The Haunting of Hill House (Four Episodes In)

 When it comes to horror, I generally like to fall back on the cliché: "I'm a pusher, not a user." Truthfully, I consider the stuff I write to be more in line with dark fantasy (or just fantasy) than horror, but I also think that the genres (along with sci fi) exist in a sort of spectrum or multidimensional graph. I think the monsters in fantasy should feel like they're out of a horror story, because the fantasy is that there exists an equal or greater force for good that can stand and oppose them.

But I've always been drawn to that darker side of things, while at the same time I'm a total lightweight when it comes to actually enduring horror. Perhaps more than any other genre (except perhaps cringe comedy,) horror is one that is endured and not simply enjoyed. There's a pride viewers get from watching scary movies - a kind of bragging rights - that feels a bit akin to people who like the very spiciest foods. There's almost a joy in being able to disparage those who don't like it. (At 35, my mouth still really likes spicy foods but my stomach and intestines are not such big fans anymore.)

So, I've always been in this kind of weird place when it comes to horror. I really enjoy the mystery and intrigue that often comes with it - the sense that there's a bigger picture to put together, threaded together with hints and glimpses. But I also hate actually feeling scared. I have an active imagination, and unless I'm unusual, I think adults don't so much get over their childhood fear of the dark so much as they just learn to manage it.

So color me impressed, I guess, that I've managed to get this far into the Haunting of Hill House. I watched the first episode weeks ago, but finally started early enough in the evening that I was able to get through three episodes before I cut myself off for the night.

Ghost stories are one of the (and maybe the most elemental) subgenres of horror. I think basically every human culture has a concept of ghosts, because I think every human culture struggles to reckon with death. People exist, and all of a sudden their bodies cease to be a conscious, sentient entity that you can relate to and become inanimate objects. On a deep level, it's almost as if we have an internalized sense of the conservation of matter and energy - whatever the person's animating force was that made them them, the "person" of them, has gone missing. So, we think, where might it have gone?

That can apply both to villainous individuals and to loved ones we miss, which makes the concept very fertile for different kinds of horror.

I think of all horror subgenres, ghost stories are the ones most aligned with talking about grief. On a metaphorical level, the people we lose haunt us. And sometimes, the unresolved aspects of those relationships mean tensions that we can never unravel.

It's been nearly five years since my mother died of cancer. Five years is simultaneously a yawning chasm of time and also the blink of an eye. Our current historical moment - at what is (knock on wood) hopefully the later stages of a bona fide plague - has made the last two years feel temporally distorted. For me, I'd say I'm in that stage where the grief is still tender, like the scars on my wrists after I put my arms through a window when I was 6, but there's also a post-"my mother is alive" routine that my family has developed. I wanted my mom to live to be 100 or more, but I wasn't exactly a child when she died, having turned 31 a few weeks earlier.

The Haunting of Hill House is a loose adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel. It tells the story of five siblings whose mother died while they were living at the eponymous house back in the 1990s when they were kids (this might be the first thing I've seen when the "adults looking back to their childhood" sort of story feels strongly like it's my generation). The house was haunted, though the memories of the strange things happening there varied greatly between the kids - all they know is that one night, their dad woke them up and got everyone (except the mother) into the family car to drive away.

The structure of the first several episodes follows the various siblings and the way that this trauma has shaped their lives. Steven struggled as an author for years until he wrote a highly fictionalized version of their family trauma, and has become a big success in the "non-fiction" ghost story genre, even if he's a skeptic himself, having never seen any of the things that his siblings claim to have. Shirl (short for Shirley, and surely that name cannot be a coincidence - I assume Steven is named for Stephen King, who does often have authors as protagonists in his stories) has become a mortician, running a funeral home and clearly seeing embalming and her craft as a way to fix (and control) death. Theo, the middle child, is a child psychologist, helping kids deal with trauma, though with her episode we start to get a bit of a broadening of the scope of the show's supernatural elements. The most recent I watched is that of Luke, one half of the pair of twins that are the youngest in the family, along with his sister Nell. Luke always struggled with being talked down to and disbelieved, and in adulthood he became a drug addict, giving his family another reason not to take him seriously.

The structure works very effectively to show the complex tapestry of this family and the way that it was shaped by trauma.

What's interesting to me is that the show seems entirely uninterested in the meaning or source of the haunting of the eponymous house itself. Oftentimes, ghost stories (especially of the haunted house variety) will require its protagonists to solve the mystery of the ghosts haunting the house in order to prevail and bring peace.

Here, however, four episodes in, the show is far more interested in exploring these characters and the different ways that grief can manifest - even while scaring the shit out of you with its ghosts.

It is very good. But fair warning, if you've experienced any period of acute grief, you're going to see a lot of familiar feelings, so take care of yourself if you're going to watch it.

The Expanse Ends Leaving You Wanting More

Well, I finally finished The Expanse.

Season six has been, as I understand, an adaptation of the novel Babylon's Ashes and the novella Strange Dogs. The latter hints at the plot that comes in the final three novels, but the show ends with some clear dangling threads.

I don't know what to expect here. On one hand, the additional 3 seasons Amazon was able to give the show let it bring things to a conclusion that felt fairly satisfying, resolving some of the big themes that have been part of the story since the beginning. Indeed, I noticed some bookending motifs in the finale that paid off nicely.

But the show makes no attempt to hide the fact that there are elements of the story that remain an issue - issues that I know are part of those final three books.

Will we get an adaptation of those stories by the same team? Or are we just going to be content with this partial adaptation? Are the producers playing their cards close to the vest, or should we truly consider this the end?

Let's get into spoiler territory.

Another Visit to the Idea of Sci-Fi Hardness

 The Expanse is set in the 23rd century. While it shares that with the original Star Trek, its expectations for technological advancements are far more modest - there's no warp drive, and while humanity has managed to colonize the solar system, the only group even contemplating interstellar travel is a sect of Mormons who have commissioned the largest space ship ever built, the Nauvoo, to serve as a generation ship to travel another star system over the course of hundreds, maybe even over a thousand years (oh, and the ship never actually winds up being used that way).

Another sci-fi show I've started watching is Raised by Wolves, which has incredible technology that includes androids indistinguishable from humans, interstellar travel, and weapons that can apparently disintegrate an individual human target with sound waves. And this one is set in the 22nd Century.

Essentially, if there's one thing that sci-fi authors profoundly don't agree on, it's the rate at which we can expect technology to advance. Sometimes, there's an in-universe explanation for the advancement of technology - I believe in Raised by Wolves, the sudden jump in technological prowess is thanks to the discovery of alien messages in the scripture of an (in our time at least) obscure religion from about 2000 years ago.

But I also think this returns us in part to the question of "hard" versus "soft" sci-fi that I wrote about a couple posts ago on this blog.

I think the clearest way to explain hard sci-fi versus soft sci-fi is how many logical leaps it takes for one to arrive at the kind of technology we see in the story. For example, a lot of sci-fi stories give their spaceships and space station artificial gravity, which seems to be achieved through some technology that is generally unexplained. In The Expanse, though, rather than going through some convoluted idea of "gravity plating" that seems like it would be very energy-inefficient, instead the world has the "Epstein Drive," a much more fuel-efficient fusion drive that simply accelerates a ship at 1G until the ship gets about halfway to its destination, at which point the ship just turns around and starts decelerating instead, again at 1G. Thus, the engine becomes "down" for your ship. While the engineering and scientific breakthroughs that would be required to make an engine that can sustain that level of thrust over the course of an entire interplanetary trip is itself a kind of mysterious and undiscovered technology, the physical basis for artificial gravity is thus fairly plausible.

Different audiences engage with sci-fi for different reasons. And, indeed, I think you could count this kind of "crunchy" hard sci-fi to almost be a different genre (another great example is The Martian, whose author has joked with the authors of The Expanse that their stories take place within the same fictional timeline).

Where I get a bit defensive, though, is when people claim that this form of science fiction is inherently superior.

When Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, he was less interested in the technological ideas behind it than the sociological ones. He wanted to address things like racism and the Cold War in a metaphorical way that allowed him to raise issues that were considered too controversial for the time. Additionally, he wanted to portray a positive vision of the future, which included egalitarianism around race and gender. As someone who was born about 20 years after Star Trek first came on the air, it never seemed that revolutionary that there was a black woman who was one of the senior officers on the Enterprise, but for the 1960s, that was a pretty big deal (to be honest, though, I think that growing up in a household that held similar values to the ones expressed by Star Trek, I didn't realize that it was, in fact, still a bit revolutionary in the 1980s).

In Star Trek, many of the aliens that the crew of the Enterprise meet are very human-like. Some look identical or near-identical to humans, and many look like humans but with prosthetics (the design of the Klingons shifted significantly in the third Star Trek movie, making them look somewhat more alien with the ridged foreheads).

Now, I think most people think that if there are aliens out there (and given the size of the universe, it's not at all irrational to think that there are) the likelihood of their looking anything like us is profoundly small. So, the idea of human-like aliens is typically considered a "soft sci-fi" trope.

But it serves a purpose - aliens in hard sci-fi are usually depicted as extremely mysterious, if they're even depicted at all. Humanoid aliens, though, allow us to imagine new cultures that are different than our own but nevertheless revolve around the same basic experience and needs. Mind you, Star Trek does have plenty of truly alien aliens - weird slimes, intelligent crystalline structures, etc., but by allowing for a somewhat bigger leap of logic than the existence of The Expanse's Epstein Drive, it allows them to tell stories that you couldn't do if you tried to keep things extremely hard.

 I think that ultimately, hard science fiction is ultimately just a methodology for maintaining the willing suspension of disbelief. All fiction relies on this, and it's a nuanced thing. Just as we might be pulled out of a story by a character acting in a way that seems contrary to what we've learned about them so far (except when that's a deliberate reversal within the drama) we might be pulled out of a narrative when an element of the fictional reality becomes too unbelievable.

I had a moment like this when watching one of the early episodes of Fringe - a show from about a decade ago that I think was meant to be the next Lost (it was created by J. J. Abrams) but never took off in popularity. I actually wound up liking the show once it got over some of its awkwardness in the first season. But there was an episode in which a group of women give birth to babies who swiftly age into full-grown adults and then die of old age within minutes.

I remember feeling pulled out of this because it occurred to me that a person only grows in size because, you know, they take on matter through eating. These babies were ballooning to adult size without any clear source of material.

My friend Tim poo-poo'd this criticism with a trope he likes to call "A Magic Carpet Could Never Turn a Corner Like That at That Speed," i.e. a needlessly picky critique applying real world logic to a fantastical situation. But I do think that the somewhat (somewhat) more grounded sci-fi the show was trying to portray itself as having put my criticism within reasonable grounds.

The point is that you set up an expectation in the audience as to how critical we should be of its realism. Human-looking aliens showing up in The Expanse is a pretty huge stretch, but it's to be expected in Star Trek.