Of the Relevance of Storytelling or How School Can Suck

As a one-time graduate student of medieval history, I have spent a fair amount of time considering the relevance of historical study to the contemporary world.  This issue of relevance becomes especially, well, relevant for scholars of chronologically or geographically removed time periods.  For example, I studied 12th-century European monasticism while living in early 21st-century Louisiana.  Even had I lived in Europe at the time, I imagine my feeling of irrelevance to the modern age would have been only mildly mitigated.  Complicating my search for relevance was the insular intellectual culture of the university at which I found myself.  And I do not believe Tulane to be wildly different from most other major American universities, public or private, in this respect (although I imagine private universities are the worst culprits). 

I loved my chosen field, but still I looked with envy at the Latin American Studies students, for example, who were immersed in post-colonial theory while living in a post-colonial city.  The issues they tackled daily, theoretical as well as practical, often pertained obviously and immediately to the world they actually inhabited as scholars.  I eventually left academia, one of the few work atmospheres in which I have ever felt truly comfortable, for a variety of reasons but large among them was the increasing suspicion that my study of history would soon spiral into navel contemplation. 

To be clear, just as I believe in art for art's sake I do believe in history for history's sake.  There need really be no excuse to tell a good story about the past.  However, to spend my entire professional life participating in historical research and writing that would only interest other professionals (or students of said profession) who research and write about history...well, that seemed narrow for a field that touches on every aspect of human existence and, I believe, should be better represented in our daily lived lives.

Since leaving academia, I have started to think about history not merely as a discipline, but as a true epistemological category.  Just as spirituality, say, or science or mathematics constitute ways of knowing and thinking that overarch academic disciplines, I believe that history is more than the study of  past events.  It is a mode of thought and inquiry that leads to what we might call historical knowledge, that is, knowledge of past events, their representations and their historiographical meaning in a variety of contexts.  History is a mode of thought premised on one single question:  What came before? 

Since I can remember, my curiosity about the world has taken shape in relation to that question.  I did not just study history as a student, I thought historically as a person, always looking into the origins of things in order to explain their present.  I have loved classic films since a young age and I recall in middle school checking out biographies and autobiographies of Katherine Hepburn, James Cagney and Charlie Chaplin  because I thought information about their lives might enlighten my experience of watching their art. 

In high school, I loved reading fictional accounts of Arthurian legend.  I quickly grew curious about the factual basis, if any, of these stories and started reading non-fiction works like accounts of English archaeological digs.  Eventually, this exploration from fiction to the facts behind fiction led to my choosing medieval history as my undergrad major and master's field.   Academic study of history certainly brought nuance to my understanding of the limits and purpose of historical knowledge.  For instance, I am now aware of the scholarly debates concerning the relation (or lack thereof) of an artist's life to her art and concerning the relation of primary source documents to "reality" or lived experience.  Academic study has shaded and made subtle my understanding of what it means to think historically, but it certainly did not teach me how to think historically.  

So I mostly intend this long, personal musing to gesture toward more complex questions about history's place outside of academia in our lived, quotidian lives.  Whether we access history through what many scholars snobbishly refer to as "public history" (e.g., museums, tours, films, popular literature) or we do so simply by remembering and telling the stories of our own lives and our family's lives, history should be a living mode of thought rather than an ossified set of theories.  History should speak to our own self-identities in a dynamic way; it should acknowledge ambiguities without resolving them; and we should not forget its most basic form is storytelling

The House that Hitchcock (and a Healthy Dose of Stage Blood) Built

It seems to me that the last decade has seen the unfortunate proliferation of an unfortunate subgenre of horror movie.  I don't have a name for this subgenre...but I will describe it and give some examples.

• Movies of this subgenre rely mostly on gross-out gore for their scares.  (E.g., Hostel, where a completely peripheral character's eye slides out of its socket and down her cheek as her face gets blow torched.  Yeah.)  

•  The protagonists of this kind of film are typically uncompelling, vapid if not outright stupid, and sometimes mean.  You want these fools to get killed.  (E.g., the "hero" in the unapologetically and violently sexist Deadgirl, which asks the important question:  Is gang rape still gang rape if the victim is a zombie?  The Descent, despite its favorable Rotten Tomatoes rating, also gets a thumb down from me and inclusion in this category.  If I had friends like those two-faced spelunking girls, I would hope they got eaten by subterranean naked mole rat people.)  

• The characters behave ways in which people do not behave for psychologically obscure reasons.  I attribute this characteristic largely to laziness and basic bad writing.  (Here I especially think of Ink, a boring movie about the dream lives of people.  It depicts only the tritest of dreams - really facile wish-fulfillment dreams (e.g., a kid hitting a homerun in the majors, a middle-aged lady eating cake and losing weight).  Dreams so completely devoid of symbolism or ambiguous meanings, that I began to wonder if the writer had ever actually had a dream.  The Last Winter, so bad even Ron Perlman couldn't save it, also struck me as particularly poorly written - like a less original, less frightening knockoff of John Carpenter's fantastic The Thing.  )  

• These movies that have so earned my disdain have a special affection for portrayals of brutality uncomplicated by anything as interesting as a plot or suspense; as though depicting cruelty alone constitutes horror.  (Among the offenders: Wolf Creek, High Tension and Hostel gets a second mention because I disliked it so much.)  

Celebratory cruelty in horror movies, while I'm on the subject, enjoyed a special renaissance after the release of Saw; which is brutal, yes, but also well-written, innovative, psychologically taut and truly scary, not to mention possessing that rare gem of horror filmdom: a great surprise ending.  An army of mediocre filmmakers looked at Saw and chose to mimic only its fairly shocking violence, but none of its plot sophistication.  I have come to think of gory brutality in horror films like I think of CG effects in fantasy or action films: they are delightful when well-executed but patently unnecessary.  Cruelty punctuated with buckets of fake blood, like slick computer animation, can satisfyingly add to a film that already has other things going for it - clever writing, good characters, psychological depth - but as a gimmick, they cannot save a film that has none of these aforementioned qualities. Still persists the proliferation of horror movies featuring brutal cruelty, unmitigated by clever dialogue or tightly-wound suspense (or even humor, often used to great effect in some excellent horror films, e.g., any Sam Raimi horror movie, Shaun of the Dead, Killer Klowns from Outer Space) .

So, with this crap parade of recent horror movies, I had been losing my faith in the genre as contemporarily imagined.  In the last month, however, I have seen a handful of really superlative new horror movies.  I plan a 'best of' list for some future post, but for the purposes of this entry I examine the one that most tripped my trigger: The House of the Devil.

As the title suggests, this film is a basic girl-trapped-in-scary-house-with-unknown-evil plot. What elevates this movie to art (really -  I don't throw Hitchcock comparisons around lightly), is its reliance on building suspense through editing, pacing, through what is implied but not shown, and through what is feared but not known.

 Ti West wrote, directed and (excellently vital to the movie's greatness) edited The House of the Devil.  Released in 2009, it is set in a fully-imagined late '70s/early '80s America - feathered hair, taper leg jeans, wall-hanging curly-corded rotary phones, the whole enchilada.  This movie is better than retro, however.  It really recreates the period.  West even shot it using 16 mm film.  I started watching The House of the Devil without knowing the film date and  West rendered the period so authentically, only the naturalistic dialogue tipped me off that I was watching a more recent film.  And since I have mentioned the dialogue...

The House of the Devil is extremely well-written.  The dialogue between the protagonist, Samantha, and her best friend, Megan, particularly impressed me (well played by Jocelin Donahue and Greta Gerwig, respectively).  It felt like I was watching two actual women who behave as actual friends and relate to each other as actual people would.  This makes one care about them.  I do not think I can overstate the importance of sympathizing with one's horror film protagonist.  If she's too stupid or too unbelievable, you just wish she'd get killed already.  That kind of negativity for one's protagonist only works if the film has a self-conscious B-movie cheese factor and thus works as comedy.  In a sincere horror movie, liking the protagonist is vital.  And The House of the Devil is sincere.  It completely lacks the self-referentially jaded and satirical quality of films like Scream or New Nightmare (good horror flicks both, but their scariness relies on breaking rules of the horror genre, not on playing by those rules excellently).

I mentioned West's superior editing.  Many shots have odd angles, slow and tense pans, or unusual points of view.  West has assembled these interesting individual shots in a way that gives the film pacing suggestive of Jaws.  Early(ish) on, we get one violent, schocking and confusing scare.  Then the film reverts to its established pensive yet paranoid tone, which it maintains while slowly increasing the tension right up until the denouement and the breathless, rug-out-from-under-you ending.  

Which brings me to another comparison: the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that grasped how underexposure heightens fear and tension.  When you see only silhouettes and quick glimpses of Freddy's horribly scarred face and terrifying razor claw, when you see a girl getting ripped to shreds and tossed around a room but you can't see the perpetrator, the scare is much more thrilling than one you can look square in the eye.  It reaches you almost primordially, like a Lovecraftian "unspeakable" Cthulhu scare.  Ridley Scott also nailed this means of frightening his audience in Alien.  As the Elm Street franchise proved, the more familiar the monster's countenance, the campier his presence.  (NB:  I exclude here New Nightmare, as that film represents Wes Craven's first adventure into self-referential horror - it is scary because it doesn't take the rest of the franchise seriously, just like Scream is scary because it doesn't take the horror genre, in general, seriously).   

One final note about The House of the Devil: it features two amazing performances by the equally wonderful Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, as the owners of said devil house.  These two are so understated, so polite when Samantha first meets them, and yet so menacing.  You distrust them on a gut level, though for the first portion of the film they also seem strangely kind and reasonable.  Noonan's first scene alone is worth watching the whole movie for. 

In sum, this film is a treat for the horror fan who finds psychological scares harder to shake than visceral ones and Ti West is a thinking viewer's filmmaker.  I can't wait to see his next big thing, and I sure hope it's a horror movie.

 

How Nothing Will Ever Be the Same...Except What Stays the Same

Post-colonial theory has done some fantastic things for western historiography.  It, along with feminist theory in particular, has decentralized the traditional European narrative by focusing on the perspectives of indigenous people, women, religious and other minorities.  Essentially, post-colonial theory examines the realities of those who were subjugated or otherwise affected by the expansion of colonial powers around the globe, and it does so by paying particular attention to power structures, issues of dominance, marginalization, agency, oppression, and resistance.  

Post-colonial theory has problematized the very act of getting at and portraying the perspectives of indigenous people, women and so forth, i.e., the "subaltern".*  European colonialism discouraged, ignored and willfully destroyed many sources that were or would have been created by the people subject to colonial rule, which sources historians use to piece "history" together.**  It is, therefore, practically more difficult to study the sublatern than it is to study white Europeans of the period.  Moreover, there exists the old anthropological problem of studying an "Other" (or subaltern) when one comes from a culturally removed paradigm.  How can a 20th- or 21st-century historian - a product of the western European paradigm perpetuated by colonialism - accurately depict the experience of an individual or individuals who were marginalized and silenced by this same colonialism?  Isn't that very project predicated on the familiar old patriarchal attitude Europeans used to subjugate colonized peoples in the first place?  Post-colonial theory has helped historians deal with these sticky issues of intellectual honesty and cultural sensitivity, as well as the brutal, often horrifying and always upsetting realities crafted by colonialism.

Another consequence of the development of post-colonial thought is to divide much of western historiography into the pre-colonial and post-colonial eras.  I will not aver that this division is an illogical one, unduly constructed by historians or placing unwarranted emphasis on a single event or set of events.  European colonial expansion certainly changed the world forever and established power differentials of which we see the ramifications today.  

However, I do believe that naturalizing the pre-/post-colonial divide obscures continuities that are, perhaps, useful to note.  Additionally, it inhibits the adoption of post-colonial theory by historians of pre-colonial periods.  Historians love to annex historiographical theory from a variety of sources and employ them in novel circumstances, but the premises of post-colonial theory imply the uniqueness of the post-colonial world so much so that historians of pre-colonial time periods seldom venture to use the post-colonial methodological lens to examine their own subject matter.  I think this pre-/post-colonial divide, in emphasizing the exclusivity of each time period, might end up working to the detriment of both.  

In some senses, a narrative of continuity is the same bad old narrative of the oppressor with which post-colonial theory so handily dispensed.  I certainly do not argue for a return to this historical perspective.  Nevertheless, permitting post-colonial theory to speak only about the colonial and post-colonial world underestimates its utility for broader timeframes and topics.  

By the time Europe "discovered" the Americas in the 15th century, it had already established itself as a civilization that liked to insinuate its interests wherever it could, first in Africa, and then in Asia.  I do not propose that European military and commercial projects in Africa and Asia precisely mirror colonial expansion following 1492, but I do suggest that they bear enough resemblances to justify comparing them. 

Just a few thoughts.

A very early consolidation of broad-reaching power occurred in Europe at the hands of the Romans.  First as a republic, and later as an empire, Rome colonized what is now Europe as well as lands all around the Mediterranean and into central Asia.  Rome, like other colonial powers before and since, created an economy reliant on slave labor and the influx of non-human goods from Roman colonies or, administratively-speaking, provinces.  Rome encouraged the production of and multiplied the consumption of luxury goods, grain, animals and human labor all across its vast territory.  Read here for more specific information on Rome's material exploitation of Africa, here for information regarding the Roman (ab)use of animals in its provinces, and here for a summary of the Roman empire's reliance on slave labor imported from its provinces. 

Certainly Roman colonialism differed from early modern European colonialism in important ways.  Nevertheless, the material relationship between Rome and her provinces, as hinted at above, resembles 15th- and 16th-century colonialism in more than one way.  Additionally, the differences between European colonialism of the early modern period and that of every other period are precisely what have already been most explored by post-colonial historiography.  Surely a comparative study between ancient Roman empire and early modern European colonialism (breaching that pre-/post-colonial divide!) would yield interesting insight into both periods. 

Additionally, after Rome's fall its former territory, still tenuously sharing the Latin language and Christianity, soon became the collection of regions that would eventually identify itself as a cohesive "Europe" (once a healthy dose of Germanic tribal militarism was added to the mix). The nations of Europe, as diverse as they are, share this cultural heritage of the Roman, early medieval (i.e., tribal) and late medieval periods.  And from the medieval world, after all, developed the Europe that would exert itself via colonialism around the globe.

And now I have finally worked my way around to the medieval period, whose projects of expansion I really would like to talk about.  But that for another post.

* Like any good field of thought, post-colonial theory has built up its own vocabulary where each word has been loaded down with meaning, nuanced differentiation from other concepts, and the general fruit of academic hairsplitting.  I don't say that dismissively, but having been trained in historiographical theory more germane to pre-colonial time periods, I approach post-colonial vocabulary with some trepidation.  I understand that I may not, in every case, employ terms and concepts to the fullest extent of their epistemological baggage.  
** Not to mention the fact that most western historians are trained to look primarily at written sources.  This tendency creates a bias toward literate peoples and their cultural product.  In order to study oral cultures, historians require strategies that help them get, often obliquely, at the lived lives of people who did not leave a written record behind them.  At the very least, it requires historians to approach narratives generated by the dominant, literate powers with a healthy amount of distrust, especially when it comes to their depiction of those at the opposite end of the colonial power structure.