Hogan/Haints/Room237

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. Hogan makes it clear that the murders of the Indians are also in a sense an attack on the natural order itself. In a heartbreaking scene, Hogan describes hunters who have killed 317 golden eagles in order to ship them back to the East Coast and sell them to taxidermists. These same hunters inadvertently start a fire that destroys, among other things, an ancient copse of trees and the almost apocalyptic overtones that Hogan gives to her description of the fire suggests that the whites have a purely instrumental attitude towards Indians and nature, seeing them as exploitable resources that will and can be used up until they’re exhausted. The responses of the Indian characters to this situation vary widely. Some, like Moses, seem resigned and defeated. Some, like Michael Horse, move further away from the whites seeking sanctuary in nature. Some, like Nola, try to resist in whatever ways they can. And some, who have accommodated themselves to the white world, begin to rethink that accommodation and contemplate going back to the old ways. The sense of personal and environmental turmoil and disruption that Hogan creates skillfully is visceral and widespread.

I also read the first fifty pages of Arthur Redding's 2011 book Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions. In some ways, Redding is following in the footsteps of critics like Teresa Goddu and Mark Edmundson, and even Leslie Fiedler, in trying to account for both the history and the continuing prevalence of gothic narratives in American culture. What sets Redding’s work apart, however, is the complicated sense of temporality that he develops in his examination of the gothic. While concentrating for the most part on twentieth-century and contemporary texts, Redding also has his sights fixed firmly on the past when he argues that the gothic is a way for Americans to come to terms with the ghosts of the past, and not only the past that actually took place, but also alternative pasts that were never allowed to come into being. But Redding is not concerned exclusively with the past, but also with futurity, and not just the future as apocalypse, but also with the gothic as a form of future-oriented possibility: “The American ghostly…signifies a relative liberation from historical servitude: It is a ghost of alternative, of potential, of possibility. This potential may damn or destroy us, as in the apocalyptic gothic…it may, alternatively, lead to salvation of a sort.” In this first section of the book, Redding pursues this argument through readings of Jamaica Kincaid, Isabel Allende, Henry James, and, inevitably, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison is exemplary for Redding for the way in which she finds “ways of speaking to and through the dead, by inventing alternative possibilities out of silence itself.”

I also watched Room 237,  Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, in which various enthusiasts explain their theories about the (hidden) meanings of the film. Ironically, I found the theories themselves to be the least interesting aspect of the film, perhaps because I wasn’t really persuaded by any of them. Instead, what really impressed me about this movie is the way it functions as a love letter to the medium of film as a whole, the way it serves as a prime example of exactly how and why people get obsessed about a favorite movie. In this respect, Room 237 is a wonderful experience. The film also reflects the continuing influence of auteur theory in the sense that nearly every claim made about The Shining’s hidden meanings attributes both intentionality and complete artistic control to Kubrick. This fact makes the nod toward the postmodern attack on authorial intentionality toward the end of Room 237 quite ironic, because this nod flies in the face of the way that the rest of the film emphasizes Kubrick’s genius. Ascher makes a very smart decision in not showing us any of the speakers, but instead accompanying their words with clips from The Shining and other Kubrick movies. Had we been shown the speakers, I think we would have become preoccupied with (judging them based on) their appearance. Instead, Ascher’s decision enables us to stay focused on what they have to say. For me, the immediate impact of the film was to make me want to watch The Shining and Kubrick’s other films again as soon as possible and perhaps that’s the highest compliment I can pay to Room 237.