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The horror of exurbia

Haunted House Films Are Really About the Nightmares of Gentrification

By Sam J. Miller, PopPolitics.com
Posted on October 31, 2007, Printed on November 21, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65512/

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. --Hannah Arendt

In the course of 15 years as a tenant organizer, my friend and mentor Artemio Guerra has become intimately, disturbingly familiar with the process of gentrification -- the shifting demographics, the clash of old and new tenants, and the monstrous machinations of landlords bent on pushing out rent-controlled tenants. The threats and harassing late-night calls. Whole buildings left without heat. Bombs planted in lobbies. INS called on immigrant tenants who fight back. A nightmare so pervasive it would surely rate broader attention if it wasn't a "normal" consequence of capitalism.

Artemio and I always end up having long discussions about horror films and politics, so he called me up after seeing the haunted house film Cold Creek Manor. "It's all about gentrification!" he said. "It's a piece of crap, but still ...

He was right on both counts. In the film, an upper-middle class family from New York City moves into a rural working-class community, and finds itself under assault by a crazy handyman who used to live in the house, as well as the angry spirits who haunt it.

Rich city folks move out into the country and find themselves up against nasty poor locals and a ghost in another recent vengeful-spirit film, Wendigo. The more I thought about this recurrent motif, the more I realized: the modern haunted house film is fundamentally about gentrification. Again and again we see fictional families move into spaces from which others have been violently displaced, and the new arrivals suffer for that violence even if they themselves have done nothing wrong.

This thriving subgenre depends upon the audience believing, on some level, that what "we" have was attained by violence, and the fear that it will be taken by violence. In the process, because mainstream audiences are seen as white, and because gentrification predominantly impacts communities of color, the racial Other becomes literally monstrous.

The biggest cliche in the modern haunted house film is that of the Indian Burial Ground. In Pet Semetary, The Shining, and The Amityville Horror, the source of the problem is that the real estate parcel in question has desecrated sacred ground.

The conquest of North America could be classified as our most extensive gentrification, where thousands of communities of color were violently pushed out by white settlers manifesting racist destiny. The ubiquity of the Indian burial ground points to screenwriter laziness, but it also constructs a movie-going public all too willing to accept that our homes are literally built upon genocide and terrified that those dead Indians will come back -- not to scalp us or to take "our" land through armed force, but to suck our children into the television or make our husbands go insane and try to kill us with an axe.

Guilt over the North American genocide persists, in spite of centuries of racist history that have clouded the general public's grasp on the extremity of violence perpetrated against the Native Americans -- the broken treaties, the Indian Removal Act, the smallpox blankets. With the death of the Western as a film genre and the success of the Civil Rights Movement in challenging the blatancy of racism in mainstream culture, the Indian-as-bloodthirsty-savage was transformed into the Indian-as-murderous-ghost.

That's one of the main ways the horror genre, on its surface so apolitical, connects to the United States' histories of genocide. How far a leap is it from the menacing ex-slaves in Birth of a Nation to the zombies in Night of the Living Dead? Even though its subtext of displacement and gentrification might foreground race and violence and displacement, the haunted house film participates in the mystification of demographic change by convincing us that we are innocent, and the people we have displaced are monsters.

Displacement creates a paradox: We acknowledge the wrong that has been done but feel powerless to do anything about it. A sort of collective guilt springs up, a sense that we are insignificant cogs in the machinery of economic and social factors that create gentrification. This is particularly true for the middle class, who are often forced by economic necessity to move to gentrifying neighborhoods or to new suburban developments that have demolished pre-existing space.

Regardless of their place on the political spectrum, most people acknowledge that their government does some very bad things, and that they themselves might have to face the consequences. As in Malcolm X's famous comment on the assassination of John F. Kennedy -- "the chickens are coming home to roost" -- and following the Golden Rule, a system that maintains itself through violence will engender a violent response. The price of living in the comfort that globalizing imperialism can provide is the chance that we will be the victims of retaliatory violence -- like the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11.

In the same way, the consequences of gentrification flicker on our radar regardless of whether or not we feel personally culpable. The question is, can we do anything about it? The modern haunted house film tells us that we can't -- that the only way to live in peace is to destroy the monsters we have already replaced.

From its roots in the Gothic tale, the haunted house story has often been about guilt visited upon the innocent for things their ancestors (or husbands, or cousins) did. Somebody did something wrong, and somebody else is paying for it. Think of Jane Eyre, taunted by the madwoman in the attic who turns out to be the wife her lover has locked up. The children in The Turn of the Screw are destroyed by their governess' sexual frustration, manifested in ghost form. In what might be the most influential literary example of the "bad house" story, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, the "evil" has its source in its owner/architect's repressive patriarchal Puritanism.

The assumption has always been that "innocent" beneficiaries of privilege won, though violence will be made to pay for that violence. This construction of innocence is disingenuous, since real guilt does exist, even though the complex mechanisms of modern markets fog the issue in ways that play into "our" desire to feel like we have no role or power in the process.

Race is structured out of haunted house films, because the horror film is largely intended to allay guilt -- scary movies invoke it only to exploit and then banish it. Candyman and The People Under the Stairs represent attempts to expose the racial underpinnings of the genre, but even they depend upon the audience (constructed as white) having a pre-existing fear of "black" spaces -- housing projects, tenements, the inner city -- since those spaces are represented in exaggerated forms that exploit middle-class misconceptions.

And even this exploration has come to an end with the current glut of horror films -- witness Dark Water, about an urban renter whose affordable housing is haunted by the ghost of tenants past, and which takes place in a New York where somehow both ghost and victim (and just about everyone else) manages to be white.

What is a ghost?" Stephen Dedalus wonders in Ulysses. "One who has faded into palpability through death, through absence, through change of manners." The haunted house film mimics the workings of the real estate market, where gentrification and urban renewal push people of color into homelessness, into shelters, into prisons. People of color register as monsters -- homeless boogeymen, gangsta rappers, violent crack addicts waiting outside your house.

Gentrification is itself something of a ghost -- trivialized by the mainstream media, ignored by government, distorted in academia as "impossible to quantify," or obfuscated by policymakers -- as in a report from the Brookings Institution that somehow wonders Does Gentrification Harm the Poor? Because the "audience" for gentrification is always the poor, people of color, immigrants, working class seniors, and combinations of the above, the realities of gentrification are usually "invisible" to those who shape the public's understanding of the issues.

In my day job, organizing homeless folks who have been displaced by the tens of thousands by rising rents to fight back against city policies and practices that abet gentrification, there is no question that the poor are harmed by gentrification and that poor people of color are disproportionately harmed (currently, 90 percent of the 35,000 people in NYC homeless shelters are black or Latino). The other thing that's painfully clear is that everyone wants to do something about it. In spite of the mainstream media's demonization of the homeless as crazy, violent substance abusers, many people acknowledge that the presence of homeless people is the result of systemic problems and that homeless individuals are not "garbage."

Despite the claims of local government and real estate interests (if one can indeed claim them as separate) that "neighborhood improvement" will transform poor, crime-infested communities into bright, green utopias, most people are able to see the realities and are eager to support grassroots efforts to transform blighted neighborhoods in ways that do not negatively impact existing demographics. The survival and success of the haunted house film indicates a considerable (subconscious?) guilt, which in turn indicates acknowledgment of culpability and oppression.

Horror films give us back our sins as monsters. The parents who burned Freddy Krueger alive find their randy teenage offspring butchered. Nuclear testing wakes up Godzilla. In slasher films, sexuality is a capital offense. Dr. Frankenstein's hubris leads to the deaths of everyone he loves. And starting with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, class antagonism has been at the heart of the horror film.

These days, the two most popular plotlines in the dozens of scary movies that come out each year are: (1) A middle class family or group of teenagers wanders into the wilderness and the clutches of a depraved monstrous lumpenproletariate ("The Hills Have Eyes," "Wolf Creek," "The Descent," "Wrong Turn," "Cabin Fever," "Chainsaw Massacre," "Silent Hill"); or: 2) A similar configuration of victims menaced on their own luxurious turf by monsters who symbolize "our" paranoid fantasies of the violent, dispossessed working class, even if they do not actually come from it ("When A Stranger Calls," "Cry Wolf," "Cursed," "Scream," all the slasher films that do not fall under the first category).

The spate of slow-moving zombie films that followed in the wake of "Night of the Living Dead" represent a capitalist nightmare of communist revolution: the brain-dead bloodthirsty working class, desiring nothing but our destruction, rises us up to besiege "us" in our comfortable homes, our malls, our military bases.

Would a haunted house film have any resonance in a communist country? Is it possible to imagine The Grudge in an economic structure where housing is guaranteed -- however problematically -- and where people have extremely limited freedom to choose their own housing? Present-day capitalism leads to an inevitable fetishization of home, of "our" space, rooted in our understanding that nothing is guaranteed. The haunted house film expresses the universal human fear that your home is not safe, that it will be taken from you by violence.

House of Sand and Fog is an honest look at the emotional costs of a system where housing is a commodity, and not a right -- the film can be read as a haunted house tale with no ghosts or monsters, just "normal" human beings whose basic needs are in direct opposition and cannot be reconciled.

Haunted-house escapism allows us to evade two fundamental truths: that on some level we participate in the displacement of others, and that we ourselves are vulnerable to displacement and homelessness. At the same time, the stigmatization of the homeless in media and in governmental policy has become so extreme that "we" equate the homeless with monsters. When you lose your home, you lose your membership in the human community. You become something else: a ghost, a monster.

Not all haunted house films end with the ghosts getting brutally exorcised, or the humans packing up and running for their lives. Although the dynamics always play out as a war of Us vs. Them/ Good vs. Evil/ Old vs. New, the battle sometimes ends in a draw. The parody Beetlejuice, also about clueless, rich, urban gentrifiers colonizing a haunted house in the countryside, ends with the dead and the living recognizing that they are fundamentally the same, and learning to co-exist in harmony. The nature of scarcity economics makes this precise solution impossible with real-life gentrification, but active cooperation across the lines of class and race is not only possible, it's essential.

Expecting a mainstream horror film to give us a road map towards fighting gentrification is as absurd as hoping that an anti-war film will tell us how to stop a war. Instead, art -- bad art, good art, corporate art, independent art -- should prompt us to examine our fears and our assumptions, and move us to a deeper inquiry of how they impact our reality.

The haunted house film makes assumptions that are worth questioning: Who are "we" as an audience? To whom do these films address themselves? Who haunts "our" homes? Whose homes do "we" haunt? But it also contains the seeds of a real dialogue concerning the human costs of the housing crisis, and our responsibility and our power to do something about it.

Sam J. Miller is a writer and community organizer. For the past three years he has organized homeless people to successfully fight for changes in city housing policy. A graduate of Rutgers University, where he majored in cinema studies, he lives in the Bronx with his partner.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/65512/

Place, space, and public policy

I wish political scientists would stop using the word "place" when they mean "space." (I have had this argument repeatedly since I started a PhD in poli sci, where "place-based public policy" is a new buzzword.) But then again, I'm glad they are starting to recognize that policies have spatially differentiated impacts...

An op/ed by a poli sci prof in today's Globe and Mail not only uses "place" in the way that I would prefer, but recognizes that policy, identity, and place are linked:

Putting Canadians in their place
Some cultures take root in their geography - others do not
ANDREW STARK
Professor of management and political science at the University of Toronto
Globe and Mail, August 13, 2007

'If some countries have too much history," Mackenzie King said when Confederation was about 70 years old, "we have too much geography." Having now just turned 140, Canada has twice as much history. And what those intervening years tell us is that our national bonds get strained not simply because we have too much geography. Rather - in a way unique among democracies - different groups within Canada have come to relate to geography, to place, in very different ways.

Consider a comparison that can be made between Quebec and the U.S. South, once home to North America's only other serious secessionist movement. The place itself - the Mississippi River, bluegrass, cotton fields, magnolias - has, as the historian Carl Degler wrote some years ago, become central to southerners' sense of their identity. And as southern pride and sense of self has come to focus more and more on place, it has - as a welcome byproduct - come to focus less and less on race.

The political culture of French Quebec, of course, has never embraced the vicious racism that views one ethnicity as superior to another. But for years, Quebec's sovereigntist leaders, in attempting to heighten the emotional pitch of their cause, have flirted with appeals to blood, tribe and ethnic origin. Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that one scarcely ever hears them talking about the physical glories of the place itself. After all, to speak of forest, tundra, maple trees and plains would be to speak of Canada, not just la belle province.

Is it possible that where the local place hasn't assumed a sufficiently prominent role in a group's self-conception, matters of blood and tribe are free to loom larger - with adverse consequences for national cohesiveness? Another set of Canadian and American experiences would seem to bear this out. Despite valid quibbles, there is a basic truth to the idea that many U.S. immigrant groups, while retaining their unique identities, are relatively socially integrated; for our ethnic cultures, by contrast, Canada is more in danger - as Yann Martel has said - of becoming a "hotel." One of the reasons may be that U.S. immigrant cultures have more readily woven into themselves a distinctive sense of local place. The Jewish-American culture chronicled by Isaac Bashevis Singer incorporated the sights and sounds of the Lower East Side; the Italian-American culture of Tony Soprano is caught up in the landscape of northern New Jersey: He could not have lived in Seattle. As the literary scholar Jeff Karem says, there is a "crucial connection between regionalism and ethnicity ... in American literary history."

Not so much in Canada. The Jewish-Canadian heroes of Mordecai Richler's Montreal could have lived elsewhere - growing up in the Vancouver Jewish community, I certainly knew Duddys and Joshuas - and all that Montreal uniquely provided them were French-Canadian girlfriends. As Caribbean-Canadian writer Austin Clarke says about the characters in his Nine Men Who Laughed, they "could also be in London, Paris, New York or Moscow. They happen to be in Toronto." It is not that ethnic culture fails to shape places in Canada - no one can mistake the charms of Toronto's Greektown for those of Chinatown - but that place often fails to become core to Canadian ethnic cultures. And that leaves room for elements of blood and descent - for the most insular kinds of human differences - to become more prominent.

If some of Canada's cultures have gone no more than a few steps down the road of incorporating a sense of place, others - aboriginals, for example, or Atlantic Canadians - go far in the opposite direction. From the Haida park reserve to the Newfoundland outport, the ways of life rooted in these specific places form the very marrow of their cultural self-conceptions. Consequently, policies that try to preserve their culture at the cost of taking them away from their place (as with various attempts at aboriginal resettlement) or that preserve them in the place, but at the cost of changing their culture (as employment insurance has frequently done) will always be unsatisfactory. Instead, we can preserve these cultures only to the extent we preserve them in the place. But of course doing so is costly, and so the surrounding debates often fray the bonds of national unity.

Here again, we would gain some perspective on how impressive our own challenges are if we glanced at the Americans, who have it easier. Early on, Congress and the Supreme Court began affording U.S. aboriginals greater legal protection for their place-based ways of life than exist in Canada. Partly as a result, economic assistance to American native reservations tends to get debated more purely on its economic merits, without getting as tangled in the fraught question of cultural survival. For a different reason, when small American regional towns stand to lose their main businesses, it is rarely said that a culture is thereby at risk: There is a sense in which small-town America and its culture exists everywhere in the United States. Debate over the economic policies needed to sustain aboriginal and regional places in America does not become as freighted, in the way it necessarily does here, with the idea that a culture is in jeopardy.

Other democracies beyond our own, of course, face challenges because a culture is deeply bound up with a local place - as with the Basques in Spain - or, conversely, because a culture has been unable to incorporate the local place into itself at all, as with the Muslim population of Paris. While some of these controversies have been sharper than our own, no other major democracy confronts challenges as broadly as we do on both fronts simultaneously: because place has taken little root in some of its cultures and great root in others. In this summer of our 140th year, there is some real truth to the claim that if Canada can succeed, then the world can.

A Moving Train in Place

I was listening to the new Issacson biography of Einstein (audible.com reccommends...) on the way to New York on the train. The General Theory of relativity (distinct from the Special Theory of Relativity, of course) was dervied from a thought experiment involving a train, a clocktower, a person on the platform, and a person inside the train. Which is in place? Which is in motion?

John Bergers' current Orion article Ten Dispatches About Place captures the problem with the getaway landscape that I've been following through exurbia (an excerpt):

"Every day people follow signs pointing to some place that is not their home but a chosen destination. Road signs, airport embarkation signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others for business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realize they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, longitude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose.

They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance that separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience.

Sometimes a few of these travelers undertake a private journey and find the place they wished to reach, which is often harsher than they foresaw, although they discover it with boundless relief. Many never make it. They accept the signs they follow and it’s as if they don’t travel, as if they always remain where they already are."

Culture/Nature

Why do I have to be here to know where I am?

(L. Taylor 2005)

Place as a Camel's Mouth

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but what about looking in the mouth of a rental camel on the shores of the Persian Gulf?

Toronto, Radiant City

A new way of thinking about the slabs of the suburbs.

Inbound LGA, Prospect Park

 Photos by Davina Pardo

Skyscrapers to the people!

The 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art opened late last week, and today I braved the snow to visit the main venue, the Federation Tower, soon-to-be the tallest building in Europe, scheduled for completion next year. Not sure if this was a sly marketing ploy or a masterful curatorial stroke, but three floors (19th, 20th, 21st) were sacrificed to the arts for one month. I find contemporary art insufferable, especially in vast quantities, but the grand location here made sure there was always something delightful to look at. Particularly distracting, in the best possible way, were the squiggles on the windows by a Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi. I wonder if any art show has ever been upstaged (or at least neutralized) in this way before. The sprawling interiors took on the semblance of a raw exhibition space, although they are well on their way to being turned into multimillion dollar penthouses and offices.(There will even be a swimming pool on one of the top floors.) I hesitated to support the mammoth construction of skyscrapers in Moscow, but I always thought they will make at least one positive contribution, giving new vantage points for viewing this city. They have indeed done that. At least for now.

Sand Storm

If we had galloped into Saudi Arabia, we wouldn't have known it. If we had galloped off the edge of the dune...

For the movie version, see http://www.aebrinton.typepad.com/doha/

Narva

Here's a glimpse of a place more wintery than Doha. I was just in Narva, on the Russian-Estonian border, one of the most incongruous frontier points I've ever seen. Two old fortresses face off on both sides of the Narva river (Russia is on the right), with an aging bridge connecting the shores.

Russia's borders are more accidental and incoherent than most, drawn up for obscure reasons to serve empires that have long crumbled apart. But this crossing is particularly bizarre.  Narva on Estonia's side is dominated by ethnic Russians, but there's still a dazzling view of the fortified showdown across the river (a fitting image for two endlessly quarreling countries).

The installations of the border post include the bridge and the corridor that extends deep into the shoreline. The awkward part is that it's possible to walk around, beneath and over all the infrastructure, while never technically breaching the frontier.

The border crossing feels like some alien body that pierces the town but remains completely separate and isolated from it.

I had a similar feeling on the Russian-Chinese border across the Amur river last summer, but there isn't actually a bridge there - only boats and ferries crossing back and forth. Here you stumble upon it in the middle of the town.

The Estonian fortress was built by the Danes in the 13th century, and the Russians added its counterpart about two hundred years later.

Jeff Wall

The Crooked Path, 1991
A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993

Eastward to Doha

Hijacking Aspen's latest posts from Doha: horses & mosques

From Lip King to Her Knotty Corner

Many of you will have seen this, but: some punny cartography of the Toronto subway system (whose real map is here), inspired by a similar stunt in London. This sort of affectionate appropriation seems to get transit managers all huffy.

Radical Cartography II

from Chris Yates