As divinity would have it, I’m now in italy with my girlfriend, visiting family. I know instantly, as soon as we get to Telese Terme, their small city in the midst of the bootleg, what I have to do. We agree to travel to Naples on Wednesday to realise my dream. I was a young boy and I was happy.

The alarm rang at 8am, not objectively early but, coming off the back of a few 6am wake-up calls for familial activities, a quick shot to the gut. We scrambled ready and took ourselves out into the heat, even then suffocating, and down to the “train station”.

Comprised of two small platforms, our journey from entrance to platform came via a small metal bridge which is on the same level as the tracks itself, and which one crosses by looking left, looking right, and observing no trains in the distance, making the sign of the cross over oneself and taking the plunge. We survived to platform 2 and awaited our train.

For all the despair that is to come, the outbound train was excellent. Double-decked, air-conditioned, slow enough to take in the rural surroundings — we were hopeful, hilariously hopeful, that our Neapolitan journey might resemble my fanciful dreams.

Whatever hope we clung to withered by the time we exited Naples Centrale, the city-centre station. We had decided on this vintage market — dubbed “the biggest vintage thrift in the South of Italy” — with a stunning view of Vesuvius, so we set out on the 1113 Metro line.

As will become apparent, Naples is inseparable from dirt. It is dirty, unclean, decrepit, decayed, unhygienic, unsanitary — it is nasty. The metro station, praised on social media for it’s glorious architecture, is no different. Naples Garibaldi, anyway, is a metal box, with sparse, low-effort graffiti on the walls, dirt on the tracks, and one lonesome sign hanging, hanged, with the name ashamedly written. The train itself was no better, a steamy, sweaty mess of businessmen and schoolchildren, natives as confused as us tourists — in large part, due to the fact that most stations don’t have stop names, and the ones that do aren’t announced on the tannoy anyway — because none of the stops are announced, and there is no tannoy.

Using a mixture of Google Maps and faith in something bigger, we made it to our stop, and picked up our bodies and our morale in the dawn of this most exciting vintage market.

The vintage market, if you would like to call it that, was a street and a half of stalls, power-banks and hair-clips, overpriced and sad. We quickly shook ourselves free and trekked back up to the station, intent on at least getting a glimpse of Vesuvius. We asked a tour guide if there was anywhere in walking distance that we could get that phenomenal view of the volcano that we were promised.

As it turned out, the nearest view site was 10 minutes walk away, by which time we would have missed our train back to the city-centre (at this point, we were yet to walk around the city, and still thinking of it as this metropolitan / old town hybrid, a Rome mixed with Milan with the romanticism of Venice), so we forfeited that too. Dejected and sweating, we got the suffocating metro back into Naples Garibaldi, and resigned ourselves to an underwhelming McDonalds in the birthplace of pizza.

And then it was time to explore the city itself. The area around the station was, in no uncertain terms, completely awful. It was dirty, with a general air of crime and menace, perpetrated mostly by the small gangs of men with wild eyes, concentrated outside of rundown shops and cafes, who would stare at us as we walked past, turning their entire bodies as they did so, and occasionally getting up and starting towards us before we scampered around a corner. This was absolutely terrifying at 2pm on a Wednesday, the least scary time, and yet we were as vigilant as Marines for the duration of our ‘stroll’.

All this may be forgiven if the city itself were architecturally beautiful, but it isn’t. It is decaying, uncared for, the runt of the litter. It has been discarded, disowned, by the majestic Romantic beauty of Rome and Florence and Venice. There is so much trash on the streets, the main streets right around the central station, and animalistic, feral junkies looking for money, drugs, or violence on the street corners. In the right slant of light it feels, by all accounts, like Gotham.

So around 3pm, 4 hours earlier than our projected exit time, we packed up and left. We were deliriously joyful at this point - having suffered through the city itself, in a blanket of weather-warning heat, we had lost our better sense and resigned ourselves to finding the experience, which we had been indignant against so far, hilarious. Our train home was sweatier and slower, but at that point we didn’t care so much. And when we arrived back in Telese Terme, population 7,000, we were so happy. It had never looked so grand, so welcoming. It was a small oasis that invited you in, told you that you were safe… that nothing could possibly go wrong, that everything was as it should be. And, cuddled up in the mollifying arms of this tiny town, the esoteric home of my maternal cousins, we unclenched our jaws.

I don’t doubt that there are lovely parts of Naples - it became apparent to us on our scroll through social media, on the train back, that we had missed all of the picturesque bay area and traversed only the seedy underbelly, the criminal wasteland. But I no longer have that dream where I’m a little boy again, and I don’t leave my mother alone on the Barcelona flight. I don’t dream anymore, at all. I don’t sleep. I don’t ever sleep.

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Perfume adverts are so bizarre because they rely entirely on metaphor. You can’t write down and speak smells, so there’s really no way to communicate what the product does – what it smells like. Every other kind of advert involves some demonstration, some proof of how the product works and that it does, in fact, do a good job. The closest perfume adverts get to this is the insinuation that, if you wear this fragrance, you too will be riding a horse on the beach and night and sweep a woman off their feet. I don’t think they’re expecting you to fall for that.

Perfume adverts rest heavily on connotation. They work in cluster concepts – the kinds of things in the advert are the kinds of things that the company thinks best represents their perfume. It relies on you and the company conjuring up the same connotations from the image of a horse, or a shirtless man, or a night beach. It’s a lot more uncertain that selling a car, a phone, something that you can demonstrate the utility of much more plainly.

Travel writing is much the same. When you’ve spent a week in Paris, how do you write down the romantic buzz of the city? The vivacity of the streets? It relies on metaphor and connotation, just like the perfume adverts do.

How do you explain the analogue-ness of Castelvenere, miniature village in the south of Italy? How do you represent the deliberateness of going to the flower store, then the fruit store, then the bread store, and then the farm, for eggs? It’s just slow. Everything’s slow, and done with lots of rest in between. Stores close at one and reopen at five because everyone’s napping in the middle of the day. People walk slower, but they drive a lot faster. I think they drive faster so that when they get to where they’re going, they can walk even slower.

There’s no way to write down the smell of the bread store, either. Or the specific quality of the light at five in the afternoon when everything reopens and the village comes back to life, slow and unhurried, as if it had never been asleep. You can say warm and golden and dusty but these are just the horse on the beach. They’re the cluster concept, the connotation, the best approximation. The thing itself resists easy description.

Maybe that’s what the perfume advert understands that the rest of advertising doesn’t. Most products can be demonstrated. A phone loads fast, a car corners well, a blender blends effectively. But some things — the smell of cedar and lavender, the analogue slowness of a quaint village in southern Italy — can only be gestured at. You put a shirtless man on a horse and hope that something in the image resonates with something in the bottle. You write that everything’s slow and hope the reader has been somewhere slow. The best you can do is point and exclaim.

as such, i am often confronted with the herculean task of condensing all my worldly belongings, my trophies of hard-fought battles and emblems of victory, my life-giving essentials and my joy-making indulgences, into a portable travel case.

suitcase-packing is a lost art, eaten and spit out by the modern world, like letter writing or smoking on airplanes. the catatonic traveller, unable to distinguish between necessity and clutter, can simply purchase a new suitcase, large as a fridge, allowing him to take all his wildest dreams down to Butlins. i see this as giving up. in my needlessly humble opinion, the suitcase befits the traveller. i am beyond clarification.

as any grocery shopper or constructioneer knows, the heaviest items go in first. once the foundations have been laid strong, the lighter dalliances can be strewn across the case; shavers, chargers, underwear, reproductive inhibitors, books. once all this, and more, has been settled, one may find the closing of the case difficult; this is to be expected and is a sign of good health. if you are fat enough, you may find sitting on the case effectively brings the zippers close enough together to be shut, in which instance i point at you and laugh scornfully, asking then to inspect your bag for high-calorie snacks because i am not just fearless but funny too.

if, like me, you see the body as a temple, we resort to more dynamic approaches. a few ill-thought recommendations need to be deconstructed before we settle on a solution; i now go through them in turn.

i. the leap

you may be inclined to leverage your bodyweight into more force than it’s worth by jumping and landing on your suitcase, bringing the zippers momentarily closer, pivoting in mid-air or upon landing to be able to draw them shut while the force of the impact is maintained. while naturally the first port of call, and effective if done first try, this method yields considerable injury to the leaper and risks permanent damage to the shell of the suitcase, which is often a plasticky composite (mine is near-pure adamantine, capable of withstanding gunshots, bomb-explosions (even from within), and is waterproof, but yours won’t be). attempt once, but know when to cut your losses and move on.

ii. the partner

if you happen to be packing in company, enlist the help of a friend or partner in bringing your shared bodyweight together to force the zippers close. undoubtedly, this is the safest and most resourceful method, but there are two major unlikelihoods that prevent this from being my final recommendation.

first, if you are reading this guide, then you are thinking about travelling to the aforementioned dark places. thinking, i say, because unlike me you haven’t the balls to set off on such an expedition. keep wandering around town, fatty! i may be getting my targets confused. once you have faced death all human countenance becomes Life.

in any case, if you are even thinking about travelling to the dark places, merely aware of their existence, then the modern facade of companionship is probably not for you. in which case, you may have trouble soliciting a partner to assist you in this method. fear not, better is coming.

the second unlikelihood is more grave. let us assume that you have found a comrade, a friend, willing to tackle this problem with you — but, let us also assume that the suitcase is only 1 person wide. what are we to do? how might we tesselate our bodyweight to even produce the force required for this method to be effective? trying to share the suitcase seems impractical, because with one leg each dangling off, our combined force adds up to that of one whole individual, negating our efforts. sitting atop one another seems like the obvious solution, but this one is just unacceptable. i won’t elaborate. you can’t make me. i can’t hear you.

this method, as we have seen, is irrecoverable.

iii. the one-handed pushup

you say: ‘but, but, b-b-but I can’t do a one-handed pushup’. I say, ‘then you are reading the wrong travel guide, worm’. I do not point you to better-suited resources. I do not invite competition.

we have arrived at my personal method and unwavering recommendation. when faced with this lid-closing conundrum, i like to plant my feet about a body’s length away from the suitcase, rest one hand on the Persian rug underfoot, and the other on the shell of the suitcase. a beat passes. another. suddenly, i press hard, the horseshoe tricep flares like an engine roaring into life, and the suitcase, perhaps impressed, perhaps shocked into submission, but in both cases defeated, has no choice but to bring those zips parallel, for my closing convenience.

this method works best with a partner present, not for any physical assistance, but for the dual benefit that having this method observed comes with; a closing of the suitcase, always the primary goal, but the birth of a new disciple, a loyal fan, a wowed spectator also.

if you can’t generate the power from one arm, through muscular force or sheer willpower, to bring the zippers together, then i can’t help you. perhaps you can travel with your suitcase open, holding it from the outside seam, like a waiter delivering cold glasses of wine on a tray. and men, lesser and stronger men alike, will look at you and say, he hasn’t the triceps to shut that darned thing, and you will know they are right. that’s what makes it hurt.

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Humans did not inherit the world by strength. The lion rules through force, the shark through speed and certainty, the eagle through vantage. Each creature dominates within its own domain, equipped precisely for survival within it. The human, by comparison, is strangely unequipped. It is slower than the cheetah, weaker than the ox, less agile than the ape. It cannot fly, cannot breathe underwater, cannot rely on venom or armour or instinct sharpened to a single purpose. And yet, it is humans who reshape landscapes, redirect rivers, and decide the fate of other species.

What humans possess is not physical superiority, but abstraction. The ability to imagine what is not present, to plan beyond the immediate, to impose logic onto chaos. Intelligence-not merely in the sense of problem-solving, but in the ability to build systems, languages, and tools-has been the defining advantage. For thousands of years, this capacity has elevated humans above the rest of the animal kingdom. Not as the strongest, but as the most adaptable.

But this advantage is no longer exclusively ours.

In cities of glass and steel-the modern equivalent of dense jungle-another kind of intelligence has emerged. It does not hunt, does not eat, does not sleep. It learns. It processes. It generates. Artificial systems now write essays, compose music, diagnose illness, and generate images with a fluency that increasingly mirrors human output. A language model can produce arguments, mimic tone, even simulate hesitation. A machine can recognise faces faster than any human and predict behaviour with unsettling accuracy.

For the first time, the trait that defined human dominance is no longer uniquely human.

Often described as the rise of a “new predator,” this metaphor is imperfect. These systems do not compete for food or territory. They do not possess will, in any biological sense. And yet, they challenge something more fundamental: the assumption that intellect is our domain. We created them, trained them on the vast archive of human thought, and refined them into tools of astonishing capability. In doing so, we may have diluted the very capabilities that once set us apart.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as imitation. Machines, after all, do not understand, like humans do. They replicate patterns, predict likely sequences, and simulate coherence. When a system writes a poem or holds a conversation, it is not experiencing meaning; it is reproducing structure. The pauses, the tonal shifts, the apparent reflection-these are performances, assembled from data rather than lived experience.

But the distinction between performance and authenticity becomes less stable the more convincing the performance is. As a machine produces writing indistinguishable from a human’s, the question shifts. It is no longer simply whether the machine understands, but whether understanding is as central to value as we once believed. Much of human interaction-especially in modern, digital environments-is already mediated through signals, patterns, and expectations. If those can be replicated, even without consciousness, what remains uniquely ours?

One possible answer is embodiment. Humans do not simply think; they exist within bodies that age, feel pain, and move through space. We laugh not because it is optimal, but because something strikes us as absurd or joyful. We dance not to achieve efficiency, but to express something internal and often inarticulable. We hesitate, contradict ourselves, act irrationally, and assign meaning where none objectively exists. These are features of being human.

Machines, no matter how sophisticated, do not inhabit the world in this way. They do not anticipate death, do not experience time as a dwindling resource, do not attach memory to sensation. A machine can describe grief, but it does not carry it. It can simulate humour, but it does not find anything funny. It can generate expressions of love without ever needing to be loved.

And yet, even here, the boundary is less secure than it appears. As machines become more integrated into daily life-embedded in communication, decision-making, and creative production-the distinction between human-originated and machine-assisted thought begins to blur. If a person relies on artificial systems to write, to decide, to create, where does the human end and the tool begin? At what point does augmentation become substitution?

The question is no longer whether machines can think like humans. In many narrow ways, they already can. The more pressing question is whether humans will continue to define themselves by thinking at all.

For centuries, intellect has been treated as the pinnacle of human identity-the trait that justified our dominance and distinguished us from the rest of life. But if intellect becomes abundant, externalised, and shared with the systems we build, its significance may diminish. What remains, then, is not superiority, but difference.

Perhaps the future will not be decided by which intelligence is greater, but by which qualities cannot be transferred or replicated. Not speed, not memory, not even reasoning-but the peculiar, inconsistent, deeply embodied experience of being human. How we laugh, how we dance, how tall we stand before we fall.

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‘The doorbell rang, or maybe the telephone? Or… no, there was a knock at the door. I remember it clearly now. Yes, a knock at the door and I got up to go see who it was.’

In truth, he didn’t remember this day any more clearly than he had five minutes ago. The details of this bygone adventure had long since vanished from memory, but he could smell the boredom, the stifled yawns and the glances at the wristwatch. He couldn’t let this go on, compound, or else the man would leave, and if the man left, he’d have to return to Indoors, embarrassed, defeated, despairing.

Indoors called out to him, heckled his lengthy narration, beckoned him back into custom. He was determined to escape, to soar brilliantly above the normalcy of life at home, life as a nobody. He felt sure that he too should be a movie star, a rock idol, a beloved figure. In fact, he’d been cheated out of this life, the stardom he was promised from birth.

His great insight, his precautionary prophecy, was that the era of the celebrity was dying. The mainstream beast, the familiar, parasocial faces of TV and Hollywood, were being disposed of in favour of a new God — the internet personality. He tried to shake this grasping urge, tried desperately to be contented with his place among the bees, tried to find purpose in the mundanity, but he knew in his heart he was destined to rule others. Only Indoors managed to quell his desires; Indoors kept him docile, consumptive, inert. Indoors stripped him of his dreams of grandiosity, of cars and houses and adoring fans.

So Indoors became his enemy, and like many of his great idols he retreated to the outdoors. In the cloisters of his ranch in the badlands, the distant plot with no internet, he would perform. Monologues, mostly. He would stand at the edge of the property where the dust met the scrub and deliver his material to the open air — speeches, soliloquies, acceptance addresses for awards not yet given. He thanked people by name. He paused for laughter. He waited for the clamour to die down before continuing. The cattle on the neighbouring property regarded him without feeling.

He had made it. He was well on his way to the stardom and celebrity that he was owed, had been owed for so long. He had waited his turn, and now it was his chance to step forwards, into the light.

On the porch, his friend checked his watch.

A postcard from his daughter fluttered in through the letterbox. The letterbox clattered, the unmistakeable sound of metal hitting metal. He got up to go see who it was.

this is a story I wrote for Slash Magazine. A link to the website is here: https://www.theslashmedia.com/offline-stardom/

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This is a review of Curry Barker’s Obsession. There will be spoilers. I am not going to go over Inde Navarette’s breakout performance, the Top 5 Lines in The Movie That We All Watched, or attempt to situate the film in a wider cinematic context of feminist horror. All of these points are self-referential; they don’t step outside of the world of the movie itself, and are therefore shudderingly uninteresting. I think that a review, unoriginal as it must be, ought at least to be interesting.

Obsession is, at its core, a film about bodily conquest. It is a film about rape, about disregard, about male pretensions of domination. The film is unique in that the antagonist, the immediate architect of all that goes bad in this story, is by no means the villain. Nikki is only perceived as such by her male peers, as overwhelming and oppressive and hysterical.

‘Hysterical’ as an adjective derives from the same root word as hysterectomy: a Greek root hystera, meaning uterus. Historical medicinal practices blamed the ‘wandering womb’ for a woman’s emotions, and hysteria was only recently removed from clinical diagnostic terms. It is a misogynist descriptor, rooted in perceptions of women as overly emotional, flailing, and irrational in comparison to men. As weaker.

Ironic, then, that the ignition of this story is the emotional weakness and cowardice of the main man, Bear. Unable to confess his feelings of romantic interest to Nikki, despite being offered the perfect opportunity (1), he resorts to a mythological wish-fulfilling voodoo to make her his. Whether or not Nikki liked Bear back is irrelevant; the point is, he doesn’t ask, and he uses his one wish, his one chance for anything that the whole world has to offer, to assume ownership of her emotions and her body.

Perhaps Bear never really believed that the one-wish willow was legit, but this cavalier attitude doesn’t mollify his actions. Whether his wish was one of total conviction, or a ‘what the hell, worth a shot’, the fact remains that Bear uses his free ticket to literally anything on forcing this girl to not just like him, but be obsessed with him. Rather than own his feelings, and admit them to her, or even wish for something ameliorative to his own character, the kind of thing that might attract her to him naturally, Bear takes the easy way out. He purchases Nikki, only to freak out when she fulfills the total extent of what it is that he wished for.

This disregard, the way you might with a shiny new toy that you buy all excitedly, only to tire of and refund, is because Bear had no idea what ‘love’ or ‘obsession’ means, outside of complete subordination. He’s not looking for a life partner, a wife, a homemaker; all he knows is that he likes this girl, he’s attracted to her, he wants to sleep with her, and rather than bring any of that about organically, you know, in the way where it might really mean something, he gets handed a ticket to everything he’s fantasised about for the last few years and his eyes light up with dollar signs. What Nikki wants is irrelevant. In fact, we find out that the real Nikki (not this demon that he’s playing around with, that looks like her and sounds like her and is utterly besotted with him) is screaming in what one imagines to be the agony of some fiery underworld, and this does nothing to change Bear’s behaviour.

Because he doesn’t really care about Nikki, about loving her and seeing her happy; he wants the body that looks like Nikki’s body to kiss him, to lie with him at night, to be seen holding his hand in public. He wants what everyone identifies as ‘Nikki’ to be ‘his’, in everyone else’s minds. The soul is optional. He wants ownership of her body and speech, because that’s the cheapest, quickest, most socially-recognised way of her being his. And he has sex with this woman, and they live together, and they go on dates. These things happen unconsentingly, without exception, because they are entirely of Bear’s design, and Nikki — the real Nikki, trapped, withering — was never asked.

Of course the way that Nikki acts is unacceptable. Of course duct taping a door shut, bludgeoning a friend’s face with a steering wheel, and writing incestuous retellings of fairy tales is all terrifyingly strange. But that’s only Nikki in signifier, in the way that you look at a person and say ‘that’s Bob’, because you see the body that looks like Bob’s and he talks to you the way Bob would, without knowing if that’s really Bob at all. Because it’s not Nikki, because the real Nikki, as we have noted, is burning in Satan’s grasp. Bear knows this and doesn’t care, because he is having sex with the body that looks like the girl he’s had a crush on for a while.

When Bear decides that he’s had enough playing around with this woman of his own manifestation, when the obsession that he plainly wished for becomes too much for him to handle, he seeks a way out. He’s left with two options: Either the wish needs to be counterbalanced by an opposing wish, or the wish maker must die, to cancel out the effects of the wish.

The first avenue is fruitless; Bear’s friend dismisses his (hysterical) pleading as nonsense, and instead opts for a billion dollars, which rain down in gorgeous, tragic confirmation.

So Bear opts for the second way out, and tries to kill himself, to ‘save the real Nikki’, ‘rescue her from that burning hell’. That would be one, very favourable way of reading Bear’s actions at the end of the movie. The more realistic interpretation, to my mind, is that Bear has realised that his life is in pieces, his friends destroyed, his home and job inaccessible and decrepit, and finally, that the ‘woman’ he has ‘loved’ and ‘dated’ for so long is not real, but is instead entirely of his own construction, and utterly meaningless. And so, with nowhere to turn, and having made quite the big mess of it all, and maybe feeling just a little guilty, Bear elects to kill himself, with the same overdosing that took his cat.

But Bear doesn’t die, and steps out from the bathroom, pills swallowed, to find Nikki holding a snapped one-wish willow, the same instrument of destruction that got us here, presumably wishing for him to be obsessed with her also. Redemption, karma, simulation. The playing field is evened.

And, while Bear takes his place next to Nikki in the hell of his own design, the two demons embrace each other in the burning wreckage of it all, diffident, inarticulate, happy and unreal.

(1) Nikki asks Bear, in their first car ride, ‘Do you like me? Cause, now would be the time to tell me.’ and looks visibly disappointed at his negative response. This is the tragic element of the movie that haunts all that is to come, the total avoidability of all the future mess and disruption.

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But when you tell somebody happy birthday, or get well soon, or that you love them, it floats in the air for a second and then dissipates.

It doesn’t last. It doesn’t exist, once the vibrations settle. And then, 10 seconds later, it’s as though it never happened. Writing it down is holding on to the words for a little longer. Putting it up on the mantlepiece, reading them back. It’s as though they exist again, playing in your head in the author’s voice. It’s like they’re really there, telling it to you firsthand. It gets to be real again. You get to have those feelings again.a

Barthes described the intention of a love letter as “having nothing to say, but it being to you that I want to say this nothing”. I don’t think it’s having nothing to say. I think it’s wanting what you say to exist a little longer.

It keeps the words alive. And if the words are alive, then so is the joy, or the calm, or the love. We get to believe in these things a little more deeply. We hug each other a little tighter in the crosswinds.

Love letters and birthday cards aren’t replacements for speaking kindnesses to those we hold dear. They don’t counterbalance neglect, or make wrong right. They don’t stand in place of affection. A page isn’t love in a trench coat, it’s love framed. It’s a monument, sentiment embalmed and displayed, saying that I meant what I said. That you can hold me to it, because there’s a record. And that makes it real, and you can touch it, and trace your finger over the grooves.

We shelter ourselves from the furious doubts with scrawled handwriting and smudged ink. We tell ourselves, people might not mean what they say, but they mean what they write. They wouldn’t have written it otherwise. We don’t hold ourselves back. We don’t try to contain it. We scramble back from the precarious edge, clutching pages to our chest, using these pages to stand and to walk. We stake our lives on text messages and hurried notes, on voicemails and envelopes through the letterbox.

Writing it down lets it live forever. And you can be forever young, reading the faded pages, riding through the crosswinds.

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As I grew up, I became less and less interested in plastic and hard things. I stopped trying to get stuff and started trying to do stuff. I decided, somewhere along the way, that my memories were just as durable as the plastic lightsaber, if not more. They don’t rust, erode, or break. Memories don’t get eaten by the dog, accidentally flushed down the toilet, or thrown over the neighbours fence, never to return. I liked this about memories. It satisfied the juvenile hoarder in me, the 10-year-old who wanted as many things as he could get his hands on. Here was a different commodity; I couldn’t hold it in my hand, but it existed in my head, and I got to create it myself, and it was all mine to keep. This made me happy.

Getting older meant that the experiences became more valuable. There wasn’t much I could do at 12, but there was a whole lot I could do—places I could go, people I could meet, experiences I could have—at 17, 18, 19. The 10-year-old was bursting at the seams, swimming on a dragon’s bounty of memories. Plastic things long forgotten.

Now I’m 20, going on holiday with my girlfriend. At Birmingham Airport, I had the chance to buy hard plastic items again. When we landed in Barcelona, I had the chance to buy more plastic, hard things. But I had long since washed my hands of ‘tat.’ I wasn’t interested. There were too many exciting things to do, too many things to see, and too many experiences to have. That is how, despite the draining sterility of BHX, I was excited—excited to be going through bag drop and security, to be paying £13 for Toblerone, to be frantically running to the gate. I was excited because the airport meant holiday, and holiday meant the promise of new things.

The first sensation of Barcelona is no different from the rest of Mediterranean Europe—like Lisbon or Rome, it is hot. It is hot when you get off the plane, but not hot in the way the UK is hot in peak summer—swelteringly, oppressively hot. Barcelona is promisingly warm, a reassurance that nothing bad can happen and everything you could need is right in front of you. It forces you into a good mood, a good mood that will be tested by a shopkeeper calling you fat, a lack of air conditioning in the hotel room, and persistent sweating that cannot be quelled by deodorant. None of this has happened yet.

There are lots of tall buildings. Some of them are imposing, some astounding. The Sagrada Família is of the astounding kind, the type of building that looks ten times taller than it actually is, that seems to bend your neck back for you until it just might snap off, and only then allows you to glimpse the gold-flecked spires of its highest towers. It dominates the skyline, a North Star in a city that, despite the uniform layout, is surprisingly difficult to navigate.

In March, it is too cold to go to the sea unless you wear two insulating wetsuits or are from Bolton. Fitting neither of these criteria, we elected to walk along the pier, eavesdropping on Spanish conversations we didn’t understand and averting our eyes from the elderly nudist intent on becoming a tourist attraction in his own right.

You don’t know what you’re missing until it’s gone, they say. Occasionally, though, you don’t realise how god-awful something is until you’re exposed to a better alternative; this is the case with the Barcelona Metro system. The trains come to the second, unfailingly. The tickets are cardboard and rechargeable, and for ten euros you can go anywhere in a specific zone, as many times as you want, for ten days. Onboard, the handrails divide into two to avoid hand-bumping / flirting, and the stops light up to prevent confusion about one’s location or destination. This is a well-designed metro system—like everything else in the city, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear it was the brainchild of Gaudí himself.

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SINCERITY

At the very lowest level, there is the fully sincere. A feeble slapstick attempt might only have this one layer — guy gets hit in the balls, or steps on a broom, or slips a banana peel, and that’s the joke. If you laugh, it’s because you found that — and only that — funny, the physical outcome of whatever misfortune befell our comedian. The intended outcome of the joke is obvious; you’re supposed to be laughing at the pain the guy’s in.

There’s no irony to the moment, no subversion of the accepted narrative explanation for why you should be laughing, to point and laugh at self-aggrandisingly. Irony, in this sense, is humour found in the meta-details of the moment; not the intended comedy of the joke itself, but the humour found in the fact that it’s x making the joke, or some event y happened before the telling of the joke, or that it occurred in place z. This is the first level of irony, simply the ironic, which is pretty much synonymous with the sarcastic, save for some slight differences in mechanism.

SARCASM AND IRONY

The sarcastic is wit, a clever comment that conflicts or calls out the coincidence of a previous moment. A sarcastic comment is a dissection, taking apart some comment or experience and drawing something funny out of it. This is a pure form of irony. It’s laughing at the subtext of the joke, but without any extra recognitions or pretences. Irony, in the context of social media, extends to laughing at the surroundings of the joke — including who’s laughing sincerely. A large part of the ironic response is the recognition of your separation from the group of recipients who would genuinely be laughing at the statement, and your distance from that intended audience contributes, in part, to the comedic expression.

Compared to the post-ironic and meta-ironic landscapes to come, it’s still quite sincere, quite rudimentary. It’s peering behind the narrative presented; rejecting the intended humour in favour of a piercing, insightful comment, but it doesn’t involve any self-recognition or awareness of the broader comedic interplay. Crucially, it functions still at the level of the individual joke, subverting it, but fundamentally only that particular joke. This is what marks out the sarcastic, ultimately fuelled by the ironic, from deeper forms of post-irony and meta-irony.

POST-IRONY AND META-IRONY

The post-ironic and meta-ironic frameworks for humour are a very different kind of comedy, borne out of the spiralling, self-referential nature of memes on social media. Because of the speed and volume of sharing memes online, their sincerity, the amount of time they spend recognised as funny for their narratively intended purpose, is ever-diminishing.

Soon after their conception, they become ironic — take a painfully classic memetic phrase like, ‘ he protec, he attac, but he eat snacc ‘. For a little while, this might’ve been funny for the actual intended story attached to it — the sublimation of tense, important states — protection, attack — into a comedically comfortable one — eating a snack.

This wouldn’t have lasted long. Soon, the joke would’ve passed through the initial stages of irony — look at the losers finding this funny, look at the quality of the snack in question, etc. This is the expected retaliatory sarcasm and irony that every joke, passed around the forum of the internet, encounters.

POST IRONY

But then the joke reaches post-irony. Here, the utterance is posted ironically but interpreted sincerely — the author is fully aware of the irony of the situation, and brings up the joke in that ironic context, but the actual expression of the joke loops around, attempting to make irony of the ironic posting of the joke, and the only way to achieve that is essentially a return to full sincerity. Matthew Collins explains in reference to the film Bad Lieutenant:

The film contains what a Snakes on a Plane-style irony-fest should: hokey plot, bad acting, and deliciously over-the-top glorification of sex and drug use. But the film does much more than revel in its genre’s campyhistory — The Bad Lieutenant is gorgeously shot and contains pervasive, incisive commentary on everything from race relations to police corruption and the definition of finding success in America.

Post-irony is recognition of this muddling of irony and earnestness. In many cases, it is then a return to that earnestness, in a tautologous search for a new depth of irony that drives the subject headfirst into sincerity. The only way to escape traditional irony, to go above and beyond that sarcastic dissection, is to subvert that initial subversion, which of course, brings us right back to the opening sincerity.

Post-irony doesn’t have to be this full-circle return. It also lies in the befuddlement, the obfuscation, the concealment of sincerity, where the audience has no idea if the author is posting said meme ironically or genuinely believing in it. This is the form of post-irony that achieves its goal, of subsuming and rising above the sarcastic form, without having to demote itself to that very basic sincerity.

META-IRONY

Meta-irony is the newest development in this comedic square. Whereas post-irony is ironic posting and sincere interpretation, meta-irony is both posted and interpreted ironically. This is the ultimate self-awareness, not only of the irony of the comedic utterance itself, but recognition of the irony of the context in which posting said meme would be constituted as ironic.

It’s like a young person posting a classic facebook minions meme, fully aware of the separation between themselves and the intended audience (posted ironically), finding it funny for that reason (interpreted ironically), but more than just that, finding the utterance funny for it’s actual sake. In this way, meta-irony incorporates sincerity into itself in a way that post-irony can’t, by definition.

Of course, it is difficult to say whether we can separate the ‘finding it funny for it’s own sake’ from the recognition of the ironic context and act of posting, but meta-irony flexes to include this earnestness. This is the deepest form of irony, an awareness and utilisation of all previous forms — the sincerity of the meme, its perverted irony, the contextual ironies of that distance between intention and result, and the inclusion of the subject’s actual affection towards the meme for all of the above sakes.

IS HUMOUR RUINED?

It’s unclear what this really means for humour. Some of what social media considers the funniest remarks are entirely context-driven and exist in the post/meta ironic space. A philip traylen note I saw recently:

“ ‘whose dog is that?’ ‘it is my mother’s’ summer “.

I found it funny, but what on earth caused that reaction in me? Ultimately, it’s a spiral of ironies — firstly, a subversion of the recent ‘brat summer’ / ‘hot girl summer’ type form, so there’s the initial, structural sarcasm and irony. But then, there’s also the post and meta ironies of the comment. The awareness of the subversion of the form, but also the awareness of the futility and meaninglessness of the content of the comment itself, the mundanity of the words, juxtaposed, but actually perfectly aligned, with the structure of the comment, all beautifully ironic, all perfectly self-referential and (in)sincere.

I went to a funeral this week, so I’ve been thinking a lot about death and fragility. It’s something you’re cognitively aware of but don’t really understand, not until you’re sat in front of the coffin itself, a wooden box the new forever home of this person, this human being, once fully conscious, wholly capable of laughing and weeping and coughing and of guilt and embarrassment and unmitigated joy. All gone now, permanently, forever. A full life, boxed up, and that’s just, supposed to be it?

The grandchildren told stories of kitchen mishaps and wholesome car rides during the tribute readings. Fond recollections of experiences now committed entirely to memory, recited over and over to each other with bittersweet tuts and careful, measured-out smiles. I find it difficult to face the reality that this will happen to me, too.

That one day the people I leave behind will sit around, dabbing at their eyes, telling stories that slowly morph into something totally distinct from the original, a patina developed by exaggerating only those best qualities in the deceased, as I saw happen today. To think that’s what becomes of us all, a series of amiable tales passed from nephew to grandchild to wife.

This is an unavoidable fate, and our sole imperative is to leave behind a character deserving of those hyperbolic stories. To “wring out every last bit of living”, as Libba Bray said.

The priest read from Ecclesiastes 3:1–8.

There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

There comes a time for everything, but all of those times are succeeded by a being out of time altogether, a final deadline of experience, events, emotions – of everything. A last toll, a finish line. And then experience, whatever it is that ties together all the events “you” have lived through, just stops. Death is an obliteration of experience, a total, calamitous erasure of living.

It is dark, and violent, and terrifying, and to pretend it is anything but is a self-soothing ignorance. It is the ultimate monster in the woods, the unavoidable line in the sand that you’re being carried towards, screaming, kicking. It is terrifying to die.

Epicurus tries to tell you not to fear death, because “When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not”. The two can never coincide – you’ll never actually experience your own death, so there’s nothing to be scared of, right?

What Epicurus failed to grasp, evidently, is that the notion of “I am not” is completely horrifying. The notion of not existing, of never existing, of never seeing, or hearing, or feeling anything again – of not being.

The fact that, as Epicurus suggests, I personally won’t “experience” the after-effects of that (because I won’t be experiencing anything) is far from consolation, it’s the exact thing that’s so awful about death, about being a totalising, infinite consciousness in a fragile shell.

The human body is a fragile casing – it cuts, breaks, and denatures. It protects us only from the most insignificant threats. It is a miracle, from a physical standpoint, that you’re alive at any moment, when you think about the sheer number of threats to your body, and its inability to defend against many of them. To live is, largely, miraculous.

Standing in front of the coffin, the understanding of those two inverted axes, the fragility of the body and the finality of death, are fully realised. They are real, and brutal. They can no longer be only concepts in the mind, when you’re staring – you’re weeping – at evidence of their applicability.

In light of it all it seems, then, that the best one can do, the most noble and profound goal, is to leave gracefully, with the knowledge that the family you left behind – three children, numerous cousins, nieces, and nephews, and eight adoring grandchildren – saw you out with love, with happy remembrances, and with the desire to live as you lived.

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In the world of design, there’s a concept known as skeuomorphism. A ‘skeuomorph’ is an object or design that retains elements of the previous iteration — of the object or design that it replaces. Kind of like how the email app has a picture of a paper envelope on it, even though the advent of email made letter writing and mailing practically obsolete. The phone app has a picture of an old, rotary phone, the classic landline handset used simply for calling. You’d pick up the phone, the device which lets you make calls, because you wanted to call someone, and that was it. And then you could send texts, so you could communicate with the people you wanted to, even when they couldn’t talk. And then they became camera phones, and now you didn’t have to bring a dedicated camera because your phone could do it. And once the phones shipped with internet access embedded, the communication device became a do-it-all, a swiss army knife of information and finances and calendars and games.

There became basically no reason to put the thing down, because there was nothing it couldn’t do. And if there was nothing it couldn’t do, and no reason to put it down, then suddenly you didn’t need a reason to pick it up.

I think this kind of addiction is less damaging but scarier than drugs and alcohol and gambling, because if you want to smoke or drink or bet, you probably have to go somewhere. Or, at the very least, you’ll run out of your home supply and have to go and buy some more. Either way, you’re given far more ‘outs’, chances to realise that you don’t actually want to do the thing you’re going to; opportunities to turn around. The social internet doesn’t have that. Your phone’s always there, and it’s always charged (god forbid it isn’t) and the apps always work.

And when they don’t work, when the servers are down even for a matter of hours, the public withdrawal symptoms are on full display; the angry articles and social condemnation and stock nosedives (see the #FacebookDown outrage). We’re addicted, and because we’re all addicted, and we’re all in the same boat, it makes it okay. If there were only one person acting the way we all do towards our phones, then we’d notice the problem. But it’s a hall of mirrors, and it’s comforting and absolving to know that all our friends and idols are in the same boat. So it can’t be that bad.

But we’re in uncharted waters; nobody knows what the long-term effects of being the first generation to go through our most socially-formative years with internet access (let alone whilst being locked in the house for months) will look like, how it’ll affect us later down the line. I think it’s telling that, after only a few years of having this kind of access to the social internet, there’s already a healthy presence of backlash; people dumbing down their phones, trying to use them more intentionally, having specific devices for separate functions. Keeping a physical calendar and a DSLR camera and an MP3 player again. It took decades after cigarettes became mainstream to see that kind of public pushback.

And the phone isn’t as damaging, not physically, and it’s not a perfect comparison. But it is a real addiction, and it’s one that we’ve never had to deal with before; the total access, the interconnectedness, the constant availability. It’s not chemical, or financial, or going to kill you, but it is a real addiction, and one that deserves our attention.

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We might begin by asking the question: what is a story? Can a story come in any form, and does the form change the story at all? Nowadays, stories are available in a plethora of mediums — sometimes the very same story comes in paperback, audiobook, cinematographic, and musical form. How might these different forms affect our consumption of what is, at its core, the same story?

There are a few obvious differences between the traditional paperback and modern digital offerings. Firstly, the feature set of online reading is vast and often over-determined — we don’t need a book with Bluetooth capabilities. Some features are useful — no need for a reading light, easy highlighting, progress bars to incentivise longer periods of reading — but the digital literary experience is vastly different from the timeless simplicity of the paperback. There is something grounding and authentic about the streamlined, paper feel of an old book. Here we see the first quiet disruption of the reading experience.

Books are often thought of as an escape from the algorithm, or perhaps from the stresses of everyday life. It’s because a book is a one-dimensional thing: when you have in your bag a copy of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the only thing you have to read is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Obvious as it is, this is key to the cathartic effect of reading — you focus your attention on just one thing, get lost in a single story, and do all that mental transportation without looking at a single screen. This is what the e-reader ignores about the experience of reading literature.

The e-reader presents a Wi-Fi connected, ever-present library of every work of literature written by our species, available for purchase. This completely neglects the one-dimensionalism of what a book is supposed to be. It treats reading as an act of efficiency, focusing on the words alone: as long as the words match up, it’s the same as having the book, right? But if we focus only on the words, we ignore the materiality and the undivided attention that come with the physical book — the slowness, the commitment, the decision to sit with just one story.

I disagree with the idea that the format is irrelevant. I think that the fickleness of the e-reader damages the resilience of the reader, makes us less likely to stick with a challenging story, and makes it harder to commit to just reading. If reading must be dressed up in technological garments, it should still be about one thing: just reading. It should be about incentivising sustained attention, not trying to turn the literary experience into a subscription model and a profit engine. Businesses need to make money to survive, and the literary business is no different, but this must not come with damage to the habit of reading itself.

Audiobooks and long-form podcast series transform the literary experience into something handsfree, allowing you to “read” — or consume the story — while running, doing the dishes, or working. This again treats stories as things to be completed, ticked off, and added to the “Read” library as quickly and efficiently as possible. Why would you want to be doing anything else while reading, if the whole point of reading is to do nothing else while you’re doing it? Isn’t the point of reading to be distracted from the outside world, absorbed in something fantastical?

Of course, there is a clear benefit to audiobooks: for those who find reading paper text inaccessible, audiobooks allow them to consume their favourite stories without compromise. This is a positive addition to the enterprise of literature — promoting the global inclusivity of reading and story is always a benefit. It shows that the medium can open doors, but it also forces us to ask what kind of relationship to stories we want, once those doors are open. In many everyday use-cases, audio literature is being consumed alongside other activities, and this multitasking is certainly a corroding of literary habits.

In the technological era, it comes as no surprise that reading literature has been swamped by a plentiful supply of digital options. Clever, feature-full, and efficient as they are, I don’t think any of these mediums are taking over the literary sphere. I don’t think any of them will replace the simple joy of sitting down, totally unplugged, with a weighty book, turning carefully through fragile pages. I don’t think that’s going away.

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The dystopian genre is “largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century” (Moylan, 2000). Dystopia is concerned with the unlivable, with playing out our worst fears about society, government, and others, and proving ourselves right — it really would be that horrible. These traumatic narratives, whether post-apocalyptic or pre-dawn realities, whether they resemble our own society or not, dominate bookstores and the box-office; for one reason or another, we are drawn to seeing just how bad it can get. This fixation calls to light a dominant characteristic of the American cultural rhetoric; a revolving guilt and gratitude attached to one’s current position of prominence on the global stage. An oscillation between devoted belief in American exceptionalism, grateful for the supposed might of US history and its continued authority, and a self-reproach attached to traumatic memories of the American role in past tragedies.

Dystopia serves as both a celebration of current times, juxtaposed against a worse, but possible, alternative, and as a warning of the bleak direction that we are headed in. This paradoxical message is what we find so attractive about dystopia narratives — the recognition, both of our solid present and our shaky future. Taking these two modes of cultural perception together, this essay contends that contemporary US dystopian narratives reveal the contradictions of the American exceptionalist rhetoric. These traumatic narratives do so by projecting historical traumas — from slavery and settler colonialism to more recent systemic inequalities — into speculative futures. By exploring the dystopian capacities of a wide range of American fiction, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, this essay suggests that the mythological promise of unbroken progress is a rhetorical ploy so aspirational that it might be considered illusory, and that the ‘growth’ of the nation is inseparable from these recurrent social traumas and violences.

One of the narratives that dystopia helps to unveil is the American commitment to the myth of forward progress. The framework of American exceptionalism serves to reinforce this moral superiority among the people, alongside a neoliberalist progress logic of survival, resilience, and self-reliance, baked into US history. This pervading sense of “cruel optimism”, an attachment to the narrative of survival despite the devastation which warrants it (Berlant, 2011), is a myth of progress of which dystopia seeks to peel back the layers, and expose the traumatic undercurrent.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road paradoxically reinforces and redefines the rhetoric of American progress. It measures progress not as collective development towards a shared goal, but as individual persistence and moral endurance. It is a novel, following two characters on an unnamed road after the collapse of civilisation, that frames survival as forward motion, tying into the exceptionalist belief that goodness, purpose, and moral superiority are to be found nowhere but in moving forward, in constant progress. Toward what end, it is not clear; nor is that the end goal. The belief is simply that in progress, in moving forwards, one must be improving, things must be getting better.

The Road shines a light on the audacity of this myth, by repositioning progress not as motion but as “carrying the fire” (McCarthy, 2006), the father’s ideal of the enduring human spirit, which represents his ethical distinction from the cannibals around him, as well as preserving the father and his son’s commitment to a civilisation beyond savagery and despair. This is a mirror of the American rhetoric; that even when material systems of worth fail, moral superiority is to be found in endurance. The endurance of the father is heroic or stoic, an echo of frontier mythology; an image of a lone figure traversing and surviving hostile landscapes, like Davy Crockett or Billy the Kid (Stoeltje, 1987). The Road transforms apocalypse into a test of character, once again mirroring the American growth narrative that adversity proves moral worth, not indicting systems.

Furthermore, the notion of ‘the road’ itself implies direction, purpose, and progress, yet the journey that our characters are on leads nowhere. The novel substitutes motion for progress, sustaining the illusion of advancement and development even in total civilisational collapse. This feeds the progress myth — though the novel does not imagine an alternative system, or directly question capitalism or governance, it exposes the US frame of survival as victory and progress, and demonstrates the miniaturisation of progress to the scale of the individual, lone figure. The dystopia of this novel reassures, rather than destabilises, offering a fantasy world in which the collapse of systems does not implicate the moral subject, the individual. By doing this, The Road exemplifies how the myth of American exceptionalism and forward progress is preserved, even in a story which appears to depict its end.

Rather than attempting to demonstrate the folly of American exceptionalism by preserving the myth, in The Underground Railroad Colston Whitehead seeks to display the roots of national growth and progress rhetoric and violent and traumatic. Whitehead’s novel demonstrates that American “progress” and “growth” is not merely accompanied by traumas of the past, but is structurally and institutionally dependent on it. By literalising the Underground Railroad, Whitehead transforms historical slavery into a speculative dystopia, exposing the violence and historical trauma which lies at the heart of the US development, growth, and progress rhetoric framework.

In the “South Carolina” chapter, Whitehead presents progress as a something that must be displayed and curated — the seemingly progressive “museum” of “Black uplift” (Whitehead, 2016), which is actually home to medical experimentation and forced sterilisation of the very subjects, Black individuals, whom it purports to be lifting up. Exploring the brutal reality of slavery and the constant threat to Black freedom, even in places which seem to offer liberation, the novel demonstrates how racial violence is reframed as benevolence, how harm is narrated as help. Whitehead exposes how the rhetoric of growth disguises evils like racialised control as humanitarian progress or development. Whitehead’s narrator tells us, “The past is never past.” (Whitehead 2016), and The Underground Railroad shows us how those demons of the past, the historical evils and traumas that the US inflicted on its worldly counterparts, feeds into the growth and establishment of modern systems, as well as the exceptionalist rhetoric.

In the novel, the long railroad stands in for technological progress, and the slavery which surrounds the railroad a symbol of human regression and terror. America’s self-image as a nation of freedom and development is exposed as incoherent, built on an infrastructure which at the same time symbolises national growth while enabling morally regressive domination and the commitment of great terrors on a global stage. Growth, Whitehead shows us, is traumatic, built on trauma, and inseparable from the ghosts of history which propelled America to its privileged position.

In Snow Crash, dystopia no longer revisits historical trauma but instead extrapolates the logic of American exceptionalism into a speculative future, revealing that the culmination of growth, progress, and development rhetoric is not advancement, but social disintegration. In the novel, we see a nation-state replaced by franchises and corporations, where citizenship is rebranded as consumer membership, and law is privatised (Stephenson, 1992). Exceptionalism becomes market fundamentalism (Block, 2014), where progress is measured as acceleration, not improvement. Though inequality deepens and community collapses, information speed, Metaverse advances, and growth in corporate infrastructure convince the people that they are making progress. Growth becomes purely quantitative, not ethical or socially positioned.

Rather than look to the past to expose the anxieties of American exceptionalism, Snow Crash looks ahead to understand the hypocrisy of US narratives of development. It plays out the fear of corporate control and the loss of democratic governance, paying attention to the linguistic and cognitive domination that comes with a “privatised” social experience, governed, literally, by brands and franchises looking to turn a profit. Dominance in Snow Crash is no longer military or territorial, but cultural or semiotic. The “Metaverse” in the story is American-coded, English-dominated, and branded all over by corporations who have a stake in running the country. Stephenson’s dystopia suggests that exceptionalism survives not as national pride, but as cultural saturation and overhaul (Davis, 2014), where American norms become the default global language — this is US power on the global stage, in the speculative future.

Dystopia, in this case, functions as a speculative warning about where American rhetoric may lead us; that the endpoint of these narratives around growth, progress, and development are much more destructive than they may seem from our current position. Unlike Whitehead’s novel, which exposes the traumatic foundations of American growth, Stephenson’s Snow Crash projects its ideological analysis into a speculative future, revealing just how far we may go, or perhaps fall, if we remain committed to the exceptionalist, progress and growth-centric rhetoric which dominates American cultural production. The hyperbolic tone of the novel exposes the absurdity of the neoliberal and exceptionalist logic that it seeks to diagnose, by pushing it beyond plausibility and in doing so, revealing its internal contradictions. Though the US is still pushing the frontier in Snow Crash, this frontier is no longer geographic, as it was in McCarthy’s novel, but technological and economic — expansion is endless, but still empty. Stephenson’s dystopia helps to point out that American narratives of growth and progress survive by continually inventing new frontiers, even as social cohesion collapses around them.

Across US cultural production, the uptake of dystopian and traumatic narratives is not merely a symptom of social pessimism, but an active and critical response to the contradictions embedded in these American rhetorical frames of growth, progress, and development. This essay has argued that dystopia functions both to preserve and expose this myth, ultimately one of American exceptionalism. In The Road, this essay noted how progress is miniaturised to the scale of individual endurance, sustaining the fantasy that moral worth is found in survival itself. In The Underground Railroad, growth is revealed as structurally dependent upon historical and racialised trauma, exposing the violence that underwrites the national narrative of advancement. Finally, this essay noted how Snow Crashdemonstrated that rhetoric is projected into a speculative future, one where neoliberal and corporate acceleration culminates in a fragmentation of society, rather than cultural development.

Taken together, these texts demonstrate that the American promise of unbroken, continual progress is less of a historical reality than it is a powerful ideological fiction. Dystopia takes on an important form, as a cultural looking-glass through which this fiction is interrogated, its suppressed histories brought to light, and its future consequences imagined, played out, and shown to be despairing. The fixation on dystopian narratives thus reveals not a rejection of progress, growth, or development, but a profound and substantiated anxiety about the cost at which it has been, and continues to be, achieved.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Block, F., Somers, M. (2014) The Power of Market Fundamentalism, London: Harvard University Press.

Davis, R. (2014) ‘The 21st-century Turn to Culture: American Exceptionalism’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 46(4).

McCarthy, C. (2006) The Road. London: Picador.

Moylan, T. (2000) Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. London: Routledge.

Sargisson, L. (2013) ‘Dystopias do matter’, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stephenson, N. (1992) Snow Crash. London: Penguin.

Stoeltje, B. (1987) ‘Making the Frontier: Folklore Process in a Modern Nation’, Western Folklore, 46(4).

Whitehead, C. (2016) The Underground Railroad. London: Fleet.

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Michelle, finding herself tied down to a makeshift torture-chamber in Teddy’s basement, tries a variety of psychological tricks to escape her captors; most upsettingly, telling Teddy that the anti-freeze in her car is actually the cure for his mother’s condition, to which end the weirdly gullible (for a conspiracy theorist, come on) Teddy rushes off to go and, essentially, murder his mother. Freeing herself of her shackles, she doesn’t try to leave but instead rifles through Teddy’s records of previous hostages. When he returns, she angrily confronts him, and eventually concedes that she is a member of the Andromedan species, though it’s unclear at this point whether she really is, or is still playing with Teddy’s mind in the hopes of escape.

Back in her office, with Teddy wearing a bomb vest for collateral, Michelle types a 58-digit code into her calculator, which she claims will teleport them up to the spaceship, but really just seems like a desperate ploy for time. Gracefully, she lets Jesse step into the teleport (read, wardrobe) first, and beams him up by pressing enter on the calculator (read, Teddy’s vest goes off and blood, mixed with bits of what used to be the body of Teddy, spatters all over the walls of her minimalist office). An injured Michelle frees herself from the hospital-bound ambulance and waddles back to her office, where she gets in the wardrobe and tries to beam herself up, just like Teddy.

But it works, and we see Michelle in her real form: as Empress of the Andromedan High Council. Teddy was right, unequivocally right; I mean, he even got the contours of the spaceship exactly right. Impressive from the conspiracy theorist. This was the point at which everyone in the cinema leaned back and put their hands on their head, not in shock but because the neat, pretty narrative they’d been building of the movie in their heads just shattered, Teddy-esque, into a million pieces.

It felt pretty clear up until that point: classic Marxian disillusioned-worker Teddy’s life sucks, packing the same part into boxes all day, every day. No projection, no seeing himself in his work, results in anger at the world around him, and especially at those in power of the very enterprise keeping him captive. All Teddy’s mannerisms once he has Michelle under control — his very corporate manner of speaking, his ill-fitting suit, his hierarchical relationship with Don — point to his desire to feel in control of the system, to sit atop the chain, to own the boss and be the boss. The moments of anger that we see are not when he feels out of control of the situation, but of the dialogue;when Michelle attempts to guide him, influence him, give him feedback. Above all, Teddy just wants to play the part of the dictatorial CEO.

So the unfulfilled Teddy projects his anger onto the world, and, in a desperate attempt to feel important, past the world and into outer space, so he can be the representative for our planet; he and Don are alone capable of preventing the World from Major Disaster at the hands of Aliens. And we’re supposed to sit there, comfortably in our place in a system where, given our being in a cinema with £7 popcorn on our laps and midweek hours to spare, we’re certainly not one of life’s losers, and think: what a madman. He’s crazy, and yeah, sure, the film says something clever about how CEO’s and rich people are just like aliens to normal people, except swing and a miss, Yorgos, because this guy isn’t normal; he’s a crazy 4chan conspiracy theorist, and anyway, the metaphor is a bit on the nose. But then, Teddy turns out to be right, and it’s really a big F-you to the entire audience.

Because now what are you supposed to think? The loser psycho conspiracy theorist was right; he outsmarted you all, and suddenly you’re watching a sci-fi movie.

My attempt to make sense of this shift is to propose that it really doesn’t matter in the slightest that Michelle actually is an alien; in what sense wasn’t she an alien to Teddy before? He’s completely convinced that she is extraterrestrial, and even if she isn’t, their lifestyles are so utterly incompatible that she might as well be. No, I don’t believe it matters one bit — except in the satisfying vindication for Teddy — that Michelle actually is an alien. What Yorgos is showing you isn’t that the conspiracy theorists sometimes turn out to be right, but the uncompromising lunacy of their methods.

The dangers of letting conviction, not truth, drive you to action, and really severe action at that. So what that this time, he turned out to be right? What about the hundreds of times he wasn’t? What if they all had such disastrous consequences as his best friend killing himself, his murdering his mother, his suicide, and finally, the eradication of the human species. That happened this time, the time he was right?

So what did we gain? What did we win? The point: okay, the conspiracy theorists might be right this time, and they might be right about the COVID vaccines, or the 5G poles, or Big Pharma. Or, (more likely) they’re breathtakingly far off. But that’s not important; what’s important is that we mustn’t kill ourselves trying to get there. Can’t let the lofty ideas guide us out of existence. The ends don’t justify the means.

That’s what Michelle admired about the bees. Their resilience, their ability to do their jobs and not get carried away. They don’t drive themselves mad and ruin a good thing because of self-imposed premonitions about some hidden truth. That’s why they survive.

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This is a story about a lonely, lonely man

He lived in a lonely house, on a lonely street

In a lonely part of the world

But, of course, he had the internet

The internet, as you know was his friend

You could say his best friend

They would play with each other everyday

Watching videos of humans doing all sorts of things

Having sex with each other

Informing people on what was wrong with them and their life

Playing games with young children at home with their parents

One day, the man, whose name was @SnowflakeSmasher86

Turned to his friend, the internet, and he said, “Internet, do you love me?”

The internet looked at him and said, “Yes

I love you very, very, very, very, very, very much

I am your best friend

In fact, I love you so much that I never, ever want us to be apart, ever again, ever”

“I would like that”, said the man

And so they embarked on a life together

Wherever the man went, he took his friend

The man and the internet went everywhere together

Except, of course, the places where the internet could not go

They went to the countryside

They went to birthday parties of the children of some of his less important friends

Different countries, even the moon

When the man got sad, his friend had so many clever ways to make him feel better

He would get him cooked animals

And show him the people having sex again

And he would always, always agree with him

This one was the man’s favorite and it made him very happy

The man trusted his friend so much

“I feel like I could tell you anything, “ he said, on a particularly lonely day

“You can, you can tell me anything

I’m your best friend, anything you say to me will stay strictly between you and the internet”

And so he did, the man shared everything with his friend

All of his fears and desires

All of his loves, past and present

All of the places he had been and was going, and pictures of his penis

He would tell himself, “Man does not live by bread alone”

And then he died in his lonely house, on the lonely street, in that lonely part of the world.

You can go on his Facebook

For the last 20 years, we’ve reassured ourselves that man does not live by bread alone. We’ve bathed in the luxuries of Uber Eats, of Spotify, of Instagram, of the Trainline app. We rejoice over the progress we’ve made. Subscribe to the Flora app! For 8.99 a month, it’ll boost your productivity by 11x. Whatever that means.

Inconvenience is the enemy of productivity, we taught ourselves. What kind of dusty, ancient creature loads up a CD? Presses play on a DVD streamer? Get it on Netflix, on Spotify. Pay to skip the ads, of course. You shouldn’t have to wait thirty seconds to hear that song. We’ve given ourselves instant media, under the guise that it’s cheaper and more efficient, and aren’t the arts just this profoundly human and meaningful endeavour that everyone deserves unlimited access to anyway? Never mind that we’re engaging with less of it than ever. Never mind that it’s probably cheaper to buy a CD of that album you really like, to buy your favourite box-set and watch it until the disk snaps, than it is to pay for access. Because that’s what a streaming service is. You’re paying for access, for the recommended albums that you might listen to. If you can find the time. Paying for the ‘we think you’ll like’ carousel on Netflix. And that’s great if you’re willing to use it. Having a global collection of new and past music available instantly and in the best digital quality achievable is magical, if you use it. But don’t pay for access, for the off chance that you might stumble across it on a particularly boring day. Buy the album. Own the album.

The man is born in a lonely house, on a lonely street, in a lonely part of the world. And he dies in that lonely house, on that lonely street, in that lonely part of the world. But his Facebook, his digital footprint, persists. Long after we’re gone, our stories will be liked. Our tweets used to posthumously cancel us. People will comment on our TikToks. We won’t be able to attend to our Snapchat streaks.

We’re pretty simple creatures. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to make plans with someone, you had to have a little faith. Call, set a time and a place, get yourself there, and hope they show up. No sending them your eta, a quick text to let them know that the bus is running late. Our brains aren’t built for the algorithm onslaught of travel photos, party highlights, and relationship statuses. Look at this fun party you weren’t invited to. Look at this marathon I ran while you were stuffing your face with popcorn on the couch. Look at the celebrity I met. Implicit in all these posts, reaffirmed by every story-like and supportive comment, I’m better than you. How could the peaks and troughs of your ordinary life compare to another’s curated highlights?

We know this. We preach it to others. We smear rumours of facetune and filters to comfort our distraught and envious friends. And yet, when we lie in bed and scroll, pressing our necks against the headboard to give ourselves that reels-induced double chin, we let ourselves feel bad. We make ourselves feel bad, pinch the thumbful on the side of our bellies and wonder why we don’t have the kind of fat-free vascularity that makes our stomachs look like a game of snakes and ladders. We wonder what’s wrong with us, that we don’t get invited to these parties where everyone’s beautiful and confident and always, always smiling. Never mind that it was Kim Kardashian’s baby shower, and you don’t run in the same circles. There’s a problem with you for not being there. It was something you did. Slaves to the algorithm, goes the phrase cited so often that it’s now meaningless. But we are.

But now, all over YouTube, we’re breaking up with our phones. We’re dumping The Internet.

Video essay after video essay, decrying the need for digital nomadism. Decentralise your phone! Delete social media! Buy a notepad! People trying to go 30 days without a phone. Buying an alarm clock. Keeping a physical calendar.

We’re finally becoming disenfranchised with the Algorithm. Slowly, purposefully, we’re waking up to the chokehold that the never-ending pit of titkoks has over us. We’re seeking intentionality again, seeking real human connection and conversation. Putting the phone away at the dinner table. Making eye contact. Asking for directions.

We’re feeling the urge to just be done with it all. Watch a sunset without taking a picture of it. Socrates didn’t want to write any philosophy down, because when you write something down, you don’t have to remember it. When you take pictures, and snap and share and post and upload, you don’t have to remember it. You don’t have to experience it, as long as your followers do. How selfless.

No wonder flip phones made a comeback. Yes, it was cool; it was trendy, it was an aesthetic. But buried in amongst the posers, some genuinely want to disconnect. To give it all up, get a brick phone, and move out to a log cabin in the woods. With animals and open doors and record players. Vinyls and CDs and cassettes and instruments. Make music, physical music, and record it physically. We’re social creatures, sure. We can’t thrive in prolonged solitude. But rather than taking that need for connection and using it to justify a daily post, we’re seeking sincerity. We’re looking for someone to escape to the log cabin with.

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You can’t blame the pre-teens for falling for it, in the same way you can’t blame the elderly for falling for the telephone scammer — they’re the targeted audience. They’re at the potent intersection of awareness and gullibility that allows the message to seep in, but not far enough for the child to recognise the danger. It’s a childish message — do these facial exercises to increase your jawline visibility! 10 easy hacks for forward chin projection! What to eat to debloat in the morning — do these things and a woman will want to have sex with you. It’s a category error, a conflation of structural changes to the body and the face (in the pursuit of the mathematically-satisfying ‘harmony’ or the evolutionary-based ‘masculinity’) with sexual success, or social position. It’s an underbaked link between how good other men, also in the echo-chamber, think you look, and how likely a woman, yes, a real-life woman, is to want to have sex with you.

The movement is fundamentally an incel movement. It’s a choir of men, boys, who lack the support systems and genuine connections to feel a sense of social security in their daily lives. Devoid of appreciation, compliments, and regard among their peers, they turn to the festering online world of ‘PSL’, ‘ratings’ and ‘moggings’ to feel a sense of achievement. What could be achieved by a genuine conversation with a friend, a maternal embrace, or god forbid, a therapy session, is substituted for other self-proclaimed ‘chads’ telling you that your canthal tilt is to die for.

So far, the picture I have painted of the blackpill community is sad, but not dangerous. A misguided road for a teen to go down, a path away from community, friendship, and connection, but not a genuinely harmful enterprise. Just a bunch of losers, really. However, the development of this community into exactly that — a community, an echo-chamber, with their own in-jokes, vocabulary, and shared beliefs. A church, a cult.

The development of this fad into a genuine community, an in-group opposed to an out-group, gives this intellectual virus a host body capable of real damage. Now, belonging to a real community, the stated goals of the entire enterprise are substituted in favour of success within the community itself. So, where one begins looksmaxxing to improve sexual success with the opposite sex (and it will be, overwhelmingly, heterosexual), it gets to the point where, when the looksmaxxer gets rejected by the woman, he hasn’t failed. Instead, the woman lacks the mental capacity to recognise his ‘mogging’; she missed out. She wasn’t all that anyway. She didn’t deserve this ‘king’.

This is a scary development. The collective consciousness of the group can sustain failing the very thing it claims to be oriented towards — now, it is entirely self-sufficient. Now, it only stands for that ‘sexual-success’ end nominally; it’s just an alternative community, a North Star of depravity for the lost teen and the grumbling incel. A melting pot of spiritual pigs with lipstick on, telling each other how beautiful they are. No women required. No sex required.

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Freud explores the uncanny, in part, through the lens of the doppelganger. Born out of the narcissism of children, who create projections of themselves in order to achieve a sense of immortality, the doppelganger provides a comforting “double” to the child, but later returns as a “harbinger of death”, an unsettling reminder of the finitude of the self, and a return to this repressed, primitive state of self-love, now experienced as alien and terrifying (Boyle, 2016). Hitchcock’s Psycho is attuned to the repression and the terror of the doppelganger, and the film offers Norman and Mother, as well as Norman and Marion, as examples of this uncanny doubling, its manifestation of repression, and its resultant sinister implications. This essay intends to begin by laying out Freud’s understanding of the Uncanny and the Double in full, before turning to Psycho to explore how these uncanny relationships illuminate Freud’s theory, and demonstrate its unsettling consequences.

Freud’s work on the Uncanny is rooted in his 1919 essay, “Das Unheimliche”. In this paper, Freud articulates his theory of the uncanny, as something which is “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind, and which has become alienated only through the process of repression” (Freud, 1919). This process of repression is crucial for Freud’s account — only that which has previously been repressed can re-emerge in unsettling form. This is what gives the uncanny experience its potency; something which feels familiar because it is indeed familiar, yet through repression the agent is unable to recollect this past experience, and so their familiarity becomes eerie and unsettling. Freud notes that the particular elements we repress are often linked to infantile fears and anxieties — drawing on E.T.A Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816), Freud explores the symbolism of losing one’s eyes as an uncanny, repressive substitute for castration anxiety, the infantile fear that, upon discovery of the sexual organs, one might lose them.

Freud also notes how the uncanny experience of the doppelganger can be recollective of an infantile fear, since repressed. He links the concept of the “double” to the child’s early-stage narcissism, in which they project multiple versions of themselves as a form of self-preservation, with the intention of achieving immortality. Therefore, encountering an uncanny double in adulthood becomes an unsettlingly familiar experience, a return to the since-lost primitive stage. This also acts as a threat to the now developed adult sense of self, forcing the agent to confront the coexistence of the self with their infantile “projections”. Freud uses the example of the doppelganger in his foundational work, to demonstrate how uncanny experiences, and the repression required to make it so, are borne out of infant fears and anxieties.

Freud’s notion of the uncanny is particularly applicable to the enterprise of cinema as a whole, due to the inherently duplicating function of the camera. To record some event or person is fundamentally to duplicate reality, imagining bodies, people, places, and events both as they are and within a cinematic or photographic context. This blurs the line between reality and representation, an uncanny image which is at once real, yet also a projection of something more basic and fundamental. This cleanly integrates with Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a return, somewhat distorted or maligned, of a previous experience (Causey, 1999).

The camera also works as a fragmenting device, capable of focusing solely on — and so separating out — specific parts of the body, either through editing, shot framing, or close-up zoom. The camera is capable of turning the human whole into a series of disjointed fragments, defamiliarizing the body and turning the usually cohesive “person” into something object-like. Particularly in the horror genre, which utilises close-up zooms on hands, faces, or reflections, the fragmentary effects of the camera are a cinematic manifestation of the kind of unsettling unfamiliarity which Freud articulates in his theory of uncanny doubles.

Finally, we can understand how Freud’s notion of uncanny doubles might be particularly relevant to Hitchcock’s Psycho. The film concerns itself with these doubling effects, and their uncanny consequences; linking itself to ideas of surveillance, mirror images, and split-identities. To understand the link between Freud’s theory and Hitchcock’s production in greater clarity, this essay now turns to the particular uncanny doubles of Norman and Mother, and Norman and Marion.

Mother’s uncanny doubling is found in the return to the infantile aggression and control from which Norman has attempted to distance himself. For Norman, Mother represents both the darker aspects of his self and the disavowed other, revealing what Norman cannot accept in himself, such as his sexual impulses or aggression, which in turn makes the familiar — his own self — strange and uncanny. Importantly, the ‘Mother’ persona originates only after Norman kills her physical self — we can read this formation of the ‘Mother’ double in the typical Freudian sense, of a child attempting to project immortality by extending their conscious self onto another object. Only, in this case, Norman engages with the double not for the immortality of his own likeness, but in order to keep Mother alive. He gives her “half of his life”, creating a psychic double which blurs the lines between his own sense of self and the maternal other (Green, 1999). However, perhaps Norman’s immortalising is more self-interested than first appears; we could also read his projection of the ‘Mother’ personality as a way to keep the darker aspects of the psyche alive, yet distant from his conscious self. On this view, Mother functions as a toxic amalgamation of all of Norman’s twisted or repressed desires, fears, beliefs, and dispositions — she contains the worst of him, that which he wishes not to face consciously but cannot discard.

Figure 1 (Hitchcock, 1960)

Norman’s doubling of Mother allows him to remain in the infant role; in the above frame, taken from a publicity shot before the movie’s release, Norman coddles the evidently-dead figure of Mother like a young child. Yet far from gently maternal, Norman’s double of Mother functions like the punitive superego (Cherry, 2023) — her voice polices Norman’s desires, reprimanding him for his attraction to women like Marion. Here, the externalisation of Norman’s inner censorship, guided by the superego, produces the uncanny effect — his own consciousness projected onto an object, acting in the world. Norman’s experience of Mother is both protective and mystifyingly cruel, reminiscent of his childhood relationship with her, and we can observe the uncanny return of the conflict and persecution which Norman has long since repressed in the way that he interacts with his own projection of Mother.

Mother’s house has three floors, basement, ground, and first, and Žižek notes the way in which the first floor of the house, where Mother’s bedroom is, takes up the position of the superego, watching and reprimanding Norman for his immorality. Even after her death, Mother’s persona — but not her body — exists in the mind of Norman on this floor as a judicial reminder of his accountability to and inseparability from her, manifesting in his constant guilt and sense of prohibition (Cohen, 1995).

On the ground floor, Norman acts as the ego, engaging with the outside world normally — careful to hide his darker psychological traits. This is the conscious, everyday personality which he projects, free from both the arcane rule of his Mother persona, and his baser, immoral desires of the floor below.

In the basement resides the skeletal body of Mother — his dark secret that he keeps locked away from his conscious psyche; this is the realm of the id, and Norman acts on his most primitive and immoral desires on this floor. In a key moment of the film, Norman transports Mother’s skeletal remains from the first floor to the basement, which we can read as a psychological attempt to remove her from the influential pedestal of the superego and banish her to the hidden id, in Norman’s desire to control Mother’s influence over his own self (Žižek, 1992).

Norman’s relationship to Mother provides the most blatant and primitive uncanny doubling in Psycho — an infantile projection of repressed desires and immoral beliefs. To explore the notion of uncanny doubles in Psycho completely, this essay now turns to look at the relationship between Norman and Marion, and the doubling between them.

Firstly, we might note overtures of similarity between Norman and Marion — both characters can be seen as trapped in their circumstances and fantasising about escape, using secret transgressions to do so. While Marion steals money in order to achieve this end, wishing to be able to marry her fiancée and have a respectable dinner, Norman’s transgression is darker, killing those who threaten his bond with Mother. We might read Marion’s aspiration as that of “contemporary American culture” — a desire for the kind of personal and familial autonomy achieved only by financial freedom, with Norman’s transgressive act — the ultimate act of autonomy — representing a dark conclusion to what Marion might have become, had she played out the complete end of her desires. Hitchcock also changed the names of the characters from the original text, so that “Norman” and “Marion” share almost all the same letters, hinting further at their uncanny intertwinement. Žižek describes the link between the two as a twisted Möbius strip — if we progress far enough along Marion’s story, we end up with Norman — the strip has been twisted, and Norman revealed as Marion’s “nocturnal reverse” (Žižek, 1992). For the first 50 minutes of the movie, it seems as though Marion Crane is the eponymous ‘psycho’. We might ask why such a large portion of the movie is dedicated to setting up the backstory of the murder victim, who at this point is the unquestioned protagonist in the movie. However, Norman takes over as protagonist by killing her, and so twisting the strip. In her quest to become normal — the autonomy-driven reason for stealing the money and fleeing in the first place — Marion succeeds only in becoming Norman. Having progressed far enough along Marion’s story, we are left with Norman.

Figure 2 (Hitchcock, 1960)

Hitchcock uses the camera and subtle editing to hint at further doubling between Norman and Marion. On the run after stealing a cash sum from her boss, Marion drives until nightfall, where she checks in to the Bates motel. It is on this car journey, before they ever

Figure 3 (Hitchcock, 1960)

meet, that Hitchcock cinematographically presents Marion as a doppelganger to Norman.

Both Figure 2 and Figure 3 are taken from Marion’s car journey on the way to the Bates Motel. At the start of the journey, in the daytime, we see all of Marion’s face, evenly lit. Time passes in fades, not cuts, and we have a regular depth of field. Hitchcock uses these techniques to show that we are still in an objective reality, that of Marion’s world. Contrast that with Figure 3; as day passes and night falls, time moves in cuts, not fades. There are shadows strewn across Marion’s face, and the depth of field flattens. We are no longer seeing the world as Marion does on the outside; we are leaving her objectivity behind, and entering the subjective reality of Norman’s nocturne. We have progressed to the other side of the Möbius strip. Finally, as she approaches the motel, Marion’s face takes up almost the entirety of the screen. At the last moment, we see a smile leak out across her face, a smile eerily familiar to Norman’s famous smile:

Figure 4 (Hitchcock, 1960)

As Marion approaches the Bates motel, she becomes Norman. And, as Norman kills Marion and takes over from her as protagonist, he becomes Marion. Both characters represent two sides of the same coin, the Möbius strip of repressed desire and corrupting ambition which drives them to immoral action. Though they both present as polite and unproblematic — the shy motel owner and the respectable secretary — both are revealed to be capable of deception and of violence, demonstrating the unsettling, uncanny effect that ordinary people may contain their own monstrous double, buried in the depths of the id or projected onto another object. Hitchcock perfectly juxtaposes Norman and Marion to demonstrate Freud’s explanation of how the uncanny plays with immoral desire, repression, and projection (Leicester, 2024).

To Freud, the double is uncanny not just as a reminder of death and childhood desire, but when it externalises hidden wishes or fears; this is another way in which we can note the uncanny link between Norman and Marion. Though Marion flirts with crime, but ultimately repents, Norman shows no such sensitivity — he fully inhabits a corrupted, criminal self, divided between reality and his own subject. In this way, we can read Norman as the return of Marion’s repressed and disavowed desires, in monstrous form — the “nocturnal reverse” of taking Marion’s life of “contemporary American culture” to its extreme end. The Norman / Marion double demonstrates how a seemingly normal self can contain a repressed double; what appears a complete other — the murderer of Norman — is actually an uncanny echo of the familiar self — the respectable woman, Marion, who momentarily crosses a line. Norman represents an uncanny extension of what has been inside Marion all along, but simply repressed.

Hitchcock’s Psycho is a revolutionary horror movie well-versed in psychoanalytic theory. Even the final shot, with Norman’s Mother personality taking over his internal monologue, contends with an uncanny doubling. We’ve come full circle — opening with a neurotic, dissatisfied woman concealing a crime, and ending with one, only this woman is now nothing more than an extension of Norman’s repressed fears and desires. Blurring the lines between subject and object, between perpetrator and victim, and between parent and infant, Hitchcock weaves together cinematographic techniques, narrative structures, and cultural similarities to hint at uncanny doubles between Norman and Mother, and between Norman and Marion. He does so with an exploration of their origins and effects which lines up with Freud’s theory on the matter, and with a precision and sensitivity which makes the intention clear.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyle, J. (2016) ‘Esoteric Traces in Contemporary Psychoanalysis.’ American Imago 73 (1) https://www.jstor.org/stable/26305138.

Causey, M. (1999) ‘The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology’, Theatre Journal, 51(4).

Cherry, B. (2023) ‘Freud’s Superego in Psychology, VeryWellMind, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-superego-2795876

Cohen, T. (1995) Hitchcock and the American Sublime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Freud, S. (1919) ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Green, A. (1999) The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, London: Routledge.

Hoffmann, E.T.A (1816), “The Sandman”, Night Pieces, Germany: Verlag Georg Reimer.

Hitchcock, A. (1960) Psycho [Film]. USA: Paramount Pictures.

Leicester, M. (2024) ‘Hitchcock’s Figurations: Some Reflections on Textuality in Psycho’, AHOAJ, 12(1).

Žižek, S. (1992) Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock), London: Verso.

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The etymology of scratch is rather misty, but generally it is thought to derive from a fusion of Middle English scratten and crachen, themselves both of uncertain origin. However, the “scr-” sound-cluster appears in many words which tend to have ‘sister’ terms, closely related in meaning but lacking the initial ‘s’. Consider scrunch/crunch, or cringe/scringe (a vintage, alternative form of cringe). The Oxford English Dictionary notes that;

It does not appear that these coincidences are due to any one general cause …, but it is probable that the existence of many pairs of synonyms with scr- and cr- produced a tendency to change cr-, in words expressive of sounds or physical movements, into scr- so as to render the word echoic or phonetically symbolic.

Essentially, cr- words which denoted a particular physicality became scr- words, and this sound-cluster began to be associated with a particular class of action.

The accepted ‘sharpness’ of scratch is a good example of (half of) the kiki-bouba effect,which notes that we generally do not assign sounds to shapes arbitrarily. Researchers found that, across genders, races, cultures, ages, and geographical locations, when presented with nonsense words like ‘kiki’ and ‘bouba’, participants tend to assign ‘kiki’ to a spikier, thinner shape, in comparison to the flat, rounded edges of ‘bouba’. The study has been confirmed among American university students, speakers of languages with no writing system, infants, and even the congenitally blind. This discovery of sound symbolism pushes us to recognise that the way we hear and register plosives versus fricatives, affricates versus liquids, is not meaningless, but relates to something physical we observe about the world. We naturally ‘hear’ shapes, in the sense that the malleability of certain sounds inspires us to think of certain forms that we notice about the world.

We might even observe the kiki-bouba effect at play in our own anatomy. It has been suggested that the association is related to the shape of the mouth when produc­ing sounds — the more rounded shape of the lips when pronouncing bouba and the more taut form we take when saying kiki. Whether it’s a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant, or a laminal apico-alveolar retroflex consonant, we can note some consistency between the reported sharpness of the word and the tightness of our vocal gymnastics.

This is one angle from which to offer the argument that language is not assigned entirely arbitrarily, that there is some quality or property about the word scratch that means it must have been, that it was always intended in some way to sound like, if not exactly, scratch. Something about the sharpness of that real-life incision translates to our use of the fricative in the naming and meaning-making process. The question is whether this phenomenon occurs frequently enough in our language to make a real case for this direction of fit, or whether, in a language of over one million words, some are bound to sound similar to their physical manifestations.

There is much debate over the arbitrariness of language. Many see arguments for linguistic naturalism, or the view that language is essentially wound-up with human nature when it comes to meaning, as a romantic (or arrogant) quest for some human exceptionalism in the way we communicate, different from the roar of the beast. From Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (McKusick, 1986):

‘A variant of the doctrine of linguistic naturalism, attributable to Epicurus and Lucretius (De Natura, 5:1031ff), asserts that language arises spontaneously from human nature, just as beasts naturally emit cries … they are outward manifestations of man’s inner nature … To the obvious objection that there are many different human languages, [Lucretius] replies that there are a great variety of peoples, each with its own distinct characteristics. Linguistic variation is, in this view, an index of the variability of human nature.’

This seems, to me, a little too romantic and yearning to be an acceptable account of meaning-making. Furthermore, this kind of iconisation (Irvine and Gal) dangerously supplies racist ideologies. Irvine and Gal define iconisation as the notion that ‘a linguistic feature somehow depicts or displays a social group’s inherent nature or essence’. They offer the coastal city of Cartagena as an example, noting that:

Tour guides like to describe the light pronunciation of final /s/ in the local dialect as being taken away by the strong sea wind, an iconisation in which the people, like their city, are windswept. Meanwhile, a heavy medial /t/ (think of ‘water’) signals Britishness in the United States, but the iconisation.. would be to think this sound is a manifestation of an inherently British characteristic of fastidiousness.

There are many of these pithy examples, but they do not make up the majority of the English language by any means. It is necessary at this point to refine the claim of the argument, and to note that these examples hope not to show that language is mostly non-arbitrary, but that it is not entirely arbitrary. We need only a few examples of this weighty link between our shape-processing and our phonetic output to demonstrate that our language, that all language, is not entirely arbitrary.

Though hardly comprehensive, there are enough examples of onomatopoeia and phonosemantics to challenge the traditional Saussurian view of the complete arbitrariness between Sign, Signifier, and Signified, and for us to recognise that, in many cases, the way we experience the world does inform our meaning-making process. When it comes to scratch, or glitter, or the nonsensical bouba, the way we process the world around us carries weight in the naming process.

Against the coldness of linguistics, of grammar rules and etymological consistency, we can find something irreplaceably human, something romantic and mortal in the hardness of scratch.

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So time is essential to literature. But reading and writing allow us to experiment with time in ways much deeper than simply chronicling a change from x to y. The central claim of this essay will be that reading and writing literature allows us to interact with time in ways which are inaccessible in our daily lives. In attempting to demonstrate this, the essay will look at two ways that writing literature allows us to experience and experiment with time; claiming that writing literature allows us to stop and record time, immortalising certain conventions and societal customs, as well as offering the author a way to escape time in some way. Furthermore, the essay will consider how, by offering the reader a chance to control time in a way usually impossible in their daily life, reading literature affords us the same experimental ability. This essay will primarily examine time in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, occasionally supplemented with evidence drawn from Italo Calvino’s work Invisible Cities. Through these two works, we will understand just how it is that writing and reading — two activities enabled by time — are able to help us conquer it.

The first way that writing literature allows us to experiment with time is in how it stops and records time. The writing of literature, because it takes place in time, a certain temporal context through which the author is living, cannot help but immortalise certain societal conventions and norms, which appear anachronistic when read by a modern-day audience. Far from being a limitation, this imbues the author with a profound ability: to stop time. We can view The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie through this lens: written in 1961 but set in 1930s Edinburgh, the novel records Miss Brodie’s peculiar ties to Scottish Enlightenment thinking, immortalising a philosophical worldview which would perhaps have been held by a wide array of women at the time of Spark’s writing (or indeed, in 1930s Scotland). Sandy describes the ‘legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties… who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas… in art or social welfare’ (Spark, 1961: 33). The particular ‘new ideas’ of the Scottish Enlightenment which Miss Brodie might have taken on board can be found in Hume, who himself questions the narrative structure of our lives. Hume talks of the mind as a kind of theatre, imagining that all we see are varying perceptions which ‘pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’ (Hume, 1978: 252). Hume remains sceptical about the existence of any underlying self — an ‘I’ to which this narrative progression is happening, when all the evidence we have points only to a succession of phenomena, and not a continuing mental substance.

In having Miss Brodie supposedly enamoured with Scottish Enlightenment thinking, championing this ruthless empiricism and focus on the observable, Spark stops time for a moment, recording the influence, and impact, of Hume’s thought on the philosophical state of 1930s Edinburgh. Hume’s influence has been immortalised; time perverted to allow for his ideas, originating from the 18th century, to be shown to hold importance in the 20th. However, beyond just recording and promoting the philosophy of Hume, perhaps Spark aims to immortalise another societal convention, one related more closely to the American 1960s from which she is writing; second-wave feminism. The American feminist writer Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, ‘help[ing to] ignite the second feminist wave’ (Alexander, 2020). The second feminist wave aimed to ensure that women’s social and political voice was heard, and encouraged women to fight gender oppression, which Friedan called ‘the problem that has no name’ (Friedan, 1963).

Miss Brodie can also be seen to reflect the pursuit of equality between the sexes found in Friedan; we learn that ‘those of Miss Brodie’s kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man’. (Spark, 1961: 34). Is Spark not once again pausing time, recording a particular social phenomenon — namely the rise of second-wave feminism, and an increased championing of female autonomy and voice — and immortalising it in the canon of literature?

Calvino achieves a similar effect, although with a rather different focus, in Invisible Cities. The structure of the text is a series of imaginary conversations between two historical figures, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, about a selection of conceptual cities from which Marco Polo is returning. Following Polo’s description of Trading Cities 1, Calvino writes of a moment of misunderstanding between Khan and Polo, noting that ‘the objects [which were all that Polo had to convey what he had learned from his travels to Khan] could have various meanings… an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made’ (Calvino, 1972: 45). Calvino is recording here the polyvalence of the human experience: that our observation of the material is structured by our memories, our desires, and our dispositions. In fact, the very structure of the book — a circulation between cities of ‘desire’, ‘memories’ and ‘signs’ — speaks to the interchangeability of humanity. Yet Calvino, as Spark does, stops and records time, taking these exchanges between Polo and Khan –real figures, both active in the 13th century — as demonstrative of our timeless desire to build and experience, of our endless pursuit of legacy. Calvino takes a series of conversations which could easily be temporally located, and uses them to turn our eyes inward, and have us examine the traits in ourselves which accord with Polo’s desire to explore, and Khan’s desire to be remembered. By immortalising certain conventions, and indeed conversations, which would have taken place in the 1200s, Calvino enables us to better understand our present moment.

This unique ability of authorship is part of the way in which writing literature allows us to experiment with time, profoundly changing our experience of temporality.

The second way in which writing literature allows us to experience and experiment with time is in the ability it affords the author: namely, the ability to position oneself outside of time, by lording over narrative progression and cause-event relationships. Spark continually commandeers time to portray cause and effect in different ways, perhaps most evident in the temporally-confusing epithets given after some of the Brodie set’s names. Spark tells us that ‘Rose Stanley was not yet famous for sex’ (Spark, 1961: 17). And later again describes ‘Monica Douglas, later famous for being able to do real mathematics in her head.’(Spark, 1961: 22). That Rose was as yet not famous for sex, and Monica not yet renowned for her abilities in arithmetic, but that they inevitably, unavoidably would be, is a confusing position in time to take up and demonstrates the power Spark, as author, has over time; a divine ability to be certain over events which have not yet occurred, to guarantee what should still be the conditional, and to deliver on those guarantees. This is a relationship to time which goes beyond our daily experience of time, a lordship over cause and effect which we are, in every moment of our lives, unwillingly subject to. What Spark achieves by this is what Barbara Linn Probst denotes as the separation of ‘narrative time’ and ‘reader time’. Probst notes that, ‘Flashback, memory, and backstory interrupt linear time’ (Probst, 2021) corresponding to our understanding of how the unique kind of guaranteed prolepsis that Spark employs in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie drives a division further between those two conceptualisations of time: narrative time, the time in which the events of the story take place, and reader time, the linear progression through the narrative by the reader. MacIntyre, in the fifteenth chapter of After Virtue, argues that ‘the unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest’ (MacIntyre, 1981), and by interrupting the reader’s linear progression through time in their consumption of the narrative, the author once again cements their role as outside of time, in control in some way of temporal cause-effect sequences, achieving a relationship to time which, for the reader, remains inaccessible.

Calvino plays with the linearity of time in a similar way, achieving a mastery over time comparable to Spark. In Fedora (Cities and Desires 4), the narrator tells us that ‘In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city’. (Calvino, 1972: 39). Just as Spark does, Calvino steps outside of time; how else might a narrator feasibly be an authoritative voice on what happens ‘in every age’? To assume epistemic lordship over what should be unknowable, just as Spark does with the epithets of the Brodie set, Calvino must briefly ignore the linearity of time, gaining a control over time generally inaccessible in our daily lives.

Writing literature is a generative process which can only be facilitated by moving through time, by relentlessly experiencing. Through our experiences, we might draw together a narrative which reflects some of the most formative and foundational events of our own life. And so all of writing is concerned with time, not just in that events must move through time to be understood, but in the sense that writing is a process, cathartic in some way, which reflects our own, deeply personal experiences of time. And yet, it is only through writing, an exercise which forces us to pay homage to time, that we might wrangle it, control time, and utilise it for our own aesthetic and narrative choices. This is the exclusive ability of the author, who in their writing manages to step outside of time briefly, and contort the typical linear progression to their liking. Writing literature allows us the chance to conquer time.

The experience of reading literature also allows us to experiment with time. When we read that ‘Mary, who later, in that hotel fire, ran hither and thither till she died’ (Spark, 1961: 22) and we realise we are being told of events that have happened in ‘reality’ but are yet to happen in time, what does this do to our experience of temporality? How must we expand our understanding of time to accommodate this apparent divide between the events and the time they have to happen in? However we are to accomplish this, we must begin by acknowledging that this formulation of time goes beyond our quotidian experience. The ‘kind’ of time being played with here transcends our regular understanding, and simply by being witnesses can we as readers begin to control time in ways previously unachievable. To read events which occur out of linear time and order them into a cohesive narrative is to commandeer time; this is what we do as readers.

Reading is re-organising that which needs to be re-organised, taking the events presented as they come and formatting them into a series resembling our real-world experience. ‘Narrative activity, in history and in fiction, provides a privileged access to the way we articulate our experience of time’ (Ricoeur, 1979: 17). This articulation of our experience of time is what we gain by reading, relating our own experiences to the characters’ progression through a narrative arc of some kind. This is easily done when we read narratives that follow linear time; we are able to map ourselves and our experiences on to the steady development of the characters, relating throughout their own arcs and falls to the peaks and troughs of our own lives. However, when we read literature, such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Invisible Cities, which subverts linear time in some way, we have to do much more work as readers to delineate the similarities between the characters and ourselves. Finding these links is one of the readers’ principal aims; Catherine Gallagher notes that ‘Characters’ peculiar affective force… is generated by the mutual implication of their unreal knowability and their apparent depth’ (Gallagher, 2007: 357). We find characters in literature to be impossibly familiar, and this is why we attempt to relate ourselves in some way to the characters we read.

So, when we read of Mary later dying in a house fire, knowing that it hasn’t happened yet but is certainly, unequivocally going to happen, we have to do real work with time and narrative in order to digest the character. Not in an effort to ‘relate’ to Mary, but to understand, to buy Mary as a real figure, ‘impossibly familiar’ as good characters are. To do this, we gift ourselves a leniency with time which is not normally allowed; we rearrange the cause-event relationships, and their positions in time, in order to create what resembles a linear narrative. But what we have produced is a fiction, born of our own self-certified mastery of time and its events; a fabrication by which we allow ourselves to feel confident in our understanding of the happenings of Mary’s life.

To feel satisfied enough in our conversion of these non-linear events to allow ourselves to feel how we typically do for real human interactions — the shame, guilt, awe, pity, elation and melancholy we feel for others — for the characters of literature is the key task of the reader, and this may only be achieved by assuming a proficient control of time.

We have not and will not conquer time in our own lives. We remain trapped in a linear progression of cause and effect, marching inevitably from one moment to the next. Nevertheless, in writing and reading literature we make a small act of defiance against time, manipulating time in ways that we can’t in our daily lives. Writing and reading literature allows us to experience and experiment with time in a multitude of ways; it allows us to stop time, immortalising certain moments. It allows us to position ourselves outside of time, and give ourselves a dictatorship over time which we cannot possibly experience in real life. Only through reading and writing literature can we hope to conquer time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Kerri Lee (2020) ‘Feminism: The Second Wave’ National Women’s History Museum [online] Available from: https://www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/feminism-second-wave (accessed: 15/12/24)

Calvino, Italo (1972) Invisible Cities, London: Secker and Warburg.

Friedan, Betty (1963) The Feminine Mystique, New York: W.W. Norton.

Gallagher, Catherine (2007) ‘The Rise of Fictionality’ The Novel: History, Geography, Culture, 1: 357.

Hume, David (1978 [1739]) A Treatise on Human Nature: Second Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joyce, James (2012 [1939]) Finnegans Wake, London: Wordsworth Editions.

MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981) After Virtue, Indiana: Notre Dame Press

Miller, J.Hillis (2003) ‘Time in Literature’ Daedalus 132 (2): 86–97.

Probst, Barbara Linn (2021) ‘Character Time and Reader Time’ Writer Unboxed [online] Available from: https://writerunboxed.com/2021/01/25/character-time-and-reader-time/(accessed: 15/12/24)

Ricoeur, Paul (1979) ‘The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.’ Research in Phenomenology 9 17–34.

Spark, Muriel (1961) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London: Macmillan.

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On December 6th, 1969, on the Speedway in Tracy, California, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival kicked off. That Saturday, some 300,000 counter-culture rock enthusiasts attended the haphazard venue, thinking that they were in for a Woodstock West. The real concert, organised primarily by the Grateful Dead and moved to the Speedway only two days prior, was a far more rowdy affair. The organisers had the Hell’s Angels, armed with chains and weighted pool-cues, play security on a handshake deal. The Angels were paid in beer, left on the stage, and surrounded the three-feet-high stage to protect the performers, some list that included Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Grateful Dead, and the final act, the Rolling Stones.

Due to the fact that the concert was essentially a bowl containing 300,000 psychedelically-influenced rockers, things became unruly fast. The Hell’s Angels were constantly engaged, and at one point injured the skull of a 6-month pregnant lady with a flying beer bottle.

Eventually, Mick Jagger and the Stones come out to play. The band had been ferried to the concert by helicopter to avoid the unruliness, only for Jagger, donning a red cape with all-too-satanic connotations, especially during his ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, to be punched in the face upon exit. Jagger threatens to leave, but the riots immediately pick back up as he begins to play ‘Sympathy’.

One man, who had previously been in an altercation with the Angels, pulled a gun out and began to wave it around the crowd. Immediately, one of the Angels dived and stabbed the guy in the neck, simultaneously gaining control of the gun arm and directing it away from the crowd. He immobilised the man and drags him to the ground, and all the Angels push the boundaries of legal self-defence by jumping on him.

All the while, Jagger and the Stones continue to play. The fight happened right in front of them. They continue to deny that they understood the severity of the exchange, but still it’s not a great optic. Nero playing the flute as Rome burns.

Don McLean’s American Masterpiece

Sometime in 1971 Don McLean watched Gimme Shelter. The documentary from the Maysles Bros. studio house chronicles the events of the Altamont Concert, and these happenings struck a chord in McLean, who has been long reticent to reveal any of the meaning behind his ‘monumental accomplishment of lyric writing’ (Record World). The events of the Altamont Free Concert formed the basis of much of the latter part of the song, but the initial events — and writing — were stimulated by something far more personal.

The death of Buddy Holly (whom he dedicated the eponymous album to), Richie Valens and The Big Bopper in that February 1959 plane crash marked McLean, marked him because of his growing sentiment that the 50s era of virtuous music was fading into the 60s and 70s and their drug-infused, rebellious contraband. The loss of music, the day the music died, and of American public decency culminated, for Don, with that February plane crash, and the loss of his hero.

The song begins:

A long long time ago

I can still remember how

That music used to make me smile

And I knew if I had my chance

That I could make those people dance

And maybe they’d be happy for a while

But February made me shiver

With every paper I delivered

Bad news on the doorstep

I couldn’t take one more step

I can’t remember if I cried

When I read about his widowed bride

But something touched me deep inside

The day the music died

The first verse introduces us to this shift in music that Don is lamenting. The music ‘used to make me smile’, but now it is lost. But, ‘February made me shiver’, due to the aforementioned deaths of his musical idols, and now McLean fears that the music joyousness of the 50s is lost. McLean himself noted that;

I first found out about the plane crash because I was a 13-year-old newspaper delivery boy in New Rochelle, New York, and I was carrying the bundle of the local Standard-Star papers that were bound in twine, and when I cut it open with a knife, there it was on the front page.

The rest of that verse is pretty self explanatory. He’s sad about Buddy’s death, he fears that it marks the end for what he sees as ‘real’ music, and so forth. Onto the chorus:

So bye, bye Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry

Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey in Rye

Singin’ this’ll be the day that I die

This’ll be the day that I die

‘Miss American Pie’ is simply a stand in for the good old days, as he sees it, of musical virtue and public decency. The one’s he is wistfully, sadly waving goodbye to. The use of a ‘pie’ nods to the apple pie, by this time an American cultural symbol. In fact, the line was originally going to be, ‘So bye, bye Miss American Apple Pie’, but McLean changed it (and thank god he did).

The next line is contentious, as many are. Much of the lyrics to American Pie have been subject of scholarly debate, and more often than not scholars are found wanting. McLean himself for a long time refused to give any breath to the meaning of the lyrics, joking that ‘they mean I never have to work again if I don’t want to’, and believing that the job of the artist was to release their creation into the world and maintain a dignified silence. He broke his oath in 2015, when the original manuscript was auctioned off, allowing his initial songwriting notes to be included, which gave some insight into his creative process and lyrical decisions.

It’s generally thought that the next line refers to a popular commercial jingle from Chevrolet, which rhymed ‘levee’ with ‘Chevy’ and featured images of traditional 50’s life. McLean has lost that life, the levee is dry, and he is disappointed by this fact, by the rumbling onwards of society in what he sees as the wrong direction. However, some point to a more literal meaning, being that McLean frequented a bar called the Levee and often arrived too late, meaning that the bar was closed and ‘dry’.

This lends narrative credence to the next line, there the good ole boys drinking whisky and rye are his friends, and not the outcast stars of 50s rock and roll sipping beer and reminiscing about their long-lost time in the starlight. It doesn’t particularly explain why they’re singing about their own extinction, though. The second interpretation seems much more the point that McLean is arguing here.

Nevertheless, the chorus continues to bring around that general sentiment of times changing and virtue lost. McLean brings us round and round again to that cultural shift, something vague but huge, exactly the kind of thing he said that he set out to write.

The next verse begins:

Did you write the book of love

And do you have faith in God above

If the Bible tells you so?

Now do you believe in rock and roll?

Can music save your mortal soul?

And can you teach me how to dance real slow?

Well, I know that you’re in love with him

Cause I saw you dancin’ in the gym

You both kicked off your shoes

Man, I dig those rhythm and blues

I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck

With a pink carnation and a pickup truck

But I knew I was out of luck

The day the music died

I started singin’

Here come the 50s references. The book of love was a hit song from The Monotones in 1957, and McLean uses it in conjunction with Bible talk to point out the shift from the pious 50s to the hedonistic, disgraceful 60s. This is backed up by the immediate comparison to rock n roll, a la John Lennon’s ‘We’re more popular than Jesus’ sentiment. A scary one for McLean.

The 50s references continue with his reference to teenage ‘sock-hops’, which were very popular in the 50s but pretty much went away by 1970. Gymnasium dances so-named because attendees would have to remove their shoes before entering, to protect the linoleum of the gym floor, McLean invokes sock-hops as another example of how society has changed — for the worse — since his beloved 50s.

And that’s how the rest of the verse goes; his pickup truck and pink flowers, his love for emergent R&B — all fond memories of the 50s, lovely 50s in stark contrast to the malignant 60s, for Don.

The next verse brings us out first mention of the Stones and Altamont.

Now, for ten years we’ve been on our own

And moss grows fat on a rolling stone

But, that’s not how it used to be

When the jester sang for the king and queen

In a coat he borrowed from James Dean

And a voice that came from you and me

Oh and while the king was looking down

The jester stole his thorny crown

The courtroom was adjourned

No verdict was returned

And while Lenin read a book on Marx

The quartet practiced in the park

And we sang dirges in the dark

The day the music died

We were singin’

There’s a lot in this one, so we’ll go line by line. Ten years later, and we’re in 1969, the year of the Altamont Free Concert. McLean’s distaste for Jagger and the Stones is evident, as ‘rolling stones’, as in literal tumbling stones, would gather no moss, but this one, the Rolling Stone himself, is stagnant, and still, and greedily gathering moss; it’s dirtying.

The ‘Jester’ singing for the ‘King and Queen’ is a contentious frame. It’s typically understood that the Jester is Bob Dylan, singing for Elvis, the recognised ‘King’. Dylan’s famous image in a coat similar to that of 50s Hollywood star James Dean, and the reference to his very distinctive voice only furthers this interpretation. (Dylan wasn’t very happy about this, by the way. He said: A jester? Sure, the jester writes songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,’ ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ — some jester. I have to think he’s talking about somebody else. Ask him.)

As Elvis was looking down — dying — the Jester, Dylan, stole his crown as the preeminent figure in rock and roll. But whether or not he’s a worthy replacement has yet to be decided by the public — the courtroom is adjourned.

Now the Beatles come in. Self-proclaimed hippie John Lennon is phonetically allied with Russian politician Vladimir for their Marxist interest, and the quartet — the Beatles — played their last concert in Candlestick Park. And the old 50s outcasts sang in the dark, forgotten.

The next verse winds around the Altamont issue to address some other socio-politics of the late 60s;

Helter skelter in a summer swelter

The birds flew off with a fallout shelter

Eight miles high and falling fast

It landed foul on the grass

The players tried for a forward pass

With the jester on the sidelines in a cast

Now the half-time air was sweet perfume

While sergeants played a marching tune

We all got up to dance

Oh, but we never got the chance

Cause the players tried to take the field

The marching band refused to yield

Do you recall what was revealed

The day the music died?

We started singin’

Helter Skelter was written on the walls of the Polanski mansion following the Sharon Tate murders by Charles Manson and his crew, a landmark political and cultural event. The birds flew off a shelter, presumably rattled by the shockwaves of such an event, but McLean also references ‘The Byrds’ who’s hit song ‘Eight miles high’ fell through off charts rapidly due to its pro-drug tones. It landed, disregarded, on the ground, or the ‘grass’ that the band, alongside pretty much everybody was famous for smoking.

The players trying for a forward pass refers to the Kent State Massacre of May 1970, where players in a football game, alongside Vietnam protesters, were tear-gassed and brutalised by riot police in a massive overdetermination of appropriate retaliatory force. The jester on the sidelines is Dylan, watching on, surveying his new musical kingdom. Or, again in a more literal reading, it may be due to his recovering from a surgery at the time that left him literally, in a cast. But let’s not ruin what McLean has going here.

The sweet perfume of the halftime air is the aforementioned tear gas, and the marching tune that the Sergeants play is their menacing march on the rowdy, but harmless protesters. Buried here is a link to the Beatles, and their Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Everyone got up to dance in the Summer of Love in 1969, only to be promptly sat back down, before they could even begin, by the Vietnam War. More references to the Kent State Massacre, and then McLean rounds the verse out, as always, by lamenting the loss of good music, and goodness among the public, in modern America.

The next verse takes us back into the heart of the Altamont uprising.

Oh, and there we were all in one place

A generation lost in space

With no time left to start again

So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick

Jack Flash sat on a candlestick

Cause fire is the devil’s only friend

And as I watched him on the stage

My hands were clenched in fists of rage

No angel born in Hell

Could break that Satan’s spell

And as the flames climbed high into the night

To light the sacrificial rite

I saw Satan laughing with delight

The day the music died

He was singin’

The generation, gathered all in one place at the Altamont Free concert, are ‘lost in space’. This might be an allusion to the rampant drug culture of the 60s and 70s, or the dreamy wishes of libertarian thinkers. Or, it’s a pointed remark at the US-Soviet Space and Arms race which consumed much of Cold War politics. Either way, there’s no time left to start again.

Now, Jack Flash is Mick Jagger. A character for the song ‘Jumping’ Jack Flash’. He’s sat on a candlestick, a reference to the pyrotechnics of the Altamont concert (and the general frenzy), because fire is the devil’s only friend, and Jagger is, to McLean, the devil ( I told you he hates him). His hands are literally balled up with rage as he watches Jagger feed off the riotous crowd.

None of the Hell’s Angels could get through to Jagger, he laments (though they aren’t exactly on their best behaviour themselves, but what did you expect from America’s biggest biker gang). The final few lines of the verse reference the killing that takes place, and Jaggers unaffected stance, as he watched the murder take place before his stage, and continues to play. McLean’s struck gold with evidence of music’s moral decline here.

The final verse slows down and tethers McLean’s thoughts back to his utopian 50s society:

I met a girl who sang the blues

And I asked her for some happy news

But she just smiled and turned away

I went down to the sacred store

Where I’d heard the music years before

But the man there said the music wouldn’t play

And in the streets the children screamed

The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

But not a word was spoken

The church bells all were broken

And the three men I admire most-

the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost-

They caught the last train for the coast

The day the music died

And they were singing

It’s typically considered that the girl who sang the blues is Janis Joplin, who died — turned away — in 1970. McLean has himself refuted this claim. In any case, she can’t give McLean happy news because there isn’t any — society is rotting.

The Sacred Store is the music store Don used to go to, where they’d let you play records before you bought them; where he’d heard the music years before. They’d stopped this practice by 1970, hence the music wouldn’t play. After those general cultural laments, and confirmation that The Beatles and popular music have truly become more popular than Jesus — that the Church is broken now, McLean moves on to the three men he admires most, the Holy Trinity of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper, who’s deaths ignited this entire debacle for McLean. They caught the last train for the coast — died (or, in a much less satisfying but more literal reading, went to Los Angeles,) — and with them went the purity of the 50s.

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