Halloween: The Worst Holiday of the Year

Halloween was last week and while that probably made candy hungry children happy, the fact is that Halloween is actually the lamest holiday of the year.

 

The biggest reason that Halloween ranks near the bottom of my holiday list (in a distant last place after April fool’s day) is because of the dressing up. Now, many of my Facebook friends have recently posted status updates criticizing people’s tendency to use Halloween to look like sluts. Specifically, these friends have pointed out how many women use the holiday to look like sexy nurses, sexy witches, sexy maids, or other variations of sexiness. To this I would also add guys who choose virtually nothing on Halloween (albeit not always in a “sexy” way).

I concede that sexy/scanty costumes can unfortunately objectify the wearer, but I would also say that I’m not terribly bothered by them. If you want to look like a slut and objectify yourself, that’s your choice. What I do think is silly is the need for a holiday to do so. Why not just dress like that all the time? Or why not do so in conjunction with other holidays wear dressing up isn’t an end in itself. (What better to celebrate the fourth of July than with sexy nurses and guys in loincloths?)

 

Slightly more seriously, the persistence of dressing up seems to suggest that many people have latent or repressed desires that they express on Halloween. The prominence of sexual costumes indicates that many of those repressed desires are sexual, though other Halloween staples like zombies or robots equally represent social insecurities simmering beneath the surface of people’s psyche. It’s possible to look at Halloween in this context through the lens of Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of subversion and containment; people subvert social norms through their Halloween behavior, but such momentary subversion allows them to continue participating in those norms the rest of the time (a rough, inadequate summary of the theory, I admit). Still, it seems like it might be better to try to reconcile desire with belief. For example, instead of condemning sex or allowing technology to pervade our lives (while simultaneously expression trepidation about those issues through costume), we could figure out a lifestyle that would balance our values with our desires.

 

There are other reasons that Halloween doesn’t make sense as well. Take for instance, its complete detachment from its harvest origins. Since few people participate in harvests, or have any connection to agriculture, it makes little sense to celebrate a harvest holiday. In light of the kinds of costumes that people tend to wear, we could at least move it to a warmer month. (August is hot and doesn’t have an abundance of holidays.) In reality, however, the point is that the meaninglessness of Halloween actually detracts from the pleasure it brings. In Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle he includes a chapter called “Spectacular Time” in which he introduces a concept called pseudo-cyclical time. Basically he makes the point that society has moved to an industrialize, arbitrary, and falsely seasonal concept of time. Though he doesn’t get into Halloween, the celebration of such a holiday clearly contributes to the thesis that society may merely be a parody, and consequently less fulfilling, than it once was.

 

The reasons that Halloween is both outdated and inadequate could go on and on.  Hopefully, however, the notion of “holidays” like Halloween—where we get to take a break from our labor, standard behavior, and the values predicated on these things—will eventually become unnecessary.  

Green Technology/Green Living

It should go without saying that our world is something we need to take (better) care of and I’ve been excited lately to see a gradual shift toward greener living in mainstream America.  But lately I’ve begun to believe that many of the “green” advances we’ve made are little more than superficial shifts that allow us to become complacent while environmental problems continue to worsen.  In other words, just because we can say that our society is a little bit “greener” today, we’re not really addressing the source of our problems. 

 

Probably the most salient example of America making superficial changes while ignoring the real problems is hybrid cars.  Like many people, I think hybrids are great and if at some point I have to buy a new car it’ll be a hybrid (though hopefully something even better will come along soon).  Still, hybrids are cars.  They produce destructive, if fewer, emissions.  In reality, even if we all drove 100 percent electric cars there would still be emissions from the manufacturing processes and from the power plants that charge the cars.  So, in the end, the problem is absolutely not that our cars are producing emissions; it’s that we’re driving cars in the first place.

 

Of course manufacturing anything produces waste, but imagine if everyone spent their time and money buying bicycles or good walking shoes instead of cars.  The amount of waste that we produce would go down dramatically (not to mention the fact that everyone would be a lot healthier).  Unfortunately, however, few Americans live close enough to anything to make walking or biking practical modes of transportation.  This means that the real environmental problem isn’t that we’re driving clunkers or SUVs (though we should get those vehicles off the roads too), but that we’ve spread ourselves out in such a way that we’re required to pollute to get anywhere.  In essence, the issue is the layout of our cities and the composition of our neighborhoods, not the miles per gallon we get in our cars.  What’s more, if it’s our cities that are forcing us to drive so much, it’s our underlying cultural and ideological assumptions that allow our cities to exist the way they do.  So change has to begin with a radical reassessment of these underlying assumptions.   

 

The problem with hybrids is that they’ve become an excuse to ignore this radical change.  They allow us to sidestep questions about the ethics of commuting, suburban and sub-suburban city planning, and a whole score of other issues that sit much closer to the source of our environmental problems.  When we drive a hybrid we’re doing our part and we feel like we’ve answered those questions.  The problem is that in reality, we haven’t even begun to ask them. 

 

Hybrid cars are simply one example of green technology distracting us from actually living green lives.  There are many others.  Finally, however, if we actually want to make a difference we need to reevaluate not only the type of engine we want in our car, but also the underpinnings of our society.  We need to take a holistic approach to improving our lifestyles.  We need a paradigm shift.

Robots: Subverted/Contained

It shouldn’t be a surprise that robots are everywhere.  At least in the movies.  Obviously, robots serve different roles in different movies; sometimes they’re good (like Data in Star Trek or David in AI) but more often they’re evil (like Colossus in Colossus: The Forbin Project, or HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey).  In any case, what seems like a recent surge in robot movies got me wondering even more than ever why we keep coming back to this idea.  (When I say surge I mean movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator Salvation, and the recent book that I’m looking forward to reading How to Survive a Robot Uprising.)

 

One of the most obvious reasons that robots appear in movies is to serve as a cautionary tale: humans shouldn’t play god and manufacture beings.  If they do, disaster will ensue.  That’s the basic message behind the robots in Colossus and 2001, as well as countless other sci-fi movies going back to Metropolis.  Indeed, if you watch enough sci-fi you might start to get the impression that the relationship between humanity and God is the genre’s single biggest theme. 

 

While I think that reading of robot movies is interesting, it doesn’t quite explain why we keep coming back to that theme.  Indeed even though there have been great advances in robot technology, we’re still not very close to having Rosie the Robot cleaning our homes, or having intelligent machines interacting with us as sentient individuals.  Given these circumstances, it seems like intelligent machines wouldn’t come up as often as they do.

 

To understand why robots appear in so many movies I think it’s useful to look at Stephen Greenblatt’s ideas about subversion and containment.  This theory has been applied in a number of ways but for this blog it might be awkwardly boiled down thusly: some people will want to fight the powers that be (subversion), so society will create ways for them to vent that energy and feel like they’re fighting without actually causing any damage or change (containment).  

 

In this light we can look at robots in a few different ways.  First, they represent manufactured intelligence and its accompanying danger.  Second, however, they also represent the mechanized individual.  Even if they’re robots, they often look like people and the treatment of artificial intelligence in many movies seems to reveal an underlying fear that people are becoming a little too much like machines.  This too, is a really old theme and is expressed in films like The Matrix as well as straightforward robot movies.  Third, robots represent the apex of technological development and humanity’s dependence on it.    

 

If we look at robot movies in this context, we might see them as helping us feel comfortable about technology and exorcising our animosity toward it.  Yes we are all dependent on it.  Yes we all kind of act like machines.  Yes robots could someday replace people.  However, instead of  going out and smashing up machines or simply trying to do without them, our collective anxiety is contained by the movies.  In other words, robots often represent human inadequacy and the movies they inhabit help us feel a little less bad about ourselves.  The movies give us strategies to deal with robots that never really change anything but our emotions.

 

There are a number of interesting implications to this idea.  For example, the pattern of subverting and containing technophobia (or at least “robophobia”) actually leaves the door wide open for future advancement (a good thing in my opinion).  It also allows us to reconcile with all the technology we use on a daily basis.  (So I can use my microwave or laptop without worrying about the fact that I couldn’t do much without them.)  However, this pattern also presents possibilities toward which we might feel greater ambivalence.  For example, because there are no real robots lording over us, we have to ask what social or ideological element the robots represent.  Might it be government?  Business?  Or maybe something larger and more abstract, like capitalism or religion or simply "culture"?  I don’t know (of course), but it does seem likely to me that the anxiety our culture apparently feels about robots isn’t simply fear about some distant future in which robots will rule the earth.  Instead, it seems likely that robots are symbols of something else, and that the cycle of subversion and containment (as experienced through robot movies) has broader, socio-political ramifications.