Kitsch Magazine: Spring 2014

kitsch vol.

12 no. 2

Sleep Paralysis

Your Worst Nightmare Understanding

the Sound and the Fury .. of Sorority Rush

She Wore Blue Velvet The Terrifying Sincerity of David Lynch

Who’s Afraid of the Chupacabra?

Urban Legends Broken Down

kitsch vol

12 no 2 | spring 2014

editor in chief

managing editor social media editor bite size zooming in watch and listen

mo rahman victoria hines katie o’brien yana lysenko anna brenner yana makuwa

kaitlyn tiffany

design editor peter zawistowicz lead copy editor tia lewis art editor thelonia saunders zooming out nate coderre aurora rojer

fiction anna brenner nate coderre

writers

layout artists

zander abranowicz

copy editors

alyssa berdie

alejandra alvarez

christian cassidy-amstutz

alyssa berdie

sophia chawala

tyler breitfeller

caleb grant

emma court

emma jennings

arielle cruz

hannah kim

caleb grant

allie littrell

zack labe

kyle massa

james rainis

sooyeon nahm

ariella reidenberg

evan needell

amy saul-zerby

katie o’brien

marissa tranquilli

taylor rescignano

zachary zahos

melis schildkraut

tyler breitfeller hannah kim

artists

zander abranowicz brandon ray leathead kristina lovaas katie o’brien

advisors

daniela pimentel michael koch english, cornell university catherine taylor writing, ithaca college

cover art

thelonia saunders

aurora rojer thelonia saunders michelle savran clarrie scholtz jin yoo

kitsch magazine, an independent student organization located at Cornell University and Ithaca College, produced and is responsible for the content of this publication. This publication was not reviewed or approved by, nor does it necessarily express or reflect the policies or opinions of Cornell University, Ithaca College, or their designated representatives.

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in this issue 4 5 6 8

Cayuga Conservationism Movie Déjà Vu How to Survive a Horror Movie What Cornell Building Are You?

9

Woody Allen: Father of Controversies But Not of Soon-Yi Previn 10 A Breakdown of Three Popular Urban Legends 12 The Power of Voodoo (Who-Do?) 14 Exploring the Deep Web 16 The Science & Mythology of Sleep Paralysis 18 The Debated Bravery of Coming Out 20 Scary Censorship 22 Inequality & Art

24 26

The Haunting in Ithaca An Outsider’s Look into the Mythical

World of Sorority Rush 30 Lulu is Fucked Up, Let Us Count the Ways 32 Four Collegetown Bars and Their Corresponding Emotional Breakdowns

35 38 40

Cyclical Scares Wicca and Artifice The Fashion of

American Horror Story 42 The Evolution of Witches

in Popular Culture 44 R.L. Stine Does Not Use Ghost Writers 46 American Horror Story’s

Female Horror Story 49 The Terrifying Sincerity of David Lynch 52 The Immortality of Jaws 54 Awkwafina 56 Portrayals of Mental Illness on Television

59 60 61 62

Three Poems by Amy Saul-Zerby Beached Flower Girl A Facebook Poem

letter from the editor

What horrifies can also seduce—it’s what makes Pretty Little Liars’ sleek scares so addictive, what makes every college-aged girl from here to Sydney call Beyoncé’s glamorous “Ghost/Haunted” “to die for,” and what makes us want to know the truth behind every beautiful, murderous villain on American Horror Story. As much as these things are built on themes that terrify us, we are drawn to them. Red lipstick is more powerful around fangs; black gloves are more enthralling when they’re a piece of a paranoid puzzle; TV killers are more fun when they’re real.

Later in this issue of kitsch, I make reference to Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, a theory which posits that the things we find most basically horrifying are also those which we find most simultaneously engrossing. The abject is not just the physically dangerous or the instinctively repulsive—it also includes that which “disturbs identity, system, order...what does not respect borders, positions, rules…the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” While kitsch set out this semester with only the vague theme of “Haunted,” it quickly shifted from a catalog of that which was most obviously scary to an exploration of that which scares and seduces, horrifies and thrills, those things that do not respect society’s borders. Katie O’Brien investigates what makes the Deep Web a world of possibility and a hotbed for crime (p. 14), Zach Zahos explains what it is for cinema to be terrifyingly “sincere,” drawing on scenes from the most iconic David Lynch films (p.49), and Anna Brenner gets a closer look at sorority rush, as a voyeur into a world which (let’s not argue about this now) both fascinates and repulses (p.26).

There is an urge to understand the things that haunt us, as a way to come closer to exorcising our fears, to making sense of that which “disturbs identity”—Arielle Cruz proposes that we not demand a female rapper be feminist (p. 54), Anna Brenner writes reflectively about what Ellen Page coming out can and should mean in an age where the act is sometimes minimized (p. 18) and nowhere are the ghosts of a personal past more visible than in the poetry of Amy Saul-Zerby (p.59).

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt and a dash of humor—what is meant to be scary sometimes fails to make us cringe and succeeds in making us laugh. We can bounce back from the things we feared might haunt us. James Rainis gives an account of four different hyperbolized emotional breakdowns that one might have in a Collegetown bar (p. 32) and Zack Labe describes Cornell’s most haunted places with a smirk and a forewarning of absurdity (p. 24). After all, while kitsch requires reflection, analysis, citation of sources and fact-checking of Jessica Lange quotes, what it ultimately demands is a freedom to engage with “the ambiguous.” Journalism meets fiction, the sincere meets the snarky, the scary meets the funny, and our “composite” is this—as Aurora Rojer writes in a love letter to R.L. Stine (p. 44)—“We’re not afraid of the dark anymore.”

— Kaitlyn Tiffany, Editor-in-Chief, Spring 2014

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art by aurora rojer

Nate coderre

At this point in the semester, Cornellians have seen quite a few deer—grazing in their backyards, scampering across the Arts quad, wandering around the plantations.

Cornell boasts incredible wildlife and picturesque natural areas, in no small part due to the work of local activists who look after Ithaca’s animal populations.

I think the Cornell bubble is part of the reason why a recent article in The Guardian surprised me so much. Its headline read, “Wild Beavers seen in England for the first time in centuries.” The noble beaver has returned to England! Praise Aslan! Wait, where have the beavers been this whole time?

Apparently, wild European beavers used to be quite prevalent in England, but the beavers in Britain and Wales, killed for their fur and meat, were hunted into extinction in the 16th century. The United Kingdom had already begun carefully reintroducing beaver families into specific natural reserves around the countryside, but officials were incredibly surprised by the appearance of these beavers. Experts believe that a family may have been living along the riverbank in Devon for a while now, and they are convinced that this development bodes well for the viability of future beaver populations.

So if the Great Lion isn’t coming back, why is this so interesting to me? Perhaps it’s merely because this endangered species seems so much less exotic than the ones I normally hear about. It’s all too easy to mentally distance myself from the impending extinction of certain types of tigers in Indonesia or pandas in China, but beavers are animals that I have enjoyed encountering in the wild, and it’s strange to imagine this happening to an animal I am so familiar with.

This article took me down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia pages and journal ar- ticles. Unsurprisingly, I found many more instances when conservation issues came to a head. European settlers used to hunt American wildlife incredibly irresponsibly. However, I was surprised to find an interesting conservation battle is playing out in Ithaca over the relatively large deer population. The Cayuga Heights Trustees passed the Deer Management Focus Area (DMFA) program in 2012 due to concerns about the rising deer population. The program allows outside contractors to annually trap and kill massive amounts of deer under the cover of darkness, in a vast area that includes many residential neighbor-

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hoods. I was certainly shocked by this idea, having seen so many of these deer myself without ever hearing of this program. The pro-hunting argument centers primarily around three issues: the risk of increased Lyme disease, car accidents, and damage to the environment. Local officials have ignored widespread local opposition to push this program through. James LaVeck, cofounder of Cayugadeer.org, has helped publically debunk a lot of the arguments by approaching wildlife experts to comment on Cayuga’s deer issue. The experts universally condemned the Lyme disease argument. For example, Tamara Awerbach of the Harvard School of Public Health, states explicitly that “there is no linear correlation between killing deer and the tick population” and is appalled by the lack of scientific basis the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) uses in its arguments. Additionally, there is no evidence that more deer have collided with vehicles over the past 15 years. In fact, there is some evidence in insurance reports that the number of collisions actually increases during hunting seasons, likely due to the increased number of startled deer. Most of the biodiversity issues are so complicated that experts seem divided on exactly how much the deer population hurts or helps other species of wildlife, but there are plenty of experts who argue that the presence of deer actually helps.

Many bait-and-shoot enthusiasts claim that deer are hurting bird populations, but the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has never found evidence to support that claim.

It would be impossible to develop a full-length argument for the value of animals in this space. However, I think it safe to say that most people believe that animals have some degree of inherent dignity. While the vast majority of them would not advocate the abolition of hunting, many people, I believe, would intuitively question the ethics of the authorities’ violent (and potentially unnecessary) methods of cutting into the deer population, and should feel remorseful about the elimination of a species (even if they survive in other areas of the world). Conservation issues such as this have entirely too many complexities and ambiguities for our society to settle on immediate solutions, so the best we can do to remain informed. I spent two years at this school without developing any sort of serious curiosity about our wildlife, and I missed out on important context. There are already a lot of local residents who are actively fighting against these deer control practices, but I’d encourage even more to investigate the issues further and participate in the discussion as best as they can. •

YANANISAI MAKUWA art by THELONIA SAUNDERS

My favorite part of going to the movies is watching the trailers. I love sitting in the theatre and seeing a snapshot of the endless panorama that is the current film industry.

I used to watch the previews and become enthralled by the tidbits of new stories strung together to entice us into seeing what else Hollywood has to offer. But unfortunately, as I’ve watched more movies, my experience with trailers has changed. Instead of feeling excited to go see the next big flick, I find myself comparing films to their originals from three decades ago, or naming the six other movies I’ve seen with the same basic plotline, or wondering how many sequels they can squeeze out before the franchise is allowed to rest in peace.

Today, if you aren’t at a cool film festival or an indie movie theatre that shows old classics, odds are you aren’t watching a movie whose main intent is to produce something of real artistic value. Most commercial films are so focused on making money to pay back rich executive producers that they have few qualms about sacrificing quality for something that will make a buck. This central concern, combined with the tried and true facts that people love hype and people love sequels, has led to the movie franchise. The most obvious and current franchise is Marvel’s Avengers. A comic book series is perfect for movie adaptation: Your protagonist and antagonist are placed into neat, easy-to-cast boxes, there’s a ready-made fan base, the plots are all laid out, and you have several to choose from, so there are obvious opportunities for sequels. The franchise movie doesn’t have to be based on a pre-existing storyline, or even a storyline with sequels (re: The Hobbit fiasco). Examples like the Bring It On cheerleading franchise, and Saw’s ceaseless gore and torture, prove that all you need to make a franchise is a basic plot that can be infinitely re-shuffled with minimal creative effort.

Although the magnitude of remakes has certainly increased over time, the practice of translating books to the screen has existed since the very beginning of motion pictures. Gothic writers like Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley have had their works adapted since the 1890s and Shakespeare’s comedies were adapted for the screen in the early 20th century, beginning with a film version of As You Like It from 1912. Today, it is almost impossible to distinguish adaptations from original movies. An unnerving number of hugely famous films were in fact simply converted from less-than-famous novels. While this appropriation of novel plots has obviously given birth to many excellent films over the years—Alfred

Hitchcock’s Psycho and Robert Zemenckis’ Forrest Gump, starring Tom Hanks, to name a couple—the movie industry shouldn’t be striving to simply make good adaptions.

The novel and the film are two distinct artistic forms, and the points that can be emphasized in each do not always overlap. For example, movies need less time for exposition and setting the scene, so more time can go into characterization. Instead of beautiful paragraphs describing settings and interactions, we get facial expressions and body language to reveal motivation. Good filmmakers should be writing scripts and devising plots that take advantage of all that the film genre has to offer.

In spite of the numerous examples of remakes and adaptations (some well done and some not so much), all hope for originality in film is not yet lost. The past decade has seen some real gems in terms of original screenplays, like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The King’s Speech, and this last year’s winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Her. Her is a great example of a movie that took advantage of the movie form to do something that couldn’t really be achieved in a novel. The uncanny sight of a man going on a date with a two square inch computer would have been impossible to communicate without the visual, and having Scarlett Johansson’s displaced voice fill the theatre was the ideal way to portray a sentient being without a body. Another recent original movie that takes advantage of form is the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. With specific and intelligent lighting, awesome reflective subway-window shots, and a soundtrack perfectly tailored to a movie about music, Inside Llewyn Davis is a story made for the visual medium of film.

Art informs art, and expecting movies and other forms of entertainment to have no crossover is ludicrous. How many successful authors and classic greats have borrowed or reused wellknown storylines? Many of Shakespeare’s most famous plays were based off of stories that the audience had already heard before. It is also unfair to assume that only original films take advantage of the medium. Movies like Life of Pi with its extraordinarily beautiful CGI, and The Shining with its revolutionary psychological horror, are perfect examples of book to film adaptations that match or exceed the original in excellence by taking advantage of the styles and technologies of movie making. However, I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask talented writers, directors, actors, and cinematographers to mine their imaginations for new stories that are best told on screen. What can you show us that we haven’t seen before, and can’t read in a comic book or a novel? •

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how to survive a horror movie

spoiler: you don’t.

Caleb Grant art by Aurora Rojer Picture this: you’re settled in with your friends, mashed together on a dirty couch that probably should have been replaced years ago. Your left leg has fallen asleep, but your crush is next to you and you want to play it cool. The popcorn is popped and the tensions are high you as watch someone scroll through Netflix. Everyone is shouting at once:

“I wanna watch Independence Day!”

“Netflix doesn’t have good movies, let’s watch The Fox and the Hound.”

“No c’mon let’s watch Rubber, I hear it sucks!”

“

I promise. It’s not real. Unless it’s based on a true story.

”

To your dismay, A Nightmare on Elm Street appears in bold letters on the screen. You start to wonder why you decided to walk all the way down here in the blistering cold, just to get the piss scared out of you. But you’re there and it’s too late to back out now. So how do you make it through? Fret not, for there are a few simple measures that can help you to survive—unlike most of the characters in the movie.

What will you need? First and foremost, some candy, because why would you watch a movie without some candy? If you don’t have candy, walk out that door and get yourself some.

Next, your hands. Your hands are some of the most incredible tools at

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your disposal. Sure, covering your face might not be the most glamorous option, but it will protect you from the chainsaw-wielding, dead body-toting, blood-sucking maniac on screen. If hands just aren’t good enough, you’re in luck; blankets can be just as useful.

Grab a blanket and, when needed, you can completely submerge your face in it, effectively blocking out all of the horrifying images that leave you tearful from

fright.

And third, get yourself some space. You know most of the people in the room are inevitably going to end up huddled together. Safety in numbers, right? Wrong. If you don’t watch horror movies often, chances are that at one point or another you are going to be flailing like a deer in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve. I’d suggest moving to a seat where you have a nice bubble of room. You don’t want to send high-flying kicks or elbows into someone’s face and ruin the whole night, do you?

Okay, so the movie has started. A young man sits in an ominous, dimly lit diner. It’s quiet—too quiet. He gets up in search of the waitress. The bass thunders and from somewhere behind him, you hear the sound of knives scraping against each other.

You want to let out a bloodcurdling scream. You want to yell, “RUN,” at the top of your lungs. You want to pick up your chair and throw it through the TV then dive out the window.

Let me stop you right there. Rewind.

The movie has started.

Here are some pointers to get you through the night:

1.

Crack jokes.

Joking about something scary always makes it less scary. A room filled with laughs makes it harder to freak out about the murderer who is so realistically slicing through people with a machete.

2. Remember your hands.

As mentioned before, when it gets really scary, utilize

“

utilize the tried and true method of peering through your fingers

”

the tried and true method of peering through the cracks between your fingers. For some reason, only seeing a sliver of the screen—or none at all—really takes some of the fear away. When Freddy Krueger is closing in on his victim and the ominous mood is all too telling of what is to come, get those hands out.

3. Open a window.

When you do weep out of fear, crack a window and pre-

tend a breeze is blowing into your eyes. Pretend that even though it’s a burden, you’re far too hot to close the window.

4. Have an out.

Come in with a reason

to excuse yourself when the movie really starts to get scary. When you know those razor sharp knives are about to find their way into the screaming girl on screen, it’s time to utilize that “call yourself” app you’ve been saving for the occasion. Take the “important phone call,” and return after the screaming has died down.

5. It’s not real.

I promise. It’s not real. Unless it’s based on a true story.

Because every movie that says it’s a true story is absolutely, positively, undeniably a true story.

6. Rebound.

After the movie has ended, don’t sit alone in the dark,

watching your closet, waiting for the boogieman to come out and devour you. First of all, it’s not going to happen. I think. And second, don’t let your mind get the best of you.

Throw on a funny TV show, read the Amazon reviews for Haribo sugar-free gummy bears—whatever helps you forget about the scary guy with the chainsaw, or the man with the messed up face killing people in their dreams.

Follow these steps, and you’ll be golden. Though when you’re walking back to your room at night and hear some low guttural noises coming from behind you, I wouldn’t stick around. Honestly, I have no idea what’s out there.We find hundreds of new species every year.

Who’s to say werewolves don’t exist? Not I. •

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WHAT

CORNELL BUILDING ARE YOU?

EMMA COURT

Poor, unsuspecting Socrates and Plato—little could they know of the phenomenon that would eclipse their fame and wisdom: BuzzFeed quizzes. Later generations will look back on this era and name it the Second Renaissance for its deep and fulfilling exploration of self-knowledge. BuzzFeed quizzes possess the remarkable ability to pinpoint whether you are a Miranda or a Carrie in Sex and the City or which fudge brownie you are, all based on weighty factors such as your favorite color and which of several adorable puppies you like best.

How did we derive purpose before we knew what we should name our iPhones or how single we are or, indeed, whether Ryan Gosling is our soul mate? Forget “any person, any study;” give the people what they want—any person, any meaningless, pop culture-influenced classification that can then be shared on every social media platform possible.

Thus, in the quest of contributing to understanding one’s truest self and adding to the existing body of knowledge on the topic (see “Which Sorority Should You Have Rushed?” among other enlightened treatises on the self), we bring you “Which Cornell Building Are You?”—a highly scientific document determining only the most significant aspect of a person’s being. Feel free to retake until you receive the classification most to your liking.

1. Caffeine is the window to a college student’s soul. Where do you find the best coffee on campus?

A) Libe Cafe, without a doubt.

B) Trillium Express—quick and efficient, just the way I like it.

C) Temple of Zeus. The farther the coffee, the more I enjoy it.

D) I only drink decaffeinated teas from the Amazon region.

And no, Amazon.com is not the same thing.

E) I’m a VIP at Starbucks.

2. Assuming you even go to class, what is your choice of transportation?

A) TCAT, although I sometimes have to ask where it’s going.

B) Walking. How else do you think I get legs this nice?

C) Biking.

D) My unicycle. It’s only for those unafraid of social alienation.

E) Oh, just borrow my Mercedes and drive me there.

3. Your choice for the New Student Reading project book this year is: A) Harry Potter. It doesn’t matter which one. Magic, friendship, adventure—what else do you need?

B) The Great Gatsby. Leo DiCaprio is to die for.

C) Anything by Junot Díaz.

D) One word: Bukowski.

E) Teen Vogue, since it’s already on my reading list.

4. The best Instagram filter is: A) Valencia. Everyone uses it.

B) Toaster—the only way to look tan during Ithaca winters.

C) Walden, because Thoreau, Ithaca is Gorges, it just makes sense.

D) Forget Instagram, Piclab is where it’s at.

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E) No preference—my Barbour jacket looks good in any filter.

5. Who should provide the soundtrack to the freewheeling bacchanal that some call Slope Day? A) I don’t care as long as it’s sunny, I’m drunk, and everyone is happy.

B) Someone really, really big—I’m talking radio every day, big.

C) Ellie Goulding and Vampire Weekend.

D) I could go for some spoken-word poetry.

E) Whatevs. If I don’t like the performer, I’ll just fly out to see Jay Z in L.A. MOSTLY A’s: Robert Purcell Community Center It doesn’t matter what year you are currently, at heart you’re always going to be a freshman. Between meal swipes and dressing to theme at open parties, it’s hard to keep all those Greek letters straight .You’re cute, naïve, and infinitely appealing to sketchy senior boys, but that all will change come your first Ithaca winter. Bring it on, October.

MOSTLY B’s: Mann Library A little out of the way, a little hard to get to, but you like it that way. Maybe you grew up in the city or abroad, maybe you started drinking when you were eight, or maybe you’re just naturally cooler than the rest of us, but you were over this whole college thing before it began. The only place your jaded vibe doesn’t show is at those big annual events you haven’t had enough time to get sick of. Homecoming is fun and Slope Day is fun, but everything else in between—pass, you have a very pressing nap to attend to.

MOSTLY C’s: Morrill Hall Partially obscured by construction for most of our collective Cornell consciousness, Morrill represents your own approach to mainstream Cornell culture. People know you, sure, and you may even be considered part of the Arts Quad, but nobody will confuse that with conformity to mainstream rules. If anyone needs you, you’ll probably be chilling on a tightrope strung between two trees, reading Dostoevsky.

MOSTLY D’s: Milstein Hall In this world of boat shoes and Nantucket red shorts, you are a shining beacon of hope and dreadlocks. Too complex for just one architectural style to define you, you break all of the rules.

Most likely career path: Managing ecologically sustainable farmed salmon in California, where—without much success— you’ll encourage them to go against the flow.

MOSTLY E’s: Statler Hotel You were born and raised on the Upper East, call New York City “the city”—where else could you be referring to?—with the same attitude about Ithaca as the Goldman Sachs recruiters that stay within your gleaming walls: It’s just a layover. If you aren’t an AEM major, Hotelie, or in ILR—transfer, ASAP. Manhattan is a little far from Ithaca, but with Daddy’s jet you can make a weekend of it. First stop, Nobu. •

woody allen father of controversies but not of soon-yi previn

mo rahman

It’s been over 20 years and we’re still submerged in Woody Allen controversies, the latest of which is rumored to sound the death knell for his thus far resilient career. Molestation allegations of Dylan Farrow, adopted daughter of Allen and ex-wife, Mia Farrow, rose in 1993 and the ghost of Allen’s past is back to haunt him. Over the years, members of this estranged family have shared their two cents on Allen’s disputes. What it boils down to is the explosiveness of Allen and Farrow’s tumultuous relationship and either party’s complete lack of a moral compass that can only come from the power of being a celebrity.

The duo experienced their first publicized battle in 1992 at the revelation of Allen’s illegitimate relationship with Soon-Yi Previn (Farrow’s adopted daughter with ex-husband, Andre Previn) by Farrow’s discovery of nude photos of Previn in Allen’s possession. When twenty-year-old Previn first began seeing Allen in 1991, Farrow and Allen had been dating for 12 years. According to various accounts by Previn, she had never considered Allen a father figure nor was he around for much of her childhood. Ronan, Allen’s biological child with Mia Farrow, refuses any relationship with Allen due to this affair, suggesting that it would be a “moral transgression” to support a scenario in which his father would be his brother-in-law. And even this can be followed with the controversy of Ronan’s actual biological roots, as he is rumored to be Frank Sinatra’s child, but was born 19 years after Sinatra and Farrow’s divorce. Years later, Farrow claimed her son could “possibly” be the child of Frank Sinatra, given that their bond was lifelong and exceeded a mere divorce. With a relationship embedded in lies, Allen and Farrow’s war has not only broken the family, but now also clouds the entire lineage in ambiguity.

The situation with Previn’s photos was the formal end to Farrow and Allen’s relationship and the beginning of a long-winded custody battle in which Farrow won custody of all of their mutually adopted and biological children—three in all. A year later, Farrow implicated Allen for child molestation of seven year-old Dylan. Various anonymous friends and family recounted anecdotes of Allen’s perverted behavior that ranged from flirty to sexual and everything in between. According to Allen and Farrow’s adopted son, Moses, anything his mother suggested could not be true.

Estranged from his father for over a decade, Moses now believes his mother created this story as an act of revenge upon Allen. He also suggests in various accounts art by clarrie scholtz

that Farrow, not Allen, was the abusive parent. In his defensive statement for the New York Times, Allen writes that the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospitality tested Dylan and it was concluded that Allen did not molest her.

So it would be an understatement to say that it came as a surprise when, 21 years later, Dylan chose to bring back these allegations. In her statement, Dylan focused on tear-jerking anecdotes of various things her father did to her, such as how he sexually exploited her while she played with a toy train. By the end of the letter, she candidly expressed her grief over his success, challenged Allen’s fans to still love his work and pleaded with celebrities any way connected to Allen to understand her side. In response, Allen blamed Farrow for feeding Dylan stories for years, which he believes have altered her memory from what truly happened during her childhood years.

Stars have had an opportunity to share their opinions on the complex situation. Lena Dunham admits to being proDylan Farrow in this situation given “the actual evidence in the world…[that] strongly suggests that Woody Allen is in the wrong.” However, she chooses not to let her stance on the matter affect how she looks at his work because art, in Dunham’s opinion, should not be used to imply criminal behavior. On the other hand, Scarlett Johansson—someone who is directly addressed in Dylan’s letter—feels as though Farrow’s statement is irresponsible because it addresses people like Johansson on an issue that she doesn’t have any personal knowledge on. She states that anything she could believe would be guesswork.

Johansson has a point. In this intricate patchwork of statements regarding the Allen controversies, truth and fiction are too blurred. The concrete facts are that Mia Farrow and Woody Allen allowed their relationship to decay to the point that they not only caused nuisance in each other’s lives, but also consequently caused all of their children to suffer psychologically from the aftermath of the drama for perhaps their entire lives. The greater issue to really consider is how far we allow celebrities to go when the terms are morally ambiguous. Between the two, Farrow and Allen have been accused of child abuse, domestic violence, molestation, lies, and so much more. Yet their lives continue on, in the glory of their fame and fortune, and soon enough, the public forgets too.

It’s time to take a truly analytic look into the Allen controversies and incriminate both Farrow and Allen for at least some of their misconducts. •

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a breakdown of three popular urban legends and their origins Tia lewis

art by Thelonia Saunders In the same way that mythologies are not confined to the ancients, creepy stories are not only told through the endless number of Paranormal Activity sequels or through shows like American Horror Story. There are plenty of strange, modern tales that travel by word of mouth and through low-tech websites created by conspiracy theorists who love colored fonts and clipart. Here are the basics on three contemporary legends you’ve probably already heard of from your superstitious uncle or imaginative childhood friend—but may not actually know much about.

area 51

the myth: The government is hiding aliens at Groom Lake. More specifically, the CIA is using the air force base known as Dreamland, Homey Airport, and Area 51 to build UFOs based on alien technology that crashed there, probably in the forties or fifties. Besides sporting an unnecessary amount of nicknames, the base also contains remnants of alien spacecraft, energy weapons, and the secret to time travel—not to mention that the fake moon landing footage, which fooled a nation (and the world), was filmed in part at Groom Lake. Seems like a lot was happening in south Nevada between the forties and mid-nineties, when suspicions finally began to settle down. But that’s not all. Supposedly, Area 51 was a meeting place for Majestic Twelve, the secret government organization created by President Truman in the late forties to investigate UFO sightings, which was spurred into creation after the crash of an alien spacecraft in Roswell, New Mexico incited interest in the existence of extraterrestrial life. MJ-12, as it was abbreviated in official documents, was mentioned in various sources until it was announced as a hoax started by an Air Force special agent.

However, to this day, some Area 51 conspiracy theorists incorporate MJ-12 in their theories.

the reality: UFO sightings in the area spiked as the air force base, in a shocking twist of events, began to test aircrafts. The

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Lockheed U-2 spy plane began testing in the fifties and flew so high (about 70,000 feet) that people living nearby took it to be a flaming UFO in the night sky. This silver-winged aircraft ceased testing around 1960, when the USSR shot one down and the CIA realized it was just too costly to keep the project alive. Not long after, another spy plane called the Lockheed A-12, codename OXCART, was developed for the CIA and tested out in Area 51. Commercial pilots who flew through the area saw the already strange looking plane moving at incredible speeds (about 2,300 miles per hour) and reported sightings of it to Project Blue Book, the Air Force committee for investigating UFO sightings.

They thought what they were seeing was an alien spacecraft when, in fact, it was just a very cool plane. Finally, there were some people who came out with information about Area 51 that undoubtedly fueled a considerable amount of the speculation. One of these people was Bob Lazar. Lazar, who was hailed as a whistleblower by believers and considered a nut by everyone else, claimed to have been employed at Area 51 in the late eighties. Lazar said that he worked in an underground lab where an extraterrestrial, disc-shaped spacecraft was being held—which the Air Force denies.

Supposedly, when Lazar tried to sneak his friends in to see it, he was fired. While there does seem to be proof that Lazar worked in a different top-secret facility in the past, there are also many things about what he said which do not check out. One being that he went to MIT. Another being the entirety of his UFO claims, which he now no longer chooses to discuss. Maybe he realized that someone pulled a cruel prank on him all those years ago, telling him the ship he was working on in the lab was alien—or maybe there was no ship at all and he never even went to Groom Lake. Better yet, maybe he’s been right all along and we can only wait for the government to admit that everything he’s said is true.

chupacabra the myth:

The legend of the chupacabra began in Puerto Rico in 1995 and expanded into the southern United States and Mexico. While the descriptions of the creature seem to vary from reptilian to dog-like, everyone seems to agree that the chupacabra is a vampire. In fact, the word chupacabra breaks down to literally mean “goat sucker” and was the name given to the mysterious culprit of livestock and pet killings by a comedian named Silverio Pérez. While he supposedly used the term to refer to the idea of creatures that sucked the blood out of other animals, primarily goats, it soon came to refer to a single mythical creature of dubious appearance.

In the United States, the image of the chupacabra became that of a hairless dog mixed with a kangaroo. From all over the southwest United States came claims of the chupacabra sucking the blood out of livestock, dead chupacabras lying on the side of the road, and suspicious animals lurking in the darkness. In 2006, the chupacabra spread to Russia, where Vadim Chernobrov, a paranormal researcher, claimed the creatures lived near the Ukraine-Russia border and were kangaroo-like in appearance, stacking their prey into patterns based on color and leaving no footprints behind. In

the past seven years, the chupacabra has reportedly been found in the Philippines and various states within the U.S., from Texas to Kentucky. The appearance of the creature seems more consistent now—dog-like, hairless, eerie—and the victims are the same: animals drained of blood and left dead.

the reality: People, in general, don’t seem to know much about existing animal species. Most of the supposed chupacabra stories are explained away by animal experts who can identify the mysterious corpses of dead chupacabras as nothing more than the deformed carcasses of coyotes or dogs. After birds pick at a dead animal long enough, it will start to look like anything the imagination can come up with. Live chupacabras have been identified on more than one occasion to be coyotes or dogs with physical defects or mange, a disease that can leave them furless. In terms of the blood-sucking nature of the chupacabra, zoologists such as Dr. Karl Shuker have explained that most of the supposed draining of blood included no signs of significantly drained blood at all. If an animal has a torn wound, it will bleed, and that’s what happened to most of the “chupacabra victims.” While they may appear to be bloodless in death, the dead animals’ autopsies showed that their blood loss was not unusual given the puncture wounds of teeth. Although the legend is still growing across the globe today, the chupacabra as an actual animal seems to be nothing more than creative fiction, spurred on by people who can’t recognize a sick coyote from a normal one or tell the difference between a dead animal without its blood drained and a dead animal with its blood drained. Plus, Chernobrov, the Russian researcher who studied chupacabra attacks around Moscow and perpetuated the idea of their existence, also claimed, in 2011, to have built a time machine. Various niche news sites such as BeforeitsNews.com and MysteriousUniverse.org have reported on Chernobrov’s claims, but, as the world has yet to meet the man’s future self, it can only be assumed that his word is not 100% reliable.

bloody mary the myth:

Face a mirror at midnight with only a candle and spin around three times, whispering “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary” as you do so. If you’ve done everything right, a cockroach will appear by your feet, or a dead baby, or the angry spirit of Bloody Mary herself—depending on who told you the story. This slightly more terrifying version of the “game” known as Bloody Mary, mainly used today to scare kids at sleepovers, originated in the early 20th century as a ritual meant to let young women see into their future. According to the original version of the game, if a girl walked backwards up the stairs with a candle in her hand, then gazed into a mirror, she might catch a glimpse of her future husband’s face. If not her husband, she might see a skull, which would signify her death before marriage. Nowadays the game doesn’t so much offer a glimpse into the future as

it does test the bravery of children. Some tales claim that Bloody Mary will simply appear, often with a baby or covered in blood, while others say that she may attack the person who summoned her, clawing out their eyes or leaving them dead and covered in bloody handprints. Either way, the game ends in terror—if you complete it successfully and she does appear.

the reality: Nothing stirs the imagination like the dark. There have even been claims that those who believe they saw Bloody Mary after playing her game are victims of self-hypnosis, Troxler’s effect, or simply a desire to impress their friends with a big fat lie. Essentially, Troxler’s effect suggests that staring at a mirror in a dark room may cause hallucinations based on optical illusions, where your eyes are tricked into seeing a sort of ghosting image effect, produced by a faint light source and movement and causing things to both appear and disappear from vision. In his paper, “Strange-Facein-the-Mirror Illusion,” Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo suggests that seeing faces where faces should not be may also be due to the misfiring of the brain’s system of face recognition. The brain is constantly searching for faces and can create an illusion of one based on shadows and light if tricked, for a moment, in something like a poorly lit bathroom mirror. Basically, seeing Bloody Mary for a split second in the mirror is much like Facebook being convinced that there is a face hidden in someone’s knee—the system is misfiring. The character of Bloody Mary herself is almost certainly based on Queen Mary I, who is also known as “Bloody Mary,” although not for popping up in people’s mirrors at night. The idea of the baby appearing can be traced back to Queen Mary I’s many miscarriages, which, if anything, only adds to the disturbing nature of the game.

No matter how much more we learn about the world or how advanced science and technology become, it seems that people will still choose to believe in the supernatural to explain surprisingly natural occurrences. Even as we advance as a species, our culture continues to support a faith in fictional tales, sometimes over cold hard fact. Of course, just because there are logical explanations to counter strange phenomena doesn’t mean you have to give up on legends completely. After all, stories like these are more than just coping mechanisms that exist to explain the unexplainable—they’re a part of culture and tradition, representing the quirks of one society to another. Embracing them should be about embracing the imagination and an open curious mind, as long as you remember not to take them too seriously.

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the tri-racial cultural influences that shaped louisiana voodoo

the power of

voodoo (who-do?)

thelonia saunders art by jin yoo Voodoo gets a bad rap in media. Pretty much any representation of the practice on the big screen or small is in the form of quasi-satanic curses, pin dolls, or that dying star of the Hollywood horror scene: the zombie. But Voodoo is more than a half-hearted attempt to kill off more dumb white people in the latest slasher flick—it’s a practice rooted in at least three separate continents and multiple distinct cultures. These varied origins all converge in Louisiana, creating New Orleans Voodoo, whose Voodoo image is the one most Americans are familiar with today. This image of Voodoo is primarily based on long-held rumors that irrevocably intertwine the practice with various evil and nefarious doings. While this makes some sense—especially given the aspects of Voodoo that have become rampant in popular culture—it is a blatant fallacy that undermines the deep cultural and religious background of the practice of Voodoo.

The first instances of “Voodoo” as we know it appeared in the West Indies, specifically in Haiti, where the relatively remote nature of the island allowed it to grow mostly undisturbed by outside influences. Haitian slaves brought their West African tribal religions with them to the New World, thus creating the foundation of Voodoo. These religions, as well as an older form of Voodoo, Vodun, can be traced back to the Dahomey region (now known as modern day Benin) on the coastline of West Africa. Though these slaves came from different religious backgrounds and tribes across West Africa, they all held similar core beliefs that allowed them to identify as a single religion. In Haiti, these religions came into contact with Catholicism, the firmly enforced colonial religion on both the French and Spanish sides of the island, as well as the beliefs of the Taino Indians, native to the island. Since they could not openly worship their own deities, the slaves looked to the Catholic icons and re-appropriated their images, which came to represent the African Loa, so they could continue to worship, if only via subterfuge. A fun switch, if only for the irony, is that of the Loa Erzulie Freda, goddess of love and sex, whose image is still associated with that of the Virgin Mary. There were other links between the two religions that helped ease the transition of one into another, forming Haitian Vodou.

Voodoo, like Catholicism, is a monotheistic religion with one all-powerful god, “Bondye” (Bon-Dieu or “Good God”), who does not care much for interfering in mere human’s affairs, and other lesser deities (or “Loas”) that take the role

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of surrounding spirit forces, somewhat resembling angels, in function at least, with very different specific purposes and evocations.

These deities are a mixture of Petra Loa (deities connected to the New World and generally considered more aggressive), Rada Loa (connected to traditional African deities, usually more calm in demeanor), Guédé Loa, gods of death, and the Nago Loa and Kongo Loa, deities originating in Nigeria and the Congo respectively. Any of these deities can be evoked in ceremonies if you have a conduit, in the form of a priest (Hougan), priestess (Mambo), magician (Bokor) or sorcerer (Loup-Garou). This person will then draw a Vévé, a symbol representing a specific deity to evoke them in a specific ritual, usually using some sort of powder, such as flour, wood ash, or cornmeal. Sometimes in older practices, these rituals involve animal sacrifice, but that’s something that seems to have been going out of style in the younger regions that still practice Voodoo.

Haitian Vodou then led to the formation of the most recent iteration of Voodoo: Louisiana Voodoo. New Orleans was host not only to slaves brought directly from Africa, but also Louisiana-born Creole and Haitian Creole who arrived after their exile following the Haitian Revolution of 1791.

This population not only included white plantation owners and free people of color, but also the plantation owners’ slaves, whose presence caused unease to the Southern slave owners who were worried they would incite a new revolution, this time in the States. This slave community grew and prospered in Louisiana. While Voodoo had been quietly practiced since the slave trade first started in the region in the early 18th century, it was this new high concentration of slaves, both from Haiti and from the American Slave trade, that brought new popularity to the religion and led to newfound interest from the general population. Fearing another slave uprising and worried by the meetings held mostly by slaves to practice Voodoo, the Government decided to control the practice by formally legalizing it, but under the condition there be some sort of supervision. This was the

only legal way for slaves to gather, which eventually meant that the entire practice was totally outlawed again. This only served to heighten its popularity.

Amounting to somewhere between 65 and 80 percent of all practitioners in Louisiana, women were the biggest participants in Voodoo. These women ranged virtually across all class levels, from slave women to free women of color to Creole women. This widespread influence and presence of women in the movement led to a highly matriarchal structure emerging in the Voodoo scene, from which, starting in the 19th century, emerged high-ranking women in Voodoo (known as “Voodoo Queens”). These Queens held massive amounts of influence in the movement and came to represent the Voodoo religion in general to those not involved in the practice itself. The most famous Voodoo Queen by far is the renowned Marie Laveau, whose heyday in the 1830s generated massive popularity even to this day. Though she started off as a hairdresser, she was taken under the wing of Voodoo Witch Doctor, Doctor John, who taught her much about the practice.

When news of her powers spread amongst Voodoo circles, she quickly overthrew the other Voodoo Queens of New Orleans and became the single Voodoo Queen of her time (something which continued even after her death). Thanks to some medical training as well as her Voodoo training, she was well versed in healing practices, but eventually came to specialize in matters concerning love and money. Above all, Marie Laveau was a shrewd businesswoman who managed to commercialize the practice of Voodoo in order to maximize her success and power. When she died, she was succeeded in her practice by the youngest of her 15 children, a daughter who had the same name as her, leading perhaps to more rumors of her immortality and long life. However, while you may be hard pressed to find the real Marie Laveau (even the body in her tomb is rumored to be that of another Voodoo Queen) it is believed that one can still ask for favors of Marie Laveau if money, white rum, candy, or cigars are left as offerings on her tombstone in the St. Louis Cemetery (which has more visitors than Elvis’ grave).

There are a few things that formally separate Louisiana Voodoo from its closest counterpart, Haitian Vodou. These elements include the emphasis on “gris-gris” (a magic talisman, usually a pouch, used to protect the carrier or bring them good luck), a component of Vodun practices, and various occult paraphernalia originating from “Southern Folk Magic” (which itself related to old European magic beliefs), the importance of the Voodoo Queens, and the presence of Li Grand Zombi (a snake deity based on the deity Nzambi from Whydah in Africa), whose name is taken directly from the snake owned by Marie Laveau, as a spirit guide for ceremonies.

Far from being the malicious practice it is often painted as, first by a population that condemned it out of ignorance, then by the media of the next few centuries, Voodoo was actually a huge force for good in Louisiana. The knowledge of medicine and magic held by believers of Voodoo greatly helped those who turned to it for healing and even

increased life expectancy in the slave population. Voodoo also encouraged the practice of ancestor worship and the subsequent respect of elders. For all its positive influences however, it was rumor and panic on the side of those who knew nothing of it, which formed the image of Voodoo most present in media today.

If you’ve watched the latest season of American Horror Story, then you are already slightly acquainted with the figure of Papa Legba, guardian of the underworld and passages and thus, arguably, the most important Loa. He is often likened to the figures of St. Peter or St. Michael, who hold equivalent positions in Christian lore. It has to be noted however that unlike his American Horror Story counterpart, the figure of Papa Legba, while considered generally mischievous, is not actually out for baby’s blood. His depiction in the show is also inaccurate in that it basically clothed him in the typical “Voodoo” costume: the top hat, broken sunglasses and old tux that are a staple of the Voodoo mythos in media. This can sometimes be embellished with cotton stuffed up one’s nostrils and white face paint to resemble a corpse prepared for burial, but is an image that has been replicated time and time again in the name of Hoodoo in films—from Doctor Facilier in The Princess and the Frog to villain Baron Samedi in the oft-forgotten Bond film Live and Let Die. Their physical traits are in keeping with the image of the Barons, high-ranking Loa of Death and members of the Guédé Loa, who have strong links to magic, ancestor worship, and death. These Loa are generally considered to be quite vulgar, and have been known to scare the living and taunt them by eating shards of glass or raw chilies.

Since 1932, with the release of the Bela Legosi movie “White Zombie,” there has been a re-invigorated mainstream interest in the religion of Voodoo, as well as an onslaught of representations, often completely missing the mark and based more on rumor and superstition than any actual facts. As time passes, however, portrayals of Voodoo have slowly become a little more accurate (although still generally pretty far from the truth).

This recreation and manipulation of image does not only concern the practice of Voodoo, but also the city it is inseparable from. Indeed, the city of New Orleans, same as its Voodoo culture, has been recreated time and time again, with varying degrees of accuracy. These “artistic” interpretations vary from a thriving hip and artsy community, usually with the entirety of the city composed solely of the French Quarter (looking at you again, American Horror Story), to a city comprised almost entirely of the Bayou, populated by a plethora of horror creatures. Anne Rice, of Interview with a Vampire fame, is one of the earliest writers to use the city to create the Southern Gothic aesthetic that’s oh-so-popular nowadays. But its rich cultural history amounts to more than a few Voodoo dolls stabbed through with pins and two dime curses. And while interest grows in the practice, the actual interest in the spirits themselves fades, and Voodoo becomes more and more pageantry, rather than a traditionally spiritual practice with deep roots that reflect an American cultural history.•

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OH, WHAT A

tangleD WE WEAVE WEB exploring the deep web Need a hitman? Fake social security card? How about some mail-order heroin? Thanks to the Deep Web, you can obtain any of these anonymously. Accessed through a browser called Tor, the Deep Web has two distinct implications as it seeps into mainstream usage. On the one hand, it’s a way for people to have unrestricted, untraceable access to a vastly greater amount of data and utilities than is available on the “surface Web.” For some, the Deep Web represents freedom of information and anti-censorship, which is especially important in countries with extreme Internet restriction and control of information. On the other hand, its untraceability fosters pretty much every type of criminal behavior imaginable and provides users with a possibly over-inflated sense of security.

Michael Bergman, who coined the term Deep Web, explains that “searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net through the surface of the ocean: A great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed.” Turns out, Google does not allow you to access all the content available on the Internet—far from it. The Deep Web, also known as the Invisible Web, consists of that which cannot be accessed by a standard search engine; Google, Bing, and Yahoo only provide access to the surface Web. Search engines use web crawlers to systematically browse and index publicly available web pages, but there is far more to the Internet. According to BrightPlanet, an organization specializing in Deep Web intelligence founded by Bergman, the surface Web contains about one billion individual documents, compared to the Deep Web’s 550 billion. BrightPlanet also states, “trying to wrap your mind around the Deep Web is like trying to imagine there is a whole other world with even more resources and living beings than on Earth. It’s territory unknown to most, yet it has potential for everyone.” So how does one access the Deep Web? Through a Deep Web browser—the most popular being Tor, whose web addresses end in “.onion.” Tor is to the Deep Web what Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer are to the surface Web. Activity on the Deep Web is untraceable. Tor hides the origins of web-browsing activity through a technique called “onion routing.” On the surface Web, everything you do online can be traced back to your IP address. Tor routes all Internet activity through multiple decoy servers before arriving at the desired webpage, nested in layers of encryption (hence the onion metaphor).

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katie o’brien art by katie o’brien

Tor’s gift of anonymity provides a way to combat Internet censorship and access information otherwise unavailable in countries with oppressive regimes. For example, the Turkish government recently banned access to Twitter after citizens posted evidence of corruption. A government spokesman claimed, “Twitter is being systematically used for character assassination against the government.” National Turk reports that the government is tightening its blockade, making it more difficult to avoid through simple methods. People fear that YouTube will be banned next, as it refuses to comply when the Turkish government demands that certain clips be deleted. As a result of these recent restrictions, Tor usage has surged in Turkey. Recode reports that there are “more than double the number of Turkish users on the software [than] just days before the government instituted the ban.”

Internet censorship is not unique to Turkey. The OpenNet Initiative classifies the degree of filtration occurring in a country as “no evidence,” “suspected,” “selective,” “substantial,” or “pervasive.” Based on their system, there are 20 countries classified as having pervasive censorship, five countries with substantial censorship, and 24 countries with selective censorship. In March 2013, Reporters Without Borders named the five “State Enemies of the Internet” as Vietnam, Syria, Bahrain, Iran, and China. Gary King, a political scientist who conducted a study on patterns of censorship in China, concluded that Internet censorship by the Chinese government is the “most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented.” A serious accusation. The Atlantic reports that King’s study showed that “objectionable posts are removed with a near-perfect elimination rate and typically within 24 hours of their posting” and that the censors focus their efforts on posts that attempt to instigate protests, demonstrations, or even mass gatherings that are not political. The militant system, known as the “Great Firewall of China,” blocks access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and even successfully restricts people from using Tor. The process for a person in China to access Tor is much more complicated than normal, but still doable.

As horrifying as the restriction in China sounds to the American ear, the western side of the word is not immune to Internet censorship either. It recently made headlines that the U.K. instituted a porn filtration system that comically also blocked sex education and LGBT resource websites by accident. While its purpose is to protect children online and

Internet users have the option of turning the filter off, many fear it is just the start of censorship in Great Britain. As for the United States and Canada, OpenNet Initiative reports, “while there is little technical filtering in either country, the Internet is subject to substantial state regulation in the United States and Canada. With respect to surveillance, the United States is believed to be among the most aggressive countries in the world in terms of listening to online conversations.” This is precisely the reason why Edward Snowden, after leaking documents revealing the scope of the NSA’s global surveillance programs, encouraged people to use Tor for their online communication. He stated that using Tor causes your telecommunications provider “to no longer spy on you by default, the way they do now, today, when you go to any website.” The Deep Web is currently the most

“

Law enforcement is

”

completely helpless to stop it

powerful tool available for Internet users to circumvent censorship and surveillance.

But the cliché “with great power comes great responsibility” exists for a reason. Powerful does not mean foolproof, and anonymity does not exactly foster an environment where responsibility is a priority. The anonymity offered by the Deep Web amplifies the users’ feeling of security immeasurably and, consequently, the bullying rampant on the surface Web shifts to a straight-up crime infestation on the Deep Web. In December, we all heard about the Harvard Student who was charged with emailing bomb threats with the hope that finals would be delayed. Sophomore student Eldo Kim sent the messages through an anonymous email client called Guerrilla Mail, using Tor. However, he accessed Tor on Harvard’s wireless network, so while authorities could not see that he had sent the emails, they could see that he had accessed Tor at the time when the emails were sent.

When confronted by the FBI, Kim confessed to having sent the bomb threats.

The Deep Web also provides the perfect platform for soliciting illegal services. While the Deep Web has been around for a decade, the recent shutdown of the massive online black market, Silk Road, made the website the most notorious facet of the Deep Web. With such categories on the front page as Apparel, Books, Digital Goods, Drug Paraphernalia, Electronics, Erotica, Forgeries, and Money, websites like Silk Road open up a whole word of illicit online shopping. Sometimes referred to as “the Amazon.com for illegal drugs,” Silk Road allowed its users to buy and sell drugs anonymously over the Internet using the decentralized online crypto-currency Bitcoin. In October, the FBI shut down Silk Road and arrested its creator, Ross Ulbricht, whose alias on Silk Road was the Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR).

Apparently, the nail in Ulbricht’s coffin, setting off the chain of events that led to his arrest was a simple amateur mistake made almost three years prior. In 2011, the year Silk

Road launched, the first few references to Silk Road on the surface Web were made by a user named “altoid.” Later that year, a user named “altoid” posted on a forum about “a venture backed Bitcoin startup company” and told interested users to email “rossulbricht” on Gmail. Once officials linked Ulbricht to “altoid,” they were able to link him to Dread Pirate Roberts. From there, his surface Web trail along with numerous other mistakes led to his eventual arrest. In July 2013, the FBI received a full copy of the Silk Road web server, giving them access to all transaction information and private messages. Inspection revealed that DPR was in the process of hiring a hitman to kill a user who hacked the site and attempted blackmail and that DPR had completed a hit in the past.

When Silk Road shut down, people were panicking all over the Internet, wondering whether their drug purchases could be traced back to them and some sellers did get arrested. While the case of Silk Road was extremely complex and covert, it shows that anonymity on the Deep Web is more fragile than we may think and by no means immune to mistakes made out of arrogance.

That being said, it took the FBI a full two years to track down DPR and take control of Silk Road. And about a month later, Silk Road 2.0 appeared, and it is still going strong.

There are many other Deep Web black markets for drugs, but buying and selling drugs on the Deep Web is child’s play compared to some of the other crimes that go on—not limited to child pornography, human trafficking, assassins for hire and snuff films. All are there in plain sight and law enforcement is completely helpless to stop it.

According to The Washington Post, the documents that Snowden leaked revealed that the NSA is working “around the clock to undermine Tor’s anonymity,” and that the State Department is helping fund the effort. The agency looks for ways to break Tor’s encryption by finding vulnerabilities in the system, but they have only been able to discover the identities of individuals—mass surveillance is not possible on the Deep Web. The Director of National Intelligence has stated that “the Intelligence Community’s interest in online anonymity services and other communication and networking tools is based on the undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies.” So terrorists can and do use the Deep Web to garner support and plan attacks, which is terrifying.

Michelle Obama recently told a crowd of Chinese students that Internet access should be a “universal right.” It’s great that the Deep Web allows people to protect their privacy and combat censorship, and though it can be a platform for awful crime, criminals will arguably find a way to commit crime no matter what. Either way, the Deep Web is there. Its usage will probably only continue to spread, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. Its existence has created an interesting dichotomy between citizens protecting themselves from the government by using the Deep Web, and the government attempting to protect citizens from crime on the Deep Web—a struggle that embodies the constant trade-off between liberty and security in our society. •

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YOUR WORST

NIGHTMARE the science and mythology of sleep paralysis Imagine waking up completely paralyzed. There is a strange pressure on your chest, you are aware of your surroundings, and you are overwhelmed with dread because there is an evil presence in the room with you—the Intruder.

Maybe it is whispering to you, maybe it is touching you. You cannot scream and you cannot will yourself to move. You are experiencing the phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. Would you believe that there is a scientific explanation?

Mythology has developed all around the world surrounding sleep paralysis, most commonly attributing the experience to a demon sitting on your chest.

Researchers believe that sleep paralysis happens when, essentially, your mind wakes up before your body does.

When entering REM sleep, the brain paralyzes the body using two chemicals to prevent the sleeper from moving and acting out his or her dreams. But sometimes REM sleep is disturbed and the sleeper awakens while the body is still paralyzed. Sleep paralysis is sort of the opposite of sleepwalking, which occurs when the brain does not shut down movement properly during a dream. During sleep paralysis, movement is shut down and the dream just happens right in front of your eyes. While an episode of sleep paralysis is not dangerous, it can be absolutely terrifying.

According to The Sleep Paralysis Project, there are nine conditions associated with sleep paralysis: Being “awake,” realistic perception of environment, inability to move, overwhelming fear and dread, sensed presence, chest pressure, difficulty breathing, laying on the back, and “additional unusual sensations.” The first three are the only symptoms that are always present, and the rest may occur in varying degrees of severity.

Erratic sleep patterns and certain

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KATIE O’BRIEN art by KATIE O’BRIEN

sleep disorders increase the chance of having an episode of sleep paralysis. Some people never will experience it, some will a few times in their life, and some do on a weekly basis.

The strangest part of sleep paralysis is its accompanying hallucinations. The brain often perceives that there is someone in the room, floating over you, pinning you down, or even sexually attacking you. In addition to visual hallucinations, common sensory experiences include sounds like “doors opening, animals growling, approaching footsteps, scratching, internal buzzing/beeping, malevolent whispering, as well as smells of rotting flesh, ‘death’, decay, damp, mold and feelings of being moved, drifting, rolling, floating, cold or heat.” Out of body experiences have also been reported.

If you think this sounds ridiculous or far-fetched, just read some of these stories from a Reddit thread about sleep paralysis: JUST COMING IN TO SAY GOODNIGHT: “When I realized I was paralyzed and started panicking, something whispered in my ear ‘Just coming in to say goodnight.’ That’s when I felt like something was pushing me toward the edge of my bed.”

SHADOW CREATURES: “I saw a cat-sized shadow creature at the base of my bed and it slowly crawled up on to my sheets and finally up to my chest...

Another time I saw a shadow-man walking around my room, disappearing behind my open door.”

SPOONING WITH A DEMON: “I was lying on my side with my back to the door and it felt like someone got into bed behind me. Under the covers and put their arm around my waist. Then it felt like they were cuddling into me and I

THE NIGHTMARE BY john HENRY FUSELI

could feel breath on my neck ...Worst of all it whispered ‘Not yet. You’re not ready yet.

I’ll come back when you are.’”

SEX WITH A DEMON: “I felt my legs lifting... and then [a] demon crawls on to the bed up between my legs until his face is right close to mine. I couldn’t make out the details of this face, just a silhouette. And the next thing I knew, we were having sex.”

SLICK ALIEN: “To me, it’s usually a slick, black alien-type creature about four feet tall, although I have seen a grim reaper type figure as well.”

EVIL OLD LADY: “An old lady stand[s] over my head and whispers ‘Darling...’ I told my mom about that one and she asked if I thought it was my late grandma? No. It was evil.”

HUNGRY SCARAB: “There’s a gigantic Egyptian scarab looking over me and telling me it can’t wait to taste my rotted flesh. It will then go on to describe all the ways it would eat me...and then it turns into several hundred/thousand smaller versions of scarabs and [they] buzz away into the cracks in the walls.”

EYES LIKE BLACK HOLES: “...Feminine voice telling me, ‘Go back to sleep’ or, ‘Goodnight, baby’...She’s draped in black clothing that seems wet. Skeleton hands but a very soft, feminine, young face. Eyes like black holes. She’s always sitting on my chest.”

Crazy right? All you have to do is web-search “sleep paralysis stories” to find countless unbelievable tales. I have had sleep paralysis twice. The first time, I woke up, couldn’t move, and felt a heavy pressure on my chest. Everything seemed to be buzzing and I was very warm. The second time, I had nodded off for a moment while sitting on my friend’s bed. She was talking to me to try to get me to wake up and I could hear her but I couldn’t respond. Neither time did I feel an evil presence or hallucinate, but I also knew that it was sleep paralysis and remained calm, focused on breathing, and tried to move my fingers. Some researchers believe that the sense of evil and the hallucinations stem from the intense fear felt upon waking up paralyzed.

These hallucinations have, unsurprisingly, yielded mythology and lore surrounding the phenomenon worldwide.

Sleep paralysis is also commonly associated with the mythic incubus, and its female counterpart the succubus—demons that sexually assault people in their sleep. Another link is to the Old Hag from British lore, who leaves her body at night to sit on victims’ chests. In southern-America, sleep paralysis is commonly referred to as “being ridden by the witch.”

In German folklore, it is a spirit or goblin that rides on sleeping humans’ chests, causing nightmares. Legend in Fiji describes sleep paralysis as being eaten by a demon, sometimes by the spirit of a dead relative, who has returned for unfinished business. New Guinean mythology explains the

phenomenon with sacred trees that feed on human essence—the sensation of sleep paralysis occurs when you wake up during the feeding.

Catalan legend says the Pesanta causes sleep paralysis, a huge dog that puts its paws on people’s chests while they are sleeping. WebMD reports, “research shows that people in countries as diverse as China, East Africa, Mexico, Newfoundland, and the United States have long believed that paralysis is caused by demons, witches, or other supernatural creatures sitting on their chests.”

In addition to similar mythological explanations across cultures, the word for sleep paralysis in many unrelated languages has to do with demons and ghosts pressing down on the body. To give just a few examples, the Korean term for sleep paralysis is gawi nulim, which means “being pressed down by a ghost.” Sleep paralysis is often called Ja-thoom in Arabic, which translates to “what sits heavily on something.” In Finnish, the word for nightmare, painajainen, is believed to have originally referred to sleep paralysis, because painaja translates to ‘presser’.

“ ” reports of alien

abductions can be explained by sleep paralysis

Therefore, sleep paralysis is a very strange but shared human experience that has helped shape our notions about the paranormal. According to Scientific American, “some people are certain that they have experienced such paranormal events” as “attacks by demons, ghostly visitations, and alien abductions” when in reality, most of the events were probably hallucinations. It is believed that the contents of the hallucinations are influenced by one’s cultural background. For example, Americans only started reporting being incapacitated and probed by aliens after flying saucers became part of pop culture. Carl Jung explains in his book Flying Saucers that reports of alien abductions can be explained by sleep paralysis—the lights, the noise, the feeling of whirling, the actual alien in plain sight—all explainable.

The mind is simply projecting a nightmare, a co-creation between the sleeper’s beliefs and subconscious, while in a malfunctioning state between being asleep and awake. The terror felt upon awakening causes the brain to perceive everything as a threat, morphing images and sensations based on its expectations. So if you ever wake up paralyzed, don’t allow fear to take over, or you may find yourself confronting apparitions of your deepest fears—and they will certainly feel real. •

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ellen page: the debated bravery of coming out and one american chick it matters to anna Alison brenner art by THELONIA SAUNDERS This past Valentine’s Day, Ellen Page stepped out in front of hundreds of young people at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s inaugural Time to THRIVE conference and, after eight minutes of encouraging words and charmingly awkward weight shifting, told them why she was really there.

“I’m here today because I am gay,” she said, the audience erupting into applause. “And because maybe I can make a difference to help others have an easier and more hopeful time.”

As pretty much the whole world knows by now, Page was not the first celebrity to come out this year, nor the last.

College football star Michael Sam preceded her announcement with his own by only five days and, most recently, Tyler Glenn, the Neon Trees frontman, came out in a Rolling Stone article that hit the presses on March 28th. And she certainly wasn’t the first star—let alone Hollywood actress—to get real about her sexuality. So why did her announcement create such a stir? And did it even really matter?

Many websites, blogs, and online commenters alike asked that very same question and for every Daily Beast (“Ellen Page Comes Out As Gay in Beautiful Speech at Human Rights Campaign Foundation Conference”), there seemed to be a Time magazine (“Ellen Page: Is Coming Out Really Still ‘Brave’?”).

In Brandon Ambrosino’s Time article, he agreed that it’s “great to hear a celebrity speak so authentically about dealing with and overcoming pain,” but questioned the bravery of Page’s “announc[ing] to a room full of LGBT youth, at an event sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, that she, a popular and well-to-do Hollywood 20-something, was gay.” Juxtaposed with Michael Sam, the NFL hopeful whose announcement has lead to “a chance he won’t be drafted now,” Page’s coming out seemed like small potatoes to Ambrosino. After all, she didn’t stand to have her

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career ruined; at worst, “it is possible that some ignorant producer might not cast her in a particular part out of fear that she can no longer ‘play straight.’”

Even Sam’s announcement was met, in part, with eye rolls. Comments on Will Leitch’s New York Magazine article “Jason Collins and Michael Sam Are Heroes and, More Importantly, Forefathers” veered from dismissive (“*if this were 1963 instead of 2014, maybe. Gay is as mainstream as light beer,” and “Sam has yet to prove himself…He’s no hero. He’s a guy who plays ball well and labels himself gay”) to downright hurtful (“The continued feminization of pro sports” and “There is nothing heroic about sexual deviance”). The existence of those last two comments alone only proves just how far we are from living in a society where being gay actually doesn’t matter and, while it’s great that

“

What’s Mine?

”

What’s Private?

What’s PUblic?

people want to believe we now live in a world where everyone and your mother is gay (okay, maybe not your mother), it just honestly isn’t true. As Leitch writes, “All this matters.

It matters so much. Which means it’s time for the next time.

It’s time to make it really not matter at all.”

Since being gay—and coming out as such—still does matter to society, it makes perfect sense that it matters also to the gays who have yet to come out, in both how they choose to present themselves to others and in how others

choose to view them. Tegan Quinn, half of the queer, indie rock-goddess duo Tegan and Sara, might have said it best in an interview with the Huffington Post post-Ellen Page’s HRCF speech: “We know lots of people who are struggling

“

I was tired of hiding — or, at least, of ‘lying

”

by omission’

say “yeah, sure, I guess.”

But I, too, was tired of hiding—or, at least, of “lying by omission.” So, when Ellen Page got out there in front of hundreds of LGBTQ teens and said, “I am gay,” I felt almost as if I were watching myself up there, announcing it to the world. And when they broke into applause—well, it felt a lot like they were clapping for the both of us.

So yes, it is 2014, not 1963. Yes, much of the entertainment industry is gay and many celebrities are out. But Ellen Page never claimed to be original, or unprecedented, or even a hero. She just wanted to make a difference.

And, while I can’t speak for everyone, for this tiny American chick, she did. •

with how to come out. Do I come out, what’s mine, what’s private, what’s public?” She continues: “[We] have certainly been there to listen to and sort of nurture this idea that you can come out and it’s okay.” Thus, to her, what Page did both “will make her a happier person” and was “incredibly brave,” as it “told a whole generation of people that it’s okay to be out.”

This past Valentine’s Day, I checked Facebook one last time before shutting my phone off and going to bed. And then I saw it: a link from Variety with the headline, “Ellen Page Comes Out As Gay: ‘I’m Tired of Hiding.’” I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Same headline. Then, I laughed.

I laughed because, ever since Juno came out, people have told me I look and sound and act “just like Ellen Page.”

My friends told me. Boys told me, typically when they were trying to hit on me. Even my aunt told me. And, just when I thought that maybe I had outgrown the comparison or the Juno craze had died down sufficiently, there was one of the first friends I made at the Hangar Theatre last summer running up to me in the hallway because she had finally figured out who I reminded her of.

“Who?” I asked, thinking that she was going to mention a friend from home, or a cousin, or something else entirely.

“Ellen Page!” she announced.

All these thoughts rushed through my head as I sat on the floor of my childhood bedroom and watched all eight minutes of that speech. All the head nods, all the gesticulations—and yes, especially that awkward, hands-in-the-pockets weight shifting—were me. Or at least something a lot like me. Creepily, a hell of a lot like me.

And when she said those three words that sent the entire audience into a rapture of applause, something within me released.

For years, I have been struggling with my sexuality. I’d say “had,” but if we’re being honest here, it’s an ongoing process, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever truly figure it out—and that’s okay. I I know that I like girls and I know that, in the past, I’ve also liked guys—although if you asked me to name the last five people I liked, all the names would be feminine and most would end in the letter “a” (go figure). When I came to college and the topic of my sexual orientation came up, I would just say I was “not straight;” when people asked if that meant I was bisexual, I would

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scary

censorship

who decides what’s appropriate for child eyeballs?

yana lysenko

art by jin yoo

When Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was first published in 1981, conservative parents across the country protested its content so much that the book, along with its subsequent sequels, became the most contested book series of the nineties. The consensus of those protesting was that the book targeted an audience much younger than appropriate for its “mature” content and imagery.

20 years or so after this controversy, HarperCollins released a new edition of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The stories (thankfully) went unchanged, but Alvin Schwartz’s beloved preadolescent novel lost the key component of its popularity: Stephen Gammell’s graphic, disturbing illustrations. The startlingly surreal black-and-white pencil drawings by Gammell were replaced with Brett Helquist’s less scary, more cartoonish story depictions, and this sparked a controversy amongst fans of the childhood classic—those who grew up reading the book under covers with a flashlight, terrified by the pictures, but excited nonetheless. Parental groups have always tried to lobby support for censorship, especially regarding content that includes violence, death, or grotesque imagery, but in their excessive concern over appropriate visual media, they neglect the interests of their children.

I remember when I picked up a 99-cent copy of the book in elementary school. Schwartz’s story of Harold the human-skinning scarecrow or the hook-wearing serial killer called “The Hook Man” were unsettling, but they could not compare to the disturbing illustrations. The images of inhuman faces, torn limbs, and ghostly figures gave the visual sensation of watching a horror movie without the realistic violence that would have overwhelmed most ten-year-olds.

As a child, I was simultaneously excited and horrified by the pictures. Initially shocked by the gruesome imagery, something would compel me to look back at them, flipping through the book in the hopes that there would be more.

Perhaps that’s why Schwartz’s books appealed to preadolescent readers: They provided the quick rush of excitement sought from horror through the illustrations, but avoided prolonged exposure to gore and violence that may have shocked an unaccustomed young viewer. I found Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark after realizing that the influx of violence and gore in horror films was too overwhelming for my preadolescent mind. Schwartz’s books gave me an adrenaline rush without the sensory realism of horror films; I couldn’t see people die in the books or hear their screams like I could in movies. However, as children ma-

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ture into teenagers, this realism disintegrates and we increasingly are able to see films as simply fantasy. Simple horror like Schwartz’s books, children’s shows like Courage the Cowardly Dog, and cheesy Disney Channel original movies like Don’t Look Under the Bed (which was also banned, by the way) not only give children what they’re looking for, but also introduce horror so that as we mature, we can willingly move deeper into the genre without being disturbed. By substituting Helquist’s illustrations, the books lose their ability to serve as an effective transition into visual horror as a genre that Scary Stories originally provided to its readers.

Preadolescents with a desire for horror imagery will grow into adolescents with an even greater desire for horror. But due to limited exposure to such a genre, they prolong the development of something like a horror coping mechanism that allows viewers to watch horror movies and other imagery with no long-term psychological disturbances.

By attempting to remove horror imagery, those who support censoring it fail to recognize young viewers’ legitimate psychological need for excitement. From childhood to early adulthood, we have a heightened craving for emotional stimulation, or what psychologist Marvin Zuckerman refers to as “sensation seeking.” This constant quest for excitement manifests itself in activities ranging from drug use to skydiving to watching horror movies that all, in different ways, provide adrenaline rushes. Since most people can’t jump off a bridge on a weekly basis, one of the most accessible ways to feel these rushes is through unrealistic

thriller or horror films that provide not only escapism, but a degree of violence and gore that instinctively appeals to us.

It’s the violence that concerns people, however. Horror, as a genre, faces particular criticism from parents and other defenders of media censorship because of its depiction of bad behavior and extreme violence. Defenders of horror censorship argue that such gruesome imagery can damage psychological development during youth in various ways, from encouraging acute anxiety to increased desensitization and dehumanization that may lead to sociopathic tendencies. By attempting to save the young viewers from burgeoning psychological problems, critics inadvertently prevent adolescents from learning to cope with violence.

In 2011, the British Board for Film Classification completely banned screening or distribution of the horror film sequel The Human Centipede II, believing that it could inflict “psychological harm” upon its viewers. The Board argued that “there is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalized, degraded, and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience.” But how does viewing these so-called brutal acts on screen translate to pleasure for the audience? Saying the audience feels “pleasure” implies that they enjoy watching human mutilation and torture. There is a difference, however, between enjoying such acts, and watching them simply to feel a rush of adrenaline, while also acknowledging that the film is entirely unrealistic. Frequently, when viewers witness a particularly atrocious act in a horror film, they will look away because the imagery is too grotesque for their own appreciation. This shows a certain degree of human sensitivity even while watching horror films, and such an example may prove that while people watch horror films, it’s not the violent action that appeals to them, but the fear, disgust, and simultaneous thrill of seeing what they hope to never witness in real life.

The rise of mass media from the fifties onward through television, cinema, and consumer-accessible literature has inspired psychologists to formulate correlations between viewing media violence and acting out based on media violence. These conclusions range from arguments of increased social aggressions to more bold assertions that horror films encourage gruesome murders. One major case cited in these arguments is the 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger in England, where he was abducted by two 10-yearold boys, tortured, and killed. Some British tabloids at the time argued that the murder was supposedly inspired by the horror film Child’s Play 3, because Bulger was splashed with blue paint while tortured, which the killer doll Chucky had also done in the film. Apparently one of the killers’ fathers had rented the film a few months prior to the murder, but it was never confirmed whether or not his son actually watched it. Additionally, the boys had shown signs of longterm psychological issues after extensive professional analysis, so there is a tenuous connection between viewing such a film, and acting out based on the violence it portrayed.

In the past 20 years, psychologists have released studies arguing that no correlation exists between media violence and realistic violence, because media has risen and expanded in the past half-century or so beyond horror films

alone. Psychologist Barrie Gunter published a study in the American Behavioral Scientist, an academic journal, in 2008, stating that violence has increased with the rise of popular media, but media has such a vast variety of subcategories that it’s impossible to isolate actual violence with its fictional portrayal. While horror films have skyrocketed in popularity since the mid-20th century, so have television news pro-

“

legitimate

psychological need

”

for excitement

grams that bombard viewers with headlines and images of violence—in this case, real violence. The fantastical element of horror lit and films appeals to its audience, because even in a particularly violent scene, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that all of it is fake, that it is still fundamentally fiction. In news stories, however, there is no fantasy, but a firm insistence on open, uncensored reporting. Censors can overlook the psychological harm or provocative social maliciousness of Libyans beating dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s body after his death (as was shown with video footage in 2011), so they shouldn’t fear the danger of a bad Chucky sequel.

Horror’s other main appeal comes from its ability to graciously remind viewers of their own comfortable privilege. Danny Boyle’s horror film 28 Days Later visualizes the effects of a zombie apocalypse realistically enough to greatly disturb us, but even greater is our relief after the film ends and we remember that mysterious pandemic viruses don’t exist (except for one recently discovered in Siberia, but let’s ignore that for now). In a world full of complaining, horror films encourage us to contrast our lives to those of the characters and remember our own blessings.

Still, one has to wonder just how well we can control children’s exposure to violent media. It would be impossible to determine a strict age limit at which horror can be deemed appropriate. And whether parents like it or not, the desire for adrenaline combined with growing peer influence increases the likelihood that preadolescents will develop an interest in horror and visual violence, so adults shouldn’t be surprised to find their children discretely seeking out more daring forms of media as they grow older.

Despite significant evidence that disproves social and emotional harm caused by fictional violence, parental groups probably won’t stop lobbying for censorship. It may stem from their own ignorance, or simply the inherent desire to shield their children’s eyes from anything unsafe, but overcoming parental restrictions is the key issue for every adolescent coming-of-age. In any case, the digital age has made censorship more difficult, considering that most media is now readily available on the web. It’s no longer difficult to find unrated versions of horror films online, and old editions of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, while expensive, are available on Amazon and other bookselling sites. So, whether the censoring boards ban certain films or not, with the prevalence of media on the Internet, no one’s going to care whether the movie they’re illegally streaming is banned or not. •

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from athens to vanderbilt

to kickstarter inequality and art “Who gets to create art?” asked The Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott in an essay on the controversy over the 2012 release of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. “For the most part,” he says, “it’s born of privilege.” In large part, the right to create art, at least on a national level, seems to be reserved for those who can afford it as well as for those who have historically been permitted to do so. This idea goes back to Athens at least, if not further. Elliott says, “I have a vague memory of a history class talking about the role of leisure and abundance in the creation of much of the work stocking our museums.” To be part of the elite, or the hegemony at least, is to have leisure time, resources, and inspirational encouragement—all the necessary tools to provide society’s artwork.This form of stratification appears in the way that schools’ arts programs are funded disparately by class, in the way the power structure reproduces itself in culture, and in the way that opportunity and motivation to create art are unequally distributed.

The process starts in elementary school, when certain kids are able to go to public schools that are well-funded by local property tax dollars; these are the few schools with a surplus of money that can be allocated to arts programs.

Additionally, a completely separate group of students are able to go to private performing arts schools that give them incredible advantages in terms of accessing and creating art. The discrepancy compounds further when wealthier students go to college. Of course, it’s mostly the more wealthy who will get the B.A.’s and M.F.A’s, whereas the majority of the remaining student population are going to be encouraged to look for something with immediate post-grad financial benefits. After college, creative types still have to decide between devoting time to their art and earning a living wage. Elliott says, “More importantly, is there a net beneath you if you fall, because nobody accomplishes anything if they only get to fail one time.” Further, it takes just the slightest bit of critical thinking to realize that “if you were raised to believe your voice matters, it’s more likely that you’ll believe you

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kaitlyn tiffany art by daniela pimental have something important to say,” in Elliot’s words.

There’s no way to ask the question of “who gets to create art?” without a historical framework. According to sociologist Peter Blau, from the medieval era up until about the 19th century in Europe, artists were dependent upon the patrons who would determine all of the aesthetic trends— members of the nobility and the church who had the funds to support art and the leisure time to enjoy it. In a more stable, late 18th century Europe, after class became even more firmly established based on wealth and lineage, the restrictions of art loosened up a little. In fact, there wasn’t much difference culturally between the elite and the masses during this time, continuing through the time of the vaudeville and the early opera in the 19th century, because elite status was sufficiently entrenched as to let the cultural stuff slide.

Once the industrial revolution began, and “access to elite status became less limited through family ties and more open to new wealth,” according to Shamus Khan of The New York Times, there emerged an “exclusive culture distinct from the common American.” The industrial revolution was the era in which the American bourgeoisie was consolidated. Khan explains this consolidation with an anecdote about William Vanderbilt. When Vanderbilt tried to buy a private box in the New York Academy of Music in 1880, and was turned down, he joined forces with other new-money families like the Goulds, Rockefellers, and Whitneys to found the Metropolitan Opera House. “Modern temples of power were built on the foundations of the old,” says Khan, and these new elites “built moats and fences not just around neighborhoods but also around cultural artifacts.” It was around the time of the Rockefellers that the opera houses dropped their vaudeville performances, that Verdi upped his ticket prices, and that the Metropolitan Museum of Art started turning people away if they exuded “offensive odors.”

It is even more unlikely today that the underprivileged will be able to express their talents through

art because, as Khan notes, we have created a deeply-ingrained culture of “individual self-cultivation.” The rhetoric of the new elite “emphasizes such individualism and the talents required to make it,” while at the same time reiterating that, “talents are costly to develop and we refuse to socialize these costs.” This notion is most obvious and noted in the allocation of funds in our public school system.

The National Center for Education Statistics released a report in early 2012 that illustrated the changes in arts funding for public schools as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act; the report showed a 20% reduction in arts funding for economically disadvantaged school districts. According to a study by the National Art Education Association in 2010, this is mainly due to the fact that the No Child Left Behind Act creates stringent testing and funding standards.

In poorly-funded schools, this means cutting all programs not directly related to standardized test scores or graduation rates. The Rand Corporation released a report in 2005 which argued that art “can connect people more deeply to the world and open them to new ways of seeing,” and more empirically, that art programs in schools have been correlated with increased abilities in math, reading, critical thinking, and verbal skill. Eric Cooper of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education asserts that arts involvement is especially important for the economically disadvantaged, saying, “Arts education enables those children from a financially challenged background to have a more level playing field with children who have had those enrichment experiences.”

But, ironically, the kids who could benefit most from an arts education are the kids who aren’t getting one.

In 2012, Thomas Espenshade of Princeton University wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that “elite higher education helps maintain social inequality in America and the economic recession is magnifying that problem, especially in public institutions.” He notes that this trend is evident from start to finish in the college process—more than half of the applicants to America’s elite universities are from upper-middle-class or upper-class families, and by graduation the rate is 60%. Stereotypes of liberal arts educations going to the children of the affluent aren’t stereotypes at all—while 79% of students in the top income quartile receive Bachelor’s degrees, the figure for the bottom quartile is a mere 11%. Artsiest of the liberal arts schools, institutions such as Hamilton College and Bard College boast in their admissions materials that their alumni are some of the wealthiest individuals in the country—neglecting to mention that this is a status that these alumni mostly enter with.

Judith and Peter Blau conducted a quantitative study of America’s 125 largest metropolitan areas asking the question, “How do social and economic conditions influence the prevalence of artistic pursuits?” What they found was numerous reiterations of what we already knew. Sociologists echo each other across generations, with Thorstein Veblen writing in 1899, “the development of American art depends on the contributions of the wealthy, the capitalist elite,” with Pierre Bourdieu, in 1973, noting how cultural capital forms symbolic boundaries between classes that are recreated generation after generation, and with Steven Feld, in 1983, collecting the numbers and noticing that audiences for art events are disproportionately from wealthier households,

even for popular music and movies.

This was all still true by the time sociologists Blau & Blau conducted their study, and they explained this phenomenon as an off-shoot of a capitalist democracy. “The nouveaux riches help legitimize their elite status beyond the purely economic realm by becoming patrons of the arts, both because they assume a function traditionally associated with elite status and because patronizing the arts enables them to guide cultural standards.” Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of their findings is that this economic inequality actually promotes artistic creation in a metropolis, and not for good reasons. Inequality increases the notable cultural distance between classes and therefore requires the creation of more art to satisfy the various subcultures that arise around these lines. The wealthy subculture, of course, receives the most statistically significant portion of this increased production.

Pierre Bourdieu’s 1973 work, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” explains that “the educational system reproduces all the more perfectly the structure of the distribution of cultural capital among classes.” He asserted that art, literature, and culture almost always directed undue attention to the creators and diverted attention from the social situations and advantages that formed the creators themselves. In other words, people refused to acknowledge that artistic representations were recreations of inequality. Recent discussions show that the art world thrives on inequality. Adam Davidson points out that “because each piece of fine art is unique and can’t be owned by anybody else, it does a more powerful and subtle job of signaling wealth than virtually any other luxury good.” The fine art market seems to be completely separate from the overall economy, as it grew faster than subprime housing in the years 2003-2007. Therefore, the rich not only own the ability to make art, they own the ability to possess it as well.

Ticket prices for high culture goods and events have excluded the middle class for years, but the cost of things like popular movies and musical shows are now rising in excess of inflation, too.

It’s hard to pretend that economic advantage doesn’t equal artistic advantage. People are lauding the accomplishments of online organizations such as Tumblr, a free blogging and art-promoting site, that claims to grant the ability to “follow the world’s creators,” and KickStarter, a website that allows people to remotely donate money to small arts projects based on brief pitches and video clips.

The 2011 documentary Press/Pause/Play argued that art is becoming a more democratic process as independent publishers and moviemakers break away from the constraints of “the industry.” Technological advances may well change the conversation when it comes to the acquisition of the supplies to make certain types of art—but it hardly addresses the issues of time, aspirations, aesthetic training, educational background, or industry know-how. Even the “independent” art world is an industry after all, and if you can save a sliver of your paycheck each week to eventually acquire some recording equipment on-the-cheap, does that really equate being on the same playing field as someone who received a pricey, formal musical education at Julliard? •

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the

haunting

in

ithaca Cornell’s most notorious spooks zack labe art by AURORA ROJER It is likely that, at least once, you have found yourself locked away and alone on a Saturday night while immersed in a scary movie. After the movie ends, you find yourself exiting into the hall. You run to the bathroom. The showerhead that has been broken since the beginning of the fall semester continues to drip. A creepy kind of drip... Drip...

Drip... You quickly brush your teeth and turn toward the door. Scream. Oh, wait. It’s just the lovely and semi-disturbing howls of drunken Saturday night escapades at the TCAT bus stop. Okay, back to your room. Thud. Ugh, just another night of furniture rearrangement with your friendly neighbors on the next floor up.

We’ve all been there. Petrified that some ghoulish figure is lurking, waiting for the exact moment your roommate decides to leave. And yet, despite this feeling, we love it.

We love to be scared.

The paranoia of being alone in the dark is enough to raise most hairs. Combine that with a campus that features gothic architecture, deep gorges, and a history of urban legends, and you’ve found the ideal setting for a scary story. Even a simple late night walk home from Olin makes us shudder—be it in response to the faint sound of laughter across the dark Triphammer Foot Bridge, or the rustling of hemlock trees on Libe Slope. From stories of poltergeists in Statler to the still-unsolved mystery of the old Ecology House fire, Cornell is immersed in secrets and hauntings that lurk around every building.

bradfield hall

Bradfield Hall, Tompkins County’s tallest building, is an odd structure with windows on only the top floor. It was a late night back in November 2012, and my group-mates

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and I had just finished up a project. While taking the elevator down, it stopped on the 7th floor. And then it stopped on the 5th floor. No one entered the elevator. When we mentioned this strange experience to our professor the next day, he told us the story of how, supposedly, a former professor haunts parts of the buildings—usually through “unexplained elevator stops.” Cue Twilight Zone theme song.

So there it is. My own little Cornell ghost encounter. In spite of that, the following encounters tell of a much more haunted past and present.

rebecca cornell

The roots of apparitions and ghouls can be traced to well before the founding of the university. Ezra Cornell descended from an affluent family that settled in Rhode Island in the late 17th century. In 1673, shocking news swept the Quaker community that the well-known Rebecca Cornell had been burned to death in an “unhappy accident.” Early police reports focused on the theory that her clothing had ignited from coming too close to the bedroom fireplace.

But suspicions grew. Rebecca’s brother, John Briggs, testified in court that he saw the ghost-like figure of Rebecca appear to him in his sleep and say, “See how I was burnt with fire.” When a local crime team was sent in to investigate the body, they discovered that Rebecca Cornell had a small stab wound. Her son, Thomas Cornell, was charged with murder and later hanged. After his hanging, there were no more reported encounters with Rebecca’s ghost. It’s interesting to note that after Thomas’ execution, his wife gave birth to a daughter named Innocent, who later married Richard Borden. Borden is a direct ancestor of Lizzie Borden—the infamous woman who murdered her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892.

“Lizzie Borden had an axe She gave her mother 40 whacks When she saw what she had done She gave her father 41.”

“

Cornell’s dark corridors of seemingly ancient

gothic

architectural structures

”

are enough to incite fear and pAranoia willard straight hall

After the death of Willard Straight, his widow, Dorothy, donated a large sum of money to construct the student union building. For years, she longed to be reunited with her husband again. It is reported she performed multiple séances in Willard Straight to contact his spirit through me-

diums, but they were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, students and staff occasionally witness unexplained presences in the building. Most of these ghost-like figures described are men wearing tuxedos with hairstyles not of this era, who appear to be headed to a formal party.

statler hall

One of the most haunted buildings on campus is Statler Hall. Third shift custodial staff have often accounted seeing a pale, darkly-dressed woman, thought to be Alice Statler, emerge from the walls and clock faces. During one late night shift in 1998, the manager of the custodial staff recalled that a ghost-like figure grabbed and tugged on him in Statler Auditorium. “It wasn’t trying to hurt me,” he remarked. “It was just being playful … Believe me, Alice is here.” In fact, after one encounter with Alice, an employee walked right out of the hotel and never returned.

the ecology house

The headline reads, “Nine Die in Cornell Fire.” During the early morning hours of April 5, 1967, an unsolved, but suspected arson fire raged through the Cornell Heights Residential Club. The former motel and present day Ecology House once housed upper-class women and students in a six-year Ph.D. program. With no smoke detectors or other fire prevention technologies, new furniture and upholstery released toxic gases and chemicals as the fire quickly spread throughout the structure. Eight students, one professor, and one dog tragically passed away; there were 62 survivors.

Current students of the Ecology House often report unexplained flickering of lights or voices in some parts of the building. While many of these incidents are reported in the basement, residents have also heard a dog barking in addition to apparition-like hazes in some of the dorm rooms.

risley hall

The Ecology House is not the only campus dorm with unexplained activity; Risley Hall is often alleged to be a hotbed for mystery and folklore. In 1911, Mrs. Russell Sage donated $300,000 to building Risley Hall and asked that the building be named after her husband’s mother. It is reported that Prudence Risley, or “Auntie Pru,” lurks through the building flickering lights and is responsible for unexplained footsteps late at night in the hallways. Mysterious cold drafts are also felt throughout the building during these late night hours.

There are plenty of other rumored poltergeist-type incidences on campus, from falling bookshelves in the Olin stacks, to fraternity haunts at Sigma Chi, Lambda Chi Alpha, and Delta Kappa Epsilon. Cornell’s dark corridors of seemingly ancient gothic architectural structures are enough to incite fear and paranoia. While perhaps many of these unexplained haunts are, in fact, explainable, it is most certain that Cornell’s ivy walls are implanted with some sort of spirit—be it supernatural, or just the effects of a late-night Red Bull study session. •

25\\

understanding the Sound

and the fury

an outsider’s look into the mythical world of sorority rush anna Alison brenner Before I came to college, I couldn’t understand why anyone who wasn’t a “girly-girl” would join a sorority. The stereotype of prissy, Jewish American Princesses who slept on fluffy pink comforters and wore Juicy tracksuits everywhere was far too ingrained in my head—by the media, and god knows what else1—for me to possibly imagine any alternative.

And then I came to Cornell.

Over my first few months here, I met girls who were actually in sororities. And while some fit the stereotype better than others, most of them barely did, and some didn’t at all. These girls wore t-shirts and jeans, watched Arrested Development, and loved Harry Potter, David Sedaris, The Catcher in the Rye. In other words, they were cool. Before long, many of them became my closest friends.

A year passed. I was now a semi-all-knowing sophomore, it was Fall Break, and all the dining halls were closed.

Which was how my close friend, Ingrid2 (with whom I had a long conversation during O-Week about how we were “not the sorority type”) and I ended up following a mutual friend of ours home for brunch.

“Home” turned out to be a beautiful, red brick house on North Campus. Our friend opened the double glass doors, and there we were, smack dab in the middle of the parlor. The parlor.

We made our way past the elegant dining room—which had wallpaper, real, nice wooden floors, and at least two large tables with fancy chairs—and into the kitchen, where we helped ourselves to chocolate chip pancakes and seemingly-unlimited fruit salad. And that’s when my best friend—

1 Middle school bullies? 13 years of prep school? Regardless, there’s no real excuse for my prejudice besides my own shortsightedness.

2 Her name isn’t really Ingrid, but, in developing this article, I decided to use pseudonyms to protect interviewees’ identities, allowing them to speak freely and without fear of being found out.

//26

who had been adamant that she “was not the sorority type” just a year ago—turned to me and said, “Hey, maybe we should rush.”

“If this is what being in a sorority’s actually like,” I said, “maybe we should.”

And then I laughed, because I was kidding. And she laughed, because she wasn’t.

I first thought to write this article my freshman year, after going to a Knicks game during the first weekend of winter break with my friend, Taylor. A year older than me, Taylor had rushed the previous winter and was, at the time of the Knicks game, living in her sorority. When we struck up a conversation about what we were going to do for the rest of break, she remarked that she had to return to campus early for Rush Week. I was intrigued.

“What’s Rush Week like?” I asked.

“It’s… stressful, honestly,” she answered. “There’s just so many people you have to talk to, and you only have such a short amount of time that conversations rarely get beyond what your major is and how cold it is outside. Plus, you have to dress up. And it’s really, really cold.”

“So why do you have to go back for rush this year if you already rushed last year?”

“Well, now I have to help run rush. Which I’m so not looking forward to…”

She proceeded to tell me how running rush entailed toiling through a packed schedule full of house decorating, cleaning, and, of course, meeting and evaluating the prospective new members.

“Plus, I really need to go shopping for new clothes before I go back.”

I was confused. “New clothes? But you’re not rushing, you’re only evaluating the rushees, right?”

“Well, yeah, but you want to give the house a good image. So we have a dress code.”

“A dress code?” I snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Nope. And you have to get fancier as the days go on.”

A list of all the clothes Taylor needed to procure fol

“

they’re on something and i’m not sure what it is.

But it’s a very hard drug.

”

lowed. I listened, incredulous.

“That’s so weird,” was the only response I could come up with.

“Yeah. It’s totally like its own little world, basically.”

Its own little world, I remember thinking. Huh. From that moment on, I was hooked. I knew I had to figure out what exactly Rush Week was, to understand its set-up, its rituals, the highs, the lows—everything.

And of course, like any good writer, I would have to write about it.

Except there were issues.

I first completed this article last year, which is why three of the following four interviews were recorded in the spring of 2013, each about the rush season that year. This article underwent numerous drafts and copyedits since then. It was finally proofed and set to make it into the kitsch layout for the issue that semester—when it was pulled from the magazine, due to fears that the article (and those interviewed in it) presented the rush experience in an unrealistic and potentially negative light.

While it is true that four people’s opinions are not the end-all be-all on rush and sororities, they are still four people’s opinions. They are stories about four different rush experiences—now from two different years, no less—and four different outcomes. They should be read and understood as such.

So, without further ado, here they are.

rush week dropout meets second-year sister The first person I thought to interview was Jessica, a close friend of mine from L.A. who is, in many ways, your stereotypical girly-girl: Her room is a pink explosion, she’s always dressed in J. Crew or Victoria’s Secret, and she has a 3:1 heels-to-sneakers ratio. I was surprised to learn that she dropped out of Rush Week early on in the process and figured her story would be a particularly interesting one.

By some bizarre twist of fate, the moment we sat down in my room to begin our conversation, Adele, another friend of mine and proud sister of a “lower tier” sorority, walked in. Figuring this would be my only chance to have both a current sister and Rush Week dropout in the same room, I asked Jessica to tell me about her experience.

“Um, it was like… I can’t even explain it,” she began, sitting down on my bed and making herself comfortable. “I dropped out because I got sick. Now I only really remember the ones I didn’t like.”

“That makes sense,” I responded.

She perked up suddenly, remembering Adele was in the room. “Wait a minute, Adele, you’re in a sorority, right?”

Adele turned around and smiled, “Yeah, I’m in [sorority name].”

“Ah, okay. I actually don’t remember that one, which means it must be nice. I only really remember the ones I didn’t like. Well,” she rolled her eyes, “it’s not that I didn’t like them, it’s just that… some of them have, like, Barbies.

Like, I can’t explain it any other way. Like, [one of the upper tier sororities]—I don’t even know what they’re on. They’re on something, and I’m not sure what it is. But it’s a very hard drug.”

“Coke,” Adele offered, matter-of-factly. I laughed.

“Yeah,” Jessica continued. “It’s a very hard drug and they’re super peppy and they’re, like, if you wanted the epitome of a sorority girl on coke, you would go there.

“Anyway, in terms of the whole rush process, it’s like— you like wait in front of the house. And then the girls are like, ‘Okay, two minutes, guys!’ And then music starts blasting from the house. And then they start banging on the house— so much that you think the house is going to crumble. And there are screams, and pop music playing at screeching levels. Then they open the doors, and there’s dancing and music and more screaming and lots of hair flipping. And you go in, and you cannot hear—you go deaf—and one of the sisters like takes you—it’s very systematic—and they take you, and they sit down and they sit by you, and there’s lots of touching, lots of asking questions.

“And then the next sister comes back and then they like switch out. And you get two or three sisters. And, like, they have to memorize all this, so they have to really listen to you, because they tell the next sister stuff about you. And that’s just the first round…”

Adele jumped in, “It’s hard to remember names. I was so bad at that…”

“Those are the first two days,” Jessica continued. “You go to six houses each day. It is painful, Anna. I can’t even… in the cold, in the snow. And you have to look kinda cute.

And you’re losing your voice after, like, one house. Because you have to understand, like, while they’re talking to you and asking you questions, there are like 50 other girls doing the same thing in a very small space. And it’s all very—it has to be very superficial stuff because they have to meet a ton of girls, like hundreds of girls. So they have to ask you the basic questions. And you do this over and over and over again to the point where you know what the person next to you did for winter break. You end up going to all of the houses. Then, after the first two days, you pref.1 “And they all have drinks, too. They have, like, their house drink, like salted caramel hot chocolate, hot apple cider. Warm drinks, that type of thing. Some of the houses had really good drinks—and like, you lose your voice—you need them, because you literally lose your voice.

“They also all have stories about how a sister came in their need. It’s like some story that rhymes and has a moral.

And there’s, like, pictures and motions.

“Oh, and they all look nicer than you, which is something I didn’t understand. You look kind of cute, but they’ve 1 Pref (verb): the act of ranking sororities in one’s order of preference.

27\\

all got full makeup, full hair—they all look nicer than you, which is a little scary.”

“Huh.” I leaned back in my desk chair in thought.

“What’s it like being on the other side of that, Adele?”

“Honestly? It’s exhausting. Especially when you’re in charge of a round. I was in charge of pref round, the last round before bids. For my round, you have to order tables, tablecloths, chairs. You have to order flowers, vases, other decorations… There’s a ceremony.”

“So did you think it was harder to rush or to be in charge of the rushing?”

“See, I rushed as a sophomore and I think I was more comfortable as a person at that point,” she explained. “Like, a lot of times, second semester freshmen—you’re still really intimidated by older girls, and stuff like that. So I think it’s a little different.”

Then Adele left to decorate a basket for her little, leaving Jessica and I to sit around and procrastinate by discussing her experience as a debutante.

a not-so-princessy leia talks lord of the rings, joins sorority

//28

up in [your sorority]?”

“Well,” she continued, “my best option was the one I’m in now. So I figured, ‘Okay, it’s either this or it’s nobody. I’ll go check it out.’

“Anyway, on the last day, I get to the house and go over to talk to this one girl—which is the only girl I’d get to talk to, because you only talk to one person on the last day— and, at first, the conversation was really awkward. But then we started talking about Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, and we clicked. That was definitely the moment I realized that there were people just like me in [my sorority] that I could bond with.

“So now being in the sorority is awesome. Yeah, there are some girls in the sorority who, well, I don’t hate them, I just don’t get along with them, but my pledge class is so big, I’m not going to get along with everybody, and there are definitely a lot of cool people who I do really get along with.”

“That’s awesome!” I smiled. “Anything else you want to say about the experience?”

“Yeah,” she continued. “My Rho Gamma said everybody cracks. Everybody has a moment where they’re crying because they didn’t get into the sorority they wanted to.

And it’s really stupid that you cry, because it’s not that big of a deal… I think you’re gonna end up in the place where you’re gonna end up. I had that moment before I found out that [my sorority] is the perfect house for me.

“So honestly, rushing is really whatever you make of it.

If you go in thinking, ‘Well, this is going to be stupid,’ then it will be. But if you go in thinking, ‘I’m going to make this awesome,’ it’ll be awesome.”

My second interviewee was Leia1, another close friend and classmate of mine, who, like me, is an aspiring playwright and screenwriter. I was pretty surprised when I heard that she had rushed, as she always struck me as someone who, although not exactly a tomboy, would certainly not be afraid to kick someone’s ass. I found it odd that someone so forceful, independent, and genuine would choose to rush after hearing both Jessica and Adele acknowledge the process’s superficiality. That said, I figured that Leia must have had a pretty good reason for rushing (and later, pledging).

As we walked down to the first floor of Goldwin Smith one day after class, I asked her if she had always planned on going Greek.

“Yeah. I mean, I was kind of doubting it at the beginning of the year because everyone in my suite was rushing and they’re all really girly, and so I thought maybe sorority life isn’t for me,” she explained. “But then I spoke to my older sister—who didn’t go here, but who was in a sorority at her school—and she said, ‘Trust me, you have to do it.

It’s fun just to rush! My friend rushed and didn’t even join a sorority, and she said rushing was fun!’

“But whoa, was she wrong! Rushing was horrible. Rushing was cold. We had to dress up—I don’t like dressing up.

I didn’t like having to be identified by what we wear and dressing up to impress girls, I think that’s bullshit.”

I laughed. “So it sounds like rush wasn’t really what you were expecting…”

“No!” she exploded. “No one prepared me for that.

That said, it’s really been so worth it in the end. The weird thing is I didn’t even like the sorority I’m in now until the fifth time I visited.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really? So then how did you end

I went to high school with Nicole. She’s the type of girl who says she hates girls, so, naturally, I was surprised when I saw she had rushed and pledged a sorority. We sat down one evening to talk, and I asked her what had made her change her mind about Greek Life.

“You know, originally, I absolutely despised the sorority system,” she began. “But I wanted to try something new and when I came here for Rush Week, I wasn’t going to pledge, I was just going to rush—see how it is, see what I’m missing out on. But, yeah, things changed.” She laughed.

“So what was the experience like for you?” I asked.

“So, number one: when I came in, I knew the basic rankings—like, the unofficial rankings—and I knew I did not want to be in the Core Four2. I would, like, kill myself if I were in there, because I knew, like, if I wanted to join a sorority, that was not going to be it at all. I needed something chill, [with] kind of bro-ish girls—[that] kind of thing. But it was weird—I actually ended up liking one of the Core Four…”

“Really?” I was surprised.

“Yeah,” she continued. “Some houses, I knew I didn’t want to be in them, but I wanted to be invited back. I was

1 This name was also changed. Actually, all of the names in this article were changed. Yay, anonymity!

2 The Core Four (noun): term used to refer to the four “Upper Tier” sororities

reluctant rushee pledges house

invited back to one of the Core Four, which I was surprised at, because I’m not blonde. Or rich. [But] as [stupid] as it is, I kind of wanted to feel like I could be in the Core Four if I wanted to—which is really sad when I look back on it.

Because the thing is, I knew I didn’t want to pledge there.

The way I see it, with the Core Four, they make their girls do whatever, like, to keep up their reputation. Like, you can’t wear sweatpants with your bag and shit like that, which is ridiculous. They tell you how to dress, they tell you who to talk to—” I snorted in disbelief. “Wow, are you serious?”

“Yeah, it’s actually like that. And then Middle Tiers are usually trying to be that. So they’re working their girls hard as well. And then the Lower Tiers don’t really care. So that’s a lot nicer.

“But anyway, I realized how awful the process was when you get to cut the houses and they get to cut you—because I had the most amazing conversations at two “Upper Tier” houses, but I got cut. And it was, like, most of the houses I got cut from went like that. So throughout the week, you’d end up overhearing girls saying things like, ‘Oh, I’m probably not pretty enough,’ all the time. And honestly, I felt that way quite a few times, which really upset me.

“It was also really hard to stick to your own opinions of each house [because] there’s your opinion and then there’s the unofficial ranking, which really influences you a lot, which is really sad. I didn’t know if I wanted to pledge, because my house was Lower Tier and, while I liked the girls, I didn’t know if I wanted to put myself on that level. My mom told me to take a risk—I could always deactivate. And that’s how I ended up in my house.” She leaned back on the couch we were sitting on and looked up at the ceiling for a moment.

“Now that I think about it,” she continued, “my sorority is more, like, bro-ish. It’s exactly what I was looking for. So I am happy. I’m probably not gonna deactivate. But right now, the only thing is: Do people look down on me because I’m in a Lower Tier? How embarrassed am I to wear my letters, even though I love my sorority?”

ingrid was totally not kidding, actually rushes The last interview I conducted was with Ingrid, who, as the title of this section suggests, was totally not kidding and did rush.

“A lot of different things [made me decide to rush],” she began. “As a sophomore, I felt more comfortable with who I was. I feel like a lot of freshmen rush because they are lost and looking to find who they are. I rushed because I was already found…if that makes sense. I had my core group of friends and I was ready to branch out. I feel like at Cornell, everyone has at least two circles of friends, and I only had one. So I turned to rush. Also, my roommate last semester [Taylor1], was in a sorority.

“I came to Cornell with a very skewed depiction of

1 Yep—mindfuck: the same Taylor I took to the Knicks game. Whoaaaa.

“

i came to cornell with a very skewed depiction of greek life

”

Greek life,” she admitted, “mainly from popular culture.

None of my really close friends freshmen year rushed, but second semester freshmen year and first semester sophomore year, I realized that other friends I was making, friends I had already made who I was getting closer to, were in sororities or fraternities. If they were in Greek life, it couldn’t really be that bad.”

When I asked her what the worst part of rushing was, she agreed that it was getting cut “by houses you really liked.” The best was getting called back to (and eventually a bid from) a house she loved. One peculiar thing that happened was when a girl tried to tell her that Demi Lovato’s version of “Let It Go” was better than Idina’s (“I didn’t really know how to react to that…”). However, in my opinion, the strangest story she told me of Rush Week itself was when a girl in one of the Core Four straight up asked if she “[went] to the Hamptons a lot,” since she is, after all, from New York City.

All in all, though, rushing was definitely a positive experience for Ingrid. “As a sophomore, I have had more time to listen to stereotypes about different sororities and have my own biases. Some of these stereotypes are true. And I was happily surprised that some of them are not. “[My opinion of sororities changed—they] are a lot more inclusive than I thought they were, and also stand for a lot more than just partying. The first day after Bid Day, I was sitting in Libe, and a senior girl in my sorority came over and started talking to me, just because we had our letters in common. We had to learn mottos and ideals, and all about the philanthropies that my sorority supports.”

So what, exactly, is Rush Week?

It’s cold. It’s an attempt at community building, at presenting yourself in the best possible light in a very short amount of time. It’s getting sick, losing your voice, but still finding the will to keep on going—or maybe not. It’s a little “survival of the fittest” and a lot of running around in heels.

It’s shallow—but it has to be, because how else could one possibly create enough of an opinion of someone to judge whether or not they’d fit in with their friends? It’s its own universe, but it’s deeply rooted in our own. After all, realistically, when aren’t you judged on your clothes or appearance—even in an “Oh, this person looks cool” or “Oh, this person looks sloppy” way?

But, more than anything, it is something you can never fully understand unless you live it. More than anything, Rush Week will always be a mystery to me. •

29\\

lulu

is fucked up...

ithaca women on “the app for girls” anna brenner & kaitlyn Tiffany Lulu, self-dubbed the “first-ever app for girls,” allows women to rate men that they know by syncing the app with their Facebook accounts and categorizing them as “ex-boyfriend, crush, together, hooked-up, friend, or relative.” In a multiple-choice quiz, women compartmentalize the dude in question by his sexual capability, appearance, personality, and a range of miscellany—from cooking skills to his sense of humor. The answers to these questions are amalgamated into a one-through-ten rating system. At the end of the quiz, girls can sort through an array of pre-written hashtags that range from complimentary (#4.0GPA) to sexual (#KinkyInTheRightWays), cautionary (#TotalF***ingDickhead) to random (#GrowsHisOwnVegetables).

Men can also add hashtags under the categories of “Turn Ons” and “Turn Offs,” allowing them to express their distaste for #OrangeTan, #ArmpitHair, and #LittleGirlVoice, or their fondness for #KillerBod, #HoldsHerLiquor, and #FreeSpirit. (More on this later.)

Founder Alexandra Chong, a graduate of the London School of Economics, has declared Lulu to be part of a “Take Back the Internet” moment for “young women who have come of age in an era of revenge porn and anonymous, possibly ominous suitors.” Chong told the New York Times that she got the idea for the app during a “boozy brunch with female friends.” “We were all sharing stories about guys, relationships, and sex,” Chong said. The group concluded that women should be able to find out more about a guy via the Internet than the pre-existing social media allowed. They needed a “Guygle.”

“When you Google a guy, you don’t want to know if he voted Republican or what he wrote a paper about in college. You want to know if mothers like him. Does he have good manners? Is he sweet? It’s just this gratifying thing that you know you can do. You have no control of whether a guy is great or a jerk and at the end of the experience, even if no one reads it, you feel like you have gotten back at the guy. You have taken a bit of control.”

In the interest of seeing how the women of Ithaca feel about Lulu, we asked Cornell students from various social groups, class years, and sexual identifications to share their thoughts on the app and on how Lulu, as well as other dat-

//30

ing technologies, have factored into their experiences.

Anna Brenner: I first found Lulu through an article in New York Magazine and downloaded it immediately—as an experiment!—to see what it was about. I mean, it was a crazy idea, right? And I was just there to watch the crazies in action. It’s not like I actually cared to know what people were saying about my guy friends or past hookups. I mean, I’m not some boy-crazy Straight Girl. So it was okay that I was looking at the app, because I wasn’t looking at the app.

Just seeing it. Uh-huh.

Kaitlyn Tiffany: The first time I looked at Lulu was last semester, when Anna and I were talking about writing this article, and I was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed.

In my defense, there was wine involved, but it was kind of weirdly fun to look up a bunch of my male friends and see what women had been saying about them. It gave me this creepy diary-snooping type insight into the side of their lives we never really discussed. And of course, I looked up a few people I was marginally interested in. JUST TO SEE. Pandora’s fucking box.

A.B.: After semi-successfully shutting down those little warning bells ringing through my brain, I opened up the app, plugged in my Facebook info, and took a deep breath.

Within seconds, my vision was assaulted with photos of guys off my friends list, from the “bro” I had just eaten lunch with, to the boy I went with to prom and hadn’t seen nor heard from since. And, underneath each photo, in bold white font, was a number, followed by an assortment of seemingly nonsensical, hot pink hashtags.

To put it simply, I felt creepy. And disgusting. And wrong. And yet…

K.T.: Curiosity kills the cat, every goddamn time. For one, once I was sober, the memory of my foray into Lulu was paired with an icky, hot shame. It’s a warped impression of female solidarity that believes that all women are looped together into some weird conspiracy to strategize about men. What’s my motivation to tell a stranger the best

and worst parts of hooking up with a guy that I know? A magic bond mystically solidified with menstrual blood and mojitos and Ya-Ya Sisterhood self-mutilation rituals? Bitches are strangers. It’s a really nasty form of gender essentialism that says this is something girls should want to do, in order to “take back the Internet” and have agency in the dating world. It’s also presumptuously heteronormative—immediately categorizing all guys from my Facebook list as straight and verifying that my Facebook gender says “female” before I can post.

Lianne Bornfeld ’15: Out of one corner of our mouths we’re talking about how we can’t degrade or judge women based on their appearance or on gossip but out of the other corner we’re saying it’s totally fine to do it for guys. It’s not fair to say, out of some vindictive reasoning, ‘Well, girls have endured this for centuries and now it’s the guys turn. It’s pretty morally base.

Shanti Kumar ’17: When I am casually hooking up with a guy, I like to rate his Lulu anonymously and then check his profile occasionally to see if any new anonymous ratings have showed up since mine. This could mean one of two things. Either a girl he used to hook up with found his Lulu and rated him, OR he recently hooked up with another girl and she rated him. I use it as a way to roughly gage how monogamous my hook-up relationships are.

L.B.: It reminds me of this book I read in high school, trashy chick lit: A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl. The crux of this hard-hitting literature was that these women are repeatedly hurt by this guy who sleeps with them and then treats them like crap. So they make this group and localize a place to talk about him. They take the Judy Blume book, Forever, and they write about him in it and then put it back in the library. It was like cautionary tales… Just be a normal person and Facebook stalk and have the common decency to talk about people behind their back. It’s not something I want documented.

K.T.: Obviously I looked up the dude I was interested in at the time, and absolutely terrified myself. He had pretty positive comments and a solid 9.0, but he also had close to 2,000 views (HE COULD HAVE ANYONE) and had inputted a lot of hashtags of his own about what he was interested in when looking for a lady. Cue mini-spiral of self-doubt.

Do I #SpeakMyMind enough? Am I #Confident? Definitely don’t have a #KillerBod! And on the flip side, I prayed to God I wasn’t a #StageFiveClinger or any of the other myriad vague taboos he had listed (the turn-off #GrannyPanties had me at damn near existential crisis levels of worry). At the same time as these optional hashtags aren’t enough for guys to ably defend themselves against the things girls are writing about them, they’re also counteracting the “empowering” goal of the app—however misguided that goal may be. It’s a hot bed of neuroses.

L.B.: I genuinely give zero fucks, I am an open book— I’m a pretty dedicated Facebook stalker; it’s one of my few skills as a human being. I don’t tweet at people if that’s a thing that people do. Not really this Lulu thing, and not Tinder. With regards to the technology of dating, if it’s about the initiation of a relationship, I really don’t think there’s any hope there.

S.K.: The first person I used that Lulu tactic on is a computer science major. He said he was “annoyed that girls had Lulu because if the same app had been made for guys to

“

Someone, somewhere, is drunk-singing “You Don’t Own Me”

”

rate girls, the media push back would be tremendous.” I asked him if he wanted to code a new app that would do the same for guys to rate girls, just for gender equality. He shrugged and said it wasn’t worth it.

L.B.: [One guy asked], “Wait so are we not going to hook up at all?” And I was like, “No. No we’re not, we’re gonna lie there and we’re gonna fall asleep and I’m going to wake up and go to class.” He made it out to seem like I was crazy, because spending the night next to someone and sleeping is so much odder than putting a complete stranger’s dick in my mouth. It just seems really backwards to me, it’s really illuminating. I called Rachel immediately after as like, “This is it. This is like it,” in a nutshell. So I’m celibate now.

A.B.: I clicked through profile after profile. After profile after profile. I called my best friend in from the other room.

And she called in another friend. And then we went down to dinner.

“Look what we’ve got!” we gloated, like five-year-olds showing off their new velcro, light-up sneakers. “You won’t believe this!”

We spent the entire dinner flipping through profiles.

And, no matter how exploitative I felt, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this stuff was not meant for anyone to see—that, in a normal, rational world, this stuff shouldn’t even exist.

I mean, if guys had tried to make an app that rated women—the original Face Book, anyone?—it would’ve gotten shut down in a hot second. The entire liberal establishment would’ve internally combusted in its rage. But somehow, when women go out and make a man-rating app, everything is awesome, nothing hurts, and someone, somewhere, is drunk-singing, “You Don’t Own Me.” Lulu shouldn’t exist. But it does. So we looked. And looked. •

...let us count the ways 31\\

four

collegetown

and their corresponding

Bars

emotional breakdowns the lonely man’s guide to ithaca nightlife james rainis art by kaitlyn tiffany

concupiscence

Life has been rough on you: Your prelims have beaten you down like a gang of French Nationalist skinheads encountering a vaguely ethnic guy, your roommates have all just landed better internships than you and, most pressingly, you haven’t gotten laid in literally forever. Like, so long that your condoms (or, for inclusivity’s sake, dental dams) have actually expired. But, in the prophetic words of R. Kelly, it’s the freakin’ weekend, baby, and you’re about to have you some fun. This means alcohol.

Too much alcohol.

You went into the night thinking you were going to be the party’s resident Zach Morris, dropping panties/boxers and freezing time to explain exactly how you’ve been crushing life tonight. Instead, you’re more like Screech, or, rather, actor Dustin Diamond—you’re the kind of fuckup that needs to hire body doubles for their sex tape, except you’re also as drunk (and horny) as a masturbating Central Park wino. Due to your misjudgment of your sexual attractiveness and excessive use of “negging”—you’ve recently stumbled across a copy of Neil Strauss’s pickup artist guide “The Game”—you have been spurned by an object of your affection and are determined to grind up against a stranger at any cost necessary. And we’re talking any cost: In your mind, your dignity has evolved into a form of liquid currency.

As you rampage through Collegetown, yelling and laughing and just generally gallivanting all the while, the world becomes your oyster. Your friends are horrified, apologizing to passersby and trying to reign you in enough that you don’t attract the attention of a cavalcade of Cornell police.

At some point, you pee in an alleyway next to a dumpster, marking the territory like a dog. This is your town, dammit, and you’re going to pee where you want to.

You’ve arrived at Pixel and, amid the neon lights, sweaty bodies, and absurdly loud trap music, you suddenly realize

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you are in your element: White girls are attempting to twerk, bros are pumping fists in some ironically unironic appropriation of Jersey Shore culture, and the friction created between everyone’s jeans could power a small African village.

The stickiness of the floor is astounding: Compounding the regular beer spill phenomenon is a bartender so smitten with a group of girls—fresh out of a theme party, dressed in cat ears and devil horns—that he’s been feeding them sugary concoctions which (out of some misguided attempt at politeness) they’re pouring directly onto the dance floor. As you drag your friends, protesting, through the amorphous mass of hormonally charged gyration machines to the stage to give some broke-ass college DJ a panic attack about the well-being of his gear, you black out.

The next morning, you don’t remember much, but you’re alone in your bed and smell vaguely of vomit and shame. You check your phone and discover a half-dozen texts from concerned friends and one from a clearly drunk ex-fling that reads “wassup?” Your naughty bits recede into your abdomen at the missed opportunity. You shake your fist towards the heavens, cursing the name of Jose Cuervo.

mawkishness You almost didn’t leave your house tonight. There was an argument you had with yourself in the mirror. You could be in bed, playing guitar and eating Wheat Thins and generally avoiding all of the anxiety that is part and parcel of nightlife, yet you apply the necessary preparations almost robotically, as if some instinctual directive is forcing you to “have fun.”

“It’s senior year!” you imagine your parents nudging, “Be young and make mistakes!” You sigh and pull on a sweater.

You debate brushing your teeth, but decide against it. Maybe your pizza breath will give you a little space.

Flash forward and the people around you are ruminat-

ing about their time here at Cornell. They seem to have been given the rose-colored glasses typically reserved for the subjects of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” They talk about how the associates they’ve made in their Greek houses—which they pay for—or student organizations—which they all secretly resent for actions committed in elections past—or secret societies—which they’ve fellated, in one way or another—are the “best people they’ve ever met,” and how they’re so excited to work in New York or Seattle or San Francisco and “totally hang out all the time.”

You are at Ruloff’s. You’ve managed to occupy one of those tables in the front where people can see how much fun you’re pretending to be having, and have diagnosed yourself with a major case of déjà vu, as these same saccharine sentiments were passed around like so many cases of VD four years ago during your senior year of high school.

Remember those people? You like their photos on Facebook and get drunk with them on Thanksgiving Eve and talk about how much you miss them, but never do anything to prove that their absence is really affecting your life. Recently, when your mom told you one of your best friends from back in the day had gotten engaged, you were thrown aback. You could’ve sworn he was gay. You text them to congratulate them, but quickly abort the conversation. You are not sure that there is anything to talk about really, except for those boring high school stories you rehash every time you hit up the watering holes in your hometown. “Remember how we tricked crazy old Mr. Marcik into thinking Sam was in an arranged marriage? Remember when Dave tricked you into drinking piss that one time? Remember when Abby blew the bartender?” You grimace at the weird way that time has eroded all of the teenaged momentousness out of those memories. Maybe those friendships were as stupid as the ones you’ve made at Cornell and you just don’t realize it.

Back in Ithaca, your classmates surround you, trying to

come to terms with passing from the comfortable bubble of Cornell to the unforgiving real world with the help of Long Island Ice Teas and pitchers of generic light beer. But you, ever the party pooper, stare solemnly into your drink and wonder, is this really it? Did you seriously spend the best days of your lives here, living in dilapidated and overpriced houses, doing pointless homework just to drown your sorrows in alcohol every weekend with people you’re not even sure you like? You know that you should be feeling something—anything—but there’s an emptiness in your stomach that even the most convoluted mixed drink couldn’t fill. A casual acquaintance asks you what’s up, and you start to talk about your feelings of inadequacy and your fear that everything is just a sham, man, it’s all just a fucking sham.

You use the word “ennui.” Your acquaintance, happily drunk off their ass because they actually are fulfilled by their life’s pursuits, excuses themselves and rejoins their cooler, better looking, and more successful friends. This is why nobody likes hanging out with you.

epicureanism Someone was supposed to bring coke. Were you supposed to bring coke? You don’t remember, but you sure as hell aren’t going to admit culpability to your friends, who are struggling to conceal their erections as they escort a cadre of rail-thin blondes in the direction of their apartment to partake in a little bit of the booger sugar. You get a text.

Apparently you could score some from a dude named Randy, so you leave to meet him in the Loco bathroom.

Wait. What the fuck has happened? You used to be a good kid. President of the National Honor Society, second chair cellist in the school orchestra, co-captain of your

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high school sailing team—everyone’s mom wanted you to be their daughter’s boyfriend, even if all their daughters scoffed at the mere mention of the idea. Sure, it all started with a couple puffs of Mary Jane—yes, you’re so uncool about drugs that you call it that—but it’s all spiraled into the most thorough science experiment you’ve ever conducted.

You’ve befriended drug dealers of all shapes and sizes in order to get good prices. There’s one guy who you just have in your phone as “Mushrooms,” and you’re close enough that he’s asked you to help him format his resume, which, in the Hotel School, is the most intimate interaction two students can have. You’ve ingested powders, smoke, pills, and plants into all your natural orifices, though you’ve wisely drawn the line at needles (also, boofing is completely out of the question, as you never really resolved those potty training issues that inspired the anal retentiveness that spurred your success in high school). Now you, the kid whose profile picture is a throwback photo of him riding a camel with his mom during a 4th grade field trip to the Bronx Zoo, are meeting a drug dealer in a bar bathroom and—holy shit, are you about to get raped?

You’re mildly surprised that Randy isn’t the large black man with his arm around the girl at the end of the bar—apparently that’s the president of the Forensics Club, you fucking racist—but the prematurely balding white dude who’s trying so desperately to pull off that goatee that it’s kind of adorable. You follow him into the bathroom and clench your butthole a little, but not too much, because you’re pretty sure that if push came to shove, you could take Randy. He sells you an eight ball for a reasonable price—and yes, you know the difference between a reasonable and exorbitant price for the devil’s dandruff, mostly because this has become your favorite extracurricular activity.

You hurry back to the apartment and all the girls but two have vanished, dooming you to an empty bed this evening. You cut up the drugs, using the Visa Black your dad so carelessly bequeathed to you, snort them and immediately realize you’ve been ripped off. You got a better high when you snorted a line of Pixie Stix sugar for 10 dollars in the 9th grade. Luckily, your friends don’t notice, because they’re about to get laid—excitatory transfer or something like that is causing them to mistake their drunk boner excitement for the stimulation provided by a particular crystalline tropane alkaloid that, frustratingly, is absent from your life at the moment. You spend the rest of the night playing FIFA on your buddies’ couch. Your friends retire to their bedrooms with their lady friends and, jacked up on imaginary coke, have loud sex into the wee hours of the night.

Man, fuck those guys.

torpidity Undergrad life is so fleeting, right? It’s an extension of adolescence, where students exercise their newfound freedoms by embracing their most immature and reckless impulses. You recall the absolute anarchy of Orientation Week, when College Avenue transformed from a mere charming throughway into a film-ready version of the collegiate lifestyle, where students betrayed their intellectual sensibilities

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in favor of Keystone-fueled interactions they hoped would lead to sexual intercourse or, at least, a moment of Instagrammable perfection.

You know better, though. You’re over the drinking games and the light beer. You’re at Chapter House, where grad student clientele are just so beyond all of that crap.

Instead of urine-colored water, they have real beer. So many kinds: Pale ales, Indian pale ales, Native American pale ales, lagers, stouts, skinnies, talls, something called an Avocado enema—though you don’t really understand what they are and you haven’t really developed a taste for them, you know that they exude sophistication. A folk band is playing and lends the entire evening a polite, homespun ambiance.

You feel like you’re in a cool commercial for a sustainable fashion product or something.

While waiting to play pool—a far more civilized drunken pastime than flip cup—you start chatting with an older bearded gentleman, a philosophy Ph.D., and his noseringed girlfriend, who is getting an advanced engineering degree of some sort. The conversation goes well enough until it is interrupted by a group of frat guys in the corner.

“Chug! Chug! Chug!” they chant, and there’s something animalistic and brilliant about their fervor. You think of the Vikings—or, at least, the image of Vikings that a youth playing video games has instilled upon you—who treated drinking like a religious experience unto itself. These young men are tossing themselves into this ritual with an unparalleled enthusiasm, as if their very existence depended on whether Chad could transfer the contents of his pint down his gullet in an appropriately protracted amount of time. Chad, apparently, is a champion, and no drinking challenge is too much for him. He slams his glass down and it shatters, crushing the spirit of the over-worked bar staff.

All at once the tranquility of the evening is dispelled.

Many of the Chapter House’s patrons are rolling their eyes.

“Homoerotic much?” jokes the nose-ringed woman, and you politely laugh. But while you struggle to follow some highfalutin conceptual argument about Nietzsche and Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, you look onto the shitshow brigade reveling in the corner and start to panic.

Does adulthood mean an abandonment of, well, reckless abandon? For some reason, does a college degree preclude the use of funnels or shot-skis or pumpkin bongs? From here onward, does a night out on the town strictly mean dinner and drinks, consumed in the manner our parents taught us?

You quiver at the thought of a future where body-slamming a beer pong table results not in ego-inflating pride, but a veil of shame and discomfort for everyone involved.

But no, you, being a coward, don’t throw off the shackles of adult expectation to embrace chaos. Instead, you make more snide comments about the “meatheads” and their carousing. You take comfort in your abstinence from any circumstance in which you might accidentally utter something foolish. Instead, you sip your microbrew and exchange exhaustively crafted intellectual barbs with your bearded counterparts, and the circle of self-validation and detachment from all things genuine continues.

Isn’t adulthood fun? •

CYCLiCAL

SCARES how hollywood has handled horror and formed our fears

Fear-based entertainment is incredibly counterintuitive.

Fear exists is to trigger a response in our brain that saves us from a range of unpleasant experiences—from being chastised by a parent to being mauled by a tiger. It is difficult to pinpoint when in time the stomach-dropping adrenaline associated with fear became something sought out for amusement, but since then, people have flocked to theatres and spent enormous amounts of money for a mode of entertainment that is both thrilling and chilling, without any end in sight.

John P. Hess of FilmmakerIQ.com describes horror as a genre that has a “recognizable pattern that happens again and again,” a pattern that has come to be known as a series of “horror cycles.” These cycles represent trends in the genre as a whole, sub-genres that draw from past trends, or completely new revolutions in horror. They are essentially ribbons that can be used to tie together horror movies from a particular time period. Looking at the content of these cycles, from supernatural animal-human hybrids to psychotic killers, it becomes clear that if film is at all representative of reality, humans are really only afraid of one thing: aberrant people with monstrous characteristics.

The first cycle in the history of scary movies comes from German expressionist film and is referred to as the Gothic cycle, primarily because of the creepy, Adams Family-esque architecture used in the settings. Although many have described Le Manoir du Diable, a 1896 French film, as being the first horror film, some of the scenes, like when the devil’s cohort pokes the hero in the butt, seem intended to evoke humor rather than fear. In my opinion, the 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is truly the first horror film: the ghoulish villain is deathly pale with dark shadows around his eyes and the damsel’s distress is chilling, even in the over-the-top pantomime form of the day. German filmmakers continued to produce scary movies similar to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for several years.

However, in 1925, due to the economic instability caused by WWI, these German studios were absorbed by Hollywood, the enormous entertainment machine that had just begun to flourish internationally.

Around this time, many German expressionist filmmakers immigrated to the United States to keep their jobs after Universal Studios purchased their intellectual property rights. As a result, Gothic horror started to take off in popularity and monster movies became hits in the horror world.

Gothic fiction novels, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, were adapted into films, re-adapt-

yananisai makuwa art by thelonia saunders ed, and turned into sequels. While this outburst of monster movies eventually moved past its prime and entered into a downward spiral, the death of this horror cycle allowed for the birth of a different style of film. In order to guarantee continued success, the thrills of horror films became increasingly exaggerated until they eventually led to movies that were easy pickings for parodies.

The monster movie parodies of the twenties and thirties gave way to a cycle of psychological horror. Beyond the realm of B-movies and smaller studios, RKO studios began making movies that generated a scare not by exposing the protagonists and viewers to a vicious monster, but by building a mood of fear and tension. One of the first examples of this is a movie called Cat People, produced by Val Lewton.

(A perfect example of masochistically seeking fear in the movies, Lewton actually had a phobia of cats.) The horror of Cat People depends most on its building up of good, old-fashioned Freudian fear in the mind of the protagonist, who is driven to villainy by her own psychological self-manipulation. Only the last 20 minutes of the movie include typical horror scenes with violence or confrontation, while most of the 90 minutes are spent on suspense-building exposition and backstory.

This cycle of horror in which moviemakers played mindgames with the audience eventually died down, but would return to the screen in the sixties. Between those two cycles, the Cold War put the “nuclear boogie man” at the forefront of everyone’s minds, and the horror of the late forties and early fifties reflected that. This period began what Hess calls the “Pulp Science Fiction” cycle, in which aliens and mutant monsters would descend on cities to destroy and terrorize.

Although similar to the Gothic cycle, as audiences watched monsters attack and the thrill came as much from the makeup and costuming as it did from the strategic use of silence and sound, this Sci-Fi cycle moved past the well-known terror tales set in medieval mansions. By trading in the old narratives, writers for these new horror films gave themselves room to imagine newer, scarier plots.

As aforementioned, psychological horror returned in full (read: greater) force in the sixties with the iconic filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. In 1960, Psycho became the first motion picture to communicate to studios that horror was a genre worth pursuing, a genre that could generate real revenue. This realization, combined with the lifting of the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code, which censored profanity, sex, and drugs, among other things, broadened the freedom and popularity of the horror genre. Psycho and

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similar horror movies of its time changed the game of horror by bringing the monsters closer to home. The character of Norman Bates in Psycho is scary not because he has claws or sucks blood for sustenance, but because he is a normal man on the outside, hiding a monstrous mental aberration on the inside. This type of psychological horror doesn’t let the audience leave their fear behind in the theatre, but causes the chilling paranoia to linger and follow them home in the dark.

The lifting of the Motion Picture Production Code not only allowed for serious consideration of the horror genre, but also led to an increase in the variety of and temporal difference between cycles. As we look at the end of the sixties and into the seventies, it becomes unproductive to discuss horror cycles linearly because their beginnings overlap and their subjects diverge. In England in the seventies, Hammer Film Productions picked up the Gothic horror cycle left behind by Universal Studios, making remakes and sequels to all the old classics. Although these productions of The Mummy, The Curse of Frankenstein, and Dracula flared up and died out, from the ashes of this cycle came the epitome of Gothic horror parodies: The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Fully embracing the gay liberation movement that was swelling at that time, Rocky Horror included an attractive gold speedo-wearing Frankenstein character, sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing aliens, and innocent fiancés—all trapped in a classic Gothic mansion.

Other notable cycles in the history of horror include the Edgar Allan Poe cycle, produced and directed by Roger Corman. These movies, cranked out over a few years in the mid-sixties, pandered to the public’s desire for blood and boobs. Beautiful, bloody Barbara Steele in The Pit and the Pendulum and comatose Myrna Fahey in House of Usher provided the beauty while the strange sicknesses and torture chambers provided the gore. These films represent the appeal that horror has for the independent filmmaker; they have low production costs and can be relatively formulaic without sacrificing success. Another parallel cycle in t h e sixties and seventies is the occult horror cycle. After exhausting monsters and mind games, filmmakers returned to the subject of the earliest proto-horror: the devil and his demons.

Movies like The Exorcist (said to be one of the best occult horror films of all time) made use of special effects to visually capture a grotesque perversion of the human body in a way that had not yet been achieved, even with the numerous human-to-monster transformations that populated the genre in the past.

In more recent years, the horror cycles following the occult cycle appear to be

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created by cinephiles and film students inspired by the decades of horror films that preceded them. As a result, the subject matter varies widely, although still stylistically influenced by previous topics. For example, Jaws and the subsequent “shark horror” subgenre, drew from the psychological thrillers of the forties (except, by the seventies, people had realized sharks were scarier than cats). In Jaws, Spielberg created such a powerful atmosphere of fear surrounding the shark that even today the soundtrack of this film is virtually synonymous with “scary movie.” The movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie was hugely influenced by the occult cycle, but its use of teenagers made it the beginning of an annoying-teen horror trend that manifested itself strongly in the nineties and early 21st century. Alien and the 1982 remake of The Thing revamped the pulp science fiction cycle of the fifties, taking it leaps further with the special effects of the decade and launching a very popular sci-fi horror cycle.

In relation to eighties horror, one iconic horror movie that is virtually impossible to categorize is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Although clearly informed by the regular-Jack-psycho-killer horror that began with Psycho as well as some occult horror (re: the old woman’s decaying corpse), The Shining is stylistically an entity of its own. The uncanny setting of an empty labyrinth of a hotel and the close shots of Jack Nicholson’s face as he mentally deteriorates are just two of the countless aspects of Kubrick’s filmmaking that set this movie apart in the world of horror.

Yet another horror phenomenon is the slasher movie.

The slasher style begins with the archetypal Texas Chainsaw Massacre: low-budget, but with enough gore and raw acting to hook anyone with a penchant for horror. Halloween, made in 1978, a few years after Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was the first in a series of Hitchcock-inspired, low-budget slasher films. This movie drastically changed the face of horror by bringing the monster to suburbia and beginning the “terror in the backyard” formula for subgenre. By the nineties, the slasher had arrived at the end of its cycle, with self-referential borderline parodic slashers like Scream in 1996 and I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997. However, the slasher did experience a breath of new life beginning in 2004, with the ultra-gory torture movie franchise Saw. In terms of classifying modern movie making, identifying a single cycle in our day and age is virtually impossible; all of the money and technology funneled into the industry allows moviemakers to tell and retell virtually any story they choose. In 2013, movies that fit into every possible horror subgenre were released, spanning from Gothic vampires, to slashers, to slasher parodies. One trend does stand out, however, and it will probably come to define our decade for future students of horror film: zombie horror, which has been plaguing theatres and TV screens for the past decade. We have seen countless zombie and medical pandemic movies, beginning with 28 Days Later in early 2002, and continuing with the recent 2013 blockbuster World War Z, as well as the epic AMC series The Walking Dead. The fear of zombie apocalypse is characteristic of modern horror, but we know it won’t last. Soon directors will choose another dark avenue to corral our fears and manipulate our minds, and we will pay them handsomely to do it. •

WICCA

AND ARTIFICE wiccan origins of american horror story: coven Thelonia saunders

art by thelonia saunders

During its 13-episode run, American Horror Story: Coven introduced an array of mystical powers that the witches specialized in. The amalgamation of occult occurrences throughout the season served to confuse the central mystery of the show: The identity of the new Supreme, the witch who would exhibit all “seven wonders,” or seven magical powers that most witches only got a taste of.

From the inclusion of real life serial killers such as The Axeman and the singularly sadistic Madame Lalaurie, to the presence of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, Coven took great care to use historical accuracy in its storytelling. But to what extent was the portrayal of the witches’ powers in keeping with real Wiccan practices, both past and present?

THE SUPREME The Supreme is something that does not exist in Wiccan lore, but seems to be used in the similar role of High Priestess in Wiccan circles. The difference between these two positions is that the High Priestess does not receive her title based on how many powers she can replicate—or how many people she will kill to get there—but rather based on her experience, desire, and capability to commit to a leadership position at the heart of a group. Really, the position of High Priestess is more akin to a group leader in any religious context, something which I think we can all agree does not represent Fiona “terrible life decisions” Goode in any way, shape, or form.

THE SEVEN WONDERS Divination: In American Horror Story, Divination is tightly linked to objects, focusing on what they are, where they are located, and their historical background. Although it only made an appearance in the finale, the power involved a simple wave of the hand over a bunch of rocks to sense the location of a completely different object. It is closely related to, but different from, the Second Sight, which was a power only Cordelia possessed and was the result of a glass of acid and a pair of gardening shears to the face. This power related more to revealing past events through touch, but both are related to the Wiccan practice of Divination.

The jury is out on whether or not it’s better to know where your keys are or if your husband cheated on you, though.

Since the time when people first began to wonder what the weather would be like in a week or whether or not there really would be someone tall, dark, and handsome in their future, there have been those who claimed to be able to read the future. In order to carry out these readings, a variety of instruments, ranging from runes and tarot to tea leaves and astrology, are used. However, more important than the instruments used is the person translating—the one interpreting the signs and peering into the future. Divination is a way to interact with the “divine” by obtaining information from a deity, but which deity is entirely dependent upon the beliefs of the reader.

Vitalum Vitalis: One of the least developed wonders on the show, Vitalum Vitalis, is the power to transfer life energy from one person to the other. This power is highly similar to that of Resurgence, to the point where it gets pretty confusing. However, Vitalum Vitalis seems to differ from Res u rg e n c e

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in that it uses life force rather than an entire soul. Vitalum Vitalis can be used to give yourself a swift facelift if you, like Fiona, find yourself in a bind and want a quick fix to make yourself look like a young girl of 50 again. The only catch is you need to find yourself some poor sap you can just suck the life out of. Then again, there are those who are able to use Vitalum Vitalis in the same way that Misty Day uses the power of Resurgence: To heal or bring people back from the dead, using their own life force. All in all a much more noble gesture than Fiona’s rather inventive use of disposable characters’ lives.

While an herbal facemask will probably do more good for your skin than spiritual healing, the practice of “magnetic healing” is one that is widely used in Wiccan practices.

This idea relies on the existence of a universal electromagnetic flow, which sometimes gets jammed and needs to be straightened out by a healer. However, unlike in AHS, the healer is simply a conduit to the healing flow of energy, using the patient’s force rather than contributing their own.

Descensum: Descensum is the spiritual journey to the afterworld, during which you have to relive your worst nightmare over and over again until you manage to break free of it. But beware—linger too long and you turn into a fine dusty mist as the sun rises. It is not really clear how this power is supposed to help the witches in any way, except for maybe the brief rush of no longer being in Hell, but that would require actually making your way back—which seems to be rather difficult. Chalk this power up to being the worst self-motivational exercise in existence.

The idea of an “astral projection” of the soul is one that exists in a variety of religions, including Wicca. However, the portrayal of this power is tightly related to the practice of not only Voodoo, but also more generally to Christianity, proven by its basic reliance on the presence of a Christian afterlife.

The gatekeeper, Papa Legba, is a figure of Voodoo that is a mixture of the African Loa of the same name and the Catholic figure of St. Peter. Still, it must be noted that, historically, the actual figure of Papa Legba is not a coke fiend, nor does he generally lust for the “blood of innocents.”

Transmutation: While in the show this power is basically teleportation, the Wiccan idea of transmutation is more akin to its alchemical origin: A change in one’s very substance, whether it be physical or mental. For Wicca, the magic that brings about this transformation is termed the “Great Work” or the “greater magic.” This power is one that cannot only be summoned in rituals but also in everyday life, in which case it can be connected with any sort of ongoing spiritual or personal growth.

Te l e k i n e sis: Telekinesis, or the ability to move things with your mind, can be used either for a full-on Carrie effect or a more m u t e d Matilda move, to your discre-

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tion and/or moral sensibilities. Sadly, once more, the power of Telekinesis is very, very fictional.

Pyrokinesis: An offset of Telekinesis, Pyrokinesis involves lighting fires with your mind. While fire is important to Wiccan practices, it can only be created here in the real world with a lighter, some matches or, for the very handy, a couple of flint stones. No psychic fire lighting skills for the non-fictional among us, sadly. Alternatively, you’ll have to think of other methods to rid yourself of your neighbor’s curtains and create a dramatic exit. Maybe invest in a flamethrower.

Concilium: In Coven, Concilium is the imposition of one’s will onto another person; basically, mind control. This can be resisted, to some extent, if you want to risk having your head explode à la Scanners.

The idea of mind control is one that does not have any basis in real life, unless you get into heavy debates about the validity of hypnosis and brainwashing, but that is not so much magic as it is psychological manipulation—although you could make the argument that all magic is some kind of optical manipulation.

OTHER POWERS Black Widow (aka: Death by Vagina): Zoe has either the coolest or the worst power imaginable. Fortunately for her, the two people she winds up bonking with were both dead at some point prior, so no harm, no foul. Good thing her powers don’t pull a reverse Pushing Daisies and kill off the resurrected mid-sex—can’t imagine that would be fun.

The closest this power gets to Wiccan beliefs is the presence of a Succubus, but Wiccans in general don’t seem to want to associate with Succubae, perceiving them as evil.

This idea has many historical origins, but the most relevant one is the Bible, which claims that a Succubus is only out for human males’ semen for later nefarious devil pregnancy scams and, afterward, will most likely kill you. Later ideology seems to put forth that Succubae are just out to absorb people’s life forces, via sexual energy. This idea combined with the notion of a “killer vagina” plays into the idea of women as a destructive sexual force, being used to hurt men—who are the only ones killed during sex.

Injury Transference: This power is unique in the show to Queenie, who calls herself the “Human Voodoo Doll,” and can transfer any sort of harm done on herself to another person.

This does not have any relevance to Wicca, but rather to Voodoo practices. There is no physical power that works exactly like this one does, but the idea of a Voodoo doll does exist, albeit more so in pop culture than the actual religion. This no- tion is mostly falsehood,

because while there are “Voodoo dolls” in the Voodoo practice, they are not used to inflict harm on other people with pins and needles. This idea would be more akin to Southern folk magic practiced in Louisiana, or the European “moppets” that are used in magic rituals, than to Voodoo.

There is, however, a Voodoo practice that involves nailing the dolls to trees to serve as guides to spirits, so the idea doesn’t entirely come out of nowhere.

Clairvoyance: The ability to read minds, though not a selective power. As Nan can attest, being able to constantly hear everyone’s thoughts is pretty terrible and is not at all helpful for one’s concentration, which is why she always carries around headphones. However, she does know that this power can come in handy too (Oh, lemon cake is the hot neighbor’s favorite food? What a coincidence that I just baked one and brought it over).

This power, which represents more of a “general psychic ability,” is perceived very differently by certain sections of the Wiccan community—although there are many factions disputing the argument and at least some of them seem to be of the “14 year-old online Goth” variety. While a good deal of people (at least online) claim they possess some sort of psychic ability, there is another group that chooses to avoid the concept of “party tricks” as part of the Wiccan religion. In between these, there is the vague concept that all human beings, to a certain extent, are born with a sort of clairvoyance and have the ability to focus those energies into a connection with a higher consciousness.

Resurgence: While she does have the power to bring the dead back to life, Misty Day probably should have stuck to Jesus’ example and limited herself to one miracle—any more and it loses its magical wonder. Then you get what Coven wound up being for a good chunk of this season: Devoid of tension and probably better off staying in the ground than coming back for one last go.

Despite the magic in American Horror Story being based, to varying degrees, on actual Wiccan and Voodoo practices, it is also highly based on stereotypes and artificial Hollywood ideas of what would look coolest on screen— an idea which summarizes a lot of issues that littered this past season. While seeing these witches do magic was pretty entertaining in the first few episodes, the overwhelming number of different powers as well as the fact that each witch exhibited more than one power at once throughout the season gave the impression that most of the powers were underdeveloped (with the exception of a handful like Cordelia’s “Second Sight,” which featured heavily in the main plot). As with most things in Coven, it probably would have been best to stick to “less is more,” and focus instead on the actual process of learning at the school for witches, rather than have it all be waved away with a montage and musical number—great as it was to have Stevie Nicks sing. •

“

this coven doesn’t need a new supreme. It needs a new RUG

”

This is another power that doesn’t have any Wiccan relevance.

If someone out there could really resurrect the dead, we probably would have heard about it by now and would have either started worshipping them or shooting them (hey, I’ve seen zombie movies, I know how these things start).

39\\

the

new witch in town

the fashion of american horror story: coven

Victoria hines

art by thelonia saunders A pack of women donned in black stilettos, black skirts, black wide-brimmed fedoras and white blouses greeted viewers in the teaser videos that introduced the recent season of American Horror Story. This awfully Yves Saint Laurent-like display also introduced a new image for teenage witches of the 21st century (sorry, Sabrina). Pointy hats, billowing fabric, and black furry friends no more! These women are seriously up to no good, wearing only the most prized designer threads and extremely rare vintage finds.

Ryan Murphy’s series American Horror Story captured the interest of viewers when its first episode aired back in 2011, and it has only been gaining more popularity with its gory and disturbingly enticing storylines. I’m sure even those who have attempted to avoid it as much as possible (ahem), have felt the effects of its popularity, whether it be from the gushing of obsessed friends or the numerous news headlines praising its craftsmanship. The most recent season, American Horror Story: Coven, certainly didn’t disappoint with its gruesome lacerations and weird, demonic sex scenes. However, horrific peculiarities aside, the fashion in Coven reigned supreme.

The show’s costume designer, Lou Eyrich, set out to give each character a distinct wardrobe to emphasize their personality traits. The most notable character portrait Eyrich constructed was that of Myrtle Snow (Frances Conroy), the eccentric mortal enemy of Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange).

Myrtle is one of the few people in the show that has the ability to put up a fight with the Supreme, given the power she holds as a member of the Council of Witchcraft. She is also one of the few characters whose sense of style works completely against Fiona’s notion that a real witch wears black. Though Myrtle does don the color often, it is usually executed with brightly colored gloves or an eccentric pattern. Just as the two women come head to head in the show, so does the competing visual of cinched black power-dresses and campy, vintage polka-dot blouses.

//40

Diana Vreeland, Grace Coddington, and Peggy Guggenheim were all influential figures in the creation of Myrtle’s final look—and important women in style. Vreeland, known for her work with Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, was a great contributor to fashion for 30 years as a columnist and editor. Current creative director of Vogue, Coddington, is a highly acclaimed stylist who has collaborated with only the best in the industry. Guggenheim is a famed American socialite and art collector of the thirties with an entire museum dedicated to her work and lifestyle in Venice, Italy. These three women are icons held up with great prestige in the fashion industry, and their style-conscious ways translate directly into Myrtle’s character. It is also nearly impossible not to think of Grace Coddington after seeing Myrtle’s shock of frizzy red hair. The character of Myrtle, whose wardrobe ranges from New Orleans vintage pieces to Carolina Herrara, is well versed in fashion not only in her look, but also

“

horrific peculiarities aside,

the fashion in Coven

”

reigned supreme

in her dialogue, as she often gives reference to key insiders such as Diane von Furstenberg and Chanel. If not yet sold on Myrtle’s haute-ness, don’t forget that her last word was none other than,“Balenciagaaaaa!”

Myrtle’s hair, in addition to her assortment of vintage cat eye sunglasses, became a signature look for her character throughout the season. Her unique features came to define her image and contribute to the idea that a witch’s

appearance need not follow the tradition set by popular media up until now. It also comments on how the image of a witch has undergone a massive development because of American Horror Story. When Myrtle comes to mind, we do not see the image of the ‘double, double toil and trouble’

witches we have always known and expect a witch to be. Instead we see the carefully constructed image of a woman who has a few misgivings with Halston’s sellout to J.C. Penney, is just mad for tartan, and continuously points out her own fabulously superior style. The modern witch is rid of media stereotypes and is a unique individual that has fully adjusted to the society of human beings (as the show continues to remind viewers).

The character of Fiona Goode is also quite opinionated in her view towards the fashion choices of a modern witch. Before they could be seen in public with her, the young witches of the Coven were instructed by Fiona to “wear something black.” And the color, certainly, became a staple throughout the season as the girls’ wardrobe palettes rarely veered from tones of black and white. Though black remained consistent in the look of each of the girls, Eyrich styled the outfits of each character to reflect their distinct personalities.

Zoe Benson (Taissa Far-

miga) holds the very provocative power of being able to instantly murder a man—with her vagina. Despite this quite explicit ability, she is portrayed as a shy girl-next-door. Her wardrobe consists of a more laid-back, slightly Urban Outfitters catalogue-like style. She is seen in oversized cardigans, pleather overalls, funky hats, and casual ankle boots. The Hollywood starlet, Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts), on the other hand, has a style that rings true to her socialite status. An assortment of bandage dresses, fur, large sunglasses, and a pack of cigarettes shapes her Nicole Richie/Mary Kate Olsen image. The similar distinction of style and wardrobe of these two characters applies to rest of the witches in the coven. They all give off a dark vibe but have key aspects to their look that set them apart as individuals within the story.

Clothing also foreshadowed which characters would or would not see the season to the end. In the teaser videos for Coven, there were women wearing white blouses and a few dressed completely in black. It was discovered by fans at the completion of the season that those who wore black in the teaser were the characters that died; those who wore white were the ones who survived.

The fourth installation of the series has recently been announced to be American Horror Story: Freak Show, centered on circus acts of the bizarre, run by a German expat. Seeing as clowns have been fairly consistent throughout history and horror films—and will likely make an appearance in Freak Show—it will definitely be interesting to see what Lou Eyrich manages to do with the polka dot onesies and pop-on noses. •

41\\

The Evolution Of

witches

In popular culture Tyler breitfeller art by Aurora rojer

The concept of magic has been around for as long as humankind itself. What early humans couldn’t explain, they’d ascribe to miracles, a higher power, something mystical. The practice had been used for religious, medicinal, or even divinatory reasons, with customs varying across cultures. Magic was an agent of aid, a helping hand to the helpless.

Even as humanity grew more organized, ideas of a mystical force didn’t disappear, but were merely tamed— adapted for society and turned into regulated cultural instruments. As certain religious institutions gained ground, other belief systems and ways of thought were given more negative connotations. Somewhere along the way, magic became chaos. While witchcraft always seemed to be a scapegoat for misfortune, early modern Europe saw it as the perfect villain to their hero—the church. Witches were thought to breed pandemonium and provoke failure, with some old conspiracies claiming outright that they were agents of the Devil. As the Bible fervor calmed in the coming centuries, so did the notion of sadistic witches—for the most part. Today, the world’s favorite antagonists have remained relevant enough to earn their spot in what has become the literary canon.

As humans, we revel in disorder. Pass through a plaza, café, anywhere really, and you’ll be subjected to mindless gossip that surrounds you in droves. Someone screws up?

Hilarious! Your best frenemy falls down the stairs? No way!

Who should we tell next? We live for mistakes and the people who make them. Look at any movie, show, play—no one cares about a character that’s flawless. Where’s the fun in that? There is nothing better than a tragic downfall, figuratively or literally. And when a play opens with thunder and lightning and scheming and maniacal laughter, well, we know not to expect anything too uplifting.

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy and tells the story of immoral pursuits of power and the effects, both psychological and political, that it casts onto its participants. Dark ambition is the characters’ drug of choice, and the dealers are none other than a trio of pot-stirring witches. At the beginning of the story, the witches act as prophets, telling Macbeth of his destined success. Once he takes the throne, they return to tease him with prophecies of his downfall. Their actions are contradictory and their motives

//42

are undisclosed. So, why witches?

The answer is simple. They were seen as traitors in Shakespeare’s day, rebelling against spiritual norms, and so it’s easy to cast them as the defiers of logic. Shakespeare leaves no clues as to whether Macbeth would have actually taken the title of king had he not pursued it so aggressively, and therefore whether the witches created his fate or simply reported it is impossible to know. These witches come with no clarification, and each time they appear havoc lays in wait. Put simply, they are chaotic plot tools. The three witches had no goals but to cause trouble for those around them, and this pretty much sets the tone for the portrayal of witches in popular media for the next few centuries. On a scale of undeveloped chaos-causers to complex characters, these witches are at the far left, and it is not until the iconic Wizard of Oz that their place begins to shift.

Fast forward a couple hundred years and say hello to everyone’s favorite wand-waving, sparkling sorceress, Glinda.

The Good Witch of the North staked her place in modern witch history as a benevolent force of magic in Oz. L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, clearly did not create his witches with a sadistic alliance in mind.

As the film’s prominent good witch, Glinda welcomes Dorothy to the world of Oz and sends her off to see the Wizard in her first appearance and, later, also rescues Dorothy from the poppy field and reveals the secret of the shoes.

Despite her limited appearances, Glinda plays a crucial role in the protagonists’ adventure.

Although she knew the magic of the shoes, she still sent Dorothy on her mission to Oz, an act of either carelessness or, more likely, quick wisdom. The shoes withheld an immense power, and of course Dorothy had to be tested before she was taught to harness it.

On the other hand, we have the Wicked Witch of the West. Green-skinned and clad in black robes, this witch is a vengeful force to be reckoned with. While she seems to be in line with the Shakespearian troublemakers, it is made clear that she is acting out of greed and revenge. She wants the slippers, she wants the power, and she wants Dorothy to pay for dropping a house on her sister. She is chaos, but with purpose.

Although these witches aren’t exactly the stars of the story, they’re much more developed than what Shakespeare gave us. The witches fill both roles, the background hero and the forefront villain, each hiding subplot beneath their sleeves. They have goals, and they act to achieve those goals. They make moves for themselves and are justified with more than a penchant for chaos. The Good Witch of the North and the Wicked Witch of the West mark the ground where witches to come will carve their own niches, deeper than before, and act to achieve them. While the Oz witches still exist primarily as magical overseers, there is more depth to their characters. Unlike Macbeth’s trio, we know their motivations and enough backstory to establish reasonable justification for their actions. So, congrats Baum, your two wand-wavers make a decided move up the developmental scale.

Remarkably enough, the first real examples of substance over sorcery hail from teen sitcoms. When witches came to the small screen, they brought a more positive outlook on the mythos. Sabrina Spellman wasn’t after vengeance, or distress, or the toil of those around her. Witches began to be portrayed as normal people that just happened to be magical in nature, at no fault of their own. They didn’t seek power (well, most of them, anyway), they didn’t exact revenge, and they definitely didn’t lure the mortals around them to their own doom. These characters weren’t chaotic warnings from Hell, but good role models for the young audiences they targeted. Taking cues from the nineties’ success stories, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and The Craft, Disney Channel created a force to be reckoned with with Alex Russo of Wizards of Waverly Place.

Alex was reckless, headstrong, and stubborn, careless on the surface and wore sarcasm like armor. She was also thoughtful, a good friend, ambitious, and insecure about her own abilities, stuck in the shadow of her overachieving older brother. Put plainly, Alex Russo was your typical teenage girl. Wizards of Waverly Place, set in New York City, avoided emphasizing the supernatural, and instead used magic as a means to convey morals and develop character. Noticeably void of flying monkeys, the spells in Waverly Place brought action figures to life, created comedic clones, and induced chocolate obsessions.

The sitcom did to witches what diets do to desserts— took out all the worst parts

and left something laughable. These were kids who grew up with us; their powers usually weren’t front and center, but when they were, it came back to bite them in the face.

Innocence characterized these witches, and for the first time in witch culture they were people we could really root for and empathize with. It took an approach designed for pre-teens to see where bewitching success really lied, and these shows set the groundwork for the witches of the following decade—the modern powerhouses, the practitioners of their own special bitchcraft.

As the self-proclaimed “baddest witch in town,” Fiona Goode repeatedly charmed audiences as she led American Horror Story: Coven to rating success. The third season of the acclaimed anthology followed the story of Salem descendants at Miss Robichaux’s Academy, using witchcraft as a means of conveying themes of minority oppression,

“

Witches aren’t

”

soulless villains

anymore

familial relationships, and racism. Apart from its occasional nods to gritty voodooism, the witchcraft in Coven was often effortless and gruesomely glamorous. Not halfway through the first episode we watch Fiona snort a line of cocaine and consume a man’s life force. Spell books and cauldrons aside, Coven presented us with witches who came ready to flip a party bus with the flick of a finger and look good doing it.

These new witches are running the show. And unlike the girls of Oz, they aren’t wholeheartedly good or bad. These modern day witches have depth and an unspoken emotion that leaves viewers wondering who the good guys even are (or if there are any anymore). We root unshakably against Macbeth’s trouble causing prophets, but something has happened since then. Miss Robichaux’s girls act with purpose, each coming with their own assortment of redeeming qualities, and before we know it, we find ourselves rooting for a supernatural serial killer. Using the power of Macbeth’s spell casting troublemakers and the increasingly complex character design of the pre-teen heroines as their foundation, the girls of Coven broke the scale, marking a divergence and innovation in the genre.

It’s virtually impossible not to notice this new breed of witch in mainstream culture, but why now? These witches are powerful women to match what could be America’s strongest feminist movement in decades. The males in Coven fall prey to the witches—no one is safe. The same people that watched Alex growing up are now at an age where questionable morals and superpowers are all the rage. Witches aren’t soulless villains anymore, existing only to stir the pot for the real stars. They’re front and center, complex and powerful, motivated and emotional. Over the years, witches have evolved to being worth more than just their magic.

Instead, they have become a staple of fiction, portrayed as strong women first—and spell casters second. •

43\\

Plot Twist:

R.l. Stine Does not use

ghost writers

the man, the myth, the machine aurora rojer

art by Thelonia Saunders

Robert Lawrence Stine is winning. Literally. With his ghosts, werewolves, monkeys in lab coats, and cursed Halloween masks, the author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series bestowed nightmares and fantasies unto an entire generation of children—and made bank in the process.

His books have sold over 400 million copies in 32 languages worldwide and in 1997, Stine placed 36th on Forbes List of 40 best-paid entertainers with an income of $41 million for the fiscal year. USA Today named him America’s Number One Best-Selling Author for three years straight during the nineties, and he even won a Guinness World Record for being the best-selling children’s book series author of all time—a title he held, until some British upstart purloined this badge of honor with a series about wizards. So what is it that makes Stine so special?

First is sheer volume. Stine has written at least 379 books and is still going strong; he claims in an interview with the Village Voice that “at one point I was doing a novel every two weeks. I had two series going ... Now I do seven Goosebumps a year, and that’s a lot.” Everyone born after 1980 has read at least one of these books—and, more than likely, somewhere around 12.

Stine learned how to churn out print at his first job out of college. He worked for a woman who owned six magazines about movie stars but never went to the movies and, as he describes it, “never left her apartment and dressed in a brown robe.” Stine’s job was to make up interviews with celebrities. “I’d come in in the morning and she’d say, do a [made up] interview with Diana Ross. I’d say okay and type type type. She’d then say, do an interview with The Beatles.

They were sold as real interviews. No one ever complained in those days. You learned to write really fast. I had to write five or six interviews a day.”

//44

But Stine does not work alone; his wife Jane is his editor and another factor that allows him to embrace the scary story machine that he is. As Stine puts it, “the only thing we fight about [is] plots. Nothing gets past her. She finds holes in the plots and always thinks of better stuff. I’ve never been right. I’ve been married 40 years and have never won a bet. She’s always right.” Jane is also a writer, causing many to wonder if the two have ever tried to write together. They have, but, as Stine recounts, “She locked me in a closet and left the apartment, that’s how bad it got. We didn’t collaborate after that.” Perhaps those furry green paws on the cover of How to Kill a Monster are based on true events.

Another key to his success is that Stine is funny. Whether it’s an annoying little sister who gets kidnapped by aliens or a monster with overactive mucus membranes, Stine knows how to get his readers laughing. He actually got his start writing humor, not horror. At age nine, he created his own humor magazines, typed up on a clunky typewriter and distributed beneath desks when the teacher’s back was turned in class. He then wrote a humor column for his high school’s newspaper and, while attending Ohio State University, edited and contributed to a humor magazine under the pseudonym Jovial Bob. Stine keeps up his humor for his older fans with his hilarious twitter, tweeting gems such as, “Was I swindled?

Someone sold me a set of e-ashtrays to go with my e-cigarettes” and “Am thinking of turning to a life of crime. Does anyone know where there are any internships?”

His humor also helps balance out the scary in

his books. One of Stine’s greatest talents is making a story just frightening enough that you have to bite your lip as you turn the page, but not scary enough to induce permanent damage. Stine explains that he does so to “make sure that the kids know that these books are fantasies. I keep the real world out. So, I don’t do real serious subjects. I don’t even have divorced parents. I wouldn’t do child abuse, or drugs.

I wouldn’t do anything in the real world. They have to know that these are just fantasies and that they’re not really happening. Once you’ve established that, you can get pretty scary.”

Naturally, some adults have still expressed that they believe his books are too much. People have complained that his series is too scary, too violent, poorly written, depicts occult or satanic themes, and even that it might provoke harmful thoughts or behavior and encourage disrespect for people a n d property. But Stine brushes off this criticism like a m o n s t e r shakes off lagoon slime.

He explains, “People who go after violent things for

“

People are always

trying to punish kids,

and if there’s

something

kids really

”

like, people will find

something bad about it

kids just don’t like kids. People are always trying to punish kids, and if there’s something kids really like, people will find something bad about it.” In contrast, Stine is “always in favor of good violent things. I think violence is good for kids and good for people. It gets it out. I also think that even kids know the difference between real violence and fantasy violence.” This respect for kids surely explains the hoards of elementary school students who keep buying, reading, and trading his books.

Another reason Stine is so successful is that he genuinely loves his fans. And when he isn’t busy spreading the joy of fear through his books, Stine responds to every piece of fan mail he receives. All of them. So if he’s a robot (very likely), at least he’s a robot with a heart. Some of his favorite letters include, “Dear R. L. Stine, I love your books. Your family and friends are proud of you, no matter what anybody says,” and “Dear R. L. Stine, you are my second-favorite author.” (“That was it, no explanation.”)

And—last but not least, Stine is legendary because he knows how to stay relevant. Not only is he still writing (new novels as well as tweets), but he’s also about to win a lifetime achievement award from the Horror Writer’s Association (apparently a very big deal) and watch his work hit the silver screen in 2016, with Jack Black slated to star in a Goosebumps movie. You can also catch Victoria Justice starring in MTV’s new TV drama adaptation of Stine’s Eye Candy. But even if Stine had faded into nineties oblivion along with Tamagotchis and Furbies, he still would have been relevant—Stine got a generation of kids bogged down

by Nintendo 64s and Gameboy Colors to look up from their screens and grab a book. He got kids who had previously only read for school to stay up late with a flashlight under the covers. Stine opened up the world of reading to millions who may not have found it otherwise—and to the rest of us, he threw wide the gates of our imaginations and let us run free with the monsters and the slime and the talking dummies. He got us to face our fears and to laugh at them in the face. So, thank you for that, Robert Lawrence Stine. We’re not afraid of the dark anymore. •

45\\

American horror Story ’s

FEMALE HOrror Story

alyssa berdie & Kaitlyn Tiffany

art by Brandon Leathead

American Horror Story is meant to explore and exploit the typically “American” fascinations with very specific forms of horror: those which invade the American home and family, those which get us labeled as “insane” and barred from participation in society, and those which send us on literal and metaphorical witch hunts and epitomize our collective paranoia. But, more than simply presenting these themes for viewers across the country (and around the world), show creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk illuminate the classic plotlines of American horror as classic plotlines of female horror. Every season, the most terrifying depictions of violence, betrayal, and tragedy are inflicted upon women.

Every season, the most deeply feminine fears, unique to the female body and to the types of violence inflicted upon it, are the ones most wholly realized.

Historically, horror movies have used sexualized violence as a way to hold audience’s interest, to make violent eroticism more acceptable in mainstream media, and to perpetuate the societally reinforced male urge to be not only violent, but violent against women specifically. American Horror Story emphasizes these themes until they’re impossible to ignore, be it through depictions of involuntary sex with ghosts, stillborn babies, possession by the devil, drug-induced gang-rape, mutilated but living bodies, impregnation by aliens/rapists/serial murderers, the inability to get pregnant, a housekeeper who has one appearance around women and another around men, or a sadistic Nazi doctor who fetishizes virginity and brutally punishes sexuality.

The show has “an uncanny ability to provoke pure disgust,” writes Grantland’s Molly Lambert. “How many other shows can boast that they make viewers need to throw up?”

But I’d argue that it’s not “viewers,” who feel the need to purge, but female viewers—those for whom the triggers of paralyzing fear are laid out subtly in American Horror Story, over and over again.

The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) describes American Horror Story as a story about “abjection”—referring to Julia Kristeva’s conception of the word, which is based on the Hebrew Bible. “The Judaic Tribes of the Hebrew Bible created laws concerning what was and wasn’t abject so that they wouldn’t die out: people naturally wanted to do things like have sex with their wives when the wives were on their periods, but when you’re living in the desert, as these Juda-

//46

ic Tribes were, you just can’t get yourself clean enough. Accessing the abject would be to risk disease and, ultimately, death.” The answer to this problem is to turn the woman’s menstrual cycle into something unclean and shameful—in other words, “abject”—and create around it a theory “of grossness, of confusion, of what we must reject in order to live.” According to Kristeva, the abject applies to not just what physically repulses, inducing nausea in the same manner that American Horror Story does in its viewers, but also, on a deeper level, to “what disturbs identity, system, order.

What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”

The violence of American Horror Story is a violence of abjection because it, in all cases, appeals to that which we as women find most basically horrifying and simultaneously “engrossing”. The horrors presented are engrossing here because to experience them is so unimaginable that it must be imagined, so unseeable that we must, at least for a moment, see it.

season 1: murder house Murder House takes on the standard Amityville Horror trope of the corrupted American Dream: a family with a horrible past and a shaky future jumps at the chance to move into a beautiful and affordable home for an opportunity to start over, regardless of the house’s well-known violent past. The essence of the American Horror Story project is to re-imagine these already familiar tropes; the premise is the same, some of the events are the same, but the overall picture is surreally horrifying, larger than life, bigger than “based on a true story,” and hopelessly, convolutedly gory.

In regards to Murder House, this means that the home has not just a history of murder, but a legacy of it; highly sexualized violence has been occurring in this house for generations because it’s just what society does. Society murders women. And, though it is not only women who die in American Horror Story’s debut season, it is mostly women whose ultimate horrors are recognized. The website Autostraddle points out that the violence isn’t sexualized simply because a lot of it is based on explicitly sexual acts of violence, but also, in a broader sense, because “brutality and gore are sometimes eroticized here in a way you might be familiar with if you’ve seen enough horror.”

The ability for the home to be penetrated by evil creates a direct and painfully obvious allegory for the vulnerability of the female body. It is Vivien (Connie Britton) who initiated the move into the infamous murder house after she discovered her husband Ben’s (Dylan McDermott) infidelity—he had been sleeping with an undergraduate student of his, Hayden (Kate Mara)—and it is Vivien who ultimately pays the price when Hayden’s ghost infiltrates her home with the intent of destroying Ben’s family. The invasion of Vivien’s body by Tate (Evan Peters) in disguise is an equal and parallel horror, and the moment in which she realizes that she carries not her husband’s child, but the child of a murderous ghost, is one of the most heartbreaking moments in recent television memory.

The only scene that could possibly top it is Violet’s (Taissa Farmiga) realization that her suicide attempt was successful and that she is forever trapped in the house in immortal ghostly form. While she thought that she had tried and failed to kill herself upon learning Tate was responsible for a decades-old school shooting, it is revealed that her body has been rotting beneath the floorboards of her own home for months. As the teenage victim-of-the-mistakes-ofothers, Violet represents the singularly horrifying notion that a young woman can become consumed by her affection for a man to the point that she might immaturely decide her life is worth nothing without his. Here, the horror is doubled because she is granted the superficial continuance of life that allows her to feel the crushing regret of the decision.

“But it’s never that simple,” writes LARB, “the abject is at once an object of fascination and of repugnance. It draws in as it repels, seduces as it disgusts. It ‘fascinates desire,’ but must, ultimately, be rejected. We want to see a corpse, not because we’re weird, but because a body should mean life—and here it doesn’t. It confuses meaning, sure, but that’s gross and engrossing.”

Ultimately, women are the ultimate source of abjection—they are the source of menstrual blood, they are the embodiment of the emotional and the obsessive over the rational and the existential, they are selfish in motherhood and want to keep their children close and dependent. “In tales of abjection, the abject feminine manifests as the sprawling abyss—the mother who threatens to consume, to castrate, to make others into the gaping hole that is their lack.” Despite our empathy, something in us condemns Vivien’s efforts to hold her broken home together, something in us sees Violet as young and stupid, something in us must be repulsed by them in order to avoid their fate.

season two: asylum Asylum is a somewhat-expected rendering of America’s dark history of imprisoning and treating as sub-human, psychiatric patients whose ailments were debatable and whose “treatments” were unspeakable. Again, it is the horror of the female that is given center stage; while men and women reside together at Briarcliff, the men are there for nameable crimes (though not all are guilty), while the women are there for vague and even ridiculous reasons, all distinctly feminine, and are subsequently abused in distinctly feminine

ways. Grace has been imprisoned after murdering her sexually abusive father and is later forced to undergo a botched and nearly fatal hysterectomy; Shelley is diagnosed as a nymphomaniac (though her only ostensible crime is talking about enjoying sex) and becomes the victim of horrible medical experiments; Charlotte believes herself to be Anne Frank, is clearly suffering from postpartum depression, and receives a lobotomy to eliminate her “violent psychosis,” a procedure that leaves her powerless, docile and ultimately, the perfect domestic companion to a husband who missed not her, but her childcare and cooking services.

The most striking example of the realization of female horror in Asylum, however, is the imprisonment of ambitious journalist, Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), who originally comes to Briarcliff hoping to expose some of its indecencies. The horrifying but ultimately male-subjugated Sister Jude (Jessica Lange) discovers that Lana is a closeted lesbian, sharing an apartment with her partner Wendy (Clea Duvall), and then blackmails Wendy into having Lana committed. While I have to admit that most of Murder House didn’t really strike a chord with me, horror-wise, the terror came early and often in Asylum. As a woman, there is no fear more deep-seated and triggering than the fear of being unfairly labeled as crazy and of being powerless to stop your own march towards silencing.

Lana’s “treatments” in the asylum range from electroshock therapy to an absolutely devastating-to-witness aversion therapy in which she is given a vomit-inducing serum paired with images of sexualized women and then forced to masturbate while touching a male prisoner’s penis. Shortly after this episode aired, Autostraddle published a piece entitled, “The Lesbians of American Horror Story: For Us, the Scary Parts are Real,” which presented the horrors that Lana experienced as particularly horrifying given their general historical accuracy and symmetry to commonly-practiced “cures” for homosexuality. “To have such practices fully supported by society is a horror story we don’t need to call inventive or fantastic, because we know the line between our stories and a story like Lana Winters’ is still too thin,” writes Kate.

Winters is also raped by Bloody Face (Zachary Quinto), a serial murderer who kills women and turns their skin inside out. He reveals to her that he killed Wendy, and then rapes her while referring to her as his mother. Later he begs her not to abort the child that this act produces, and dubs her violation of the motherly duty an act of monstrosity. Lana tries to abort the baby herself with a coat hanger, but fails, and even when she reluctantly gives birth and asks that she not have to look at the child, she is ultimately, and horrifyingly, forced to breast feed it. The last episode of Asylum, “Madness Ends,” provides small comforts—though it is revealed that Bloody Face’s son has taken up his father’s work of murdering women, in the final episode, Lana gets to shoot him in the fucking head.

In this way, Asylum grants more resolution to the female horror story than Murder House—Autostraddle also writes, “Whereas all evil in Murder House can be traced back to the evil manipulative seductresses of past and present, all evil in Asylum traces back to this or that fucked-up power-hungry white guy and/or the archaic ethics that enabled powerful

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people to treat women like sub-humans.” The women in Asylum are stronger than the ones in Murder House, and Sister Jude and Lana both receive redemption after years of fighting. While American Horror Story offers up abuse after abuse against these women, we’re not watching because we like to see them be brutalized, but because, as Madeleine Davies of Jezebel writes, “They are the kind of women who, when punched in the face, will spit out a bloody tooth then throw a punch of their own.”

“

EVERY SEASON, THE MOST

DEEPLY FEMININE FEARS ARE THE ONES MOST WHOLLY REALIZED season 3: coven

”

Coven gave us an imagined sequel to 17th century Salem witch trials, where women were prosecuted as “witches” and put to death for committing acts such as not attending church and not believing in the existence of ghosts, or for simply having a poor reputation. Rather than being treated like humans in need of help, women became victims of their powerlessness and mass hysteria. Coven takes place mostly in modern times—though occasionally jumping back to the 1830s—in a world where witches (and the hunt) still exist.

The main story takes place at Miss Robichaux’s Academy boarding school, run by Headmistress Cordelia Foxx (Sarah Paulson), where young witches come to learn their craft, control their powers, and stay safe from the Delphi Trust, a wealthy corporation of witch hunters who pose as a financial institution. Delphi is secretly working with the Voodoo priestesses, a group of mostly African-American women who are rivals of the witch coven and also want them dead.

In the first episode of the season, a young witch, Zoe Benson (Taissa Farmiga), decides to have sex with her boyfriend for the first time and accidentally kills him, causing her mother to send her to Miss Robichaux’s Academy. This first female horror presented itself in the very first scene of the first episode: Benson murders her boyfriend because she unknowingly posses a power from the Salem era to cause brain hemorrhaging in anyone she has sexual intercourse with, leaving her feeling afraid and out-of-control of her own body. Later in that same episode, another young witch at Miss Robichaux’s, Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts), is gang-raped by a group of frat brothers after being given Rohypnol at a frat party. These are both examples of the way society refuses to explain to young girls the horrors that they can potentially face in a culture that still rarifies realistic sex education and silences the victims of sexual assault.

One of the most widespread female horrors in and outside of the American Horror Story world is that of female competition and racism. Coven, specifically, features a rival-

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ry between the witches of the coven and the Voodoo priestesses. American Horror Story show runner Ryan Murphy commented that the season “really is about the witches of Salem pitted against the Voodoo witches.” The witch coven and the Voodoo women have been feuding since the witches settled in New Orleans, invading the Voodoo priestesses’ territory and pointing to current intersectional feminism in America—or the lack thereof.

Intersectional feminism is simply the equality of all women, regardless of sexuality, biology, race, body-type, or men. Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe), another young student at Miss. Robichaux’s Academy, is the Coven’s only black member, which quickly becomes an example of how women are ostracized or made to feel different from other women due to race, sexuality, and body-image—concepts we see in media and that bleed into our reality. Queenie struggles with being part of the all-white Coven, even though she is a descendent of the Coven like the rest of the witches.

Eventually, she accepts an offer from Marie Laveau to be a part of a “proper family.” The Voodoo faction in general is discarded in favor of the white witches. The priestesses’ living conditions are far inferior to the Coven’s, and the anger that Laveau lives with stems from violence perpetrated by a racist. Yet, the whole first half of the season depicts the rivalry between Supreme Witch Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) and Voodoo Queen Laveau, where Fiona goes as far as to exhume Delphine LaLaurie—a serial killer who tortured and murdered slaves, including Laveau’s lover—to anger Laveau, ignoring the much larger injustices LaLaurie has committed in her lifetime. The rivalry escalates, becoming a race war as Fiona ends up beheading Laveau’s former lover.

Laveau orders a witch hunter to kill the entirety of the Coven and Queenie joins Laveau by threatening Zoe and Madison that, “The war is coming… and you are going to lose.”

Fiona and Laveau eventually come together for the betterment of all of these supernatural women, and devise a plan to confront the witch hunters in the most simple of terms—mercilessly killing every member of the Delphi Trust present without even getting out of their seats. They later toast to a “long, long friendship” because, as Fiona said herself, “When witches don’t fight, we burn.” This scene between Laveau, Fiona, and the Delphi Trust truly embodies the idea of intersectional feminism—minus the supernatural aspects and murder. The feud between these witches throughout the season depicts a very concerning divide amongst women. But, in the end, the unity between Fiona and Laveau and disbandment of the Delphi Trust shows us that solidarity between all women is the most effective and powerful way for women to stand up and fight against inequality.

Regardless of the horrors American Horror Story creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk choose to depict, it is hard to deny—though many have—the unique and powerful way they present the many hardships women (and Americans in general) continue to face. Therefore, American Horror Story is not just frightening and gory entertainment, but a commentary on how these injustices that exist in our world are much larger and much scarier than they appear to us in reality. •

the

terrifying sincerity of

david lynch zach zahos art by zander abranowicz “It’s okay to laugh.” Whenever I force my friends to sit down and watch a David Lynch movie or his TV show Twin Peaks, that is what I tell them. “You will see lots of weird stuff and some scary stuff, but you should find it funny, too.” So much of Lynch’s style is overdone, oversaturated, over-emoted, that when the on-screen images do not send our stomachs turning or jolt us out of our seats, they stimulate generous, albeit uneasy, laughter.

But laughing at an over-the-top scene in a Lynch movie is only step one. It’s an automatic physical response, and clearly intentional given how his filmmaking style overloads the senses with whirling camera movements, bold colors, and sappy pop music.

We giggle in our seats because Kyle MacLachlan trotting around like a chicken in Blue Velvet warrants no other response.

The weirdness comes out of left field, and we wonder if Lynch is just playing some big joke on us serious, grumpy cinephiles weaned on Bresson and Tarkovsky. Is this some Godardian satire? A Kubrickian

black comedy? Is this just chaotic, undisciplined crap?

Appreciating David Lynch becomes a lot easier when you accept that he simply does his own thing. “Lynchian” is an accepted adjective in film criticism by now, and the late David Foster Wallace took a stab at defining it in a memorable 1996 profile of the director for Premiere magazine: “A particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” Read that sentence again, since it’s unusually academic for the no-bullshit author of Infinite Jest. Basically, Wallace is saying that Lynch’s style works through ironic juxtaposition—by, say, finding a severed ear as you walk back to your white-picketfenced suburban home, as MacLachlan does in Blue Velvet.

What I would like to add to Wallace’s definition is that Lynch employs ironic devices for the ultimate effect of reaching the viewer on a visceral, sincere level. His style is reflexive, intellectual and metacinematic (count how many cameras you see within his movies), but it differs from the detached, alienating “Brechtian” style we may prescribe to Steve McQueen’s Shame or David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. Instead, Lynch embeds his cerebral questions—like the crisis of aging as a Hollywood actress in Inland Empire— within a lucid, direct style that engages the senses before the brain. Like any horror filmmaker, he knows what the union of image and sound can stir and even excavate in the individual audience member. Unlike the director of the most recent 3D Saw sequel, however, Lynch forces us to think about his art after we watch it, for it hits close to home even when it doesn’t make practical sense.“ “The stuff that comes out in the work is, I think, a lot more truthful than the way you are just walking around,” Lynch told Chris Rodley in the book Lynch on Lynch. This rather colloquial expression of ideology explains Lynch’s fascination with the sinister “underbelly” of safe and sunny society, as captured in the opening of Blue Velvet or almost any scene in Mulholland Drive. What makes his films jarring and immediate instead of drily polemic is his insistence on

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seeing horrors from the eyes of the victimized. Haunted by nightmares in the real world and the mind in equal measure, Lynch collapses it all into the ineffable, and thus the fully cinematic, and thus, the sincere. It’s just that his brand of sincerity is so twisted that even the luxury of laughter leaves an awkward aftertaste.

an uncanny connection to 9/11 Looking back at the first decade of the 2000s, Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out New York observed, “Can there be another movie that speaks as resonantly—if unwittingly— to the awful moment that marked our decade? Mulholland Drive is the monster behind the diner; it’s the self-delusional dream turned into nightmare.” He refers, of course, to the events of September 11, 2001, as well as the moment in Mulholland Drive where we meet the “Bum” behind Winkie’s Diner. Despite Lynch finishing that film before 9/11, that terrifying jump scare has a lot to say about the way we process such a tragedy, particularly those of us too young at the time to comprehend the event.

Millennials connect with Lynch’s evocation of the uncanny, particularly as it is realized in Mulholland Drive, due to our inability to put the sensation of the uncanny—of something slightly normal, and thus elementally skewed—into words. Our verbal, analytical grasp of the uncanny is weak only because its innate potency within us is so strong. I believe that 9/11 had a formative effect on our psychological

“

Millennials

connect with

”

lynch’s evocation of

the uncanny

growth, much more than most of us may realize.Those of us born in the late-eighties to mid-nineties have a pre- and post-9/11 mindset. The former is tethered to our childhood, which is, by default, supposed to be a halcyon time of white picket fences, green lawns, and friendly firefighters—or so Blue Velvet goes. The latter mindset crystallized in the midst of childhood, before adolescence and thus before we obtained much of an operable rational facility. And so, the violent, public display on 9/11 tore through innocence and burrowed deep into our emotional, rather than intellectual, space.

For Millennials, the event struck an ineffable register, influencing the way we view the world more than the way we comprehend it. For 9/11 derives its horror from the sight of a passenger airplane descending from the sky, gliding over the Statue of Liberty and smashing into a skyscraper where fathers and mothers commuted for work. This is the unforgettable, unbelievable side of the uncanny: the opposite of faceless historical genocide or insular battlefields. We children asked inappropriate, incessant questions and only

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wrapped our heads around the consequences of the attack later. But it stayed with us, and it corrupted our grounding in some of life’s most essential concepts, like home, security—even morning.

The scariest moment in Mulholland Drive is when Dan (Patrick Fischler) meets “Bum” (as he/she is named in the credits) behind Winkie’s Diner. The scene takes place in broad daylight, presumably breakfast time. Dan first recounts a nightmare he had, about confronting a monster in the rear alleyway of that same place, to a friend at a window-side table. His friend assures him he must relive the nightmare outside, in order to prove that it was only a dream. When Dan does so, apprehensively approaching that white alleyway, we see the monster, and it is horrifying. Dan sees it (his friend does not) and faints, presumably dying from the shock. There is no plausible reason for the Bum to chill behind the Diner, aside from scaring the shit out of Dan. The monster springs from an unseen alleyway and stains a white, bright place with pitch-black terror.

That scene spooks us for the simple and effective jump scare at its climax, yet it troubles us, after the movie is over, because it arrives without any anticipation. Even as the camera glides in a gentle bobbing motion, inching toward the rear of the diner, we feel anxious without reason. We sense a creepy calmness. Because Lynch does not explain why the Bum appears for the remainder of the film, the scene only gains meaning by transcribing so little of it to the given scenario.

Lynch finished the film before the 2001 Cannes Film Festival in May, but it did not premiere in the United States until October 12 of that year. By that time, the U.S. had suffered a blow it was barely starting to put behind it. In Rodley’s book, Lynch says, “[The outside world] just seems like a horror story!” Like any horror filmmaker, Lynch sets out to scare his audience, which he does in that second-long, wordless shot where the Bum appears.

Yet Lynch also displays tremendous empathy for Dan, even while ostensibly killing him. The face of evil shows itself and takes an innocent life suddenly, randomly. The circumstances of his death go unknown to Dan as he enters it and to us as well. We try to solve what happened in the scene after the fact, detecting clues and stringing together elaborate theories. It’s 13 years later and no viewer can proclaim with certainty why this strange “murder” occurred. All we are left with is an unsolvable, unbelievable crime. Death has visited home, and home will never be safe again.

the face of laura dern In early November 2006, David Lynch sat at the corner of La Brea and Sunset Blvd. with a billboard, a banner, and a live cow. The billboard read, “For Your Consideration: Laura Dern,” for her performance in Inland Empire, while the banner advertised, in all-caps, “WITHOUT CHEESE THERE WOULDN’T BE AN INLAND EMPIRE.” When asked about the meaning behind that slogan, Lynch told Variety, “I ate a lot of cheese during the making of Inland Empire.” Typical Lynch: Come for the crazy, leave touched but still confused.

That (actually true) story is proof that Lynch cares about Laura Dern. Blue Velvet made her, if not a star, then an iconic 19-year-old actress whose expressive, contorting face attracted as much attention as Isabella Rossellini’s bruised and naked performance. Lynch has only worked with her twice since, in 1990’s Wild at Heart and 2006’s Inland Empire, but their collaborations have been nothing short of mesmerizing. While those two films attract as much hatred as they do admiration, Dern sears through any pretentiousness and leaves no question about her talents. More than almost any other female performer, Dern focuses all energy in exposing her interiority through her face. Lynch recognizes this peculiar gift and, in their films together, maps onto her face a mirror for how we react to life’s horrors.

In Blue Velvet, Dern gives a (in)famous monologue about a dream she had. “In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren’t any robins and the robins represented love,” Sandy (Dern) tells her boyfriend, Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), in his car. She gushes, with awkward ebullience, about how the robins then swooped down and vanquished darkness in a “blinding light of love.”

Lynch syncs this scene to Angelo Badalamenti’s overbearing score, which is to say a typical and very pretty piece of music from Lynch’s maestro. We may think Lynch wants us to pity Sandy for her naïve, on-the-nose sincerity, and that instinct explains why theaters, like Cornell Cinema the fall of my freshmen year, often erupt into muffled laughter as she speaks.

Yet this scene depends on its antithesis, which arrives later at her house, where Jeffrey’s mistress, Dorothy (Rossellini), shows up without any clothes and in a hallucinatory daze. Dorothy clutches Jeffrey and shouts, “I love you, love me!” The realization that her boyfriend had been cheating on her—with an abused woman who shows up on her front lawn—overloads Sandy’s ability to react and she proceeds to cry in one of cinema’s most memorable close-ups. Dern scrunches her face and opens her maw so violently that you imagine a young Claire Danes must have taken some notes.

The toll of a broken heart, plus the impact of witnessing domestic violence for the first time, rushes through her face.

It’s no wonder we have so little a clue of how to react to it.

Lynch stages a similar scene in Wild at Heart, except Dern’s character empathizes with the victim instead of casting herself as one. Dern and Nicolas Cage pull over on the side of a highway to inspect a grisly car crash. They find only one survivor, a pretty girl (Sherilyn Fenn, Audrey from Twin Peaks) who stumbles around and literally can be seen pushing part of her ruptured scalp back onto her skull. The girl collapses in front of the couple and dies dramatically, arms spread like Christ and blood pouring from her mouth. Lynch frames this moment with the girl splayed upside-down, so as to capture Cage and Dern in the same shot as they watch her expire. It’s as if we are huddled with them in this awful yet intimate moment and Dern, of course, grieves like no one else. Lynch affords her another dramatic close-up that contains too much emotion to comprehend, though the scene, with its blatant parallels between victim and witness, is too sad to laugh off.

By the time Inland Empire, Lynch’s three-hour video art piece masquerading as a narrative film, came out in 2006,

Dern had grown up. She had not landed an acclaimed starring role since Alexander Payne’s 1996 film Citizen Ruth, a low-budget indie outside the Hollywood system. Her age surely had something to do with why Hollywood forgot her, for a woman approaching 40 in the business faces an uphill slog through sexist double standards. Inland Empire is as self-aware as Lynch’s films come, so Dern plays an actress named Nikki who revives her fledging career with a sexy role in a romantic drama about infidelity. The media and her co-star (Justin Theroux) make cruel remarks about her age, one factor amongst many that causes Nikki to lose her mind. About an hour in, the narrative momentum derails and cycles through surreal vignettes.

One of the scariest scenes is also the shortest and most densely packed: it is one shot of Nikki limping along a path in the dead of the night. What starts as an extreme long shot and an extremely noisy (Lynch shot the film on video) one at that, becomes a terrifyingly clear close-up when Nikki runs toward the camera. Her face filling the screen, Lynch throws amber light over her and a piercing shriek on the soundtrack to scare us despite whatever steps we might have taken to brace ourselves. The immediate terror of the shot—and, again, the randomness of it—assures we will talk about it after we leave the theater, and think about it, too.

Through Lynch’s direction, Dern acknowledges the icon that is her face, with all the weird masks she has made of it, and how she has grown into middle age, a time when actresses can no longer land close-ups. This shot, as well as an even weirder one at the climax of the film, indicts the prejudice against female representation in commercial cinema while calling back on all her prior work with Lynch, connoting violence, death, and emotional turmoil. Even after applying an intellectual reading to the shot, as I try to do here, we recognize that its admirable thesis emerges on a visceral level. Lynch engages our feelings—almost all of them—so that we feel injustice before thinking about it, which we must do if we wish to will it away.

telling it straight David Lynch knows what he wants and gets it. That is not to say he gets what he ultimately gets, for he has admitted time and time again that so much in his movies remains beyond his intellectual intent. But he feels all that he puts on screen, and he filters that feeling, by default, through the world of dreams. The subjective chaos of Lost Highway speaks to us through the same grammar as The Straight Story’s down-to-earth simplicity. Lynch recognizes that there is no such thing as too much, so long as his delirium hits deep and does not scatter. He perpetuates Hollywood’s definition of movies as entertainment, for there is too much humor, color, music, movement, and emotion to leave a Lynch film without that superficial, gut-level thrill. The thing is, that feeling stews around, there in the gut, and circulates through the whole body, reaching the brain last so that it arrives there with profound urgency. Lynch gets us high and makes us sick of cinema, and so we laugh because we don’t know how to deal with it. Ha ha. That was funny, I think. •

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“IT’S ALL

Psychological...” the immortality of jaws I have had multiple conversations with my father about the movies that have impacted him most throughout his 53 years of life. One particular response has remained constant for as long as I can remember. Whenever I ask, “What is the scariest movie you have ever seen?” he invariably responds with the movie Jaws, without giving his answer any prolonged consideration. My father has seen a host of modern horror films. But no matter how much these films have frightened him, he swears that none compare to how Jaws made him feel while sitting in a movie theater as a 15-year-

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ALEJANDRA ALVAREZ art by AURORA ROJER

old, watching the legendary shark saga unfold on the big screen.

In popular culture nowadays, the horror genre has come to be dominated by plots and characters devoted to a handful of very specific themes—the first of which includes an exploration of transformation in existence, or the exchange between the states of “human” and “animal” (vampires and werewolves, for example). Additionally, the genre is fascinated with drawing a delineation between mortality and immortality, with a specific interest in those who straddle this line. Here, we can think of our friendly poltergeists and demons—and who can forget our beloved, recurring American Horror Story spirits? Inquiries into the metaphysical as well as into superhuman capabilities or magical powers are made by budding witches and warlocks in many a film. And lastly, the classic murder mystery as featured in primetime television favorites like CSI and Law & Order remains endlessly compelling.

But Jaws does not fall into any of the categories above.

If it does not feature a possession, a supernatural battle of strength and wits, a witch’s coming of age, shape-shifting human beings, or mind-boggling dimensions of the human character, then what is it about Jaws that makes it so extraordinarily captivating? What aspect of this classic gets our skin crawling, our minds racing, and our instincts directing us in the opposite direction of any proximate body of water?

An investigation into how cinematographically radical Jaws was for its time, its consistent evocation of instinctual fear, and the manner in which it masterfully personifies the film’s aquatic star, Rogue, may just give us some answers into this multidimensional question.

Everything about Jaws, from its production to its direction, from its musical score to its character development, utterly revolutionized the field of cinematography and obliterated the standard for creating audience connection with the action on screen. In 1975, a year when the horror genre was releasing movies featuring demonic activity (The Devil’s

Rain and Race with the Devil), werewolves (The Werewolf of Woodstock), serial killings (Criminally Insane), and parodied alien encounters (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), few expected the animal protagonist and placid setting of Jaws to provide comparable terror.

Steven Spielberg, director of Jaws, explains in multiple interviews how he endeavored to create a believable atmosphere by including a relatable setting, “quaint” in nature and standard enough in appearance, scale, and population for multiple people to identify with it. Several locales were considered for the setting of Jaws, but none other than Martha’s Vineyard seemed to fit the bill that Spielberg set at the onset of production. Perhaps his steepest request was a setting that would facilitate shooting on the open ocean, something that had never been attempted before by any other film crew and posed several seemingly insurmountable problems for the team at the time. These problems included unpredictable weather, choppy waters, and countless technological blunders, among other things. Yet the struggle of filming on the Atlantic as opposed to within a tank or along a lake enabled the crew of Jaws to cultivate believable graphics that encapsulated Spielberg’s vision of Amity Island: a sleepy, seaside village dwelling on the cusp of a “textured, violent,” and untamable ocean.

A testament to the success of Spielberg’s setting selection is that audiences saw and continue to see their status as individuals, as family members, and as friends reflected in the characters of Amity Island’s citizenry. They recognize the manner in which they themselves would react if something as elusively threatening as a shark of unimaginable size, strength, and bloodthirstiness was to swim along their coast one fine summer. The rawness of this primordial fear in response to threat, this innate fight-or-flight reaction all human beings are endowed with by evolution, is elicited in the audience and mirrored in the scenes in which Amity Island’s beach crowds evacuate the water as Rogue comes near. Jaws is ultimately the story of one such animal’s success in evoking this very reflex: to either fight—like Brody, Quint, and Hooper do for the majority of the film—or flee like most would if warned of a shark in close proximity.

In documentary-style features—“Shark Week” on Discovery Channel, for example—which seek to demystify the reality of sharks, scientists identify the habitual and evolutionary traits of shark behavior: they must swim in order to stay alive, they serve as the ocean’s essential “vacuum cleaners,” and they do not have a preference for human flesh when it comes to feeding time. On the contrary, most shark attacks are the products of confusion on the shark’s part; by extension, the resulting injuries they inflict are not premeditated nor intended, as most experts have assured us. However, it is implied that Rogue is a conscious and murderous creature—such an implication, no matter how ungrounded in scientific research or incongruent with the fact that Rogue was played by a mechanical shark, was enough to turn the audience’s world upside down at the time of the movie’s release. Something that had seemed so impossible before had come to life on the screen—a nightmare come true in which the animal kingdom, supposedly inferior to humanity in rationale and morality, could, in fact, possess a creature that employed these very traits.

Achieved by the film’s artistic components, what enabled the starring shark of Jaws to maintain this overarching presence of conscious intimidation was its personification.

The movie’s omniscient camera angles, aquatic lighting, oceanic landscapes, and iconic musical score excelled in portraying this unlikely but poignant relationship between humankind and its beastly counterparts. Scenes presented

“

MOST SHARK ATTACKS ARE

A PRODUCT OF

”

CONFUSION

ON THE SHARK’S PART.

through the eyes of Rogue as it patrolled the waters near Amity Island, terrorized Brody and his hunting crew, and attacked its multiple victims all lend themselves to the illusion that Rogue is aware and in pursuit of both flesh and fear.

One such visual that comes to mind is that of an innocent swimmer’s silhouette viewed from below the surface. The preliminary strains of Rogue’s signature theme song begin to play ominously in the background as the shark ascends through the water, concluding in a crescendo as the swimmer falls victim to Rogue’s abnormal dietary tastes. Rogue’s repetitive nature, fictitious though it may be since sharks do not actually attack serially, ensures it remains a permanent threat until its inadvertent destruction in the film’s concluding tank explosion.

However, Rogue’s end is not brought about by humans—no matter how hard they try, it is ultimately credited to a freak accident. Even at the end of Jaws, the viewer cannot leave the theater with a feeling of accomplishment or with a solution to the mystery of this shark’s seemingly homicidal tendencies.

According to my father, most of his generation, and Bravo’s original “100 Scariest Movie Moments,” Jaws will forever be remembered as singular in its shock-factor and unique in its ability to incite fear and paranoia. Rogue’s gruesome attacks, its apparent consciousness and intentionality (reflected in its attacking consistency), and the inability of the protagonists to defeat the monster all lend themselves to the audience’s inability to process what is happening onscreen. And when humans cannot reconcile their preconceived notions about the way things in life should operate, we succumb to fear. Indeed, Jaws is a thrilling, chilling film that appeals to the cringe reflex in each and every one of us, despite it being nearly 40 years old and full to the brim with outdated CGI and special effects.

Viewers are left wondering, if humans cannot conquer the shark, then who can? Can it ever be defeated by sheer human force? The movie leaves these questions unanswered, alongside a plethora of sharks that remain in our world’s oceans and possess new and extraordinary character traits ascribed to them by their doppelganger in Jaws. •

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By the time you read this, I hope you have all heard of Awkwafina (originally Nora Lum) and that you have been made publicly uncomfortable by her ridiculously strange and smart rap (“My vag a Beyoncé weave, yo vag a K-Mart hairpiece.”) At only 24 years old, Awkwafina is an incredibly talented singer and producer. Unfortunately, her current rise in popularity seems to be attributed not to her talent, but to her label as an “Asian female rapper.”

Yes, Lum is an Asian female rapper, but trying to define and discuss her work, or anyone’s, within the scope of being Asian and female is a travesty, especially since feminism and culture shock aren’t her goals. In fact, Lum has explicitly said in interviews that the goal of her music is not to make any kind of feminist or pro-Asian statements—yet, somehow, headlines from BuzzFeed and its peers remain the same.

It’s easy to see how people are confused. Awkwafina’s collection at first glance pushes the envelope on a couple of female and Asian fronts—she has songs entitled “My Vag,” “Queef,” and “Yellow Ranger” for goodness sake. But is there a point when comedy is just comedy? If she doesn’t consider her songs feminist and the like, should we?

Looking through Awkwafina’s public statements, beyond her song titles and lyrics, it quickly becomes clear that she isn’t the woman that some people want her to be. Read: a uniquely feminine and Asian activist. She has publically said in an interview with the Daily Beast that there are no female rappers she looks up to and went even further saying, “Other female rappers are overly sexual, have no wit, and their lyrics are so generic. I want to change the game to make rap that shows I’m not a normal female rapper—it’s

awkwafina

rapper, Asian, female ­— separately arielle cruz not about how rich I am, how much sex I have, or how many boyfriends I have.

That’s just not me.” While she is probably right, the statement was a bold one.

Awkwafina does not give props to her fellow female rap artists at all. Instead, she calls them out as being less intelligent than some of the male rappers out there, and declares that she has no role model so she does her own thing.

That thing often involves pushing some boundaries and speaking explicitly about her own experiences—experiences with vaginas, sex, Asian glow, New York City, and marijuana. While for some of these things she has gotten some minimal backlash on sites like Hairpin, overall Awkwafina has gained much support through releasing her first album, Yellow Ranger. The album is mostly composed of her YouTube successes including “Yellow Ranger,” “My Vag,” and “Queef.” There is no doubt that Awkwafina is good at what she does: The production is stellar and the rhymes are whip smart.

And she is still keeping busy. According to her Facebook, in addition to producing her own music, she has cre-

//54

ated music videos, films with other NYC indie-rappers, and has been featured on Vice’s Fresh Off the Boat. However, many still believe that she “isn’t going anywhere.” But in the current moment, a moment that may be called a bit of a feminist renaissance with the success and endless conversations about Girls, Beyoncé, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, and more, is it possible to talk about Awkwafina simply in terms of her music?

In the media the artist is often compared to female icons before her, rappers and snarky women, most commonly Daria and Kreayshawn. But she has never been compared to another Asian artist—likely because there are none to compare her to. And while her style of speaking may resemble Kreayshawn, the comedy and commentary she brings to her songs (“Mayor Bloomberg (Giant Margaritas)”) is al-

“

Is it possible to talk about Awkwafina simply in terms of her music?

”

together unique (read: Kreayshawn’s fun, street-savvy tone, with less pointless lyrics). Spunky and aggressive, while simultaneously crafted and interesting, her music would be more aptly compared to the work of Childish Gambino, who also takes pride in talking about anything and everything including race, the shallowness of the rap game, and current events.

Now, before I go any further, I’m not saying that Awkwafina’s work is meaningless; it is far from that. In past interviews, Lum has commented that she doesn’t think that Awkwafina could exist without some cultural relevancy, and that she hopes her songs inspire some millennial solidarity or a feeling of understanding. And they do. Or at least they do for me, another college-educated female from the New York area.

Is there something so wrong with having a successful career and not trying to change the world at the same time?

Awkwafina isn’t trying to be Lena Dunham, or the newlyout-as-a-feminist Beyoncé—for now, she’s trying to have a career at all. But for some reason, because she is to become the first Asian female rapper to achieve some kind of distinction and she is poking her head out during our generation’s version of a feminist revival, many are misfiling her with the current trend, rather than cracking open a new pack of manila folders.

But really, is Awkwafina’s rap any less liberating and feminist if those weren’t the original intentions? Does it actually matter if she didn’t mean to be feminist, given that she came to embody it anyway? The topics that Awkwafina talks about do affect Millennials, and are also political and culturally charged. She has, whether it was intentional or not, made statements in a feminist or at least liberated way,

and is brandishing some uncomfortable lyrics for the world to see. Her presence is undoubtedly helpful for an Asian music community that is struggling to break into the U.S. mainstream. Her bold attitude is what got caught our attention, after all.

As a feminist myself I’m torn. Should Awkwafina be sticking up harder for women as a sign of solidarity? Or is expecting all female artists to be taking a strong stand or writing about the culture of women too restricting and part of the problem? Maybe one day we can talk about the merits and faults of Awkwafina in terms of her musical presence, cultural relevance, and potential role as a voice for Millennials, but for now, while she is still the first Asian female rapper and women are in the spotlight trying to change dialogue, these labels of Nora Lum that should not be relevant, are indeed very relevant.

Regardless, right now Lum is switching to comedy. As she said to the Daily Beast, “I didn’t write [“My Vag”] as a feminist track because it would be depressing.” It probably would have been. •

art by michelle savran

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MISREPREseNTED and

MISUNDERSTOOD portrayals of mental illness on television MARISSA TRANQUILLI As consumers of modern culture, we have a very complicated relationship with the mentally ill. Many of us stash them in the back of our minds as plot devices, charities we donate to, scientific studies, or something unnoticed, until they directly affect us. Without being mentally ill ourselves, it is nigh impossible for us to grasp what people who are mentally ill are thinking and feeling. As a result, literature, film, and television exploit this ignorance to craft their wares in accordance with their own specific agendas. Without a frame of reference or personal experience with mental illness, it can be difficult for us to understand characters that are haunted by their own limitations.

I took on this article after watching United States of Tara and seek to share my experience of that show in hopes of shedding light on the use and abuse of the mentally ill within the media, although I admit that I had very little knowledge of the illnesses themselves. In order to learn more, I approached occupational therapist Ashley Smith, who works with autistic children, to answer some of my questions.

Marissa Tranquilli: What films or television shows portray mental illness well? How do they touch upon reality? what is so special about them?

Ashley Smith: Examples of films or television shows that portray mental illness well include: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Temple Grandin, and Silver Linings Playbook. Both the first and second films I have listed portray an individual with autism, while the third film portrays a man with bipolar disorder. All three films do a wonderful job of portraying accurate symptoms of mental illness, reflecting on both the good and the bad while refraining from focusing on the “stereotypes” portrayed in the media. For example, Temple

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Grandin tells the true story of “Temple,” a young woman who grew up with autism in a world that did not understand her. This film does a great job of placing the viewer in the eyes of someone with autism, and how they experience their sensory environment (e.g. sounds and sights seem more enhanced and scary at times), and their social environment (e.g. having difficulty with social interactions/relating to others). Finally, this film also displays how successful autistic individuals can become if provided with the right support and treatment; Temple ended up graduating with both her master’s and doctoral degrees in animal science. With that being said, this film only captures an individual who is at a higher level on the autistic spectrum. I think more films need to be created that show the array of functional outcomes/ symptoms that an individual with autism can have—to educate the public on the full picture. The film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape does showcase a young boy who is lower on the autism spectrum well, however he is not the lead in the movie and therefore the specifics of the illness are not discussed. The third film I have listed, Silver Linings Playbook showcases the struggles of a man with bipolar disorder. This film also does a great job of portraying both the “manic” and “depressive” ends of this disease, without “exaggeration,” which is many times the case. It also portrays bipolar disorder in a positive light, and demonstrates how with the right supports and treatment, an individual can live a fairly normal life.

M.T.: What films or television shows portray mental illness poorly? What are they doing wrong?

A.S.: When I think of films or television shows that por-

tray mental illness poorly, the first ones that come to mind are horror films (e.g. Halloween, Friday the 13th). This genre of film tends to depict a “psychopath”, focusing on the extreme negative outcome of mental illness, when left untreated. Not all individuals turn violent and this portrayal can lead to the public associating mental illness with violence.

M.T.: What are three things about mental illness that most people don’t know?

A.S.: This is difficult for me to answer but I will try my best. I think three things most people don’t know are that not all mental illness is as severe as it is portrayed in the media, most mental hospitals are much more humane now and do not use torturous treatment methods (e.g. strait jackets), and mental illness manifests itself in different people in variable ways (i.e. some may have a more severe form of bipolar disorder than another individual with an identical diagnosis).

[END INTERVIEW] United States of Tara is a show that deals with dissociative identity disorder—an illness in which duress or emotional turmoil can render the patient into an alternate personality—an excellent plot device any writer would kill to get his or her hands on. Tara Gregson is happily married to her husband, Max, with whom she has two children, Marshall and Kate. Tara lives out an idealistic life, working as a painter, hanging out with her sister, and spending time with her family. But Tara isn’t always just Tara: She’s also T, a 16 year-old stuck in slutty nineties crop tops who loves playing DDR at the arcade and hooking up with random men; Buck, a smoking war vet who rides a motorcycle and takes home women; and Alice, a fifties house wife who curls her hair, bakes, and washes out her children’s mouths with soap when they swear. The problem with this situation is that, when triggered, Tara will snap into one of these different personalities, and her family is left to wrangle them and keep her out of trouble. When Tara returns to her body

“ NOt

all

mental

illness is as

”

severe as it is portrayed in the media

she is forced to live with the decisions of her alter egos, or “alters,” and clean up the messes they made.

The interesting thing about United States of Tara is the

fact that, in its extended episodic timeframe, it is able to turn its focus onto many different aspects of the illness and the family’s reactions. Whereas films, due to their standard two-hour running time, are forced to focus on only one aspect of mental illnesses—namely, either the toll they take on those with the illness or on the people caring for them—the intermittent nature of television shows enables the writers to fully explore how Tara’s dissociation affects each character. Her children have to juggle both their own adolescent angst as well as stopping T from getting “Slut” tattooed on their mom’s stomach, and Max has to contend with the fact that Buck, unbeknownst to Tara and her entire family, has been carrying out a committed relationship with a woman named Pammi.

Many films derive the greatest part of their plotline from the toll the illness takes upon the family members. However, United States of Tara allows us to access Tara’s mind. Without a mental illness, it is difficult to immediately associate with a mentally ill character, but Toni Collette (the actress who plays Tara) draws the audience into each of the alters by making them all so human. Tara’s desire to control her own life, to understand why she is the way she is, and cope with her own loss when it comes to possessing this sickness gives viewers a common ground on which to connect with her. We care not only for Tara, but the emotionally fragile, impetuous, and unique alters she becomes. As the series progresses Tara is able to share co-consciousness with her alters. They hold meetings where they discuss conflicts they have with one another and draw up agreements as to who gets the body when.

The show is focused on Tara and we get to view her fear, disgust, and struggle. And yet, at times, her family is able to make light of the situation, allowing her to embrace her alters in the situations that demand their presence. While the media has a tendency to depict mental illnesses negatively, United States of Tara shows some of the good that comes out of Tara’s disorder in scenes such as when Buck teaches

57\\

Kate and Marshall how to bowl, or beats up Kate’s abusive boyfriend.

The largest issue with mental illness in film and television is its use solely as a plot device in horror or crime stories. Even in a show as upbeat as Psych, whose audience is aware of the ridiculous nature of the show and needs no aid from horror constructs, a character with a similar dissociative identity disorder to Tara is found to be the killer in a murder.

Although he is undergoing treatment for his illness, he believes himself to be haunted by the ghost of a woman, who turns out to be one of his alternate personalities reaching out to him. A different personality is unhappy with his therapy and the progress being made, so he decides to murder the therapist. This idea of what it means to be “mentally deranged” coats mental illness with a sense of fear. Even when we are consciously aware of the fact that the mentally ill are not deranged murderers, the horror and crime genres have twisted our perceptions.

Of course, the most famous multiple identity film of all time is Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock is a revolutionary director and Psycho is a genre defining film, but the plot exploits the lack of knowledge regarding mental illness on the part of the average viewer. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a psychopath (psycho) is regarded as a mentally ill person who is highly irresponsible and antisocial and also violent or aggressive—a person consistently exhibiting psychopathic behavior. The problem with the title is that it automatically classifies someone with a serious mental illness in a derogatory manner. Yes, Nor-

man Bates is a murderer in his psychosis, but this fact fails to be properly acknowledged. Hitchcock uses our lack of knowledge of mental illness and multiple personalities to create fear in the final scene with Norman.

The majority of the film uses camera techniques, suspenseful soundtracks, and the withholding of information from the audience to generate the tension and horror that the film is famous for. Through the reveal of Norman’s secret and his final mother-personality voiceover as he sits in his cell, Hitchcock allows Norman’s illness to become the film’s chilling plot twist. One of the big problems with using this kind of mental illness in horror films is that it feeds into our subconscious fear of the mentally unstable. Writers seeking thrilling plot devices will use our innate fears and only continue to worsen misconceptions, rather than explore mental illness in real day-to-day situations. In United States of Tara, Tara’s alters do act out violently on occasion, but it is clear that the responsibility lies with a particular alter or the disease itself, rather than Tara. With movies like Psycho, the audience fears sweet, mild-mannered, crazy Norman; they do not attempt to understand his reasons or the illness and instead see the violence that is fed to them through the abuse of the plot.

The real problem with mental illness in the media is that it consistently presents powerful stories. As a topic that is so alien, and yet so close to home, stories of mental illness can generally hook most audiences. Yet its use can and should be mediated. In this day and age, film and television are our cultural outlets. Trapping the mentally ill in the same character tropes and casting them as deranged murderers stunts the growing acceptance we have for those who are different. We use insane asylums in our haunted houses and watch countless horror films where the “crazy” person is an unhinged murderer. However, if we allow it, the media that continues to hold back the mentally ill by perpetuating misconceptions can also help society understand the truth of mental illness.

The unknown is not going to be abandoned as a plot device, but if it’s channeled into television shows like United States of Tara and films like Silver Linings Playbook, mental illness can be understood in its reality: Highs, lows, and everything in-between. •

by THELONIA SAUNDERS

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three poems by amy saulzerby

Don’t forget that habits are just as breakable as hearts In the end, loving you was just another thing my body did.

I felt my body soften into yours I did not realize it had gone slack as a rag doll.

Maybe we listen to the same songs over

life advice periodically clear your web history to hide your recent activity from yourself

and over for the same reason we fall in love with the same people again and again.

Maybe there comes a time to change the fucking station.

open a new word doc and close it open a new word doc and instead of closing it leave it there empty and staring at you lie to yourself but make sure the lies don’t contradict each other don’t show all of yourself but if you do, don’t give a fuck even if you don’t, still don’t give a fuck generally, give no fucks

i will turn this delorean right around, young man I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that sleeping with someone I used to be in love with is the closest I will ever come to time travel.

(Very, very slowly.)

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beached Ariella reidenberg After licking the sand

The tide recedes and she slobbers soundly

her face became turgid

Calling to mermaids for help.

tongue swelling it almost

I wanted to be a mermaid when I grew up

exploded out of her mouth.

Not a scientist, like my mother.

If that tongue could talk

Now look at me

it’d tell me, it tastes

following her in gritty footprints

so different without water

to the bloated carcass.

that living up here is so dry.

I bet it was once a Mom too.

Even through the hailstorms.

Bobbing in and out of the horizon,

Have you ever seen a tongue up close?

swims her family of three

Red bumps in a pond of smaller, gray ones

Sea creatures communicate through song

with a slime line right down the middle.

as water carries a tune better than air.

Hers doesn’t look like that, anymore.

Beneath the wet sand, her flippers sink in snug

I can’t even find the line.

but the two-leggeds mark her for dead

Brought here on the backs of plastic bags

And carve out her innards

she didn’t know

for museums.

she would suffocate.

What did they see that scared them so

The idea that your own body can suffocate you

much that they return to the sea?

just the pure weight of it alone

See the remnants of pelvic bone

makes me wonder what the whale song is really about. floating around in there?

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Ribcage crushed by tons of blubber

They had legs, once, just like us.

lungs deflating under salt-like hail

But tide pool bathtubs suited them better than porcelain.

She waves her knife and yells for everyone to get off the ticking time bomb.

I remember the video of the whale exploding after one cut.

Mommy is super careful with her knife.

The blade goes in, a hiss comes out the first warning.

Only a few hours of daylight left to defuse the tension— men arguing about who keeps the jaw bones With the bickering, the hail, the balloon expanding and my mother carving on top of it all I look to the ocean and wish again to be a mermaid.

flower girl Tia Lewis

poetry

My mother is shooing away the bad guys cutting off fins kids playing on the blubber—like trampolines

Two dandelions, crossed like your eyes, tongue out

Three water lilies, between us in the pond, white as teeth

One blue tulip, painted on your canvas, painted on your lids Five daffodils, full of sunshine, bright as you

Four lavender stalks, in the back of your jewelry box, pale Seven carnations, quiet confessions, pink as your cheeks Twenty forget-me-nots, an apology, you throw them out One red rose, blooming between us, bloody fingers

Twelve daisies, your mom’s favorite, you shake and scream

Two arched orchids, distant like us, wilting with our long hair Seventeen foxgloves, your touch a whisper, my face a mirror

Thirty-one snapdragons, thrown in a vase, you slam the door Six calla lilies, a laugh, a lie, you push my hands away Three irises, an icy morning to follow a fiery night One sunflower, bent outside our door, your door

Twenty-four lilacs, for all your years, all our months apart Ten hydrangeas, alone, still, one for each year gone.

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a facebook poem by zander abranowicz Locked Up Abroad: 14+ Hours Trapped in “El Dorado” Bogota Airport...

9am-2pm [Hours 1-5]: Arrive from Cartagena. Naps, cappuccinos, reading. Mistake creature squeaking in red pet carrier for monkey. It is not. Play with furry object for a while. A puppy (?)

2-3pm [Hour 6]: Passports stamped, fatal error. Fail to get on earlier flight standby. It dawns that we are no longer allowed out of airport due to stamps. Imitating Tom Hanks in “The Terminal.” Men without country.

3-4pm [Hour 7]: “Monsters University” and X-Games wipeout reel on silent TVs drinking local Bogota beers. Excitement when waitress brings large bucket of french fries. Reaction tempered when it’s discovered that bucket has false bottom and doesn’t hold all that much at all. It is brought to my attention that Aldous Huxley is my doppelgänger.

4-5pm [Hour 8]: Watch Federer match on silent TV drinking beers. Text friends and family on sporadic wifi connection.

5-6pm [Hour 9]: Lay down on pedestrian conveyor belt. Consume Burger King at food court. Write a song about favorite legal defenses: Irresistible urge, temporary insanity, Wild Beast Rule.

6-7pm [Hour 10]: Duty free browsing. Grubby hands dip into “facial caviar.” Cologne sprayed liberally. Some gets in my mouth by accident. Settle on a cheap gold Casio watch, only souvenir save painful sunburn and assorted insect bites.

Watch longingly as LAN Chile and Avianca planes depart for destinations near and far. Caracas, Quito, Lima, Frankfurt, Paris.

7-8pm [Hour 11]: Make joke in Spanish about chest hair to jewelry store clerk. Unexpectedly successful. Drink beers at our favorite bar in the airport (Read: Sole bar in Bogota airport). Read about WWII looted art. Whose idea it was to make the movie “White House Down”?

8-9pm [Hour 12]: Queasily stare into space. Temporarily forget I am in Bogota until I see city lights out window beyond tarmac. Channing Tatum defeats right wing terrorists with help of U.S. President, Jamie Foxx, after Ford Explorer crashes into Oval Office, killing James Wood.

9-11pm [Hour 13-14]: Reach gate. Nirvana. Paunchy fellow with headphones in but not plugged into aux playing synthheavy music from laptop. Flee to hide laughter. Desastre: flight delayed an hour and a half. David Bowie hallucinations.

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kitsch would like to thank The Student Assembly Finance Comission

our Cornell advisor, MICHAEL KOCH JOE SHELTON and Cayuga Press The Merchant’s House Museum in New York City SAM BROMER, GINA CARGAS, RACHEL ELLICOTT, JAMES RAINIS

and Mann Library (our haunt away from home)

IF YOU LIKE: art

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