Letting Go

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I should’ve known from the title that this would be a sad story.  Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go won the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite being speculative.  It’s only mildly so, but enough that it is sometimes classed as science fiction.  It’s appropriate that a twentieth anniversary edition was released because it is an extended consideration of the price of technology as well as dehumanization.  I’ll need to put in some spoilers, so here’s the usual caveat.  I read this novel because it’s often cited as an example of dark academia and it certainly fits that aesthetic.  It starts out at a private school called Hailsham, in England.  The students are given some privileges but their lives aren’t exactly posh.  Most of their possessions are purchased on days when a truck sells them things they can buy with money they earn by creating art.  They aren’t allowed to leave the school.  Spoilers follow.

The special circumstances of the children are because they’re clones being grown for replacement organs.  The public doesn’t want to know about them or interact with them.  In fact, most people believe they don’t have souls, or aren’t really human.  They’ve been created to be used and exploited until they die, always prematurely.  While this may sound grim, the story is thoughtfully told through the eyes of one of these children, Kathy.  She becomes best friends with Ruth and Tommy, who later become a couple.  Ruth is a difficult personality, but likable.  As they grow they’re slowly given the facts about what their life will be.  They’re raised to comply, never to rebel or question their role.  Most simply accept it.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, in a submissive way, try to get a deferral regarding their “donations.”

I suppose it’s presumptuous to say of a Nobel Prize winner that it’s well written, but I’ll say it anyway.  Ishiguro manages to capture the exploratory friendships of youth and reveals what you need to know in slow doses, all told with a compelling, if sad and accepting voice.  Although the genre could be sci-fi, it’s set in the present, or, more accurately, about twenty years ago.  The technology, apart from the cloning, is about what it was at the turn of the century, or maybe a decade or two before that.  With what we see happening in the world right now, people should be reading books like this that help them understand that people are people, not things to be exploited.  And that Nobel Prizes should be reserved for those that are actually deserving for their contributions to humanity. 

Publish, Perish

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Publish or perish has been around for quite a while and I feel for younger scholars who are trying to publish their collected essays as their second book.  Collected essays, in case you’re not familiar with dark academia, are generally what senior scholars do before they retire and they can’t be bothered to rewrite everything into a proper book.  Or maybe the topics are disparate and don’t easily fit together in one category.  When I was teaching the general rule was an article a year and a second book for tenure.  I was able to do this without a sabbatical, and with a heavy teaching load and administrative duties at Nashotah House.  It’s a lot of work.  My biggest challenge was coming up with ideas for new books.  Eventually I published my collected essays on Asherah in the second edition of my dissertation.

I’d written a 50-page article on Shapshu, the Ugaritic sun deity, that was intended to be my second book.  Then J. C. L. Gibson retired and I had to have something for his Festschrift.  There it went.   It was about that time that I started Weathering the Psalms.  That was my “tenure book.”  There was over a decade between that and Holy Horror, for a number of reasons.  The main one was that I was trying to cobble together a career between Gorgias Press and moonlighting as an adjunct at Rutgers University.  There was no time for research and publication.  Ironically, that only came after I gave up academia to enter the commercial world of publishing.  I see younger scholars now expected to produce that second book, and some of them go for the collected essays approach.  I understand.

Back when I was applying for first jobs—and the scene was already very tight, I assure you, despite promises just a few years earlier—I applied for everything.  One search committee chair wrote a scolding letter saying I wasn’t senior enough to apply.  By the end of his dressing down, he concluded with something along the lines of “unless you’re applying because there are so few positions, in which case it’s understandable.”  He was right.  So few jobs and so much student debt!  I landed at Nashotah and began cranking out the articles.  In a moment of weakness I offered to write some further academic treatments after my horror movie books appeared.  They don’t do anything for my career, of course.  And they take away time from popular writing practice.  Who knows?  Maybe some day I’ll gather them into a book.  Then again, maybe I’ll find myself growing younger too.

And Bones

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Often making lists of dark academia movies, The Skulls plays right into that territory.  A secret society, an elite college, and something’s definitely gone wrong.  It’s not a great movie, feeling somewhat contrived, but it fits the mold pretty well.  Things are a little too pat in the film, and the writing isn’t the best.  It’s entertaining, if overblown.  The story begins at an unnamed Yale (actually University of Toronto) with working-class Luke being invited to join the Skulls after an impressive rowing competition victory.  From the first, the Skulls meetings seem to lack gravitas.  Rich and powerful, they are above and beyond the law.  The problem for Luke is that his friends, Will and Chloe, are being edged out of his life.  Will, who writes for the school paper, breaks into the Skulls headquarters but is caught by Caleb, Luke’s “soul mate.”

Will is killed in what follows, and Luke wants to get out but it’s too late. Caleb’s father is the head-honcho for the Skulls and decides to have Luke committed to an asylum when he refuses to cooperate over his friend’s death.  Chloe and the second-in-command of the Skulls, Senator Levritt, rescue Luke and he challenges Caleb to a duel.  I’ll leave it off there so as not to spoil too much.  That gives you a sense of the darkness, in any case.  But the film doesn’t feel that dark.  Yes there is a murder, and there are bad guys, but something I can’t define prevents it from having the tone that you might expect from a grim tale.  As I say, things are a little too pat.  The characters’ emotions are a little too close to the surface.

The movie did well at the box office, but the sequels were released direct to video.  As far as the academia side goes, there are, no doubt, secret societies.  Privilege doesn’t let go once it gets a grip.  But the above-ground “Yale” sees a bit too light and airy.  Maybe more classroom and library scenes might’ve helped.  Likely it would’ve been better had it been based on a novel.  Films that are based on books have a solid development on which to stand and it’s often a matter of figuring out what to omit.  The writer and director had gone to Yale and Harvard, respectively, and wanted to portray what secret society life is like.  But that’s the thing about secret societies—you can’t really know, can you?  It’s a matter of imagination.  And dark academia is where such things fit.

Death in Cambridge

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In an effort not to give too much away, I’ll try to give only the bare bones and some impressions.  The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides, is considered a dark academia novel.  It revolves around a series of murders in Cambridge and the informal investigations by a psychologist (Mariana), whose niece attends St. Christopher’s College.  There is, not surprisingly, a lot of psychological tension.  It’s also a good illustration of the human condition—our psychology can often be disrupted by those closest to us.  We’re a complex lot.  The whole story is also set against the backdrop of classic Greek tragedies.  Mariana is half Greek herself, living in England.  She’s also a widow and, although not a minor, a woman without parents or siblings.  As a psychologist, she tries to help others sort out their lives.

Perhaps some of us are born prone to trauma through some combination of naiveté, innocence, and neurodivergence.  It’s well known that what simply rolls off one person will traumatize another.  People sometimes comment that it’s surprising that I watch horror, but the fact is that it’s generally removed from my personal traumas.  Looking back over some sixty years, I see quite a lot of trauma and I empathize with Michaelides’ characters who experienced such deficits, some of them without even knowing it.  This really stood out to me while reading the novel.  With the exception of some of the maidens, just about everybody is hurting.  Who are these eponymous maidens?  A group of students who have coalesced around an American professor of ancient literature.  And they’re also the ones who tend to get bumped off.

This is a book that moves along.  Part of the reason is that it has short chapters, something I’ve come to appreciate over my life as things get busier and busier.  Long chapters can be a challenge.  A novel I read recently had no chapters at all (but at least there were scattered extra-spaces between collections of paragraphs).  But what really keeps the pages turning is the story.  Michaelides is very good at misdirection, which is why I didn’t describe the plot in any detail.  You have to read it to see how things unfold and I don’t want to spoil that for anyone.  A literary murder-mystery, it has no speculative elements, apart from a few coincidences.  It does, for at least some readers, have quite an impact.  For me, it influenced my thought process for the rest of the day after I finished it.  At that, with all the books I read, is pretty rare.

Dark Lovecraft

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There is no shortage of Lovecraftian horror movies out there.  I watched The Unnamable because I found it on a list of dark academia movies.  And also, well, it’s horror.  I’ve most likely read Lovecraft’s original story at some point in time, but I didn’t remember it at all.  The dark academia part comes in because it involves college students and a haunted house.  A low-budget offering, this is hardly great cinema.  It’s not sloppy enough to qualify as a bad movie.  That puts it somewhere around “meh.”  The film opens with Joshua Winthrop being killed by the monstrous daughter that he keeps locked in a closet of his house.  Then, in the present day (the movie is from 1988) three college guys talk about it and the skeptic decides to spend the night in the house to disprove the monster tale.  He is, of course, killed.  Although his two companions don’t go looking for him, others end up in the house.

A couple of upperclassmen looking to score with freshmen coeds, talk two women into going to the house with them.  As they start to enact their plan, the monster kills them one-by-one, leaving the virginal final girl alive.  Meanwhile, the other two students whose friend was killed, also come to the house.  They manage to rescue the final girl and escape the creature by invoking the Necronomicon’s spells.  The music cues are often comical, suggesting that this isn’t to be taken seriously.  They also spoil the dark academia atmosphere.  For me, a horror film works best if it’s either clearly horror or clearly comedy horror.

It did, however, raise a question in my mind.  Dark academia and horror do have some crossover.  H. P. Lovecraft often had professorial types as his protagonists.  Was he writing a form of dark academia?  It’s difficult to say.  Lovecraft’s work was known as “weird fiction” in his time, and it has become its own kind of genre.  (Just try to publish in the rebooted Weird Fiction without your Lovecraft cap on and see how you fare.)  I’ve been pondering genres for quite some time, and since I watch movies because they’re free or cheap, often, I see some unconventional fare.  There’s no question that The Unnamable is horror.  When the movie ended I was sad for the monster.  She’d been living according to her nature, and really didn’t deserve the treatment she received from a bunch of trespassers.  Not a great movie, it nevertheless made me think.

No Ordinary Picnic

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I will be including spoilers in this review, so please be advised!  Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel that began as speculative but then turned naturalistic.  Mostly, anyway.  Born in 1896, Lindsay published the novel just after she turned 70.  Since she was Australian, it stands to reason that the story is set there.  Hanging Rock is an actual place and, according to multiple sources, Lindsay ended the book with a speculative chapter that explained the mystery.  What is the mystery?  On Valentines Day 1900, the girls at Appleyard College set out for a picnic at, well, Hanging Rock.  While there, three of the girls and one of their chaperones disappear.  Since everyone travels by literal horse power, getting back and forth from the scene of the mystery takes hours.  The head mistress of the college is frantic, mostly because she’ll be losing tuition because of this.

Eventually one of the girls is found, somewhat mystically, by a young Englishman with whom a romance starts and seems to end abruptly.  The found girl remembers nothing of what happened that day.  Further investigations are held, but the mystery is never solved.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Appleyard, the mistress of the college, takes a strong dislike to one of the girls who was devoted to one of the missing.  After one of the girls’ governesses, recently dismissed, burns to death, the headmistress appears to have murdered the girl she disliked (or she fell/jumped from a window; the novel isn’t explicit on the point).  Mrs. Appleyard, realizing she is ruined, goes to Hanging Rock where she dies by suicide, throwing herself down the rocky side of the outcropping.  The speculative ending—no longer part of the novel—had the missing girls disappear into a kind of time warp.  Lindsay’s editor had her remove that chapter.

The novel became quite well known in Australia, and to the wider world when a movie was made from it.  The interesting thing is that the novel presents itself as describing factual events, like the Blair Witch Project.  This is so much the case that the rumor grew that the events really did happen.  A book was even written, suggesting a solution regarding what happened to the missing girls.  Had the excised chapter been published with the book, it would’ve been clear that this was a fictional tale.  Lindsay had a savvy editor, however.  Nothing sells like a dramatic story that readers believe to be true.  Witness The Amityville Horror.  Even though naturalistic, a bit of the speculative still hangs about the story, making for a good gothic novel without a firm resolution.

Hop In

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Especially the first part, of Mona Awad’s Bunny, is so well written I almost laid down my pen for good.  I really enjoyed this one.  Once the story gets deeper, into the second and third parts, questions begin to arise as to what’s going on.  One reason for this is the story becomes speculative in nature and Awad’s not about to give away what’s “really happening.”  Set among a set of five graduate students at the prestigious Warren University (the name is a hat-tip), the novel is often considered dark academia.  It starts out pretty light, and although Awad maintains her deft hand, it grows progressively darker as the tale goes on.  Samantha Heather Mackey is enrolled in the writing program with a cohort of four “perfect” women—the kind many guys go for.  Sam’s an outsider, though, writing dark and troubled stories while her classmates garner the professor’s praise.

The “perfect” women call each other “Bunny” and they eventually invite Sam into their clique.  This annoys Sam’s best friend and sometimes roommate, a local artist who isn’t a student.  But Sam is caught.  She learns that the Bunnies actually transform rabbits into their ideal boyfriends.  They haven’t got the process down pat, though, and the resultant hybrids often have various deformities.  Sam is the only one who can’t do this transformation.  Until she does.  But it doesn’t turn out like anyone expects.  I’d better draw my plot summation to a close there, otherwise I might hop into spoiler territory.  I wouldn’t want to do that because I recommend reading this one for yourself.  Awad’s writing is beautiful and compelling.  I did wonder if I’d interpreted everything correctly when I finally put the book down.

Dark academia comes in a rainbow of colors.  Here, although comi-tragic, there’s something seriously wrong at Warren University.  There are plenty of books and classes, as well as intrigues among ingenues.  And also some serious reflection on expectations and how they affect relationships.  Friendship and what it really means.  Loneliness, and how it creeps into the lives of creative people.  It’s also a story about writing and learning to write.  As noted above, it succeeds wildly in this.  There are definitely horror vibes about the tale, but it’s so well told that you might lose track of the fact that they’re there.  When Margaret Atwood praises a book, it’s worth paying attention.  While not dark and dreary, Bunny shows the sub-genre off as one of great potential.  It’s worth twitching your nose over.

Horror Time

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In case anyone’s wondering (ha!), I haven’t lost interest in horror.  I’ve been discussing quite a few dark academia movies lately since that’s where I seem to be, but what’s really lost is time.  I’m no great consumer of social media.  I spend literally five minutes on Facebook daily.  Less than that on Bluesky and Twitter.  I don’t have time.  I love watching movies, but they take time.  I often discuss this with family—I’m not sure where the time goes.  In my case it’s not social media.  Much of it—the lion’s share—is work.  When a three-day weekend starts to feel like just enough time to get everything done before starting it all over again, I think there’s an elephant in the room.  If I can just squeeze past your trunk (pardon me) I would note that I spend as much time as I can writing and reading, but even that drains too quickly.

I read a lot.  And I read about writing.  Those who do it best have time to put into their craft.  If they’re working long hours, have a family, and weeds that love all the rain we get around here, they’re better than I am.  Home ownership (if you can’t afford to hire groundskeepers) is itself a full-time occupation.  As is writing.  And, of course, work.  What’s been suffering lately has been my time for watching horror.  Part of that’s money too.  I’m not sure if anybody else has noticed, but prices haven’t exactly gone down since January, and movies aren’t always free.  I have a long list of horror films I want to see (quite a long list), but tide, time, and money wait for no-one.  I even had a four-day weekend not long ago during which I had no time to watch horror.  Horrific, isn’t it?

I’m at a stage of life where the shortness of it all stares me in the face.  I was a late bloomer and my career never really took off.  It ended up taking time and not rewarding that time at the usual exchange rate.  I’m watching friends and family retire and some finding too much time on their hands.  Hey, brother, can you spare an hour?  I think of my farming ancestors where every minute was filled trying to stay alive in a world where leisure time really is a luxury.  I have no right to complain, but I do wonder where the time goes.  I suppose if I didn’t blog I’d have a little more time for horror, but I just can’t face giving up all this fame.

Bad Intensions

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What, exactly, defines dark academia?  I ask myself that question a lot.  Looking for movies that might help answer that question sometimes brings about unexpected results.  A film that appears on several dark academia lists is Cruel Intentions.  I’d never seen it before and since it’s generally classified as a teen romantic drama, it isn’t exactly what I tend to go seeking.  Still, that definition is important to pin down, dark academia.  So I tried.  It presents itself, at least up front, as a teen sex comedy.  A rich playboy at a private school, and his scheming step-sister, enjoy destroying the innocence of new coeds.  She uses coke and he appears to be addicted to sex.  There’s not much to really like about either one.  Then the unexpected happens—he falls in love with one of his intended victims.

If the plot sounds a little familiar, it may be because it is a retelling of Dangerous Liaisons, a movie I’ve never seen based on a novel I’ve never read.  What makes it dark academia is that it takes place in a private school.  An exclusive private school (but aren’t they all?).  And it does take a dark turn toward the end.  The cad (Sebastian by name) is eventually caught in his relentless womanizing and although the woman he truly loves is a forgiving sort, it can’t save him in the end.  The movie has the fun of double-double crossing and certainly doesn’t paint a very flattering portrait of the rich.  Indeed, Dorian Gray comes to mind as well.

The movie, qua movie, is enjoyable enough.  The acting is pretty good.  I’d seen it described as a thriller as well, and there may be some junior-level thriller moments.  Dark academia, at its best, has some crossover with thrillers, or even horror.  Since the aesthetic appeals primarily to the young, it is perhaps inevitable that it goes gently into that dark night.  I’m trying to get a handle on it because it has captured my imagination.  In many ways dark academia has helped make sense of what has happened in my life.  I love the gothic aspect of the genre.  The few shots of the gothic architecture of Manchester Prep were appreciated, but the movie as a whole doesn’t have much of a gothic feel, beyond the monied privilege of kids who’ll probably never have to do a day’s work in their lives.  Dark indeed.

Finding Fossils

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Mary Anning was a real woman.  She made valuable contributions to paleontology in the first half of the nineteenth century, although she wasn’t always credited for her work.  The movie Ammonite is a fictionalized account of her life at Lyme Regis, where she lived and discovered dinosaur fossils.  Being fiction, the movie focuses on how Mary “came out of her shell” by entering into a relationship with Charlotte Murchison (also an historical person, wife of the Scottish geologist Sir Roderick Impey Murchison) who was left in her care when she came down with a fever after trying to recover from melancholy by taking the sea air.  Mary had established a life of independence and wasn’t really seeking relationships; her mother still lived with her and, according to the movie, they had a distant but loving regard for each other.

I was anxious to see the film because it is sometimes classified as dark academia.  Since I’m trying to sharpen my sense of what that might mean, it’s helpful to watch what others think fits.  The academia part here comes from the intellectual pursuits of Anning and the academic nature of museum life (one of her fossils was displayed at the British Museum).  Anning, who had no formal academic training, tried to make a living in a “man’s world,” and in real life she did contribute significantly to paleontology.  The dark part seems to come in from her exclusion from the scientific community, and perhaps in her love for Charlotte, a forbidden relationship in that benighted time.  Of course, this relationship is entirely speculative.

Fictional movies made about factual people make me curious about the lives of those deemed movie-worthy.  Ammonite is a gentle movie and one which raises the question of why women were excluded from science for so long.  No records exist that address her sexuality—not surprisingly, since she lived during a period when such things weren’t discussed.  Indeed, she didn’t receive the acclaim that she might have, had she lived in the period of Jurassic Park.  She was noticed by Charles Dickens, who included a piece on her in his magazine All the Year Round, in 1865, several years after her death.  These days she is acknowledged and commemorated.  This movie is one such commemoration, although much of it likely never happened.  As with art house movies such as this, nonfiction isn’t to be assumed.  Nevertheless, it might still be dark academia.

Sunday Wednesday

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Being busy people, it took us a couple weeks to watch the eight episodes of Tim Burton’s Wednesday, and I think he’s really outdone himself.  As I mentioned before, I was never a great fan of The Addam’s Family, but I watched it often enough to know the characters and their quirks.   I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the television show.  It had monsters, but nothing really scary.  It was funny but some of the humor seemed beyond me.  I watched it anyway.  I didn’t bother with the movie when it came out.  Then on a rainy weekend afternoon I watched episode 1 of Wednesday and I was hooked.  For one thing, this is dark academia personified.  Exclusive, gothic, school, dark mysteries, secret societies.  It’s all there.  And for another thing, it’s well written and the acting is very good.  And then there’s Poe.

Image credit: Chainwit. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

(On a side note: I recently found another review of Nightmares with the Bible.  It is my most reviewed and least successful book.  The reviewer agreed with other reviewers that the Poe angle didn’t convince them.  As I told one critic, the Poe angle is a personal one.  Poe was a man, a sin of which I’m also guilty.  And men of a particular stripe feel protective of women.  Maybe it’s one of those biological things we should just get over, but Poe felt that it was poetic and, being a far less intelligent experiencer of that same disposition, I feel it too.  I think Tim Burton might also, for Wednesday seems full of that as well.)

At Nevermore Academy, the morbid, anti-social loner Wednesday learns to accept a kind of friendship from other outcasts.  There’s a town vs. gown aspect as the residents of Jericho don’t exactly love the academy, but they appreciate the money it brings in.  The founding pilgrim, Joseph Crackstone, was a hater of those who were different and tried to rid the world of others not like him (this is important).  Over eight episodes this backstory interrupts into the present and threatens the very existence of Nevermore.  What ties it all together, of course, is Wednesday.  Nearly as gothic as Sleepy Hollow, this Netflix series showcases the aspects of Burton’s vision that I find most compelling.  And the first season was nominated for quite a few awards.  A second season has been approved and I’ll be watching that one, down the road.  I can’t get enough dark academia these days, no matter the day of the week.

Prior Memory

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Sometimes I just don’t know where my mind is.  A few months back my wife and I decided to watch Heathers for the first time.  It got a bad rap when it came out but we finally gave in because there were so many cultural references to it that we felt we had to be informed.  Now none of that makes it worth comment.  What does, in what’s left of my mind, is that I was sure I’d written a blog post about it.  I hadn’t.  The thing is, I even thought I remembered some of what I wrote about it.  Uhn-uhn.  Didn’t happen.  So I guess I can trawl my memory and see if I can recollect what I thought I had already said.  Here goes.

The movie is a disturbing and funny look at growing up and its hard lessons.  Everyone said that it glorified suicide, but that wasn’t what I saw.  One person attempts it, and the others are all actually murdered and made to look as if they died by suicide.  Not a lighthearted topic, I know, but the students pretty much all want to live.  J. D. (read into that what you will) is the real criminal.  An outsider with a chip on his shoulder, and who has no problems being (or associating with) a criminal.  Or making others into criminals.  

As with many, perhaps most, adults, I remember the confusion of puberty quite well.  I wanted to be liked in school (I never had many friends) but I was quiet, bookish, and very religious.  Having grown up feeling generally unliked, I found acceptance, for a time, at church.   This movie captures that aspect well—the desire to fit in with a cohort that is particularly hostile (teenagers).

What brought Heathers back to mind after these few months was the fact that some classify it as a dark academia movie.  Dark academia generally has some schooling involved, sometimes directly, sometimes as implied.  There is a natural kind of darkness in high school and into college years.  This is something we may be in danger of losing with universities becoming glorified trade schools.  Not all of life is about finding a job.  The humanities suggest that being human is sometimes enough.  Heathers seems to have aged pretty well, being over thirty at this point.  Some of us took three decades to see it.  And if we feel like we’re losing our minds from time to time, at least now I’ll know I have indeed posted upon this movie.

University Death

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This is an important and thoroughly depressing book.  Despite globalization, I fear that a book from down under might fail to be readily found in the United States, where it’s also needed.  Peter Fleming’s thesis is spelled out in the subtitle.  Dark Academia: How Universities Die.  I’ve read a few other books like this, but I was attracted by the title of this one.  Fleming points out much of what I already knew, but with the stats to back it up, as well as compelling personal stories.  Few people worry about professors.  We’re conditioned to think their lives are easy and carefree.  I doubt they ever were, but since the eighties, when universities started to act like business ventures, the cracks showed in the foundations and their lives grew harder.  Capitalism ruins everything.  Fleming discusses the political maneuvering in the UK and Australia, as well as in the US.  We’re all facing the same nemesis.  Greed.

Politicians began attacking universities likely because they realized that educated individuals can see through the shenanigans that people like Trump, and Reagan and Bush before him, pulled.  They didn’t want alternative voices.  Debate is anathema.  The easiest solution was to make education a business because businesses always want more money.  Now, I’m shooting from the hip here, but Fleming pulls such things together with evidence.  I have witnessed firsthand some of what he describes—living as an adjunct instructor, barely making enough to cover the bills.  At the same time learning the university I was working for had been hiring “managers” (hundreds of deans, associate deans, etc.) but couldn’t afford to hire faculty.  That sports (something Fleming doesn’t address) were allocated far more money than teaching.  Yes, things were bad.

Fleming points, rightly, in my opinion, to neoliberalism as the culprit.  That’s the form of liberalism that’s wedded to free market capitalism while spouting the causes that traditional liberals support—care and concern for all people.  The older I get the more I see that neoliberalism is what the Republican Party used to be.  They’ve veered hard right and since, in America, liberals have never really had a chance to hold power since Roosevelt, they’ve become neoliberals.  Thus began the transformation of higher education before I ever started my doctorate, but I didn’t know it.  I’m no political scientist.  I’m a teacher interested in the past.  And religion.  Having grown up poor, I invested all my scant resources into getting qualified to teach, only to discover that the ivory tower was being sold to the highest bidder.  Dark academia indeed.

See Monsters

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I have a soft spot for seventies movies, but I can’t decide if The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is horror or not.  I found it on a horror list, and an oblique reference to Lord of the Flies got me interested.  It reminded me, in some ways, of The Wicker Man.  Although based on a Japanese novel, the movie’s set in England.  Two subplots seem unrelated except they happen to the same widowed mother and son.  The son is part of a group of five boys in a private school who have a secret society (echoes of dark academia here).  The leader, although not yet at puberty, is a sociopath who’s very bright and the others follow him.  He declares that a perfect balance (a very East Asian religious outlook) exists that adults simply cannot realize it.  Indeed, adults are bad.

At the same time, the boy’s mother meets and falls in love with a second-mate on a merchant ship.  The boy likes the mate too and feels that they have found a perfect balance.  Thus the two plots come together.  The boys in the club feel that the son has gone soft on their principles, and so to prove he hasn’t they arrange the vivisection of an anesthetized cat.  When the sailor returns, unexpectedly, to try to marry the widow, her son objects.  The perfect balance has been distorted.  The boys decide that the sailor must be treated “like the cat.”  They take him to a distant overlook on a pretense, and drug him.  In a long shot at the end, the boys gather around his unconscious body.  Now, the similarities to The Wicker Man may seem passing, but the idea of human sacrifice is there.

Is this horror or not?  Hard to say.  Most of the movie revolves around the mother’s relationship with the sailor (which the son watches, voyeuristically, through a knothole in his bedroom cupboard.  The secret society is always there, however, and when the plots come together you realize that the sailor will have to be killed.  Like Wicker Man, there’s nothing really explicit here, although Wicker Man does have a horrific ending.  The Sailor only has one by implication.  The leader of the secret society of boys is pretty scary and apart from the widow, parents are pretty scarce in the movie.  I was left wondering what it was that I’d just seen.  I can see why someone would list it as horror, but it had other echoes that I felt might fit better.  It was, however, free for the streaming.

Scholars and Villains

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Having read M. L. Rio’s novella Graveyard Shift, I turned to her debut novel, If We Were Villains.  It must be a heady feeling having your first novel become a bestseller, but reading it confirms why.  Rio came to my attention because of dark academia.  This novel is written as realism, so there’s really no speculative material.  At least not directly.  It’s the story of seven friends at the Dellecher Classical Conservatory.  They are the fourth-year students majoring in acting and they are essentially a Shakespearean troupe.  Dellecher only puts on Shakespeare plays, so much of the story is built on the Bard.  There may be some plot give-aways below, and I think this is a book you might want to read—so be advised.  I’ve continued to read Shakespeare beyond high school, mostly sticking to his better-known plays, so this was enjoyable to me.

The crisis begins when the largest and strongest member of the troupe—the leading man—becomes offended by not getting assigned the role he feels entitled to.  He begins acting out against his classmates, bullying them onstage so they can’t call out his bad behavior.  To make things more interesting, one of the troupe is his girlfriend and another of the women is his cousin.  Since they all value what they do so much, and it’s their last year, nobody wants to challenge him.  Until it gets out of hand.  Although Dellecher is exclusive, there’s quite a lot of partying that takes place.  Drinking and drugs seem freely available.  One night when the leading man is drunk, he takes out his hostility on his troupe-mates but is found nearly dead in the lake by dawn’s first light.  And then things start to spiral.

Dark academia is a genre that explores the dark part of higher education (and sometimes secondary education).  I think that most people, even if they enjoyed college (as I did) saw there were tenebrous aspects to it.  This particular genre focuses on those negatives, but not to the exclusion of the very real draw of continued learning.  Since college is when many people receive their first taste of independence, and what passes for adulthood, many emotions come to the fore.  Love, jealousy, fear, and passion among them.  These are powerful motivators and much of our lives are spent learning to control them so that we can live together as a productive society.  This novel, like much dark academia, lingers in those places where unresolved emotions and unchecked bullying collide.  All with a Shakespearean touch.  Classic.