Missing the Halloween Spirit This Year

One of the things I like about the town I live in is how people go all out for Halloween. We usually get a ton of trick or treaters and it's just a blast overall. I was having fun in the leadup to this week, but suddenly I've lost the spirit.

Part of it has to do with the ridiculous obligations in my life right now, both in terms of work and parenting. I am just tired, all of the time. During the few moments I have to rest my mind is preoccupied with the sad, depressing state of the world. This month has brought war in the Middle East, related murders in this country, a mass shooter, a radical anti-democratic gerrymander in North Carolina, and an election-denying Christian nationalist weirdo being elevated to the Speaker of the House. (I wrote about the latter on Substack.)

This is all being experienced through a media filter that constantly promotes lies and manipulations of all kinds. It's getting hard to tell the truth, and soon people will stop trying. Once that happens, there's no bottom.

I can't escape the feeling that everything is collapsing. On inauguration day in 2021, I cried tears of relief and joy, hoping we were through the Trump years. I had been vaccinated against COVID the day before and the two events together felt like two horrible crises might finally be ending. Looking back I can't believe my naivete. Trumpism and COVID are not past. They were tipping points knocking down a rotten and rickety American and world social order that had been teetering for decades. 

Neoliberalism hollowed everything out, including basic social obligations and connectivity. We've lost the capacity for positive collective action and the privations of COVID have made us even more angry and suspicious. We interact through social media, which only brings out the worst in us. In the face of all of this progressives have retreated into making self-righteous statements ("In this house we believe...") because deep down they know there's nothing that can be done about it in any material sense. Social movements have adopted a "leaderless" model allowing them to take to the streets while accomplishing nothing. 

The scariest thing this Halloween is the world we are living in. I once believed in the capacity for change, but right now my main focus is trying to survive the coming onslaught. Just take the shooting in Lewiston, for example. We know there's absolutely no chance that we will regulate guns, and that our society is awash in so many guns and gun nuts that any attempt to regulate them would be useless. A conservative Supreme Court would strike that down, anyway. We talk about the 2024 election as if it's a referendum on democracy, but democracy already lost. 

I tried posting about this on Facebook and people assumed my feeling that Halloween had no joy this year is curmudgeonly, not the result of existential dread over the state of the world. Don't worry, you'll probably be feeling the same way by next Halloween.

It's the Silence of God, Charlie Brown

I was bummed to hear that It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown would not be getting a live TV airing this year. Perhaps it's my dumb old man nostalgia talking, but it was always my favorite of all the holiday specials on TV when I was growing up. In those pre-streaming days they were true appointment television, and this special was one of the first things my family taped off of TV onto our brand new VCR. It also inspired thoughts much more intense than the usual holiday special fare. 

The Great Pumpkin special came out in 1966, in the midst of a cultural moment where many speculated that traditional notions of God had outlived themselves. Time magazine, hardly a radical outfit, put our their infamous "Is God Dead?" cover that same year.

No foreign film director dominated the art houses of the day like Ingmar Bergman, and earlier in the decade he crafted his "Silence of God" trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. All three grappled with the fact that we live in a world where God manifestly does not intervene. If there is no divine being actively guiding our lives and giving meaning, what then? Although Bergman rejected his religious upbringing, I find these films to be far meatier meditations on faith than what professed Christian film-makers have been able to come up with. At the end of Winter Light a disillusioned minister doubting his faith still holds service in an almost empty church but manages to find a reason to live in it. 

Like Bergman, The Great Pumpkin contemplates God's silence. Linus is a true believer surrounded by doubters who mock his steadfast faith. In fact, their mockery only strengthens his belief. He goes out into the pumpkin patch, eagerly awaiting the Great Pumpkin's arrival, even fainting when he mistakenly believes it has arrived. When comes to, he finds out it was just Snoopy. His deity has refused to give him a sign, or to requit Linus' devotion. 

However, his faith is not shaken. The next day Charlie Brown tries to comfort Linus by saying we've all done stupid things, causing him to explode in anger. How dare Charlie Brown call his belief "stupid"! His response to God's silence is thus to pray that much harder. 

I've never known quite what to think of Linus in this moment. Yes, he is being obstinate and silly, but his devotion to his principles is admirable. After all, the Great Pumpkin will only reward the most "sincere" pumpkin patch, and Linus is wholly sincere. 

We live in a scary and seemingly senseless world. It is hard to maintain belief in anything in the face of our world's all-consuming cynicism. In the face of injustice, humanity cries to the heavens for assistance, but it does not come. At the same time, letting cynicism win ensures that nothing will be able to change. Maybe Linus sitting fruitlessly in the pumpkin patch isn't so laughable. In this broken world cut adrift from divine assistance, we could all use a little sincerity. 

John Carpenter's Halloween and Fortress Suburbia

I released my newest Substack this weekend, inspired by my first viewing of John Carpenter's Halloween. Released in the late 70s after the last major waves of suburbanization and before the dawn of gentrification, it questions suburbia's founding myths. The place that supposed to be protected actually spawns true evil. Check it out!

The Trump Monster Is Strangling The GOP Mad Scientist

In keeping with the spirit of the season, I've been watching lots of old Frankenstein movies this week, and so I've had mad scientists and monsters on my brain. Watching the aftermath of the release of the Trump tape yesterday made me realize that the monster, long having been on a rampage, is now choking its supposed mad scientist master.

The monster here isn't Trump, or even Trumpism, but a certain kind of populist conservative politics propagated, encouraged, and nurtured by both the Republican Party and conservative media over the past fifty years. It doesn't matter if the candidates are "big government conservatives" like Nixon and Dubya, or more laissez-faire types like Romney and Reagan. Almost every candidate the GOP has put out in the general election since Goldwater (save for Gerald Ford and Bob Dole, to their credit) has tried to divide the country in order to win by taking the bigger half. These divisions have often been made on consciously racial fault lines in order to pander to the white majority's baser instincts. In other cases, they exploited cultural fault lines, be they generational or religious.

I'll just give you a greatest hits highlight reel: Goldwater opposing the Civil Rights Act, Nixon's appeals to "law and order" and "the silent majority," Nixon's terming of his opponent in 1972 as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion," Reagan's talk of "welfare queens" and "young bucks" and "states rights," George HW Bush's Willie Horton ad, Dubya's "with us or against us" and turning out Bible thumpers to attack gay marriage in '04, McCain's harping on Bill Ayers and Palin's "real Americans" rhetoric (the beginning of the Tea Party), Romney's 47% "makers and takers" schtick, and just about everything out of Donald Trump's mouth.

In recent years this kind of conservative populism was given a massive shot in the arm, Steve Rogers-style. After losing both the White House and Congress in 2008, many wondered if the conservative movement had met its Waterloo. Instead, conservative media went on the offensive, most famously in the guise of Glenn Beck, an old school paranoid ranter who would have embarrassed the editors of Red Channels. The Tea Party was soon unleashed, and by appealing to the most rabid portion of its base, the GOP managed to thunder back. Of course, to do this they had to let the monster of its leash. And the monster started getting so confident that it was not afraid of fire or the whip wielded by its master anymore. It decided it would not be quiet and go back into its hole.

And so the monster found a new master: Donald Trump. This master told the monster exactly what it wanted to hear, got it angry and smashy to wild effect. The mad scientist tried to ignore this at first. Then, afraid that the monster would be lost forever and the scientist's powers destroyed, decided to chicken out, cross its fingers, and just let Trump do his thing. Now the scientist is paying the price for his cowardice and craven cynicism, and is being strangled by the monster. My only hope is that the monster finishes its task right before the angry peasants show up with torches and pitchfork to destroy the awful beast.

The Wisdom Of Halloween

More than most people, I am attuned to changes in the seasons.  This might be partly because I grew up in central Nebraska, a place where the weather changes are violently breathtaking.  Summer there brings thunderstorms barreling down the Plains and winter blinding blizzards that come just as suddenly.  Living in a rural area, the changes in the seasons also marked obvious changes in the cycle of work and the cycle of life.  Spring's planting, summer's verdant bounty, fall's harvest and winter's dormancy all surrounded me.

Our oldest and best holidays come from ancient times and a world where the rhythms of agriculture dominated.  The holidays marked the season's changes, even if Christianity had been grafted onto them.  Christmas is the warm light in the midst of the winter solstice, Easter the celebration of nature's resurrection turned into Christ's.  The Church tried to turn Halloween into All Saints Day, but Halloween has come out victorious.  It comes at the end of October when the harvest has come in, the leaves mostly fallen, and grass has started to go brown.  Life is dying or going into hibernation, and thus the feeling that the line between the world of the living and dead is blurry.  Halloween is thus the wisdom of the ancients still available for us to draw from.

I must say, as I hear the leaves rustle on my street and the dark of night gets spookily dense, I can feel the cold hand of the world of the dead on my shoulder.  But its not all scary.  I have sadly lost many very close to me over the last few years.  My wife's grandfather, my grandmother, my cat, and one of my best friends have all lately passed into the realm of the dead.  Over the last week they have felt eerily closer to me, their presence almost palpable.  It's as if I can almost see their faces, and feel their touch again.  Sometimes that feeling is almost unbearable, but I am glad that this unsettling time also brings me closer to their spirits.

Make Mine Gothic Horror

This year I'm really getting the Halloween spirit, perhaps because it's my first living in my own house.  We've got pumpkins on the front porch (soon to be jack o'lanterns) and some spooky decorations on the mantlepiece.  Most importantly, I've been delving back into the creepy world of gothic horror, broadly defined.

Most modern horror leaves me pretty cold, perhaps because much of it amounts to a theater of the grotesque.  Since the advent of the ratings system horror films have been free to be as gory as they wanna be, unleashing a parade of grisly deaths and slashers stabbing naked teenagers.  The whole slasher genre reeks of misogyny, and horror film franchises that have followed in its wake, like Saw or Final Destination, focus on delivering shocking, bloody deaths.  These films are basically the modern day equivalent of circus sideshow entertainment or gladiator battles, and appeal to humanity's baser instincts.  I certainly have some base instincts of my own, but slasher/gore films were never an appetizing way for me to indulge them.

Older horror films had to be a little more creative and to rely more on the imagination of their audiences.  They knew that just a little blood and the suggestion of gore could be much more frightening than explicit, graphic violence.  Take for instance The Horror of Dracula, the first Dracula film by Hammer studios starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.  It establishes an eerie, frightening mood from the beginning with a shrill, bombastic score and bright red titles over shots of Castle Dracula's statues.  The opening credits end with Dracula's name etched in stone, the score dropping suddenly into silence, and blood slowly dripping on the vampire's name.  The sudden inclusion of blood in a credits sequence is shocking, especially how the camera lingers on it.  Later in the film we don't see the stake go directly into a vampire's heart, but her blood curdling scream allows the viewer's imagination to create a scene for their mind's eye much more grisly than what would have been put on screen.  Much the same can be said for sexuality in these older films (Brides of Dracula is a good example), which must be suggested rather than explicit.

Most of all, I like my horror to be more about mood than killing.  Give me a dark, torch-lit castle, creaky wooden doors, a foggy graveyard at night, and haunted houses.  These are great places to spend a couple of hours on a dark October evening.  Some of the Hammer films are pretty lame, but their set designs are so amazing to look at that you barely notice.  The Edgar Allan Poe adaptations by Roger Corman's AIP studio flicks starring Vincent Price also manage to attain maximum creepiness through stellar set design.  Apart from a few exceptions, horror is a genre full of films with little artistic momentum behind them, produced cheaply and often carelessly.  I can enjoy bad horror films if they set the right atmosphere, and many of the bad ones get that very right indeed.

For instance, Son of Frankenstein is much inferior to James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, the two best of the classic Universal horror flicks.  The stuffy Basil Rathbone lacks the unhinged, sullen spite of Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein, and there's a cute kid thrown into the story to boot.  That being said, the film is shot beautifully, and sets are absolutely gorgeous.  Much the same could be said for later Hammer Dracula flicks, which lack the power of the original, but still look fantastic.

Most horror films in the last last forty years have gone for shock and gore instead of mood and atmosphere.  Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.  There have been a few good exceptions.  Werner Herzog remade Nosferatu in the late 1970s, with amazing results.  Perhaps a similarly-inclined director today can go against the grain of the genre and revive the classic gothic tropes in interesting ways.