I adore horror. I blame it on watching Nosferatu (B/W 1922) when I was 7. Darkened room. Middle of the afternoon. Slept with my sheets over my neck for years (years) after.
I watched It Follows & The Babadook back to back & It Follows completely impressed me. No spoilers so all I’ll say is – A super simple horror conceit. Totally effective.
It creeped me out for days and I realized It Follows reworks a very simple horror device central to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that occurs in the moment the creature comes to life and looks at Frankenstein:
‘…by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs…..
He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs.’
Frankenstein’s horrified response is rooted in becoming (in Laura Mulvey’s terms) the object of the gaze and the shift in power that occurs in that instant. Lots more to say but you need to see it first.
The Babadook riffs on another classic in the supernatural horror genre, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. (minor spoilers). The film plays off the mother’s loss and her psychological state as possible set-ups for the horror as it unfolds. And like James’ Screw, the story plays out with delicious ambiguity. Of the two, It Follows is still creeping under my skin. Depending on the day, out of the blue, I’ll see someone & there it is. The best kind of horror.
Prufrock Descending documents an investigation of mood shifts in T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem, “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.” This interactive website is the result of a collaborative investigation in reading moods undertaken as a class project (150 students!) in ENG 287 The Digital Text (University of Toronto). We engaged in passionate debates re. tagging moods via phrases, lines, and stanzas, and wrestled with the subjective nature of literary analysis (training & expertise be damned!). The interactive poem offers three version reflecting more expansive and more fine-grained readings as there was no way to arrive a definitive single reading.
From the site:
From Conrad Aiken’s early 1916 review, Eliot’s dramatic monologue has had almost a century of being read as a psychological character study exploring the fluent mutability of an anxious, indecisive self-consciousness. Key to this interpretative approach is the dynamic interplay and range of emotions that Prufrock voices and which are readily discernible to both the scholarly and common reader (to borrow Virginia Woolf’s term). Undertaken as a collaborative TEI encoding project by the students in The Digital Text, a second year English course (University of Toronto, Fall 2014), our initial question approaching this text was whether we could map the moods articulated in the poem as we as readers perceived them? What would the aggregate of our collective readings look like? Would we see a marked convergence of opinion in our close readings? Or would we see striking divergences? What we discovered was both. Remarkably, as we dove deeper into our project, what was increasingly foregrounded was the ambiguity of reading and the instability of literary analysis as a methodological process. To paraphrase one student’s response, ‘the whole poem could be defined as expressing a single mood and then the TEI process challenges the reader to parse the nuances.’ The collaborative class process of deciding on a list of mood terms became an investigation of the rationales for individual close readings and a realization that there is no way to determine or argue for a definitive reading of mood and meaning in Eliot’s poem.
Just stumbled on this webdoc – Montreal based with an intriguing description
“The Saint-Laurent borough uses Picbois Productions to document the process of Integrated Urban Revitalization (IUR) underway in the Chameran neighborhood. The web documentary “Neighbors” allows to follow the evolution of this sector through neighborhood life and especially through the eyes of the citizens of Chameran the heart of this major project on a human scale.”
I’m off to Halifax end of Feb. to join the Women Making Waves Conference & crafting a transmedia masterclass. Looking forward to connecting with the community on the East Coast!
Watching the end of ‘Coda,’ my daughter and I were pretty much traumatized, like so many other WD fans pouring out their ‘NOOOOOS!” on Twitter. During the Talking Dead, we were pretty much silent, with small outbursts as to how unfair, and how unexpected, and how if someone had to die, there were a number of other characters who seemed to be much more logically set-up to exit in that finale episode. Gabriel seemed to be heading towards a self-sacrifice that would give him some redemption as a character. There were so many other potential story lines the lost character had yet to play out.
To get straight to the point and to borrow from Daniel Libeskind, ‘great art communicates spirit,’ and that’s exactly what the writers’ room decision to arbitrarily kill off a character who was just beginning to come into her own failed to do. Robert Kirkman, the comic book artist who created the original Walking Dead comic and who is Executive Producer / writer on the tv adaptation, explained the death on a shell-shocked post-episode Talking Dead as reflective of the reality of what would happen in a zombie apocalypse. Some people are just going to die.*
That’s true. That’s exactly what life does. That’s not what art has to do. To quote Libeskind again, ‘great art communicates spirit.’ The writers, producers, directors and actors have absolutely communicated the moral core of The Walking Dead. Through all of the great moments in the show, the emotional resonance of the show springs from the question of survival at what cost. Cannibalism is the final expression of that, the step beyond or outside of humanity. Art gives us a medium of expression where we as immersed viewers can defy existentialism after a century of great crises that have justified for many a loss of faith in humanity, in God or whatever spiritual beliefs you might follow.
We’ve had over a century now of art rendering the existentialist’s dilemma (Kafka, Sartre, Beckett…). The Walking Dead series has repeatedly reached the level of great art by taking us back to the moral core of humanity and fans now have an expectation & trust in the writers’ ability to create great moments. The emotional and moral resonance of the long arc to season 4’s loss of Hershel and the aftermath. And for horror, the soul-jerking reveal of Gareth eating Bob while chatting with him by fire light, which reaches and maybe, maybe, surpasses Dante’s Ugolino, condemned to the final circle of hell for eating his children while locked in a tower for treachery.
The outpouring of grief for Beth is, I would argue, a response to what we all know, that her death was without meaning. It did not change anything. It did not alter or restore a balance. It reinforces existentialism in a world where existentialism may be the pragmatic reality yet it also functions as a choice. To eat. Not to eat. Humanity at what cost. The real challenge is in finding and asserting meaning in contexts where that has been lost.
Strangely, the last few episodes have increasingly brought religious symbolism back into the show. Gabriel’s church, the Madonna statue on the van dashboard in Daryl and Carol’s escape. Why bother with all that layering of meaning and loss of meaning, of faith and loss of faith, if the world the Walking Dead is now one that the writers room will treat as an arbitrary killing field? That’s not why I turn to art or what I expect from great art.
(yes. there is a petition to bring Beth back. but they can’t. cuz she’s dead.
