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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Fiction offers some fulfillment. It lets us see things that we didn't know we could do or be, but it's not the solution. If you want to live, you have to step outside the fiction.
Johanna Isaacson:You make the point that horror is a form of culture that satirizes popular culture and the passivity that DeBoer analyzes. Why do you think horror in particular is a genre that has purchase on this common sense?
Joshua Gooch:Hi. I'm Josh Gooch. I teach at DUville University in Buffalo, New York, and I've just published Capitalism Hates You, Marxism, and the New Horror Film, from University of Minnesota Press.
Johanna Isaacson:Hi. I'm Jo Isaacson. I am the author of Stepford Daughters, weapons for feminists and contemporary horror. I am privileged to interview Josh today. I thought I would start off with a question, and we'll kinda keep rolling with it.
Johanna Isaacson:I love the book, and I'm so happy to find such a kindred spirit. It's packed with brilliant insights and readings near and dear to this old Marxist feminist horror nerd's heart. And I noticed that this is your first book on horror. Can you say a little bit about how you came to the project?
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. I started before the pandemic writing a lot on the Gothic and its relationship to capitalism, and I had some idea that I was going to do a nineteenth century, twentieth century, twenty first century sort of look at the influence on the theory and the ideas. And then the pandemic hit, and it seemed like everything around us was just screaming, fuck you. And, and it was very clear that that's what capitalism felt about us. So at that point, I shifted gears and thought, well, you know, maybe we're all gonna die.
Joshua Gooch:I just write the book I wanna write. So that's what I did, and I just refocused it around horror now and what it was telling us about our culture now and capitalism now.
Johanna Isaacson:Awesome. And then the title of the book is Capitalism Hates You, which I love. And many of the chapters kind of repeat this refrain, and you've started to answer this. But I'm curious why this phrase figures so deeply in the book serving as a kind of leitmotif.
Joshua Gooch:What I was really thinking about was how much it seems like everything's arrayed against you. Right? And this feeling that that things are not set up for people to succeed. And, you know, for a long time, I think I was I was relying pretty heavily on Lauren Berlant to think about that stuff. But when I wanted to put it in a a more directly Marxist framework, I kept coming back to this sense that it wasn't just that it's not like it's a feeling that we get in horror, but it's also it's a way that capitalism sees our needs and the needs of the environment, the things that support us as as as living beings as obstacles.
Joshua Gooch:And that that obstacle that we can we make for it is what makes it hate us. And so, like, how do we experience that in our culture and what does it look like became sort of the the the all the big question. So every time I would come up with some new set of films I'd wanna think about, you would see, oh, well, that's that's showing us another way in which our ability to thrive is being thwarted by capitalism.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. It definitely feels that way. So the book begins with the overarching argument that horror needs Marxism and ends with the assertion that Marxism needs horror. Can you expand a little on this invocation of criticism of capitalism and the horror genre in specific?
Joshua Gooch:If I start with horror, horror now is packed with social critique. Right? And it's not like you've gotta go teasing it out. And coming from from a literary studies background, you often feel like, oh, I'm gonna find secret. Right?
Joshua Gooch:The little secret critique that's hidden in there. You're like, no. There's no secret. It's just telling you what it is. But if you approach those films then as saying like, oh, well, it's just it's hitting you over the head, or it's it's doing exactly what I think it's gonna do.
Joshua Gooch:That's projecting what I want into the film. And so what I really wanted to think about was, well, what's social critique doing? How does it connect to what Marxist theory looks like? How's it different? And and that means that you can draw, I think, the richness of our response to this contemporary moment out of horror, but you without reducing it to Marxist theory.
Joshua Gooch:Marxism is there because it helps us understand what those critiques are and grounded in materialist analysis. But it's not to say that, you know, all these films are are made by Marxists. I think someone like Jordan Peele would probably not agree with that at all. But also, I think that Marxism needs horror because horror now is so different. It's got a much more expansive set of filmmakers.
Joshua Gooch:Our sense of it and what it can do has really changed from the late nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, especially in terms of criticism. And that means that we need to think critically in more expansive ways than I think some Marxist theory has gone. Right? I mean, you can crack open some books, and it feels like we're basically in 1960, and we're still talking about the same five Germans. And they're all dudes, and there's no social reproduction.
Joshua Gooch:There's nothing there's nothing of of that's actually engaged with the real issues that we confront in our our world now. We just have sort of repetition of the same. And so, you know, Marxism needs horror because it means that we have to think about black Marxism. We have to think about racial capitalism. We have to think about social reproduction.
Joshua Gooch:We have to think about ecology and and what the metabolic rift means for us. All those things mean we have to fold it into a much more full vision of of Marxism than we've had, I think. That's not to say I'm the only person doing this, but but I feel like like it's part of a a need just to fill in that gap.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I mean, I think this book is really groundbreaking and such a lovely, great contribution because it's just like the title is like, this is about capitalism, and then you don't do that thing where a lot of people do, we're adding on gender, adding on race. Like you understand that capitalism is gender, is race, and it's all it's all, like, absolutely integral to your argument rather than, like, some little, like, footnote or something. I really appreciated that. Yeah.
Joshua Gooch:Thank you. It's the thing that, like, really why I wanted to write the book. I was so frustrated with the way that it's often it feels like people keep having the same arguments. We start from one place, and then you just keep, like, we're gonna add a little bit here and a little bit there. And you're like, no.
Joshua Gooch:No. No. What if we just assume all the grounds of the things that are actually meaningful and then we argue from those? And that's what I decided. This was this was the pandemic breakdown where I thought, oh, well, do I have to build it up piece by piece?
Joshua Gooch:Like, fuck it. We're gonna just do it. And I I mean, because it doesn't make sense otherwise. You can't you can make sense of the world if you have all these pieces together. But if you don't, you just wind up in some very weird places.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. It's and there's just so much that you you need to lead with, yeah, what's actually happening on the ground rather than, like, some idealist fear of Marxist value theory perfection. You know? That's very true. So at some point, you make the distinction between horror as therapy and horror as diagnosis.
Johanna Isaacson:Could you say a little bit about what you meant by that?
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. So what you notice a lot, and I got really heated up about the use of evolutionary psychology in some horror, mostly because I feel like we are not it never engages with a bad history of evolutionary psychology and its strong anti feminist bias and all of those things. But what we see, I think, in popular culture and especially in popular writing about horror is it's sort of like, well, it's it's a way that we can work through our bad feelings. And you can even see it in some critical approaches to horror as a safe space. Right?
Joshua Gooch:The safe space idea of horror where you you get to see your your bad stuff worked out, and it's out there on the screen. And it really does, I think, structure a lot of how people approach it, and you can find it in all kinds of popular journalism about horror. It was popular in the pandemic as a essay topic. But I think that what horror just does is show us those fears. It doesn't work it through.
Joshua Gooch:It doesn't give us a solution. It reflects them back to us in a way. It's a a shared social judgment, and that if if something works in a horror film, it's because a lot of people have decided that they share that assessment that this thing is is scary, that this thing is wrong or terrifying in some way, shape, or form. Once you see, oh, we share that judgment. Well, that's a diagnosis, but it doesn't give you an answer.
Joshua Gooch:If you wanna get an answer, have to do something. You know? And if you don't do something, it's not gonna work itself out in the film.
Johanna Isaacson:No, I totally agree. And I think that a lot of films are really ambiguous about that. So I feel like that's a really great role of a Marxist critic is to kind of steer away from the trauma. Again, my friend and I are working on something right now on like trauma theory and how, like, everything is about trauma now, and it becomes very depoliticizing. But the trauma is real.
Johanna Isaacson:Right? It's it's related to actual experience, like you say. And so I think that distinction is really, really helpful and is what separates real criticism from, like, just the kind of puss pieces that are that are out there too. So my next question, I was thinking about, Sia Nagay. She's a theorist that both of us are interested in, and you bring up her aesthetic categories, and the idea that the aesthetic categories we experience are deeply entwined with historical conjuncture.
Johanna Isaacson:You say that horror fills a gap in contemporary culture. It is an aesthetic category able to remediate the horrors of our economic system into something pleasurable. And then later you relate this to Michael Lowy's notion of critical irrealism, which is a kind of romantic opposition rather than cold analysis. And I really like this because I think we Marxists kind of get reputations of being anti pleasure in a way, but you're kind of, you know, hinting that the genre doesn't have to be a chore or a burden. And so I was wondering why you know, a little bit more about, like, pleasure and and why you think horror fills this gap rather than sort of realism or more overtly activist documentary forms.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. I mean, it it well, it serves a particular, I think, function in our culture, but it's it's strange. It was important to talk about pleasure, I think, because so much of horror scholarship will talk about it as being distinctly unpleasurable, and that doesn't make any sense of why it's popular. You know? You're like, oh, well, I love going to the movies and being horribly traumatized.
Joshua Gooch:It's not gonna get people that doesn't just from a from a very vulgar economic analysis doesn't make any sense. So, like, why do you go in and search out these images? And I think it makes sense to treat it as a way of making these things pleasurable, but pleasurable in the see. Right. And this is where we get back to that question of horror as diagnosis or horror as therapy.
Joshua Gooch:Right? It's pleasurable because we share the judgment with other people that this thing is is scary. But it doesn't solve that problem. It just lets us share that judgment together. And there's some really I I mean, I really like Linda Williams on, on Psycho.
Joshua Gooch:Right? With the she's got all these photos of of people responding and thinking about how they're responding not just to the film, but to one another. And one of the things I really wanted us to think about when we think about horror is that it's a collective, genre. I mean, genres are always collective in a way, but that horror is very much a conversation between audience and creators, and there's constant movement in that sphere and between how critics take it and academia. We are always informing and and changing it in a way that is interesting and exciting and part of what makes it pleasurable.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I I love that because throughout the book, you're really focused on the social rather than the individual, right, which is very, you know, Marxist thing to to be focused on. So that kind of shared judgment is part of that sociality for sure. Yeah. And speaking of pleasure, I we should I should probably start bringing in actual films because people love to hear about that, which I do.
Johanna Isaacson:So one of the first films you talk about is drag me to hell, which I love as well. And you lead up to this exploration by bringing up the work of Soren Mao and Nancy Fraser. Do you wanna talk a little bit about why you wanted to talk about Drag Me to Hell as a kind of starting point?
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. Okay. That's that's great. Well, I mean, I just talked about, Mao and Frasier because they're the the people who are, I think, right now doing the best work synthesizing all those different parts and and working with them together in a way that's that's new and exciting. But Drag Me to Hell is just a great film.
Joshua Gooch:The first two films in the book are really post financial crisis films. Right? So there's drag me to hell, which is an immediate post financial crisis film about mortgages and the kinds of moral choices that people make under capitalism. And then there's Mayhem, which is a a much later film but has a a very similar kind of dynamic. And I wanted to start with, drag me to hell because it's such a strange film.
Joshua Gooch:Right? It's it it is built around a trick, and the trick is really brilliant. You spend most of your time being horrified by what's happening to this awful, awful bank manager. And everything is is very degrading. It's it's disgusting and terrifying.
Joshua Gooch:But by the end of the film, you realize, right. That's fine. There's a there's a sudden reversal, and that reversal all hinges on the shift in whether a cursed object is a button or a coin. Right? And it's that movement between something that's a a use value and and a representation of value.
Joshua Gooch:And that suddenly reversal is part of the reversal of the your your moral judgment, right, of what's going on in the film. And you realize, oh, that's the woman who kicked an old lady out of her house for no reason other than she wanted a promotion. Yeah. Drag her to hell. That's great.
Joshua Gooch:Go for it. And that's that's what how the film works. And so I thought it it really captured both the sentiment of the book, which is, you know, capitalism hates you, but also that sudden shift in how we understand what what value does. It guides you and gives you a lot of choices and encourages you to make certain kinds of choices, to succeed under those particular rules to get more stuff. And everything that the the main character is doing, Christine is doing in that film, is all about getting more stuff and succeeding, but it gets be it just becomes increasingly grotesque from murdering her I think it's her kitten.
Joshua Gooch:Right? And, you know, she's pulling things out of her mouth all the time. And the the, you know, the conclusion is she's digging up this woman's grave and then desecrating the corpse. And the whole thing is is shot like this very Sam Raimi, you know, so, sort of evil dead climax. But only then do you realize, oh, she's the demon.
Joshua Gooch:That's the turn. And so getting that sense of of both what value does, how we relate to it, and how it encourages us to or incites us to act in certain ways and makes those things seem natural even though they they really don't have to be.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I totally agree. I love that in that she's like, you both are sort of, like, experiencing her awfulness as somebody who just, like like you say, kicked an old lady out of her house for a promotion, but also the inevitability and the way she's been dragged into this abstract system that forces her and and doesn't make her feel like she has a choice. And both of those things are, like, constantly happening at once. And I never really, I think because I've read other criticism, but the the button and the coin thing is such a Marxist, yeah, distinction between used value and abstract.
Johanna Isaacson:You know? I know. I love that. Yeah. As a kind of weigh in.
Johanna Isaacson:So I think we kinda covered my other question about drag me to hell. And then I thought we could spend the rest of our time sort of going through your chapters and just kinda getting into some of the categories that you thought were most useful to think about Marxism and horror. And so your first chapter is called work hates you, which I love. The hates you thing just is endlessly giving, by the way. It's great.
Johanna Isaacson:Because definitely, it's that visceral thing that horror does is like and and the interpolation of the you is great. But so at one point, you sum up your introduction to that chapter by writing Marx's theory of value shows us how work in capitalism makes up one facet of a system where domination is abstract, impersonal, and social. So I was wondering if you can unpack this a bit and discuss why this translates into the idea that work hates you.
Joshua Gooch:I was trying to figure out the best way into this one, and I'm going to go to something very strange. When I was like 27, I temped for about a year and a half at a construction site. Right. And there's nothing all that unusual or oppositional for a lot of people going to work every day and thinking work sucks. And I wanted to make that an an a surprising piece of common sense.
Joshua Gooch:Right? That you can look at work and say, yeah, work sucks, but you still go to work, still do all the things that that you need to do to pay for your means of subsistence to get, you know, very Marx y. But to try and and lay out how that stuff operates in in terms of Marxist theory, this is my my point of entry for talking about Marxist theory of value and really trying to to step away from what I see a lot of people using, which is a very vulgar labor theory of value and thinking that that what value really comes down to is, you know, I put my work in, it immediately constructs value, and then capital steals it from me. And I wanted to, you know, lay out the the basic concepts of being forced into a kind of exchange, so a formal structure, and a series of rules that then govern whether or not what you do gets assessed as valuable by a market exchange system. Right?
Joshua Gooch:And I won't do all the categories people want. They they can read the book. But my point in doing all that was then to to link at and look at, like, how that shows up in film, and I turned to Mayhem, this Joe Lynch film from 2017, which is a really interesting film. I I find it kinda cynical, and Joe Lynch is kind of a strange filmmaker. But it's a very anti work film, and it's got a silly conceit of a rage virus that causes people to become ultraviolent.
Joshua Gooch:So that gives you, you know, your basic setup. And then it our main character is a lawyer who has argued successfully, I believe, that anything is allowed or is legal if you are infected with this virus. So this then becomes the conceit of, well, I can do what I want if I'm trapped in this circumstance. So he is inside his law firm, and it's rage infected and kills his way to the top. What I wanted us to kind of see in that is how much, you know, the idea of the the rules that govern how we operate in in capitalism, become, especially now when we are working in more service oriented economies.
Joshua Gooch:And then if you're a information worker, are very much structured around our knowledge of the rules and our ability to manipulate those rules. And that this breeds a kind of cynicism and opportunism. Right? I understand what I need to do. I understand how the rules operate.
Joshua Gooch:So I can just tweak them over here. I can leap over there. I can make changes to get what I want. And it's very much what the film is about. It shows you how if you're clever enough, you can manipulate the rules enough to get what you want even though work is a, in this film, explicitly cutthroat environment.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I love that with your analysis of Mayhem because it's like it's clearly like an anti work film, but it's not clear until you analyze it. I mean, it's been a long time since I've seen it, but that why and how it's anti work. And you I thought you really made some great distinctions in your analysis of it. So you transition from outlining your key points on why works hates you to horror by saying, domination has been a central thematic concern for the genre since the Gothic.
Johanna Isaacson:Your example here is Dracula. Can you say a bit about how Dracula exemplifies this concept?
Joshua Gooch:I mean, Dracula is all about work. Right? We've got professional workers all over it. It's about transcribing and collecting information. And my focus in the book is on on Harker, the the main character that we meet.
Joshua Gooch:And he's controlled by his boss from a distance. And he then meets up with Dracula who controls people from a distance. There's this paired psychic power that goes on. Have you seen the the the Edgar's Nosferatu?
Johanna Isaacson:Mhmm. I was gonna ask. Yeah.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. So, like, he's taking the the Mernau Nosferatu. And in that one and and in the Eggers, they keep the same move, which is to condense Renfield and Harker's boss into one character. Right? And so then you have very directly, oh, Harker's boss is a form of supernatural violent domination that's directly connected to the count.
Joshua Gooch:And that that just seems to play out in almost every version of Dracula that you get from the original Stoker forward in different forms. I mean, my favorite still remains, you know, an old Simpsons episode where Homer gets to fantasize about killing his boss. You know, like, because because he's a vampire. That that idea of the domination, of course, is coming all the way back from, the Gothic and the sort of violent patriarchal father, but it becomes so deeply tied up with work in the twentieth century. Especially when you look at the twentieth century adaptations, they be they just become overbearing, I feel, sometimes with this connection of work and domination in Dracula.
Joshua Gooch:The Eggers film, I don't wanna get on a riff, but I had some real problems with that one.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. Should talk about it sometime. Yeah. It just occurred to me as you were talking that it's always like Frankenstein gets called, like, the proletarian horror, and Dracula gets called, like, sexual horror. And they're like dichotomized that way.
Johanna Isaacson:And this is another example of how you can never like take work out of the sex or take sex out of the work. You know, they're just like they're just kind of in there.
Joshua Gooch:No, it's right there. And it's so but because it gets attached to feminine work, right, with Mina, that it's goes right over people's head.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. Well, speaking of the feminine, I loved reading your second chapter, Love Hates You, since feminist social reproduction and horror is near and dear to my heart. You start the chapter by focusing on the common sense that if we love our jobs, we will never work. In this chapter, you talk about I blame society, the power censor, and Saint Maude as examples of horror that critiques women's exploitation by their jobs or women who are possessed by their work. As an example, since I know that one the best, do you wanna describe a little about, I Blame Society and how it serves as an example of this type of exploitation?
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. I Blame Society is such a great film. They'll set it up very briefly. We have a woman who is a a filmmaker, and she at the beginning of the film is essentially fired by her agent, she can't get anything funded. So she returns to a documentary project about a little backhanded compliment she received that she would make a great serial killer.
Joshua Gooch:She gets a a brief offer to put together a pitch deck from a pair of producers. And really, all the producers want is for her to put her name on it so they can say that a woman is producing it. And this becomes her opportunity in her mind to then prove that she can be a great filmmaker by completing her project about being a great serial killer. And that's just then what she does. She goes out and she becomes an excellent serial killer.
Joshua Gooch:And it's a it's a wild movie in in some ways because of that. I love the way she's bridging fact and fiction there, like the use of the documentary footage from earlier on and the fictionalization, there's not a strong differentiation between the world of the film and our world, which makes the the critique much stronger. But what she does throughout is she's just doing the social expectations that she's getting from the industry. Right? She's enacting those things.
Joshua Gooch:And so it's why it's called I Blame Society. Right? So she's just doing those things. All of those expectations are coming from the film industry, and it's, you know, hinge on the strong female lead. I mean, that's so she just keeps coming up with different ways to portray herself as a strong female lead, but they're all very I mean, they're violent and exploitative.
Joshua Gooch:Right? So she's gotta take her top off. She's gotta film herself having sex, and she's gotta, you know, kill people and then show her strength. All these things that become representations of strength according to the male producers that she talked to earlier. That's which, of course, winds up with her in a self destructive spiral where she can't ever come out of it.
Joshua Gooch:I I I mean, I love what what you have about her as the the the smile strike, which I think is is right.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I love that it's like a critique of kinda girl boss feminism and lean in feminism, but also this anger at the emotional labor that she's supposed to perform. So, yeah, as a smile strike. And the fact, like you say, that it's so close to real life that the creator and star is playing Jillian Horvath, who's, you know, the name of the real person who's made this, and it's all a very small budget film. There's just, like, a lot of self reflectivity in it.
Johanna Isaacson:That's really cool. I'm glad it's getting so much attention.
Joshua Gooch:No. I it needs more attention. I I just love that turn toward the end when she's telling one of her victims how, you know, she's just so disappointed that she's so good at what she does, but she's just never not getting the recognition. It's it's such a great moment.
Johanna Isaacson:Just the end when she's, like, chopping up the guys who hired her and saying, you wanted a strong female lead.
Joshua Gooch:That is the ending is is what's so perfect, and then the spray of blood that becomes the title. It's just great.
Johanna Isaacson:So at another point in that chapter, you say, capitalism uses meaningfulness to make women's unpaid labor seem like a natural expression of their being, which I think is so well expressed. And I was wondering if you could think of a moment in the films you discussed that really highlights that experience.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. That's gotta be Saint Maude. I wasn't sure how to write this book until I saw Saint Maude, I thought, oh, well, that's it. There's this moment when I mean, Maude is a carer, and it's it's hard to convey, I think, to a American audience what a carer is situationally in the in The UK. So I'll call her a home health aide, and maybe that will make it clear.
Joshua Gooch:Right? She's very, very far down in terms of the health care hierarchy, and she's so she's not well paid. She's not in a great social situation to begin with. But what gives her work meaning is this sense of a religious calling, and that drives her throughout the whole film and also another possession narrative, which drives her insane. But I think the moment in that film that has to be it would be she has a brief conversation with her patient, right, where she's finally communicating about God in the way that she wants to.
Joshua Gooch:And it's so powerful for her that, you know, she's going up the stairs. She has a sort of uncontrollable orgasm. And the way that the the film portrays this character, I think, is very much, one of sexual repression. Right? That that her attraction to this patient, she can't express, and therefore, she's coming up with these alternate ways of viewing the world and thinking about it.
Joshua Gooch:But I think that that sort of layering of that one layer of meaning is covering over this this other layer where it's they're happening alongside where it's the meaningfulness of what she's doing that is pleasurable to her. Right? And that's that's the the thing that keeps her going because otherwise, it's a terrible job. And without those things to keep the work going, without something that makes it meaningful, it won't happen.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. And I love that just so much horror now is showing the refusal to embrace what's meaningful completely in order to show its exploitation. Like, you know, those moments that are just so startling and like the Babadook in Hereditary where a character is just like tells their kid they basically hate them or tries to kill their kid, you know, which is obviously they do love their kid, but it's just like, I can't let the fact that this bond is supposed to be everything to me exploit me anymore. Right? And and it just shows these really taboo moments of, like, you know, that kind of refusal in really interesting ways.
Johanna Isaacson:My next question, you look at the relationship of the theories of Marxist feminists such as Silvia Federici and Mario Rosa Dalla Costa to Wallerstein, as they advance the argument that capitalist appropriation of women's unpaid labor is akin to ongoing primitive accumulation, the violent expropriation of people, land, and resources. This comparison helped seventies feminists understand women's unwaged labor, but in both of our work, we extend this comparison to waged labor. So can you flesh out why you feel this still applies maybe in relation to Saint Maude? I was thinking about writing about that one too, so I was so glad you did that one because it didn't make it into my book. But, where violence and feminized care work are so closely aligned.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. Oh, I'm curious what what you're thinking. My sense of how this works is that the unwaged nature of the argument in the seventies is all about building an argument in relationship to a very specific historical problem, right, the housewife. And even in, like, Della Costa, she starts talking about people working outside the home and the need for that is supplemental and the ways in which that's more likely than not to get recaptured by capitalist exploitation. So, like, it's present in there, but they don't wanna lean too hard on it because the focus is on the naturalization of the appropriation of unwaged work.
Joshua Gooch:And I think it's important for us to continue to talk about that in relationship to waged work because anything that's treated as gendered or feminized in especially in American culture is devalued for that reason. Right? It makes it so that you can pay it far less. And Saint Maude is the the perfect example of this where she's living in a one room flat. And, you know, in the historical context of this, waged care workers in The UK had their pay cut and cut and cut.
Joshua Gooch:She appears to work for a private health care company, but most people would be working for a public company and making very, very little money. And her her existence really represents that sort of loss of economic status. And it's it's even sort of highlighted from the beginning of the film where we see her working as a nurse. Right? A nurse is decently paid.
Joshua Gooch:And she she gives that up because of something that goes wrong, but she then replaces her pay with her belief in God. Right? So the meaning then takes it over. And this this allows her to keep working, but it also justifies not getting paid as much.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. Yeah. And I it's really interesting how some contemporary films, they'll stage the whole housewife Betty Friedan horror thing of, like, suffering inside their house with their child and their kind of housework, but then recognize like in the Babadook that she's also a care worker, right? And her waged work, unlike the Betty Friedan thing of like, oh, once you get out of the house and you have waged work, all this naturalized, degraded work will be gone and you'll be valued in society. And yet there's just like an absolute parallel between the care work she does outside and inside the house.
Johanna Isaacson:The call that's coming from inside the house has spread like a virus.
Joshua Gooch:There's, like, this weird not weird, but, like, a very small cycle of cuckoo horror. There's, the one where it's just a suburban house that people can't ex escape. You can look that one up. There's cuckoo hatching. Right?
Joshua Gooch:Like, where where that sort of motif keeps coming back. And it's interesting that it's it's persistently the cuckoo as the way of of thinking about that.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I was thinking about cuckoo the other day. It's very cyclical to almost like Jean Diehlmann or something like that. Right? Like, that kind of, like, repetition rather than the forward thrusting of these sort of narratives too, and and and like a lot of sort of feminist experimental film as well.
Johanna Isaacson:And so then your next chapter is called nature hates you, and you cite Amitav Ghosh who argues that fiction hasn't engaged with climate change because most of its representational strategies aren't up to the task. You interpret this to mean that realist stories aren't equipped to represent environmental realities. So I was wondering why you thought that. So why do you think horror is a more appropriate genre?
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. I guess I would say the problem with realism that I was trying to get from Ghosh was simply that when it confronts climate change, climate change takes place on nonhuman scales and nonhuman temporalities. Right? It's not that realism can't show us different kinds of things like that. You know, we get realist approaches maybe in something like Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.
Joshua Gooch:Right? It's fairly realist. But it also has to he's confronting lots of problems about time compression. Right? So when when Robinson wants to really deal with climate change in an earlier book like The Red Mars and The Mars trilogy, he's got to then make his main characters live for hundreds of years.
Joshua Gooch:Right? Because he can't deal with that that amount of time. And and even then, he's compressing things. And horror is able to do that, in various ways with different supernatural elements, whereas, you know, in science fiction, they'll they'll go with made up science y things. So we have lots of I mean, I didn't I didn't spend nearly enough time on quite questionable choices of the Wendigo to represent this and some troubling stuff.
Joshua Gooch:But different uses of supernatural figures to capture the past and its effects on the present and also to think about scale. What's bigger than human? What's smaller than human? That's why I wanted to focus I mean, I spent most of my time in in that chapter on fungal horror because fungus is is a way of thinking both big and small. Right?
Joshua Gooch:And it lets it lets the filmmakers get down to those sort of very tiny, tiny, micrological levels, get those little experimental art film documentary shots of spores leaping into the air, and then big shots at the forest and and trying to get people to imagine the mycorrhizal mat that runs through a vast area, something that that takes you outside of those kinds of human scales. Horror lets you do that in a way that I think realism, it hits some walls with, and or at least it it gives us ways to imagine it in a way that realism doesn't want to.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I totally agree with that, and I love that in your book. I mean, I feel like that's been talked about from a Marxist perspective with sort of cognitive mapping and with, like, Robin Wood talking about, like, horror and its relation to the unconscious or, you know, getting past, like, sensors in in ways that realist film can't do, but I've never heard it really talked about in relation to environmental, like, horror specifically. So I thought that was a really great move. So for the listener, can you break down some of the key concepts you mobilize in nature hates you, such as appropriation, the four cheaps, dispossession, and the metabolic rifts?
Johanna Isaacson:That's just a big question. Yeah.
Joshua Gooch:It's it's I would focus on appropriation because it's kind of the thing that links everything together. When I finished the book, I realized that I had one major insight in terms of how I think about Marxism, which is that capitalism isn't just a system of exploitation of labor, but it's a system of appropriation. And those two things work side by side. And so the appropriation of unwaged labor, which is central to social reproduction theory, that that matters there, but it's also central to how we engage with the environment. And so the appropriation of unpaid for resources or underpaid for resources.
Joshua Gooch:Right? And that is a way of sort of dealing with what Jason Moore calls the four cheaps. I made sure I wrote them down because I always get it slightly wrong. Labor power, food, energy, and raw materials. And if you think about capitalism as being driven by the search for those cheap things, and that means cheap labor or not unpaid for labor of food, cheap energy, this makes sense of a lot of what we we confront.
Joshua Gooch:And then exploitation happens alongside it when it starts running out of things it can easily take. And if we see those things working together, then, like, okay, now we actually have a pretty good sense of what capitalism looks like and how it works. If we just think about exploitation, we don't. So appropriation, I think of, is the big thread that runs throughout the whole book and hopefully connects things for people.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. And again, kind of underscores why we have to talk about the environment and women and race, because these are the things that are considered natural raw materials that are brought in with this kind of violence. Absolutely.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. So you have a chapter called The Neighborhood Hates You. And I was wondering why you thought the neighborhood is central to the new black horror from a Marxist perspective and some how it some of your key concepts such as gentrification, uneven development, white flight, deindustrialization. Again, like, those are big things that people can read the book for, but more maybe more just overall of, like, the the importance for you of the neighborhood.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. The neighborhood is the more that I thought about the book, the more I could see how there are cycles and sort of subcycles. And new black horror seems to me like that first cycle, and I think we're coming out of it, especially with sinners, was very much about making space inside the genre for black creators. Right? And so the focus is very much on literally space and the policing of genre space and the policing of physical space, which become then sort of pairs so that so much of those films are about making black art.
Joshua Gooch:I mean, Sinners, Coogler's film is all about making black art too, but it's in a different way. It doesn't use space in quite the same way as, like, Get Out or Us. But the the problem, it's interesting to see it sort of develop across different films. So thinking about that is like a real problem for the creators and things that they're navigating, and making such amazing films with and how that relates to uneven development of the environment, like what gets gentrified, what gets left behind or abandoned. Right?
Joshua Gooch:Ruth Wilson Gilmore's organized abandonment. Right? It's a really important component of what you see. And think about how well there are spaces that are clearly defined in these films as white spaces and non white spaces. And that's part of the uneven development of capitalism, which is then, for all of these films, tightly linked to what it means to make black art.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. And I think so much is reversing the history of horror where it's like a white enclave threatened by the dark other and just showing who is really unsafe in those spaces of whiteness, you know, which, you know, Get Out starts so well and, like, sets the tone for for so much of it. And, obviously, Get Out is the seminal work, and I love how you analyze Chris's photos in that film. You say, these photos serve as meta commentary on the use of black suffering as art, but they can also help us think about the connection between urban disinvestment, the suburbs, gentrification in the urban core. It's interesting because the racial undertone in horror movies taking place in the suburbs have historically been about fear of the racial other.
Johanna Isaacson:I guess I kinda just said that with notable exceptions like the people under the stairs. Can you give some examples from films in the new Black horror genre that turned this trope in conventional horror around?
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. We've we've got Get Out. We've got Us. Master is in the in the in there. But I was thinking about some other ones that weren't in the chapter.
Joshua Gooch:Like, The Blackening, I mentioned briefly, but that's premised on the rural areas as being outside, basically just stepping into a purely white space. And there's an an I guess we'd call this a Blacks Inn horror film because it's it's made by a white filmmaker, a film called Blood Conscious. It's a serious version of the blackening, if that makes sense. So, like, same set of problems, same set of issues where you've got a clearly defined you know, we're going on vacation in the country. The country is a very white space, and everything is wrong about being there and being in danger.
Joshua Gooch:You know? But then I I think I mentioned I I didn't do anything with nanny because I wasn't quite sure how to slot it into that, but the employer's house in nanny is very much that sort of dangerous space. It's very clearly defined as that sort of dangerous space. And I didn't talk about his house, but the entire setting is basically the horror and danger of it. And the white social workers who keep needing to come into the house are themselves like this sort of major threat and what sets off all of their, I think, trauma really in that film.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I know. It's just such a brilliant needed intervention, and all of those do that in such different ways. You know? There's just, like, endless room for expansion of the genre, it feels like.
Johanna Isaacson:You mentioned the role of cops in new black horror, as in Candyman and Get Out. How do cops figure in these films, and how do they tie into the notion that the neighborhood hates you?
Joshua Gooch:Right. So for the filmmakers, this is all post Black Lives Matter. We've got the immediate reference to Trayvon Martin in the opening of Get Out, and it just builds from there through these films. There's a strong, I would say, Afro pessimist current that runs through, especially Jordan Peele's films and the films that he's connected to. The way that I'm reading this in relationship to uneven development is that the police are the shock troops of capital.
Joshua Gooch:They define who gets to be where and whether you should be there or not. And we see this over and over again, in terms of they're literally policing space. They stop Chris as he's going into the white suburbs. They show up at the end, and you you don't even have to have the the original ending of Get Out to get the implication of the police lights showing up when he's in the road. In Candyman, it's the same issue.
Joshua Gooch:We have the police heavily, present in Cabrini Green because they want to seize that land and gentrify it. They weren't there when they might have actually been needed. So that's a persistent feature, and it's an interesting way that the politics and social analysis of the creators, I don't wanna say completely reinforces the kind of reading I'm making, but it's not antithetical to it. I think what makes Peele unique is that he started in comedy and that the structure of horror and comedy are so closely related. They're strongly formal.
Joshua Gooch:They have to follow a certain form and understand the form in order to have their effects. Right? But they also need to have some kind of comment or connection to the broader world in order to have impact. I'm trying to think of what the most famous Key and Peele thing might be, and it'd be something like the Obama anger translator. It connected to something that was very obvious to people and then could land as a joke, they could use it over and over again.
Joshua Gooch:In the same way, I think that he sort of understands that you need to have a strong context and connection to what's happening in the world, but also a clear sense of form to make that context land meaningfully and then an orchestration of it so that it has a proper effect. To my mind, that's why he's been so successful is a strong understanding of the form and the need to connect things formally in that way. It's different than what we see other people doing. And even if you pardon me, wants to just talk about Sinners for a while, but, like, Sinners is not a horror film in some ways. Right?
Joshua Gooch:It's not organized in a a standard horror film narrative structure. It fits into it in some ways, but it's not orchestrated in the same way. And that's really interesting to me. It's doing something else, and it's aiming for something else, I think.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. No. Peel's stuff is so deliberately shaped, and that's why his Nope is really interesting because he's such a master of form. And then he's able to riff on the form because he just has all the beats so, like, completely structured in this way.
Joshua Gooch:I could suddenly make a make a Spielberg movie Yes. Out of a horror movie. Right?
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Because he's just so steeped in genre in this brilliant way. Just as an aside, I noticed that in this, the neighborhood hates you and other chapters, you find the term elevated horror useful as a category.
Johanna Isaacson:So I was wondering how you thought the term helps us think about new horror and what you thought about criticisms that it may create, like, elitist hierarchies within the genre.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. I I mean, I used elevated horror because that's a term that people have, but I think of it as a term that is going to keep changing over time. At this point, I see people online using elevated horror to describe very specifically Babadook style films. Take any real element, make it into a metaphor for grief, riff on it from there. But my use of it was much more focused on the idea of a production cycle that's essentially, I think, started with The Babadook or maybe a little bit before, depending on how you wanna think about who got funding.
Joshua Gooch:The success of The Babadook, The Witch, Hereditary, that those started a particular production cycle of art horror films that were aimed for a broader audience and that were specifically positioned in the market to be not gross horror. Right? That there was a way that and it it's not about my assertion that that there's good and bad horror, but that the the marketing was this was respectable and that respectable audiences could go and see it. And it's not like, you know, you're going to watch zombie. There's no sense that you're appealing to people who are gonna go see a Folchie film when you are going to see hereditary.
Joshua Gooch:You're not expecting to get gross out horror in that way from an elevated horror film. I think you had a question here about the substance. And, like, I think that's why why people, like, really freaked out about certain parts of the substance because it's done in a very formal way. We've got those very, very structured framings, the way it starts, the way it ends. Even the shots inside the apartment are highly formalist that give you a sense of, this is art horror.
Joshua Gooch:This is real cinema. And then suddenly, it's just excreting body parts and shooting blood everywhere, and people don't know what to make of that. And you're like, that's part of the genre. Like, no. No.
Joshua Gooch:That's that's not my genre. I'm I'm here for an art film that makes special social commentary on things I care about. You're like, yeah. And it's it's a horror film. So that, I think, is important to see is how the that sort of production cycle moved and changed, and then what we're seeing is new sort of subgenres or or genres as they're coming out.
Joshua Gooch:Right? So new black horror doesn't exist without the elevated cycle. Right? Peel, I think, gets, in some ways, a bump out of the success of those other horror movies, but then creates this new thing that is now autonomous in its own way, and people look at it in its own way. Same the same sense of, like, the Babadook has moved through that and now given us a lot of films of a similar style, but we're getting all these kinds of offshoots and subgenres that are coming out of what would have been that production cycle in the twenty tens.
Johanna Isaacson:Totally. My friend and I have been thinking about this, and it's sort of interesting how it started out also, like, lot of them had these kind of political allegories that were pretty important to a lot of us. You know, I definitely have mostly have written about a lot of these films because they're so politicized, but they're sort of like the cycle kind of has gotten exhausted and devolved in certain ways into this just brand of a set of vibes in certain ways. And so we're brainstorming, writing something about this, and we just saw the Thunderbolts trailer has this thing trying to advertise it as a A24 movie, which is just like really. It's kind of like it's now quantified and marketed in this particular way.
Johanna Isaacson:That's sort of aside, but it's a Marxist issue, I think, in in an interesting way. But the substance really pushed back on that, I think. And that's like you say, that's why it hit people where it hurts. So I I really like that. So I really like your point in your next chapter, commodities hate you, that pushes against the idea that all culture is commodified and thus, for Marxist, has nothing to say.
Johanna Isaacson:At one point in grad school, I became kind of frustrated with this reading of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle that flattened, like, culture, all culture into ideology. But you make the point that horror is a form of culture that satirizes popular culture and the passivity that DeBoer analyzes. So if mass culture is the common sense of capitalism, then cultural analysis and satire could help us understand and criticize commodification. Why do you think horror in particular is a genre that has purchase on this common sense? Is there an example of a film that specifically targets mass culture that you can think of?
Johanna Isaacson:And I guess I keep asking the same question about why this genre, but it's just endlessly fascinating to me.
Joshua Gooch:So, like, this is the the chapter where I think I talk about the cult film the most. Right? And it's I think it's really helpful to think about horror's relationship to the cult film because it does appeal to us and to an audience that is distinct or separated from mass culture in a way. And so one of the things I find most frustrating about not just this deboard, but also adorno esque readings of of culture is that question of, like, where do we stand? Right?
Joshua Gooch:Well, can we stand outside and look? And you're like, well, I mean, I'm standing right here. I don't know. What do you want? That you're inside and outside, and that the cult film really understands that.
Joshua Gooch:And in some ways, that can be to its detriment. Right? I mean, that's one of the reasons why some cult films are just Gonzo weirdness, and the the whole point of that is to make you feel like, well, this is different and therefore not, what other people will like. But when we see the sort of long history of horror, especially Romero's Night of the Living Dead, as appealing to us for its oppositional nature that it at least gave creators a place to make somewhat oppositional art. Whether it was fully oppositional or not doesn't really matter.
Joshua Gooch:It's that it was able to stand outside enough to say, right, not this. Even if it knows that it's also that too. I mean, Demons knows what it is. It's making fun of the response to horror film as somehow going to degrade and turn you into monsters. It never thinks that you're going to watch the movie and then get scared because I'm gonna become a demon too.
Joshua Gooch:Whereas the ring, that's the whole point. You're probably, oh, maybe maybe it's transmedial. Maybe it'll get me. But there's no payoff in that. It says, look.
Joshua Gooch:Dumb people think you're gonna watch this movie and then start wandering around like a zombie. It understands that that's your relationship to it. And so I think horror, especially that kind of horror, is important for thinking about how it can be oppositional. And it's a kind that I think, especially with, like, the elevated art horror stuff, often doesn't show up. Right?
Joshua Gooch:You watch an Eggers film, and he doesn't care about that. He's not gonna do anything like that. But if you you know, the substance is gonna give us something like that. And so seeing where those kinds of transitions between older forms of horror is kind of is is fun right now.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It made me think of, you know, all the films that kinda have a fun horror satire of somebody watching a horror film. And even, like, Gremlins does this.
Johanna Isaacson:It's like so it can be kind of a low culture too.
Joshua Gooch:I I've been trying to get my my nine year old to watch Gremlins. He's not willing to do it yet. I mean, that's the end of murder party too is, you know, he's he's gone through some sort of horrific murder party, and then he comes home and to relax, he turns on a horror film. Right? It's it's a it's a persistent feature of the comedic satirical comedy horror.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. Definitely. I watched that movie because of your book, and I was so glad I did. It was really funny.
Joshua Gooch:That's a good one. Yeah.
Johanna Isaacson:So just because I know we're getting a little bit towards the end, we can go to the last chapter. I just wanted to say, of course, as a feminist horror scholar, I was drawn to your chapter, the family hates you, where you work with family abolition theorists whose writing I really admire, such as Sophie Lewis, Emmy O'Brien, and Kathy Weeks. You can tell even from the name that family abolition is going to be a really controversial concept. So can you say a little about why that category is useful to you and and maybe why it's controversial?
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. I mean, I always think about Sophie Lewis' sort of throwaway line, abolish the family? What the fuck? Right? And that's very much the but but the the reason it matters is it that the nuclear family for capitalism is a way of appropriating care.
Joshua Gooch:Right? It's a way of cutting off how care gets not just made, but but circulated, like, who who you get to care for and why. So as a Marxist, to think through what a better world would look like, it would have to involve not having privatized care, not making the family the structure that is where care exists. The basis of it, I think, really comes down to that somewhat old timey idea of the public and private spheres. Right?
Joshua Gooch:That there's a sphere that is for care and that's outside the world of business and a sphere of business. And the very idea that those things could be separated in that way is why you need to abolish the family. That's I mean, that's that's the the basis for me, and it's the reason why I I used it throughout the book.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. It's a really important category for me too. And it's just like the fears around it. It's just like, oh, you know, in capitalism, the family is the last bastion of intimacy and care and privacy and all these things. But that comes with so many strings, right?
Johanna Isaacson:Like, you can only have this if you play your proper role in the family. You can only have this if, you know, you live by your parents' values. So if you're like a queer kid, you you don't get that family care. Or or if you don't have a romantic relationship, you know, you don't get that care. So that's really with Sophie and Emmy and Kathy, all their work is to kind of show that exclusiveness that they want more care, not less, you know, kind of thing.
Johanna Isaacson:Exactly. And I think a lot of the films that you look at I mean, I was thinking we could talk about hereditary a little bit in that regard since it's something that we both write about. So why would that in that chapter, why do you think that film is a example of family abolition? And could you talk specifically also, I loved this idea, I didn't think about it before, of the cults in Hereditary and other horror films as a concept that you found important in this chapter.
Joshua Gooch:There's a lot about cults in this, mostly because I found that every time I was looking at a horror film about the family, there were cults. Just far more cults than you would expect. And my argument is that the cult is a kind of bizarro capitalist version of the family. Right? It's the public sphere made into a family.
Joshua Gooch:It predates upon people. And the reason why I thought Hereditary fit best into this chapter was because of the way that the family is wholly structured by outside forces. Right? We the the beginning of the film is another one of those things where I wish I had more opportunity to teach horror films because I think if I show this to my students just offhand, they would freak the hell out. But that opening scene when we you know, he does this long push in onto a doll's house, which is one of Annie's miniatures, and then it becomes, Peter and his father, Steven, getting ready for the morning.
Joshua Gooch:You know, how do people make sense of that shot when they first see the movie? Right? It only makes sense when you get to the end and you've got another sort of paired shot it comes out and it's again in a sort of diorama. And you realize, oh, okay. Well, they've been used like dolls and manipulated by the cult the whole time.
Joshua Gooch:They're not the family is a construction of the cult. It's not something that is natural to them. And that's that to me is why it was was a a good fit for family abolition because once you see the family as a construction that's meant to do something for somebody else, not for you. Right? We always think of the families are the the way that we get care.
Joshua Gooch:But you're like, well, what if that structure is really about doing something for someone else and isn't really about our care at all? That suddenly shifts how you think about the family entirely. And the cult needs that family because it wants to take their bodies and use them for their their own purposes. So it it draws all those sort of components together. But, yeah, I would be curious, like I mean, I I had one great semester when I taught Psycho, and I had one student who absolutely did not see it coming, and she screamed at the top of her lungs.
Joshua Gooch:I was just never seen anything like that. I'm like so so being able to ask them, like, did you notice the opening of the film? And I think they just would not. You just zone out and let it go and say, like, oh, that was a fun little shot. Sure.
Joshua Gooch:It doesn't mean anything. And then you realize, oh, this is this is the structure of the film.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. And, like, the way that the cult of the family is serving capital, if that's like the cult leaders, it externalizes all the care that it should pay for, right? That it should support onto the family and then blames the family for failing when it can't reproduce itself. And somehow we're supposed to, like you were saying before, find the family so meaningful that we can't see all that externalization of care by the state or by the forms of, you know, the bosses who profit from the family's unpaid labor, right? Like that that is made invisible by that family idealization kind of thing.
Johanna Isaacson:So all these moments of, like, in hereditary, I'm talking about screaming at the top of her lens, Tony Collette's, like non naturalist kind of ways of screaming and kind of showing her agony, like in ways that are just beyond any kind of realism, like denaturalize that family care in really interesting ways, I thought.
Joshua Gooch:It it makes the the family into more constructed roles. Right? And you see them as variations of her miniatures. But also, I think it lets us see that you have real experiences inside that constructed role. Right?
Joshua Gooch:So it's not like you aren't experiencing care or love inside some of these relationships if you have access to them, but that it doesn't change the constructedness of it or the fact that that constructedness of it is destructive to you. And that's that's the part that I think family abolition gets at very well, which is, sure, if if you if it works for you and you feel like you're getting all the care you need, that doesn't mean that it's not cutting you off from other forms of care. It means that you're trapped inside this little space, this little dollhouse.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. And I think it makes sense what you were saying earlier that you started with Lauren Berlant as thinking about this because the the idea of cruel optimism is really woven throughout your whole book of just, you know, the thing that makes you able to live is also killing you. That's like only the horror genre could really show that duality of experience. Right?
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. I mean, because she she does it so well with the Dardenne brothers. Even there when she's talking about and I love the Dardenne's, but she has to put them into genre context to make it sensible. And you're like, well, okay. So the genre really does matter for how we understand our experience of that cruel optimism.
Johanna Isaacson:So at one point, you make a distinction between current and older horror films concerning the family that, in earlier cycles, the family terrifies because someone can't perform their familial role. Films like Psycho, The Bad Seed, Carrie, and The Shining are cautionary tales of bad children, bad mothers, and bad fathers. In elevated family horror, the family's terrors come not from the failures of individual family members to fulfill their roles, but from the family's patriarchal and heterosexual norms. And I just was wondering if you could elaborate that a little bit, what a particular contrast might be between an older and a newer film.
Joshua Gooch:Alright. Let me try to do this with The Shining and Hereditary. Maybe it'll work. But, I mean, The Shining is Jack's just an asshole father. Right?
Joshua Gooch:That's his deal. And I I think that's and that's also and that's this is the Kubrick film. Right? And this is one of the reasons why King hated the film. Because in the book, Jack is a a caring father who's possessed by his alcoholism, and he's conflicted and all of these things.
Joshua Gooch:And in in Kubrick's film, he's just a dick. He's a dick who wants to drink. And so his inability to act in a caring role is really the crux of the whole film. And you so his his and his dissolution and violence just express what kind of person he is and his inability to be a father. Right?
Joshua Gooch:Whereas in hereditary, no one is struggling against a defined role, I don't think. Right? The roles are there, and the roles are destructive purely because they are roles. Right? Tony Colette, as the mother, is destroyed by what the expectations of motherhood and daughterhood are in that plot.
Joshua Gooch:The same way that Peter is, I think, sort of really destroyed by his sense of his responsibilities to his sister and to his parents. Like, everyone is psychically and physically attacked by the roles that they have in the family. And that's not the same thing as being unable to be a good mother. Right? And I it's interesting that when I think about some of the ways that newspaper reviews would write about hereditary, we often often about, like, well, is she can she feel like a good mother and so on and so forth?
Joshua Gooch:That's I don't think is really the issue in that film at all. It's that the the family itself is the problem and not whether the individuals in the family are a problem.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. That's such a great distinction. I love that because you're meant to, like, be afraid of Jack in The Shining, but you're meant to be afraid of your own inability to perform in hereditary. Like, very much in and and and, all the characters have learned the lessons of like second wave feminism, like, you know, Annie has a job, her husband is sensitive and a psychologist and is like trying to be very caring. And even though everybody's learned all those lessons, they still can't do it, you know.
Joshua Gooch:And the way that Astra does it by saturating the whole frame with possible threat. Right? So, like, eventually moving Annie into the background and having her run around. Let me tell you, I I can't get a good shot of that to save my life off of a screen capture. But it makes it clear that, like, the enclosure of the family is actually like, it's the enclosure of the frame and that sense of the structure itself being trapped and and demobilizing because you're in the family, not because you're not able to be the right kind of family member.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. I love that. And the use of melodrama too, of, like, that claustrophobia that felt in melodrama is really interesting. So your final chapter has the title Feelings Hate You and concerns therapeutic narratives and horror. And as I was saying, this was really helpful to me because I'm working on something related.
Johanna Isaacson:But, I thought in this regard, it would be interesting for us to talk about the Babadook. So in my book, I read the ending of that film in light of the family abolition argument that you made in your previous chapter. In that context, I thought the sustained presence of the Babadook was the acknowledgment of ambivalence and fear towards motherhood. But I found your perspective on the film equally convincing where you read the ending as a form of capitalist realism, a sort of valorization of therapeutic narrativizing and the management of what Sian Nagai calls ugly feelings. So was wondering if you could say a little bit about your reading of The Babadook and how it exemplifies your argument in that chapter.
Joshua Gooch:So, I mean, I think your reading of the film is entirely right for the film. What I wound up doing was trying to think about it as a film in a larger cycle, and it's in the larger cycle that it becomes really weird. Jennifer Kent is making that argument, and it's drawing on a host of of feminist theory and history. But that it provides us with a particular kind of narrative form that a lot of people have now turned into, or, you know, use a fancy Marxist term reified. Right?
Joshua Gooch:Like, it's become this sort of narrative form that people can now just pick up and use willy nilly and often unrelated to feminist concerns. Right? You can see it's it's grounded in ideas from the women's film and from melodrama, but it's it's now disconnected from it. And that that idea is that the Babadook gives us that ability to say, look, we've got an ear real element. Right?
Joshua Gooch:The Babadook. It gives us a a way of metaphorizing a particular set of feelings and then of by by making them physical, giving you something to then struggle against and overcome. And then you can tell the story of your overcoming of your bad feelings or learning to manage your bad feelings, and this becomes a a lovely sort of narrative arc. And it's something that's threaded throughout twenty first century self help. So I really drew on a lot of scholarship about self help and the way that that particular way of telling a story, which I think is not I don't think that's what Kent's going for, but it it gave us something that resonated with other things in our culture that then became very useful for filmmakers, both because The Babadook succeeded financially and because it's a it's a readily replicated kind of story.
Joshua Gooch:And so then it becomes this cycle of therapeutic horror where people confront their bad feelings, they overcome them. And I yeah, I they're not they're not terribly interesting in some ways. And so I really was trying to deal with the fact that there's this there's a lot of them. And they're not all bad, but they are all kind of the same. And after you've seen a couple, you start thinking, oh, is this so is that the oh, it's a metaphor for grief.
Joshua Gooch:Okay. You can see how that goes. Okay.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. Almost every film that comes out seems to be doing that. Even films like they'll have really interesting, like, visual things, but we were thinking about, like, long legs and cuckoo. They're good, but they just like, what do they add up to other than ex expelling grief or working through grief, yeah, in this way? You know?
Johanna Isaacson:At least with Babadook, she brings in all these social questions, you know? But the those, like, kind of seem to exclude, you know, those questions in a way.
Joshua Gooch:I've been trying to figure out what to do with Perkins films, and my best guess at this point would be a highly personal reading about his relationship to his father. Like, I mean, everything else is kind of they really resist a lot of that kind of reading for that reason, and then they just rely on this pretty paltry sense of of trauma or remediation of trauma.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. And I love that you ended up thinking about that in some ways, even those films that are depoliticized, if we kind of bring Marxism to them, we can still find really interesting ways to look at that symptomatic city. Right. You know, of just like because that that itself is a feature of capitalist ideology. Right.
Johanna Isaacson:Of, like, the trauma narrative in an interesting way.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. The way I talk about it is managing your feelings. Right? And so, like, this idea of, well, we can now see what our bad feelings are, and then we can learn to manage them. And this is kind of a I wanna say it's a trick, but it was my attempt to deal with the fact that people keep talking about horror as therapy.
Joshua Gooch:If we now have a very explicitly therapeutic take on what horror narrative could be, and if people read it that way, if they experience it that way, and the storytellers are telling you that this is what the story's about, well, at that stage, gotta say, why are you doing that? It doesn't it doesn't make a lot of sense that everyone needs this many trauma narratives. But I think it makes a lot of sense if you say, well, the the world we live in is really depressing, and it's unpleasant, and we need some way to learn to manage that. Okay. Well, let's let's try this.
Joshua Gooch:We'll say this is a good way to learn to manage how bad you feel.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah. Almost propaganda. And it's sort of interesting because I was just, like, looking at the history of trauma therapy, and it's just something that starts out very politicized with, like, women's consciousness raising groups or Vietnam veterans working through PTSD that was very linked to, like, political things that happened to them. And then it just goes into, like, the Oprah talk show circuit. You know?
Johanna Isaacson:Just, like, working out a way to, yeah, like, externalize and individualize feelings and detach them from their political sort of collective origins. I think we're getting close again, but my last ish question was that you looked at we're all going to the world's fair in this light as a critical purchase rather than going deep into therapeutic narrative. So I was wondering if you could describe a little bit about the critical work that that film is doing.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah, this is probably my favorite film in the book. And it's critical work is that it takes the idea that horror can be therapeutic and then just attacks it from every conceivable angle. So we've got our main character who is depressed and looking for social connection, starting trying to play this horror game online, which she's hoping is going to change her life and make her new friends and give her social connection. And instead, it just gives her access to a lot of ugly negative feelings, exposes her to some potentially dangerous people and really leaves everything unresolved. Right?
Joshua Gooch:It she gets to see what's bad and then can't deal with it. You just confront it. You're like, oh, that is a problem. What I liked about it is that it leaves so much undecided and it keeps forcing us to say, how do we want to interpret this? Why do we want to interpret it that way?
Joshua Gooch:And what does that mean about how we expect the narrative and horror? What do we think it's going to give us? Right? It's like it holds out this hope of processing or solving an issue when instead it lets us see the issue, but it leaves us entirely to our own devices to decide what we're gonna do about it. And that's what I like about it as a film.
Joshua Gooch:Right? Instead of saying, hey, we got through the badness. Look at that. We've learned to manage it. It's like, no.
Joshua Gooch:This sucks. You're gonna have to do something about it. I had finished the book before, I Saw the TV Glow came out. But when I got back the page proofs, I had to put in a little bit about it because it really does sort of draw this film together for me. Right?
Joshua Gooch:It's very much, I think, a trans narrative in that way in that it says, you know, fiction offers some kinds of fulfillment. It lets us see things that we didn't know we could do or be, but it's not the solution. You can't live inside the fiction. The fiction isn't reality for you. And so if you want to live, you have to step outside the fiction.
Joshua Gooch:And and that's what I really love about the film.
Johanna Isaacson:Oh, I so agree with you. And I just think, yeah, both of those films used impressionistic kind of horror tropes and evocativeness to let us, yeah, explore those problems without telling us and overexplaining, which was one of the things I really didn't like about the new Nosferatu. There was just so much overexplaining and slotting you into one particular narrative way, which always ends up being those trauma narratives because those are the those are our given narratives. Right? So just just by not overexplaining, film can do incredibly much more interesting work.
Johanna Isaacson:Yeah.
Joshua Gooch:I feel like you could probably tie overexplaining to long sequence shots in Hollywood film. Because the moment you watch just the first five minutes of Nosferatu, I thought, oh, shit. This is gonna be terrible. Like, suddenly, the camera's moving everywhere. We're in and I this is my my horrible past as a Victorianist.
Joshua Gooch:I just looked at the costume site. This is in 1890. Oh, no. This is eighteen thirties. What are you guys doing?
Joshua Gooch:And it was all downhill from there.
Johanna Isaacson:I would be curious what you're working on now.
Joshua Gooch:Yeah. Right now, I've got a couple of sort of horror projects percolating, and one of them is about regional horror. And so the idea was to look at how horror captures in profilmic spaces political economic changes. And my my focus was the place where I grew up. I'm from Sonoma County.
Joshua Gooch:There's a far too long history. You go all the way back to Hitchcock filming in Santa Rosa, and then I wrapped up with Scream. Probably could have gone further. But you can get a sense of, like, this shift from a rural regional economy that's very much focused on market produce and to a a highly gentrified white culture that's built around tourism and wine and and how those things intersect with the ways that you the kinds of stories that horror told for those spaces. And it was always fun to kind of find the weird intermediate points.
Joshua Gooch:Right? So, like, Cujo is shot in that area. Yeah. I mean, get interesting sort of sort of context for how those those things worked. It was fun for me, at least.
Joshua Gooch:The problem was I realized that there is not a lot of great regional history about the different parts of California. So you're just going through a lot of California history and trying to dig up little parts. And then the other piece I'm working on right now, which is probably more likely to be finished, is a book on contemporary multicultural popular horror. So working on writers like Stephen Kramm Jones, Celine Moreno Garcia, Victor Laval. And so so thinking about the kinds of questions that have come up in the book and thinking about how specifically writers are dealing with the same kinds of concerns, but and this is the the sort of key difference.
Joshua Gooch:I'm I'm still futzing with it, but trying to make connections between film adaptations and film narratives and the ways that people are telling stories. Right? Like how literature moves into film and back again as opposed to thinking about like, okay, adaptation. And again, too literary in my my my starting point, but we almost always get book, film, book, film. And with these, it's very clear that film is part of the culture, and you have to know these films in order for them to make sense.
Joshua Gooch:You can't read Stephen Graham Jones if you don't know slashers. Yeah. You'll be you'll be very angry if you do. I don't know. So it's more more interesting to think about, like, how horror is a transmedial genre, and that's sort of what I'm thinking of for for the the next book project.
Joshua Gooch:What are you working on?
Johanna Isaacson:That's awesome. Well, I just finished a book on whatever happened to baby Jane and thinking about the sort of psycho bitty genre and sort of feminism and aging, especially it ended up weirdly becoming a kind of manifesto on what it's like to get old as a Gen X person and how the gender non essentialism and the rage in those films, in baby Jane especially, has been kind of adapted by queer people and be kind of taken back in a similar way by aging women. So that was a fun project. And then I'm right now actually working on a book on Sisters by DiPalma for this series called Time Codes, where you write a chapter for every minute of the film. It's not very short chapters, but, it's also a fun kind of experimental project and thinking about feminism and the complex relationship of feminism to DiPalma sisters in this way.
Joshua Gooch:That's great.
Johanna Isaacson:Well, it was so great to chat with you and I love the book. So thank you so much for reaching out to me to do this. This is It
Joshua Gooch:was wonderful, and it's a pleasure to meet you. Thanks a lot. All right. Thank you.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Capitalism Hates You, Marxism against a New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.