I've been thinking about witchcraft lately. I know, that's bizarre, but there's a reason (two, actually). First, I've got a fantasy/horror short story, "The Burning of Sarah Post," under consideration by a couple periodicals, and it's a tale of witchcraft set in a quasi-Puritan past and full of archaic diction and psychedelic imagery. If anything comes of it, you'll be the first to know.
The other reason my thoughts have turned to witchcraft recently is that I was asked to contribute an essay about The Exorcist to a forthcoming book commemorating the film (and the novel on which it was based). The invitation sort of came out of the blue, and I've been trying to think of an angle to approach the essay, something that hasn't been said a hundred times before (always a challenge when dealing with a text that's become such a cultural icon). It seems to me, though, that one might approach the story of The Exorcist as a continuation of a very old tale we've been telling in America for hundreds of years, dating at least back to the Salem witchcraft hysteria: the tale of pre-pubescent girls whose supposed dalliance with malign powers confounds the social order. I won't go into great detail here--in part because I'm still formulating my ideas--but I do wonder why this tale has proven so durable. In an earlier post ("Domestic Terror"), I commented on the pervasiveness of invasion stories in American literature and culture: perhaps because our nation was founded on invasion, we Americans seem to have an obsession with the idea that some alien threat is trying to invade us. But the witchcraft story poses an intriguing variant: while on the one hand it's consistent with the invasion narrative's broad outlines, involving an invisible agent's insinuation into a domestic enclave and the ensuing collapse of personal and social boundaries, its focus on girls just entering sexual maturity is striking.
Maybe this says nothing more than that women historically have been the prime suspects of witchcraft accusations--but that still doesn't answer the question of why adolescent women are featured so prominently in these American versions. What is the particular cultural threat embodied by these youngsters? What is the particular cultural fascination in seeing their bodies spectrally ravaged (and ravished)?
I'll have to do more thinking about this, obviously--in some ways, I'm using this post just to get some of my thoughts on the page--but I'm as eager as anyone to see how it all turns out.
Showing posts with label social alienation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social alienation. Show all posts
Monday, March 29, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Fantasy Cinema and Social Critique: The Case of District 9
I recently watched the film District 9 on DVD. (I avoided it in the theater after hearing it was ultra-violent, and I handle that sort of thing better on the small screen.) It actually wasn't all that violent: lots of distant shots of exploding bodies and blood spattering the camera lens in keeping with the film's pseudo-documentary style, but no real gore by your average horror film's standards. As someone who's fascinated by the processes of social alienation that are explored, exposed, and reinforced in fantasy/sci-fi films, though, I found its commentary on the subject intriguing, if a bit inconsistent.
The plot of the film is simple: an alien mother ship filled with nearly two million crustacean/insectoid creatures stalls above Johannesburg, South Africa, and--in a grotesque parody of the apartheid system from which that nation has only recently distanced itself--these newcomers become the victims of prejudice, speciesism, isolation, recrimination, and violence. The derogatory name "prawns" is applied to them; they dwell in slums separated by fences from the human population; crimelords move into their territory, further straining an already fragile social structure; and an unholy alliance of government officials and corporate interests seeks to exploit their advanced technology after permanently resettling them to what one spokesman finally admits are de facto concentration camps. The film's action unfolds from these events, as some of the aliens resist violently, others are slain by private military forces working for the resettlement agency, and the human head of the operation becomes infected by a virus that slowly transforms him into one of the "prawns." His desperate pursuit of a cure, and his uneasy allegiance with the alien revolutionary who promises to deliver one, provide the film some of its most unnerving and uncanny moments.
But they also pull the film away, to a certain extent, from the social commentary I had taken to be its core. To begin with, these events force the film into a violation of its own stylistic principles, as action involving the infected human and his alien ally necessarily takes place in scenes no documentary camera could capture. And this is a not insignificant concession to form, inasmuch as the documentary style was itself, in the film's early movements, the principal vehicle by which it represented the alienation of the "prawns" as a systemic social practice rather than an individualized or isolated instance of intolerance. I'm reminded of the film Iron Man--a far inferior film, by the way, but one that shares District 9's tendency to personalize the political, in the case of the lesser film by retreating from a promising critique of entrenched militarism into an indictment of particular individuals operating outside the licensed military apparatus. Being, as I said, a far better and smarter film, District 9 never goes as far as Iron Man in whitewashing the political structures of inequity it exposes--but by morphing into a kind of alien buddy-movie, it does tend to displace or soften the critique.
At least, that was my impression on an initial viewing; maybe I'll see it differently next time. But I do wonder why it's so hard to sustain political critique in popular media; I'm not fully satisfied with the usual explanations having to do with the corporate allegiances of the culture industry. I wonder whether there's simply something incompatible between cinematic fantasy and social critique. And if so, I wonder whether as a lover of fantasy film, I'm once again looking for social change in the wrong places.
The plot of the film is simple: an alien mother ship filled with nearly two million crustacean/insectoid creatures stalls above Johannesburg, South Africa, and--in a grotesque parody of the apartheid system from which that nation has only recently distanced itself--these newcomers become the victims of prejudice, speciesism, isolation, recrimination, and violence. The derogatory name "prawns" is applied to them; they dwell in slums separated by fences from the human population; crimelords move into their territory, further straining an already fragile social structure; and an unholy alliance of government officials and corporate interests seeks to exploit their advanced technology after permanently resettling them to what one spokesman finally admits are de facto concentration camps. The film's action unfolds from these events, as some of the aliens resist violently, others are slain by private military forces working for the resettlement agency, and the human head of the operation becomes infected by a virus that slowly transforms him into one of the "prawns." His desperate pursuit of a cure, and his uneasy allegiance with the alien revolutionary who promises to deliver one, provide the film some of its most unnerving and uncanny moments.
But they also pull the film away, to a certain extent, from the social commentary I had taken to be its core. To begin with, these events force the film into a violation of its own stylistic principles, as action involving the infected human and his alien ally necessarily takes place in scenes no documentary camera could capture. And this is a not insignificant concession to form, inasmuch as the documentary style was itself, in the film's early movements, the principal vehicle by which it represented the alienation of the "prawns" as a systemic social practice rather than an individualized or isolated instance of intolerance. I'm reminded of the film Iron Man--a far inferior film, by the way, but one that shares District 9's tendency to personalize the political, in the case of the lesser film by retreating from a promising critique of entrenched militarism into an indictment of particular individuals operating outside the licensed military apparatus. Being, as I said, a far better and smarter film, District 9 never goes as far as Iron Man in whitewashing the political structures of inequity it exposes--but by morphing into a kind of alien buddy-movie, it does tend to displace or soften the critique.
At least, that was my impression on an initial viewing; maybe I'll see it differently next time. But I do wonder why it's so hard to sustain political critique in popular media; I'm not fully satisfied with the usual explanations having to do with the corporate allegiances of the culture industry. I wonder whether there's simply something incompatible between cinematic fantasy and social critique. And if so, I wonder whether as a lover of fantasy film, I'm once again looking for social change in the wrong places.
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