Ghosts and the Machines 29

Ghosts and the Machines 29 Ghosts and the Machines: Spectres of the Technological Revolution Katarzyna Ancuta ABSTRACT In popular imagination, ghosts, or the spirits of the departed have always existed as traces of the past. But today, like anything else in this world, if they want to survive they need to adjust to the present, if not future. Nowhere is this more visible than in contemporary Asian horror cinema, perhaps to a certain extent also because unlike in the rationally repressive west, many Asian cultures do not rush to deny spiritualism, but rather negotiate the ways in which spiritual experiences can apply to media and technology-infused global societies. This article draws on the need to exame the ways new media and visual technologies affect the representation of ghosts in contemporary Asian horror film, in effect producing a new variety of spirits.These new spirits materialise within photographic and video images, transmit themselves through television frequency waves, become embedded in an electronic code, scramble the signal of video surveillance cameras, clone themselves using cellular technologies, replicate through text messages and emails, hack computer systems and infect the cyberspace better than any computer viruses known to man. No longer wrapped in proverbial bedsheets and clinking chains, these new ghosts call for a redefinition of certain concepts that Gothic and Horror have learnt to take for granted. *** One of the legacies of Euro-centric rationalism and utilitarian belief in the unquestionable supremacy of science and reason has been the representation of progress as a technological triumph over spiritualism and superstition. Based on these grounds, the man-made dichotomies of tradition and modernity, nature and culture, wilderness and civilisation etc., shaped the Western way of life for years to come. The stubbornness with which Asian societies refused to moderate reality according to the said binaries and persisted to uphold their “irrational” attitudes to life resulted in adding one more opposition to the existing paradigm: East and West. Within this framework, Eastern aesthetics and philosophies, Asian devotion to tradition and appreciation of nature were, thus, for many years presented as nothing but apparent manifestations of backwardness. Today, as the encroaching rationalisation of the universe has pushed the supernatural to the margins of acceptability in Europe and America, it may be refreshing to notice that the Asian continent still remains filled with pockets 30 Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society of resistance to that kind of reasoning. But if the existence of the supernatural is rarely questioned in contemporary Asia, where tradition and superstition go hand in hand with advanced technology and extreme consumerism, it is because Asian societies do not seem to feel the need to question or marginalise the supernatural, other than the compliance with this, not inherently Asian, demand for rationalisation, which, bearing in mind Asia’s colonial history, did not always work to its benefit in the past. The increasing interest of the international film markets in Asian horror film productions in the last decade has made it possible (and popular) to speak of the global horror community. But the acknowledgment of the local Asian film industries does not merely pose a potential challenge to Hollywood’s hegemony in the world of cinematic horror. Perhaps the most important result of this kind of globalisation of horror is the fact that it forces us to reconsider all the central concepts of the genre we have got used to taking for granted. One such concept that seems to urgently require our attention is the idea of a ghost. While it is hard to imagine the existence of Gothic or Horror without ghosts in general, most critics agree that contemporary horror film does not necessarily need to follow a supernatural plot. However, when we look at East Asian and South East Asian horror films (exemplified in this research by Japanese, South Korean, HK, Thai, Singaporean, Taiwanese and Chinese productions), it is difficult not to notice that a great majority of all the films constituting the horror genre in Asia are ghost stories. In fact, it may be worth mentioning that some Asian languages, like Thai for instance, have no separate word to describe the horror genre. Horror movies in Thai are simply called “ghost movies,” nung pee, which makes it rather difficult to classify as horror any film that does not feature a strongly supernatural plot. This is not to say, however, that Asian ghost movies resemble cinematic ghost stories standardised by Hollywood models. In fact, this is exactly why they both succeed and fail with general international audiences expecting to find readily recognisable American-made patterns Asian ghosts seem to be so reluctant to adjust to. If traditionally ghosts can be described as the spirits of the deceased, in Asian movies they are almost always completely anthropomorphized, as a consequence of Asian popular beliefs and ancestor worship rites linking the dead with their human form (frequently through pictures and photographs). The human-like representation of the dead in their afterlife is a common and cross-cultural pattern, as observed by Peter Berta in “Afterlife in Cross- Cultural Perspective,” who argues that “individuals essentially perceive death Ghosts and the Machines 31 and afterlife on the pattern of their life in this world, by the projection of their anthropomorphic categories and relations” (1), and believes that the said practice is a necessary result of death being treated as an empirical taboo in many cultures. Berta remarks that the concept of anthropomorphizing the afterlife can be found in practically all religious teachings (2), as exemplified by the practice of placing favourite belongings of the dead person with the body to be used in the other world (2). At the same time, however, the survivors “rationalize” their construction of death and the afterlife through a juxtaposition of realistic and symbolic imagery used to depict the difference between the living and the dead and their respective “living” habits. For instance, if the dead are supposed to consume food similarly to humans, they are frequently expected to feed on the steam or the smoke of the offerings rather than enjoy the actual meal. According to Berta, such a dualistic construction of the death concept (through anthropomorphizing and rationalization) “(partially) alleviates the empirical taboo of death, and makes it meaningful” (1). The need to construct the image of the afterlife as the mirror image of this world can obviously be seen as a way of dealing with grief after the passing away of one’s loved ones, but also as a method to ease one’s general fear of death. One “practical” answer to that need was the appearance of spectral photography in the 19th century. In his article on spirit photography, Louis Kaplan speaks of “the survivors’ need to ‘people the world’ with […] ghostly phenomena and maintain a connection with ancestors after their departure from earth” (2), which he sees as responsible for the fact that the relatives frequently vouched for the authenticity of the images even after the photographs had already been exposed as fakes. Similarly, in his paper on death and photography in 19th century America, Dan Meinwald situates 19th century spirit photography in the context of spiritualism, described by him as a belief that formulated a philosophic or even a religious foundation for the denial of death by seeking a scientific, empirically verifiable proof for the existence of spiritual afterlife (“The Afterlife” online). Discussing three famous cases of 19th century spirit photographers that all led to scandalous trials ending with an exposure of fraud, William Mumler in America, Frederick Hudson in England and Édouard Buguet in France, Dan Meinwald points to the visible differences in the photographic representation of the materialised spirits, which seem to be consistent with the expectations of a given society. And so while American spirits tended to be recognisably human, if a bit faded and transparent, English ghosts were usually shrouded in folds of ectoplasmic vapours and less substantial, 32 Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society while the French ones seemed an odd mixture of the two. In all the cases, the spiritual figures were undeniably anthropomorphic in their shape, making it all the easier for the bereaved to recognise their late relatives in the vague impression on the photograph (“The Afterlife” online). Interestingly enough, Western celluloid ghosts tend to follow a similar pattern when it comes to their visual representation, strengthened by the descriptions derived from the works of the 19th century ghost story masters. While retaining a hint of a human-like posture about them, they are most likely to be represented as lacking substance, semi-transparent, dark or luminescent entities always ready to disintegrate into thousands of minuscule particles and be blown around by the wind. Created solely for the purpose of titillating their rational audiences, these kinds of ghosts seem to be expiating their very existence, remaining vague and immaterial enough to be taken for an illusion, should the need arise. If we attempt to read a ghost figure in semiotic terms then, using classic Peircean terminology, we could classify these kinds of ghosts as indicators or indices. According to Peirce, indices are signs that “show something about things on account of their being physically connected with them” (“What is a sign” §3 online). In practice, this can explain why Victorian and, consequently, Hollywood ghosts are frequently indicated rather than represented by a gust of wind, a sudden drop in temperature, a mist or a manifestation of ectoplasm. Contrary to that, on a par with beasts and monsters, Asian spirits seem to have retained their iconicity. Peirce maintains that icons, or likenesses “convey ideas of the things they represent simply by imitating them” (“What is a sign” §3 online), regardless of whether the imitated objects actually exist or not.

Load more