Our actions reveal what our speech by itself can’t.
The Fog is one in every of John Carpenter’s best accomplishments. Its story is elegant in its simplicity, its visuals sumptuously forlorn, and its rating seeps spectral sequences of tones which linger within the viewer’s thoughts lengthy after its remaining body. Not like many horror movies, The Fog (1980) is notable for counting on silence, pure sound, and music to hold its ahead movement, just like the tide sweeping forgotten gadgets out to sea.
Not solely forgotten gadgets, although, however forgotten histories as effectively. Vengeance and the corruption of reminiscence are the first motifs explored by The Fog, although it doesn’t spotlight its themes the best way a Mike Flanagan or an Ari Aster movie would possibly. However extra on that later.
The movie begins with an epigraph from Edgar Allan Poe: “Is all that we see or appear however a dream inside a dream?” This provides technique to an outdated man telling a bunch of kids tales round a campfire on a seaside. Because it approaches midnight he tells one final story: the story of the Elizabeth Dane, a ship that wrecked in a dense fog 100 years earlier than. The Elizabeth Dane mistook a campfire on the shore for a secure passage away from rocks. Her crew, the neighborhood’s fishermen promise, will rise from their watery graves when the fog returns to seek for the campfire that led them to their deaths.
It’s a story everybody locally of Antonio Bay is aware of, and but nobody is aware of. For there’s the story the neighborhood has enshrined, one in every of a tragic mistake and its transformation, however beneath and camouflaged inside that’s one other story of greed, homicide, and deception. The falsified story underwrites the lifetime of the neighborhood within the current, however how lengthy can deceit maintain such a life?
The true story involves gentle with Father Malone, who, the movie insinuates, is an alcoholic. Malone is misplaced in some kind of malaise, avoiding the issues of money circulate and upkeep of his church, however it appears as if these issues are solely symptomatic of a extra elementary downside, an alienation of which Malone himself is just maybe dimly conscious. His shadow is projected towards one of many partitions of his research, suggesting he’s a shadow of his former self.
After midnight is struck, a brick out of the blue dislodges from the wall and falls to his desk, revealing a journal. Malone discovers it belonged to his grandfather, himself a priest on the time of Antonio Bay’s founding. It has been sealed up in a hiding place inside the church’s edifice, symbolically and actually concealing a secret inside the church’s—and the neighborhood’s— starting. That it nonetheless exists in any respect reveals that there was an no less than unconscious need for these secrets and techniques to be found.
Father Malone is the movie’s ethical heart, the one who, by the invention of the key of Antonio Bay’s founding, awakens to actuality.
The church’s structure deforms itself to uncover what has been hidden. It needed to so as to rectify an authentic deformation, one hidden in plain sight. The journal discloses his grandfather’s half in a conspiracy. The church is tarnished by this founding priest’s willingness to associate in homicide and theft moderately than condemning it. The wreck of the Elizabeth Dane returns with the tide, however remodeled. For whereas the occasion has been mythologized as a minor tragedy and subsequent catalyst for the city’s founding, in actuality, Father Malone learns, it was a deliberate act.
The Elizabeth Dane was carrying a bunch of lepers, led by a benefactor named William Blake, who had organized with the city’s founders to determine a brand new colony on a close-by island. The six conspirators sought each to quarantine the neighborhood from the lepers’ uncleanness and to provide the capital it wanted for its basis. The prospect of a leper colony so close to to Antonio Bay repulsed them. However this panicked urge to banish the unclean solely revealed the uncleanness on the coronary heart of Antonio Bay’s founders. The demise signified within the lepers’ flesh was an inconvenient analogue of the residing demise that enslaves humankind, and of their haste to exterminate the bearers of leprosy the conspirators demonstrated their bondage to leprosy’s antitype.
Their readiness to rationalize murdering Blake’s group demonstrated their truest devotions and strongest drives. In any case, we act out of not what we declare is most vital to us, however out of that which most claims and grounds us. Our actions reveal what our speech by itself can’t. The truth that a priest condoned and performed a component on this crime is a horrible indictment upon him and his vocation. To assume that the development of the church can cleanse him and his fellow conspirators of guilt or sanctify their wrongdoing demonstrates their gross mischaracterization of the God they ostensibly serve.
Although different characters are launched within the first third of The Fog, Father Malone is the movie’s ethical heart, the one who, by the invention of the key of Antonio Bay’s founding, awakens to actuality. He’s gripped by a renewed sense of responsibility by the apocalyptic intervention of the reality turning into unconcealed. It’s proper to characterize it as apocalyptic, as that phrase most correctly denotes an unveiling, a revelation. It connotes much less the tip of the world and extra the tip of a world insofar as that world was constructed upon distortion and lies. Such a world unravels within the occasion of apocalypse because the one to whom the reality is revealed sees by falsehoods that had given it construction and a synthetic future.
The picturesque facade of Antonio Bay is however a dream inside a dream, one that almost all of its residents are content material to stay inside. Its founding sin rises out of the previous the evening Father Malone is given the journal, on the hour the conspirators deliberate the deaths of Blake and his males. “Midnight ’til one belongs to the lifeless,” the elder Malone writes. “Good Lord ship us.” Pay telephones start ringing all through Antonio Bay, TVs activate, automotive alarms go off, objects start to maneuver and rattle and glass shatters between midnight and one o’clock. Three fishermen on a trawler, the Sea Grass, are ingesting and killing time when the revenants of the Elizabeth Dane return in an eerie fog and kill them. The evening’s peace is disrupted by these demonstrations that one thing unnervingly Different lurks beneath the facade of that peace. However everybody goes again to sleep. Life resumes precisely as earlier than.
The reality can set us free if we’ll obtain it. The issue is that we steadily favor the narcolepsy of falsehood, the dream inside the dream. Regardless of studying the reality of the Elizabeth Dane’s wreck from Father Malone, Kathy Williams, the organizer of the centennial celebration of the city’s founding, asks him if he’ll nonetheless pronounce a benediction on the centennial. “Antonio Bay has a curse on it,” he solutions sternly. “Can we take that as a ‘no’?” her assistant asks, dismissing his censure. “Our celebration tonight is a travesty,” he continues, undaunted. “We’re honoring murderers.” “I believe you’re taking all of this a lot too critically,” Kathy says, making an attempt to ideologically sedate him. As so usually is the case, an inconvenient previous will be ignored when its mythicized double is extra helpful for the current.
Ghosts are at all times, at all times signifiers of one thing that has gone incorrect: a secret that has not been delivered to gentle, an injustice that has not been righted.
The atrocity woven into Antonio Bay’s origin mirrors the violent historical past of the US. Criticisms of one thing just like the 1619 Mission will be apt on particular historic grounds and it nonetheless be indisputably true that the historical past of this nation is soaked with the blood of human beings deemed unworthy of the ambitions it assumed for itself. It is probably not true that this nation was based for the objective of subjugating and exterminating, however it’s past dispute that this stuff occurred within the prosecution of its self-appointed fable of manifest future.
Although falsehood can provide rise to concrete conditions which can be actual, the Actual at all times pushes again towards its counterfeits and towards the veneer with which we cowl over the cracks in such myths. The journal belonging to Father Malone’s grandfather illustrates how that which is repressed at all times returns. The reality that may rupture the unreal serenity we take pleasure in doesn’t keep buried. Manufactured tranquility is at all times extra precarious than it seems to be, relying because it does upon its denizens staying ideologically asleep.
However once more, The Fog doesn’t cut back the wreck of the Elizabeth Dane to a cipher for the US’ wars towards and relocation of Native People. Does it illuminate that historical past by its narrative mirror? It actually can, if we’ll see it, however it’s to the movie’s credit score that it doesn’t achieve this by hamfisted allegory. In pursuing one factor it invitations hermeneutical reflection upon many different issues during which we acknowledge similarity. This order and focus is significant. The artlessness of a lot up to date “elevated horror” lies exactly in trivializing each the objects of horror inside the story and the real-world analogues to which that horror can apply.
In such cinema the horrifying factor on-screen fades in significance as what the story is “actually” about involves the forefront—and what it’s “actually” about, it appears, is trauma and grief. This crowds out the horrifying stuff you have been fooled into pondering have been vital. It’s an underhanded bait-and-switch technique that communicates 1) that what you have been excited to see is definitely trivial and a couple of) that what you actually must be concentrating on is your ache as a result of anything is only a distraction from that. Furthermore, it communicates that ignoring these horrifying issues to focus in your ache is transformative in a great way, moderately than a method to additional curving in on your self.
The Fog does nothing of this type. The movie presents its premise, then depicts its characters confronting the antagonists, and in so doing confronting the historic incorrect by which they grew to become sympathetic antagonists. All of those parts are interwoven: there isn’t a prioritization given to that nebulously outlined phenomenon—trauma—over the conflicts the movie has assured us are important.
Modern critics could complain that The Fog doesn’t develop its theme of repressed historical past and revenge in a extra explicitly political vein, however it appears to me that that is the error of failing to differentiate the truth that all artwork has a political valence from the insistence that every one artwork be explicitly political in its type and its targets. The Fog is content material to smother the viewer in an environment of dread, trusting we’ll acknowledge in it a surplus that speaks to the actual world during which we’re located.
[Hauntology] riffs on the similarity between “ontology” and “haunting” to show how absence will be as highly effective as easy presence.
The movie acknowledges that historical past isn’t merely what occurred previously. Historical past is the continued reception of what occurred as mediated by discourse: it’s how we interpret the previous and dwell inside that interpretation. Acknowledging this isn’t to commit the sins of “elevated horror”; it’s merely an acknowledgment that ghosts are at all times, at all times signifiers of one thing that has gone incorrect: a secret that has not been delivered to gentle, an injustice that has not been righted. The ghost is a witness to an imperfect previous, and the worry they convey is owed not solely to their being-dead-and-yet-not, however to the re-emergence of the previous we need to go away forgotten.
The Fog is an train in what Jacques Derrida styled “hauntology.” The phrase riffs on the similarity between “ontology” and “haunting” to show how absence will be as highly effective as easy presence. The determine of the ghost is Derrida’s working example, because the ghost is lifeless and but, in its exercise, is clearly one thing extra than lifeless. The one the ghost represents is gone, in some sense, and but they’re right here, the place they shouldn’t be.
Or ought to they? As a result of the ghost is a testomony to an unrectified and even suppressed previous, it might be that the current is what shouldn’t be. Hauntology usually trades in “misplaced futures,” these visions of what’s now our current that by no means got here to be and but hang-out us in our disappointment. Although they by no means have been, we sense and are burdened by their loss.
Hauntology can be at dwelling, nevertheless, with the previous that by no means actually was and the previous that won’t die. Each are depicted in The Fog: the parable of Antonio Bay’s noble founding is commemorated despite having by no means taken place, and the murdered and defrauded victims who contest that fable. In even essentially the most prosaic account of historical past, that which is absent exerts itself and influences us, the residing, however hauntology conceptualizes the tensions between the residing and the not-quite-living which we routinely overlook and but understand, nevertheless faintly.
The titular fog itself is such a hauntological marker. Fog, it’s recommended within the movie, is uncommon in Antonio Bay: “as out of the blue because it had come,” the outdated man from the start says, “the fog lifted, and by no means got here once more.” Its uncanny emergence heralds the return of the supposedly lifeless previous that refuses to be forgotten, that now calls for its reckoning. That fog that appeared the evening of the Elizabeth Dane’s wreck “appeared” to help and abet the conspirators, Father Malone’s grandfather observes in his journal. And but the fog now accompanies Blake’s mission of vengeance.
The fog is the surplus that spills out of the wound of the previous, and it’s an extra that characterizes the revenants’ need as effectively. The fog will not be involved with justice; it seeks solely to destroy and attaches itself adventitiously to others’ murderous intent, whether or not that be Antonio Bay’s founders or their victims. Neither are Blake and his males involved with justice, correctly talking: an imbalance is confronted of their coming, sure, however they don’t search explicit targets who will correspond to every of the unique conspirators. Their victims are merely on the incorrect place on the incorrect time.
The journal can be a hauntological artifact; by it the previous imposes itself upon its mythologized counterfeit. Nevertheless, it’s one which interprets the unusual occasions that start happening. Moreover, it impels Father Malone in the direction of repentance and sacrifice. It’s a literal relic of Antonio Bay’s foundational sin that unexpectedly launches the very chance of taking possession of that sin. Father Malone finds his vocation renewed by its intervention such that on the movie’s climax he gives himself to Blake in order that the others who’ve fled to the church from the fog could dwell.
Answering the calls for of those that have been denied justice previously will usually require a kind of demise so as to atone for that incorrect. However it’s one that’s willingly accepted to rectify that incorrect. As a rule it’s symbolic moderately than literal: a humbling, a returning of what was wrongfully taken, regardless of the case could also be. However whichever it’s, symbolic or literal, to behave on this manner is to observe the sample of Jesus’s life. Father Malone accepts this and reverses the course initiated by his grandfather. The place one priest failed in his responsibility to signify his folks to God and God to his folks, this one embodies the best way of Jesus Christ who, because the Final Adam, the true Israelite, and the right priest, absorbs and undoes the injury wrought by his predecessors.
As easy and as well-executed as The Fog is, nevertheless, it’s not with out some odd moments which have baffled viewers, components that don’t neatly match this narrative logic. Why does a plank from the Elizabeth Dane wash ashore, and why does the ship’s title remodel into the phrase, “Six should die”? Why does Blake’s voice play by the radio when the plank is positioned upon it? Why does the physique of the fisherman recovered from the Seagrass briefly reanimate and threateningly method Jamie Lee Curtis’s character? And why does it inscribe the quantity three on the ground? One may reply, “As a result of it gives a clue the characters want for the sake of the plot,” and they’d not be incorrect. However why does it virtually make sense right here?
The ultimate horror of The Fog is the residing demise that wishes to devour all of us, that tells us that our need for revenge is justified.
It appears to me that hauntology provides a solution, one that may be true even when Carpenter didn’t consciously intend it. The relics and artifacts of the previous converse and they’re going to say what they most have to say no matter our readiness for or curiosity in it. The plank is handled as an fascinating discover and absentmindedly positioned on the radio when Blake appears to reap the benefits of the amplification and transmission out there there. No matter else he could also be now, Blake was a person and his betrayal harm him deeply and bewildered him and he should converse. “One thing like an albatross across the neck,” he intones over the radio. “No. Extra like a millstone… Rattling all of them!”
Equally, the person recovered from the Seagrass longs to be recognized. He’s a human being: how may he not? He was taken by pure happenstance, made to pay for different males’s sins. He’s a sufferer the identical as Blake and his males, silenced with no witness to the incorrect of his demise. His scrawling of the quantity three appears much less ominous to me and extra of a warning, as if to say, “The issues that did this to me search three extra. Be watchful.” However in fact it’s tough to see by to such a that means when the creator is a corpse that has one way or the other collapsed behind you.
Alongside these traces of each inconsistency and of being recognized, there’s the movie’s ending. The journal reveals there’s a giant cross made out of the gold stolen from Blake and his males—one other indicator each of that priest’s woebegotten values and of his consciousness of his want for atonement. Father Malone takes it on to Blake as he gives himself on behalf of the others. In an arresting picture, Blake’s undead palms grip the now glowing cross as Father Malone stands frozen in each terror and resolve. After which the revenants and the cross are gone.
Later, after the others have returned to their houses, Father Malone wonders aloud why that encounter ended because it did. “Why not six, Blake?” he asks. “Why not me?” And in that second the fog creeps into his church as soon as extra, and Blake returns to dispatch him. Once more, it’s easy sufficient and completely true that the revenants return for him on the very finish in order to supply one remaining scare. However what can be true is that this second demonstrates the malignant absurdity of the need for revenge.
Plainly the revenants thought of the return of their gold an vital part of their mission. However they don’t seem to be happy with its restoration. The passage of time between their disappearance and reappearance within the church is suggestive of a time of deliberation, and their return to the church reveals that revenge compels them. They are going to accept nothing lower than demise visited upon others—precisely six, no much less. And sadly, they’re extra like their very own murderers than they possible care to acknowledge, as they go to that demise upon folks with no substantive connection to the incorrect perpetrated upon them.
It’s on this insatiable need that the viewer sees that no matter they have been in life, and nevertheless they have been wronged by unscrupulous males in that life, they’ve turn into one thing ghastly and different. They aren’t the lads they as soon as have been: they’re shadows and wraiths, twisted upon themselves, unable to dwell with something lower than scales completely balanced by homicide. These shadows reply one other, earlier on. Father Malone grew to become most absolutely himself in his readiness to put down his life, whereas Blake and his males grew to become inhuman wraiths on account of their ravenous starvation for revenge. That revenge now defines them greater than another issue from their former lives.
The ultimate horror of The Fog is the residing demise that wishes to devour all of us, that tells us that our need for revenge is justified, that it calls for satisfaction, that we can’t be aside from it. Historical past will proceed churning and grinding away at human life, however will that be what’s most formative for us? Many people will likely be wronged on this vale of tears, however will we consider that vengeance is the one factor that may full us? Whether it is, and if we’ll consider that, then although we’re biologically alive we’re already within the grip of demise. Real, substantive life lies in self-emptying, within the renunciation of status and of false histories. Taking over our cross can wake us out of the dream inside a dream that’s no life in any respect.
