Jump in the Line: Beetlejuice as American Cringe

Look, I didn’t think I had been gearing up to write about the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice, but I’m really seeing that a lot of what I’ve been talking about fit into this movie, and I really must admit that it’s a fun movie. I recommend rewatching it if you get the chance. It’s only an hour and a half long. However, I stand by what I said about the movie previously: it is part of that genre I mentioned and labeled American Cringe. (cover image from “Dead Ink Apparel” https://deadinkapparel.storenvy.com/products/24311235-dont-tread-on-me-chuck)

Whistling the Vagrant Song: A Review of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (Odd Columns, #1)

Set in a time-screwed 1930s – it’s mostly the dust bowl, but you can meet people who live in your future, as far forward as the 1950s and 1960s – Where the Water Tastes Like Wine casts you in the roll of a minion: you lost a card game with a supernatural entity called the Dire Wolf. He has transformed you into a spirit, and sent you to walk across America, starting in Maine, to collect stories.

The Nostalgic, The Uncanny, and The Unheimlich: On ''Over the Garden Wall.'

Despite what I said a while back about History and Nostalgia being opposites (and, don't get me wrong, I largely stand by that) it may be more appropriate to say that nostalgia and the uncanny are entangled antitheses: the former a longing for the past, and the latter an unwelcome intrusion of the past into the present. And if Stranger Things is the apotheosis of nostalgia in television, then I submit that the avatar of the uncanny is the animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall.

The Stranger: Vanishing Hitchhikers and Other Possibilities

The Stranger, the ghostly figure who picks up Seeger and delivers him back to Malpais in episode seven, is an echo or a remix of several figures throughout literary and holy texts. He is, possibly, the most folkloric figure within Perdition's Teeth: more rooted in the American -- and, admittedly, some older -- legends than many of the other characters.

Down The Highway of the Damned: American Gothic

Perdition’s Teeth borrows from many sources — it is consciously formatted as an epic, it draws from Hardboiled and Road Fiction (most obviously Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and — indirectly, Whose Names are Unknown, by Sanora Babb, the woman who did all of the research for both novels.) The one well that Edgar and I kept coming back to is that of regional American Gothic.

North America is a vast continent, spanning thousands of miles — the tag line comes from the distance between Oklahoma City (where the second episode begins, at the chronological beginning of the series) and Goldfield, where the first episode begins in media res. Between these two places, the heroes meet dangers both mundane and fantastic, and it is in this borderland that the gothic thrives — the tension between two poles, and the irreconcilable conflict between them.