Eruditorum Press

The Coalition of Chaos

gothic marxism

The Hidden Abode

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On The Boy (2016).  Spoilers, and CW for references to psychological and physical abuse.

 

The Boy, a film from 2016, written by Stacey Menear and directed by William Brent Bell, has been largely-forgotten, but deserves better.  It tries to be to patriarchy what Get Out, released the following year, would be to racism.

The film was marketed as a specimen of the creepy haunted doll subgenre of supernatural Horror, which enjoyed a rather half-hearted renaissance in the wake of the massive success of The Conjuring in 2012, and its breakout star (and best actor) Annabelle.  The Boy spends a good part of its first two acts pretending to be just such a creepy haunted doll movie… though precisely how hard its pretending is open to question, as we will see.

It’s a surprise to me that I like this film as much as I do.  Firstly, the director, William Brent Bell, is generally a purveyor of crap.  Misogynistic crap, in one marked instance.  Secondly, The Boy does things which I generally – and ideologically – dislike.  It has a ‘twist’ ending which…

If you’re reading on, I’m assuming you have either seen the movie or don’t care

…which supposedly recontextualizes the entire film, and makes it clear that, while you may have thought you were watching a story about a creepy haunted doll, you were actually watching a story with no supernatural elements whatever, beyond the usual implausibilities built into most movies via the aesthetic ideology of ‘realism’.

I do not like ‘twist’ endings.  I especially do not like ‘twist’ endings which also function as ‘narrative substitution’.  Like fourth wall breaking, I generally find narrative substitution to be a cheap trick which can give the appearance of cleverness while actually saying very little, and generally unravelling the text’s coherence of theme and character development.

I do not like stories which appear to be supernatural but which turn out to have a ‘natural’ explanation.  I do not even particularly like stories which maintain an ambiguity as to whether or not the events of the story are supernatural.  Firstly, such stories tend to cheat.  The ambiguity tends to be a pretence.  In order to manufacture the supposed ambiguity the story must impose an overpowering natural reading, even if it pretends not to.

More importantly, for me, by undermining or eschewing the supernatural, a supernaturally-inflected film cheats itself of the vast and fertile potentialities of polysemy that is the uncanny, the symbolic, and the truly irrational, confining itself instead to the banal personal irrational of the individual disordered psyche.  The great strength of uncanny storytelling is that it deals with the generalised irrational.  Irrationality as society, as history, as life.  It depicts characters experiencing a world that is irrational – and hopelessly so – all around them, and deep in its structure.  I am convinced that this hits closer to a true and visceral expression of the experience of living in modernity.

The Boy does all the stuff I dislike.  Its twist recontextualises the film, substitutes one narrative for another, and removes the supernatural from the story, substituting one disordered psyche for what looked like an irrational universe.  …

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The Crack Down the Spine – Part 1

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Opening a consideration of the Ghost Story, drawing on…

 

…the valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled… *** …a Marxist genealogy fascinated with the irrational aspects of social processes, a genealogy that both investigates how the irrational pervades existing society and dreams of using it to effect social change. Gothic Marxism has often been obscured in the celebrated battles of mainstream Marxism, privileging a conceptual apparatus constructed in narrowly Enlightenment terms. The Enlightenment, however, was always already haunted by its Gothic ghosts… 

Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination

 

Miracles; murders; demons driven out and stones roiled from tombs. The cheap glamour did not taint the sense beneath. It was only, in the natural history of the mind, the bright feathers that drew the species to mate with its secret self.

Clive Barker, The Forbidden

 

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I first encountered ghost stories in the sense I mean the term, the modern Ghost Story, in the spare room of the paternal grandparents’ bungalow.  I used to stay with them for a week or two every summer holiday when I was a kid.  They – and I suppose I mean my grandfather really – used that room to store the books he didn’t want on display.  Alongside all the old issues of Readers Digest, and the condensed novels, and my father’s old football and cricket annuals, there were lots of old books.  I don’t mean old books in the sense of dusty, leather-bound tomes, their pages wormy and crumbling, attached by chains to the shelves.  I don’t mean Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or In Praise of Folly.  I don’t mean the Tractate Middoth or the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred or The King in Yellow.  I mean from the 1950s and 60s.  Cheap little paperbacks, and hardbacks with tatty paper jackets of at most two colours, both usually yellow, bearing artless illustrations and prices in shillings and pence.  There were more recent paperbacks too.  All dogeared and ragged, some losing their yellow pages when opened, their glue binding turning to powder, their spines cracked.  The anthologies of science fiction stories and ghost stories were the ones that grabbed little me.  The numbered Fontana collections with their amazingly eerie covers.  The trashier ones covered in studio staged photos of cobweb-draped skulls.  It was here that I first encountered Lovecraft, the two Jameses (M.R. and Henry), the two Bensons (A.C. and E.F.), Machen, Hodgson, and Blackwood.  Oliver Onions and Saki.  Dickens and Poe and Stoker and Le Fanu.  And lesser lights like Chetwynd-Hayes, and outright inferiors whose names I don’t remember – but which I often liked best at the time, if I’m honest.  And so on.  

Of course, this wasn’t my introduction to stories about ghosts.  But it was my introduction to Ghost Stories.  

 

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If you come to think of it, the one thing which the human mind cannot grasp is the finite, not the infinite, the temporary, not the eternal.

…

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These Things of Darkness – Part 1

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Dismembered Bits and Pieces of an Introduction;

A Fingerpost Pointing in Various Directions, Some Wiser to Travel Than Others

 

*

It would be obvious and banal to repeat the observation, employed by every hack journalist tasked with writing some bit of Dracula fluff, that “the Count will never lie down”.  Similarly, it would be obvious and banal to liken the spread of Dracula around the world and throughout culture to the exponential, viral expansion of vampirism that would ensue if vampires were actually real.  It would be no more than stating the fact that Dracula is a successful commodity or brand. That is what successful commodities or brands do. They reproduce. Seemingly without human input and out of human control, to the point of threatening people.  They seem to do this despite the fact that their reproduction is actually a result of human production. As with vampires, commodities are reproduced by the parasitism upon, and negation of, the human subject. Capital is the vampire battening on us, as Marx saw.  Commodity production hollows people out. Capital expands as humanity shrinks. The similarity between the viral commodity and Dracula is a tautology, since it has been so successful precisely because it expresses the underlying mechanism of its own success.

*

Dracula and Frankenstein are inextricably linked.  Mutually dependant. But like many things that are inextricably linked and mutually dependant they are also irresolvably separate and antagonistic.  About the only thing they have in common is their moment of conception. As David McNally pointed out, both were conceived in the course of a single night in 1816, during which Mary Shelley became heavy with Frankenstein and Lord Byron with Dracula.  It is tempting to look at the evening as a copulation between these two, from which both came away pregnant. Dracula, it is true, gestated longer than Frankenstein. He was born almost immediately (in authorial time) whereas Dracula took longer. He was transplanted from Byron into Polidori, and then into Stoker, with much genetic material contributed along the way by Le Fanu and others.  Ironically, it was Dracula who had to be assembled from the bits and pieces of other characters.

*

Franco Moretti – great Marxist critic and himself, it transpires, predatory monster – wrote a famous essay, ‘The Dialectic of Fear’, interpreting Dracula and Frankenstein as representing – to describe his argument crudely – bourgeoisie and proletariat. 

Frankenstein assembles his creature from many human parts, the parts of the dismembered poor, as the proletariat was constructed in the era of primitive accumulation during which the book was written.  The creature is corporate, its individuality and selfhood the subjects of contestation.  It is now called ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ in the same way that a worker is said to be ‘a Ford worker’ (Moretti’s analogy).  Its creator draws back from it in horror, recognising his future gravedigger in his own creation. It is feared that the creature will be the progenitor of a ‘new race’, a ‘race of devils’, much as the new global proletariat was constructed using new racial categories, and seen as a new and terrifying phenomenon that threatened to override the world by breeding too much, or by more consciously political means.…

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Turning the Tables

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“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”

– Karl Marx, Capital vol.1

Consciously or not, a lion’s share of SF/Fantasy is concerned with just this.  Almost to the point of running with Marx’s ‘great idea for a story!’.

It’s also a great illustration that the best Marxism is Gothic Marxism.  A Marxism which recognises the uncanny, the weird, the surreal, the fantastic, as both truthful expression and invaluable heuristic.  The real world is made so strange, so bass-ackwards, so haunted and haunting, so alien by capitalism, that only historical materialism informed by the uncanny and the dreamlike can truly capture it.…

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