Mythologising family (Halloween come-down de-spook)

Okay, so Halloween is over now. We all did some dressing up and got in the festive mood. I released my Bloodborne Spooktacular and everybody loved it. We’ve all gotten a bit spooked, now let’s all take a breath, and get de-spooked. The best way for us to get de-spooked is if we look at something that’s spooky with an ending that relieves us of all the tension. Better than that, let’s look at two things like that, and just for kicks, I’ll apply a normalising media analysis to them so that we can all feel totally fine about even the genuinely spooky things that happened!

The first thing I want to look at is The Haunting of Hill House, a short Netflix series based loosely on the book of the same name by Shirley Jackson, author of The Lottery. Wait, is it rude for me to qualify who Shirley Jackson by mentioning a short story she wrote for a magazine when she wrote several legitimate full books… because that’s what her publisher did. Hill House (the show) is about a family who lived in a scary mansion a long time ago and their various mental health issues. Or it’s about how they got haunted by ghosts. Or it’s about time travelling ghosts? Or a house that eats souls? Did you know most horror sounds really bad when you just describe the basic premise?

Usually I do a quick spoiler warning at the start but I thought I should make a bigger deal of this: if you care about spoilers, please watch Hill House before this video, because I’m right about to talk about some of the biggest and most upsetting plot points and I’m not sure they’ll be the same if you know they’re coming. I can handle only getting 5 views on this video, I’d rather you go watch the series first.
Okay here we go: Nell is dead. The first five episodes of Hill House are laid out as a map of the stages of grief, following the five children of the Crain family. In the first episode, skeptic Steven, representing denial. Next, Shirley the mortician, representing depression. Theo, my favourite character, who plays a bit into the angry lesbian trope, funnily enough represents anger. Luke, the drug addict, who is constantly trying to convince people to enable him represents bargaining. Lastly Nell, the sibling who dies, represents acceptance. Everything in her episode is structured around being accepted, but maybe it’s also about fate - about inescapability.
Nell is haunted all her life by a woman with a broken neck, and after losing her husband, is drawn back to the house where her mother died and when she stays in the motel nearby she misses time and suddenly finds that night has fallen. At the house she wanders through visions of her distant family and her dead husband, experiencing an acceptance that she can’t find in real life. When she tried to call her family, most of them ignored the call. Suddenly she finds a noose around her neck and she is pushed into hanging herself. As she dies, she realises that she is the broken-necked woman that has been haunting her, her entire life.
Viewed as a story of mental illness, Nell feels compelled back to this place of extreme trauma and can’t get past this vision of a hanged woman. What’s really scaring her about this ghost is that she could become it. Even viewed without that lens though, the time-travel element in this ghost story is really interesting, because it says something about how family affects us over time. In the final episode Nell’s ghost appears to her siblings and essentially tells them she’ll always be with them. 

The time-travelling nature of all the ghosts in Hill House recontextualises the ghost as not just someone dead from the past, but maybe as someone alive, in the present, with whom you don’t have the relationship that you want, or a vision from the future of something you’re terrified of becoming. When Nell’s family argue at her funeral, they are haunted by a monstrous version of the mother Olivia, and Nell’s ghost is in the room with them the whole time, invisible to everyone. She is being ignored at her own funeral while the family focuses instead on their traumatic past.

When Nell finally unites the siblings it’s by helping them all see each other, and communicate, but it’s also by bringing them back to the house where they can all confront the narratives they possess about their family. Some of them see Olivia the mother as a monster. Steven says that she was just unwell, but because of that he fears having children, lest they suffer the same way. They have to all confront the past in order to form a new idea of their family.

So here’s the second big spoiler warning: If you haven’t played What Remains of Edith Finch… you know actually this one doesn’t matter as much as a spoiler warning. I think the premise of that game is that everyone in their family has died, so it’s not exactly a spoiler. I’m going to discuss some of the details of the deaths, but otherwise this is more just a really strong recommendation than a spoiler warning. Go play the game, it’s fucking great. You can watch this first or not. That’s fine.

Also, honorable mention to Hereditary, which I didn’t want to spoil and go into here and require you to see three things in order to get this mini-essay… but it fits these themes really well. If you want to understand what I mean just bear in mind what I say here and go watch thiiiiiiiis videoooooooo... 

In What Remains of Edith Finch you play as Edith Finch - dead - who is exploring her family home and discovering the truth about how everyone in her family died. Her mother Dawn - dead - tried to keep it from her while her great-grandma Edie - dead - tried to tell her and her two brothers about the family curse. The framing device of the story is that you are actually Edith’s son Christopher, who is reading about the family after her death.
Edith’s two brothers are Lewis - dead - and Milton - dead…??? Milton disappeared. It’s really not clear how he disappeared, whether he wandered into the woods and died, metaphorically disappeared into his art and died some other way, or if he actually just ran away from home and was presumed dead. Whatever happened to Milton, it was some sort of self-removal from the family at a time when the family unit was just the three siblings and Dawn and Edie, who were constantly at odds
Edie is trying to tell the story of the Finch family as a family curse. Dawn is trying to tell her children nothing about the family at all.

Hill House and Edith Finch are both about mythologising family. Our family is a unit of people and in some ways a vessel for a meme or familial identity. By transferring knowledge through a family we can make new members of the family more well-informed than they could possibly be otherwise. A family contains the power to bestow enormous social capital upon its members.

However, if that power and process are perverted they can perpetuate harmful ideas, traditions, and behaviours. There's evidence to suggest great-grandma edie finch is manipulative or even abusive. Olivia Crain is deeply unwell one way or another and leaves a lasting impression on her children that amounts to their family home being "haunted". Edie wants to mythologise the Finch family as being cursed and members of the Crain family want to mythologise their family either "haunted" or "crazy". Steven has spent his career selling ghost fiction while being a cynical paranormal skeptic because he personally wants to remember his mother as an unwell person and not as a monster. There is however a catharsis he is missing out on because of this, only going back to the house and confronting his mother's ghost can mend his deep seated issues. Nell on the other end of the spectrum is so sure of the haunting that she feels supernaturally drawn to the house and ultimately inescapably has to die there.

I think that there's a reading of Edith Finch where Milton runs away from home and grows up elsewhere, and the developer said that him being the king from the Unfinished Swan was "kind of canon" which to me says that read one way around, Milton escaped from the Finch family curse by running away and having nothing to do with it. Maybe he became a famous artist, maybe he just made enough as an artist to live happily. Either way, his flipbook shows him using a "magic paintbrush" to create an exit and leave through it.

Dawn wanted her children to grow up without the curse, because she believed that believing it made it true, but in a way I think this gave it more power, made it more real, because it made her fear and hate Edie, who wanted to tell Dawn's children about the family curse. Only Edith's eventual strategy of full disclosure can possibly work because laying the facts out plainly allows someone to make up their own mind. Otherwise it would have to be total severance like Milton. The game is called What Remains of Edith Finch and I think there's a second phrasing of that - as a question - which asks whether her attempt to tell the whole family history plainly and simply will be effective in saving Christopher from "the curse".

I think the time travel element in Hill House works really well for this discussion of the mythologising of family, because family tradition is often thought of as ghosts that haunt you from the past. However, as shown in Hill House, ghosts can be from the present too, and even from the future, and still relate back to the mythology that you buy into around your family. Nell is being haunted by the future because of an expectation of death. Shirley is haunted by the living, by the present, because of her fears of her family falling apart, and I'm sure on some level, fears that she'll become a mother who ruins her family.

Examining the narratives that our family has formed - that any group we live within has formed - can help us find the harmful ideas, patterns and behaviours and replace them with better ones.

A chemistry teacher of mine once told us that her children were smarter than her. A few of us in the class responded that this was sad, but she said “it’s not sad. I am smarter than my parents, and my children are smarter than me. That’s the way it’s meant to be.”