EPISODE 338: THE REAL MONSTERS WERE THE ONES WE MADE ALONG THE WAY

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

It’s still a few days until Halloween – or as we like to call it here in the States, Day When White People Should Seriously Pre-Examine Their Choices.

Seriously, there is some white kid out there right now telling his friends for Halloween he’s going as Megyn Kelly in blackface.

And they’re like, Do Not Do That.

And he’s like, No, I know, I’m not racist guys, I’m just making fun of Megyn Kelly.

And his friends are like, Do Not Do That.

And he’s like, Shut up, it’s original. I’m even going to wear my MAGA hat with it.

In the Jesuits we don’t really “do” Halloween. It’s kind of a bummer, honestly. A couple years ago I even went out and bought a costume anyway. It was this fantastic Hilary Clinton mask.

She's amazing, right?

I had this whole idea that I would stand at the front of campus on Halloween and on Election Day, wearing the mask and waving at the traffic.

Which I could have done, really, it’s not like I had some premonition of catastrophe. But it was all so fraught I was sort of worried people might complain that the university was endorsing a candidate (as if that would have been a bad thing, he thinks to himself) and then the Jesuit community would get in some kind of trouble.

So now she just sits on a shelf. Waiting for her chance to point at someone maniacally.

I don’t know what’s crazier, that we have a whole day dedicated to dressing as crazy as you want and wandering around in public, or that it's not every day. Wasn’t the underlying theme of childhood Don’t Bow to Peer Pressure. Be Your Own Special Snowflake. Dance Like Nobody Can See You, Because Nobody Can, You’re All Alone.

(I may not have gotten that last one exactly right.)

Seriously, how is it that that was the lesson we were meant to learn, and yet we all wander around every day behaving and dressing within a relatively narrow set of guidelines. Why do people only sing and dance down the street in the movies and/or shows about teenagers? What are we waiting for?

Of course Halloween isn’t really built around joy and self-expression once you get to be an adult. Or really fear, actually. It’s more about being clever and/or deniable fantasies. I really don’t like blood at all, I just thought it would be fun to appear to be disemboweled for Halloween.

Maybe the thing we really need at Halloween is stakes. You know, some legitimate (though minor) source of terror. Like do the Purge, but with a promise that nobody gets hurt, only scared. Once you admit you’ve been frightened everyone has to let you alone. Like Lazer Tag.

That’s a terrible idea, isn’t it... This is why they don’t put me in charge of anything but making stuff up. ++ It’s funny, the things we’re afraid of. Like darkness, sure. It’s the unknown. You could fall. Or get lost. Or be ripped to pieces by a puma.

(I know that sounds crazy, but that’s the thing about pumas. In the dark they’re really really hard to see.)

Death, same way. I mean, not with the pumas (although who can say what happens when you die, it could be wall to wall puma). No it’s the absolute unknown. The unknowingiest of unknown. Also, it’s like when you’re playing cards and you’ve betting hard all along and then now you’re at the point where they’re like, Okay then, show your cards. Except it’s not a game and you have no idea what you have or what you get for it. You might feel pretty great along the way, but at the end?

Or falling. Does anyone really like falling? Only people attached to rubber bands. Or maybe if it’s such a long fall that for a while it becomes something else, like flying but vertically tho.

But then there’s fears that most of us have that don’t make any sense on the surface. Like bugs – Daddy Longlegs and spiders and ants and cockroaches and flies close up. 99 times out of 100, none of those beasties poses you any threat. And yet, when I see a cockroach I can feel my whole body pull in on itself so hard if there were suddenly to be enough of them I am pretty sure I would become a black hole. I would spontaneously self-singularity.

(I actually had a GIF of cockroaches here, just a bunch of them together, but it was still so disturbing I cut it and replaced it with this happy flying rainbow unicorn.)

Dogs are probably a million times more likely to hurt you. How many stories have there been about terrible dog attacks, in fact? But most people, when they see a dog, do not think I am right now going to have to flush that thing down a toilet.

Maybe there’s some deep genetic impulse at work, bugs as carriers of disease pretty much for all time and all that. But I kind of wonder if it’s more that most bugs are just so damn foreign. It’s like they’re opposite the Uncanny Valley, so far removed from looking or behaving like us that on some visceral level most of us just cannot handle it. At both ends, things just seem WRONG.

It makes me worried about contact with extraterrestials, actually. The way we deal with things that are genuinely alien is pretty instinctive. Spielberg and Mathison’s ET looked like a little doll; but if it looks more like Cthulhu, or a centipede, we could be in some serious trouble. ++ You know what’s really scary these days, and sort of fascinating to think about if you could imagine that you yourself are an extraterrestial watching while eating Reese’s Pieces rather than being human along with the rest of us?

Other people.

Seriously, if I had to rank top things people are afraid of specifically today, “Other People” would almost definitely be #1. Whether you live in the States or elsewhere, it just seems like we’re all more and more anxious about one another. What we believe, what we’d do for what we believe and what we’re willing to ignore for what we believe.

We’ve always been at least part of our worst fears. See: Robbers. Gun Violence. Terrorists. Bosses. Parents/Children who Just Don’t Understand. But it’s all much moreso now. It’s part of what made GET OUT so compelling – the “monster” was just other human beings. Nothing supernatural about it.

But then something terrible happens and we all drop whatever we’re doing to help each other. Or the latest Marvel movie comes out and red, blue, purple or fuchsia we’re all in there loving it. Maybe our situation today is kind of like when you’re in a fight with your partner and it’s gotten to that point where the more you talk about it now the worse it will get but you just can’t stop. Meaning, when we’re not focusing on how different or opposed we are, we’re actually not as opposed as all that. (Most of us, anyway.) But when focus on our fighting, we fight all the more.

I know it’s dark and sort of super grim, but us as the monsters of one another’s stories – it’s kind of true, isn’t it? ++

Maybe the scariest sculpture I've seen in recent years is this one from Berlin. It's supposed to be German legislators arguing about climate change while the world drowns around them.

It's called "Follow the Leaders". ++ Probably my weirdest experience with fear of late happens when I fly. Twice in my life I’ve had really rough, long flights. One was so bad that it felt like we were on a rollercoaster. And as I tried not to hypervenilate the Jesuit sitting beside me just laughed and laughed. “Nothing we can do anyway”, he told me before I and some other passengers stuffed him in the overhead bin.

The other was just long – turbulence that went all the way from Los Angeles past Hawaii. When it goes on like that so long, the whole rest of the flight you’re assuming it’s just a matter of moments before it comes back again. So awful.

So yeah, I’ve gotten kind of scared of flying. Like the last few long flights I’ve been on I find me telling myself at various points, Look, You, don’t expect it to stay calm like it currently is. I don’t want to be surprised.

But here’s the weird part: when those terrible moments hit, I find myself internally getting more peaceful. I’m still FREAKING OUT. But on some other level something Zen kicks in. Sometimes I randomly imagine myself sitting with someone I care about, or who seems very easy going to me. Sometimes I don’t. But either way, it’s like some surrender instinct has grown a little, and runs even amidst my anxiety. It’s like my version of the computer subroutine that turns on the fan when the computer is starting to overheat.

Sometimes I wonder, what is the fear there really? Is it crashing? Being ripped from the plane? Not being able to change my situation? The feeling of smashing into the ground and/or water from a million miles up? Yeah, maybe that. Pain – we tend to lose track of it pretty fast when things are going better, but the anticipation of being in it is pretty awful.

Of course that’s often what holds us back so much, too, that fear of pain of one kind or another. Test this out on yourself: What if a lot of the time we’re each living in a horror movie that’s actually only in our heads? We freak out, we attack, we run away – but the monsters we’re responding to aren’t really there.

++ LINKS ++

Ah, the fun Halloween-y links I’ve been saving for you...

Like this story of the sociologist who gets hired by theme parks to make sure their horror attractions are scary. In my next life I want that job.

Here’s the super secret origin story of the original Halloween, which 40 years ago was written in two weeks, got made for $300,000, was almost totally dismissed by critics, and um, just had yet another sequel that killed at the box office. (Hollywood, learn something.)

I love this little video about the tombstones at Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Turns out each of those stones is dedicated to someone who worked there on the ride.

Pretty much I love everything about the Haunted Mansion, including the fact that people love to go on the ride and dump the ashes of their loved ones. The Wall Street Journal just did an article on this; “The Haunted Mansion probably has so much human ashes in it that it’s not even funny,” one custodian explained to the Journal. They even have a special code for human remains cleanup.)

If you want to be hip, chic and trendy with the kids, here’s a piece on “spooky” culture,aka things like changing your Twitter name to something more Halloween-y, or wearing a pumpkin head and dancing to Ghostbustersin a black unitard.

This piece on cursed objects sold on eBay is absolutely the must read of the week.

One listing: “HAUNTED CHILD SPIRIT DOLL”

From listing: “We moved into our 1920s house a couple of years ago. A while ago I stumbled upon an old trunk in our basement that had been converted into a toy box. Since then, the following has happened:

—My sons’ toys go off randomly without anyone there to touch them. —My eldest son has nightmares every night and has woken up thinking he has heard someone walking around in his room. —My front door has swung wide open with no one there. —I have heard laughing and someone coughing when I’ve been home alone. —My five year old son is now afraid to sleep in his room alone and must have a light on. —He also talks about an old man and his mother that live in our basement. —You can hear what sounds like footsteps sometimes coming from the above attic. —Our remote and toy batteries drain down unusually fast. I am not responsible for anything that may or my not happen when in possession of this doll.”

(Believe it or not someone bought it, and for just $60. eBay buyers, you are so much braver than me.)

Finally, the New Yorkeron surviving your first ninety days in Hell:

Build strong relationships with your fellow damned.Hell is other people, so be sure to introduce yourself to as many of them as possible. Build both horizontal (laid out on the quartering table) and vertical (dangling in a suspended cage) bonds. Keep in mind, though, that the demon asking, “How was yourweekend? Tell meallabout it” is torturing you, not befriending you.

Have a great Halloween. Michael Myers may be trying to get into the house, but it doesn't matter, because we are Jamie Lee and he will not define us.

See you next week. Geronimo!