Unlike any blogger worth his salt, I guess I don’t put a lot of stock in immediacy. What I end up writing here usually has been digested and re-digested a few times. Like, for instance, the death of Jerry Falwell, which I’ll get to here when I finally decide what it is I want to say about the man and when I doubt anyone will longer care about what the “blogosphere” has to say about this particular news headline.
It is with that spirit, then, that I offer my own review of a book that came out two years ago. Hurray timeliness!
For those of you who find lack of immediate responsiveness troubling, I’ll go ahead and warn you now: I’m still brewing up a review for this site of a movie I love that came out thirty years ago.
And with that, on with the show.
Have you ever seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? The first time I saw it, I was full of anticipation, being a huge sci-fi fan and having endlessly heard people say that it was the greatest sci-fi movie of all time. So, my sophomore year in college I got it from the library, watched it all the way through, and concluded that those people were full of crap. I hated it! At the time, it was boring and nonsensical to me. Frankly, I thought it sucked.
Thankfully, I grew up a little.
Over the course of the next year or two, I actually learned how to watch movies. How to makes sense of them. I began looking for what the director was trying to say through a certain scene, and I began getting background information on the movies and directors, and the whole movie-watching experience opened up for me. I came back to 2001: A Space Odyssey with this new perspective, and I was blown away. I now join the chorus praising this movie as the greatest sci-fi film ever.
Why is it so great? Well, for many different reasons. Here, I’d only mention one: the way that it consciously interacts with the themes of the sci-fi genre in an unabashedly philosophical way. It expresses the fullest heart of the aspirations of science fiction, and thereby refocuses the direction of the whole genre. Never has a science fiction film said so much by really saying so little. It’s genius, and it changed everything.
Sci-fi is not the only genre that’s received an extreme makeover in the last half-century. Look at westerns. Shane defined what Westerns would be, Sergio Leone altered the basic landscape with his Man Without a Name trilogy, and then Clint Eastwood undercut its core values of redemptive violence and frontier mythmaking in Unforgiven. Today, any western released that seems unfamiliar with Eastwood’s innovations and plays along the lines of former western stereotypes seems trite and vacuous.
As a fan of certain genres, the two previously mentioned among them, I’ve embraced the above-mentioned films. And I’ve been waiting for the same heady treatment to ride into town and save one of my own favorite genres - horror. I’ve always thought that there are some great possibilities with ”macabre tales” – something redeeming to say when telling stories of our worst fears. Now there have been some great ones recently, along with some horrid ones, what with it’s apparent resurgence as of late. I’ve written here on this site before about the greatness available in the horror genre, and so I do not want to bore you with repetition. Rather, I wanted to tell about a book. A book which, I believe, has the power to save the horror genre, at least in the printed world.
One of my favorite authors, a man who deserves an entire post unto himself, is Chuck Palahniuk. You’re certainly familiar with the film based on his first novel, Fight Club, and therefore have a little idea of the kinds of books he writes. The most recent novel he’s published (before last month’s Rant) was a crazy one called Haunted, about a group of writers answering an ad for a writer’s retreat in an old abandoned theatre that will last three months. The group is there to abandon their lives for a short while, and finally write the masterpieces they’ve had inside themselves forever. But when their food, water, and electricity supplies begin to dwindle, their stories get more desperate.
Haunted unfolds in the form of chapters mixed with poems and short stories written by the characters. Few of them will leave your stomach turned right-side up. In fact, the story “Guts” was read by Palahniuk on his book tour promoting Haunted, and caused the fainting of over 70 people when all was said and done. But it is not the gross-out factor that makes this book a brilliant statement on the horror genre.
So a group of misfits store themselves away in a spooky, abandoned theatre for three months, their supplies begin to dwindle, and people start dying. What’s so original about that? Nothing, necessarily. But it is the source of the mayhem that makes the ultimate pronouncement on our times, and this genre. The writers live in “fear” of the man who organized the whole thing: Mr. Whittier. In truth, though, Mr. Whittier does not cut them off from food and water. Rather it is themselves who do so. Each character has in his or her mind the great book/adapted screenplay that will be made from this experience, so they spoil their own food. They cut off their own water supply. They break their generator. They cut off their own fingers, evidencing that they suffered the most, and so will receive the most calls for morning/late-night talk shows about the ordeal after its done. They eagerly wait for weaker characters to die off, because the narrative arch they have planned for their book doesn’t quite fit together without it. And as soon as one character dies, the others sigh in relief, knowing that the royalties will have to be split one less way between them all.
And don’t worry: Everything I’ve told you is evident in the first fifty to seventy-five pages or so. This is no spoiler post.
The greatness of this book is what Palahniuk makes us afraid of. You come away from the book not a little more afraid of the dark, or ghosts, or abandoned buildings. You come away fearful of the celebrity-seeking impulse inside all of us; you come away disgusted by how fame via film adaptations and reality TV can drive people like us to wish for and celebrate the death of others.
How we all see others as means to our own ends, ends which can be brutally frank and unrepentent in our more honoest moments.
In an age of reality TV becoming, in a sense, reality for us, we want to make monsters out of people. We operate best if we have a scapegoat for our stories. We need antagonists, and we will go to any lengths to create them. We need good guys and bad guys. The funny thing about Haunted is, if we ever did encounter a real ghost in the book, it would be anticlimatic. It just wouldn’t be as scary as the narcissism of the characters.
But a refrain you’ll see occasionally in the book says, “Every story is a ghost.” Every story brings back to life someone long-dead or forgotten, giving them chance to haunt us again. Situations that frighten us, they come back in stories. So horror is found not so much in ghouls or goblins, but in the narcisssism of people like us and the power of stories to revive monsters in our minds.
Now that’s scary.
1 Comment
June 19, 2007 at 11:54 am
NETWORK!!!! Finally I can figure out how you feel about that movie.