Still Acting Paranormally

The film critic Vivian Sobchack once argued* that in sci-fi films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) viewers are forced into an unusually active role by the sheer 'minimal activity' of what we see on screen. This seduces us into 'an attentive paranoia which makes us lean forward to scan what seem like the most intentionally and deceitfully flat images for signs of aberrant alien behaviour from the most improbable of suspects'. They thus bear out Lawrence Alloway's view that suspense is nothing happening. The rationale behind both Paranormal Activity movies raise this attentive paranoia up a notch by exploiting the familiar eerie, empty, luminous world of the security camera. As we sit in the cinema we feverishly scan every nook and corner of the rooms depicted on the screen waiting for an intrusion. It's a film, in fact, which counters the conventional logic of cinema in these times of supersize TVs. Paranormal Activity is really 'made for the small-screen'.

Paranormal Activity 2, somewhat improbably, manages to repeat the same trick as the original, largely by increasing the dimensions of the scrutinized space, the number of rooms, mirrors and doors, the number of characters (including the most vulnerable person of all, an infant), and adding more adept special effects and more chilling set-pieces. This time, too, I found the 'demon' myth more persuasive. In the first movie, the uncanniness of the sudden intrusions into the tableaux of domestic ordinariness (the dramatic making-unfamiliar of the familiar, homely space) was diluted by the idea that the demon, a less uncanny horror figure than ghost or poltergeist, was living in the loft like a difficult lodger, burning photos and dragging bits and pieces upstairs. PA2 provides a more intriguing back-story, to the effect that Katie and her sister's grandmother must have made a deal with the demon in return for giving him (it?) the first-born male child from her family line. It makes Katie a much more sinister figure - and increases the uncanny feel of the demonic possession scenes involving both sisters.

The film also does an admirable job of remaining compatible with the narrative of the original film - and expanding it. PA2 is not just a sequel but a kind of prequel and 'simul-quel' too. Yet the three-weeks gap following the transfer of demonic energy from one sister to another makes me wonder even more about the demon. It asks us to imagine that a creature which has largely confined itself to living in an untidy cellar, periodically making clumsy trips upstairs to rattle pans, turn off lights and remove the pool cleaner from the pool, is capable of negotiating the busy highways from one part of California to the other in order to hatch a plot whereby he will inhabit one sister, kill her boyfriend, return to the original house, kill the other sister and her husband and then take an infant which he surely could have simply kidnapped without fuss in the first place. It is not the most efficient campaign. This demon clearly has a taste for complexity - or rather a strong aesthetic sensibility. What is curious throughout the films is not his terrifying power so much as his restraint. Why, when he is capable of subduing an Alsation in an instant or dragging an adult downstairs and possessing her within minutes, is he apparently unable to remove an unsuspecting child from his cot? Why, for that matter, is a creature who is able to manipulate teenagers into spelling out 'Hunter' on a ouija board seemingly unable to scratch out something legible on the cellar door? The only conclusion is that the demon is not just the reason for the terrible narrative but its auteur as well. He knows that Alloway is wrong. Suspense is not 'nothing happening' but lots of little things escalating over time into bigger things.

The question the film leaves us with is how the third instalment - if there is one - will unfold. My money's on a representation of a different kind of domestic normality, where the teenager Ali tracks down the Demon, Katie and Hunter to an untidy apartment somewhere else in California, where they live in dysfunctional splendour, trying to manage his demonic outbursts, and watching reruns of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.


*in Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1997)

The Apprentice

Joy Stefanicki: fired, 13th October 2010

I spend half of each episode of The Apprentice constantly on the point of switching over. I find the abrasive stupidity of the contestants almost unbearable. These are not the sort of people I want to spend any time with - even if they are on the other side of the screen. Here we have the normalized 'narcissistic personality disorder' of the Big Brother generation fused with the normative ideology of business: 'I say exactly what I think, I get exactly what I want, I will win at all costs...'. The beauty of Big Brother, though, is that the format itself - especially the extreme length of the time most contestants must spend in the house - means that this ego-shell is peeled away bit by bit until it's patently obvious that the proclamations of the contestants is all bluster.

A similar argument is often used about the moral punishment dealt out on The Apprentice. The beauty of this show, the argument goes, is that we can rejoice in seeing the most obnoxious people flayed by Sir Alan, scourge of the vain and stupid, in the boardroom at the end. Last night's episode, for example, revealed Joanna as mouthy and unnecessarily combative in the tasks and then forced to acknowledge her 'aggressive' nature by Sir Alan. Strangely, though, neither she nor her inept team-leader, Laura (who boasted at the start she could deal with any kind of personality only to demonstrate she could deal successfully with no-one) was fired. No, it was their fellow team-member Joy - ironically-named yet essentially well-meaning. Why? Because she was deemed to have shown Sir Alan 'nothing' in two weeks. And this, ultimately, is why I hate The Apprentice: the narcissistic aggressivity of the candidates is validated by Sugar's own business ethic. The lesson of each episode is: you have to show yourself as mouthy, aggressive, contemptuous towards others, determined to win at all costs... but you just have to do it in the right way.

A Lethal Weapon

On the day after Derrick Bird shot dead 12 people in Cumbria BBC Radio 4 broadcast a play entitled Six Impossible Things. Based on the true story of a murderer, it contained the line 'I'll put a bullet in your brain'. 66 complaints were made to the network, which quickly apologised and declared it had been wrong to broadcast the play. Why did this upset people? Who were they? Could they be protesting about anything more than ironic coincidence?

This seems part of the disturbing willingness to be part of a 'community of grief' which has marked British society since the death of Diana. People seem to need to think of themselves as 'victims' of tragic events, imagining that it's just too painful in their grief-stricken state to be confronted with images of any sort of violence. I vividly remember that a day or so after Diana's death the scheduled movie, Lethal Weapon III, was replaced by the sentimental (and wonderful) film, Field of Dreams, as if watching Mel Gibson's wild staring eyes as he brandished the eponymous firearm was just too upsetting for those in a fragile state after the tragedy. Of course this sentimentality is all media-led, as the duty of the news networks and newspapers is seemingly to create a community united in outrage and grief. The BBC is the prime offender here, so at least there is another irony: that its drama wing has to play by the strange rules it enforces elsewhere.

Because You Were Home: The Strangers

The Strangers is a film utterly without redemption - along the lines of ‘torture porn’ movies such as the Saw series and Wolf Creek. Having endured the motiveless terrorizing and torture of a couple who just happen to be ‘home’ when a group of random attackers choose to call, we are left with no hope, not even a deeper ‘point’. The opening of the film refers to some real event which ‘inspires’ the movie, though the makers appear to be unaware what this actually was or unwilling to reveal it. More likely, they don’t care. 

The opening is genuinely scary, especially when the girl knocks at the door at 4 in the morning asking for ‘Tamar’ and, when told she’s not there, says plaintively ‘Are you sure?'. When we see one of the attackers suddenly inside the house, on the margins of the frame, while the central Liv Tyler character remains oblivious, it's absolutely terrifying. But from then on the movie has nowhere to go. It seems unsure and indifferent to what the point of all this is, other than – to go by the word of the director on the accompanying DVD Extras – to provide some innovative kind of movie horror experience. But this ambition extends beyond little other than technical innovations such as constructing the house in a vast studio so that the echoes are as loud and spooky as possible.

No, if there is a point it is simply that one’s home can be easily invaded. It thus reminds me of David Hare’s comment that the message underpinning Patricia Highsmith’s fiction is that ‘once you set your mind to it, any one human being can destroy any other’. In The Strangers, when asked by the Liv Tyler character why they do this, the masked intruders reply: ‘Because you were home’. This seems to refer to the victims just happening to be in while the killers were on their random spree. But it also conveys a deeper logic, that being ‘home’, counter to all the conventional connotations of safety and security, is where you are at your most vulnerable. This message is in keeping with the general paranoid tenor of 21st century America. But it's actually something that horror films have taught us more implicitly for decades. Think of the common post-horror-film experience of having your own house transformed suddenly into a location for potential evil as you eye dark spaces nervously and rush past empty rooms on the way to the safety of bed. It's the home that is made strange.

Watching Cloverfield Again

Cloverfield is an object-lesson in how to revitalise an established genre. It's a monster movie, but the genre is presented from a different point of view, as if we are looking in from the outside. It is also the movie which reveals how 9/11 taught Hollywood how to do disaster. According to Slavoj Zizek, in his instant response to the catastrophe, 'The Desert of the Real', one of the striking things about the media coverage of 9/11 is how it showed that we had been 'prepared for' the event by movies depicting the destruction of US cities such as Escape From New York and Independence Day. But Cloverfield shows that there is a parallel knock-on effect. Want to know how people react in the face of a crisis? Replicate the real footage of people running in panic around the streets of New York. Need to detail the moment when it's suddenly clear nothing will ever be the same again? Replicate the home video inadvertently capturing the moment tragedy strikes. Equipping the cultural imagination (see also 2006's Right At Your Door) with the ability to depict disaster with supreme accuracy is one of the clear consequences of 9/11.

Blitz Street

What an unsettling experience watching Channel 4's Blitz Street is. The programme has built 'a row of terraced houses specially built on a remote military base and subjected it to a frightening range of large-scale bombs and incendiaries similar to those dropped by the Luftwaffe' (Channel 4). Experts then proceed to analyse the damage done by each bomb - the SC50, the SC500 etc. This insight into the devastation wrought by the weaponry is accompanied by 'emotional eye witness testimonies, giving a fantastic insight into day-to-day life on the home front and the immense psychological damage caused by the bombardment'. But the effect on the human beings who had to live through this shattering of masonry, glass and wood remains implicit. As is clear from the excited expert analysis of the effects of the bombs, the programme-makers have invested all their energy into the reconstruction and destruction of the buildings. The result is a rather autistic attempt to comprehend the horrors of war - despite all the noise and violence, we are left with a 'clean' analysis, untroubled by mess, but missing the point. The unspoken element, of course, is the human body. What would bring together emotional testimony and destroyed buildings is a similarly forensic dissection of the smashing of human flesh and bones. Now that would be emotional.

Mr Benn's Secret Life

Coming back to Mr Benn after several decades was a surprise. I'd always thought of it as a programme about the magic of escapism. Each episode reveals the enrichment of one man's daily existence following his indulgence in his fantasy life. Watching it again, however, I couldn't help fixating on Mr Benn's normal life as depicted in each episode. This is a man who dresses up in a suit and bowler hat yet never goes to work, lives in a bustling street but has no friends, owns a three-bedroom terrace house but shares it with no one. The only person he speaks to in his real life is a shopkeeper. What a desolate figure! Rather than a childhood world of unlimited potential, Mr Benn is an emblem of the alienation of modern existence. His real secret-life lurks not in the fancy-dress shop but beneath that sober suit and tie. What has happened in his past? Has he lost his job, divorced, never been able to start a relationship? What will become of him? What will happen when he becomes increasingly addicted to his fantasy-life and starts carrying it into Festive Road, walking around dressed as a knight, explorer, astronaut, etc., frightening the children? The real tragedy here is that none of his neighbours would notice.