Antebellum (2020) and the crooked path out of a nightmare, part 2.

rev., Feb 25, 2021.

Elizabeth, interloping in Eden’s hotel room,

sees that Eden has taped up a drawing her daughter made on the wall, to feel less homesick, so a tactic of creating a sense of being at home, or thinking of you. This is parallel to one I saw for the first time ever with The Little Things, on HBO, where Deke (Denzel) an old cop goes to an old hotel to stare at pictures of a suspect he puts up on the wall too, strange. It is also nicely contrasted, and this is good picture play, with another ersatz picture of a plantation, in the very art, large scale painting, in the room.

indeed, this IS picture play, in the sense that the movie is playing with pictures to create some ideas that push it along. I posted on it, since this is my balliwick, it could be said to be the flip mechanism of the movie

(since in first viewing I did not see this at all, I assume most viewers didn’t either; then I thought it, when it reappears in the cabin, might be a test card-like sign showing Eden how to do the flip; but, no, it is also an inosculation with her daughter by way of a children’s drawing she had in her hotel room earlier, it is as if the underscoring link between the two venues, and solves the problem).

Elizabeth then sabotages the room service, which Eden complains about at dinner, by flipping the sign on the door to do not disturb too

Then there is a strange encounter on the elevator. There is a little girl,

she looks pasty, and ghostly, dressed antiquely, and all about keeping quiet

the creepiest thing is that she drags a doll after her, on a rope, on the floor, like it was an abject slave, it is also gray, the color of the shadiness of the blinds

she sees the little girl in the corridor, it’s kind of creepy; then, hotel hallways, because of which hotel hallways are creepy, get quite long, scary

and way at the far, far end, far off, there is the little girl again, so Eden has an encounter with, as if, the twins of the Overlook hotel, some ghost child from the past of the site.

Who is this girl? a few possibilities. One, she is another appearance of the Soul Guide Girl that we saw in the opening shot, leading you into the otherworldliness of it all, that is, a function of the film, a dream guide in the abstract, and a common trope; two, if inside the plot, that is, diegetic, she might be related here as there to Jenna Malone and thus be being used by her to further spook Eden into knowing she is somehow being stalked; or three, this is a hotel, in a horror movie, that means a haunted hotel, and in a haunted hotel since 1980, that means scary little girls

This latter suggests, and this would not be such a bad idea, that this posh hotel, are we in Atlanta? is situated on the site of an old plantation, maybe the original historical one of the one being reproduced in the movie, where a little girl still haunts. Nonetheless, its presence as a trope here, while provocative, is, alas, incidental, nothing much comes of it, except to make of it one more breadcrumb on the trail of stalking that Jenna Malone is springing on her.

Later, there is another picture of the plantation, same one,

and, as if also to flip the opening sequence, Eden is now the belle of the ball, more picture play, ok by me

then the girls go out, have a strange time, then that’s over

after being picked up by Uber it turns out that Malone is driving the car, with the music up, and the overseer is at work too

she is abducted

now, if you were following closely, this plot, that, people with mad obsessions abducting people to use to them fulfill their needs, it is a common trope, I mean, it goes waaaay back to One Body Too Many (1935), for example, when Lugosi abducted brides to use their blood to make his wife young again. But in this case I think the director team, while some of the facile or incidental hinting at tropes might have been read by critics as simply poor characterization and not sly hints, made use of Blackness, and the climate of wokeness which has foregrounded Blackness, to divert our attention away from the possibility that as a highly successful black businesswoman goes about her business in the world, there is not only microaggressions, but also a stalker and her husband actively trying to abduct her back into their mad fantasy world, so, I concede, while I was stirred by these hints, I did not pick it up.

Then, she goes back, she as if wakes up startled from a dream again, but this time she wakes back up into “1860”.

Two things. This COULD be a case of two women, somehow linked to each other, who have nightmares consisting of each other’s lives, imagined across 150 years, is it possible to have epigenetic dreams? and would this be an example. A woman slave in 1860 has nightmare dreams foretelling of her great great great great granddaughter’s life running into problems, and, for that, she then transmits that dream to that granddaughter who then makes the connection by having nightmares of her 4^th great grandmothers agonies in her nightmare life. It’s possible. In both cases, however, these are not leaping dreams, leaving the person sitting bolt upright in bed, these are shallower, wake up startled dreams, bottoming out at the level of the symbolic, which, for me, might mean that they do not have the punch, or the shock value, that would make plausible the idea that they traveled in time.

Two. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), there is no question that she travels back in time, that is, there is a definite chronologically based travel from the hippie era to the civil war era. The means by which this happened though was not a dream, but a kind of dizzy spell, which pulled her back. But she did not know when it would hit, she had no control of it and dreaded it. So, somehow, it was some sympathetic force in time itself, which hooked her and pulled her back and forth in time. I wished Butler would have further explored exactly what these dizzy spells entailed, but she preferred to treat the nodes of the spectrum, not the core passage.

It was at this point that the movie tosses us a curve ball, the general goes out to answer his cellphone.

Wait, what? but, in the rules of time travel sci fi, if the movie is grounded in real 1860 then the cell phone might be one of those technologies that people back in time do not understand when the hero brings it with him back in time. By some pull, he is pulling back technology from his time too. But, it’s weird.

But, in any case, this being pulled back in is different this time because it seems Eden has decided hell no almost immediately, she plans to leave, now. his is prompted by the other girl committing suicide, and as the movie flips and flips back and forth across the time line she is shown not in her bikram but in a poorly built hut in slave days, still, however, according to visual trope, Venetian blinds bespeaking a world of shady doings

Another point. Because, precisely because the movie keeps coming back over the in-between, from today to the past, from the nightmare to the fantasy life of a popular author, while if merely incidental visual rhymes like this could be accused of pingponging in a trollish way–troll pingpong image formalism a plague upon our times–when there is something more; then it is actually true that the imagery is eisentoptic, that is, it actively moves over the in-between, and the visual shot is a function of the movement. When, indeed, the camera pulls back from this shot, to only see the fragment of her hanging in a window

it keeps pulling back,

almost to obliterate it, or reduce it to a no big deal, happens every day in slave quarters living; it keeps pulling back,

then we get to Eden in the fields, and she has that blank look on her face again, like she is there, but not there, aware of something not right, or absolutely sure of it, but uncertain how to proceed,

This sort of visual sequence reinforces the fact that, in fact, this is NOT a dream, but a real experience, that is, this morning, that women in her 19^th century slave wear was dressed to the nines giving a lecture on empowerment, and now, next day, she is back in the field in some abduction nightmare by a psycho couple who have taken their hate of what the world did to them out on black people, this posits this back and forth relation as more akin to, if not actually, lucid dreaming, that is, Eden is aware of this being a nightmare, because it is not one. But that is what the visual sequence says, there is, here, double awareness. An accent is placed on this, informing us, in fact, of this fact, even if we have not realized it yet, when the camera crawls out of the rows of cotton

up to the sky; the plot suggestion here is that Eden has decided tonight is the night, because it will be a clear night, with a full moon to guide us,

and the directors assure us, they all know, they are not stupid, but like hostages in a hostage situation they are playing out their hostage speeches, to survive this mess.

this also adds a vividness to this framed view of the idyll she wants to escape from, she is waiting at the window for night to fall, shots like this struck me as almost suggesting we were in a lucid dream, that is, that she knew was dreaming, or in a nightmare, once again, she is vacant, not there, thinking herself ahead of the game, This shot made me highly suspicious however, I kind of stopped, to wonder at it.

its beautiful framing made me think of a similar shot in Nomadland, when Fern looks out upon her foreign world

such shots correspond to a trope I have identified, the Raven’s Gate. It is an inside out POV, but from a person who is out. It is not unlike the shot of Veronica Carlson in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1970), aware by her husband’s crime that she is cast out from normalcy, and will ever after that live outside, looking back in at life. It is like the spin in the Black House construct, which I have found in Blackcoat’s Daughter

and in Franco’s Count Dracula (1972), and in Rabid (1977)

it means that life is going on without you perfectly fine, and you only see the negation and emptiness of it, it is an ambient view, gazing out past it: and it may be a criticism that the directors played this blank stare card once too often, bringing the charge upon Monae that she was not up to it as a character, but throughout she was a “figure” of a survival strategy in a nightmare,

so Eden decides tonight, she cannot sleep.

Another word. In Kindred, Butler wrote that when a slave woman was taken by a white master she usually ended up leaving the slave quarters and sleeping up in the same room, maybe even the same bed as the master. As in Mandingo (1972), slave women were reduced almost to the status of being sexual bed warmers to provide comfort to the men. It is therefore weird that she sleeps with the general, or whoever he is, in what looks like a slave quarter house. Why is he there? But, moreso, she does not like this arrangement at all.

I have of late been looking more carefully at how in horror movies hauntings around a bed are measured by the extent to which they express the anxiety of a body with nine openings. Lying your head down on the mattress, without the pillow, is a prostration pose, indicating bereftness and forlornness. It could be said it is a type of the Kong foot type of light sleep paralysis, where you are laid low by stress. You can’t get to sleep, but you don’t want to wake up either. She is huddled in on herself, then, in rejection of the monster on the other side of the bed, her master.

Anyways, night falls, and she is in her nightgown, and he is sleeping in bed next to her.

we have already seen the full moon and we are going to see it at least five more times during this escape sequence, it bespeaks that a change is happening, something magic or evil,

and then she puts her plan into action. Her position in bed is this,

she has no problem with the Empty Pillow haunting her, in fact, she wants the Empty Pillow, she does not want him in her bed, and sleeps almost in protest with him. When he looks over at his side of the bed she sees not a man she loves but an interloper who has taken her hostage in bed. Since in the Raven’s Gate one peers through the emptiness to stir up a Death Mask, one also sees in the entoptic agitation of it Pillowie, the demon of the pillows pretending to be a person; the Bear Hug, a large black presence impassable, suffocating; Wrink, even wrinkles becomes as if demons; Splitface, a kind of death mask in descent that splits in touching down; and then there is even the Angel of Death (all demons I’ve named) . Let’s just say that this unwanted presence in her bed has incorporated all of the phantoms of a Death Mask, to spell death to her if she cannot break free. But the key thing, in terms of escaping, unlike in The Invisible Man, is that he seems to have a psychotic power over her, then seems to be a very light sleeper, ever watchful of her, so she cannot make a noise. Thus, in the darkness of this Raven’s Gate, so many of the moves by which a person gets up and out of bed to explore this or that in a gown prowl are not open to her, she has to be slier. It seems that if she crawl over him, that would wake him up. If she just got up on her side of the bed and walked around, that would wake him up. If she moved at all on the floor, with all of its creaks, that would wake him up. No, his waking up is so dangerous to her plan she cannot wake him up. While she might’ve killed him, her awake, him asleep, she doesn’t. She just wants to get away.

So, she is even under the slant of the roof, totally stuck and cornered in bed with another (a feeling I have felt, so this is nicely placed)

in a rather mechanistic gesture as if to force herself to treat this as a regimen she checks if he is sleeping by fanning her hand over his nose and mouth

So, she flips. She quietly gets up on her knees, on her side of the bed, roughly at the level of her knees, then reaches across his body to the far or his edge of the bed, to take hold

and then after she secures that position, she next carefully puts her hands down on the floor

now the fun thing here is, besides the fact that she felt lying on him below the knees would not wake him, she glances over to the wall to help her at this moment, as if to steel herself to undertake a body movement not at all easy

she gets encouragement from childrens’ drawings, reminding her of her daughter, and a plane, and maybe this gave her the idea, she recreated it here in secret to keep the faith, nice touch.

it IS a copy of the drawing in her hotel room, so is currently serving her as a kind of totem of encouragement (every parent chooses these from the wonders their children draw), which means this visual is an extension of picture play, the odd detail being that the daughter’s wish for a life in house looks a bit like the plantation

and then in a wide arc, she flips; completely standing on her head (the movie fudges on how much of her this would expose)

then on her planted hands pivot quietly to let her body flip over hers too and land softly on a spot on the floor she has pretested as not creaking

well, she did that part, she exhales

My response was all in, at this point, this movie became a horror movie, taking place in the wiggle room of horror, in so far as she undertook this “escape movie” crooked path to escape a menace so menacing that his presence demanded it and that he not be woken. I think of how Max von Sydow did his escapin, in the Night Visitor (1971), Shawshank, many other movies like this. The Crooked Path as a trope is, in effect, the Far Path, but as made crooked by obstacles, forcing it to wobble about or zig zag to some other form. It usually arches over the whoosh, to avoid the whoosh, because that is too dangerous.

this is when the movie came alive for me, as I posted.

it is also coincidentally weird that I come across this strange bed slip the same week as I watched Saint Maud (2021), to study her floating

and then too there is Blake’s Antaeus, who lifts Dante across the devil’s hole into hell.

Now in the language of horror, the fact that in her maneuver she ended up going over the sleeper next to her means that she entered his hover space.

this created the opportunity for a close encounter face to face, her to him, like Alien to Ripley, but not this time. Usually a hover dream floats and circles, like in Blake.

but lower forms, as I have also studied this week, as in this print of Erysichthon being cursed with hunger, it comes in low, and it covers rather than hovers.

From either space a nightmare can be waged. But, she flips out over that, to avoid communicating with his masquerade space, hoping to have stayed clear. So, that is fun, a proning situation in which she knows of the masquerade capacity of his body to suspect movement around him, even when he sleeps, and she figured out a way, from sleeping in bed next to him, to circumvent.

Then, the second thing is to get down to the floor on the other side she has to contort herself. This entails, first, the move, then, second, the standing upside down, and then, third, the flip over onto her feet away from the bed, leave her facing him.

the movie fudged a bit on the legs up in the air part because such a move in pantieless 1860 with only a nightgown on would’ve exposed her below, a sign of death in movies, and making of her, if she stands beside the bed, her vulva as her face, that is, upside down, a kind of Watcher demon, very dangerous, more so if with the face of a vulva. So, in making this flip, she flips, in terms of the language of masquerades of hauntings by bedsides, into a demonic position, especially if it denuded her.

then, making the flip, to then end up flipped, this one pleases me because it all but leaves her looking like she is about to spiderwalk away, again, this is a DEMONIC pose.

and so this is the spiderwalk demon, suggesting she might still spring back on him and attack him.

but, it does not end, after that, when a demon is known, we usually hear that its bones crack, and it crunchily, jerkily assumes full size and moves toward you, saw this analyzing the Annabelle movies this week (from Annabelle Creation)

In her case, here is where what she was doing on the floor comes in, she was, all this time, testing the floor for creaks so that she could find a trail of hard spots across the floor to get out without a creak that would wake him, again, the assumption being as a wary hostage-taking sleeper (a trope going back to the 39 Steps), he is a very light sleeper who will hear every creak. This is pretty wonderful, and the concentration which she poured into this strange little project clearly marks her strategy of escape as relying on the crooked path.

there is almost a dance here, there is a sexual element, as, again, in the stretch it is implied she is partly exposed, but, in general, formally, she is moving like a demon, but overriding the conventions with an aversive purpose, so on the crooked path she is pushing back against an attack.

then she is out, in absolute silence

then, Bush and  Renz doing some nice work here, it….gets better. End of part 2.

Antebellum (2020) and the crooked path out of a nightmare, part 1.

rev., Feb 25, 2021.

In order to process Antebellum (2020) it is necessary to first go through the movie that I saw, for the first time, and then go back over it again a second time. The fact that the movie has a surprise ending, not unlike, in its entirety-encompassing way, Night Shyamalan’s The Village, means that you will see it the one time with surprise, then never see it that way again. The idea that a movie should be shaped this way is linked to the notion of an innocent eye, that one can see something one time innocently, and then never again see it that way, once you know how it all turns out. The innocent eye might also be the exonerating eye of the prepossessing self of WASPs in America, whose preestablished egos only desire from the eye reproductions of their core urges. The surprise ending is a device to wrench the certainty of the prepossessing singleton self out itself, to humble it before a force that might really change them. But more on that in a bit.

The movie opens, like Welles’ Touch of Evil with a long looping tracking shot, with the extra input that it situates the slave quarters vis a vis the main house and more or less maps out the world of the slave walking through his or her daily life.

then a little girl walks us in, this The Walk Us In girl is a trope, there was also one in Midsommar, it means that there is some secret things going on that we cannot see yet

she then runs to see her mother, a lovely bonneted antebellum belle living the life.  

but the camera keeps crawling, swinging around like young Michael Myers to the back of the house

then there is some surprise secret business going on in back, because we see a rank of soldiers marching in an allee into backparts of the property.

they are bivouacked back there, in, then, a kind of counterspace to the plantation.

as we go through and out a lot of windows here, tracking shots which suggest framing of framing, or the idea of a lucid dream, or nightmare, the tent provides us with another frame so we pour through that; then come out the other side, into another “view” maybe a dream

but this view is only of a field of sheets hanging on the line, a trope going way back to represent the wobble-wobble between waking and dreaming, and a place where monsters lurk,

this is played up as a screenwipe and as a descent into entoptic light dreaming, by wobbly through close-ups of it

and nice work (an example of this trope used for hide n seek purposes can be seen in Halloween and in the Peggy Fuery Friday the 13^th movie, too, it’s, like I said, a trope

and then, right on time, as if to announce to us we have gone through or over to the other side, in dream, or reverie, but also in a sort of kerplunk dissolve, we pull back the bed sheet, and see the rebel flag, ba dump dump, landing in a nightmare indeed, where it still flies in an open field, but where this field is is the question

then we just keep on going, and we see that way back over yonder on the other side of the field is the slaves’ quarters, relative to the overt fantasy of the house this is more a Village of Dreams, even if in a nightmarish way, but they are shown as rather quaintly pretty, no? like they might in a tour today of a plantation house

but, the camera does not stop, it keeps going. I had a twinge of recognition of the psychodynamic places coming through, but also a misgiving or two. It was interesting that the slave quarters are, in fact, on the property, but far off, marginalized. Here, too, however, they looked too ersatz, pretty. This time it goes through two buildings, though they are not quite near enough to each other to constitute a devil’s alley, they play as that as one heads from the ’front’ to the reality behind, always trouble at the other end of the devil’s alley

and we go through, as if through, that is, a gauntlet, nice examples in Frenchman’s Farm (1989), Antrum (2019) and then Wolf Moon, I think, also Crows Nest, it is a classic visual trope bespeaking trouble

but then the fact that one black women sat round in back as if out of sight, in a lovely surrounding, gave me pause. I have, in my time, and as part of the culture of the early 90s, sought out the touch of reality in such sites. Visiting a place like Mystic Seaport, which we did, when the kids were small, you take in the whole of it, then dive in in the sense that you look for some object that pings uncannily and thus makes it oddly real. In this regard, this slave quarter recreation for the movie, but, moviewise, moving through is trouble

The idea is that the wall is the blockage in time between present and past, but it is through randomly placed objects that a connection can be made. Then, the fact that this zoom continued on to result in the shooting of a possible runaway, while the titles were still running, made of it all a title sequence, which are typically incipit in the nature, that is, like trailers, they try to evoke beforehand the whole look and problem of the movie.

but then it keeps going. There is also a spatial trope of Behind the House, not so much the backyard, as the notion that in the backyard, there being a measure of privacy, bad things can happen, this too is a visual trope

then startlingly, in this version, it also opens up to all that is beyond it, a vast Valley of the Gods,

for the first time, behind the next house, camera left, we see Eden, being taken back in, apparently after an escape.

then we see some runaway-curtailing in the back acre; then, psychogeographically, it all breaks off out of the safe place, relatively speaking, of the plantation, to the danger place of the fields, also a trope in rural-set movies, she is in trouble

caught

but still shot; then after a bit more, the title comes up

it can be said that some of the reviews of this movie were undertaken as if the reviewer simply did not see that the E was backwards, which changes the reading of it. The reverse of the letter divorces BELLUM, or war, from ante, and leaves ante to be tacked on by some perverse nostalgia to a state of permanent war based on slavery, as per what one historian calls the neo-confederate narrative. But what these reviewers, apparently not seeing it as a horror movie, missed is that in this early long crawl there are at least ten visual tropes, that is, visual conventions which in themselves convey a core meaning, all of which clearly signal that the place we are in is unreal and a nightmare, somehow on the other side of the mind from waking, in a land of dreams, so, expect worse.

Our tour of slave life opens with a confederate general coming to the slave quarters, after her recapture, to enforce upon Eden the nature of her crime, by branding her, it is a fairly clichéd encounter, and leaves her but hands at the window, utterly defeated. But, here, too, as the face peeking over the windowsill, over the prostrate come-alive hands on the sill, she gazes as if at an artifice,

a picture, through the window, the movie’s commonest visual trope, and there is something strange in the fact that this movie seems to make more use of the full moon than even in Lon Chaney Jr’s Wolfman,, then, too, done up in a sort of Blakelockish style, obscure, clouded.

this sort of imitation of painting in a movie says “artifice” to me too, though, again, watching a movie the first time, you are not going to quibble on this, but just see it as movie

Then, too, six weeks later we are in the fields with the slaves, listening to booming of guns in the distance, its source uncertain (if by the logic of the movie they are listening to a battle, then, or there is some sort of recording, like in Red State, no, it is never made clear)

indeed, this picture clearly means to be compared to some pictures of cotton pickers past,

and the likeness does not fall kindly, in terms of brutal similitude of the movie. Actual pictures seem weighed down by the unending nature of it,

by the nightmare of it, like a cornfield in a horror movie, a place of terror, things hiding,

but in addition to the awfulness of real pictures, there seems to be a genre of sentimentalizing pictures, to make it all look quaintly consuming, that is, people in unalienated joy merging with their natural surroundings.

it is, of course, a movie trope going back to the Nazi officer telling camp Jews at Auschwitz in Schindler’s List that they are good at making money, the snide overseer mentions old spirituals, because it is sort of true, there was a time when even liberals thought singing spirituals was a nicety to African Americasn (I recently screened, Blood of Jesus (1940), and it is 100% spirituals, one doesn’t know whether or not Williams submitted to the stereotype or thought he was promoting black culture).

the lovely lady riding by the horrors is also a trope that goes back to sword and sandal movies, I remember the Roman princess who takes on Barrabas as a good luck token, in Barrabas (1960); then too Ann Baxter laughing at Moses in the pits of mud after attesting to his Jewish heritage, it goes way back, and, in the movies, it kind of blames her for her complicity as somehow being worse than the masters’ infractions, so here it is again, in full flower (that the movie traffics in tropes does not bother me, what they do with them is the point, at this point, I’m thinking, pretty conventional usage)

the evil woman behind the man is rubbed in in the next scene when a new crop of abductees are brought in

in a movie like this, where there is a twist at the end, the one thing that bothers me is the fact that in order to make it work the director and script have to be in on the joke with the story, meaning that the script can infer a problem, but never speak of it openly. I mean, if you don’t know what is going on, this young woman’s script is opaque, but if you know the ending she is clearly a kidnap victim asking another what’s going on here

but then there was something of interest, though, again, first time through, you settle into accepting the historical circumstances as the scene, and that’s that, so I had no suspicion, but Eden is spending all her time at her place testing the floors for creaks.

she is doing something with the wall below a table (I now think she is scratching an inspirational picture, a copy of a drawing her daughter made, onto a secret place in the board, to give her courage, it turns out to be a key image)

and she is testing the floor for creaks, upset whenever she hears one, she is trying to find a creakless path over the perilous floorboard, a way of escape

this sharp focus on a narrow path is the stuff of prison escape movies, fed in through a horror movie concentration here too

it is hard to say what she is doing. Planning an escape might be the only thing that occurs to one, though not to the extent that I pinged on the notion that the slipstream of plot that this behavior is part of makes of it a prison-escape movie where we spy on a person engaging in surreptitious behavior hiding his or her tracks, executing an escape plan. This gives the movie a sharper core drive, and, indeed, such a drive of this sort is the signal characteristic of a genre movie versus an art house film. Certainly, in my  view, a horror movie should be a horror movie from the opening frame, preoccupied with a vector having opened up on a problem situation that a person is in, and narrowing things down, that is, executing the attack on the vector,  from there. Thus, I am saying that a horror movie happens when the FEAR switch is switched on, and it does not end til the switch is switched off.

There is another indication that, in addition to the crooked path, the movie communicates through code, when after Eden fights with the newcomer over their strategy of survival, the newcomer an activist, Eden being shut up and wait to escape, they gesture against each other either side of the door closed between them, when she leaves, and this criss-cross

is immediately formally rhymed with, as if in a montage, with a confederate flag X, and a chant from the nighttime gathering of soldiers

there is a hint, in this shot of the torchlight parade to a banquet down the path under the trees a whisper of the landscape of the formicarium, or the blind pathways of hell on earth, but by and large this movie steers clear of hell on earth imagery.

this then follows through with the plot, until, at the end of a terrible day, Eden lies down in her bed, having just been fucked by her general, and sighs

then there is a close-up of her, from a hover POV, as if falling asleep,

but then she wakes up, or rather, Returns to Consciousness, usually after being given up for dead, with her startled, woke look

there is a little tickle of daylight coming in on her, but it is timelight too, it is the present day,

this is a twist of a two bed tropes I’ve been exploring of late, the Empty Pillow and the Death Mask. The tropes are if you are of a couple and wake up and see the pillow next to you you not only wonder where he is but imagine the worst so go looking for that worst; if, however, you wake to find The Death Mask, that is, your own face, looking at you, this may take you to your worst fears about yourself. Here it is as if two pillows, one in the past, one in the present, have been stacked one on the other. When she is there, her pillow here is empty; when here, her pillow there is, but, in both cases, the worst case scenario imagining is intact. To move on one pillow from fake sleep to eureka wake up is a self-reflexive knot, it relates to making use of the pillow over one’s head not to hear annoying noise; or, as in Joker, using a pillow to suffocate and kill someone, sometimes out of mercy. I will call this the My Pillow trope, in “hono”r of a conspiracy theorist this past season, and it is a nexus wherein by eisoentoptic images one crosses back and forth.

Then, we’re back in the present and we find Eden in bed next to her husband, in a posh apartment, in a posh life. And one wonders, was all that slave stuff just a dream?

it is interesting, however, that their bed is very big, that the man has come to the middle of the bed to serve the woman in her spot on the left, her right, and that there is a picture of a black man with a crown on above the bed, bespeaking the relationship acting out below

the crooked crown seems to be a motif in African American portraiture of late, but I could not identify this one, except as it declared them to be contemporary people

The movie makes use of it a few times, to as if false positive scare us. Soon after she is again pictured in this way.

the rhetoric sounds almost tortuous, so we worry, but then the screen tilts

and we find out she is on her head (this at least attests to her physical capability, vis a vis the crooked path of escape),

but it is also true that the therapist tries to create a space of bikram which wiki says was a popular form of yoga in the 70s where a person struck a sequence of poses in a room heated to 105 degrees to make it seem like India. Fine, but in movie language, it means that Eden is in one of the shadiest, venetian blind blinds I have ever seen, and going back to at least The Maltese Falcon venetian blinds means things are uncertain, shady, gray area, wobbly. What this does, visually, is to signal that her present both in time and place is haunted by some other place, pulling on her.

she is on a book tour, and after having had a testy online meeting with Jenna Malone, she then gets some creepy flowers at the door, which means to us, since this is a hotel, she is, in fact, being stalked, which is the present day side of the crooked path as we will see.

there is a sly ha-ha with regard to recent reappraisals of Founding Father heroes by revelations about their slavery past that she is the Jefferson Suite,

then too daisies, sorry, this is sign of the clangy awful unlistening tininess of the wide world, trouble

we then flip on this by showing that she is by no means in her life in the present going about being quiet; in fact, she is strutting her stuff and sticking it in the eye of anyone who might have trouble with an aggressive, in charge, black woman, nice shot of her stomp in the lobby

the contrast between her whole look and the boring businessman’s norm in the lobby, the fact that it is a lattice shot, ie back of the head, means we are to see everything through her POV

then after talking to another presenter about ancestors haunting her, she is startled to see, stepping up to the concierge desk, an ersatz picture

at the hotel there is an ersatz picture of a plantation, as if to bespeak southern hospitality, benignly, and contrasted with the smiling officiousness of the woman at the check in it speaks to alienation, or creepy cultural hangover. (I have actually seen a movie with precisely the same image in it in a key spot, though I forget which).

she also experiences a microaggression in front of that picture, as her request is put on hold to talk to another client

she felt that one

at precisely the same time the stalker is upstairs using condescending southern charm language to get into Eden’s room

it is weird, we are shown her legs, upskirt almost

she goes into her bathroom, of all places, and steals a lipstick, like a token of war; she uses it on herself, personal

I am not sure what this shot means, could be showing us the button, a sign of a sorority?

then again, in the venetian blinds, she sits on her bed, something is up, and it does not feel good

end of part 1.

Sula Bermudez-Silverman’s Sighs and Leers, Amityville Dollhouse (1996) and the voodoo of abuse.

rev., Mar 21, 2021.

I have some hope that the fusion that I predicted five years back is coming to fruition, even though most art worlders seem content to maintain their field privacy inside the safe confines of an enclave. A show at Murmurs, LA, right now, in fact, has a press release which is entirely grounded in horror movies, and in horror lore, even though then glossed with a rationalized political explanation. My comment

so, I was stuck again by another moment of synchroetherrhoe, that is, everything flowing together, because on Friday night, following my study of the Amityville Horror, in the vigil of the death of Ronnie DeFeo, which strikes me as very much a precedent as a “thing” on the American landscape as what was also dealt with this week in Atlanta, into the cuadecuc or worm’s tails of its storying in sequels, I watched Amityville Dollhouse (1996), and it literally was about how somebody made a dollhouse version of the Amityville house and that then played voodoo havoc on a house it was brought home to from a stoop sale. So, on the one hand, in contemporary art, I am looking at a glass house made with, also sugar and salt, sugar to ersatzly underscore the sugar slavery legacy of Haitian voodoo, salt because believed in the actual voodoo culture to block out demons,

with a shot from the in fact very good miniature photography of Dollhouse in the movie,

this is not a case of twinfire, or trolling, in a degenerate form of the dialectical image, that is, comparing things by appearance that have nothing in common in reality; but, in fact, a real visual fusion, as the two things have very much in common, The artist, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, did not mention the dollhouse trope in her release, but a small house staged in a room to project out onto the larger scene, is, in fact, a long-held trope (and I have recently explored it in Annabelle The Creation (2015), Hereditary (2019), Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) and The Lodge (2020)). In all cases, in general, a dollhouse miniaturizes the lifesize trauma but also functionally works as voodoo dolls to predict things that might happen in the main event. In The Lodge, even, the dollhouse was where the kids planned out their attack on a stepmother they did not want, it was literally their voodoo. Also, a dollhouse, like a house votive at the Caruso caves, 5^th century bc, is a push-pull object in a nexus relation with the lifesize event, it says, there is trouble, but in this instance it is being as if blocked out or managed by forcing it into a miniature form which I can think about with a measure of agency (in this regard, a dollhouse can also be like a diorama, a place to plot things out). Finally, a dollhouse is a place of fetishization, where one can reduce things to a fetish, in the general sense that the painter Charlene von Heyl talks about, as something that in its reduction to a doll status for that packs into an element of a fetish of something forgotten from one’s youth (and I have mentioned that the one such form from my own youth which I now and then touch upon but cannot seem to surface entirely, is related to some sort of dollhouse, or miniature, in a book or advent calendar form, I do hope it is not like the railroad set in the attic in the Allen v Farrow story, a keeper of a memory otherwise forgot). So it creates a nexus in the movie, and in the gallery, to force you to your knees, to then confront the issue as a pow from that POV. So, as one goes through it, a work of art

and a movie

in the art, boarding up windows is mentioned by SBS as another form of warding off evil; in the movie, terrific shot, a door to an upstairs bedroom, and a real ooze begins to come out of it. Then this shot, which is so iconic it is almost a symbol by itself (see Dougie Jones paperwork in Twin Peaks the Return, and I make use of it too),

and then the goo sliming coming down the stairs of the dollhouse in the movie

and this one, a particularly nice shot of the saltiness or sugariness of the construct; again, you are gazing on the haunted house of art, as it confronts by material the past from which it comes, even as for that it serves in a voodoo form to cast a spell

What I like about this is that it appears, and is clear from the sources, that the artist understands the dollhouse trope in the popular art form of horror movies, and may or may not know its possible potential as a symbol of conflicted domesticity in contemporary art, though no examples come to mind at the moment, and this is the essence of what I call FUSION. And that is all I mean, really (that said, I have, of course, gone way past mere trope study inside horror movies to examine the dream structures in horror movies as possible clues to dream structures in the human mind in general). The fact that they are lighted relates to their being a more scenic kind of astral chamber for stolen souls, also a thing in voodoo. So this, is a more artistic, more presentable, more metaphorical and expanded upon form

of this

and I started with pufferfish because I did not know what it was doing, though filed it in with other witch artists in the sense that they are making use of detailed recipes of strange materials and substances as if creating a brew, a trend that seemed to start with Lucy Dodd five or so years ago,

the fact that this is grounded in real natural history is also another point of nexus to related art

the fact that the puffer fish has a neurotoxin in it that paralyzes people and that it was used for that in real vodun to create a semblance of the spiritual belief in zombies, by making the subject of a spell an actual sort of zombie, so it is an exploitation device; then that it puffs itself up entirely into an indigestible ball to prevent attack, makes of it the perfect monster of the moment of synchroetherrhoe wherein I begin to suspect that such flowing together is about creating a new armor for another period of life to come. But, formally, this sort of thing is put in the sand with other natural elements, and contribute to an actual astral bottle array. like this, another work

this is a ratification, that is, a slight formalization, of a real world object used in actual vodon practice. It signals this, almost in the manner of play, that is, pretending it is real because it has real objects in it, but that does not mean it is any more real than a drawing of it, to ground the reference to voodoo in a work of art to its prototype model in real life, the Haitain equivalent of a witches bottle. The orb on top could refer to a very rare trope which I doubt she is aware of in movies, one sees one in Bad Timing (1980), an Art Garfunkel movie about killing his wife in Vienna, and symbol last Spring to me of the chryskokkopterophasian monster of truculent, everspinning, never to be cornered ego. And so, the house is just a more artistic version of that, it has roots in the real, it functions, metaphorically speaking, as a real thing, it has agency of an apotropaic sort

but, it sitting on bricks also suggests that the house is on fire, or has been tossed onto the fire. This, then, makes for one of those almost unbelievable finds where you discover that at one time or another some human mind somewhere has thought up pretty much everything there is to think up and we only come to see the iconic as separated out from that, but in this movie, Dollhouse, finally, the haunted dollhouse is just thrown into the haunted real fireplace, which then torches the whole house. It is for grounding contemporary art in the real insides of a real work of popular art that I originally started to study popular culture in detail in one genre, and I am getting my payback often in recent times, albeit its cassandran invisibility, as this to me gives the above a real grounding in the real

this is even more connected to “reality” in the movie because the real fireplace is also haunted

the first problem that they have in the house, is that it wakes up the wife sweating, because it is too hot in the house

He then goes down to find the fireplace on, so turns it off. We later find out that it is haunted because a house on site burned down and then the dad of the kids and dead husband of the wife then built this house but saved money by using the original stone fireplace, which, of course, survived, and is in a newspaper report picture.

There is a touch of Amityville angelspace in this grounding of a haunting in a newspaper clipping, but the rationale is pretty shaky. It is also a nice nexus twist with regard to Claire as she will be doing quite a bit of sweating in this movie

but not for that kind of heat. But we first see her as a sweating woman, who you do not see much of in the movies.

the flip side of this is that as she is suffering from grief for a dead husband that coincides with the inability of her new husband to get her off, her attention drifts to the adult son of she and her first husband, whom she begins to incestuously lust after, after seeing him playing basketball without his shirt on. Already all sweaty, she runs up to her room to shower, but is trapped by masturbatory impulse along the way. And the flipside of this is that she hates that her son is having sex with the local girls, or she is turned on by it. At one point he takes his girl out to a cabin on the property, where hobby items exist, like a mounted wasp

they then get down to business and she shows us the goods on top and almost on the bottom too

she zeroes in, paralyzing the male gaze

but, then, possibly because the mother has sent an evil impulse through the house upon them, the wasp in the frame comes alive again (this also happened in The Exorcist the Beginning), and it is loose

through it we see sex ommitidia, that is, sex that puts them together but, if the POV is that of the mother, takes her apart

and showing us a classic symbolic form level hypnagogic image of sex, which splits it apart into abstract unreadable pieces, is ok

but then, sent by mother dearest, almost as if rumor sent by the goddesses to the Roman army in the eighth book of the Aeneid, the wasp is a cockblocker, he lands on his ears, while he is having sex

we get maybe the best shot in the movie, artwise, the ommitidia view of them kissing, up top

and then in an obvious rubber ear, which reminded me a lot of Damien Hirst’s Apollo Smintheus, he goes into the ear, to become not just an earworm, but a drive-me-crazy invasion of the head (which I actually was somewhat afraid of one night in August when I had seven, seven flies flying around my room)

he gets that intercourse, which cancels his other intercourse, cock is blocked, sex a bust

evil dollhouse is happy

mom is kinda happy, kinda upset

From her titles, it is apparent that SBS is to be taken seriously that for her in the train of her thought going back to a prototype space in reality in Haiti this is meant to be an actual repository, maybe an urn, for a dead person; and, in another titling, a house could be a resurrection chamber, that is, put the astral jar inside it, and give it a place to live, it might begin to live in there and haunt (as in fact is what exactly happens in the dollhouse in Annabelle Creation), Repository 1: Mother

so, extraordinary fusion, where art is informed by horror movies, and horror movies can be informed by art. The key of her train is the source in reality. Even her use of voodoo, there is a reality inside, That is, as in the movie, just as here, with the scatterings on the floor, there are real elements in the work and there is a real gunky something inside the voodoo doll that activates as real

I thought the use of the hand from the Creature of the Black Lagoon was a bit too slick, and a break in the discourse, since it and zombies have nothing in common. I even critique the movie, one of the very first horror movies I ever saw, and whose statue I owned in various forms in my deep drawers, overused the jump scare shot in the abstract of hand plus harsh chord, over and over again, I still feel it here. But then the sand is littered with real ingredients

so, truly, this was a major example of effortless fusion, and a situation where my strange combination of knowledges, of contemporary art and horror movies, would’ve, in another life, had me sitting in the theoretical catbird seat to make of all such fusionists my zombie minions.

As to the actual installation of art, it failed in the establishment of a negative space of a real shrine or ritual space in the gallery, as for example I detected in the installation of Jean-Marie Appriou’s show at CLEARING earlier in the season, and in Justin Matherly’s installation at Paula Cooper, it seems to not in fact place objects next to each other for reinforcing agentic reasons, but just aesthetically

the fact that the artist goes to town on the feminism angle of combining in a tapestry scenes of monsters carrying scantily-clad women in horror movies, a trope as old as horror, and much more complicated than she supposes, and Michelangelos’ Pieta, I’m sorry, I have to throw a red flag, I do not think the two are connected in any real way, in the sense that body postures and gestures are carefully parsed in horror as in other art, and the two postures say different things. Nor do I think the tapestry speaks to the house or hands.

but, if you notice, there is one that is cornered, very much like the Telesphorus statues in Matherly’s installation or incubation

and we retreat to it by a series of da-dun-dun horror chordings by way of an entrainment of hands

and eventually come to a strange scatter, with aesthetic precedents going back to Karen Kilimnick

and it consists of many strange voodoo ingredients, so it is witchy, and accords to my saying that most installations or practices today are basically personal witchcraft against the world; and there is a forensic, investigatory element here, in the sense that one’s gaze shifts from objectifying to discovery, in the details

and in a tranche in her art that also bounces off of Rochelle Goldberg’s, she sees in up-close appraisal of objects a metaphor or allegory, so Satan Tossing the angels, and not only is this ANGELSPACE reference, but to MILTON, for god’s sake. Then, too, it is specimen of a pufferfish itself, but it looks like a spooky apotropaic demon mask, which might also have been a thing

I see this face

which reminds me of a cenobite from Hellraiser

but the angelspace is conveyed by the contrast of the real thing with glass elements,  that is, glass art, and this the Goldberg-like element, and the Milton

and this brings me back by inosculation to Saint Maud and Blake

and even Dore, whose Dante applies, and also The Prophecy movies, that is, pure angel space (suggesting this sandy scatter as an example of the White Sepulchre too, no doubt). And while I was a bit worried by the slickness coming in, worrying that here was yet another work of contemporary art that pretended to respond to popular culture but, like me prior to my deep dive, knew nothing of the mechanics of an art in actual popular culture (most of which art now I see as exploitational), it wasn’t til I got down here to the specimen of a pufferfish that the work double-pinged on me simultaneously as both, that is, the nexus tone

SBS also felt, in trying to express all her themes (I think she started out with a headexplosion, and maybe ought to have saved a few other trains of thought for another exhibition), she felt she required a go-between, or Tiresian, as I am currently calling it, to move from work to work, and, more importantly, body of work to body of work. Strangely, her choice, also glossed as angel, as the title is Paradise Regained, a wasp

little glass blowings, maybe not literally a wasp, but then too the green dragon, which relates this one to Chloros and a level of hell,

and in another one imaginging these that flitter from work to work as often in danger

and again

My take at present on why there is so much marginalia in the art of the time, much like that in medieval manuscipts, is that the prescriptions of style cause artists who nonetheless much abide chafe, so they have their say, as Michelangelo did, with sfogo, little steam let-offings on the side, small sideeye comments, fine. But I also sense that here SBS meets up with the “casters” such as Harry Gould Harvey IV and  Genevieve Hoffman, and I like casting for its pretense of acheiopoetoi, that is, capturing the self-generated, or generative art creations in the entoptic eye, without any cogitation preceding it, and for some reason this sidebar art/test card art is having a moment and a thing among younger artists, SBS simply angelspaces it all to keep the spirit of voodoo entraining through the space.

The fact that the real stuff, however, entrains to the corner, signifies that in her general topography of the dream world of voodoo, the center might be invisible, or aesthetisized into covers, while the real stuff happens in the back room. This is meant to be taken as real spellcasting. It is, as mentioned in the press release, a real astral soul container. And in her mind, moving between the two, she kind of means it.

To Fear a Painted Devils Trumpet includes some actual dead bees. Lewis Williams argues that bees emerge as a trope in art to signify the tingling feeling that shamans felt from the drug that took them to far off places. The inner core was invisible, there were bees all about, so they are basically harbingers, they announce, they proclamate, they espouse, they exhort, they predict, they also get crushed and left for dead. They are the worker bees, the sacrifice required to make of voodoo a real thing (ie it must be life and death to create the shock to elevate one to an agentic state)

It again shocks me, the synchroetherrhoe. Only this past month, reading The Origins of Greek Religion by Harrison, 1920c, I learned of the Enneakronous, of nine-spouted fountain recovered by classical Greeks from they believed ancient ancient Greece, as a kind of fountain of life, and my guess is the nine-opening fountain serves as a metaphor for the nine-opening body of humans (except when women while nursing open to 11), I also think there was a grid on nine on augury arrays set up by augur priests on the roof of a Roman temple to Capitoline Jupiter, so nine is a big number (there are also nine screens watching the sleepers in Come True (2020)). Also, they are bees. Foregoing their role in female cults on the Nile and in the Aegean, flies always play a role in signalling the presence of an evil demon. In the Amityville Horror, the flies are elemental, and bespeak a haunted room on the second floor of the house, which attacks Fr Mancuso, and at other times, in Amityville the Awakening, the flies that come from under James in bed seem to be rather a projection of and a punishment for the doctor’s heartless prognostics which he ends up hallucinating as real in a dizzy attack that all then whooshes into his mouth, and then they are gone. They torture him for his doubt, but also scare him out of the house for good.

It is also true, in hell on earth as I have formulated it as a deep structure in the dreaming mind, passages and roads take on a formicarian quality. That is, they are burrowing in, and thus look more like antfarm digging outs, than humanely made roads. Thus, an  insect form informs an element of human imagination (these ideas come from Burkert’s Creation of the Sacred, it is also from that book that I worked out the almost animal nature of a deeper averruncate vector, in which in aversion of pursuit sends out types of angels or demons, but, then, when it gets in close, things get apsyrtic as one begins to pars pro toto cut off body parts to throw to the pursuer to parts of himself to save the whole (there was just in the news a little insect exemplum of a bug that surrenders his whole body, to create a new one inside his prey). Thus, that a formicarian form characterizes hell on earth is fitting. But, then, in considering elements of angelspace, I also found ommatidia, another excellent word for a factor of gaze I have long known, the fly’s eye gaze, that sees the world as a kaleidoscope, it, incredibly, plays out also in Amityville Dollhouse (1996),  and it seems there to serve as a cockblocking force against his male gaze.

In a part of her exhibition that serves as the pathway in, or out, that is the Far Path to the Far Place, to place the whole of the rest of the show in the Far Place, and in ambience, dreamwise, there is a line of portholes, perhaps not entirely necessary, except as they set the stage. Again, they have lots of wasps in them, it is almost as if here is where SBS is going to reverie in a fugue of ommatidia not unlike how the imagination of Goya reveried motifs and schema into varying worlds (the same mental technique used by David Hammons in his 60s body drawings at the  Drawing Center). She even ala Kara Walker seems to see the window as a screen, and, perhaps she had this notion in a daydream, or it came to her by following a fly or wasp in her room, much in the manner in which TIppi Hedrun in The Birds follows the flight of a bird to then swing around and see that in just a few minutes a mass gathering is on, alerting her to the formation of a vector, and a need to move now. So, to here, a scene

and in especially porthole 6, where the wasps etc are back in glass and on the window, as if wanting to get in to take part in the feast being made for them as a Jewish woman devours her child during the siege of jerusalem, the text says this is Mary of Bethuzbe, very likely a storied inversion of Mary herself, and her cannibalism is in my view, and it is happening now, the monster of THIS moment, March, 2021, is that the centralized blame-figure of Trump having been removed from discourse, each party seems to be backing up into cannibalization of itself, and it does seem like that is happening, so this is a figure of now. And the wasps/dragons take part

this too, in understanding that most stories in the past were moral exempla, to teach morals, is a lot like Rochelle Goldberg’s use of St Mary of the Desert, maybe even uncomfortably close, but it has a pungency of RIGHTNOW that I really like,

the image being slightly obscured, and mediated in a foreign form, glass, or plastic in glass, and in a frame, and behind a sculpture, places it almost in the category of a property or background image of a painting in a horror movie, which I look at so often, which bespeaks what is going on on screen, even when, sometimes, you can barely see it.

even closer, to whole shot brings us almost into the books that must appear in research sections in horror movies, all the images usually staples from the corpus of German Renaissance witch or devil prints, which I made use of in a 101 art history, which I literally just wrote about in The Amityville Horror (1978), yesterday, the corpus in that movie presided over by Beelzebub, lord of flies.

the corpus goes into his pants, for him to steal it, an aparcharestrhai (breaking the ice) crime

and then the corpus, so much fun (Cranach’s beserker, a favorite)

as this gloss of a rare page from a medieval mss indicates this Mary and generally cannibal Jewish women became an antisemitic emblem and canard to explain why god removed his favor from the Jews

so you can see the noble women deceived above

and then the cannibal women, it is almost as if the attack is being made on the premise of saving the children from the evil jewish women of Jerusalem, we see the women of the town eating their children, though one seems to have dropped down to be “saved” by the Christian soldiers (this canard also fed in, in the first waves of anti-Semitic lynchings in the eleventh century, to the canard that Jews ate babies)

this speaks to this moment, the DeFeo death/Atlanta shooting moment, this week, because it was clear in the killer the averruncate vector had activated on him, and he went into aversive action, killing women he blamed for his addiction to what they could give him, literally throwing them under the bus, the most popular aversive tactic recognized in a rational culture; but, of course, he then sought suicide, and that, along with cannibalism, is the most extreme form of aversive gesture, when the sleep demon attacks. This is not to exonerate him (except to say that others will then misread his action to exonerate him and them), as Arwa and Solnit in the The Guardian this week seem to think. It simply shows how a mechanism that has been committed to premodern times has resurfaced now, when the fear vector is turned on. In Mad Max Fury Road (2016), by various tropes, the hero gets out from being the human shield, to win; but as he is attacked others suffer reduction to the more extreme last stages of options, this includes the I’m Already Dead moment and the Death Scream moment, that is, he is gone. This is not to exonerate him, but it explains where he was at. He then, in his defense from absolute shame (please stop sharing your suicides) he takes human shields, but kills them, to prevent him or others after him (now he is doing others a favor) from falling prey to sin. 

and in terms of the averruncate vector having been turned on, as per Burkert

he is in full retreat, maybe he has decided that he is past the Palinurus phase, that is, he will offer himself up to his misery, a suicide; and backed into the apsyrtan phase, where he will make use of others as human shields to represent his tearing apart of himself, and comes, finally, to the Castor stage, the most extreme, no way out stage, Castor means he castrates himself and throws his genitals to the pursuer, that can be done by as reported killing the women so that they won’t “tempt him” anymore, even if he is going to die; this is also where cannibalism survivor tactics and suicide carried through work out. That is, it is over. It is NOT to exonerate him (though every step he takes HE THINKS exonerates him, see Von Trier’s House that Jack Built), it is to understand that this is what things have come to. Nor do I hold a double standard, this is criminal activity in the modern world. The solution is to find the people for whom the vector has begun to close in, and shut it down, to stop it from worsening into crisis and tragedy. This means to turn off the more general lattice level conjure vector, the vector of fear, to get rid of the fear both sides in the culture, in all populations, to return to a “normal” of behaving in a sane, somewhat rational and civilized way with other people.

Anything can happen. Rationalizations on all sides are not understanding, in any case. So, here, SBS seems to link the political overlay of the show (see the press release) with the fact that in these voodoo spins obscene tales emerge. This story, as told by Josephus, is a horror story, even with a putrid smell, like in Amityville, and with an evil serving of child to the invaders, like in the stories of Peleus sic and etc.

and HERE is the print used

amazingly, relative to Amityville, the baby is by the fire; also, that’s not Santa Claus, Jews were signified in medieval art with pointy hats

(so, vis a vis a work of art, this gives me secondhand pleasure to know the image made use of derives from a corpus of real propaganda from former times; as a work in a horror situation it gives me pleasure to be able to actually identify it, to understand the full meaning of it). It is also suggested by the above that the hornets are the soldiers or officials.

it is possible that SBS is making an aside remark on the nature of the storied literature or lore that informs horror, and how it can be dealt with, in an age of new untruth. In my reading through this history, lore consists of true and unture stories that mix up over time to become “tradition” at some point of which it becomes pointless to factcheck, better to retell to try to bend the lore another way. It may be that as in this event in Amityville Dollhouse, the gaze is undone by the buzz, that is, a bug getting inside one’s ear. It corresponds to a bee in one’s bonnet, as the saying goes, or an earworm, which I classify as fugue state vigilogogic symbolic level spin in the cingulate which simply and exactly like an earworm gets into the bloodstream and is therefore fed by a compulsion to tell it again and again and again, that is, a mythos. It is the danger of myth, but also the “fun” of it. I wonder if this ethos is also partly derived from Damien Hirst’s foot of Apollo Smintheus with a rat on itt, that is, it is by local habitus that the mind works, only by managing the habitus can one overcome it.

since we are going through a plague time, and the plague time has been plagued by earworm idiocies of a premodern nature, this certainly rings true on yet another level. For all this then, an exhibition most promising by a young artist who seems to have launched her practice in storying.

footnote

It is also strange synchroetherrhoe that the title and font for this show parallels a movie that opened at SXSW this week, a documentary on folk horror,

SXSW 2021: Dive into folk horror with ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched’