Owed to my Romantic proclivities, the most spiritually challenging aspect to living in Los Angeles is its seasonal monotony. I am never so acutely aware of it than at this time of year, when my biorhythms, still calibrated for the East Coast after nearly two decades, anticipate the cooling of the air and coloring of the foliage. With only gentle reminders, at best, from Mother Nature of the Earth’s shifting axial tilt, a greater metric burden is placed on holidays: Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is how I make the mental transition to spring; Fourth of July reminds me summertime has commenced in earnest; Thanksgiving heralds the coming Christmas season, when those who are dear to me will be near to me once more.
In that way, holidays do more than merely mark the passage of time—another birthday, another Mother’s Day, another New Year’s Eve—but in fact give the year its very structure. With the exception of August, which itself is traditionally a time for family vacations, every month has at least one official holiday that helps define it. The particular aesthetics of one over the other, from its foods to its music to its very color palette, conjures a fully immersive sensory experience all its own. Sure, we may prefer some holidays over others, or celebrate some more than others, but where would we be without them?
I guess we’d be in 2020. I don’t know about you, but the only friends I got drunk with on St. Paddy’s were Sean Penn and Gary Oldman; the only baseball games I got out to this past spring featured Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Charlie Sheen; the only beach I visited this summer was out on Amity Island. My cousin’s son turned twelve this past May, and I couldn’t help lament he wouldn’t be spending what will likely be his last summer of innocence on the streets with his friends as I did; I sent him a copy of Stephen King’s The Body so he could at least have a vicarious boyhood adventure. We’ve all made due however we must this year, “celebrating” seasonal occasions in our living rooms or backyards, clinging to the semblance of normality those traditions provide in these traumatically abnormal times.
But when the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health prohibited trick-or-treating last month, that was a bridge too far. Parents—not kids, mind you—went apeshit, and the very next day L.A. softened its position substantially, merely recommending against the time-honored practice, so cease-and-desist with the hate-tweets, please! Banning trick-or-treating was perceived as canceling Halloween—an unacceptable sacrifice in a year full of previously unthinkable compromises.
It’s impossible to imagine my own parents, who always made the holidays special, reacting so histrionically. The first decade of my late father’s life, after all, coincided with the Great Depression; I don’t think he would’ve felt particularly sorry for us had trick-or-treating been suspended on account of a major public-health crisis. And not because he was unkind or unsympathetic, but rather because he wouldn’t have viewed it as an impediment to celebration.
My childhood Halloweens in the Bronx were frightfully—and wonderfully—low-rent. Each October, the flimsy paperboard decorations would come out of my mother’s antique desk drawer: a witch on a broomstick for the kitchen window; a skeleton with adjustable joints for the front door. Considerable time was spent selecting a guise to assume—it always seemed to come down to a Super Friend or a scary fiend—at which point Mom would bring us to the drugstore to pick out one of those Ben Cooper five-and-dime costumes, with their vinyl jumpsuits and plastic masks, the tapered edges of which would slice into the side of your face. We’d come home and try them on—just to make sure they fit?—then Mom would put them away till the 31st. The anticipation was intoxicating.
My father was a natural storyteller, and road trips up the Hudson Valley this time of year provided no small supply of inspiration. Up at the Bear Mountain Inn, there was a massive oil painting of Rip Van Winkle over the fireplace in the lounge, and Dad would regale me and my younger sister with tales of the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew in the nearby woodlands, and of course the legend of the Headless Horseman, who once haunted not some rural European burg, but rather a neighborhood horrifyingly close to our own. (Is it any wonder I grew up to be a writer of supernatural fiction?)
Back at home, Dad would carve our single pumpkin of the season as my sister and I watched John Carpenter’s Halloween or John Badham’s Dracula on WPIX, edited for television, on a decidedly low-def 13-inch screen, but sufficiently terrifying to scare us into hugging our thighs against our chests for fear of what might be under the couch. Though we lived on the eighth floor, the trees outside towered over the building’s roofline, their nearly-denuded branches rattling in the window-buffeting gust off the Hudson, the overcast heavens eerily amber-washed with skyglow; such were the optimal conditions Dad would wait for before he’d read from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark—after the two of us had had ample chance, as Washington Irving so poetically expressed it, “to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions.”
It was delightfully frightening. Oh, there were definitely apparitions out there, but they were out there. We were in the steadfast warmth and impenetrable safety of our home, under the protective spell of my parents’ custodianship. Far from making us feel scared, Halloween made us feel uncommonly safe; it primed us, in fact, for the comfort and joy of the coming Christmas season. As late master of horror Wes Craven once astutely observed, scary stories don’t create fear—they release it.
As for trick-or-treating itself? That was always a hit-and-miss affair: We grew up in a heavily Jewish Orthodox apartment building, so a sizeable percentage of households didn’t observe the holiday. Still, there were enough of us there in the same age range, so we’d go door-to-door together, winding our way down eight flights, ending up on the stoop outside the lobby, happy to peel off our stuffy masks to cool down in the brisk air as we took inventory of our high-fructose bounty. Upstairs, my parents had pizza waiting, and Dad would set up an apple-bobbing station on the balcony; he’d thumb-pressed dimes into some of the apples, so it was always a thrill to emerge with one of those in my jaw. Halloween continued to pay dividends over the next several weeks, as the candy we’d scored was enjoyed a piece at a time in our lunch bags.
The coronavirus pandemic can no more cancel Halloween than the Grinch could steal Christmas; the former holiday isn’t about trick-or-treating any more than the latter is about opening presents. No, the celebratory possibilities are limited only by the breadth of one’s cultural imagination. That trick-or-treating has become such a point of contention this year speaks less to what children expect from Halloween than what adults do. The uncalendared continuum of 2020 has left us all disoriented, yearning for normalcy, for ritual—for that very assurance of security against things that go bump in the night my parents used to provide, which we could use now more than ever.
But on the plus side, unmoored from the rote, comfortable customs of ordinary circumstances, we’ve been forced into a state of (sometimes uncomfortable) contemplation, of reevaluation. The disruptive series of real-world nightmares that have unfolded over the past eight months have expanded our collective vision, inspiring us to dream dreams of a world on the other side of our interconnected crises markedly more equitable and sustainable than the one we currently have. Breaking with tradition, whether voluntarily or otherwise, does that sometimes: It deepens our appreciation for the longstanding practices that still have value, and throws into harsh relief the ones that have simply become bad habits in need of reform. That’s nothing to be afraid of.
I view Trick or Treat as just another ploy to get us to buy stuff we don’t need. At least, that’s what it has become in recent years. So, for me, it’s cancellation is welcome and should form a part of that re-evaluation you are advocating.
Hey, Frank! Thanks for stopping by!
As a custom, trick-or-treating is a perfectly benign practice that — much like narrativity (and a host of other things) — became the subject of corporate abuse. There’s absolutely no question that Halloween, along with all the major holidays, has been hijacked by consumer capitalism, something I considered addressing in this essay before opting to keep it more thematically focused (this is by a mile the shortest piece I’ve posted in years!). I sincerely doubt my parents spent more than $25 on Halloween (which I’m sure my mother budgeted for), and that includes the five-and-dime costumes, the pumpkin, the pizza, and the apples.
But for reasons I wrote about in “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse,” Gen X — the demographic that makes up a disproportionate share of the parents that flipped their shit when trick-or-treating got suspended here in L.A. — have been especially susceptible to the manipulation of the nostalgia-industrial complex; we’ve conflated memorabilia with memory. Such is the reason we self-infantilize by buying
toyscollectibles, dressing up in Halloween costumes ourselves, and — most egregiously — worshiping at the altar of cartoon characters:Speaking as an American Xer, we are a generation that yearns for the “utopian” simplicity of Reagan’s America; through our ’80s-fixated pop culture and our materialistic habits, we have steadfastly declined to face the intractable complexities of the 21st century in favor of recapitulating the comforting simplicities of the 20th. Our refusal to cope with the cancelation of Halloween this year is part and parcel with our denial of the consequences of climate change and extractive capitalism: We lack the moral imagination to envision a new narrative.
If the Industrial Age worldview of extractive exploitation becomes a victim of the pandemic — which is compelling (at least some of) us to reconsider the institutionalized (and long-unexamined) practices of modern existence — that’s one casualty I won’t mourn.
Thanks so much for the comment, Frank. Happy Halloween!
Your childhood Halloweens sound delightful.
And I agree. Halloween will live on in our heart even if the parties and such aren’t safe to do this year.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Lydia!
Yes, Halloween was always a time of great excitement where I grew up: The local chamber of commerce held an annual event whereby the exterior store windows in the shopping district were decorated with Halloween-themed paintings by the local the elementary school students (I participated a few times). Later, in my teenage years, a bunch of us would gather at the local comic-book shop after hours to celebrate the day (a tradition I wrote about in “Counter Culture”). I have many happy memories of those days, and few if any of them had anything to do with elaborate or expensive festivities. I’m absolutely certain a direct line can be drawn from the singularly joyous associations of my youthful Halloweens along the Hudson to my career now as an author of supernatural fiction.
I wish you a safe, healthy, and Happy Halloween, Lydia!
Sean
Thumb-pressed dimes–wow. I need to include that in one of my books (I do have a non-prehistoric series). Halloween has become older kids walking around for candy, egging the driveways, and worrying about the safety of kids collecting food from unknown strangers. I don’t really miss this one twere it to disappear.
That’s how brilliant and resourceful my father was, Jacqui: Press a dime into an apple, dump it in a bucket of water, and you’ve made the day of the kid who emerges with it between his teeth! Halloweens don’t come any more no-frills than that, and I wouldn’t trade those memories for all the elaborate costumes and gadgets kids have today. (I’ve written about my late father often on this blog, including in “Age of Innocence” and “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse.” He was a character. And God knows my beautiful mother went out of her way to make sure the apartment looked festive! That Halloween is my favorite holiday is owed to the loving influence of both of them.)
I don’t have children myself, Jacqui, so I honestly don’t know what children or adolescents do these days for Halloween. For us, it was never a night of mischief; it was a day to celebrate the apparitions that made themselves manifest but once a year — in the singular shadows and light of autumn. Like I said: I grew up only twenty minutes down the road from Sleepy Hollow, New York, so for me, the premium I place on Halloween — much the same as the one I place on good horror stories — has more to do with atmosphere than overt devilment. How I love the witching quality of the air this time of year!
Happy Halloween, Jacqui — I hope yours is safe and uneventful.
Sean
Trick or treating has nothing to do with Samhain anyway. To be authentic, you need to light a bonfire and set a place at the table for your dead ancestors. It’s American consumer culture that turned it into a gorgefest! Hallowe’en was never a big deal here when I was a kid, but now parents lose their minds when schools don’t allow the kids to wear costumes during the day, something I never did. It’s just all part of the big consumer cycle now: Hallowe’en merges into Christmas, which merges into Valentine’s Day, which slides into St. Patrick’s Day, which blends into Easter, which, up here, morphs into Victoria Day, then Canada Day, then the August Civic holiday, then Labour Day, then Remembrance Day, Thanksgiving, and back to Hallowe’en again, all of which have their accompanying merchandising. It’s exhausting, really.
Like I said to Frank above, I have nothing against the (somewhat) more modern Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating; it’s perfectly acceptable to me that holidays incorporate customs and symbols (like the Christmas tree) adopted from eras and places other than where they originated. But when I was a kid, Suzanne, it was tacitly understood that Halloween was for the kids, Thanksgiving for the adults, and Christmas for the family. All of that changed when Gen X became parents. Now adults buy
toyscollectables and readcomic booksgraphic novels anddress up as superheroescosplay, and children are the ones lobbying for gun control and climate change legislation. Our kids look to the future while we gaze into the past. It’s unforgivable what we’ve done — the responsibilities we’ve renounced.And — no surprise — that moral abdication had a corporate sponsor. Through figure/ground reversal, the nostalgia-industrial complex has persuaded Xers that simpler times are merely a one-click product purchase away! And what better way to trade on sentimentality than by exploiting holidays — particularly Halloween and Christmas — because so many of our most sacred innocent memories are indelibly associated with those special occasions?
But while we’re busy chasing the ghosts of our own holidays past, we’re not really facilitating memorable experiences for our own children — much the way my parents did. We think that by insisting on allowing trick-or-treating to go on as planned during a public-health crisis we’re upholding some sacrosanct cultural tradition, but all we’re doing is betraying our lack of imagination. We’re saying, “If our kids don’t get to go door-to-door (or, as you point out, to school) in their expensive single-use costumes, then Halloween is fucked.” It’s no different than if the parents of Whoville had said on Christmas morning, “Well, no gifts, no tree, no roast beast — looks like we’re shit outta luck, kiddies. Christmas is canceled!”
On account of COVID-19, parents have a unique opportunity this coming holiday season — which includes (here in the States, anyway) Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas/Hanukkah — to reframe those commercially bastardized occasions for their children as the cultural (if not spiritual) celebrations they’re meant to be. Dr. Seuss knew what he was talking about (as did Dickens and Charles M. Schulz). And perhaps by teaching our children those lessons, we’ll relearn them ourselves.
Happy Halloween, Suzanne!
>It’s no different than if the parents of Whoville had said on Christmas morning, “Well, no gifts, no tree, no roast beast — looks like we’re shit outta luck, kiddies. Christmas is canceled!”
I have to wonder how “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” would have gone if a few big corporations had access to Whoville at the time…
BTW, “Nightmare Before Christmas” is a perfect metaphor for cultural appropriation: Halloweentown appropriates Christmas from Christmastown
(I didn’t realize it myself. I read it somewhere)
Have a safe and happy Halloween
Indeed, Dell — Whoville didn’t have a Starbucks, I suspect!
Two of the best Christmas specials from the genre’s Golden Age of the 1960s — How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and A Charlie Brown Christmas — made impassioned pleas for a less materialistic and more spiritual celebration of the holiday, but the all-time greatest Christmas story — Dickens’ A Christmas Carol — was less concerned with treating the symptom (materialism) than diagnosing the disease: capitalism itself. I wish everyone would reread it this holiday season (or at very least watch the still-undefeated George C. Scott adaptation from 1984).
There’s so much I could say about The Nightmare Before Christmas! Is it a Halloween special… or a Christmas special? The answer is… Yes! Only the mad genius of Tim Burton could’ve found a credible way to make a movie that belongs equally to both holidays. In addition to being about misunderstood creativity (one of Burton’s favorite themes), I’ve always thought of Nightmare as a lovely little parable about the grass always seeming greener on the other side of the fence. But there is certainly an argument to be made for the story as a metaphor for cultural appropriation; I never thought of it like that. (I’d love to read that article if you find the link to it.)
Thanks for the Halloween wishes! Back at ya!
It was actually just a tweet, and it pretty much just said that
But googling “nightmare before christmas cultural appropriation” will lead to some good articles, including The Mary Sue (https://www.themarysue.com/nightmare-before-christmas-cultural-appropriation/), this twitter thread (https://twitter.com/KindesaurusRex/status/918186934169686018), and others
Wow, that was seriously fascinating — both the Twitter thread and the Mary Sue article! Thanks once again, Dell, for sharing a great link!
The central theme that’s emerged on the blog this year, as you well know, is that of moral imagination. It’s a concept I’m still exploring — and learning to apply myself. You know, I’m a huge John Carpenter fan: I’ve written about him here on the blog, and my unpublished novel Escape from Rikers Island was consciously titled in tribute to Escape from New York. A few nights ago, I needed something unchallenging and Halloween-appropriate to watch — the World Series was stressing me out, and cable news is depressing as all hell between the pandemic and the election, etc. — so I opted to revisit Vampires from 1998. I first saw it in theaters, right around the time I’d signed with my first manager, and remembered it as a super-stylish horror-Western with typical Carpenter antiheroes, atmospherics, and a hell of a cool score. And, to be sure, the movie’s got all of that in spades.
(It’s also saddled with a deeply problematic screenplay: There’s a third-act “plot twist” that’s nakedly telegraphed, early and often; in several instances, characters needlessly and nonsensically keep information from one another for no other reason than the plot demands it; and at the climax, the master vampire flees into a dilapidated barn at sunrise, and the hero chases after him for a final showdown. Why? The vampire was cornered in there, with no way to come out till nightfall! Why not simply anchor the chain from the armored truck’s winch to the side of the barn and tear the whole ramshackle structure down? The sunlight would’ve flooded into the barn, burning the vampire to a crisp, and the hero wouldn’t have had to put himself in harm’s way! Whatever…)
Both the stylish direction and subpar screenwriting notwithstanding, I was fairly appalled by Vampires‘ moral bankruptcy. I don’t have a problem with stories about tough guys — I love Tombstone and Heat and State of Grace and Unforgiven (and I’m even an Escape from L.A. apologist) — but these characters are uniformly irredeemable shits. They’re just vulgar, violent, misogynistic assholes, who’ve stumbled onto a vast conspiracy — vampires exist! — that literally everyone else has somehow failed to notice. And Carpenter has nothing critical to say about any of them; in his eyes, they are redeemed by their courage and male bonding.
Contrast that with Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Like many Burton protagonists, Jack is the victim of misunderstood creativity, but as the analyses you linked to point out, Burton doesn’t entirely let Jack off the hook for his own sins (like his presumptive entitlement). This being a fairy tale, Jack is redeemed in the end when he comes to his senses and atones for his wrongdoing; Burton (and his collaborators) had the moral imagination to draw an important distinction between conscious, good-faith creativity and unconscious cultural appropriation. Good for them. And it’s done so subtly, too — the movie doesn’t whack you over the head with its messaging.
It’s a great example of what I’ve repeatedly called for: that storytellers consider the messages they’re imparting in their fictions — that we need to strive to write with as much moral imagination as we do commercial imagination. Dystopian sci-fi author Cory Doctorow recently shared his own crisis of conscience about the values his work has promoted:
These are conversations all artists should be having with themselves, and with each other. To get started, Polygon is running a great series called Imagining the Next Future, which challenges storytellers to consider how their work will help shape the decades to come, for good or for ill.
And, of course, that’s a conversation I plan to continue right here…
I wanted to ‘like’ all your replies, Sean, but you don’t have a ‘like’ buttoin on comments.
I think we are in agreement pretty much. Except perhaps the idea of Reagan/Thatcher being an era to look back on with longing. I guess that shows how much worse things have become since then. I’m from an even older generation that actually remembers the fifties and how the sixties and seventies seemed to be taking us towards better times.
Hey, Frank!
As I recall when I looked into the matter some years ago, the “like” button on comments is a feature of WordPress.com, but not WordPress.org. What the difference between the two is I’m not altogether sure, but I’m a WordPress.org site, so I don’t have that particular feature.
Just to be clear: I in no way share my generation’s nostalgic yearning for Reagan’s America! I’ve written extensively on this blog about how Gen X fetishizes the ’80s the way boomers do the ’50s. I’m on record as saying Ready Player One, Ernest Cline’s paean to 1980s pop culture, is one of the most evil novels ever written. I am utterly embarrassed by my demographic’s childish longing for the neon-glow excess of the 1980s. If I never see another Star Wars or Halloween or Terminator or Top Gun movie again, it’ll be too soon.
I suspect, much as it was in the 1960s here in America, we are once again in the grip of a cultural/political revolution — a rejection of outmoded ideologies. And I’m going to do everything in my power, as an activist and engaged citizen, to make sure we don’t backslide. As I’ve recently argued, we desperately need a page-one rewrite of the social compact, and I think — think — we’re on the verge of actually getting one in 2021. But that means voting for Joe Biden next week, and then holding his feet to the fire to deliver on Big Change:
I’m an optimist — I do believe better times are coming. But hope requires action, and now more than ever, we need everyone focused. To that end: It’s time, Gen X, to put away childish things and join the fight.
I saw another article talking about how holidays in a pandemic are the perfect time to reframe them as family time. My fondest memories of Halloween aren’t necessarily about begging for candy with other kids, but about all the creative time spent with my family: carving pumpkins, decorating, making my costumes. Skipping the traditional trick r treat aspect of Halloween doesn’t take away any of that. Why not dress up in your scariest garb and put on a classic scary film? I don’t have kids, but there’s no shortage of things parents can do with their children for the holiday to make it special.
Indeed, Jeff. Beginning with my April post, “Misery Sans Company: On the Opportunities and Epiphanies of Self-Isolation,” I have argued the pandemic gives us a rare (if admittedly unwelcome) opportunity to consider anew all manner of previously unchallenged “absolutes,” from the stories we tell about ecological collapse to excessive force, to the ways we’ve abused/devalued Enlightenment democracy and prescriptive narrativity itself. I truly believe 2020 will be remembered as the ideas-and-development phase of an entirely new draft of the social contract.
As for Halloween: It no more comes from Party City than Christmas does from Toys “R” Us. Furthermore, these prolonged stay-at-home circumstances provide parents with a unique opportunity to teach their children resilience — to demonstrate by example how to pivot when life doesn’t go your way. Alas, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a stubborn streak of impatience, immaturity, and selfishness in a great many of us that have never been asked to sacrifice in a meaningful way. But…
I think it’s also made many of us kinder, more patient, more compassionate. We tend to think of those virtues an innate characteristics in people — qualities you are born with or you’re not — but kindness, patience, and compassion are in fact skills that are quite often consciously applied. 2020 has been a shit year, for sure, but it’s offered no shortage of chances to practice those ideals. For that — as well as for your stopping by the blog today — I am grateful.
“plastic masks, the tapered edges of which would slice into the side of your face.” Lol. I remember those. And I loved my dad’s wonderful ghost stories about escaped prisoners rowing across Lake Champlain in the middle of the night… and scarecrow-making and pumpkin carving. Oh, yes, Halloween is way more than candy. Our little town has a socially distanced parade of the cutest kids ever. It’s hysterical and adorable. There will probably be candy, but hopefully handled by the main street businesses in a responsible way. It amazes me how people are responding to this pandemic with such limited imagination. I’ll end with a quick wish for a happy outcome in a week’s time and a new start. Happy Halloween.
Remember those awful masks?! And how the circulatory-restrictive rubber bands were always an inch too tight?! Haha! Good times!
I wonder, Diana, given the fear-based parenting philosophy of my generation (Gen X), if parents even tell their children scary stories, or let them trick-or-treat, on their own, in suffocation-hazard costumes?! I’m not a parent myself, but I suspect many adults shield their kids from scary stories for fear of inducing permanent psychological damage? I know kids today definitely don’t enjoy the “roaming radius” I did, as I wrote about in “Age of Innocence.”
That’s the thing: It isn’t the act of trick-or-treating itself that has value. No, trick-or-treating is merely an excuse “for kids to be kids in an active physical universe separate from their parents and other adults but still in the real world, a rich kid-world that . . . has all but disappeared in the 21st century” (ibid., vii). Gen X parents think they’re doing their children a favor by forcing the trick-or-treat issue, but they’re really just doing what they’ve always done: stealing the space and time of childhood. Instead, all we need to do is make a safe home for our kids, then let them occasionally venture out into the world — knowing they’ll be happy, at the end of the day’s adventures, to come back.
Happy hauntings, Diana!
Great piece, Sean. I enjoyed your childhood stories of the holiday season. And they provide a clear contrast to the attitudes of those who cannot seem to adjust to the current circumstances with any kind of rational thinking. As, always, you offer a view of the deeper layers that get missed by the masses. My personal reaction to this situation is bewilderment. Are people saying they would prefer to expose their children to a potentially deadly virus rather than accept a momentary disappointment? It is the lack of imagination and creativity that is at fault here. Something your parents demonstrated in abundance!
For those unaware, Tara and I are fellow environmental activists; we both sit on the leadership committee of the Climate Reality Project’s San Fernando Valley Chapter. As such, we have been trained by our mentor, Vice President Gore, to understand the most basic — and arguably most important — action any of us can take with respect to solving the climate crisis is to simply talk about it with friends, neighbors, and colleagues. One needn’t be an expert on the subject to engage in meaningful dialogue about it; the point isn’t so much to edify others on climate change as it is to provide a model for open, conducive conversation about it. You’re not trying to convince anyone that climate change is real — because anybody still in denial about that can never be persuaded otherwise — but rather you are trying to get them comfortable discussing what for most people is an abstraction — and an alarming one, at that. Because the climate breakdown is overwhelming, unsettling, and invisible, many people choose quite successfully to ignore it. I’ve said this many times before, so forgive the reiteration: Liberals are climate deniers, too. No, we don’t deny the science of climate change… merely the inevitability that it will disrupt our children’s lives. We convince ourselves they will (somehow) be the beneficiaries of First World insulation from climate disruption. (They won’t.)
To my view, Tara, the inability of Gen X parents to cope with the (temporary) social disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic — like, for instance, trick-or-treating — is part and parcel with their climate denial: It’s a refusal to accept that our children’s generation is going to have to pay the (long-overdue) tab for the fossil-fueled party we’ve thrown since the dawn of the Industrial Age. It’s a reflection of the tremendous guilt we feel for passing that terrible burden on to them. We can’t teach them to adapt to these changes because we lack the moral imagination to envision a different kind of future, and certainly the moral courage to face that future. Such is the reason why Gen X has retreated into a teenage wasteland of ’70 and ’80 nostalgia — a nonstop orgy of Star Wars and superhero movies that emblemize simpler, happier, more halcyon times.
Tara, I’m so glad you popped by the blog and joined the conversation, and I encourage everyone to visit Tara’s WordPress blog and have a look around. In addition to being an indefatigable environmentalist, she is an animal-rights activist, as well, and a supporter of artists and authors. And a friend to all!
Thank you so much, Sean, for introducing me to the WordPress blog community! I have been a fan of Sean’s work for quite some time and am looking forward to connecting with each of you here. Along with my focus on climate-related and animal rights conversations, I believe in doing what I can to support artists. Tim Burton is right. We are misunderstood by the majority of the human race.
Here is proof of that in a blog piece I wrote back in January 2014:
https://Tarasitser.blog/2014/01/
In my view authors are particularly important at this point in our history. We have more places to get our writing out there and our words have more impact than in the bad-old days of major publishers keeping out the little guy.
I plan to stop by each of your blogs and spend some time looking at the world through your eyes.
I absolutely believe writers and artists are essential at this historical inflection point, Tara. As I argued in “The Road Back,” stories have the power to change the world. When used artfully and responsibly, storytellers can provide inspirational and aspirational models for nonviolent cooperation, for social progress, and for participatory democracy.
Here’s hoping America’s next chapter starts tomorrow…
To those of us feeling doom and gloom (especially me): We know we can fix at least some of this environmental damage. Because we have before
https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d
>Then, in 1948, a Caltech biochemist named Arie Haagen-Smit made the connection with car exhaust. Even after his discovery, Haagen-Smit had to fight the oil-industry backed researchers who attempted to disprove his ideas.
Over 70 years later, Haagen-Smit’s fight is almost exactly the same as we face now. He won
https://www.kcet.org/history-society/how-los-angeles-began-to-put-its-smoggy-days-behind
Note that the Republican Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency was created while he was President
Absolutely, Dell! Some of the damage we’ve done is immutable, yes, and we will need to learn to adapt to that, but the worst of it can be averted if we act boldly and swiftly. Mother Nature has a remarkable capacity to self-heal. This past spring, when all the major cities of the world were under lockdown, within weeks the air was clear and marine life had returned to bays and harbors typically occupied by boats! The extreme-weather events — and even the coronavirus crisis itself — is Mother Nature screaming at us to get our shit together: to enact a Green New Deal; to be more responsible and conscientious custodians of this planet. If we work with Her, instead of trying to subjugate Her, we can heal this planet — I absolutely believe it.
Yes, Nixon passed the Clean Air Act and created the EPA. And when faced with increasing evidence of a hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan — no friend to “tree-hugging hippies” — decided the prudent decision was not to argue with doubters but to take out an insurance policy on ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons; DuPont developed ozone-safe substitutes, and a generation later, the ozone layer is well on its way to restoration. (And he accomplished this without compromising his conservative values.)
That’s the kind of story I want to help tell in 2021…
Wonderful stirrings Sean. I think the biggest bummer is going to be the lack of holiday spirit at Christmas time. If nothing else at this crazy time it’s a good time to remember gratitude. 🙂
Thanks for dropping by, Debby!
You know, as I was making dinner last night, my wife asked if it was too early in the season to put on Christmas music. Ordinally, I would’ve advised against that during the first week of November — it’s still a long run to Christmas, after all! But for some reason, I thought it was a great idea…
And it was. After a few minutes of Brenda Lee and Kelly Clarkson, I felt happy for the first time since I can remember. Joyous, even. The world felt like a warm and welcoming place. A kind place. It was a complete fantasy I was surrendering to, of course, but I was willing and delighted to do it, if only for a few minutes.
No, we are not going to be gathering for big parties of tree-trimming and merry-making this year, and we’re just going to have to be okay with that — same as with trick-or-treating. But I also think, as I argue in the closing paragraph of this essay, 2020 gives us a unique (if unsolicited) opportunity for introspection — to reflect on the ways the world is different right now, and, correspondingly, to recommit to the practices that still have value, and reconsider the ones that don’t. And as I wrote five years ago in “Solitary Consignment: A Christmas Story,” my most cherished holiday moments are always the ones I manage to steal for myself — to be alone with my thoughts during the holy silence of the season.
Thanks for commenting, Debby. Hope your holiday season is a joyous one. Perhaps as soon as this week — even today? — we may have something to celebrate…
“High-fructose bounty” will or has already become my new favorite turn of phrase. In lieu of trick or treating here, we too spent the evening with Michael Myers. I was disappointed that my #2 son said he felt he was always one step ahead of MM, so the film wasn’t scary. That soundtrack though! Though my sons are too old to extort candy for themselves, I absolutely love that they enjoy dishing it out to the neighborhood littles. We missed that this year. Let us hope that the, in your words, calendarless continuum begins to find its distinctions again. There is much to celebrate, or acknowledge at the very least.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Friend of the blog Wendy Weir from Greater Than Gravity attempted without success to post the comment above, so she sent it to me privately, and I’ve reproduced it verbatim, hence the reason my avatar appears next to her name. Here’s my response:
Thanks, Wendy!
I have a young niece and nephew that watched the original Halloween a few years ago and shrugged it off with a yawn. I suspect there are at least two reasons for this, the first being that, for reasons I argued in “The Road Back,” Digital Age kids simply don’t process reality as a linear, closed-ended narrative. It’s probably impossible for them to truly emotionally submit to an old-school cinematic experience because they’re always aware it’s “not real.” This isn’t a question of suspending their disbelief; it’s a matter of the movie’s linear narrativity not conforming to reality as they understand it: open-ended and nonlinear. I don’t know about you, but the kids in my life — when they can be persuaded to even sit down for a movie — watch it with one eye only, iPhone in hand, monitoring the device for incoming pings that signify something far more important happening elsewhere. When one’s brain has been conditioned to be everywhere at once, it’s just too hard to invest sustained mental energy in a two-hour feature film. (I’m in no way suggesting this is true of your son, simply a general observation I’ve made about the differences between our generation and theirs.)
The second reason Michael Myers is considerably less scary now than he was forty years ago is owed to over-franchising. Even if you’re fifteen and you’ve never seen a Halloween or Friday the 13th movie, you’re still aware of the iconography from those franchises because they’ve so pervaded the culture. You’ve seen the costumes at Party City. You’ve caught clips of the movies when you scroll past AMC. When you’ve been repeatedly exposed to something that’s only meant to be fleetingly glimpsed in shadows — the way the Shape is — it loses its “fright factor” considerably. As Wes Craven once noted, “The fact that they made Freddy more and more jokey took him farther and farther away from that child-molester thing that just kind of sticks to you in a way that maybe you don’t like.” Familiarity made Freddy considerably less terrifying.
That said, I don’t view their disinterest in our traditions as a bad thing. It doesn’t have to mean something to them to mean something to us. Every generation deserves its own cultural experiences and identity. That’s part of the reason I haven’t bothered to see the recent Halloween revival with Granny Laurie; Halloween was great in its day… but it was really only entitled to one good scare. As I’ve urged time and time again on this blog, it’s time to tell some new stories for a new era.
And this is certainly an unprecedented era! Here’s hoping this week it takes a more hopeful turn…
Be safe out there, Wendy!
Sean
P.S. I totally agree with you about John Carpenter’s gooseflesh-inducing music! I write much of my fiction to his soundtracks. A few years ago, he released two albums of original material, Lost Themes and Lost Themes II, which I wrote about here. The unique aesthetic identity of his movies is owed in no small part to his moody, synth-driven scores.
>watched the original Halloween a few years ago and shrugged it off with a yawn
Question: Since you’ve studied film-making and script-writing, are scary movies scary to you? Or do you see “behind the scenes”?
When I was a kid I studied special effects. I’d wanted to become a FX artist when I grew up (this was before CGI). So when I see a movie monster or movie gore I find myself trying to figure how it was done. I’m not saying I’m brave, but most horror movies don’t scare me
Two of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen are the Blair Witch Project and It Follows. Note what they have in common. We don’t actually see the monsters in either of them. And for the most part the FX range from none to minimal (except at the end of It Follows)
Assembled sticks or a naked man on a rooftop can be much scarier than $50,000,000 worth of CGI
Oh, boy — now you’ve opened a can of worms! Haha!
I think part of the reason we, as a moviegoing audience, have become so hard to impress is because movies simply no longer possess that wonderful How’d they do that? factor. Hollywood could produce a considerably more technically proficient and visually arresting version of Escape from New York today than Carpenter did in ’81, but you know exactly how they’d achieve those barren Big Apple canyons — via CGI. Yawn. The thrill of seeing EFNY as a kid was wondering how Carpenter (on a shoestring budget, no less) conjured such a convincing postapocalyptic Manhattan, because you know he didn’t have digital tools at his disposal, and Kurt Russell clearly isn’t on a set-dressed backlot — you can see down the streets behind Snake for blocks and blocks and blocks! So, you are really drawn into the Stygian world of that film — because it is so convincingly tactile. You feel like you’ve been whisked into a fully immersive dark fantasyland. Such is also the reason the universe of Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back feels so palpably lived-in and believable, whereas in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, it’s antiseptic and unconvincing.
The (over)use of CGI has been particularly problematic for horror. With scary movies, we are always subconsciously looking for a reason to “see the strings,” because if we can be persuaded the monster is fake — even just momentarily — the tension abates. We can relax! When we are refused a good glimpse of the monster, however, as we are for most of Jaws and Alien, we have fewer “exit ramps” to exploit. And with “human” monsters, like in Halloween and Friday the 13th and Scream, the expressionless masks the killers wear serve a similar veiling function: They deny us the (cold) comfort of ascribing a measure of motive to their actions, and — for the protagonist — the option of appealing to their humanity.
I suspect at least some of the reason for the colossal success of The Walking Dead can be attributed to how credible its zombies are. And the fact that it shoots on location in rural Georgia doesn’t hurt, either, because it has a very convincing sense of place; it doesn’t suffer from that phony backlot feel that instantly challenges my suspension of disbelief. My issues with the show’s moral imagination notwithstanding, it was a breath of fresh creative air after a decade of glossy, big-budget, star-driven creature features like I Am Legend and Van Helsing, with their pixilated monsters and sweeping cityscapes. Walking Dead felt dirty, and dangerous — like when you’d catch Dawn of the Dead on TV as a kid. Even before the found-footage subgenre that Blair Witch popularized, so much of the best horror — from Romero to Craven to Hooper to Carpenter to Raimi — had a guerrilla quality that made it seem forbidden, or taboo. (Frankenstein and Dracula were epistolary novels, the 19th-century literary equivalent of found footage). Perhaps because it was a cable horror series (based on a cult comic book) with snake-belly low expectations, the producers of The Walking Dead were afforded a rare creative opportunity to buck trends and do something old-school… and, to their credit, it resonated.
Horror still scares me when it establishes parameters — “rules” — and then finds creative permutations on its central premise by operating within those defined narrative boundaries. Sometimes the rules are discovered as the characters go along (Poltergeist), and sometimes they are explicitly spelled out in advance (Gremlins) — both ways are equally fun for different reasons. The Conjuring literally has a scene in which the Warrens offer a lecture (in a classroom, no less) on the three stages of demonic possession, and then the filmmakers have a field day with all the possibilities therein. (“Hey, wanna play hide-and-clap?”)
That contract a scary story makes with its audience — by setting the rules then playing by them — is how it creates tension; no movie understood this more consciously and brilliantly than Scream. From Dusk till Dawn is “cool” in a pseudo-grindhouse way, but it isn’t at all scary, because there’s no consistency to its vampire mythos: Some characters turn into vampires within moments of being bitten, yet when Harvey Keitel sustains a bite, he reasons he’s only got “another 45 minutes” till he turns — and he’s right! Huh? Meanwhile, the bar’s vampire band self-explodes for reasons manifestly unclear. It’s just a gorefest without rules.
And while some horror exists to purposefully, explicitly, and artfully fuck with our sense of narrative orientation (Suspiria), shit like American Horror Story is what I call “anything-goes horror,” or “kitchen-sink horror,” in that anything can happen at any time; there’s no rhyme or reason for any of it. (What the fascination with that franchise is I’ll never know.) To paraphrase David St. Hubbins: It’s such a fine line between artful and undisciplined.
I would say It Follows is the scariest movie I’ve seen since at least the turn of the millennium: conceptually original, aesthetically brilliant, thematically resonant, and deeply unsettling (because it followed — no pun intended — its own rules), just as the original Nightmare on Elm Street was thirty years earlier. Like Nightmare — and so many “Supranatural Monster” movies — it painted itself into a bit of a corner in that the villain is so unkillable, the way it’s ultimately vanquished is a tad unsatisfying (same is true for the way Nancy overcomes Freddy), but that’s a minor carp that in no way diminishes the overall experience.
This isn’t totally germane to our conversation, Dell, but I thought I’d use this forum to offer my take on Vampires vs. the Bronx (seeing how I once made my own vampire movie in the Bronx!). I adored the use of actual Bronx locations — I felt like I was home — and I thought the thematic subtext (vampiric gentrification) was enviously brilliant; the young cast was terrific, too. While it was a cute movie, though — no spoilers ahead — I ultimately thought it could’ve been a lot funnier and a lot scarier. The concept was far superior to the execution, which didn’t really rise above the level of a Disney Channel TV movie. Overall, it was a missed opportunity to do something that really could’ve been the Lost Boys or the Buffy of its generation. I wonder if perhaps the movie’s failure to achieve greatness goes to the very erosion of traditional narrativity I wrote about in “The Road Back”?
Anyway, Dell, thanks for chatting horror with me today, and taking my mind of the real-life horror story playing out on CNN right now…
I saw Terminator 2 in the theatre when it first came out (1991). The FX at the time blew me away
But at the same time I was a little sad. They could do (almost) anything w/ CGI, and now FX were “dead”. There was no more challenge. The end of an era
Note that nowadays even when a TV show or movie uses a practical effect or special makeup, we assume it’s CGI. Like a magician on TV performing a card trick doing AMAZING sleight-of-hand but we assume it’s a camera trick
I remember the summer T2 came out, as well, and everyone understood it was a game-changer. Arguably, The Abyss opened the door for T2, which opened the door for Jurassic Park, which inspired George Lucas to finally realize what became Episode I. CGI took such a quantum leap in the 1990s.
Though, arguably, SFX from the 1980s have by and large dated better than those of the ’90s; case in point: the creature FX in An American Werewolf in London (1981) verses An American Werewolf in Paris (1997). (There are many exceptions on both sides, of course: The model work and matte paintings in Tim Burton’s Batman seem less convincing with each viewing, for example; meanwhile, Jurassic Park still holds up near flawlessly.) For Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Coppola made an unorthodox creative decision to rely on practical, in-camera FX — only the tools that would’ve been available to filmmakers at the dawn of cinema — and, consequently, the movie looks and feels like no other from its era. There is, in fact, only a single CGI effect in the entire movie… and it is, no surprise, the most dated (and least convincing) FX shot in the film.
Today’s CGI has allowed filmmakers to conjure, with photorealistic precision, the exotic landscapes and creatures they envision — down to the most atomic detail. This is an amazing thing and an unfortunate thing. Lucas cringes at all the “flaws” in the original Star Wars trilogy — hence the reason he’s never stopped tinkering with it — and has explicitly and repeatedly said the prequels were produced just as he imagined them. Need I elaborate on that?
Technical limitations often compel more creative storytelling. One of the exciting things that was happening in the 1990s, as the blockbusters were going all-in on CGI, was that you had a generation of indie filmmakers without a scintilla of Hollywood resources telling some very exciting stories, like Reservoir Dogs and El Mariachi and even, in a more low-key way, Clerks. Those movies had that tactile quality we were discussing in the last exchange, Dell: The world of those films felt lived-in and relatably imperfect; watching them, you felt like you were getting a peek into a secret subculture. That was thrilling.
And there’s a difference between thrilling and impressive. The sprawling fantasy landscape of Middle-earth conjured in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings saga is impressive… but it isn’t thrilling. Ten or fifteen years earlier, it would’ve been breathtaking, but nowadays it isn’t enough to wow us. Imagine that — that the breadth of detail in those movies could leave us so blasé! But when you see that level of worldbuilding every single week on Game of Thrones, that becomes merely the expectation baseline. At this point, I don’t think we’ll ever reclaim the How’d-they-do-that? sensation cinema once provided.
To wit: I recall watching Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them a few years ago and being consciously aware of the digital manipulation in every single shot. Here was this grand, fantastical vision of 1920s New York — a favorite era of mine — and the FX were so pervasive and overwhelming that I didn’t for even a moment believe what my eyes were seeing! The FX not only didn’t impress me… they actively undermined my willing immersion in the storytelling experience — because they were too good!
But… such cynical disengagement on the part of the audience provides a challenge and an opportunity for filmmakers: to tell better stories. Storytellers will have to raise their game, appealing to viewers’ emotion and intellect, the way movies once routinely did, before Hollywood went full theme park. Perhaps there is even an opportunity for novelists to reassert some of their cultural influence — to help audiences discover the pleasure of actively bringing their own imagination to the storytelling experience? For all my lecturing this year about how storytellers have a responsibility to illumine a path forward, maybe the secret isn’t so much presenting the audience with a fully-formed vision of a better society, but instead inspiring them to envision one with us?