One Function of the Guardian/Observer for the Middle Classes (Neatly Encapsulated in the Title of a Single Article)

'I feel defensive about my second home - but my guilt is largely unnecessary' (Ian Jack's column in The Guardian, Saturday 27 October 2012)

The Demon in the Machine: Paranormal Activity 4

The idea which runs through the Paranormal Activity series is that the visual technology which is so much a part of contemporary life might just capture something horrible, either by accident or design. In the original film (2009), a couple attempt to make sense of frightening paranormal disturbances which have been occurring in their new home at night – a light turning itself on and off in the hallway, a door opening by itself, loud thuds and crashes upstairs, etc. – by mounting a digital camera in their bedroom and recording while they sleep. This is followed by handheld cameras in Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), security cameras in Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), a prequel to the original, and now, in this fourth instalment, a series of networked laptops recording continually via webcam throughout the house.

Our handheld digital world has had a huge impact on cinema, and not just because the compact nature of digital cameras and smartphones – and their low prices – makes filming accessible to all. Where the mediatized global catastrophes of the Sixties were televisual (the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, for example), in the twenty-first century, they have been digital. One effect of this is the way footage from 9/11 and the 2004 Tsunami taught film-makers how to really ‘do’ realistic disaster (e.g. in Cloverfield - see previous post). But what Paranormal Activity suggests is that there is something disturbing about the technology itself, something dangerous about our very compulsion to record every moment of our lives. What if the devices we deploy to protect ourselves should uncover, or even unleash, a submerged world we would be better off not knowing about?

Jane and Louise Wilson

 

In its heyday in the late Eighteenth Century, gothic fiction specialized in exotic, enclosed spaces, fitting locations for heightened  drama, such as the rooms in castles or monasteries. Now we are as likely to encounter the gothic in the ordinary spaces of our everyday world – not only the urban architectural spaces explored in the photography of Jane and Louise Wilson, but in everyday suburban kitchens, bedrooms and garages. ‘Suburban Gothic’ is a label coined by Bernice Murphy to refer to a major sub-genre within American gothic over the past few decades, which expresses the anxiety that beneath the surface of the most mundane of environments something extraordinary is lurking, something virulent or evil. The Paranormal Activity series is a recent example of a sequence of films that include Halloween (1981) and Disturbia (2005). The original film was set in a modest example of ‘tract’ housing, the sequels in more affluent villas. Each, though, is representative of ‘suburbia’.

From the outset, the plot has been the weakest link in the Paranormal Activity series, despite the creditable attempts to embellish it in the sequels. A demon has attached itself to one of two sisters, staying with her throughout her life as she moves from one suburban locale to another, making sure she and her offspring stay in his possession, eliminating anyone who gets in his way. But why this is the case, and even how it works, is less clear. In a way the story is rather un-gothic: demons are more monstrous but less uncanny than ghosts. But in the end this doesn’t matter. In Paranormal Activity 4 the simple plot – demon wants boy back – is just a pretext for the real business of the film: to show us how menacing the spaces of our ordinary lives are. The films gives us the Freudian uncanny in an especially direct sense: our homes are made unhomely by the act of scrutiny. It may be that the most problematic inconsistency of the story is the fact that a force formidable enough to drag adults through rooms, start cars, and send chandeliers crashing down on people, is apparently unable to turn off a laptop. Yet this demon has no interest in stopping the camera, for it is his biggest ally.

*Bernice Murphy, Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2009)