A Head Full of Ghosts

A Head Full of Ghosts would make a very good episode of Black Mirror. Aside from the fact that it features a recognizable element of media and pop culture (reality television) mixed with an element of horror (demonic possession...or psychiatric persecution, however you want to look at it), it also showcases the anti-cathartic ending that makes each episode of Black Mirror so oppressively bleak. Honestly, I was shocked when I realized I had reached the ending. There's no real resolution or tying up of events - it's treated a bit like a mystery that you don't actually realize is a mystery. There's a reveal of a whodunnit, and then it ends as though the reveal itself is supposed to make everything better. Spoiler: it doesn't.It's hard to describe who's point of view this book is from. Technically, it's from the point of view of Meredith, looking back on the period in her life when her older sister was supposedly possessed by a demon and a reality show was erected around her exorcism. But Meredith takes you through different angles of perspective. In some, she's an adult talking to a writer, Rachel, who is planning on writing a book about her family and the show. In others, we go into her dialogue as she describes what happened to Rachel, and suddenly Meredith is 8 years old again, experiencing everything fresh. The third perspective is one of snarky blog posts that Meredith writes under the name Karen Brissette, where she analyzes the show herself from a distance. She treats her own life as a fiction - or, the kind of fiction that reality TV is, which I've heard called “assisted reality.” She regards her own life, her own experiences, through the lens of media analysis, applying story tropes and film techniques to something that actually happened. It creates a fascinating metatextual effect - as though Paul Tremblay is deconstructing his own story within his story, calling out the moments of exploitation, even breaking down a classic horror moment by explaining why it was scary. It's a really intriguing approach, if not a little disorienting.Nonetheless, I kind of dragged myself through this book. The first maybe third of the book features a lot of very spooky and disturbing behavior on the part of Marjorie, Meredith's possibly possessed sister, that both fits in with common exorcism-movie tropes while also taking it a little bit beyond. It's genuinely unsettling but also intriguing from a story perspective. However, at one point, when Meredith is talking to Rachel, she refers to her sister's affliction as a “descent into schizophrenia.” We don't find out until much later that there was never actually an opportunity for Marjorie to be formally diagnosed. But after Meredith says this, there's little illusion about what's happening - this is not a horror story, it's a story about sick girl and her struggling family being taken advantage of bt the religious authorities in their life and opportunistic TV people. There's nothing supernatural at all happening. And once you realize that, there doesn't seem to be much hope for this family. Watching them crumble becomes a debilitating exercise that vaguely resembles entertainment.From a technical standpoint, I think A Head Full of Ghosts is a fascinating attempt at doing something different. But I wish it had more in the way of justice. There's a lot of lip service paid to the patriarchal oppression that contributed to the events in the story (the father's unemployment and desperate attempts to regain control of his life through his faith; the dismissal of Marjorie's intelligence and fear of her strength and abilities that lead people to believe she's possessed; and the combined powers of an old institution -religion - and a new one - media - doing the same thing institutions always do - making women's lives miserable), but in the end nothing is really done about it. Though maybe that's exactly what Marjorie's murder-suicide was supposed to be, her stopping a form of oppression in its tracks by killing her parents and herself. Or maybe it was just a girl with paranoid schizophrenia who falsely believed her father was trying to kill her and her family. Or maybe it really was a demon the whole time. Maybe I'm just old. It's hard for me to watch women - particularly young women - hurting. Stories like this are almost scarier than something like [b:The Handmaid's Tale 38447 The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1498057733s/38447.jpg 1119185], because as possible as it may seem there's still a few stumbling steps before we get there. A Head Full of Ghosts could be happening right now. In fact, it probably is.