The Nightmare of History
A thought experiment: While you may reasonably discredit the existence of ghosts, it is likely you would think twice about sleeping alone in an empty hotel where someone had been murdered. Why is this? Has the murder left some kind of psychic residue in the hotel—ectoplasm, say—that may disturb your dreams? Or is the apprehension merely an old atavistic terror of death from a lost age when spirit lived in everything? Do images of terror spill into the hotel from your overly imaginative psyche (that has not yet been analyzed) and so produce spooky phenomena and the worst vibes? Or does blood, as the Torah says, call out from the ground? Both and?
In the gothic genre it is as if the hotel is made of this crying blood. Built structures in the gothic mode retain an undead past—a living past that does not yet know it is dead. The sacred space of the church has been turned upside down into a cursed space: the physical church is the curse. In the gothic imagination, death is no end point or threshold, but rather is a space, a built environment, a zone bounded in brick and mortar. Architecture, in this view, has the uncanny ability to externalize unthought psychic phenomena; likewise the psyche internalizes these literal structures and their violent histories. Psyche and architecture intersect in dream. Just as we inhabit these haunted buildings, so do these buildings inhabit us, haunting our waking thought.
Horror movies continue the gothic nightmare of architecture and it is more often the case that the uncredited antagonist of the horror movie is a building. The Shining, for example, is first and foremost, an exquisite catalogue of interior design set pieces; that these spaces happen to be cursed with domestic violence of the worst variety is a feature of the design—“the white man’s burden”—and that is in turn built upon a site of native genocide. The Overlook Hotel manifests this genocide in its undead form. The unthinking repetition of the past, retained in undead structure, both physical and psychical, is the nightmare that must become real: eg, history.
Marx, writing in his high gothic style, becomes psychoanalytic even before Freud was born: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Todd McGowan suggested that were Freud to have written The Interpretation of Dreams after he had encountered the death drive, after the world war, when history had violently disrupted his world, he would have called the book rather The Interpretation of Nightmares.
The Shining (1980)
