feel like having sus around for commentary drastically changed how i watched this film. movie night at my apartment became a less braindead affair than usual. if he’d been there when i watched tremors, for example, maybe i’d have gotten more out of it than “wow, a giant worm that kills people... cool!” but who knows.
in znore’s essay on mcluhan, he mentions that sound, in a vision-focused culture, reflects the unconscious. “saturn exiled to the underworld.” that thought goes through my mind a lot when listening to the soundscapes of my suburban environment. as safe and saccharine as it all looks, its sounds tend to be eerie: drones emanating from buildings, the sighs, wails, and growls of cars, and various other machine-sounds.* particularly in the grocery store where i work, there's this bright pseudo-california visual environment (kind of a tiki aesthetic, really) but a gloomy aural environment dominated by the refrigeration system - weird hums spanning the audible frequency range, and sudden deep rumbling and gurgling. the cheery music plasted over it is comically ineffective, the juxtaposition with this cold aural atmosphere is quite strange if you actually listen, but ofc we usually block it out.
it’s not difficult to extend this association with the unconscious to what produces these sounds: all these unseen utility inner-workings running through the walls/floor/ceiling/backrooms keeping the visible world running beyond our knowledge. so where is the underworld? in the other movie we watched, friday the 13th, which is set out in the forest, it’s in the lake - textbook mythological stuff. but in the suburban imagination it can be in these dark closed off utility spaces - the boiler room of a power plant in elm street (also a boiler room in the shining), or the storm drains in it.**
(you might argue that this stuff isn’t really that secret or mysterious: there are plenty of very normal people who work in these environments for whom it's all fully transparent and logical. but is the second part true? the other day there was a power outage at work, and i heard the electrician who was called in say to the manager that even he didn’t know why some things were still running and others weren’t. he wondered if the still-running electricity could be coming from the place next door, but that space is empty, unused. my guess is that a lot of this utility stuff is done in a very ad hoc, palimpsest type way. no one fully understands it.)
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lately, mainly thanks to reading dandadan, one of other_life's old pseudonyms has been circling my mind: magic teens. i don’t know if she meant it this way (i'm guessing it was taken from a boards of canada track?) but it’s just one of those phrases that you "recognize" right away, it's that evocative and poignant. secret meetings, don’t go to sleep, accidentally stepped into another world, oh shit it’s happening again. romance and horror - that’s the key thing, that these two forces are awakened together.
it’s possible to take a horseshoe understanding of emotions - the opposite extremes are in some sense close together. it was the best of times the worst of times. there’s a sense in which romance dawn opens up a pandora’s box of previously unknown dark experiences.
what makes dandadan, for the most part, a cozy read is that the gang is in place. a ragtag group of misfits attuned to forces the adults and other teens can’t sense, guided by a mentor, an adult living on the outskirts of society who stayed touch with those forces and learned about them. what makes elm street so stressful, in contrast, is that the group, the sense of solidarity in the face of unknown forces, never falls into place. they have the common dream, but they deny it, fall asleep, and suffer for it.
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* c.f. “the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz”… suicide’s “rocket usa” and really the whole album being another previously mentioned instance of fluorescent light sound, and that album, particularly “frankie teardrop” is very much trying to explore the emotional underworld
** important to note that just as i was typing this my fridge abruptly starting making noise, almost had a heart attack