society of the spooktacle
[[note to any unlikely readers — I’m still stalling, so in the interim in order to create the illusion of progress, please enjoy(?!) this small effort to take seriously, if only briefly and not very seriously, a joke working title for the project.]]
Halloween used to promise a night of transgression and inversion, a break from the mundane, a chance to become something radically different. A non-political Charivari, a no(lo)n(ger)-religious Carnival. It was a vacation from the everyday, a world turned upside down, where new norms and values, not to mention monsters and spirits, reigned.
Halloween is the Las Vegas of the holiday cycle. What happens on Halloween stayed on Halloween. The next morning, you woke up, put away your Halloween costume, put on your everyday costume and returned to life as usual.
But things are different now. Halloween has changed, to be sure, but more importantly, the world it promised escape from, is no longer the same world. Today, instead of being a break from reality, Halloween is today perhaps the holiday most like everyday life for many people. In a society of the spectacle, Halloween is the ultimate spectacle. The spooktacle.
Is this true? Let’s ask noted theorist of the spectacle, Guy Debord. Here are a few selected quotes from his classic book, The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
On Halloween, the goal is to become an image, the image. Consider how our costumes give us the opportunity to consume, reconstitute, and recycle popular culture (i.e., commodity culture) at a furious pace. We take the shape of our favorite tv and movie characters, or the actors who portray them. We become consumer products or the commercials that sell them to us. We embody internet memes and inside jokes. We do this to position ourselves as experts on the spectacle, as active and intelligent viewers. Importantly, however, we require the recognition of others. We need others to “get” our costume, to acknowledge, and thus legitimize, our social positioning.
“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”
Why has Halloween become an adult-centered holiday? Why are the pleasures (and constraints) normally afforded only children becoming more available to adults? We are promised that this is liberation, a chance to have our adult cake and eat it like a kid. But maybe child’s play is small consolation for the unfinished adventures many experience on their path to adulthood, as they find traditional avenues closed off to them.
“The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with ‘all good things’ that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those ‘famous for being famous’ hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image.”
Halloween is a perfect embodiment of our current celebrity culture. It starts with the proliferation of celebrity costumes. While most are sincere homages, fan culture come alive, there is still room for transgression, such as when white folks don black face to celebrate their heroes. Celebrities themselves have become a bigger staple of our Halloween entertainment, as we admire their costumes, so much more expensive and clever than our own, which are proudly (and professionally) splashed across celebrity news magazines and websites, as well as personal Instagram accounts. And then there is the Halloween celebrities themselves, ones whose costumes are so good, so striking, that everyone takes notice. It used to be that you might win a prize at a contest with such a costume, but today there is always the chance, and sometimes the hope, that you’ll launch into the viral spaces of micro-celebrity, which just might be the first step towards real celebrity.
“This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.”
Like everything else, Halloween has erased space. It’s everywhere. Halloween depends on a public, but today we can go out in public without ever leaving our room, and we can go out on the streets but be completely absorbed by events and people worlds away. And just as space has been erased, so has time. This is more than the standard complaints about Halloween costumes and candy going on sale earlier and earlier each year. Today, Halloween never really ends, and thus never really starts. This is not to say that we are necessarily all riven by this “internal separation” but the nature of the relations, and the meanings they carry, has almost certainly shifted in important ways. Has Halloween ever been anything more than a straightforward, albeit spectacular, economic transaction?
“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
On top of its crass economism, Halloween is pure representations. And it is increasingly representations of representations of representations, as we layer meta on top of irony on top of images on top of mash ups on top of memes. Even when the costume comes off, it’s not always clear what lies beneath.
Spooky.
Thus ends today’s effort to avoid doing real work. Join me tomorrow, where I eschew wordplay with classic texts of French cultural theory, opting instead for tinkering with traditional American proverbs. Next time: “When life gives you lemons, make liminality.”
