October 31, 2019: ScaryStudying: The Shinings

[Following up the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have a boo-tiful holiday!]

On what we can make of the two opposed endings to the novel and film versions of the same scary story.

I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you either haven’t read Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably skip this post, as I’m gonna spoil the heck out of the endings to both. Because while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the two versions throughout, it’s really the endings where they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and, thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at any earlier moment in the film.

There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I discussed yesterday): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an eternally scary world.

King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions, certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the heart of my fourth book project: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel, Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely dark world. Obviously you know which I prefer; but I would also argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.

Last scary story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?

October 30, 2019: ScaryStudying: American Horror Stories?

[Following up the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have a boo-tiful holiday!]

On whether America can have home-grown horror—and where we might find it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously complained (in the Preface to The Marble Faun) about “the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong … Romances need ruin to make them grow.” Given what he and his era meant by “the Romance,” it’s possible to paraphrase his point this way: America was, at least in the early 19^th century but perhaps remains, too young, too devoid of a distant past and the ancient castles and ruins that come with it, to produce a Gothic literary tradition in the same way as Europe. Even Edgar Allan Poe, the Hawthorne contemporary and American Gothic writer who would seem so clearly to disprove this idea, set his most Gothic stories either abroad or (as in “The Fall of the House of Usher”) in an undefined place that could be anywhere (and feels more European than American to be sure). So it might indeed be fair to ask whether there can be a homegrown American Gothic.

It was of course in implied response to such a question that Grant Wood painted American Gothic (1930), one of the most famous and most ambiguous works of American art. Using his sister and the family dentist as his models for the iconic farmer and his wife, Wood created what seemed to be a simple and realistic portrait of two average (and somewhat unhappy and stiff, but not particularly mysterious) people. But then he gave it that title, and the whole thing suddenly became a great deal more complex and challenging. Is the title sarcastic, contrasting the simplicity and even boring-ness with those much more mysterious and compelling qualities Hawthorne had listed? Is it genuine, attempting to draw attention to the horrors that can lurk in quiet farmyards or families? Or is it an ironic combination of the two, recognizing that America does not have the overtly gothic qualities but might in its apparent simplicity and ordinariness possess a subtler and very different but ultimately no less horrifying quality?

Your mileage may vary, of course, and Wood’s painting will always remain open to those and many other possible interpretations. But I would argue for the ironic interpretation, not least because it fits with the painting’s own two contrasted yet interconnected levels (what’s on the canvas and what’s in the title). And I would connect it to our contemporary popular culture by noting the echoes of Wood’s title in the 21^st century hit TV show American Horror Story. From its first season on, Story can be seen as an extended and far more explicit (this is the 21^st century, and they’ve had full seasons of episodes to fill) representation of the idea that average American families and homes contain within them great and gothic horrors, that the scariest thing of all might not be a ruined castle full of vengeful ghosts and supernatural terrors, but a sunlit suburban home full of, well, those same things. I’d like to think that Hawthorne would be entirely on that board with that idea.

Next scary story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?

October 29, 2019: ScaryStudying: Five Masterpieces

[Following up the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have a boo-tiful holiday!]

My nominees for five of the scariest works in American literary history (in chronological order):

1)      Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation (1798): Brown’s novel suffers from some seriously over-wrought prose, and it can be hard to take its narrator seriously as a result; the pseudo-scientific resolution of its central mystery also leaves a good bit to be desired. But since that central mystery involves a husband and father who turns into a murderous psychopath bent on destroying his own idyllic home and family, well, none of those flaws can entirely take away the spookiness.

2)      Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839): Just about any Poe story would fit in this space. But given how fully this story’s scares depend precisely on the idea of what reading and art can do to the human imagination and psyche of their susceptible audiences, it seems like a good choice.

3)      Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948): I don’t think there’s anything scarier, in the world or in the imagination, than what people are capable of doing to each other. And Jackson’s story is probably the most concise and perfect exemplification of that idea in American literary history. I’ve read arguments that connect it to the Holocaust, which makes sense timing-wise; but I’d say the story is purposefully, and terrifyingly, more universal than that.

4)      Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt” (1950; don’t know why the font is so small in that online version, but you can always copy and paste and then enlarge—it’s worth it!): The less I give away about Bradbury’s story, the better. Suffice it to say it’s a pretty good argument for not having kids, or at least for only letting them play with very basic and non-technological toys. Ah well, that ship has long since sailed for me.

5)      Mark Danielewksi, House of Leaves (2000): As I wrote in yesterday’s post, Danielewksi’s novel is thoroughly post-modern and yet entirely terrifying at the same time. Don’t believe it’s possible? Read the book—but try to keep some lights on, or maybe just read outside, while you do.

Next scary story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other scary stories you’d share?