Anne of Oxford Street

  [Trying to escape the past; image:  Bloody Disgusting ] Ti West’s homage to '70s exploitation cinema succeeds in mastering the key technique of absorbing historical fiction: depicting a deeper past in contrast to the period in which it is set, thereby making the setting appear modern, contemporary, and present . The past creeps closer. This ability to evoke an era, to touch history, is mostly accomplished with set design. While coeval events are separated by a simple split screen, the split between past and present is made spatially: inside the old house is a deep past, and outside the old house it is modern times. The house is so convincing as a portal to another time that I am reminded of visiting the house my father grew up in before it was torn down: dark and oppressive with the weight of the previous century, cluttered with dusty brack-a-brac. Full of dust and objects that seem layered in it, the old dark house is a time capsule that sucks the characters into history an...

The house was haunted. Every once in a while, I would see the previous inhabitants. The people, who seemed to be a family, wore clothes I would estimate to belong to the 1880s or 90s. They would appear and disappear like a hallucination, creeping in at the edge of my field of vision. Sometimes I would only catch a glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye. Over time, they lingered and became more visible, more real. They were doing ordinary things: moving about, opening drawers, discussing mundane, everyday matters. Not everyone who entered the house experienced the haunting, but if they did, it could be dangerous. Apparently, I’m very susceptible to these things. There was danger in paying too much attention to the ghosts. If you interacted with them, they could take over your mind. If you connected with them too much, for too long, you could get sucked into their world and lose yourself. You could become one of them. The danger increased each time I made contact. The rule of the ho...

Elon Musk, his family, and his fans, are all fond of using the phrase “doing good things for humanity” (or some variation thereof) to describe Musk’s business activities. This is ridiculous enough – claiming that by becoming ever richer, Musk is advancing civilization. But, as “History Lives in Us,” Musk’s apparently futuristic worldview – one where he must gain riches in technologically advanced ways, impregnate many women (also using the latest technology), and colonize other planets – is a direct descendant of late-Victorian Imperialism. This isn’t surprising, given that Musk comes from a wealthy white South African dynasty. Every time I hear or read the phrase “doing good things for humanity” to describe Musk’s corporate Imperialism, I think of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, “The White Man’s Burden.” The poem’s title became shorthand for its message: that white British men were responsible for civilizing the world, that British Imperialism was a force for positive change in the ...

Popular culture presents history as a series of technological improvements and corporate powers as heroic improvers of society. The stories historians tell are often less simplistic, but also, strangely, less likely to be believed. Education occupies an uneasy place in North American culture, and this is why history itself, as an academic discipline, is a central preoccupation of Severance. In episode 1, at the anti-dinner party hosted by his sister and brother-in-law, we learn that the protagonist is himself a historian of WW1 and a former professor. This scene is a painful reminder of our collective lack of historical sense, and of the reduction of general education in history to rote facts and interesting anecdotes with no real value to our current moment except to amuse ourselves. (image from Metawitches ) Upon learning of Mark’s area of expertise, a guest attempts to starts a conversation about it. Guest: Oh, okay. Well, I got one for you. I was just reading this think piec...

  So much “productivity hack” advice involves making the bodies of labourers – or “human resources” – streamlined for efficiency. Women’s bodies, of course, are notoriously difficult to control, as well as essential to reproducing the labour pool. [And I write this in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision to open the nation’s wombs for business.]  Despite his relatively progressive ideals,  Twain  – like so many 19th century writers  – depicts female sexuality in The Gilded Age as naturally suited to support patrilineage; any feminine unchastity threatening this organizational system is eliminated (at least in fiction) with the erring female's suicide.  Margaret Atwood famously claimed that she hadn’t put anything into The Handmaid's Tale that couldn’t be found in history, and the writers of Severance could easily say the same, especially when it comes to its depiction of reproductive issues. After all, wealthy women in the not-so-distance past...

Such reads an engraved inscription in “The Perpetuity Wing,” a museum of the history of Lumen, the omnipotent corporate power that rules over the fictional world of Severance . It’s a truism that winners write the history books; not only winners of wars fought on battlefields with formal rules, but – what’s easier to forget – winners of colder wars. After all, in this world and in the parallel reality of Severance , popular American history is told from the point of view of major corporations. Some of the numerous ways this happens will be covered in future posts, but in this three-part series, I focus on the popular history of work and Lumen’s industrial aristocrats, the Eagan family. (Image from Metawitches ) Lumen’s founder, Kier Eagan, a gilded age captain of industry, depicted as a self-made man, with an image somewhat like Andrew Carnegie, fits the Horatio Alger model of virtue made rich. The imagery of the period, including didactic history painting favoured to depict nation b...