(The decade ends in 7 days and I find myself occupied by intrusive reflective tendencies. The following amount to something between a blood stain and shrapnel pulled from the wound)
Elsewhere I wrote about similar 90s children's shows and their secret philosophical aspects. Here it would be tempting to do the same by bringing up Kant in relation to the synthesis of both real and fantasy and inside / outside via imagination, a dual synthesis which seems embodied not only in the show's premise but also its name (i.e. 'thinking outside of the box' makes explicit that thought is always with its limits; to think 'outside' the box means to reject the typical way of doing something for a way that stretches the limits of thought). But as tempting as it is we will only mention it here as a tease before moving onto to something else...
2: Something else: The adults in Outside the Box seem not only to hold a space for the children that is warm, welcoming and conducive to emotional and cognitive learning, but also provide a feeling of being seen and heard that validates a child's deep seated needs - an experience I long for. That is, while watching I couldn't help but morosely think to myself 'I wish my father could've been like this' which instantly reminded me of a recent experience - I am walking in the city with my partner. A father and his son are walking nearby. He stops his son and takes a selfie with him. The two laugh joyously. I feel a strange pang of something cut through my cold veneer for but a moment and I turn to my partner - 'It must be nice to have a dad.'
I remember this and then snap back to the here-and-now, back to Outside the Box. I watch and think 'this is a child's wish for a wonderful home with a wonderful mother and father, but here I am just waiting for the film reel to melt and the monster to climb through the hole in the screen.'
Above: 'grindhouse' (horror genre) film burn effect; Below: repressed Kantian monster (thing in IT self) breaches the representation / real divide - the hyperreal - the hyperhorror
3:19Horr90rs: When I watch Out of the Box I am waiting for the fantasy to melt away and for the underlying trauma of the real to expose itself. I am waiting for the horror.
Shows like Out of the Box resonate with other shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. The latter ran from 1968 to 2001 and, as far as I am concerned, set the standard for children's learning programming.
Also in the 90s, specifically on their second album Life is Peachy (1996), Korn - who all did copious amounts of meth in the 90s - releases the song Mr. Rogers that perfectly encapsulates this repressed horror latent in the child's fantasy realm.
Jonathan Davis (who on the debut album sings about his father raping him), alternating between raging yells, creeping squawks, and haunting drones, sings
"Fred, you told me everybody was my neighbor
They took advantage of me, you let them take their turns hitting me
I wish I would have never watched you
You really made my childhood a failure
What a fucking neighbor
I hate you
Be my neighbor
This fucking hatred I feel
This fucking pain that I feel
My childhood is gone"
The terror of discovering your parents - the ones who are supposed to to be close to you - are estranged from you, the pain of trusting strangers, being mistreated by them, the penetration of the horrific real into the child's fantasy of the well meaning, warm, learning community of like-minded stranger (the liberal utopia?) - the melting of the fantasy home-family movie as the monster crawls through the hole in the film - are all captured here not only by the lyrics but also the sonic structure of the song with its droning melodic introduction interrupted by seemingly out of place low tuned staccato slams followed by eerie guitar riffs and staticy phasored noises.
It is at this point I am reminded of Mark Fisher's approach to music and hauntology, Xenogothic's recent talk of his history of adoption and his previous talk of writing about 90s Nu Metal, but also Nick Land's text 'A Dirty Joke:'
"...the sacred substance amphetamine...After perhaps a year of fanatical abuse it [Nick referring to himself in a completely dehumanized way] was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane...On one occasion...a car being driven by the sister of its thing (the ruin). It was night, on a motorway. The journey took several hours. During the previous night, Christmas Eve, it had followed its usual course into fanatically prolonged artificial insomnia. It had spent the time devoted to futile 'writing' practices - it still pretended to be 'getting somewhere' and was buoyant with ardent purpose...It was accompanied to the early hours by a repetitive refrain 'from next door' - a mediocre but plausible rock song whose insistent lyric circled around the words: "Going to hell." ... In the car it listened to the radio for the whole journey. Each song was different, the genres varied, the quality seemingly above average, the themes tending to the morbid. "This is a cool radio station," it said to its sister. "The radio isn't on," its sister replied, concerned. Vauung learnt that the ruin's unconscious contained an entire pop industry...Nothing more was said about it. Why upset your family?"I think of this text because in its entirety it captures and induces in me a deep, unrelenting, inarticulate sadness. Not a sadness that is a mourning or a wishing for change, but a complete renunciatory sadness that borders on eroticism. A coming to grips with the raped world. A let down. Though originally published somewhere between 2005 and 2007, it appears as the last text in Fanged Noumena which plays perfectly into this let down feeling in that Fanged Noumena is a trip that continually picks up speed as it moves from Land's rather tame early academic texts to his full blown strange and schizoid diagrammatic rants; its a mania and escalates into increasing psychosis until the mania hits the roof, the meth high dies, and the crash sets in.
2019 is a crash.
2020...?
(My energy drink is wearing off so I am trailing out...)
