BirdIsGone/GreatRecession/RipperStreet

Today I finished Stephen Graham Jones’ The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto “There are ways. There are always ways.” Variants of these sentences occur multiple times throughout this book and they signify at least two things. First, they suggest that the Indian characters in this book are survivors, even tricksters; that they can always find a way past or through the difficulties that face them. Conversely, these sentences also suggest the opposite: that no matter how hard they try, the Indian characters cannot escape the fate that awaits them in a white world. Usually, though, it’s a combination of the two. Thus, although the crime novel dimension of this book apparently ends with the arrest of the ‘guilty’ parties, not only are the concepts of both guilt and innocence highly relativized by Jones, but also it’s not at all clear whether or not the forces of (white) law and order have arrested/captured the right people. If that is indeed the case, then who’s the butt of the joke? Jones leaves that for the reader to decide.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television. In “Real-to-Reel Recessionary Horrors in Drag Me To Hell and Contagion,” April Miller looks at how, in recent horror films, “the recessionary ‘monster’ has reinvigorated the genre by tackling the gender, class, and race divisions exposed by particular business practices at the heart of this current crisis,” while James D. Stone, in “Horror at the Homestead: The (Re)possession of American Property in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity II,” argues that the Paranormal Activity films are “tales of the recession, not only because they stress our blithe disregard for the steady, inevitable advance of a monster, but also because they track the gradual collapse of consumer capitalist dreams.” Finally, in “’We are the walking dead’: Zombie Literature in Recession-Era America,” Lance Rubin shows how the novels World War Z (Max Brooks) and Zone One (Colson Whitehead), and the comic The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkland) all use zombies to “articulate the dread of financial dislocation, of being one pink slip or catastrophic illness away from joining the hordes of the unemployed, uninsured, foreclosed, or homeless, as well as the moral compromises one might make in order to survive.”

I also watched the third episode of Ripper Street. This episode, “The King Came Calling,” is a good example of how the series makes use of the Jack the Ripper context. The episode begins with what seems like an outbreak of cholera but further investigation proves it to be a case of mass poisoning, with the poisoner motivated (in part) by a desire to outdo the Ripper in terms of numbers of victims. What’s effective about this technique is that it suggests how the crimes of the Ripper might have resonated in Whitechapel in 1889 (in this instance, as a source of inspiration) without getting hung up on the question of the Ripper’s identity. My one quibble with how the show is developing is the way in which the character of Inspector Reid is becoming impossibly saintly and heroic. Unless he starts developing some serious character flaws soon, I shall grow quite tired of him! Unfortunately, I don’t think this is likely because of the way Ripper Street seems to idolize the police, but that’s an issue best left for another post.