YOU ONLY MOVED THE HEADSTONES: THE UNBURIED VIOLENCE OF SUBURBIA
August 2 - August 29
Suburbia is a place of nightmares.
The films in this series all grapple with, in one way or another, the uneasy dread that arises out of the sublimated violence necessary to establish and maintain the utopian illusion of American suburbia. As we careen into a new century of heightened fortress politics and racist nationalism, we have to understand the unbroken continuity of violence propping up the entire project of suburban life. These horrors have always been here.
The suburbs are a mechanism by which we have suppressed Black wealth and amplified white wealth, alienated and isolated ourselves from each other, and brought devastation and ruin to our natural environment to an extent that we're only beginning to grapple with. From the genocide of Indigenous Peoples, to the patriarchal violence against women’s time and lives hidden inside the home, to the brutal police violence which has been fundamental to maintaining it: this is the real legacy of the suburban American utopia. And now, as suburbs are increasingly being ceded to poverty and wealth is returning to cities in new waves of gentrification, the uninterrupted process of colonialism continues.
So how does this film series -- shot through with enforced conformity and violent rupture -- grapple with these histories? Well if there's anything that's a catalyst for the gothic in horror, it's the desperation to suppress the reality of the past as a kind of force in the present. In John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN, what happens to the little six year old boy that's locked away as an attempt to banish the past? He comes back as an inhuman force. He can’t be locked away. You can't banish the past. It'll always find a way to make its spectacular violent return.
Films like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS show that suburbia is not secure. It’s contingent. It's a fragile place you're supposed to be delighted to have attained, but it's shot through with a strain of paranoia and violence that can't easily be erased. You don't know who you're living next door to. It could be anybody. This enduring trend of modern alienation is rooted in the fact that we no longer have real communities to call ourselves a part of. We actually need the language of horror to describe things in the real world because it's a way of avoiding a kind of ethical abnegation of responsibility. We need to know that our world is a horrifying creation. We need to reclaim the language of horror as being the only thing suitable for giving a systematic description of contemporary capitalist conditions.
We have to unearth, make visible, confront and resolve the many hidden violences that the suburbs hold. We have to think through how to decommodify them, how to undertake a process of degrowth towards new forms of eco-socialization. The white nuclear family was ALWAYS a death sentence. This is a screening series interested in the inevitable consequences of masking the implicit violence of our society behind idealistic facades. It’s about what seeps back in when you try to shut stuff out. We’ve moved the headstones but not the graves. And nothing stays buried forever.
The films in this series all grapple with, in one way or another, the uneasy dread that arises out of the sublimated violence necessary to establish and maintain the utopian illusion of American suburbia. As we careen into a new century of heightened fortress politics and racist nationalism, we have to understand the unbroken continuity of violence propping up the entire project of suburban life. These horrors have always been here.
The suburbs are a mechanism by which we have suppressed Black wealth and amplified white wealth, alienated and isolated ourselves from each other, and brought devastation and ruin to our natural environment to an extent that we're only beginning to grapple with. From the genocide of Indigenous Peoples, to the patriarchal violence against women’s time and lives hidden inside the home, to the brutal police violence which has been fundamental to maintaining it: this is the real legacy of the suburban American utopia. And now, as suburbs are increasingly being ceded to poverty and wealth is returning to cities in new waves of gentrification, the uninterrupted process of colonialism continues.
So how does this film series -- shot through with enforced conformity and violent rupture -- grapple with these histories? Well if there's anything that's a catalyst for the gothic in horror, it's the desperation to suppress the reality of the past as a kind of force in the present. In John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN, what happens to the little six year old boy that's locked away as an attempt to banish the past? He comes back as an inhuman force. He can’t be locked away. You can't banish the past. It'll always find a way to make its spectacular violent return.
Films like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS show that suburbia is not secure. It’s contingent. It's a fragile place you're supposed to be delighted to have attained, but it's shot through with a strain of paranoia and violence that can't easily be erased. You don't know who you're living next door to. It could be anybody. This enduring trend of modern alienation is rooted in the fact that we no longer have real communities to call ourselves a part of. We actually need the language of horror to describe things in the real world because it's a way of avoiding a kind of ethical abnegation of responsibility. We need to know that our world is a horrifying creation. We need to reclaim the language of horror as being the only thing suitable for giving a systematic description of contemporary capitalist conditions.
We have to unearth, make visible, confront and resolve the many hidden violences that the suburbs hold. We have to think through how to decommodify them, how to undertake a process of degrowth towards new forms of eco-socialization. The white nuclear family was ALWAYS a death sentence. This is a screening series interested in the inevitable consequences of masking the implicit violence of our society behind idealistic facades. It’s about what seeps back in when you try to shut stuff out. We’ve moved the headstones but not the graves. And nothing stays buried forever.