EPISODE 240: BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

This week had me thinking a lot about ghost stories. It could have been the fact that Tuesday was Halloween, but I think it was more likely the fact that with it we also left October behind.

For me, November is a haunted month. The beauty of autumn here in the Northern hemisphere begins to collapse like an overripe pumpkin into piles of faded, rotting leaves and some soon to be awful form of wetness. The chill in the air which seemed so enlivening just weeks ago starts to set in the bones, and darkness more and more covers the land.

(Unless you live in Southern California, which is basically Groundhog Day, the reality show. Yee hah.)

In the Catholic Church we follow the celebration of All Saints on November 1st with that of All Souls on November 2nd, and to me that’s in part an acknowledgment that in the cold and the dark we have a renewed sense of the spirits of friends and family that haunt our lives and walk our land.

Somewhere along the line I read that ghost stories are really stories of unresolved grief. A ghost is a human being who hasn’t been able to let go of some pain or longing. They wander the earth or a certain building or just outside your window right now don’t look up you’ll see them staring, looking for some access to what they want, really looking for a way out of this endless trap they’re in.

(From a storytelling point of view there’s a great internal conflict in there, the ghost sometimes thinking the last thing they want is to leave, they want to be with their loved ones again, and yet their quest to find whatever they seek always bears with it the consequence of eventually finally leaving this place or plane.)

In a way even in their most terrifying forms --

(I highly recommend you never never watch the Paranormal Activity movies if you want to ever sleep again)

(I mean it, don’t watch those movies, they will ruin everything)

-- ghost stories are also a theory on the afterlife and purgatory. First of all, there is an afterlife – congratulations. Second of all, it’s not happy for everybody. Sorry about that.

But doesn’t that make sense, really? I have to say, this whole image that as soon as we die we enter into this happy place where we no longer have any cares or concerns and Bobby McFerrin sings and whistles while we Irish jig our way across the dinner table just doesn’t make much sense to me, because the act of dying means leaving a whole lot of important people and experiences and choices behind. Some of them maybe are tied up in a bow, but a lot of them aren’t. What is going to happen to that person you’ve loved your whole life? Or your kids? Or their kids?

Or what about the things you really screwed up? The forgiveness of God aside, if we believe in such a thing, doesn’t it take some time for us to accept that for ourselves? Especially when the consequences of some of our worst choices continue to play out? Is it really that crazy to imagine some of us might fight to stick around and try to make things better, or even just be trapped for a while in the acceptance of our own mistakes and limitations?

I’m not being coy here, I’m not talking “trapped” as in “tour package will include one thousand years burning in a fiery pit”. We’re our own fire pits, when you get right down to it, filled with no lack of self-recrimination, some of which is totally justified. Yeah, you did screw that thing up.

And, my personal belief, God respects us way too much to not let us work our way through that. He’s the midwife, helping us give birth to our humbled, freed self, laying out some breadcrumbs to forgiveness, maybe even to fixing some part of the mess we’ve made in some cases, but ultimately we’re the ones pushing our way out.

It’s that story of the butterfly – if it doesn’t fight its own way out of the chrysalis, it won’t get strong enough to fly. If we don’t face our stuff, whether that stuff may be sins or broken hearts, getting into some kind of promised land will always feel like a cheat.

Once you’re dead, you’ve kind of got all the time in the world, no? So I’m not sure there’s any hurry. You want to spend a hundred years moaning and throwing stuff, Sure. Makes sense. Just don’t make things worse for anybody.

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Another way of saying this is that ghost stories are always about tragedy. From the ghost’s point of view something terrible has happened. In the movies that usually means they’ve suffered in life (or in their manner of death) in some nightmarish way.

But it doesn’t have to be as dramatic as that – it can just be the fact that they died full stop. That’s the tragedy they’re reeling from.

As far as I know there’s no ghost story about a ghost that’s just hanging around for the heck of it, except for maybe in cartoons and other children’s stories. And even then – I was looking into the origins of Casper the Friendly Ghost for this piece.

(Attention: Writer is about to try and destroy your childhood.)

Casper is this nice little boy ghost stuck in a community of adult ghosts who scare people for the heck of it.

But even though this is a children’s cartoon, there’s a lot of sadness built into all this – he’s the only child ghost, first of all; all the other ghosts are men, and annoying men, let’s go get a drink at the pub after we make people weep in fear men, not father figures or friends. And there’s not a woman to be found anywhere.

Lacking anything approaching a family or community, he tries to befriend the animals that he loves. And they run like hell, leaving him sitting alone crying.

In one early story like this he’s eventually befriended by a baby fox who sees how sad he is. And they develop this wonderful friendship – until, that is, a hunter comes along when Casper isn’t around and chases him down with his two big dogs, firing a rifle at him. Casper hears and eventually scares them away, but it turns out by that point it’s too late, the baby fox is dead.

(Seriously, this is a children’s story?)

You can guess the way the writers turn this nightmare into a happy ending – as Casper weeps over the grave he’s built for the baby fox – this poor kid does a lot of crying for a children’s cartoon – the fox floats up, now a ghost itself, and starts licking his face. Sure, some stupid hunter just murdered a baby fox, but hey, finally Casper has a friend! #WhatReallyMatters

From what I read, in the original 1940s cartoon storyline, Casper never meets a nice baby fox at all. After he gets rejected by all the animals he gets so distraught he tries to kill himself by laying on a train track.

(I did warn you about your childhood.)

I don’t know which guts me worse, that he actually doesn’t know he’s dead (how did he die?), or that this is a story about a child who feels so alone and rejected he tries to kill himself. Brutal, brutal stuff.

Of course immediately after all that Casper is befriended by two kids who take him home, he saves the day and becomes part of the family and in the end he goes to school with his friends, dressed by their mother as a child. Happy happy, la la la.

But still, you know?

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Just to undermine one more blessed nostalgic idyll – Have you wondered about the Disney Haunted Mansion? It’s my favorite ride at Disneyland. I don’t know why, exactly; I certainly don’t find it scary, or even really surprising any more. No, there’s something about it that’s a comfort. The graveyard scene especially –I think maybe in its own dark and twisty way it offers its own take on a heaven-ish vision of the afterlife. Everyone playful, happy, singing, having a grand old time, and accepting the whole now I am a ghost thing.

I’m apparently not the only one who feels this way about the Mansion and its graveyard. As I think I might have mentioned here before, Disney has had problems with people dumping loved ones’ ashes in that graveyard on the ride. (And elsewhere, too.) It’s apparently a pretty pricey mistake to make, too, as the park has to send in special janitors afterwards to locate and clean out all that ash.

But before the graveyard, do you remember that scene in the dining hall? There’s got to be a hundred ghosts in that room, eating, fighting, flying around.

Now, if we accept the general rule that ghosts in a house are there because that’s where they died, or that’s where something catastrophic happened to them, we’re either dealing with a Jim Jones level suicide/poison/murder thing, or we’re looking at a cursed room that keeps killing its occupants.

Either way, this is way more Lovecraft than Uncle Walt, if you ask me.

(Fun fact: have you wondered how Disney creates those ghosts? It’s actually a very very old magic trick called Pepper’s Ghost. Basically, everything you see happening in that room is actually happening underneath you and off to one side. Lights that illuminate those “ghosts” reflect off plexiglass into the dining hall, creating the illusion of the ghosts floating about.)

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While I tend to think of ghost stories with an eye towards our final destinations (please don’t get up until the captain turns off the seat belt light, also please be aware that your baggage may have shifted during our flight), ghost stories are also clearly stories about our current everyday lives. We all know at various times and in different ways what it is to be trapped inside our longings, or wrestling with unresolved pain or grief, maybe from decades ago. Really, a ghost story is just like an exorcism story, a tale of our own ongoing struggle to be free.

I was reading an article this week that seems completely unrelated to this. (It will not surprise you to know I received an A+ for transitions in school.) The piece was a Guardian exposé of sorts about former Facebook and Google execs who have come to believe that the very technology they helped develop is hurting people. Like the guy who invented the Facebook “like”, who fears that we’ve all become completely distracted, unable to focus – and that if nothing is done to change this the next generation won’t even know that their lives could be different.

Or there’s the former Google strategist who says “We’ve habituated ourselves into a perpetual cognitive style of outrage, by internalising the dynamics of the medium.”

(It’s a very good article. Well worth your time.)

The strategist’s point, and the point of many in the article, is that as much as we all complain about outrageous behavior on social media, in fact those platforms depend on it. Appalling tweets, clickbait headlines and incendiary articles are the magnets that wrench us out of distraction and into engagement. What’s even better (for those platforms), that engagement is not satisfying; no matter what small hit of release we get from responding to nastiness, it doesn’t last. In fact usually it only leads to a deeper need, as we get from some (or many) a negative response (or, worse, no response – there is nothing as unsatisfying or unnerving as a post met with silence).

Basically social media is the soda pop of human interaction. It claims to offer you a way to fill you up, but in fact its chemistry actually only creates further sense of need. (There is no such thing as a thirst-quenching soda; as sweet as they might taste, their sugar and caffeine actually dehydrate you.)

(If you want a crazy example of how and where the outrage machine works: yesterday Slate posted an article about a new episode of Stranger Things it didn’t like. The social media headline: “Stranger Things ‘Punk’ Episode is a Historic Embarrassment.” New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik piled on, “There is no credible defense possible of that episode.”

This is an episode focused on one character in sort of a punk-themed setting. Nothing vile or offensive happens. It’s just not something people have enjoyed. But online that’s not going to really grab you, is it? So instead we have to spruce it up with some real high-quality outrage.)

There’s no high schooler in the last year forty years who hasn’t been taught how advertising is built on creating a sense of need, of something I’m missing. Television, a medium that has always generated its income from the advertising minutes it sells, in effect works on the same way, creating characters that become so important in my life that when they’re not there I feel their absence, want them back, and building storylines that generate anxiety within us. (You can also look to the new season of Stranger Things for a how-to guide on episode-ending cliffhangers, and the internal drive they create to immediately move to the next episode so that I can feel better.)

(You should really watch the new season of Stranger Things. It is an '80s utopia.)

Social media works similarly, but with the want/need emerging not out of marketing or a storyline but our interactions with one another. We see other people having stuff, doing stuff and want what they have. Or, even more often right now, we see people saying things we disagree with, it creates a sense of frustration, and so we feel a need to respond. Which does not satisfy and therefore should mean we walk away, but actually somehow leads us to interact even more.

Caught in these loops, searching for satisfaction, what has social media made of us? Aren’t we all reduced to angry spirits walking online corridors throwing plates and looking for a way out?

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Anthony DeMello was an Indian Jesuit who did a lot of work bringing together Hindu and Christian spirituality.

He has some fantastic little books of stories and meditations. Here’s one I really like that seems like a nice antidote to the black hole that is social media.

1. Turn your phone off (not vibrate – no sound at all). Put it somewhere where you can neither see nor feel it.

2. Find a comfortable place to sit, where you can’t see any screens. Take a few long deep breaths.

3. Close your eyes. Breathe in and out, in and out. And as you do so, listen to the world around you. What do you hear? What are all the sounds?

4. Enjoy them all. Savor whatever you find.

5. After a couple minutes of doing this, open your eyes. What do you immediately notice? No need to look around – just, what pops out? Whatever it is, savor it. Enjoy it. And breathe.

6. After a couple minutes, close your eyes again, and listen. What do you hear? Enjoy it. Breathe.

7. After a couple minutes, open your eyes again. What do you see? Enjoy it. Breathe.

8. Close your eyes. What are you feeling? Whatever you’re feeling, savor it. Breathe.

It’s amazing how much there is going on around us that we don’t even notice. And how much more interesting it all is than all our devices.

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MY FIVE FAVORITE GHOST STORIES

1. THE SHINING

It’s nothing like the book that it’s based on. It’s nothing like anything that has come before or since. It creates a sense of visceral wrongness to the ghosts that makes them deeply deeply scary. And it’s one of the greatest horror movies of all time, right up there with Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and the live action Smurfs.

WHY HOLLYWOOD? WHY?

2. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

A modern instantly-classic take on the haunted house, what really made this special was that you never ever under any circumstances see the spirit that’s haunting this place. It’s also why you should never watch this film, because you will never be able to see your own house as empty and you alone again.

3. THE SIXTH SENSE
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen The Sixth Sense, but I’m not sure I’ll ever lose that feeling of my jaw dropping at its end. I don’t know whether it’s one of the greats or not, I can’t even remember the story all that well, but I remember how it made me feel and so it will always be special to me.

4. AMERICAN HORROR STORY: MURDER HOUSE

While each subsequent season of AHS has gotten harder to understand (who is still watching this show, and why, I’m serious, I really want to understand), that first season, about a family moving into a haunted house, is a real gem. It played on many of the great tropes of family horror – the marriage in conflict, the neighbor with a secret, the lonely kid befriended by a rebel, the cursed residence.

And it innovated. Here a ghost looks just like everyone else. No spooky edging to their figures, in some cases they don’t even know that they’re dead. Which led to some great plot twists and made for a great season of television.

5. PAC-MAN

What? Pac-Man is clearly the story of a haunted house. It’s got ghosts, it’s got that scary thing where the corridors out only lead back into the house and there’s no escape. It never ends.

The real question is, what awful thing did he do to those four spirits to turn them into ghosts in the first place?

That’s right, deal with it, when you’re playing Pac-Man you’re identifying with a cereal killer.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

GHOST

I feel embarrassed mentioning Ghost, because it is cornball. But when it comes to ghosts as longing, here for a reason, concerned about us, there’s none better.

POLTERGEIST

Again, iconic for its time, if almost totally lacking in logic. (So what, there’s like a ghost dimension? What is this, Ghostbusters? And they want the girl why exactly? And what is with the TV?)

But at least with Poltergeist we get a strong ghost rationale for their presence – the classic Indian graveyard chestnut, which somehow manages both to acknowledge the violence at the very heart of the founding of our country while still representing Native Americans in a racist, how-white-people-see-us way (aka Indians have strong medicine). And it's pretty compelling.

++ MY POP CULTURE WOW OF THE WEEK ++

I know, I've already mentioned Stranger Things, Netflix’s mashup homage to 80s horror and childhood buddy films, Stephen King meets Steven Spielberg, a couple times this ep.

The second season just dropped. I won’t spoil it, but it’s pretty great. Stronger than the first season, I’d say. God the kids they’ve cast are outstanding, their performances so true and heartfelt. Someone online yesterday was saying they could watch that show without their being any horror element at all.

And you know, I think that’s maybe my one complaint about the show in general. The plot, super compelling, very well crafted, but it seems so separate from the heart of the show. What it’s really about, Stranger Things? I think I should be saying it’s about kids struggling to figure out the elements of growing up, and adults struggling to overcome their own pasts to learn how to be good parents. And there are certainly gestures in those directions, but the overarching plot really has nothing to do with any of that. That's all about monsters and other universes and deep dark science experiments.

It’s striking to me that my favorite moments from season two are not the crazy cliffhangers and wonderful story ideas (I did not think we could ever top the total ridiculousness of what Joyce did to her house in season one, but oh boy do they), but a few very brief and very unexpected moments where characters deal with more normal things, like girls and dances and arguments with their kids.

I’m in there for the horror of it all, definitely. But in a way I think the show is missing the fact that the real horror story for twelve year olds is the reality of becoming an adolescent or realizing you are a pretty crappy parent.

Some people can't stand the crazed manic fearful (insert insane synonym here) way Winona Ryder portrays the mother of tween perpetual-victim Will Byers. But I have to say, I love her. She will do anything for her boy, and she is unhinged in the most wonderful way.

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I tried my hand at a social media-told ghost story for Halloween. You can see whether I succeeded.

Kumail Nanjiani, who stars on the tech startup satire Silicon Valley, was also talking on Twitter this week about the experience of meeting all kinds of tech entrepreneurs on the job, and how little any of them seem interested in the ethics of the things they’re creating. It’s a really interesting thread.

(Kumail also had a movie come out with his wife this fall, The Big Sick, which is the true story of him struggling to deal with his parents – who didn’t want their Pakistani Muslim son marrying a white girl – and her parents, after she suddenly falls deathly ill soon after they’ve broken up. A very funny and heartfelt film. If it’s still around you, go see it.)

Are you hearing the term “milkshake duck” a lot lately? I am hearing the term milkshake duck a lot lately. And being old and unhip I have no idea what it means though it sounds delicious.

Turns out, what it refers to has absolutely no relationship to milk based products or waterfowl of any kind and instead of delicious is a way of talking about ordinary people who society grows fascinated with only to quickly discover something they don't like.

How the internet works I just don’t even.

The painful revelations in Hollywood continue. This week Vulture did a fantastic interview with the 94-year-old actress Rose Marie, who played Sally Rogers, the fantastic female comedy writer on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She talks about her nine decades of working in the entertainment business and how she made her way, became via Sally an icon of an empowered woman, and sometimes lost work because she refused men’s advances. A fun read.

You know, no matter how much Hollywood (or I) might turn ghosts into monsters or emblems of unresolved pain and grief, the other side of it all is that if you believe in ghosts or an afterlife none of us ever really walks alone.

I don't know about you, but I like the idea there might be someone that's always there and I can check in with from time to time right now.

Have a good week.