Cult Cinema #14: Exiles, part 2

(Another revisitation, this time of Martha Marcy May Marlene. Spoilers as ever, discussion of rape, gaslighting, relationship abuse.)

Balloted

Last year, I was told by a friend that he'd submitted We Don't Go Back to the Recommended Reading list for the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards. I wasn't sure what that meant. So I checked it out.

Cult Cinema #13: Exiles, part 1

(I've already written about The Passion of Darkly Noon, as part of We Don't Go Back. As the completion of On a Thousand Walls and Cult Cinema becomes more urgent, I've got to revisit it, and, inevitably, Martha Marcy May Marlene, which comes next.)

 

Exiles

We've got the Moonies to thank for a lot of what we know about this sort of thing. The simple fact that Sun Myung Moon was a dyed in the wool hand rubbing Bond villain who freely owned the way he created structures of control means that we have a language of this. Moon codified the ways churches control us. And not just churches, any ideological group with the right tenor: inspired by a friend's experience with a hard-line leftist group, years ago I wrote a piece where I listed seven ways, I think it was, in which revolutionary Marxist-Leninists and conservative evangelical Christians closely corresponded, and managed simultaneously to outrage members of both constituencies, which was one of my finest moments, let me tell you.¹

Leaving any extreme religious group is never simple. Even more mainstream ones leave their mark upon us. Churches have mechanisms of social control, even if they don't admit to them. And this is never more clear when you see what happens to people who leave, whether willingly or not. When you've been in a controlling and abusive religious movement, you don't just leave, because you had an emotional relationship, a human relationship, with that institution and the people in it. And as many people who have escaped from an abusive relationship that they had invested in will tell you, one of the feelings you rarely get warned about is the grief, the mourning for it, because the fact is, as hateful as that personal or institutional (or both) relationship might have been, it still leaves a gaping hole in your emotional life.

In Search of the Miraculous #16: The Color Turquoise

The New York Times recently ran one of those "what books do you like reading?" Q&A puff pieces in its review section, featuring Alice Walker, the writer, as you probably know, of The Color Purple. In this piece, simply a list sent to the New York Times correspondent by email, she recommended a book called And the Truth Shall Set You Free and equally warmly recommended its author, David Icke.

A man walks into a forest

A man walks into a forest.

Haunted Britain

A catalogue of hauntings from the landscapes of my life, 1987–2002.

On a Thousand Walls #15: Edge of Darkness (1985)

(Spoilers as ever. But this is a piece of TV that's well over 30 years old, so frankly, who cares?)

One of the things that I've spent a deal of time looking at since this film and TV project became a serious thing, rather than just a movie marathon that got way out of hand, is how the conditions for cultural moments reproduce themselves, how a trope or a plot concern can be utterly of its time, and then some years later becomes really dated, and then a bit later still it looks utterly prophetic. And that feeds into this wider idea I have of folk horror as a hauntological thing, which is in short how we make movies about witches in the woods when we as a society are haunted by the feeling that history is unresolved, that the past has business with us.

And the difference between the urban wyrd (or the urban weird as I'm becoming more inclined to spell it) and folk horror is that the precise grounds for this discomfort, both literal and metaphorical, are different. The psychology of the urban landscape admits a different sort of haunting. I mean it's not even that an urban wyrd/weird story happens in a city as such: both Dead Man's Shoes and Helen, for instance, as well as Edge of Darkness, which I'm going to be looking at here, pivot on events in green spaces, but it's how the body politic intrudes on those spaces that makes for the status of the haunting.