Graveyards of the Living
Suburban Horror in Poltergeist
I flew home to attend a wedding and visit family earlier this month and, with all due respect to my mom’s house and big yard, the suburbs are my vision of Hell. She lives in the endless sprawl south of Seattle, where Burien blends seamlessly into Renton into Kent into Auburn into Federal Way into Fife into Tacoma and so on, forever. Despite the profusion of Douglas Firs that break up the view at least, it’s the most dismal place I’ve ever lived—a totally unwalkable, paved over, inhuman environment suited only for cars.
It’s also, somehow, crushingly boring. Man has remade every inch of the suburban landscape but did such a poor job of replacing nature’s splendor with anything that might appeal to people or be useful at least. One day during the trip Liz and I decided to go to a heavily bastardized Mexican restaurant I have fond memories of with my mom only to discover it was slammed and the wait was untenable. My mom knew a different place she promised was close. Maybe my standards for this sort of thing have been warped living in New York, but I had forgotten that “close” in suburban terms can be like five miles away. We got there by driving up Pac Highway, a despondent drag bordered by countless strip malls, many set well back from the road to provide football fields worth of parking. All this land ruined and not one other restaurant in sight, let alone some other form of entertainment or culture.
I find the suburban landscape unbelievably vile and depressing but on this trip more than anything I found it deeply uncanny. Suburbia is so filled up, dominated by manmade structures and pathology, but simultaneously so empty, saturated with wasted space and a malicious inhospitality that effectively banishes people from the public square—not that the suburbs have squares or downtowns in a meaningful sense—and sequesters them in businesses and their homes. Everywhere is the overwhelming evidence of humanity that itself stays just out of sight. The suburbs are eerie, weird, and, in a word, haunted.
The suburb as we know it was invented in 1947 with the creation of Levittown on Long Island and spread rapidly throughout the 50s, long enough ago to make it the default backdrop in the imagination of American life. City living is thought of as the aberration. Like most ways America thinks of itself, this is backwards of course. The mass suburban migration is one of the greatest shifts in American culture in living memory but remains puzzlingly unexamined. It happened, surely, but few artists seem to have had much interest in interrogating this new world and its attendant accessories and neuroses. (Yes I have seen Blue Velvet—we’ll get to Lynch eventually in another essay.)
So thank god for Steven Spielberg. Born in 1946 and raised for the first ten years of his life in Haddon Township, New Jersey, Spielberg is part of the first generation to grow up in the new suburban world. The evidence is clear in many of his most classic films. As the cinematic prophet of the suburbs, he consistently mined them in his 70s and 80s work as a source of juxtaposition—mundanity versus wonder in E.T., safety versus danger in Jaws, responsibility versus adventure in Close Encounters—but Poltergeist is his clearest articulation of the uncanniness and contradictory nature of his favorite setting. In Poltergeist, Spielberg stops to consider his backdrop, to wonder where it came from and what came before, to wonder if we paved over something foul when the houses were built.
Poltergeist is so great and so well known I’m almost embarrassed to explain its plot but here we go. Our protagonists are the Freelings, a family of five: dad Steven (Craig T. Nelson), mom Diane (JoBeth Williams), oldest daughter Dana, scaredy-cat son Robbie, and youngest daughter Carol Anne. They live in “Phase One” of Cuesta Verde, a housing development still expanding into Phase Four, with Phase Five planned. Steven sells houses for the company building the neighborhood—according to his boss he’s sold $300 million worth of the development, their best salesman. Carol Anne begins hearing voices from static on the tv. Soon chairs are moving on their own. During a storm a portal opens in the children’s closet, sucking Carol Anne into the spirit world. The family enlists paranormal researchers and a medium to rescue her. Eventually Diane crosses through to the other side and brings Carol Anne back. Pretty straightforward and, with one major exception, barely a horror movie—it plays much more in the realm of awe and wonder that Spielberg specialized in.
(Also, the movie’s direction is credited to Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame but the question of who really directed Poltergeist has long been contentious and unsettled; most of what I’m concerned with here is more in the ideas and script of the film and it frankly looks like Spielberg’s work so I’m just going to treat him as the author.)
I’ve focused on the built world of the suburbs but what makes Poltergeist great is the way it portrays and interrogates the psychology that environment creates. It’s also so good at that thing modern movies seem to have completely forgotten how to do, where the introductory scenes before the plot and the haunting kick in are actually interesting and relate to the movie’s main themes. For instance, the early scene where Steven has his buddies over to watch football but the tv keeps switching to a childrens’ show. He explains that his remote and his neighbors’ are on the same frequency or whatever so both remotes effect both tvs. He goes out back to reason with his neighbor over the fence but communication is impossible. “My kids want to watch tv,” the neighbor says flatly, and that’s that. Both resort to pettily switching the channel back and forth from within their homes, growing enraged at a distance. In that sequence the film gives us our baseline for understanding its world and what Spielberg is worried about: in the atomized world of suburbia, communication is impossible, your neighbors hate you, technology is the universal mediator, and screens are coming to dominate our homes and minds.
From its opening moments Poltergeist is unrelenting about communicative breakdown and the beguiling role technology promises it can play in restoring it. The film begins with Steven asleep in front of the tv as the network signoff footage of flags and soldiers—“It’s about America!” Spielberg is screaming—cuts to static. Carol Anne wanders downstairs, growing entranced by the white noise. No words have been spoken yet. Then: “Hello?” A question, like she’s answering the phone. “I can’t hear you!” A connection has been made but it’s a poor one. The spirit world desperately needs to deliver a message but it’s not getting through. This plays out between characters over and over. Carol Anne later gets a call on her play phone (we know it’s the ghosts) that she says is for her dad. He tells her to take a message. When Diane tries to ask Carol Anne about her strange behavior she chooses a bad moment of crosstalk at breakfast; eventually all three kids descend into senseless chanting and mimicry.
Meanwhile, the tvs are always on. The house has three: in the living room, in the master bedroom, and a small countertop unit in the kitchen. When Diane catches Carol Anne staring into more static with her nose inches from the kitchen unit’s screen, she admonishes her that she’ll ruin her eyes. Then, in an incredible punchline, instead of turning it off or chasing her away, she just changes the channel, to what looks like a war movie. Should be fine for a six year old!
In another of my favorite sequences, after Carol Anne has been taken, the family tries to speak to her across the dimensions. Diane says “I guess I’ll call her,” an oddly anodyne formulation for what she’s trying to do. It’s impossible to convey in text but the lilting tone she uses when she says, “Carol Anne, it’s Mommy, sweetheart. We want to talk to you,” can only be described as phone voice. Facing the unfathomable and supernatural, the characters retreat to the conventions of the mundane.
Were this all the movie had to say it would be a competent if unspectacular use of genre to comment on certain social developments circa 1982. Instead the movie ascends to greatness just over halfway through when Steven’s boss, Mr. Teague, invites him out for a walk. They climb up the hill to look out on the housing development, unbuilt lots below them. It’s a standout bit of direction—the camera tracks along a fence and eventually pulls back to reveal gravestones on the other side. The parallelism between the graves and the lots is unmistakable.
Teague reveals that the entire valley used to be a cemetery before the company relocated it. (When corpses begin popping out of the ground late in the film it becomes clear the company moved the markers but didn’t bother with the bodies.) Steven is appalled but Teague doesn’t see the problem. “It’s not an ancient tribal burial ground,” he says. “It’s just… people.” That appears to be true—the most legible headstone in the shot reads “Becky, born September 3, 1903; died December 6, 1955.” No last name.
There’s something profound being said here about America, our ability to remember history, and our relationship to our surroundings. How did the company get away with building over a graveyard? Why doesn’t anyone remember what used to be here? Where did the people buying houses come from? If it were an ancient Indian burial ground, Teague’s actions would be an atrocity but there would be a historical throughline, an understanding of what’s been desecrated to make way for the new. Instead, there’s this incredible gap, a complete oblivion separating this place from its own past. Generations of white people came and lived and died and were buried—some less than 30 years prior—and now are utterly forgotten and anonymous, unknown to the latest batch of interlopers who will live heedlessly above them.
Are screens and phones the source of our distraction and inability to communicate meaningfully? Is it the suburbs, with its frenzy for “private” property amid prying eyes and dearth of public spaces? Or is this the American experience? A state of mind trapped in an eternal present, unable to connect with anything that came before because what came before has been bulldozed and cast out, leaving only empty spaces behind.
As Steven and Teague look out over the valley, we see hills on the other side. They’re perfectly anonymous as well, landscapes purged of identity or history, “virgin” territory ripe for settlement. Teague’s comment forces us to think about Native Americans and how they might have seen this land. Mount Rushmore comes to mind, which was originally a holy site of the Lakota Sioux called Six Grandfathers before the government blasted it to pieces. It’s a truism that America went mad when it ran out of frontier but Spielberg sees past this idea. By casting aside history and stripping the land of any distinguishing characteristics, we’ve created the frontier par excellence, one that’s endlessly renewable.
It’s not exactly novel to read horror movies as expressions of the cultural anxieties of their times but Poltergeist stands out because the battles it picks are ones we uniformly lost. Screens, it goes without saying, have proliferated nightmarishly. When Steven tosses the tv out of the motel room in the film’s closing shot, it’s good for a laugh. It’s a half measure—a personal protest against overwhelming opposition. Americans are more isolated and hostile than ever. Our natural environment is in crisis and our built environments are actively hostile to human life. It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing these problems as problems of our current moment. Poltergeist is a reminder that all of these are deeply embedded in our history if we can access it, and a reminder of the forces that constantly stand in our way.
If your house is sinking, pull up a floorboard or start digging in the yard. You’ll get answers, though you may not like what you find.
