Today's post is the first in a three-part look at a new novella by Michael David Wilson called The Girl in the Video. This is the longest installment of the three, largely because I enjoy the simple fun of letting my subconscious float in a sea of signification, and this short work offers a lot of room for doing that.
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If literature is a proverbial window onto life, then horror
fiction is the fenestration that provides some of the most crystal clear views of
the human psyche, that shifting realm wherein the constant play of the sacred and
the sinister shapes and defines who we are. Indeed, it is a typically Freudian
approach that sees our minds—our personalities—as arising from the contest
between our innate bodily desires and the “civilizing tendencies” forced upon
us by society and culture. But what if that delimiting “civilization” is
itself, as philosopher Herbert Marcuse posits, already frighteningly enfeebled
and sick? Is the mind produced within this society similarly broken?
This is the dark question at the heart of Michael David
Wilson’s novella The Girl in the Video,
a work that displays how damaged—“unhinged”—an individual can be when the only
sociocultural limits that shape the self are those set by the ubiquitous web of
contemporary “social media” outlets and technologies. The titular girl in this
novella is the product of social media, a woman devoid of empathy but brilliant
in her ability to use technology to reveal secrets that can be used for
malicious harassment.
And while The Girl in
the Video can be summarized as a thriller in which a married couple are
haunted and hunted by a psychopathic killer, that would be too easily glossing
over the insights Wilson offers into how the very act of stalking profoundly
affects the mind of the intended victim—in this case, the husband Freddie who,
with his wife Rachel, is a British expat living and working as an English
teacher in Japan.
As the first person narrator, Freddie presents himself as
witty and deeply in love with his wife, but also somewhat insecure in both his
own abilities and his relationship with his wife. When caught viewing a video
sent anonymously to him—an amateur recording that has an undeniably erotic
affect upon him—he hides the source of his excitement from his wife.
Later when
discussing the possibility of becoming a father, he confesses his insecurity:
“I fuck things up. Don’t want my kid to become another fuck-up in a long list
of fuck-ups.” Despite his wife’s reassurance, Freddie cannot let go of his
nagging worries about an uncertain future that may include both a mortgage and
a baby.
Nor can he let go of the peculiar video he has received. In
the days after downloading it to his phone, Freddie continues to re-watch the
strangely mesmerizing video of a girl wearing a Hello Kitty mask that shows
only her mouth. The grainy video offers a setup comparable to the famous Sharon
Stone scene in Basic Instincts, the
girl wearing a similar outfit albeit black with fishnet stockings—but
repeatedly crossing and uncrossing her legs in rhythm to the music, until she
stands and sways her hips in rhythmic coordination as well. “Delicate.
Alluring. Sensual.” For weeks afterward Freddie’s finds sensual pleasure in
repeated viewings until the demands of work divert him to other distractions.
Though not at all pornographic, the video is erotic but only
in a mildly suggestive way: close-ups on flexing legs, swaying hips, painted lips.
More disturbing is that Freddie recognizes the video is hypnotic, placing him
into trance with the very first viewing. “Relaxing. Meditative. Freeing.” With
his first viewing concentrated viewing Freddie enters a trancelike state, one
he obviously enjoys.
Some professional hypnotists such as
Ivan Tyrrell, writing on the Human Givens Institute website, have warned
that trance may have a negative effect upon some, and that even a pleasant
therapeutic experience may result in varying degrees of post-hypnotic
depression. Tyrrell also argues that those in a deep trance may not even
remember what occurred when they were in the dreamlike state, during which
their minds are especially open to suggestibility and subliminal perception is
at its highest.
Freddie’s pleasure in the trance state and his repeated
post-viewing sensual response suggest the possibility of a subliminal hypnotic
suggestion within the video. But the
masked girl in the video says nothing beyond wishing her viewer a belated Happy
Birthday. Where could the hypnotic suggestion be hidden, and what is the message?
Could the video be something more than a teasing of Freddie’s masculine ego?
Could the underlying suggestion be an attempt at entrapment through enticement?
Even before Freddie discovers that what seems like a red and
white flash in one of the sender’s later videos is actually a brief shot of the
girl’s breasts with the command “find me” written across them, it is obvious
that this first video is rife with elements of erogenous seduction. These are available
in the physical components of the video, most specifically the focus upon the
legs of the girl in the video.
“The camera focused on … her lower body … legs in fishnets,
crossed and uncrossed, crossed and uncrossed, always right leg over left, in
sync with the music. …swinging frenetically.” Proponents of dream analysis see
legs as symbolic of confidence, especially the comfortably crossed legs.
Freddie will later experience these legs in a nightmarish form, legs detached
from the torso, the fishnet stockings taking on the auditory equivalent of “sharp
razors on a blackboard, raw friction as her legs crossed and uncrossed.” It is
worth considering that Freddie is portrayed as experiencing a period of low
self-confidence while he and his wife negotiate their future as possible
homeowners and parents. While the symbolic message of “strength” is said to be expressed in
dreams of disembodied legs, in both the video and his nightmare these are not
Freddie’s own legs, but those of an unknown, masked woman.
The girl’s legs, covered in fishnet stockings, are opening
and closing like a net thrown out to capture prey. Rather than an image of
self-confidence, these legs are giving to the insecure viewer/dreamer the
suggestion of strength and security to be found within their grasp, the
symbolic fish that ancient Ephesians sometimes used to depict the regenerative,
vulvic powers of Artemis, goddess of the hunt.
The trap having been set, the video momentarily shows the
girl standing, relishing the capture of her prey, hips swaying in a bizarre
mime of beastly mastication.
The next visual focus in the video is the masked girl’s
lips, with her legs still visible as they cross in time to the music. With all
this motion, the girl applies a thick layer of deep red lacquer. It is worth
noting that Wilson uses the word “sanguine” to identify this shade of red,
suggesting Freddie’s receptivity to the allure of the masked girl through the
word’s association with the personality type that celebrates friendliness,
sociability, openness, and perhaps an impulsiveness that disregards social taboos
about physical contact.
In his nightmare re-envisioning of this scene, Freddie
feels he is the lacquer itself, the complacent liquid—a physical state
suggesting complete surrender—being brought to the girl’s mouth, one drop at a
time. In this nightmare, each dip of the brush into the lipstick pot brings
agony to Freddie’s ear, suggesting that he should have heard and understood the
girl’s hypnotic message. At the close of the nightmare, the girl’s lips take on
an enormity that ends in the eating of the dreamer.
The “belated” birthday greeting in the video is the girl’s
only spoken comment, and in retrospect it can be taken as Freddie’s being
welcomed into a new phase of life, of being born into a life of childlike fear
brought on by the harsh ministrations of a cruel maternal image, a “bad mother”
who rises in contrast to the revelation of Rachel’s pregnancy.
While the identity of the masked girl and her relationship
remain hidden to Freddie, the woman is subliminally introducing herself and suggesting to her viewer, Freddie, that he had indeed been connected with her at
some point in the past. The girl communicates this through the
background song used in the video, humming along with it to emphasize her
connection to the lyrical expression.
Freddie finds the music familiar, and
eventually recognizes it as the opening song on an album entitled “Perdition
City” by the Norwegian experimental electronica band Ulver. Freddie’s
recognition comes when he hears the first line of the opening piece: “What is
the meaning of this voyage?” With this song the girl in the video is opening
the door for Freddie and inviting him to a terrifying journey.
The lyrics of this opening song, “Lost in the Moments,”
allude to a longtime relationship: “So many bends and these years we've been
together passed.” The girl is suggesting that she and Freddie have a
relationship that goes back quite some time. She is also confessing to a
pleasure in whatever has transpired between them:
And all this time she was
tremendously excited/
About everything she saw/
Everything we had talked about.
It is possible that Freddie has a subconscious recognition
of this message of familiarity, but it does him no good for as a teacher he has dealt with
perhaps hundreds of students over the many years of his career. What his
subconscious does take fright at is the girl’s suggestion that through the
album she is giving him a warning, made glaringly clear when Freddie many
months later hears the notes of “Lost in the Moments” being used as someone’s
ringtone in a restaurant. “The damn thing made me jolt up so hard I almost fell
out of my chair,” Freddie says.
The tune sets off an anxiety attack for Freddie, most likely
a subconscious realization that the girl in the video is there in the
restaurant, taunting him, hunting him. One
of the lyrics in another song on the “Perdition City” album warns of a world in
which “Lone killers haunt the highways/ And dark forces move through the
shadows.”
A quick look at the musical selections of the girl in the
video supports the argument that Freddie has recognized and consciously
accepted—too late—that he is now the girl’s prey. The best place to start is
with the name of the band: Ulver, a Norse word for “wolf.” This alone may have
set off alarm bells for Freddie. As philosopher Paul A. Trout notes in his study of
storytelling tropes, “Among the earliest forms of human self-consciousness was
the awareness of being meat.”
The girl in the video has chosen well. Indeed, her
Hello Kitty mask suggests she sees herself as a much larger feline predator. (Freddie
may also have subconsciously recognized in the band’s name “Ulver” the phonemic
suggestion of the female vulva, which
of course links him back to the fish net and the symbolic connection with the
ancient Greek goddess of the hunt.)
A hint of what awaits him is available in the album name, “Perdition City.” The word “perdition,” built from Medieval Latin and Christian concepts of Hell, suggests an onslaught of suffering and punishment. Again, the girl in the video has chosen her background music carefully, knowing that Freddie is familiar with the band, the album, the music, and the lyrics. His familiarity will serve her communicative needs, opening to him the message that the journey ahead will be torturous and end in even more misery.
With this, Wilson is giving his readers an ominous foreshadowing.
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