Growing Old in the Anthropocene

Image by Frederic Remington via Wikimedia Commons.

by Danny Watts

What it means to be a man has meandered a path throughout time, changing and bending to its different contexts. Yearning to be seen as a man, the adolescent male searches for recognition, he seeks to cross the bridge from boyhood into manhood. In his 1992 novel All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy writes of three young men and their attempts to journey from boys to men. The desolate and sparse western country unravels in front of the trio, and in attempts to make a claim to their manhood they become engulfed by the dark realities of the ‘wild-west’. In the work, masculinity culminates into many unique power relationships shaped by violence. Violence is a law of power, a law upheld by every man they encounter, looming over every thought, action, and decision. In order to achieve their status as men there comes a price tag of power. In All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy uses symbols to sketch the fluid concept of masculinity through the experiences of John Grady Cole, Rawlins, and Blevins, examining how relationships of power frame manhood as violence, in addition to the internal struggles the characters have with expectations of masculinity.

In McCarthy’s literary world, violence is a necessity throughout many of his works, serving as not only a stylistic choice but a major framing mechanism for his novels. All The Pretty Horses is no different. Throughout the boys’ adventures, violence takes form as an inescapable condition of manhood. John Grady’s father, a seasoned war veteran, is an important cog in the development of his son’s view of masculinity. “His father stubbed out his cigarette and picked up his fork and stabbed at the pie with it” (McCarthy 25). McCarthy uses this subtle, yet important, diction of stabbing, the act of thrusting with intent to harm, in order to demonstrate the nuances in the communication of the expectations of a man. The father’s expression of power over the pie sets the standard of masculine expressions. Father figures are key in outlining social expectations of young men and in John Grady’s case his father’s displays of power outlines his internal definition of manhood, correlating masculinity with power. There is a constant struggle between the boy and man, a struggle of recognition, with the boy attempting to be perceived as masculine. Rawlins and John Grady fall victim to this desire for approval and they lie in order to achieve respect. “We’re runnin from the law, Rawlins said. The Mexican looked them over. We robbed a bank. He stood looking at the horses. You aint robbed no bank” (34). This specific lie is indicative of their immaturity, as its wild nature is distinctly childish and unbelievable, reminiscent of the stories they’ve most likely heard of cowboys or other prominent masculine figures. Throughout their journey, each boy seeks the confirmation of other men in their manhood. “You reckon he thinks we’re desperados?” (55). Desperately , they attempt to convey masculinity, and the only way they know how is through grasping at power. The violently powerful status as a desperado, a reckless criminal, are what the boys are intending to appear as. To John Grady and Rawlins, the most manly reputation one can have is that of a violent criminal, illustrating their view on the importance of power, its relations to violence, and the ultimate combination of the two in order to achieve the status and recognition of a man.

In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976), French philosopher Michel Foucault asserts that the ultimate power is murder. That is, the ability to take another’s life and express violence is the highest power of all. Foucault continues, “One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others. One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 138). In All The Pretty Horses, the boys’ forced immersion and complete subjection to violence is illustrative of Foucault’s proposed idea. Power, according to Foucault, now involves managing life ‘to the point of death’, with an example of this being within the prison where every action carries the weight of potential death. “Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone” (McCarthy 137). Rawlins and John Grady are no sovereigns, instead they wage wars of violence and bloodletting in order to survive, illustrating the proposed shift in violence and its purpose by Foucault. The boys adopt a Foucaultian ideology, using their masculinity in attempts to alter the power imbalance, using threats of death to both gain power and maintain their livelihood. Their capacity for violence is not a masculine triumph, but rather a necessity forced onto them in order to foster life. To McCarthy, death is symbolic, taking form as a signifier of masculine power; it shapes the actions and journey of John Grady.

The gun is a symbolically masculine object, with it being an almost substitute for what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan terms the phallus, in McCarthy’s work. Lacanian theory describes such a concept as essential to achieving manhood, presenting the castration complex, referring to the fear of loss of the penis, as a driving force in shaping in defining masculinity. “The installation is the subject of an unconscious position without which he would be unable to identify himself with the ideal type of his sex” (Lacan 312). The fear of castration, according to Lacan, drives young boys to conform and internalize a masculine image. The idealized man is imprinted onto the young boys, and their journeys are being shaped by their internal definitions of manhood. Rawlins, John Grady, and Blevins are not on a heroic journey to become men, they are instead journeying out of fear of not becoming men. With the gun acting as a pseudo-phallus, McCarthy places heavy emphasis on both their inability to operate the weapons and their seeming necessity to John Grady and Rawlins. “Rawlins stepped down and slid his little 25-20 carbine out of the bootleg scabbard he carried it in and walked out along the ridge. John Grady heard him shoot. In a little while he came back with a rabbit and he reupholstered the carbine and took out his knife and walked off a ways and squatted and gutted the rabbit” (McCarthy 35). The carbine is an extension of the phallus, a direct objectification of manhood. In this passage Rawlins ritualistically disassembles the rabbit, and in doing so, expresses his masculinity. Rawlins is not simply surviving in the wild, but achieving the idealized version of masculinity through the gun. By using the carbine, Rawlins claims masculinity in a performance of violence in an attempt to prove that he is not deserving of castration. Through understanding the castration complex by way of Lacanian theory, the symbol of the gun and its relation to masculinity becomes clear. The gun, and its use, becomes a stand-in for an expression of masculinity. The gun is symbolically masculine not only for its ability to express power, but in addition, without it the boys do not feel to truly be men.

Power is an inescapable grim truth of manhood, and Rawlins and John Grady fully expect to encounter violence in one form or another. Guns are a vehicle for violence, an unequivocal weapon, versatile and expressional in bloodletting; it becomes essential for the young men’s journey. “What did you bring to shoot? Said Rawlins. Just Grandad’s old thumb-buster. Can you hit anything with it? No” (31). John Grady Cole is unable to operate the old thumb-buster, proving that he chooses to bring the gun, not out of desire, but rather seeming necessity. Upon meeting Blevins they begin to question his masculinity, posing him a test of violence. “You throw your pocketbook up in the air and I’ll put a hole in it, he said… He pitched it up underhanded… Then he shot. The billfold jerked sideways off across the landscape” (48). Blevins had passed, he was fluent in the language of violence, thus proving his worth as a man.

Blevins, despite his proven masculine value, is still incredibly naive, leading to the absolution of his manhood and life. A thunderstorm strikes pure fear into Blevins, who’s childish nature elicits a rash response. “Where’s your clothes at? I took em off” (70). This behaviour is not what one would expect of a rugged outlaw, one who supposedly only fears god. Powerless to nature, it becomes clear that Blevins is not a powerful figure, but rather masquerading as powerful due to his associations of power and masculinity. McCarthy uses Blevins’s actions to reinstate the fact that these boys are still in fact boys donning the hats of men. Rawlins comments to Blevins to quit his journey to manhood. “You better see if you can trade that pistol for some clothes and a bus ticket back to wherever it is you come from” (74). This is not just a simple trade of items; it’s the call for the death of Blevins’s masculinity. The pistol, an essential to violence and with it masculinity, in trade for a bus home. Subject to this fate Blevins would be utterly powerless, quite literally being driven back to whence he came, unable to have true control. Blevins however does not give up, and continues to push forward in attempts to reclaim his lost power and masculinity. This push ultimately culminates into violence. His violent outbursts lead to his own killing. The endless pursuit of masculinity and reclaiming what was lost leads to him killing three men, Blevins desperately attempts to validate himself as a man and seals his own fate. His youth and eagerness to ascend to a powerful man certifies his damnation. “[Blevins] don’t have no feathers” (167). McCarthy intentionally states Blevin’s lack of ‘feathers’, or pubic hair, as a stark reminder of his youth. Blevins is still a young boy full of ambition and dreams who has been led astray by the ideals of masculinity to resort to a life of violence. His belief that masculinity is earned through brute force blinds him to reality.

Being shot at is Rawlins and John Grady’s first encounter with violence: “there were three pistol shots from somewhere in the dark all evenly spaced that went pop pop pop” (83). The boys had been baptised in violence, beginning their ascension to manhood. This encounter marks a turning point for both, stripping away their prior innocence and awakening them to the harsh reality that lay ahead in the frontier. This passage specifically illustrates the mechanical and cold nature of violence. The “evenly spaced bullets” are an indiscriminately inhuman objectification of violence (83). Similarly to the rhythm and mechanical manner in which Blevins is murdered, “[t]hey caint just walk him out there and shoot him, he said. Hell fire. Just walk him out there and shoot him. John grady looked at him. As he did so the pistol shot came from beyond the ebony trees. Not loud. Just a flat sort of pop. Then another” (178). The word ‘pop’ calls back to this previous moment, the actualization of needless violence.

This indiscriminate violence shadows the boys’ journey. During their captivity under the captain, a symbol of power and masculinity, at least by title, they are subject to the inevitable violence of manhood. The captain strips Rawlins of his masculinity through violence, “Put down your pants. What the hell for?… The guard stepped forward and took a leather sap from his rear pocket and struck Rawlins across the back of the head with it. The room Rawlins was in lit up all white and his knees buckled and he reached about him in the air” (163). Rawlins is beaten to submission; he is beaten out of his masculinity by the captain. A rude awakening for Rawlins to the innate power relations of masculinity, and how quickly one’s masculinity can be taken away. “Turn around. Put down your pants. He turned around and unbuckled his belt and pushed his trousers down” (163). Rawlins’ s stripping and sexual assault is a physical emasculation, stripping him of his clothes, his power, and his dignity. McCarthy does not want the reader to understand masculinity as just a capacity for violence, but also the emotional meaning contrived from manhood. In addition, masculinity’s many forms of expression are similar to those of power. The captain’s actions are not simply violent, they are a means to establish power. Through the captain, McCarthy highlights the impactful nature of power relations in every aspect of masculinity. Pride, dignity, and image are essential in the formation of a man’s persona and through the captain’s obliteration of Rawlins’s masculinity McCarthy reveals how the emotional is an extension of violence, and the deeply rooted ties between power and masculinity. The captain’s masculinity and power comes in his violence, his will is realized due to the immense ease at which he is able to facilitate violence.

The captain, however, is not representative of idealized masculinity. McCarthy portrays him as flamboyant, juxtaposing the boys’ notions of masculinity as silent and stoic. In the Mexican frontier, in order to survive a man must present himself as powerful. The captain contrasts the cultural backdrop of his surroundings, an intentional choice by McCarthy in order to emphasize the indiscriminatory reach of power relations. “At a gray metal desk in one corner sat a stout man likewise in a khaki uniform who wore about his neck a scarf of yellow silk.” (157) The bright yellow of the captain’s silk scarf contrasts sharply with his uniform. A traditionally masculine attire of a uniform is seemingly out of place on the captain, a display of femininity on such a powerful character. McCarthy intentionally highlights the femininity of the captain to challenge the ideas within the boys, and readers, of the relation between portrayed masculinity and power. The scarf is more than a simple fashion statement, it is a symbol for the feminine side of violence and power. Despite the captain’s appearance, he is brutal and violent, convoluting the pre-established ideas of violence and its seemingly inherent masculinity.

The captain is similar to the boys in ways they may not realize. Like the boys, he is in search of approval and a masculine appearance. “[The captain] leaned back in the chair and sat with his arm upright and the burning cigarette a few inches from his ear in a posture that seemed alien to him. As if perhaps he’d admired it somewhere in others” (167). The parroting of the captain, and his observable discomfort in doing so, is illustrative of the desire to conform. Similar to the young boys the captain attempts to achieve a masculine persona, but for the captain it seems he will never truly ‘fit’ due to his innate femininity. McCarthy’s diction is indicative of this natural femininity and the captain’s desire for masculinity. ‘Alien’ reveals a disconnect between his performance, his attire, posture, and behavior, and his real self. The captain ‘admires’ masculinity, he has an internal appreciation from masculinity, however, he is unable to achieve this. The captain resorts to outbursts of violence, utilizing his power, in attempts to achieve his masculine status. Revealing the complicated relationship of power and masculinity, the captain serves as an exploration of the complexity of masculinity with McCarthy portraying him as a man who does not fully embody masculine traits, but rather uses power as a replacement.

Violence has become a necessity for the boys. To maintain safety Rawlins and John Grady must put their violence, and with it masculinity, on full display in order to achieve power. In prison this is amplified “[u]nderpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill” (182). McCarthy purposefully uses a prison, something in which one is held against their will, as a symbol for inescapability of masculinity and power. In prison the boys are forced to confront the dark cruelty of violence. Each man is judged by their capacity for violence, a test of their manhood. “We think we’re a couple of pretty tough cowboys, said Rawlins. Yeah. Maybe. They could kill us at any time. Yeah. I know” (186). The two have interpreted their violence as heroic, an act that has solidified their status as cowboys, as men. However, McCarthy has positioned the boys in a power relationship in which they must fight for survival. Violence has now become a requirement for existence. Their personal power imbalance, threat of death and being killed, is the driver of their heroic battles, not their self-believed inherent masculinity.

Returning to Foucault’s initial argument, killing another is the ultimate expression of violence, power, and masculinity. McCarthy presents murder as a right of passage, one that separates boys from men. John Grady murders a young boy, one McCarthy describes as a “cuchillero” (200). This diction is important, as John Grady fights no ordinary man but one of honour, a brawler and a fighter, the kill is a transition into the world of violent and powerful men. “From the red boutonniere blossoming on the left pocket of [the cuchillero’s] blue workshirt there spurted a thin fan of bright arterial blood” (201). The blossoming flower of the cuchillero, his life, dreams, goals, are punctured by John Grady’s knife. McCarthy intentionally chooses a stabbing in this instance to illustrate the true personal nature of violence. Stabbing is different from the act of shooting, as the murderer must be in direct physical contact with the victim. He must feel the knife enter the victim, his hot breath turning cold, and just like a prison there is no escaping the violence. The boutonniere also serves a symbolic purpose, usually associated with a rite of passage such as a wedding; it signifies a pivotal shift in John Grady’s journey. John Grady is now married to violence, eternally bound to carry the ramifications of his actions. “Blood sloshed in his boots” (201). Boots are essential to a cowboy, they are an extension of his masculinity, and they have been flooded with blood. John Grady burdens the weight of his masculinity, forged in fire of battle, with him forever. Enacting the ultimate power of murder has a punishment of eternal burden. “His boots left wet tracks of blood in the dry floor of the yard” (202). His masculinity is stained, and it will follow him forever, leaving behind a trail of violence.

John Grady is fluent in the language of violence, and now, forged in blood, it is time for him to exercise his newfound power in order to uphold his status as a man. Seeking retribution, and his horse, John Grady returns to where Rawlins was stripped of his manhood, the captain’s office. McCarthy shapes John Grady to believe that a violent reshuffling of power is the only solution and that, after the expression of the ultimate power, he is man enough to take matters into his own hands. This newfound masculinity enables John Grady to command his fate. John Grady understands violence, he understands the necessity of power: “John Grady stood. He cocked the pistol. The click of the sear and the click of the cylinderhand falling into place were sharp and clear in the morning silence” (258). Once again, McCarthy returns to the mechanical and sadistic nature of the gun, the lackadaisical violence of a firearm. John Grady, now a master of violence, fights for control, for true manhood: “When the charro looked up into the pistolbarrel John Grady could see the gears meshing in his head and everything turning and falling into place” (260). John Grady, throughout his travels has grown to understand power, now he witnesses a conversation of violence taking place in front of his very eyes, and he understands. “Then he stepped through the door and put the barrel of the revolver between the eyes of the man crouched there. The man had been holding the rifle at his waist and he dropped it in the dirt…Almost instantly John Grady’s legs were slammed from under him and he went down… He knew he’d been shot” (264-265). As John Grady finally demonstrates his dominance, his masculinity, McCarthy quite literally rips it from beneath him, displaying once again the ebbs and flows of power relations. John Grady has let his masculine ego get a hold of him, his downfall is his carelessness. John Grady has been given an illusion of power, an illusion of masculinity.

This constant pendulum of power is present in Foucault’s ideology. “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (93 Foucault). Power relationships are more complicated than one would imagine according to Foucault, due to their omnipresence everything involves a power struggle, thus making it ever changing. John Grady’s experience with the captain elaborates on this idea, showing that eventually power will shift due to its constant availability to be impacted. The captain’s once seemingly unchallenged power and masculinity has now been flipped on its head. In response to his wounds John Grady flees, however the bullet hole remains. “He dragged the pistol from the coals… And jammed the red hot barrel ash and all down into the hole in his leg” (274). McCarthy reinforces the inescapability of violence, as the pistol being both a vehicle for death and healing. By ironically juxtaposing a tool for harm as something with a property to help and heal, he also frames masculinity in this context. To elaborate, masculinity can be both destructive, it’s seeming inherent violence destroys those around it, but also it can prosper with the right intention. Masculinity, according to McCarthy, is similar to that of a gun, a double-edged sword that can both harm and aid. When wielded with purpose under the right context, masculinity can become a tool for survival, resilience and justice. However, when used for power only violence ensues.

“The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised… In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him… He rode with the sun coppering his face… Rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come” (302). All The Pretty Horses ends on a note of completion, rather than closure. John Grady has come to the end of his trials as a man, the red blood staining him permanently, he has completed the challenge of violence. McCarthy’s final paragraph is telling of the journey, the passage, of John Grady’s masculinity. The long shadow of his past trials will continue to haunt him, looming forever unable to shake. Blood spilled hues his manhood red. The world to come being that of a man, man’s world, at the foot of John Grady, yet McCarthy leaves room for uncertainty, does he continue down the road of violence? Or will he change his ways?

Masculinity is not simple, and McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses addresses the topic as one full of complexity and nuance. The direct linkage between masculinity and power is interwoven delicately by both society and men. McCarthy explores masculinity through the journey of three boys and their attempts to achieve the societal masculine standard. The boys link expressions of violence, brutality and power to manhood. Power, as John Grady believes, stems from masculinity, however he could not be further wrong, as McCarthy, through the symbols of the captain’s scarf, illustrates that power enables masculinity. Guns, a physical representation of power, are a looming threat for each character, the mechanical and inhuman violence plagues the boys. Violence becomes essential to survival, a practice taught by the world of man, which is then rewarded through being able to see another day. However, violence does not come without consequence, as Blevins is killed for his actions, and John Grady holds a heavy burden for life. Masculinity, McCarthy argues, is neither inherently evil nor good, but rather a force shaped and controlled by its usage. John Grady, bathed in the blood of consequence, paid the immeasurable price of manhood, forever to roam the red desert of power. A boy, loaded by the ammunition of power becomes a gun , the question is, do they have to shoot?

Works Cited

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Vol. 1, the Border Trilogy. Vintage Books, 1993.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Routledge, 2020.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I. Pantheon Books, 1978.

Image by Marjanhg, via Pixabay.

by Parker Macdonald

Like much of David Lynch’s filmography, Mulholland Drive is a surreal and uncanny movie to watch. While it is easy to pinpoint aspects of the film where it is surreal, understanding why Mulholland Drive is uncanny is much more difficult, because what causes our perception of the Uncanny is not as well understood. Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and Clasen (2023) assert that the Uncanny is the “anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not, and/or by the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat…that might be present” where the ambiguity is caused when mentalisation, the ability to infer the mental state of other beings, is disrupted. This disrupted mentalisation can occur when “perceiving mind in mindless things or failing to perceive mind in beings that have minds” (323). And certainly, this feeling of a mindless thing containing a mind certainly applies to Mulholland Drive: from its use of editing to follow multiple storylines and create a non-linear narrative to its cinematography, at times it is as though Mulholland Drive is thinking on its own. Indeed, some film philosophers, such as Stephen Mulhall (2015) or Robert Sinnerbrink (2011), would argue that Mulholland Drive is thinking for itself. Mulhall, in particular, advances the theory of Film as Philosophy in which, rather than merely illustrating philosophical arguments or concepts, films actively participate in systematically thinking about and evaluating philosophical questions and arguments (3–4). To examine how Mulholland Drive philosophises on the concept of film as a language, particularly through editing and shot conventions, these ideas of Film as Philosophy will be used to view Mulholland Drive as utilizing a divergent style of “thought” and communication to disrupt the mentalisation between the audience and the film, creating an uncanny experience: this use of the Uncanny serves as Mulholland Drive’s main argument in favour of viewing film as a language.

Of course, when we say that films are thinking, this isn’t meant in the literal sense: films don’t have minds and thus cannot think as we do. Rather, as Mulhall explains, “Various elements within them have a significance that depends on the way they hang together with other elements to make a coherent whole and thus allow us to make sense of our experience of them” (91). The aesthetic experience created is the basis of the philosophical argument the film presents by reorienting our way of thinking on a subject, in a manner that is similar to philosophy. Thus, while Mulholland Drive is not ‘thinking’ in the traditional sense, the process by which it creates a philosophical argument via the aesthetic experience—created through the use of an internal logic, the way in which the cinematic elements ‘hang’ together and interact—can be thought of as being akin to the process of thought (Mulhall 91). Understanding the philosophical argument Mulholland Drive is trying to make through its aesthetic experience, the way in which it is ‘thinking,’ requires an aesthetic critique of this experience to understand this internal process (Mulhall 86).

It is important to note that just because a film can be conceived of as ‘thinking’ doesn’t make it uncanny. When Mulhall originally presented his idea of film as philosophy, he demonstrated how films can “think” using the Aliens quartet and expanded upon his ideas using the Mission: Impossible series, films which are not typically associated with the Uncanny (Mulhall 127). Furthermore, if we posit that there is an internal process that is analogous to a mental process in films via the construction or representation of a philosophical argument, then there is no misattribution of a mental process to Mulholland Drive. Mistaken mentalisation occurs when we attempt to infer the thoughts of mindless things, such as their beliefs or intentions. By creating a philosophical argument, Mulholland Drive necessarily has intentions, beliefs, and understandings. Thus, there is an internal process for the audience to attempt to infer from, and the audience is therefore appropriately mentalising Mulholland Drive.

It is noteworthy, though, that the audience perceives Mulholland Drive as ‘thinking’ in the first place. Mulhall argues that this can only be done through a critical aesthetic analysis of a film, indicating that the audience, though they may not realise it, is analysing Mulholland Drive and thus perceiving it to “think” (Mulhall 86). Whenever we perceive Mulholland Drive to be ‘thinking’ in this sense, it is in response to uncanny cinematic elements such as result from the filming or editing of a scene. Though these cinematic elements are the creation of David Lynch, we engage in the analysis necessary to perceive a film as ‘thinking’ whenever we encounter them. As a result, the audience conceives of Mulholland Drive as a separate ‘thinking’ entity, with ownership over these uncanny elements, only when we encounter these uncanny cinematic elements. Thus, it isn’t the concept of Mulholland Drive ‘thinking’ that is uncanny to the audience, but rather, the cinematic elements which provoke us into perceiving Mulholland Drive as ‘thinking’.

These cinematic elements are uncanny because they are the product of a divergent ‘thought process’ and communication style which disrupts the audience’s ability to mentalise the film and its characters. The relationship between Mulholland Drive and its audience can be seen as corollary to the Double Empathy Problem. The premise of the Double Empathy Problem is that when neurotypical and neurodivergent individuals communicate, “different dispositional outlooks and personal conceptual understandings” manifest in different communication styles, which disrupts mentalisation between individuals (Milton et al.). Bolis et al. expand upon this premise by positing that communication occurs on multiple levels, not just between individuals. When individuals communicate on the personal level, they communicate with each other utilising conventions for that situation, which they gain from interacting with the socio-cultural level. A lack of interaction with the socio-cultural level by neurodivergent individuals is what results in the differing communication styles (3–4). The relationship between Mulholland Drive and the audience can be understood through this framework if we view Mulholland Drive as neurodivergent in this way. This perspective marks how this essay will diverge from Mulhall’s approach: namely, the notion of thinking as a monolithic process. Cognitive sciences have shown that far from one type of thinking, there are multiple neurotypes that diverge from the neurotypical way of thinking and communicating (Bolis et al, 18). If we are to accept Mulhall’s proposal that films can indeed think, then we can also consider the possibility of neurodiversity within films. Mulholland Drive’s ‘neurodivergence’ occurs because it doesn’t interact with the socio-cultural level with regards to film conventions, utilising a different communication style which disrupts the audience’s ability to mentalise the film and its characters. When the audience interacts with Mulholland Drive, they assume that the film will communicate and have the same conceptual understanding of itself as the audience does. Mulholland Drive’s divergent communication style and ‘thought process’ thus disrupts the audience’s attempts at mentalisation, creating an uncanny aesthetic experience.[1] The relationship between the Uncanny and disrupted mentalisation within Mulholland Drive is exemplified by the Club Silencio scene. In the scene, numerous bizarre occurrences occur, such as the death of a singer, Betty undergoing a fit, and the mysterious appearance of the blue box. Throughout the scene, the audience doesn’t understand what is occurring or Mulholland Drive’s intentions; they understand that there is danger connected to the club, but not how, creating ambiguity around the danger and thus creating an uncanny feeling throughout the scene. These uncanny experiences stake Mulholland Drive’s philosophical claim in favour of film as a language. If a cinematic language doesn’t exist, then the use of an atypical communication style should not interfere with the audience’s ability to understand the film; thus, the Uncanny should not be created. It is with this theoretical framework that we can better understand how Mulholland Drive constructs the Uncanny.

Central to the creation of the Uncanny, according to Christiansen and Clasen’s definition of the Uncanny, is the ambiguous presence of a source of fear (323). While we certainly can sense danger and feel afraid during the Club Silencio scene, the constant threat of danger is established much earlier in Mulholland Drive by the Winkie’s Diner scene. In the scene, a man describes a recurring nightmare to a friend where the man has a constant “god awful” feeling that he can’t explain, but he knows that it is related to a horrific figure behind the diner at Winkie’s. As the men walk to the alleyway behind Winkie’s, a horrific-looking vagrant appears around the corner, causing the man to faint and die. This scene establishes the presence of an ambiguous threat throughout the rest of the film. Firstly, it scares the audience and establishes Mulholland Drive’s willingness and capability to act as a threat. As a result, the audience continues the rest of the film experience prepared to fear Mulholland Drive. Secondly, the scene attaches a symbolic meaning to a specific shot combination. As the men approach the back of the diner, the camera alternates between a shot of the men approaching the back of the diner and towards the camera to a point of view shot from the point-of-view of the men. As the men approach the back, they aren’t immediately able to see the horrific figure, there is only a wall in sight. As the men approach close to the wall, the audience enters into the point-of-view shot once again, from which we see the horrific figure appear from behind the wall and jump-scare the audience. The use of the point-of-view shot to jump scare the audience establishes a relationship between the presence of a threat and the point-of-view shot combination. This relationship aligns with the thesis of cinematic language, which argues that shot sequences can be seen as akin to a phrase in a language, where a specific combination of shots communicates specific information and ideas. In this case, the point-of-view shot is being used to communicate the presence of danger nearby (Sinnerbrink 25).

The point-of-view shot is prominently used twice more in Mulholland Drive to create a feeling of uncanniness in the audience. It is first used again when Betty arrives at her aunt’s house. Once she enters the house, we get a similar combination of point-of-view shots looking around the house and shots of Betty approaching the camera. This shot combination makes us feel as if there is a threat present in the house because the last time this shot combination was used, there was indeed a threat; yet, just as with the Winkie’s diner scene, the actual presence of the threat is left ambiguous. The audience is effectually told that there is a threat through the use of the particular shot combination, and yet they can’t see it. When Betty enters the bathroom and meets “Rita,” it subverts our expectations of a jump scare and leaves us with an uncanny feeling. Is Rita a threat? Nothing she does seems to indicate she is, and so the threat is left ambiguous. Simultaneously, the lack of an immediate threat impedes our ability to mentalise the film as we are left unable to answer why Mulholland Drive is portraying Rita as a threat. This same sequence occurs when Betty and Rita go to Diane Selwyn’s house. The point-of-view shot combination is used as they approach Diane’s bedroom, and once again, the presence of an immediate threat is left ambiguous: this time we see Diane Selwyn’s corpse on her bed, but the presence of an immediate threat is left ambiguous. Through the shot combination, we are once again told that there is a threat, and Rita’s reaction to seeing the corpse seems to reinforce this idea, but the precise nature of the threat is left unknown. In both cases, an uncanny feeling is created as a result of divergent expectations and understandings. Diane Selwyn’s corpse and Rita are threats, though the audience may not realise it immediately: by meeting Rita, Betty will begin a journey that will culminate in the death of her world. Likewise, Diane Selwyn’s corpse causes Rita to undergo an identity crisis, which will result in the death of her identity as “Rita.” Thus, Mulholland Drive follows the conventions it establishes; however, an uncanny feeling is created in the audience because of a conceptual misalignment wherein Mulholland Drive associates the point-of-view shot combination with death, whereas the audience is associating it with an immediate threat.

The uncanny feeling created by this difference supports another argument for film as a language. Proponents of the cinematic language thesis argue that if we consider editing/montage as the level upon which the cinematic language exists, then just as with other languages “comprehending the meaning of… a [shot sequence] would therefore require an act of decoding according to the relevant cinematic ‘code’ ” (Sinnerbrink 26). Indeed, the existence of a mismatch of understanding highlights how the POV shot sequence does require an act of “decoding” through analysis to fully understand it, as the creation of the uncanny in response to the shot sequence demonstrates that the audience doesn’t fully understand what Mulholland Drive is trying to communicate.

Still, critics of the cinematic language thesis argue that film conventions exist, not because of a ‘cinematic language’ but rather, because it is “a pragmatically effective way” of communicating information, which relies upon “the same kinds of [natural] perceptual abilities we ordinarily use to communicate with each other” (Sinnerbrink 26). Yet, through the use of the Uncanny, Mulholland Drive calls this argument into question. After Betty gets into a taxi on her way to her aunt’s house, Mulholland Drive cuts to a shot of the old couple Betty travelled with sitting in a limousine and smiling. The fact that the old couple are smiling isn’t what makes the scene uncanny and uncomfortable to watch; rather, it’s the prolonged duration of the scene where all the couple does is smile. A similar scene occurs when Diane believes Camilla comes back and Diane begins crying, and the shot lingers on her crying face. The ambiguity of threat doesn’t derive from the fact that the subjects of these scenes show only one emotion for a prolonged period: instead, it is the fact that Mulholland Drive lingers for so long on these emotions that the audience assumes that there is some significance to Mulholland Drive focusing on it, yet, there doesn’t appear to be a clear reason for it. As a result, the audience is unable to mentalise Mulholland Drive and makes its intentions ambiguous. As established by the Winkie’s diner scene, Mulholland Drive can terrify the audience, and by not being able to ascertain its intentions, we begin to feel anxious about whether Mulholland Drive is about to scare us again.

There doesn’t seem to be a significance behind prolonging these scenes: it seems as if the purpose of these scenes is to let us linger in these emotions. Yet, Mulholland Drive does so incredibly inefficiently. Our understanding of the emotions of these characters could be established with a much shorter scene. And it is with these inefficient uses of a scene that Mulholland Drive engages the argument that ‘cinematic language’ isn’t a language and merely the most efficient way of communicating information. If conventions are only a matter of efficiency, then communicating inefficiently should not affect the audience’s overall understanding of a scene. Nonetheless, as evidenced by the uncanny feeling the audience experiences when watching these scenes, that is not the case: a significance is attached to the prolonging of the scene by the audience, which Mulholland Drive itself does not seem to attach. As a result, the audience is unable to mentalise Mulholland Drive, which makes its intentions ambiguous. This, in turn, causes them to feel uncanniness as they are unable to understand the nature of the significance that they believe Mulholland Drive also attaches to these scenes. The length of a shot carrying significance in terms of the information it is supposed to communicate highlights that every type of scene and shot convention has some underlying meaning to the audience. Thus, conventions don’t exist as an efficient way to show information in a way that our natural perceptions can understand, but rather they act as a shorthand for the audience to gain meaning just from the type of shot. The use of the ‘wrong’ shot to communicate information results in the audience being unable to fully understand the intent of Mulholland Drive. This demonstrates that there is an underlying cinematic language that the audience is utilising to make sense of scenes.

Arguably, the most important part of any language is its words, and for proponents of the cinematic language thesis, the individual shots within a film are the words. As some critics of the cinematic language thesis argue, however, the relationship between words and their meaning are arbitrary conventions. By contrast, the relationship between a cinematic image and its subject is “less a matter of applying arbitrary conventions than of using our capacities for natural or ‘untutored’ perception to understand what we see” (Sinnerbrink 25–6). Mulholland Drive challenges this notion through the use of doubles. After Betty and Rita open the blue box, the story of Mulholland Drive changes, this time following the story of Diane Selwyn and Camilla, who are played by the same actresses as Betty and Rita, respectively. The use of the same actress for multiple characters within the same film creates an uncanny feeling within the audience: there is the natural assumption that there is a relationship between the two characters the actresses are playing, but the nature of this relationship and why they look the same is unknown. When Diane is first introduced, the only knowledge the audience has of her is that she was a rotting corpse in the world of Betty and Rita. By showing Diane’s corpse in Betty and Rita’s world, it firmly establishes them as two separate people, which makes the use of the same actress even more disconcerting. The audience understands that Diane and Betty are different people, yet when we look at them, we see the same person. When we first see Diane, we’re left to wonder whether these are the same people, and whether they have the same mind; as a result, we’re unable to mentalise Diane because the state of her mind is left ambiguous. Does she have the same mind as Betty or is her mind distinct from Betty’s, and the physical resemblance a mere coincidence? An uncanny feeling is thus experienced by the audience by this inability to ascertain whether their mentalisation of Diane as a separate person is correct. It is only until later in the film when this mentalisation is confirmed, and the mental relationship between Betty and Diane is better understood by the audience (when we realise that Betty is a persona created by Diane Selwyn in a dream world), that this uncanny feeling recedes.

This conflict between what the story tells us and what we see demonstrates that there are arbitrary conventions that govern how we view and perceive images. The actress for Betty and Diane is the same person, yet we perceive and understand them as different people because it is a convention that we adopt. We are willing to assign a different identity and mind to the same person solely because the cinematic narrative tells us that they are a different person, similar to how we assign meaning to certain sounds because of the language we use. When the narrative of Mulholland Drive tells us that they are two separate people, we accept this statement, even if we still view them as being the same person. The uncanny feeling the audience experiences occurs because of the conflict between trying to mentalise Diane as Betty, while also recognising Diane as a separate person. This convention also applies beyond Mulholland Drive to other films: though we may see the same actor or actress in multiple films, we still recognise them as distinct people in all those films, precisely because of cinematic conventions.

Mulholland Drive’s arguments for understanding cinema as a language is perhaps most clearly articulated in the conversation between The Cowboy and Adam Kesher. During the conversation, The Cowboy tells Adam that he needs to change his attitude if he wants to have a good life. If Adam Kesher does good, he’ll see The Cowboy again once more; if he does wrong, he’ll see The Cowboy twice more. Yet, in the story of Betty and Rita, Adam Kesher never sees The Cowboy again; it is the audience who does. Thus, this conversation can be viewed as actually being a conversation between Mulholland Drive and the audience. Under this understanding of the conversation, we can see how Mulholland Drive comments on the communication difference between the audience and itself. Firstly, The Cowboy tells Adam that there’s sometimes a buggy, and The Cowboy is the driver of that buggy. If Adam changes his attitude, then he can ride along, but only if he changes his attitude. The buggy in this conversation acts as a metaphor for the story of Mulholland Drive, with the necessary attitude change being a change in how open the audience is to different communication styles. If the audience isn’t receptive to Mulholland Drive’s style of communication and is unwilling to use the cinematic language Mulholland Drive has created, then they won’t be able to effectively follow along with the story. This idea is further reinforced by The Cowboy’s warning: if the audience sees The Cowboy twice more after the scene, they’ve done wrong. When the audience sees The Cowboy again, it is when he is waking Diane Selwyn, but when they see him the second time at Adam Kesher’s party, they are not actually seeing The Cowboy again; rather, they are seeing someone who looks like The Cowboy. But to make the distinction, the audience has to accept that the actors in the world of Diane and Camilla are portraying different characters from the ones in Betty and Rita’s world. If they don’t, then they will see The Cowboy twice more after the conversation and will have ‘done wrong,’ because they haven’t changed their attitude and adopted the conventions Mulholland Drive demands of them. This demand thus validates the role of conventions in the perception of images in films and the communication that occurs between the audience and a film as a result.

Thus, through the creation of an uncanny cinematic experience, Mulholland Drive philosophises on the idea of cinema as a language. The creation of the uncanny cinematic experience occurs as a result of a misalignment in communication styles between the audience and the film: this misalignment can only occur if there exists a cinematic language that the audience relies on to understand the film, and expects the film they are watching to utilise. The language of cinema exists not only through conventions in editing, in which significance is attached to shot combinations and the duration of shots, but also in the conventions of how we perceive characters within shots, perceiving their identity beyond what we simply see.

Endnotes

[1] Because this discussion posits that films can think and philosophise, stylistic decisions in the film will be referred to as Mulholland Drive’s to emphasise the process of thought being attributed to Mulholland Drive.

Bibliography

Bolis, D., et al. “Beyond autism: Introducing the dialectical misattunement hypothesis and a Bayesian account of intersubjectivity.” ©S. Karger AG, Psychopathology, in press, 2017.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens and Mathias Clasen. “Creepiness and the Uncanny.” Style, vol. 57 no. 3, 2023, p. 322–349. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/909692.

Lynch, David, director. Mulholland Drive. Les Films Alain Sarde, 2001. kanopy.

Milton, Damian E., et al. Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Edited by Fred R. Volkmar, Springer, 2019. SpringerNature, https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4614-6435-8_102273-2#citeas. Accessed 17 April 2025.

Mulhall, Stephen. On Film. Routledge, 2015. Taylor & Francis Group eBooks, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/read-online/1949c3db-2b70-4872-9852-2f3cc4fd0ba0/book/pdf?context=ubx. Accessed 17 April 2025.

Sinnerbrink, Robert. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

Image by unknown photographer for Office of War Information, via Wikimedia Commons.

by Oscar Mead

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a reflection not just on grief, but on the illusionary properties of death. Like Bechdel’s life, the book is defined by the presumed suicide of her father. The graphic novel presents its subjects in relation to this monumental event – death especially. Although approached from various angles, death belongs, inevitably, to her father. Bechdel pulls from her life in an endeavor to piece together a complete image of him. Her attempts to understand her father are attempts at untangling the emotional knot that has defined her life. In the process of unveiling some ‘truthful’ depiction of him, Bechdel strays from reality; as he becomes more complex, and she learns more about him, his figure is further eclipsed. In death, her father is simultaneously decoded and disguised. His secrets are posthumously divulged, yet they only add to the intricacy of Bechdel’s interrogation. As she delves deeper, his death becomes the only lens through which she is capable of viewing him. In her impossible task of encapsulating her father, the futility of her attempts at creating his completed image becomes exposed. He becomes retroactively concealed. Death in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home obscures representation; death simultaneously reveals and simplifies the concealed dimensions of Bechdel’s father – ultimately, overriding who he really was.

Death in Bechdel’s Fun Home uncovers revelatory insight into her father, exposing his most private and closely guarded ‘self.’ After her father’s death, Bechdel is able to explore both physical and mental spaces previously barred to her, both in analyzing memories with a new perspective, and through literally searching her father’s belongings. While doing the latter, Bechdel comes across a collection of photographs, including an inappropriate picture of their teenaged male babysitter lying shirtless on a bed in a hotel room: “In fact, the picture is beautiful […] Why am I not properly outraged? Perhaps I identify too well with my father’s illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper.”[1] Although at this moment Bechdel already knows about the nature of her father’s relationship with Roy, she is, perhaps for the first time, seeing him as truly vulnerable. This picture is evidence of not just his clandestine affair, but of the passion behind it. Bechdel immediately recognizes the trace of her father’s “illicit awe”; she can see, exposed to the world, her father immersed in sensuality. The shot shows more than just its dimly lit subject – it shows the angle at which her father appreciated the scene he so delicately enjoyed. More naked than the boy he relishes in, his elation, his unrestrained zeal, his intoxication with freedom is laid bare. In this image, he is wholly and willingly exposed in the private comfort of the hotel room. This picture captures not just a subject (Roy), but a look given by a man temporarily freed from the monotony of his restrained life. Scholar Sara Villamarín-Freire similarly recognizes the insight revealed by the uncovered photograph, but misinterprets its underlying significance. Her essay argues – primarily – that Fun Home, through its visual-textual devices, deconstructs the typical ‘patriarchal father figure’ through its raw depiction of Bechdel’s late father. One of the essay’s pieces of evidence for this claim is the way in which Roy’s portrait affects Bechdel: “In holding the photo and looking at it, Bechdel inhabits her father’s gaze, and thereby becomes a sympathetic witness to her father’s hidden sexuality.”[2] Villamarín-Freire conversely understands the method by which this picture translates its meaning – through embodying Bechdel’s “father’s gaze.”[3] However, if we expand beyond the narrow conclusion that this allows Bechdel to become a “sympathetic witness to her father’s hidden sexuality,”[4] the photograph assumes greater significance. Again, this photograph is so impactful to Bechdel because it exposes not the affair, but the tenderness tied to it. Villamarín-Freire correctly assesses that this shared look allows Bechdel to connect more deeply with her father, but her conclusion is reductive and too focused on the aesthetics of the moment. Bechdel’s “father’s hidden sexuality” is just the catalyst for the greater reveal of his emotion; she is in awe because she is seeing her father without emotional walls, not because he is gay. Their shared ‘gayness’ isn’t the end of the discussion, but the beginning; this glimpse into her father is impactful not because of their shared sexuality, but because she can see that this is true. The revelation is itself momentous while the details of what is revealed are secondary to her father’s vulnerability. Amidst the same collection of photos to which Roy’s portrait belongs, Bechdel finds other unveiled images. She introduces them to the reader first by commenting, “What’s lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself,” before moving on to the actual description of her findings: “He’s wearing a women’s bathing suit. A fraternity prank? But the pose he strikes is not mincing or silly at all. He’s lissome, elegant.”[5] Whereas the picture of Roy indirectly displays her father’s emotion, this photograph of her father in drag presents him assertively. This image has no need for “translation” – it is itself a total encapsulation of a freer, more invigorated version of her father, a seemingly ‘truer’ version of him. He is captured head-on, fully exposed. Only in death is he made so clear. These images could have been unearthed while he was alive, but now, having no agency in their consumption, his emotions lay bare. He cannot combat the clear evidence presented in these photographs, he cannot deny or ‘play off’ what they display. It is the finality of death that truly ends this discussion; all that’s left are the photos, not explanations or ‘cover-ups.’ These pictures are visceral because they cannot be cheapened by lame attempts to re-hide this side of him. Death has nullified his defense; here he is, this is how he felt – there is no rebuttal. This vulnerability could only be exposed after his death, once these pieces of Bechdel’s father – known only to a select few – have been revealed to her. The question then arises: is Bechdel able to complete her desired representation of her father? Absurdly, she cannot. Bearing witness to these new pieces of him does not bring Bechdel clarity, they only further complicate her restoration efforts.

The newly unobstructed pieces of her father exposed by death do not contribute to a veracious account of the man he was; they do not equate to a ‘true’ image of him. In trying to reconcile the many facets of her father, Bechdel incorporates her understanding of his vulnerability into her reconstruction of him. However, the new information she acquires is not illuminating. While coping with the absurdity of her father’s death, Bechdel seeks to explain his willingness to die through his sexuality, writing, “I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”[6] Bechdel’s greater understanding of her father and his sexuality does not explain the depths of his character, but instead opens new pathways for her endless interrogation. These new lines of questioning only feed into Bechdel’s need to understand him; they do not satiate her desperate hunger. By framing his willingness to die through the “sexual shame” that she has uncovered – whether correct or not – she is imposing herself onto him. She is interpreting the bits of him left behind, and in so doing, moving away from truth. Her conclusions may have precedent, but they are arrived at in vain. Peering into his sensual side pulls her further into herself, as opposed to him. Jessie Munton’s metaphysical interrogation of perception in her essay, “How to See Invisible Objects”, dissects this idea. The essay, as its name suggests, focuses on the mechanics of perception and the implications they have on experience. In the first section of the paper, while explaining that experience and perception are linked to time, Munton uses an example reflective of Bechdel’s decoding of her father:

A phrase of music ending in a perfect cadence and one ending in an interrupted cadence may conclude on the very same chord. It can seem as though one’s experience of hearing that final chord differs in the two cases not just in the sense of completion or homecoming that the perfect cadence has […] but in the more basic auditory experience of hearing the notes themselves.[7]

Munton argues that experience is formed by the culmination of several moments surrounding a single subject; the interpretation of an individual ‘snapshot’ of an experience is fundamentally incomplete, or even unfaithful. Bechdel’s construction of her father functions under this same principle. The captured elements of her father act as fragments of the greater ‘experience’ of him – the ‘truthful representation’ she is trying to create. Each new piece of him she uncovers does reveal another ‘snapshot’, but it is impossible to ascertain the greater significance of each fragment in isolation. As Munton’s example demonstrates, without possessing greater context, “one’s experience of hearing that final chord differs”; Bechdel’s findings cannot definitively ‘say’ anything concrete about her father. Applying this understanding of perception, how can any of Bechdel’s conclusions about her father’s supposed “sexual shame” be grounded in reality? They cannot. Without the whole image, the conclusions she draws from any posthumously unearthed ‘snapshot’ are solely based in speculation. They come from herself, not her father. Thus, in attempting to ascertain the motivations of her father’s suicide, Bechdel creates the meaning she wishes to see. A few pages after her hypothesis about “sexual shame”, Bechdel acknowledges, albeit somewhat vaguely, the impact that her interpretation has on the ‘sides’ of her father she is uncovering: “Perhaps my eagerness to claim him as ‘gay’ in the way I’m ‘gay’, as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself – a sort of inverted Oedipal complex.”[8] Bechdel’s desire to “claim” her father’s sexuality is a microcosm of her general interaction with the information she learns through his death. In witnessing his vulnerability, she is not given the answers to her questions, but more perspectives from which to ask. She assumes he is gay and recognizes her bias in doing so. She hasn’t received any absolute evidence, only inclinations – hints that add to the ever-growing portfolio of her father. Villamarín-Freire describes this collection as an “archive” – a fitting term that captures both the methodical and meticulous way Bechdel compiles the puzzle pieces of her father: “However, the archive she assembles cannot speak for Bruce. We have no way (and nor does the author) to gain access to Bruce’s experience or testimony, which leaves a blank space that is filled in by his daughter’s narrative.”[9] Unable to “speak for Bruce”, each photograph, each note left behind, is incapable of telling Bechdel anything ‘true.’ However convincing the narrative she spins may be, her extrapolations of each uncovered archeological find are distorted echoes at best since, as Munton recognizes, a single chord cannot be experienced without its accompanying phrase. The insights Bechdel gains are mutable and subject to differing interpretations. Although she learns more about him, the image she wishes so fervently to see remains opaque, hidden by a multitude of possible meanings. Yet this opacity is not just unaffected by her discoveries but further clouded.

Death, in exposing the vague and interpretable elements of her father, obnubilates his character and distances him from reality. Bechdel’s interpretation of her father creates a narrative – it demands it. The many pieces, the sides of him she unearths, are desperately forged together in an attempt at cohesion. Exposed by his death, and made overtly visible, Bechdel has the vulnerable pieces of the permanently unfinished puzzle that make up her father. Her desire to fit them together – to complete a truthful reconstruction of who he was – overwhelms her ability to see him clearly. As Villamarín-Freire puts it, “Through her act of narrative creation Bechdel takes over the author-creator role, replacing her father as the new master narrator.”[10] Although it seems obvious that Fun Home is about Bechdel’s father, the true focus is on Bechdel herself; her impossible task of wholly representing him necessitates a departure from reality and from him. As she interprets and narrativizes the fragments of her father left behind, she becomes the “master narrator” and overrides his image. Near the beginning of the graphic novel, as Bechdel first speaks of her father’s death, she expresses this sentiment: “It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him.”[11] The insight to which she is now privy does not account for the missing pieces of this puzzle but reshapes the ones she already had. Each memory – each newly discovered secret or confession from her father – can only be seen “retroactively” through the lens of his suicide. The true image of the puzzle is cut away and stretched as she jumbles the pieces together. The resulting scene – her ‘Frankensteined’ vignette – does not satisfy her, and thus she must fill in the gaps. Munton, in analyzing the process of experience, highlights, in a more formal logical sense, the fallibility of perception as it is assaulted by memory: “A view that claims such stimulation is essential for perception is forced to say that our conscious experience flips constantly between moments of seeing and moments of remembering. And yet to the subject these states are functionally and phenomenally indistinguishable.”[12] Applying this interpretation of perception to Bechdel, it becomes clear she operates under Munton’s experiential clause. Bechdel, while not switching between personal memory and perception, is oscillating between her desired narrative and the interpretation of the ‘evidence’ left by her father. Yet, just as in Munton’s example, to Bechdel, “these states are functionally and phenomenally indistinguishable.” The result is the same. Bechdel is producing an image of her father that travels increasingly further from truth; left with only these incomplete pieces, it is impossible for her to fit them together without distorting the final image. A wholly encapsulating and faithful reconstruction of her father is, by necessity, the harmonization of her interpretation and her craving – no such scene can exist with what has been left behind. In one of her many attempts at hiding the stitches, Bechdel attaches her father to a plausible story: “A narrative of injustice, of sexual shame and fear, of life considered expendable. It’s tempting to say that, in fact, this is my father’s story. There’s a certain emotional expedience to claiming him as a tragic victim of homophobia.”[13] Her endeavor to narrativize her father is a response to the incomplete picture of him that remains. To frame him, in this particular example, as a “tragic victim of homophobia”, is to fabricate her own closure. Through Bechdel’s endeavors to complete the image of her father, the futility of the task becomes clear. As Villamarín-Freire asserts, “The archive becomes not a warrant of truth, but rather the exposure of the feverish process by which truth is sought […] as the whole memoir explores how telling the difference between reality and representations of it is a futile enterprise.”[14] Bechdel is barred from truth and so her many attempts at ‘faithfully’ representing her father cannot succeed. Fun Home doesn’t explore the truth of her father, but the “feverish process by which truth is sought” since, in death, Bechdel has lost not only her father but any chance at understanding him. Through her narrativization Bechdel denies this. She clings, desperately, to the idea that through analysis and dedication, she may come to overcome this barrier. However, the reality of the situation is much bleaker than Bechdel can admit. The death of her father forever resigns him to obscurity. Just as how in death he cannot deny his previously hidden passion that is posthumously revealed to his daughter, he also cannot answer her questions. The possibility of explanation has been permanently replaced by his suicide. Left solely with this final act, Bechdel can only ever partially parse her father. Any attempt to complete his image is an exercise in fiction; she will never wholly and faithfully encapsulate who he was.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home understands death. Centered around the suicide of the father of the book’s author and protagonist, Fun Home is framed by loss. Bechdel, in and through this graphic novel, seeks to understand and truthfully represent her father. Traveling non-chronologically through her life, Fun Home uses Bechdel’s feelings and experiences to endeavor to decipher the truth of her father. His suicide reveals elements of himself that become visible only posthumously; his most vulnerable and passionate sides are exposed through previously hidden ‘snapshots’ of his private, and, at times, illicit life. Unable to explain or deny the information contained by these unintended silent confessions, Bechdel’s father becomes ‘falsely’ depicted. Death resigns him to silence, and his daughter to an incomplete unsolvable puzzle. Her only method to fill in the gaps of the unfinished portrait of her father is for Bechdel to stray from reality and truth, to create fictitious cohesion. What option does she have? Left with no context and no explanation, all she can hope to do is compile the incomplete and ununderstood pieces of her father – her reconstructions that are unable to authentically capture the man he was. Death, despite unearthing aspects of her father, ultimately shrouds his image. Death makes Bechdel’s understanding forever impossible.

Endnotes

[1] Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Tragicomic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 100.

[2] Sarah Villamarin-Freire, “Two Ways of Looking at the Father: Sharon Olds’ The Father and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” 425F Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature 27 (July 2022): 179.

[3] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 179.

[4] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 179.

[5] Bechdel, Fun Home, 120.

[6] Bechdel, Fun Home, 228.

[7] Jessie Munton, “How to See Invisible Objects,” Nous 56, no. 2 (2021): 346.

[8] Bechdel, Fun Home, 230.

[9] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 176.

[10] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 176.

[11] Bechdel, Fun Home, 23.

[12] Munton, “Invisible Objects,” 357.

[13] Bechdel, Fun Home, 196.

[14] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 176.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Munton, Jessie. “How to See Invisible Objects.” Nous 56, no. 2 (2021): 343–65.

Villamarin-Freire, Sarah. “Two Ways of Looking at the Father: Sharon Olds’ The Father and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” 425F Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature 27 (July 2022): 83–165.

Image by Andy Mabbett, via Wikimedia Commons.

by Natalie Vakulin

Life-writing is, in a broad sense, any exploration of past life as viewed from the present. This exploration asks existential life questions that possess no answers. The exploratory journey that writers go on in search for these answers provides the reason for not only this form of writing but all writing. Once we understand that this exploration is a goose chase–a search that is either fruitless or pointless–not in the sense that it is useless, but in that it contains no destination, we can better analyse all texts that deal with lived life. Virginia Woolf’s pseudo-biography Orlando is an example of this exploratory goose chase. Spanning a fantastical 300 years and including a transformation from man to woman, Orlando’s life has one constant: their writerly pursuit. The reason Woolf presents for which writers write is the exploration of existential life questions. However, in a mimicry of this exploratory process, Woolf entertains an alternative reason that writers could have for writing: fame. Woolf explores fame through ideas of immortality and obscurity, all the while negating through her exploration that these are the true reasons for writing. Her exploration of fame is deeply founded in historical understanding, and here lies her true argument: Virginia Woolf in her novel Orlando, argues that literary exploration of past life experience, understood through the historical lens of individual past, is a questioning of the meaning of life that has no answers but remains the singular reason for which all writers write. It is necessary to take together the scholarly conversation surrounding life writing in Woolf in order to grasp how it is rooted in temporal experience. Building on the work of a number of writers who have explored Woolf’s engagement with time and temporality, I re-read her image of writings as a “wild goose chase” to emphasize the open-endedness of this aspect of her work.

Orlando is a purposefully explorative text in which Woolf often takes literary meanders to investigate themes in a way that seems to contradict her central arguments. However these explorations are significant, and when viewed as literary experiments from which we can draw meaning, they provide ways through which we can better understand Woolf’s project. One of these apparent red herrings is the overarching theme of fame. Woolf explores fame in terms of immortality, positioning this as the reason for writing. In her subsequent negations that fame is the reason for writing, propounded chiefly through the satirical positioning of obscurity, Woolf presents a significant alternative theme to explore: the importance of history.

Fame in Orlando is initially understood as the immortalizing of a poet through the work that they leave behind when they die. This is presented as an outcome that is dependent on the poet’s individuality. In the family crypt that he visits with morbid obsession, Orlando, reflecting on his ancestor’s lives and deaths, “cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but that this man [the writer Sir Thomas Browne] and his words were immortal” (Woolf 50). This sentence highlights two key components to the immortality argument: that good writers are made immortal through their writing, and that those who are not eternalised return without consequence to the dust from which they came. This latter metaphor of what defines a meaningful life worth remembering is repeated when Orlando, newly transformed into a woman, spends time with the Romani people. The group collectively possesses a sense of historical eternity, “a lineage of such antiquity” that “their ancestors had built the Pyramids centuries before Christ was born” (Woolf 88), which conflicts with Orlando’s individualistic fame-seeking. In order to be immortalized for his work, Orlando as an individual must also be remembered. When Orlando is present, the Romani people feel “whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their hands” (Woolf 87). This response is a recognition that Orlando is pursuing immortal glory through her writing in a very individualistic way. Because of her individualism, Orlando is unable to coexist with the Romani people who only exist eternally as a group and individually have no fame. This distinction of the individual is also significant because of the emphasis on individual life in life writing. Therefore though Woolf will continue on to refute that fame is the reason for writing, her exploration of the individual already points to her grander themes.

Angeliki Spiropoulou in her book chapter “Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando” connects these principles and explains the significance of historical understanding to fame in Orlando. Spiropoulou understands Woolf’s image of fame’s immortalizing function as the glory sought by heroes of antiquity. Her analysis of the character Nick Greene reveals that Woolf continues her exploration of fame by connecting fame-seeking with an idealization of the past and that Woolf begins her refutation by satirising this figure. Spiropoulou writes that in Homeric times, “the hero was ensured ‘immortal fame’ through the song of the poet whose fame, in turn, increased in direct analogy to that of his subject” (Spiropoulou 105). This makes explicit that seeking immortality through fame has been an ancient historic goal for humans. In antiquity, heroes cared less about their lives than they did about the glory their name would receive if they were written into verse. Greene admires this form of fame. A poet and critic, Greene is a comical figure who appears in two different ages, embodying this tension between immortality and glory through his idealisation of the past. Greene “praises the ancients in Elizabethan times and the Elizabethans in Victorian times,” maintaining that “it is always the dead poets who are worthy of admiration” (Spiropoulou 106). Whatever age he is in, the current “art of poetry was dead” (Woolf 53). This reveals that for Greene, the quest for immortality is inspired by a veneration of the past. Greene values the “divine ambition” he calls “La Gloire” (Woolf 54), an obviously classical concept that he believes only the past ages of writers to have possessed . Therefore he represents a longing for a time past along with a quest for immortality. For this, Greene is ridiculed. “He pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first catch his meaning” (Woolf 54). This makes Greene out to be uneducated, or simply incorrect in more than just his French. Woolf also ridicules Green’s hypocrisy; he criticises writers who “are in the pay of booksellers” and write for monetary gain (Woolf 162) while asking for a pension from Orlando. “The materialist motives underlying Greene’s conditional proposition seem to serve Woolf’s satiric demystification of poetic genius” (Spiropoulou 109), writes Spiropoulou. Greene is positioned to represent the desire for immortality through fame, which Orlando at times possesses, but because of the satirical nature of his character, an argument that fame is the reason writers write is undermined.

Woolf continues her critique of fame by positioning it as completely undesirable in the creative process. Early in his his journey, Orlando pauses, and “[in] leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of [Orlando’s] heart their dancing ground… he vowed that he would be the first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name” (Woolf 49). Spiropoulou understands this passage with its heavily feminine coded criticism as a result of Orlando being rejected by the Russian princess Sasha, which Spriropoulou describes as a “transposition of love into ambition” (Spiropoulou 107). This passage, though it describes how Orlando is motivated by fame, simultaneously criticises fame as a strumpet, making a connection between fame seeking and the unfaithful Sasha. “Glory is linked with ill emotions, such as egotism and envy, which are not supposed to belong with art and artists. Here, as in her late works, Woolf seems to place a higher value on obscurity than ambition” (Spiropoulou 110). This is seen when, reeling from Greene’s humiliation of him, Orlando “tore up” his ambition of “conferring of eternal immortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave among laurels and the intangible banners of a people’s reverence perpetually” (Woolf 62). This time, rejection causes Orlando to turn to obscurity. “While fame impedes and constricts […] obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded” (Woolf 62). He resolves to write not for fame, but in obscurity “to please [him]self” (Woolf 61). Having disproved fame as a viable reason for writing, Woolf continues her exploration by pointing her satire at obscurity, ridiculing this as a viable reason for writing as well.

Woolf rejects the deliberate pursuit of obscurity through her representation of Shakespeare, and through how Orlando is unable to stick to his new resolution of working in obscurity. Thinking of writing without fame or glory, Orlando thinks,“Shakespeare must have written like that” (Woolf 62). Spiropoulou explains this passage as follows: “Obscurity emerges as the precondition of great art and an attribute of all great poets” (Spiropoulou 110). And though her argument is astute, she fails to investigate how obscurity too is satirised by Woolf. Woolf uses Shakespeare as a self-contradicting example of how Orlando paradoxically romanticizes the obscure lives of writers he glorifies. Shakespeare was well-known during his lifetime, which overlapped with Orlando’s. Shakespeare is one of Orlando’s “favourite heroes” in the age during which the playwright is “writing or having just written” (Woolf 53). Shakespeare is therefore presented as both obscure and as a household name whose plays are acted out in public (Woolf 35-36). In these examples, while Orlando idolises Shakespeare’s obscurity, Woolf shows that he wasn’t in fact obscure. This is further mocked in the description of the “rather fat, rather shabby man” (Woolf 15) that Orlando glimpses writing in his kitchen. The man is again unnamed but is understood to be Shakespeare. Woolf chooses to describe the man in a neglected light highlighting his obscurity while simultaneously leading readers to know him for Shakespeare. This is another example of the paradox of fame and obscurity that Woolf uses to mock both. Later, having just finished her book, Orlando feels her manuscript “wanted to be read. It must be read.” (Woolf 159) This shows that Orlando was unable to live a life of obscurity and that her idealisation of obscurity was opposed by Woolf.

As seen through Greene’s idealisation of the past and passages in which Orlando explores their idealisation of the past, fame and obscurity are linked to historical understandings of literature. Spiropoulou writes, “Similarly being at odds with his/her time by embodying different temporalities at any one time and opting for obscurity, immortal Orlando offers a historical understanding of every present, connecting it to the past while gesturing to futurity” (Spiropoulou 113). As in the rest of her exploration of fame, Woolf seems to contradict herself here. Spiropoulou quotes a passage in which Orlando thinks, “there is no such thing as [eternal] fame and glory” (Woolf 157). But right before Orlando had been thinking: “future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me with fury” (Woolf 120). These two opposing views cancel each other out, leaving the theme of Orlando’s temporality as the significant take away. It is not instantly obvious from this scene how Orlando’s positioning in her temporal life is significant to her writing. Yet already, from Woolf’s exploration of fame, we have two aspects with which to approach the issue of temporality in Orlando, the individual and the historical understanding of the past.

Tais De Lacerda reads Orlando through the lens of Jean-Paul Sartre in “Life-writing and the Poetics of Temporal Experience in Woolf and Sartre,” exploring how life writing is done through recollection of past experience. Though the article delves largely into the aesthetic constraints of this type of writing, De Lacerda astutely points out that “Writing about life involves taking lived experience as an object” (Lacerda 218). Life writing explores past experiences from the perspective of the present. “Woolf manages to introduce temporality as something experienced, thus providing a valuable contribution to the development of perspectives on human reality” (Lacerda 216). Read through the lens De Lacerda proposes, passages such as “and she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends…she need neither fight her age, or submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself” (Woolf 154) can be understood as a representation of an author’s temporality in terms of the subject they write about, life experience. The last words of this passage also connect to ideas of individuality, a concept carried over from Woolf’s exploration of immortalising the self.

With this consideration of past experience in the writing process, we can understand why Woolf brought us on an exploration of fame as a reason for writing. Fame is not, in Woolf’s understanding, the reason for writing. However, understanding the significance of the individual self and past experience in life-writing is necessary to a complete comprehension of Woolf’s argument that writing is for exploring existential life questions. In the entirety of her novel, Woolf mimics the life writing that she explores by writing a biography, intrinsically an individualistic pursuit, from the perspective of a single day. “And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight.” (Woolf 191) The rest of Orlando’s story has been their past, and for a single moment, the publication of the book on the same day on which it ends, we view the entirety of Orlando’s life from that temporal spot. Orlando is the experienced past that De Lacerda identifies and is like all life writing, a questioning of the meaning of life.

Having come to the conclusion that all life writing is done retrospectively through exploring the past from the present, Woolf explores the meaning of life that writers try to find through their writing by emulating life in literature. Sanja Bahun in her chapter “Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life” investigates the line “Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee” (Woolf 158). Analysing this passage, Bahun draws out how it is through an explorative process of representing life in writing that writers ask and attempt to answer existential questions. In this very line is an emphasis on exploring. Through writing, authors are able to go on a journey asking these questions, but this process has no destination and their questions have no answer. The merit, like Woolf, demonstrates in the entirety of her explorative, experimental text Orlando, lies in the very journey itself.

Orlando’s grappling with how to represent life in writing is a significant part of their character arc and is represented mainly through how they write about nature. The first time that Orlando writes in the text, as a young boy of sixteen, he makes the mistake of looking out the window at the nature he is trying to describe. “After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another” (Woolf 13). Later, he cannot decide if “the sky is blue […] the grass is green” or if “the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas gave let fall from their hair; the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.” Concluding that “both are utterly false,” Orlando “despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is” (Woolf 61). Bahun writes how “when the same trope is revisited in Chapter IV” Orlando “has started writing nature” and the narrator “has not found the answer to the question of what life is” (Bahun 73). There is a difference between the objective truth of nature and the truth that is represented in writing. Orlando up until this latter moment does not know what this truth is and so is unable to articulate nature in their writing. In the moment before she “dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, ‘Done!’” (Woolf 158) she realises the truth she seeks is the answer to the question, what is life?

Orlando has been searching for a deeper truth in her portrayal of nature and as she finishes her book, she discovers that what she has been searching for is the meaning of life. “Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness […] Let us go, then, exploring” (Woolf 158). Orlando realises that the truth she seeks in her writing is the answer to existential life questions which can only be explored through life writing. “Woolf’s narrator goes out to explore the question ‘What is life?’ by interviewing birds” (Bahun 74). “Life, life, life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they don’t know what to say next” (Woolf 158). This passage makes explicit the ideas Bahun drew out in the earlier passage, that writers undertake a journey in search of an answer. Bahun writes Woolf has “The belief that the answer can only be found – and figured in writing – through an exploration, as direct as possible, of the pre-figured, ‘life’ itself”(Bahun 74). Writers explore life in their writing through ideas of past and present because they know that if there is an answer, it is only to be found through exploration.

Woolf plainly states that there is no answer to the question of what is life, instead, she maintains that the exploration in search of this answer is where the merit lies, and that authors will continue this exploration because it is the reason that writers write. “Alas, no answer to the ‘overwhelming question’ has been provided. All this effort seems to have been in vain. Or, has it?”(Bahun 74) asks Bahun. After the writer has gone on their exploration, represented by Woolf as asking the birds and the insects, they return “to the reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is- alas, we don’t know.” (Woolf 158) This reaching for an answer throughout Orlando is represented by the wild goose. “Haunted! … There flies the wild goose … stretched after it. But the goose flies too fast. … always I fling after it words like nets” (Woolf 181) In this paragraph, Woolf creates a vivid image of something that is always just slipping out of your fingers. Orlando’s last words, “It is the goose! […] The wild goose….” followed by the date of Orlando’s publication indicate the impossibility of ever answering the question of the meaning of life, yet this also shows that writers will continue this vocation despite knowing rationally that there can be no answer. Orlando does not stop reaching for the goose, crying out for it even as the book comes to a close.

The wild goose chase that Virginia Woolf takes us on in her novel Orlando is a twisting, often contradictory journey that demonstrates many of the themes she sees writers explore in their writing. Life-writing is taken as a case study on how writers explore the individual through lived experience. Fame is explored as a reason for writing but is then dismissed. The whole exploration mimics the way that writers question life, searching for its meaning. Woolf does not believe that answers to these questions exist, yet, in her novel, she asks them herself showing the necessity of such questions to writing and vice versa. Anyone who explores these themes, whether in life writing or alternative literary exploration, can take from Woolf a deep appreciation of the process. Woolf argues that literary exploration, though externally appearing like a wild goose chase, remains a critical pursuit.

Works Cited

Bahun, Sanja. “‘Let Us Go, Then, Exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life.” Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence. Ed. Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 68–79. Print.

De Lacerda, Tais. “Life-writing and the Poetics of Temporal Experience in Woolf and Sartre.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 44, no. 4 SI, winter 2022, pp. 213+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A735759772/LitRC?u=ubcolumbia&sid=summon&xid=12df914f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.

Spiropoulou, Angeliki. “Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando.” Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence. Ed. Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 104–115. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Edited by Michael H. Whitworth, Oxford University Press, 2015.

Image by Eduardo Balderas, via Unsplash.

by Sofia Alvarado Roa

When one knows the miracle that is the sun’s warmth in contrast to the biting loneliness of the dark, how can one resist the promises and hopefulness that light brings when bound by the unrelenting darkness of reality? Sometimes, when the darkness of reality is too much to bear, one becomes desperate to grasp the light that fantasy provides. In this desperation, one’s stubbornness in forcing fantasy into reality can blind us to the darkness we might bring to our surroundings in the process, as seen in John Grady’s journey from his bleak reality towards his dreams of the cowboy way of life. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses illuminates the path of a young cowboy’s realization of the sacrifices that must be made and the pain that comes with the journey to happiness as he searches for and poisons the promised land where he believes his dreams of “pastoral frontier life” (Gebreen 90) are attainable. Driven by his desire for the light of his fantasies of the Old West amid the darkening reality of the New Age of America, he stubbornly struggles to accept the vast difference between his fantasies and the world’s realities, specifically the gap between his idealized image of the world and its actuality. In doing so, he becomes blind to the damage he brings to the world around him, as seen in the effects of his ignorant pursuit of his ideals with Alejandra. While searching for paradise, John Grady is willing to forcefully create his desired reality from fantasy even if it means “the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower” (McCarthy 282).

Early in the novel, John Grady Cole welcomes the dark that overwhelmingly envelops him. He is clouded by darkness as early as the first page when he visits his grandfather’s corpse in a “black suit” and stands “in the dark glass” (McCarthy 1). His surroundings are all “dimly lit” (McCarthy 1), and he is further wrapped in the “dark and cold” (McCarthy 1) of the outside world. It is apparent that he willfully remains in the shadows as he himself chose to ride “[i]n the evening […] when the shadows were long” (McCarthy 5), and if anyone reached out to pull him out of these shadows, they would be refused, as seen when he sits in his late grandfather’s office:

He leaned and turned off the little brass lamp and sat in the dark […] She came down the stairs and stood in the office doorway and turned on the wall switch light […]
What are you doing? she said.
Settin.
She stood there in her robe for a long time. Then she turned and went back down the hall and up the stairs again. When he heard her door close he got up and turned off the light. (McCarthy 10-11).

John Grady embraces the darkness, or has grown accustomed to it, so much so that even when his mother stands at the doorway, reaching out to him and turning the light on, he shuts it down. His mother seems to notice something is wrong as she “stood there […] for a long time” (11); given his grandfather’s recent passing, she could be inviting him to talk about it, to drag his feelings from the depths of his soul. John Grady blocks any kind of connection that would pull and unravel him from the coils of darkness, answering a simple “Settin.” (11) when she asks what he is doing. John deliberately turns “off the light” (11), thus willfully condemning himself to the emptiness of darkness.

However, it is essential to note that John Grady’s idea of light and dark, good and bad, is the opposite of what the changing world around him deems these to be. The world “that was rushing away and seemed to care [for] nothing” (Morrison 179) embraces the light that modernity brings, while he embraces the darkness of the Old West. When embracing the darkness of the fading reality of the Old West, which becomes his ideal, he is really pursuing the light of this dream rather than accepting the light of modernity. We see the duality of light and dark in the opposing meanings they have for John Grady and others. While his mother sees the sale of the ranch as a new opportunity, he sees it as a loss. Going back to the scene where he sits in the office, John Grady embraces darkness, but it is rather that he is clinging to the light of his distant fantasy. He “sat in the dark” (McCarthy 11) much like his ancestors would have, refusing to keep the artificial light of the “little brass lamp” (McCarthy 11) on. Furthermore, John Grady blocks any kind of connection that would pull him from his stubborn fantasies in his curt answers and by deliberately turning “off the light” (McCarthy 11) his mother offers him both by attempting to connect with him but also by literally turning on the switch light he switches off. Not only are his hopes clouded by the death of his grandfather, but during this time, “the oil industry had a strong position in the cowboy’s land and their way of life was quietly fading.” (Gebreen 97). His maternal grandfather’s death marks not only his “disinheritance” from the “family ranch” but also “his disinheritance from the ancestral ranching dream” (Gebreen 90) as his mother sells the ranch to an oil company. McCarthy “signals the grandfather’s death as the gradual end of the American plains where ranchers sell their lands for oil companies” (Gebreen 98). Modernity and progress that have begun to sweep across “the Old West […] interrupts John Grady’s dream to live the cowboy life of [this] Old West” (Gebreen 91-92). This modernization of San Angelo and the loss of his pastoral dreams through his grandfather’s death bring about a darkness that coils all around him. The possibility of his cowboy fantasy slipping away from his grasp becomes more evident. This despair is symbolized through the imagery like when “he stood in the dark” (McCarthy 3) and then, escaping the candlelight, “walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness […] and he stood there for a long time” (McCarthy 3). John Grady is followed by his dark reality everywhere he goes, and the light of modernity, wherever it is found, does not last long, as he does not desire this light brought to him by others. John Grady rejects modernity and its light again and again. He rose and rode when “it was still dark” (McCarthy 21) and further pulled away from the light brought by symbols of modernity like the headlights of a truck offering him a ride, whose light vanished as it left him in the night, and rode off, taking the light with it. John Grady does this because this light that is offered to him does not shine on the future he dreams of, but rather represents a future that will take him farther away from the cowboy life, ironically darkening his view on his situation. Therefore, he has no interest in accepting or remaining in this particular “light,” which to him is simply more darkness. Refusing to cave in to the wave of unrelenting change storming his life, he too becomes unrelenting in his search for a promised land where his dreams might come true. He does not look for light in the New Age of the oil industry, but instead seeks it out in the ancient light of the “starlit prairie falling away” (McCarthy 11). Ultimately, this disconnect between John Grady and the new world casts a shadow upon his life. It is from this feeling of hopelessness that he decides to seek the answers he is looking for in Mexico. In the US, he has no ranch and no future. So, in blissful ignorance, he chases after this dream with his best friend Rawlins, “ten thousand worlds for the choosing” (30).

As a result of the impending darkness of a modern America due to the gradual erasure of the cowboy, “the solution is to search for a landscape that is […] connected with [John Grady’s] deep desire for a stable, recognizable [cowboy] identity” (Gebreen 92). A displaced John Grady is only bound to be lured by the “south of the border” as it is “the only place remaining of the ranching culture” (Gebreen 93). As opposed to America, Mexico seems to exist in a distant past where the effects of industrialization have not fully seeped into the culture, and they “frequently appear to go back in time as soon as they [reach] the border” (Gebreen 93). This regression is evident not only in the “increasingly more primitive” means of food: “first purchased restaurant food, then canned goods, followed by food offered and prepared by others, to food hunted and cooked by themselves, first a rabbit, then a buck” (Morrison 183), but also in the “vaquero” culture that still lingers. Thus, John Grady successfully finds his promised land and can “bring back [his] vanished heaven […] when [he and Rawlins] get jobs as vaqueros (cowboys)” (Gebreen 94) at Don Hector’s ranch. Yet, there is another factor, in particular, that promises all the light he seeks: that being the heir of John Grady’s own dream, Don Hector’s daughter. Alejandra whose “eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat” (109), is the ultimate representation of light in John Grady’s mind considering that to win her would mean possibly acquiring the ranch and with it, the “ancestral ranching dream” he was “disinherited” (Gebreen 90) of. This is pointed out by Rawlin’s when he asks John Grady if he has “eyes for the spread” (McCarthy 138), meaning the ranch, when they talk about him having “eyes for the daughter”, (McCarthy 137,) meaning Alejandra. This is supported by the multiple times Alejandra acts as a beacon of light in the darkness through imagery, as seen when in the moonlight Alejandra herself was a “pale” vision “like a chrysalis” (141) against the dark depths of the water, “a pool of black” (141). Her symbolism as light is also seen when Rawlins and John Grady lay in the dark and “in [this] darkness” (McCarthy 119), Alejandra’s name is evoked, and she lights his path towards conquering this world “taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands” against the “dark vault overhead” (McCarthy 119). The importance of her role as hope in the despair of reality is further cemented when in John Grady’s darkest time after having killed a man for the first time, he “would not think about Alejandra because he didn’t know what was coming or how bad it would be” (McCarthy 204), instead saving the memory of her in the event of a more dire reality. He knew that there might be something worse to come, so in preparation for that darkness, he saves the brightest light, the memory of Alejandra, so he can have hope to hold onto it if the time comes. Her presence illuminates the darkness of the reality haunting him in both San Angelo and Mexico. Thus, Alejandra and her inheritance of “pastoral frontier life” (Gebreen 90) seduces John Grady as her status would allow him to fulfill his cowboy dreams, she provides him with “a sense of what it means to keep on living and to look forward to being in the world” (Gebreen 96).

Just as “he was the seduced,” he also was “the seducer” (Morisson 179). Stubbornness born out of desperation is represented in the quest for light, as John Grady hurts the people around him due to the forceful way he pursues his dreams of a pastoral life. He does so as “he possesses both a capacity for self-deception, believing that he can achieve the impossible, as well as the charisma of […] to persuade others” in order to “achieve the impossible” (Morrison 189). As is the nature of the duality of light and dark, by bringing others into his fantasy, he himself brings darkness to the people surrounding him. We see this when he corrupts Alejandra, putting her reputation at risk and poisoning her own relationships with her father and Dueña Alfonsa. John Grady seems to be blinded to the glaring differences between his fantasy of Mexico and its reality, and how his unrelenting efforts to turn one into the other are hurtful to others. He often dismisses the hints given through Alejandra’s words, whose deeper meaning highlights his romantic views on the world are not its reality just because he deems it to be, as seen in the following passage, where he claims her to be more beautiful than her friend:

She is very pretty. You will see.
I bet she aint as pretty as you.
Oh my. You must be careful what you say. Besides it is not true. She is prettier.
(McCarthy 125).

John Grady is warned to be “very careful” of not acknowledging reality as “true” ignorantly, simply because the reality of someone else does not align with what he wishes were reality. His naive ideas are also challenged and rejected by Alejandra’s great aunt, Dueña Alfonsa. She herself has witnessed how “the irrationality and senselessness […] of the world are perfectly capable of triumphing over […] idealism.” (Morrison 182), having lived through the violence and bloodshed brought by the revolutionaries of Mexico. She, too, offers her own words of wisdom, stating that: “the world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” (McCarthy 238). Even though John Grady attempts to get on her good side and allow him to keep being with Alejandra, “ultimately [Dueña Alfonsa’s] sympathies do not lie with […] revolutionaries who [subvert] […] [dreams] into a bloody reality” (Morrison 190). Thus, John Grady does not get Dueña Alfonsa’s blessing to carry on his romance with Alejandra, consequently casting a shadow over the light he had found in her. Still, Dueña Alfonsa’s attempted enlightenment meets John Grady’s blind eyes as even after learning of Alejandra’s deal to never see him again in exchange for his freedom, he pursues her once more. By this point, he has “seriously compromised her by alienating her from her father” (Morrison 178-179) and her great aunt. Furthermore, he risks her reputation should the community find out what Don Hector’s daughter has been up to. However, John Grady cares more about his chance at his dream life than Alejandra’s real one. So, he attempts to grasp her once more. Even though John Grady clutches to Alejandra’s light as tightly as he does, in the end he “loses her,” leaving him with the feeling of “abandonment in the world with no place to go” (Gebreen 96). Finally beaten down by reality, he is forced to face the “the chaos and anarchy, the irrationality and senselessness, of the world” (Morrison 182). His Mexican promised land “of false enchantment has been stripped […] of its magic” (Morisson 190) after learning how dark the world can really get, but also from Dueña Alfonsa’s push back against his attempts to remain with Alejandra, which hinder his attempts to replace reality with dreams. Ironically, this stubborn clinging to Alejandra is ultimately what results in him losing her. The desperate attempts to secure his fantasies end up further asserting the darkness of his reality. Now having “experienced the duality of […] nature […]” (Morrison 182), John Grady finally sees his idealized Mexico as a “thin veneer” and “its moral code exposed as distorted and subverted” (Morrison 185). Now that he understands that the reality is that he cannot have Alejandra nor her inheritance of the ancestral dream, as the society in which she lives does not allow her to wed him, the magic of “that land of false enchantment” (185) fades away.

Early on, John Grady seems to carry darkness wherever he goes, and any peek of light, from trains, lamps, or his mother, would vanish as soon as it had come. He chooses to live in the shadows and always “turned off the light” (11). This is because while the world around him sees the modernization of the West as good, to him it represents the erasure of cowboy culture– one that he dreams of living himself. The good light of modernity to others is hopeless darkness to John Grady. As a result, he embarks on a “journey to Mexico is to struggle for a cowboy culture that he wants to preserve […] from fading away” (Gebreen 94). He chooses to follow his light and ultimately “finds what he […] [lost] in America […] [:] his dream of pastoral life at the hacienda working with horses and riding them through the landscape with his friend and falling in love with Alejandra.” (Gebreen 95). Motivated by his longing for the light of his fantasies and their preservation, he refuses to differentiate between his dreams and the world’s realities. This is particularly evident through his obliviousness to the harm his pursuit of ideals causes those around him, as seen in the impact his naive ambitions have on Alejandra. While seeking paradise, John Grady strives to forcefully mould his desired reality from fantasy, even if it entails that “the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower” (McCarthy 282)—a vision ultimately beyond his reach.

Works Cited

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Vintage Books, 1993.

Gebreen, Hayder A.K. “Identity Crisis in Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, Apr. 2016, pp. 90–99, https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.2p.90.

Morrison, Gail Moore. “John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, Revised Edition ed., University Press of Mississippi, 1999, pp. 175–191.