Brainwashed into believing in a Moral Dictator called ‘God’: Caprica

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artificial intelligence, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, globalization, monotheism, Zoë Graystone

The Battlestar Galactica prequel series, Caprica, really started to hit its straps at about Episode 4: ‘Gravedancing’ (for more on BSG-related topics from Tyrone and Eric, visit here, here, and here).

Caprica is set on the planet of the same name, a planet possessing technology a decade or so more advanced than ours, and on the brink of developing artificial intelligence. The planet Caprica is controlled by global business and a world government, exercising effective political control over the other eleven of the twelve colonies, and wielding a  powerful law enforcement and intelligence service called the Global Defense Department (G.D.D.). The parallels to our own political situation (in descending order of power: global business, the U.S. government, and the F.B.I.) are obvious.

The only apparent threat to established power is posed by the terrorist group, Soldiers of The One, whose monorail bomb explosion in the first, pilot episode killed Zoë Graystone, daughter of artificial intelligence entrepreneur, Daniel Graystone. The dominant religious belief within the twelve colonies is polytheism, one more or less based on the ancient Greek pantheon. This polytheistic religion is practiced more nominally and with less literalism on Caprica than it is on other planets, such as the more fundamentalist Gemenon and Tauron. By contrast, the religious innovation of the Soldiers of The One (S.T.O) is monotheism, belief in one God, a belief that sets them against the secularizing and nominally polytheistic Caprican government.

This clash in worldviews – and again the parallels with life on Earth in 2010 are obvious – produces some fiery religious dialogue, punctuated with the usual half-truths, ignorance, fear, and prejudice. When the G.D.D. confronts Amanda Graystone (Zoë Graystone’s mother) and proceeds to force a search of Zoë’s possessions for evidence of her links with the S.T.O., the confrontation produces one of the best lines of the season to this point:

Amanda Graystone (Zoë’s mother): What do you think you’re going to find here?
Jordan (GDD Agent): I really don’t know. Maybe who she met with. Who brainwashed her into believing in a moral dictator called ‘God’…

The GDD agent then delivers a line which nicely captures the inevitable conflict which arises when a political power and a rival religious power each claim absolute authority – and the resulting systemic violence from the political hegemony, defended as though it were benignly protecting the existing order from unaccountable violence:

Jordan (GDD Agent): I’m sorry if we have to take your daughter’s life apart in order to put other terrorists behind bars. But if we have to, then so be it.

After Zoë’s involvement with the S.T.O. is made public, the Graystones are invited on a comedian’s talk show –  the media form in which most Caprican young people receive their news. The theme of religious conflict is further developed on the show. Amanda Graystone is asked why she didn’t report her daughter as a terrorist, and replies that she never knew:

Amanda Graystone: When was I supposed to call the cops?
Baxter Sarno: Well, I don’t know, maybe when she started worshiping the big Destructo-God-In-The-Sky, maybe?
Daniel Graystone (Zoë’s father): We didn’t know, there weren’t any signs.
Baxter Sarno: You said she was ‘troubled’.
Daniel Graystone: See… she was angry. That’s a better word. My wife’s right.
Baxter Sarno: Well, ok, ‘angry’, but I would also like to add – “morally blank”. Because the virtual world is a poor teacher and doesn’t provide boundaries…
Daniel Graystone: You know who would completely agree with that – that is Zoe. And that’s exactly how the S.T.O. [Soldiers of The One] got to her… She saw things in the virtual world – ritual sacrifices, games like New Cap City, and she felt the absence of moral guidelines, just like you do, like a lot of folks do. And into that absence steps the S.T.O., offering this marvelous ultimate moral arbiter. It’s quite appealing – for a teenage girl especially.

This exchange captures something Bruce Lincoln notes in Holy Terrors. The typical response of the U.S. to Muslim terrorism was to deny that the terrorists operated from religious motivations; to instead paint them as amoral agents acting merely for political – or even selfish – purposes. Such a slant is completely contradicted by the nature of the instructions which each of the 9/11 bombers were issued and followed before the attack – which stressed the religious rationale for their actions at almost every step of the way, and which was couched in language which emphasized their overall goals of holiness, cleansing, and purity. If any religious element was mentioned in official U.S. media reports, it was painted as a variety opposed to “true Islam” – as though the religion the 9/11 bombers practised was somehow not a valid form of religion. But while it is certainly not a valid form of Islam for the vast majority of Muslims, it does constitute “genuine” Islam for some.

Before her death, Zoë created a virtual copy of herself, the program for which becomes the prototype for artificial intelligence and the creation of the Cylons.

As the Mother of an entirely new species, her name, Zoë, takes on a special significance. It means “Life” in Greek, for which the corresponding Hebrew name is חוה (Ḥavvah): “Eve”.

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Paul writing Jibberish

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jibberish, Paul

One Jack Kilmon has a complaint about the way TV Bible-documentaries portray Paul writing his letters:

“Many of these documentaries, like “After Jesus,” flash back to and anchor themselves on a guy dressed in ancient garb with a reed in his hand, writing on papyrus to represent the Gospels or the Pauline epistles as the narrator discusses some historical event mentioned in those texts between discussions from some of the finest and most brilliant scholars and authors today… Now I can forgive the Medieval artists who depict the evangelists or Paul writing a text of scribbling or jibberish but in every one of these documentaries, not just one but all of them, the director does close-ups of the papyrus and the scribe dipping his reed and writing…what? Jibberish! Scribbles!”

So… the TV documentaries are portraying Paul as though he was writing jibberish? This might be just too obvious to even say, but: at least they are getting something right!

For complete historical accuracy, they then need to portray hordes of scholars across the span of the subsequent two millennia asserting that they have made perfect sense of Paul’s jibberish.

View Jim Davila on The Waltons (1973)

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Jim Davila, The Waltons

Jim Davila‘s appearance on The Waltons in 1973 is available on YouTube:

“Before he became the famous biblical scholar whom we know and love today, Jim Davila was a child actor. In 1973, little “Jimmy Davila”, as he was then named, starred in an episode of the popular 1970s television show, The Waltons (Season 2, Episode 9, “The Fawn”). He played Erin’s beau, “Harold Beasley.” Uncannily, the initials of the character’s name are the same as those which occur in “Hebrew Bible.””

Jim Davila was the Biblical Scholar up a Tree

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biblical scholar up a tree, heavenly counterpart, Jim Davila, shaman, The Waltons, The Youth, world tree

Yes – congratulations to Loren Rosson, who was the first person to correctly guess that Professor Jim Davila was the biblical scholar (proleptically speaking) pictured up a tree in yesterday’s post.

Jim Davila in 1973 and 2007: The Youth and his Heavenly Counterpart?

And why was Jim up a tree in 1973? Was he, perhaps, involved in some esoteric shamanistic practice involving a World Tree? Not at all. Jim was acting the part of Erin’s beau, Harold Beasley, in Season 2, Episode 9 of the very popular 1970s television series, The Waltons. Why was Harold up a tree? As John-Boy explains earlier in the program, “I guess that’s just Harold’s way.”

Goodnight, Jim-Boy!

From Caprica & Coupland to Žižek on Immortality

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Andrei Tarkovsky, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, death, Douglas Coupland, immortality, Monstrosity of Christ, Slavoj Žižek

Eric recently commented on the way the forthcoming Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, reflects the 20th Century Western shift from otherworldly to this-wordly spirituality:

“… The relentless drive for ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-realisation’ that is part and parcel of so much of contemporary religious thought and practice, is necessarily a this-worldly matter…”
(Dr Eric Repphun)

In response, I wondered if the transhumanists might be the ones today who have reincorporated the infinite into this dominant strand of this-worldly spirituality. For, in the transhumanist body, both the finite-material and the infinite defeat of death are combined. Much like the Christ.

And as a spooky synchronicity (religiously speaking), Slavoj Žižek recently gave a lecture (with the same title as the book he co-wrote with John Millbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, 2009), in which he says this:

“Did you notice how, in contrast to previous centuries, especially the Nineteenth Century – when the topic of finitude was, as it were, reserved for materialism, and spiritualists, idealists were talking about (and I simplify very much, but nonetheless) the infinite, the spiritual dimension is our contact with the infinite, and so on – all of a sudden (it started with Heidegger, taken over by others) in the Twentieth Century, it’s the very finitude which becomes the ultimate support of spiritualization. The idea is that – precisely insofar as we are finite beings, that is to say, irreducibly thrown into a world that we cannot ever dominate, rooted in this world, unable to withdraw from our concrete place in historical reality to gain a kind of a neutral position, above the run of, outside the run of things – precisely because of this, we cannot ever think of dominating technologically, or in any other way, reality. So we have to remain open for an unfathomable transcendent otherness.

So again, no wonder that even with cinema-makers, I noticed – like, who is the most materialist cinema-maker, arguably, probably, over the Twentieth Century? My choice would have been Andrei Tarkovsky – the Russian guy. But he is also the most spiritualist. You see this idea that, precisely because of this idea that we are stuck into our bodies, our place, this gives to our existence an unfathomable abyss that sustains it, which is the proper place of spirituality.

And on the other hand, the only ones who are ready to take over – in a way that I don’t accept, but nonetheless – the old topics of immortality, infinity, in the sense of getting out of one’s body, are some (usually, even the more vulgar ones) Darwinists, brain scientists or cognitive scientists who claim, you know this idea that that the ultimate, especially in the so-called tech-gnosis movement, where the idea is that the ultimate goal of recent digital, bio-genetic development is to transform our very personal identity into – to cut a long story short – into software; into a virtual program which can then be downloaded from one to another hardware, so that we can indefinitely reproduce ourselves. So that’s an interesting reversal.

Where I am, along with Alan Badiou, is on the side of infinity here – not this vulgar materialist infinity, but nonetheless an infinity, if nothing else the Freudian infinity, even immortality.”

Caprica, Douglas Coupland, and the Problem of Immortality

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Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, death, Douglas Coupland, immortality, Peter Berger

The rebooted television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) was, in this reporter’s opinion, one of the finest serial narratives in the history of the medium (though the Baltimore-set crime drama The Wire, which ran at pretty much the same time, is arguably just as good). It is science fiction, certainly, but as an allegory, the whole series can be read as a long, eliptical meditation about religion and its role in contemporary society.  Battlestar told the story of the conflict between a far-flung human civilisation called the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and a race of genocidal, fundamentalist robots known as ‘Cylons’.  The Cylons, originally created by Colonial scientists to serve as slave labour in the Colonies, eventually launch a devastating war of rebellion and revenge on the Colonies.  The series follows a handful of human survivors as they flee across the galaxy, pursued by the beings that their parents had created.  Though Battlestar ended its run early this year, a new series, Caprica (the name of one of a Colonial homeworld), which will begin its run in 2010, explores the human world of the Colonies at the time of the creation of the original Cylons.  While it toys with familiar science-fiction and horror themes about the creation of life and the terrible responsibility that this act brings with it, there is something that is even more intriguing about the excellent feature-length pilot episode that was released recently on DVD.  While Battlestar Galactica had a good deal to say about religion, and particularly about the ways in which we in the West view Islam, Caprica adds an interesting dimension to the series’ commentary on religion.

Caprica: Alessandra Torresani as Zoe

In the Caprica pilot, we learn that the fundamental motivation for the development of the original Cylons was a fear of death and the refusal to accept the death of a loved one.  Daniel Graystone, the man most responsible for the creation of the Cylon technology, is driven by a disquieting mixture of greed, ambition, and grief.  Graystone is, in grand Battlestar tradition, is a deeply flawed and compellingly human character.  There is an interesting and troubling parallel between the way Graystone approaches his research and the way that he treats his human daughter that speaks volumes about the ambivalent place that science occupies in the universe of Battlestar and Caprica.  Early in the pilot, Graystone’s precocious teenage daughter Zoe is killed in a human bombing executed by a member of an underground monotheistic sect (the Colonists are polytheists).  Zoe, a secret member of the same sect, has created an effective and sentient virtual copy of herself that Graystone discovers only after her death.  He forcefully appropriates the virtual Zoe and uses her as the basis for the first working Cylon model.  The pilot ends with a truly chilling image of a hulking metal Cylon Centurion, developed for military use, pleading for help in a halting, adolescent girl’s voice.  Though there are real questions as to Graystone’s ultimate motives, it is obvious that he is deeply affected by Zoe’s death and his initial trials with the virtual Zoe and the Cylon bodies are motivated by a desire to undo her death, to deny the basic fact of mortality.  Graystone is suspect in that he is overly ambitious and unscrupulous, but also because he is a deeply rational man unable to face this one troubling aspect of reality.  His attempts to counter death with technology will end, we know before he begins, is the Cylon-led genocide that almost wipes out the human race only a few decades later.

Though this requires a good deal more study before it is anything more than simple conjecture, it seems that the fear of immortality is an increasingly common theme in contemporary genre fiction.  To cite a not insignificant example, in the Harry Potter books, the main villain, Lord Voldemort, is driven largely by a quest for immortality, or by a fear of death.  Likewise, in the lamentable Star Wars prequels, we learn that the motivation driving Anakin Skywalker, who eventually is transformed into über-villain Darth Vader, is again both the fear of death and the refusal to accept that everything must die.  There is something interesting here for the study of religion in that there are deep connections between ideas of mortality and life after death and the Judeo-Christian religious milieu that these texts have grown out of.  If we are to believe Peter Berger’s classic 1969 study, The Sacred Canopy, religion, at least as he conceived it from a largely Eurocentric and Christian-centred perspective, is tied fundamentally to the spectre of death.  Berger writes of the importance of death in religion, which he sees as a social phenomenon which creates a sort of ‘canopy’ of explanations and motivations that helps people make sense of their world:

Its legitimating power, however, has another important dimension – the integration into a comprehensive nomos of precisely those marginal situations in which the reality of everyday life is put in question …The confrontation with death (be it actually witnessing the death of other or anticipating one’s own death in the imagination) constitutes what is probably the most important marginal situation.  Death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality – of the world, of others, and of self.  Death radically puts into question the taken-for-granted, ‘business as usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life … Insofar as the knowledge of death cannot be avoided in any society, legitimations of the reality of the social world in the face of death are decisive requirements in any society.  The importance of religion in such legitimations is obvious.  Religion, then, maintains the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of an all-encompassing sacred reality.[1]

He concludes, a few pages later:

The world of sacred order, by virtue of being an ongoing human production, is ongoingly confronted with the disordering forces of human existence in time.  The precariousness of every such world is revealed each time men forget or doubt the reality-denying dreams of ‘madness’, and most importantly, each time they consciously encounter death.  Every human society is, in the last resort, man banded together in the face of death.  The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.[2]

Though many scholars have challenged Berger’s ideas (including Berger himself, who came in later decades to disagree with many of his own conclusions), The Sacred Canopy is deservedly a classic in the field.  We have reasons to take him and these ideas seriously.  Though we may be suspect of how reductive his thesis is, there can be little denying that religion and death are in many ways intertwined, especially in the Abrahamic monotheisms.

What does this emerging fear not of mortality but of immortality tell us about the state of religion in the Western world?  It seems odd in an environment that is undergoing something of a religious revival (to use a horribly loose and loaded phrase) that the drive for immortality plays such a destructive role in a number of prominent texts.  If there is indeed a growing suspicion with those who strive for immortality, would this mean that there is also a growing suspicion of a certain kind of religious thought and practice – perhaps reflecting the fact that the writings of some militants from various traditions have given immortality (and its dozens of willing virgin girls or its empty planets to inhabit with one’s innumerable wives) have given the afterlife a bad name?  Or would this mean that contemporary religion is becoming more and more oriented towards this world rather than any other.  Though both of these possibilities likely get to the truth of the matter in different ways, it is the latter suggestion that seems to be more compelling, because there is something profoundly this-worldly about much of modern Western religious practice and its sacralisation (perhaps even divinisation) of the self.  The relentless drive for ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-realisation’ that is part and parcel of so much of contemporary religious thought and practice, is necessarily a this-worldly matter.  This is an interesting development in that it represents something of a return to the prehistoric religious world that early sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber described (or, depending on how sympathetic we are to their work, created), which was largely focused on mundane, this-worldly concerns.

This also raises a further question: if this is truly is what is happening out there in world beyond the ivory tower where we in the Dunedin School find ourselves working (though it is in reality not a tower of any sort but a clapped-out two-story house built in the 1920s and later converted into offices with little care or subtlety), what might be driving this change?  Turning again to fictional narrative to approach this question, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, in his brilliant 1993 novel, Life After God, speculates on the reasons that his characters are unable or unwilling to think about another world:

Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless.  Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised non-paradise; death was something similar to recycling.  Life was charmed but without politics or religion.  It was the life of the children of the children of pioneers – life after God – a life of earthy salvation on the edge of heaven.  Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life – and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.  I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line.  I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched.  And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.  But then I remind myself we are living creatures – we have religious impulses – we must – and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion?  It is something I think about every day.  Sometimes I think it is the only thing worth thinking about.^[3]

In line with the tendency observable in Caprica, Coupland tells us elsewhere that embracing mortality is one of the crucial steps in developing a deeper understanding of the world.  In his Polaroids from the Dead, a collection of essays and journalistic writings, Coupland tells a parabolic story about an ‘enchanted city,’ a city charmed but without rain, and a visit paid to it by a skeleton.  The story is a scathing condemnation of contemporary culture, and particularly its ignorance of the possibility of an afterlife and a purpose to the enigmatic figure of death.  Here Coupland compares the enchanted city, which is in reality a highly disenchanted place, with the genuine enchantment that the interloping skeleton, as both a metaphor for the hidden and as the literal presence of the dead, brings with him.  The skeleton tells the city’s people, who plead for help in making it rain:

‘It is simple … While you live in mortal splendour – with glass elevators and grapes in December – the price you pay for your comfort is a collapsed vision of heaven – the loss of the ability to see pictures in your heads of an afterlife.  You pray for rain, but you also are praying for pictures in your heads that will renew your faith in an afterlife … I am the skeleton that lies deep within each and every one of you.  I am the skeleton just underneath your lips, your eyeballs, your flesh – the skeleton that silently carries both your heart and your mind’.^[4]

Quite contrary to Berger’s concept of the ‘sacred canopy’, in which religion plays a role in protecting people from death, Caprica, along with the work of Coupland (and doubtless many others),  suggests that embracing mortality and the spectre of death may in fact be a characteristic religious gesture of our times.

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[1] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Press,1969): 42-44.

[2] Berger, Canopy, 51.

[3] Douglas Coupland, Life After God (New York: Pocket Books, 1994): 273-274.

[4] Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996): 59-60.  It is worth noting that the vision of the dancing skeleton reappears in somewhat modified from in Coupland’s 2004 novel, Eleanor Rigby (London: Fourth Estate) in the form of a visionary story about a forsaken community of farmers on a vast prairie who face conflicting information from above. Images of bones and intimations of mortality play an important part in the slowly unfolding story of the farmers. See Coupland, Eleanor, 91-92, 98-99, 102, 159-166, and 248.

The Vampire and/as Modernity: Let the Right One In and the Rationalised City

Cover of the First Edition

Like that other great creation of modern horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster – who appears in a new guise every few years, recently and memorably in the revamped Battlestar Galactica – the vampire is an enduring and ever-flexible framework on which to hang any number of metaphors.  In the most popular iteration of the contemporary boom in vampire film and fiction, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series brings this metaphoric structure back to the psychological/sexual terrain first explored by Bram Stoker in the original 1897 novel Dracula.   For Meyer, the vampire legend is a template with which to draw a clunky, simplistic allegory about sexual abstinence, one which draws heavily if implicitly on Meyer’s Mormonism.  Why the Twilight books are so popular is a mystery to me – and I suspect to anyone who is not a teenaged girl (though I must admit to only having read the first novel; I did try to read the second novel – for professional, academic reasons, of course – but stopped dead after the very first scene, caught on the simple fact that the two lead characters are completely unlikable).  Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the novels capture something that strikes a chord for many readers, though again they are mostly teenaged girls.

This is supported by the fact that the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer covered very similar territory with considerably more depth and subtlety almost a decade before Meyer began her saga.  Both series turn on a romance between a vampire and a young human girl, toying with images of the monstrous and with conventional notions of the perverse.  In the end, however, both are rather tame in light of a superior example of the vampire/human romance, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 Swedish novel Låt Den Rätte Komma In (translated into English variably as Let the Right One In or Let Me In).  While there is a good deal that could be said about the borderline-sexual friendship between Oscar, a young outcast, and Eli, a vampire who moves in next to Oscar in a block of council flats in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg, Lindquist’s novel is perhaps even more interesting in its employment of the vampire mythos to deconstruct and challenge contemporary suburban living.  In this, he turns the vampire story into an interrogation of modern alienation, coming out the other side with a pointed social criticism that is far more subversive and far more convincing than anything Twilight has to offer.

While there are any number of texts that seek to expose the dark underbelly of the respectable surface of suburbia – and here we need only think of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet or Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road – Lindqvist’s novel suggests something rather different, something rather more disturbing: that the rationalised post-War suburb is itself a manifestation of evil (or the metaphysical Other), or is at least a willing participant in it.  The novel is a catalogue of suburban problems, from drug abuse to broken families, from individual alienation to the kind of quiet, almost casual violence that occasionally erupts at places like Columbine High School (and Littleton, Colorado bears no small resemblance to Blackeberg).  When Eli, among the most tragic figures in the long history of fictional vampires, moves to Blackeberg, she finds the perfect place to live the sort of closed-off, impermanent life that her vampirism forces her to live.  In Oscar, a sad, quiet boy who is mercilessly bullied at school, she finds a perfect companion, one who is perfectly and disturbingly willing to commit violence.  While Tomas Alfredson’s remarkable 2008 film adaptation of Låt Den Rätte Komma In, which was shot largely on location in Blackeberg (indeed, it opens with a stunning night-time image of the suburb’s only subway station), captures some of this, the novel brings this theme to the forefront.  The novel – and to be fair, the film – has a remarkable sense of place, capturing something of the inherent disconnect of people living in new, purpose-built, rationalised cities.  The novel opens with a telling section titled ‘The Location’ in which the omniscient third-person narrator tells the reader about the short history of Blackeberg, which was built as a whole in the 1950s:

It was not a place that developed organically, of course.  Here everything was carefully planned from the outset.  And people moved into what had been built for them.  Earth-coloured concrete buildings, scattered about the green fields …

It is big.  It is new.  It is modern.

But that wasn’t the way it was.

They came on the subway.  Or in cars, moving vans.  One by one.  Filtered into the finished apartments with their things.  Sorted their possession into measured cubbies and shelves, placed the furniture in formation on the cork floor.  Bought new things to fill the gaps …

A good place.  That’s what people said to each other over the kitchen table a month or so after they had moved in.

‘It’s a good place we’ve come to’.

Only one thing was missing.  A past …

You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn’t even a church.  Nine thousand inhabitants and no church.

That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality.  It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror.

It explains in part how unprepared they were.[1]

For Lindqvist, place is defined by history and by those who have passed through it.  This comes across clearly in a passage when Oscar, walking out in the forest towards a sledding hill one night, passes by a deserted and much older house:  ‘He reached the place where the path started to bear down strongly towards Kvarnviken Bay, and climbed onto his Snow racer.  The ghost house was a black wall next to the hill, a reprimand: You are not allowed to be here in the dark.  This is our place now.  If you want to play here, you’ll have to play with us’.[2] The whole of Blackeberg is, in a sense, a ghost house, a place empty of its own history but still in the grip of the past and its shadows.  In the 1980s, when the story is set, Blackeberg has seen only a few decades of human habitation and thus has very little memory; however, this doesn’t shield the suburb and its residents from what has come before.  The paired remarks, ‘But that wasn’t the way it was’ and ‘It explains in part how unprepared they were’, are both foreshadows of the dark story to come.  These interlocutions can also be read as a deliberate challenge to what it means to be big, new, and modern.  Into this modern place, which has no regard for the metaphysical, Lindqvist invites the tragic figure of Eli, who undermines all of this, suggesting that there is no way of escaping the legacy of the past, that modernity, despite its pretences to having done away with the superstitions and unreason, is in fact infected with metaphysical, unexplainable evil.  Eli embodies this unreason, the unthought (to borrow a word from Michel Foucault) of the modern city as Oscar gradually comes to realise that there is something profoundly different about his new friend.  He thinks: ‘She was scary … there was something in her, something that was … Pure Horror.  Everything you were supposed to watch out for.  Heights, fire, shards of glass, snakes.  Everything his mum tried so hard to keep him safe from’.[3] Lindqvist’s modernity offers Oscar no refuge for these things.  That very few people in the novel can ever bring themselves to believe that Eli is a figure of mythical, supernatural violence merely underlines this.  That Oscar, a product of the modern family structure and a resident of the modern city, is at least as disturbing a character as Eli further hammers this home; the rationalised city, and by extension modernity itself, will never be free of the dark shadows of history.  In fact, the well-lit rooms and public spaces of Blackeberg might just need these shadows.

A conversation between two of the town’s drunks, heartbreakingly realised figures of both despair and ragged humanity who become major players in the story, adds another dimension to this critique.  Lacke tells his friend:

I don’t want to be here anymore …

Here, the whole shebang.  Blackeberg.  Everything.  These buildings, the walking paths, the spaces, people, everything is just … like a single big damn sickness, see?  Something went wrong.  They thought all this out, planned it to be … perfect, you know. And in some damn wrinkle it went wrong, instead.  Some shit.

Like … I can’t explain it … like they had some idea about the angles, or fucking whatever, the angles of the buildings, in their relation to each other, you know.  So it would be harmonious or something.  And then they made a mistake in their measurements, their triangulation, whatever the hell they call it, so that it was all a little off from the start and it went downhill from there.  So you walk here with all these buildings and you just feel that … no.  No, no, no.  You shouldn’t be here.  This place is all wrong, you know?

Except it isn’t the angles, it’s something else, something that just … like a disease that’s in the … walls and I … don’t want any part of it any more.[4]

Blackeberg, Sweden

For Lacke, the evil that Eli brings (she kills two of Lacke’s closest friends) is a function of the place itself, not an incidental or outside force.  He assigns to urban planning an agency to create mood, atmosphere, and event that is perhaps exceeds even what the most altruistic of urban planners imagine is possible.  Indeed, in beginning with a description of the suburb, the novel offers us a sense that Eli is drawn to the place, called somehow by its wrongness.

This speaks to the inevitable dark side of Michel de Certeau’s comment (see The Unofficial City), that haunted places are the only places where people can live.  If places aren’t haunted by their own history, then they produce or attract their own kinds of haunting.  Låt Den Rätte Komma In tells us that Eli will always live next door and suggests that we as moderns are perfectly willing to open the off-white security doors of our flats and invite her inside.

Maybe this isn’t even a choice; maybe she’s here already.

Lina Leandersson as Eli in Låt Den Rätte Komma In (2008)

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[1] John Ajvide Lindqvist, Låt Den Rätte Komma In, trans. Ebba Segerberg (London: Quercus, 2007): 1-2.

[2] Lindqvist, Komma In, 243.  Emphasis in original.

[3] Lindqvist, Komma In, 242.

[4] Lindqvist, Komma In, 363.  Emphasis and ellipses in original.