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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 3)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

Links to all previous essays in this series may be found below.

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  1. Succession

As we have seen, the character of Dr. Haynes invokes the evangelical reformers of the English Reformation.  This Reformation was a revolution from above; a top-down change of official ideology in the service of expanding the power and property of the national state and the crown.  It took the form of an ‘enclosing’ of church property, wealth, land, and ideological hegemony by new owners, by the crown, the crown’s state bureaucracy, those sectors of the aristocracy allied with the crown’s project, and those sectors of the rising middle class allied with both.

It is easy to look at Dr Haynes and declare that he had no business ascending to the role of archdeacon because he did so via murder.  But is this correct?  His expectation was that he would be given the post upon the death of Dr Pulteney, and he was right.  All he did was hasten the event.  He achieved his post but the post was always and already his.  How can a world which prizes enterprise and ruthlessness, competition and victory, declare out of the other side of its mouth that it is wrong for him to take the post by force?  By the values of such a civilisation, surely his crimes make him more deserving?  Yes, the church publicly espouses contrary values, publicly despises ambition and cruelty, but then so does Dr Haynes publicly advocate the same worldview.  Is he to be declared unfit for office because he lives by both the ideological claims and the material reality of his institution, his society?

Haynes and his story invoke the spectre of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

It is by no means clear that Macbeth is actually an illegitimate king because he came by his crown by murder.  He is destined to be king.  We know this because the weird sisters see his kingship and its consequences in the future, already written.  And if he achieves the crown of Scotland by deadly competition, so too does Duncan before him, so too does Malcolm after him.  As Richard II says in his own play “they well deserve who know the surest, safest way to get”.

Much as Macbeth is haunted by three witches or weird sisters, so is Haynes haunted by three figures: the carved cat, the carved monk/Death, and the carved Devil.  He does not encounter the Devil explicitly but the Devil character on the stalls is described as having fearsomely long and sharp talons, and Haynes’ facial injuries at his demise are ambiguous: they could be the work of the cat or the clawed Devil – or, in some obscure way, both.  And surely his own crimes would be seen, from within the confines of his own belief system, as diabolical.  Again like Macbeth he is also haunted by women in the sense that Jane Lee’s threat of exposure and blackmail dogs him, his sister’s absence leaves him at the mercy of the supernatural forces in the house, and the entities lurking in the house are repeatedly mistaken for maids moving around.…

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 2)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark.  Here is Part 1 of this essay.  It really is one continuous and continuing piece.

I had no heart to post this last week.  But that was last week.

 

4. Just what kind of Anglican churchman is Dr John Benwell Haynes?

i.

We will start with the most basic trait of the story’s main character: his name.  It is hard to believe that M.R. James used this name without referential intent, since it takes us right back into the heart of the early English Reformation.

Simon Haynes, sometimes Heynes, (c.1495-1552), was, writes Professor Alec Ryrie in The Gospel and Henry VIII – Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, “one of the most well connected evangelicals of the period.”

Simon Haynes attended Queens’ College, Cambridge; the same college where Erasmus studied during his time in England.  Erasmus would have been there at the same time as Haynes, so it seems likely they met.  Erasmus of Rotterdam was not a Protestant – he remained a Catholic and originally refused to take sides in the Luther / anti-Luther debate, eventually coming down against Luther – but his humanist critiques and satires paved the way for reformist, eventually Protestant ideas.  And it is difficult to argue that his 1516 publication of a translation of the New Testament into Latin and Greek had no influence on the Reformation, which began almost immediately afterwards.  1516 was the same year Erasmus left Queens’ College, and in which Haynes graduated and was made a fellow.  After taking holy orders, he continued to rise through the college positions, eventually becoming president (same thing as ‘master’ in most colleges).

In 1533, Haynes was one of the delegates to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s special court at Dunstable Priory, which was tasked with judging the arguments Henry VIII was putting forward for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  Unsurprisingly, Henry’s archbishop and his panel agreed with Henry’s position, and Cranmer declared the marriage annulled.  The following year, Haynes teamed up with Bishop John Skip (or Skypp) – chaplain of now-Queen Anne Boleyn – to preach against papal supremacy at Cambridge.  Haynes then served as an ambassador to France alongside Christopher Mount (or Mont), as an agent of evangelical reformer – and first architect of the English Reformation – Thomas Cromwell.  Their secret mission was to establish lines of communication with Martin Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon, and possibly persuade him to come to England.  As Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Haynes attended the baptism of the baby who would later be crowned Edward VI and oversee the most ideologically and governmentally thoroughgoing phase of England’s Protestant Reformation.  In combination with the arch-persecutor of English Catholics (and future backslider) Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, Haynes accused Sir Thomas Wyatt (Ambassador to Spain, poet, and rumoured lover – or at least adorer – of Anne Boleyn) of unlawful contact with the English Cardinal Reginald Pole. …

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 1)

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On ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

 

  1. Introduction

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was one of the stories that M.R. James wrote in order to perform for his friends and guests at the famous Christmas meetings of the Chit-Chat Club.  It was subsequently published in Contemporary Review in 1910, and then republished in a book entitled More Ghost Stories (a sequel to his first published volume of stories Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) in 1911.  In an introduction, James describes the fictional Barchester Cathedral as “a blend of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford”, and is clearly also riffing on the Barchester of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels.  James was a reader of contemporary fiction.

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was adapted for television by the BBC in 1971.  Under the slightly truncated title ‘The Stalls of Barchester’, this adaptation inaugurated the famous strand of TV films known as the A Ghost Story for Christmas series.

The story was also adapted for television in 2000 by BBC Scotland as one episode of the four part series Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

 

  1. The Story (including total spoileration)

‘The Stalls of Barchester’ is a murder mystery without a mystery and a ghost story without a ghost.

There follows a necessary recitation of the plot.  I strongly urge the reader to experience the story for themselves first.

In the early 19th century, Dr John Benwell Haynes, the unmarried and widely admired precentor of Barchester Cathedral, succeeds to the post of archdeacon after the death of the extremely elderly archdeacon Pulteney.  Pulteney has died in a fall down the stairs, reportedly as a result of a stair rod being left under the carpet by an inefficient maid servant, Jane Lee.  Lee, we hear, has been dismissed.  In contrast to the deaf and senile Pulteney, Haynes is a zealous and efficient administrator.  A big part of his job seems to be to get the tenants on diocese-owned land to start paying their rents again, something the late archdeacon Pulteney permitted to lapse for years (may the angels guard his grave).  It takes Haynes three years to put the affairs of the cathedral and diocese to rights again.  Once this is achieved, things start to go badly for him.

One evening, during prayers in the cathedral, Haynes is touching “an exquisitely modelled figure of a cat” on his choir stall and, instead of wood, feels fur and a living body under his fingers.  On another occasion, he is touching another carved figure – an ambiguous character with a mutilated face and a noose around its neck, cowled like “a monk, or ‘friar of orders grey’”, who seems to represent Death himself – and feels the dank fabric of its robes.

These quotations come from Haynes himself.  James gives us sections from a letter Haynes drafts (but apparently never sends) to Sylvanus Urban, some time before his supernatural experiences begin.  Sylvanus Urban was the pen name of Edward Cave (1691-1754), the founder, editor, and publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine (he thus coined the term ‘magazine’ to refer to a printed periodical). …

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Uncommon Prayer-Books

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(Also: The Crack Down the Spine, Part 2)

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In the last essay, I remarked upon a paradox: M.R. James is thought of as ‘the father of the modern British ghost story’ (etc. etc.) and yet rarely wrote about ghosts as such.  This is not a particularly original observation but it is one that remains, perhaps, under-theorised – something I hope to address.  As also intimated last time, James is a fanatically material writer.  His ghosts are not ghosts but – as we will see in the next essay – cats and carvings, monks and stair carpets, and many other material things besides.

This is not actually as puzzling as it might seem at first glance. In fact, the ‘ghost story’ as we know it does not restrict itself to stories about spectral figures of the dead.  While we separate the uncanny story into various subsections based on content and/or tone – the vampire story, the Weird tale, etc – we also use the term ‘ghost story’ as an umbrella term.  And this is a paradox which goes back to the start of the modern ghost story, itself an inherently modern category as we have already seen in the previous ‘Crack Down the Spine’ essay.

A story about a ghost is simply that: a story with a ghost in it.  A Ghost Story is an example of a particular literary form, which may encompass many more kinds of entities than simple spectres of dead souls.

In the anthologies I read as a young child in my grandparents’ spare room at night, anthologies entitled as collections of Ghost Stories, I found stories featuring not just ghosts but also vampires and werewolves and curses, incomprehensible creatures, inkblots on the fabric of reality, predatory feelings and impressions…  The Ghost Story is a form tending into a genre.  It is a particular kind of expression of a particular class of social feelings, generated by the anxiety, alienation, and vertigo of the modern world.  There is a crack down the spine of the history of the ghost story.  It is a crack which separates the modern Ghost Story from the perennial story about the ghost, to the point of making it debatable whether we are actually talking about one continuous phenomena.  The crack is, of course, modernity.

Just as capitalism adapted phenomena which pre-dated its triumph – such as the nation state – to its own purposes, and in so doing altered it qualitatively as well as quantitatively, to the point where the phenomena are linked by little more than a continuity of terminology, so too did it do this to the story of the supernatural irruption and the uncanny presence.

Long before the Ghost Story there were stories about ghosts.  Pliny tells of a stoic philosopher who moves into a house haunted by a proper chain-rattling spectre which can only be laid (i.e. put to rest) when the phantom’s corpse is discovered and properly buried.  And such stories go back all the way through antiquity, and further back still.  …

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An Evening’s Entertainment

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On Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee (2000, BBC Scotland)

This essay is intended as a light introduction to a series on the ghost story writer M.R. James, some of his stories, and their television adaptations, as well as some related texts and phenomena, which I hope to post fairly regularly over the next few months.

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In 2000, on four evenings over the Christmas period, BBC2 aired a series of half-hour programmes entitled Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

In a previous essay, I wrote a little about my childhood introduction to ghost stories.  I’ve spoken on podcasts about my near-lifelong love of Hammer films.  It will be no surprise then that 24-year-old me tuned in to this series, and recorded the episodes on a home VHS recorder.

Three of the episodes have long been available on the various versions of the BFI DVD/blu-ray box-set of television Ghost Stories for Christmas, whereas one – ‘The Ash Tree’ – was never released owing to rights issues over music used in it.  The BBC – with its special rights arrangements – used part of the musical score by Howard Shore for the 1986 film The Name of the Rose in the background of the Ash Tree episode, which subsequently made it impossible to release commercially.  The episode has since been repeated – for the first time in years – on BBC Four, as part of the resurrection of the whole idea of British television ghost stories at Christmas which began in the mid-aughts.  For a while, however, the only way people could see the Ash Tree episode of the Christopher Lee Christmas Ghost Stories was the rip of my own old VHS recording which I uploaded to YouTube.

While I was already enamoured with ghost stories and Horror in general, it was this 2000 series which began my fascination with the work of M.R. James.  With respect, I am not so interested in the man, except insofar as his life illuminates his work.  (L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle misquotes Flaubert in ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’.)  But this television series was a quiet revelation to me.  A slow revelation too, as it only gradually dawned on me how great it was, and how great was its source material.

These episodes are the greatest screen adaptations of the work of M.R. James.  That is a bit of a claim, given the love and esteem in which the 1970s Lawrence Gordon Clark films are held.  Before I (sort of) defend it, let me talk around the issue a little.

As mentioned above, in the early aughts the BBC suddenly decided to remember its old tradition of adapting ghost stories – most famously the work of M.R. James – for Christmas dramas, and to resurrect the tradition.  (The early aughts were, of course, famously the moment when the BBC resurrected one of its other vintage series, with great success.)  The resurrected Christmas ghost story drama genre soon came under the stewardship of Mark Gatiss, and he also presented a documentary about M.R.…

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“The Earth Hath Bubbles as the Water Has” – On ‘Don’t Look Now!’ (1973)

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The ideas in this essay were developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea.  It is respectfully – perhaps presumptuously – dedicated to Frederic Jameson.

 

“And so, no more than the seasons to its unflowering inlets of the sea, do modern years bring any change to the gothic city… I wished to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings…” – Marcel Proust, The Captive

 

  1. You Can Skip This Bit

Criticism is the art of reading in public. There is precious little value to such an activity if it is not itself creative.  Wilde called criticism “a creation within a creation”.  But, as with all creativity, it produces better results if it is kept within certain limits, if it is a game with a particular context, social objective, and self-imposed rules.  That – as Wittgenstein illuminated – is how language, and hence meaning, itself works.  Meaning cannot exist outside of such a game anymore than a mind can exist outside of a body.

The purpose of the game of criticism is to approach the text not only with oneself (as a reader) but also with itself.  It is to interrogate a text with its own textness, its own form and content, but also its own social embeddedness, its producedness, its own material and social history.  If a text ‘says’ certain things, it is the job of criticism to suggest why, to base such suggestions not only on the text’s material self but also upon the social selves that made it, and their social and historical positioning.

The solution to every riddle is that it is a riddle.  The solution of every puzzle is that it is a puzzle.  A jigsaw puzzle is not the picture which is formed when all the pieces are assembled in a certain ‘correct’ way; a jigsaw puzzle is the entropic mess in the box when you buy it.  Without its fragmentation, it is just a picture.  A maze is not the path which takes you to the centre; it is the obscuring of such a path.  The meaning of a maze is not that straight path; the meaning of a maze is that it is not just a straight path, and yet is nevertheless walked.  The meaning of a jigsaw puzzle is the game whereby assembling it in a certain way gives one the illusion of reversing entropy.  The meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is not a small plastic box with a different primary colour covering each side; the meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is the process of integrating each and every flat plane of colour.  The meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is also the history of consumer capitalism, nostalgia, youth, the semiotics of era, and so on.

We cannot solve a work of art such as the one under consideration here, the film Don’t Look Now! (1973), directed by Nicholas Roeg, based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier which was published in 1971. We cannot decrypt it or decipher it, as it shows us itself, with its own self-interrogations which lead nowhere. …

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Ending Explained (Part 4)

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Final part of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994).  The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea.

In The Mouth of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft, Alan Moore’s Providence, metafiction, the ‘fourth wall’, China Miéville’s ‘arche-fossil’, and the Marxian ‘real abstraction’.

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In the graphic novel Providence, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Jacen Burrows, H.P. Lovecraft is bred to be a redeemer or messiah by a secret society or cult whose aim is nothing less than the rupturing of the division between reality and fiction to permit the re-entry into reality of the Old Ones, the Old Gods, the Outer Monstrosities, the presiding cosmic entities of the haute Weird.  In an early twentieth century America which seems to partly be the world in which Robert Chambers sets The Repairer of Reputations (first story in The King in Yellow), closeted gay journalist Robert Black makes a tour of lovecraftian events and characters which represent the activities of the cult – events and characters which directly mirror and reiterate events and characters we know from Lovecraft stories.  He meets H.P. Lovecraft, who listens to his tales and reads the material he has amassed.  Lovecraft then turns this material into his own fiction.  Mirroring the rise of Lovecraft as a massively freighted cultural touchstone in the real world, Lovecraft’s fiction then goes on to reach a critical mass of critical appreciation and cultural belief, which triggers the apocalypse desired and engineered by the cult.  As a result of a concentration of semiotic hegemony and cultural influence, Lovecraft’s fiction comes into being.  Lovecraft’s fiction, and his cultural footprint, thus becomes a conduit for outside entities who take over humanity’s collective consciousness, bringing our nightmares into reality.  The Old One entities are depicted as a kind of corporate cloud of sentience which, via its human representatives among the cultists, wants and engineers this turn of events.  

I am not in a position to engage in responsible criticism of Providence itself, having only read it once – and that a few years ago – but it seems to owe something to John Carpenter’s 1994 movie In The Mouth of Madness, or at least to be mining a startlingly similar seam, albeit with a more dense, literary, and specifically referential (though not reverential) approach to Lovecraft in particular.  

Moore has the advantage of being able to consider the recent extraordinary upsurge of interest in Lovecraft, and the history of Lovecraft’s growing bottom-up success which fed into it, even as he – Moore – contributes to it, enfolding his own consideration into the phenomenon he is thinking about and vice versa.

One of the things about John Carpenter as an artist is that he sometimes seems almost uncannily ‘of his moment’ but also intensely prescient of forthcoming cultural preoccupations.  As with Halloween, The Thing, and They Live!, with In The Mouth of Madness, Carpenter was well ahead of the curve.  …

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Ending Explained (Part 2)

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Part 2 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994), and other things via it.  The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman.  It also features a little self-plagiarism.

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There’s a documentary, originally aired on British television in 1999, called Pornography: A Secret History of Civilisation.  After a couple of quite decent episodes, the series starts considering the then-present and the then-future.  It’s stuffed with comment from ‘cultural critics’ and ‘social theorists’, who generalise about what ‘we’ are becoming – with ‘we’ supposedly standing for all humanity while actually implicitly referring to the middle classes in the developed world in the era of pre-general crisis neoliberalism.  A little surprisingly even in 1999, the oppression of women, the objectification of female bodies, patriarchy, sexism, etc., are issues barely touched upon.  (I am resolutely Sex Work positive, but there are ways of talking about the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal power relationships instantiated in the pornography business without stigmatising sex workers.)  Alongside the theorists, there are words from entrepreneurs or capitalists, and yet the word or topic ‘capitalism’ is barely properly mentioned.  It is silently present as the ‘civilisation’ of the title.  Despite the profound thinkerizing about porn’s supposed journey into ‘the mainstream’ there is precious little time left for wondering who sets the agenda of the mainstream.  Media ownership is not a topic, except for the times when a handful of porntrepreneurs (presented as pioneers and farseeing cultural trendsetters) get to spout their self-seeking spin.  In the midst of much pontificating about the meaning of things from the perspective of the business owner or the consumer, there is hardly any attention paid to the perspective of the worker, of the (if you’ll pardon me) working stiffs getting screwed.  Porn is, apparently, an industry with consumers but no producers.  To the extent that producers do appear, the emphasis is on the employers rather than the employees.  When sex workers appear, the emphasis is firmly on self-employment, on the sex worker as a petty bourgeois individualist.  You might argue that this turned out to be prescient, what with the rise of OnlyFans and the sexual gig-economy.  And yes, the series manages to notice that the internet will change things.  (There is nothing about the inequalities of internet access, or access to media more generally, in any of the discussion of porn consumption and ‘cybersex’.)  But the series has an entirely mistaken idea of the context in which such changes will play out.  Its idea of the future is an artefact of its own moment.  That by itself is okay.  Every idea of the future is an artefact of its own moment.  The interesting thing about ideas of the future is precisely what they tell us about our own moment.

All the hallmarks of the late-90s intellectual milieu are to be found in this text.  The social and political cynicism masquerading as consumerist utopianism.  Utopianism itself stripped of all noble and liberationist inflections and fused with a kind of gleeful dystopianism, reflecting the way that the post-Cold War intellectual landscape, with its End of History vibe, saw the future horrors and joys of unfettered capitalism as being equally inevitable, and then celebrated this with a knowingly sick grin of elitist torpor and overdosed irony. …

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Ending Explained (Part 1)

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Part 1 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994).  Some of the ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman.

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John Carpenter’s late – and last – classic In the Mouth of Madness (1994) is famously metafictional.  In the final scene of the film, the ‘protagonist’ John Generic Name… sorry, I mean John Trent… goes into a cinema which is showing a film called In the Mouth of Madness, advertised as starring John Trent, and watches himself on the screen, watches the film we’ve just seen, essentially.  He watches himself declaring repeatedly (in alternate cuts of the same scene, featuring Sam Neill’s varying line deliveries) that he is nobody’s puppet and that the surreal things he’s experiencing are “not reality”.  Apparently overcome by the realisation that he is, in fact, a fictional character in a film, John Trent begins laughing.  His laughter gradually goes from being hysterical in the figurative sense to hysterical in the literal sense.  As he starts having a panic attack, the film – the one we are watching – cuts to the credits.

Carpenter does not put ‘Starring Sam Neill’ on the poster.  He does not break the fourth wall directly.  Within the frame of the text, the barriers between reality – the life of John Trent, the world in which Hobb’s End is a fictional town created by author Sutter Cane – and fiction – the world of Hobb’s End and the monstrosities that exist there – breaks down, and the two are shown to be essentially one and the same.  But the text does not breach its own actual limits.  The text does not depict the barriers between itself and us, the viewers, breaking down.  The metafictional apocalypse depicted on screen does not seem to affect us, the viewers.

In the Mouth of Madness landed in 1994.  In 1994 I was in my second year of an English & Philosophy degree.  I was wading through Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Kristeva…  It was the high academic fashion of the moment.

Lacan famously used topology as a source of metaphors and analogies, even if he himself denied that they were metaphors and analogies.  He describes the neurotic subject as a torus or möbius strip – or as a cut on a torus or möbius strip.  Putting aside the question of his actual knowledge of topology or mathematics more generally, we can appreciate the image of the circulating, edgeless, closed-loop shape as a way to visualise neurosis.  At the risk of sounding like Zizek, we can easily apply this image to In the Mouth of Madness, in which a sequence of events plays out which is easily interpreted as the experience of paranoid neurosis on the part of an individual subject – indeed is so interpreted within the frame of the story – and which loops back upon itself at multiple points.  Not only does the framing story provide an exactly symmetrical shape to the story – Trent is put in the lunatic asylum at the start; Trent escapes the lunatic asylum at the end – but the inner story, the picture within the frame, is recursive.  …

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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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