A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (23 page)

Agreed? Good. Now, why would Sarah Barrett do that? And what does it mean?

Maybe the Barretts refused to actually strap their splayed-out fourteen-year-old daughter to the bed, and her fake-tying
was an improvisation spurred on by necessity. Maybe the show’s special effects budget had runneth over and/or they were concerned the restraints would look obviously untied or broken. Possible, especially given the shabbiness of the other special effects used in the room (which I’ll get to a bit later). Or, maybe Sarah did it all on her own and went rogue! To be honest, though, I really don’t care about the practical whys and hows of the nonrestraints. I’m more interested in what it says about Sarah as a character. If we stay on board with the premise that what happens on the show is fiction, then we can analyze the fake-tying-down in the context of Sarah’s character development. And it’s a big development. Sarah only pretending to tie down her daughter so that Marjorie can escape later is a Big Fucking Deal. The show went to great lengths over the previous five episodes to build Sarah as the passively sarcastic nonbeliever, one who ultimately deferred to the will and judgment of her husband, drank wine, and moped around the house. Whether the writers intended it or not, the fake-tying scene is Sarah’s melancholy moment of redemption. Melancholy, because we know it’s too late for her to truly help her mentally ill daughter. Tired of being told what to do by the cabal of men in her home, Sarah finally rebels and aids her daughter’s eventual escape, even if it is only a brief and terrible escape.

—While we cheer Sarah’s growth of a backbone, we face-palm as Marjorie’s knowledge of the rite is
again
presented to us as proof positive of her possession. This is one of the most misogynistic aspects of the show: not only is it impossible for a silly
girl
to know what the patriarchy knows (i.e., Christian verse and scripture, canonical works of literature; everything written by and for men, of course), we’re supposed to actively fear that she has acquired that knowledge. That obnoxiously Christian theme of forbidden knowledge hits us over the head as heavily as a cudgel. Yes, I said a cudgel. Marjorie even seems almost bored with her recitation of
tired shit written by men
the lines.

—The misogyny is so obvious and pervasive that it’s almost ho-hum by this point. So let’s go goth again! (*Karen dresses in black, puts on old Morrissey CDs*)

Like many of the greatest characters of gothic literature, Marjorie is a doomed protagonist, one who mirrors the themes of the
story
show. Is Marjorie going
mad
(in the parlance of the gothic!) or are there supernatural forces at play? Marjorie is a liminal being. She’s presented as both human and animalistic demon, as both hero and villain. The danger she presents (the taboo, forbidden knowledge she attained somehow, her becoming what we fear before our eyes) is both threatening and seductive.

The protagonist having to deal with a
wicked father
is also a trope of gothic literature and film. Yeah, I know, I blabbed on and on about how the show tries to make John Barrett the hero of its God-n-family-values psychodrama, but that doesn’t mean they succeeded. From episode one, John’s unyielding mania shines through the cracks, and only worsens. Like Jack Nicholson’s not-exactly-nuanced portrayal of
The Shining
’s Jack Torrance, John Barrett is as crazy as a bedbug (I love that saying) from scene one. He just needed a catalyst to get his full-crazy on. And no, you can’t call this hindsight. John Barrett infamously poisoning himself and his family (with only the youngest, Meredith, surviving) one month after the final episode aired will be forever intertwined with the show’s narrative.

(aside 3: Despite my light/jokey tone throughout this deconstruction of
The Possession
, I have a very difficult time separating a campy reality show from the real-life horrors the Barrett family experienced. Together they make for a compelling and important story, one that I admittedly get lost in, one I’m clearly still trying to wrap my head around. And, no, I don’t care to comment on the irony/spookiness/synchronicity/coincidence of the father killing
his wife in the “Growing Things” story Marjorie repeatedly told Merry, paralleling their real father poisoning his family.)

Other jackasses have tried to argue that it’s John Barrett, not Marjorie Barrett, who becomes
The Possession
’s true tragic figure, and that the show is really about his descent into madness, his being
possessed
by the ugliness of hatred and zealotry. His daughter’s illness, his family’s dysfunction, his unemployed status, and his beloved Catholic church abandoning him post-exorcism, are the aforementioned catalysts to his own psychotic break (see the
Howard Journal of Criminal Justice
and their breakdown of the four types of men who kill their families), and blah, blah, blah. Fuck that bullshit.
The Possession
tried to position John Barrett to be its hero and failed miserably, and his cruel and cowardly poisoning of himself and his family further discredits the show’s reprehensible social and political agenda.

Marjorie is our doomed hero. John Barrett was and is the wicked father, the wickedest of fathers. The show did succeed in one aspect: John was indeed a symbol of decaying patriarchy.

—
The Possession
deciding to shoot the exorcism rite in real time (or at least shot in a way to give the appearance of it being shot in real time) was the right decision, even if it meant some of the special or practical effects they employed weren’t all that special.

It’s so cold in the bedroom during the exorcism that we can see everyone’s smoke-stack breath.
Scary, cold, eeeevil!!!
It’s all very dramatic and reminiscent of Friedkin’s
The Exorcist
. We get three “live” shots of a plummeting thermometer, with the temperature dropping as low as thirty-nine degrees in the room. They hit us over the heads with
the freakin’ thermometer. They don’t come right out and explicitly lie to our faces, but the implication is that the room is freaky cold solely because of the presence of the demon. They certainly don’t tell us,
hey, it’s November in northern Massachusetts, so we turned off the heat and opened the window because people breathing frozen breaths inside a house looks creepy
. Check the video. The window behind Marjorie’s bed is covered by the curtains so we can’t see if it’s open or not. But in two shots (one when Sarah pretends to tie down Marjorie’s feet, the other when Marjorie sits upright in the bed) the curtains blow and billow into the room. Curtains don’t billow into a room without wind or, granted, without Satan! (*
Satan’s Window Treatments
is the name of my punk band*) Wind is the much more likely culprit. So, yeah, the window is open, folks, and that’s why it’s cold.

The self-opening and self-closing desk drawer. Horror stories and movies (and funhouses for that matter) have long employed the inanimate becoming animate as a go-to scare tactic. There’s no denying the power of that particular flavor of the uncanny, or
Das Unheimliche
in Freud’s German (oooh, look at Karen showing off . . . *thumps chest*). There’s a scene in Sam Raimi’s
Evil Dead 2
, the brilliant sequel to the ultimate cabin-in-the-woods movie, where a roomful of inanimate objects comes to life and laughs at the bloodied and beaten hero, Ash; the deer head, the turtle-shell lamp, desk drawers, bookcases, each is given its own unique voice and laugh. It’s a hilarious spoof scene, shot in a weird kind of frenetic stop motion, which imparts a twitchy/strobelike appearance, so it looks like a cartoon or a comic book, nothing to be afraid of, right? But the scene quickly becomes deeply unsettling as the laughter swells, becomes manic, our own smile starts to fade and the scene starts to feel like it has been running a long time, yeah, and we’d like it to end now please and thanks, stop the scene before it gets worse before we see and hear
something we can’t unsee. . . . And so along with Ash (who’s bellowing like a full-blown maniac by this point), we feel ourselves being pushed toward the edge of madness. In
The Possession
, the animated desk drawer isn’t played for laughs, but the drawer does push Marjorie over the edge: her repeated denials—she wasn’t the one moving the drawer, she wasn’t in control—her asking for someone to stop it, and then her agitated state ultimately explodes into her attack on Father Gavin. Unlike the phantom restraints on the bed, which we never really get a good look at, the camera repeatedly focuses on the desk drawer. Its movement is mechanical, like a player piano, or the funhouse coffin lid that opens and closes by itself. I’ve timed six different drawer opening and closing intervals that are fully caught on screen and their times are identical. Either the evil, furniture-moving entity is OCD, or there is a mechanism hidden inside the drawer. Yeah, I think there’s a’ somethin’ inside the drawer. We never get to see inside the drawer, of course. Even when Marjorie rips out the desk drawer and sends it crashing to the floor, we’re never shown what was or wasn’t inside. The camera focuses on the people tending to the injured and bleeding Father Gavin. That means what it means.

And speaking of the bleeding Father Gavin . . . Marjorie’s attack scene is set up in much the same way John Carpenter staged his famous jump-scare blood-test scene in
The Thing
. In that movie, Carpenter shows us MacReady (Kurt Russell), from the same vantage point, dipping the hot needle into petri dishes filled with his crew’s blood samples. The needle hisses quietly in sample after sample. Even though we know something bad is going to happen eventually, we’ve been subconsciously trained to believe that the repeated shot of Russell dipping the hot needle into the blood is a “safe” shot. We’re continually shown those same
safe
shots until by process of literal elimination we’re down to two blood samples, down to two men, one of whom
has
to be
the monster. MacReady distractedly argues with the man he thinks is the monster as he puts the hot needle into the blood sample from the other guy, and whammo, the infected/thing blood jumps away from the hot needle and we jump out of our goddamn skin. In
The Possession
’s exorcism scene, Father Gavin covers Marjorie with a comforter three times (hmm, a trinity?). Each time, we’re shown the same camera angle. It’s a perspective from the middle of the room so both he and Marjorie are in profile. It’s a wider shot so we can see the length of her body on the bed, but Marjorie’s head and Father Gavin’s body are left of center, subtly telling us that there really isn’t anything to see here. His covering Marjorie with the comforter is thus established as a
safe
shot for us to see. The second time he pulls up the comforter reinforces this, so much so that our focus remains with the voice of Father Wanderly, standing in the right foreground reading from his red leather-bound book. When Father Gavin goes to pull up the comforter the third time, we notice him, but he’s become part of the background, part of the rhythm of the overall scene. All of our focus is on what Father Wanderly and Marjorie are saying to each other, so when Marjorie strikes like a cobra and clamps down on Father Gavin’s wrist, it’s totally unexpected and horrifying. Father Gavin’s screams are so loud and high-registered, they turn to static in the speakers, and underneath it all is a mix of shouts and stamping of feet on the hardwood floors. The video image is pixilated/blurred out around Marjorie’s face and Father Gavin’s arm. What’s happening is apparently too gory and awful for them to broadcast. We can see red in the pixels and the damage we imagine is likely worse than what they could’ve shown us. When Marjorie finally pulls away, a blurred-out section of Father Gavin’s forearm sickeningly elongates and stretches.

(aside 4: My favorite aunt loves horror movies like me [hi, auntie!!!] and often proudly talks about how she’s seen the movie JAWS like fifty times. But when it comes to the scene
at the end of the movie, where Quint gets bitten in half, she can’t watch. She changes the channel or leaves the room or covers her eyes. She was in fifth grade when she first saw the movie. Watching that beloved whiskey-soaked rascal Quint screaming and spitting blood into the camera and then his lower half disappearing into the gaping mouth of the shark scarred her for life. She insists that she will never watch the Quint death scene again even though she knows that it probably looks totally fake and the adult her might scoff and chide her younger self for being so silly, so easily scared. But there’s another part of her that knows she can’t ever watch it again because maybe watching it again would make her feel just as frightened, as sick, and as lost as she did when she first watched it.
What if seeing that scene now as an adult would be somehow worse?
That’s how I feel about the Father Gavin attack. I’ve seen thousands of scenes that were more gory and disturbing (on a visceral level) than what’s in
The Possession
, but that attack scene, man . . . when his pixilated skin stretches out away from his arm and Marjorie is still clearly attached to the other end . . . I can’t deal with it. But I forced myself to rewatch the Father Gavin scene for the first time in over a decade right before I sat down to write this blog post. It was as horrible as I remembered it. Maybe worse. Definitely worse. Rewatching it made me want to give up on finishing this series of blog posts, made me want to give up doing anything other than burrowing into my couch with a bottle of wine, a can of honey-roasted peanuts, and further numb myself in the glow of classic
Simpsons
episodes. You have no idea what I put myself through for you!!!!!!)

The Father Gavin attack scene is a worthy penultimate act for what I would argue is one of the most disturbing endings of a television show, before or since.

—Of course we have to end with the end; end with a discussion of the floating elephant in the room.

Moments after the attack on Father Gavin the major players are either writhing on the floor or screaming for help, screaming at one another, desk drawer crashing to the ground; everything is set into chaotic motion with Marjorie in the middle of it all. The audio only gains a focus when Meredith (off-camera) clearly shouts, “I hate you! I hate you so much! I wish you were dead.” Then the scene jump cuts.