O'Neill/Wee/ParanormalActivity2

Today I read the next fifty pages of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. In this section, the postcolonial dimensions of cricket take on a more prominent place in the novel as we hear of Chuck Ramkissoon’s plan to found a New York Cricket Club. Part of Chuck’s calculations involve not only the potential media audience for matches played at such a venue, but also the huge numbers of West Indian and South Asian immigrants in the New York Metropolitan area. In this way, O’Neill’s novel is both an immigrant novel in a long American tradition, but the 21^st century version of that tradition is very different—less focused on assimilation to an American norm and more on what immigrant cultures can bring to the host country—cricket is a nice symbol for this inassimilable otherness that immigrants embody. In this respect, it would be interesting to read this novel alongside CLR James’ classic study of the relationship between colonialism and cricket, Beyond A Boundary https://www.dukeupress.edu/Beyond-A-Boundary/. More tomorrow on what O’Neill does with the personal politics (or the absence thereof) of his protagonist Hans.

I also read the next fifty pages of Valerie Wee’s Japanese Horror Films. This sections discusses the different ways in which Hollywood and Japan approach the subject of the supernatural in film. If one overlooks the inevitable generalizing, Wee makes an interesting argument about the difference between the either/or of the Western perspective on the relation between good vs evil compared with the both/and view of the Japanese perspective (influenced by Shintoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism). This difference, according to Wee, leads to a further difference in how the two film traditions treat the supernatural—it’s something evil that needs to be overcome in the Hollywood tradition, whereas it’s more a question of restoring balance and harmony in the Japanese tradition. The next chapter on Ringu/The Ring allows Wee to ground these generalizations in a close reading of the similarities and differences between the evil videos in the Japanese original and its American remake. Perversely, despite the strength of her discussion, I found myself wanting Wee to also discuss the parody of The Ring in Scary Movie 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFt3KQhkQA. What can we learn from parodies of horror movies? And what is it about the horror genre that makes it so suitable for parody?

Funnily enough, the parody of Paranormal Activity in A Haunted House that I watched the other day took me in turn to the sequel, Paranormal Activity 2. These films are a work of genius in their own way. Just think of the combination of elements from a financial point of view: a cheap cast (no stars needed) and minimal special effects (hardly any gore because they’re not body horror films) and you’ve got a winning combination. I think the suburban setting is absolutely key to the success of this franchise, not so much because a suburban audience wants to believe that their habitat is dangerous, but because that audience wants to see into their neighbors’ homes, especially prosperous homes, and be convinced that these apparently picture-perfect lives are anything but. Schadenfreude, in other words, plays a particularly important role in this type of horror film. The other reason for their success is that they have a very accurate understanding of the state of our contemporary surveillance culture. To be precise, they go beyond the truism that we are being watched by Big Brother and instead recognize that we are often all too happy and willing to put ourselves on camera, to survey ourselves in the interests of knowledge and security. This results in a situation where the actions of the family under demonic siege in this film both seem rational, in a sense, and where our voyeuristic consumption of their plight is justified because there is a mystery to be solved. For these reasons, Armand Mattelart’s The Globalization of Surveillance would be a very interesting book to read alongside the Paranormal Activity films. http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=074564510