Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear [1 ed.] 1138498289, 9781138498280

Citation preview

Make America Hate Again

Horror films have traditionally sunk their teeth into straitened times, reflecting, expressing, and validating the spirit of the epoch, and capitalising on the political and cultural climate in which they are made. This book shows how the horror genre has adapted itself to the transformation of contemporary American politics and the mutating role of traditional and new media in the era of Donald Trump’s Presidency of the United States. Exploring horror’s renewed potential for political engagement in a socio-political climate characterised by the angst of civil conflict, the deception of “alternative facts,” and the threat of nuclear or biological conflict and global warming, Make America Hate Again examines the intersection of film, politics, and American culture and society through a bold critical analysis of popular horror (films, television shows, podcasts, and online parodies), such as 10 Cloverfield Lane, American Horror Story, Don’t Breathe, Get Out, Hotel Transylvania 2, Hush, It, It Comes at Night, South Park, The Babadook, The Walking Dead, The Woman, The Witch, and Twin Peaks: The Return. The first major exploration of the horror genre through the lens of the Trump era, it investigates the correlations between recent, culturally meaningful horror texts, and the broader culture within which they have become gravely significant. Offering a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on popular culture as a site of cultural politics, Make America Hate Again will appeal to scholars and students of American studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies. Victoria McCollum is Lecturer in Cinematic Arts at Ulster University, UK. She is the author of Post-9/11 Heartland Horror: Rural Horror Films in an Era of Urban Terrorism and the co-editor of HBO’s Original Voices: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Power, and Alternative Media in Contemporary Turkey: Sustainability, Activism and Resistance.

The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture Series Editor: C. Richard King Washington State University, USA

Dedicated to a renewed engagement with culture, this series fosters critical, contextual analyses and cross-disciplinary examinations of popular culture as a site of cultural politics. It welcomes theoretically grounded and critically engaged accounts of the politics of contemporary popular culture and the popular dimensions of cultural politics. Without being aligned to a specific theoretical or methodological approach, The Cultural Politics of Media and Culture publishes monographs and edited collections that promote dialogues on central subjects, such as representation, identity, power, consumption, citizenship, desire and difference. Offering approachable and insightful analyses that complicate race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability and nation across various sites of production and consumption, including film, television, music, advertising, sport, fashion, food, youth, subcultures and new media, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture welcomes work that explores the importance of text, context and subtext as these relate to the ways in which popular cultures work alongside hegemony. Also available in the series Convergent Wrestling Participatory Culture, Transmedia Storytelling, and Intertextuality in the Squared Circle CarrieLynn Reinhard and Christopher John Olson Make America Hate Again Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear Edited by Victoria McCollum Prestige Television and Prison in the Age of Mass Incarceration A Wall Rise Up Victoria M. Bryan For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/TheCultural-Politics-of-Media-and-Popular-Culture/book-series/ASHSER-1395

Make America Hate Again Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear

Edited by Victoria McCollum

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Victoria McCollum; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Victoria McCollum to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McCollum, Victoria, editor. Title: Make America hate again : Trump-era horror and the politics of fear / edited by Victoria McCollum. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Cultural politics of media and popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007385 | ISBN 9781138498280 (hbk) | ISBN 9781351016513 (ebk) | ISBN 9781351016490 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Horror films—United States—History and criticism. | Horror films—Political aspects—United States. | Popular culture— Political aspects—United States. | Political culture—United States. | Polarization (Social sciences)—Political aspects—United States. | Trump, Donald, 1946—Influence. | United States—Politics and government—2017– Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H6 M26 2019 | DDC 791.43/61640973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007385 ISBN: 978-1-138-49828-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-01651-3 (ebk) Typeset in Garamond by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures Foreword by Kendall Phillips List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction

viii ix xi xiv 1

V I C T O R I A M C C OL LU M

PART 1

“Drain the swamp . . . we all float down here!” The evil clown archetype, Trump’s circus of cruelty, and the freak show of US politics in American horror 1 “Let’s put a smile on that face”: Trump, the psychotic clown, and the history of American violence

17 19

S C O TT P O O L E

2 Shilling Pennywise: chump change in Trump’s (trans)America

32

T H E R E S A L . GEL L ER

PART 2

“A (nasty) woman’s place is in the resistance!” Trump’s war on women, “pussy” grabs back, and queer horror steps out of the shadows 3 Breaking out and fighting back: female resistance in the Trump-era horror film J O S H UA GU L A M

55 57

vi

Contents

4 An end to monstrosity: horror, queer representation, and the Trump kakistocracy

67

M A R S H AL L MOORE

5 Trauma, repression, and The Babadook: sexual identity in the Trump era

81

F R A N P H E ASAN T-KEL LY

PART 3

“We all bleed red!” Of God and monsters, targeted bodies, and metaphorical walls in Trump-era horror 6 Lock her up! Angry men and the captive woman in post-Recession horror

95 97

DAW N KE E TL EY

7 “I told you not to go into that house”: Get Out and horror’s racial politics

109

C H R I S TO P H ER L L OYD

8 Securing the borders: isolation and anxiety in The Witch, It Comes at Night, and Trump’s America

119

B R ANDO N G RAFIU S

PART 4

“You’ve been Trump’d . . . get out (of the White House)!” Animated alternatives and horror-centric parodies and podcasts, reimagined à la Trump 9 Trump’s great American family: racism, sexism, and homophobia in Hotel Transylvania 2

129 131

S I M O N BAC ON

10 South Park: Trump, technology, and the uncanny

141

C H R I S TI AN H ÄN G G I

11

Get Out (of the White House): the Trump administration and YouTube horror parody as social commentary JAM E S W E S T

152

Contents 12 Beware the untruths: podcast audio horror in Post-Truth America

vii 164

R I C H AR D H AN D AN D DAN IEL L E H AN C OC K

PART 5

Now you’re in the sunken place . . . with a damn fine cup of “covfefe”: the dangers of nostalgia and the darkness of future past in the age of Trump

175

13 “There is no return”: Twin Peaks and the horror of pleasure

177

DO NA L D L . A N D ERSON

14 “I don’t understand how this keeps happening . . . over and over again”: Trumpism, uncanny repetition, and Twin Peaks: The Return

195

M A RTI N F R ADLEY AN D J OH N A. RIL EY

Index

211

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 6.1 6.2 10.1 10.2 14.1 14.2

The monster chase in Frankenstein The Losers’ Club goes swimming Towering pile of floating trash in Pennywise’s lair Pollyanna McIntosh as the Woman chained in the cellar John finds Rosie in a cage Poe (also known as “Nightpain”) is summoned by the Goth Kids The seeming answer to America’s tolerance and sensitivity “Gotta light?”: the Woodsman semiotically conflates presidential iconicity with abject poverty Candie, Mandie, and Sandie perform a reified version of femininity

34 46 51 100 105 143 149 198 203

Foreword Kendall Phillips

Like any popular film genre, horror has had its ups and downs. But, unlike some genres that experience long periods of decline and virtual absence from the silver screen, every time the monsters of one era become so hackneyed and familiar as to become laughable, a new variation of monstrosity and horror arises to shock audiences anew. The alien invaders of the 1950s, the slashers of the 1980s, the ghosts of the early 2000s may look different and even be framed within different narrative structures, but they share one crucial element: they are meant to be scary. In the midst of these ebbs and flows of the genre, there have been at least two periods that were filled with such productivity and creativity as to be heralded as golden ages. The first dawned along with the formal recognition of the genre in 1931 with the release of Tod Browning’s Dracula in February and then James Whale’s Frankenstein in November. These two films, along with their monstrous brethren, were the first motion pictures called “horror films” and they set the stage for the genre to this very day. A second golden age occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, there was an onslaught of inventive, transgressive, and brutal horror films that effectively redefined the parameters of the genre. Of course, it is notable that these two periods of remarkable productivity in relation to the horror genre were also periods of deep political and cultural turmoil generated by the Great Depression in the 1930s and the political unrest of the anti-war, Civil Rights, and other social movements in the late 1960s. Indeed, much of the scholarship attending to horror films has underscored this general sense that the genre has a uniquely sensitive relationship to points of cultural tension and conflict. As I write this foreword, we may well be in the midst of the Third Golden Age of Horror. The outstanding chapters contained within this tightly edited volume point to such a conclusion. And, if this third golden age is the result of a major point of cultural turmoil, that turmoil has a name: Trump. Of course, the tensions, anxieties, and conflicts that seem to be arising everywhere around the globe were not all caused by the 45th President of the United States and, in many ways, the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump to the White House is more a symptom of the rising fear and anxiety that has

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Foreword

fuelled and been fuelled by xenophobic, nationalist, racist, misogynistic, antiSemitic, and anti-immigrant (among others) rhetoric in numerous countries. As many of the chapters in this volume, including the insightful introduction by McCollum, suggest, recent horror films and television series have been tapping into these dark emotions for some time and it seems likely that the coming years will see a continuation of the kind of productivity and boldness that have characterised the past few years.

Contributors

Donald L. Anderson teaches courses in writing, American literature, and film. He is currently an adjunct faculty member at Washington State University in Vancouver, USA. His research focusses on horror cinema, nationstate criticism, and biopolitics. His work has been featured in the journals Horror Studies, Rhizomes, Gothic Studies, and Situations. Simon Bacon is an independent scholar based in Poznan, Poland. He has contributed articles to many publications on vampires, monstrosity, science fiction, and media studies and has co-edited books on various subjects including Undead Memory: Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture (2014), Seductive Concepts: Perspectives on Sins, Vices and Virtues (2014), Little Horrors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Anomalous Children and the Construction of Monstrosity (2016), and To Boldly Go: Essays on Gender and Identity in the Star Trek Universe (2017). His monograph, Becoming Vampire: Difference and the Vampire in Popular Culture, came out in 2016. He edited The Gothic: A Reader (2018), and he is writing his second monograph, The Undead Self: Absolute Otherness and the Continually Troubling Identity of Dracula. Martin Fradley teaches at the University of Brighton and the University of Roehampton, UK. He has published widely on issues pertaining to popular Anglo-American cinema, and his work on American horror film has appeared in the anthologies American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010) and Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (2013). Theresa L. Geller is Scholar-in-Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. She was Associate Professor of Film Theory and History at Grinnell College before joining the Beatrice Bain Research Group. Her scholarship includes The X-Files (2016), Feminism’s Indelible Mark: Reframing the Work of Todd Haynes, as well as articles in American Quarterly and The Velvet Light Trap. Brandon Grafius is Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit, USA. Much of his work involves the intersection of religion, politics, and the monstrous. His book, Reading

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Phinehas, Viewing Slashers: Horror Theory and Numbers 25, in 2018 from Fortress Press. He has written on horror and monsters for journals such as Horror Studies, Post Script, and Currents in Biblical Research. Joshua Gulam is Lecturer in Media and Communication at Liverpool Hope University, UK. His research explores the relationship between Hollywood cinema and global politics, with a particular focus on the humanitarianism of contemporary film stars. Published works include chapters in the edited collections Lasting Screen Stars (2016) and The Political Economy of Celebrity Activism (Routledge, 2018), as well as a short article in Celebrity Studies. Danielle Hancock is a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, with several publications on audio horror and podcasting. As well as academic work, Hancock and Richard Hand have co-created audio horror performances. Richard Hand is Head of Film TV and Media Studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK. He is the author of numerous books on diverse aspects of popular horror culture and audio drama. Christian Hänggi received his first PhD from the European Graduate School with a dissertation entitled Hospitality in the Age of Media Representation. He received his second PhD from the University of Basel with a dissertation on music in Thomas Pynchon’s work. He teaches at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkok, Thailand. Dawn Keetley is Professor of English, teaching horror/Gothic literature, film, and television at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. She is the editor of We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and the Fate of the Human (2014), the co-editor (with Angela Tenga) of Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (2016), and (with Matthew Sivils) The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Routledge, 2017). Her Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston came out in 2017 from the University of Massachusetts Press. Christopher Lloyd is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is the author of Corporeal Legacies in the US South: Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture (2018), Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century American South (2015), and numerous other works on contemporary US culture. Victoria McCollum is Lecturer in Cinematic Arts at Ulster University, UK. She is the author of Post-9/11 Heartland Horror: Rural Horror Films in an Era of Urban Terrorism and the co-editor of HBO’s Original Voices: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Power, and Alternative Media in Contemporary Turkey: Sustainability, Activism and Resistance.

Contributors

xiii

Marshall Moore is the author of several works of fiction, including the novels Bitter Orange, The Concrete Sky, the short-story collection The Infernal Republic, and in 2016 A Garden Fed by Lightning. With Xu Xi, he co-edited the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong. His PhD focussed on ghost stories in both the Chinese and the Western traditions, as well as on the mechanics of horror fiction and the nature and limitations of genre. Moore is now an instructor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Fran Pheasant-Kelly is MA Film Studies Course Leader and Reader in Screen Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Her research spans fantasy, science fiction, terrorism, space, science, and abjection in film and television. She is the author of numerous publications including two monographs, Abject Spaces in American Cinema: Institutions, Identity and Psychoanalysis in Film (IB Tauris, 2013) and Fantasy Film Post 9/11 (2013), and the co-editor of Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen Door (Routledge, 2015). She is currently working on a third monograph entitled The Bodily Turn in Film and Television. Kendall Phillips is Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. He focuses on theories of democratic culture, the rhetoric of film, and aspects of public remembrance. He has published several books including: A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema (2018), Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter and the Modern Horror Film (2012), Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (2005), Framing Public Memory, and Controversial Cinema (2007), The Films that Outraged America (2008), and his essays have appeared in such journals as Communication Monographs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Philosophy & Rhetoric. Scott Poole is Professor of History at the College of Charleston, USA. He published the John Cawelti Award–winning Monsters in America in 2011 (a second edition appearing in 2018). In 2014 and 2016, respectively, he published cultural biographies of “Vampira” and H.P. Lovecraft, the latter a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. John A. Riley holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He has published several journal articles on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and a book chapter on contemporary Georgian documentary. An article about Peter Strickland’s use of horror tropes is awaiting publication. He is Assistant Professor of English at Woosong University, South Korea. James West was a Fulbright scholar and Visiting Professor at Elon University in North Carolina, USA, in 2017–2018 before beginning a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Northumbria University, UK. West received his PhD in American History from the University of Manchester in 2015. For publications and other information, go to www.ejameswest.com.

Acknowledgements

For those who can’t even. For my Partner, who somehow managed to be nothing but supportive of a book about a brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, and who reminds me each and every morning that Piers Morgan looks like the pigeon lady from Home Alone. For my Folks, who continue to provide me with an endless supply of love, reassurance, and Sunday roasts. To my loyal comrades in the trenches at Ulster University’s School of Arts and Humanities, thank you for being you and for letting me be me. Special thanks go to Dr Rob Porter and Dr Brian Bridges. Both Research Directors lead with empathy, support, and honesty and my early career has been all the smoother for it. I’d also like to thank my Head of School, Dr Tom Maguire, for his advice and enthusiasm, and for suggesting that I include “Cat” in the title of this book (sure to make it an Amazon best-seller [stay tuned for the sequel: Fire and Furry: Is Your Cat Smarter Than Trump?]). I’m also deeply grateful to my former PhD supervisor, Dr Niamh Thornton, for remaining present throughout my early career. Niamh was the first to read the introduction of this book and offered much encouragement, guidance, and insight. Thank you to my students, who, whether they know it or not, helped me work out some of the themes herein (your cheques are in the post). I am indebted to the contributors – Scott, Theresa, Joshua, Marshall, Fran, Dawn, Christopher, Brandon, Simon, Christian, James, Richard, Danielle, Donald, Martin, and John – for turning in such marvellous chapters. A collection like this results only from the contributions of many talented people. Lastly, my sincere thanks go to those at Routledge who supported this book from the get-go.

Introduction Victoria McCollum

On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States and, according to The New York Times, the least popular president-elect in modern history. Trump’s controversial inauguration, or “inaugu-rage” as it is more commonly referred to (due the divisive and volatile nature of the event), marked the “Don of a New Day” for the United States (New York Post, 2017), an era characterised by increasingly hard-line policies and rhetoric which favour nationalism, America firstism,1 and xenophobia. So dramatic, hotly contested, and consequential was this victory that British newspaper The Independent (2017) ominously stated “So Help Us God,” as Trump, a billionaire reality television star, or as cultural studies scholar Kellner (2016) puts it, “a hypercapitalist pig [obscenely branded] into a political candidate,” evoked a dark vision of patriotism and protectionism. Trump’s authoritarian populism is an American nightmare and appears to represent a clear and present danger to democracy, US global peace, and stability. Unsurprisingly then, the current social climate for many in the US and beyond is depressed, angered, paranoid, and hopeless. Six months prior to Trump’s election, online intellectual editorial site Public Books published a faux, yet frighteningly pertinent, university syllabus offering an introduction to the currents of American culture that led to the rise of Trump. “Trump Syllabus 2.0”2 (Connolly and Blain 2016) explores the deep historical and political roots that help to explain Trump’s unprecedented rise during the 2016 presidential campaign. The following keywords, drawn from the titles of the recommended reading list, strongly suggest that Trump engaged the disturbing underside of American politics to mobilise his supporters: American Authoritarianism; Blood; Disability; Dog Whistle; Empire; Immigrants; Ku Klux Klan; Manliness; Mass Incarceration; Misogyny; Nostalgia; Patriarchy; Populist; Power; Protest; Racism; Reactionary Politics; Sexuality; Shame; Silent Majority; Slavery; Terrorism; Torture; Tycoon; Violence; White Rage; and White Supremacy. Whilst one would need a sabbatical to read all of the readings and resources assembled by leading American historians in the syllabus,3 a brief glimpse at the content reveals a hideous lineage of sexism, racism, nativism, homophobia, classism, ableism, and a

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horde of other stratifications that has contributed to Trump’s recent personal and political gain. Today, the not-so-faint stench of slavery, anti-Semitism, genocide, fascism, and neo-Nazism is rapidly surfacing across the Western world, in parallel with the unprecedented flow of migrants fleeing either conflict zones, poverty, or a severe lack of opportunity. In tandem, economic nationalism, which is concerned more with the nation than it is with the economy (see: America First “Trumponomics”) is in full swing, alongside a resurgence of far-right movements across Europe and the United States. Indeed, it would seem that certain socio-economic conditions (particularly crisis and deprivation)4 provide fertile soil for the extreme right to rise and thrive. For Trump’s cultural capital, thanks in part to his populist prose (in which he claims to represent the people against the political establishment),5 appeared to mature and multiply amongst small-town spaces and places of economic struggle in which the now president achieved his largest margins. Of course, the subsequent surge in violent hate crimes in the US6 following Trump’s rise to power is indicative of the divisive rhetoric (permeated with racism, cruelty, bigotry, and abuse) mobilised during his campaign. However much we gape at the brutal culture of chaos (and resistance) that we currently find ourselves living in: an age of rage in which it has become highly unsurprising to hear the US president refer to various territories (such as Haiti and countries in Africa) as “shithole countries,” all while a hail of bullets rains down on a classroom of innocent children weekly in the US (by Valentine’s Day 2018, there have been eight shootings), democracy and multiculturalism in America, not to mention education, are enduring death by a thousand cuts. The inextricable link between wealth, violence, power, and politics that continues to define Trump’s presidency provides the first impetus for this book, which is less concerned with Trump the “man” than with “Trumpism,” and the dangerous rhetoric being used to cultivate a politics of fear and to make America hate again.7 Before journeying into the multifaceted abyss that is the contemporary horror genre, it should be noted that the call for papers employed in the interest of creating this edited collection was met with a myriad of responses within the academic community. I received over one hundred chapter proposals in just four weeks, thanks to the leverage of supportive scholars on social media, and a plethora of bewildering emails: some of which can be merely defined as ideological rants (couched in isolationist, protectionist, and on one occasion, anti-Muslim, rhetoric), others as unsolicited “sexts” (disappointedly, from more senior [male] academics). The point here is that this book has already been met with baffling response amongst my own academic community: a complex blend of aggression, encouragement, hope, hostility, frustration, praise, and disdain. In fact, one particularly fragile (American) scholar retweeted the call for papers with the words: “regressive left dimwit,” which, on reflection, seems remarkably polite considering the obscene and savage antagonism that

Introduction

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my colleagues (particularly early career females) encounter on Twitter on a daily basis. Such a response to the call for papers serves as a reflection of the interests that exist at the hinterlands of this book, the uniting and dividing, power and provincialism of Trump, who appears to crystallise all the archetypal virtues of small-town America (God, guns, guts, and glory), while also fulfilling metropolitan America’s cruellest stereotypes about the defects of those same places. The Trump era is essentially a tale of two paths: on the one hand, Trump occupies the position of yet another elite – the billionaire class, a poster boy for excessive conspicuous consumption – yet on the other, Trump serves, according to some, as an almost messianic figure to those suffering from economic deprivation, humiliation, and political alienation. That said, my use of the term “Trump era,” in the context of this book, is not intended to indicate praise to the now president’s accomplishments in office, but instead to denote a brief interval, an instant from which a period of time or sequence of events has been reckoned. Furthermore, it is not my intention to minimise or trivialise the presidency of Donald J. Trump, nor the profound challenges that the United States continues to confront in a globalised world of increasingly complex relations. This book does not suggest that Trump-era horror is an unproblematic category of popular culture, nor does it claim that a certain homogeneous narrative drives it. Instead, this collection of essays demonstrates that the horror genre is responding more rapidly, and at times a good deal more effectively than competing art forms, to the events, anxieties, discourses, dogmas, and socio-political conflicts of the Trump years. As Phillips (2005, p. 10) advocates, horror holds a twisted mirror to both cultural and individual fears, therefore, “we should gain some insight into the dynamic processes by which we project our collective fears onto the screen and by which these fears are projected back to us.” Before turning our gaze to the intersection of popular culture, politics, and American culture and society – to the bold critical analysis of popular horror films, television, and horror-centric internet phenomena produced in the Trump era, let us lean into the God, guns, and glory of Trump TV. God bless American television: popular culture and the president Popular culture, whilst meaning different things to different people, depending on who is defining it and the context of use, is inherently political as this particular category of texts and practices includes some forms of culture and essentially marginalises others. It is well known that contemporary popular culture, such as Ryan Coogler’s ground-breaking celebration of black culture, the American superhero film Black Panther (2018), often brushes dominant societal ideals, even histories, against the grain. Popular culture at its best disrupts rigid societal ideals and hierarchical structures, whilst at times reflecting

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them, by subtly challenging audiences to confront hegemony and by opening up broader social dialogue on critical issues, such as race, class, gender, sex, and power. Indeed, it is difficult to measure the importance of a film like Black Panther, which features a predominantly black cast (of tenacious superheroes), particularly amidst the fraught climate of Trump’s America – where a thriving black future seems all the more difficult to attain. The film’s emphasis on imagination, creation, and liberation produces a representation emblematic of a past long denied and a future that feels truly present, and in doing so Black Panther “opens up its world, and yours, beautifully” (Dargis 2018). Such subversive texts serve as fantasies (or nightmares [in the case of the horror genre]) informed by our ugly reality. They possess power, the kind of influence that could impact political agendas, frame audience consciousness, and produce profound shifts in values, practices, ideals, and beliefs. On the other hand, some popular culture works to reinforce hegemony (sports media serves as an especially crucial arena [consider the hegemonic masculinity unleashed in contemporary MMA coverage]) and is notoriously associated with stimulating a kind of collective hypnosis or encouraging prevailing cultural “common sense.” Traditional perceptions attached to popular culture (derived from the interwar Frankfurt School of critical social theory) consider it a precarious product, puppeteered by the “elite,” a highly commodified propaganda system carefully assembled to render its audience compliant and content, no matter how abysmal their economic circumstances.8 Whilst such critical theory may indicate a snobbish reaction to the crassest of popular culture in the past, the early insight of prominent theorists, such as Adorno and Horkheimer (1944), more than a half-century ago, does help to explain the Trump phenomenon today. After all, media-saturated fast-capitalism and media-centric politics constitute the tools of Trump, who, in turn, serves as a crass product of the mass media age – a supply-driven cultural economy in which entertainment, celebrity, and politics have merged. The president’s populist, hard-hitting, attackoriented, unpleasant, proletarian style on social media, for example, positions Trump as an omnipotent authoritarian figure: a big little man, atop the greasy pole, but at the same time a regular Joe. For Trump connects with the masses not through facts, knowledge, and rationale, but through the medium of beliefs and feelings, typically on online platforms conducive to egocentric and ideological political strategies. As Jeffries (2017) laments, echoing latent warnings that American popular culture blurs the distinction between truth and fiction, between the commercial and the political, “the way he [Trump] speaks and lies and bombards voters – this is a way of controlling people, especially people who don’t have a sense of history.” Similarly, Ross (2016) strives to provide an explanation as to why “American authoritarianism” seems on the verge of being realised, decades after critical theorists called it, concluding with just three words, “Traffic trumps ethics.” Trump’s orchestration of media spectacle and a surprisingly compliant

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mainstream media was central to his success (Kellner 2016, p. 10). As Schneider (2017) notes both on the rise of the orange-haired demi-god and a celebrity culture that has morphed into politics, “when a tacky reality star runs the country, politics and pop culture become linked. It’s been a long time coming in America.” Probing further, Fuchs (2017) summarises well Trump’s mobilisation of popular culture, such as Twitter, into a profitable industry (or show) of several million audience members: Trump is not just a president, candidate and capitalist. Trump is a brand and a media spectacle that celebrates itself and thereby accumulates capital, power and followers. Trump is also an ideology – Trumpology. Trumpology is Trump-style ideology. . . . As US President, Trump has become the chief-populist-Twitterer, the master of 140-character-politics. The acceleration, compression, superficiality, tabloidisation and onedimensionality of politics and ideology have found a new point of culmination in Trump’s Twitterverse. It is perhaps unsurprising then that this commander of communication would go to great lengths to curtail freedom of the press (more so than any other president in history)9 and to threaten specific publications that dared to criticise him. It is, therefore, important to take a brief glimpse at the manufacturing of distraction in the age of Trump through specific forms of particularly regressive American popular culture.10 Coinciding with the horror genre’s acceleration in the Trump era (which we will explore in the following section), major television networks in the United States, since Trump took office, have leaned toward conservatism. Venable (2017) takes stock of the long-established, yet reinvigorated content of Trump-era TV, There’s been a swift slant towards conservatism at the big networks. . . . We’re talking apple-pie, drive-in theater, yellow-ribbons-round the tree conservatism manifested in two genres: shows about the military and shows about religion. . . . Love of country and love of God are everywhere mainstream primetime, and even the current political chaos won’t change this direction. Indeed, the glory, grit, and guts of stories that encompass persuasive American ideologies (faith, family, and love of the nation) make for compelling viewing no matter your political leaning, but, as Venable suggests, it does seem that executives were questionably quick to pivot toward the archetypal values, evangelical tone, and war theology of quintessential Republicanism and “the people” (who elected Trump). Recent American military TV dramas, such as Seal Team (CBS); Valor (The CW); and The Brave (NBC), not to mention contemporary staunch religious entertainment such as Kevin (Probably) Saves the World (ABC) and The Year of Living Biblically (CBS), no longer

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relegated to documentaries and Sunday morning slots, serve to support Venable’s claims that red (state) is the new black.11 Nevertheless, as McCollum (2016) notes on the quick turnaround of similar premeditated and deeply conservative narratives (in film and TV) throughout the contentious Bush years (especially during the “War on Terror”), horror repeatedly emerges as a counter-narrative in response to such turbulent political climates and thus reopens and reinvigorates an active, contested public sphere. The deadly serious business of horror: coding, complexity, and (in)coherence The horror genre has traditionally sunk its teeth into straitened times, spitting out the bloody pieces as politically conscious allegories. Thus, this is why many horror texts inherently demand political categorisation as the genre tends to embody our collective nightmares – the terror of a culture expressed in its cinema. The horror genre’s capacity for allowing audiences to become involved with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a genuinely serious manner is, of course, old news. Vietnam-era horror, and to some extent post-9/11 horror, for example, have been unpacked to death by academics, cinephiles, and critics eager to analyse their latent, and sometimes blatant, implications. Much contemporary horror is plugged into its social and historical context in fairly compelling, complicated, and persuasive ways. There is no need to recapitulate the argument for, or against, the horror film’s intrinsic progressiveness: this has been shrewdly accomplished by Wood (1984) and by many others.12 In an LA Times article, “Has Horror Become the Movie Genre of the Trump Era?,” Chang (2017) refers to horror’s reinvigorated position as a meaning machine genre, “horror stories are having a moment . . . horror might, in fact, turn out to be the signature genre of the present moment.” Indeed, much of the popular horror discussed within this book engages with the political, capturing, and in turn critiquing, the grim actualities of the Trump era. The contributors, therefore, apply a strong degree of intellectual, hermeneutical, and interpretive work here, unpacking the visual, sonic, narrative, and thematic elements that allow us to construe meaning above and beyond the literal, which the audience, although relatively autonomous, might not have been able to decode on initial viewing. However, it goes without saying that horror films are not political manifestos, but rather, cultural commodities designed to make a killing at the box office. The authors here all too aware of the profound scepticism with which discerning “it’s only a movie” scholarship views the scary side of social commentary. When certain texts (especially horror films) are read as “about” contemporary political and cultural contexts, they are often met, and at times rightly so,13 with a stern scholarly dress-down. Indeed, it is all too simple (and horror too complicated) to simply cherry-pick a specific context and to

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download it onto the text, arriving at, or forcing into place, some unequivocal message. Many of the works examined here remain textually open, meaning that a variety of contextual, cultural anxieties can be cued. With this in mind, this book aims to provide a productive, rather than reductive, account of the horror genre in the Trump era, one which fixes the meaning of elements within the texts in a manner that ratifies, rather than denies, the complexities and ambiguities involved in the textual process. As Maler (2017) notes on the very clear possibilities of the present genre in relation to the political moment, “horror has a new flavor in the Trump-era.” In fact, the most horrifying element of popular horror today may well be the similarly fearful situations and irrational echoes of the texts that we perceive in the conversations around us – on TV, radio, podcasts, and at home. Take, for example, the new influx of natural horror (creature features), in the last two years, in which terror is derived from natural forces. Whilst beyond the scope of this particular collection, the scary shark scenario in Johannes Roberts’s 47 Meters Down (2017) and Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows (2016), as well the films’ relative temporal proximity, suggest a bewildered and horrified reaction to Trump’s US-Mexico border strategy. In both recent films, a carnivorous Great White shark cruelly mans an imagined border whilst threatening to devour new visitors, emphasising the abstract constructions of the human and non-human, of “us” and “them,” of borders and bloodshed, providing multiple vantage points, it could be argued, for audiences to consider both weaponised boundaries and the demonisation of the Other.14 The events, anxieties, discourses, dogmas, and socio-political conflicts of the thus-far short Trump era have already begun to seep into popular horror: context infecting text, moments of metaphorical contagion producing allegories that transform real anxieties into more or less palatable forms. The startlingly explicit and premeditated pointed-commentary of American Horror Story: Cult (FX, 2017) comes to mind, which revolves around the severe unravelling of a liberal American driven to utter despair (by a marauding gang of murderous clowns) following Trump’s victory (seriously). The season seeks, however ham-fistedly, to interrogate deeper cultural and political anxieties, but it is also careful to satisfy its core audience by shaking up and spraying like a bloody seltzer all over its spectators. Whilst this particular text is openly “about” the Trump era (it is as subtle as an amplified death rattle), the popular horror explored within this book tends to circle thematically around contemporary political ills, without quite being “about” them. American Horror Story: Cult, despite being hampered by broad political generalisations, could be read as a dull blade slashing wildly at Trump’s triumph, the horror story from which many cannot wake. On the other hand, and from a more nuanced appreciation of the multiple meanings and inconsistencies of the text, the series might be read as standing for two seemingly opposed terms simultaneously: as a thinly veiled (and compulsively watchable) reflection of an national nightmare, in which infantile and strange

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villains (evocative of Trump) clown around with rituals of aggression, whilst at the same time a cruel satire of anxious liberals (portrayed as privileged, self-dramatising, and pretentious) hastening their own demise through fear and paranoia. What remains most interesting about the recent horror series is its seeming attempt to serve as a double-edged sword. The series appears to immobilise the recent past into an allegorical attack on the Trump regime, at the same time as it animates the present to satire those opposed to the very same thing, thus rendering all political sides as baffling caricatures. American Horror Story: Cult is a fascinating and timely socio-political metaphor desperately in search of a much, much better series. Horror is a complicated business. Therein lies its appeal. As Hills (2012, p. 109) sensibly remarks on the semiotic diversity of textual codes and the more general ambiguity of contextual meanings, “the monstrous alien invader can stand for two [or more] seemingly opposed terms simultaneously.” For Wood (1984, p. 134), horror, it might be said, “[is] progressive precisely to the degree that [it] refuse[s] to be satisfied with [the] simple . . . , to the degree that, whether explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously, they modify, question, challenge, and seek to invert it.” The moment of unprecedented incoherence that we currently find ourselves living in, and the subsequent complexity of the horror explored here, marks the second impetus for this book, which remains cognisant of the multiple meanings and at times twinned (con)textual instability of the texts, as highlighted above. As Wood cautions, on the convoluted tenants of contemporary filmmaking, So many things feed into it [making text] which are beyond the artist’s conscious control – not only his [sic] personal unconscious . . . but the cultural assumptions of his [sic, indeed] society. Those cultural assumptions themselves have a long history (from the immediate social-political realities back through . . . history . . .) and will themselves contain, with difficulty, accumulated strains, tensions, and contradictions. In other words, each of the texts analysed here will say more than can be known, and more than can be articulated, by any one author at any one time. Road map to the chapters Monster clowns, those malicious misfits of the midway who terrorise, haunt, and threaten us, have long been a cultural icon. From the moment Stephen King’s Pennywise (a dancing clown with razor-sharp teeth) crawled out of the drain and into the cultural landscape, it has terrified audiences. In Part 1, the authors interpret the subversion of the traditional comic character as crucial to our understanding of the chaotic rise of Trump and as a chilling embodiment of distinct fears and anxieties at an uncertain moment in American history.

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In Chapter 1, Poole examines cinematic killer clowns over several decades of a violent, and fearful, American landscape positioning the texts as crucial to our understanding of the chaotic rise of the Trump regime. For Poole, the figure of the homicidal clown “dangerous, lethal, and unpredictable has become, since the 1980s, the psychotic circus atmosphere that embodies the things so inarguably true about the contradictions, the insanity, of American violence.” Similarly, delving deep into the sewers of the cultural moment in Chapter 2, Gellar strips bare American supernatural horror film It (2017), reading the mystifying fears of the killer clown film as viciously encoded as femiphobia and transphobia and thus emblematic of the Trump era. In fact, for Gellar, It represents the first “truly neoliberal horror film,” reflecting a set of norms endemic to neoliberalism’s demands and political transformations. Popular horror often stands accused of misogyny, misandry, and misanthropy. Brushing associations of formulaic simplicity, misogyny, and gratuitous violence (that preclude any significant aesthetic or political ambition) against the grain, in Part 2 , authors examine the representation of women in contemporary horror as an ultimate and undeniable indictment of a masculine culture and the beneficiaries of its tenets. In Chapter 3, Gulam queries the role that the horror genre has to play in representing and mobilising female-led resistance to the anti-woman agenda of Trump, offering insight into why female characters are still being enslaved, raped, and mutilated in horror and, indeed, how we might read their screams, fall, and rise, as expressions of resistance in the age of Trump. For Gulam, at a time when a sexist bigot presides over the White House, orchestrating a series of attacks on women’s rights, there has never been a greater need for progressive horror cinema – for popular stories of empowered women that might inspire audiences (both female and male) to take a stand against Trump’s reactionary politics. Lastly, queer narratives of repression and survival in recent horror are interpreted as allegories of broader socio-political anxieties, and as a ritual of cultural problem solving. In Chapter 4, Moore outlines how and why queer representation has taken a turn away from capital punishment for existence and toward narratives of survival and resilience in the years leading up to Trump. Exploring numerous examples of LGBT characters having the strength, the stamina, and the adaptability to fend for themselves, Moore argues that “representation in horror matters because character deaths tell us about who is seen to matter in society,” and contends that the current trend of resilience is unlikely to change. Delving deep into the intricacies of Jennifer Kent’s Australian supernatural horror film The Babadook (2014), in Chapter 5, Pheasant-Kelly connects the premise and motifs of the film to the anti-LGBT politics fermented by Trump. For Pheasant-Kelly, “the psychological aspects of repression” represented in The Babadook can be

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equated with “the repression of sexual identity emergent in the politics of Donald Trump.” Whiteness, in the horror genre, has been synonymous with death, and the bringing about of it, for some time. Although, narratives of white male anger have proliferated in recent decades. In Part 3, the authors explore the multiple conflicted political valences with which the white man as monster is freighted; the always-present structures of racism that sustain white spaces in recent horror; and the genre’s increased focus on external threat. In Chapter 6, Keetley describes the trend of the white male as antagonist of horror (locating it within the horror tradition), whilst illuminating a reiterated scenario, one that galvanises the horror and dread of this subset of films: a woman is discovered chained or caged in a cellar or basement. Demonstrating how this horror trope intersects with one of the clarion calls of Trump’s 2015–2016 presidential campaign, the chant “Lock her up!,” Keetley illuminates how The Woman (2011), Don’t Breathe (2016), and The Neighbour (2016) elucidate the complicated ways in which men’s felt loss of power and desire to redress and avenge a sense of powerlessness, following the Great Recession of 2008, gets enacted in this subset of films. However, as Keetley cautions, “It is worth pointing out, though, that none of the women in 2010s horror stay locked up.” Furthermore, in Chapter 7, Lloyd explores the pervasive and insidious bigotry of “liberal” white Americans in Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning, race-savvy satire Get Out. Explaining how this frightening and fearless horror film skewers and critiques race-relations in the US today, by “foreground[ing] the dominant white spaces through which black Americans move,” Lloyd offers insight into how, and why, the oldest of American horrors are being dramatised in new and significant ways. In Chapter 8, Grafius utilises historical and sociological research on how societies enforce external boundaries as a lens through which to view recent horror films It Comes at Night (2017) and The Witch (2015), arguing that strong external boundaries are frequently a mask for anxiety concerning the society’s weak internal cohesion. Grafius demonstrates how both films offer a nuanced and disturbing look “at the costs of allowing anxiety to determine a group’s course of action, and the impossibility of sufficiently protecting against threats from the outside.” Such powerful socio-political undertones lay bare the disturbing underside of recent American politics. Some of the most powerful images in the horror genre today are actually being created outside of the live-action horror film. In Part 4, authors examine the horror genre’s socio-political underpinnings, aesthetic range, and critical promise, through the lens of children’s animated film, adult animated TV series, internet parodies, and podcasts. Exploring alternative texts largely absent from horror scholarship, discussions in this section range from the racist, sexist, and homophobic undertones found in recent children’s horror to the fearless lampooning of such discriminatory practices on animated TV to the incisive social commentaries of Trump-themed web parodies and the power of the horror podcast in post-truth America.

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In Chapter 9, Bacon analyses how Hotel Transylvania 2 utilises much of the horror genre’s original signification of monster (ethnicity, misogyny, homophobia, and so on), but in a way that simultaneously both denies and reinforces it through the vehicle of the great, all-inclusive, American family. As Bacon notes, “there is much in the first Hotel Transylvania film that extols the value of populist support and a rather authoritarian view of family values that are characteristic of what might be described as the Trump era.” Turning to another animated text, aimed at not children but adults, in Chapter 10 Hänggi explores the absence of jollity and the addition of darker undercurrents (elements of the uncanny; the monstrous; the notquite-human; and the technological sublime) in South Park (1997+) leading up to Trump’s election. For Hänggi, a number of idiosyncratic Trump-era episodes “stage technology gone haywire as a threat to humankind, not in a way that science fiction might treat it – as a spatially or temporally distanced reality – but instead firmly rooted in the here and now.” Sticking with satire, in Chapter 11, West examines the impact of online parody horror trailer Get Out (of the White House), which features the now president (and his family) as the antagonist, reading it as an incisive social commentary as well as an effective critique of Trump’s rise to power. For West contends that through the production of parody horror trailers, “liberal YouTube channels and users were[/are] able to voice their opposition to Trump’s presidency, and, in doing so, contribute to a rich history of political horror and horror parody.” In keeping with the topic of horror-centric web phenomena in the Trump era, in Chapter 12, Hand and Hancock analyse how popular horror podcasts, such as The Truth (2012–2016) and Welcome to Night Vale (2012+), “have exploited audio’s curious liminality as both deeply intimate and uncertain.” This chapter includes insightful case studies of two highly successful American podcasts, first exploring the extrapolated horrors and alternative histories of dramatic anthology series The Truth; and then the dark comedy, paranoia, and distorted neo-Gothic Americana of serialised “community radio show” Welcome to Night Vale. The horror genre and nostalgia are not unfamiliar bedfellows. The horror film’s formulaic and familiar nature frequently serves as comfort food to its audience, who engage with highly stylised representations of the (horrific past) from the safety of the present. In Part 5, authors unpack the desire (and dirt) of nostalgia in the age of Trump, conjured by his harmful ideology to “make America great again,” arguing that Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) represents the ever-present possibility of things falling apart, whilst radically condemning sentimentality for the precarious past. In Chapter 13, Anderson examines how Twin Peaks: The Return radically condemns sentimentality through relegating key characters to the side and severely limiting the role of the most beloved character, Special Agent Dale Cooper. According to Anderson, by frustrating viewer pleasure, the creators foreground the ways pleasure is manufactured, thus providing “an antidote to the very narrative constructed by Trump,” who incessantly promotes a

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sentimentalised past in the interest of lulling the American public into complacency. Furthermore, arguing that Lynch’s revived mystery drama is profoundly an unsettling neo-horror text that is deeply “Trumpian” on many levels, in Chapter 14, Fradley and Riley suggest that the series’ Gothic abstractions deliberately resist any comfortingly nostalgic escape from the sociopolitical realities of the American present. For Fradley and Riley, “The Return is thus entirely symptomatic of its age: an often-harrowing meditation on the fractious relationship between a mis-remembered past, a nightmarish present and a seemingly impossible future.” The Trump phenomenon serves as a teachable moment that enables us to make sense of the recent transformation of US politics and the mutating role of traditional and new media. The authors of the chapters help us understand how popular horror continues to reflect, express, and validate the spirit of our epoch, capitalising on the political and cultural climate in which the genre is made. Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear represents the first major exploration of the horror genre through the lens of the Trump era and the subsequent transformation of American and global society. Notes 1 Trump’s use of political slogan “America First,” which was linked to anti-Semitism during World War II, brings to mind the gratuitous killing of UK Labour MP and refugee advocate Jo Cox. Days before Britain voted in the European Union referendum, Cox was brutally murdered by Thomas Mair, whilst he allegedly shouted, “Britain first, this is for Britain, Britain will always come first!” 2 The name of the syllabus, which includes the digits “2.0,” of course, denotes a superior version of an original concept (“Trump 101”) which was published by The Chronicle of Higher Education (2016) just weeks before, but suffered from several egregious omissions, including its failures to include scholarship from academics of colour and to address Trump’s implementation of racism, sexism, misogyny, and xenophobia. 3 Connolly and Blain took inspiration from the recent academic trend (loosely termed “#syllabus”) of curating reading lists to respond to significant cultural phenomena or current events (Pearce 2016). Other key examples include #fergusonsyllabus, #charlestonsyllabus, #blacklivesmattersyllabus, and #standingrocksyllabus. 4 J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (2016), about growing up poverty-stricken in Appalachia (now branded “Trump Country” [a narrative that flattens the region’s diversity]) does not mention Trump but is hailed as a must-read prism into the alienation felt by America’s white working class and the rise of the now president. 5 Power elites of a right-wing political outlook do frequently don the disguise of anti-elitism and conservatism in order to appeal to the inhabitants of struggling rural regions, often convincing “blue-collar” workers to vote against their own economic and political interests (Frank 2004). 6 Compelling evidence had been used to link the influence of Trump’s election and the increase of US hate crimes. This hypothesis is known as the “Trump Effect” (Rushin and Edwards, 2018). 7 “Make America Great Again” is a campaign slogan first used in American politics by President Ronald Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan stirred a sense of patriotism when employing the slogan both to springboard his campaign and as an indication of his aim to tackle the nation’s economic distress. Whilst the slogan was later

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adopted by President Bill Clinton in his 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton later criticised Trump’s mobilisation of the phrase during the 2016 election, deeming it a racist dog whistle. Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi and current equality advocate, claims that the slogan plays to the far-right’s efforts to make its message more appealing by toning down the rhetoric. As Picciolini (2017) states rhetorically, “Well, to them, that means make America white again.” Having fled European fascism, Frankfurt theorists, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, had experienced first-hand the many ways in which the Nazis employed the tools of mass culture to encourage passivity toward fascist culture and society. While in exile in the United States, theorists came to believe that American popular culture was also dangerously ideological and merely worked to promote the interests of US capitalism. In addition to Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the “culture industry,” however, Adorno developed an “aesthetic theory” that suggested certain forms of modernist art could provide a redemptive glimpse of a world beyond the instrumental rationality of consumer capitalism (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944). President George W. Bush (2001–2009), bolstered by the mainstream media, also co-opted and cranked out prefabricated narratives in the hope of distilling and purifying the experiences of the American public into a more “appropriate” global impression after 9/11 and during the “War on Terror” (McCollum 2016, p. 51, 48–49). The specific content and cinematic techniques of some mainstream American news media does mirror some of the most powerful propaganda films of Nazi Germany. See Kellner’s (2016 p. 45) comparison of Trump’s mega-rally in Alabama (2015) and Leni Riefenstahl’s German propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). The 2018 revival of popular 1990s sitcom Roseanne, which centres on the everyday life of an American working-class family, serves as an especially pertinent example. Roseanne (played by Roseanne Barr) is now a fictional Trump supporter, and a hectoring bully, who relentlessly argues politics with her pussy-hat-wearing sister. The pilot, which faced a dearth of criticism for courting controversy and right-wing conservatism, earned Barr a personal phone call from a thrilled President Trump, who congratulated her on the high ratings (approx. 18 million viewers). Two months after the premiere, Roseanne was cancelled when Barr likened former Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett to Planet of the Apes (1968), in an abhorrent tweet which the network deemed inconsistent with its values. For Wood, the horror genre tends to engage with political and ideological issues in one of two ways: it is either progressive or reactionary. “Progressive horror,” for Wood, has the potential to subvert bourgeois patriarchal norms (such as those associated with gender, sex, and the family unit). In this category of horror, monsters (or meaning machines) tend to exhibit a degree of sympathy, which in turn leads to some form of critiques of the social repression and/or oppression of the monster (which might [symbolically] stand in, for example, for ethnic groups, female sexuality, homosexuality, and so on). The point here is that normality is called into question by “progressive” representations. On the other hand, “reactionary horror,” for Wood, tends to view (and dehumanise) the monster from a distance, presenting it as utterly evil and/or downright non-human and, therefore, endorses, as opposed to resisting, social norms. That said, horror, and the monster at the heart of it, is often coded in multiple ways and so academics, cinephiles, and critics should resist simple interpretations of any kind of univocal “message.” Many critics and scholars refuse to bend the knee to the zeitgeist and it has to be said that their film criticism is often all the better for it. American journalist Nick Pinkerton is one such critic – and my thanks to Martin Fradley for bringing this to my attention – whose film criticism (frequently published in Sight & Sound) is symptomatic of his feeling dissatisfied, dispirited, even a little depressed, with contemporary horror cinema. For Pinkerton perceives recent horror to be perversely occupied with glib, trendy, and not so much plotted as delivered political metaphors at the expense of compelling genre filmmaking (of which he is a staunch advocate). On the recent The First Purge (2018), the fourth instalment

14 Victoria McCollum in an American dystopian action horror franchise, Pinkerton (2018) states, in an enjoyably caustic review, “The First Purge has things to say about contemporary America, but who doesn’t? And who cares, if it only has another pathetic yowl to add to the din?” Pinkerton has a point: the film’s socio-political metaphor is heavy-handed to the point of being counterproductive. There is certainly merit to the awareness-raising properties of horror films such as The First Purge, which other critics have deemed a notable blaxploitation film of the Trump era and the best instalment of the franchise to date. Yet the frenzied socio-political ramblings of some contemporary horror do feel largely devoid of any sort of useful specificity and therefore lack the tangible teeth needed to radically challenge the status quo and to compete when inevitably compared with the distinguished work of modern horror’s founding fathers (Romero, Hooper, and Craven). Indeed, it is worth thinking about how growing dissatisfaction regarding the socio-political limitations of the current horror genre chimes in tandem with growing discontent regarding the limitations of anti-Trump dissent as it currently stands. 14 This particularly interesting interpretation was outlined in an excellent chapter abstract by PhD candidate Ece Krane (School of Film, Media and Theatre at Georgia State University) and freelance journalist Damon Krane during the call for papers; however, the connection between horror, fear, and the natural world was, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this collection.

Bibliography Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. 1944. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectics of Enlightenment by Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Chang, J. 2017. “Has Horror Become the Movie Genre of the Trump Era?” LA Time (Online). Accessed 5/4/2018. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2016. Trump 101. The Chronicle of Higher Education (Online). Accessed 16/3/2018. Connolly, N. D. B. and Blain, K. N. 2016. Trump Syllabus 2.0: An Introduction to the Currents of American Culture That Led to ‘Trumpism’. Public Books (Online). Accessed 16/3/2018. Dargis, M. 2018. “‘Black Panther’ Shakes Up the Marvel Universe.” The New York Times (Online). Accessed 6/4/2018. Frank, T. 2004. What’s the Matter with America?: The Resistible Rise of the American Right. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd. Fuchs, C. 2017. How the Frankfurt School Helps Us to Understand Donald Trump’s Twitter Populism. Communication and Media Research Institute (Online). Accessed (27/3/2018). Hills, M. 2012. “Cutting Into Concepts of ‘Reflectionist’ Cinema? The Saw Franchise and Puzzles of Post-9/11 Horror.” In Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror by Briefel, A. and Miller, S. Austin: University of Texas Press. The Independent. 2017. “So Help Us God . . . Donald Trump Sworn in as 45th President of the United States.” The Independent (January 20th). London: Independent Print Limited. Jeffries, S., in Illing, S. 2017. If You Want to Understand the Age of Trump, Read the Frankfurt School by. Vox Media (Online). Accessed: 26/3/2018. Kellner, D. 2016. “American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism.” In Transgressions, Cultural Studies and Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Krane, E. and Krane, D. 2017. Sharks from South of the Border: Building or Bringing Down ‘the Wall’ in 47 Meters Down and The Shallows? Abstract submitted, via Email, to the Call for Papers. Maler, H. 2017. ‘It Comes at Night’ Is the Horror Movie for the Trump Era. Four Two Nine (Online). Accessed 5/4/2018. McCollum, V. 2016. Post-9/11 Heartland Horror Rural Horror Films in an Age of Urban Terrorism. London: Routledge.

Introduction

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New York Post. 2017. Don of a New Day: Trump Arrives to Take Office as 45th Prez. New York Post: Metro Edition (January 21st). New York: News Corp. Pearce, K. 2016. Understanding Trumpism: Syllabus Co-Compiled by Johns Hopkins Historian Goes Viral Post-Election. Johns Hopkins University (Online). Accessed 16/3/2018. Phillips, K. 2005. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Picciolini, C., in Marissa, M. 2017. Is ‘Make America Great Again’ Racist?. Voice of America: Broadcasting Board of Governors (Online). Accessed 16/3/2018. Pinkerton, N. 2018. “Review: The First Purge.” In Sight & Sound. September Issue. London: British Film Institute. Ross, A. 2016 “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming.” The New Yorker (Online). Accessed 26/3/2018. Rushin, S. and Edwards, G. S. 2018. The Effect of President Trump’s Election on Hate Crimes ( January 14th). Social Science Research Network (Online). Accessed 16/3/2018. Schneider, C. 2017. “In the Age of Donald Trump, the Crassest Pop Culture Is the Key to Understanding Politics.” USA Today (Online). Accessed 26/3/2018. Vance, J. D. 2016. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper. Venable, M. 2017. “Trump-Era TV Is Here, with God, Guns and Glory.” TV Guide (Online). Accessed 26/3/2018. The Washington Post. 2017. “The Trump Era Is a Leap in the Dark.” The Washington Post (January 19th). Washington: Nash Holdings. Wood, R. 1984. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film by Grant, B. K. and Sharrett, C. New Jersey: Scarecrow, 164–200. Wood, R. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. 47 Meters Down. 2017. Directed by Johannes Roberts: Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures. American Horror Story: Cult. 2017. Directed by Various: FX Network. The Babadook. 2014. Directed by Jennifer Kent: Entertainment One. Black Panther. 2018. Directed by Ryan Coogler: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. The Brave. 2017–2018. Directed by Various: National Broadcasting Company. Get Out. 2017. Directed by Jordan Peele: Universal Pictures. Hotel Transylvania 2. 2015. Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky: Columbia Pictures. It. 2017. Directed by Andy Muschietti: Warner Bros. Pictures. It Comes at Night. 2017. Directed by Trey Edward Shults: A24. Kevin (Probably) Saves the World. 2017–2018. Directed by Various: ABC. Planet of the Apes. 1968. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner: 20th Century Fox. Roseanne. 2018. Directed by Various: Carsey-Werner Distribution. Seal Team. 2017+. Directed by Various: CBS Television. South Park. 1997+. Directed by Various: Viacom Media Networks Debmar-Mercury. The First Purge. 2018. Directed by Gerard McMurray: Universal Pictures. The Handmaid’s Tale. 2017. Directed by Various: Hulu LLC. The Shallows. 2016. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra: Columbia Pictures. The Witch. 2015. Directed by Robert Eggers: A24. The Year of Living Biblically. 2018. Directed by Andy Ackerman: Warner Bros. Television. Triumph of the Will. 1935. Directed by Leni Riefenstahl: Universum Film AG. Twin Peaks: The Return. 2017. Directed by David Lynch: Showtime Networks and CBS. Valor. 2017–2018. Directed by Various: CBS Television Distribution.

Part 1

“Drain the swamp . . . we all float down here!” The evil clown archetype, Trump’s circus of cruelty, and the freak show of US politics in American horror

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“Let’s put a smile on that face” Trump, the psychotic clown, and the history of American violence Scott Poole

Two months before the election of Donald Trump, the clowns began appearing at the edge of the woods. In the last hot summer days of August 2016, children living at the Fleetwood Manor apartment complex in the deeply conservative city of Greenville, South Carolina, told their parents about figures in face paint with bulbous red noses attempting to lure them into the woods. Local police found nothing and no one. But the painted phantoms kept coming for the children in a rumour panic that spread across the nation, with particular resonance in deeply conservative states that Trump won decisively in November. A clown can get away with murder.

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I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose voters. Donald J. Trump, January 24, 2016 The age of Trump has seen the apotheosis of the clown as archetype, symbol, and nightmare of folklore and film. Pundits and cultural critics have repeatedly used the image to describe his demagogic buffoonery, chaotic governing style, and aimless malice. The first year of his regime included the longest and most widespread phantom clown scare in American history, a remake of the made-for-television horror classic It for the big screen, and Ryan Murphy using clown horror as a central trope in American Horror Story: Cult, a series that opens with a montage of clips from the 2016 election. The clown in horror narratives, with its obsessive appeal and dangerous terror, offers a key to understanding Trump’s own politics of horror. An examination of films that traded in clown horror from Reagan’s America to their massive resurgence after 9/11 reveal their tendency to explore two themes central to understanding right-wing nativism. First, the films examined here engage in a brand of poisoned nostalgia for small town America imagined as facing a dire threat. Second, most cinematic representations of clown horror depend on a sense of aggrieved masculinity that explodes in chaotic violence. The inhuman face of the psychotic clown acts as a symbol

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for the American acceptance, indeed its obsession, with unexpected and unpredictable violence. It’s the same face worn by the 45th president, silly, pathetic without being exactly sad, and seemingly masking a bottomless potential for social, cultural, and geopolitical mayhem. The frightening clown image runs deep in the global history of cultural symbol and performance. Although there’s no space here to elaborate the long history of the figure in myth and theatre, Benjamin Radford has already provided the most detailed account of the longer genealogy of clown horror in his book Bad Clowns. Radford (2016) points out that “It’s misleading to ask when clowns turned bad for they were never really good” (p. 20). He shows us Christian bishops worrying about clown antics in late antiquity, the Harlequin figure in early modern performance that combined doltishness and violence, and the 19th-century’s “Mr. Punch” of Punch and Judy fame, a character whose clownish personality supposedly gave a darkly humorous edge to the extreme violence he prosecutes on his wife, children, and bystanders. “That’s the way to do it!” he screams maniacally as he delivers skull-crushing blows with his signature blunt weapon. The horrific and violent clown made an early appearance in the silent film era. Lon Chaney played a vengeful prankster in 1924’s He Who Gets Slapped. Chaney portrayed a mild-mannered scholar whose research, and wife, are stolen by a wealthy patron. He becomes a sad clown whose act revolves around being slapped. By the film’s end, he murderously slaps back. Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) gave us the deformed, and maniacal, jester in Conrad Veidt’s performance. Jack Pierce’s makeup, seeming to disfigure Veidt with a permanent rictus grin, provided direct inspiration for the Clown Prince of Crime himself, the Joker. Veidt’s “Gwynplaine” suffers a lifetime of abuse and his rejection by an upper-class love interest turns him into a serial killer. Lon Chaney famously said that “a clown is funny in the circus ring, but what would be the normal reaction to opening the door at midnight and finding the same clown standing there in the moonlight?” Chaney understood that the uncanny nature of the clown deeply unsettled even those who went to them for entertainment. In fact, Benjamin Radford notes that Jack Nicholson echoes Chaney’s comment about the clown in moonlight in his gaudy Gothic performance of the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” Nicholson’s viciously violent Joker asks his unlucky victims before they die (p. 21). Most clown horror films are falsely categorised, and dismissed, as “cult” films, films that supposedly avoid serious issues, combine high concept with low budgets, and seek to appeal to a niche audience. However, Fredric Jameson’s idea of “the political unconscious” underscores how the highly symbolic nature of clown horror makes it a particularly pungent variety of political commentary (Jameson 1981). Jameson writes that, “the production of aesthetic or narrative form” works as “an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (p. 79).

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Mark Shiel has offered a powerful caution to thinking of cult films in such terms with a particular focus on the countercultural biker film of the 1960s. He questions the use of terms like “trash cinema” or “paracinema” that tend to dehistoricise film, assume that even oppositional narratives are easy to commodify in postmodern capitalism, or that ignore the “historical-materialist” conditions that produced a film in favour of the privatised obsessions of self-consciously “cult” fandoms (Shiel 2003). Historicising, rather than universalising, clown horror in American life urges us to look at a particular trajectory of the psychotic clown that reveals the underground cultural forces that emerged in Trumpism and the Trump regime. Looked at in this way, the story of a new kind of clown horror film begins, not in the electoral maelstrom of 2016, but in the 1980s. Since that decade, “phantom clown” sightings and evil cinematic jesters have been highly dependent on one another for specific tropes and broad thematic elements. Although the most significant phantom clown panic in American history appears to have started in the months preceding and the year following Trump’s election, the first rumour legends date back to the early 1980s, the decade when frightening cinematic clowns began to fill the screen. These expressions of clown horror suggest that Trumpism may be aberrant, but is not an aberration, in America’s deeply violent history. Its roots run deep in the violent settler societies from which the United States emerged but has gained a special pungency in the 50 years that preceded, and in some respects prepared the way, for the rise of Trumpism. The clown, in its uncanny powers, monstrous intentions, and its alchemy of violence and nostalgia, reveals the social machinery of power in post-industrial America: Trump’s America. Phantom violence and the violence of phantoms In the late summer of 2016, in the days following the first alleged sightings, menacing harlequins appeared all over Greenville County, South Carolina. Fleetwood Manor apartments sent a letter to residents on August 24th about “a lot of complaints” concerning “a person dressed in clown clothing taking children or trying to lure children in to [sic] the woods.” Obviously, a clown “taking children” constitutes a rather different situation than someone, maybe, trying to “lure” children. But the language of the letter replicates the nature of the panic that emerged in the South Carolina summer and swept the country. The public coined supposed clown sightings into rumour legend. Sightings became “attacks” and “killings.” Rather well-armed South Carolinians turned the emerging panic into a situation of actual danger. A Greenville sheriff ’s deputy made one of the department’s numerous visits to the Fleetwood apartments after “a report of gunshots” that had as their source in “men from the complex . . . who fired shots into the woods” after thinking they had “heard something” (“To The Residents of Fleetwood Manor”; LaFleur 2016).

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Pranksters acted out the rumour legend by dressing as clowns or setting up threatening online profiles. Folklorists such as Bill Ellis call such behaviour “ostension,” the actual performance of a rumour legend (Ellis 2000). These incidents ran the gamut from tedious but harmless behaviour like teenagers in Texas wearing clown masks at school to activities that border on domestic terrorism. In Alabama, police investigated and eventually charged a woman and two juveniles for making online threats concerning a local high school using the persona of “Shoota Clown” or “Floma Klown” (Stokes 2016). A number of cultural critics made connections right away between the emergence of Trumpism and the clown panic. Trump had already been widely criticised, and sometimes unwisely dismissed, as a clown in a large number of outlets, including the more traditional conservative media. National Review, once the flagship publication of the American right before the Fox News/ Breitbart era, called Trump “the foul-mouthed clown” after his nomination. The late conservative op-ed writer Charles Krauthammer called him “a rodeo clown” (Noonan 2017; Schwartz 2015). Mary Valle, writing in The Guardian in October of 2016 interpreted this language with razor-sharp precision. She called Trump “a gigantic killer clown” who used his supporters’ “despair and hopelessness against them.” Valle suggested that maybe the time had come “to panic over imaginary clowns” (Valle 2016). But, Valle added some important nuance. Perhaps the psychotic clown had long been preparing the way for Trump’s American horror story. She noted that Ronald Reagan “with his molded, strangely too-dark hair, rouged cheeks, and permanent smile” had successfully sold his act to Americans while children of the ’80s worried perhaps more than any generation since the 1950s about nuclear annihilation. These worries ignored the fact that America’s massive military build-up and increased tensions with the Soviet Union began during the Carter administration. Still, Reagan’s tough guy rhetoric, his proclivity for joking about doomsday scenarios into hot mics, and what Valle calls his “sadistic Santa Claus” persona magnified these fears for kids who came of age watching The Day After (1983) on network TV. Even during the ’80s, the shadow of the clown could be seen behind the happy-go-lucky figure of Reagan. Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew Ronald Reagan as a clownish figure, occasionally very specifically as the “sad-clown” archetype. Reagan’s film Bedtime for Bonzo (1951) influenced the Dead Kennedy’s protest song mocking Reagan, “Rambozo the Clown,” that appeared on their 1986 album Bedtime for Democracy. Finally, an enormous number of mass clown sightings first occurred during Reagan’s two terms, sightings that found their counterpart in the first clown horror films since the silent era. The summer of 1981 apparently saw the first conflation of clown horror with tropes of “stranger danger” that had roots in the 1950s. On May 5, elementary school children in Brookline, Massachusetts, claimed two men in clown suits had tried to lure them into a black van. The next day, Boston police responded to

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complaints of similar incidents in Roxbury and Jamaica Plains in Boston, both dismissed by authorities as “hysteria” growing from the garbled accounts of young children. In the next two months, both Pittsburgh and Kansas City experienced similar panics. In every case except for Brookline, the panics occurred in overwhelmingly working-class African American neighbourhoods. This trend continued with a phantom clown seen in the largely African American Congress Heights neighbourhood of Washington, DC, and in numerous sightings on Chicago’s South Side in 1991 and again in 2008 (Dessem 2016). The role of race and the racist structures of American life have generally been ignored (or simply dismissed) in relation to the phantom clowns of the 1980s and 1990s. Extraordinarily, no real attention has been paid in the research on the moral panics of the 1980s to the Atlanta child murders (1979–1981). During those two years, no less than 28 murders of African American children and young adults occurred. The murders ended in May of 1981, precisely when phantom clowns began to appear in black communities across the country (Renfro 2015). Film joined the phantom clown sighting at the nexus of American racism, nostalgia for the past, and the fear and fascination with violence. The horror narrative of the psycho clown dawned with Reagan’s “Morning in America,” his hymn to the golden age of small-town life performed even as his administration openly contemplated a winnable nuclear war, systemically terrorised black neighbourhoods by militarising the police, and armed death squads in Latin America. The children’s nightmares born on increasingly bleak city streets began to appear in American film. “Some men just want to watch the world to burn” Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) became the first decade of phantom clown sighting’s flagship film. The Chiodo brothers, Edward, Stephen, and Charles, made the film on a tiny budget, grounding it in the most frightening image Edward Chiodo could think of: driving on a dark highway when your headlights suddenly reveal a passing car driven by a clown. The brothers used this image as an origin point for their effort to pay tribute to the science fiction films of their childhood. The Killer Klowns are a deadly alien race who not only look like gruesome clowns but seem to have a culture based on elements of the circus; they land in a saucer that looks like a carnival tent, they enshroud their victims in cotton candy, and throw acid pies. A popcornshooting bazooka became the film’s most expensive prop. The ridiculous premise worked, partially because of the uncanny nature of clowns themselves. Frequently films and folklore do present them as something other than human and efforts to explain the horror they produce frequently note the fear that they are something more, or less, than a human in a clown suit. The Chiodo brothers’ success also drew on the material conditions of the era. The evocation of “Morning in America” in Reagan’s 1984 election

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campaign drew on yearnings for a supposedly more innocent time. “Crescent Cove,” where the Killer Klowns make their terrestrial incursion, replicates every idyllic small town perched on the edge of destruction in 20th-century American cinema. It’s not the city or the ’burbs but Norman Rockwell’s dream about America, threatened by the insidious. It could be Bedford Falls from It’s a Wonderful Life or Santa Mira from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Both cinematic settings reflect the fear that something sinister may destroy the innocence of small-town life. Although hairstyles, automobiles, and cultural references join the release date of Killer Klowns in making us assume we are in the 1980s, much about the film suggests it could easily be the 1950s. The narrative displaces teenagers, a favourite target of the decade’s cinematic slashers, with college students. But these ’80s college students still innocently “make-out” at the local inspiration point and their relationships are confusingly juvenile. A mom and pop pharmacy remains open on main street and, note well, there’s an actual main street where people shop and die at the hands of extra-terrestrial clowns. Like Spielberg’s Amity Island, Crescent Cove presents an idyllic America under threat but also seemingly lost in time. Even the town’s biker gang seems far removed from The Wild Ones, The Wild Angels, or the subversive gearheads of Easy Rider. Notably, the brief scene with the bikers on the bad side of town features the film’s only black character played by Melvin Thompson (called simply “Black biker” in the credits) and the 1950s-style juvenile delinquents are rather quickly dispatched. Killer Klowns also presented various versions of masculine anxiety lurching toward real and rhetorical violence. This should come as no surprise in an era when young men in the ’80s looked to the adolescent Rambo sequels (1985, 1988) to First Blood (1982) to explain to them male rage and violence in the post-Vietnam era. Two generations act out their male angst in Killer Klowns. The struggle between police captain Dave Hansen and college student Mike Tobacco to possess Debbie Stone (Suzanne Snyder) makes for a strange, out-of-place subplot to the extra-terrestrial clown invasion. Both college boy and cop battle each other over the right to act as her protector. Meanwhile, the old, grumpy, and corrupt police sergeant wonderfully named Moody hates the younger generation, bitterly grouses about his subordination to the younger Captain Hanson, and evokes his service in Korea. Moody dies horribly at the hands of alien clowns, silencing the generation that had been valorised to the point of campy absurdity in Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge (1986). Two years after Killer Klowns, the 1990 TV miniseries IT brought clown horror to a much wider audience, including children. King’s novel and the madefor-TV movie features the idyllic small-town Derry, Maine, its adolescent “Losers’ Club” bicycling off into a summer of innocence that turns horrific. The tale offers an example of what has been King’s magnificent fixation on small-town sentiment that hides a heart of darkness. Tim Curry played “Pennywise,” an extra-dimensional terror that appears as a child’s worst nightmare,

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manifesting primarily as a clown with serrated teeth. The production of IT played a crucial role in defining clown horror, despite the limitations of the small screen. The image of Pennywise is one of the two most iconographic psychotic clowns in Western culture, if for no other reason than, as Benjamin Radford (2016) simply puts it, “never before had a scary clown appeared in living rooms across the country during prime time” (p. 67). Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Dark Knight owns as much, if not more, of the cultural clownscape than Pennywise. Ledger’s performance, in which he transformed himself into the embodiment of nihilistic anarchy, has become the stuff of legend. His astonishing portrayal transcended expectations on its own terms and set the bar impossibly high for any actor trying to pull off on-screen villainy. Ledger’s death after completing the film added an even darker shade to the character’s frightening aura. The themes of cinematic clown horror are evident in both IT and Dark Knight, often in oblique and startling original ways. Derry joins the list of towns American cinema has worried over, the possibility that Norman Rockwell’s America actually offers a playground for monsters. Dark Knight wears a post-9/11 sensibility on its armoured sleeve in its handling of this American obsession. The small town has been replaced, not by traditional cinematic representations of “the big city,” but with a Gotham that’s more post-apocalyptic urban hellscape than a place where people live. It’s a city not only haunted by a psychotic clown, but arguably facing an equally virulent threat from a masked vigilante and a police department none too concerned with collateral damage, civil liberties, or the truth. Distressed manhood also appears in both films though in radically different ways. Pennywise acts out the narrative of stranger danger with supernatural peril, the apotheosis of the clown stalking children; so closely matching many of the phantom clown sightings that it has been wrongly blamed for them (the novel appeared in ’86 and the film four years later, long after the first phantom clown rumour legends). The evil clown’s interest in children also mirrors the masculinity panic of the 1950s and 1960s in which, with essentially no evidence, public safety announcements and private warnings about allegedly predatory gay men abducting children became common (the novel and 1990 film place the first half of the story of IT in 1958). Paradoxically, the “prowler” appears as an aggravated version of the violence often inherent, and hidden, in male heterosexual fantasy. Terror and rage at Pennywise the child killer sublimates and legitimises the violence inherent in American conceptions of masculinity; just ask the men in Greenville, SC who fired their guns wildly into the woods because they thought they heard a sound. IT also displayed an obsession with the fetish of male domination. The town bully’s constant threat “I’ll kill you all” is exactly echoed by the threats of Pennywise. The only female member of “The Lucky Seven” is Beverly Nash (Annette O’Toole), a victim of abuse from her father and later by a

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boyfriend and business partner; the source of their rage as inexplicable as that of the supernatural clown that hunts the children of Derry. Meanwhile the male nerds of the “Losers’ Club” grow into successful men in what Regina Hansen (2017) calls a “wish-fulfilment version of hegemonic masculinity at the expense of female agency” (p. 163). In Dark Knight, the Joker seems the epitome of distressed manhood imploding and exploding like a dying star. Ledger’s maniac tells a gathering of nervous crime lords that they have “lost their balls” in their inability to deal with the Batman. Just as has often been the case with his representation in the comics, he occupies an odd place in the spectrum of gendered imagery given that his dark-cowled nemesis seems a sarcastic comment on aggrieved masculinity. Batman, in his many graphic novel adaptations and certainly in the Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan films, appears encased in muscled armour while driving and piloting absurdly phallic weapons of mass destruction, all the while speaking in the raspy growl that mimics every tough guy grunt from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood. The Joker operates as Jester to Batman’s Lear in almost every version of their relationship, nowhere more clearly than in Dark Knight. He wants the Batman to admit they share a tormented psyche. The nihilism that lurks just behind the mask of grim justice really only finds true expression in the Joker’s savage willingness to take the use of violence to its illogical conclusion. The plasticity of the image Joker presents adds to the chaotic effect. During the course of the film, he tells no less than three different versions of his origin story, the tale of his mutilated face with scarring that gives the effect of a permanent sinister smile. This had led to the proliferation of fan theories, some much discussed online even a decade after the film’s release. In the most popular and intriguing of these notions, the Joker’s real origin is in the Iraq/Afghanistan invasion. Fans have found somewhat convincing evidence that the Joker has a background in a Spec Ops team given his knowledge of explosives, small arms, and the tactics of terror as political theatre. Although doubtful that Nolan intentionally planted this suggestion in the film, it says much about this generation’s best-known psychotic clown that devoted fans see in him the very old cinematic image of the wounded, mentally unstable veteran that stretches from Deerhunter (1978) back to Abel Gance’s 1919 J’accuse (Leadbeater 2018). At a time in American culture when ironic became a synonym for hip, the Joker’s demand of his victims – “Why so serious?” – became a battle cry. Rhetorical and real violence has kept fascination with the character strong and become a vessel for the racist, chaotic politics of the American “altright.” This neo-fascist movement attempts to resuscitate older forms of racist domination in discourse by attacking women, the poor, marginalised groups, and the physically challenged online and in speeches. When directly confronted they claim they are only being ironic; essentially responding to outrage with “Why so serious?” This has been particularly effective on social media where harassment and bullying thrive. Self-identified “trolls” verbally

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abuse a wide range of people and viewpoints and then, at the last moment, make use of some version of the Joker’s quip. In this, many of these harassers look to Trump as their Troll-in-Chief, truly the Clown Prince of Crime whose rhetoric draws from a sludge pit of racist, xenophobic, and misogynist toxicity (Nagle 2017). Heath Ledger’s Joker as icon for pointless chaos serves as a peculiar political symbolism in the age of Trump and of clown horror. When Nolan’s Dark Knight first appeared, many conservatives embraced the film. Nolan’s image of Batman willing to subvert Gothamites civil liberties to defeat terrorism seemed to give them a caped crusader working in the service of the Patriot Act (Yglesias 2008). This reading of the film contains a terrible irony for those traditional Republicans who dismissed Trump as “a clown.” In one of Dark Knight’s many famous pieces of dialogue, Alfred (Michael Caine) tells Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) that the gangsters of Gotham who aid the Joker have “in their desperation, turned to a man they didn’t understand.” The Joker has no recognisable agenda. He has no vision of a new morning for small-town America. He’s simply an explosion of grievance, rage, and violence. “Some men,” Caine warns, “just want to watch the world burn.” The circus comes to town America on the edge of Trump seemed a series of paradoxes. Concern over community centred less on the old paradigm of small town vs. city and increasingly on digital interchanges. The most optimistic saw in two Obama administrations the beginnings of a “post-racial society” even as a steady stream of barely cloaked, or sometimes completely undisguised, racism spewed forth from his critics. The murder of unarmed black men and women, a feature of American life from the country’s colonial period, received more attention as juries proved unwilling to convict, and sometimes even indict, private citizens and police officers for such crimes. When protests erupted, as they did in Ferguson, Missouri, after the murder of Michael Brown, local authorities launched an essentially military response, using armoured vehicles, tear gas, and nightsticks. Meanwhile, employment increased but wages did not. Capitalism had been saved from itself by the bank bailouts of the early Obama years. America continued its longest ground war in Afghanistan and a stream of psychologically and physically damaged veterans returned home. The numbers of civilian deaths caused by American forces grew but only the periphery of the political left raised concern. In 2014, season 3 of American Horror Story gave us Twisty the Clown, the murderous persona of a highly privileged and emotionally stunted white man who exudes misogyny and unexplained rage. Online insurgencies like “Gamergate” offered a youthful version of the ranting men of the baby boomer generation on Fox News, inexplicably furious at a system that continued to offer them every opportunity to thrive, indeed subsidised their ability to thrive. Something was wrong.

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Clown horror increased in popularity between2014 and the second year of the Trump administration. Film and television took on similar tropes to earlier films with some highly revealing differences. Three horror narratives reveal how the obsessions from earlier clown horror have metastasised in the three-ring circus of Trump’s rise and accession to the presidency. Two films, Clown and Stitches, are especially revealing. In Clown (2014; released in the US in 2016), the small town, even the small town under threat from extra-terrestrial or interdimensional pranksters, has utterly disappeared and the horror plays out amid tract housing. In fact, Kent (Andy Powers), the protagonist, monster, and victim of the film works as a real estate agent, buffeted by the economy, despised by his in-laws, and regarded with annoyed pity by his wife. One fateful afternoon, his efforts to sell a house have him cleaning up some old clown costumes collected by the previous owner. Having forgotten to hire a clown for his son’s birthday party (marked down as evidence of his failure as a father), he dons one of the costumes. Director Jon Watts turns this into a very creative exercise in body horror when Kent finds it impossible to remove the costume even as it gradually alters his features and possesses his personality. This curse forces him to wander the suburban wasteland, psycho clown and sad clown all at once. Even as he tries to fight the curse, he becomes a living representation of impotent male rage, finally becoming a danger to his own family. Stitches (2012), a joint Irish and Swedish production, hews rather closely to the themes found in American clown horror. Its international production suggests that certain elements in the formulae have transatlantic appeal, particularly the embittered sense of a lost past and what that it means for masculinity in the present. Stitches, like Clown, exhibit a feeling of placelessness. Tom (Tommy Knight) lives on a kind of McEstate in an idyllic setting complete with tree house and no neighbours as far as the eye can see. Teenage Tom, in fact, needs a telescope to disturbingly spy on his love interest Kate, played by Gemma Lee Deveraux. Stitches the clown, on the other hand, lives in a camping trailer. In his opening scene, he’s portrayed as drunk, frustrated, and having casual sex (that no one seems to be enjoying) in his tiny, unkept living space. He leaves the trailer, angrily stuffing himself into a decrepit auto, to appear at Tom’s birthday party, a job he clearly hates performing for kids he hates even more. The accidental death of Stitches at Tom’s party leads to the sad psycho clown’s supernatural return on Tommy’s 16th birthday. Like a paranormal Joker, Stitches murders and mutilates with one-liners on his lips, turning McMansion into abattoir. Although adolescent love wins the day and puts him into supernatural stasis, the final scene suggests that the outraged male Id in face paint will make a comeback. In late 2016, horror fans awaited the coming of a new iteration of It to the big screen and New Yorker cartoonist Carter Goodrich painted a cover for the Halloween issue of the New Yorker called “October Surprise.” In it, Trump

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appeared leering out from behind a tree, a conflation of Pennywise, and a shark preparing to feed. Trump’s election seemed a mean-spirited prank, a surprise to everyone including, apparently, his supporters and himself. Almost a year after the deadly October surprise, American Horror Story: Cult ostensibly took on American political culture directly with what we might see as found-footage horror from the 2016 campaign combined with an alt-right villain played by Evan Peters. Unfortunately, this resulted in little political commentary and enormous ideological confusion in a show that, as Jenna Scherer put it in Rolling Stone, presents less a “parody and comment” on Trumpism and becomes instead “an artifact” of it (Scherer 2017). The series made a politically progressive same-sex couple into agents of violence as meaningless and chaotic as that of their alt-right counterparts. The eponymous cult dresses as clowns for their pointless massacres. Rob Zombie could have done something with this but Murphy cannot, creating a bizarre alchemy of alt-right fantasy and centrist liberal angst. American Horror Story: Cult seems to be a reminder that horror works best when it’s oblique. Murphy’s shotgun blast of allegory somehow managed to indict Trumpism, second-wave feminism, the Manson murders, and murderous clowns as all part of the same phenomenon. It’s a cynical effort and thrives off the cynicism that surrounds it. There’s nothing that makes sense here, nothing to really think about, it’s a social media argument with everyone screaming in caps FAKE NEWS turned into a TV show. There are elements in the series that try to evoke toxic male revenge fantasies (“There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a humiliated man,” Evan Peter’s alt-right fearbot declares early in the season). We watch as a hipster neighbourhood becomes a killing ground, a callback to earlier ideas in American culture about the possibility of neighbourliness and connection. Still, it’s not an American horror story; its American horror broken into razor shards, weaponised, and hurled at the audience like an early morning presidential tweet. A series of haymakers that never land, American Horror Story: Cult is destined to be an interesting primary source for any possible future historians sifting through the debris of this era to try and make sense of the American paranoia that gave a vicious reality star the presidency. As satire, it fails us. If anything, many viewers more likely to respond to Evan Peter’s chaotic charisma, a literal poor man’s joker who wants to put a smile on your face, rather than to the attempts at critiquing the desire for such figures and the chaos they unleash. We are a long way from the unabashed weirdness of Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a tribute to campy horror of post-war America and brimming with subtext that tells us much about post-Reagan America. Edward Chiodo, on the featurette The Making of Killer Klowns on the 2014 Blu-ray edition of the film, had this to say about the clowns in general: “I just never liked them, I never thought they were funny. To me it was an unnerving thing.” He remembers being taken to the circus at Madison Square Garden as a kid and having a clown “get . . . in my face, and I didn’t like it . . . but everybody around

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me was laughing. I thought ‘why is everyone laughing? This is frightening’” (Chiodo 2014). If there is a human future, historians will debate whether Trumpism represented a bizarre and florid episode in or continuity with America’s historical trajectory. A look at the last 50 years suggests that his personal style of anarchic conservatism has long been part of American politics, throwing the shadows of the violent American past. The figure of the homicidal clown – dangerous, lethal, and unpredictable – has become, since the 1980s, the psychotic circus atmosphere that embodies the things so inarguably true about the contradictions, the insanity, of American violence. Why is everyone laughing? This is frightening. Bibliography Chiodo, Edward (2014). “The Making of Killer Klowns” featurette Klowns from Outer Space. Directed by Stephen Chiodo (Blu-Ray). Dessem, Matthew (2016). “The Wave of Clown Sightings is Nothing to Worry about: It Happens Every Few Years!” Slate Magazine (Online). Accessed 20/4/18. Ellis, Bill (2000). Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions and the Media. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Hansen, Regina (2017). “Stephen King’s IT and Dreamcatcher on Screen: Hegemonic White Masculinity and Nostalgia for Underdog Boyhood.” Science Fiction Film and Television, Volume 10, Issue 2, pp. 161–176: Liverpool University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1981). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. LaFleur, Elizabeth (2016). “Greenville Clown Incidents Taken Seriously, but Sightings Unconfirmed.” Greenville News (Online). Accessed 15/4/18. Leadbeater, Alex (2018). The Best Dark Knight Joker Origin Theory and How It Improves the Movie. Screenrant (Online). Accessed 20/7/18. Moran, Lee (2017). “Donald Trump Is a ‘Dangerous Clown’ on the New Yorker’s Cover.” Huffington Post (Online). Accessed 6/7/18. Nagle, Angela (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Washington, DC: Zero Books. Noonan, John (2017). “Rebuilding the GOP after November 9.” National Review (Online). Accessed 2/6/18. Radford, Benjamin (2016). Bad Clowns. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Renfro, Paul Mokrzycki (2015). “‘The City Too Busy to Care’: The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Southern Past, 1979–1981.” Southern Cultures, Volume 21, Issue 4: Winter. Riotta, Chris (2017). “Creepy Clown Sightings, 2017: North Dakota Children Targeted in Latest Menacing Incident.” Newsweek, May 1. Scherer, Jenna (2017). Clows, Cults, and Trump: Why the New ‘American Horror Story’ is a Missed Opportunity. Rolling Stone (online). Accessed 12/12/2017. Schwartz, Ian (2015). Krauthammer on Trump: We Have the Best Republican Field in 35 Years and We Are Talking about This Rodeo Clown. Real Clear Politics (Online). Accessed 1/7/18. Shiel, Mark (2003). “Why Call the Cult Movies? American Independent Filmmaking and the Counterculture in the 1960s.” Scope: Online Film Journal Studies, Issue 8. Institute of Film Studies, University of Nottingham.

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Stokes, Prescott III (2016). “$200 K Bond Set for Flomatron Woman Posing as Creepy Clown.” Al. Com (Online). Accessed 22/5/18. “To the Residents of Fleetwood Manor” Property Manager, Fleetwood Manor Apartments N.D., Collection of the Author. Valle, Mary (2016). “The Explanation for October’s Clown Sighting.” The Guardian (Online). Accessed 11/2/18. Yglesias, Matthew (2008). “Dark Knight Politics.” The Atlantic (Online). Accessed 7/7/18. American Horror Story: Cult (2017). Directed by Various: FX Network. American Horror Story: Freakshow (2014). Directed by Various: FX Network. Clown (2014). Directed by Jon Watts: Cross Creek Pictures and Dimension Films. Clownhouse (1989). Directed by Victor Salva: Triumph Films. The Dark Knight (2008). Directed by Christopher: Warner Brothers. Funland (1987). Directed by Michael A. Simpson: Double Helix Films. Heartbreak Ridge (1986). Directed by Clint Eastwood: Warner Brothers. He Who Gets Slapped (1924). Directed by Victor Seastrom: Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer Studios. IT (1990). Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace: Lorimar Productions. Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988). Directed by Stephen Chiodo: 20th Century Fox. The Man Who Laughs (1928). Directed by Paul Leni: Universal Studios. Stitches (2012). Directed by Conor McMahon: MPI Media Group.

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Shilling Pennywise Chump change in Trump’s (trans) America Theresa L. Geller

The week that surprise blockbuster horror film It (Andrés Muschietti 2017) was released, the New York Times lauded the film for “supercharging the box office,” arriving as a “cultural juggernaut . . . smashing September box office records with an eye-popping $117.2 million in estimated North American ticket sales,” an especially shocking number, considering the film boasted “no stars and a modest production budget of about $35 million” (Barnes 2017). Brooks Barnes, the author, attempted to explain the shocking success of the film – possibly more shocking than any of the tepid scares provided by the film itself – positing that it is a “well-made and expertly marketed movie.” Notably, the first rationale is weakly supported in the article, held up by claims that the inexperienced director’s previous (and first) film, Mama (2013), received strong critical reviews, and that the famous novel’s author, Stephen King, has a huge fan base. Of course, neither of these are any evidence that It is a “well-made” film. Indeed, the author props his “well-made” thesis on the fact that the film is derivative of the Netflix hit, Stranger Things (Netflix 2016), sharing nostalgia for the 1980s and a scary mystery centred on misfit kids. Barnes’s second thesis is more to the point; Warner Brothers successfully shilled the film in a range of clever promotions: Warner built a two-story replica of the film’s haunted house that was free to tour. About 35,000 people visited over the course of a month – with studio staffers encouraging them to take photos and post them on Instagram – and lines stretched to five hours. The studio shut down an online wait-list after it reached 85,000 names. (2017) It also focussed on viral buzz by promoting the film via a virtual reality experience available in real life on a school bus sent to eight cities, and posted on Facebook and YouTube. However, this chapter is catalysed by president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, Toby Emmerich’s incisive observation in Barnes’s piece: “Whenever a movie overperforms to this degree – becomes a tent pole – there is some kind of cultural accelerant at play” (cited in 2017). What is the cultural

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accelerant at play in It? Needless to say, the 2017 reboot (also known as It: Chapter One) must be understood in the cultural landscape of which it is a part, even as it figures that landscape in its cinematic allusions, and thus only that film version will be the focus here (and not previous adaption). Dan Lin, a producer of It speculates: “The message of the movie is actually hope. . . . If we stick together and rely on one another’s strength, loyalty and goodness, we can – like the kids in the film – overcome our fears and the evil in the world” (cited in Barnes 2017). Such a banal “message” hews a little too closely to “Make America Great Again” – Trump’s campaign phrase that also evokes a vague nostalgia for unnamed times past, but certainly the Reagan era, precisely the era of the film, was the hoped-for referent. If The Babadook ( Jennifer Kent 2014) is the monstrous queer icon of resistance, and Get Out ( Jordan Peele 2017) figures the contemporary (post-)racial imaginary, It is the first horror film to truly represent Trump’s America and its red-state, fearbased ethos. Certainly the recent Unite the Right “protests” in Charlottesville were impelled by a similar sentiment, as they too “stuck together and rel[ied] on one another’s strength, loyalty and goodness,” in order to “protest” in words and deeds now openly expressed under Trump’s regime those they perceive as “evil.” While those on the left side of the political spectrum recoiled in horror at the sight of white nationalists winding through the streets of Charleston, bearing torches and chanting anti-Semitic or other xenophobic slogans, in a scene reminiscent of so many monster films, they perceived themselves as citizens standing up against a monster that menaces their way of life. Indeed, evil is in the eye (or ideology) of the beholder. If there is something uncanny in the scene of Charlottesville’s white men (and some women) that recalls other images of torch-wielding mobs (Figure 2.1), it is because such a scene asks us to ponder: where – or who – is their monster? As they chant “Jews will not replace us,” we are reminded of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with its Gothic anti-Semitism;1 in fact, many of Stoker’s themes are uncannily echoed in the chants of the white nationalists, from “blood and soil” to “end immigration,” both salient motifs identified in Stoker’s Ur-text of the horror genre as we know it.2 And when challenged, these same “protesters” were also quick to literally denigrate their antagonists, hurling racial epithets and calling them “faggots,” attesting to even deeper psychic fears. Released exactly one month after the Unite the Right rally, It rallied audiences with images of sadistic white male teens, led by the racist psychopath Henry Bowers,3 viciously targeting the only black member of the Losers’ Club, Mike Hanlon, with impending violence and calling his white friends “flamer” and “faggot” – and yet, while Bowers may well have grown up to march in Charlottesville (Bowers would be about 44 at the time of the rally), armed with the same language and/of hate, he is not the monster we are meant to fear in It. Even though the film’s codes associate the racial terrorism of the Bowers Gang with Jim Crow imagery of burning bodies (a common practice in lynching, as denoted in the lyric “the sudden smell of burning flesh” in

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Figure 2.1 The monster chase in Frankenstein

Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol), as their first attack of Mike is preceded by him seeing this image, the mullet-headed fascists are not the evil to fear in the film. In fact, Henry is ultimately revealed to be a victim of his alcoholic father’s (the aptly named, “Butch Bowers”) bullying; in a key scene, Butch, a local cop, stops Henry from killing a cat with the gun the boy has taken from his father by shooting it at his son’s feet, terrifying Henry in front of his friends, to whom he declares: “Ain’t nothing like a little fear that’ll make a paper man crumble.” One might well be reminded of Jason Kessler, the altright organiser of Charlottesville humiliated by his own father, with whom he lives, during a live-stream video chat with neo-Nazi Patrick Little (Beauchamp 2018). And yet, such “paper men” are nevertheless deadly, transforming their fear into violence. One might well argue too that Henry overcomes his “fears and the evil in the world” by killing his father – the source of his fear (and racism). But then again, so does the Losers’ Club. This is precisely the pivot on which horror divides, developing into reactionary or progressive narratives. In short, “the message” is not to face one’s fears by understanding their historical, geographic, and socio-cultural origins but rather to come together as a collective to destroy the thing (“it”) that is figured as the locus of those fears, without discussion or explanation. It affirms the narrative of meeting fear with violence, especially by a group that perceives itself as “losers” despite

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their actual social power as white male first-world subjects (the woman, black, and Jewish individuals are all the most targeted members of the club). In this way, It evokes several of the tropes of Trump’s America – conspiracy-driven survivalism, dubious authority figures (Butch is a cop in the film but not in the book), femiphobia, righteous gun-toting, questionable consent (discussed below), paranoia, and so on – all of which are constructed as acceptable responses to fear because they are borne out by “losers” with whom we are meant to identify because of the preliminary scenes of humiliation and abjection by others, particularly the Bowers Gang. But of course, they are not the source of “evil” in It – rather, that is the primaeval force, Pennywise, the dancing clown. By the third act, the Losers come to look less like a “club” (to which they are relegated by their victimisation) than yet another gang of white male teens – in a scene that recalls the Bowers’ gang nearly killing Mike with rocks at the river. It is that very confrontation, with one group of young white kids attacking the other across the river with rocks that in fact enables the Losers to turn that rage and violence against Pennywise in the final confrontation. The equivalency with the Bowers’ teens turns the “club” into its own violent “gang,” learning to call upon their fear to transform it into deadly aggressive force. This is in fact how It tapped into its zeitgeist, making a decades-old horror narrative frighteningly relevant to the contemporary political moment. Following Robin Wood’s (1979/1985) anatomisation of the horror film, It may well represent a new development in “the evolution of the American horror film” (p. 208), propped on older tropes yet bringing the “reactionary wing” in line with a new political climate (p. 215). Briefly, It calls forth many of the elements mapped out by Wood, including the “Terrible House” in the form of the abandoned Neibolt house (a.k.a., the Well House on Neibolt Street), the confusion surrounding sexuality, and, clearly, the central motif of “the return of the repressed” – in this case, literalised with Pennywise re-emerging from the bowels of the earth every 27 years (1979/1985, p. 202). The content of that repression, however, transforms with each new return – like the killer clown itself. Significantly the reboot alters the dates of It’s cycle, with the timeline for “Chapter One” beginning in 1989 – the year George Bush, Sr. is inaugurated president. This, it must be noted, sets up “Chapter Two” to take place in the year of Trump’s election – 2016. The political implications of this timeline hint at the change in reactionary rhetoric that has occurred from one era of conservative politics to the most recent. 2017’s It traces out a new set of meanings – meanings, like Pennywise himself, that begin to take shape in 1989 – the very year Francis Fukuyama published his essay, “The End of History,” in which he first speculates that “we may be witnessing . . . the endpoint of mankind’s [sic] ideological evolution” (cited in Kotsko 2018, p. 97). For critics of Fukuyama, such as Marika Rose and Adam Kotsko, this “end” was in fact the beginning of “normative neoliberalism” – a politicoeconomic order of free market policies that naturalise radical inequality, and one that “strove to shape the entire world in its image” (Kotsko 2018, p. 125),

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while it itself remains obscure (as an ideology), one that “loves to hide . . . [it’s] invisibility as a measure of its power” (Kotsko, p. 11). It, I suggest, is the first truly neoliberal horror film, reflecting a set of norms endemic to neoliberalism’s demands and political transformations – transformations that work precisely by their shape-shifting into different forms that inveigle as they deflect from their true purpose. Under this neoliberal dispensation, the terms that once defined the reactionary wing of the horror film are no longer as salient as they once were. Certainly “the designation of the monster as simply evil” remains the same, and horror films continue to be understood as “progressive precisely to the degree that they refuse to be satisfied with this simple designation”; It fails this test, however, refusing to explain Pennywise as anything other than the incarnation of an ancient evil – “a metaphysical, rather than a social, definition” – as Wood points out, and one that “suggest[s] that there is nothing to be done but strive to keep it repressed” (1979/1985, p. 215). Thus, It justifies turning its young “losers” into righteous killers – but killers of what precisely? If “the relationship between normality and the monster . . . constitutes the essential subject of the horror film,” then how are these Manichaean polarities constituted in this new reactionary incarnation (Wood 1979/1985, p. 204)? A notable change in It is that the monster, significantly a monster with a name (unlike, say, the Blob) who freely converses with its prey, embodies a set of contradictions. While It returns (as the repressed) to Derry as a threat to the community, IT is often not “perceived by the consciousness as ugly, terrible, obscene,” but rather frequently takes on appealing forms (Wood 1979/1985, p. 215). Indeed, in the film, Derry and its people are remarkably monotone and unappealing – Pennywise, in its clown form, is colourful, offering brightness and spectacle in contrast to drab Derry. To be sure, this does not make Pennywise sympathetic; IT remains “totally non-human,” like the alien in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) with whom it would appear to share several sets of teeth, but the monster is rarely seen in its “pure form” that resembles a giant spider. Rather, IT is viewed most often in its clown appearance, and as such engages its victims in dialogue, even though they know that it is indeed a monster in its visible – and visibly colourful – alterity (unlike, say, Damien in The Omen whose “normal” appearance as a child allows his caretakers to disavow his identity as the antichrist). Indeed, Pennywise recalls other dialogical monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster (into which IT tellingly transforms in the novel, evoking the sympathetic monster’s visage to underscore the contrast with IT’s utter inhumanity, made up not of human parts but of human fears). Pennywise’s shape-shifting, thus, should be understood as a metonymy of the rhetorics of horror, which provides ways of defining . . . what is evil (and what is good) in societies, what is monstrous (and what is ‘normal’) . . . [and] are put to use . . . in

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the very same socio-political system . . . [that] needs these rhetorics . . . needs horror itself – in order to be what it is and do what it does. (Gelder 2000, p. 1) These rhetorics are powerfully in play in the current political moment as fear is mobilised against an endless parade of imagined monsters – monsters It presciently enumerated in IT’s transformations from lisping make-up wearing, effeminate clown to castrating figure of Judith (who cut off the head of Holofernes; IT will also appear as a disembodied head). Such rhetorics now saturate political discourse, which makes the 2017 reboot’s change of making Pennywise feed off fear, rather than just eat children, all the more pointed. With Fox News and the Right proliferating all sorts of rapidly shape-shifting monsters to rally the “red wave” (making Pennywise’s trademark red balloon particularly iconic), the need to understand the “powers of horror” and its instrumentality to political discourse is foremost to deconstructing our current “age of unreason.” In José Monleon’s “1848: The Assault on Reason,” he argues that with the rise of the bourgeoisie came a set of newly configured fears: What all these fears ultimately shared was the suggestions that the social order was in danger, even though daily experience did not indicate the presence of a threat. . . . Attached to the system as an ontological part of it, destruction could manifest itself in unreliable or unbelievable forms, but it would always be there, casting a shadow over the future and the prosperity announced by the comfortable universe of the bourgeoisie. (1990/2000, p. 21) Neoliberal bourgeois prosperity, in the wake of the normalisation of the free market, casts an even deeper, longer shadow, with death-dealing businesses4 and the commodity fetishism of technological “progress,”5 requiring its commensurate monsters to dissemble from its insatiable appetite for profit. Thus, It takes a page from a 19th-century playbook, deflecting its own violent unreason on to “nonproductive sectors,” such as the poor, mostly “foreigners,” who were accused of “not belonging” and “suspect of all the crimes, all the evils, all the epidemics and all the violence . . . [making] every alien a potential criminal” (cited in Monleon 2000, p. 22). Trump’s unending claims for the criminality of immigrants need not be reiterated here to recognise the extant parallels. Pennywise is both an ancient evil and an “alien” from a different dimension (or “Macroverse”). As such, IT is the manifestation of unreason within a national imaginary that depends on an unending series of logical reversals that disavow the historical and social violence on which it is founded. While I have written elsewhere and at length about horror’s ability to expose these reversals and undermine the dominant ideologies that depend on them through the complexities of narrative,6 It refuses to narrate, refuses

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to provide context and history – quite literally. Like Fox and the pundits of the Right, part of the explanation for IT’s opacity is that IT’s powers include preventing anyone from investigating too deeply Derry’s murderous past or retaining this information. IT’s reign is tied to the effacement of history and the erasure of knowledge, as well as the suppression of affect, especially that of empathy for those who are suffering, that result from such dialectical thought. While the monsters of the Enlightenment, like those of Mary Shelley and E.T.A. Hoffman, suggest that “if reason produced monsters, then it is easily understandable that a sense of culpability would arise among those of the dominant culture,” this culpability will be entirely disavowed two hundred years later. As the age of reason gives way to the age of neoliberalism, there arises the demand for a renewed epistemological certitude to assert a competitive marketplace as the route to freedom and human flourishing, even as it creates the conditions for unparalleled economic disparity. Of course, such economic disparity came with the rise of the bourgeoisie but, as Monleon details, it was always ambivalent, caught “between accepting the consequences of their philosophical principles and defending their class interests. This choice affected the entire bourgeois spectrum,” and was reflected in the paradoxes of the fantastic, which “offered to the public the disquieting possibility that reality was a problematic entity with several, and even contradictory, layers of signification” (2000, p. 24–25). The neoliberal present is not concerned with such paradoxes; rather, it revivifies preindustrial polarisations of good and evil in much of its original terms. Although It contains elements of the fantastic, it hews closer to the Gothic’s insistence on the concreteness of monsters, “a definition that rooted them either in this world or the other,” and in ways that refute the ambiguities endemic to industrial society (Monleon 2000, p. 26). Notably, the story of Pennywise is one that allegorises such shifts in the historical treatment of unreason. When IT emerges from its hibernation every 27 years, it incarnates the spreading of unreason “from confinement to the sewers, undermining the foundations of the order,” represented by Derry, Maine; yet, this does not destabilise that order but rather provides an excuse for “the implementation of peace and order through ‘unreasonable’ repressive measures” (Monleon 2000, p. 24). In our own neoliberal times, unreason is now ascribed to the surplus populations produced by the global marketplace of finance capital, who are dehumanised, like the proletariat before them, and are thus transfigured as threat but in a strategy of externalisation, in which the alien-ness of the Other is asserted against all reason. By turning away from more nuanced representations of the monster, It demands a teratology sensitive to the crassly fear-mongering political rhetorics that create monsters where there are none. That It has generated over 700 million dollars to date, tops all box office records for a September opening, and holds the top spot for an opening weekend for a fall release and is second only to Deadpool (2016) for widest R-rated release and opening suggests that It successfully shilled a monster for

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our times – and “shill” Pennywise did, figured as a trickster from the circus no less (a likely origin for the verb “to shill”). As Gelder argues, “Sometimes the monster might well work to obscure certain features that make a culture what it is; a monster’s inscrutability may point to a certain blindness culture has about itself ”; in Pennywise’s “grossly excessive” embodiment sympathy is refused, enacting a paradigm shift in the “generally taken for granted [idea] these days that monsters at least deserve our understanding” (2000, pp. 81–82). IT is referred to as a serial killer, alien, ancient (atavistic) evil, and, of course, frightening clown cannibal with a taste for children, concatenating every unassimilable figuration of the non-human to generate revulsion and horror in the viewer. It is Stephen King himself who associates such figures of abject horror with the national imaginary of the Baby Boom: “we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris” (cited in Gelder 2000, p. 254; emphasis mine). One might well speculate that this is the historical reference point in Trump’s “great again” – as his presidency continues to coast on exactly these three rhetorical rails. The shocking success of It, I argue, “recovers the marginal, derided form and makes it speak for [Trump’s] nation,” deploying the American horror film’s most reactionary tropes to “obscure cultural contradictions” underlying the new paranoid patriotism of the right (Gelder 2000, p. 254). Rather than organise its “norms” around family or even an individual (like the 2018 reboot of Halloween), it ties its plotline to a place – Derry – a synecdoche for the nation in which it is set, and in so doing, shuts down “questions concerning the meaning of self-defence, vengeance, and justified violence,” drawing on “myths of uncommon ‘masculine’ valour and all-too-common female victimization, and to images of violation, sacrifice, ritual [the Ritual of Chüd, to be exact], and of life reduced to a struggle for survival” – all legitimated in a narrative anchored to an implicit patriotic motif of protecting one’s geographic origin from outside “influence.” It’s postmillennial paradigm shift in the American horror film effects a sort of ideological gerrymandering, one that notably moves away from privatised tropes of the family and individual survival to the legitimated reactionary fervour of the male collective in response to an ever-changing target that takes on forms dictated by socio-cultural fears. As Gregory Waller argues, “the horror film has engaged in a sort of extended dramatization of and response to the major public events and newsworthy topics in American history since 1968 . . . mirror[ing] our shifting fears and aspirations” (2000, p. 264). It is precisely the film’s engagement with American history that situates It in the tradition of American Gothic, while as a reactionary horror film, it nevertheless resists the literary form’s more critical aspects. Teresa Goddu situates the American Gothic “within specific sites of historical haunting, most notably slavery . . . the gothic tells of the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it” (2000, p. 270). By making Pennywise and Derry co-constitutive (“Derry is IT; IT is Derry”), horror is woven into the fabric of small-town America. Yet, It evokes the historical

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horrors of nation-building not to “disrupt the dream world of national myth with the nightmares of history” but rather to “work to coalesce those narratives,” reifying “an idealized national identity” in its reductive glimpses of historical atrocities and its mystification of them through IT’s pointed (and repetitive) adumbration of the abject in the figure of Pennywise (Goddu 2000, p. 270). Goddu, in explicating the American Gothic, “use[s] the term ‘abject’ to signify . . . historical horrors. The nation’s narratives – its foundational fictions and self-mythologizing – are created through a process of displacement: their coherence depends on exclusion” (2000, p. 270). It risks disrupting these narratives by situating its horror in a place that stands as a synecdoche for America itself. And yet, by tying historical horrors to the monstrously abject – and “alien” – Otherness of Pennywise, It creates a revisionist history that disavows those horrors entirely. In King’s revisionist timeline, Pennywise is the intruder on American soil, not the settlers. The novel figures the colonists as victims of Pennywise’s murderous hunger, evoking the story of the Roanoke colony, in the first “appearance” of IT in the 1740s. In the film, this revisionism goes further to power “the machine of national identity” by giving Pennywise an origin story tied to the deaths of 91 members of a beaver camp who disappeared, rumoured, in a telling reversal, as the result of a plague or slaughter perpetrated by indigenous tribes (Goddu 2000, p. 270). Of course, we know the European settlers perpetrated the equivalent of germ warfare as part of the mass genocide of the indigenous peoples they encountered, robed, raped, and destroyed; the film, however, introduces a convenient third term to the equation, externalising the abject facticity of settler colonialism on to an “ancient Evil.”7 Indeed, Pennywise’s threat is generated by the series of historical exclusions he figures, reconsolidating the narrative of an innocent nation, concatenated in the Losers’ Club of young white men constructed as victims themselves of perpetual harassment and encroachments. Pennywise draws IT’s frightful meanings from a chain of “episodes in political demonology,” as Michael Rogin names it (1987). Rogin, notably, identifies these episodes as constitutive of a “countersubversive tradition at the centre of American politics . . . call[ing] attention to the creation of monsters . . . by the inflation, stigmatization, and dehumanization of political foes” (1987, p. xiii). At the time of the production and release of It this tradition was strategically exploited (by Russia and Fox News, but also by monopolies like Google and Facebook) to assure a Trump presidency. Rogin’s argument, therefore, has a new urgency we ignore at our own peril: American demonology has both a form and content. The demonologist splits the world in two, attributing magical, pervasive power to a conspiratorial center of evil. Fearing chaos and secret penetration, the countersubversive interprets local initiatives as signs of alien power. . . . The countersubversive needs monsters to give shape to his anxieties and

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to permit him to indulge his forbidden desires. Demonization allows the countersubversive, in the name of battling the subversive, to imitate his enemy. (1987, p. xiii; emphasis mine) Such countersubversive demonology has nearly fully replaced what we understand to be political discourse itself, determining the very grounds on which the political is even recognised as such. Significantly, Rogin’s explication of “political repression and demonology as instruments in the historical construction of an American political identity” is titled Ronald Reagan, the Movie (1987, p. xix). His title calls attention to the creation of not an actual political leader but the image of one. The political hero represents one fulfilment of countersubversion in modern America; the motion picture of mass culture is another. . . . Movies provide more than additional evidence about demonology; they speak to the fundamental countersubversive impulse to ingest historical, physical, and personal reality. (1987, p. 296) Pennywise literalises this ingestion of history, appearing (“awakening”) at moments when conflict arises from the demonology of targeted groups like workers (the Kitchener Ironworks explosion in 1908), African Americans (in the case of the burning down of the black-owned business, “The Black Spot,” by the Maine Legion of White Decency, a northern counterpart to the KKK in 1930 in the novel, named only as “a cult” in the film though moved to 1962, coterminous with the Civil Rights struggle), and homosexuals (with the 1984 murder of Adrian Mellon, elided from the film). That each of these are iconic eras of a struggle for rights – for the proletariat, for black citizens, for gays and lesbians post-Stonewall and at the burgeoning of the AIDS crisis – speaks to the function of Pennywise as a figuration for violent historical repression of social others in response to their claims for equal citizenship. To this end, Pennywise’s “birth” in the novel should be noted; IT painfully awakes with the Age of Enlightenment in 1715–1716, in the same decade of Immanuel Kant’s birth. The rise of Pennywise’s reign of terror is concurrent with “a new, revolutionary definition of the subject as free,” one that came with an increase of anxiety, as Joan Copjec argues in her discussion of the figure of the vampire – a cannibalistic figure with which Pennywise shares several attributes (1991–1992/2000, p. 60). “The very definition of the subject as free,” as Copjec explains, produced a shadow version of itself: The Enlightenment double was conceived as nothing, nothing but the negation of the subject’s attachment to the world. This double, then, guaranteed the autonomy of the subject, its freedom from pathetic

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existence in which it could be manipulated by other things, persons, or traditions. But once this double was thus detached, once it was set loose in the world, it was inevitable that the subject would occasionally “run into it,” approach it a little too closely. (1991–1992/2000, p. 60–61) Without getting too far into her psychoanalytic discussion, we can see how the vampire and IT are similarly coded as this negation, a double that curtails the autonomy of the subject. Pennywise, more than any vampire, has powers attached to place rather than specific subjects (indeed, the victims of violence tend not to be under IT’s sway), making it a particular negation or shadow for a national conception of freedom, of America as the land of the “free.” It makes Pennywise, I suggest, much more expressly political than previous Gothic monsters because of IT’s historicised and emplaced violence, beginning with the violence of settler colonialism that founds the US. It’s revisionist backstory exempts Derry’s (Euro-American) townspeople from collective responsibility for enacting the inevitable violence that is the logical endpoint of political demonology, aided by an alien influence that affects mass historical forgetting, and with it a tamping down of affect, particularly sympathy for others. However, it is the synchronic forms IT takes in the diegetic setting of 1989 that suggests that It might well go by the name Donald Trump, the Movie. Pennywise takes forms that Trump supporters might find immediately recognisable as demonic threats to “freedom” – from an infectious leper to the image of woman in the painting in the synagogue where Stan Uris studies for his Bar Mitzvah. The woman in the painting is credited as “Judith,” nodding to possibly the most painted woman from Jewish canon – the heroine from the Book of Judith. These incarnations align with narratives from today’s political demonology, with the explicit instrumentalisation of leprosy – by the Secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services no less – to demonise immigrants, for example (Lambert 2017).8 The story of Judith is also implicitly about the threat of invaders, since Judith is angry with the Jewish people for not trusting God to deliver them from their foreign conquerors. She seduces Holofernes and restores Bethulia (Jerusalem) to the Jewish people (as did Trump in 2017). Yet the way that IT incarnates Judith – and to whom – substantiates an anti-Semitism sustained throughout the text. Manifesting in a synagogue, with the only light coming from a stained-glass Star of David behind Stan Uris’s head, Judith from the painting manifests and terrorises the only Jewish member of the Losers’ Club, chasing him from the building. Not appearing in the novel, the film’s addition of the terrifying Jewess even scared King himself. This change from the novel is indicative of the political climate of the 2017 release. While the 1986 novel called upon an encyclopaedic range of pop culture monsters, from Rodan and the Mummy, to the shark from Jaws (1975) and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the film narrows these incarnations down tremendously. The only women IT becomes in the novel are those

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members of the community who have died by IT’s machinations, but all the novel’s monsters are syphoned into this one distortedly female embodiment. The film eschews cliché movie monsters, replacing them with a few representative incarnations (other than of people they know, like Georgie, Eddie, and Ritchie), particularly the embodiment of the phallic women that Jewish Italian painter, Amedeo Modigliani, made famous. With her elongated fingers and face, Judith suggests new fears about the abjection of powerful femininity that abounds in the 2017 version. Indeed, if there were any question of her phallicness, the woman in the painting is seen with a very long flute, and the music of her flute precedes her appearance, like the acousmatic voice of Mother in Psycho (Hitchcock 1960).9 That film’s foundational horror at the abject confusion between the genders is revivified in a film in production at the height of the battle for the presidency, shaped by the misogyny on which that battle was waged – and won. The film reduces its abject terrors to the question of gender difference; however, in 2017, this difference is given new meaning and complexity in the wake of the transgender subject and their political demands for rights and recognition. What initiates the film’s narrative is the making of a paper boat. It opens with a sweet scene of older brother, Bill, making a paper boat for his younger brother, Georgie, teaching him less about how to make the boat but rather about how to gender such an object. More than once Bill must insist that it be called “she” lest Georgie forget sexual difference. Like the money in Psycho that turns out, in the end, to be worth less than the paper it is printed on, Georgie’s paper boat is “the embodiment of the metonymic object-cause of desire which propels the endless progress” of the story (Žižek 2000, p. 75). Hollowed inversion and folds on one side, pointed protrusion on the other, the boat introduces It’s Moebius band: “if we progress far enough on one surface, all of a sudden we find ourselves on its reverse” (Žižek 2000, p. 72). Against this ontological instability, Bill insists on the force of the Symbolic to secure gender difference, insisting “you always call a b-boat, she.” Bill’s stuttering reveals the inability of language to secure such difference, as it happens again in the next scene with Stan, when Bill erroneously refers to Stan’s “d-d-dick” being cut off as part of the Bar Mitzvah ritual. To this extent, the film sets out its terms repeatedly by focussing on gender dimorphism, accompanied by the threat of castration. The bridge between these scenes is Georgie’s encounter with Pennywise, ending on having his limb ripped from his body, followed by the paranoia of the Losers’ club joking nervously about the Jewish practice of circumcision (as if that were not standard hospital practice in 1989). The conversation about the Bar Mitzvah gives away the film’s crucial anxiety – that masculinity is never assured, never truly anchored in or to biology: “At the bar mitzvah I read from the Torah . . . and then I make a speech, and suddenly I become a man.” The becoming of men through the enactment of ritual is the crux of the film’s anxiety – one that signals the return of the repressed about gender that Pennywise must ultimately re-secure for the boys (and viewer).

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To speak of repression is to speak in the language of psychoanalysis; indeed, the generic codes of horror, which trade in fantasy and nightmare, invite psychoanalytic discussion arguably more than any other genre. As Joan Wallach Scott (2011) avers, The enigma of sexual difference is at the heart of psychoanalytic theory. Despite norms that attempt to prescribe behaviours for men and women that are said to conform to the bodily requirements, confusion remains . . . confusion is expressed in fantasy, but also in conflicting attempts to impose definitive meaning. . . . Sexual difference is an intractable problem. (p. 112–113) The instabilities of gender are at the root of much of the violence in the film, but notably in ways less associated with Pennywise. The teens themselves are preoccupied with the meanings of sexual difference, and the ways secondary sexual characteristics are supposed to (but consistently fail to) secure gender meanings. And when gender difference is introduced into the Losers’ Club, this gender anxiety is only amplified, with Beverly Marsh signalling an intrusion that destabilises gender even further. If the film’s anti-Semitism evokes castration fears, the introduction of Beverly takes on Trump-level neuroses about the abjectness of femininity. In one of the most baroque horror scenes offered by the film, after “Beaver-ly” first appears in the film, reduced to her vagina by bullies in the girls’ bathroom who refer to her as “trash” and “slut,” the film script will go on to prove them right. In a change from Cary Fukunaga’s original script, Beverly flirts with the pharmacist (seen to actively reciprocate with an 11-year-old girl) while purchasing the tampons she needs, having started her period. With her entry into womanhood, Beverly is reduced to an object of desire throughout the film – something many critics were quick to note (Bradley 2017). While Pennywise visits each of the Losers’ Club, IT does not incarnate a body (i.e., leper, Georgie, Judith) with Beverly but instead terrorises her by mirroring her own abject body. Running past her sexually abusive father (implicit in the novel; much more explicit in the film), Beverly steals into yet another bathroom to read Ben’s love haiku. While she revels in being desired, voices speak to her from the sink drain. In a scene that replicates penetration, Beverly uses a metal tape measure to penetrate the depths of the drain, one that does not appear as metal smooth pipe but rather as organic material. If there is any question that this has sexual implications, Richie will later joke about “measuring dicks.” Moreover this imagery will be replicated in the final “climax” when the boys enter Pennywise’s dark, earthy well to rescue Beverly. Yet, before that can happen, the girl must be punished for her own sexual curiosity and put in her place – cowering in the corner covered in the evidence of her castration. It literalises the horror of female “plumbing” in a scene that has blood and hair spew up from the hole in the sink, drenching the entire bathroom and Beverly in

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a scenario that literalises Trump’s hysterical (in both senses) comment about Megyn Kelly: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.” While there is much to be said about the metaphorics of this scene, especially in its association of the abject with femininity thus closing the gap between psychic identities and anatomical bodies, or “the gap between anatomy and its sexuation” (Wallach Scott 2011, p. 113), I want to draw attention to the metonymical implications instead. Beverly is perpetually connected to bathrooms and plumbing. Like the “she” that brings Georgie to IT, Beverly is the catalyst for the boys to finally penetrate IT’s lair in the sewer, as she is kidnapped and unconscious in Pennywise’s well – a change from the novel. The film’s fascination with sewers reflects a psychic anxiety about gender and its irreducibility to biology, to our plumbing. As Wallach Scott asserts, Gender consists of historically specific and finally uncontrollable articulations that aim to settle the confusions associated with sexual difference by directing fantasy to some political or social end: group mobilization, nation building. . . . To give one example, the analysis of male dominance . . . asks how links between social and psychic anxiety are being forged . . . in the boundaries that maintain differences of sex, and in phantasmatic warnings about the consequences of altering or breaching those boundaries. (2011, p. 21) The film’s femiphobia anchors its group mobilisation, as the Losers’ Club is impelled by a patriarchal call to arms with Beverly’s abduction. While their inclusion of Beverly into the club seems to mitigate the accusation of femiphobia, it is the ways Beverly is linked to IT that suggests a metonymic relation between the two, wedding horror less to feminine embodiment than to the breakdown of differences between the sexes. Despite the symptomatic focus on her sexual difference, she actually looks more like them, acts more like them than not, exemplified in the scene at the watering hole where they all wear similar white underwear and her body does not signal much visible difference even though they at first recoil at the idea of swimming with her until it becomes a question (yet again) of their masculinity, not wanting to be “shown up by a girl.” Once in the water, the camera pans from head to head, in a scene that makes clear the ways the body is the fictional ground of sexual difference; in the marked similarity of the heads above water between the boys and Beverly, with her newly shorn hair, sexual difference is anxiously destabilised as their bodies are obscured in the dark water (Figure 2.2). It is this spectre of de-differentiation that is the anxiety that haunts the text. At the moment when a woman was claiming the right to be president, panic about sexual difference was utilised to assail that liberal political claim. “Women occupy a special place in the history of American demonology,” according to Rogin; “manifestly they have been made into victims whose

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Figure 2.2 The Losers’ Club goes swimming

persecution justifies revenge. . . . But women have also been cast, explicitly or implicitly, as the monsters. Countersubversion connects political to sexual anxiety by raising the spectre of female power” (1987, p. 290). The association of Beverly with IT through the spatial overlap of bathrooms and sewers suggests her integration into the group – as opposed to being the cause around which the patriarchal group forms – poses a threat to the collective of boys that make up the club. In the decade in which the film is set (and about the time King was writing it), “when feminists campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution . . . the opposition regularly offered the specter of mandatory single-sex public toilets as a warning of the worst dangers of the amendment” (Wallach Scott 2011, p. 20). When the boys clean up the blood IT erupts all over Beverly’s bathroom, we see this fear come to life – not only boys doing the woman’s work of cleaning the bathroom, but an acceptance of her equivalence with them as “losers.” That equivalency brings with it Pennywise’s escalation of terror as the agent of phantasmatic warnings about the consequences of breaching gender boundaries, making the aptly named IT a specifically political demon – and the latest figure in American political demonology. IT is the transgender being that figures the horrifying conclusion of ceding male dominance in the countersubversive imaginary, directing that fantasy to the political ends of enforcing gender asymmetry, putting the woman into her passive, sexualised place while also providing the phantasmatic rationale for group mobilisation (and nation-building). There is nothing new about the association of femininity with monstrosity, to be sure. Beverly’s trajectory, in fact, shares much with another key figure in King’s horror novels – Carrie. While many critics find in the film version of Carrie (Brian de Palma 1976) a progressive tale of female adolescence throwing off the shackles of a repressive society, Shelly Stamp Lindsey argues otherwise: “we must consider what most critics have glossed over – the role gender plays in the articulation of horror – since the film repeatedly

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insists on Carrie’s gender and the specific development of feminine subjectivity” (1991/1996, p. 281). The parallels with Beverly are apparent, from the harassment by female classmates in a female-only bathroom/locker room space to the fact that both characters are introduced at the start of menstruation. If, as Lindsey asserts, “we associate Carrie’s menstruation with a bloody attack . . . Carrie’s adolescent body becomes the site upon which monster and victim converge, and we are encouraged to postulate that a monster resides within her,” then this is revisited in Beverly’s similar trajectory, with a geyser of blood spewing from a (sink) hole in her bathroom when she should be attempting to “plug up” her own bleeding “hole” with her newly purchased tampons – the very items thrown at Carrie (1991/1996, p. 282). Yet I want to suggest that this older association of the feminine with the monstrous undergoes a subtle shift in It. Much ink (and cinematic blood) has been spilt on the topic of woman’s difference in the horror film: The horror, as often noted, arises not from woman’s “castration,” but from the fact that she is not castrated. . . . Woman and monster are posed as analogous terms in horror films . . . because of their shared (and threatening) anatomical difference. . . . Nonhuman and nonmale are confused as equivalent threats to human identity; bodily difference becomes, in both cases, the locus of the nonhuman. (Lindsay 1991/1996, p. 283) Unlike Carrie, however, Beverly is not the monstrous-feminine that once anchored the ideological premises of the horror film. The aim of It is precisely to disarticulate the nonhuman from the nonmale by introducing a third term (pronoun): IT. Rather than becoming more sexually differentiated as Carrie does, Beverly becomes more like the boys of the Losers’ Club – in fact, her abusive father even remarks that her short hair “makes you look like a boy.” Moreover, the rain of blood associated with her is not what casts her apart (like Carrie) but rather draws her further into the Losers’ Club. It is in her bathroom where the adolescents are equalised – both the boys and Beverly see the blood, and clean it together. In the space of the bathroom Beverly declares her sexual innocence, telling Bill that the rumours about her are not true, even as her difference is seen in abundance in the blood all over the walls. There is no question that this blood is seen as a marker of sexual difference when Richie makes it perfectly clear: “Hey I wasn’t the one scrubbing the bathroom floor imagining that her sink went all Eddie’s mom’s vagina on Halloween.” This moment in the film has been read as progressive even though many have critiqued the film on the whole for its diminishing of Beverly to a damsel in distress, rendered catatonic until she be awakened by Ben’s kiss. Aja Romano is quick to point out all the ways Beverly is associated with bathrooms, noting how her father assaults her there, and then Pennywise, appearing in his place after Beverly has cracked Al’s skull with the top to the toilet tank, abducts

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her from the bathroom (in a change from the novel). This equivalence of her father with IT is repeated in the final showdown when Pennywise transforms into Al to scare her. Thus, Romano argues that the boys’ seeing the blood in the bathroom is a hidden feminist message about believing women about their abuse – the thesis that grounds her claims for “the film’s function as an analog for the current sociopolitical moment” (2017). Of course this is anachronistic because the socio-political moment of #MeToo had not yet broken at the time of the film’s release; however, the film’s writing and production coincide with a much more reactionary socio-political discourse that received widespread national coverage. Romano misses the obvious bait and switch in her own argument: After a tense encounter between Beverly and her abusive and predatory father . . . the male members of the Losers’ club stop by. . . . In terms of plot, this [bathroom cleaning] scene is significant because it helps tip off the Losers’ club to the fact that everything happening . . . in Derry is somehow connected through the town’s drainage system. (2017) “Everything happening” in Derry is not in fact connected to the sewers; in claiming so, the real inequities of power between children and their parents – specifically patriarchal power, demonstrated by Butch Bowers, Alvin Marsh, and even Rabbi Uris – are obscured. The pivotal bathroom scene does not address the real source of Beverly’s abuse but connects it instead to a monstrous figure that attacks women in restrooms. The boys pay no attention to her horrifying father but rather see their purpose as directed toward protecting Beverly from IT – the garish intruder in her bathroom (not the abuser of her body).10 Al Marsh is the one who actually attacks her in her bathroom, and she is left to fend for herself against the man who literally tries to grab her pussy. The film’s analogous relationship to the moment of 2016–2017, I suggest, has more to do with national attention turned to bathrooms and threat of the breakdown of gender they (do not) threaten. At every mention or image of sewers in the film, gender threatens to come undone, from Georgie’s genderless boat (which Bill insists is a “she” but then names the “USS Georgie,” rendering both boat and boy gender ambiguous) to Beverly’s shorn hair coming back up through the sink to tie her (down) to sexual difference. In the scene following Stan’s confrontation with the castrating Jewess from the painting, Bill insists the boys go into the sewers to look for Georgie; when Eddie fears getting caught, Bill counters: “The sewers are public works, we are the public, aren’t we?” This question of who has access to public sewers and the bathrooms they connect to – highlighted by Eddie’s constant refrain about “grey water” and wading through the piss and shit of Derry – points to a different timely political discourse, one concocted in part to telegraph to a nation a phantasmatic warning about considering men and women equal (or, equally presidential).

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Akin to the reduction of women’s equal rights to fears about unisex bathrooms in the 1980s (one contemporaneous sociohistorical reason why King’s 1986 novel might be obsessed with bathrooms), Trump’s election was heralded by a unique political hot button issue, North Carolina’s HB 2, and a host of “bathroom” bills springing up in conservative states that legislated trans-panic by requiring people in government buildings to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender assigned on their birth certificates. That the bill was repealed not long after it was instituted says much more about its utility to generate fears about gender de-differentiation at a timely moment in electoral politics than its actual stated aims. Significantly, the repeated rationale for the fear-baiting bill was to “protect women and young girls” from “predators” in women’s restrooms (Eichner 2016). And while no evidence has ever been produced to lend this argument any credence, we are given the spectacle of such phantasmatic anxieties coming to fruition in It, which evokes the terrifying nightmare of gender de-differentiation in the logic of countersubversive politics. While Beverly, with her short hair and freckled face, looks like one of the boys, Pennywise carries the demonic weight of gender confusion, highlighted by the actor’s (Bill Skårsgard) thick painted face, glossy red lips, and high cheekbones. Pennywise bears more than a slight resemblance to a distinctly queer figuration on the demonological horizon – the transgender subject. As pronoun choice has emerged as a central discourse on the liberal political landscape, “IT” takes on new significations since the pronoun reveals nothing about its gender, but everything about the losers’ (and our culture’s) fears. Pennywise should, by all accounts, be recognisable as a he (indeed, how often do we think of female clowns?), and yet the boys insist on IT’s status as an it – as a genderless evil that wears make-up, dances, and whose bodily morphology changes at will. While Pennywise was originally cast in the first adaptation with cinema’s most famous “sweet transvestite” Tim Curry, this version is anything but sweet, and therefore much more timely for the Trump presidency – one currently threatening to federally legislate “biological” gender. Pennywise threatens, today, the disarticulation of femininity from the body to which it should be normatively attached. In Carrie, “Carrie builds up the surface of her body, as if to cover over what lurks beneath” by adopting the “masquerade of femininity that consists of an exaggerated build up of the body’s surface through makeup, shimmering fabrics, jewels, enhanced colour . . . accumulating excessive signifiers of femininity . . . [to] conceal those aspects of her body disturbing to the male onlooker” (Lindsey 1996, p. 288). In It, Pennywise dons this masquerade of femininity, fully disarticulating femininity from any specifically sexed body. While this disarticulation may offer affective queer potential,11 when those affects are organised into ideologically rigid emotions, particularly fear and horror, the demonology of countersubversion is at work. It begins and ends with Bill correcting Georgie’s gender pronouns, but in the last scenario, Pennywise’s form of Georgie now bears a visible missing “limb” (both King’s novel and the film are obsessed with penises), and this absence is enough

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for Bill to know to kill him. Pennywise takes several forms in the final showdown, including, notably, the “lady from the painting,” playing on the concept of the “painted” lady, which ties the feminine masquerade to predatory sexuality expressly. Importantly, Pennywise may morph into these phantasmatic figures for the boys such as the castrating woman or the castrated child, but for Beverly, her fear incarnates in the form of very real male predation embodied by her father. This last form taken by Pennywise, before Beverly drives a rod through his mouth at the words “Hey Bevvie are you still my little girl” (words spoken by Alvin earlier that indicate his sexual abuse and possession of her body), transfers male sexual predation onto Pennywise, though in actuality, he is one of the least sexual horror icons in the genre (even the shark in Jaws is more sexual in his killings).12 The Losers’ claim to no longer fear IT’s alterity, yet the only option they can imagine is violence: “kill him.” They say this when Bill sees Georgie, but also when IT morphs back into a clown; calling IT him is tied to violence, as they refer to him only in the directive to “kill him.” And with this group aggression against a figure that incarnates gender confusion – echoing the Bowers’ gang calling the overweight Ben “Tits” to justify their violence against him – Pennywise crawls back into IT’s dark well, its (temporary) demise marked by the fragmentation and dissipation of the dancing clown’s façade, a masquerade (of femininity) that reveals nothing beneath it. In displacing sadistic aggression onto the newest figure of demonology, the transgender subject, particularly one that affects the feminine masquerade, the male Losers’ are transformed into a patriarchal group – one “connected” in their sexual access to the body of the woman (Jung 2017).13 The horror of It is rooted in the ways patriarchal power has slowly come to be challenged, and thus is met with aggression and panicked heterosexuality, evident in the novel’s most authentically horrifying scenario of the boys running a train on Beverly, as if it were some sweet right of passage. While the film omits this scene outright, its intent remains intact, telegraphed in the obsession with turning inanimate objects into “shes” – and vice versa. Contemplating King’s conclusion to the book (one he defends to this day) after the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, in which the Supreme Court Justice nominee cried over time spent with his high school buddies, bonded over “devil’s triangles” and “boofing” (denying these are sex acts), I cannot help but cast a gimlet eye on the reboot as a coming-of-age tale. In doing so, we might hear in Pennywise’s abstruse (and not very scary) “Come join the clown. . . . We all float down here” a reasoned – and reasonable – appeal. I want to suggest we slow our rush to see in Pennywise’s painted face a child-eating monster – indeed, is this not what the 4 Chan conspiracy theorists want us to see in a woman who dared to demand equal access to political office by creating an equivalent horror narrative of child sex trafficking in “pizzagate”?14 The repeated conceit (repeated 21 times!) – “you’ll float too” – suggests an equivalence of bodies as the endpoint of de-differentiation and non-hierarchal relations, a suggestion strengthened by the film’s other tagline not in the film: “IT takes many

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Figure 2.3 Towering pile of floating trash in Pennywise’s lair

forms.” Indeed, trans embodiment may well allegorise the infinite permutations of bodily diversity – but is this really something to be feared? If we actually opt “to float” we risk coming close to our double, our negation, but in so doing we might see the costly toll of our “attachment to the world,” of our “freedom” – the towering pile of garbage around which the de-differentiated and partial bodies float (Figure 2.3). In this ever-growing monument of waste (what Žižek names the inertia of the Real) we see the material excrescence of the neoliberal ideology of the free market. We are meant to be distracted by our fears of the clown so we don’t see the elephant in IT’s living room – the material signs of a “zombie doctrine” that allows our political system to eat us alive while it feeds (on) our phantasmatic fears.15 Notes 1 This is a much-discussed interpretation of the novel; see Halberstam (1993). 2 Count Dracula has also been read as a threating figure of 19th-century immigration, even citing contemporary social critic, Max Norda on the “degeneration” of Eastern European immigrants – language nearly identical with what Trump and his acolytes use in their fearbaiting language concerning immigrants today (see Berick 2014). Of course, this language also turns on anti-Semitism – a set of discourses that directly shape Trump’s narrative as well (see Milbank 2018). 3 Possibly named for another Republican politician, Henry F. Bowers, who formed the American Protection Association, which bragged about the vote they “controlled” and created affiliated “patriotic” organisations that were rabidly anti-Catholic, which led to a discriminatory anti-immigration platform. The resemblances are worth noting.

52 Theresa L. Geller 4 See Constant (2016). 5 At the cost of at least four million lives in the Congo; see the documentary film Blood Coltan (Patrick Forestrier 2007). 6 See Geller, The X-Files (2016), and “Race and Allegory in the X-Files” (2017). 7 If Pennywise shares features with the Babadook, it is less its queerness than its allegory of settler colonialism and the perpetual haunting this casts over the wealth, power, and property made possible in the wake of such violence. 8 See Lambert (2017). And now leprosy is being rekindled with the Fox news coverage of the migrant caravan, just in time for the 2018 midterm elections. 9 See Chion (1992). 10 I have argued for the feminist significance of recognising the actual horror of the daughter’s experience of ongoing sexual abuse by the father in Twin Peaks. See Geller (1992). 11 See Geller (2013). 12 See Tupitsyn (2008). 13 Made appallingly clear in the novel’s most egregious scene: After defeating IT, the kids get lost in the sewer tunnels on the way out; this is attributed in part to the fact that they’re losing their “connection” to one another. The solution is to bind them together, which Beverly . . . says can only happen if each of the boys has sex with her. . . . For almost ten exhaustive pages, King describes each of the boys having sex with Beverly and their orgasms as a version of “flying.” (Jung 2017) 14 One does not have to look far to find several memes of Hillary Clinton as Pennywise. See YouTube video: “IT Trailer – Hillary Clinton Edition 2017.” 15 See George Monbiot (2016).

Bibliography Barnes, B. (2017). “‘It’ Breaks September Records, Supercharging the Box Office.” The New York Times (Online). Accessed: 10/11/18. Beauchamp, Z. (2018). The Organizer of the Charlottesville Rally Just Got Humiliated by His Own Father. Vox (Online). Accessed: 20/11/18. Berick, J. (2014). They Walk among Us: Vampire and Immigration in Victorian London. Notes from the Tenement (Online). Accessed: 10/11/18. Bradley, L. (2017). The New It Is a Compelling Coming-of-Age Story-for the Boys, at Least. Vanity Fair (Online). Accessed: 30/11/18. Chion, M. (1992). “The Impossible Embodiment.” In: S. Žižek, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). New York: Verso, 195–207. Constant, P. (2016). “The Free Market Doesn’t Care If You Live or Die.” The Observer (Online). Accessed: 20/11/18. Copjec, J. (2000). “Vampires, Breast-Feeding and Anxiety.” In: K. Gelder, ed. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 52–63. (Extracted from Vampires, Breast-Feeding and Anxiety, October 58, 1991/2). Gelder, K. (2000). The Horror Reader. London: Routledge. Geller, T. L. (1992). “Deconstructing Postmodern Television in Twin Peaks.” Spectator 12.2 (Spring), 64–71. Geller, T. L. (2013). “Trans/Affect, Monstrous Masculinities, and the Sublime Art of Lady Gaga.” In: M. Iddon and M. Marshall, eds. Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion and Culture (Routledge Studies in Popular Music Series). London: Routledge, 209–230. Geller, T. L. (2016). The X-Files. TV Milestones Series. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University. Geller, T. L. (2017). “Race and Allegory in Mass Culture: Historicizing the The X-Files.” American Quarterly 69.1 (March), 93–115. Goddu, T. A. (2000). “Introduction to American Gothic.” In: K. Gelder, ed. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 265–270. (Extracted from Gothic America, New York: Columbia University, 1997).

Shilling Pennywise 53 Halberstam, J. (1993). “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Studies 36.3 (Spring), 333–352. Jung, E. A. (2017). How Does the New It Movie Deal with Stephen King’s Orgy Scene? Vulture (Online). Accessed: 8/12/18. Kotsko, A. (2018). Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Lambert, M. (2017). The Trump Administration, Immigration, and the Instrumentalization of Leprosy. Religion & Culture Forum (Online). Accessed: 2/12/18. Lindsey, S. S. (1996). “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty.” In: B. K. Grant, ed. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 279–295. (Extracted from Journal of Film and Video, 43.4 [Winter 1991], 33–44). Milbank, D. (2018). “Is it a Coincidence That Trump Uses the Language of White Supremacy?” Washington Post (Online). Accessed: 20/11/18. Monbiot, G. (2016). Neoliberalism: The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems. The Guardian (Online). Accessed: 10/12/18. Monleon, J. (2000). “1848: The Assault on Reason.” In: K. Gelder, ed. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 20–28. (Extracted from A Spectre is Haunting Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Rogin, M. P. (1987). Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Romano, A. (2017). It: The Most Surprising Scene in the Movie Has Nothing to Do with Clowns. Vox (Online). Accessed: 5/12/18. Tupitsyn, M. (2008). Jaws Revisited. Fanzine (Online). Accessed: 5/12/18. Wallach Scott, J. (2011). The Fantasy of Feminist History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Waller, G. A. (2000). “Introduction” In: K. Gelder, ed. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 256–264. (Extracted from American Horrors. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Wood, R. (1985). “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In: B. Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods, Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California, 195–220. (Reprinted from The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, by R. Lippe, R. Wood and A. Britton, eds. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979). Woodward, B. and Costa, R. (2016). “Transcript: Donald Trump Interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.” Washington Post (Online). Accessed: 20/11/18. Žižek, S. (2000). “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large.” In: K. Gelder, ed. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 71–77. (Extracted from Everything You Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London: Verso, 1995). Alien (1979). Directed by Ridley Scott. 20th Century Fox. Blood Coltan (2007). Directed by Patrick Forestrier. Tac Presse. The Babadook (2014). Directed by Jennifer Kent. Entertainment One. Carrie (1976). Directed by Brian De Palma. Red Bank Films. Deadpool (2016). Directed by Tim Miller. 20th Century Fox. Get Out (2017). Directed by Jordan Peele. Universal Pictures. It (1960). Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. Lorimar Productions. It (2017). Directed by Andy Muschietti. New Line Cinema. Jaws (1975). Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures. Mama (2013). Directed by Andy Muschietti. Universal Pictures. The Omen (1976). Directed by Richard Donner. 20th Century Fox. Psycho (1960). Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount Pictures. Stranger Things (2016+). Directed by Various. Netflix.

Part 2

“A (nasty) woman’s place is in the resistance!” Trump’s war on women, “pussy” grabs back, and queer horror steps out of the shadows

3

Breaking out and fighting back Female resistance in the Trump-era horror film Joshua Gulam

Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, following a campaign in which he repeatedly used sexist rhetoric to undermine his opponent, appeared to mark a significant setback not only for the advancement of female participation in US politics, but the women’s movement more generally. However, one of the most striking features of Trump’s election is the degree to which it has inspired an upsurge in female-led political protests, as well as a broader revival of feminism in the United States (Enda 2017). From high-profile events such as the January 2017 Women’s March, the largest single-day demonstration in American history, to the record numbers of female candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, women across the country are choosing to fight back, rallying, and mobilising at a level that has rarely been seen before. What’s driving these campaigns is more than just a desire to see the current president deposed. It’s a determination to challenge gender violence of all forms. Indeed, this groundswell of resistance has fed directly into calls for an end to workplace discrimination and assault, with outrage over Trump’s sexist behaviour providing fertile ground for the emergence of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. From the perspective of female protest, therefore, Trump’s victory has proved to be a galvanising force, encouraging women (and girls) to come together to demand action on a range of issues that have long been ignored. Parallels to these protests can be found in a recent cycle of horror films that show besieged and oppressed women fighting back. With their narratives of female survival and resilience, box office hits such as The Purge: Election Year (2016), and critically acclaimed features You’re Next (2013), It Follows (2014), and The Witch (2015), tap into a growing sense of anger at the patriarchal structures that dominate US politics and society. In each of these films, tough female protagonists turn the tables on their tormentors, and, in doing so, free themselves from a series of literal and figurative constraints. This chapter explores the relationship between this cycle of films and recent political shifts. Specifically, it considers the role that horror has to play in representing and mobilising resistance to the anti-woman agenda of Trump. Do these stories of female empowerment contribute meaningfully to wider calls for gender equality? And, how might they help to communicate the diverse

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goals of the feminist movement to wide audiences? For the purposes of brevity, I have chosen to focus my analysis on three films, all of which were released in 2016: 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), Hush (2016), and Don’t Breathe (2016). Each of these films deals explicitly with questions of gender and power, and captures a broader feminist thrust that has been central to both horror cinema and US politics, in the age of Trump. Horror films have traditionally been criticised for their gratuitous depictions of violence against women, with many suggesting that the genre helps to promote a culture of misogyny (e.g., Wood 1986). However, this type of condemnation is built upon an overly reductive reading, which overlooks the presence of female pleasures within horror cinema (Jancovich 1992). In fact, one of the reasons why the genre speaks so strongly to the Trump era is because of its “contradictory” mix of antifeminist and feminist elements (Pinedo 1997, p. 71). Isabel Cristina Pinedo, writing about the progressive potential of the horror film, argues that it can: create an opening for feminist discourse by restaging the relationship between women and violence as not only one of danger in which women are objects of violence but also a pleasurable one in which women retaliate to become the agents of violence and defeat the aggressors. (Pinedo 1997, p. 87) Building on the work of Pinedo and other scholars, this chapter examines the gender politics of contemporary horror cinema. Overall, I argue that films like 10 Cloverfield Lane, Hush, and Don’t Breathe make a valuable contribution to the ongoing fight against Trump; and that they do this by not only using sadistic male antagonists to represent and critique his hate-filled politics, but also by offering up models for resistance in the form of their heroic female protagonists. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a loose sequel to found-footage monster film Cloverfield (2008). Initially conceived as a standalone feature, but retrofitted to sit within the Cloverfield universe, it adapts the original’s themes of paranoia and entrapment to a stripped-back narrative of male-on-female abuse. The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Michelle, a young woman who falls unconscious after being run off the road in a mysterious car crash. When she wakes the next morning, Michelle finds herself in an underground cell. Her captor is Howard, a doomsday prepper played by John Goodman. Howard tells Michelle that there has been an attack (possibly “chemical or nuclear,” most likely “the Russians”), and that he brought her to the bunker beneath his farmhouse for her own safety: according to Goodman’s character, the air outside is toxic, meaning that anyone left on the surface is dead. The only other person present is genial handyman Emmett (John Gallagher Jr). Emmett confirms that something catastrophic has occurred, explaining how he made his way to the bunker after seeing a series of “bright red flashes” in the sky. However, Michelle suspects that there may be more to Howard than

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meets the eye; and, when he begins to elicit increasingly aggressive and domineering behaviour, sets about to uncover the circumstances that led to her being underground. Working together with Emmett, she learns that it was Goodman’s character who ran her off the road, and that he has imprisoned and murdered at least one woman in the past. Determined not to be another one of his victims, Michelle resolves to break free of the bunker, irrespective of the dangers that await outside. At its core, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a critique of patriarchy. It uses Howard, and his imprisonment of Michelle, to explore the way that society treats women, making visible the very real but often hidden limitations that are imposed upon what they can say and do. In this sense, the tagline, “Monsters Come in Many Forms,” serves to draw a comparison between the destruction caused by the Godzilla-like creature in the 2008 original, and the corrosive patriarchal structures that confront Michelle. Indeed, the primary threat to the female protagonist of 10 Cloverfield Lane is not extra-terrestrial; it’s Howard’s insidious efforts to undermine and oppress her. One of the key ways Goodman’s character exerts control over his captive is through a process of infantilisation, as he seeks to remake Michelle in the image of his estranged daughter, Megan. In the opening scenes, Howard gifts Michelle his daughter’s old clothes, and, when she’s looking for something to pass the time, points her to the teen magazines that Megan used to read. These early incidents hint at Howard’s retrograde vision of female identity, his belief that adult women should both behave as children, and submit entirely to male authority. Perhaps the most significant moment in the film, at least in terms of its feminist critique, is the sequence in which the three central characters play a guess-the-word game. Emmett is giving Howard clues to the title of a famous novel, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). Howard is quick to get the first word; but, when Emmett prompts him on the second, stating “It’s what Michelle is” the older man becomes flustered: he guesses “girl,” “child,” and, just before the timer runs out, “little princess.” Howard’s failure – his utter inability to guess the word “woman” – serves as a reminder of not just his sinister intentions toward Michelle, but also the wider patriarchal culture that he represents. It is the representativeness of Goodman’s antagonist, the depressingly familiar quality of his male chauvinism, that makes 10 Cloverfield Lane such an effective piece of social commentary. When Howard patronises Michelle, as part of a more systematic attempt to strip her of agency, the audience is reminded of the types of everyday sexism that routinely impact on women’s lives, and which played a key role in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. As various scholars have observed, Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, a vastly more experienced candidate, was at least partly informed by a deep-seated gender prejudice that views women as “less capable” than men (Bock et al. 2017). This was a notion that Trump himself perpetuated over the course of the campaign, with his repeated suggestions that Clinton was “not fit” for leadership.

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Echoing the sexist rhetoric that Trump directed at Clinton, Howard’s interpretation of what constitutes appropriate female behaviour is extremely limiting, restricted to the traditional duties of looking beautiful, staying silent and, more generally, caring for the needs of men. At one stage, for example, he tells Michelle that she will “learn to love cooking,” indicating the future domestic role he has planned for his captive. In a later scene, Howard instructs Michelle to attend to the wound on his forehead (a wound she caused during one of her escape attempts). However, when he hands over a needle and thread for the stitches, Howard unwittingly provides Winstead’s character with the tools for her escape: in one of several adept displays of survivalist technique, Michelle uses these to construct a hazmat suit that will enable her to venture into the (supposedly) toxic air outside the bunker, sewing together plastic soda bottles and a shower curtain, and sealing the seams shut with duct tape. From the outset, Michelle establishes herself as a determined and resourceful hero. When she first wakes up in the bunker, for instance, she finds herself chained to a wall, the only objects at hand a broken cell phone and the crutch for her injured leg. Rather than panic, Winstead’s character immediately starts to whittle away at the bottom of the crutch, fashioning a spike that she uses to ambush her captor. At every stage, then, Michelle refuses to accept the role of passive victim, choosing instead to eke out a means of resistance in the limited items around her. Hence, it is while reading Megan’s magazines that Michelle first conceives of her idea for the hazmat suit, sketching the preliminary designs on advertisements for the “latest” teen trends. As with the needle and thread, Michelle’s subversive use of the magazines functions as a symbolic rejection of patriarchy: her drawings of female survival gear, on top of photographs of smiling teenage models, indicate just how far she has strayed from Howard’s fantasy of obedient womanhood. Michelle’s ability to repurpose the stereotypical trappings of female identity, using them to facilitate her escape, recalls the way that feminists have sought to weaponise elements of Trump’s misogynist rhetoric against him. A similar resourcefulness was evident in the latter stages of the 2016 election race, when protestors were quick to pounce on various blunders made by the Republican nominee. When Trump interrupted Clinton during the third presidential debate, leaning in to the microphone to call her “a nasty woman,” he was seeking to disparage her credentials, to frame the Democrat in terms of the stereotypical female traits of hot-temperedness and duplicity. However, within hours of the debate, Clinton supporters had turned this insult into a rallying call, sharing the hashtags #nastywomen and #IAmANastyWoman via social media in a powerful display of collective resistance. Although these campaigners were ultimately unsuccessful in getting their candidate elected, the #nastywoman slogan continues to exert an influence over everyday discussions about women’s political representation and rights – as evidenced by its ongoing circulation in memes, and on t-shirts and placards. Writing about the emergence of the #nastywoman

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movement, journalist Jenny Hollander (2016) notes: “It’s a beautiful thing to see misogyny called out, repackaged, and rebranded as a message of female empowerment.” 10 Cloverfield Lane shares in this sense of irreverent feminist protest, with Michelle’s heroics anticipating key strategies in the ongoing fight against Trump; namely, a willingness to re-appropriate his sexist vitriol as a site for resistance. Ultimately, Winstead’s hero escapes the bunker, dowsing Howard with perchloric acid, before crawling through the vents to freedom in her hazmat suit. However, upon reaching the surface, she is confronted with a new danger in the form of a giant spaceship. It turns out that Howard was partly correct: America is under attack; but from an army of alien invaders, not the Russians. In a further display of quick thinking and toughness, Michelle improvises a Molotov cocktail from materials found in a nearby barn, firebombs the spaceship, and drives to safety in an abandoned van. While driving away, she intercepts an SOS message on the radio, calling for any ablebodied person to head to Houston, where the army is currently battling an alien attack. Buoyed by her escape, Michelle turns the van around, making the choice to join the fight for humanity’s survival. In the closing scene, then, Michelle puts Howard in her rear-view mirror, both literally and figuratively. Rather than dwell on the abuse she suffered in the basement, Winstead’s character moves on to the next fight, signalling once again her determination to break out of the constraints imposed by patriarchal structures. It seems particularly significant here that the SOS message in the final sequence should be delivered by another woman (Sumalee Montano), with this relatively minor plot detail further emphasising the feminist thrust of the film – its commitment to the principle that women have a central and active role to play in society. Fighting back against her tormentor using a combination of ingenuity and grit, Michelle exemplifies a character type that Carol Clover (2015, p. 35) terms the “Final Girl.” She is the one left standing, who outlasts all of the other major characters, including, most importantly, the killer/monster. A recurring criticism of the Final Girl trope is that it constructs female subjectivity within the narrow parameters of patriarchal discourse. Vera Dika (1987, p. 95), in her analysis of early slasher pictures like Halloween (1978), argues that the limited agency accorded to the surviving female is most apparent at the close of the film, when, having killed or escaped her tormentor, “she loses her motivation for sight and for violence and so her ability to drive the narrative forward.” For Dika, these female protagonists are never entirely free: they are always ultimately “trapped within the confines of the frame,” with the final shots reinstating their status as objects. 10 Cloverfield Lane subverts this trend through Michelle’s decision to join the human resistance. By turning the car around and heading for Houston, the frontline in the epic struggle against the aliens, she reasserts her agency and cements her status as a fighter. Thus, unlike the conventional Final Girl, whose victory is undercut by the killer/monster’s imminent return in the sequel, Michelle continues

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to wield control over her own narrative, and captures a trend of celebrating female self-determination within contemporary US horror. Directed by Mike Flanagan, Hush also offers up a strong image of female empowerment, but does so through the conventions of the home invasion film. Co-writer Kate Siegel stars as Maddie, a deaf-mute author who lives alone in a remote cabin in the woods. The opening scenes of the film introduce Maddie’s deafness, as well as giving a series of insights into her professional and personal life: Maddie moved from the city less than a year ago, following a difficult break-up, and spends all of her time trying to complete her belated second novel. While sitting down to write one evening, she receives a series of unsettling images via email – someone has been inside the house, and is now using her cell phone to take photographs. The unnamed intruder (John Gallagher Jr) – listed in the credits simply as “The Man” – has already murdered Maddie’s neighbour, Sarah (Samantha Sloyan), and plans to do the same to her. Maddie locks the doors just before he can re-enter, but has no way to call for help as the killer has switched off the power to the house. Instead, she must try to survive on her own. What follows is a tense game of cat and mouse, with the killer thwarting each of Maddie’s efforts to escape, until she decides to stand her ground and confront him head on. Like Howard, Gallagher Jr’s character views women as objects for male gratification, taking a perverse pleasure in the power that he is able to exert over his victims. When he first reveals himself to Maddie, the pair coming face to face through the window of the locked front door, the killer explains that he intends to play with her, prolonging the misery for as long as possible. However, in contrast to 10 Cloverfield Lane, where the primary threat to Michelle is psychological, the violence in Hush is much more physical and sexual in nature. At the simplest level, the threat of sexual violence is symbolised by the killer’s choice of weapons – a hunting knife and a crossbow (Newman 2017). Clover (2015, p. 32), in her influential account of “gender in the slasher film,” outlines the psychosexual dimensions of such choices, explaining: “all phallic symbols are not equal, and a hands-on knifing answers a hands-on rape in a way that a shooting, even a shooting preceded by humiliation, does not.” The threat of sexual violence is also implied through dialogue. In a later scene, for example, the killer remarks that Maddie is “holding out” on him, that he thinks she will scream if he can get her in “the right spot.” There is a double meaning to what he says here, the words alluding to sexual penetration, at the same time as referring to the literal act of piercing her flesh with his knife. Hush’s sexually suggestive dialogue recalls the violently misogynist rhetoric so often employed by Trump and his followers. For example, the killer’s boast that “I can come in any time I want . . . I can get you any time I want” closely echoes the president’s own comments about grabbing women “by the pussy.” In an audio recording from 2005, and which was leaked to the media shortly before the 2016 election, Trump can be heard bragging about using his fame to get women to “fuck” him, and groping them without waiting for consent

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(“You can do anything”). The Republican candidate subsequently sought to brush aside the leaked audio, rationalising that his vulgar and degrading comments were merely “locker-room talk.” Yet, the “pussy tape” became a lightning rod for the anti-Trump campaign, spurring countless women and men to take action against the politician. One of the ways they expressed their anger at his misogyny was through the knitting of woollen “pussy hats,” which appeared in the thousands at rallies and demonstrations across the country. This powerfully visible gesture of defiance parallels the way that Maddie is ultimately able to seize the initiative from her attacker. Like the pussy hat wearers, she turns the tables on a man (The Man) who demonstrates nothing but hate and cruelty towards women. In Hush, the killer underestimates his victim: he assumes that, because she is deaf and a woman, Maddie is powerless to resist. However, Siegel’s hero proves herself to be more than a match for The Man, demonstrating calm under pressure and utilising each of her perceived weaknesses as a strength. What finally enables Maddie to emerge triumphant is the decision to confront the killer on her own terms. When she realises that running is not an option, after he foils yet another of her escape attempts, Maddie resolves to stand and fight. At this point, she uses her own blood to write a message on the window (“DO IT. COWARD”), directly challenging Gallagher Jr’s character to come inside the house. Once inside, the hunter becomes the hunted, as Maddie employs a range of resourceful strategies to wrest control from the killer. She sets off the fire alarm, for example, using the extra-loud siren – designed specifically for the deaf – to disorient the killer and cause him to drop his knife. In the ensuing struggle, Maddie blinds her attacker with insecticide, before killing him by plunging a corkscrew into his throat. Much like 10 Cloverfield Lane, therefore, Hush punishes male chauvinism, at the same time that it rewards female defiance. In this respect, both Michelle and Maddie’s narratives speak strongly to a rising tide of female resistance in the Trump era, showing what can be gained by women who refuse to conform to the demands and expectations of men. Don’t Breathe opens with a disturbing prologue, in which an elderly man drags a young woman through the street. The woman, who we later come to know as Rocky ( Jane Levy), is battered and unconscious; and her attacker, “The Blind Man” (Stephen Lang), is pulling along his victim by the hair. Even in the opening minutes, then, Fede Alvarez’s film foregrounds issues of gender and power, with this brief and enigmatic sequence flagging up the crucial question of who gets to control women’s bodies. Such issues are proving critical to horror cinema at a time when the US president is spearheading a renewed attack on reproductive rights. Films like Hush and 10 Cloverfield Lane engage with debates surrounding abortion obliquely, by telling stories about women who are penned in and dictated to by sadistic men. Don’t Breathe brings these debates to the screen on a much more explicit level, doing so through the experiences of its aforementioned Final Girl, Rocky; and, more specifically, the violence that is enacted upon her body by the male

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antagonist. Indeed, the prologue turns out to be a flash-forward, the briefest of glimpses into the horrifying physical abuse that she endures. Set in the ramshackle suburbs of present-day Detroit, the film follows a group of three teenage delinquents – Rocky, Alex (Dylan Minnette), and Money (Daniel Zovatto). When they hear about a blind army veteran hoarding up to $300,000 in cash, part of the settlement he was awarded after his daughter died in a car accident, the trio decide to break into his home and take the money for themselves. However, the heist doesn’t go according to plan, with The Blind Man proving far less helpless than Rocky, Alex, and Money imagined. Upon discovering the break-in, he locks the unsuspecting teenagers inside the house and begins to pick them off one by one. Like Hush, Don’t Breathe uses disability to offer a twist on the traditional home invasion narrative, but diverges from the previous film by locating the source of the horror inside the house – with the owner, rather than the intruders. Silently stalking his victims, Lang’s character is a truly terrifying figure, one of the most memorable film villains in recent years. Indeed, the ease with which he dispatches Money, seizing the teenager by the throat before executing him with his own gun, recalls the cold-bloodedness of Halloween’s Michael Myers. Yet, the full extent of The Blind Man’s monstrosity only emerges in the second half, following a much-remarked-upon twist that builds on the issues raised in the prologue. While searching for a way out of the house, Rocky stumbles upon a hidden room in the basement, where she discovers a pregnant woman (Franciska Törőcsik) chained to the wall. The chained-up woman is Cindy Roberts, the person who accidentally killed The Blind Man’s daughter with her car: Lang’s character has kidnapped and impregnated Cindy as part of a demented quest for justice (“an eye for an eye”). Horrified, Rocky delays her escape so that she can free the pregnant woman; and, together with Alex, they manage to break the lock on the basement door. However, just as they open the door, The Blind Man appears and opens fire. Mistakenly killing Cindy and badly wounding Alex, he takes Rocky as his new prisoner, telling the teenager that he will only set her free once she bears him a child. With its narrative about a man forcibly impregnating women, Don’t Breathe plays on contemporary anxieties around reproductive rights, especially as they relate to the Trump administration. In an effort to win over conservative evangelicals during the 2016 election, Trump campaigned on an aggressively pro-life platform, suggesting at one stage that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. In the months following his inauguration, he has set about to deliver on these campaign pledges, working together with the hyper-conservative wing of the Republican Party to launch a series of attacks on women’s right to choose. One of Trump’s first acts as president, for example, was the reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule, a Reagan-era policy that bans US aid funding for overseas organisations that provide abortion services. At the same time, his nominations for Associate Justice – Neil Gorsuch (confirmed in April 2017)

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and Brett Kavanaugh (confirmed in October 2018) – have threatened to shift the US Supreme Court even further to the right, opening up the possibility of the gradual rollback of Roe v. Wade (1973). The character of The Blind Man speaks to one of the gravest injustices in contemporary US politics, whereby a male-dominated executive is able to sign into law policies that limit what women can and cannot do with their own bodies. Thus, his warped perspective on Cindy and Rocky, viewing them only as means to an end, mimics the callous disregard of Trump and his pro-life cronies towards women’s reproductive rights. Of the three films discussed here, Don’t Breathe is least successful at critiquing gender violence, partly because it veers so far towards sensationalism. After disposing of Cindy’s body, its value as a life-giving vessel now gone, The Blind Man turns his attention to Rocky. Using a metal harness, he suspends the teenager from the ceiling, before thawing a sample of his frozen semen and sucking it up into a turkey baster. Just as he did with Cindy, Lang’s character plans to inseminate Rocky with the baster and hold her prisoner until she gives birth. Cinematography and editing combine in this sequence to make a spectacle of the sexual assault, Fede Alvarez’s camera lingering on the contents of the baster in a series of extended close-ups, while reaction shots of Rocky, looking on in wide-eyed terror, evoke the abject portrayals of women that are a common feature of the horror genre. From this perspective, it’s noteworthy that Levy’s character is unable to save herself. At the last moment, Alex intervenes to stop the assault, hitting The Bind Man over the head and untying his friend. Earning over $155 million at the international box office, from a production budget of $10 million, Don’t Breathe was a major commercial hit, ending 2016 as the second highest-grossing horror in North America. The film’s twist was central to its success, with large numbers of critics and viewers praising the “boundary-pushing,” “gross-out” nature of the baster scene (see Rafferty and Watercutter 2016). On one level, this scene risks trivialising the fight for reproductive rights, sublimating the issue into a generalised discussion about good versus bad taste. On another level, the sensationalism of Don’t Breathe captures something of the raw and urgent nature of this fight. Freed from the harness, Rocky turns on her attacker, retrieving the baster and shoving it down The Blind Man’s throat. Given recent political events, Rocky’s retribution – her willingness to pay back the violence she suffered in kind – reads like a moment of catharsis, an expression of rage at the way in which abortion services are currently being gutted across the US. When Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, many voters were left reeling by the result, bewildered and frustrated at the success of a candidate who once bragged about grabbing women’s genitals and was committed to eradicating the gains of Roe v. Wade. However, in the months since, there has been cause for optimism – a sense of strength in collective action. Films like 10 Cloverfield Lane and Hush tap into this sense of optimism with their narratives about women turning the tables on violent and sadistic

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men. Don’t Breathe, on the other hand, is far less optimistic, its coda revealing that The Blind Man survived Rocky’s retaliation, in addition to opening up the possibility for future sequels and victims. Irrespective of the differences between these three films, and the extent to which they offer up a new generation of Final Girl protagonists, what’s certain is that the depiction of female characters like Rocky, Michelle, and Maddie, has assumed an increased significance in the current era. At a time when a sexist bigot presides over the White House, orchestrating a series of attacks on women’s rights, there has never been a greater need for progressive horror cinema – for popular stories of empowered women that might inspire audiences (both female and male) to take a stand against Trump’s reactionary politics. With this chapter, I have highlighted one of the ways in which a recent cycle of horror films has begun to do this, through an emphasis on the theme of female survival and resilience. Bibliography Alcott, L. M. (1868). Little Women. Sudbury, MA: Roberts Brothers. Bock, J., Byrd-Craven, J. and Burkley, M. (2017). The Role of Sexism in Voting in the 2016 Presidential Election. Personality and Individual Differences, 119, pp. 189–193. Clover, C. J. (2015). Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Updated Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dika, V. (1987). The Stalker Film, 1978–81. In: G. A. Waller, Ed. American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 86–101. Enda, J. (2017). Donald Trump is the Best-and Worst-Thing That’s Happened to Modern American Feminism. State (Online). Accessed: 8/8/18. Hollander, J. (2016). “I Am A Nasty Woman” Is the Female Empowerment Message Donald Trump Didn’t Mean to Inspire. Bustle (Online). Accessed 8/8/18. Jancovich, M. (1992). Horror. London: Batsford. Newman, G., 2017. Sonic Horror Geographies: ‘Hush’, Gender, and Disability. Open Ivory Tower (Podcast). Accessed: 8/8/18. Pinedo, I. C. (1997). Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany, NY: Suny Press. Peaty, G. (2017). Power in Silence: Captions, Deafness, and the Final Girl. M/C Journal, 20(3). Rafferty, B. and Watercutter, A. (2016). We Need to Talk about That Awful Don’t Breathe Twist. Wired (Online). Accessed: 8/8/18. Wood, R. (1986). Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). Directed by Dan Trachtenberg: Paramount Pictures. Cloverfield (2008). Directed by Matt Reeves: Paramount Pictures. Don’t Breathe (2016). Directed by Fede Álvarez: Screen Gems. Halloween (1978). Directed by John Carpenter: Compass International Pictures. Hush (2016). Directed by Mike Flanagan: Netflix. It Follows (2014). Directed by David Robert Mitchell: RADiUS-TWC. The Purge: Election Year (2016). Directed by James DeMonaco: Universal. The Witch (2015). Directed by Robert Eggers: A24. You’re Next (2013). Directed by Adam Wingard: Lionsgate.

4

An end to monstrosity Horror, queer representation, and the Trump kakistocracy Marshall Moore

There has been a significant shift in the way LGBTQ characters are represented in the horror genre on film and TV since at least 2015, an interval that roughly corresponds with the end of the Obama presidency and the beginning of the Trump era. In this chapter, I am extending and expanding upon the work of Darren Elliott-Smith in Queer Horror Film and Television: Masculinity and Sexuality at the Margins (2016), which is essentially the jumpingoff point for this research, and Harry M. Benshoff in Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997) (Elliott-Smith’s book picks up more or less where Benshoff ’s leaves off. Moreover, in the seminal The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1987), Vito Russo devotes a chapter to the subject of queer horror, and many of his observations are as relevant today as they were when he made them three decades ago. Herein, I will focus primarily on The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, American Horror Story, the television remake of The Exorcist, and several of their most relevant predecessors to argue that the connection previously made between queer sexuality and monstrous Otherness is finally being severed. First, though: does representation actually matter? I maintain that it does, albeit within realistic expectations, and I would like to get that question out of the way first by looking at arguments from both sides before focussing on horror. In The Queer Politics of Television, Samuel Chambers argues that concerning ourselves with representation is pointless: “it can provide absolutely no political guarantees” (2009, p. 87). Taken at face value, this is a sensible, defensible statement. However, Chambers further suggests that a critique based on norms would be more useful: specifically, that attacking those norms by subverting them would be more efficacious in terms of bringing about social change and representative justice. Although this line of reasoning has merit in the abstract in the sense that it acknowledges the lack of guaranteed outcomes, it lacks a practical corollary. Kylo-Patrick Hart, who conducted a study on post-1960 representation of gay men in the American media, takes the opposite view: “Media representation . . . matters because representation is a form of social action, involving the production of meanings that ultimately have real effects” (2000, p. 62). So does Amy Villarejo, whose writing in Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire extends

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the work of Theodor Adorno, making a case that the matter of representation is less about the struggle for social justice – and emphatically not in the sense that “television reflects its viewers; that television ought to do so; that it has an obligation toward diversity of representation; or that diverse representation leads to political change” (2014, p. 3; emphasis in the original) – than it is about the proposition that no boundary exists between “us” and TV. To put it another way, we should care about representation for the same reason we look in mirrors. Although I side with Villarejo and Hart, I note that little consensus exists – to say nothing of the disconnect between LGBTQ theorists and the wider queer community – around what form representation should take and who should be the arbiters of its validity and effectiveness. The queer community, to the extent that one can even be said to exist, is too diverse for such consensus to be achievable. Case in point: while welcomed by some, the (hyper)masculine gay men of Dante’s Cove have been called inauthentic and said to pander to gay male anxieties about perceived effeminacy (Elliott-Smith, 2016). More recently, the sitcom Modern Family, which is perhaps more often credited for its positive depictions of gay couple Cam and Mitch, has also been criticised: it has been pointed out that Cam and Mitch are de-sexualised in a way that is inconsistent with the other, heterosexual characters (Rosenberg, 2010; Kornhaber, 2015). As Sean Donovan writes in Gender Forum, Queer representation in shows such as Modern Family seeks to incorporate and devour queerness: surrounding it in normativity structures and, ultimately, destroying it. The show is every bit the polemical extreme of “reproductive futurism” defined by Lee Edelman in his landmark work No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), in which he argues that the rhetorical figure of the child in culture becomes a means of solidifying heteronormative stability, as well as Lisa Duggan’s model of homonormativity. (2016, p. 43) And given the controversy surrounding the homicidal lesbian characters in Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 thriller Basic Instinct, which some viewers interpreted as “mov[ing] female heroism and cinematic lesbianism to a new and exciting place” and others saw as “part of a general smear campaign that Hollywood has long maintained against queers” (Halberstam, 1993, p. 196), it should not be surprising that opinions are strong on the subject of representation but inconsistent on what it ought to entail. At the very least, the conclusion one can draw from all this is that queer audiences are difficult to satisfy. There is much validity in the point that these shows often seem to collapse queerness into a narrowly gender-conforming and heteronormative array of body types and relationship structures, but so great is/was the stigma around homosexuality that it was only as recently as the 1970s that queer characters were openly identified as such on American TV at all. Often this

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happened on topical episodes of popular series (Russo, 1987; Villarejo, 2014; Elliott-Smith, 2016; et al.), and those shows “continued to trade in stereotypes [even as they] also circulated more lingering and intimate glimpses of queer life-worlds” (Villarejo, 2014, p. 23). It has taken much longer to see characters whose queerness is incidental, and whose same-sex relationships are treated with the same respect as heterosexual ones. While there is room for improvement, some of the criticism originating from queer theory is also not helpful: it goes to nihilistic extremes, as can be seen in Edelman’s linkage of queerness to the Freudian death drive and recommendation that queers embrace an abjected status in (or outcast from) society, rejecting heteronormative institutions such as marriage in favour of unspecified or ill-defined alternatives (2004). We also see this in the ever-expanding definition of queer that interpolates terrorists with members of the sexual or gender minorities they might prefer to blow up (Ruti, 2017). While Edelman’s underlying points about the myth of reproductive futurity and its prominence are well taken, I find his reverence for abjection problematic and patronising toward the subjects whose lives queer theory was ostensibly intended to speak to, of, and for (I am not a Freudian, and further discussion would be outside the scope of this chapter). Bringing the discussion back to horror, Barbara Creed invokes Julia Kristeva’s writings on the abject to argue that an imperative exists to exclude the abject, “separating the human from the non-human and the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject. Ritual becomes a means by which societies both renew their initial contact with the abject element and then exclude that element” (1986, p. 68). By this chain of logic, if we start at queer theory and follow the thread to discover what is being said about the abject space Edelman and other queer theoreticians would have us occupy, we are to go on equating queer status with the abject, the monstrous, even with human waste. To put it another way, to be treated like shit, which I contend is not necessarily still the baseline for queer representation in horror. Before we move on, a brief and final comment on my usage of the word “queer.” As Michael Warner says in “Something Queer about the Nation State,” The term does not translate very far with any ease, and its potential for transformation seems mostly specific to a cultural context that has not been brought into focus in the theory of queerness. Even in cultures with well-organized gay movements and a taste for Americanisms, there has been little attempt to import the politics with which the label has been associated here. In the New World Order, we should be more than usually cautious about global utopianisms that require American slang. (2002, p. 209) Herein, I use “queer” for convenience and inclusivity, and I use it interchangeably with “LGBTQ.”

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An end to monstrosity? In lieu of the generic linkage between queer sexuality and monstrosity/the Other, we are beginning to see resilience and capability as a new baseline in queer representation. This may be less about Trumpism than timing, although the most recent series of the TV series I cited in the introduction seem to bear out my hypothesis. This is not to say that every LGBTQ character in horror TV and film is portrayed in this manner now; “heterosexuality is [still] framed in conjunction with normalcy, and queer characters are positioned as foils to leading players” (Sevenich, 2015, p. 36). But the reflexive tendency to demonise and/or exterminate them (“punishment for existing”) seems to be waning. Furthermore, I contend that structural homophobia has not necessarily been behind every decision to kill off a queer character in these series. A key precursor to this emerging pattern in representation would be campy homonormative horror series such as Dante’s Cove and The Lair, and the “queer slasher film” Hellbent, all of which were written by gay men and produced with gay audiences in mind. This is also true of their immediate predecessors, the “killer queers [featured in] the queerly produced films The Living End (1992), Swoon (1992), or Sister, My Sister (1994)” (Benshoff, 1997, p. 232). These films would most likely never have been produced by straight filmmakers. Because of horror’s inherently conservative genre requirement that what is monstrous (which Creed and Kristeva posit as the abject) must be eradicated in order to preserve the norm, the narrative in which queers are punished for existing has also gone by the wayside (perhaps not completely, but it is notably absent from these early works). Instead, as Elliott-Smith (2016) points out, these transitional works are more propelled by gay male insecurities based on physical appearance, desirability, and HIV/AIDS. And Benshoff, in his own book, hints that this “cultural equation of monster and homosexual,” which “continues to be exploited in new and vigorous ways,” may finally be within measurable distance of its end but does not provide examples (1997, p. 238). I argue that we now have them. There are three significant examples of non-monstrous, non-Othered, capable queer resilience in lead characters in current/recent horror series: Colman Domingo’s Victor Strand in Fear the Walking Dead, Sarah Paulson’s Ally Mayfair-Richards in American Horror Story: Cult, and Ben Daniels’s Father Marcus Keane in The Exorcist. Because The Exorcist was cancelled after the end of its second series, I will focus more on Victor Strand and Ally Mayfair-Richards. Strand appears for the first time in the fifth episode of series 1: he and one of the other series leads are in a military holding cell at the beginning of the zombie outbreak, as Los Angeles and other major cities are being overrun. Strand is almost supernaturally calm in the midst of this chaos; he is shrewd, wealthy, conniving, and persuasive, at one point in episode 6 (“The Good Man”) saying “the only way to survive a mad world is to embrace the madness” (Fear the Walking Dead, 2015).

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Capable of making an instantaneous assessment of his situation, he identifies the one other person in the holding cell most likely to help him escape and shows no empathy whatsoever toward the remaining prisoners in the facility with them. He has a yacht offshore, anchored and ready to serve as refuge and getaway vehicle, and a destination in mind – the ranch his partner’s family owns down in Mexico. As the series has progressed, his character arc has been less about embracing madness (although he continually struggles against his impulses to flee and/or to betray people) and more about embracing humanity. In fact, his sexuality is not even revealed until the fourth episode of series 2 (“Blood in the Streets”), as he and the survivors he is travelling with attempt to make their way to a safe house he and his partner jointly own. A pivotal FTWD episode that says much about the difference in the way LGBTQ characters are now portrayed in horror is “Sicut Cervus,” the sixth in series 2, in which it is revealed that Strand’s partner Thomas Abigail (Dougray Scott) has been bitten and will soon die and turn into a zombie. Strand struggles with the choice of committing suicide in order to die with him, and is in fact encouraged to do so by Celia (Marlene Forté), a woman who works on the estate and who has been murdering people in the belief that they are resurrecting as “what comes next” (AMC, 2016). In the end, and choosing to live, he shoots the zombie that Thomas has turned into. Later, in “Pillar of Salt” (episode 12), Strand is potentially fatally wounded when an aggrieved woman stabs him. He survives because other members of the group risk their lives to find medicine for him, which is not an outcome I would have expected ten years ago in a mainstream horror series like this one. In defiance of the “punishment for existing” narrative, Strand is (at the time of this writing, series 4 is airing) one of two remaining leads to have survived since series 1, the others (including, in the current series, Kim Dickens’s Madison) all having been killed off. For much of the first half of American Horror Story: Cult, Ally MayfairRichards is anything but capable and resilient. In the series’ opening episode (“Election Night”), the announcement of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election sends Ally into a mental-health crisis. She sobs as she and her wife Ivy (Alison Pill) watch the results on TV; later in the episode, Ally has hallucinations of a pack of evil clowns while buying groceries. In the episodes that follow, more phobias (small, clustered holes; bloody objects; confined spaces) she had previously been able to manage with therapy resurface. As with every other series of AHS, there are multiple plot threads that will eventually more or less converge, often via the deaths of significant characters, a structure that has been interpreted as a destabilisation and queering of the seriality of TV that “adopt[s] linear narration in only the most remote and temporary fashion” (Geller and Banker, 2017, p. 37). In this case, it is not resilience but Ally’s fragility and its effects on the people around her that define her as a character. To make things worse, Ivy and other members of the titular cult (modelled to an extent on Trump and

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his supporters) have been gaslighting Ally with the intention of causing her to have a breakdown. They succeed: in episode 7 (“Valerie Solanas Died for Your Sins: Scumbag”), two-thirds of the way through the series, she is hospitalised. In the following episode (“Winter of Our Discontent”), upon being released, Ally learns of the plot against her and its place in a larger sociopolitical scheme being enacted by Kai Anderson, the cult’s leader (Evan Peters). In this episode (“Winter of Our Discontent”), she begins to find her strength, seeking revenge against Ivy for her betrayal and then endeavouring to put an end to the cult. Significantly, whatever happens to Ally during her hospitalisation happens offscreen, a temporal compression that may be read to indicate that the strength and decisiveness Ally exhibits after her discharge were always there. This is consistent with the background information given about her during the series: her psychological issues were under control until the election and the cult’s subsequent actions brought on her crisis. In the series finale (“Great Again”), Ally successfully mounts a campaign for the US Senate and entering a life of public service. For both characters, sexual orientation is presented as a non-issue, of no more importance than that of anyone else in the story. By not having to negotiate the closet (which was a trope explored deeply in Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under, which with the ghosts that appeared in most episodes may also be seen as a forerunner of today’s queer horror representations [Chambers, 2003]), Stand and Ally are able to exist more or less free of the worries about who knows they are gay, who doesn’t, and what the reaction will be. They are in danger but not because they themselves are seen as monstrous. This approach contrasts sharply with the way the closet is dealt with in The Exorcist. Father Marcus is a priest, and the Catholic Church’s mediaeval stance on homosexuality creates a constant balancing act for him. Bad enough that he is not even entirely sure what his sexual identity is, a detail proposed by Ben Daniels, the actor who played him. In the original teleplay, Father Marcus was written as gay, but Daniels convinced Rolin Jones, the series one showrunner, that a more nuanced portrayal of sexuality would be more realistic. In the resulting version, Marcus entered the Church as a preteen, several years before his sexuality had developed. When he is finally excommunicated, he begins a process of self-discovery. Is he gay? Bisexual? This is left open-ended (Roots, 2017); in an interview given toward the end of series 2, series creator Jeremy Slater seems to confirm the open-endedness, saying in response to negative tweets about a scene in which Marcus kisses another man, I saw a couple of homophobes on Twitter and my response is, “Good, fuck you. I’m glad you didn’t like it, I’m glad it ruined the show for you. You shouldn’t have good things in your life.” If a homophobe can’t watch the show any more because one of the characters is gay, then I’m glad something good has come out of it. This is 2017 and we still have people throwing temper tantrums on line because they don’t want to see

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gay characters. I think it’s the last gasp of a certain breed of dinosaur that’s on the way out, and let them kick and scream as they go. (2017) In the same interview, he goes on to confuse the issue by saying that “[w]e’ve said from the beginning that Marcus is a bisexual character, which is pretty rare on television in general and certainly on network television, where everyone has binary definitions of gay or straight” (Slater, 2017). What matters more is the vehemence of Slater’s denunciation of homophobia, a stance unlikely to have been seen (much less printed verbatim) in the mainstream media a decade ago. Ironically, the people he deals with in the secular world tend to accept him as he is; the demons he battles in his work as an exorcist are the ones who mock his sexual identity and lingering feelings of shame. Due to the nature of his work and the fact that he has survived it, resilience is almost a given. In the series, he survives possession and any number of other harrowing supernatural attacks and emerges more or less unscathed. Had the show not been cancelled, it seems likely that the arc of his character development would have been toward greater certainty and security in his sexual identity, and thus more inner strength that would enable him to survive his job. This trend of resilience, which I attribute largely to the growing influence of out gay and lesbian filmmakers and producers – notably, Alan Ball, Ryan Murphy, and Brian Fuller – was already in place by 2013. As members of Generation X, they would have come out – as I did – at a time when gay identity was tied up with the death sentence that was HIV/AIDS, and with queer activists screaming in the streets. Indeed, throughout much of the 1990s, gay men were often depicted as having HIV, almost as if impending death were the only acceptable gay storyline (Hart, 1999, 2000). While resilience may be new as a descriptor when it comes to queer characters in film and on TV, there is nothing particularly new about it within the LGBTQ community. And while queers have been making films and TV since the origins of those two media, the fact that there are such prominent out ones is a genuinely new development. Many queer creatives above the age of 40 are the ones HIV/AIDS and the bigots in the small towns where we grew up didn’t kill – a statement that would have sounded hyperbolic five years ago but today, in light of the violence and growing political repression under the Trump administration seems worth pointing out once again. It is notable that these directors’ earlier projects confronted homophobia head-on: Ball’s 1999 film American Beauty, for example, was about a deeply closeted ex-Marine Corps colonel who believed his male next-door neighbour (played by Kevin Spacey) had seduced (in an ironic case of art imitating life) his teenage son. Homophobia and the characters’ reactions to it are recurring themes in Six Feet Under, as it also is in Ryan Murphy’s Glee. Among the shows still on air, it is probably not surprising that Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story led the way with resilience among queer

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characters. In the most literal chronological sense, the direct forerunner would be Alan Ball’s True Blood, which was based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries series and aired from 2008 until 2014. Setting the queer vampire characters (Pamela De Beaufort, played by Kristin Bauer van Stratten; Tara Thornton, played by Rutina Wesley) aside, it is Lafayette Reynolds (Nelsan Ellis) who is the show’s most prominent example of LGBTQ representation. Although Lafayette displays the same tough-mindedness we see in Victor Strand and post-institutionalisation Ally Mayfair-Richards, I hesitate to suggest that True Blood went as far as these later series in delinking queer sexuality from the monstrous Other. Partly this is to do with Lafayette’s flamboyant appearance and exaggerated mannerisms throughout: he is not a cross-dresser, but a rather more complex figure who wears make-up and ostentatious jewellery, often appearing to be part pirate and part drag queen. In the story, he augments his job as a short-order cook by selling drugs and dabbling in prostitution. During series 3, he is shown to be a psychic medium, and in series 4, he is possessed by a malevolent spirit and forced to murder his lover (who himself was a male witch). Lafayette’s otherness is not merely a product of his outrageousness and his abilities, however. Among the human/living True Blood characters (more so in the TV series than the books), women, people of colour, and sexual minorities tend to be supernaturals of one form or another, and straight white men tend to be “normal.” It is in this respect – queer resistance rather than queer resilience – that True Blood is the true forerunner to American Horror Story. If “violence against white men perpetrated by women and people of color disrupts the logic of represented violence so thoroughly that (at least for a while) the emergence of such unsanctioned violence has an unpredictable power,” as Jack Halberstam writes in Imagined Violence/Queer Violence (1993, p. 191), the same logic should apply to queers vis-à-vis the heteronormative society that oppresses them. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) might at first glance seem to be another early forerunner of queer resilience in horror, but it falls squarely into the punishment-narrative category of representation, arguably even more so than True Blood. Writer and showrunner Joss Whedon (whose godfather was gay) has gone on record as valuing positive representations of LGBTQ characters (Mangels, 2002). Although the show drew praise for having a lesbian lead character (Willow Rosenberg, played by Alyson Hanigan), her “sexual awareness coincided with her initiation into the dark arts” (Kelly, 2016). After her girlfriend Tara (Amber Benson) was killed off – in the first episode in which they had been shown having sex – Willow “descen[ded] into black magic vengeance that not only turned her into a killer but imperiled her friends, her sanity, and eventually the world itself ” (Mangels, 2002). Even True Blood’s sanitised depiction (or lack thereof) of intimacy between Lafayette and his brujo boyfriend Jesús was less troubling: although there was a double standard in terms of how their sex life was depicted, at least Jesús didn’t die after their first time in bed together.

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Where True Blood arguably paved the way for this shift in representation, Ryan Murphy has gone much further with it, although this did not become apparent until series 2 of American Horror Story. The gay couple in series 1 (2011, and later given the subtitle Murder House) were incidental enough not to warrant discussion here, but Lana Winters (played by Sarah Paulson), one of the main characters in AHS: Asylum (2012–2013), is the embodiment of resilience as she survives commitment to the titular insane asylum, rape, a murder attempt, and an assortment of other horrors and indignities. Highly significant is the fact that, as Elliott-Smith points out, Asylum is set in the 1960s, a time in American history when homosexuality was still criminalised, which meant being publicly identified as LGBTQ could result in imprisonment, commitment to a psychiatric institution, loss of employment, estrangement from family, or some combination of the above (2016). It is also significant that Murphy cast Sarah Paulson in this role: she has publicly identified herself as sexually fluid, but all of her acknowledged relationships in the last decade have been with women. This is the first of a number of casting and narrative choices in AHS that further support my contention that Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and the other principals in the show, aware of the issues related to representation and queer history, are choosing to set a new precedent. Although AHS’s third (Coven) and fourth (Freak Show) series dealt very little with LGBTQ themes in the most literal sense, both were thoroughly queer in the academic sense by focussing on marginalised, oppressed subcultures (witches whose supernatural abilities are apparently an inborn trait which requires them to hide; the cast and crew of a travelling freak show in 1950s Florida). After Asylum, the next series to feature a prominent queer storyline was series five, Hotel (2015–2016). After two series with storylines that explored themes of queer experience and identity symbolically, Hotel went to the opposite extreme. Resilience in the strictest sense matters very little in this case, however, as most of the queer characters are supernatural in some way. For all its slaughter, queer and otherwise, Hotel is highly relevant to my discussion of queerness and monstrosity because it continues AHS’s trend, in increasingly clear evidence since Asylum, of queering itself. In Hotel, Ryan Murphy has made a (full-)frontal assault on the queerness-as-monstrosity trope by literally making all the queers monsters, presenting “queerness not as the monster that threatens community but as the antidote to the horror of heteronormativity or marriage, domesticity, monogamy, and family” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 32). Like every other series, the plot is convoluted and does not lend itself to concise, coherent summary. Essentially, the shabbychic and very haunted Hotel Cortez in downtown Los Angeles is owned by a bisexual vampire, played by Lady Gaga (who publicly identifies as bisexual), who despite her status as a bloodthirsty immortal is not immune to the ravages of bad investments. She contrives to sell the hotel to a bisexual-or-gay fashion designer (Will Drake, played by Cheyenne Jackson, who is gay), who is later murdered and becomes a ghost. Among her lovers are Ramona Royale

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(played by Angela Bassett) and the possibly bisexual Donovan (played by Matt Bomer, who is gay): both vampires. The bartender is a bald transgender woman called Liz Taylor; played by Denis O’Hare (gay, publicly out), she chooses to be murdered so that she can become a ghost, united with her true love Tristan (bisexual, played by Finn Wittrock). As was the case with Coven and Freak Show, Hotel presents a sort of subculture that must be hidden from view of the outside world, only this time the queerness is explicit. Although these vampires can walk in sunlight and the ghosts have solidity and agency, safety requires them to keep their existence a secret. The origins of the vampirism in Hotel are not supernatural: it’s a blood-borne virus, an obvious HIV reference that harkens back to less-positive (ahem) circa-1990s gay male representations. Notably, the queer characters are all either already dead, or they die in the end, or become vampires or vampiric ghosts; together, they form an immortal, supernatural chosen family in a place that they own and control, where they are safe. In other words, the queer characters get the most subversive happy ending imaginable. Like AHS, The Walking Dead was also an early adopter of queer resilience. The three surviving queer characters in Frank Darabont’s TV adaptation of The Walking Dead were among the first to embody this strand of toughness and resilience instead of horror-fodder victimhood, and of the three who have been killed off, it is notable that two had in common a certain fragility and risk-aversion (the third died in a gun battle). Tara Chambler, played by Alanna Masterson, was the first out queer character on the series. Introduced in series 4 (2013), her presence on the show was a harbinger of the representation that would be seen in this series and others. Initially a member of an enemy faction of predatory survivors, Tara joins the group led by series lead Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and stays with them through the travails that ensue. She is introduced in the context of a relationship at first, but her girlfriend Alisha (Juliana Harkavy) is fatally shot during a battle between the two groups. Later, in series 6, Tara has a brief romance with Denise Cloyd (Merritt Wever), but Denise is murdered by yet another group of enemies (the Saviors) toward the end of the series. Near the midpoint of series 5 (2014–2015), the first gay male characters are introduced: Aaron (played by Ross Marquand) and his more reticent boyfriend Eric Raleigh ( Jordan Woods-Robinson). Aaron and Eric were residents of the Alexandria Safe-Zone, a walled enclave in the Northern Virginia city of the same name, but had the role of scouts and rangers, venturing out into the zombie-overrun surrounding area in order to observe and recruit potential Alexandria residents. The third of The Walking Dead’s three prominent (and surviving) queer characters is Paul Rovia, nicknamed Jesus because of his appearance. Played by Tom Payne, Jesus has a somewhat similar recruiting and supply scavenging role to Aaron and Eric at first. In series 6 (2015–2016), after Alexandria has been overrun, the survivors make their way to another (relatively) safe outpost, the Hilltop Colony, where Jesus is one of the first people they meet.

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The Walking Dead has drawn criticism because of its depiction of (and perceived tendency to kill off) LGBTQ characters. In particular, Denise Cloyd’s death coincided with another highly visible lesbian character’s death on postapocalyptic science fiction series The 100, and warrants discussion here. In the second and third series of The 100, series lead (Clarke Griffin, played by Eliza Taylor) is romantically involved with another woman (Lexa, played by Alycia Debnam-Carey. When Debnam-Carey won a lead role on the thennew Fear the Walking Dead, her character was written out of The 100, leading to accusations of homophobia; in response, she insisted in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that the only motivation for eliminating the character was that she was leaving the series (2016). While an argument could be made that television writers ought to consider other plot devices than dramatic death scenes when actors leave shows, it was a legitimate ending for that character in that post-apocalyptic storyline; I do not see it as indicative of a larger trend of devaluing queer lives and characters, and my reading on the queer dynamics of The Walking Dead is similar. In this relentlessly bleak fictional universe, one of the overarching themes is the breakdown – from conflict or from the fate worse than death that is resurrection as a zombie – of interpersonal relationships: they often do not survive even if the characters in them do. Resourcefulness and toughness are valorised above caution and timidity, and I contend that the characters Denise and Eric died not because they were gay but because it was a statement that they fundamentally lacked the toughness and resilience necessary to survive. This show is not kind to its meeker characters – or to any of its characters, really. To return to the more recent past, AHS: Roanoke (series 6; 2016) may be read as a clear textual linkage between the previous two series’ examinations of the experiences of marginalised groups and the politicised dangers warned of in Cult. Roanoke, like Kevin Smith’s 2011 Red State, is a stark and horrific romp in redneck-infested woods. Harkening back as far as Deliverance (1972) in its portrayals of hapless city people menaced in the country wilderness, Roanoke is essentially a ghost story with two connected groups of antagonists: the ghosts of the disappeared Roanoke Colony and the inbred (but living) family who serve them. The premise of the story is that a documentary about an interracial Los Angeles couple have moved to this house in a remote, rural corner of North Carolina. Things went horribly, supernaturally wrong and culminated in what appeared to be a murder-suicide. Because the documentary, My Roanoke Nightmare, was such a success, the producer has decided to create a sequel using the actors who had played the roles of the first film. In a clever usage of mise en abyme, the actors actually go to the house during the “Blood Moon” series when the original murders took place. There, they find themselves menaced by the same ghosts and rednecks who killed the original inhabitants. Like Deliverance, Roanoke seems to be saying that city and country don’t mix; people from blue states and big cities leave them at their own peril. The interracial couple Shelby (Lily Rabe) and Matt (Andre Holland) may be read

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as queer; certainly they are Others in the eyes of the locals, as are the actors playing the actors who portray them (Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding Jr). Throughout, Roanoke shows us condemnatory/purgative attacks against these outsiders. The ghosts arrived and died in what is now America in the late 1500s and have the morals to match. The pattern that emerges is in their viewpoint, the modern day itself is the Other, and although they label it as sacrifice carried out on religious grounds, in essence they are attacking and obliterating anyone who represents an incursion into their 16th-century norms. The hillbillies, they understand, but Hollywood people, mixed-race couples, African Americans, Asian Americans, and homosexuals violate their views on the natural order of things and must be wiped out. In other words, Roanoke is a provocative exploration of Trumpism. Ultimately . . . Does art (for my purposes here, TV and film) lead, or does it follow? I believe it does both simultaneously because, as Villarejo argues, it is less a product of us than it is an extension of us. Overall, I expect the resilience narrative to persist, at least for the near future. To the extent that we may view the Trump kakistocracy as a class war, the financial success of productions such as AHS, The Walking Dead, and The Exorcist is likely to trump (ahem) the growing dystopian trend in American governance. Even if Trump does not remain in office, the social divisions that have surfaced during his tenure in the White House are unlikely to be easily and quickly resolved. It is too soon to tell whether our political future will be The Handmaid’s Tale or Sense8, but either outcome may well go hand in hand with narratives of resistance in the wake of the trauma of the last few years. Moreover, the disruptive power of the internet, and the entrance of web-based producers of TV and film (the latter being of particular relevance because this distribution model sidesteps cinemas and brings them straight into viewers’ homes) Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon suggests that these representations are likely to remain the norm. Another positive development (although some will not take it as such) is the trend of demonising the traditional enemies of all that is queer: rednecks, religious fundamentalists, and their associated belief systems and institutions. The queer characters in the film Red State, which featured a cult of murderous, well-armed, rabidly homophobic Christian zealots, may not have survived, but neither did most of the cast; more recently, the TV adaptation of The Exorcist has featured a demonically compromised Catholic Church, and in its hellish bureaucracy, the figurative is made literal. If, as Villarosa contends, we are TV and TV is us (2014), the question of representation is neither obsolete nor irrelevant. Yes, it would be a welcome change for more queer characters and relationships to survive within the horror genre. Representation in horror matters because character deaths tell us about who is seen to matter in society and who does not. At the same time, horror is not the genre we should look to for “happily ever after” representations in the stories

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and their endings, empowerment for its own sake; and not every on-screen death is a manifestation of homophobia. Bibliography Benshoff, M. (1997). Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Chambers, S. (2003). “Telepistemology of the Closet; or, the Queer Politics of Six Feet Under.” The Journal of American Culture, 26(1), pp. 24–41. Chambers, S. (2009). The Queer Politics of Television. London: I.B. Tauris. Creed, B. (1986, 1 January). “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen, 27(1) pp. 44–71. Debnam-Carey, A. (2016). “Alycia Debnam-Carey Reflects on ‘Passionate Response’ to Series 3’s Lexa Twist.” The Hollywood Reporter (Online). Accessed: 26/8/18. Donovan, S. (2016). “Becoming Unknown: Hannibal and Queer Epistemology.” Gender Forum, (59), pp. 38–61. Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Elliott-Smith, D. (2016). Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins. London: I.B. Tauris. Geller, T. L. and Banker, A. M. (2017). “That Magic Box Lies: Queer Theory, Seriality, and American Horror Story.” The Velvet Light Trap. 79(Spring), pp. 36–49. Halberstam, J. (1993). “Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage, and Resistance.” Social Text, 37(Winter), pp. 187–201. Halberstam, J. (2005). “Neo-Splatter: Bride of Chucky and the Horror of Heteronormativity.” Film International, 3(3), pp. 32–41. Hart, K. P. (1999). “Retrograde Representation: The Lone Gay White Male Dying of AIDS on Beverly Hills, 90210.” Journal of Men’s Studies: A Scholarly Journal about Men and Masculinities, 7(2), pp. 201–213. Hart, K. P. (2000). “Representing Gay Men on American Television.” Journal of Men’s Studies: A Scholarly Journal about Men and Masculinities, 9(1), pp. 59–79. Kelly, A. (2016). Queer Fear and American Horror Story. The 13th Floor (Online). Accessed: 21/8/18. Kornhaber, S. (2015). The Modern Family Effect: Pop Culture’s Role in the Gay-Marriage Revolution. The Atlantic (Online). Accessed: 21/8/18. Mangels, A. (2002). “Lesbian Sex = Death?.” The Advocate, (869/870), pp. 70–71. Roots, K. (2017). Exorcist’s Ben Daniels Teases Marcus’ Finale Reunion with Mouse, Untangles Their Past: ‘He Was in Love with Her’. TV Line (Online). Accessed: 26/8/18. Rosenberg, A. (2010). Modern Family and Gay Marriage: It’s Complicated. The Atlantic (Online). Accessed: 21/8/18. Russo, V. (1987). The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: Harper Collins. Sevenich, R. (2015). “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are’: Queering American Horror Story.” Gender Forum: An Internet Journal of Gender Studies, 54, pp. 35–51. Slater, J. (2017). The Exorcist: Interview: Jeremy Slater (Series 2) (updated). Sci-Fi Bulletin (Online). Accessed: 26/8/18. Villarejo, A. (2014). Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.

80 Marshall Moore The 100 (2014+). Directed by Various: The CW. American Beauty (1999). Directed by Sam Mendes: DreamWorks. American Horror Story (2011–2017). Directed by Various: FX Networks. Basic Instinct (1992). Directed by Paul Verhoeven: Carolco Pictures. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). Directed by Various: UPN. Dante’s Cove (2005–2007). Directed by Various: Here TV. Deliverance (1972). Directed by John Boorman: Warner Bros. The Exorcist (2016–2018). Directed by Various: Fox Broadcasting Company. Fear the Walking Dead (2015+). Directed by Various: AMC Networks. Glee (2009–2015). Directed by Various: Fox Broadcasting Company. The Handmaid’s Tale (2016+). Directed by Various: Hulu. Hellbent (2004). Directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts: Regent Releasing. The Lair (2007–2009). Directed by Various: Here TV. The Living End (1992). Directed by Gregg Araki: October Films. Modern Family (2009+). Directed by Various: ABC. Red State (2011). Directed by Kevin Smith: SModcast Pictures/Lionsgate. Sense8 (2015–2018). Directed by Various: Netflix. Sister, My Sister (1994). Directed by Nancy Meckler: British Screen Productions. Six Feet Under (2001–2005). Directed by Various: HBO. Swoon (1992). Directed by Tom Kalin: Fine Line Features. True Blood (2008–2014). Directed by Various: HBO. The Walking Dead (2010+). Directed by Various: AMC Networks.

5

Trauma, repression, and The Babadook Sexual identity in the Trump era Fran Pheasant-Kelly

While the The Babadook (Kent, 2014) was released prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration, its theme of trauma repression in the domestic sphere has recently resonated with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) audiences and has become emblematic of the anti-LGBT politics fermented by Trump. The parallel was drawn unwittingly (Bradley, 2017) but has fallen on fertile ground in that its narrative of repressed grief, which manifests as a monstrous Other (called Mister Babadook), has been interpreted as analogous to the repression of alternate sexual identities, with the image of the Babadook becoming a gay icon (Hunt, 2017). The film’s plot unfolds around the tense relationship between Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis), whose husband was killed in a car accident whilst taking her to hospital to give birth, and her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Initially, it appears that Samuel is suffering from anxiety triggered by the loss of his father, and is suggested by his symptoms of trauma and erratic actions. It is also implied by his school teachers who claim that he has significant behavioural problems. In addition, lighting, mise-en-scène, and sound effects, generated from his perspective, visually and acoustically suggest that he is troubled. However, instances of fast motion and slow motion editing, and amplified non-simultaneous and asynchronous sound associated with his mother, as well as various narrative clues begin to suggest that she is also mentally distressed. It soon transpires that Amelia too appears to be suffering from the effects of trauma and is projecting her grief onto her son. Thereafter, the spectator begins to witness hallucinations from her perspective rather than from that of Samuel. Ultimately, the monstrous Babadook remains confined to the basement of their home, with no absolute resolution of Amelia’s trauma, merely its ongoing repression. Taking into account the reception of The Babadook, this essay has two original aspects: first, it extends Robin Wood’s (2003) canonical thesis regarding the representation of monstrosity to include trauma; and second, it equates the psychological aspects of repression represented in a cinematic context with the repression of sexual identity emergent in the politics of Donald Trump. Engaging with theorists of trauma and repression, including Richard McNally (2003) and Roger Luckhurst (2008), critical works pertaining to sexual identity, as well as horror theorist Robin Wood’s

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(2003) account of the return of the repressed, this essay textually analyses the film’s theme of suppressed grief and traumatic dissociation. It considers these aspects through the film’s visual and narrative tropes and connects them to the repression that LGBT individuals may experience, focussing on Trump-era politics and the Babadook as gay icon. The Babadook, horror, and monstrosity While it is often considered that trauma is difficult to represent directly in visual form (Žižek, 2002), and is usually consigned to signification via the emotional and behavioural expression of traumatised characters, the monster of The Babadook serves as a visual embodiment of trauma. Indeed, according to Roger Luckhurst, cinema offers a key means for the temporalization of experience . . . and its specific stylistic devices (mise-en-scène, montage, conventions for marking point of view and temporal shifts in particular) have made it a cultural form closely attuned to representing the discordances of trauma. (2008: 177) To date, there has been limited scholarship on the figure of the Babadook as traumatic signifier and/or gay icon, exceptions including Michael Reiff ’s (2018) comparison of the film with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Weine, 1920), a review of the film from a psychoanalytic psychotherapy perspective (Ingham, 2015), and commentary in the context of feminism and white motherhood (Sisco King, 2018). Other studies centre on maternal indifference and abjection (Buerger, 2017), and the association of the film with the Australian Gothic tradition (Balanzategui, 2017). In contrast, this chapter focusses on trauma (and its manifestation as monstrous other) in The Babadook as an extension of Wood’s canonical theory of Otherness (2003) as well as considering the film’s reception in the context of Trump-era politics. Wood’s (2003) theory centres on the horror film and contends that monstrosity falls into several key areas. His argument rests on the nature of repression, which he categorises, according to prior work by Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse (in Horowitz, 1977), as either basic repression or surplus repression. He describes how basic repression is what makes one human, and that “it is bound up with the ability to accept the postponement of gratification, with the development of our thought and memory processes, of our capacity for self control, and of our recognition of and consideration for other people” (Wood, 2003: 63). On the other hand, surplus repression is tied up with a “process whereby people are conditioned from earliest infancy to take on predetermined roles within that culture . . . [that] makes us into monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists” (Wood, 2003: 64). As a result of this ideological conditioning, Wood suggests that surplus repression in Western culture relates to sexual energy, a

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relevant point in connection to The Babadook, not only reflected extra-textually in its gay iconicity but also diegetically in the way that Amelia’s heterosexual desire is repeatedly highlighted (and is mediated in the narrative through heterosexual relationships portrayed on television). Indeed, Wood outlines four key ways through which this sexual energy is repressed, namely as sexual energy itself, bisexuality, female sexuality, and the repression of the sexuality of children. He goes on to emphasise the close link between the model of repression and the concept of the Other, making clear that Otherness constitutes whatever a bourgeois ideology rejects but must in some way address (2003: 65). This mode of dealing with the Other involves “either rejecting it, and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it” (Wood, 2003: 66). Wood postulates eight categories of “Otherness,” these including: other people, woman, the proletariat, other cultures, ethnic groups within the culture, alternative ideologies or political systems, deviations from ideological sexual norms, and children. While The Babadook envisions trauma as an additional form of Otherness, its gay iconicity also draws attention to the “surplus repression” of alternate sexualities that Wood identifies, an aspect that Harry Benshoff (1997) explores in greater detail in his analysis of horror and homosexuality. Basing his perspective on the inequality between men and women in Western culture, Benshoff points out that this becomes one of the bases for the dominant ideology’s fear and loathing of male homosexuals. . . . Reflecting this, as well as other cultural and formal sexist imperatives, the majority of homosexual figures in the American cinema . . . are still coded as masculine with some type of feminine and/or monstrous taint. (1997: 7) (Given its uptake as a gay icon, this is potentially relevant to The Babadook where the monster is labelled as “Mister Babadook”). At the same time, the film consistently offers a critique of normative heterosexuality by its unflattering depiction of female characters who are involved in heterosexual family units. This critique is not only directed through characterisation (they are mostly portrayed as self-obsessed and materialistic), but also by flat lighting, camera angles that position the characters as dominant in the frame, and a mundane mise-en-scène reflecting their seemingly trivial existences. As Wood comments, “[t]he definition of normality in horror films is in general boringly constant: the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support them” (2003: 31). In marked contrast, the sequences involving the Babadook are filmed using high contrast lighting, diverse camera angles, movements and framing, and with graphic, often surreal imagery constituting the mise-en-scène. The Babadook himself is a black, two-dimensional storybook figure styled in the way that a child might

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picture a monster; that is, having pointed teeth and pointed fingers, and Gothic resonances in his top hat and cape. Trauma and repression The possibility that the Babadook is a symptom of Amelia’s grief is first intimated in the opening sequence when she is clearly experiencing a nightmare, although initially the spectator is unaware of her traumatised condition. However, as the narrative unfolds, she increasingly suffers from insomnia, hallucinations, and disorientation. She also acts strangely and often violently toward Samuel. Because it transpires that her husband died seven years prior, and McNally states such signs “do not suggest possible psychopathology unless they persist for more than one month” (2003: 105), her symptoms arguably constitute post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In film, this is often conveyed through flashbacks but these are not the primary indication in this case (although they do materialise in stylised form later). Rather, Amelia suffers a range of symptoms that Arieh Shalev states are further consistent with PTSD, including: nightmares; being upset by reminders; avoiding thoughts, feelings, and reminders connected to her husband; detachment and loss of interest in things; displays of anger; difficulty in concentrating; and being easily startled (2007: 215). Referring to earlier work by Erich Lindemann (1994), Shalev indicates that “expressing and communicating these symptoms is a prerequisite for recovery from acute grief, whereas their repression might lead to an ‘impacted grief ’ and protracted psychological dysfunction” (2007: 215). For Freud, these symptoms arise as a result of repression of strong emotional reactions from the conscious mind into the unconscious and as Pamela Thurschwell further explains “what the mind cannot accept, the body acts out” (2000: 29). Certainly, while Amelia appears to acknowledge superficially her husband’s death, she actively suppresses any mention of his name or discussion of the accident that killed him. As McNally notes, many authors tend to use the term repression to refer to an unconscious act, whilst suppression is a conscious attempt to expel distressing or unwanted thoughts (2003: 169). However, Freud implies that suppression and repression are similar and comments that repression is not a defensive mechanism which is present from the very beginning, and that it cannot arise until a sharp cleavage has occurred between conscious and unconscious mental activity – that the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious. (1957: 147 original emphasis) Drawing on the work of a number of scholars, Matthew Erdelyi supports this Freudian distinction and expands this point to note that “a conscious defense may readily transmute into an unconscious defense” (1990: 15) whereby “a

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conscious defensive operation, through repeated use, may gradually become automatic and essentially unconscious in deployment” (1990: 15), a process that correlates with Amelia’s mental state. She also displays signs of dissociation, whereby one deals with internal conflict by “a temporary alteration in the integrative functions of consciousness or identity” (Horowitz et al., 1990: 80). The cluster of symptoms that Amelia experiences is described in the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as constituting PTSD (McNally, 2003: 8) but can only be so diagnosed if the symptoms were “triggered by an identifiable traumatic stressor” (McNally, 2003: 79). McNally explains that such stressors refer to the threat of, or serious injury to oneself or to others that induce intense feelings of fear and horror (2003: 79), the fatal car accident implied at the beginning of the film being one such stressor. Trauma in The Babadook The film signals its traumatic intent from the opening scene which features a straight on close-up of a female figure (whom we later learn is Samuel’s mother, Amelia) clearly in distress, signalled by hyperventilation, a facial expression of terror, and slow-motion editing. The lack of, and distortion of diegetic sound adds to the sense of disorientation while extra-diegetic sound effects intermittently interject to increase the disturbing quality of the sequence, which seems to be taking place in a car. In addition, irregular strobing and high contrast light effects lend a nightmarish sensibility. The imagery culminates in an overhead shot which views the figure apparently falling away from the viewer. As she falls down onto a bed, a child’s voice in the distance can be heard calling “mum,” and it becomes apparent that the woman is having a nightmare. McNally discusses the significance of traumatic nightmares, and reports that some survivors experience dreams that “are often exact replicas . . . of actual traumatic experiences” (2003: 108). While the spectator is unaware of the circumstances that led to Amelia’s nightmare at the start of the film, it becomes evident, in a later iteration of the imagery, that she is revisiting the scene of a crash that led to her husband’s death. In the above-mentioned sequence, the child, Samuel, tells his mother that he also had “the dream” again. However, Samuel’s dream is different, and seemingly involves something that is concealed because the camera rapidly cuts to position the spectator under a bed as Samuel and his mother peer beneath it, as if looking for something. A further rapid edit ensues to another interior position but this time from inside a cupboard as Samuel’s mother throws open its doors, and is then followed by a cut to a close-up of a child’s story book that features a black and white version of Little Red Riding Hood, with the wolf baring its teeth. The overall effect of this quickly edited sequence is unsettling and, together with the nightmarish opening, establishes a sense of fear and apprehension, with the implication that there is something hiding in the house. Samuel’s response to the dream

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is “I’ll kill the monster when it comes. I’ll smash its head in” and seems violent and inappropriate for a young child. Thereafter, a series of extreme close-ups of Samuel as he sleeps with his mother reveals him grinding his teeth, scratching his feet, and gripping his mother’s neck tightly as if he is experiencing another nightmare. Rather than comforting him though, Amelia moves away from him and a close-up of her face suggests that she is irritated by his activity. Overall, the spectator has the impression that Samuel is stressed. The next morning, another rapidly edited sequence involves sequential close-ups of wood being sawn, nails being hammered, and a crossbow-like weapon being made, followed by extreme angles as Samuel runs up from the cellar and quickly replaces a key on a hook as if he should not be down in the cellar. There is a suggestion that he is doing something wrong. His mother is then awoken by series of crashes and the sound of breaking glass. She rushes downstairs just as Samuel demonstrates his newly constructed weapon and smashes a window pane. This latter sequence is rendered once more through a series of rapid edits that, together with the employment of extreme camera angles, creates a jarring visual and sonic effect. Amelia again looks troubled by Samuel’s actions, reinforcing a sense that he has behavioural issues. Aside from Samuel’s regular mention of monsters, the supernatural quality of the film is suggested throughout by editing, cinematography, and mise-en-scène. For example, a close-up of a Victorian “magician” poster, which then cuts to an extreme close-up of the words “do the spirits come back?” printed on the poster, hints at the possibility of a haunting presence. At this point, Samuel is dressed up as a magician with top hat and cape, foreshadowing the image of the Babadook that is to follow, and referencing the Gothic Victorian tropes of the magician poster. His implied manipulation of his mother (which is ultimately significant in her recovery from grief ) is suggested at this point by a low angle shot of him as he performs magic tricks for her (she is kneeling down before him), and then a high angle shot as he strokes his mother’s face and then leans down and hugs her – however, she again pushes him away as if irritated or offended by his gesture. In general, she rejects Samuel, for the reason which later becomes apparent that she associates his birth with the death of her husband, Oskar (Benjamin Winspear). The implication that Samuel is displaying behavioural problems becomes more prominent when the school which he attends calls his mother into a meeting where the headmaster places the handmade crossbow on the desk. Subsequent discussion between Amelia and Samuel’s teachers furthers the notion that Samuel is somehow behaving oddly. His mother defends him, saying “he already feels different . . . what he needs is some understanding.” Subsequently, she withdraws Samuel from the school. On the way home, stopping at the supermarket, he tells a school friend that his daddy is in the cemetery and that he was killed whilst taking his mother to the hospital to give birth. The openness of his statement not only clarifies the source of

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Amelia’s trauma but also suggests that Samuel has accepted the death of his father. We gain more insight of this when Amelia meets her sister, Claire (Hayley McElhinney), only to find that Claire is somewhat unsympathetic to Amelia’s ongoing grief, telling her that “maybe you wanna celebrate his birthday properly this year, anyway . . . on the day” (the significance being that this is also the anniversary of Oskar’s death). Despite her distress, Amelia puts on a brave face and is kindly towards her neighbour and those elderly patients in the care home where she works. However, she looks constantly harassed and down-trodden, while her home is persistently viewed in low key lighting, and is replete with shadows and creaking sounds. In addition, there is a particular sense of foreboding about the cellar, first in the way that Samuel earlier ran quickly up and locked the door, and second, by the fact that the family dog scratches the cellar door, which seems to suggest that there is something concealed there. Overall, the imagery relating to the relationship between Samuel and his mother alternates between affection and bleakness – for example, the two seem disconnected as they eat dinner in silence with only the clatter of cutlery audible. They are made to appear even more isolated by the use of long shot as they sit at opposite ends of a long dining table. The camera immediately cuts to a static image of electricity wires against the twilight sky which further engenders a sense of emptiness while static interior shots of their home at night continually emphasise its stillness and suggest something ominous will happen. A repeated scenario whereby the camera positions the spectator under Samuel’s bed or in the cupboard adds to the sense that there is a sinister presence in the house. The nature of this threat begins to emerge when Samuel takes a book from the bookcase for his mother to read from – titled “Mister Babadook” – the book containing frightening images of a monster with spiked hands and teeth, and wearing a top hat. As Amelia reads it out loud, close-ups and then extreme close-ups sequentially focus on these horrifying aspects and rest on the words “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” In an uncanny parallel with Samuel’s existence, it contains threatening text and disturbing visuals of the Babadook terrifying a small boy, resulting in Samuel screaming hysterically. The text is also significant in the context of the Babadook’s adoption as gay icon. For example, the words “if you’re a really clever one and you know what it is to see, then you can make friends with a special one, a friend of you and me. . . . I’ll soon take of my funny disguise” readily translate to the repression of alternative sexualities. The film not only utilises the storybook to mediate its messages, but also focusses on television as a medium to express Amelia’s loneliness and in several sequences, she watches fictional romance on late night television. She also looks enviously at other couples kissing and tells Samuel bedtime stories that end with a prince and princess living happily ever after. We realise that her behaviour is strange when she is reading in bed and she hears odd sounds but rather than investigating, she hides under the bed covers and

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pretends that she is unable to hear anything. She also begins to oversleep and confesses to her work colleague that she is stressed. Leaving work early one day, slow motion editing, a lack of diegetic sound, and an image whereby her reflection in a window is distorted begin to suggest that her state of mind is disordered. She also rejects any suggestion the Babadook might be real, although Samuel continues to insist that it is. In an effort to deal with his loss, Samuel often retreats to the cellar where his father’s belongings are stored and where he has made a shrine incorporating a photograph of his parents. He has also hung his father’s clothes against the wall to recreate his form so on sudden glance, he seems to be there, and talks to, and performs “magic tricks” to the photographs of his parents. Samuel clearly wants to talk about his father and is suffering from trauma, manifesting in extreme fears and hallucinations though Amelia forbids any mention of Oskar. Her denial of grief is made clear when a work colleague calls by to check on her, and Samuel screams “she won’t let me have a birthday party and she won’t let me have a dad!” Meanwhile Amelia also becomes increasingly distraught and as the anniversary of her husband’s death approaches, she ventures into the cellar where she finds Oskar’s possessions scattered on the floor. Shortly thereafter, she finds shards of glass in her soup and her appearance becomes more dishevelled. The gradual deterioration of her mental state is repeatedly signalled through physical aberrations in the mise-en-scène, such as a close-up of an overhead lamp flickering on and off, although at this point it remains unclear whether the Babadook is a real entity or just a figment of Samuel’s imagination. For Samuel, the monster seems tangible and he suffers from panic attacks and eventually convulsions as a result of his fear. The spectator is likewise led to believe that it exists because the storybook featuring the Babadook mysteriously keeps reappearing despite Amelia’s attempts to hide, and then destroy it. Amelia’s social alienation is increasingly signalled through framing and cinematography. For example, at a birthday party held for Samuel’s cousin, her sister’s friends stand in a semi-circle and are viewed in a low-angle shot from her perspective so that she appears subordinate to them. The women are filmed in flat lighting, costumed almost identically, and patronise Amelia telling her that “she just needs to get back into her writing.” Referring briefly to Amelia’s loss they then focus on their own narrow (heterosexual) lives leading to an angry outburst by Amelia. As Benshoff notes, in the horror film, it is usually the heterosexualized hero and heroine who are stereotyped – painted with broad brush strokes – while the villains and monsters are given more complex, “novelistic” characterizations. As the titular stars of their own filmic stories, perhaps it is the monsters that the audience come to enjoy, experience, and identify within many films, normative heterosexuality is reduced to a trifling narrative convention. (1997: 12)

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During the party, Ruby (Chloe Hurn), Samuel’s cousin, then taunts him about not having a father to the extent that he pushes her out of the tree house. In fact, when anyone mentions her husband, Oskar, Amelia snaps at them and stops Samuel from talking about him. She therefore suppresses any aspect related to her husband. The inability to maintain this repression is signalled by the fact that she hides the book, and, as noted, it reappears and when then she tears it up, it appears back on the doorstep with even more graphic and violent images of her killing their pet dog, then Samuel, then herself. Its text “the more you deny the stronger I become” is even more telling in respect of trauma repression and illustrates Wood’s model of the return of the repressed (2003). The reappearance of the book causes her to report it to the police in the belief that she is being stalked. In other words, she displaces her stifled emotional state onto another individual, reflecting the fact that, as becomes progressively more evident, her grief persistently manifests in physical form. Just as she gives an account of the book to the officer, she glances up to a coat hanging on the wall to see that it resembles the top hat and spiked fingers of the Babadook. This framing is momentary and the spectator witnesses it from her point of view, first suggesting a supernatural occurrence but also again hinting at her deteriorating mental state. This is amplified by the police officer who, in his unsympathetic and derisive attitude, symbolises a patriarchal system that oppresses and demeans women. Such an attitude undoubtedly fuels the gay iconicity of the Babadook while his slovenly, patronising demeanour and whiteness contrast with the spiky, Gothic appearance of the black Babadook, illustrating the aforementioned commentaries by Benshoff (1997) concerning the inequality of men and women, and Wood regarding the “general boringly constant . . . [of] the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support them [my emphasis]” (2003: 31). The suggestion that Amelia is hallucinating becomes more pronounced in the subsequent sequence when she grows aware of a cockroach crawling on her shoulder. This is viewed from an omniscient perspective so that, initially, there is little reason to suspect that she is imagining the insect. As she screams and brushes it off, she notices a stream of them emanating from behind the fridge. Frantically moving the fridge, she rips off the wallpaper whereupon an extreme close-up sees them issue from a hole in the wall. Shortly thereafter, two community service officials call to check on Samuel’s absence from school (as noted, she has withdrawn him from the school following the headmaster’s reaction to the crossbow episode). The officials check the kitchen, which is now in a state of disarray following the “cockroach incident.” Amelia explains to them about the infestation and just as she says that “they were coming out of a hole in the wall behind the fridge,” the camera frames an area of wall to reveal no such hole. It is at this point that her mental state becomes clear.

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Particularly noticeable is the way that scenes mediated via her perspective seem to communicate specific messages to her. For example, as she washes the dishes, she watches her elderly neighbour through an opened window – the sound of her neighbour’s television is audible and we can hear one character comment about hearing strange noises, and haunted houses. A female character on the television then asks “are you sick,” suggesting that Amelia is projecting her thoughts onto her external reality. The framing and editing continue to augment the film’s unsettling visuals as Amelia then goes to bed, the lights flickering on and off. As she suddenly looks up, we see her reflection from her point of view in long shot, followed by a cut to medium shot, the edit creating a disjointed feel to the sequence and her reflection in the narrow strip of mirror in the centre of a wardrobe lending a sense of entrapment. Upon hearing scraping noises at the door she first lets the dog in, before the door opens again and a barely discernible figure slips in. She hears the words “Babadook” and hides under the bed covers before looking up to see the Babadook materialise as a physical entity on the ceiling. Thereafter, her insomnia becomes pronounced as she avoids going to bed and watches late night television where scenes from early cinema seem to transpose into images of the Babadook. These are all viewed from her point of view and therefore seem “real” to the spectator so there is ongoing ambiguity about the existence of the Babadook. In fact, television is a medium through which she continually projects her trauma. However, we also witness her escalating irrationality and aggressiveness as she lies in bed screaming at Samuel who complains that he is hungry. She hallucinates regularly, crashes her car, sits in the bath fully clothed, and ignores her neighbour. Still maintaining her point of view, we hear whispering voices and see out of focus shots. She then imagines that she has killed Samuel, and rapidly edited incongruous and disturbing images on television (as if reflecting her consciousness), give way to a news report that a woman has stabbed her son with a kitchen knife, seeming to foretell her life, especially when an image of herself appears on the bulletin. Slow motion editing is employed as she follows Samuel into the cellar where she imagines that she sees Oskar who tells her that he needs her to “bring the boy.” His words echo the earlier conversation with the headmaster when he too referred to Samuel as “the boy” and further intimate her confusion between reality and imagination. Extreme high contrast lighting invests the scene with a ghostly supernatural quality, and as Shalev notes, might be interpreted as dissociation whereby she “hears[s] or otherwise feel[s] or perceive[s] the presence of the deceased with the intensity of a hallucination” (Shalev, 2007: 216). His voice distorts and high contrast lighting causes her to appear “bleached out” whilst he recedes into shadow. She then imagines that the Babadook attacks her, making it even more unclear what she is imagining and what is actually happening. According to Laurence Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson, and Mark Barad, “[i]n addition to symptoms related to fear and anxiety, the psychological consequences

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of trauma may include disturbances of memory, identity, and perception termed dissociation [original italics]” (2007: 7). McNally explains that dissociative symptoms include, derealization, a strange, dreamlike sense that one’s surroundings are unreal; depersonalization, a sense of being disconnected from one’s own body; a sense that time is either slowing down or speeding up; and amnesia, an inability to recall important aspects of what happened. (2003: 172, original emphasis) These effects manifest as we witness her point of view again while she watches television and the camera pulls in and out of focus as a series of disturbing and grotesque faces appear. The intermittent deployment of (often extreme) fast and slow motion editing adds to the sense of time distortion, while Amelia’s exhausted expression and the surreal imagery on television and within the diegesis give the effect of a strange disconnected state. She subsequently strangles the dog and pulls out her own tooth, and then seems to glide along the floor with her fingers splayed as if inhabited by the Babadook. Indeed, as David Spiegel explains, dissociation is a feature of trauma whereby there is “some kind of divided or parallel access to awareness” (1995: 127). In its most extreme form, Spiegel states that dissociation can result in multiple personality disorder (1995: 127) correlating with the fact that Amelia seems to fluctuate between good and evil, with Samuel recognising this oscillation. He traps her in the cellar, and renders her unconscious in order to protect himself and rid her of the Babadook by forcing her to face her loss. In the process, she convulses violently and vomits a black fluid, the scene augmented by extreme fast motion editing that renders it dreamlike. She then relives Oskar’s death and stands up to the Babadook, as she finally learns to control her grief. As Wood notes the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression. (Wood, 2003: 68) However, as Wood further suggests “in a society built on monogamy and family, there will be an enormous surplus of repressed sexual energy, and that what is repressed must always strive to return” (2003: 72). Accordingly, her grief in its material form as the Babadook does not entirely disappear but remains locked in the cellar. Following Wood’s thesis of Otherness, we can argue that Amelia has to an extent overcome her trauma “by rendering it safe and assimilating it” (Wood, 2003: 66). In fact, when the two community service officials call back, Amelia tells them quite openly that her husband died on Samuel’s birthday.

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The Babadook, repression, and sexual identity in the Trump era The adoption of the Babadook as a gay icon corresponded with the inauguration of Donald Trump as US President in 2017, which marked the onset of an administration that not only seemed racially discriminative but also placed limits on the rights of the LGBT community and women’s access to abortion. To this end, Trump has appointed advisers who are opposed to women’s rights, abortion rights, and LGBT rights, with Vice President Mike Pence being particularly renowned for his extreme socially conservative views regarding these groups (Girard, 2017: 6). One example of the outcome of such discrimination is the ending of federal protection for transgender students that allowed them to use bathrooms matching their gender identities (anon, 2017). While there is no direct connection between The Babadook, which was released in 2014 – well before Trump’s appointment – and the anti-LGBT politics that have been associated with him, the figure of the Babadook has nonetheless garnered gay iconicity and is emblematic of Trump-era politics. This resonance with LGBT audiences potentially arises from several aspects of its visual and narrative manifestation and is an aspect that has emerged retrospectively after the film’s release. As Claire Sisco King has already noted, these characteristics might include costume as the Babadook “wears dramatic – even scene-stealing – costuming that recalls the theatricality of drag, and he struggles against a (rather literally) closeted existence in which many disavow or reject him” (2018: 166). Sisco King goes on to argue that the queer iconicity of the film highlights normative constructions of the family, the hegemony of reproductive heterosexuality and the implications of both for the lives of women (2018: 166). She also identifies a possibly racist element in the blackness of the Babadook. While not contesting these possibilities, one might extend these points to focus on the way, for example, that white men in authority refuse to acknowledge the possibility of the Babadook’s existence. Equally one might argue that the film effectively critiques the incompetence of institutions (and thereby institutional failure to acknowledge alternative sexualities) outside of the family in the way that the school, community services, the police, and medical services fail to identify the causes underlying Amelia’s distress, or deal with these appropriately. So too does the film draw attention to issues of mental health that are increasingly being foregrounded by well-known public figures (such as Prince William) and the increased governmental funding that mental health has only recently begun to attract. In summary, Wood’s theory of the horror genre can be extended to include trauma, as illustrated in the case of The Babadook where “normality” as perceived in Western culture involves heterosexual relationships and the family unit, both which are disrupted by the death of the father. If Wood focussed on categories of Otherness that reflected ideological norms of the 1970s then films of the new millennium arguably feature trauma because of a rising attention to PTSD in the wake of 9/11 and heighted governmental

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and high-profile attention to mental illness in recent times. Whereas the disruption of the family unit appeared as a narrative trope in 1970s horror films following the Vietnam War, then The Babadook, akin to other films of the new millennium, also reflects on the absent father figure following 9/11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, the repression of grief and its manifestation through aspects of the mise-en-scène, especially a physical materialisation as monstrous Other, has inadvertently caused the Babadook to become a gay icon. This extra-textual adoption by LGBT audiences coincides with Trumpera politics that oppress the rights of women and minority groups, and is encouraged by the film’s diegetic attention to and critique of heterosexual and patriarchal structures. Bibliography Anon (2017). “Donald Trump Revokes Barack Obama Guidelines on Transgender Bathrooms,” The Telegraph (Online). Accessed: 10/12/18. Balanzategui, Jessica (2017). “The Babadook and the Haunted Space between High and Low Genres in the Australian Horror Tradition,” Studies in Australasian Cinema, 11(1), pp. 18–32. Benshoff, Harry (1997). Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bradley, Laura (2017). “It’s Official: The Gay Babadook Has Netflix Babashook,” Vanity Fair (Online). Accessed: 21/8/18. Buerger, Shelley (2017). “The Beak That Grips: Maternal Indifference, Ambivalence and the Abject in the Babadook,” Studies in Australasian Cinema, 11(1), pp. 33–34. Dempsey, Aoife (2015). “The Babadook (Dir. Jennifer Kent) Australia 2014,” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 14, pp. 130–132. Erdelyi, Matthew (1990). “Repression, Reconstruction, and Defense: History and Integration of the Psychoanalytic and Experimental Frameworks,” in Jerome Singer (ed.), Repression and Dissociation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–32. Freud, Sigmund (2001) [1957]. “Repression,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 14, pp. 141–158. Girard, Françoise (2017). “Implications of the Trump Administration for Sexual and Reproductive Rights Globally,” Reproductive Health Matters, 25(49), pp. 6–13. Horowitz, Gad (1977). Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytical Theory: Freud, Reich, Marcuse, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Horowitz, Mardi, Henry Markham, Charles Stinson, Bram Fridhandler and Jess Ghannam (1990). “A Classification Theory of Defense,” in Jerome Singer (ed.), Repression and Dissociation: Implications for Personality Theory, Psychopathology and Health, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 61–84. Hunt, Elle (2017). “The Babadook: How the Horror Movie Monster Became a Gay Icon,” The Guardian (Online). Accessed: 14/12/18. Ingham, Toby (2015). “The Babadook (2014, Directed by Jennifer Kent): A Film Review from a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Perspective,” Psychodynamic Practice: Individuals, Groups and Organisations, 21(3), pp. 269–270. Kirmayer, Laurence, Robert Lemeson and Mark Barad (2007). “Introduction,” in Laurence Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson and Mark Barad (eds.), Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–20.

94 Fran Pheasant-Kelly Lindemann, Erich (1994). “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief,” The American Journal of Psychiatry, 151(6, Suppl), pp. 155–160. Luckhurst, Roger (2008). The Trauma Question, London and New York: Routledge. McNally, Richard (2003). Remembering Trauma, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Reiff, Michael (2018). “Mediating Trauma in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook,” in Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds.), Terrifying Texts: Essays on Books of Good and Evil in Horror Cinema, Jefferson: McFarland Press. Shalev, Arieh (2007). “PTSD: A Disorder of Recovery?” in Laurence Kirmayer, Rovert Lemelson and Mark Barad (eds.), Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–223. Singer, Jerome (ed.) (1995). Repression and Dissociation: Implications for Personality Theory, Psychopathology and Health, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sisco King, Claire (2018). “‘If It’s in a Word’: Intersectional Feminism, Precarity, and the Babadook,” The Popular Culture Studies Journal, 6(2–3), pp. 166–189. Spiegel, David (1995). “Hypnosis, Dissociation, and Trauma: Hidden and Overt Observers,” in Jerome Singer (ed.), Repression and Dissociation: Implications for Personality Theory, Psychopathology and Health, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 121–142. Thurschwell, Pamela (2000). Sigmund Freud, London and New York: Routledge. Wood, Robin (2003). Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond, New York: Columbia University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London and New York: Verso.

Part 3

“We all bleed red!” Of God and monsters, targeted bodies, and metaphorical walls in Trump-era horror

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Lock her up! Angry men and the captive woman in post-Recession horror Dawn Keetley

While white men have always featured in the horror film, they have for the most part, until our current decade, been expressly impure, the defining characteristic (according to Noël Carroll) of the horror genre. Halloween’s Michael Myers (1978) and Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger (1984), for instance, are not simply white men (although they are that). They are also unnatural monsters, inhabiting (and violating) the border between human and non-human, living and dead. Since around 2010, however, there have been growing numbers of horror films in which the antagonist, the “monster,” is just a white man. He is human with no supernatural or unnatural characteristics at all; granted, he has a propensity for unmitigated evil, but it’s an entirely human propensity. In this the burgeoning number of horror films that feature a white man as the monster, moreover, there is a reiterated scenario, one that galvanises the horror and dread of the film: a woman is discovered chained or caged in a cellar or basement. She has been captured for a variety of reasons, but it is the power of the scenario in and of itself that shocks. As viewers, we are confronted with the simple and visceral spectacle of the captive woman. The trope of the captive female is not new. Indeed, it formed an integral part of the late 18th- and early 19th-century female Gothic, and a description of the female Gothic plot rather aptly describes this recent horror trend: “the male transgressor,” Alison Milbank writes, “becomes the villain whose authoritative reach as patriarch, abbot or despot seeks to entrap the heroine, usurps the great house, and threatens death or rape” (2009, p. 121). In horror films of the 2010s such as The Woman (2011), The Collection (2012), I Spit on Your Grave 2 (2013), 13 Cameras (2015), The Neighbour (2016), Split (2016), Don’t Breathe (2016), Pet (2016), Insidious: The Last Key (2018), Bad Samaritan (2018), and 10x10 (2018), heroines are indeed “entrapped” by patriarchal villains threatening death or rape and seeking to “usurp the great house” – seeking, in short, to regain what they feel is their lost power.1 Despite the fact that the trope of the captive woman has long roots, it emerged with particular force in the immediate wake of the Great Recession of 2008 and has intensified in the latter part of the 2010s, galvanised by the 2015–2016 campaign and presidential victory of Donald Trump. The content of horror film is never reducible, of course, to just one or two causes,

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and it is certainly never shaped exclusively by a single historical event, but this particular trope of 2010s horror is profoundly influenced by the ongoing erosion of male power and privilege that was catalysed by the recession. As Hanna Rosin declared in a watershed article in The Atlantic (and later in her book of the same name), the 2010s seemed to usher in The End of Men (2010). Not only were three-quarters of the eight million jobs lost in the Great Recession lost by men, but, in early 2010, “for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs.” The new dominance of women in the workplace joined the ongoing majority of women in higher education, which had, Rosin notes, been feeling “like a crisis to some people” as early as the mid-2000s (2010). Both long-term trends in the modern post-industrial economy, then, as well as the shorter-term cataclysm of recession, indeed seemed bent on ushering in men’s demise. Small wonder that Donald Trump rode his clarion call of “lock her up!” to victory in the 2016 US presidential election, winning a resounding 71 percent of the white, working-class male voter (Francis, 2018, p. 1). Trump supporters were precisely those hit hardest by the Recession – middle-aged, workingclass, white men (Thompson, 2016). Trump not only tapped into men’s escalating sense of powerlessness but also offered a means of redressing it with fantasies of “locking up” a powerful woman. Indeed, it seems that animus against Hillary Clinton was one of the most decisive factors in Trump’s victory. In his study of Trump voters in Pennsylvania (one of the crucial swing states of the 2016 presidential election), Robert Francis found that they were “more anti-Clinton than they were pro-Trump.” The “overwhelming distaste for Clinton” that Francis found is consistent, he writes, with polling showing that Trump supporters across the country were “more against Clinton than in favor of Trump” as well as with a recent in-depth study “that found that the most unifying factor across all types of Trump voter was dislike of Clinton, a view held by 9 in 10 respondents.” While many Americans had legitimate concerns about Clinton, Francis adds that he believes sexism is “underappreciated” as an explanation for “the degree of distrust and even hostility faced by Clinton during the campaign” (2018, p. 8). Opposition to Clinton herself may well (for some) have bled into a more generalised hostility to increasingly powerful “women.” An article in The Atlantic in the lead up to the November 2016 election that exploring what characterised Trump’s supporters found that a feeling of “powerlessness and voicelessness” was a principal predictor (Thompson, 2016). The “lock her up!” chant perfectly taps into male powerlessness as a compensatory emotion, a powerful “structure of feeling” that alleviates and avenges powerlessness. In their reiterated representations of the chained woman, horror films reflect and reinforce this “structure of feeling,” a term explicated by Raymond Williams in his Marxism and Literature (1977, p. 132). The term “structure of feeling” is useful because, as Williams defines it, it is not just about intellectually held ideological principles. It recognises that people’s beliefs are profoundly

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constituted (also) by “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt”; “structures of feeling” mark “thought as felt and feeling as thought” (1977, p. 132). Structures of feeling are, moreover, more inchoate than consciously held beliefs – the word “feeling” signalling that “what is at stake may not yet be articulated in a fully worked-out form” (Buchanan, 2010). If there is one truism about the horror film, it is that it aims to elicit emotion. As Mathias Clasen sums it up, critics agree that “the genre is affectively defined – that is, according to intended audience reaction” (2017, p. 11). Horror films, then, are in a particularly strong position to shape “structures of feeling,” entering viewers’ lives in visceral and emotional ways, dramatising and also helping to shape ways of feeling about the world that surpass mere “ideology.” It should be said, though, that to the extent that horror movies have been screening the fantasy of the “locked-up” woman – and with a notable upsurge during and since Trump’s campaign – they both support and critique it. Horror movie “monsters” have always evoked wildly divergent feelings, not only disgust, fear, and anger. As Robin Wood pointed out, “Few horror films have totally unsympathetic Monsters” (1986, p. 80). So while the white-man-as-monster, with his caged female victim, may function as a powerful source of identification for some white male viewers (who may also be Trump supporters), the inevitably ambivalent politics of the horror film means that the central dyad of these films – male “monster”/female captive – is by no means a stable one, not least because the caged woman always turns the tables on her male captors. The fantasy thus ends up belonging not only to the hypothetical white male spectator. Power: the woman Lucky McKee’s 2011 film The Woman sharply distils the chained woman trope and brilliantly comments on its function in shaping gender and power relations. Based on the novel of the same name (2011) by McKee and Jack Ketchum, The Woman has a starkly simple and horrifying plot. Small-town lawyer Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) finds a feral woman one day while out hunting and chains her in his cellar (Figure 6.1). His ostensible purpose for doing so, which he shares with his family, including wife Belle (Angela Bettis), son Brian (Zach Rand), and daughters Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter) and Darlin (Shyla Molhusen), is to civilise her. In fact, however, she is a vehicle for his sexual sadism as he tortures and rapes her. Appalled at what is happening (and having herself, it is implied, been raped by her father), Chris’s teen daughter Peggy eventually unchains the Woman, who kills Chris and his wife Belle (who was complicit in her husband’s abuse). The film ends with the triumph of the female “tribe” as the Woman, Peggy, Darlin, and another mysterious and disfigured daughter of Chris and Belle head into the woods. Both Chris and the Woman vie for the title of “monster” of this film. Barely “human,” giving inarticulate grunts and chewing off Chris’s finger, the

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Figure 6.1 Pollyanna McIntosh as the Woman chained in the cellar

Woman appears to be the “monster” that threatens the seeming “normality” of Chris’s middle-class nuclear family (Wood, 1986, p. 78). As a horror figure she harks back to the cannibal clan in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977). But McKee inverts expectations early on, making it clear that Chris Cleek and his son Brian are the monsters. The narrative of the film is driven by what some have claimed is men’s difficulty in adapting to the new post-industrial economy, which is, as Rosin puts it, “indifferent to men’s size and strength” and possibly “better suited to women” (2010). As a small-town lawyer, Chris dresses in khaki pants and a shirt and tie and sits at a desk all day. His propensity to hunt in his leisure time, as well as his abusive tyranny over his family, disclose a seeking for potency he seems to lack in his mundane job. The Woman on the other hand lives in nature, hunts for her food, and is fearless. She mirrors Chris’s desires for a greater power, and his chaining her in the basement enables him both to acquire her wildness and develop his own in taming her – a transference of power. From anyone’s perspective besides his own, however, Chris does have unequivocal power over his family, who are cowed by years of abusive behaviour. He nonetheless has an aggrieved sense that he is being profoundly injured by women, an injury he articulates in a central speech in the film after he has just beaten his wife into unconsciousness and tied up Peggy’s teacher: he has thus beaten, tied up or chained no less than three women – and still his sense of injury persists. I’m so fucking sick of “You can’t” from the women in the family. . . . Make that all women. Because you’re leeches. Every one of you. You suck a man dry. He works like a dog every day and then you suck him dry.2

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This sense of injury is at the heart of the caged woman trope: men feel slighted, dismissed, or materially harmed by women, and this prior harm legitimates a violent and compensatory aggression. In this way, The Woman intersects with the “lock her up!” chant of Trump supporters – their own desires to palliate a felt sense of loss and powerlessness projected onto a crucially gendered rallying cry. The Woman chained in Chris Cleek’s cellar distils this structure of feeling in its crudest and most violent form. Securing futurity: Don’t Breathe Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe became notorious for the shocking reveal, in the film’s middle, that the Blind Man (Stephen Lang) has a young woman chained in his basement. Even more shocking, it becomes clear to the characters who discover her – Rocky (Jane Levy) and Alex (Dylan Minnette) – that he is keeping her there until she bears his child (he impregnated her by means of a turkey baster). After the girl (and the Blind Man’s unborn child) is killed in Rocky and Alex’s attempt to free her, the Blind Man trusses Rocky up in the same basement and tries to impregnate her. Like The Woman, Don’t Breathe features a middle-aged white man who chains up a woman and uses her body to take back something he feels she has taken away from him, some power in the world – specifically, in the case of Don’t Breathe, a family and a future. To the extent that Don’t Breathe is starkly defined by generational as well as gender and class conflict, it reflects what the Washington Post called the “massive generation gap” of the 2016 presidential election. “None of the 1960s era elections produced a comparable partisan difference,” writes David Hopkins (2016). Don’t Breathe shows, moreover, that young women really have injured its protagonist, and so the white male “monster” in this film, as repulsive as his actions are, is a much more ambivalent figure than Chris Cleek in The Woman. In Don’t Breathe, the Blind Man captures and impregnates the young woman (Cindy) who drunkenly ran down and killed his daughter and whose wealth and privilege spared her from the consequences of her actions. As the Blind Man says, “She should have gone to prison. But rich girls don’t go to jail,” a logic by which he justifies rape. She killed his child, so “I thought it only fair that she give me a new one.” He applies the same logic to Rocky. Because she and her friends broke into his house, another child of his is dead, and now Rocky owes him a child. The destruction (twice) of the Blind Man’s future is figured in his geographical marginalisation: he inhabits a house on a street of abandoned houses in Detroit, a city economically decimated by the loss of industry and manufacturing beginning in the later decades of the 20th century. That the Blind Man has his child killed and his house invaded by three young people who, from beginning to end, think they have a right to his money, only exacerbates how he has already been discarded by the forward progress of the new post-industrial economy. Since the Blind Man has no future, he grabs it violently and confines it in his basement.

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The Blind Man seems to embody a certain profile of the Trump voter – and, not insignificantly, he lives in Michigan, which narrowly, and unexpectedly, swung Republican for the first time since 1988. Recent research on the “men America left behind” has identified the struggles of white working-class men: a 2017 study showed more than 11 percent of men aged 25 to 54 were unemployed and not looking for work; over half of them took pain medication on a daily basis. While other groups in the US have seen improved health and mortality rates in recent years, death rates have increased among white men with no college education, much of that rise attributable to “despair deaths” – alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide. In general, these men “feel their masculine ideology is under attack” (Weir, 2017). The paradigm shift in masculinity, which is both ideological and economic, “might have been a factor in the 2016 presidential race,” writes psychologist Kirsten Weir (2017). “Exit polls showed the widest gender gap since exit polling began in the 1970s.” The Blind Man is a middle-aged white man, a veteran injured in the Gulf War, and he has been left behind by the economy, having no apparent employment or source of income. He has literally been “paid off ” for his injuries by the family who took away his future. It is particularly telling that Rocky and her two friends are not the least dissuaded from robbing him when they realise he is blind – and their plan is explicitly founded on their knowledge that the death of his daughter means that he has a large settlement of cash in the house. Rocky is capable of empathy, though. When she and Alex discover Cindy tied up in the basement, Rocky immediately says to her, “I don’t care what you did. I’ll get you out of here.” While Rocky’s response, and her horror at what the Blind Man has done to Cindy, is certainly understandable, she never once empathises with the Blind Man, even before she finds out what he has in his basement. Indeed, the film itself predicates its visceral power on Cindy’s suffering, on the horror of the moment when Rocky and Alex discover Cindy tied up, not on what the Blind Man has suffered. While we see Cindy’s suffering, we only hear about his. The film justifies Rocky’s taking of all of the Blind Man’s money, moreover, with her drug-using mother’s predatory boyfriend, a man who threatens Rocky and her little sister, thus offering an explanation, even excuse, for everything Rocky does to the Blind Man. In the world of Don’t Breathe, the sexual harms of girls and women are of vastly more importance than the harms suffered by the Blind Man – his lack of a name at once standing in for his unimportance and for his potential status as “Everyman.” While the suffering of girls and women galvanise blind solidarity (Rocky’s “I don’t care what you’ve done”), the injuries of middle-aged white working-class veterans are ignored; certainly, they provide no reason they shouldn’t be preyed upon. Indeed, the Blind Man has been characterised in reviews in ways that bolster his role as the true “monster” of the film and that strip him of his humanity. As Jia Tolentino describes him in her New Yorker review, he has an “evil heart,” and – aligning him with horror icons like Michael Myers in

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Halloween and the shark in Jaws (1975) – she writes that he is “a supernaturally able killer – a bloodthirsty synthesis of golem, sadist, and shark” (2016). Tolentino rightly adds that Don’t Breathe represents “another type of horror” than the supernatural, one that is found “outside the confines of a movie theatre,” but she limits this realistic “horror” to rape, erasing the specific injuries of the Blind Man.3 It is precisely this erasure that propelled the Blind Man to confine Cindy and then Rocky in his basement in the first place. And this act – more generally, the trope of the chained woman – is integrally bound up with how white, working-class men’s sense of the erasure of their own injuries has galvanised the “lock her up!” chant.4 Survival: The Neighbour Released in September 2016, Marcus Dunstan’s The Neighbour follows protagonists John (Josh Stewart) and Rosie (Alex Essoe), who live in a rural and extremely economically depressed Cutter, Mississippi. John is a drug dealer, which he hates and does only from economic necessity. The couple starts to notice some strange things about their neighbour, Troy (Bill Engvall), who comes over to their house one night with the clear intent of warning them off his property. When John gets home the next day, Rosie has disappeared – so he makes the trek to his neighbour’s house and discovers first an unknown woman, Sarah (Melissa Bolona) and then Rosie in cages in the basement. The Neighbour is Marcus Dunstan’s third film as director, following on the heels of The Collector (2009) and The Collection (2012), and all three were written by Dunstan and Patrick Melton. Both The Collector and The Collection fall squarely in the category of torture-porn, tipping the scale, for instance, toward the brutalising of men not women – torture-porn’s signature revision of Carol Clover’s claim about the slasher that “Abject terror” is “gendered feminine” (1992, p. 51). Both films do, though, draw from the slasher in featuring a barely human masked “monster” driven by what Clover called “psychosexual fury” (1992, p. 27). It is precisely in its difference from Dunstan and Melton’s earlier films that The Neighbour signals the difference of the new “caged woman” horror of the 2010s from the post-9/11 torture-porn subgenre and the earlier slasher. The “monsters” of The Neighbour are neither masked nor inhuman: they are very human, caught in a web of hopelessness and trying to survive, not unlike the Blind Man’s efforts to survive in Don’t Breathe. That survival involves, though, a resurgence of the victimisation of women – a return to the gendering of abject fear as feminine (Clover, 1992, p. 51). As in The Woman and Don’t Breathe, the caged woman’s entrapment and fear form the visceral centre of the film. The Neighbour repeatedly evokes Tobe Hooper’s 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which highlights a shared subtext of economic dispossession but also the vast difference between the “monsters” of each film and between the 1970s and the 2010s. Troy is living with his two sons and his wife and their mother has recently died. They are clearly struggling to make a living

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and hence Troy has hatched the plan to kidnap wealthy young people and ransom them back to their parents – just as Hooper’s family infamously made a living off of other humans. The family in The Neighbour, just as Robin Wood writes of the family in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, “only carries to its logical conclusion the basic, though unstated, tenet of capitalism, that people have the right to live off other people” (1986, p. 93). When Troy’s sons enter the house at a key moment, Troy asks them who is unable to tie a slipknot (since one of them failed to tie a prisoner up properly, allowing him to escape). This evokes the scene in Texas Chain Saw Massacre when the family first comes together, the Cook having captured Sally (again), and he berates his sons as “half-wits,” yelling at Hitchhiker for almost getting caught, for leaving his brother alone, and for allowing Leatherface to destroy the door. A subsequent scene in The Neighbour directly evokes the scene in Texas Chain Saw Massacre in which the family tortures Sally, as she is bound to a chair. Troy and his sons shoot a ransom video of Sarah on videotape, the quality approximating Hooper’s film, and, in one shot, one of the brothers hold a hammer by Sarah’s head, visually echoing the scene in which Grandpa tries to hit Sally with a hammer. Troy and his sons are not Hooper’s family, however. The Cook, Hitchhiker, and Leatherface are deranged, driven only by a perverse irrationality (albeit one rooted in very real economic conditions). Troy and his sons are nothing if not rational actors. As Troy says at one point: “We was just tryin’ to get a few bucks from people who already got plenty.” He and his sons engage in logical albeit criminal economic transactions rather than the perverse translation of the work of slaughtering animals onto humans that marks the pathology of the Texas Chain Saw family. The “monstrous” family in The Neighbour is, in short, thoroughly human. They live in a rural area and have no apparent employment, and the death of their wife and mother seems to have made their situation even more dire. As Troy says to his son, “When your mom died, I was scared. I didn’t know how we was going to survive. But we made it work, didn’t we? We found a way.” This dialogue suggests the crucial economic importance of women in the post-Recession world: it is the woman’s death that pushes the family into such economic straits that they turn to kidnapping. And if the loss of a woman proved catastrophic to the family, it is Sarah – the principal caged woman – whose ransom Troy hopes will save them. “Tonight we are gonna get everything we need to survive. And then we ain’t gonna be scared no more.” Sarah is captured out of stark economic necessity, in Troy’s view, and the central horrifying spectacle of the film – the women caged in the basement – serves as compensatory spectacle, redressing the way in which men’s livelihood is now dependent on women. It is also a fantasy of retribution for that very fact – for the predominance of women in the workforce which may very much feel like it has come at the cost of men. In part, then, the visibly caged women in The Neighbour reflect on the less visible economic entrapment of the male “monsters.” The sympathy the film

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insinuates for Troy and his family is heightened by the parallels between them and John – trapped by the lack of alternatives into running drugs for his uncle. Late in the film, Troy says to John, warning him he’s not going to get away if he kills Troy and his sons, “I’m just a middle man. Just like you John. . . . Nobody gets away.” The caged women at the centre of The Neighbour are not the only ones in a trap, then – and it’s telling that when John goes down into Troy’s basement and discovers first Sarah and then his girlfriend, each in their separate cages, Dunstan chooses to use only close-ups of the caged women. In the scene in which John discovers Rosie, in particular, the close-ups mean that both characters are framed by bars, so, in most shots, it is unclear who exactly is in the cage and who is outside (see Figure 6.2). As each man is forced by financial necessity to engage in crime, it is hard not to read this as a commentary on the current bleak economic state of much of America, just as Hooper’s film was a similar commentary of the recession of the 1970s. In 1990, Robert Bly published a book called Iron John: A Book about Men that became central to the Men’s Rights Movement of the 1990s. The book argued that men should get in touch with their “wild man” and was centred on a parable drawn from a Grimms’ fairy tale called Iron John or Iron Hans. To circle back to the film with which I began this chapter, it seems clear that The Woman also evokes this fairy tale, although with a stark difference that demonstrates the difference of the 2010s. In Iron Hans, a king goes hunting in the forest and finds a wild man with brown skin and covered in hair lying at the bottom of a pond. The king brings him back, locks him in an iron cage and forbids anyone to open it upon pain of death. His son, however, sets him free and, fearing his father’s displeasure, escapes into the woods with the wild man. Eventually, the prince disobeys the wild man too, who sends him away but tells him that if he ever needs anything, to say his name three times. The prince endures many struggles but grows up. He is then able to return

Figure 6.2 John finds Rosie in a cage

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home – importantly, with more power than his father – but only after he has sought and been granted his three wishes by the wild man: indeed, a crucial part of the tale is the wild man coming to the prince and saying, “What is it you want?” (Bly, 1990, pp. 255–257). By both letting the wild man out of his cage and asking for his help, the prince releases him, for it turns out the wild man is really a lord under a spell – and he gives all of his riches to the prince in gratitude. The point of the parable, for Bly, is about letting the “wild man” out from the pond, out of the cage, out of the forest, and acknowledging his centrality in men’s lives. In The Woman, the patriarch goes hunting in the woods and finds not a wild man but a dirt-stained wild woman; she is in a river, just as the wild man was in a pond; like the king, the patriarch of The Woman cages her and forbids anyone to let her go. In The Woman, it is the daughter, not the son, who defies the father’s command and frees her. Her release of the wild woman precipitates the daughter’s ascent over the father, although it is a bloody one and involves his destruction. In Iron Hans father and son live together, happily, at the end – the son’s new power a “natural” progression that the king accepts. In The Woman, the daughter cannot live with the father; he would never countenance her having any power; and she must violently destroy him in order to live at all. In The Woman, in short, there is no rite of passage that allows fathers and daughters, men and women, to share power and live together. They are bound in a narrative of mutual destruction: only one can survive in a zero-sum game of power. In The Woman, Don’t Breathe, The Neighbour, and the many other films that feature the trope of the caged woman, men who feel powerless, voiceless, marginalised, trapped, and left behind compensate for these feelings by confining women. This is our parable in the 2010s. The act of a man’s overpowering a woman and keeping her captive offers a fantasy of revenge and remasculinisation that is likely to resonate with many white, middle-aged, working-class men in post-Recession America. Trump tapped into this fantasy with his call of “lock her up!,” a chant that swept crowds at rallies in an irrational fervour that exceeded the rational critiques people might legitimately have formulated about Hillary Clinton. These films from the 2010s, and Trump’s dangerous appeal, demonstrate a moment of crisis in gender relations, as men, in the post-Recession post-industrial economy, are losing power they once had to women over whom they once wielded that power. “Lock her up!,” like the caged woman trope of 2010s horror film, is an affective and to some degree inchoate structure of feeling that taps into men’s increasing powerlessness, both real and perceived, and Trump manipulated it to get into the White House. It is worth pointing out, though, that none of the women in 2010s horror stay locked up. Notes 1 This trend has also emerged in fiction. See, for instance, Natasha Preston’s The Cellar (2014), B.A. Paris’s Behind Closed Doors (2016), and Ellison Cooper’s Caged (2018).

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2 This speech resonates with a tenet of the men’s rights movement, which holds that men’s supposed power is illusory. Michael Kimmel quotes Warren Farrell on the myth of male power: “Power is not earning money that someone else can spend and dying earlier so they get the benefits” (Kimmel, 2013, p. 110). 3 Hofmann has written a brilliant dissection of the complicated politics of victimhood in Don’t Breathe. 4 These men’s sense of grievance is in part about the loss of privilege that has historically accrued to gender and race, but it is also about real economic and social losses. As an article in The Atlantic puts it, describing the typical Trump supporter, Although white men without a college education haven’t suffered the same historical discrimination as blacks or women, their suffering is not imagined. The Hamilton Project has found that the full-time, full-year employment rate of men without a bachelor’s degree fell from 76 percent in 1990 to 68 percent in 2013. While real wages have grown for men and women with a four-year degree or better in the last 25 years, they’ve fallen meaningfully for non-college men. (Thompson, 2016; emphasis added) See also Weir.

Bibliography Bly, R. 1990. Iron John: A Book about Men. Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley. Buchanan, I. 2010. “Structure of Feeling.” In A Dictionary of Critical Theory. New York, Oxford University Press, Online. Clasen, M. 2017. Why Horror Seduces. New York: Oxford University Press. Clover, C. 1992. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Cooper, E. 2018. Caged. New York: Minotaur Books. Francis, R. 2018. “Him, Not Her: Why Working-Class White Men Reluctant about Trump Still Made Him President of the United States.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. 4, 1–11. Hofmann, G. 2016. “Don’t Breathe: The Politics of Justice and the Subjectivity of Victimhood.” Horror Homeroom. Accessed: 29/8/18. Hopkins, D. A. 2016. “An Underappreciated Fact about the 2016 Election: The Massive Generation Gap.” The Washington Post. Accessed: 10/12/18. Kimmel, M. 2013. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York, Nation Books. Milbank, A. 2009. “Female Gothic.” In: Mulvey-Roberts, M. (ed.), The Handbook of the Gothic. New York, New York University Press, pp. 120–124. Paris, B. B. 2016. Behind Closed Doors. London: Harper Collins. Preston, N. 2014. The Cellar. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Fire. Rosin, H. 2010. “The End of Men.” The Atlantic. Accessed: 29/8/18. Thompson, D. 2016. “Who Are Donald Trump’s Supporters, Really?” The Atlantic. Accessed: 1/3/18. Tolentino, J. 2016. “The Twisted Appeal of ‘Don’t Breathe’.” The New Yorker. Accessed: 13/9/18. Tyson, A. & Maniam, S. 2016. “Behind Trump’s Victory: Divisions by Race, Gender, Education.” Pew Research Center. Accessed: 9/8/18. Weir, K. 2017. “The Men America Left Behind.” Monitor on Psychology (The American Psychological Association). 48 (2). Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York, Oxford University Press. Wood, R. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York, Columbia University Press.

108 Dawn Keetley 10x10 (2018) Directed by Suzi Ewing: Unstoppable Entertainment. 13 Cameras (2015) Directed by Victor Zarcoff: 30 Bones Cinema. Bad Samaritan (2018) Directed by Dean Devlin: Electric Entertainment. The Collection (2012) Directed by Marcus Dunstan: LD Entertainment. The Collector (2009) Directed by Marcus Dunstan: LD Entertainment. Don’t Breathe (2016) Directed by Fede Álvarez: Screen Gems. Halloween (1978) Directed by John Carpenter: Compass International Pictures. The Hills Have Eyes (1977) Directed by Wes Craven: Vanguard. Insidious: The Last Key (2018) Directed by Adam Robitel: Universal Pictures. I Spit on Your Grave 2 (2013) Directed by Steven R. Monroe: Anchor Bay Films. Jaws (1975) Directed by Steven Spielberg: Universal Pictures. The Neighbour (2016) Directed by Marcus Dunstan: Anchor Bay Films. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Directed by Wes Craven: New Line Cinema. Pet (2016) Directed by Carles Torrens: Orion Pictures. Split (2016) Directed by M. Night Shyamalan: Universal Pictures. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) Directed by Tobe Hooper: Bryanston Pictures. The Woman (2011) Directed by Lucky McKee: Bloody Disgusting.

7

“I told you not to go into that house” Get Out and horror’s racial politics Christopher Lloyd

The comic yet serious line at the end of Get Out (2017), “I told you not to go into that house,” speaks to a long genealogy of haunted or menacing American dwellings. The home, in horror cinema, is that site of uncanny return, of buried secrets, of ghost-saturated spaces, and imminent peril. In a US context, that home also carries with it particular racial, cultural, and national memories. From Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975), literary depictions of un/homely horror are now canonical. But cinema, from The Amityville Horror (1979, 2005) to The Others (2001) and The Conjuring (2013), has equally offered an array of domestic spaces that protagonists are simultaneously drawn to, and need to escape from. The end of Jordan Peele’s lauded Get Out borrows from this lineage of creepy dwellings, leading to the final moments when black photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) escapes from the home of his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), with the aid of his best friend Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery), a TSA agent. Rod’s “I told you so” moment is also a knowing wink to us as horror’s audience, who often watch as characters go into houses that we know are not safe. Moreover, in this particular case, Chris has just escaped “the sunken place” – a psychic space of subjection and oppression – as well as the clutches of a family that want to use and abuse his body and identity. Peele’s film, then, is certainly more than a typical genre piece. This chapter examines how Get Out – an exceedingly tense horror film nonetheless – skewers and critiques race-relations in the United States today. Echoing earlier films about the apprehensions of identity in middle-class America – such as Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) – Get Out utilises the horror genre and its conventions to radical political and historical ends. Emerging as it does in the era of Presidents Obama and Trump, Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, police brutality, neo-Nazis, and the tearing down of Confederate monuments, Peele’s film vividly works through the present moment and foregrounds the dominant white spaces through which black Americans move. Invoking the historical uses of black bodies in the present, Get Out dramatises the racialisation of captivity and fugitivity in the Americas. We follow Chris as he escapes the clutches of the Armitage family who auction

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off Chris’s body to be implanted with a white man’s consciousness. Their “coagula procedure” is a way of both evacuating and using blackness and black bodies for white advantage. Yet, rather than cast the villains of the film as far-right nationalists or white supremacists, as one might plausibly expect in 2017, Peele makes a liberal white family the key antagonists. The horror and Gothic genres, especially in the United States, have always been cultural vehicles for manifesting racial tensions and conflict, and this film is no different. Get Out, I want to suggest, is the scariest new film about the oldest of American horrors. Get Out begins in suburbia at night, invoking the domestic habitus of numerous US horror films. A young black man, Logan King (Lakeith Stanfield), is walking down the street, talking on his phone, telling someone that he stands out here “like a sore thumb.” We might expect, in this context, a violent scene to unfold with white police, or a neighbour expressing that this man is “out of place.” But what follows is unexpected but just as horrifying – a car pulls up alongside him, slowing down. Loudly, “Run Rabbit Run” is playing from the stereo. Though Logan tries to walk past the car, a man eventually gets out, grabs him, and puts him in the trunk – all the while wearing a knight’s helmet. The film then cuts to the titles. As the words Get Out dominate the screen, we see a tracking shot of thick forest on a roadside; alongside this pastoral, but haunting, US landscape, we hear similarly evocative choral African music. After the titles, we cut again to a different mise-en-scène and music track: black and white photos of African Americans in urban environments, a tracking shot of a fine apartment, a young white woman (Rose) buying pastries, and a young black man (Chris) getting ready, to the sound of Childish Gambino’s soulful “Redbone.” Chris is a photographer, living in the city, and is about to visit his girlfriend’s family for the first time, upstate. These three different settings – the stolen body of a young black man, the threatening US wilderness underlaid with African singing, and the aesthetics of black bodies in the city (in real life and in images) – thematise Get Out’s interest in surface and depth, rural and urban, body and image, captivity and fugitivity. Such tensions run throughout black culture in US history, but in the 21st century, shadowed by the Obama and Trump presidencies and alongside the ascendance of the Black Lives Matter movement, these preoccupations are just as politically charged. It is a contention of this chapter that Peele’s film uses the architecture of the horror genre to examine, as Jared Sexton puts it in relation to Afro-Pessimism, “how blackness might be thought . . . in an anti-black world that shapes and structures every aspect of black existence, except – or including – whatever escapes. Fugitivity is not freedom, or not yet” (2016: np). Going “into that house,” as I suggested above, is not simply a replication of horror tropes, but a materialisation of black life inhabiting (or not) white structures and spaces in the United States. As Eric Savoy notes, the haunted house “is the most persistent site, object, structural analogue, and trope of American gothic’s allegorical turn” (1998: 9), because it formalises and embodies an inability to forget, or the persistence of the

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past. Get Out discloses, through its form, how anti-blackness persists in the contemporary United States, and how even purportedly “post-racial” and “liberal” environments are shaped by the legacies of slavery and segregation. Chris and Rose discuss visiting her family and the possible tensions around their interracial relationship. He asks, directly, “Do they know I’m black?” and Rose’s response, “No, should they?” seems to gesture toward a moment in which race seems not to matter in American life. Indeed, Rose notes that “they are not racist,” and that her father “would have voted for Obama a third time if he could” (Peele, 2017). This line is repeated later by her father Dean (Bradley Whitford), as he and Chris talk – a repetition that should reveal to the viewer the scripted nature of the family’s dialogue and their surface-level liberalism. On their drive upstate, Chris calls his best friend Rod, working at the airport. We see him patting down an old white lady, and tells Chris, “the next 9/11 is going to be some geriatric shit.” Rod also tells Chris: “Don’t go to a white girl’s parent’s house” (Peele, 2017). Taken together, these two lines show Rod as vocally conscious of the pernicious US scripts about black and brown bodies, and the threats of whiteness to people of colour. He skewers the dominant cultural narrative of “terrorism” as connected only to brown bodies (usually male), suggesting that ostensibly “harmless” white subjects should be scrutinised instead;1 and Rod also pinpoints the dangers lurking in white spaces, even purportedly liberal domestic ones. A sudden interruption to this rural drive forebodes corporeal violence: they hit a deer, who staggers off into the wood to die. A policeman arrives, and immediately questions Chris, asking to see his licence. Rose, performing a version of “woke” whiteness, stands up for Chris, arguing with the policeman that he was not driving the car and thus does not have to show identification. If this scene grates, it is because of Rose’s overly emphatic “defence” of her boyfriend and the demonstration of liberal resistance to state racism. At this point of the film, we trust Rose entirely; but so far, with a kidnapped black man, a dead deer, Rod’s warning, and Rose’s behaviour, we feel tension rising. Chris and Rose soon arrive at the Armitage house. Though the film is set in New England – awash with fall foliage – Get Out was filmed largely in Alabama for tax purposes. The southern setting does not only make sense monetarily but also aesthetically and politically. We, and Chris, see a grand house with white columns and huge grounds; we also see a black groundskeeper, Walter (Marcus Henderson), staring at the house. Eventually, we will learn that this man – along with the housekeeper Georgina (Betty Gabriel) – are actually just the corporeal vessels for Rose’s grandparents’ minds. I will say more about this use of black bodies below, but here it is worth emphasising southern/northern dialogue at play. The columned house with grounds and black workers cannot but call up antebellum properties in the US South. Yet, by setting the film in a northern state, Peele refuses to exceptionalise racism as a southern problem. For, as Jennifer Rae Greeson, and numerous other southern studies scholars have told us, the US South has always functioned as “an internal other for the nation, an intrinsic part of the national body that

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nonetheless is differentiated and held apart from the whole” (2010: 1). The South thus becomes the site where all of the nation’s ills are projected: “A concept of the South is essential to national identity in the United States of America” (Greeson, 2010: 1). Get Out thus plays with both local and national histories of race in America. This national story of race-relations plays out through Chris’s awkward integration into the Armitage household. After seeing the housekeeper and groundskeeper, both of whom have pained smiles on their faces, Chris sits down for dinner with Rose, her parents, and her brother. This scene of microaggressions, familial revelation, and power games alerts us to the fact that this family is not as amiable as first thought. For example, Rose’s brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) acts out at the meal, provoking Chris to wrestle him. Jeremy’s line, “with your frame, your genetic make-up? If you pushed your body . . . you’d be a beast” (Peele, 2017) not only fetishises and exoticises Chris’s blackness and corporeality, but also invokes racist categorisations of animality. It also forebodes the way in which Chris’s body (along with many others) are taken, bought, and inhabited by white consciousnesses through the “coagula procedure.” The microaggressions of the dinner-table conversation are also acknowledged by Rose: “how are they different from that cop?” (Peele, 2017). Rose addresses the permeation of racism into all kinds of speech and acts – not just explicit violence or hate, as many liberal whites might suggest – and covers her own complicity in the Armitage family business. Drawing a line between the policeman’s targeting of Chris to her brother and parents’ cringeworthy actions, Rose alerts us to the deep continuum of anti-blackness in the contemporary “liberal” United States. The above dinner also, of course, echoes and conjures up previous films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In that famous film, Sidney Poitier plays a doctor, John Prentice, who marries a young white woman and goes to meet her parents in their lavish San Francisco house. Not only does Get Out re-stage that dinner scene, but it also replays certain encounters, such as when Prentice is confronted by the African American maid Tillie; she famously tells him, “Civil Rights is one thing. This here is something else” (Kramer, 1967). The tense feelings between the Drayton family and Prentice are also shared. Tillie sees Prentice’s position in the house as a disturbance, and a crossing of racial/class/gender boundaries, even in a purportedly liberal California. In Kathryn Bond Stockton’s words, Prentice, as the queer “child-intruder,” makes the “parents reflect upon their ethics of inclusion . . . and reflect upon their image as liberal intellectuals” (2009: 192). Where that earlier film hinges upon whether the family will integrate Dr Prentice into the family – testing their “ethics of inclusion” and tolerance – Get Out dispenses with that notion very swiftly, as Rose’s parents make an awkward, but ostentatious, display of their liberalism. Dean asks the couple, in a cringing way, “how long’s this been going on. This thang?” and also acknowledges that “I hate the way it looks,” a white family with “black servants.” Again, saying that he “would have voted for Obama a third time,” Dean embodies a display of “woke whiteness” that

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both protests racism yet carefully re-enacts it at every step. By re-working Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in the present day (a task previously attempted in Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s derided Guess Who [2005]), Peele’s film stages a dialogue between Civil Rights-era race-relations and those of the present day. Part of what we see in Get Out – at least until Chris’s body is taken into the basement to be “inhabited” by a white man’s mind – is the legacy of slavery and segregation onwards, as they are manifest in the 21st century. More particularly, we see “the routinized violence of slavery” that Saidiya Hartman theorises in Scenes of Subjection (1997). In this book, Hartman turns not to “the shocking and the terrible” but to the “terror of the mundane and quotidian” (1997: 4). By looking at “correctives and declarations of slave humanity,” Hartman shows how these seemingly benevolent acts actually “facilitated subjugation, domination, and terror precisely by preying upon the flesh, the heart, and the soul” (1997: 5). The strange goings-on in the Armitage house – the slights, the odd comments and looks – are all microaggressions and, of course, preludes to the captivity of Chris’s body; they are ways of seeing the “quotidian” subjections of slavery lingering in the present. It is the self-professed post-racial and liberal white America that exacts forms of bodily and psychic wounding on black Americans in ways highly similar to what Hartman is discussing in the 19th century. That night, after dinner, Chris escapes into the garden to have a cigarette, something he has already been chastised for by Rose’s parents; indeed, Missy (Catherine Keener), as a therapist, offers to hypnotise Chris to help him quit. He sneaks out into the garden and out of the darkness sprints the gardener Walter. He runs directly towards Chris, panicking him, and only at the last second does he switch direction, seemingly not even noticing the guest. Chris notices, too, Georgina watching at the window, confirming his suspicions about the strange behaviour of these black workers. When back inside, Chris stumbles across Missy still awake in her office. She makes him sit and asks probing questions about Chris’s life, especially his mother, all the while stirring her cup of tea – a trigger for inducing hypnosis. As he goes under, Missy says “sink into the floor,” upon which we follow Chris into freefall as he descends into black night, backdropped by swelling music. Back in the office, we see a close-up of his face, mouth open, wide-eyed, and crying. This infamous shot visualises the pain and distress Chris feels as he is forced into the “sunken place.” Hypnotised, Chris is forced into a dwelling that is conditioned by terror and the inability to respond or resist. The sunken place is a form of psychic captivity that Christina Sharpe might theorise as being “in the wake” of slavery: “this is the flesh, these are bodies, to which anything and everything can be and is done” (2016: 16). In this way, Missy’s grip over Chris’s mind is an extension of the logic of slavery and its aftermaths. The sunken place, then, is both a physical and psychic space of subjugation and ontological evacuation. It is a form of individual control and the attempted obliteration of blackness itself: the sunken place is antiblackness materialised.

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On the next day of Chris and Rose’s visit, a “gathering” of friends descends on the Armitage house: the long line of black cars streaming up the driveway evokes both a presidential and a funereal cavalcade, both signalling threat. Chris is taken from one couple to another, all of whom make comments that are at best problematic and at worst racist: “I do know Tiger,” one says (referring to Tiger Woods, the black golfer); another, erotically touching Chris’s arm, looks at Rose saying, “Is it true? Is it better?” (referring of course to stereotypes about black masculinity and sexuality); another says that today “black is in fashion.” Hearing about this on the phone, Chris’s friend Rod says, “they got you on display,” and “white people love making people sex slaves.” Rod’s continued refrain in Get Out – especially after they learn that Logan King has gone missing, and then shows up at this party – is that all of the white characters are keeping (black) sex slaves. Historically, we know that many slave owners raped slave women, who often then bore children (Collins, 2004), but recent scholarship has also excavated the abuses of slave men too (Woodard, 2014). In both cases, enslaved black people were used in myriad ways that involve the captivity of, and control over, their bodies. Get Out’s narrative traces a line between this era and the present. Chris also meets Logan, the man who we saw taken at the beginning. Chris tries to reach out to him – “Good to see another brother round here” – but receives an awkward reply. When an Asian-American guest asks Chris and Logan whether being black is a disadvantage in the world, Logan’s response is suitably confused and strained. Attempting to take a secret photo of him, Chris accidentally sets off the flash. This visual stimulus startles Logan and makes his nose bleed. “Get out,” he shouts at Chris, “Get out!” That fateful, titular, warning is an eruption of black wokeness – the flash literally “wakes” the shred of Logan’s consciousness – that unsettles Chris even more. Soon after, he discusses leaving the house, but Rose eventually talks him into staying. At the same time, the Armitage guests all spend time in the garden bidding on Chris’s body: Dean is leading an auction, amongst the guests, for ownership of Chris. While the blind art dealer, Jim Hudson (Stephen Root) who successfully “purchases” Chris’s body says, near the end of the film, that his race was not relevant to his decision, it is clear that the Armitage family only trade in black bodies. And as the afternoon unravels quickly – Chris sends the photo of Logan to Rod, who identifies him as a friend of a friend who recently went missing; Chris’s phone goes dead; and then he discovers a box full of photos of Rose with various black boyfriends, even though she told Chris she had never been with someone black before – the horrors of the household come to light. Rose has thus been taking black people home for years, so that they can be bought for white people to inhabit through the coagula procedure. Chris attempts to escape but is blocked by the whole family working in unison – the switch to terrifying antagonist is played most successfully by Allison Williams here – and then wakes in a basement room, tied to a chair, opposite a mounted stag’s head (a nod to the deer that is killed at the

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beginning, entwining their deathly fates). He is forced to watch an old film about the Armitage family and their procedure on a television: “behold the coagula” it reads. Noting the “physical advantages” of bodies like Chris’s, this white family have been taking black bodies and implanting the brains of white people with the money to do so. The coagulation that the term implies is a congealing of white power and supremacy over black corporeality and psychology. It is the direct descendant, or continuation, of slavery’s capture. Jim, who acquires Chris’s body is asked, “why black people?” Jim says, because they are “stronger,” “faster,” “cooler”; the black body is coded as enhanced or exceptional for certain purposes. Katherine McKittrick, in Demonic Grounds, argues that during slavery, “The owned and captive body was thus most profitable if it was considered to be a healthy, working, licentious, reproductive body” (2006: 44). The value of a slave lay in its usefulness for a master’s needs, much like in this contemporary setting. Jim tells Chris, “you won’t be gone,” as a “sliver of limited consciousness” will remain: “you’ll live in the sunken place.” As a “passenger,” Chris is reduced to a kind of “social death,” in Orlando Patterson’s words (1982). Put another way, during slavery – “the body is territorialized – it is publicly and financially claimed, owned, and controlled by an outsider” (McKittrick, 2006: 44). The coagula procedure simply extends that territorialising work in the 21st-century and continues to map black bodies as spaces to own. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody argues that the Armitage family are creating “inwardly whitened black people” who are “cut off from their history and their self-consciousness and, therefore, deprived of the power to rebel” (2017). Of course, Chris breaks free from their clutches and from his captivity. As a fugitive – joining a long list of black revolutionaries, rebels, and escapees, linking the present to the Haitian Revolution, the Underground Railroad, and the stories of many slave narratives – Chris is able to break free from the Armitage home, set it alight, and (with the help of TSA agent Rod) drive off into the night. This final section advances quickly and bloodily with an atmospheric mise-en-scène, utilising many of the conventions of horror cinema (night-time setting, rolling fog, claustrophobic rooms and corridors, sudden loud noises, and so on). Yet, this terrifying climax, with multiple deaths – including Walter’s shooting of Rose and himself – is not necessarily a celebratory ending. Chris fights his way out alone and only Rod comes to pick him up. We think, briefly, that police lights are heading towards the driveway at the very end: the scene, though, looks dubious – a black man standing over a dead white woman. In any other (white) film, the arrival of police would perhaps signal safety and resolution; here, the lights signal the possible re-capture or incarceration of this black man. Instead, Rod gets out of the TSA car and takes Chris to safety. If we think that Rod’s role as a state operative (policing, controlling, and “protecting” the border) undercuts the escape in some way, we have to remember that the police want nothing to do with Rod’s rescue attempt; we watch a long scene whereby three officers laugh Rod out of the station

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when he tells them the story. As we have seen, as TSA, Rod is sceptical of the white people that he screens, not people of colour. Thus, while the police offer no help to Chris, Rod, or the missing Logan, they do offer threat and/ or negligence (recall the earlier scene in the car). Get Out is placed squarely within an era when we see, weekly, police officers apprehending, wounding, and killing unarmed black people across the United States. It is only Rod, woke to – in Christina Sharpe’s words – the wake of slavery’s afterlives, who is able to warn Chris “not to go into that house,” and also to help him escape it. “How did you find me?” Chris asks; “I’m TS-motherfucking-A. We handle shit,” Rod replies. Horror and the Gothic, especially in the United States, have always been genres that articulate and attest to tensions and ruptures in the nation. As Teresa Goddu writes, the Gothic always “needs to be historicized” as it is a “distorted, not disengaged, version of reality” (1997: 3). In other words, Goddu enables us to see that horror is not about escaping the real world – through haunted houses, ghosts, monsters, and so on – but rather seeing it anew. Moreover, to historicise the US Gothic is to see the “historical horrors that make national identity possible” (Goddu, 1997: 3), from slavery and Native genocide onwards. The roots of the Gothic and horror, then, are deeply entwined with America’s dark past: a past that is not consigned to history but lives on and reverberates into the present. Horror continues to articulate – in its most visceral and politically insightful forms – the anxieties, tensions, and traumas of US life. Get Out’s emergence two months after the inauguration of Donald Trump thus requires us to contextualise it within a turbulent (yet not unexpected) moment of US history. If the story of the United States is one founded upon trauma and violence – colonisation, Native removal, slavery, genocide, white supremacy – then Trump’s installation in the White House after eight years of Barack Obama’s leadership is entirely understandable. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, Trump is “the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president”; he is thus not like all the other white men who came before him but is “America’s first white president” (2017: 344). In other words, Coates sees Trump as the embodiment of whiteness (its privilege, its power, its history, its blindness) and thus as the negation of, or direct response to, Obama’s blackness. While I am wary of using a label such as post-Obama America – or, indeed, the term that Get Out wants to obliterate, “post-racial” – we can clearly posit that Trump’s ideology of white supremacy, xenophobia, and nationalism shadow Obama’s legacy. Indeed, the Trump candidacy and administration have undone, rescinded, and dismantled so many of Obama’s policies and structures. Thus, Get Out’s politics of race – in themselves horrific, but also articulated by the horror genre – are deeply tied to the contemporary moment, straddling two oppositional presidencies. We cannot but see the film shaped and undergirded by this racialised present: Obama, Trump, Black Lives Matter, Muslim bans, protests of the national anthem, the killing of Trayvon Martin and so many others. The Armitage house, haunted not by ghosts but

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by a long genealogy of racial violence, is a building that may ultimately burn down by the film’s end, but is metonymic of so many other white spaces that have entrapped and held captive black subjects and will continue to do so. Get Out allows Chris a bloody escape, but black life in the shadow of slavery’s continued unfolding is disturbed by many other horrors that continue to exert corporeal and psychic threat. Coda At the time of this book going to print, Peele’s second feature, Us, WA released, is breaking box office records and garnering rapturous critical acclaim. While I cannot say much about the film here, it is necessary to highlight how Peele, through these two movies, is reconstructing the horror genre for the contemporary moment. Where Get Out used the “sunken place” as a metaphor for black subjugation, in Us, he uses “un/tethering,” a mode of connection between self and other, identity and its shadow-side. With these two terms alone, Peele is developing a grammar, a vocabulary, of political horror sufficient to the demands of the twenty-first century, under the Trump Presidency and after. I look forward to seeing the two films analysed together to further unravel horror’s radical potential. Note 1 There are many studies one could go to, but see the following for a useful starting point: Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, “Most of America’s Terrorists are White, and Not Muslim” (2017).

Bibliography Brody, R. 2017. “Get Out: Jordan Peele’s Radical Cinematic Vision of the World through a Black Man’s Eyes.” The New Yorker (Online). Accessed: 2/3/18. Coates, T. 2017. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. New York: One World Publishing. Collins, P. H. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York and London: Routledge. Goddu, T. 1997. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Greeson, J. R. 2010. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartman, S. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, S. 1959. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking Penguin. King, S. 1975. Salem’s Lot. New York: Doubleday. McKittrick, K. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ruiz-Grossman, S. 2017. “Most of America’s Terrorists Are White, and Not Muslim.” Huffington Post (Online). Accessed: 23/6/18.

118 Christopher Lloyd Savoy, E. 1998. ‘The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic.’ In Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (eds.), American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Sexton, J. 2016. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 29 (Online). Accessed: 23/6/18. Sharpe, C. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Stockton, K. B. 2009. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Woodard, V. 2014. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture. New York: New York University Press. The Amityville Horror (1979) Directed by Stuart Rosenberg: American International Pictures. The Amityville Horror (2005) Directed by Andrew Douglas: MGM Distribution Co. The Conjuring (2013) Directed by James Wan: Warner Bros. Pictures. Get Out (2017) Directed by Jordan Peele: Universal Pictures. Guess Who (2005) Directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan: Columbia Pictures. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) Directed by Stanley Kramer: Columbia Pictures. The Others (2001) Directed by Alejandro Amenábar: Dimension Films.

8

Securing the borders Isolation and anxiety in The Witch, It Comes at Night, and Trump’s America Brandon Grafius

Many aspects of Trump’s presidency have been surprising, even shocking. But one constant has been Trump’s desire to isolate America from the rest of the world, to shatter our traditional alliances and dramatically restrict immigration. It’s a worldview deeply rooted in anxiety, an anxiety that reveals itself in dramatic fantasies of rampaging immigrant hordes and international financiers laughing at America’s hapless trade deficit. Sociologists have long noted that the desire for a culture to build walls and circle the wagons around themselves increases with anxiety, whether this anxiety is real or perceived.1 This theory has borne itself out in the 21st century in a variety of ways, including our response to the attacks of 9/11. And most recently, increased isolation as a response to a perceived external threat has reared its head in the 2016 presidential election, in which horror stories of malevolent immigrants pouring into our cities became a common feature of political stump speeches. In response to a variety of fears – perceptions of a stagnant economy, the evolution of social mores on a variety of issues in the previous decade, and many others2 – America elected a leader whose platform was built on dramatically reducing immigration, increasing the pressure from law enforcement on minority communities within the United States, and dramatically reducing our relationships with other countries. America responded to its anxiety by turning inward. Trump convinced enough of the American people that the barbarians were at the gates, so we agreed to raise the drawbridge.3 Recently, two horror movies have explored this desire to turn inward in the face of threat. In both The Witch (2015) and It Comes at Night (2017), a family finds itself in a situation of extreme duress. In both cases, the family’s patriarch responds by attempting to exert control and tighten the boundaries around the family. And in both cases, these attempts to protect the family from the outside world lead to further discord within, eventually resulting in the family’s demise. The discourse in both films is a complicated one; these are not simple allegories for our times. But both of them offer a nuanced and chilling look at the costs of allowing anxiety to determine a group’s course of action, and the impossibility of sufficiently protecting against threats from the outside.

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Isolation and moral purity in The Witch In The Witch, we see a family respond to a threat to their identity by withdrawing from society. Rather than compromise his religious beliefs, the family’s patriarch opts to leave with his wife and children to found a homestead in the wilderness, isolated from their former community. This isolation becomes more and more salient as the film progresses. The Witch begins at a Puritan heresy trial, with patriarch William (a remarkably grim-faced Ralph Ineson, looking like he just walked off the set of one of Ingmar Bergman’s mediaeval films from the 1950s) choosing to have himself and his family banished from the colony rather than recant his beliefs. While William’s heretical beliefs go unstated in the film, he seems most likely to fall within the first controversy, known as the Antinomian controversy.4 The official position of the Puritan church was that only officially recognised ministers of the church could determine who was truly “converted,” and thus who was to be treated as a full member of the colony. The Antinomians, in contrast, believed that only the individual could judge his (or her)5 inward beliefs.6 William aligns himself with this belief in his initial speech. As the camera scans the faces of William’s family, he makes a plea for the true expression of faith as the reason for forming this new colony. He is cut off by an unseen judge: “No more! We are your judges, and not you ours.” William responds, “I cannot be judged by false Christians, for I have done nothing save preach Christ’s true gospel.” This precipitates his removal from the community, as he refuses to subordinate his own conscience to the (perceived) needs of the community. Reflecting on how the Antinomian controversy relates to instances of xenophobia in the Hebrew Bible, David Janzen writes: “Obviously, this was, on one level, a dispute over where power was to lie in the new community” (Janzen, 2002, p. 63). William’s refusal to recant his heretical beliefs is, in essence, a challenge to the authority structures of his colony. Although writer/director Robert Eggers is far too savvy to state it directly so early in the film, this initial scene already introduces the theme that will dominate the rest of the film: an anxious community attempts to defend itself against perceived threats (from within or, as we will see later in the film, without) by tightening its control over its members. As his family attempts to build a new life for themselves in their homestead, William will attempt to duplicate this same model of family cohesion, with devastating results. From the beginning, the family’s homestead is marked as a place of isolation. The small house and barn are located in the midst of a field, but long shots continually remind us that they are surrounded by menacing woods on all sides. We first see this as the family arrives at the homestead and proceeds to pray together; rather than remain on the characters, the camera pans over them to the woods that mark the edge of their homestead. As the camera closes in on the woods, the discordant choral score rises to a crescendo. (For most of the film, music is only present during scenes involving the

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woods.) Throughout the film, these woods will serve as an important boundary, marking the border between the (supposedly) safe space of the family homestead, and the dangerous domain of the forest.7 But repeatedly, the camera emphasises the looming presence of these woods, always present, always threatening. As we are reminded constantly under the Trump administration, borders can be frightening places; when the community perceives itself as threatened, they become even more so (Douglas, 2002; Wuthnow, 1987, pp. 69–71). In addition to this sense of isolation, the family’s interpersonal relations quickly unravel. The first precipitating event is the disappearance of the family’s baby, Samuel. Matriarch Katherine passes Samuel to Thomasin to watch; rather than follow where she takes him, the camera immediately cuts to a shot of the woods, the perspective slowing drawing closer while its ominous nature is reinforced by a subtle introduction of minor-key ambient music. (Music and the woods, again.) A quick jump cut takes the film to a giggling Samuel, and Thomasin playing a peek-a-boo with him. But after several rounds of this game, she pulls her hands from her eyes to find Samuel has disappeared. A POV shot brings her gaze up to the edge of the woods, with a single, small pine tree rustling while the trees around it stand still. Thomasin races to the edge of the woods, but stops short of entering; at this point in the film, only the camera is permitted to follow the witch across this border. The family is also fracturing in less dramatic ways. POV shots communicate to the viewer that pubescent Caleb is rather infatuated with his elder sister’s (extremely slight) cleavage. And William, deeply concerned with his family’s ability to survive on their own, deceives his wife in two instances, letting his children shoulder the blame both times. We learn that William has taken his wife’s heirloom cup and sold it for supplies; when she blames Thomasin for its disappearance, William remains silent. In addition, William takes Caleb into the woods to hunt, but refuses to tell his wife where they have been. Finally, Caleb resolves the situation with a lie about an apple tree he had seen in the valley. In both of these instances, William is engaged in an act of deception, but is unable to tell an outright lie. In one case, he allows his wife to continue her suspicion of Thomasin; in the other, he allows his son to lie in his stead. Unable to hold his family together, William retreats into obsessive wood-splitting. The family might not have enough food to eat, but they have an enormous pile of wood stacked up against their cabin. In the midst of this unravelling family, suspicion grows that they are being targeted by a witch. First, the younger twins, Mercy and Jonas, claim they have seen the witch flying around. Thomasin responds by claiming to be the witch herself and threatening Mercy, in a joke that goes on far too long to be merely innocent, leaving Mercy terrorised. When Thomasin and Caleb sneak off into the woods on a disastrous hunting trip, the family dog is lost and Caleb encounters the witch herself, in the form of a beautiful young woman. A POV shot indicates that Caleb is just as interested in her cleavage as he is in his sister’s. When Caleb stumbles back to the farm, naked and on the brink

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of death, the family is convinced that it is witchcraft; Williams is certain that the witch is one of them, with young females Thomasin and Mercy being labelled the most likely culprits. Perhaps the family was doomed from the moment they left the relative safety of the Puritan enclave. Or perhaps if they were not so busy pointing fingers and deceiving each other, they might have noticed the actual evil presence in their midst: Satan himself in the form of their goat, the ominously named Black Phillip.8 Indeed, Mercy and Jonas sing a song early on in the film that telegraphs this major development: “We are ye servants/we are ye men/ Black Phillip eats the lions/from the lions’ den.” But after Caleb’s death, William boards his three remaining children into the shed, vowing to return to the village in the morning. He never has the chance though, as Black Phillip rams him into his own pile of wood. Katherine blames Thomasin for William’s death and attacks her, leading Thomasin to kill her in self-defence. And while Thomasin has been charged with witchcraft at various points in the film by her parents, it is not until she is the only surviving member of her family that she makes a pact with the devil and actually becomes the titular witch. As the family’s patriarch, William was first willing to stake his entire family’s existence on his own integrity. But as their situation grows more dire, he demonstrates that he is willing to compromise this integrity for his family’s security. In the isolation of the homestead, he takes it upon himself to protect the family from the threatening forces of the woods and from the creeping starvation that seems always imminent. However, in his controlling attempts to protect his family, he commits a series of betrayals, sees imaginary threats in a variety of places, and is unable to perceive the actual threat that exists in the family’s midst. The protective wall built around the family by their patriarchal protector proves to be their undoing. Red doors and the danger of human connection in It Comes at Night It Comes at Night presents another isolated family, this time survivors from a vaguely described but seemingly omnipresent plague. The almost complete lack of a backstory, and only the bare minimum regarding the mechanics of the disease itself, serves to heighten the sense of anxiety that permeates the film. The only thing the viewer knows about this disease is that it is deadly, and that it is highly contagious through even the slightest touch. The film begins with a close-up shot of a shirtless man, lesions covering his skin and his black eyes glazed over. A muffled voice is speaking to him off-camera, attempting to reassure him; the camera turns around to reveal a woman (Sarah, played with admirable grit by Carmen Ejogo) wearing a gas mask, explaining the voice’s lack of clarity. Her voice is barely understandable as she says, “I love you, dad.” And in the first minute of the film, its major theme is introduced: the social conditions resulting from the plague have made human intimacy extremely difficult, if not impossible. Sarah’s

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husband, Paul, and teen-aged son, Travis, lay her father gently in a wheelbarrow, then take him into the woods and shoot him. This scene also introduces the viewers to the kinds of choices the plague forces people to make: Sarah is upset that Travis had to participate in killing his grandfather, but Paul argued he couldn’t make Sarah assist in killing her own dad. Both Sarah and Travis should have been exempt from having to help put their own father/ grandfather to death, but one of them had to help. As in The Witch, the family’s response to this threat has been to isolate themselves. Much of the film takes place inside of the family’s farmhouse, which they leave as seldom as they can during the day and only in dire emergencies at night. All the exterior doors have been boarded except for one: an ominously red door which leads to an entrance room. This red door “stays locked, all the time,” when the family is home. Throughout the film, this red door becomes emblematic of encroaching threat; whether it is a slow tracking shot that leads down the hallway to the door, pounding from an unknown source on the other side, or, later in the film, it being left open with severe consequences, the family is only safe as long as the red door remains secure. After the death of the Sarah’s father, the family achieves some sense of routine. But this routine is quickly shattered by the arrival of a stranger, who breaks into their house thinking it is abandoned. The immediate response is distrust, as Paul knocks him out with his rifle butt and ties him to a tree; we gradually realise this is to test whether he has already been infected. But even after the incubation period has passed, Paul has nothing but suspicion for the stranger. After showing the man his loaded gun, Paul interrogates him: “Make me believe you,” he says. He wants to know where the man came from (his brother’s house), who else was with him (his wife and kid), what he has seen in his journey (nothing), why he left (the water supply). This rapid-fire series of questions is in sharp contrast to how the film itself has kept hidden the backstories of the main characters, and of the plague itself. After an interrogation lasting only a few minutes, we know far more about this stranger than we know about Paul or his family. But it is only later that Paul stops to find out that the man’s name is Will. Unlike the authoritarian patriarchs of other recent apocalyptic narratives,9 Paul and his wife make decisions for the family in dialogue. Sarah manages to convince him, without much of a struggle, that “The more people we have here, the better we can defend it.” So Will, his wife, and their son move into the house, making for a very uneasily blended household. Distrust still runs high. When Paul and Will drive out to reclaim Will’s family, Paul is continually checking Will through the rear-view mirror. They are ambushed by gunmen along the way, and even though Will helps defend the pair, Paul is highly suspicious of Will’s request not to kill one of the gunmen. (“We could have questioned him for information,” Will says in defence.) And in one of the few quiet moments of the film, Paul and Will share a glass of whisky together – a delicacy in this post-plague world. They smile and share stories with each other, until Will makes a reference to being

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an only child. Paul instantly pulls back and reverts to his suspicions, remembering that Will had said he and his family had been staying at his brother’s house. “It was my sister’s brother,” Will says. “I always thought of him as a brother.” Paul is unconvinced, and the moment of connection between the two men is gone. This theme recurs throughout the film: among many casualties of the post-plague world, the loss of human connection is one of the most painful. Their warmth towards one another over a glass of whisky indicate that Paul and Will could have been good friends, in another world. Likewise, Travis has moments of connection with Will’s wife, Kim, which go to waste as the two families’ relationship breaks down irrevocably at the film’s climax. Travis has desperately longed for this kind of human connection throughout the film, as when he uses the attic crawl space to listen in on Will and Kim’s intimate conversation. As they find a moment of laughter between each other, Travis has to stifle his own laughter for fear of being overheard. But his longing for connection is expressed most tragically when he finds Andrew, Will and Kim’s young son, experiencing a night terror while sleepwalking. Travis takes the young boy’s hand and leads him back to his parents’ room; it is only later, after he has made physical contact with Andrew, that he realises the red door is standing open. The consequences are swift and tragic, and shatter all hopes of a mutually advantageous community. The film’s title seems rather enigmatic; after all, there is nothing concrete that stalks the family, and the plague travels just as well during the day as it does at night. But a possible answer lies in a subtly woven pattern: one thing that does arrive at night, repeatedly, is human intimacy. In the horrific world constructed by the film, this intimacy is always dangerous, and sometimes fatal. The film presents both families as being stuck in an impossible situation. While the plague necessitates isolation for survival, each member still feels the need for human connection. For Paul, family is most important, and all others are to be meet with a high degree of suspicion. When Paul observes Trevor starting to build a connection with Will, Paul tells his son, “You can’t trust anyone but family. As good as they seem.” Human connection outside of the immediate family is dangerous, and is to be avoided at all costs. But the characters constantly push against this restriction, seeking out connections between each other whenever possible. Paul and Will strike up a friendship over a glass of whisky, and Trevor seeks companionship from Will, Kim, and finally, young Andrew. The true horror of the film lies in its vision of a world where human connection is not only discouraged, but deadly. Isolation in horror, isolation in Trump’s America Both films present a family under severe threat, who has retreated into isolation as a way to protect themselves. But both films also present this isolation as an unsustainable situation, one which the individual family members cannot endure without severe damage to their psyches. In both films, it is this

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psychological damage which leads to the ultimate demise of the family. In The Witch, the family’s isolation is an attempt to achieve the moral purity which William cannot find in the settlement; once the family is isolated in the farmhouse, William believes that the family’s moral purity is the only thing that will keep the witch at bay. But through the course of the narrative, the family members prove unable to live up to this ideal of morality, including William himself. And in a final irony, the most dangerous evil is not in the woods, but has been living on their farm all along. And in It Comes at Night, Paul and his family believe that isolating themselves will allow them to be removed from any sort of contact from outsiders, whether physical or emotional, thus allowing them to remain free of the plague and preserve their supply of goods. But they are unable to overcome their needs for emotional connection, with horrifying results. Clearly, these are not the first horror films to use isolation as a major theme. Night of the Living Dead (1968) has often been analysed through this motif, as has John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), just to name a pair of frequently cited examples.10 Across many times and cultures, humans have been concerned about threats that lie outside of the community, and isolation is a common response to perceived threat. Certainly, this pair of films touches upon a universal anxiety. Some scholars have argued for horror as an increasingly global genre, as popular culture becomes more and more homogenised by global capitalism and the internet.11 There is certainly truth to this claim – as technological advances and economic systems work to create one universal culture, it stands to reason that genre films will start to look more and more alike as well. But while many anxieties may be universal, there is still room for particular expressions of these anxieties, and some expressions may speak clearly and directly to a particular cultural moment.12 And in their themes of isolation as a response to an external threat, both The Witch and It Comes at Night present a powerful dialogue with the political climate in America under the Trump administration. Trump’s campaign was built upon the premise that the world was falling apart, and that drastic measures were needed to keep us safe. In order to “Make America Great Again,” we have to start from the premise that America is no longer great, that something has gone deeply wrong. Trump found his scapegoat in the Mexican immigrants supposedly pouring across our border, the “rapists” and “bad hombres” who are running amuck through our border towns in the president’s fevered imagination.13 Along with Trump’s nightmares about our borders, he has recurring apocalyptic visions of the impact of trade on our economy. In these visions, lower- and middle-class Americans are being devastated by unfair trade practices from our European allies, China, and various other global boogeymen. The only response, Trump claims, is to isolate ourselves from the world, whether it be by closing off our borders and building a Mexican-funded wall or issuing punitive trade restrictions on our global competitors.

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As in The Witch, the isolation Trump would impose requires moral purity on the part of Americans, as we forsake the benefits of the global economy in order to purchase from our fellow Americans. While there are many jokes to be made from the juxtaposition of “Trump” and “moral purity,” the most relevant is Trump’s inability to run his own businesses in such a manner: recently, Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago resort requested federal permission to hire a total of 78 temporary foreign workers for the winter season (Anapol, 2018). Apparently, Trump’s resort was unable to find American workers willing to work for the low pay his resort was offering. And like the family in It Comes at Night, the attempts to isolate ourselves as a nation come with the cost of severing relationships around the globe, and foregoing compassion for anyone who is not an American. Perhaps the most painful example of this has been the administration’s “family separation” policy, under which the children of immigrants requesting asylum are detained in separate facilities from their parents. The Trump administration claims it is necessary to prevent the rampant abuses of our immigration system, but it requires an entire nation to switch off their empathy for these parents and children. Both The Witch and It Comes at Night speak directly to these fears. Each film is less about the external threat itself than it is about what the fear of that threat does to the films’ protagonists. Each family responds by attempting to isolate themselves, then imposes impossible restrictions as a consequence of this isolation, resulting in the family’s unravelling. For many of us, this is one of the deepest anxieties of living in Trump’s America: in order to preserve our lives, or at least our economic prosperity, we are being asked to give up our humanity. It’s a trade-off that did not work out well for the families in either The Witch or It Comes at Night. Notes 1 See, for example, the work of Hetherington and Weiler (2009). This study argues that authoritarianism is the defining fault line of our current political debates. A strong majority of people respond to feelings of threat by supporting more authoritarian policies. However, those with a predisposition towards authoritarianism are much more likely to perceive threats in any given circumstance, increasing the likelihood that they will approve of an authoritarian solution. In short, for those who measure high on authoritarian indices, the world is always a scary place. 2 Recent works to explore the anxieties of rural voters include Hochschild (2016) and Vance (2016). Both offer a sympathetic account of the anxieties that lead rural voters to vote against their economic self-interest. 3 Recently, John Judis (2016) has argued that populist movements across the Western hemisphere are a direct result of the stagnation of wages among the lower and middle classes. More broadly, journalists have explored the roots of resentment in contemporary southern whites, arguing that it stems from a perceived lack of fairness within the American economic system; this frustration is then displaced onto African Americans, immigrants, and other scapegoats. 4 Although the witch-hunts are perhaps the most well known, Erikson (2005, pp. 10–11) has documented three distinct controversies in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636– 1692, with the witch-hunts being the third. His detailed description of the Antinomian

Securing the borders 127 controversy is found in (2005, pp. 71–107). As Erikson notes, the theological views of the Puritans changed dramatically on this issue from their time in England to their establishment of a new colony. Erikson writes: Whereas the early Puritan theorists had emphasized the private nature of each person’s covenant with God, the New England theorists began to argue that God had entered into a covenant with the people of the colony as a corporate group and was only ready to deal with them through the agencies they had built to govern themselves. (pp. 72–73) 5 Anne Hutchison is the most well-known female defendant in the Antinomian trials (Erikson 2005, pp. 92–107). 6 While sharing the name “Antinomian,” the theological view expounded by the New England antinomians is distinct from the antinomians of 16th-century Europe. In the European controversy, Luther disputed with Johannes Agricola, among others, who argued that Christians were bound by the Gospel, not by the law. A brief description of this controversy is found in González (1987, pp. 111–114); in contrast, the New England Antinomian Controversy centred on whether the authority to interpret Scripture lay with the individual or the community. 7 The forest serves a similar function here as it does in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village, in which a village is constantly worried about threats from “Those We Do Not Speak Of.” Some of the most effective scenes of the film involve the village watchmen, keeping guard from a torchlit tower over the edge of the forest. 8 Fans of the film were quite taken with Black Phillip. The Hollywood Reporter refers to him as the “Breakout Goat” of the Sundance film festival, and a “minor cultural sensation” (Abramovich, 2016). The malicious goat has even made his way into pop music: in a recent hip-hop song, rapper Homeboy Sandman brags that he’s like “Black Phillip at a petting zoo” (Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman, 2016). 9 The Walking Dead jumps to mind; for a reading of the series’ embrace of authoritarian masculinity, see Gencarella (2016). 10 For a reading of Carpenter’s film using isolation as a key motif, see Prince (2004). 11 See, for example, Klein (2010), who argues the postmodern 21st century increasingly challenges our ideas of “expressions of national culture,” to where film genres are becoming “transnational.” The essays in Byron (2013) explore this question from a variety of perspectives. 12 Andrew Tudor’s question is still relevant: “Why do these people like this horror in this place at this particular time?” (Tudor, 2001, p. 54). Using The Cabin in the Woods as a touchstone for his discussion, Michael J. Blouin argues that Hollywood, as an expression of neoliberal ideology, frequently attempts to present a typically American experience as universal. Blouin (2015) sees The Cabin in the Woods as critiquing this attempt to mask culturally specific forms of expression. 13 Trump infamously launched his campaign with an attack against the “rapists.” Some of his most inflammatory quotes on immigration from his early campaign, with fact-checking, can be found in Lee (2015). He affirmed these views in an 5 April 2018 speech in West Virginia, where he referenced the “caravan” of immigrants, in which “Women are raped at levels that have never been seen before” (Jacobs, 2018).

Bibliography Abramovich, S. B. P. (2016). The Real Story Behind the Breakout Goat of ‘the Witch’. The Hollywood Reporter (Online). Accessed 2/8/18. Anapol, A. 2018. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Requesting Permission to Hire 78 Foreign Workers. The Hill (Online), 10 July. Accessed 2/8/18.

128 Brandon Grafius Blouin, M. J. 2015. A Growing Global Darkness: Dialectics of Culture in Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods. Horror Studies 6 (1), pp. 83–99. Byron, G., ed. 2013. Globalgothic. London: Manchester University Press. Douglas, M. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge Classics Edition. New York: Routledge. Erikson, K. T. 2005. Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. Allyn & Bacon Classics Edition. Boston: Pearson. Gencarella, S. O. 2016. Thunder without Rain: Fascist Masculinity in AMC’s the Walking Dead. Horror Studies 7 (1), pp. 125–146. González, J. L. 1987. A History of Christian Thought, Vol. III: From the Protestant Reformation to the 20th Century. Second Edition. Nashville: Abingdon. Hetherington, M. J. and Weiler, J. D. 2009. Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. New York: Cambridge. Hochschild, A. R. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. Jacobs, B. 2018. Trump Defends Mexican Rapist Claim during Conspiracy-Laden Speech. The Guardian (Online). Accessed 2/8/18. Janzen, D. 2002. Witch-Hunts, Purity, and Social Boundaries: The Expulsion of the Foreign Women in Ezra 9–10. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press. Judis, J. B. 2016. The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports. Klein, C. 2010. The American Horror Film?: Globalization and Transnational U.S.-Asian Genres. In S. Hantke, ed., American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 3–14. Lee, M. Y. H. 2015. Donald Trump’s False Comments Connecting Mexican Immigrants and Crime. Washington Post (Online). Accessed 2/8/18. Prince, S. D. 2004. Dread, Taboo, and the Thing: Toward a Social Theory of the Horror Film. In S. Prince, ed., The Horror Film. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. pp. 118–130. Rock, A. and Sandman, H. 2016. Couple Things. New York: Stones Throw. Tudor, A. 2001. Why Horror: The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre. In M. Jaconovich, ed., Horror, the Film Reader. London: Routledge. pp. 47–56. Vance, J. D. 2016. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper. Wuthnow, R. 1987. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkely: University of California Press. It Comes at Night (2017) Directed by Trey Edward Schultz: A24. Night of the Living Dead (1968) Directed by George A. Romero: Image Ten. The Thing (1982) Directed by John Carpenter: Universal Pictures. The Village (2004) Directed by M. Knight Shyamalan: Touchstone Pictures. The Witch (2015) Directed by Robert Eggers: Parts and Labor.

Part 4

“You’ve been Trump’d . . . get out (of the White House)!” Animated alternatives and horror-centric parodies and podcasts, reimagined à la Trump

9

Trump’s great American family Racism, sexism, and homophobia in Hotel Transylvania 2 Simon Bacon

It is problematic in the least to attribute certain aspects of mainstream films to the policies or administration of an American president, particularly one that has not even completed their first term in office. This has not stopped critics undertaking such an endeavour though this is often done in retrospect – much has been written about the effects of the Reagan administration on Hollywood film.1 However, the rise of Donald Trump as an acceptable candidate, and later president, says something about the wider rise of populism and a more nationalist and insular view of America which inevitably has found a measure of expression in popular culture in general and Hollywood film in particular. As such it can be a valid undertaking to look at films from the past five or six years which can be seen to anticipate and encourage such a turn in popular and populist thought. In this regard looking at Hotel Transylvania (Tartakovsky 2012) and its sequel, by the same director, Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015) can be particularly enlightening.2 More so as one of the main figures behind the franchise is actor and producer Adam Sandler, who is a committed Republican, and although he has not explicitly expressed his support of Donald Trump, there is much in the first Hotel Transylvania film that extols the value of populist support and a rather authoritarian view of family values that are characteristic of what might be described as the Trump era. Other traits of this era are a very right-wing view of what constitutes America and many confused and confusing statements that deny any such thing, and this too is characteristic of the current Hotel Transylvania films. The first film in the animated franchise came out in 2012, which was before Donald Trump began his push for office, and yet it reflects much of what was to come. This film sets the scene, and tone, of all that follows. Dracula, or Drac (Sandler), runs a hotel for monsters in Transylvania far away from the world of humans. He started this venture because his former family home was burned down by rioting peasants, killing his wife, and he now lives in the hotel with his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomes) and assorted full-time staff. He protects his daughter, and indeed his guests, by ensuring that humans are kept away from the property, which begins to outline the overprotective stance he has towards Mavis and how he will happily lie to her to make sure she does what he wants, specifically not meet humans.

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Consequently, he creates a secure border all round the hotel where no outsiders (humans) are allowed to enter. Of course, one illegal alien does happen upon the hotel and Jonathan “Johnny” (Andy Samberg) gets embroiled in Drac’s plot to deceive Mavis but it does not stop them from “zinging.” This is an important love-at-first-sight moment (Moore 2018, p. 189) which the film constructs as being extremely heteronormative – it only ever happens between a male and female. In fact, in terms of the narrative it starts to describe the rather contradictory nature of its view of monsters who whilst being the same as Drac are also othered by him. Indeed the vampires are shown to be more human than monsters – human-with-benefits almost – and more so as being “white.”3 The zing helps to qualify this as it is shown to be almost exclusively the “white” characters that experience it – whilst the other monsters talk of the “zing” we are only ever shown vampires and humans taking part in it. Consequently, the other monsters are left to take on the role of racial others in the narrative – something which is emphasised by the fact that the only African American actors in the film, CeeLo Green and Luenell, voice a Mummy and a Shrunken Head respectively. As the film nears its close the linkage between humanity/vampires and whiteness reaches something of a crescendo as Drac has to reunite Mavis and Johnny and travel by day to the airport but gets stuck in a large crowd at a local monster festival – seemingly a Transylvanian Comic-con about classic monsters. Realising they are in the presence of the real Dracula and Frankenstein, the festival-goers make a shaded arch with their costume capes so that Drac can make it safely to the airport. This wave of populism gets the vampire to his goal – and the crowd are shown to adore their idol – reuniting the young lovers and seemingly healing the rift between monsters and humans. However, as soon as Hotel Transylvania 2 begins the confusing messages and inherent racism seem to get even more pronounced. Return to Transylvania Part two of the franchise was released in September 2015, a few months after Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president. And although one cannot make direct correlations between such events, the sequel continues its agenda of racism and sexism but with an added dash of homophobia. Hotel Transylvania 2 continues the story of Mavis and Johnny and the arrival of their firstborn Dennis (Asher Blinkoff). The boy is half-human and halfvampire (a dhamphir) but Drac hopes the vampire side will take precedent. Just before Dennis’ fourth birthday party his grandad tries to get him to turn into a bat and studies his mouth to see if he’s “getting his fangs.” Of course, the little boy thinks Drac is joking and carries on playing but his grandad is deeply disappointed that he appears to be only human. This begins to mark out the divisionist nature of the film, as it’s not desired for the boy to be neither one thing or the other, as Mark Chakeres (2018, pp. 159–160) notes, “the film designates his hybridity as an ‘either/or’ situation, as in will he be a

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human, or a monster.” This motif runs throughout the film, though as might be expected rarely remains as cut and dried as that as the final arbiter of one’s racial categorisation is the King Vampire himself. At Dennis’s party this becomes even more pronounced as Johnny’s parents, Mike (Nick Offerman) and Linda (Megan Mullally), come to the hotel. Although both sides do their best to mingle and be on their best behaviour it is clear things aren’t going very well. One of the most interesting, and telling, aspects of the party, and it repeats throughout the film, is the monster food, as it is quite literally “monster” food. Possibly the most disturbing part is the large multi-tiered birthday cake which screams as slices are cut out of it, and the resultant servings themselves wail as though young children separated from their mother. It is implied that the monsters happily eat this food and find nothing unusual about it – we later even see Mavis crying over her favourite dumplings, who cry along with her. It instantly others the monsters in two ways: firstly, the fact they happily eat food which seems to be as alive as they are makes them literally cannibalistic;4 second it infers the monstrous nature of other culinary cultures, particularly those that eat foodstuffs deemed inedible for cultural reasons such as snails, frogs, or dogs for instance – John Block Friedman (2000, p. 26) notes how diet and customs have historically marked a people or race out as monstrous. This categorises the monsters as doubly so, not just in how they look but, in their very culture/nature; their monstrosity is inherently correlated to a form of ethnic otherness, although this does not apply to Drac or Mavis of course. Somewhat contradictorily the films paints the humans as being equally monstrous in their attempts to embrace the difference of their daughterin-law’s extended family – suggesting that trying to accept difference makes one monstrous as well.5 However, the events that unfold are enough for Mavis to decide that if Dennis is going to be more human than vampire he should be raised with Johnny’s parents in California rather than in Transylvania. Neither Drac or Johnny are keen on this, the latter as he enjoys the kookiness of the hotel and its guests. As such Drac decides to try to make Dennis’ fangs appear by force – make a vampire of him – so he tells Johnny to take Mavis to his parents whilst he looks after their son. This also forms part of the constant attempts of Drac to control and manipulate his daughter continued from the first film. This coercion is shown at length at the start of Hotel Transylvania 2 which begins with extended clips of her father trying to inveigle his way into the pregnancy and birth at all stages, blurring the lines between father/lover/husband/stalker exampling ongoing abusive patriarchal control. In this regard their relationship partially mirrors the dynamics of that between Edward and Bella in Twilight, where the audience is lead to believe that “Edwards (Drac’s) Control and intimidation are partly ‘for Bella’s (Mavis’) own good’ only makes the normalization of abuse in this story all the more destructive” (Heath 2012, p. 27). Indeed, it can be read that the vampire only allows Mavis to be with Johnny as Drac can easily control him.

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The film effectively splits in two as the separate trips begin each showing how monstrous the respective groups are, though disguising them as oneliner jokes rather than discriminatory remarks. Much of the humour in both films falls between that of The Munsters and The Addams Family from the 1960s, a point that critic Todd VanDerWerf (2018) sees as a mark of their endearing charm, “They gussy up very old, seemingly worn-out jokes in a new coat of paint, and tweak them so they still make you laugh. They’re classicist in many ways, but they’re executed in the modern styles of computer animation.” However, they are delivered with very little contextual consideration of cultural changes that have occurred in the intervening 50 years which often changes the quaint into the overtly racist or homophobic. The most obvious examples of these happen in the Californian part of the film so it is worth starting there. The first instance happens when Mavis and Johnny go into a 24-hour Mini-Mart store where she gets amazingly excited about the selection of slush puppies and the CCTV cameras and monitors. The cashier in the shop, Kal, is portrayed as an expressionless Middle Eastern gentleman who barely speaks a word until Mavis starts joyfully dancing in front of one of the cameras drinking a slushy. At which point she is joined by the grinning shop-assistant also slurping a drink – as though they are both similarly outsiders – whilst Johnny (the human) stands and stares in bewilderment. The scene clearly correlates Mavis’s monstrosity to that of the shop-assistant (who in build and construction also reflects something of Frankenstein and Murray the Mummy who are Drac’s friends) and vice versa; they are equally monstrous outsiders in the human world of America. The second instance occurs when the couple reaches Johnny’s parents’ home in Santa Cruz and the in-laws invite round some “mixed couple” neighbours to make Mavis feel at home. First to arrive is Caren, who is human, and her partner Pandragora, who is a Cthulhu-type character who catches a fly with his enormous tongue as he enters Johnny’s parents’ house. The pair seem very laid back, Pandagora in particular who comes over as a “surfer dude,” something which is confirmed as he says to Johnny and Mavis “Yeah, you’re going to dig it here. Don’t even worry. People are totally cool with our lifestyle choices.” Caren confirms this and adds that although the children get picked on at school it “toughens them up.” Next are Loretta and Paul, with the latter being particularly hirsute. Linda introduces Paul as a werewolf, which he denies vociferously and immediately leaves with his partner. The scene is informative in many ways and the kinds of purposeful misrecognition of racial others involved throughout the film. Pandagora is indeed a different species but is represented as a surfer/slacker, or New Age hippy but which sees his monstrosity – which equally implies ethnic difference – as a matter of personal or “lifestyle” choice. So that the resultant bullying of their children is down to the parents’ choice to be different (racially other) and such abuse is to be expected and is indeed even good for children – not unlike Drac’s bullying of his daughter and grandson. In contrast, Paul’s large beard and long flowing hair is down to his own choosing yet is described

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in more essentialist terms than Pandagora’s difference which is due to him being a non-human species. Consequently, discrimination and prejudice seem perfectly allowable based solely on visual otherness of any sort. Alongside this is the fact that the “monsters” in each case are male and it is “human” women that are the weak link that allow for miscegenation of the species – Caren with Pandagora, Loretta with Paul the “Wolfman” (a man who chooses to look like a monster), and of course Mavis and Johnny (who is originally seen as a human monster). As such all women need to be controlled for their own good, and the good of the species making Drac’s behaviour perfectly reasonable, and for Mavis’s own good. The same applies to Dennis of course, being the child of such a pairing, abuse is perfectly acceptable and will only toughen him up, make him a real man (which equals vampire in Drac’s eyes). This leads directly into what Drac and his friends are doing with Dennis, or Denisovich as he calls him, as Grandad has decided to try and scare the fangs out of him. To do this he takes Frankenstein (Kevin James), Wayne the werewolf (Steve Buscemi), Murray the Mummy (Keegan-Michael Key),6 Griffin the Invisible Man (David Spade), and Blobby the Blob, and gets them to take turns in showing how monstrous they are by scaring humans – Dennis only ever sees them as figures of fun. Of course, each attempt fails, Frankenstein jumps out on some joggers, but they only want selfies with him, Wayne attempts to kill a deer but is distracted by a man throwing a frisbee, and Murray tries to conjure up a sandstorm but only creates a tiny mound of sand that Dennis makes a small “sand-man” from with the help of Frankenstein. Overall it shows the monsters to be out-of-date and still living in the 1960s of The Munsters and The Addams Family rather than the 2010s. The group then go to Camp Winniepacaca, the summer camp that Drac went to as a child and where he is convinced Dennis will finally become a real vampire. Once again of course it is shown that the world has moved on and whilst his friends marvel at how much fun the kids could have there, Drac is horrified at how modern and un-scary it is. The final straw comes when all the little vampires are sat in a circle around the campfire singing songs about hugging themselves. Drac becomes incensed and grabs his grandson and rushes to an extremely high and rickety old tower that he forces everyone to climb so that Dennis can dive off it and thus forcing him to transform into a bat. Unsurprisingly this fails and Drac has to fly down and save his grandson at the last second, which is quickly followed by the tower collapsing on the camp buildings, causing them and the car that they had driven to Winniepacaca in to catch fire. All this is captured on someone’s phone and posted on YouTube where Mavis sees it and demands to see her father immediately. This causes a race back to the Hotel as Drac continues to lie to his daughter about not being there with Dennis. Mavis arrives first and tells her father “I was worried Dennis wasn’t safe around other monsters. Now I don’t think he’s safe around you,” and declares that after her son’s fifth birthday party, which is only a couple of days away, she will be taking him to California.

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Mavis has invited Drac’s father Vlad (Mel Brooks) to the party who is something of a purist and still hunts humans, along with his servant Bela – who looks like a giant talking bat. She has also invited some of Dennis’s cousins who immediately start bullying the little boy (again emphasising the effeminate state he inhabits as a mere human). Vlad speaks with a pronounced Jewish accent, giving shape to earlier 19th-century anti-Semitic prejudices that informed Bram Stoker’s vampire, and linger with it still.7 Mel Brooks is a well-known Jewish comedian, yet in the film his supposedly lighthearted comments infer homophobia and anti-Semitism. This last is seen in his strongly anti-human stance which reads within the film as anti-WASP (White-Anglo Saxon Protestant) and consequently confirming anti-Jewish prejudice. This construction is further confirmed by his reaction on how quickly he notices that Dennis has not got his fangs yet so decides to scare them out by changing the children’s entertainer, a man in a “Kakie the Cake Monster” outfit, into a scary monster – making a vampire of him. Dennis is extremely frightened but Drac protects him and berates his father, who in turn is outraged as he discovers his son has humans at the Hotel. Mavis joins in the quarrel and whilst this is going on a very scared Dennis runs away to the forest followed by his friend Winnie (Sadie Sandler), who is Wayne’s eldest daughter – Dennis had earlier revealed to Drac that he and Winnie had “zinged,” an interesting turn of events as the vampire seems perfectly fine with it. As the pair flee from the party they run into Bela (Rob Riggle) who attacks Dennis causing Winnie to dive in to try and rescue him, but the giant bat throws her away knocking her unconscious.8 Dennis is incensed by this and his fangs pop out as he attacks and overpowers the vampire bat. Now that his fangs have appeared Dennis seems to have super-human (super-vampire) powers but even so Bela manages to grab his father and threaten to kill him. Suddenly Vlad appears and turns Bela into a tiny bat deciding that family is the most important thing after all. Both Dracula and Vlad have decided that they love Dennis just the way he is, though of course now he’s actually become a vampire it seems to make that much easier. These final scenes are equally illuminating and confusing and as such perfectly examples the kinds of conflicting messages that typify the ongoing franchise (and indeed presidential administration). Drac begins Hotel Transylvania 2 railing against hybridity, a stance seen embodied in the figure of his father Vlad, but seems happy to embrace it once it is confirmed that his grandson is a vampire – one can equally read this as being against Dennis’s suspected feminisation/homosexuality but once his fangs appear, confirming his entry into heteronormativity (as indeed does his “zinging” with Winnie), there is no problem accepting either. Winnie is of course a monster, which earlier Drac inherently treats as being less than vampires – he also treats Wayne as being slightly less than himself – in their stone-like, white perfection, which seemingly also disavows his own craggily faced Jewish father, who is even more supremacist in his views than his son. Johnny’s parents are

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most indignant when Vlad thinks their son is a monster and declare that “of course he’s human” and yet are seemingly fine with their grandson Dennis being non-human. Mavis herself seems to make all the decisions but is totally unaware of how she is manipulated by her own, over-possessive father or the world he has created. Indeed, Hotel Transylvania is not unlike Prospero’s island in this respect being a world created to protect/control its creators’ daughter, populated by dreams and monsters so its inhabitants can never leave,9 and which inevitably happens to Mavis and Dennis. The land beyond the forest As mentioned before making direct correlations between films and swells in public opinion or holders of public office can be problematic even in retrospect, unless they’re mentioned by name in said works. However, it can be informative in this respect to give the texts under examination some context or at least compare them to some other animated films intended for the same kind of audience at the same time. For Hotel Transylvania this is quite convenient as it was one of three such “Gothicky” animated films for children released during 2012, with the other two being ParaNorman (2012) and Frankenweenie (2012). The three were released in consecutive months from August to October with ParaNorman first and Frankenweenie last. All three feature classic film monsters and children who are bullied or manipulated whilst trying to find their place in the world. Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is an 11-year-old boy who talks to ghosts (hence ParaNorman). Because of this he is thought as being strange, or queer and effeminate in some way, and so is bullied at school. Even his own family treat him as if he is odd and “girlish.” This is until the ghosts/zombies of the town’s ancestors rise from the ground and Norman and his “gift” are the only thing that can save them. After this Norman’s uniqueness marks him out as more rather than less and the little boy can face his future with hope. In Frankenweenie, a similarly young Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) is a quiet introverted boy whose parents worry about his not mixing or getting out enough. When his dad (Martin Short) forces him to go out to play baseball, Victor’s dog Sparky is run down and killed by a car. Victor, inspired by his science teacher, uses lightning to revive his dog, but this soon gets out and children from his class start to resurrect their own pets but with monstrous consequences and it’s not long before they threaten to destroy the town. With the help of his classmates Victor manages to get rid of the monsters but Sparky is killed (again) in the process. However, the people of the town come to his aid, and using jump leads from all their cars manage to bring the dog back to life once more. The film ends with Victor making friends with his class and in particular the girl next door, Elsa Van Helsing (Winona Ryder), whose dog Persephone is Sparky’s new love. In contrast Hotel Transylvania, as described above, is largely about Drac trying to manipulate his daughter to prevent her leaving home.

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In 2015 there were fewer Gothic-inspired films for children but Boxtrolls (2014), which came out slightly earlier, is explicitly about monsters and Inside Out (2015), though not featuring such creatures, is useful for reasons of children coping with complex emotions. In the former, Eggs (Isaac HempsteadWright) is an orphan who is raised by the Boxtrolls, shy creatures who live under the town and who come out at night to scavenge discarded rubbish, particularly boxes. An evil exterminator comes to town, Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), and in exchange for entry to an exclusive cheese club offers to kill every Boxtroll in the town in retribution for the missing Trubshaw Baby they allegedly murdered. As the story concludes it is revealed that Eggs is in fact the missing baby, and he manages to save both the Boxtrolls and the town. As the film ends the townspeople and the Boxtrolls live in harmony and Eggs and his adoptive parent/friend, Fish, drive off together. Inside Out more explicitly deals with the anxieties of change and growing up and sees the emotions of 11-year-old Riley Anderson given physical form inside her head. The story then covers the journey of Sadness and Joy around Riley’s memories as they help her come to terms with moving home. Indeed, they meet many monstrous and fantastic creatures on their trip but they are shown to have specific meaning and purpose within Riley’s psyche to process and cope with growing up. As the story closes her emotions have accepted the possibility of complex feelings and bitter-sweet memories whilst Riley herself has adapted to her new surroundings. Hotel Transylvania 2, as described above, is about a young boy forced to “grow a pair” of fangs by his grandfather, who claims he loves him no matter who or what he is. Both Hotel Transylvania films stand in stark relief to the other movies they are contemporaneous with, largely because they are as much about the main adult figure as they are about the leading child. In all the films the children are seen as being different (though less so with Riley) in some way and are often vilified or bullied because of it. By the end of each film this difference is shown to be special, often saving the town, but showing the child to be unique and deserving of respect in light of that fact. In contrast Dennis’s difference is the wrong sort and is cajoled out of him until he has the right sort. The “right sort” is not a particular kind of character, or special gift but rather the physical prowess to beat up anyone who threatens him.10 More than any of the other films, Hotel Transylvania is not really about the child growing up but about the adult getting his own way by making sure the rules of white, heterosexual masculinity is reproduced simultaneously exampling his own prowess but also the proving the justness of his own bigotry and discrimination. In many ways it actually has more in common with the various Father of the Bride series of films – Father of the Bride (1950) and Father’s Little Dividend (1951) starring Spencer Tracey, and Father of the Bride (1991) and Father of the Bride Part II (1995) starring Steve Martin – where the white father struggles to come to terms with his daughter growing up (Hotel Transylvania completely does away with the wife/mother as only the male point of view counts here). As Nicola Rehling (2010, p. 65) notes, in regard to the 1991 film, the

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greater participation of men in family affairs serves largely to further marginalise women. Both Hotel Transylvania films do exactly this and further blame the missing “mother” for Drac’s discrimination, and his abusive behaviour towards Mavis (he is only trying to protect her in the way her mother couldn’t). A world of one’s own, closing remarks It is not surprising then that the three things that mend the Drac family, and make it great again, all involve men. The first is Dennis becoming a “man” just like his grandfather; the second is great-grandad Vlad rejoining the family, reaffirming traditions and the values of the past; and Mavis not being allowed to break up the great family of men. As mentioned many times during this article it is highly problematic to say that a work of fiction is directly influenced by a particular individual, or even the cultural moment that allows for a figure like Donald Trump to become president of America. However, one can point to the ways in which a text manifests the same kind of ideological intent that a political figure or movement does. In this way the first two films in the Hotel Transylvania franchise show a character that bullies and intimidates those around him in a similar way that President Trump has been shown to on a regular basis.11 He (Drac/ Trump) seems to have fundamentally racist and sexist views that he appears to modify, yet does not,12 and has a highly problematic relationship with his daughter/wife/mother.13 Ultimately, he wants to create and control his own world where the rules change as and when he wishes but he does all this only to keep his “family” safe and make them “great” again. Notes 1 See: Wood (1986). 2 A third film, Hotel Transylvania: A Monster Vacation, also by Tartakovsky, came out in 2018. 3 “White” is rather ambiguous in the film as it tends to be defined by whom Drac thinks is like himself, an appropriately Trumpian categorisation. 4 Unsurprisingly this is not used to promote any kind of vegan agenda, which it is actually perfectly suited for. 5 In a not unrelated manner it mirrors similar vilification of “hippyfied” or “soft” parents in vampire films of the Reagan period who are consequently responsible for the monsterfication of their own children. See: Once Bitten (Storm 1985), Vamp (Wenk 1986), and My Best Friend Is a Vampire (Huston 1987). See: Ni Fhlainn (2009). 6 CeeLo Green, who voiced Murray in the first film, was in jail at this point. 7 See: Malchow (1996). 8 The film uses Bela as a scapegoat for the racism inherent in the film, making him something of a monster’s “monster,” so that by defeating and ridiculing him they make amends, or cover up, the normalised racism that pervades the narrative. 9 See: Martini and Fontana (2016). 10 In this sense Hotel Transylvania 2 bears much comparison to Matt Reeves’s Let Me In (2010) – an adaptation of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008) – which features a young boy who is bullied at school and manipulated to take physical revenge on his tormentors. 11 See: Shafer (2017). 12 Berg (2016) and Serwer (2019). 13 See: Proudfoot (2018).

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Bibliography Berg, Miriam. 2016. “7 Times Trump Showed How Much of a Racist, Sexist Bully He Is.” Planned Parenthood (Online). Accessed 20/11/18. Chakeres, Mark. 2018. “The Dhampir Gets His Fangs: Miscegenation and Exogamy in the Hotel Transylvania Film Franchise.” In Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk, eds., Growing up with Vampires: Essays on the Undead in Children’s Media. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., pp. 150–165. Friedman, John Block. 2000. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. New York: Syracuse University Press. Heath, Elaine A. 2012. The Gospel According to Twilight: Women, Sex, and God. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Malchow, Harold L. 1996. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Martini, Matteo and Fabrizio Fontana. 2016. “1616–2016 Four Hundred Years That May Reveal More Surprises.” Forme Mente, Issue 3, April, pp. 7–13. Moore, Alison. 2018. “Every Generation Gets the Vampire It Needs: What Can Vampire Narratives in Children’s Films Tell Us about Childhood in the Twenty-First Century?” In Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk, eds., Growing up with Vampires: Essays on the Undead in Children’s Media. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2018, pp. 183–199. Ni Fhlainn, Sorcha. 2009. “It’s Morning in America: The Rhetoric of Religion in the Music of the Lost Boys, and the Deserved Death of the 1980s Vampire.” In Niall Scott, ed., The Role of the Monster: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp. 147–156. Proudfoot, Jenny. 2018. “Donald Trump and His Daughter Ivanka’s Relationship Just Got Weirder.” Marie Claire (Online). Accessed 20/11/18. Rehling, Nicola. 2010. Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema. Lanham: Lexington Books. Serwer, A. 2019. “The President’s Pursuit of White Power.” The Atlantic (Online). Accessed: 19/19/18. Shafer, Jack. 2017. “Trump the Bully.” (Online). Accessed 20/11/18. VanDerWerf, Todd. 2018. “Hotel Transylvania’s Blockbuster Success, Explained in One Giant Dog and One Tiny Hat.” Vox (Online). Accessed 20/11/18. Woods, Robin. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Hollywood: Columbia University Press. Boxtrolls (2014) Directed by Graham Annabel and Anthony Stacchi: Focus Features. Father of the Bride (1950) Directed by Vincente Minnelli: Metro Goldwyn Meyer. Father of the Bride (1991) Directed by Charles Shyer: Buena Vista Pictures. Father of the Bride Part II (1995) Directed by Charles Shyer: Buena Vista Pictures. Father’s Little Dividend (1951) Directed by Vincente Minnelli: Metro Goldwyn Meyer. Frankenweenie (2012) Directed by Tim Burton: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Hotel Transylvania (2012) Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky: Sony Pictures. Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015) Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky: Sony Pictures. Inside Out (2015) Directed by Pete Doctor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Let Me In (2010) Directed by Matt Reeves: Relativity Media. Let the Right One In (2008) Directed by Tomas Alfredson: Sandrew Metronome. ParaNorman (2012) Directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler: Focus Features. Twilight (2008) Directed by Catherine Hardwicke: Summit Entertainment.

10 South Park Trump, technology, and the uncanny Christian Hänggi

Few are the viewers who would associate the American cartoon series South Park with the horror genre. And indeed, much of its fame and infamy derives from fart jokes, swear words, Pythonesque absurdity, and the general immaturity of its characters. Nevertheless, horror comes up time and again: the series occasionally invokes conventions of the horror genre, most recognisably as homages to horror films in Halloween specials such as “Grey Dawn,” “Night of the Living Homeless,” or “A Nightmare on Facetime.” The town of South Park has also been visited by monsters like H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu or Mecha-Streisand, and there are plenty of allusions to horror films, for instance a string of references in “Splatty Tomato,” the most recent episode at the time of writing. Considering that South Park is the second-longest running cartoon series with, by September 2018, a total of 21 seasons or 287 episodes, an exhaustive account of all the horror references and allusions seems beside the point. What is more, such references to, and re-enactments of, famous horror films are not necessarily what gives South Park a disconcerting, uncanny feeling. For this, we have to look deeper – and it is precisely in the seasons leading up to, and including, Donald Trump’s election that we find a latter-day expression of the type of horror that I refer to as the “technological uncanny” or the “technological sublime.” I intend to demonstrate in this chapter that Trumpera South Park stages technology gone haywire as a threat to humankind, not in a way that science fiction might treat it – as a spatially or temporally distanced reality – but instead firmly rooted in the here and now. Trump-era South Park episodes invoke and interweave a number of various elements of the “uncanny” which Sigmund Freud registered many years ago. The “Trump era” in this context does not begin with the election of Trump, nor with his decision to run for office; instead, the term designates an epoch which has brought about monstrous creatures evocative of Trump and his presidency: creatures, to be frank, of limited intellectual capacities, who run loose on base instincts, wreaking havoc, and defying any attempt at being tamed (except by scratching its back or belly, much like South Park’s Cthulu in season 14). Of course, South Park does not solely cast horror and the uncanny in terms of technology, yet these instances will be the focus of this chapter.

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South Park has long displayed a sensitivity and sensibility for technological developments and, occasionally, its overpowering existence independent of human interference. Two emblematic episodes are “HumancentiPad” (S15E1), in which Kyle is taken hostage by the Apple corporation for carelessly agreeing to social experiments when accepting the iTunes Terms and Conditions, and “You Have 0 Friends” (S14E4), in which Stan is physically sucked into Facebook when trying to quit the social network. It was only in season 18, though, that an examination of technological advances – both software (now called “apps”) and hardware – consistently provided the stage and backdrop for social commentary: nearly every single episode revolves around a technological topic, from body shaming on social media to Uber, from freemium games to self-flying drones, from video games commentary to Twitter. While some of these episodes focus on data-driven services, and their reorganisation of and impact on society, the figure of the Postmodern Prometheus is introduced when the holograms of Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur come to life and run amok in the last two episodes of season 18, “#REHASH” (a rehash, among many things, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and “#HappyHolograms.” In his 1919 essay on the uncanny, Freud searches for mechanisms in the psyche that would explain the unnerving feeling of the uncanny. He soon concedes, though, that what feels uncanny to one person might not have the same effect on another. After some 30 pages of searching for insight, Freud concludes that “animism, magic and witchcraft, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castrationcomplex” comprise practically all the factors “which turn something fearful into an uncanny thing” (1959, p. 396). The uncanny (“unheimlich” in German), as Freud illuminates, is intimately tied to the repression of “what was once heimisch” – home-like and familiar (1959, p. 399). Of course, not everything that fulfils the condition of being strangely familiar is necessarily uncanny. In a final significant move, Freud distinguishes the uncanny in literature from the uncanny in real life, stating that a necessary condition in literature (and therefore, I would argue, in South Park) is that the writer “pretends to move in the world of common reality.” In this case, Freud accepts, as well, all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; “everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story” (1959, p. 405). Again, there is a caveat to be reckoned with here, as Freud illustrates, “Even a ‘real’ ghost [in fiction] loses all power of arousing at any rate an uncanny horror in us as soon as the author begins to amuse himself at its expense and allows liberties to be taken with it” (1959, p. 407). This is precisely why the nagging apparition of Edgar Allan Poe in South Park’s “Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers” (S17E4) does not evoke a feeling of the uncanny (see Figure 10.1). It is also the reason why the citizens of South Park start to doubt whether the drone owned by Butters’ father, in “The Magic Bush” (S18E5), is not, after all, capable of flying itself, as the plot gives way to comedy when the

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Figure 10.1 Poe (also known as “Nightpain”) is summoned by the Goth Kids

citizens realise that the children have taken the drone out for a spin (the theremin [a contact-less instrument, notable for its eerie sound] used in the soundtrack contributes to this). The fictional South Park universe as such is a cartoon one and the figures drawn and animated in Autodesk Maya (the software used to animate the series) come to life through digital technology. The viewer therefore must suspend his or her disbelief, ultimately becoming part of that universe, for, as Freud (1959, p. 404) puts it, “the realm of phantasy depends for its very existence on the fact that its content is not submitted to the reality-testing faculty.” Of course, this disbelief cannot be fully overcome, which is why such reflections on the uncanny in South Park only become clear when focalised through its characters. I would argue that in this day and age, the technological uncanny can no longer be divorced from the technological sublime. Whilst the uncanny can exist on any scale, but the sublime necessitates a certain grandeur, the feelings that each evokes aren’t that dissimilar. The sublime, as Jean-François Lyotard puts it, triggers conflicting feelings in the beholder, such as “pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression” (1991, p. 92). What characterises the sublime then is the simultaneous feeling of overwhelming attraction and intense repulsion: an inescapable fascination in face of the fear of being crushed. Indeed, it could be argued that the technological sublime in our contemporary world is concerned with the unlikely functioning of allencompassing, all-enveloping, all-devouring global capitalism and its impersonal machinic processes. It is both at once familiar and unfamiliar – its sheer size and unpredictable nature capable of crushing individuals and extinguish life on earth as we know it.

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Many of the instances of the technological uncanny in South Park are concerned with blurring the lines between empirical, and virtual, reality. One such episode is the utterly baffling “Grounded Vindaloop” (S18E7), which plays, and replays, the topos of involuntary repetition where it is not at all clear if one, or several, of the characters are inhabiting their physical reality, or trapped inside the Oculus Rift – enhanced gameplay. From – presumably – inside and outside the VR, the children repeatedly call customer service, which cues the same Indian call centre rep, Steve, each and every time, who responds with the very same phrasing again and again, always ending the call with the same question. At one point, Steve ends up calling an identical “Steve” in a duplicate call centre with both trying to convince each other that it is the other one who solely exists in virtual reality. Eventually, the loop of déjà-vu is resolved, seemingly, only to cut to a final scene in which real (i.e. human and not cartoon) child actors take off their Oculus Rift headset, one more time ultimately shifting the plane of “reality” and surprising the audience with an entirely new perspective. As if the undecidability of the planes of reality in the episode was not enough, the plot eventually shifts into a meta-reality discourse that pulls the rug from under the audience’s feet. A similar effect can be observed in South Park’s hashtag episodes (“#REHASH” and “#HappyHolograms) which ultimately mourn the demise of television (in the family living room) due to the popularity of online and on-demand content (each character is depicted watching their favourite shows on PC). In one episode, inspired by Swedish game commentator PewDiePie (who makes a guest appearance on South Park) Cartman creates a YouTube channel of his own in which he comments on people commenting on video game commentators. Eventually, Cartman’s Youtube window pops up in what is supposed to be the characters’ empirical reality, whilst Twitter feeds occupy the lower part of the screen. Up to three levels of nested screens (besides the screen of South Park’s audience) mediate an already mediated, but uncontrollable, reality which has surpassed the screen and acquired a quasi-physical presence. What is more, the holograms of dead celebrities depicted roaming the United States in both hashtag episodes are, much like the creature of Frankenstein, the result of technologically enhanced animism that brings inanimate matter back to life (ones and zeros having replaced patches of flesh from dead organisms).1 Whilst it would be implausible for such paradoxical instances to have been observed by Freud, he does acknowledge that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life (1959, p. 404). The technological concerns of the South Park episodes discussed, I would argue, are apt translations of the uncanny with regard to the current possibilities of technology, both the fictionalised technology (i.e. the one portrayed in the series) as well as the technology employed to animate the cartoon. Indeed, if one was to distil a central message from all of season 18 off the series (which aired in the autumn of 2014, when Trump was not yet running), it would be that South Park acknowledges that an examination of everyday

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life is futile without paying close attention to the technology that is heavily influencing individuals and society: a technology, South Park would have you believe, that has taken on a life of its own. The distinction between empirical and virtual reality, or between “real” life and technologically mediated life, has become difficult to distinguish, if not pointless. One of the approaches that many South Park episodes appear to take is to select two or three current events or issues and somewhat randomly interconnect them. While generally taking a liberal stance on political issues (occasionally of the libertarian variety), the makers of South Park rarely advocate one particular viewpoint, but instead tend to highlight the conceits and blind spots of both, sometimes several, extremes. Soon after South Park establishes technology as a force to be reckoned with, political correctness is presented as a social issue in season 19. The season, which started three months to the day after Trump’s announcement to run for president, opens with an introduction to the new school principal, aptly named “PC Principal,” who selfrighteously promises radical change in a move towards making the school and town more inclusive. With the addition of PC Principal, South Park paves the way for a clash of cultures between academic political correctness and the brute rhetoric of sexist, xenophobic, me-first Mr Garrison cum presidential candidate. Unable to deal with Canadian immigration and PC Principal’s politically correct ways, the equally self-righteous Mr Garrison quits his job as a school teacher to Make America Great Again, his campaign promising to “fuck them [the immigrants] all to death.” After getting into a fight with his Doppelgänger in spirit, the Canadian Prime Minister, Garrison rapes him to death and is ultimately ready for the presidential race to commence. Political correctness, is, of course, the antithesis to, or the flipside of, Trump and many of his devotees. It would appear, from the majority of far-right material easily accessed online, that there exists a deep-seated fear of political correctness being imposed, one of which could be read as an offshoot of Freud’s castration complex: political correctness is perceived as severing the balls off of those who want to “speak their minds” (mainly white men, nostalgic for a past which was, ironically, not so great). In season 20 of South Park, such fears are infectious. For example, if a citizen eats a handful of sentient berries (known as “Memberberries”), the fruit has a somatic effect turning those who consume them into comfortably numb right-wingers. South Park does not quite achieve an effect of the uncanny in its treatment of political correctness per se although there are moments of violence which are hard to stomach. For example, Eric Cartman, the stock character of the psychopath since circa season 3, in vowing to bring PC Principal to his knees is instead beaten to pulp by the principal, for purposefully using words that assert his male privilege. From there on, Cartman is strangely subdued until the end of the following season in which the character’s fear of emasculation (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) comes to light when it turns out that he has had visions of a matriarchal Mars colonisation which leads to men being forced underground and milked for their semen. In the meantime,

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however, the audience surely expect that the “original” Cartman will make a comeback at any moment, reaping revenge for his humiliation at the hands of PC Principal. This expectation, of psychopath Cartman lashing back in retribution, is ultimately unfulfilled throughout the remainder of seasons 19 and 20 of South Park, triggering even more, I would argue, feelings of the uncanny as the viewer is forced to occupy an animated cosmos beyond what is normal or expected. Fast forward to the episode trilogy2 that brings season 19 to a close (“Sponsored Content,” “Truth and Advertising,” and “PC Principal Final Justice”), which unite the impersonal forces of advertising, political correctness, gentrification, and technology in an unholy, sublime alliance conspiring to rid the earth of humans. This trilogy of episodes can be read as rather strangely aligned with the factors that Freud believed to have the potential to turn something fearful into the uncanny: man’s attitude to death, the omnipotence of thought, involuntary repetition and animism, magic, and witchcraft. The trilogy begins with a handicapped kid, named Jimmy, defending his role as editor of the school newspaper when permitting a first-grader to call the cafeteria’s lunch policy “retarded,” a term PC Principal naturally takes issue with. Proud of the newspaper’s independent spirit and aspiring to the highest journalistic standards, Jimmy does not allow advertisements to be featured in the paper and refuses to have it censored by PC Principal. Instead, the editor begins to distribute the paper off campus. Indeed, the “Super School News” is an eyeopener for many of South Park’s townsfolk. As Butters’ father states to his wife, who is numbly staring at her smartphone whilst he is reading the newspaper, I had to get away from the ads. I felt that the ads were evolving somehow. They started knowing what I liked, what I was afraid of. I tried adblockers, but it seemed like every time I tried to block the ads they just got smarter! (S19E8) As Butters’ father indicates, echoing Freud’s theory of the omnipotence of thoughts, one can wish something into being – if advertisements are intimately in touch with our fears and desires, and are able to present us with what we wish for, then dearly held notions of free will are eradicated. Eventually, in South Park, a GEICO (the US’s biggest ad spender in recent years) insurance representative offers to buy Jimmy’s newspaper for 26 million dollars and, in exchange, plans to insert some sponsored content into it. When Jimmy refuses, the representative threateningly responds, “You can try to block ads but they get smarter. The more we try to shut them out, the more clever they get.” Similarly, in the episodes, Leslie, a student who is in fact later revealed to be an advertisement, comments, “Every time you block us, we get smarter. Every time you try to stop us, we are more. If one plan fails, we will plan another. You will never be rid of ads.” In other

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words: advertisements are depicted in the Trump-era South Park as an immortal, impersonal, machinic force. The time of billboards is, of course, over (Trump’s traditional advertisement spending was minimal); this is the age of self-learning algorithms and neural networks, and even with a relatively small amount of data freely available on social media, the automaton can “know” and “learn” more about us than even our friends do. Computer analysis of just 300 Facebook likes, so the theory goes, can tell a machine more about a person than his or her partner knows. As one character in South Park suggests, “Have you ever felt like an ad had intelligence? That it somehow knew what you wanted even before you knew that you wanted it?” Eventually, it is revealed in South Park that advertisements have taken human form, which ultimately sheds light on the undecidability between biological and artificial life, another spark of the uncanny, “Ads are among us. They could be your friend, your gardener. The ads are trying to wipe us out.” Even editor Jimmy, who is unusually gifted with the ability to distinguish actual news stories from online advertisements, is lured in by the charms of his school mate Leslie (herself an ad), a stark personification of what the advertising industry might refer to as an “influencer” (an individual who has the power to affect the decisions of others). What is more, it would appear that the makers of South Park anticipated the arrival of computergenerated influencers, such as Miquela Sousa (a fictional Instagram model and music artist with many millions of followers), which has raised issues of trust and ethics in our external world, not helped by the fact that Sousa continues to feud with other computer-generated influencers online. In 1906, Ernst Anton Jentsch wrote that the effect of the uncanny can be achieved when an inert “thing” is reinterpreted as being part of an organic being (1906, pp. 203–204), a theory that Freud developed 13 years on in his discussion of how feelings of the uncanny are brought about. South Park’s philosophy, that “ads are among us,” reminds us of that, but it also brings to mind John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), in which aliens invade the earth planting subliminal messages: “Consume.” “Obey.” “Conform.” The key difference, of course, is that in 1988, self-learning algorithms were not yet developed in the service of advertising, nor was advanced artificial intelligence utilised or big data employed. Instead, They Live relies on aliens – an external entity – to take on the role that South Park would suggest advertisements are performing today in a key battle for supremacy. Although the dangers of AI coupled with social media was not fully realised by 2015, the makers of South Park seemed to foresee that this would play a role in the presidential election the following year, an era in which Trump would launch a propaganda campaign against “fake news,” all the while British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, whose vice president, Stephen Bannon, was Trump’s Chief Strategist, would be accused of breaking US election law, due to its harvesting millions of Facebook profiles without consent. The self-replicating force and self-reinforcing logic of advertising is to all appearances a sublime, untameable monster gobbling up

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everything in its way, reinforcing a capitalist-consumerist logic that spreads to every aspect of life. In the case of South Park’s PC Principal, the uncanny aspect of all the goings-on only strike him when he spots an insurance advertisement depicting himself pushing ad/student-hybrid Leslie on a swing, despite being unable to recall the photoshoot. Advertising is just one, but perhaps the most pervasive, example of an impersonal force shaping society. It should be noted that South Park simultaneously undergoes a process of gentrification, starting with the establishment of a Whole Foods branch in “The City Part of Town” (S19E3). Eventually, Randy Marsh, who has fought hard to bring Whole Foods to the small town, has no choice but to take out a second mortgage, realising that, “if something nonhuman is gentrifying the world, then eventually no human will be able to afford it. They’re trying to price our species out of existence.” At one point in the episode, Nathan, another handicapped kid (and Jimmy’s archenemy), explains to the newspaper editor the provocative but not entirely unwarranted connection between ads, gentrification, and political correctness: “What is PC but a verbal form of gentrification? Spruce everything up, get rid of all the ugliness in order to create a false sense of paradise. Only one thing can actually live in that world: ads.” It becomes clear from this point on the reason why PC Principal and Leslie showed up at South Park Elementary at the same time, and why they are prone to the same ultraviolent behaviour when faced with dissent or opposition: they are in fact diverse manifestations of the same phenomenon, a phenomenon that produces a reactionary flipside, one of which, it could be argued, is evocative of the Trump era. Seasons 18 and 19 of South Park, which both aired before Trump’s election, make clear that the sublime horror that we witnessed during Trump’s election, and which we can expect to see a lot more of in the near future is, to a large extent, of a technological nature: impersonal, all-encompassing, impossible to evade, effacing the boundaries between biology and technology, and knowing us better than we do ourselves. Season 20 of the series is extraordinary in a number of ways. Not only did the makers of South Park decide to shape the episodes into a more or less coherent storyline (on internet trolls and the presidential election), which would run throughout the entirety of the season (a season, in which, Mr Garrison attempts to throw the 2016 presidential election against Hillary Clinton), the light-hearted nature of the series would dissipate, paving the way for a remarkably gloomy season – in which the makers imaginably anticipate impending disaster. Besides technology as such, it is the castration complex, I would argue, that remains one of the underlining themes of South Park’s season 20. This begins with the presidential candidate himself. Over the years, elementary school teacher Mr Garrison has been hetero-, homo-, and bisexual – both as a man and as a woman. His running mate in season 20 is no other than Caitlyn Jenner (transgender American TV personality and retired Olympian formerly known as Bruce Jenner). Thus, both South Park’s president and vice president have, in their past, undergone the removal of their primary male sexual

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organs. Of course, this does not prevent Mr Garrison, the most cynical of South Park’s adults, from lashing out via sexist comments and even threats of rape. Surprisingly, in season 20, it is not the president nor the vice president who cause an all-out “gender war” in the small town, but an internet troll by the name of Skankhunt42, the alter ego of upper middle-class Jewish character Gerald Broflovski (father of Kyle). Skankhunt42’s actions, as the main antagonist of the first half of the season, and the counteractions of a purportedly Danish entrepreneur, lead to the introduction of “TrollTrace,” a seemingly innocent internet safety company whose actual intention is to turn countries against each other as part of a world trolling plot. Eventually, TrollTrace is used maliciously against non-trolls, allowing users to look up the internet history of other citizens. This, of course, leads to social meltdown when the citizens of South Park uncover their neighbours’ (mostly men) use of internet porn, married-but-dating internet profiles, and every racist or sexist comment that they’ve made online. After all, this is an era in which your internet history can be sold to the highest bidder, and so the sublime horror scenario in South Park is not at all far-fetched. Following in the footsteps of the monstrous holograms and advertisements employed in season 18 and 19 of South Park, season 20 introduces a host of new monstrous entities, such as a charming-looking, chattering “super fruit” (named the memberberries), proposing that these have been instrumental in the election of Mr Garrison (Figure 10.2). In South Park, the memberberries constantly babble, recalling “the good old times” (in this case, the 1980s), such as Chewbacca, the Millennium Falcon, Capri Sun, and many more cultural products. At one point, the memberberries turn from recalling the goods of the past to the super fruit’s seeming

Figure 10.2 The seeming answer to America’s tolerance and sensitivity

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values and social organisation, “’Member when there weren’t so many Mexicans?”; “’Member when marriage was between a man and a woman?”; “’Member Reagan?,” and so on. As South Park fan Tcaud, a contributor to crowdsourced online dictionary “Urban Dictionary,” comments, Member berries represent insight by South Park’s creators into the altright’s ground game: an avalanche of references to 80s and 90s culture, noted for its repression of non-white, non-heterosexual elements, distract from the far right’s contempt for the social progress achieved in the 2000s and 2010s and act as a buffer against confrontation by social progressives over the right’s continued resistance. One could argue that the memberberries are an antithesis to cutting- – and bleeding- – edge technology epitomised by the omniscient advertisements in South Park. They are purely analogue: biological beings who remember a pre-globalised time when the world was simpler and the binary opposition between good and evil, between West and East, was still intact under the impending nuclear threat. Unlike the advertisements in South Park, the memberberries do not remember an individual’s predilections, fears, and longings, but instead selectively an entire era: a nostalgia reminiscent of Trumpism’s virulent nostalgia for an old status quo. The uncanniness of the memberberries, I would argue, derives from several factors. Firstly, from the ambiguity of being sour grapes, the memberberries are disguised as amiable fellows. Secondly, when the tasty morsels of organic nostalgia gang up, they are impossible to stop. For example, when the White House is swept for security in S20E8, the memberberries occupy every nook and cranny in a great, purple tidal wave (reminiscent of the famous Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan [by Abraham Bosse], and similar in meaning). Thirdly, the memberberries have the qualities of a “golem” (Cooper 2017), in that they serve as a concept uniquely suited to expressing the fears and insecurities of the contemporary era. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the memberberries in South Park are immortal, except by digestion; it is simply impossible to kill them without receiving their spirit in the act of digestion. The serialisation of season 20 can, therefore, be read as a reflection of the grand narrative that real and larger-than-life Trump spun in his extraordinary campaign: a longing for a pre-postmodern cohesive world and narrative. Like Trump’s construction of a nostalgic cohesion, however, the serialisation of South Park ultimately failed. This is partly due to the impression that the series, particularly in seasons 19–20, tries too hard, to do too much. Ultimately, there are too many loose ends in South Park, too many topics and themes too loosely connected to one another to provide a robust platform for linear exploration. The seemingly chaotic or incoherent amassing of technology, political views and gut feelings, gentrification, and political correctness – to name but a few, serve as the most salient issues to South Park in the Trump era – a pertinent sign of our times. When Trump won

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the election, commentators offered a great number of explanations for his surprising victory, including Russian trolls; Facebook bubbles; the misuse of big data; nostalgia for a time gone by; the Democratic Party’s sabotaging of Bernie Sanders’s campaign; the divisive rhetoric of Trump and Fox News; the backlash of the social strata that felt voiceless/left out, and many more. Those commentators, too, failed to bring order to chaos, perhaps, as South Park’s scatter-gun approach demonstrates, because it is simply impossible to bring those fragmented, but somehow interconnected, factors into meaningful alignment. Bearing this in mind, the makers of South Park succeeded in presenting us with a reflection of our current epoch whilst signifying the difficulty, or impossibility, of making sense of it all. What is remarkable is that South Park stages many of these challenges as phenomena that ultimately evoke feelings of the uncanny. Interestingly, following Mr Garrison’s election, which he wins once clad in an artificial tan, and a hair style resembling that of Trump, the instances of horror and the uncanny abate noticeably as South Park retreats back to its previous form, addressing social issues and current events by means other than horror. South Park had a different flavour in the Trump era. The newly elected president was – and is – so over the top that the makers of the series found it increasingly impossible to mock, tease, ridicule, and poke fun at him. As Trey Parker succinctly explains in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7.30 show: “It’s tricky now because satire has become reality.” Notes 1 While holograms did not play a role in the American presidential election, it should be noted that the French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon used a hologram of himself to reach a larger audience in the 2017 presidential campaign. 2 Serialisation spanning three episodes is not unheard of in South Park but only in season 19 is the trilogy clearly set in a non-fantastic world that obeys the laws of physics as we know them, and with hindsight, it appears to have been a test drive for the serialisation of the entire season 20.

Bibliography Cooper, M. 2017. “Jewish Word | Golem.” Moment Magazine (Online). Accessed: 31/8/18. Ernst, A.J. 1906. “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen.” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 22/23, pp. 195–205. Freud, S. 1959. Collected Papers, Volume 4. New York: Basic Books Inc, pp. 368–407. Lyotard, J.F. 1991. The Inhuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 89–107. Tcaud. 2016. “Urban Dictionary: Member Berries.” Urban Dictionary (Online). Accessed: 31/8/18. 7.30. 2011–2017. Directed by Various: Australian Broadcasting Corporation. South Park. 1997+. Directed by Various: Viacom Media Networks Debmar-Mercury. They Live. 1988. Directed by John Carpenter: Universal Pictures.

11 Get Out (of the White House) The Trump administration and YouTube horror parody as social commentary James West In March 2017, less than two months after Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, popular comedy website Funny Or Die uploaded a trailer to its YouTube account titled Get Out (of the White House). The video parodied Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out, which had been released in American theatres at the end of February. While the basic premise remained the same – a black man meeting the parents of his white partner for the first time suspects that everything is not as it seems – the setup was provided with “one crucial, stomach-churning twist.” The Armitage clan who served as the film’s antagonists had been replaced by the Trump family. Left-leaning news and entertainment outlets were quick to praise the video as a penetrating piece of political satire, noting that “it’s more than a little scary how perfectly Ivanka, Melania, Donald, Jr. and co. fit into the movie’s roles” (Martinelli, 2017). GO(OTWH) was one in a wave of parody trailers released on popular video-sharing platform YouTube following Donald Trump’s entry into, and subsequent victory in, the 2016 presidential campaign, reflecting the site’s emergence as a key space for political engagement. Content creators on both sides of the political spectrum relished the opportunity to insert the president into a variety of movie plotlines, with their choice of genre often betraying an underlying ideological or political orientation. Trump acolytes placed him into epic action films such as 300, Gladiator, and Troy, depicting him as a fearless warrior fighting back against a variety of enemies which included the Democratic political machine, establishment Republican candidates, and the mainstream media. By contrast, Trump’s critics sought to frame his electoral victory through the lens of horror, using films such as The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Purge to denounce his combative demeanour, controversial public rhetoric, and questionable moral code. While many of these trailers offered little more than hyperbolic depictions of Trump as a movie monster, the best can be placed within a rich history of political horror and horror parody delineated by scholars such as Tony Magistrale (2005) and Jon Towlson (2014). By seeking to make sense of Trump’s presidency through the lens of horror, parody YouTube trailers attempted to critique his personal attitudes and administrative policies, as well as the role

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played by his family and political supporters in facilitating his rise to power. This chapter uses GO(OTWH) as a window into the role of horror parody as a form of social commentary during the Trump era. In particular, it focusses on the president’s attitudes towards race, as well as the positions taken by his family and by prominent black supporters. In retrospect, GO(OTWH) can be seen as an early example of Get Out’s cultural resonance as a critique of contemporary American racial politics and a reflection of liberal efforts to use horror parody as a way of resisting the Trump presidency. Political horror, horrible politics, and the 2016 election For decades, horror has provided rich terrain for commentary on and engagement with the political process in the United States. The genre’s malleability, coupled with its reliance on underlying fears of the “other” or the “unknown,” has enabled horror to consistently address enduring political concerns by replacing “former cultural anxieties with more contemporary and urgent ones” (Loock, 2012; Towlson, 2014). In turn, horror’s political resonance has been used to good effect by political strategists as a way of reinforcing key campaign messages or beliefs. During the 1964 presidential race, Lyndon Johnson’s team used horror tropes in campaign advertising to paint opponent Barry Goldwater as a nuclear madman. Amid rising violent crime rates and racialised anxieties over the “urban crisis” during the 1980s, George W. Bush’s campaign advertisements used jump-scares, sinister music, and a bleak colour palette to create a “political world of horror” in which violent black felons preyed upon white women (Nelson and Boynton, 1997). Such adverts added to a growing sense in American public life that the possibility of a middle ground between those on the left and right was rapidly receding. In a world where rival political factions appeared to share little common interest, political differences were no longer simply a problem to be worked out; they were battle-lines in a “war for the soul of America” (Hartman, 2015). During the 1980 presidential campaign, the correlation between the number 666 and the letters in Ronald Wilson Reagan’s name led to conspiracy theories that he was Satan in disguise (Gilliam, 1980). Similarly, Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential race prompted fringe members of the right to contend that he was in fact the antichrist, with his wife Hillary embodying the false prophet, “a companion to the Antichrist who, according to the book of Revelation, will promote [the] Antichrist’s power and persuade people to worship him” (Hitchcock, 2011). New media technologies and consumer trends have also helped to encourage ideological polarisation and the proliferation of political horror rhetoric. During the 1990s, an emerging wave of partisan cable news outlets, headed by Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left, contributed to a toxic political culture in which each party attempted to paint the other as harbingers of national disaster (Levendusky, 2011). The rise of the world wide web and video-sharing platforms such as YouTube further encouraged content

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creators and consumers to engage with political conspiracy theories, horror stories, and dystopian scenarios under the guise of citizen journalism (Sunstein, 2018). Following its launch in February 2005, YouTube’s popularity skyrocketed, with LaChrystal Ricke (2014) contending that “perhaps no other communication medium in the history of politics has expanded so substantially and had such an impact on the political communication spectrum in such a short period of time.” The website’s growth dovetailed with Barack Obama’s rise to political prominence following his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and his extensive use of YouTube during the 2008 presidential campaign played a major role in establishing its influence as a political platform (Hendricks and Denton, 2010). However, the site also became an important space for Obama’s opponents to outline their fears regarding the president’s political beliefs. Taking their cue from supernatural horror films such as The Exorcist, conservative YouTube channels disseminated scores of highly watched videos which provided “evidence” that America’s soul had been “infiltrated and overtaken by a foreign and unwelcome ‘Other’” (Parlett, 2014). Against the backdrop of a “nightly news nightmare,” fringe conspiracy theories became embedded in the political mainstream. In a Public Policy Polling survey conducted in 2013, more than a quarter of respondents were either convinced that Obama was the antichrist or were unwilling to rule it out (Farnsworth and Lichter, 2011; Jenson, 2013). If Obama’s two terms in office were described as a “cornucopia of political horror” by conservative commentators (Shapiro, 2014), then Donald Trump’s surprising emergence as a frontrunner in the 2016 Republican primaries was greeted with similar revulsion by large sections of the American public. Trump’s incendiary remarks on illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism, coupled with his public and private denigration of women, led mainstream media outlets to label Trump as a monster and his campaign as a “horror show” (Millbank, 2015; Reeve, 2015). Debbie Williams and Kalyn Prince (2018) have used the lens of metaphor theory to highlight how media outlets adopted horror tropes to condemn Trump’s attitudes and to rationalise his political success, describing the Republican establishment as victims ready to have their “bodies dismembered and souls sucked out.” Just as YouTube emerged a vital space for conservatives and conspiracy theorists to resist the Obama presidency, so too did the platform become a prominent outlet for Trump’s detractors to outline their distaste for his candidacy in increasingly nightmarish terms. In February 2016, the popular film editing channel CineMash uploaded a trailer for a parody horror film titled Trump: Election Year, splicing extracts of speeches taken from Trump’s campaign interviews and rallies together with snippets of footage taken from low-budget horrors, American war movies, and dystopian sci-fi films. Echoing Trump’s combative support for foreign intervention and his repeated calls to loosen torture protocols, it painted a bleak vision of violent military dictatorship. Liberal commentators such as Keith Olbermann (2016) also used YouTube to denounce

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Trump’s “uncanny resemblance to horror” and to warn of the country’s devolution from democracy into “mindless, soulless cult worship.” The site’s role as a space of resistance would become even more important following the businessman’s unexpected triumph at the polling booths in November. Despite being besieged by scandal and faced with historically low favourability scores, Trump was able to translate his “outsider” political status into victory in the electoral college – an event that was met with widespread shock and outpourings of grief among young Americans, people of colour, and other marginalised communities. In the aftermath of his election, dozens of parody movie trailers were uploaded to YouTube, seeking to satirise and delegitimise Trump’s triumph through the lens of horror. One of the most incisive examples of this trend can be seen through the parody horror trailer Get Out (of the White House), which inserted Trump, family members, and supporters into the plotline of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out. Not your average monster Based around the easily relatable fear of “meeting the parents” for the first time, Get Out provided a troubling racial metaphor for enduring racial prejudice and anti-black violence in the United States. Black photographer Chris Washington is invited to the childhood home of white girlfriend Rose Armitage to meet her extended family. Unbeknownst to Chris, the Armitage family have been habitually luring young black adults into their home to use their bodies to house the brains of elderly white patrons. His suspicions are aroused following a series of unsettling encounters with the Armitage family, their African American domestic workers, and local black residents, although when Chris attempts to flee he succumbs to the hypnotism of family matriarch Missy Armitage. Through a mixture of ingenuity and sheer force of will, Chris emerges victorious in a final highway showdown with Rose and her grandfather Roman Armitage, whose mind lives on in the body of black groundskeeper Walter. Produced on a modest budget of $4.5 million, Get Out would go on to gross more than quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. Its commercial success was matched by critical acclaim, with the film appearing on year-ending top ten lists (Zacharek, 2017). In contrast to the blunt force trauma of slasher and “torture porn” films such as Saw and Wolf Creek, critics applauded Get Out’s richly layered narrative and emphasis on psychological horror, with the film’s central message reinforced by “the process of decoding and detecting the layers of subtext and interconnected tissue woven into it” (Young, 2017). Commentators also praised the film’s impact as a “social thriller” that engaged with a wide variety of socio-political concerns including mixed-race relationships, eugenics, slavery, suburban racism, and police brutality (Mendelson, 2017). One of Get Out’s central interventions was an attempt to challenge widespread stereotypes of what contemporary racism looks or sounds like. In

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American popular culture, the views of famous bigots such as Archie Bunker in 1970s sitcom All in the Family have been invariably rationalised as a byproduct of personal ignorance and working-class provincialism. Racists were racist, so the mantra goes, because they “didn’t know any better” (DiAngelo, 2018). Yet history has repeatedly proven this stereotype to be misguided. As the civil rights era put an end to Jim Crow segregation, white supremacists increasingly framed their beliefs about black pathology in mainstream sounding conservative rhetoric about welfare dependency, criminality, and citizenship. More recently, Trump’s ethnonationalist rhetoric has contributed to a “renaissance of intellectual racism” and the popularity of online conspiracy theorists and pseudo-scientists such as Stefan Molyneux (Lopez, 2014; Hemmer, 2017). It is striking that the middle-aged and elderly white men who inhabit Peele’s film are not misinformed bigots in the mould of Archie Bunker, but well-educated, upper-, and middle-class professionals such as family patriarch Dean Armitage, a bespectacled and turtle-necked neurosurgeon. Indeed, Dean’s role in the abduction plot is predicated on his highly specialised medical background and surgical abilities, which allow him to conduct the family’s operations on their unwilling black subjects. From this perspective, Dean’s training and education do not function as a counterbalance to his racist ideas; rather, they help to sharpen and refine his racial bigotry. From a similar perspective, Donald Trump’s privileged upbringing and college education helped to reinforce instead of reform pre-existing racial biases. In turn, the status afforded to him by his class privilege and professional status provided the opportunity to act on his worst impulses. Despite repeated claims to being “the least racist person,” Trump has a long and easily provable track record of racially motivated prejudice (Leonhardt and Philbrick, 2018). Federal investigations into the mogul’s real estate dealings during the 1970s and 1980s discovered that his company had avoided renting apartments to blacks, while Trump’s pursuit of the death penalty for a group of black and Latino suspects following the 1989 rape of a white woman in Central Park were widely criticised as racially motivated (Byfield, 2014). More recently, his role as a ringleader in the “birther” movement to discredit Obama’s presidency helped establish a base of populist support, while his reluctance to disavow white supremacist allies during his campaign, alongside his willingness to appoint white nationalists to his White House team, provide further reminders of his murky racial politics. In the hands of YouTube content creators, Trump’s reputation as “a Frankenstein’s monster” has seen him substituted into parody horror trailers as a variety of iconic horror protagonists (Goldsmith, 2017). While such videos can be viewed as a form of resistance or opposition to the Trump presidency, their characterisation of the president as a demented monster or psycho killer is crude and one-dimensional. By contrast, the effectiveness of Trump’s depiction in GO(OTWH) relies on reminding the audience that his ideas about race are far from an aberration, similarly to how

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the role of Dean Armitage and the plot of Get Out are “born of very real and all-too-plausible fears” (Mendelson, 2017). Just as the Armitage family conspiracy is maintained by the explicit and implicit support of a broader network of upper-middle class suburbanites, so too was Trump’s gleeful disdain for “political correctness” emboldened by a fervent base of support which came to inhabit the body of the Republican Party. If Trump was Frankenstein’s monster, a traditional ending would have seen him run out of town with torches and pitchforks. Yet, as Elspeth Reeve (2015) has noted, by the end of the Republican primaries it seemed like “the mob that appears at the end carrying pitchforks and torches [was] rooting for the monster.” The Trump family It was not only the tone of Trump’s depiction in GO(OTWH) which set it apart from other YouTube horror parodies, but also the trailer’s efforts to widen its focus away from the president, starting with his immediate family. Indeed, the trailer’s star is arguably not Trump, but his daughter Ivanka in the role of Rose Armitage. In Get Out, Rose initially appears to fulfil the role of a white “ally”; something communicated to the audience through her defence of Chris during an early encounter with a police officer, and her subsequent support in the face of mounting microaggressions from her family. However, she is ultimately revealed to be the movie’s most compelling and insidious villain. By willingly subverting historical stereotypes of white female victimhood, Rose is transformed from an ally into a racist femme fatale tasked with the entrapment of “viable” black men for hypnotism and mutilation. This twist is rendered even more shocking by the intimate nature of her relationship with Chris, presenting an extreme version of white liberal racism. As sociologists and critical race theorists have noted, while many liberally minded whites appear to champion antiracism, their attitudes have also helped to ensure that racial inequality remains a pervasive national problem. Even as entrenched patterns of racial equality have persisted, “enlightened” whites have pointed to their own individual relationships with blacks, their support for black political candidates, or their enthusiasm for rap music and other ethnically coded forms of cultural production, as evidence that America has managed to heal its racial divisions (Bonillo-Silva, 2003; DiAngelo, 2018). Following his election as the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama became the poster boy for racial progress and the emergence of a “post-racial America.” Yet the racially disparate impact of the great recession and the racially motivated backlash to Obama’s election – something which arguably culminated with Trump’s victory in the 2016 campaign – revealed such post-racial rhetoric to be misguided (Tesler, 2016). In this light, the decision to substitute Ivanka Trump into the role of Rose Armitage in GO(OTWH) provides a clear rejection of the idea that Ivanka was a “secret liberal.” Throughout Trump’s campaign and during his first term in office, political commentators such as Michael Kruse (2016) positioned

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Ivanka as her father’s “better half ” and argued that she provided the campaign with an important counterweight to Trump’s crude public statements. The candidate’s supporters could point to Ivanka’s role in his campaign team, as well as her public descriptions of her father as “colour-blind and raceneutral,” as evidence of his good intentions. After being appointed to an advisory position within the Trump White House, Trump critics expressed hope that his daughter would act as a “moderating force” to curb some of his worst tendencies with regards to issues such as immigration and racerelations (Engel, 2016; Kantor, Abrams and Haberman, 2017). However, Ivanka’s continued silence on a host of controversial White House policies such as border separation dampened hopes of such a role. By the end of Trump’s first year in office, a growing body of critics had moved to reconsider Ivanka’s role as a complicit bystander in the problems created by the Trump administration. Whereas her father’s historical statements on race at times appeared to embody a form of Jim Crow racism which “explained blacks’ social standing as the result of their biological and moral inferiority,” Ivanka’s unshakeable belief in the free market, her failure to call out her father’s racially tinged rhetoric, and her support of efforts to scrap White House policies safeguarding racial and gender equality in the workplace, reflect the embrace of a colour-blind racism that “rationalize[s] minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations” (Bonillo-Silva, 2003). This complicity is extended to Melania Trump, who takes up the role of family matriarch and resident hypnotherapist Missy Armitage. Shots of Missy’s hand stirring a spoon in a teacup – revealed in Get Out as her method of hypnosis – are interspersed in GO(OTWH) with interview clips of Melania stoically defending her husband as “kind” and “a gentleman,” whilst also rejecting accusations of racial bias or Islamophobia. By positioning Melania as a willing participant in the Armitage family’s plans, the trailer pushes back against suggestions that Trump’s partner, like his daughter, could help to curb his racially biased views. More broadly, the roles played by Ivanka and Melania in GO(OTWH) take aim at the hypocritical attitudes of many white women towards Trump’s presidency. While the businessman’s misogyny was heavily criticised during the 2016 campaign, exit polls indicated that more than half of all white women voted for him, something which black activists characterised as a “failure of white feminism” (O’Neal, 2016). Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump also find a role in GO(OTWH), with the siblings being amalgamated into the character of Jeremy Armitage, Rose’s hot-headed brother. Jeremy’s desire to physically subdue his black victims is mirrored in the parody trailer by shots of the Trump siblings hunting wild animals such as leopards and water buffalo, echoing the racialised hunting metaphors at play throughout Get Out. This is perhaps most obvious through the mounted head of a buck in the family recreation room, which doubles as a symbol for the subjugation of the hypersexualised black buck, a recurrent racist stereotype in American cinema throughout the 20th century (Larson,

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2006). We can also connect this hunting motif to the rhetoric of Dean Armitage, whose hatred of deer – “they’re taking over . . . like rats” – becomes a coded articulation of his disdain for black people. Such “dog-whistle” appeals to racism have also been embraced by Donald Trump, with the businessman repeatedly describing alleged black offenders as “animals” and “roving bands of wild criminals” (Byfield, 2014; Lopez, 2014). Trapped in the sunken place Perhaps the most controversial group to appear in GO(OTWH) are an assortment of prominent black Trump supporters including Secretary for Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, political aide Omarosa Manigault, and entertainer Kanye West. In contrast to the roles of Trump and Ivanka, who are “cast” in the roles of Dean Armitage and his daughter Rose, the parts played by figures such as Carson and West are less clearly defined. Broadly speaking, they act as substitutes for the various black people Chris meets in the Armitage’s affluent suburban community; a group which includes housekeeper Georgina, groundskeeper Walter, and family friend Logan Ward. Clips of Omarosa sitting next to Trump in a staff meeting, Carson laughing with the president at an unspecified garden event, and West meeting with the businessman at Trump Tower after his electoral victory are interspersed with movie footage as well as segments from speeches and press interviews where Trump expressed his desire to meet with the Black Caucus and proclaimed his love for black supporters. As is gradually revealed to the audience, the Armitage family’s black acquaintances are unwilling victims of the family’s surgical experiments. Their bodies have become “hosts” to the minds of ailing white “patrons,” while their original consciousnesses remaining trapped in a state of eternal limbo referred to by Missy Armitage as the “sunken place.” Georgina is in fact Rose’s grandmother Marianne Armitage, while the body of groundskeeper Walter has been inhabited by her grandfather Roman. When Logan’s strange behaviour at a garden party prompts Chris to take a photograph of him, the camera flash causes Logan’s black host, a Brooklyn native named Andre Hayworth, to briefly escape the sunken place. Hayworth attacks Chris, warning him to “Get Out!” before being restrained by fellow party-goers. By inserting figures such as Omarosa, Carson, and West into these roles, GO(OTWH) taps into criticisms directed at both the president’s black supporters and black conservatives writ large. Indeed, the belief that the modern Republican Party is at best ambivalent to people of colour and other marginalised groups has led to black conservatives being treated as pariahs by many African Americans and liberals (Rigueur, 2015). The unsavoury use of racial epithets such as “Uncle Tom” or “Coon” – slurs regularly directed at prominent black Republicans such as Utah Representative Mia Love and South Carolinian politician Tim Scott – are only the most blatant articulation of an underlying notion that black Republicans have in some way betrayed

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the black community. By splitting from the overwhelming support for the Democratic Party exhibited by African Americans as a whole, such figures risk being characterised as political opportunities or “racial sellouts” (Bracey, 2009). If Peele’s vision of black bodies acting as vessels for the minds of whites in Get Out gestured towards this stereotype, then it was rendered explicit in GO(OTWH) through the inclusion of prominent black Trump supporters – a literal manifestation of Get Out’s plot. GO(OTWH) also provided an early example of the real-life satirical application of the “sunken place,” the barely conscious purgatory into which the Armitage’s black victims are plunged. In Peele’s imagination, the “sunken place” functioned as an abstract reflection of the institutional and systemic barriers faced by marginalised people in the United States. Peele contended that “no matter how hard we scream, the system silences us” (Sims, 2017). However, in GO(OTWH), the “sunken place” takes on a more specific meaning as a term for the seemingly unconscionable support for Trump displayed by figures such as Carson. Similarly, the trailer takes Chris’s contention that Walter and other black characters in Get Out appear to have “missed the movement” and redirects it towards African American celebrities such as Kanye West, who would go on to describe the president as “my brother.” As journalist Alex Rayner (2018) has noted, the “sunken place” assumed a surprisingly weighty cultural resonance during the months following Get Out’s release. Against the unfolding backdrop of the Trump presidency, it quickly became a zeitgeist for a “widely felt political and social mood of liberal inertia and unspoken white supremacist hegemony.” Peele himself would comment on the parallels between Get Out’s dystopic social vision and the actions of Trump and his administration. Upon taking the stage at the 2018 Producers Guild of America Awards to receive the Stanley Kramer Award for films illuminating “provocative social issues,” Peele declared that “the sunken place is the system that silences the voice of women, minorities, and of other people . . . the sunken place is the president who calls athletes sons of bitches for expressing their beliefs on the field” (Ramos, 2018). In a case of art imitating life, West’s continued praise of Trump, as well as his appreciation of black conservative commentators such as Candace Owens, led to a spate of memes depicting the rapper trapped in the “sunken place.” Internet tricksters took it upon themselves to insert West into the now iconic scene from Get Out where Missy successfully hypnotises Chris, or to suggest that the rapper’s assimilation into the rich, white, and ostensibly liberal Kardashian family provided evidence of his entrapment. Firing back at such antics, West tweeted a series of photographs from the interior of his spacious home, jokingly asking his followers whether the sparsely furnished mansion looked “like the sunken place” and promising to provide them with “more tweets from the sunken place.” In a final twist, Peele himself responded to West, retweeting the rapper’s photographs and suggesting that they would serve as inspiration for a potential sequel to Get Out (Lenker, 2018).

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Conclusion By reimagining the characters in Get Out as members and supporters of the Trump administration, GO(OTWH) provided its audience with a bridge between the nightmarish vision of American race-relations outlined in Peele’s film, and widespread liberal fears that the Trump presidency would devolve into a “horror show.” Choosing to avoid well-worn and one-dimensional depictions of the president as a demented movie monster, the parody trailer instead offered a more layered critique of Trump’s personal and political failings. Focussing on his attitudes towards race, GO(OTWH) sought to utilise Trump’s election to push back against longstanding stereotypes of what racism in America looks like. In doing so, it rejected the persistent connection between racial prejudice, class status, and educational attainment. GO(OTWH) also took aim at the president’s immediate family as well as his acolytes within the African American community. By substituting Ivanka Trump into the role of Rose Armitage, the trailer’s creators challenged hopes that the president’s daughter would help to moderate his political views, and instead framed Ivanka’s administrative interventions through the lens of colour-blind racism. Similarly, by substituting prominent black supporters of Trump into the role of the Armitage family’s black surgical victims, GO(OTWH) offered a damning indictment of their complicity in the president’s actions. While aspects of the trailer’s content worked to reinforce pejorative stereotypes about black conservatives and Republicans, it effectively captured the widespread frustrations felt by many liberals towards prominent black apologists for Trump’s racially tinged views. From a different perspective, GO(OTWH) provides an early and informative example of the broader cultural and political impact of Get Out, with the film continuing to be evoked as a way of “understanding” American racial politics in the age of Trump. During the months that followed its release, the trailer’s coverage of black celebrities such as Kayne West seemed almost prescient, as the rapper’s support for Trump led to derision on social media and accusations that he was trapped in the “sunken place.” More broadly, the release of GO(OTWH) provided further evidence of YouTube’s importance as a political platform and its value as a space for content creators and consumers to engage with the political process. Through the production of parody horror trailers, liberal YouTube channels and users were able to voice their opposition to Trump’s presidency, and, in doing so, contribute to a rich history of political horror and horror parody. Bibliography Bonillo-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism without the Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Bracey, Christopher Alan. 2009. Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism. Boston: Beacon Press.

162 James West Byfield, Natalie. 2014. Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. DiAngelo, Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston: Beacon Press. Engel, Pamela. 2016. “Ivanka Aims to Soften Her Father’s Image.” Business Insider (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Farnsworth, Stephen and S. Robert Lichter. 2011. The Nightly News Nightmare: Media Coverage of U.S Presidential Elections, 1988–2008, 3rd Edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Gilliam, Dorothy. 1980. “A Superstitious View of Reagan’s Victory.” Washington Post (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Goldsmith, Jack. 2017. “Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?” The Atlantic (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. GQ. 2016. “Donald Trump and His Uncanny Resemblance to Horror.” YouTube (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Hartman, Andrew. 2015. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hemmer, Nicole. 2017. “The Renaissance of Intellectual Racism.” US News & World Report (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Hendricks, John and Robert Denton, Jr, eds. 2010. Communicator-In-Chief: How Barack Obama Used New Media Technology to Win the White House. Lanham: Lexington Books. Hitchcock, Mark. 2011. Who Is the Antichrist? Eugene: Harvest House Publishers. Jenson, Tom. 2013. “Poll: 13 Percent Say Obama the Antichrist.” Public Policy Polling (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Kantor, Jodi, Rachel Abrams and Maggie Haberman. 2017. “Ivanka Trump Has the President’s Ear.” New York Times (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Kruse, Michael. 2016. “Donald Trump’s Better Half.” Politico (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Larson, Stephanie. 2006. Media & Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Lebron, Christopher. 2017. The Making of Black Lives Matter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lenker, Maureen. 2018. “Jordan Peele Jokes about Get Out 2 after Kanye West’s Sunken Place Tweet.” Entertainment Weekly (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Leonhardt, David and Ian Prasad Philbrick. 2018. “Donald Trump’s Racism.” New York Times (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Levendusky, Matthew. 2011. How Partisan Media Polarize America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loock, Kathleen. 2012. “The Return of the Pod People.” In Loock Kathleen and Constantine Verevis, eds., Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 122–144. Lopez, Ian Haney. 2014. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Magistrale, Tony. 2005. Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film. New York: Peter Lang. Martinelli, Marissa. 2017. “Get Out Is Even Scarier When You’re Dating Ivanka Trump.” Slate Magazine (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Mendelson, Scott. 2017. “Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ Is a New Horror Classic.” Forbes (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Millbank, Dana. 2015. “Donald Trump Is the Monster the GOP Created.” Washington Post (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Nelson, John and G.R. Boynton. 1997. Video Rhetorics: Televised Advertising in American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Get Out (of the White House) 163 O’Neal, Lonnae. 2016. “The 53 Percent Issue.” The Undefeated (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Parlett, Martin. 2014. Demonizing A President: The “Foreignization” of Barack Obama. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Ramos, Dino-Ray. 2018. “Jordan Peele Says It Feel Like ‘We’re in the Sunken Place’ Right Now.” Deadline (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Rayner, Alex. 2018. “Trapped in the Sunken Place.” The Guardian (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Reeve, Elspeth. 2015. “Donald Trump Brought Fox News to Its Knees.” New Republic (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Ricke, LaChrystal. 2014. The Impact of YouTube on U.S Politics. Lanham: Lexington Books. Rigueur, Leah Wright. 2015. The Loneliness of the Black Republican. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shapiro, Ben. 2014. The People Vs. Barack Obama. New York: Threshold Editions. Sims, David. 2017. “What Made That Hypnosis Scene in Get Out So Terrifying.” The Atlantic (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Sunstein, Cass R. 2018. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tesler, Michael. 2016. Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Towlson, John. 2014. Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Williams, Debbie and Kalyn Prince. 2018. The Monstrous Discourse in the Donald Trump Campaign. Lanham: Lexington Books. Young, Damon. 2017. “The Disturbing Truth That Makes Get Out Depressingly Plausible.” Slate Magazine (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. Zacharek, Stephanie. 2017. “Top 10 Movies 2017.” Time Magazine (Online). Accessed: 2/9/2018. 300 (2006) Directed by Zack Snyder: Warner Bros. Pictures. All in the Family (1971–1979) Directed by Various: Viacom Enterprises. Get Out (2017) Directed by Jordan Peele: Universal Pictures. Gladiator (2000) Directed by Ridley Scott: DreamWorks Pictures. The Exorcist (1973) Directed by William Friedkin: Warner Bros. Pictures. The Purge (2013) Directed by James DeMonaco: Universal Pictures. The Shining (1980) Directed by Stanley Kubrick: Warner Bros. Pictures. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Directed by Jonathan Demme: Orion Pictures. Troy (2004) Directed by Wolfgang Petersen: Warner Bros. Pictures.

12 Beware the untruths Podcast audio horror in Post-Truth America Richard Hand and Danielle Hancock

Whilst witnessing the dawn of a new political era, America had already entered a new media epoch. Alongside the ascendancy of Donald Trump, there has been a revival of grassroots media and the rise of the podcast as a mass media form. Perhaps no media exemplifies the Post-Truth era as clearly as the podcast in its diffracted and unregulated proliferation. In particular, the popular genre of podcast horror offers a uniquely apt means by which to express and explore the anxieties and tensions of the world of Trump. This chapter surveys how horror podcasts have exploited audio’s curious liminality as both deeply intimate and uncertain. This includes case studies of two successful American podcasts: the extrapolated horrors and alternative histories in the anthology series The Truth; and the neo-Gothic Americana of serialised “community radio show” Welcome to Night Vale. In analysing how these shows portray America, the podcast form is argued to hold unique creative insight and communicative means within Trump’s unfolding America. Indeed, in a world of visual iconography and spectacle, the illicit world of podcast audio may be the most thoroughly malleable and, ironically, the most truthful. Introduction: the podsphere and Donald J. Trump There is no cultural product that encapsulates the ubiquity and complexity of contemporary mass media consumption better than the podcast. Podcasting is (ostensibly) democratised, proliferating, diverse, unregulated, globalised, personalised, and immersive. Podcasting as we recognise it became prevalent in the early 2000s and, by the time of Donald J. Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States in 2016, there were literally thousands of podcasts available across every topic and genre imaginable, commanding audiences from a dozen niche fans to literally millions. Podcast audiences actively control their listening pleasure and edification by choosing or accepting (via algorithmic recommendations based on their perceived “tastes”) what to consume as they simultaneously drive, jog, or scan their social media in the diffracted existence of the 21st century. The cultural, social, and political diffraction of our times reflects a phenomenal global transformation and is central to the Trump epoch. As Pablo J. Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi (2018, p. 5) argue, we have witnessed:

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[The] emergence of a digital culture that combines high levels of topdown algorithmic power concentrated in the hands of a few corporations with equally high levels of bottom-up insurgency capabilities distributed among a myriad of individual and collective actors. If the former might give the impression that a few technological giants can determine our present . . . then the latter should remind us of the vitality of avenues for contingent resistance and change. Whether through consuming infinite individual feeds we are oppressed or have revolution in sight, within this world of diffraction, the very concept of “the truth” becomes contested, unstable, and amorphous. When facts and the truth become subjectively interpreted on a partisan basis rather than objectively accepted, we enter a culture where, as Cass R. Sunstein states, a “lot of the supposed news is fake” (Sunstein 2018, p. 3). The alarming ubiquity of fake news has been central to the creation of the “Post-Truth” world that we find ourselves inhabiting and has become synonymous with President Trump. Just as the podcast is the epitome of contemporary media, the 45th president is an apposite emblem of Post-Truth in the fissured 21st century. For all the conservative values embodied in his election-winning “Make America Great Again” mantra, Trump is a very new-fangled president, not least in his perennial use of Twitter, a paradigm-shifting moment in political history as significant as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s innovative use of radio in the 1930–1940s or President John F. Kennedy’s understanding of television in the 1950–1960s. As Thomas E. Patterson (2017, p. xvi) argues: Although Barack Obama was the first Twitter president, Trump is the first one on steroids. But Trump’s tweets are just the surface of the transformation and are far less important than what’s taking place largely out of sight. Social media usage at the citizen level are having a large effect on what we know, don’t know, and only think we know. An understanding of this subterranean world is critical if we are to understand the implications for our democracy. In terms of “subterranean” culture, the podcast is an ideal form to analyse. The podcast has emerged as an important alternative mass media form efficaciously using digital technology while simultaneously representing a revival of grassroots media. Podcasts are a reflexive and responsive media, quick to produce and disseminate due to their technical ease and, in many cases, the lack of regulative control. Podcasts appear with rapidity, telling (fake) news, (alternative) histories, and (factual) fictions to whoever is searching for them. Donald Trump has been a major impetus for podcasting. Just as Trump has reinvented the role of the president in terms of media presence, the world of podcasts has responded with an unprecedented analysis of and, one might say, obsession with an incumbent president. President Trump can be found all over the podsphere. In the political context, there are podcasts

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from broad to narrow interest groups: Versus Trump which closely monitors Trump for unconstitutional activity; TrumpED – What Do We Do Now? which explores the administration’s perceived anti-education policies; Trump Nation, a forum for listeners who see Trump as a hero; and Grab Them by the Pod, a non-partisan discussion of the latest news emerging from the White House. Other Trump-related podcasts are satirical, providing comedians with endless material to riff upon, as in The Trump Thumpers Podcast. Other comedian podcasters have offered Trump “specials” such as Doug Stanhope who hosted an extra-long live episode on 8 November 2016 (i.e. election night) and, on subsequent upload, titled it The End of the World (11 November 2016) podcast. Other comedic podcasts have an almost surreal quality. In Kylo Trump: Make the Empire Great Again (2015 onwards), genuine Trump quotations are read out in the sinister voice of Kylo Ren from Star Wars. Even stranger, Robo Trump (2017–2018) features a robotic male voice that recites Trump’s tweets. Obviously, each of the (many thousands of) episodes is only a few seconds long but the cumulative effect is eerily dehumanised and disturbing. The supreme irony of Robo Trump is that this podcast was simply a product demo for ReadEar Ltd voice software which suddenly went viral and attracted millions of listeners when it began to use Trump tweets as content. Although Kylo Trump and Robo Trump may be simple yet clever examples of satire or marketing respectively, they nevertheless transmute Trump from incumbent president into a force of evil from science fantasy or a dehumanised automaton. Such darkly humorous yet undeniably eerie downloads emerge from a phenomenal area of podcasting, namely horror and the closely affiliated genres of dark fantasy and the neo-Gothic. Horror podcasting is an increasingly popular and multifaceted field that has witnessed a particularly rapid development and offers a uniquely apt means by which to express and explore the anxieties and tensions of the “world of Trump.” Horror podcasts exploit audio’s unique liminality as both deeply intimate and uncertain. There are a vast number of horror podcasts that could be considered but we will devote our attention to two significant American examples: the dramatic anthology series The Truth with its tales of extrapolated horrors and alternative histories; and Welcome to Night Vale, a serialised “community” radio show, a darkly comic and paranoid example of neo-Gothic Americana. In analysing these programmes, and the means by which they discuss and portray America, the podcast form shall be argued to hold unique creative insight to, and communicative means within, Trump’s unfolding America. The Truth Produced by Jonathan Mitchell, The Truth (2011 onwards) releases high-quality standalone audio dramas, encompassing a diverse range of genres, from science fiction to comedy. In this regard, the programme is not purely a horror podcast. But in its “darker” dramas, the series belongs to the tradition of dark fantasy on television such as The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) or the

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contemporary show Black Mirror (2011 onwards), or earlier radio antecedents such as Lights Out (1934–1947) or Quiet Please (1947–1949). Like these pioneers of horror radio, many of the episodes of The Truth would be economically or aesthetically impossible to create visually but are ideally suited to audio. The Truth comprehends the potential of audio, exploring extraordinary settings and extrapolated fantasies in efficiently crafted narratives. The pilot episode of The Truth, “Moon Graffiti” (11 February 2011), presents a compelling PostTruth “alternative history.” The play takes a genuine artefact, the “In Event of Moon Disaster” speech written for President Richard Nixon to deliver to the nation if the 1969 Apollo 11 mission ended in disaster. In the play, the president’s speech frames the dialogue between Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, marooned on the Moon and waiting to die. In its pairing of the series title The Truth with a perhaps provocative alternative history, the programme plays a postmodern game, an audacious irony that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction and the spectrum of all that lies in between. This establishes an important principle to the show that continues to this day. Like the best speculative fiction, The Truth takes simple ideas and extrapolates them. In Louis Kornfeld’s “That’s Democracy” (4 September 2012), a politics teacher in an unruly high school brings a firearm into class and, in an extreme demonstration of debate and democracy, forces individual pupils to justify why he should not shoot them and nominate someone else to die instead, asserting “If you choose no one, I will kill everybody.” Eventually the pupils select the teacher himself who, duly respecting the democratic process, kills himself. This short drama is a satire on gun control and high school shootings but it also satirises the contemporary lack of youth interest in established politics while having a curiously optimistic ending with the pupils’ majority vote having a tangible impact that saves their lives. In this respect, for all the horror of its plot, the drama is a metaphor for the untapped power of youth action. Significantly, in the summer of 2016 – during the American election campaign – “That’s Democracy” was adapted into a short film and the story, whether as audio or video, seems to lose nothing of its relevance. A comment posted by a listener called “Nanners” in March 2018 on The Truth website states “Anybody else think this story is even more powerful in 2018?” (Nanners, 2018). Certainly, “That’s Democracy” resonates powerfully at a time when school shootings have sparked vociferous demands for gun control while the pro-gun lobby and, in February 2018, President Trump himself, have seriously proposed arming school teachers as a solution. “That’s Democracy” is an example of political horror and this is to be found elsewhere in The Truth’s repertoire including a Halloween special, “The Devil You Know” (25 October 2013), which collated three horror plays which are all set in the world of electoral politics and disturbingly dramatise the fault-lines of corruption, conspiracy, and cruelty that can threaten the fragile principles of democracy. During the presidency of Trump, The Truth has produced some unsettling examples of horror drama which can be read as metaphors for the zeitgeist.

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Becca Schall’s “Decider” (26 October 2017) is about a digital device that gives its users results on the viability of their proposed ideas, not as a “right/wrong” decision but as a percentile “personal satisfaction score.” The play centres on Mallory who receives a “decider” for her birthday. She immediately adores her new gadget, relishing the freedom she believes it gives her. When she asks the decider “What if I quit my job?,” she receives 96 percent, a result unanimous enough to make her do the previously unthinkable: she resigns, signalling to her boss it was on a point of principle (rather than the stats generated by a gadget): “Try treating your female servers with respect and then maybe you’ll get some real respect back.” After this decisive act (albeit decided for her), Mallory enters a euphoric spree in which she is led by majority percentages. We follow Mallory as her addiction to the device gradually destroys her relationships and employment prospects while she yearns for the “perfect” lifestyle score of 100 percent. Ultimately, Mallory becomes mired in disappointing results until she asks the decider “What if I destroyed you?” and, to her shock, receives 100 percent. “Decider” is a powerful example of technophobic horror, satirising contemporary digital culture where there is a device or an app for everything and the anxiety that dehumanised algorithms are misleading us with calamitous consequences. Mallory’s thrill of deluded freedom as she wastes her time and limits herself reflects one of the key questions Cass R. Sunstein sees facing our society: “How might social media, the explosion of communications options, machine learning, and artificial intelligence alter the capacity of citizens to govern themselves?” (Sunstein 2018, p. 5) If “Decider” explores the tragedy of technological over-dependency, Caspar Kelly’s “Dark End of the Mall” (11 January 2017) satirises the contemporary appetite for nostalgia. The play is set in a retro-style wedding dress shop in a typical shopping mall, albeit undergoing major construction work and with a stray dog recurrently barking. The boutique is in the style of 1950s America, with popular music from the era playing in the background and the shopkeeper Lucy chatting to her boyfriend on the phone as she plans their evening together and waits for her shift to end. When Steve, a flustered customer, arrives, Lucy puts his nerves down to him being stressed about the imminent wedding of his daughter. Steve becomes increasingly frustrated and when he steals bottles of water from behind the counter Lucy threatens him with mace and calls for security. Steve begins to reveal the truth. It is not the late 1950s but the 2050s and Lucy is not a young woman but one of the androids created to service a chain of wedding dress shops that construct a 1950s idyll as a sales gimmick. While Lucy has malfunctioned and continues to inhabit her nostalgic utopia, the real world has experienced a cataclysm and social order has collapsed: the mall is in a state of destruction not construction; a repeated pop song is, in fact, a looping evacuation alarm; the yapping dog is a homicidal maniac that most humans have degenerated into; and Steve is not a customer but a desperate survivor searching for food and water. At closing time, Lucy swiftly ejects Steve from the boutique and

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she interprets Steve’s screams as he is killed by the “stray dog” as cheers of delight as he watches a sports game. The play is a powerful two-hander, the juxtaposition between the bright and chirpy Lucy and the desperate and hungry Steve finely balanced. “Dark End of the Mall” is an example of effective horror radio as the seemingly coherent setting of Lucy’s shop gradually morphs into the horrifying truth. Thematically, the play can be seen as an attack on nostalgia which seems highly relevant at the time of its release in January 2017, the same month as Trump’s inauguration ceremony. There is no question that Trump garnered votes by playing on nostalgia, above all by celebrating the values and affluence of 1950s America, a time when the USA was at its “Greatest.” As Lisa Scharoun writes, as well as economic prosperity and the realisation of a liberty previously thought to be unattainable, “the American Dream of the fifties promoted a suburban utopia of privacy and independence” (Scharoun 2012, p. 19). The cornerstone of this is the family and the automobile, emblemized in “Dark End of the Mall” in the wedding boutique and the mall. As Scharoun writes, “In its purest form it is a beautiful dream, but one that has dire environmental and social consequences” (Scharoun 2012, p. 19), including pollution and segregation. In “Dark End of the Mall,” drinking water has become a commodity to die for while the human race seems to have split into killers and survivors. Perhaps only corporate-constructed, malfunctioning androids can believe in – and actively sustain – a 1950s American Dream. The juxtaposition between the survivor and the automaton reflects a divided nation and society. For Cass R. Sunstein, there is, in the real world, a danger that we are unknowingly “living in different political universes – something like science fiction’s parallel worlds” (Sunstein 2018, pp. 2–3). This division, wherein never the twain shall meet, can threaten to be as apocalyptic as the desolation of “Dark End of the Mall.” In analysing the success of the Donald Trump electoral campaign, Luke Winslow argues that the rhetoric of the American Dream of the 1950s – as exploited by Donald Trump – functioned as “a powerful categorizing mechanism [which] helped us organize economic, moral, and cultural knowledge in forceful ways” (Winslow 2017, p. 125). This mechanism served as the hegemony of values in the USA until recent economic crises changed everything. Through the promise of a revitalised American Dream – embodied in the slogan “Make America Great Again” – Winslow detects “a Faustian bargain” for Trump’s supporters who “could feel the looming apocalypse” (Winslow 2017, p. 125) and despised Hillary Clinton’s “Love Trumps Hate” catchphrase, feeling that hate might be exactly what is needed. “Dark End of the Mall” may be set in the year 2057 but in revealing the devastation that lies behind the veil of an illusory American Dream, we become immersed into a future landscape that perhaps feels as apocalyptic and alienated as the PostTruth world of Trump. This disturbing landscape can be found elsewhere in the podsphere, not least in the uncanny world of Welcome to Night Vale.

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Welcome to Night Vale Welcome to Night Vale (2012+) is a “community radio show” for a small MidWestern American town where ghosts, angels, floating cats, and endless voids co-exist with smartphones, Twitter, and fast-food chains. In its uniquely twisted Americana, Welcome to Night Vale seems to give voice to the fears and hopes of Trump-era America, evolving in parallel to America’s new political terrain. In this way, the show has had a growing role as a site of political exploration and protest, a position which has caused diverse reactions from its fan base. Since it began, Welcome to Night Vale has explored tensions of government and community. Specifically, and increasingly, this has been with a focus towards both critiquing the intentions and actions of both “big” and local government, and supporting minority, or disempowered, populations and individuals. From the opening lines of the show’s first episode, we witness the omnipotence of the mysterious Night Vale City Council: Hello listeners. To start things off, I’ve been asked to read this brief notice. The City Council announces the opening of a new Dog Park. . . . They would like to remind everyone that dogs are not allowed in the Dog Park. People are not allowed in the Dog Park. It is possible you will see hooded figures in the Dog Park. The fence is electrified and highly dangerous. Try not to look at the Dog Park and especially do not look for any period of time at the hooded figures. The Dog Park will not harm you. In this introduction to the Night Vale Dog Park, the local government is established as highly secretive and sinister, controlling the town’s press, spaces, and citizens. Indeed, as the episode progresses, the council suggests even divine levels of power, issuing a “reminder” to all Night Vale townspeople that “the structure of heaven and the angelic organizational chart are privileged information, known only to the City Council members on a need-to-know basis.” If, from its origins, Welcome to Night Vale is playfully mistrustful of government, it is likewise openly hostile to what may be considered traditionally right-wing modes of thought. An ironic stance towards American gun law is suggested as Cecil advertises the Night Vale National Rifle Association chapter’s fundraising bumper stickers which read “Guns don’t kill people. It’s impossible to be killed by a gun. We are all invincible to bullets and it’s a miracle.” In the same episode, Cecil disparages historical American attitudes to cultural appropriation, mocking the town’s self-titled “Indian Tracker,” for his apparent Slavic ethnic-origin and feathered headdress akin to “some racist cartoon,” and also suggests his (increasingly significant) LGBT identity through repeated reference to the physical beauty of Night Vale newcomer (and future spouse) Carlos. These liberal leanings have strengthened throughout the show’s development and an increasingly political focus has emerged throughout the show’s run. Co-writer Joseph Fink attributes the show’s popularity firstly to its

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mirroring of the difficulties of “real life” (cited Michael, 2015); and secondly to the show’s use of a gay protagonist, in a show whose narrative is not predicated on the topic of sexuality. For Welcome to Night Vale, the tensions of reality, and the voice of the politically marginalised, form a double helix of meaning and drive. These issues are key to the show’s creators: in their personal Twitter feeds, Welcome to Night Vale’s principle creative team – writers Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, and lead voice-actor Cecil Baldwin – all vociferously oppose rising right-wing political factions, and Trump’s presidency. In June 2018, for example, Fink used Twitter to denounce Republican immigration policies, notably supporting the occupy-ICE campaign, and publicising White House advisor Stephen Miller’s phone number for anti-ICE protesters. Elsewhere, Cranor has decried Pro-Life movements and deemed the NRA “a terrorist organization” while Baldwin has tweeted “I will seriously be considering any and all marriage proposals from non-US citizens.” In Welcome to Night Vale’s election storylines we see perhaps the show’s most sustained critique of the US political terrain. When the openly corrupt mayor Pamela Winchell resigns, two figures stand for election: a newly arrived five-headed dragon called Hiram McDaniels runs against long-term resident “The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home.” Within this creepy fantasy, there is political commentary at play as an invasive-butaccepted figure of surveillance battles against a schizophrenic, often violent, behemoth for control of the town. Midway through their campaigns, the two candidates are joined by Marcus Vanston, “Night Vale’s wealthiest resident,” the founder of Night Vale’s “Preschool Chimney Sweep Academy” with a predilection for furniture made of human bones. When Night Vale’s property tax increases hit its citizens, Vanston is exempted: When you’re worth as much as Marcus Vanston, you have proved your value to society through hard work and determination and are no longer required to show anyone any further proof that you care about anything or anybody else, because you obviously do. Look at all your money! According to some, Marcus is worth over five billion dollars, and that’s five billion reasons Marcus is our town’s greatest citizen. (“Pilot,” 2014) If Night Vale’s mayoral campaign is as an allegorical critique of US politics in general, after Trump’s victory the show becomes most directly outspoken in protest. In April 2017, the programme directly confronts the core Trumpian themes of Post-Truth and fake news when Cecil issues a stark warning to the listeners, a warning that makes Night Vale – despite its playful absurdity and escapist fantasy – a concrete microcosm of contemporary America: “Night Vale, beware the untruths which attempt to dismantle our town. . . . Do your best to remember what is real” (“Filings,” 2017). During 2018, plot arcs of the show have warned against the investiture of over-powerful governments such as when mayor Dana Cardinal announces a state of emergency and

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assumes control of the town’s Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency and the Sheriff ’s Secret Police. As Cardinal’s power increases, the sole remaining human on the City Council – Tamika Flynn – warns against submitting to Cardinal’s will just for the sake of fear: “What I’m saying is, while Dana is a good person and a friend of mine, expanding government power on the assumption that the government will always be run by well-meaning people is a dangerous gamble” (“A Matter of Blood Part 1,” 2018). Beyond social media and allegorical expression within the storylines, the show’s creative team have arguably sought more direct communication with their listeners through the show’s paratextual frames. To conclude each episode, Welcome to Night Vale offers a “proverb” for the day. Some of these are whimsical, such as suggesting that listeners learn more about local bird names, dig a deep hole, or sell all their worldly possessions and live with a herd of goats. However, after Trump’s victory, some proverbs have become more directly political: on 15 February 2017, after the physical assault of the alt-right Trump supporter Richard Spencer and the subsequent wave of anti-Nazi memes, listeners were told to “Punch a Nazi real good in the face” (“Love Is a Shambling Thing,” 2017). Similarly, when Trump denounced the removal of confederate statues, the 1 September 2017 episode concluded by telling listeners to “Find a local confederate monument and just tear that sucker down” (“Niecelet,” 2017). Welcome to Night Vale’s growing politicisation has caused much contention and a considerable rift within the show’s listenership. Many listeners discuss the show’s growing political voice to be its greatest worth; allowing a disenfranchised youth a sense of voice. For some fans, the parallels between Welcome to Night Vale’s American Weird and the present day US offer a simplistic but ingenious means to comprehend the politics of today: comparing Trump and his followers to the podcast’s megalomaniac deity, “The Smiling God” and his violent cult, one fan comments, “Donald Trump is a smiling god of terrible power and ceaseless appetite” (ElcidBarrett, 2017). However, a rising number of listeners have condemned the creators for indoctrination or aesthetic failure. Such discussions have increased to the extent that the Welcome to Night Vale Reddit moderators have acknowledged the conflict it provokes before requesting that posters double check whether their topic has already been covered in the forum. While one Redditer argues that “the show were always kinda politically leaning towards a side,” with many fans “following the staff for their political leanings as much as their writing/acting skills,” others voice their frustrations: “I’m done, the liberal undertones have become too unbearable for me” (Anonymous, 2017; Zirealeredin, 2017) “Anonymous” suggests that the show has shifted in genre: “the horror that the show had back then isnt [sic] for us anymore. There needs to be a balance between politics and horror” (2017). Another listener laments, “God, I miss the old Night Vale. I wish they’d quit with the disguised political soapboxing,” before vowing to quit the show due to its “indoctrination” regarding issues of transgender politics and the Second Amendment (u/deleted 2017).

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Perhaps in Welcome to Night Vale’s developing role as a satire set within a Lovecraftian desert town we find a newer genre emerging, as in The Truth, an audio form of political horror. Herein the anxieties of contemporary political reality are ever-starkly represented in the town’s nightmare-scapes, eerie residents and monstrous happenings, now perhaps not for the effect of dark comedy as political allegory. In this shift from comedic horror to political horror we see the fluidity of an entertainment art which is by nature unpredictable, fast-paced, and independent. Grassroots podcasting is not constrained by top-down marketing, concerns over sponsor’s political affiliations or broadcasting censorship rules. In the arena of grassroots podcasting, creators are free to advance their political opinions, even to the extent of altering their entire aesthetic and audience. However, if Welcome to Night Vale is freed, through podcast form, to broadcast political horror without the constraints of gate-kept media, it is worth noting that grassroots media perhaps comes with its own binds. Many listener complaints regarding the show’s changing nature refer to a sense of underlying listener hierarchy: a tiered system in which Welcome to Night Vale’s fandom comprises the show creators’ “true audience,” wielding enormous influence and power. Whether or not there is truth to such claims, it is certainly true that the podcast form relies more heavily than most mass media entertainment forms on fans for direct economic support, publicity, and dissemination. The last few years have seen great growth in Welcome to Night Vale’s business model, with Fink and Cranor establishing a podcast “network” which hosts and showcases works that they endorse, developing the global live tours, and employing a greater number of production and acting staff. Secure money-flow is perhaps a greater need than when the podcast was a spare-time, three-man hobby. The extreme visibility and vocalism of social media-based collective fandoms, exerts a greater and arguably more immediate level of feedback on aspects such as plot and character development. Perhaps, Welcome to Night Vale’s perceived left-wing political horror is a co-creation of writers, actors, and fans; perhaps it has been hijacked by the formerly disenfranchised fans the show succeeded in giving a voice to; or perhaps it is simply a natural progression of the show as its fictive world moulds itself anew to reflect the unprecedented divisions and ambiguities of the Trump epoch. Conclusion As we have seen, podcasts are multitudinous and if we want to find President Donald J. Trump we can find him lauded as a hero of the American Dream or a Star Wars villain. Narratives of horror in shows like The Truth and Welcome to Night Vale takes ideas and values of our problematic times and extrapolates them into disturbing scenarios and thoroughly eerie American landscapes. We can find narratives where the Apollo 11 astronauts died on the moon, an American Dream idyll masks an apocalypse, and a five-headed monster stands for election. Where does this leave the listener? Welcome to Night Vale

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has a phenomenally invested fan base while the entire podsphere demands audiences to choose and shape their individual consumption. For Cass R. Sunstein, personal or algorithmically generated choices within social media as a whole represent the opportunity to shape our cultural pleasure which “can obviously increase fun, convenience, learning, and entertainment” (Sunstein, 2018, p. 4). There is, however, a profound risk: “the architecture of control has a serious downside” which poses a disturbing question: “Might a perfectly controlled communication universe – a personalized feed – be its own kind of dystopia?” (Sunstein, 2018, p. 5). There are more available podcasts than any of us could possibly listen to in a lifetime and although we seem free to pick and choose and shape our personal consumption from this ocean of options, through a loss of cultural serendipity perhaps we are entrapped in silos and echo chambers: not free in a paradise of options but isolated in a hell of diffraction. In the limitless, malleable, and proliferating universe of podcasts we find, ironically, the most supremely truthful reflection of the age of President Donald J. Trump. In the turbulent times of the Modern era W. B. Yeats wrote that “the centre cannot hold” (“The Second Coming,” 1921): in the tumult of our postmodern epoch perhaps there is no centre at all. Bibliography Anonymous. 2017. Comments: 113 Is the Episode That Made Me Quit Night Vale. Reddit R/ Nightvale Feed (Online). Accessed: 26/8/2017. Boczkowski, P. J. and Papacharissi, Z. 2018. ‘Introduction’, in P. J. Boczkowski and Z. Papacharissi (eds.), Trump and the Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–6. Elcidbarrett. 2017. Comments: Clickhole: Shaking up Washington: Donald Trump Just Appointed a Cloaked Man as Secretary of the Hook [Nightvale-Like]. Reddit R/Nightvale Feed (Online). Accessed: 26/8/2018. Michael, L. 2015. Welcome to Night Vale: Fighting Anxiety through a ‘Terrible World’. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Online). Accessed: 26/8/2018. Nanners. 2018. Comments: That’s Democracy. The Truth Podcast (Online). Accessed: 21/8/2018. Patterson, T. E. 2017. ‘Foreword’, in D. Schill and J. A. Hendricks (eds.), The Presidency and Social Media: Discourse, Disruption, and Digital Democracy in the 2016 Presidential Election, London: Routledge, pp. xv–xvii. Scharoun, L. 2012. America at the Mall: The Cultural Role of a Retail Utopia, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Sunstein, C. R. 2018. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. U/deleted. 2017. Comments: God, I Miss the Old Night Vale: I Wish They’d Quit with the Disguised Political Soapboxing. Reddit R/Nightvale Feed (Online). Accessed: 26/8/2018. Winslow, L. 2017. Economic Injustice and the Rhetoric of the American Dream, New York: Lexington Books. Zirealeredin. 2017. Comments: 113 Is the Episode That Made Me Quit Night Vale. Reddit R/ Nightvale Feed (Online). Accessed: 26/8/2017. The Truth (Podcast). 2011+. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell: Radiotopia. Welcome to Night Vale (Podcast). 2012+. Produced by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor.

Part 5

Now you’re in the sunken place . . . with a damn fine cup of “covfefe” The dangers of nostalgia and the darkness of future past in the age of Trump

13 “There is no return” Twin Peaks and the horror of pleasure Donald L. Anderson

Following the night of the 2016 US presidential election, a vast majority of Americans felt they had entered an alternative reality. Many assumed then Republican candidate Donald Trump could not possibly win the presidency. His documented racism, lack of basic political knowledge, and the leaked Access Hollywood audio exposing his predatorial misogyny further assured everyone – even hard-line Republicans – that a “President Trump” was an impossibility. It was Saturday Night Live, however, that best illustrated how the naiveté of white liberal progressives advanced the belief Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would succeed Obama. A skit airing on 12 November 2016 replays the election night showing the white cast members watching the election results with comedians Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. While the cast express shock at Trump’s increasing numbers, both Rock and Chappelle remain unfazed. As African Americans both are aware of what Trump and his radical base represent – a virulent racism contained within a white population bitter over the possibility of losing their majority and privileged status amidst the growing diversity of the US population. Following the election, it seemed one’s shock over Trump’s win was in direct proportion to one’s racial and class privilege. The liberal progressive dream of inclusion and social justice lulled many into a false sense of security. That dream became a nightmare. It was white liberal progressives who alone entered an alternative reality – but this reality was not actually the alternative, it was reality itself through which Trump surfaced the racial hatred, embittered white anger, toxic masculinity, and xenophobia constitutive of that reality for all to grapple with, especially those white liberals whose own privilege shielded them from the very injustices they wished to combat. Trump’s success was unexpected and repercussions were quick to follow. On January 27th Trump signed an executive order for his travel ban, thereby throwing airports into chaos. On that same day, he avoided specifically referring to Jews during his Holocaust remembrance speech. On February 22nd Trump rescinded Obama-era bathroom protections for transgender students. This reversal of Obama-led policies was best summed up by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (2017) observation that “replacing Obama [was] not enough – Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own.” What

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Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) shares with other Trump-era horror narratives is the reference to an alternative space, the “Black Lodge” – an extradimensional space of horror. The series Stranger Things (2016) includes the “upside down” – an alternate Lovecraftian version of the show’s setting. The film Get Out (2017) offers the “sunken place” where the protagonist Chris, a young black man, finds himself powerless against the desires of the white Armitage family. The Natalie Portman-led movie Annihilation (2018) shows a diverse group of female scientists entering the “shimmer” where nature has mutated into a radical new ecology. These representations of alternative dimensions undertake new meaning in the Trump era. The swiftness with which this era took hold made many feel they had entered a Black Lodge of their own – or the “upside down” where, according to literary critic Louis Menand (2018) we are living in a “down-is-up, war-is-peace world.” The Trump era fosters an environment where one struggles to differentiate wildly satirical Onion headlines from real headlines. A second commonality shared by these texts is their link with nostalgia. The mise-en-scène of Stranger Things regularly reminds viewers it is 1985. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) reunited fans in their forties and over with the original cast. Of course, reboots, remakes, and sequels are nothing new, but their presence in the media landscape at the commencement of the Trump presidency further flags a desire of the populace to reflect back on their past in romanticised, and sometimes dangerous, ways. It is here that we, especially those white liberal progressives, should recall James Baldwin’s critique of (white liberal) sentimentality – that feeling which often fuels nostalgia. Baldwin (1984, p. 14) writes, “sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty . . . the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” To look back and reimagine the past is to obscure those parts of it that break with our own desired narratives. For example, white middle-class citizens may hazily recall the ’50s as a time when America was safe while simultaneously forgetting segregation laws that held deadly consequences for African Americans. Nostalgia asks that we forget the whole of history and more importantly dishonestly replay what remains of that history in our imaginations as if it had no material grounding in both social progress and social unrest – especially unrest. It is the horror and danger of nostalgia that The Return interrogates and finally condemns. The twin plot devices inherent to the Trump era – alternative dimensions and nostalgia – are really two sides of the same coin. Nostalgia provides an alternative dimension misrecognised as a past with borders that secure the dangers hidden in what is repressed. Nostalgia and ’90s-era TV reboots in the time of MAGA It was the simple addition of the suffix “er” to the end of “Full” that signalled the Netflix reboot of the early ’90s family sitcom Full House (1987–1995). This suffix further indicated something had changed: the house was literally

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“fuller” with the addition of new characters. However, as if the writers had recognised the banality of pointing this out, “Fuller” was also the married name of daughter DJ Tanner, whose deceased husband was Tommy Fuller. What unites Full House with Twin Peaks (1990–1991) is the contemporaneity of the shows at the dawn of the ’90s (and again today) and the way both narratives rest on a traumatic death: Twin Peaks’s Laura Palmer, and Full House’s Pamela Tanner, the deceased wife of Danny Tanner. More importantly for my purpose here, both shows often repress or ignore these deaths. Full House devotes only a small number of episodes referencing Pamela’s death. The larger narrative of the series chooses to forget what is most disturbing in its history in order to foreground the family-friendly themes that made it popular. Obviously, the characters of Twin Peaks do struggle – often times painfully – with Laura’s death. But, the multiplicitous, soap opera-styled narratives that wove themselves within the fabric of Twin Peaks (and some that were loose treads), occasionally made viewers forget about Laura. In fact, it was quite easy to find oneself lost in the eccentric, splintering stories of Twin Peaks (some that felt just as cheesy as a Full House episode) and fail to see how humour and cherry pie led back to the rape and murder of Laura Palmer by her possessed father. Similarly, there would be no hijinks, bad jokes, adorable catchphrases, or sanitised family lessons without the violent death of Pamela Tanner at the hands of a drunk driver. The death of Pamela is directly and wholly constitutive of the world of Full House and Fuller House (2016) – and this is something fans of the show rarely, if ever, confront. To do so would collapse its heart-warming and carefully curated world. And so, Twin Peaks and Full House share more than we might think, which brings us to their twin reboots where they wildly diverge. Fuller House relied on the original show in order to serve up a thick slab of nostalgia. The same catchphrases were deployed and characters aped their canonical ticks and mannerisms when introduced with uproarious applause from an audience wishing to be lulled back into their memories of the early ’90s original. Fuller House gave audiences exactly what they wanted and more. Gordon of Spin magazine (2016) immediately responded with a headline arguing that “Fuller House is back because nostalgia is more valuable than quality.” It should come as no surprise that a post-9/11 US society gripped by climate change, police violence, and mass school shootings would desire nostalgia over quality – especially a nostalgia recalling a ’90s decade without turmoil. Of course, there was significant turmoil in the US during the ’90s. However, what was distinctive about this turmoil was how it emerged as televised turmoil – the OJ car chase, the impeachment process of President Clinton, the Anita Hill testimony, and the federal siege on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, were presented as televised, even cinematic, events that played alongside TV shows sharing the family-friendly appeal of Full House – thereby effectively distracting the US population from the actual terrors of the decade. It was this particular role of television that led Jean Baudrillard

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(2001, p. 251) to label the first Gulf War the first virtual war that can be “measured by . . . its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space.” These tragedies and what might be argued as the second golden age of the American family sitcom shared the same medium and this had the effect of equating their significance – Janet Reno’s authorised attack on David Koresh’s compound, and O.J.’s race down the freeway played out like another gripping television drama. In February 1993, the World Trade Center suffered its first terrorist attack. But it was the attack in 2001 following the millennium that for many represented the supposed end of innocence for the US and introduced core themes currently being played out by the Trump administration: a radical patriotism and nationalism, reinforcement of the US borders, and the continued demonisation of Muslims. Today we can answer Slavoj Žižek’s (2002, p. 49) question posed immediately following 9/11: “Will the Americans decide to fortify their ‘sphere’ further, or to risk stepping out of it?” Although both the Bush and Obama administrations pursued wars in the Middle East throughout their presidencies, Trump’s policies regarding the border, immigration, and his calls for black football players to stand during the national anthem demonstrate his commitment to Žižek’s former option. The Columbine school shooting that concluded the ’90s and was also distributed across the US via surveillance footage seems now, in hindsight, to be the catalyst to America’s tragic trend of ongoing mass shootings occurring mostly in high schools.1 Together, 9/11 and Columbine manufacture a grim film finale that retroactively and falsely erects the ’90s as a safe and secure decade. Following film critic Anthony Lane’s (2001) insistence a few days after 9/11 that people continue to see “that day as a movie,” I want to argue the sealant which coats that decade was made possible by a nascent media ecology that conflated televised real-world trauma with family TV sitcoms. This conflation had the effect of numbing viewer’s reactions to the horrors so that, in hindsight, what is firstly remembered about the ’90s is ABC’s Friday night line-up rather than the atrocities specific to that decade. At the time of this writing, the US is nearing the year 2020 and along with TV reboots there is a renewed interest in ’90s-era American culture. What makes ’90s nostalgia different from previous manifestations of nostalgia is how this nostalgia can caution us from looking to that decade for escape or comfort. The ABC reboot of Roseanne debuting on 27 March 2018, for example, was met with nostalgic-fuelled anticipation, but this soon dulled after Roseanne’s character made a self-referential joke about how families of colour in concurrent shows Fresh off the Boat (2015–present) and Black-ish (2014–present) are “just like us.” The joke was criticised for erasing representations of minorities on television by whitewashing such shows as “just like us” – no different from a white family sitcom. Although Roseanne was originally broadcast during a time when black families were regularly on television (The Cosby Show, Family Matters, Sister Sister), the greater racial diversity of our current moment made possible by shows

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like Master of None (2015–present), Fresh off the Boat, Orange Is the New Black (2013–present), and Black-ish – that have directly engaged the problematics of racial politics and representation – make watching a reboot of Roseanne feel like Thanksgiving with your older, racist aunt. Finally, on 29 May 2018, the real-life Roseanne composed a racist tweet comparing Obama-era senior advisor and African American Valerie Jarrett to an ape. The condemnation was swift and ABC cancelled the show. The brief life of the Roseanne reboot best represents the false promises of nostalgia – living in a future context in which culture and society has, partly due to the younger generation, grown more “woke” can reframe the past in unforgiving ways. A similar fate has befallen The Simpsons (1989–present) whose character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon no longer receives an easy pass from contemporary viewers. The comedian Hari Kondabolu in his documentary The Problem with Apu (2017) points out how years of seeing Apu as a Quickie Mart employee who speaks with a strong, stereotypical Indian accent has negatively shaped how people in the US relate to South Asian communities. What both Roseanne and the response from The Simpsons creator Matt Groening who reduced the criticism of Apu to the suggestion that “people love to pretend they’re offended” (Bakare, 2018, par 3) demonstrate is the current backlash against so-called “PC culture” borne from a return of ’90s nostalgia accompanied by now antiquated notions of identity at uncomfortable odds with social progress (read: “wokeness”). The origin of this nostalgic interest in the ’90s emerged from a city in the Pacific Northwest, not far from the fictional town of Twin Peaks. It was 2011 when Portlandia premiered with its unofficial theme song proclaiming the “dream of the ’90s is alive and well in Portland.” In 2014, National Geographic debuted its series titled The 90s: The Last Great Decade?. Although written as a question, the title betrays a sentiment in the culture that the ’90s were the last great decade. Despite the examples I have already discussed, there may be some degree of truth in this. According to a variety of economic analyses, the growth of the ’90s economy was powered by a rise in IT production, the Clinton tax rates, and a rise in stock values (Andersen, 2015; Harris, 2010). Not all classes benefited from this growth, but again, following the crash of 2008 and the ongoing widening gap between the rich and the poor, the ’90s reappear in our memories as the last decade of financial mobility for most Americans. If the ’90s began with an optimism shaped by the reunification of Germany, the Oslo Accords, the independence of former Soviet states, that optimism died with the students at Columbine High School and fell with the Twin Towers and was further obliterated by the crash of 2008. How could Americans not look back on the ’90s as the last great decade? The Return anticipated ’90s nostalgia in its initial PR campaign promising that “that gum you like is coming back in style.” Although hardcore Lynch fans remained cautious knowing a director like Lynch would undoubtedly resist the temptation to recycle the feel of the original, pictures of the cast

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that circulated online drew on fans’ heart strings. The Return emerged as part of the ’90s wave of nostalgia currently encapsulating the early period of the Trump era. Following the disastrous conclusion of the ’90s that forever sealed off that decade as a comforting space for millennials to rosily recall, The Return offers an antidote to ’90s nostalgia by frustrating the desire “to return” to an idealised and sentimentalised past. This chapter reads The Return as a subtextual critique of Trumps’ MAGA agenda within the context of other “reboots” of ’90s TV shows and argues how, when viewed within this context, The Return both resists Trump’s agenda and indicts the false sentimentality of its fellow ’90s-era reboots. Post-Truth, postmodernism, and nostalgia as ideology The racism of Roseanne Barr and the superficial gloss of Fuller House are not the only trends of the ’90s to reappear today and feel unsatisfactory. Postmodern theory which reached its zenith in American graduate schools in the early ’90s has been reappraised and blamed for our so-called “posttruth” era. In an interview with The Guardian, philosopher Daniel Dennett (2017) directly blames postmodern theorists for this, “I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.” The postmodern “cynicism” of truth actually exemplifies a greater commitment to justice because it refuses to take the truths of modernity at face value in pursuit of a justice that, as Jacques Derrida would have it, is yet to come, or a justice that demands greater analytical rigour for its potential realisation. I do, however, concede to Fradley and Riley’s (2019) point in this volume that the “ethical vacuum” of Trumpism represents the “gothic underside of postmodern relativism and neoliberal capitalism returning in monstrous form.” The single greatest misreading of Derrida, for example, assumes an evershifting central reference point naturally results in no meaning, when in fact, it implies quite the opposite – that there is too much meaning. And this does not result in the nihilism of “too much meaning is the same thing as no meaning” – such a defeatist attitude cowardly avoids the rigour of critique demanded by the post-structuralists. Postmodern theory, whether the Jamesonian-late capitalism version, or Baudrillard’s hyperrealism, is cognisant of its recycled and patch-worked historicism. It is not “everything goes” as Dennett and other critics like Jordan Peterson would have it. However, nostalgia, as a practice is exactly that – anything does go when the past is ideologically remembered according to one’s arbitrary and subjective whims. And this is most dangerous today when those whims are acted out against immigrants, women, and LGBTQ+ communities. Nostalgia can only invent a rosy past by ignoring parts of the past that threaten its saccharine exterior. I, and the other authors of this volume, consider Trump’s campaign leading to his presidency as part of the greater Trump era. This is important

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because it was the campaign where Trump’s nostalgic appeals to a vague American past most explicitly emerged. And, as any political advisor will argue, campaign promises are always more radical than their eventual materialisation during a candidate’s time in office. An analysis of nostalgia, whether in regard to a presidential campaign or a TV show, benefits from an examination of the role of pleasure. A person attending a political rally, or watching a TV show, finds their pleasure activated as they encounter the beginning of a narrative supported by the rhetorical appeal of political slogans and visual images. Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2001, p. 1232) regard pleasure as the fundamental instrument of distraction. If the viewer is feeling pleasure, in other words, if the viewer is acquiring what they think they want there is no reason to think about or question this. They assert: Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from the wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation. Because it distracts one from questioning ideology and representation, pleasure inhibits all resistance and prepares one to be seduced by an idealised past. Pleasure distracts, but more importantly, it maintains the illusion there exists an innocuous transaction between the political consumer and ideology such that the ideology delivers what the consumer desires. Campaigning for president and developing a TV show both require a skilful ideological process of narrativisation – the manipulation of the viewer’s pleasure so they believe the facts (or falsities) necessary for world-building. Trump narrativised a story where America had lost its way and evil “illegals” and terrorists were gnawing away at the US. He appealed to the pleasures of his base who desired a return to a mythical American past while his gestures, tone of voice, and chants (“Lock her up!”/“Build the wall!”) titillated viewer pleasure. It is not surprising then that such a campaign was led by a TV celebrity. Trump’s opening line to his January 10th cabinet meeting was “Welcome back to the studio” indicating that his presidency and the very office he occupied was a TV show. Following this line Trump relied on a variety of adjectives and phrases commonly associated with show business: “tremendous achievement,” “monumental achievement,” “You never know what’s going to happen over the next few days.” The latter line evokes the common theme of his presidency which anticipates future announcements about policy as if he were offering a nail-biting cliffhanger. It is therefore critical to read The Return as an antidote to the very narrative constructed by Trump. Its airing during the first year of the administration reveals the counter-message of the Trump regime. It exposes the way our pleasure is manufactured and manipulated. While Trump supporters longed to “Make American Great Again,” The Return punished viewers who desired

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to make Twin Peaks great again by directly antagonising that desire and leading viewers to regard their pleasure as their own prison, their own Black Lodge. “It is happening again”: Donald Trump markets his own brand of nostalgia Scepticism, resistance, and hostility towards nostalgia assume political importance in the age of Trumpism. Nostalgia in critical circles has always been eyed with caution, but the impassioned longing for a romanticised – and ultimately mythologised – past by much of the US citizenry during Trump’s campaign and presidency fuelled Trump’s divisive rhetoric. This was nostalgia without irony. The colossal amnesia that always accompanies nostalgia reached its peak when Alabama senator Roy Moore (Mascaro, 2017) responded to an African American attendee at one of his rallies who asked him when he thought America was ever “great.” Moore responded “I think it was great at the time when families were reunited – even though we had slavery – they cared for one another. . . . Our families were strong, our country had a direction.” Trump’s purposely vague slogan, itself a throwback to former president Ronald Reagan’s original phrase, welcomes any interpretation a person wishes to place on it. For Moore, his idea of a “great” American past meant audaciously ignoring the horrors of slavery and the fact that slave families were legally unrecognised and regularly destroyed by slave owners and traders. The link between The Return’s condemnation of nostalgia and hostility towards viewers who desire it, and Trump’s slogan is best revealed by Svetlana Boym’s (2001) comprehensive study of nostalgia The Future of Nostalgia. Boym begins her study with the following definition: nostalgia is a “sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” Modernity and globalisation increase the opportunities for nostalgia as a sense of “home” and “homeland” become less distinct against the backdrop of multiple homes and multiple homelands. When travelling around the world in the digital age, for example, space and time are compressed onto a smartphone’s map application while hundreds of family photos occupy the phone’s memory. Such a situation increases the longing for one’s home. Fragmentation, discontinuity, and our social media global village reproduces nostalgia as a common feeling already weaved within the frayed fabric of our digital and mobile lives. As pointed out by Jeremy Biles (2017, p. 393), the subtitle “The Return” evokes the Eliadian/Nietzschean concept of the “eternal return.” Biles writing for the Religious Studies Review suggests The Return “portrays the eternal return not as a closed loop of repetition but a cycle that multiplies loose ends and intensifies mystery with each phase.” This reading of the eternal return accounts for the second season’s splintering narratives and how the newest season literally loops Cooper into the past at the moment of Laura’s murder. Although Biles avoids referencing the concluding episode where Cooper brings Carrie Page (who he believes to be Laura Palmer and who is also played by Sheryl Lee) to Twin Peaks, his analysis of nostalgia in The Return is

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best supported by this scene. Biles claims The Return “defies the wistfulness of nostalgia by way of a fragmenting narrative and atmospheres of dread, which together convey nostalgia as a disease – as ‘home-sickness’” (author’s emphasis). Page denies she recognises Twin Peaks. The home Cooper returns her to is no longer inhabited by her mother. No one seems to recall the original owners. An “atmosphere of dread” is summoned when Page lets out a horrifying scream as if in that moment she has recalled everything that happened in the first two seasons. This is not the “home-sickness” one feels romantically, but rather a horrific home-sickness prepared for by the seduction of nostalgia. The conclusion – if one may call it that – of The Return condemns romanticising the past by way of this shocking scene. There is no return. Boym (2001) distinguishes between two forms of nostalgia: reflective and restorative. The latter is relevant to my study here because it addresses Cooper’s desire to literally “restore” Laura Palmer and Trump voters’ support of MAGA. Regarding restorative nostalgia Boym insists this kind of nostalgia “characterizes 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 and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories” (p. 41). Although published in 2001, Boym’s description uneasily evokes the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory of the 2016 campaign where it was claimed Hillary Clinton had ties to a pizzeria that trafficked children (Kang, 2016). Following the release of this absurd information, a man stormed the pizza place with a gun in hopes of rescuing the children (Lipton, 2016). Around this time a resurgence of confederate and Nazi flags appeared regularly at rightwing protests – most vividly at the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11th and 12th of 2017. David Duke re-emerged from the dustbins of history to reclaim a grip, no matter how small, on the media attention directed at the rise of the alt-right. Trump supporters and the radical groups that loosely make up the alt-right (e.g. Proud Boys, Identity Evropa, Patriot Prayer) indicate two other main traits of restorative nostalgia – “a loss of community and cohesion” and a burgeoning “right-wing popular culture” (pp. 42–43). Following a right-wing- and alt-right-fuelled desire to make America great again, the lyrics opening each episode of Full House now in hindsight recall a longing for a mythologised and racialised past that Trump’s mostly white audience desires. Multiculturalism, women’s rights, and the LGBTQ+ communities that dominate early 21st-century America certainly trouble “predictability,” thus making so many US citizens who voted for Trump wonder, à la the lyrics to Full House, whatever happened to it? Spectres of Laura Palmer: waiting to return and the antidote for nostalgia In Specters of Marx (1994), Derrida critiques Francis Fukuyama’s assertion in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) that following the demise of communism and fascism, liberal democracy definitively emerged as the endpoint

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of history. For Fukuyama, capitalism and free market systems represent the last and final political arrangement of free societies. Derrida uses the term “hauntology” – a neologism combining “haunted” with “ontology,” to capture how the absence of something continues to haunt the present. In his analysis, Derrida claims that despite the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism, Western societies continue to be haunted by Marxism. Years after the publication of his book, radical movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the recent Democratic primary win of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders (also a democratic socialist) in 2016 demonstrate that the lessons of Marxism, whether manifesting in occupational protest within common spaces, or the socialist agendas of competitive political figures, continue to haunt 21st century capitalism. The application of hauntology to my purposes here has a meta-sociopolitical aspect in relation to Trumpism and how the ideologies of the president’s base haunts liberal democracy (although Trump voters are not “ghosts” – they are concretely present – their ideologies of a lost past reproduce progressive politics as a haunted agenda always pursued by the spectre of regressive politics). But, following the work of Mark Fisher (2014), this concept also captures the narrative of The Return. Both the original Twin Peaks and The Return are haunted by Laura Palmer. As discussed above, the later part of the narrative positions Dale Cooper as an agent who not only wishes to solve the murder of Laura Palmer, but desires to literally stop it from happening by correcting the past in part 17 of the series. Cooper’s goal, then, is one of resuscitating a lost future. Fisher illustrates how, “haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us” (p. 22). Fisher’s use of hauntology is meant to address a future that was promised, but never materialised. Fisher’s elaboration of hauntology rests on Derrida’s analysis of Marxism and how communism should have triumphed over capitalism – and now only haunts the spaces of co-ops, leftist activism, and whatever commons remain outside private property. Fisher argues that “these specters – the specters of lost futures – reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world” (p. 27). The lost future of Palmer’s survival likewise fuels the world of Twin Peaks. In one of the earliest academic responses to The Return, the film theorist Walter Metz (2017) offers a reading of part 8 “Gotta Light.” The episode draws a link between the detonation of the atomic bomb and the “woodsmen” – ghostly characters covered in oil and flannel – who inhabit the Black Lodge. Metz concludes the episode “reveals the hidden backstory of Twin Peaks: The murder of Laura Palmer has its roots in the creation of American evil, the development of atomic weapons” (p. 72). Metz further claims the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki propelled the US into “historical amnesia” and that the work of Lynch is an “antidote” to “this process of repression, a gesture of hope for redeeming the original, redemptive project

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of the United States” (p. 76). Lynch may not be an antidote leading to “redemption” – although I am arguing the narrative mechanics of The Return are an antidote to MAGA ideology – but his confrontation with this amnesia (in the shape of “deferring gratification” for nostalgia [O’Brien, 2018, p. 94]) is also what situates The Return within the horror genre by sharing similar cinematic confrontations with the repressed of the socio-political and racial American landscape (e.g. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left). Again, I am unconvinced The Return offers anything for the supposed “redemptive project” of the US. Laura is not redeemed, neither is Cooper or Audrey Horne. Redemption is an integral component of nostalgia – it disastrously assumes the past can be corrected and ultimately saved. Therefore, following Cooper’s failed redemption of Laura, my analysis here disavows notions of redemption. An undertheorised trait of hauntology relevant to the experience of watching The Return is the feeling of waiting. The theme of the promise in Fisher’s analysis relies on the act of waiting – one waits for the promise to be completed, in other words, for the promise to be made good on. The Return promised a return to Twin Peaks with a familiar cast. However, as I will examine now, it is questionable whether such a promise was kept. I am unconcerned whether the show’s promise is broken or not. Instead, I am interested in the viewer’s experience of waiting for this promise to be made good on and how this extra-cinematic experience exists in opposition to other reboots of the ’90s and the larger MAGA ideology surrounding it. Trump supporters are also waiting for their future to make good on the past when America was “great.” MAGA, in other words, is Trump’s reboot of America. Waiting for Cooper Special Agent Dale Cooper is arguably the most beloved character of the series. He is our protagonist and the character who gradually changes from an overly optimistic young man into a cynical and matured law enforcer marked by the traumas he experiences in the town of Twin Peaks. He is also a character replete with mannerisms and memorable catchphrases. Cooper was the character fans most wanted to reconnect with. But, as the show was gradually released, fans quickly found they were not getting Cooper – they were getting three Coopers, none of whom were the Cooper they remembered. There was Mr. C (the evil Cooper), the mostly silent real Cooper lost in the Black Lodge, and finally the catatonic Cooper, Dougie Jones, who I will focus on here. The Return initially debuted four episodes at once on 21 May 2017 before releasing an episode each week. By the standalone fifth episode, recaps were already discussing the patience required of viewers. Pechman of W Magazine (2017) commented on the mute performance of Dougie writing that “this uncomfortable bit is getting stale five episodes in.” Discomfort is a common feeling when watching any of Lynch’s work. And it is the experience

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of discomfort – or what may be equated to the act of waiting – that triggers what Bertold Brecht and John Willet (1964) calls the “alienation effect,” where “the technique which produces the A-effect is the exact opposite of that which aims at empathy” (p. 139). Many responses to Dougie expressed frustration and a disconnect from the narrative and the character. The Return pushes the alienation effect to its extreme by extra-cinematically requiring viewers themselves wait, in real time, a week between episodes 5 and 6. It is this space – the seven days that viewers were frozen while Dougie pauses at a cowboy statue – where The Return most explicitly establishes its radical resistance to nostalgia, viewer pleasure, and the common narrative flow found in concurrent shows. When Cooper returns from the Black Lodge he takes over the life of Dougie who was manufactured by the one-armed man as a doppelgänger of Cooper – a kind of stand in while Cooper remained in the Black Lodge for 25 years. Cooper is recovering from his time in the Black Lodge and does not speak beyond repeating a few words prompted by other characters. As evident in online show recaps, viewers and critics were hopeful Cooper would soon wake from his stupor – but he does not for most of the 17 episodes. Viewers are forced to remain patient and wait for what they hope is a return of Special Agent Dale Cooper as remembered from the original series. The fact is, while the show has returned, Cooper’s character has not been rebooted by the Black Lodge inhabitants. Upon going to work at the Lucky 7 insurance company, Dougie becomes immediately infatuated with a simple statue of a cowboy, law-man figure. The statue is modest, but stands upright with arm extended pointing a small pistol expressing authority and righteousness at odds with the figure’s small build. Dougie is first framed by a low angle shot showing his admiration for the statue. Lynch then cuts to a high angle shot from the statue illustrating its dominance over Dougie. This edited sequence demonstrates the familiarity Dougie sees in the statue. As an FBI agent, he recognises the authority and commitment to law and order exhibited by the statue. He then mimics the statue as if attempting to embody his past life as a similar, humbly built hero. These brief moments of familiarity provided hope for Cooper’s imminent return. However, their brief appearances reveal the past can only be mimicked and never fully realised or, in this case, re-embodied. Later that evening Dougie returns to the statue and gently caresses its feet. A sad, saxophoneled soundtrack plays over this sequence lending it a sincere melancholy rare in Lynch’s oeuvre. Typically, when Lynch evokes sadness, sentimentality, or melancholy it is parodied with a self-aware campiness. But, not here. This sequence may be the sincerest Lynch has ever been. As the credits roll the scene does not freeze as is typical in standard TV shows, instead, it continues to play out as the soundtrack continues. The rolling credits deliver an emotional, but troubled conclusiveness. Audiences were waiting for something to happen, and this waiting was at odds with the standard meaning of credits which indicate the film or show is over.

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Episode 6 begins right where 5 left off – Dougie at the feet of the statue, now tugging at his sleeve and appearing even more troubled and lost. The music is the same. As viewers, we have also remained frozen at this statue for seven days. Lynch and Frost demand a lot from the Twin Peaks viewer. Although ongoing recaps of each episode were generally positive, the theme of patience and waiting for Cooper to return was common. Film critic Tasha Robinson (2017) writing in The Verge refers to the ways viewers of The Return share Dougie’s experience. She proposes that: It’s natural for us to want to return to a mode where we can actively participate in [Cooper’s] story, where he’s helping solve mysteries, instead of acting as its biggest conundrum. But even with his humanity lost and his agency gone, he still represents us onscreen. Even when he’s freefloating through a haze of glass boxes and stop-motion nightmare, we’re still with him. We’re still all Agent Cooper, navigating the mystery, and waiting to see where this is all going. It is common in literary and film studies to conceptualise the protagonist as the viewer’s diegetic stand-in – the character with whom they share a vicarious relationship. But, what happens with Dougie is different. Viewers don’t really want to experience the banality of waiting and so the experience of Dougie is not pleasurable, but punishing. Serialised television – especially long narrative and cinematic shows like Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan, 2008–2013) or Orange Is the New Black – has shaped TV narrative so that each episode escalates towards a cliffhanger. The space between episodes 5 and 6 avoids this now common trait and asks the viewer to not anticipate what happens next, but rather uncomfortably wait for what happens next. And this is the critical difference separating The Return from the shows surrounding it. Anticipation is typically linked with a desire for something. To wait is to pause and not necessarily desire something. Waiting may or may not require an object; however, anticipation includes – even vaguely – an imminent object. The characters in Waiting for Godot (Beckett, 1954) for example, are waiting for “Godot” – but, the objective of the play requires that Godot is never truly identified and one wonders if he/she/it/ they exist. Waiting is more often than not a passive act lacking an intentionally desired and coherent object. Upon the start of episode 6, viewers find themselves exactly where they left off. Nothing has changed and nothing has happened. In horror film criticism, much has been written about what Steven Shaviro (1993) calls the “visceral immediacy of the cinematic image” – the way our bodies react to scenes of violence and gore. Linda Williams (2009) regards the genres of horror, drama, and pornography as “body genres” because they trigger bodily responses in the viewer. But, for the genre of “contemplative,” or “slow cinema” – from which The Return at times borrows – the effects on the body are not as dramatic as crying, screaming, or ejaculating. Instead, the

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viewer simply experiences the act of waiting without a clear objective. And it is the experimental nature of these films that refuses to provide a clear objective. This is due to the technique of real-time filming where long shots are preferred to cuts and match the real-time experience of the viewer. Typically, the art of editing helps maintain a rhythm in a film and like a musical theme, this rhythm generates the feeling of movement – of going somewhere, of anticipating something. The TV reboots surrounding The Return operate on feelings of anticipation. I anticipate that Stephanie and DJ Tanner will have grown up, but they will nonetheless embody the things we desire from the universe of Full House. Many reports leading up to the Roseanne reboot employed variations of the word “anticipate.” The Return highlights this failed anticipation and in doing so makes conscious the viewer’s desire for the past. This desire is the same that can, and has been recently, appropriated for the objectives of MAGA. The Return’s alienating effect offers an antidote to this now horrific desire. Anticipation, nostalgia, and the pleasures linked with these two words imbue MAGA ideology. The ’90s reboots that make up the Trump era are the visual architecture of this ideology and replicate these three key ingredients making Trump’s administration thinkable, desirable, and finally pleasurable in all the same ways seeing Fuller House soothes viewers into total complacency. The Return exposes this architecture. Although Dougie is not awake, the discomfort of waiting produces a conscious viewer aware of the mechanics of storytelling and whose pleasure is therefore less easily manipulated in the ways Adorno and Horkheimer caution against. Audrey Horne waits to go Along with the muted portrayal of Dougie, the show offers a similarly monotonous treatment of another main character: Audrey Horne played by Sherilyn Fenn. In the original series Fenn played Horne with a sultry sexuality that characterised her as an up and coming femme fatale. Along with the other women in the show, Fenn became a sex symbol and joined the others for the iconic October 1990 Rolling Stone cover. Fenn would go on to pose for Playboy and appear on the cover under the tagline “Fenn Fatale” – further solidifying her appeal as a sexually enticing and potentially dangerous woman. Like McLachlan’s Cooper, Fenn’s Horne held the potential for giving fans what they desired – a return to Audrey’s glamour. The viewer’s reintroduction to Horne is an uneventful close-up shot of her now aged face. She still looks glamourous, but Lynch directs her debut in The Return with zero fanfare. In this opening shot, Horne is looking offscreen. If fans assumed her beauty would qualify her for an equally attractive man, this assumption was shattered by the appearance of her husband, Charlie (played by Clark Middleton) whom she is revealed to be looking at. Middleton has juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and a height of five feet and four inches – not exactly the dashingly

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handsome man fans would have expected. Further, Middleton plays Charlie with a pained stubbornness that gradually antagonises Horne (and viewers) who wishes to visit the Roadhouse to find Billy, her lover. The character of Billy is never fully explained by Lynch and Frost. But, the fact he is Horne’s lover reveals that not only is Horne married to a man unable to match her in beauty, but that the marriage is broken. Viewers are left inexplicably wondering how and why Horne is in this position. Lynch shoots this scene in one long take accentuating the tension between the two. Spread over two episodes, this scene lasts for roughly a half hour of real-time acting revolving around the simple desire to leave the house. The sustained focus provided by the long take forces the viewer to regard it as a play where the duration of the scene includes the real time of the viewer. The patience required of the viewer during this scene allows room for the viewer to consider what they are seeing. When action films speed by on screen fuelled by an explosive number of cuts, the viewer will likely regard the experience as a “roller coaster ride” – and this is the “pleasure” that Adorno and Horkheimer cite. However, slow cinema gives the viewer pause to interrogate the ideology of the image. There is, quite literally, space made for the viewer to think, to remain conscious and critically aware. For the film critic Sukhdev Sandhu (2012), our accelerated culture makes slow films “a form of cultural resistance.” The long takes and stunted dialogue refuse to provide Twin Peaks fans with an Audrey Horne bearing any resemblance to her past character. Her life is miserable as she appears stuck in perpetual return – although here it is an eternal leaving. The two finally leave for the Roadhouse in search of Billy. Their entrance into the Roadhouse doubly functions as their entrance into the larger world of Twin Peaks. Audrey never finds Billy. However, it is here that Lynch directs a specifically nostalgic moment. Out of nowhere, the announcer in the Roadhouse introduces Audrey who repeats her dance from the original series to the same music now played by the Roadhouse band. She appears to be in a trance that is soon interrupted by a fight. Audrey runs back to Charlie and demands he get her out of there. The scene abruptly cuts to a brightly lit close-up of Audrey staring anxiously into a make-up mirror reflecting her now unglamorous face lacking makeup. It feels humiliating and shows Fenn herself witnessing how the reality of her aging guarantees no return to the sex appeal she possessed in her youth as both Audrey Horne and Sherilyn Fenn. This jarring jump cut (another radical example of the alienation effect) evokes Bergman’s equally jarring cut in Persona (1967) – an early example of slow cinema – where he spins the camera 180 degrees to reveal his director of photography, Sven Nykvist. The illusion is shattered and with it the nostalgia for the past. What is significant about this concluding cut is how it punishes viewers for taking any pleasure in the nostalgia offered by Audrey’s dance. Having Fenn stripped of any makeup demonstrates the violent removal of the rosy

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exterior nostalgia maps onto the past. The Bergman-esque self-referentiality strips away the cinematic mechanics of world-making by showing us Fenn/ Nykvist as real-world architects of the illusion of film narrative. Film critic Gabrielle O’Brien points out how the: nostalgia evoked by this sequence is tempered by Fenn’s middle-aged appearance, which in turn alerts the spectator to the passage of years separating the original dance from 2017. The spectator is reminded of their own advancing years, and melancholy disrupts their nostalgic reverie. (94) In fact, the spectator is doubly assaulted by recognising that they, and Fenn, cannot return to the past, and that this past was always an illusion. Conclusion: Lynch and Frost build the wall The hesitation to leave their house, despite Audrey’s eagerness, recalls the safety and security mid-century suburbia was thought to provide white families escaping the crime of inner cities – a phenomenon referred to as “white flight.” The break between the suburbs and the city further established a clear outside and inside – one was never “in” the city, rather one was “outside” the home. Trump’s desire to build a wall and further solidify American borders replays the local division between city and suburb. But what is being truly walled off is an imagined American past inhabited by mostly white families. When the two finally leave the security of their home, Audrey’s encounter with her real image in the makeup mirror uncovers what is actually “outside” – a real present at horrific odds with an imagined past. Writing about The Return, Matt Zoller Seitz (2017) explains how: what we’re left with is a piercing series of reminders that you can’t go home again, that what was done can’t be undone or redone, that any attempt to reduce experience to a series of definitive factual proclamations is sure to end in frustration. It is unclear what happened to Audrey after she saw herself revealed in the mirror. She likely did not go back home, but her portrayal limited the viewers’ own return to the town of Twin Peaks – it walled off their access to their desired object. Note 1 The popular horror film franchise Paranormal Activity (2007–2015) employs home security footage as its primary means of cinematography, therefore acknowledging its debt to the Columbine footage and further linking ’90s-era news footage with the emergence of surveillance footage-based horror cinema.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodore W., and Max Horkheimer. 2001. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Leitch, V.B. (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory. New York: W.W. Norton. pp. 1223–1240. Andersen, Kurt. 2015. “The Best Decade Ever? The 1990s, Obviously.” The New York Times (Online). Accessed: 5/8/18. Bakare, Lanre. 2018. “Matt Groening on the Simpsons’ Apu Row: People Love to Pretend They’re Offended.” The Guardian (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Baldwin, James. 1984. “Everyone’s Protest Novel.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 13–23. Baudrillard, Jean. 2001. “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” In Poster, M. (ed.), Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 231–253. Beckett, Samuel. 1954. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press. Biles, Jeremy. 2017. “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Religious Studies. 43.4. December. pp. 393–394. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brecht, Bertolt, and John Willet. 1964. Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang. Cadwalladr, Carole. 2017. “Daniel Dennett: ‘I Begrudge Every Hour I Have to Spend Worrying about Politics’.” The Guardian (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2017. “The First White President.” The Atlantic (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Alresford: Zero Books. Fradley, M and J.A. Riley. 2019. “‘It Is Happening . . . Again:’ Trumpism, Uncanny Repetition and Twin Peaks: The Return.” In McCollum, V. (ed.), Make American Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear. London: Routledge. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of the History and the Last Man. New York: Avon. Gordon, Jeremy. 2016. “Fuller House Is Back Because Nostalgia Is More Valuable Than Quality.” Spin (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Harris, Joel. 2010. “The Story of the 1990s Economy.” Economics21 (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Kang, Cecilia. 2016. “Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child-Trafficking.” The New York Times (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Lane, Anthony. 2001. “This Is Not a Movie.” The New Yorker (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Lipton, Eric. 2016. “Man Motivated by ‘Pizzagate’ Conspiracy Theory Arrested in Washington Gunfire.” The New York Times (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Mascaro, Lisa. 2017. “In Alabama, the Heart of Trump Country, Many Think He’s Backing the Wrong Candidate in Senate Race.” Los Angeles Times (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Menand, Louis. 2018. “Words of the Year.” The New Yorker (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Metz, Walter. 2017. “The Atomic Gambit of Twin Peaks: The Return.” Reviews. 41.3. Fall. pp. 72–76. O’Brien, Gabrielle. 2018. “Anatomy of a Cult TV Following: Twin Peaks Fandom, Then and Now.” Screen Education. 88. pp. 90–95. Pechman, Alexandra. 2017. “Twin Peaks Episode 5 Recap: The Lynch Universe Continues to Grow and Grow and Grow.” W Magazine (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Robinson, Tasha. 2017. “Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks Is the Audience: Once Delighted, Now Disintegrating.” The Verge (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18.

194 Donald L. Anderson Sandhu, Sukhdev. 2012. “Slow Cinema Fights Back against Bourne’s Supremacy.” The Guardian (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Seitz, Zoller Matt. 2017. “In Twin Peaks: The Return, You Can’t Go Home Again.” Vulture (Online). Accessed: 20/8/18. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Linda. 2009. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” In Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 602–616. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! New York: Verso. Annihilation (2018) Directed by Alex Garland: Netflix. Black-ish (2014–Present) Directed by Various: Disney: ABC Domestic Television. Fresh Off the Boat (2015–Present) Directed by Various: 20th Century Fox Television. Get Out (2017) Directed by Jordan Peele: Universal Pictures. Orange Is the New Black (2013–Present) Directed by Various: Netflix. Paranormal Activity (2007) Directed by Oren Peli: Paramount Pictures. Persona (1967) Directed by Ingmar Bergman: American International Pictures. Portlandia (2011–2018) Directed by Jonathan Krisel: IFC Original Productions. The Problem with Apu (2017) Directed by Michael Melamedoff: Tru TV. Roseanne (2018) Directed by Various: Carsey-Werner Distribution. Saturday Night Live (2016) “Election Night” (Season 42, Episode 1710): NBC. The Simpsons (1989–Present) Directed by Various: 20th Television. Stranger Things (2016–Present) Directed by Various: Netflix. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) Directed by David Lynch: Showtime Networks.

14 “I don’t understand how this keeps happening . . . over and over again” Trumpism, uncanny repetition, and Twin Peaks: The Return Martin Fradley and John A. Riley “My dream is to go/to the place where it all began”: Twin Peaks, nostalgia, and popular memory The belated return of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s iconic “gothic soap opera” Twin Peaks in May 2017, midway through President Trump’s first year in office, seemed to offer audiences the panacea of basking in early ’90s nostalgia – an era synonymous with irony, postmodern playfulness, and the free-market triumphalism of Fukuyama’s “end of history.” Instead, viewers living through a markedly different cultural moment were confronted with a deeply unsettling – and, as such, profoundly apposite – series that is markedly “Trumpian” on many levels: narratively obstinate, emotionally capricious, aurally discordant, tonally uneven, and often violently perverse. What went curiously little remarked upon was the affective mise en abyme latent in expressions of nostalgia for the original run of Twin Peaks (1990–1991), a televisual phenomenon that was itself shrewdly self-aware in its employment of a seductively nostalgic aesthetic. With uncanny timing, then, The Return offered a subversive critique of nostalgic longing in a year when the newly installed president repeatedly invoked an imagined past in his guarantee to restore and purify a “lost” body politic and Make America Great Again (Richardson, 2017). In The Return nostalgia itself becomes a key source of horror. As Katherine M. Reed (2016) has pointed out, Lynch’s signature mobilisation of nostalgic tropes are always imbued with a gothicised critical reflexivity. “By questioning nostalgia’s falseness,” Reed argues, “Lynch draws us into closer conversation with our own memory, examining it for its fallibility” (p. 9). In employing an overtly nostalgic aesthetic to evoke a bygone era, “Lynch is able to point to this longing for a fabricated past in his own time, holding a mirror to his audience’s reality” (p. 10). Perhaps the most revered cult televisual artefact of the last 30 years, The Return’s steadfast refusal to pander to the nostalgic longings of its fan base proved tellingly divisive. Much-loved characters such as Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), for example, were absent for the majority of the series. When Audrey finally

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appeared, she had become a troubled and psychologically fractured version of her former self, while MacLachlan spent the majority of the series playing two other roles: the malevolent “Mr. C” and the monosyllabic idiot-savant “Dougie,” both cruelly revisionist inversions of the beloved Cooper. Angelo Badalamenti’s evocative score was employed only sparsely: a world once saturated with music was now aurally marked by a discomfiting soundscape of protracted silences, unsettling sound design, and unfamiliar songs performed at a roadside bar. Rather than the rapt insularity of a small fictional town in rural Washington State, The Return mapped its plot over a more expansive range of temporal and (unmistakeably Trumpian) geographical locations, from the brash affluence of New York City and Las Vegas to economically depressed locales in Texas and South Dakota. Moreover, there was always a suspiciously amnesiac quality to 21st-century sentimentality for Twin Peaks, a show often remembered for its quirky humour and stylish characters but which organised its narrative around the brutal murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), a young woman with a protracted history of incestuous sexual abuse.1 More pointedly, this soft-focus view of the earlier period runs counter to a growing consensus that the “age of Trump” is less a cultural and political aberration than it is the logical conclusion of decades of neoliberal consensus – a consensus that was consolidated in the years Twin Peaks was first broadcast. Not coincidentally, this specific cultural moment is the focus of perhaps the most uncompromising critique of the original series yet published. In a forceful essay, Linnie Blake (2015) begins with an evocatively nostalgic reverie about her first encounter with Twin Peaks in 1990. However, her sentimental recollections soon give way to a retrospective evisceration of the series as an aesthetic metonym for all that was insidiously mesmerising about the intertwined forces of neoliberalism and postmodernism at a key historical juncture. With 21st-century political awareness displacing youthful nostalgia, Blake ultimately finds in Twin Peaks’s seductive “strobe-lit carnival of non-sense” (p. 243) little more than highly stylised social conservatism – or, at its worst, wholesale ethical vacuity masquerading as postmodern sophistication. Blake’s scorched-earth critique of Twin Peaks is rhetorically overdetermined and disingenuously reductive in its polemic. At the same time, however, we cannot but empathise with the broader sweep of her political discontent. After all, with its volatile amalgamation of wilful indeterminacy, ideological entropy, and aggressive contempt for public institutions, what else is the ethical vacuum of Trumpism but the Gothic underside of postmodern relativism and neoliberal capitalism returning in monstrous form? As such, this essay argues that David Lynch – with his career-long dedication to illogic, absurdism, and the grotesque – is perhaps the ideal figure to engage with the surreal non-sense of Trumpism. The Return, we contend, is the most explicitly political work of Lynch’s 40-year filmmaking career – both a revisionist interrogation of Twin Peaks’s earlier incarnation and a surreal refraction of the politically emaciated culture and bleak socio-economic conditions which led inexorably to Trump’s election.2

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Central to our argument is the concept of the “uncanny” – and, specifically, uncanny repetition – as a critical paradigm through which to navigate the sprawling, often oblique terrain of The Return. In Sigmund Freud’s famous dictum, uncanny feelings are an unsettlingly affective response to “something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light” (1955: pp. 222–223). Freud understands the uncanny (and the repetitive phenomena associated with it) as a post-traumatic symptom in which repressed knowledge “returns” to unsettle our (illusory) sense of normalcy. Needless to say, this concept – the return of what should have been repressed – has a clear connection to the horrors of both Twin Peaks and American culture since the 2016 election. In both cases, the uncanny points to our intimate connection with phenomena that ought to be profoundly alien but are instead disturbingly familiar. The preternaturally un-hidden in this case is, of course, our disavowed complicity in the monstrous pre-eminence of Donald J. Trump. “We’re not anywhere near Mount Rushmore!?”: Trumpism, the “obscene father,” and Twin Peaks’s presidential imaginary An early episode of The Return sees FBI colleagues Gordon Cole (David Lynch) and Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrera) travel across South Dakota (3:4). Cole’s dismay that they will not be passing Mt. Rushmore is assuaged when Albert hands him a photograph of the iconic national monument. “There they are, Albert,” Cole muses with atonal awe, “faces of stone!” Presented with a simulacrum of this reverential monolith of presidential countenances, Cole’s comically overdetermined patriotism is tempered by the invocation of presidential exemplars, hallowed images of American “greatness” that could not but resonate halfway through Donald Trump’s first year in office. Characteristically arch and seemingly throwaway, the scene also serves to underscore Twin Peaks’s continual return to American culture’s deeply fetishistic investment in its presidential father figures. From the benevolent Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) in the series’ original incarnation through to Cole’s investment in those noble “faces of stone,” Twin Peaks has long manifested a telling presidential imaginary. For example, Mark Frost’s tie-in paratext, The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016), doggedly connects the town of Twin Peaks to virtually every significant US president (including a thinly disguised Donald Trump) from Thomas Jefferson onwards. Elsewhere, the ghoulish “Woodsman” (Robert Broski) – a spectral vagrant who appears in 1950s New Mexico during the expressionist phantasmagoria of the eighth episode – uncannily resembles a gothicised Abraham Lincoln clad in the proletarian garb of an emaciated Paul Bunyan (see Figure 14.1). The Woodsman’s uncanny conflation of presidential iconicity, folk mythology, murderous violence, and abject poverty make him a key figure in Twin Peaks’s Gothic revisionism, the mythology of classless American meritocracy both avowed and mocked in the same semiotically loaded image. With an appearance that hauntologically synthesises iconic historical images of American destitution from the 18th century through to the Great

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Figure 14.1 “Gotta light?”: the Woodsman semiotically conflates presidential iconicity with abject poverty

Depression, the semiotic register of the Woodsman evokes Trump’s comparison of his “America First” policy to Lincoln’s devout economic protectionism (Edwards, 2018).3 The Woodsman’s atemporal monstrosity reimagines extreme hardship as akin to Naomi Klein’s (2017) provocative framing of Trumpism: not as an aberration, but instead as the inevitable product of the United States’ social, political, and economic structures. With his preternatural violence and uncanny resemblance to Lincoln, the Woodsman should also be understood as a supernatural manifestation of Slavoj Žižek’s (2000) “obscene father”: a sado-masochistic personification of the super-ego who combines authoritarian cruelty with perversely transgressive behaviour. This grotesquely libidinal creature of excessive enjoyment is a pivotal Lynchian trope, an unhinged masculine psychotic who uncannily betrays the perversity structuring social normalcy. The definitive obscene patriarch in the Lynch canon is, of course, Leland Palmer/BOB (Ray Wise/Frank Silva) in Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a respected husband, father, and legal practitioner who simultaneously commits the primordial obscenity of incest, ultimately unleashing the filicidal violence that gives Twin Peaks its disquieting raison d’être. In his book Trumpism (2018), Michel Valentin argues persuasively that the shameless vaudevillian performativity of Donald J. Trump should also be understood as a grotesque manifestation of this obscene paternalism. He writes: Paradoxically and uncannily, willingly or unwittingly, Donald Trump immerses himself, via his speech, reflections, spontaneous reactions,

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and mannerisms, in . . . “the obscene supplement to the law”; obscenity being, at once, the obstacle to, and the condition of possibility of the political dimension. It is the obscene supplement of power, as well as its symptom. (p. 55) In other words, Trumpism uncannily reveals that the social structure symbolically headed by the presidency is itself inherently obscene. Trump’s indifference to the protocols and strictures of the political authority he metonymically embodies are precisely what made him repellent and fascinating in equal measure. Trump represents nothing less than the flipside of free market utopianism, an appropriately bipolar return of the repressed to which “oppositional” expressions of anger and disgust serve only as the disturbingly uncanny double of the Trumpian mode itself (Streek, 2017). To this end, the similarities between Trump’s public persona and the obscene patriarchs of Lynch’s oeuvre are striking. It is hard to miss, for example, the physical resemblance and gleeful lasciviousness Trump shares with Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan) in Dune (1984), nor is it much of a stretch to see the casual misogyny of Trump’s capricious man-child reflected in the psychotic Oedipal rage of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet (1986). Elsewhere, unapologetic pussy-grabber Bobby Peru (Willem Defoe) in Wild at Heart (1990) and Mr. Eddy’s (Robert Loggia) bipolar shifts from homosocial bonhomie to punitive authoritarian rage in Lost Highway (1997) both have clear affinities with Trumpian behaviour. These characteristics are embodied in The Return by “Mr C,” a de facto filicidal serial rapist whose phallic violence and pathological Randian maxim – “I don’t need anything . . . I want” (3:2) – mark him out as the symptomatically obscene father which Lynch’s work repeatedly inscribes at the psycho-social epicentre of American culture. “You barely make minimum wage! We can’t even afford this shithole!”: neoliberal dystopia comes to Twin Peaks Published shortly after the telecast of The Return’s finale, Mark Frost’s second ancillary volume, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (2017), provided fans with an abundance of clues about the series’ enduring mysteries. Epistolary in structure, The Final Dossier purports to be a series of FBI files carefully archived by Agent Tamara Preston (Chrysta Bell). One document – a 28-year-old autopsy report by Agent Rosenfield whist on field duty in Twin Peaks – is of particular note. Steeped in Rosenfield’s sardonic tones, the final passages of the document are worth quoting at length: Trigger warning: repeated and prolonged proximity to moribund logging communities set off my misanthropy. But indulge me long enough to offer a brief moment of sociological commentary: if the good folks of burgs like these would put down the remote and the beer and the bong

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and stay out of their “off road vehicles” and duck blinds on weekends in order to punch the clock on some career counselling or community college, they might have a fighting chance to switch horses when the Turk comes to shutter their nineteenth-century meal ticket. ’Cause the Turk is coming. The world is changing pronto, Chief, and now that these salt-ofthe-earth “country volk” realize they’ve been left behind, it’s going to be sheer hell playing catch-up. And speaking of entrepreneurial initiative, here’s a no-brainer: why don’t some of these enterprising yokels kick-start a craft brewery here in town? They’d instantly attract an endless stream of thirsty proles, and the only competition is swill. Enough community building for one night. To sum up: Leo Johnson’s dead. Having a hard time arguing that the local landscape isn’t trending upwards because of it. (pp. 6–7) Ostensibly written in April 1989 shortly after George Bush Senior stepped into the White House, it is telling that Rosenfield’s class-bound diatribe is couched in the language of a more recent era. Imbued with no little metropolitan loathing for this particular basket of blue-collar deplorables, Rosenfield’s anachronistic terminology (“no brainer,” “trigger warning,” “community building,” “trending upwards,” “craft brewery”), brutal neoliberal imperatives (“entrepreneurial initiative”), and evocative signifiers of post-2008 economic devastation (“moribund communities,” “left behind”) are unmistakeably the fractious and politically polarised lexicon of 2017. In this paratext, Frost carves yet another of Twin Peaks’s temporal repetitions, with present-day discourse and concerns uncannily re-inscribed within the past. The opening credit sequence of the 1990–1991 Twin Peaks memorably comprised an elegiac montage of industrial fecundity. The eerily fetishistic slow motion imagery, ethereally scored by Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting theme tune, established the absolute centrality of the Packard sawmill to this Pacific Northwestern logging town. Yet this industrial centrepiece – the economic heart of the town – was burned to the ground in the first season (1:7). In the radically altered opening credits of The Return, however, we are provided with an explicitly hauntological image: the spectral remnants of the decaying mill, glimpsed only fleetingly in the first episode’s opening but remaining a lingering absent-presence throughout the remainder of the series. Where the destruction of the mill served as little more than a melodramatic plot device in 1990, in 2017 the socio-economic fallout from the town losing its main employer a quarter of a century previously is acutely registered. Rather than the comfortable middle-class affluence of the early 1990s – something which itself casually disavowed the economic recession of that period – the diegesis of The Return is populated with angry, impoverished white people, many of whom are barely employed and struggling to survive. The fictional town of Twin Peaks is thus reframed as a post-industrial wasteland and, as such, a microcosm of Donald Trump’s disenfranchised voter base.

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This pervasive sense of social and economic stagnation is largely registered away from the main plot, the melancholy core of the series impressionistically mapped across minor characters. For example, in one episode two young women – Chloe (Karolina Wydra) and Ella (Sky Ferreira) – drink at the Roadhouse bar (3:9). Recounting how she recently lost her job at a local burger joint, Ella scratches furiously at an inflamed rash in her armpit. When Chloe asks where she’s working now, Ella replies with black humour. “Across the fuckin’ street,” she grins maniacally, “serving burgers!” With her blotchy skin, blackened teeth, and wasted demeanour, Ella serves as a cipher not only for the everyday precarity of menial service industry jobs, but also for the opioid epidemic that has ravaged rural and rust-belt communities across the United States. Hereafter the two women vanish from the diegesis, their fleeting appearance underscoring their status as the unsung human detritus of Twin Peaks’s post-industrial labour market. This short scene thus serves as a bleak metonym for the broader socioeconomic malaise. In turn, Ella’s disfiguring rash should be understood as a socio-somatic register. Echoed by the zombie-like girl who oozes bile from her mouth (3:11), or the soporific drunk with a huge seeping abscess on his cheek (3.14–15; 17), corporeal abjection functions as a grotesque metaphor for a broader socio-economic sickness. The genuine horror in The Return is found less in the ludic deployment of well-worn genre tropes – in episode 3:1 a sexually engaged young couple are violently eviscerated by an unearthly phantasm – but instead in these bleak fragments of post-industrial precarity. Characters who appear across multiple episodes (“Lady Slot-Addict,” “Drunk,” “Drugged-out Mother”) are social registers for the addictions that define them. Ben Horne’s personal assistant, Beverley (Ashley Judd), returns home from work only to engage in a blazing row with her terminally ill husband about their struggle to survive on a single salary (3:7). The Fat Trout Trailer Park is home to many of Twin Peaks’s most impoverished residents. Young couple Becky (Amanda Seyfried) and her violent drug-addicted husband Steven (Caleb Landry Jones) argue constantly, scarcely able to eke out a meagre existence in a run-down trailer. In a brief scene which strikes at the vampiric heart of neoliberal capitalism, a trailer park tenant admits that he is forced to sell his blood plasma to a local clinic so he can afford to eat (3:12). The voracity of the US healthcare system is again brought into later in the same episode when Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster) quietly pleads with business magnate Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) to pay for the healthcare costs of a female Fat Trout resident who has been severely beaten by Horne’s sociopathic grandson. Direct socio-political commentary, however, remains scarce in The Return. When it does arise it tends to signify a politically impotent impasse. Carl Rodd’s (Harry Dean Stanton) perfunctory critique of 21st-century geopolitical hegemony – “Fuckin’ war . . . Fuckin’ government” (3:6) – combines disillusioned fury and ineffectual dissent in equal measure. This is echoed later in the same episode when Janey-E (Naomi Watts) refuses to pay interest on Dougie’s gambling debts. “We are not wealthy people!” she spits furiously,

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before invoking the definitive post-2008 political banality. “We are the 99-percenters, we are shit on enough, and we are certainly not going to be shit on by the likes of you!” Carl and Janey-E’s populist discontent finds its enraged locus in the embattled ressentiment of online guru “Dr Amp” (formerly Dr Lawrence Jacoby, played by Russ Tamblyn), a conspiracy theorist in the Alex Jones/alt-right mould. Jacoby/Amp is arguably the most unambiguously Trumpian figure in The Return. Once a trained medical practitioner, he is now an internet “truther” with a convenient side-line promoting monetised self-help as a panacea for social and political entropy. Advocating selfreliance and encouraging his viewers to “shovel their way out of the shit . . . and into the truth!,” “Dr Amp” hawks cheaply spray-painted gold shovels as a lucrative pathway to political liberation and individual self-actualisation. Jacoby’s radical transformation functions on two broad levels. On the one hand he is – like the perpetually stoned Jerry Horne (David Patrick Kelly) – a cipher for the abject failure of the counterculture. On the other, Jacoby’s incoherent political diatribes point to the displacement of modernist “progress” (i.e. post-Freudian psychotherapy) by rabid emotional populism and aggressively partisan (post-)truth-telling. Railing against the transformation of the United States into a corporate oligarchy, Jacoby’s online rants are an ideologically incoherent mishmash, awkwardly suturing citizen-patriot conspiracism with anti-globalist fervour, and socio-political fury with drain-theswamp rhetoric. Inevitably, Dr Amp’s invective functions at the combustible juncture where radical Left meets radical Right and subsequently implodes. “Fuck you who betrayed the people you were elected to help,” ends one representative monologue. “Fuck you all in the ass you fucking treasonous puppets!” (3:12). This late capitalist impasse continues in Las Vegas, where The Return draws repeated parallels between the machinations of the gambling industry and the supposedly more wholesome commercial dealings of Dougie’s employer, “Lucky ‘7’ Insurance.” Las Vegas is the quintessential Trumpian town: a hyperreal parody of capitalist meritocracy where even a blank slate like Dougie can make it rich by playing the right slot machine. Emblematic of the anomie at the heart of Sin City is the hyper-feminine trio of Candie, Mandie, and Sandie (Amy Shiels, Andréa Leal, Giselle DaMier), an absurdist gaggle of decoratively submissive fembots who combine blank obedience with photogenic vacuity. Automata have been associated with the uncanny since Freud, and though the interchangeable trio are not the literal mechanical facsimiles he found in Romantic literature, they behave as unnerving post-human drones who have sublimated themselves entirely to the deadened strictures of their labour (Figure 14.2). Candie, Mandie, and Sandie are also entirely representative of the series’ recurrent concern with the degrading rituals and normalised humiliations of paid labour. In one episode, a casino employee is violently beaten and sacked because of Dougie’s run of luck on the slots (3:5). A man interminably sweeps a bar room floor while his boss argues on the phone about the

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Figure 14.2 Candie, Mandie, and Sandie perform a reified version of femininity

cost of two underage prostitutes, the two forms of physical labour placed in disquieting critical parallel (3:7). One-time romantic motorcycle hero James Hurley (James Marshall) now works tedious night shifts as a low-paid security guard at the Great Northern Hotel – a once democratic, carnivalesque locale now resembling a circumscribed Gothic fortress. Candie weeps uncontrollably for an entire episode when she fears she might lose her job (3:10). Married assassins Hutch (Tim Roth) and Chantal (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are enthusiastic sadists and obedient employees – the latter happily providing sexual favours for their employer while her grinning husband looks on – but towards the end of the series Chantal complains that their labour has become just another mundane job. Elsewhere, Steven Burnett is ritually humiliated in a job interview by teenage-delinquent-turned-neoliberal bully Mike Nelson (Gary Hershberger, 3:5). Self-medicating to the point of oblivion and unable to see any way out of this impasse, Steven later commits suicide in one of the series’ bleakest moments. The term “economic depression” has rarely seemed so apt. This sense of pervasive neoliberal dehumanisation is ever-present in The Return. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2015) has pointed intriguingly to Twin Peaks’s understated materialist preoccupation with the process of reification. “While things in Twin Peaks assume a kind of quasi-life,” writes Weinstock, “living creatures become thing-like”: Doppelgängers and, most dramatically, possessed individuals within the series similarly undercut the uniqueness of human subjects and force a

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consideration of human beings as merely things to be copied or inhabited. . . . In each instance, the autonomy and indeed personhood of the subject is negated. (pp. 40–41) This horrific “negation of personhood” is manifested in various forms. The doll-like Candie, Mandie, and Sandie are de-subjectified by both their labour and the strictures of heteronormativity. Several decades after their criminal operation was supposedly broken up in an FBI sting, the Renault family continue to sex traffic young women via the Roadhouse (3:7). With the bar owner – played uncannily by Walter Olkewicz, previously appearing as the long-since deceased Jacques Renault – lasciviously haggling over the price of two underage “Grade-A whores,” it is clear that this dehumanising trade in women’s bodies is merely the obscene flipside of Candie and co.’s gendered automatism. Dougie meanders through the series in a somnolent trance, his interaction with various stimuli – food, coffee, cherry pie, slot machines, human beings – grounded only in the most robotic form of mimicry. Elsewhere, Deputy Chief Hawk (Michael Horse) discovers the missing pages of Laura Palmer’s diary concealed inside a toilet doorframe. Gnomically advised by the Log Lady (Catherine Coulson) that he will find an important clue relating to his Native American heritage, a dropped coin spills from Hawk’s pocket leading him into a toilet cubicle. The cubicle is branded with an ethnically co-opted company plaque (“Nez Perce Manufacturing”); both the plaque and the coin feature a stereotypical Native American image. Hawk’s “heritage” as a descendant of the Pacific Northwest’s Nez Perce people is here entirely reified, centuries of indigenous history casually flushed away by the dehumanising force of capitalist imperatives. This thematic strain culminates in the seemingly endless stream of doppelgängers that populate The Return. Doppelgängers, like automata, have long been associated with the Gothic and uncanny modes, but The Return adds a contemporary twist: these “manufactured” human beings are produced with production-line efficiency which subsequently inflects their personalities. The unsmiling Mr C goes about his ultraviolent odyssey with the kind of grimly mechanistic demeanour which refracts the pathological underpinnings of neoliberal self-determination. Dougie’s literal deus ex machina, meanwhile, has always been an entirely manufactured person. When Cooper orders another copy of an already-copied Dougie to “happily” reunite Janey-E and Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon) with a third facsimile, husband-father (3.17), the sense of inescapable dehumanisation is overwhelming. “You were manufactured,” MIKE (Al Strobel) tells Diane (Laura Dern). “I know . . . fuck you!” she replies, with a resigned twist on the basic mechanism of disavowal. In the digital era where we all have multiple online “doppelgängers,” and where America’s pre-eminent politician-entrepreneur – who understands everything as a transactional “deal” – communicates primarily through the binary code of online soundbites, The Return’s bleak post-human dystopia persistently taunts the

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corpse of the “unique individual,” mocking the very concept with its own dark doppelgänger: the shattered spectre of neoliberal post-subjectivity. “Is it future or is it past?”: repetition, eternal recurrence, and the death of futurity As Lausten and Uglit (2012) point out, a key aspect of the uncanny is its insistent repetitiveness. The uncanny, they argues, “is not just something that is revealed to be uncanny once and for all, it is rather the insistence of the uncanny thing, that it returns again and again and again, which is at the core of its uncanniness” (p. 84: emphasis added). The fatalistic sense of endless repetition in The Return is directly echoed in critical accounts of Trumpism. For Michel Valentin, Trumpian economics has clear antecedents, from 1900s “Robber Baron” capitalists through the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand and onto the neo-conservative deregulation of the market in the 1980s–1990s. Elsewhere, Jeff Manza and Ned Crowley (2018) argue that Trumpian ethnonationalism uncannily recalls a larger set of patterns in American culture, from the Indian Removal Act (1830) through to the “red scare” and fears of foreign subversion. In Naomi Klein’s view, Trumpism is profoundly American: a 21st-century neoliberal twist on the centuries-old mythologies of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. Trump, extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion – a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half century. Trump is the product of powerful systems of thought that rank human life based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, physical appearance, and physical ability – and that have systematically used race as a weapon to advance brutal economic policies since the earliest days of North American colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. . . . In this sense, there is an important way in which Trump is not shocking. He is the entirely predictable, indeed clichéd outcome of ubiquitous ideas and trends that should have been stopped long ago (pp. 9–10) That both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton employed the slogan “Make America Great Again” in successful election campaigns in 1980 and 1992 only underscores the sense of a culture caught in a perpetual loop, the crude misnomer “the age of Trump” itself unveiled as a conveniently amnesiac delusion in symptomatically tweetable form.4 In one of The Return’s most discomfiting scenes, Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) sits at home in an alcoholic fugue (3.13), disinterestedly watching a monochrome boxing match on the television. Still living in the same house where her daughter was sexually abused as a child and in which her niece – the physical double of her daughter – was also murdered by her husband, Sarah is caught in a dipsomaniacal loop of grief, guilt, and barely numbed anger. However, the surface tragedy of this torpid, grimly quotidian scene – the

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implication is that Sarah Palmer’s evenings have unfolded in a similar manner ever since her daughter’s murder in 1989 – is rendered uncanny by the evening’s anachronistic entertainment. Sarah’s vast flat-screen television plays a 1950s boxing bout which audibly glitches every 20 seconds before returning to the start and playing through in an interminable loop. Seemingly oblivious to anything but her exhausted supply of vodka, this uncanny loop refracts not just Sarah’s own painfully repetitive existence but that of the town of Twin Peaks – and, by extension, American culture – more broadly. A paralysing sense of eternal recurrence is unarguably The Return’s pivotal thematic trope. The terminally stoned Jerry Horne spends the entire series wandering around in circles. Becky’s dysfunctional relationship with her abusive husband replicates her mother Shelly’s (Mädchen Amick) from 25 years earlier. With her blonde hair, prom queen good looks, and secret cocaine habit, Becky has obvious parallels with the doomed Laura Palmer, her youthful appearance only serving to belie a deeply troubled personal life. Audrey’s interminable argument with her “husband” Charlie (Clark Middleton) repeats the same paralysing ground over and over again (“I wanna stay and I wanna go! I wanna do both!”), less a realist portrait of a decaying relationship and more the inertia of a never-ending internal psychodrama. The Renault family continue to traffic drugs and underage prostitutes. James reprises his saccharine ballad, “Just You and I,” at the Roadhouse, departed co-singers Maddy (Sheryl Lee) and Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) replaced with dead-eyed facsimiles (3:13). This repetitive void finds its apogee in the reprise of “Audrey’s Dance” (3:16), an axiomatic jazz-scored fantasy in which a middleaged Audrey slinks across the Roadhouse dancefloor in a cruel parody of one of Twin Peaks’s most celebrated moments. It is this abyssian loop that is etched so deeply into the horror of The Return. The motif of a needle stuck eternally in a groove from the earlier series (2:14) is repeated in the opening episode. “Agent Cooper – listen to the sounds,” advises the Fireman (Carel Struycken), gesturing to a gramophone emitting digitised scratches. Later, Dougie fixates on various objects – police badges, archived files, a statue of a gun-toting cowboy – which trigger vague memories of his life as an FBI operative. In one scene, Dougie is transfixed by an American flag drooping sadly in the corner of a Vegas police station (3:9). As Dougie stares, seemingly mesmerised, a tinny rendition of “American the Beautiful” plays – apparently in Dougie’s head – sounding like television closedown music from the analogue age. The scene is telling, as if “America” itself is little more than a mass-mediated hallucination entirely dependent on repeated metonymic symbols, a dreamlike sense of the illusory underscored when – in a clear nod to The Wizard of Oz (1939) – a woman wearing bright red shoes strolls through the room. Similarly, the statue of the cowboy – a signifier of “authentic” American masculinity and the mythic Old West – shifts from a prototypical slice of Vegas kitsch to an increasingly sinister visual motif. Gun constantly drawn, the cowboy fetishistically signifies the ideological cul-de-sac that is national mythologies of regenerative violence.

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Like the pugilists pummelling each other on eternal repeat in Sarah Palmer’s lounge, the statue is suggestive of an abyss of meaningless violence with no apparent end. Thus, the apparently benign nostalgia evoked by the poster of boxer “Battling Bud” in Bushnell Mullins’s (Don Murray) office finds its apocalyptic mirror in the enormous image of an atomic mushroom cloud which sits behind Gordon Cole’s desk at FBI headquarters. The celebration of the sanctioned violence of the boxing ring is rendered uncanny by its nuclear-age double: the Gothic underside of America’s post-war democratic futurity. The boxing metaphor forms a continuum with Freddie’s (Jake Wardle) bathetic heroism. Perhaps the most jarringly dislocated character in The Return, Freddie’s glove allows him to defeat the hitherto unfathomable threat of BOB with a few (manifest) destiny-laden punches (3:17). This absurdist parody of the ideological infantilism of contemporary comic book franchises finds its own grimly realistic reflection when Cooper confronts a group of contemporary cowboys in a bland Texas diner (3:18). Less frontier heroism and more the causal violence of the everyday, the sequence shares – like the final episode as a whole – an unpleasant proximity to quotidian realities. Elsewhere, a series of nonsensically violent “squeezings” form an ideologically undifferentiated continuum between Mr C, Dougie, Richard Horne (Eamon Farren), and the Woodsman. “I will squeeze the shit out of you, bitch!” Richard screams at his grandmother, before casually threatening to anally rape his severely mentally impaired uncle (3:10). Unquestionably The Return’s exemplar of toxic masculinity, Richard’s incomprehensible rage is echoed by that of the Polish accountant (Johnny Coyne), an impossibly heavily-armed white collar worker whose anger over a car parking slight leads to a bloody shootout in a quiet Las Vegas suburb (3:16). The senseless and ludicrously ultraviolent nature of this sequence was itself rendered uncanny when, less than a month after The Return’s finale, a former auditor and real estate businessman carried out the largest mass shooting in US history, slaughtering 58 people and injuring hundreds more at a concert on the Las Vegas strip. Conclusion: “what year is this?!” In a series of episodes first broadcast in January–February 1991 (2.19–2.22), as the “first” Gulf War raged both in the Middle East and live on CNN, Ben Horne suffers a deep psychotic break. Elaborately restaging key Civil War battles in his office at the Great Northern Hotel, Horne’s psychogenic fugue leads him to believe that he is General Robert E. Lee struggling against the Union to ensure a Confederate victory. Horne is closely monitored throughout by Dr Jacoby, who sees his regressive delusion, paradoxically, as a healthily therapeutic process. “By reversing the South’s defeat,” notes Jacoby sagely, “he in turn will reverse his own emotional setbacks” (2.21). The Civil War storyline is seen as something of a creative nadir for Twin Peaks, often pinpointed as symptomatic of the show’s catastrophic decline in quality during its ill-fated second season. However, 28 years later – just as The

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Return was entering its latter stages – events in Charlottesville, Virginia, retrospectively imbued the much-maligned subplot with a depressing contemporaneity. On August 11–12th 2017, the now-notorious Unite the Right rally saw white supremacist marchers protesting against the planned removal of a statue of General Lee from the town’s Emancipation Park. The event ended with a violent but unmistakeable sense of uncanny repetition, with angry clashes between white nationalists and counter-protestors resulting in one death and numerous injuries. The Charlottesville riots have subsequently been enshrined as a key event in Trump’s first year in office, not least because the president refused to condemn the nationalist marchers, opting instead to draw a moral equivalence between protestors on both sides. In yet another example of eternal recurrence, then, what was absurdist comedy in 1991 – the psycho-social restaging of a traumatic conflict that “ended” 150 years previously – becomes uncannily prophetic of tragic real-life events some 26 years later. The Return ends, then, in perhaps the only way it possibly could: with the recurrence of a chilling, hyper-rendered scream and an abyssian sense of profound irresolution. Like the deep melancholy Helen Wheatley (2006) understands as central to Twin Peaks’s enduring affective appeal, the final episode offers a fatalistic evocation of the mise en abyme at the heart of contemporary American culture. “Heads I win, tails you lose,” Red (Balthazaar Getty) says to Richard Horne in perhaps the most concise verbal summary of the series’ pervasive ambient dread (3:6). The Return is thus entirely symptomatic of its age: an often harrowing meditation on the fractious relationship between a mis-remembered past, a nightmarish present, and a seemingly impossible future. In his epochal Freudian-Marxist critique of 1979, Robin Wood argued that the expressionist nightmares of American horror cinema are always grounded in social conflict. Latent in his brilliantly caustic commentary on the ideological dynamics of horror is the conviction that American “civilization” ultimately produces the monster(s) it deserves. “Trump is the logical culmination of the current neoliberal system,” asserts Naomi Klein. “We should have been expecting him” (pp. 258–259: emphasis added). As ever, it is in the smallest moments that the horror of The Return is at its most incisive. In the closing minutes of a mid-season episode (3:7), an obviously distraught man runs into the Double-R diner, Twin Peaks’s most enduringly utopian and all-American locale. Frantic and distressed, the man calls out for help – “Hey! Anybody seen Billy?!” – before disappearing into the night to try and find his missing friend. The diners in the crowded restaurant barely register his presence before happily continuing with their coffee and cherry pie. In yet another moment of uncanny repetition, the locals’ indifference to the obvious anguish of a fellow resident clearly recalls Bobby Briggs’s (Dana Ashbrook) grief-stricken outburst at Laura Palmer’s funeral in 1989 (1:3) in which he implicates the entire town in her death. The scene continues over the end credits, the diners continuing their meals and chit-chat while the Double-R’s ever-uncanny jukebox woozily plays a dreamy pedal-steel number from 1959. Its title? Sleep Walk.

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Notes 1 See Gillan (2016) for an insightful discussion of the way(s) the ambiguous characterisation, thematic complexities, and brutal socio-sexual realities of Twin Peaks have been elided in popular memory by the reductively amnesiac kitsch of contemporary digital culture. 2 See Fradley and Riley (2019) for a detailed discussion of the politics of The Return in the context of Lynch’s career more broadly. 3 See Donald L. Anderson’s chapter elsewhere in this volume for a more detailed discussion of “hauntology” in relation to The Return. 4 For an enjoyably polemical dissection of the relationship between Trumpism and the “debased” logic of Twitter, see Lott (2017).

Bibliography Blake, L., ‘Trapped in the Hysterical Sublime: Twin Peaks, Postmodernism, and the Neoliberal Now’, in Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner (eds.), Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), pp. 229–244. Edwards, J.A., ‘Make America Great Again: Donald Trump and Redefining the U.S. Role in the World’, Communication Quarterly 66:2 (2018), pp. 176–195. Fradley, M. & Riley, J.A., ‘“Dirty Bearded Men in a Room!”: Twin Peaks: The Return and the Politics of Lynchian Comedy’, in Amanda DiPaolo and Jamie Gillies (eds.), The Politics of Twin Peaks (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), pp.69–92. Freud, S., ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), pp. 217–256. Frost, M., The Secret History of Twin Peaks (London: MacMillan, 2016). Frost, M., Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (London: MacMillan, 2017). Gillan, J., ‘Textural Poaching Twin Peaks: The Audrey Horne Sweater Girls GIFS’, International Journal of TV Serial Narratives 2:2 (2016), pp. 9–24. Klein, M., No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics (London: Penguin, 2017). Lausten, C.B. & Uglit, R., ‘Uncanny Repetitions: Abu Ghraib in Afterthought’, Journal for Cultural Research 61:1 (2012), pp. 81–102. Lott, B.L., ‘The Age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of Debasement’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 34:1 (2017), pp. 59–68. Manza, J. & Crowley, N., ‘Ethno-Nationalism and the Rise of Donald Trump’, Contexts 17:1 (2018), pp. 28–33. Reed, K.M., ‘We Cannot Content Ourselves with Remaining Spectators: Music Performance, Audience Interaction, and Nostalgia in the Films of David Lynch’, Music and the Moving Image 9:1 (2016), pp. 3–22. Richardson, M., ‘The Disgust of Donald Trump’, Continuum 31:6 (2017), pp. 747–756. Streek, W. (2017). ‘The Return of the Repressed’, New Left Review 104, https://newleftreview. org/issues/II104/articles/wolfgang-streeck-the-return-of-the-repressed (Online). Accessed 5/4/2018. Valentin, M., Trumpism: A Cultural Psycho-Genesis (Missoula, MT: EPIS Press, 2018). Weinstock, J.A., ‘Wondrous and Strange: The Matter of Twin Peaks’, in Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock & Catherine Spooner (eds.), Return to ‘Twin Peaks’: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), pp. 29–46. Wheatley, H., Television Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Wood, R. ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Chicago: Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 164–200. Žižek, S., The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’ (Seattle, WA: Washington University Press, 2000).

210 Martin Fradley and John A. Riley Blue Velvet (1986) Directed by David Lynch: De Laurentiis Entertainment. Dune (1984) Directed by David Lynch: Universal Pictures. Lost Highway (1997) Directed by David Lynch: October Films. Twin Peaks (1990–1991) Directed by David Lynch: CBS Television. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) Directed by David Lynch: New Line Cinema. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) Directed by David Lynch: Showtime Networks and CBS. Wildat Heart (1990) Directed by David Lynch: The Samuel Goldwyn Company.

Index

ABC (network) 5, 15, 80, 180–181, 194 abduction 25, 45, 47, 156 abjection 35, 39–40, 43–45, 65, 69–70, 79, 82, 93, 103, 197–198, 201–202 abortion 63–65, 92 absurdism 24, 26, 141, 171, 196, 202, 207–208 activism 73, 158, 186 adolescence 24, 28, 46–47 Adorno, Theodor 13–14, 68, 183, 190–191, 193 aesthetics 9–10, 13, 20, 110–111, 167, 172–173, 193, 195–196 affect 38, 42, 52, 147 Afghanistan 26–27, 93 African 23, 41, 78, 110, 112, 117, 126, 132, 155, 159–161, 177–178, 181, 184 aggression 2, 8, 35, 50, 58–59, 64, 90, 101, 196, 202 AIDS 41, 70, 73, 79 Alabama 13, 22, 111, 184, 193 allegory 6–9, 29, 38, 51–52, 110, 119, 171–173 altright, alternative right 26, 34, 150 AMC (network) 71, 80, 128 Americana 11, 164, 166, 170 amnesia 184, 186–187, 196, 205, 209 anger 1, 10, 57, 63, 84, 99, 177, 199, 205, 207 animals 104, 158–159 animation 10–11, 131, 134, 137, 143, 146 animism 142, 144, 146 antagonists 10–11, 33, 58–59, 64, 77, 97, 110, 114, 149, 152 anthologies 11, 164, 166, 193 antichrist 36, 153–154, 162 apocalyptic 25, 77, 123, 125, 169, 173, 207 assault 37, 47, 53, 57, 65, 75, 172, 192 audio 11, 62–63, 164, 166–167, 173, 177 authoritarianism 1, 4, 11, 14, 123, 126–127, 131, 198–199

Baudrillard, Jean 179, 182 Benshoff, Harry 67, 70, 79, 83, 88–89, 93 bigotry 2, 9–10, 66, 73, 138, 156 bisexuality 72–73, 75–76, 81, 83, 148 blackness 92, 110–113, 116, 118 bloodshed 1, 7, 14, 24, 33, 44–48, 53, 63, 71, 74–77, 80, 172, 201 bodies 24, 28, 33, 43–45, 47–51, 63, 65, 68, 84, 91, 95, 101, 109–115, 142, 154–155, 157–160, 189, 194–195, 204 borders 7, 22, 97, 115, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 132, 158, 178, 180, 192 bourgeoisie 13, 37–38, 82–83 broadcasting 15, 80, 151, 174 campaign 1–2, 10, 12–13, 24, 29, 33, 46, 57, 59–60, 63–64, 68, 72, 97–99, 125, 127, 145, 147, 150–154, 156–158, 163, 167, 169, 171, 181–186, 205 cannibalism 39, 41, 100, 133 capitalism 4–5, 13, 21, 27, 82, 104, 125, 143, 148, 182, 186, 196, 201–202, 204–205 captivity 58–60, 97, 99, 106, 109–110, 113–115, 117 Carpenter, John 66, 108, 125, 127–128, 147, 151 celebrity 4–5, 144, 160–161, 183 Charlottesville 33–34, 52, 185, 208 childhood 2, 10–11, 19–26, 30, 36–37, 39, 48, 50, 59, 64, 68, 83, 85–86, 101, 112, 114, 118, 120–122, 124, 126, 133–140, 143–144, 155, 185, 193, 199, 205 cinematography 65, 86, 88, 192 class 3–4, 12–13, 20, 23, 38, 78, 98, 100–103, 106–107, 109, 112, 125, 137, 149, 156–157, 161–162, 167, 177–178, 200 Clinton, Bill 13, 153, 179, 205 Clinton, Hilary 52, 57, 59–60, 98, 106, 148, 169, 177, 181, 185 clown 7–9, 19–25, 29–30, 49, 53, 71 CNN (network) 207

212 Index colonialism 40, 42, 52, 116, 145, 205 Columbine 180–181, 192 comedy 11, 136, 142, 152, 166, 173, 177, 181, 208–209 communism 185–186 complicity 112, 158, 161, 197 confederate, monuments 109, 172, 185, 207 consent 35, 62, 147 conservatism 5–6, 12–13, 19, 22, 27, 30, 35, 49, 64, 70, 92, 154, 156, 159–161, 165, 196, 205 conspiracism 35, 40, 50, 128, 153–154, 156–157, 167, 185, 193, 202 corporeality 111–112, 115, 117, 201 counterculture 21, 30, 163, 202 Craven, Wes 14, 66, 100, 108 crime 2, 12, 15, 20, 26–27, 37, 75, 104–105, 128, 153, 156, 159, 192, 204 cult 7–8, 15, 19–21, 29–31, 41, 70–72, 77–78, 155, 172, 193, 195 cynicism 29, 149, 182, 187 deception 14, 121, 193 dehumanisation 13, 38, 40, 166, 168, 203 democracy 1–2, 22, 155, 163, 165, 167, 174, 185–186 demonology 7, 40–42, 45–46, 49–50, 53, 70, 73, 78, 115, 180 depression 13, 59, 103, 143, 163, 193, 196, 198, 203, 208 desire 10–11, 29, 41, 43–44, 57, 67, 70, 79, 83, 100–101, 119, 132, 146, 158–159, 178–179, 182–186, 189–192 discrimination 10, 51, 57, 92, 107, 134–135, 138–139 Eastwood, Clint 24, 26, 31 economics 2, 4, 28, 98, 100–102, 106, 119, 125–126, 181, 193, 205 education 2, 12, 14, 98, 102, 107, 156, 166, 193 Eggers, Robert 15, 66, 120, 128 election 1, 11–13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 29, 35, 49, 52, 57, 59–60, 62, 64–66, 71–72, 98, 101, 107, 119, 141, 147–149, 151, 153–155, 157, 161–167, 171, 173–174, 177, 194, 196–197, 205 enlightenment 14, 38, 41, 193 entrapment 58, 90, 97, 103–104, 117, 157, 160, 174 ethnicity 11, 13, 83, 133–134, 157, 170, 204 Europe 2, 12–13, 40, 42, 51, 53, 125, 127–128 evil 13, 17, 21, 25, 33–40, 49, 71, 91, 94, 102, 122, 125, 138, 140, 150, 166, 182–183, 186–187

fandom 21, 173, 193 fantasies 4, 25, 29, 38, 44–46, 53, 60, 98–99, 104, 106, 117, 119, 138, 151, 166–167, 171, 184, 206 fascism 2, 13, 26, 34, 128, 185 fear 2, 8, 12, 14, 23–24, 33–35, 37–38, 46, 49–50, 67, 70, 79–80, 83, 85, 88, 90, 99, 103, 124, 126, 143, 145, 155, 172, 193 femininity 43–46, 49–50, 53, 136, 203 feminism 29, 46, 48, 52–53, 57–61, 66, 82, 94, 158 femiphobia 9, 35, 45 Ferguson, unrest 12, 27 festivals, film 53, 127, 132 fetishism 25, 37, 112, 197, 200, 206 folklore 19, 22–23 food 11, 100, 121, 133, 148, 168, 170, 204 foreignisation 37, 42, 126–128, 154, 163, 205 forest 105–106, 110, 121, 127, 136–137 fragility 2, 71, 76, 162, 167 franchises 14, 131–132, 136, 139–140, 192, 207 Freud, Sigmund 69, 82, 84, 93–94, 141–142, 144–147, 151, 197, 202, 208–209 Fukuyama, Francis 35, 185–186, 193, 195 futurism 68, 186, 193 FX (network) 7, 15, 31, 80 gaming 27, 59, 62, 106, 112, 121, 142, 144, 150, 167, 169 gangs 7, 24, 33, 35, 50, 150 gaze 3, 53, 121 gender 4, 13, 26, 43–50, 52–53, 57–59, 62–63, 65–66, 68–69, 79, 92, 99, 101–103, 106–107, 112, 117, 149, 158, 194, 204–205 genre 2–7, 9–14, 33, 44, 50, 58, 65, 67, 70, 78, 91–93, 97, 99, 109–110, 116–117, 125, 127–128, 141, 152–153, 164, 166, 172–173, 187, 189, 194, 201, 209 gentrification 146, 148, 150 geographies 34, 39, 66, 101, 117, 181, 196 globalisation 1, 3, 12–13, 20, 38, 69, 125–126, 128, 143, 150, 164, 173, 184, 202 Gothic 11–12, 20, 33, 38–40, 42, 52, 82, 84, 86, 89, 93, 97, 107, 110, 116, 118, 137–138, 140, 164, 166, 182, 195–197, 203–204, 207, 209 grief 81–82, 84, 86–89, 91, 93–94, 155, 205, 208 grotesque 91, 196, 198, 201 guns 3, 15, 21, 25, 34–35, 64, 76, 123, 151, 167, 170, 185, 193, 206 Halberstam, Judith 51, 53, 75, 79 harassment 26–27, 40, 47, 87

Index hate 2, 12, 15, 24, 28, 33, 58, 63, 103, 112, 159, 169, 177, 193 haunted 8, 25, 32, 39, 45, 52–53, 75, 86, 90, 93, 109–110, 116–117, 186–187, 193, 197, 200, 209 hegemony ii, 4, 26, 30, 92, 160, 169, 201 heroines 42, 88, 97 heteronormativity 68–69, 74–75, 79, 132, 136, 204 heterosexuality 25, 50, 68–70, 82–83, 88–89, 92–93, 138, 140, 150 hierarchy 3, 50, 173 hillbillies 12, 77–78 Hitchcock, Alfred 43, 52–53, 153, 162 Hollywood 68, 77–79, 127, 131, 140, 177 homonormativity 68, 70 homophobic vi, 1, 10–11, 70, 72–73, 77–79, 131–132, 134, 136 homosexuality 13, 41, 67–68, 70, 72, 75, 78–79, 83, 93, 136 Horkheimer, Max 4, 13–14, 183, 190–191, 193 hospitalisation 43, 72, 81, 86 Hulu (network) 15, 78, 80 humiliation 3, 29, 34–35, 52, 62, 146, 191, 202–203 hybridity 132, 136 ideology 5, 11, 33, 36–37, 51, 53, 83, 99, 102, 116, 127, 182–183, 186–187, 190–191 immigrants 1, 33, 37, 42, 51–53, 119, 125–128, 145, 154, 158, 171, 180, 182 inauguration 1, 64, 81, 92, 116, 169 indigenous 40, 204 industry 5, 13–14, 101, 147, 193, 201–202 innocence 2, 24, 40, 47, 121, 149, 180 insanity 9, 30, 75 intimacy 74, 122, 124 invaders 8, 42, 61, 101, 147 Iraq 26, 93 Islamophobia 158 Ivanka, Trump 140, 152, 157–159, 161–162 Jewish 35, 42–43, 136, 149, 151 journalism 13–14, 61, 126, 146, 154, 160 kidnap 45, 64, 104, 111 killing 6, 12, 21, 29, 34–35, 50, 63–64, 89, 116, 123, 131 kitsch 1, 41, 206, 209 Kristeva, Julia 69–70 labour 12, 128, 201–204 Lacan, Jacques 52–53 landscape 8–9, 33, 49, 110, 169, 178, 187, 200 lasciviousness 199, 204

213

left, politics 107, 152, 187, 202, 209 lesbianism 41, 68, 73–74, 77, 79, 81 liberalism 7, 10–11, 29, 45, 49, 110–113, 145, 153–154, 157, 160–161, 170, 172, 177–178, 185–186 lies 4, 8, 79, 84, 90, 124, 167, 169 liminality 11, 164, 166 Lionsgate 66, 80 losers 24, 26, 33–36, 40, 42–50 Lovecraft, H.P. 141, 173, 178 Lynch, David 12, 15, 181, 186–199, 209–210 MAGA 178, 182, 185, 187, 190 magic 40, 74, 79, 86, 88, 142, 146 marginalisation 3, 26, 75, 77, 101, 106, 139, 155, 159–160, 171 marvel 14, 135 marxism 186, 208 masculinity 4, 9, 19, 24–26, 28, 30, 39, 43, 45, 52, 67–68, 79, 83, 102, 107, 114, 127–128, 138, 140, 177, 198, 206–207 masking 10, 20, 22, 25–26, 49–50, 103, 122, 127, 173, 178, 196 materialism 21, 83, 203 matriarchy 121, 145, 155, 158 melancholy 188, 192, 201, 208 memory 82, 91, 109, 138, 179, 181, 184, 195, 206, 209 menstruation 47 Mexican 7, 30, 71, 125, 128, 150, 197 military 5, 22, 27, 70, 154 minorities 69, 74, 93, 119, 158, 160, 162, 170, 180 misogyny 1, 9, 11–12, 27, 43, 58, 60–63, 158, 177, 199 modernity 1, 13–14, 20, 41, 66, 68, 78–80, 98, 107, 134–135, 159, 162, 174, 182, 184, 202 monogamy 75, 82–83, 89, 91 monstrosity 8, 10–11, 13, 21, 25, 28, 33–34, 36–40, 42–43, 46–48, 50, 52–53, 58–59, 61, 64, 67, 69–75, 77, 81–84, 86–88, 93, 95, 97, 99–104, 116, 131–141, 147, 149, 152, 154–157, 161–163, 173, 182, 196–198, 208 morality 23, 78, 120, 125–126, 128, 152, 158, 169, 208 multiculturalism 2, 185 murder 7, 12, 19–20, 23, 27–30, 38, 40–41, 59, 62, 71, 74–78, 138, 179, 184, 186, 196–197, 205–206 Murphy, Bernice 19, 29, 73, 75 Muslim 2, 116–117, 180 mystery 12, 32, 58, 74, 88, 99, 170, 184, 189, 199 myth 20, 39–40, 69, 107, 140, 183–185, 197, 205–206

214 Index nationalism 1–2, 33, 110, 116, 131, 156, 180, 185, 208–209 Nazism 2, 13, 34, 109, 172, 185 NBC 5, 194 neoliberalism 9, 35–36, 38, 51, 53, 127, 182, 196, 199–201, 203–205, 208–209 Netflix (network) 32, 53, 66, 78, 80, 93, 178, 194 nihilism 25–26, 69, 182 normalisation 13, 35–37, 49, 68, 70, 83, 88, 92, 100, 133, 139, 197–198, 202 nostalgia 1, 11–12, 19, 21, 23, 30, 32–33, 145, 150–151, 168–169, 175, 178–188, 190–193, 195–196, 207, 209 Obama, Barack 93, 116, 154, 157, 162–163 ontology 37, 43, 113, 186 oppression 13, 57, 59, 74–75, 89, 91, 93, 109, 165 otherness 40, 67, 70, 74, 82–83, 91–92, 132–133, 135 outrage 26, 28, 57, 74, 136 pain 41, 102, 105, 112–113, 124, 126, 143, 179, 191, 206 panic 19, 21–23, 25, 45, 49–50, 60, 88, 113 paradox 25, 27, 38, 144, 207 paranoia 1, 8, 11, 29, 35, 39, 43, 58, 166 parenthood 19, 48, 88, 104, 111–113, 122, 124, 126, 133–134, 136–140, 152, 155 parody 10–11, 29, 129, 152–158, 161, 188, 202, 206–207 pathology 104, 156, 199, 204 patriarchy 1, 13, 45–46, 50, 57, 59–61, 82, 89, 93, 97, 106, 119–120, 122–123, 133, 156, 198–199 patriotism 1, 12, 39, 51, 180, 197, 202 phantasm 45–46, 48–51, 197, 201 pleasure 11, 58, 62, 143, 164, 174, 177, 183–184, 188–191 podcasts 7, 10–11, 66, 129, 164–166, 169, 172–174 polarisation 36, 38, 128, 153, 162, 200 police 1, 19, 22–25, 27, 35, 65, 83, 89, 92, 109–112, 115–116, 126, 131, 152, 155, 157–158, 166, 171–172, 177, 179–180, 205–206 polling 98, 102, 154–155, 158, 162 populism 1–2, 4–5, 11, 14, 126, 128, 131–132, 156, 202 porn 103, 149, 155, 189 postmodernism 21, 52, 127, 142, 150, 162, 167, 174, 182, 195–196, 209

powerlessness 10, 63, 98, 101, 106, 178 predatory 25, 48–50, 76, 102, 177 prejudice 59, 135–136, 155–156, 161 prison 64–65, 71, 101, 104, 184 propaganda 4, 13, 147 psychoanalysis 42, 44, 82, 93 PTSD 84–85, 92, 94 purity 13, 120, 122, 125–128, 136, 195 queer 9, 33, 49, 55, 67–70, 72–79, 92, 112, 118, 137 race 27, 33, 92, 109–113, 116–117, 132–134, 153, 155–163, 177, 180–181, 185, 187 racism 1–2, 10, 12–13, 15, 23, 26–27, 33–34, 92, 111–114, 117, 131–132, 134, 139–140, 149, 155–159, 161–162, 170, 177, 181–182 rage 1–2, 24–28, 35, 65, 79, 199, 207 rallies 13, 33, 37, 52, 63, 106, 154, 183–184, 208 rape 9, 40, 62, 75, 97, 99, 101, 103, 114, 125, 127–128, 145, 149, 156, 179, 199, 207 reactionary 9, 13, 34–36, 39, 48, 66, 148 reboots 33, 35, 37, 39, 50, 178–182, 187, 190 recession 10, 97–98, 104–106, 128, 157, 200 religion 5, 30, 140, 205 repressed vi, 9–10, 13, 35–36, 39, 41, 43–44, 73, 81–85, 87, 89, 91–93, 142, 150, 178, 186–187, 197, 199, 209 Republicanism 5, 27, 30, 51, 60, 63–64, 102, 131, 152, 154, 157, 159, 161, 163, 171, 177 resilience 9, 57, 66, 70–71, 73–78 resistance 2, 9, 12–13, 33, 55, 57–58, 60–61, 63, 74, 78–79, 111, 113, 150, 154–156, 165, 181, 183–184, 188, 191 Roseanne 13, 15, 180–182, 194 Russia 40, 58, 61, 151 sadism 22, 33, 50, 58, 63, 65, 99, 103, 203 Satan 30, 122, 153 sentimentality 11, 178, 182, 188, 196 sex 4, 13, 28–29, 45–46, 50, 52, 69, 74, 79, 114, 140, 190–191, 204 sexism vi, 1, 9–10, 12, 57, 59–61, 66, 83, 98, 131–132, 139–140, 145, 149 sexualities 1, 13, 35, 44, 47, 50, 62, 67, 70–72, 74–75, 79, 83, 87, 92, 114, 171, 190, 201, 205 Simpsons, The 181, 193–194 slasher 24, 61–62, 70, 103, 155 slavery 1–2, 39, 111, 113–118, 155, 184, 205

Index spectres 45–46, 53, 185–186, 205 stalking 25, 64, 66, 89, 133 stereotypes 3, 60, 69, 88, 114, 155–158, 160–161, 181, 204 subjection 109, 113, 117 sublime 11, 52, 141, 143, 146–149, 209 suicide 71, 77, 102, 203 supernatural 9, 25–26, 28, 73, 75–76, 86, 89–90, 97, 103, 154, 198 supremacy 1, 53, 115–116, 147, 194 technologies 11, 53, 141, 143–146, 148, 150, 153, 162, 165 teenagers 22, 24, 28, 59–60, 64–65, 73, 99, 123, 203 terror 6, 13–14, 25, 66, 117 torture 1, 99, 103–104, 154–155 transgender 9, 43, 46, 49–50, 76, 92, 148, 172, 177 trauma 78, 81–85, 87–94, 116, 155, 180, 187 trolls 26, 148–149, 151 Trumpism 2, 14–15, 21–22, 29–30, 70, 78, 150, 182, 184, 186, 193, 195–199, 205, 209 truth 11, 146, 163–167, 171, 173–174, 182 Twitter 3, 5, 14, 72, 142, 144, 165, 170–171, 209 uncanny 11, 20–21, 23, 33, 87, 109, 141–148, 151, 155, 169, 195, 197–199, 202, 204–208 utopianism 69, 168–169, 174, 199, 208

215

vampire 76, 132, 135–136 vengeance 20, 39, 74 veterans 26–27, 64, 102 Viacom (network) 15, 151, 163 victims 25, 28, 34, 47, 60, 63, 99 Vietnam 6, 15, 24, 66, 93–94, 107, 140 villains 8, 64, 88, 97, 110 visceral 97, 99, 102–103, 116, 189 wars 30, 162, 166, 173, 178 waste 51, 69, 124 wealth 2, 20, 52, 70, 101, 104, 171, 201 werewolf 134–135 whiteness 89, 111–112, 116, 132 witchcraft 122, 142, 146 women 45, 57, 59, 66, 107, 117, 127–128, 140 Wood, Robin 6, 8, 13, 35–36, 53, 58, 66, 81–83, 89, 91–92, 99–100, 104, 107, 139, 208–209 xenophobia 1, 12, 116, 120, 177 YouTube 11, 32, 52, 135, 144, 152–157, 161–163 zeitgeist 13, 35, 160, 167 Žižek, Slavoj 43, 51–52, 82, 94, 180, 194, 209 zombie 51, 70–71, 76–77, 201