Ah, home. Most of us have one. Mine is located in westside Colorado Springs—a nice little house surrounded by other nice little houses. A park with a baseball diamond and swingset is a couple blocks away. Walgreens and the local pizza joint are just down the hill. My neighbors and I shovel snow in the winter, mow our lawns in the summer and wave to one another when we head off to work.
My neighborhood might not sound much different from yours. These are the sorts of places like these in which we live our lives and raise our kids. We like our neighbors—though, admittedly, we don’t know many of them well.
But what happens when we stop waving to one another and close our doors? What sort of horrific mischief might we be up to? My neighbors seem nice enough, but how am I to know that they’re not, say, Russian spies? Or that they secretly murder people and store them in their bathtubs? Or belong to a sinister cult predicated on a reality show?!
No, our quiet little neighborhoods may not be what they seem. Or, at least, that’s what our television shows are telling us.
This year, a storm of conspiracy-laden programs have snuck into our homes and taken over our TVs, speaking of the unspeakable things potentially burbling underneath America’s suburban surfaces
The Following on Fox deals with a serial killer who orchestrates murders and mayhem from behind his cell walls—somehow convincing everyday Joes and Janes to do his horrible dirty work. CW’s Cult is predicated on a fictional show (called Cult) and its legion of superfans who believe they’re receiving secret messages from the show—messages that tell them to kill or die for some hidden cause. The Americans on FX is a straight-up Cold War thriller, where a nice, suburban man and wife are secretly Soviet agents under deep cover. Just this week, I reviewed A&E’s Bates Motel, yet another show predicated on those disturbing thematic undercurrents flowing underneath a smooth, innocent surface: Norma and Norman Bates, the show’s protagonists, have already killed their first victim and plopped him in a lake. And we’re seeing suggestions that their not the only ones who have horrible things to hide.
These conspiracy-minded shows—shows where things are not as they seem in our nice and friendly neighborhoods—aren’t exactly plowing new ground. Stories of spies next door and killers living in that creepy house up the hill are, in a way, merely variations of some of our darker folk stories and fairy tales—new faces for fears that have haunted us for centuries. Back then, we might tell stories of werewolves or witches—people who we might rub elbows with in the marketplace but who’d transform into monsters with the rise of the moon or perform demonic rituals in the privacy of their homes.
Then, as now, the message is much the same: It’s hard to know who to trust. Danger lurks in unexpected places. We are never, ever, truly safe.
These themes have always been both powerful and popular—and they seem to grow in prominence when we’re pretty nervous about our neighbors.
The 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (where alien pods kill off folks and replicate their bodies) is maybe the most overt “things are not as they seem” type of horror movie. It was made during the heart of the Cold War and McCarthyism, and many experts feel that it reflects the uncertainty most Americans felt at the time—the fear, perhaps, that our friends and neighbors might be Communists … or that they might suspect that we’re the Communists and turn us in.
We’re not so worried about Communism these days, but we still have plenty of worries. Mass shootings have undercut the security we might’ve previously felt in going to a movie or attending school. We wonder, culturally, what makes such atrocities possible: Guns? Video games? Is there a sickness in the culture? We look at the killers, and we wonder how they could do such things: Are they evil? Sick? What is it inside them made them capable of such things?
And then, we examine the killers’ faces: They don’t look much different from folks we see every day. We might’ve seen them in class or standing in a line at Starbucks. We obsessively read about their pasts and realize we’ve known people who acted much that same way. We know people like that now. And so we look around our own worlds and wonder … could that happen here? Does someone who I’ve seen today have that same seed of evil inside? The same predilections? Could I be looking at a killer?
And so television has given us killers to look at: Killers like Norma and Norman Bates, driven to do horrific deeds through circumstance and mental instability. Killers like The Americans, who embrace an ideology that forgives and rewards such things. Killers like those in The Following—led by a charismatic leader to do their terrible deeds. Killers in the Cult, driven to kill through their own entertainment choices.
Perhaps in a few decades, one or two of these shows will be studied by entertainment experts, probed and prodded for insights as to what our national mindset was in the early 21st century. After all, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is studied that way today: Why not?
But for those of us living in these fearful times, these shows seem of dubious help. They don’t offer catharsis. They don’t give us answers. They both pander to our fears, and (for some select viewers) potentially heighten them. They give us new, (albeit often outlandish reasons) to fear our neighbors—the ones whose smiles seem a bit forced or keep a slightly different schedule. We might wonder what they’re up to and why they’ve never gone to a neighborhood barbecue … when the real answer is most likely that no one’s ever asked them.
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