A house that hides much worse than skeletons in its closet
My most persistent thought during the runtime of Poltergeist was about how much of this movie's DNA can be recognized in Stranger Things. The tropes of nightmarish suburbia, a childhood immersed in pop culture, electric devices as a conduit to the paranormal, a child trapped within the walls of a house, and a danger too big for parents to protect against are elements that the Netflix show clearly inherits from this '80s classic. I wasn't so much scared as amused by its visual effects, at times reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which in my book is not a good sign. When it aims for spooky, it overshoots and lands on goofy. I admit that in my childhood this movie would have terrorized the hell out of me, but watching it now leaves me with an impression similar to live-action Scooby-Doo. I suspect this is a recurring trait in the Spielberg-Lucas axis of storytelling: if it doesn't hook you when you're young, it never will.
Poltergeist feels like a condensation of mystical currents of thought that had gained strength during the hippie era but really date back to the spiritualist fad of the 19th century. Advances in the understanding of electromagnetism coincided with a growing interest in the inner workings of the mind, and it was only natural that a theory eventually formed linking electromagnetism with the paranormal. If you didn't know any better, it made some sort of sense: if you consider radio waves, they're an invisible force that exists all around us and can even pass through us, and have very tangible effects if you have a properly sensitive machine at hand. So it wasn't too much of a stretch to suppose that ghosts worked the same way. Poltergeist is an heir to over a century of superstition that viewed in electrical devices a viable tool for contacting the spiritual realm.
But Poltergeist does more than that. It also takes advantage of the moral panic that was forming around mass media and the way the TV set ended up altering not only the inner dynamics of the American family, but also the rhythm of daily life. People in Poltergeist time their activities by the programming schedule of TV; their day ends when the last broadcast ends. Even before malevolent spirits jump out of the screen, they're already under the spell of TV.
Putting spirits in the TV suggests an unspoken pun, as a riff on Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message." The movie plays with a medium (as in channel of communication) but also with a medium (as in speaker with the dead), and by blurring the difference between the technological and the mystical, it opens space for a new discursive position, one that treats electronic media as another battlefield between good and evil. Instead of a mindless machine, the TV set becomes a subject of moral analysis. And because anything that can make moral choices is effectively a person, the TV set becomes a character in the movie. You can talk to it, and it will answer. It has wants and goals. And it is very angry with you.
The family to whom all this happens in Poltergeist is presented as aspirational: upper-middle class homeowners who genuinely love each other and whose biggest headache at the moment is the construction of their private swimming pool. They don't have problems in their lives. Why make a movie about happy people?
As it turns out, their comfort rests on a pile of hidden cruelty. Their entire suburb was built on a cemetery that the developers didn't bother relocating. And this serves as an indictment of an entire way of life: these are the Reagan years, when the individualistic model of success was being preached as the definitive fulfillment of every human need. Our protagonists certainly look like they have nothing to worry about. But their happiness requires literally sweeping a lot of suffering under the rug. I don't need to recount the centuries of injustice and violence upon which American prosperity was amassed. Nor does Poltergeist pause for a single moment to moralize against our protagonists. The nightmare scenario it proposes speaks for itself: all your comfort created a debt, and that debt will come calling. And it will devour your children.
It's interesting that '80s suburban mythologizing focused so much on the children who were growing up in that space. The quasi-Puritan anxiety that rose against cities as alleged dens of vice and crime led to the creation of those artificial bubbles for raising children. But in those same '80s movies, the children are the first to fall through the cracks on that bubble.
In Poltergeist, the suburban children couldn't be more absurdly privileged. Their bedroom boasts a hodgepodge of product placement that must have sufficed to pay for the movie. They're innocent of the evil awakened by their parents, but they're its chosen targets, with their instruments of everyday joy, their toys, serving as the weapons through which their lives are snatched away. And at the top of those toys sits the ultimate entertainment invention, the provider of hours upon hours of cheap smiles: the TV.
It would seem odd to pair the unacknowledged blood left behind by American growth and the specific concerns that were circulating about the omnipresence of TV. They're two very different sources of fear. But what the TV symbolizes is precisely that prosperity. The medium is the message, and the message is that you now have luxury of spare time to sit and watch. The moral panic warned that guiding your life by the TV schedule was a scourge on society, but in reality, if you even have the time to live by the TV schedule, you're immensely fortunate. In the '80s, the TV is one of the ultimate signifiers of mass-accessible affluence (along with other traditional American life milestones, such as owning a car). So it's fitting that Poltergeist turns the TV into the executioner's weapon that will collect the old debt.
When the veil of mystery is parted and we get to see the otherworldly creatures that threaten this life of comfort, they don't seem all that scary. Of course, I say this now, having survived through The Thing and Gremlins and The Fly and Predator and Hellraiser and Beetlejuice and They Live and Child's Play and plenty of others. It's too late for me to experience those images for the first time. I have no way of confirming how horrifying Poltergeist really was, and, as I said above, the stylistic resemblance to Close Encounters of the Third Kind does its scare factor no favors. I bet many moviegoers in 1982 must have drawn the same connection in their head. Poltergeist remains as a very acute piece of social commentary, but as a horror movie, I find it rather quaint. Almost cute.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
