” (2018, author emphasis)—“charming” being used ironically here. Listening to the directors’ commentary on Ghost Stories (2018) is to listen to lengthy indulgent nostalgia. Both writers and directors talk at length about their love of British horror, and the film is filled with nostalgic nods to their favourite texts. The film and play are both rife with a nostalgia, but the inclusion of National Front graffiti, of causal antisemitism that typically went unchallenged during this period, suggests a dark side to that nostalgia. Kelly Jones writes of the control playwrights exert over their text: the onstage Author is “dead”—unable to control the reception or the impact of his text—yet the playwright(s) himself/themselves haunt the text, serving to provide a sense to the text, to control and direct the “proliferation of meaning’ in the manner of the formalist ghost-story writer. (2012, 176)

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In both the references to favourite past texts, and the inclusion of casual antisemitism in the background that does not directly affect the action, Nyman and Dyson haunt their text themselves but also raise the ghosts of a time that can be viewed nostalgically despite being far from perfect. As Daniel Renshaw writes, “the gothic text inevitably reflects the prejudices of its period, even if that reflection is not a pre-conceived component of the work, or of its ‘monsters’” (2020, 150). Antisemitism is not a direct concern of the play or film, but its products and effects lurk, like Callaghan’s ghost, in the background. Carlson in The Haunted Stage writes extensively about the recycled in theatre and the connotations an audience draws based on the texts, stagings, actors and props they have seen before. He writes that one of “the most common and powerful traditions of recycled material” is “the body of the individual actor” (Carlson 2003, 13), as the audience will have existing associations with the actors in their previous roles. However, this also refers to the actor’s real life, especially in the twenty-first century when the general public have unprecedented access to the lives, thoughts and opinions of actors through social media. As Carlson puts it, “the haunting of a new interpretation [is provided] by the audience’s knowledge of or assumptions about an actor’s life outside the theatre” (Carlson 2003, 85). In the original 2010 stage production of Ghost Stories, and in the 2017 film, the role of Professor Goodman is played by co-writer and co-director Andy Nyman. Nyman is openly Jewish, talking regularly in interviews about the twenty-first-century Jewish experience and appearing in David Baddiel’s documentary Jews Don’t Count (Routh 2022), which explores “progressive” antisemitism and Jewish experience in the present moment. The body of a Jew on the stage is important as “When it comes to film and television, Jews have been present, right in front of our eyes, yet their presence is not always made known, either by themselves or scholars” (Abrams 2016, 3). Nyman’s open Jewishness, his inclusion of Jewish bodies, subverts the “covert” nature of Jewishness—the ability to “pass”, which has led to antisemitic paranoia about the Jew as an unknowable force. Goodman, therefore, besides being a Jewish character, is then embodied by a prominent Jewish actor in the film3 so that it, in a sense, becomes haunted by the Jewish bodies of its creators. 3 A phenomenon that is not as common as one might think. David Baddiel lists numerous counts of Jewish characters played by non-Jewish actors in Jews Don’t Count and argues that this has become acceptable despite moves in various media to ensure

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Dyson and Nyman were both raised Jewish, and Judaism is clearly an important influence on the story, though it is not raised as a central theme. Simon Rifkind’s name, which is traditionally Jewish in origin, is repeatedly mispronounced, and his mother speaks Yiddish to him over the phone. Furthermore, the film opens with a recreation of Nyman and Dyson’s bar mitzvahs, featuring members of their real-life families and a cameo from Dyson himself. Listening to the directors’ commentary reveals that the opening sequence is very personal to them both, and not least as it also features a Siddur that belonged to Nyman’s grandparents. This concentration of authentic Jewishness on screen, and Nyman and Dyson’s insertion of what might be called casual Jewishness in their texts, could be an expression of what Weber describes as Jewish writers “getting mouthy, raising their Jewish voices unabashedly, in the process of overturning the tradition of ‘staying Shtumm’” (Weber 2016, 161). Nyman says of the opening bar mitzvah footage, “There’s a lot of Jews there dancing, don’t be scared guys” (Nyman and Dyson 2018). This is perhaps quite a Gothic statement of British attitudes to Judaism and Jewishness, as Nyman forefronts the existence of Jewish bodies on film, but also addresses the audience with “don’t be scared”, positioning Jews as a racial group that might prompt fear in their presumably gentile audience, even if this is said as a joke. The casual antisemitism that appears in the story—the National Front graffiti, Tony’s “Englishman, Irishman, and Jew” joke, and Mike Priddle’s referring to Goodman as “Jewy Goodman” (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019, 60)—is perhaps included to avoid Goodman’s assertion that “People tend to misremember as time goes by. They embellish” (39). In the case of gentile-written stories, the casual antisemitism of the 1980s is often conveniently omitted or even erased by “progressive” clean-ups of historical texts.4 However, it is clearly important to Dyson and Nyman’s recollection of their past as parsed through their ghost stories.

that marginalised bodies should always be played by individuals who are part of that marginalised community. 4 See, for example, the changing titles of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None

to remove slurs against Black people and Native Americans, or the changes to the text of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to remove instances of the word “fat”. While these are not changes specifically made to erase antisemitism, they are changes to texts designed to make historically “acceptable” prejudices sanitised for a twenty-firstcentury readership.

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When attempting to situate Ghost Stories as a twenty-first-century Jewish Gothic text, there is relatively little post-World War II theory to go on and is an area clearly in need of further examination beyond the scope of this article. This forces one to refer to the Jewish Gothic tropes of the pre-War period. Judaism in Gothic literature is often relegated to the figure of the Wandering Jew and parallels between vampirism and the migratory Jew. The Jewish denomination of Kabala has also provided the basis for shadowy secret societies in Gothic fiction. There is something of the “hyper-rational, conspiratorial Jew” (Davison 2004, 10) in Professor Goodman’s drive to rationalise the irrational. As Kelly Jones describes him, “The Professor has no intellectual sensitivity, and his mind is itself tangled up in intangible narratives of his own past” (Jones 2012, 174). Goodman’s very rationality, aligning him with this Jewish trope, blunts Goodman to the inevitability of his return to the hospital. Davison describes how “cabalistic magical science was regarded as a paradoxical domain of investigation that blurred the boundary between religion and science” (Davison 2004, 70), which recalls more accurately what is shown in Ghost Stories ([2010] 2019): a constant tension between the magical, supernatural elements of the stories and Goodman’s own apparently rational narrative which falls inexorably into the surreal and magical itself. There is also something of the Wandering Jew in Goodman as “The Wandering Jew generally recognizes … that his prolonged existence is a curse and that he is the accursed of God” (Davison 2004, 72). Read as such, Goodman is not merely a prophet of rationality, but of his own cursed fate. Much concern in the propaganda and antisemitic Gothic literature of the long nineteenth century focuses on Jewish migrants’ ability to “pass” as a native member of society. As Renshaw writes, “‘the Jew’ in anti-Semitic discourse, are comfortable both in high society and the poorest slums. They are to an extent chameleonic and classless in a society stratified by social position” (Renshaw 2020, 153). This is cited as still the case in the twenty-first century by David Baddiel in his polemic, Jews Don’t Count, in which he asserts, “Jews [are] the only objects of racism to whom a double status is applied, both high and low” (Baddiel 2022, 50), creating a conflation of sympathy for antisemitic racism as, he writes, “Jews are stereotyped, by the racists, in all the same ways that other minorities are—as lying, thieving, dirty, vile, stinking—but also as moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world” (Baddiel 2022, 18). Although this highlights the hypocrisy of

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antisemitism, it also perpetuates the idea of Jews “passing” in all walks of life. Hiding and reinvention were perceived as a Jewish immigrant aspect (Renshaw 2020, 156–157), and Goodman embodies this by hiding in his own narrative. The whole play is a fiction Goodman has created in order to hide from himself, from his own traumatic memories and, ultimately, from the truth that he is locked in a coma. His narrative is “chameleonic”, sliding seamlessly between the lecture theatre, the worlds of his percipient ghost storytellers, his own memories and his reality. This is apparent in the stage directions describing the transition between scenes. For example: “As we hear TONY MATTHEWS’ first line, he appears, lit through the safety curtain. The audience realise that the curtain is actually a gauze, not the solid curtain they imagined” (Nyman and Dyson 2019, 22) and later “Over the next lines of dialogue, lights come up on TONY and down on GOODMAN, until we lose all light on the lecture” (23). Goodman still lingers to the side of the stage for some time, making the shift between scenes gradual enough that the audience forget Goodman is there before he actually vanishes. This reflects the invisibility of the “passing” Jew, fading into the background of society, while also portraying the stage as an unreliable, shifting, liminal space from the very beginning of the production.

Toxic Nostalgia Viscott’s conception of psychological Toxic Nostalgia as a past superimposed on the present that cannot be erased and repeatedly intrudes is expressed in both the formatting and storyline of Ghost Stories ([2010] 2019). The text repeatedly layers the past over the present, one intruding into the other, as memories superimpose over or through the layers of the “reality” presented to the audience. As these intrusions become more frequent and stronger, they take over the narrative, destabilising both the audience and Professor Goodman. Through examining the layers of the play and how and why one set of layers overcomes another, it demonstrates how Toxic Nostalgia is experienced by its main character, but also the way in which this Gothically unsettles the audience to create a chilling horror affect. David Viscott asserts that “Toxic Nostalgia represent[s] the way these repressed feelings resurfaced in order to be addressed and finally laid to rest” (1996, 6). However, Goodman’s repeating memories fundamentally are never laid to rest. The term “laid to rest” suggests a resolution that

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allows an individual to move on, a death and a grieving and a leaving behind. In Ghost Stories, the implied repetition in both Goodman’s cry of “Oh, no! Not again!” (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019, 68) and the restarting of the play in the way it began suggests a loop that is stuck and inescapable for him. Similarly, his attempted suicide suggests he cannot even lay himself to rest. His world almost longingly features a final suicide by Mike Priddle, who, when he appears as Goodman’s doctor, refers to self-shooting as an ideal method of suicide, saying, “That’s the way to do it” (69).5 However, even Priddle’s suicide is unsuccessful, as he reappears alive after the gunshot. Viscott presents Toxic Nostalgia as a psychological phenomenon that is treatable, presenting repressed feelings in order to address and resolve them. Goodman, stuck in his own head, in his own psychological loop, can never address his repressed guilt, but only push it back down and seek solace once more in rational, controllable memories or imagined situations. Ghost Stories also demonstrates haunting through layers of memory. The primary lesson of Ghost Stories is that a person cannot escape the worst thing they ever did—or ever did not do. Goodman appears as a middle-aged man who has apparently lived a life, although he clearly has felt his life is not worth living, but the event that haunts him is from his teenage years. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth refers to “the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits” (Caruth 1995, 4–5), which perfectly describes Goodman’s experience. His trauma is lodged in his memory and takes over everything that surrounds it. References to the incident of Goodman’s guilt slide into the text at various moments, usually in a list of other relevant items—a trick of mentalism, one of many stage-magic elements co-writer, co-director and star, Andy Nyman, has gleefully worked into the text. For example, when Goodman says during his initial lecture, “These new ghosts are much more about local narrative … a soldier fallen in battle, a wife murdered by her husband, a backwards child who died accidentally while playing an innocent game” (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019, 17). Knowing that the “backwards child” is an out of place item, one can see that it is more detailed and more specific than the generalities that surround 5 This line is delivered in Ghost Stories (2017) in the voice of Mr Punch of traditional British Punch and Judy shows. These are themselves often an aspect of British nostalgia, but have roots in antisemitism. Yet another example of unacknowledged British antisemitism.

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it—the soldier, the murdered wife. There is also a morality placed on this item that does not appear in the others: “an innocent game”. Even while Goodman is unaware of the truth of his story, of the specifics that are snuck in, he is making excuses for himself. Similarly, when Goodman later refers to “some innocent person involved in an unfortunate accident or tragedy … they’re the ones I constantly replay as I lay in bed with nothing else to occupy my mind” (22). The emphasis is on the guilty party’s innocence, a removal of responsibility, yet Goodman is fixated on that situation. The reappearance of Mike Priddle after the gunshot that suggested his suicide begins the fully surreal section of the play. The stage directions read: “GOODMAN is confused—as are the audience. This shouldn’t happen—how can these worlds cross?” (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019, 58). Goodman’s lecture is the audience’s supposed “present”, the firm reality that critiques and contradicts the ghost stories, which are the unreliable recollections of the past. Priddle stepping out of his past, out of his death and into this supposedly rational, reliable present, introduces a new layer which, the audience steadily realises, has existed all along. Priddle is the layer of Goodman’s recollection, of his guilt, his memory, that has been steadily seeping into the rational present narrative. The time-loop device employed by Ghost Stories, ending the play as it began, introduces an element of the ouroboros, as well as the uncanny, as the audience believe Professor Goodman to be on stage in a hospital bed as he simultaneously enters the auditorium to give his lecture from the beginning again. These destabilisations encourage or force the audience to share in the horror of Goodman’s Toxic Nostalgia. Goodman’s memories intrude on the audience as much as they intrude on Goodman himself. The brutality of Goodman’s reality steadily overlays on the dream, or fantasy, that is the main portion of the play. Again, this creates a destabilisation. What the audience had assumed was reality is, in fact, fantasy and vice versa. At intervals, Goodman’s controlled, jovial lectures are interrupted by moments of sudden surreality, such as the stage direction: Abruptly GOODMAN just stops. It’s as though someone pushed his pause button. His lifeless arms drop to his sides, his face drops, his eyes roll and his head flops back. He takes two grisly breaths. As suddenly as he’s stopped—he starts again—perfectly normal as though nothing has happened. (Nyman and Dyson [2010] 2019, 35)

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These moments are paired with brutally loud sound effects from the gallery, in this case the sound of ventilated breathing, but turned up to a volume that makes the sound at least initially unrecognisable. Carlson describes how, during a theatrical jump scare, “The audience members, bombarded with a variety of stimuli, processes them by selectively applying reception strategies remembered from previous situations that seem congruent” (Carlson 2003, 6), but in Ghost Stories, there are few congruent previous situations. While the stage directions describe the source of the sounds as ventilated breaths, as an audience member, the volume and lack of context make them truly uncanny, identifiable only later in the play, when context is provided. These act as jump scares typical of the genre, while also acting to disorient the audience. In the documentary “Making Ghost Stories ”, Andy Nyman states that in moments of fear and laughter “the intellect is left behind at those heightened moments” (Nyman and Dyson 2018), citing the jump scare as a tool for creating a visceral moment, but also to disorient the audience into feeling before thinking, hiding layers of understanding and cognitive connection, in this case, the ventilated breathing to ideas of hospitalisation. The audience recognise that something very strange is happening behind the narrative, between the layers, but the movements and sounds are too strange to entirely give the game away. Again, the Toxic Nostalgia of the play is experienced/perpetuated on the audience as well as the play’s characters.

Conclusion The unavoidable layers of Toxic Nostalgia cannot be treated as Goodman is locked in a coma. His coma has come as a result of a failed suicide attempt, suggesting his Toxic Nostalgia has already taken him to a place of futility in which he only wanted the intrusive memories to end. It is unfortunate that, in so doing, he has trapped himself in with them, and however much he may try to hide in his own narrative—one in which he is in control, informed by rationality and logic—the Toxic Nostalgia pierces through the layers to force Goodman into his past. The audience are taken along with Goodman and encouraged, perhaps, to raise recollections of their own repressed memories, and a schadenfreude is experienced, a gratitude that the audience can leave the theatre and return to their own stable, single-layered lives. However, the Toxic Nostalgia of Ghost Stories also lies in a fondness for a past that is not accurately remembered. The British tendency

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towards erasing the negative when nostalgically reflecting on their own or collective history is part of what has triggered such immense national movements as Brexit,6 but also erases the experiences of racially driven prejudice of many British minorities, including British Jews. This text demonstrates how minority British creators use their texts to express and cultivate a nostalgia that looks fondly on the past—in this case, the golden age of British horror in the 1970s—while redressing the wrongs, or the erased racism, of that period. This is inexorably linked to the psychological Toxic Nostalgia of intrusive traumatic memories, demonstrating that casual antisemitism is an intrusive memory for British Jewish people that forever taints a nostalgia for the past.

Works Cited Abrams, Nathan. 2016. “Introduction”. In Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture, ed. N. Abrams, 3–28. Northwestern University Press. Baddiel, David. 2021. Jews Don’t Count. TLS Books Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. University of Michigan Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins University Press. Compora, Daniel P. 2022. “Toxic Nostalgia in Stephen King’s IT.” In Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT, ed. W. S. May, 149–164. University of Mississippi Press. Davison, Carol M. 2004. Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature. Palgrave Macmillan. Donner, Richard (dir.). 1976. The Omen. Mace Neufeld Productions. Friedkin, William (dir.). 1974. The Exorcist. Warner Bros. Pictures. Hardy, Robin (dir.). 1973. The Wicker Man. British Lion Films. Jones, Kelly. 2012. “Authorized Absence: Theatrical Representations of Authorship in Three Contemporary Ghost Plays.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 32 (2): 165–177. King, Stephen. 2017. IT . Hodder Paperbacks. Kneale, Nigel. 1976. Beasts. ITV. Mankiewicz, Joseph L. (dir.). 1972. Sleuth. Palomar Pictures International. Nyman, Andy and Jeremy Dyson. 2019. Ghost Stories [2010]. Nick Hern Books.

6 See, for example, Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassu. 2019. “Brexit and Nostalgia”, Global Politics and Strategy, 61(3).

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Nyman, Andy and Jeremy Dyson (dir.). 2018. Ghost Stories. Lionsgate Films. Renshaw, Daniel. 2020. “Monsters in the Capital: Helen Vaughan, Count Dracula and Demographic Fears in fin-de-siècle London.” Gothic Studies 22 (2): 148–164. Routh, James (dir.). 2022. Jews Don’t Count. Mindhouse. Sedikides, Constantine, Tim Wildschut, Jamie Arndt, and Clay Routledge. 2008. “Nostalgia Past, Present, and Future.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17 (5): 304–307. Viscott, David. 1996. Emotional Resilience: Simple Truths for Dealing with the Unfinished Business of Your Past. Crown Trade Paperbacks. Weber, Donald. 2016. “Pekhlach: Mike Leigh’s British Jewish Soul”. In Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture, ed. N. Abrams, 157–180. Northwestern University Press. Wise, Herbert (dir.). 1989. The Woman in Black. Granada Television.

Extremist Nostalgia: Mike Ma’s Novellas as Twenty-First-Century Far-Right Gothic Helen Young

The Gothic emerged in the late eighteenth century as an expression of anxiety about the irrational, barbaric past intruding into the civilised rationality of the contemporary moment. It also, however, included expressions of nostalgia for that same past and what was (positioned as having been) lost under the conditions of modernity. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first novel to be described as “gothic”, exemplifies the former impulse, while the medievalist reconstruction of his home Strawberry Hill exemplifies the latter. In the current political moment in the twenty-first century, a dual longing for and fear of the past saturates global political, social and cultural discourse. This essay investigates how such anxieties and longing are exploited for political and ideological purposes by far-Right extremism (FRE) in the USA, using the lens of the Gothic to explore two of the most widely read works of fiction that have emerged from that milieu: Mike Ma’s Harassment Architecture (2019) and Gothic Violence (2021). By approaching Ma’s novellas as Gothic epics, it reveals the ways that individual and social transformation are interlinked and depend on what is imagined, in both those

H. Young (B) Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3_19

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books and the far-Right milieu more broadly, as a successful reclamation of nostalgically longed-for white masculine violence.

Far-Right Extremism and the Gothic The Gothic has been used as a framework for understanding political and social discourse and conditions in the twenty-first century. Richard Devetak (2005) suggests that terror attacks of September 11 were the catalyst for American political discourse becoming characterised by a state of terror created through characterisation of “monsters”, such as Saddam Hussein and his regime, to be destroyed.1 Similar discursive moves have been made in Britain in relation to Muslim men (Abbas 2021). Fear of the repressed returning can be seen in European and British anxieties about German domination of the Eurozone, characterised as a kind of “Fourth Reich” or resurgence of Nazi Germany (Macmillan 2014). Understanding such political narratives as Gothic “provides a significant site for interrogating the civiliser/terroriser binary operating within the ‘war on terror’” and in the framework of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” construct that positions the Christian West and Islam as locked in a millennium-old conflict (Abbas 2021, 24). Messaging around the climate crisis has also widely sought to generate fear in attempts to instigate action; although this has been shown to have limited effects (Hunter and Röös 2016; Reser and Bradley 2017), this arguably resonates with and intensifies the affective tone of political and social discourse in ways that can be characterised as Gothic. The conditions of fear and anxiety created by Gothic political discourse enable far-Right political parties to intervene within a “security logic” (Rossi 2017, 135); this extends beyond the Muslim people, particularly Muslim men, Othered by the “war on terror” to target marginalised groups and question the social fabric, principles and values of liberal democracy that are widely perceived and constructed by the far-Right as having created the conditions in which such “threats” can exist by being overly permissive. “The far-Right” is a broad umbrella term that covers a wide range of ideological and political positions including but not limited to neoNazism and identitarianism. Populist political movements that can be 1 Wole Soyinka makes a congruent argument about the emotional register political and social discourse being fear in this period without specifically characterising it as Gothic (Soyinka 2005).

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characterised in this way have become increasingly prominent around the globe in the twenty-first century, most notoriously as associated with Donald Trump’s election campaigns and presidency. The far-Right is typically authoritarian, nativist, anti-egalitarian with positions and goals that are at odds with the foundational values of democratic liberal nations (Jupskås and Leidig 2020, 3). The far-Right includes both radical and extremist elements. This essay understands extremism, which is not limited to the Right, as accepting or embracing violence to pursue ideological, political and cultural change (Mudde 1995). A deep mistrust of liberal modernity runs throughout global far-Right radical and extremist (FRE) ideology and discourse (as well as in other political and ideological domains) including but not only in the USA. This is illustrated by strong contemporary currents of accelerationism which assume that social collapse is inevitable, typically because of perceived flaws of tolerance, secularity and multiculturalism in liberal democracies, and, in its violent militant forms, seeks to actively hasten that collapse (Kriner et al. 2021; Miller 2020; Kriner 2022). An equally strong current of nostalgia also runs through the global far-Right (Reyna et al. 2022; Peucker et al. 2021; Couperus et al. 2023). This takes the form of “restorative nostalgia” as theorised by Svetlana Boym, which engages in “antimodern mythmaking of history” (Boym 2018, 234). It is often expressed through medievalism and classicism in which the past is figured as a site of “mythical whiteness” (Whitaker 2020, 160). The American far-Right, with its essentially white supremacist nativism, takes up and exploits the social anxieties that Steve Bruhm argued more than two decades ago “have assaulted the ideological supremacy of traditional values where straight white males ostensibly control the public sphere […and a] heightened attack against Christian ideology and hierarchy as that which should ‘naturally’ define values and ethics in culture” (Bruhm 2002, 262). The climate crisis and environmental degradation can be seen to have added to this list, as in the rise of ecofascism (Macklin 2022). The Gothic, in political and fictional narratives alike, is “the symbolic site of a culture’s discursive struggle to define and claim possession of the civilized, and to abject, or throw off, what is seen as other to that civilized self” (Punter and Byron 2003, 5). The struggle over the self and the abject in the milieu of the twenty-first-century far-Right is linked to a distrust of liberal modernity. The seemingly “discordant meanings” of Gothic (Hogle 2020, 1), which include “barbaric”, “grotesque”, premodern and are linked to whiteness (Tucker 1967, 149–55 qtd in Hogle,

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2020, 1; Young 2020) and are redolent of violence and terror, are woven together in Ma’s novellas in ways that resonate with ecofascist trends in far-Right extremism. Ecofascism is a trend within a broader range of far-Right ecologisms and environmentalisms with characteristic features including: “a fragmentary, irrational Romanticism, mysticism, and anti-humanism” embedded in profound anti-modernity (Hughes et al. 2022, 1015). According to such positions, “environmental degradation […] supposedly lax gender codes, and […] global migration” are all caused or enabled by modernity and they share a romanticised nostalgia for “a historical, ‘traditional’ past” (ibid). Such positions are narrativised extensively in Ma’s novellas through Gothic structures that reverse the binary of past and present through restorative nostalgia to construct the violent barbaric as the solution to the supposed terrors of civilisation. The violence inherent in fascism typically manifests in ecofascism as militant accelerationism, particularly aimed at destroying the infrastructure that maintains modern technologies and ways of life, such as power grids and the internet (Macklin 2022; Loadenthal 2022). Such attacks are described in detail in both Harassment Architecture and Gothic Violence and are also prosecuted against marginalised groups whose identity is rhetorically linked to modernity in the books.

Far-Right Extremist Gothic Terror “Mike Ma” is an authorial pseudonym widely identified as belonging to Mike Mahoney. Mahoney is a former writer for the so-called altRight website Breitbart.com, likely founder of the accelerationist Pine Tree Party digital movement, and is outspoken in his praise for the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski (Hughes et al. 2022, 1006). His first novella Harassment Architecture (2019) is a staple of accelerationist and ecofascist reading lists and social media recommendations on platforms including Twitter and Telegram (Krill and Clifford 2022; Hughes et al. 2022). His second novella, Gothic Violence (2021), is a continuation of Harassment Architecture although it can be read as a stand-alone text, and also appears in such a milieu. Ma’s books are “standard fare within the radical right” (Miller and Gais 2021) and far-Right extremism (Macklin 2022). Ma’s novellas are typical of far-Right fictions in that they are self-published, can be easily found as free PDF files and through recommendations on far-Right social media channels. They are also available

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(at the time of writing) through mainstream commercial platforms such as Amazon’s ebook stores and networked to related works through its recommendations algorithms (Boucher and Young 2023). They are a manifestation of the far-Right’s well-documented exploitation of digital media and communication technologies (Conway et al. 2019), as evinced by ideological and rhetorical connections with trends and discourses of the far-Right, and exploitation of the Gothic fear-laden affective tone of twenty-first-century US politics. Harassment Architecture and Gothic Violence are stylistically similar to each other and reminiscent of Fight Club (1996) and American Psycho (1991) with their violent masculinity, misogyny and hallucinatory episodes. They are written in a fragmentary style that combines the core first-person narrative with sections of political and aesthetic discourse and ideological ranting. They share significant traits and content, including “irony and dark mordant humour” that is “characteristic of the wider milieu of message boards and chat rooms” of the far-Right (Macklin 2022, 985–86). Screeds of often vitriolic and violent language against groups habitually targeted by FRE abound, including extensive use of slurs. In Harassment Architecture, in the space of four pages there are descriptions of attacks on trans people, poor people and Asian people (Ma 2019, 60–64); for example, both books also include anti-Semitism (Ma 2019, 62; Ma 2021, 84–5); anti-vaccination statements (Ma 2021, 153); a violent anti-abortion fantasy (Ma 2021, 100); and misogyny is redolent throughout (Ma 2019, 9, 20–21, 74; Ma 2021, 124–5).2 While both books are strongly militant accelerationist and ecofascist in their vision of social collapse and restoration, they also invoke a wide range of other ideologies and positions from across the far-Right, including white nationalism and identitarianism: “the days are coming when all we have are words to remember a time when Sweden was Sweden, when France was France, when Europe was actually Europe” (Ma 2019, 111). Conspiracy theories from a stolen election (Ma 2019, 65) to the Great Replacement (Ma 2019, 91), “child sacrifice” (Ma 2021, 46), and “elite” and “media” manipulation (Ma 2021, 66–67) are woven into the narrative and discursive sections in ways that align with the restorative nostalgia typical of FRE (Boym 2018, 235). The overall effect is to make

2 Note that I have made the ethical decision not to directly quote abusive and offensive language and sections of the text that incite violence against specific groups.

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the militant accelerationist narrative comprehensible, relevant and potentially appealing across the far-Right, particularly with extremists, even for groups that do not share the specifically ecofascist central ideology. Ma’s novellas, like other FRE fictions, can be considered “blueprints and fantasies” of white supremacy in that they narrativise a violent pathway to political control (Michael 2009). They are distinctly Gothic in their construction of the modern USA as inherently terrifying, Othering of marginalised groups as monsters to be violently destroyed, destablisation of reality including through intrusions of the supernatural, nostalgic positioning of white masculine violence as a corrective to the supposed ills of modernity. The structure of their narratives is that of the epic in that each “focuses simultaneously on the lives of its characters and on a pivotal moment in the history of a community” (Steinberg 2005, 29). The protagonist-narrator undergoes a transformation from everyday discontent to violent warrior hero and in the course of doing so transforms society around him; in Gothic Violence, this results in the succession of Florida from the USA and its reconstruction into a low-technology, rural community of semi-autonomous families. Terror permeates Ma’s books in ways that resonate with the Gothic political narratives of post 9/11 American politics as well as with the underlying positions of accelerationism and ecofascism. Claims that the modern world is inherently and catastrophically flawed litter Harassment Architecture: “The timeline of humanity, since the last Ice Age, is one long and wild drunk drive, a kind of victory lap” (Ma 2019, 25) and “I believe the entire modern world is cursed for not only building over the bones of time since past, but in a terrible way” (Ma 2019, 59). The narrator-protagonist himself is “always one-pot-of-coffee deep on the scale of apprehension. That feeling where you’re always sure you forgot to do something deathly important”, a state of being he blames on modernity, via conspiratorial thinking: “There is something in the water. There has to be something in the water. There is something in everything … seed oil in the food, Chinese chemicals in the air, soy in this, bad in that, et cetera” (Ma 2019, 116). His transformation in Gothic Violence depends in part on refusing to engage in and with quotidian elements of modern life:

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Abstaining from seed oil because it poisons the body. Abstaining from fluoridated water because it does the same. Abstaining from casual sex because it mires the soul. Abstaining from music because lyrics carry too much propaganda. Abstaining from certain products because they contain harmful chemicals. (Ma 2021, 133)

The effect of this litany, and of the numerous other passages in both novellas that describe twenty-first-century America as dangerous and damaging, is to generate feelings of fear and uncertainty. Attacks on institutions and sources of authoritative knowledge, often tied in with gestures to conspiracy theories, are likewise scattered throughout, such as: “I think that the entire collection of history and all of recorded time is completely wrong. I think every map we have ever seen is wildly incorrect. I think that every tale passed to us is a mixture of lies, accidents, half-truths, and ghosts” (Ma 2021, 159). Modern life is made terrifying through its supposed effects and the erosion of institutional authority. Modernity is constructed as causing people to exist in a (sometimes denied) state of fear, such as in the epitome of the American urban: New York City. The protagonist-narrator of Harassment Architecture visits it, making pronouncements about its true nature embedded in an apparent visceral rejection: “Everyone in New York will rave for hours about how much they love it [… but] If you listen long enough, they start to whittle down into a much truer form, a kind of terror hidden under giddiness” (Ma 2019, 18). Anti-Semitic and racist statements follow this passage, linking financial corruption and the purported state of terror to marginalised groups targeted by the far-Right. The protagonist-narrator then positions mass murder as a solution (Ma 2019, 19). This and similar scenarios developed in both novellas offer narrative support to a general position variously stated in the discursive sections of text, such as: “There are moments when things are so dark that you can only assume you are watching some foretold end of the times. There are moments when your leaders, your neighbors, your family will all tum the knife on you […] There are very few cures to this outside of violence” (Ma 2021, 170). In a paradoxical logic of security, specifically accelerationist violence aimed at ending modernity by causing social collapse is positioned as a solution to the state of terror constructed through the text. Targets of the far-Right are dehumanised in Ma’s novellas, made into Gothic monsters blamed for the supposed terrors of modernity to be targeted by violence: “the people of now are what can only be called

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creatures or demons. […] Normal burdens and days of honest work do not make people into what you’ll find walking around here. ‘Here’ is everywhere, but primarily America” (Ma 2019, 36). The majority of the population, that is, those who are subsumed into the horrors of modern life and do not share the FRE ideologies espoused or join the violence, are constructed as targets. Arabic people and migrants are also called “creatures” and linked to terrorist acts (Ma 2019, 18, 38). So-called “elites”, a term often used in far-Right circles as an anti-Semitic dog whistle, are dehumanised through association and constructed as suitable targets for aggression: “Disfigured politicians and world leaders constantly trying to appease strange monsters for empty things like profit… The soil is thirsty for their blood and their end” (Ma 2021, 46–47). The protagonistnarrator of Harassment Architecture tells his friends that trans people are “mentally ill” and claims that alongside immigrants they are “destroying a perfectly good country”, moving in the space of a few sentences about political division to hoping for “some kind of civil war catalyst so we can fight it out” (Ma 2019, 60). In Gothic Violence, trans people are erased for a positioning of transness as ideological, both a “product of capitalism, industry, commerce, and the network” and a wound, a “symptom” of “what happens when you let the city-loving scum and their value systems take hold” (Ma 2021, 78). Such “monsters” are constructed as simultaneously symptoms of the terrors of modernity and sources of fear themselves. As such, they are represented as necessarily targets of militant accelerationist violence aimed at ushering in the nostalgically longed-for pre-modern future. Although there are no conventionally Gothic monsters—ghost, vampires and the like—both books are laced through with the unreal. Mysticism and the occult permeate both novellas from the tarot reading that opens Gothic Violence (9–10) to references to Atlantis (Ma 2019, 66; Ma 2021, 168), Hyperborean giants (Ma 2021, 155), and to the “twelvelegged black sun” (Ma 2021, 164) and “downward pointed earth” (Ma 2019, 23, 124, 134).3 Hallucinatory episodes punctuate both narratives such as a violent “daydream” of murdering police officers (Ma 2019, 69) to references to aliens (Ma 2019, 100), the narrator’s own stated uncertainty about what is reality and what is a dream or daydream (Ma 2019, 99, 140; Ma 2021, 94), and a “lost temple” of advanced technology 3 The black sun is an esoteric symbol associated with neo-Nazism and white supremacy more broadly (Goodrick-Clarke 2002).

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dug up from beneath sand-dunes on the Florida coastline (Ma 2021, 39– 41). These episodes destabilise what is real and unreal. References to an array of conspiracy theories and questioning of consensus reality function in similar ways, from claims that the Moon and Mars landings are not real (Ma 2021, 51) to questioning whether Abraham “Lincoln really existed. If he did, was he really assassinated?” (Ma 2021, 141). Such questioning is woven into gestures towards conspiracy theories: “If history is written by the victor, then it was edited and published by whoever funded them” (Ma 2019, 115). At the end of both Harassment Architecture and Gothic Violence, the protagonist-narrators’ uncertainties about reality, dreams and fantasies have vanished and their violence is presented as unequivocally real with real effects within the worlds of the texts.

Nostalgic Epic The restorative nostalgia typical of the twenty-first-century far-Right, including its extremist elements, manifests through Gothic haunting and intrusions before the political, social and cultural far-Right triumph fantasised at the end of Gothic Violence. The past haunts the present, intruding into the mundane world of contemporary modernity repeatedly in Ma’s books, for example in references to Western cultural icons and racial descent. This is seen in the opening scene of Harassment Architecture the protagonist blasts the opera Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (1845) by Richard Wagner from his car stereo, “the volume turned up to its loudest with the windows still down because I’m feeling some ancestral renegade blood aflush” (Ma 2019, 9). Culture is racialised through the reference to “ancestral blood” in this early part of the text, introducing a conceptual structure to identity that is sustained through both novellas. The past in the books threatens, justifies and demands violence: “There are some, however, who are born with the spirit of our ancients. The free man, the blood painted warrior, the one who, regardless of his place in time, will always bring his sword down on the neck of his oppressors” (Ma 2021, 62). The past is lost, leaving the present diminished, but can also be restored through aggression: “It used to be okay to kill in the name of something reasonable. Someday that kind of thinking will come back. It always comes back. Has to come back” (Ma 2019, 67). References to heroic pasts and assertions of his own “hero” and “warrior” status by the protagonist-narrator (Ma 2019, 66, 148; Ma 2021, 53, 64) resonate with ecofascist romanticisation of the pre-modern

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and more broadly with extremist narratives that seek to legitimise and valorise contemporary violence (Bennett Furlow and Goodall 2011). The specific cultural and historical references in the two novellas are to icons of white supremacist discourses, particularly, although not exclusively, the medieval and classical eras. In a passage that gestures to the black and white face paint worn by the armed figure on the front of Gothic Violence, the narrator-protagonist quotes writings of Julius Caesar (whose existence is questioned) about the ancient Britons and adds: “Like the Britons, the Vikings too wore faces pain and color […] Whether it’s to be considered war paint or a general fashion choice, it’s clear the effect was an otherworldly look. Some kind of intimidation” (Ma 2021, 145).4 He then describes buying Halloween masks to repeat the effect in an absurd juxtaposition of quotidian American consumerism with a past constructed as heroic. Historical references are similarly used in a passage decrying what the text represents as miscegenation: we see the daughters of Venus who cast their beauty into the void of deracination. Long-preserved aryan features tossed into the faceless cappuccino sea […] There is no true comparison found in previous worlds […] Not the Scythian wives taken by proto-Roman bandits. Not the erasure of the fair-haired Greek by the spiraling of Alexander. (Ma 2021, 92–93)

The passage depends on a pre-supposition that racial purity is both possible and desirable, positions inter-ethnic sex as “erasure” of whiteness and ties this to the broad theme that modernity as inherently worse than the past and should be destroyed.5 The books imagine it is specifically white masculine violence that will bring about this destruction. Restorative nostalgia resonates with the epic (although not all epics are nostalgic) because it is intimately concerned with “the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations” (Boym 2007, 9). The supposed return of the “ancestral” violent white male in the person of the protagonist-narrator is also, in Ma’s novellas, the return of an imagined pre-modern past that never really existed through imagined destruction and reconstruction of the state of Florida and its 4 Norse mythology and culture and Vikings in particular are widely invoked in iconography of the far-Right (Castle and Parsons 2019; Kim 2019). 5 Classical Greece is deployed in racist ways to help construct white masculinity in both mainstream media and FRE contexts (Oh and Kutufam 2014; Hodkinson 2022).

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secession from the USA at the end of Gothic Violence. From fleeing a fender-bender at the start of Harassment Architecture to leading a successful insurrection in its sequel, the protagonist-narrator undertakes significant self-transformation in order to access what are constructed as latent capacities. This personal transformation is directly linked in the texts to the social and cultural transformation wrought in an imagined near-future Florida through accelerationist violence and nostalgic “restoration”. This narrative of the protagonist’s transformation focusses on the physical body, in particular but not exclusively through diet, sometimes taking up ideas from mainstream wellness movements includes “avoiding blood sugar spikes” (Ma 2019, 57) and not eating gluten (Ma 2019, 158), but also including more extreme moves such as changing to an almost purely carnivorous diet (Ma 2019, 122). Gothic Violence includes a long “Nutrition Addendum” that states “diet is the all-important center of life, determining how powerful you feel throughout it” (Ma 2019, 181). The assertions of the protagonist-narrator are directed to the reader as challenges to change their own practices in similar ways in order to accrue the same effects and supposed benefits. A thread of restorative racial nostalgia runs through the addendum with references to Pliny, and Galen as advocating for raw meat and milk as a treatment for tuberculosis through a cherry-picked quote that misrepresents the argument of the modern medical text it cites (Ma 2021, 183).6 The protagonist-narrator’s dietary decisions are linked in the text to conspiracy theories that suggest modern life is flawed because of deliberate choices by powerful elites, for example: “The government made it [raw dairy] illegal everywhere because they know it has the bacteria to kill depression” (Ma 2019, 122). In the imagined community constructed in the ruin of Florida, “the strictest of all social laws pertains to diet. If your great-grandmother wouldn’t have eaten it, you shouldn’t eat it” (Ma 2021, 167). The personal, political and communal transformations narrativised through the novellas are profoundly nostalgic, while the structural shifts in diet—exclusion of what is constructed as modern and “bad” and acceptance of traditional “good” food—map to the inverted Gothic binary of barbaric and civilised at the centre of the novellas. 6 The quoted work is an historical account of tuberculosis treatments that clearly states the transformation efficacy of modern Western medicine in combatting the disease (Daniel 2006).

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Increasing physical strength, and thus the capacity for aggression and assertion of power, is similarly part of the personal transformation of the protagonist-narrator and the imagined epic community. In Harassment Architecture, a paragraph describing a specific workout becomes one about repetition: “Every day is a bench press day” (Ma 2019, 53). The repeated workouts, with attendant screaming, are themselves a form of harassment because they disconcert the neighbours until “cops knock and make sure everything is okay” (ibid). As with diet, the personal account quickly segues to a series of generalised assertions about well-being, innate superiority, and calls to violent social and political action: “All the things required of someone to be truly in shape are all things scumbags not only despise, but despise out of inability […] Act accordingly […] Make them submit” (Ma 2019, 53–54). This exhortation is carried out as the culmination of an escalating programme of violence. In Gothic Violence training becomes a small-group endeavour with a nostalgia that makes clear the activity is aimed at building collective capacity for violence: “It’s like a gladiator school where no one is a slave” (Ma 2021, 59). The move from individual to small-group maps broadly onto the escalation of accelerationist violence across the two books from the protagonist-narrator’s daydreams about individual attacks (Ma 2019, 19, 56, 72), to formation of an accelerationist cell “because we understand that today is unsustainable and cruel, that tomorrow will only be worse, unless somebody takes action. We are the somebodies” (Ma 2019, 149). In Gothic Violence, the cell builds connections with others “on our side” to conduct “urban combat” (Ma 2021, 135) until it has enough members and connections that it can take over the entire state of Florida. In that process, “less than half” of residents accept the imposed social terms (Ma 2021, 164) and those who do not leave voluntarily are “are quite literally pushed into the sea. Paramilitary units give them the option to swim elsewhere or drown” (ibid). Florida is transformed from a state of supposed modern terror into a nostalgic ecofascist utopia through coercion and murder in a process that both mirrors and is the result of the personal transformation of the protagonist-narrator. In fantasy of new Atlantis, the nostalgic personal beliefs of the protagonist-narrator manifest in imagined communal form; he is not its literal ruler, for it has none, but it is made in his image.

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Conclusion Ma’s novellas are profoundly Gothic with their destabilisation of reality and condemnation of modernity that position the contemporary USA as a place of fear, doomed to its own destruction and best hastened along the way by accelerationist white masculine violence. A characteristically Gothic struggle over the binary of civilisation and barbarism permeates the books with their restorative nostalgic longing for an imaginary pre-modern past, and fantasies of violence and condemnation of American modernity; “I don’t feel civilized in cities, do you?” and “Are you so confident that you consider this place to be civilized?” the protagonist-narrator of Gothic Violence asks (Ma 2021, 103, 117). The abject monsters into which everyone from trans, queer, Black, Arabic, Latinx and Jewish people to migrants, the media, politicians, and almost all women are made in both texts are violently destroyed along with the technology that upholds modern life. “Tradition,” or at least an imagined version of it, is “restored with a nearly apocalyptic vengeance” (Boym 2018, 235). The subject position of terror—who feels it and who inflicts it—is reversed through the imagined recovery of violent white masculinity and its assertion of power and control. In these FRE fictions, the toxicity and underlying violence of restorative nostalgic myth-making are laid bare. Ma’s novellas connect strongly with strong currents of violent accelerationism and ecofascism, functioning as narrative manifestos that reify FRE ideologies and fantasies.

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Index

A Abhuman, 7, 64, 208, 249, 251, 253 Abject, 211, 251, 262, 273, 297, 307 Ableism, 10, 225–227, 230, 232, 240, 241 Abuse, 137, 162, 165–167, 170, 172 Adaptation, 16, 18, 32, 34, 35, 46, 175, 284 Affect, 34, 46, 65, 127, 162, 204, 206, 279, 285, 288 Ageism, 226 Agency, 9, 68, 75, 103, 114, 140, 141, 162, 227, 231, 235, 237 American, 2, 8, 35, 36, 39, 50, 55–58, 84, 88, 89, 95, 96, 102, 103, 105–114, 119, 132, 146, 149–151, 153, 156, 226, 263, 270, 271, 286, 296, 297, 300, 301, 304, 307 Antisemitism, 11, 280–282, 284–286, 288, 289, 292 Audience, 9, 10, 23, 27, 28, 34, 36, 47, 50, 58, 64–66, 69, 70, 72–74, 85–87, 89, 90, 93, 94,

96–98, 101–104, 108, 111, 113, 117, 118, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 135, 140, 148, 156, 165, 183, 207, 215, 222, 234, 255, 280, 285, 286, 288, 290, 291 Authoritarian, 37, 163, 297

B Blood, 11, 22, 124, 194, 203, 207, 217, 218, 250, 302, 303 Bodies, 2, 7, 94, 104, 105, 132, 189, 200–206, 217, 218, 220, 226, 231, 249, 250, 254, 255, 257, 285, 286, 305 Body horror, 193, 255 Boym, Svetlana, 2, 3, 39–41, 45, 46, 49, 57, 58, 134, 200, 297, 299, 307 Brexit, 3, 5, 46, 136, 292 British, 3, 5, 11, 86, 185, 186, 247, 253, 254, 258, 263, 271, 280–282, 284, 289, 292, 296 Buried, 105, 137, 141, 222

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Bacon and K. Bronk-Bacon (eds.), Gothic Nostalgia, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3

311

312

INDEX

C Capitalist, 3, 121, 211, 261, 265 Childhood, 34, 85, 88, 117, 119, 121, 129, 137, 155, 191, 265, 280, 282, 284 Children, 4, 18, 96, 104, 106, 118–122, 124–126, 129, 146, 166 Civilisation, 3, 150, 267, 298, 307 Cold War, 45–50, 52, 58, 59, 133, 270 Colonial, 3, 11, 36, 40, 170, 185, 247, 252, 257, 258, 266, 267, 272 Colonialism, 4, 103, 105, 185, 194 Community, 4–6, 32, 36–41, 72, 149, 154, 211, 225, 231, 232, 234, 235, 269, 286, 300, 305, 306 Conservatism, 113 Conservative, 39, 90, 106, 108, 110–112, 151, 268 Consume, 1, 3, 6, 7, 197, 215, 253 Consumerism, 103, 105–107, 304 Covid, 73, 150 Creature, 37, 225, 228, 229, 233, 239, 251, 255, 261, 269, 302 Culture war, 12, 46 D Death, 12, 16–21, 23, 28, 29, 38, 92, 121, 125, 141, 180, 184, 198, 200, 202, 204–206, 208, 212, 220, 227, 239, 248, 264, 269, 271, 275, 280, 282, 290 Demon, 167, 233, 249, 251, 275, 302 Devil, 167, 170, 251 Disability, 225, 227–237, 239–241 Disney, 117, 118, 121, 123, 127, 129, 139, 233 Doppelgänger, 7, 62, 64, 135, 169

Double, 7, 23, 57, 62, 134, 253, 273, 287 Dream, 8, 26, 46, 49, 52, 55, 57, 59, 105, 106, 109, 112, 113, 121, 125, 129, 132, 135, 137, 138, 150–152, 156, 199, 264, 275, 290, 302, 303 Dystopia, 223 E Ecofascism, 297, 298, 300, 307 Ecology, 225 Emotional, 3, 47, 49, 52, 58, 117, 121, 122, 126, 133, 147, 155, 164, 186, 198, 296 Empire, 3, 5, 11, 35, 49, 50, 258, 263, 264, 266 England, 181, 187 Environment, 2, 7, 11, 64, 67, 87, 103, 106, 108, 110–113, 172, 173, 175, 241 Epic, 250, 295, 300, 304, 306 Eroticism, 84, 91–94 Ethnicity, 271 Evil, 6, 18, 22, 29, 32, 35, 42, 43, 87, 133, 162, 166–170, 176, 189, 216, 229, 233, 239, 250, 251, 254, 263, 265, 273, 282 Excess, 3, 105, 106, 201, 203 Extremism, 297 F Fairy tale, 90, 107, 124, 131, 132, 137–140, 154, 233, 240 Family, 5, 9, 36, 38, 54, 103–105, 107–114, 119–121, 123, 125–127, 146–148, 150–156, 175, 185, 232, 248, 249, 271, 300, 301 Fanfiction, 10, 226, 230–234, 236, 238, 240, 241

INDEX

Fantasy, 25, 26, 28, 34, 43, 103, 120, 124, 125, 167, 189, 199, 265, 270, 283, 290, 300, 303, 306, 307 Far-Right, 11, 149, 284, 296–299, 301–304 Fascism, 136, 264, 271, 275, 298 Femininity, 90, 140 Folk horror, 8, 98, 180, 185–188, 192 Folklore, 95, 135, 139, 231 Forget, 35, 87, 166, 257, 288 Forgotten, 20, 89, 105, 120, 201, 258, 279 Franchise, 6, 8, 102, 165, 198, 199, 202, 204, 207, 209 G Gender, 37, 39, 69, 91, 95, 140, 194, 213, 225, 240, 298 Gender roles, 84, 90, 237 Generation, 49, 64, 104, 106, 108, 113, 119, 156, 191, 194, 252 Gentrification, 86, 106 Ghost, 2, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 19, 20, 29, 32, 62, 134, 138, 140, 168, 216, 222, 258, 262, 280, 282–286, 289, 290, 301, 302 Globalisation, 211 Gothic, 1, 3, 4, 6–10, 12, 31–33, 42, 83, 86, 89, 113, 117, 123, 124, 126, 128, 131–134, 137, 139, 140, 146, 148, 150–152, 156, 162, 168, 171, 197, 198, 200–203, 208, 211–216, 219–222, 225–230, 233–241, 247, 249, 252, 262, 263, 265, 281, 283, 285–287, 295, 296, 298, 300–305, 307 Gothicise, 7, 12, 62, 69 Greed, 11, 109, 114, 248–255, 257, 258

313

Grief, 16, 19–21, 26, 28, 29, 38, 109, 181, 199 Grotesque, 141, 148, 176, 188, 227, 248, 249, 251, 254, 257, 297 H Haunt, 1, 7–9, 19, 29, 48, 62, 151, 153, 156, 208, 258, 284, 285, 289, 303 Haunted, 15, 16, 19, 59, 109, 135, 146, 156, 189, 216, 284, 285 Heteronormative, 5, 72, 136, 197, 211, 237 Hierarchy, 37, 39, 133, 248, 297 History, 1, 5, 21, 25, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50, 51, 65, 84, 88, 90, 91, 95, 106, 131, 134, 135, 141, 150, 165, 167, 185, 193, 212, 213, 216, 221, 222, 227, 237, 254, 264, 280, 297, 300, 303 Homely, 109, 113, 271 Homophobia, 1, 6, 35, 137 Horror, 3, 7, 8, 10, 18, 32, 35, 36, 83, 85, 96, 98, 101–104, 114, 135, 145, 146, 161, 162, 165, 167, 169, 173, 175, 176, 180, 182, 183, 186, 217, 230, 248, 254, 279, 281–283, 290, 302 Hybrid, 10, 226, 227, 266 I Identity, 4, 7, 9–11, 53, 54, 57, 69–71, 149, 152, 153, 162, 166, 167, 169, 172, 173, 231, 233, 241, 267, 271, 281, 298, 303 Imaginary, 3, 6, 11, 32, 41, 194, 209, 264, 307 Immigrant, 288, 302 Imperialism, 5, 248, 263, 266, 275 India, 11, 254, 257, 258 Industrial

314

INDEX

Innocence, 148, 169, 290

L Liberalism, 39 Lore, 135 Loss, 3, 5, 16, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29, 63, 93, 102, 113, 120, 149, 153, 200, 254, 263

M Magic, 107, 117, 122, 138, 188, 189, 235, 239 Make America Great Again (MAGA), 39, 136 Masculinity, 10, 90, 151, 304, 307 Media, 7, 39, 48, 62, 63, 65, 71, 74, 75, 89, 90, 94, 97, 104, 139, 152, 230, 285, 299, 304 Melancholia, 3, 4 Memory, 4, 7, 10, 11, 21, 34, 41, 46, 50, 58, 65, 69, 85, 97, 118, 122, 150, 164–166, 168, 170, 175, 176, 181, 188, 192, 201, 218, 262, 270, 279, 281–284, 288, 289, 291, 292 Mermaid, 10, 226, 227, 231, 233, 234, 236–241 Middle class, 104, 106, 109, 110, 156, 258 Misogyny, 1, 6, 299 Modernism, 102 Monster, 2, 6, 8, 12, 35, 134, 156, 169, 212, 222, 227, 228, 231, 250, 262, 269, 273, 285, 296, 300–302, 307 Monstrous, 3, 6, 37, 161, 175, 211, 228, 235, 250, 257, 271 Moral, 50, 56, 57, 194, 215, 229, 257

Mother, 54–56, 119, 120, 125, 132, 141, 155, 248, 249, 251, 272, 286 Myth, 37, 133, 135, 152

N Nation, 5, 6, 150, 258, 270, 272, 274, 281, 297, 304 Nationalism, 4, 11, 12, 52, 57, 136, 275, 299 Natural, 29, 83, 86, 135, 149, 172, 204, 216, 228, 261 Nature, 3, 7, 28, 38, 45, 54, 64, 74, 86, 88, 91, 108, 113, 123, 126, 129, 133, 142, 147, 155, 156, 170, 176, 185, 187, 191, 193, 197, 199, 201–204, 208, 213, 226, 228, 229, 250, 253, 256, 285, 301 Neoliberalism, 9, 114, 139 Netflix, 8, 34, 145, 146, 229 Nightmare, 9, 20, 21, 29, 105, 120, 124, 135, 151, 208 Nostalgia, 1–4, 6–12, 31–33, 35–37, 39–42, 45, 48–51, 57, 83–85, 89, 90, 97, 98, 102, 103, 118, 126, 128, 131, 132, 134–137, 139, 147, 148, 152, 154, 162, 185, 199, 200, 207, 211, 213, 222, 226, 241, 262–266, 279–281, 288, 289, 291, 292, 298, 305

O Other, the, 112, 180 Otherness, 222, 228, 231, 237, 268, 273

P Paganism, 88–90

INDEX

Patriarchy, 10, 71, 179, 185, 187, 190, 191, 195 Patriotism, 2 Politics, 1, 34, 46, 70, 75, 103, 136, 138, 201, 268, 274, 299, 300 Populism, 1, 46, 136, 201, 296 Posthuman, xiv Postmodern, 8, 10, 33, 45, 49, 52, 59, 63, 139, 179, 186, 187, 229 Psychological, 10, 26, 49, 131, 151, 153, 161–163, 165, 174, 180, 183, 188, 205, 208, 212, 229, 266, 288, 289, 292 Q Queer, 211 R Racism, 1, 11, 42, 71, 105, 137, 194, 226, 287, 292 Reality, 6, 8, 28, 32, 35, 41, 42, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 58, 64, 72, 104, 109, 124, 125, 133, 134, 138, 140, 162, 164, 167, 169, 170, 177, 180, 191, 237, 241, 275, 280, 288, 290, 300, 302, 303, 307 Rebirth, 170, 187, 251 Reception, 9, 83, 145, 156, 186, 284, 291 Reflective, 39, 46, 57, 108, 236 Religion, 18, 54, 254, 256, 287 Remake, 9, 83, 85, 88, 89, 91–94, 96–98, 102, 103, 112, 118, 131, 132, 136, 165 Remembrance, 164, 166, 181, 198, 252 Repetition, 8, 20, 23, 26, 27, 29, 110, 122, 126, 135, 153, 239, 263, 289, 306 Repress, 199, 229

315

Restorative Nostalgia, 39–41, 58, 134, 297–299, 303, 304 Resurrect, 3 Return, 1, 2, 4, 6, 26, 32, 34, 46, 48–51, 55, 109, 111, 118–123, 125, 127, 128, 147, 162, 197, 199–202, 208, 249, 279, 289, 304 Rural, 2, 86, 181, 187, 300 Russia, 11, 47, 48, 58, 264–268, 275 S Sequel, 8, 9, 117–119, 121, 127, 305 Sexism, 42, 226 Sexuality, 93–95, 152, 193, 213, 236 Social media, 4, 7, 8, 61, 65, 66, 70, 285, 298 Soundtrack, 96, 97 Spectral, 6, 27, 28, 134, 138, 139, 214, 218 Spectre, 11, 12, 31, 151, 216, 218 Spiritual, 162, 170, 218, 255–257, 272 Suburban, 103, 105, 106, 110, 111, 113, 114, 146, 152, 156, 172 Symbol, 35, 46, 87, 93, 105, 121, 126, 187, 188, 197, 207, 220, 231, 234, 235, 302 T Technology, 37, 40, 46, 58, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 73–75, 103, 104, 133, 141, 172, 298, 299, 302, 307 Toxic, 1–12, 46, 50–57, 59, 66, 67, 73, 75, 103–106, 109, 112, 114, 123, 132, 136, 137, 142, 153, 162, 163, 165, 170, 171, 175, 176, 180, 195, 225, 226, 230, 232, 240, 241, 258, 262, 264, 275, 279, 280, 291

316

INDEX

Traditional, 1, 5, 37, 50, 63, 73, 96, 107, 136, 139, 152, 162, 165, 171, 204, 231, 237, 289, 298, 305 Transgressive, 107, 212, 213, 215, 249 Transphobia, 226 Trauma, 4, 10, 11, 26, 42, 58, 106, 114, 137, 153, 164, 167, 168, 170, 180, 183, 205, 258, 262, 263, 283, 289 Truth, 5, 6, 12, 25, 39, 64, 124, 142, 165, 170, 177, 191, 221, 223, 225, 252, 288, 290

U Uncanny, 7–9, 28, 69, 113, 117, 119, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 133–135, 162, 211, 236, 248, 290, 291 Underground, 198, 203, 211, 269, 275

Urban, 86, 140, 150, 222, 301 Utopia, 5, 39, 306 V Vampire, 11, 134, 167, 207, 212, 217, 220, 227, 261–265, 268, 269, 271, 272, 275, 302 Violence, 10, 22, 35, 36, 38, 42, 96, 150, 199, 201–203, 206, 214, 218, 225, 274, 296–307 W Whiteness, 11, 39, 228, 297, 304 Witch, 89, 90, 132, 133, 137, 233, 238, 239, 271 Womb, 248, 249 World War II (WWII), 5, 136, 138, 212, 263, 264, 273 X Xenophobia, 136