DURING MY SUMMER JOB, I STUMBLED ACROSS THE BELOW CARTOON. MY COLLEAGUE, WHO WAS AN ENGLISH TEACHER AT MY WORK (AND A TOTAL BADASS), INTRODUCED SAID CARTOONIST TO ME. SHE USED THESE COMIC STRIPS WITH HER STUDENTS AS A CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE TO HELP THEM THINK IMAGINATIVELY IN ENGLISH.
AS A TESTER BEFORE HER CLASS, SHE ASKED IF I COULD GIVE NARRATING ONE OF THE COMICS A GO.
SO HAVE A GANDER AT MY IMAGINED NARRATION OF THE BELOW COMIC BY BEN HATKE. IT’S A BIT OF FUN WHICH I HOPE TO CONTINUE AS I PLUNGE FACE WONDROUSLY FIRST INTO POST-MASTERS UNEMPLOYMENT.
250 words
If you want to see more of this adorable little robot, see here.
Henry likes to amble. Not walk. Just amble. Ambling allows Henry to ponder things that one doesn’t normally have time to ponder in the frenetic world of Robot-land. Today Henry was thinking about how uncommonly warm and sunny it had been this summer. Most strange for August in Robot-land. In fact, the more Henry thought about this, the more a sense of doom came over him: things are just too good to be true. The grass is just too green, the sky is just too blue and that butterfly is just too gosh-darn yellow. It was driving Henry nuts with anxiety.
At that very moment, Henry looked up and saw what could only be described as an enormous ball. Or was it an egg? Henry hoped to Robot-God it wasn’t an egg as he was terrified of eggs. For eggs harbour ghouls, ghosts and monsters that can gobble up little robots like Henry.
Henry began to tremble as he imagined what monster lay curled inside this deceptively fun-looking egg. His mind wandered to what the monster would then do to him once it had broken free of its intricately decorated confines. Suddenly, what Henry feared began to happen.
Crack…. Crick… CRACK!
Henry ran. He ran as fast as he could, not taking even a second to look back, hoping that his little robot legs could out-run the devilish monster.
If only Henry had looked back though. If only Henry had turned around and seen that it wasn’t a monster that had popped out of the egg, but another robot who, like Henry, was all alone and in desperate need of a friend.
I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU BUT I AM CRAZY EXCITED ABOUT CRAZY RICH ASIANS COMING OUT IN CINEMAS THIS SUMMER. SO CRAZY EXCITED IN FACT THAT I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A NICE IDEA TO LOOK AT HOW THE PURSUIT OF WEALTH HAS BEEN PREVIOUSLY PORTRAYED IN FILM.
AND SINCE IT’S ME, I HAVE DECIDED TO LOOK AT TWO CHINESE FILMS: ZHOU XIAOWEN’s ERMO (1994) AND JIA ZHANGKE’s XIAO WU (1997). I 1000% RECOMMEND WATCHING THESE FILMS WHEN YOU HAVE A FREE SATURDAY EVENING AND A BARREL OF POPCORN HANDY.
Deng’s perceived catchphrase, “To get rich is glorious” [致富光荣], unleashed a wave of personal entrepreneurship and pragmatism in the 1990s that continues to drive China’s economy today. This economic transformation is presented in Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 (b.1970) Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu小武, 1997) and Zhou Xiaowen’s 周晓文 (b.1954) Ermo (Ermo二嫫, 1994).
What these films show is that whether you live in a rural village, like Ermo, or in a county-level city, like Xiao Wu, notions of gender and identity during this period were in flux. The onslaught of capitalist behaviours distorts traditional views of gender as women leave the domestic sphere and men retreat to it. By conducting a comparison of the character arch of the lead protagonists in Xiao Wu and Ermo, I will argue that getting rich is not glorious, but perplexing to not only notions of gender but also, of identity.
Background on Ermo and Xiao Wu
Zhou Xiaowen’s Ermo is set in a rural Chinese village on the fringes of modernisation during the 1990s. The main protagonist, Ermo (Ai Liya 艾丽娅), is a peasant woman who is determined to buy a twenty-nine-inch television to elevate her social status within the village. However, this pursuit for a television becomes a wider allegory for China’s pursuit of modernisation during the post-Mao period.
China’s economic transformation is also a dominant theme in Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu which is set in the rapidly commercialising county-level city of Fenyang (which is also Jia’s hometown). Amidst this swift modernisation, Xiao Wu (Wang Hongwei 王宏伟) is left behind. He scrapes a living from stealing while his friends move on to more straight-lace occupations.
While Xiao Wu has lost out, Ermo seems to take advantage of this new capitalist climate. Despite this, exhausted and confused, both Ermo and Xiao Wu eventually fall victim to China’s rampant capitalism.
Sexual Dominance
With Deng’s focus on economic reform, China opened its arms to the pursuit of monetary wealth. This pursuit of wealth was synonymous with a pursuit for power as money became a rubric of influence and control. Indeed, the power through owning and exchanging money is reminiscent of another form of human exchange: sex. Therefore, it is not surprising to observe how Ermo’s libido increases as she becomes more economically dominant.
As the breadwinner of the family, Ermo frequently exhibits masculine behaviours. She is often shown to leave the shared family bed at night to go outside to the courtyard to make noodles. The shots of Ermo’s rhythmic kneading of her feet on the noodle dough is reminiscent of male masturbation (Cieko and Lu 2002, p.95). The use of close-ups on Ermo’s perspiring face is particularly effective in showing the intense gratification she receives from massaging the dough and – on a metaphorical level – massaging her own ego (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
These close-ups also focus on Ermo’s feet and legs (see Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2). While I agree with critic Xiaobing Tang that these series of shots of Ermo’s body parts highlights her pent-up libidinal energy, I believe that this analysis is not fully developed (Tang 2003, p.656). This series of shots also suggests that Ermo’s identity is fragmented: she is presented not as a full person, but as a series of limbs conducting actions. By including these repeated behaviours, Zhou Xiaowen suggests that Ermo is a literal money-making machine.
Figure 2.1Figure 2.2
As Ermo’s libido and masculine behaviours increase with the accumulation of money, Xiao Wu’s masculine identity depletes. Xiao Wu’s girlfriend, Mei Mei, leaves him after finding out that the money he had given his friend, Xiaoyong, as a wedding gift was stolen: “dirty cash” [臭钱].
Whereas money ‘well-earned’ enables Ermo to satiate her sexual craving with an affair with her neighbour, money that has been stolen prevents Xiao Wu from continuing his relationship with Mei Mei and thus diluting his sexual dominance.
Claustrophobic Surroundings
As well as exerting sexual prowess, Xiao Wu also struggles to construct any concrete identity within this new commercialized society. For example, Xiao Wu, having stolen some ID cards, drops them off at the police station. It seems that Xiao Wu, uncertain of his own role in the world, ironically gives back identity to others but cannot find it for himself.
Although Xiao Wu attempts to adopt other identities, he is still trapped within his social environment. By positioning Xiao Wu at the edge of shots, Jia Zhangke creates a certain claustrophobia, suggesting that Xiao Wu is not only entrapped within the frame, but also within the confines of Fenyang (see Figure 3.1 and Figure 3.2). This type of framing is more frequently used when Xiao Wu is in public spaces. His discomfort to be out in public depicts what it is like to live in a Chinese city that is expeditiously changing.
Figure 3.1Figure 3.2
Similarly, Ermo is comprised of a “series of claustrophobic places” thus creating a “sense of desperation” (Donald 2000, p.122). In contrast to Xiao Wu, Ermo is at her most confident when in public. She comes into her own when selling her twisted noodles on the side of the busy city street. The tightly framed shot is indeed claustrophobic as she is squeezed between a statue of a policeman and another hawker with her basket of wares in front of her (see Figure 4.1). Despite this, it is Ermo’s repeated cry, “Twisted noodles for sale!” [卖麻花面], that vividly shows how she is audibly dominant within the public space. This image of Ermo squatting behind her noodle basket becomes the film’s visual leitmotif and associates her role as a woman within the arena of commerce rather than with the home.
Figure 4.1
In contrast, Xiao Wu is as his most self-assured when he is alone and indoors (see Figure 4.2). At what thus becomes the climactic point of the film, Xiao Wu goes to the bathhouse to bathe in the success of having established his relationship with Mei Mei. Unfortunately, this scene is the last moment of respite before the film’s cruel denouement. Away from the eyes of the public, Xiao Wu visually relaxes as he submerges himself within the safety of the womb-like pool. Like Ermo, it is through audio that we understand that Xiao Wu is at his most contented as he starts to sing – an action that he was unwilling to do in the presence of Mei Mei. While the rise of commercialism in China enables Ermo to engage and participate in the public sphere, Xiao Wu retreats to the domestic sphere escaping from the pressures of the capitalistic climate.
Figure 4.2
Cruel Endings
However, the commercial environment of the 1990s prevents Ermo and Xiao Wu from cementing these new gender roles and identities. While Xiao Wu is at his most peaceful within the domestic sphere, it is in the public sphere that we see the last shot of him. During a government crack-down on theft, Xiao Wu is arrested for stealing; he is then chained up and publicly exhibited for all to see (see Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1
Martin Scorsese notes that Wang Hongwei’s portrayal of Xiao Wu “is anything but sentimental” and makes the ending of the film “all the more devastating” as Xiao Wu is unceremoniously displayed for all to see (here for full article).
Ermo ends on a similar note – having finally installed the TV in her house, she sits beside it, vacant and exhausted, confined back in the private spehere (see Figure 5.2). Both literally and metaphorically chained, Xiao Wu and Ermo become spectacles.
Figure 5.2
In Sum…
The twenty-nine-inch television is the embodiment of Deng’s slogan “to get rich is glorious”. Yet, the staring, vacant-looking Ermo and Xiao Wu become an index of an ideological emptiness that was a result of the personal entrepreneurship and pragmatism of the post-Mao era.
Both films depict how the pressure to succeed in this new capitalist climate garbles traditional gender roles and thus, identity. The tired, dispirited Ermo cannot enjoy the fruits of her blind capitalistic pursuit of material objects; and Xiao Wu, confused and exposed, is left behind as post-Mao China hurries ahead in its pursuit of modernity: a pursuit of glory and riches.
References
Ciecko, A and Sheldon Lu 2002, “Ermo: Televisuality, Capital and the Global Village” in China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity, edited by Sheldon Lu, 89-103. Stanford University Press, California
Donald, S 2000, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China. Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland.
Ermo 二嫫. Directed by Zhou Xiaowen周晓文. Shanghai Film Studio and Hong Kong Ocean Film, 1994. Film.
I know – yawn. Who wants to know about the theory of some dude called Pierre Bourdell (or was it Bourden?) and Chinese online literature? I mean, how dull.
And yet, annoyingly so, the world of Chinese online literature analysed through Bourdieu’s theory of Cultural Production reveals some intriguing home truths about the current state of Chinese society. Quite interesting, really.
So, before having a peruse below, please see here and here for some short and sweet summaries of Bourdieu’s theory of Cultural Production to get yourself acquainted with dear Pierre.
Despite this statement from the wildly popular and self-proclaimed literary bad boy, Han Han (b.1982), the Chinese literary scene has been economically bourgeoning in recent years, partly due to the fiscal success of Chinese online literature. Online literature in China began to take off in 2003 when Starting Point (qidian.com), a brand under Shanda Literature’s wing today, rolled out the country’s first online reading payment scheme. As a result, the market has grown by more than twenty per cent annually to RMB nine billion (GBP one billion) in 2016 (Yang 2017).
In this post, I argue that the application of Bourdieu’s theory of Cultural Production to the Chinese context broadens our understanding of how the online literary field functions. Specifically, I will focus on the website, Black and Blue (heilan.com), and investigate how this website represents the online literary field by concentrating on its progression since well-regarded academic Michel Hockx’s initial examination in 2013.
The purpose of this post is to argue that there is a greater need for a relational analysis of the online literary field as China continues its path towards modernity and innovation.
Hockx’s Analysis of Black and Blue
In Hockx’s impressive Internet Literature of China, his investigation into Black and Blue struck me as particularly notable due to its illuminating exegesis into the Chinese online literary scene. As Hockx describes, the authors on Black and Blue focus on “aesthetics” and strive to display “good technical writing skills” (Hockx 2015, 22). Yet, since its appearance on the online literary scene in 2003, Black and Blue has undergone much transformation, even since Hockx’s analysis of the site in 2013. The tracing of its development allows for a deeper understanding of the clash between market-driven literature and ‘pure literature’ (chun wenxue) in China’s online literary field.
In Hockx’s 2013 analysis of Black and Blue, he describes the website as split into two forums: the first focuses on different genres and the second contains sub-forums devoted to specific authors from the group. The second forum also had forums within it devoted to “stream of consciousness” (yishiliu), and, in keeping with their avant-garde aura, had a forum especially devoted to harsh criticism (ma) of up-and-coming writers’ works (Hockx 2015, p. 132). In November 2013, the site’s membership stood at just under thirty-six thousand with a low level of “social interaction” in the forums (Hockx 2015, p. 131).
What was impressive about the website was Hockx’s notation that for the past ten years, Black and Blue moderators had awarded a prize for the best works in the forums by including it in their webzine, Black and Blue. Hockx explains that originally readers could read the webzine online or go to the forums to download the whole issue by paying with “prestige points” (weiwang), which members collected by being active on the site (Hockx 2015, p. 133). Furthermore, the monthly webzines could also be downloaded for free on the e-reader site duokan.com.
The final feature of the website in 2013 was the quarterly prize for the author of the best story on the site which had been awarded with impressive consistency since 2003. The prize was normally cash and a product of donations from the group’s core members (Hockx 2015, p. 133).
Hockx concludes that Black and Blue seemed to function as a microcosm of Bourdieu’s literary field. It includes relevant agents of the field: authors, critics, editors and readers. All of whom subscribe to an autonomous aesthetic where fiction does not need to be defined by outside forces, political, economic or otherwise (Hockx 2015, p. 132).
Since 2013, however, Black and Blue has changed considerably. These developments have rendered Hockx’s argument for Black and Blue as a microcosm of Bourdieu’s literary field, unfortunately, moot.
What has Changed since Hockx’s Analysis?
Firstly, there are now no sub-forums – only three mini-forums for novels, poetry and ‘Black and Blue life’ (heilan shenghuo) exist (see Figures 1, 2.1 and 2.2 for comparison). Moreover, when I attempted to read a webzine, I was directed to the platform duokan.com and was asked to pay two yuan (approximately 20 pence) to download the webzine, rather than pay with “prestige points”. This was at a discounted price (fifty per cent) and with further investigation, it seemed that all previous journals were for sale at similar reduced prices. When directed to the payments page, I was only given the option to pay with Wechat Pay indicating the website’s angling towards users who read literature on mobile applications. This change is most likely a response to the increase in economic dominance of conglomerates, such as Shanda Literature, operating in the online literary field.
This development is also reflected in the website’s membership statistics (as shown above). In November 2013 there were thirty-six thousand members which increased to just under forty-one thousand members in November 2017 – an eleven per cent increase. Yet, these numbers are deceptive. When compared to the previous four-year period, from November 2009 to November 2013, Black and Blue membership grew thirty-three per cent indicating that Black and Blue’s rate of membership onboarding has decreased (Black and Blue 2017).
Furthermore, when navigated to Black and Blue’s webzine tab, the last published works were dated in 2014. This hiatus is also reflected in the awards: the last official prize was also awarded in 2014. Despite its appearance of a website that is no longer in use, of all Black and Blue’s forums, the only one that has been updated in 2017 is the forum devoted to Novels. The Black and Blue moderators seem to still be active as they continue to highlight certain threads as “recommended” (jian). Interestingly, activity on other forums seems to have petered out after November 2014.
Why has Black and Blue changed?
A reason for the website’s decrease in activity is due to the increase in dominance of other market-driven websites. The emergence of the conglomerate Shanda Literature seems to be casting an all-consuming shadow over the field of Chinese online literature as it subsumes independent online literature websites. Shanda Literature’s main rival, Tencent Literature, is also on the rise in the online literature world with the recent acquisition of Chuangshi and its successful IPO in 2017 (Yang 2017).
Can Black and Blue still be Considered a Microcosm of the Bourdieu Literary Field?
In some respects, yes.
The website still contains, as Bourdieu puts it, “producers of the work’s value” (the website’s moderators), “the consumers of the work” (the readers) and “the producers of the work” (the writers who post on the Novel forum) (Bourdieu 1994, 37).
Yet, there are many more reasons for the website to not function as any representation of Bourdieu’s literary field. Most noticeably, the website has stopped publishing content in the last three years indicating its depletion in literary autonomy. The website seems to have lost its publishers, its critics and has come under the ever-growing influence of the market with the website’s introduction of monetary payment for its webzines and books. It appears to be that the market-driven 1990s has caught up with Black and Blue and has more than threatened its literary autonomy, it has considerably diminished it.
In sum…
Han Han may call the Chinese literary field “crap”, but that doesn’t warrant its neglect in analysis. In fact, it requires further examination to understand more deeply the changeable nature of the field. Through the examination of a small sampling of the Chinese online literary field, its fate seems to be that of heteronomy, not autonomy. Online literature cannot be expected to produce culturally independents works. The Chinese online literary field has become another commercial market place; websites that were autonomous, like Black and Blue, have recently monetized to survive in an ever-commercializing and ever-changing China.
WITH THE FILMING OF SERIES THREE OF STRANGER THINGS BEGINNING, I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA TO REFLECT ON THE PAST TWO SERIES OF THIS EXCELLENT TELEVISION SHOW.
THIS PIECE IS MERELY MY MUSINGS ON THE TWO GREAT D’s: JACQUES DERRIDA AND THE DUFFER BROTHERS.
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE REQUIRES PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF STRANGER THINGS ANDCONTAINS SPOILERS OF SERIES ONE AND TWO.
“So it is indeed the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes the hostage. And the guest, the invited hostage, becomes the one who invites the one who invites. The guest becomes the host’s host…These substitutions make everyone into everyone else’s hostage. Such are the laws of hospitality.”
(DERRIDA 2000, P.123)
In the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, where everyone knows everyone, a peculiar incident starts a chain of events that leads to the disappearance of Will Byers and the undoing of an otherwise peaceful community. Dark government agencies and malevolent supernatural forces converge on the town while a few locals begin to understand that there is more going on than meets the eye. The Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things (2016) explores a range of thought-provoking themes about growing up: one of which is ‘stranger danger’. Set in the 1980s where childlike innocence and naivety was slowly melting away, the concept of the threatening stranger was becoming increasingly prevalent.
French philosopher Jacques Derrida also explores this stranger/host/guest relationship in his Of Hospitality (2000). I will use the above quote as an algorithm with which to unlock the meaning of two pivotal scenes from Stranger Things series one and series two. First, the scene in the final episode of series one of Stranger Things, “Chapter Eight: The Upside Down”, where Steve (Joe Keery), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) lure the Demogorgon into the Byers’ home to vanquish it. The second scene I will examine is in “Chapter Three: The Pollywog” of series two where Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) becomes possessed by the Shadow Monster. In approaching Stranger Things through the prism of Deconstructionism, I will argue that not all relationships in this TV series are as distinctly defined as the binary opposition between the Upside Down and the “Downside Up”. Stranger Things dangles dangerously on the edge of the Upside Down through the tension between host and guest, enemy and foe, familiar and unfamiliar.
One of the most defining instances of this tension between guest and host is in series one’s “Chapter Eight: The Upside Down”. Nancy and Jonathan, having cut their hands to lure the Demogorgon to the house to attack it, are waiting for its arrival. However, an unexpected guest appears in the form of Steve, who tries to apologise to Nancy for their previous fight. An argument ensues and due to Steve’s bloodied face and Jonathan and Nancy’s cut hands, the fairy lights start flashing and the Demogorgon arrives breaking through the ceiling. Having run into the bedroom, ready to initiate the trap, the Demogorgon disappears.
The scene that I would like to examine is what follows this. As they emerge from the bedroom, the camera tracks from Nancy to Jonathon to Steve as they cautiously search the living room for the Demogorgon. The camera then moves to a medium shot of Steve where, framed by the fairy lights and the open door behind him, starts to visibly panic shouting, “This is crazy.” He leaps to the phone where the camera cuts to a close-up of Steve frantically dialling (reminiscent of Will Byers in the pilot episode of series one) but the line is dead. The Demogorgon appears to infiltrate phone lines, electricity lines, TV cables and passes through walls. (Ironically, the only entrance it doesn’t use is the door – it unlocks the Byers’ front door in the pilot episode of series one but is never shown to enter through it.)
The camera then pans out to a medium shot of Nancy snatching the phone out of Steve’s hand and shouting, “You need to leave!” The audience then sees the door opening from the outside of the house and a tracking wide shot of Steve running to his car. The camera then zooms in on Steve’s face as he catches a glimpse of the house behind him only to see the fairy lights starting to flash alerting them of the oncoming Demogorgon. One could comment that the effect of the fairy lights functions as a piece of dark comedy as the Demogorgon warns them of its arrival, much like a doorbell would at the front door.
The apparent bait in this scene is not only the blood seeping from Jonathan and Nancy’s cuts on their hand – rather symbolic of a blood pact – but also Steve’s bloodied face after his fight. This tribal symbolism is continued with the imagery of the nail-studded baseball bat. The bat is reminiscent of African nail fetishism, nkondi: religious idols made by the Kongo people. The primary function of these figures was to house a spirit which can travel out from this temporary home to cause havoc (McGaffey 1977, p.176). The vocabulary of nkondi has connections with Kongo conceptions of witchcraft which are anchored in the belief that it is possible for humans to enrol spiritual forces to inflict harm on others (Vansina 1990, p.299). In Stranger Things the idea of the nkondi figure as a weapon is transposed onto the nail-studded baseball bat. Though it is presented as a weapon in defence of the Demogorgon, the bat’s fetishization and recurrent appearances throughout the series give it the function of summoning the supernatural. Thus, the guest-host relationship reveals its ambiguous nature as the Demogorgon is both summoned and vanquished; welcomed and evicted, with the same object.
The nail-studded baseball bat and a nkondi figure Source: Pinterest
The attack on the Demogorgon is pulse-quickening. The drama begins again with a high-angle shot inside the house from the position of the flashing fairy lights looking down on the panicked faces of Nancy and Jonathon. The camera then circles them like a predator entrapping their prey. This circling motion builds to a climax where the camera stops at a medium shot of Jonathon with the Demogorgon slowly unfurling itself behind him growling demonically. The juxtaposition of the proceeding low-angle close-up of the Demogorgon on top of Jonathan succeeds in involving the audience in the one-on-one struggle between human and monster.
At this point, Steve enters swinging the nail-studded bat at the Demogorgon. The fairy lights continue to flash as the camera swings to focus on the Demogorgon and then onto Steve in a continuous dance of 180-degree shots. This culminates in the overpowering final blow of Steve’s bat as he hits the Demogorgon squarely in the stomach causing it to stumble back into the trap. Curiously, the shaping of Jonathan, Steve and Nancy’s heads and limbs mirrors the traditional image of a Demogorgon that featured in the Dungeons and Dragons game in “Chapter 1: The Vanishing of Will Byers” (see Figure 1 and 2). This raises the question: who is the villain of this scene? Is it the Demogorgon? Or is it the teenagers who have invited a guest into their home with an offering of food, instead of welcoming and feeding it, try to kill it?
Figure 1Figure 2
The guest-host relationship develops in series two of Stranger Things where more personal boundaries are invaded. In “Chapter Three: The Pollywog”, Will is at school, helping his friends look for D’Artagnan, a sentient globule Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) found in his trashcan. When Will finds D’Artagnan, it hisses, shifting Will’s reality back into the Upside Down. At this point in series two, Will’s shifting between the Upside Down and Hawkins appears to be a psychological experience. In the first series, it was clear from the very beginning that he was physically absent from Hawkins. Now, he remains physically present in Hawkins, but psychologically present in the Upside Down. After shifting to the realm of the Upside Down, Will sees a dark shape form in the school hallway. A tracking shot follows the dark shape – the Shadow Monster – creep up behind Will. Reaching the school grounds, however, Will stops running and with a powerful wide low-angle shot to underline Will’s heroicness, faces his intruder (see Figure 3).
Figure 3
The scene is visually and aurally jarring. The vast black form invades Will’s body, entering his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The shift from mid to full close-up wholly involves the audience in this perturbingly intimate scene (see Figure 4 and 5). The sound effects – a combination of thunder, growling, and robotic beeping – build on the visual imagery as it amounts to a gruesome climax of Will being overpowered by the Shadow Monster. This is disturbing simply because Will’s corporeal boundaries are being violated. In the following episode, “Chapter 4: Will the Wise”, Will returns to reality and tells Joyce, his mother (Winona Ryder) what happened, his language echoes words used by survivors of assault. At first, he pretends he can’t remember. Then, pressed, he tries to explain: “I don’t know, it came for me,” he says, crying. “It got me, Mom. I felt it everywhere. Everywhere. And I still feel it.”
Figure 4Figure 5
In terms of boundaries, here lies the development between series one and series two in Stranger Things. The guest-host relationship is still abused in both series, yet in the first series the physical boundaries between the Upside Down and Hawkins are visibly shown. But in the second series, the visible boundary is destroyed. Instead, the boundary is the body – the skin.
This ambiguity of boundaries is also shown through the use of household appliances. Joyce welcomes the fairy lights, the static-emitting television and phone calls, because she wants to communicate with Will. Yet, through this fetishization of these everyday objects as tools to communicate with the supernatural – the fairy lights, the television, the phone and the baseball bat – we see that the characters paradoxically summon the Upside Down into the home. At the beginning of series one, the fairy lights represent Will’s presence, but by the end they represent the Demogorgon. This merging of monster and Will prefigures the invasions of the Shadow Monster in the second series as well as demonstrating the difficulty in determining the guest-host relationship. It also further raises the question: have Will and monster been a single entity all along?
For Derrida, in the case of hospitality, people fail in their attempts to behave hospitably towards their guest – rather, they exhibit hostility and hold each other “hostage” (Derrida 2000, p.131). This leads to Derrida’s observation that perhaps, “we do not know what hospitality is” (Derrida 2000a, p.6). True hospitality is elusive. When we re-consider Stranger Things in the light of Derrida’s quotation, its monster gunk-soaked foundations are much too slippery to stand on. The guest-host relationship in Stranger Things is not hierarchical: the story does not reveal who is hosting and who is the guest. Does Will invade the Upside Down or does the Upside Down invade Will? Does the Demogorgon invade the Byers’ household, or is it invited? Who is invading whose world? Is reality Hawkins? Or the Upside Down?
The construction of hospitality, the very thing that pulls Stranger Things together, also allows it to be pulled apart – to be deconstructed. Straddling the Upside Down and the Downside Up seems an impossible task for anyone.
References
Derrida, J2000, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford University Press, California.
——— 2000a, ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki, trans. Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 3 – 18.
MacGaffey, W 1977, ‘Fetishism Revisited: Kongo “Nkisi” in Sociological Perspective’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 172 – 184.
Stranger Things 2016, Television program, 21 Laps Entertainment and Monkey Massacre, California, 15 July.
Stranger Things 2 2017, Television program, 21 Laps Entertainment and Monkey Massacre, California, 31 October.
Vansina, J 1990, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin.
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