Category Archives: criticism

“It Follows” and the emotional register of late-stage Capitalism

I’ve read a lot of articles recently that chuck around the phrase, “the logic of late-stage capitalism” as a kind of rhetorical flourish. Hell, I’ve probably written a few myself, so I‘m not throwing any shade here. But it’s hard to read these words without thinking about the oft-quoted line (attributed to both Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) that, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Saying we’re in “late-stage capitalism” though, kind of implies that we’ve moved through earlier stages and are now somewhere near a known ending. It has all the portentousness (and silliness) of a song by The Shamen. The logic at play here is more Captain Kirk than Mr Spock, enabling us to turn out despairing articles, give a Gallic shrug and then pop down to Waitrose for more hummus without troubling ourselves too much with what might actually come next.

From a historical perspective, this feeling is familiar. As far back as ancient Rome, figures like Cato and Cicero made their names partly by weighing in on the decline of civilisation. So believing the end is nigh seems to be a recurring cultural pattern. In my own lifetime alone we’ve had nuclear annihilation, Y2K and the War on Terror. None of these were trivial periods to live through, but we often seem to dramatise the present moment as a final gasp. Maybe, it helps to give the quotidian a glamorous touch of black lipstick. And maybe that’s part of the horror genre’s appeal (well, that and the lipstick).

“Metaphor for capitalism, innit” – Hobie tells it like it is.

Which brings me to It Follows, a horror film that explores a lot of things, but at least one of them is investigating the unrelenting dread resulting from being pursued by an ending. In the film, Jay, a young woman becomes the target of a shape-shifting supernatural entity after a sexual encounter. This creature follows her at a walking pace, killing its victim when it catches them. The entity can look like anyone. It never stops. It can be delayed by passing the curse on to someone else, but ultimately (the repressed) always returns.

Enjoying this? Buy me a coffee?

Which makes the movie and It an eerie metaphor for Capitalism: an often invisible entity, that becomes known only to its victims (something which it bears in common with Carpenter’s They Live) and which can only be avoided by exploiting other victims in a sort of manic Ponzi scheme.

Much of the creeping fear that the movie engenders is due to Its nature. Because the creature at the movie’s core can’t be reasoned with, it has the implacable quality of a primal force. It can look like your neighbours. It can look like your parents. It wears the mask of what you know.

Like Capitalism then, the entity in It Follows demands that we keep moving and keep the questions to minimum: that we keep on running, spending and consuming. It wears us down. Slowly, quietly and relentlessly.

During the film’s finale, the protagonists try to trap the entity in a swimming pool. For a moment it appears that the gambit might have worked. Jay survives, but the final shot shows her walking away with her boyfriend while, in the background, a figure walks behind them.

The End … or is it? Mwahahaha.

That circular, open ending is one of the things that makes It Follows so compelling and disturbing to me. The curse hasn’t been ended, it’s merely been postponed, unresolved. And that feels a lot like the emotional register of whatever this thing is that we call “late capitalism”.

We’re integrated components of a system that is dizzily documenting its own demise, but the endings that we might reasonably expect: collapse, revolution and transformation never quite arrive. (For me, there’s something of a parallel here, between that bit of old post-punk wisdom that any significant resistance ultimately gets packaged up and sold back to society as a life-style.) We’re controlled by the very system we’ve constructed. Telling ourselves that there is no alternative, instead of an ending we get packaged decline, reboots and bit-rot.

This is why the term “haunted capitalism” feels a more appropriate epithet to me than “late-stage.” Capitalism doesn’t die, it persists, populated and animated by the ghosts of futures that never fully arrived: dead city centres, empty social media networks and nostalgia for discontinued chocolate bars. We’re surrounded and invested in an epistemological infrastructure that exists only as a sort of grim hangover cure.

It’s entirely possible that Timothy Leary’s exhortation to “turn on, tune in, drop out”, might be one route out of our current predicament. Not as escapism, but as refusal. As a way of unthinking the system we’ve convinced ourselves is “natural.” Most economists seem to agree that our current economic model has its roots in the changes wrought during the 17th century such as early industrialisation, enclosure and colonial trade.

So before that, there were other logics and other systems available. Not better, necessarily, but different. So Hyper-capitalism isn’t inevitable. It’s no more a function of human nature than a Saturn V rocket is a function of a matchstick.

Having fun? You could buy me a cuppa, Guv’nor

It Follows doesn’t offer a clean ending. But then neither really does Capitalism. That is its horror and its ultimate trick, teaching us to fear its (almost but never quite materialising) collapse while numbing us to the horror of the present. Perhaps, it’s more accurate to think of it as a curse that we carry, not a structure we can challenge.

So, to resist haunted capitalism, perhaps we have to do more than call it “late.” Perhaps we have to try to imagine the unimaginable: not an apocalypse, but a departure. A refusal. Maybe that is something that we as fantasy, horror and science-fiction writers can do. We can lean-in to the job of re-worlding our future. Rather than documenting dystopias we can attempt to imagine how we might finally break the curse, by envisioning a world that no longer accepts it.

Because, failing that, I don’t think there’s a swimming pool big enough.

policing perception: weird fiction, the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the warped borders of the real

There’s a moment in the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 movie the Matrix where Keanu Reeve’s elegantly blank Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice. In the movie, such moments are signals that the nefarious Agents are about to emerge into Neo’s simulated reality and give him the mother of all cardio workouts.

Woah! Déjà vu, dude.

But what if something similar were to happen to you?

Perhaps you have a similar moment of déjà vu, notice that roses now seem to smell like freesias or that the sky suddenly looks a bit purple. Everyone you tell about this discovery, however, insists that everything is the “same as it ever was” (in the words of the old song). Roses smell as sweet. The sky is the same old blue.

Perhaps after a while, you might accept that it’s your perception that is at fault, shrug a little and decide to get on with the gardening. But at the back of your mind there might be a nagging doubt. Perhaps you were never supposed to notice the difference.

This is the terrain of the weird. Not quite full blown fantasy, but the quiet unease that things might not be quite right. A sense that the ground beneath your trainers might be a little less solid than you previously thought.

Few books map out this territory more ingeniously than The City & the City by China Miéville or The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson. Both of these novels deal in epistemic slippage, the boundaries of what is knowable and what is known, (what Miéville himself has referred to as “sublime backwash”). Each exists though at the polar opposite of the other. Where Miéville presents us with a world where the epistemological structure is brutally policed, Hope Hodgson describes a universe where there is absolutely and gloriously no epistemological structure whatso-fucking-ever.

In Miéville’s murder mystery, Inspector Borlú a policeman from the city of Besźel investigates a murder that requires him to work with a partner in the twin city of UI Qoma. Nothing too odd there you might think, except for the fact that the two cities share much of the same physical space. In order to maintain the illusions of separateness and sovereignty, citizens of one city must “unsee” anything pertaining to the other, ignoring people, buildings and even events that occur right in front of them. Failure to do so results in an intervention from the shadowy and terrifying force known as Breach.

Treated with a near mythical dread, Breach, disappear any violators or evidence of transgression, maintaining the ideal of separateness. They have an almost supernatural ability to detect and punish any infractions and in many ways function much like the Agents in the Matrix. They’re spectral, terrifying antagonists who are rarely perceived and cannot be beaten. Only they have access to the duality of the world as it is and as it is perceived.

One of the brilliant things about the novel is that crossing between the cities is a bureaucratic activity. Visitors must queue up to pass through a universal access point, Cupola Hall, filling out forms and editing their perceptions as they go. (Imagine entering Narnia via passport control.) Breach, then, isn’t just a surveillance force, it’s the living embodiment of the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the period between the rise of print and the digital age, when truth was shaped by centralised, text-based notions of authority.

Now, let’s flip this on its head.

Never fails.

In House on the Borderlands, if there is an equivalent of Breach they’re all out for coffee and donuts. Within the book’s framing narrative, an old man dwells in a remote house that seems to be perched precariously on the edge of space and time itself. Violent swine-things emerge from the wilderness and attack him (and his dog!). A pit opens into infinity. The house falls into disrepair as does reality itself. Time speeds up and slows down and the old man sees the solar system wither and die, meeting with the spirit form of his lost love in the process. (Clearly, the cosmic horror equivalent of drunk-texting your ex).

Here is a world without perceptual control. Consequently, the old man witnesses everything, including the heat-death of the Universe and it does him in. There’s no central authority to frame events, no system to structure reality, everything is in a state of turmoil and collapse.

It’s easy enough to see the connection here. Both novels dramatise the opposite ends of the epistemic spectrum. In The City & the City Borlú experiences the effect of a suffocating truth apparatus: ultimately you-can-only-see-what-you’re-allowed-to. In The House on the Borderlands we get a peek at what happens when no-one is in charge, not even reality itself.

It’s fair to say that we’re somewhere in the middle of these two extremes right now, that the five hundred years or so since the invention of print has been the equivalent of sleeping on Borlú’s sofa: uncomfortable, but still governed by house rules. We got verifiable truth, experts and certified sources. (A Breach of sorts also, perhaps). But it’s hard not to feel that that period is coming to an end, that while we were sleeping the internet and digital culture pushed our bed into the old man’s house on the edge of the abyss.

What is clear here is that command of the truth equates to political power. Breach wouldn’t be able to exert its control without the compliance of the citizenry of Besźel and UI Qoma. In the House on the Borderlands human history (and, ergo, all politics) is vapourised against the sheer scale of cosmic time.

But noticing that shit-gets-strange is not the same as deciding that the moon landings were faked, or that JFK was an alien. Engaging with the weird isn’t a call to relativism or an embrace of conspiratorial thinking.

There is a philosophical and moral distinction, I think, between questioning the framework and denying reality itself. While the weird draws attention to how things fit together (or not) and why, it is not an invitation to retreat from the rational. Rather, it should encourage us to ask how the rules around truth are made, who enforces them and what happens when they falter.

In world where politicised digital culture exhorts us to pick a side, the blue pill or red pill perhaps instead we should be asking: where did these pills come from? And who’s interest does it serve to keep us squabbling?

Or as Tony Benn once pithily framed it :

  • what power have you got?
  • where did you get it from?
  • in whose interests do you exercise it?
  • to whom are you accountable?
  • and how can we get rid of you?

If “doing your own research” simply means finding other people on the internet who already agree with you then I humbly submit you’re doing it wrong. Each one of those bits of confirmation bias edges us closer to the old man’s pit and the swine-things.

So we carry on watching the sky. And if it seems a bit too purple, maybe we don’t insist it’s blue out of habit or call it green out of spite. We just keep looking, keep asking and perhaps resist the pressure to unsee.

playlist

My fantasy debut: The Lighthouse at the End of the World from Titan books is available for preorder now.

manilow magic

I think my fascination with weird spaces began as an introverted, book-licking kid, reading about the Bermuda Triangle in the pages of Unexplained magazine. Today, the Triangle might be more famous for the cheese deluxe of the Barry Manilow song, but back then it was a terrifying region where the certainties of Cartesian space and time seemed to falter, with planes, boats, and people entering it only to vanish mysteriously. (Most notably, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind even hinted cheekily at their fate.)

Francois Truffaut shuts his eyes and thinks of the cheque in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind

As I grew older, I discovered these haunted landscapes in the pages of the “old weird” e.g. Machen’s The White People, Blackwood’s The Willows, and later, the deeply ambiguous Québécois outback of Atwood’s Surfacing. These uncertain, liminal spaces got under my skin, needling away, stinging like a hangnail.

This obsession only intensified when I came across Vandermeer’s Annihilation and the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. In both of these novels, the weird landscape is the driver of the narrative. Roadside Picnic, set in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, explores the aftermath of an alien visit that has left behind mysterious “Zones” filled with gravitational anomalies, toxic hazards, and sinister locales where the shadows “look wrong”.

In the face of the economic exigencies of the late-period Soviet Union, human “Stalkers” sneak into these zones to make off with little-understood, abandoned technology to sell for mis-use on the black market. Red Schuhart, the novel’s hard-bitten protagonist, likens their actions to “children playing with matches in a house on fire. The Zone is the fire, and we’re too blind to see the danger.”

The Strugatskys’ Zone is an eruption into human reality, of what Lovecraft (everybody’s favourite tomb-faced, racist bell-end) would have called “the outside”. Consequently, the novel is much less about aliens than it is about the limits of human knowledge and subsequently the human condition.

Similarly, in Vandermeer’s Annihilation, Area X is a weird space that infiltrates human power structures, replacing them with a mycological plane reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs”. As its protagonist (known only as the Biologist) discovers, Area X is a place where the human experience is interrogated, undermined, and ultimately transformed.

What keeps me coming back to these books is their conjuring of non-human presence as absence, evoking Mark Fisher’s definition of the eerie as, “the sensation of … something present where there should be nothing.” In Roadside Picnic, this absence is the unresolved mystery of the aliens’ purpose. Some believe that Earth was just a stopover, humanity unnoticed, while others think the aliens never left, still lurking invisibly in the Zone: the mutations in Stalkers’ children hinting at, perhaps, a slow-motion genetic invasion.

Similarly, Vandermeer’s Area X is a metaphor for the climate crisis, a rebellion against humanity and capitalism by a Gaian hyper-entity. The Biologist’s journey through Area X, where the landscape observes her as much as she observes it, suggesting a move beyond the human towards a type of becoming-animal futurity.

These books resonate now more than ever, I think, because the early 21st century is a profoundly weird and eerie space. The climate crisis, flame-throwing cyber-dogs and generative AI have woven a sense of the uncanny, of presence-where-we-know-there-is-only-absence, into the texture of everyday life. The Bermuda Triangle, the Zone, and Area X have swallowed the world, making our sense of the human feel contingent and in urgent need of reinvention.

The Maz-master is a man at ease with his uncanny carpet choices

As Bazzer the Mazzer once sang,

“Bermuda Triangle, makes people disappear.

Bermuda Triangle, don’t go too near.”