the gothic

February 20, 2015

Knock Knock

Jack Graham depression, hauntology, horror, the babadook, the gothic, the uncanny 6

Spoilers.

So, my pre-ordered copy of the much-critically-fawned-upon ‘horror’ film The Babadook arrived this morning. And I’ve just watched it.

What a load of crap.

Look, I get what was being attempted here. And it was attempted with a lot of sincerity, and some excellent acting. But, really, what was the point? Depression is a terrible thing. Yes, we know. We all bloody know. Even those of us lucky enough to have escaped direct experience of depression know that we have escaped something terrible. Grief is a terrible thing too. Likewise. It’s better to connect with and love your kids than to not. Yes. I don’t have kids and I know that. These are trite morals.

Of course, there’s no reason why you couldn’t make a film carefully exploring these issues, delineating the experience of suffering from grief and depression so bad that it paralyses even your ability to love your own child. But if that’s what you want to talk about, do so. Make a film about depression. Make a film about mental illness. Make a film about a nervous breakdown. Make it with sensitivity, and with the space and attention these issues deserve. The Babadook isn’t that film, though it seems to be under the impression that it kind-of might be.

If, on the other hand, you want to make a ghost story, then make a ghost story. But don’t make a film which uses the aesthetics of the ghost story as obvious and simplistic metaphors for depression and mental illness, especially if you’re going to spend the entire runtime of the film essentially screaming “THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR DEPRESSION!!!!” at the audience, as if you blatantly don’t trust them to twig.

It’s possible that someone who has actually suffered from depression may disagree with me here, and I shall respect that disagreement from my lucky positionality, but it seems to me that all we get in The Babadook are trite morals dressed up in dark cloaks. ‘DON’T LET HIM IN’ says the book about the monster that will creep into your life through looks and words, attack you in bed, and get under your skin. Well thanks. I’m sure people suffering from debilitating depression never thought of that. The story seems to also imply that, once in, depression is almost certain to lead to murder-suicide if left unchecked… which seems a dubious message to be sending out about the plight of millions of perfectly normal, innocent, non-dangerous people who are suffering from a disease. Also, depression would appear to be a monster that attacks without much in the way of a social origin. The monster sneaks into your life because of loss and boredom and family difficulties, not because of wider social problems. Moreover, the monster must be slain by the lone individual deciding to belt up. Apparently, according to this film, all you have to do to defeat the monster of depression is to pull yourself together. Even at the point where you are a slavering, knife-wielding homicidal maniac who is breaking the necks of pets (a cheap, obvious and predictable shot that one, by the way) and attempting to strangle your own kid, all you have to do is summon up the will-power to shout down your inner demons. …

January 20, 2015

American Auton

Jack Graham american sniper, auteur theory, cinema, clint eastwood - closet communist, romantics, the babadook, The Enlightenment, the gothic 2

One thing has become clear: Clint Eastwood is actually a deeply left-wing, anti-imperialist auteur with a profoundly sceptical and cynical attitude to America, war and patriotism.

It’s the fake baby that proves it.

A sentimentalised emblem of American family life… represented on screen as something blatantly unreal, synthetic, cheap, ersatz, evidently and transparently fake… and yet none of the ostensibly admirable icons of American values notice it! Instead the fake baby is cooed over like a beautiful, perfect, inspirational, precious, living child… even as Bradley Cooper (who must have been in on Eastwood’s satirical joke at the expense of red-state America, the Pentagon and all so-called ‘Heartland values’) brazenly waggles the mannequin’s little plastic hand and pretends the baby is moving by itself.

Let’s repeat that: he pretends the baby is moving. In this we see not only a Swiftian subversion of the exploitation of children as a lachrymose pavlovian trigger for tears of jingoistic pride in the eyes of America’s right-wing ideologues, but also a deeply disturbing reminder of all those babies – blown to pieces, dissolved in white phosphorous, or starved – who will never move on their own ever again thanks to the rampant violence of American military adventurism.

The symbol of America’s bright and moral future is literally a dead, hollow, plastic replica… and none of the characters notice. Too brainwashed by flags and Fox News and the 4th of July to see the cold, lifeless truth even when they hold it. And the idealised American child, the child of the patriot who has killed again and again for the US imperium, is also a reminder of the countless really dead babies that America has left in its wake across the globe.

Moreover, we – the audience – are evidently supposed to pretend we don’t notice. And he’s tricked loads of reactionaries into doing just that. Praising this superficially jingoistic, neo-con movie while silently passing over an insultingly blatant (and, on the face of it, ludicrous) piece of diegetic disruption.

Eastwood – who is obviously secretly more far-left than Michael Moore – has trolled the entire country. He’s even trolled those critics who have pointed out the fakeness of the baby! Do they think he doesn’t know it’s obviously fake? How myopic are these people? How myopic are the liberal critics of the film who have totally failed to comprehend the depth of Eastwood’s scabrous, scathing subversion? Eastwood has placed a blatant and horrifying truth about fakeness and sentimentality right in front of the entire United States… and he has stood back and let us watch as they all fail to see it.

It’s Eastwood’s most ascerbic bit of leftist absurdism, his most acidically situationist bit of surrealist theatre since the talking-to-the-empty-chair masterpiece (a performance of inspired performative lunacy that he managed to trick the GOP into letting him do on stage at their conference!).

It’s also possibly the most devastatingly subtle – yet also furiously dyspeptic and radical – comment on modern America in recent cinema.

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