kubrick – Eruditorum Press

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August 24, 2020

Get Out of My House

Christine KelleyDreams of OrgononDreams of Orgonon, kate bush, kubrick, shining1

CW: This entire blog post discusses domestic abuse, sexual violence, and severe emotional manipulation at length and in triggering detail.

“The little fucker had thrown my papers all over the floor. All I tried to do was pull him up… a momentary loss of muscular coordination.”
Jack Torrance, The Shining.

***

The woman who raised me had seemingly few qualms about shrieking her disapproval at me several times per day. Usually she accomplished her purpose with words, but sometimes she would punctuate her castigations with a punitive strike of her hand. It was unclear to me what this accomplished beyond making me afraid of my own parent. If that was her purpose, she succeeded impressively.

In the summer of 2015, I learned that there was a familial precedent for my birth-giver’s violent tendencies. For a couple months, I stayed with her parents while she worked abroad. After a minor argument in which I told the family that an extended episode of severe depression would impair my ability to join the family on a daytrip, my grandfather trailed me to my guest bedroom and aggressively pushed me through the door. As I attempted to raise myself from the floor and understand what had just happened, my grandfather stormed into the room, leaned on the floor, and pinned me down with his thumb close enough to my windpipe to be threatening. I recall little of the following altercation, except for when I was called an “evil little shit,” “an unruly child,” and worth reporting to the police. When the cops eventually arrived at the house (a process that entailed my grandfather disconnecting the landline while I barricaded myself in my room as my then-mother pounded on the door and begged me not to call the police), they concurred with my family. I was told later that my ambiguously defined ill behavior was out of line and repeat incidents could call for juvenile detention. The event was left unaddressed.

Months later, my birth-giver pressured me into emailing her father an apology. At that point, I acquiesced to the idea that I was a delinquent whose behavior disrupted and hurt the whole family. It felt like a resolution. I was at peace with my family, insofar as one can maintain a truce with a person who remorselessly assaulted them. The fatuousness of viewing abuse stories as having a clear-cut beginning or ending did not occur to me. I could do nothing but retreat inward and shrink, hoping desperately that I could be small enough to escape from the small-minded capriciousness of the people who should have raised me.

***

The Dreaming sees Kate Bush turning towards an epistemological centering of subconscious and repressed emotions. It calls to the listener, inviting them to unleash their trauma, rage, and fear in torrents of vital and horrible catharsis. Bush reveals that the adolescent optimism of her previous albums, while real and legitimate, masked deep-rooted emotions beyond neophyte positivity and bravado. While those other albums (particularly the doleful Lionheart and sometimes Delphic Never for Ever) contain great darkness themselves, The Dreaming sees Bush unleashing the id, allowing the powerful emotiveness of her work to reveal its full breadth and ability to be furious, wretchedly disconsolate, and full of hurt.…

January 2, 2012

The Empire of Vanilla

Jack Graham70s, alienation, autons, capitalism, commodity fetishism, complacent fanboy scum, hauntology, imperialism, kubrick, marx, marxism, race, richard seymour, robert holmes, spearhead from space, tentacles, the shining, weird3

Some things I’ve noticed about ‘Spearhead from Space’

There’s a lot of wood in this story.

This suggests a contrast, a conflict even, between older forms of production – the appearance of the hospital, and the Seeleys’ cottage, suggest artisanship – and newer industrial technology and mass production, represented by the factory and the evil plastic which creeps out of it.

There are lots of workers in this story. There’s a Nurse.

There’s Mullins.

Mullins, one of the many wage labourers in this story…
seen here in the act of labouring for his wage.

There’s a workman in the street, talking to the copper before he investigates the (off-screen) breaking of shop windows (implying the role of the police as protectors of private property and business). There’s the guard at the front gate of UNIT HQ. There’s the guide at Madame Tussauds.

There are the workers in the plastics factory.

I don’t know, but I’d guess that these women – together with the male worker
seen earlier in the episode, operating heavy machinery – are actual workers
in the factory where these scenes were filmed. One of the women is Asian,
which is a pretty big clue that she’s a ‘real person’ rather than an extra.

Some of the workers are ‘fake’. There are Auton Porters who help kidnap the Doctor. There’s an Auton secretary at the factory. Note how the Nestenes still employ a young woman in a short skirt as a secretary, even if she is made of plastic… but then such women are usually treated like mannequins in practice anyway.

These waxen-faced, blank, zombified workers strongly suggest an extreme form of alienation: line hypnosis, a psychological condition where people are lulled into passive, unresponsive fugue states by constant repetition of the same mechanical tasks – found most famously in people who perform extremely simple tasks at conveyor belts. More broadly, it suggests the deadened, flattened affect of people who find their Fordist jobs dull beyond belief.

Think this is a stretch? But the story makes a point of commenting upon automation. The monsters are called Autons. We see, as noted above, faceless factory workers at their tedious, repetitive, assembly-line jobs. And General Scobie, the swaggering old reactionary establishment figure par excellence, upon hearing that the plastics factory has become largely automated (which means a load of people have lost their jobs), makes a crack about automation being a splendid idea because “you don’t find machines going on strike!” In other words, workers should be treated like and behave like machines…. and replacing them with machines is the next best thing.

There is much literal commodification – often of people – in this story. Ransome is paid off… even his name suggests a payment for a person. Seeley tries to sell his “thunderball” and nearly gets his wife killed. Mullins sells the Doctor to the journos.

“I understand you pay for stories?”

But ‘Spearhead’ really harps on about life being commodified… most particularly by its concentration upon production.…