Curriculars: The Relative Weird, Part One—Horror as Privilege
Also: on teaching American Literature in the present moment
So, I started out writing a single post that ended up getting longer and longer. When it approached 6000 words, I thought it best to break it up into smaller, more digestible bits. Fortunately, I’d structured it in three sections. Here’s the first part.
As I said in my last post, it has been an interesting semester, in the “may you live in interesting times” sense of the word. I’ve been enjoying my classes and my students are a great bunch, but I always feel the spectral presence of the endless doomscroll looming over me and haunting my subjects. I usually introduce my second-year course on American literature after 1945 with a spiel about how literature offers an insight into a cultural zeitgeist. This is, I emphasize, valuable to us as Canadians, given that though we’re geographically large, we’re small in terms of population, and we abut a behemoth.1 Developing a grasp of U.S. cultural history, I suggest to my students, helps inform our understanding of the present, which is always valuable … and perhaps more urgent than usual given current events. Back at the beginning of January when I made this pitch, I paused and added that this was somewhat more immediate at a moment when “the U.S. is going through a few things.”
That was twelve weeks ago. I remember thinking that, however bad we expect things to get, it will almost certainly be worse. Now, I’m thinking ruefully about how much I lowballed that prediction.
Growing up, we were often taught that Canada and the U.S. share “the longest undefended border in the world.” That was always spoken with pride and approbation. Lately, I’m finding those words resonating in my mind with something less than the spirit of national confraternity, and something more like the spirit of paranoia.
This sense is exacerbated by the spectacle of the anti-“D.E.I.” jihad currently scouring government databases and websites, the first salvoes against universities, and most recently against museums and parks (and, bizarrely, zoos). The March 27 executive order about this last category employs language—such as that about removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and elsewhere—reads like the Project 2025 crowd considered Orwell’s 1984 as a useful guide rather than a cautionary tale.2
Reviewing what they’re looking to quash, especially anything seeking to “interrogat[e] institutional racism,” offering historical perspectives on how Western nations “have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement,” or which simply claim that “Race is a human invention,” I’m left in the position of proudly copping to the charge of being a purveyor of “improper ideology.” Looking over my courses, I must imagine that, were they subject to the tender mercies of Trump’s censorious minions, something like 80% of my content would be excised. In my second-year class, “American Literature After 1945,” we do women poets (Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop); then James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ poems about Emmett Till; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; and Angels in America by Tony Kushner. What might escape a purge? Possibly Randall Jarrell’s WWII poems, which we start the course with; Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album”; and Ben Fountain’s novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which ends the course. (Jarrell and Fountain’s survival probably only happens if the minions don’t look too closely at how I teach them; ditto Didion, who might also be culled simply for being not-male).
In my fourth-year course “The American Weird,” I must imagine that my first three weeks would have passed muster, as we did a selection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. As I talk about at length in my earlier post “The Trumpian Weird,” Lovecraft’s particular brand of racist ideation, in which threats to White subjectivity are allegorized by the monstrous and eldritch, is perfectly consonant with MAGA’s White nationalism. But after that? Well, I can’t imagine any of it would remain un-purged.
Last time I talked about my American Weird class in this space, I outlined a very rough breakdown of contemporary weird fiction: the banal weird, the relative weird, and the utopian weird. As I noted in that earlier post, the banal weird doesn’t tend to make for great storytelling (unless you’re China Miéville), but it is something we constantly encounter in reality, as at the root it’s about our apparently bottomless capacity to normalize the unthinkable. We don’t get Trump 2.0 without the banality of Weird. And, ironically, it is the forces that animate and facilitate Trumpism that make what I’m terming the Relative Weird a particularly significant iteration of Lovecraftian fiction.
The “relative weird” proceeds from an acknowledgement that the uncanny or even the terrifying is contingent: what is strange, eerie, or outright horrifying to one person might not land in the same way for someone else—or at any rate that that terror would have dramatically different valence depending on a given individual’s experience of reality.
Seen in these terms, the Relative Weird overlaps significantly with the growing presence of Black horror, especially in cinema and often with the name Jordan Peele attached. With certain obvious exceptions (some 70s blaxploitation films, for example, or such movies as the 1992 Candyman and its sequels), horror as a genre has been overwhelmingly White.3 Many of the more recent forays lean into the conceit of horror’s contingency, or perhaps more specifically, the experience of supernatural horror as an expression of privilege. Which is to say: your average supernatural horror pales in comparison to the history of being Black in America, a fact that is worked, thematically and allegorically, into a significant portion of horror and weird fiction by Black creators. Jordan Peele’s breakout hit Get Out (2017), for example, is about affluent old White people4 who kidnap Black people in order to implant their brains and live on in their young, virile bodies. To call that “allegory” seems disingenuous, as it is more a literalization of large swathes of American history.
Because I’m a child of the 1980s and grew up memorizing various standup comedy specials, the title of Get Out sent my mind instantly to Eddie Murphy’s 1983 Delirious and his riff on the bizarre behaviour of White people in horror movies, who stick around in their poltergeist-riddled houses when sensible Black people would flee.5 Even when explicitly warned by the ghosts, they stay: “In The Amityville Horror, the ghost told them to get out of the house. White people stayed in there! Now that’s a hint and a half for your ass. Ghosts say get the fuck out? I would just tip the fuck out the door.” He imagines a Black couple viewing the house, enthusing over it until hearing a spectral voice: “Oh baby, this is beautiful—you got a chandelier hanging here, kids outside playing, it’s a beautiful neighbourhood. I really love this, this is really nice. ‘GET OUT!’ Too bad we can’t stay, baby.”
Turns out my initial instinct was correct: Peele happily acknowledged that he “absolutely” took inspiration—and the film’s title—from Murphy’s routine. “I mean, Eddie Murphy is talking about the difference between how a white family and a Black family would react in a haunted house,” Peele said. “It’s one of the best bits of all time.” In the film, Peele puts the titular warning in the mouth of Logan (LaKeith Stanfield), a young Black man who has been implanted with a White person’s brain. In a moment when his old consciousness surfaces, he tells Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) to get out.
Getting out is not however quite as straightforward for Chris as it is for Eddie Murphy’s imagined Black family, given that his presence at his girlfriend’s family’s house has been orchestrated specifically to make him their next victim, the next Black person to be colonized by a White person’s consciousness. As stated above, to call this film allegorical doesn’t really seem sufficient: at base, it transposes the long history of the abduction and exploitation of Black bodies into a horror movie convention that is at once familiar and new. But arguably the most terrifying moment in the film isn’t anything that Chris endures at the hands of his girlfriend’s family, but when, at the very end, having fought his way out— killing or incapacitating his captors in the process—he faces the approaching lights of a police car in the middle of a dark road, his wounded White (ex-) girlfriend lying on the asphalt.
In an odd way, the spirit and sense of Murphy’s haunted house riff resonates most in Peele’s film at this moment. At root, the joke speaks to an underlying reality: why on earth would you subject yourself to the horrors of a poltergeist-plagued home in addition to a quotidian reality in which police stops carry the very real risk of violence and death? This is embodied in Chris’ fatalistic response: to stand, slowly, his arms raised, his face wearing an expression of mingled fear and resignation. Whatever else he’s endured, he is in this moment a Black man in America kneeling over an injured White woman, and his chances of being shot out of hand are high. Though things prove otherwise—Chris’s friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery) emerges—an alternate ending featured Chris speaking to Rod from behind the plexiglass of a prison visitor’s booth. Jordan Peele opted for the happier ending, but his original vision is at once consonant with a realistic extrapolation of events and suggests a racially-coded two-tiered set of circumstances for the horror genre’s archetype of the Final Survivor—one that receives rescue and one that receives blame.6
The introduction of this contingency complicates the assumption underlying traditional supernatural horror of a clear distinction between safe, stable reality on one hand, and the dangerous uncanny on the other. I’ll dig deeper into this complicating relativism in my next post, in which I’ll discuss Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom—a rewriting of Lovecraft’s most explicitly racist story from the perspective of a Black protagonist.
NOTES
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau summed it up in his first meeting with the American president in 1969 with what has become an oft-repeated analogy: "Living next to you,” he told Richard Nixon, “is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast … one is affected by every twitch and grunt."
Literally as I was finalizing this post I encountered a news piece about a purge of 381 books from the Nimitz Library, the library of the U.S. Naval Academy. Scanning the list of books that have been removed is genuinely appalling, as they range from unsurprising (Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D’Angelo) to such baffling choices as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As political science professor Cory Robin observes, this goes well beyond excising books specifically about diversity, inclusion, and equity—this is about “committing cultural suicide.”
As indeed has genre more generally … but one topic at a time.
Who in a beautifully ironic touch are performatively Obama-loving. The casting of Bradley Whitford, Josh Lyman himself, in the key role here is simply <chef’s kiss>.
Perhaps one of the templates for the “White people are like this/Black people are like this” routine.
The cinematic analogue that leaps to mind is the ending of George A. Romero’s paradigm-changing zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968). The sole survivor of the group trapped in a farmhouse while flesh-eating ghouls roam the countryside is Ben (Duane Jones) a Black man who has proved the most competent and level-headed person in the otherwise all-White group. He alone manages to make it through to the dawn, only to be shot by a sheriff’s posse hunting down and killing all the zombies they encounter. Not pausing to see whether the figure looking out the farmhouse window is alive or undead, one of the deputies shoots him at a distance. Ben’s corpse is then callously thrown on a bonfire while the closing credits roll.
Great post! Thanks so much. I just taught The Ballad of Black Tom alongside that Lovecraft story, & I'm very much looking forward to hearing your thoughts on LaValle's novella.