My review of last year opened with a rather definitive statement. There will be no such statement this year.
2011 was a different sort of year, a more difficult year, a year of complication and nuance and building and unraveling and expectation and perhaps — overall — fear.
When speaking of narrative a term that gets thrown around a lot is “arc.” Where does a character start, and where do they end up? The thing about life is that you’re always starting somewhere and ending up somewhere else, and then starting again. You never really stop moving. 2011 was the year many arcs ended, and when many other began.
2011 was the year of learning what it means to occupy; to learn its dangers, and its signification. American Horror Story is not just the name of a hit new series on FX, it’s also a buzzy phrase for our current political and economic clusterfuck.
But, then again, it’s also the name of a hit new series on FX.
I watched it recently, and American Horror Story is pretty good. It did its homework on haunted house movies, and it’s got some visual flair. It’s also one of the most sloppily written things I’ve seen in the past few years — there are, perhaps, no ghosts, just the mournful whisper of wind through the gaping and multitudinous plot holes.
But then there are also actually the ghosts. The fact that the show is so poorly written means that, when you get right down to it, the character arcs make no sense. Stories of haunting, as I’ve written on this blog before, often deal with that which has been denied or displaced or forgotten, the problems we’ve neglected to face but which still occupy, however nebulously, some space in our lives. To save you from any spoilers, suffice it to say that the arc of American Horror Story does not attempt to navigate this hauntological cohabitation of the past and present. What it does is cheat, in at least two ways.
One is the introduction of an apocalypse storyline — something the latest season of Dexter danced around as well — which is probably the most boring thing imaginable in a horror story for me. The antichrist, the fruition of Revelation — so fucking what? Supernatural or horror-inclined shows need to learn is that betting the whole damn farm only makes me think you’re not taking the game seriously. The stakes are so high they’re meaningless.
The second way AHS cheats is a bit more subtle. Though it wants us to think the apocalypse is a Bad Thing, total annihilation is in fact the only workable way out offered by the logic of the plot. The only way our ghosts can be overcome — or at least, cohabitated with — is to be ghosts ourselves. To force ourselves to belong to the past, or as the past seems to those who inhabit it, in a character’s words, “one long today.”
The apocalypse is the end of futurity. If there is no future, there can be ghosts. The ghosts become us, or we them.
Interesting, then, that the world is supposed to end in 2012. I doubt this, of course, but I guess I could be proven wrong.
But for the time being, no matter what American Horror Story (the series or the situation) suggests, I rather think I’d like to continue soldiering on into the future, with my ghosts in tow.
In 2010 my life was working to a clear, definite point. It was a time of transition but that transition’s nature felt solid. The solidity fell to pieces in 2011, when many things happened. These weren’t necessarily bad things; my graduation was one of them. I am the first person in my family to obtain a four-year degree, a first-generation college student and, now, a first generation graduate student. These are wonderful things.
And they are frightening things. I am on my own now, further afield than any chick from the ancestral nest. My friendships from undergrad, though they maintain in some ways thanks to modern technological convenience, have ended their arcs for now. I need to build new relationships, I need to find new ways to occupy the world I’ve made for myself, and that others have made and will make for me.
It would be dishonest to not here mention the one arc still hanging from undergrad: the most frightening and the most wonderful thing of all about 2011. She knows who she is, and to her I say thank you. Thank you for staying in this story, even as it got messy.
For the rest of you, I wish you and all your ghosts a happy new year.