Borne & The New Weird

On Borne 

Oh boy... What to say about Vandermeer's Borne? It often filled me with such an intense, visceral, fear where all I could do was look away from the words I was reading. It was surely beyond weird. Music is an important factor in my life; it accompanies me in whatever I do so I chose to listen to Bjork's discography while reading Borne, and she's been pretty weird for a while now.

Vandermeer’s fluid descriptions of Borne's apocalyptic landscape is expansive and at times, confusing, but in all the right ways. Mord’s description can be understood, and the gore associated with his existence is violent and acceptable--I'll get to this later. However, Borne’s description is a bit harder to comprehend but I initially visualized it as a purple sea cucumber with an undulating body. But Rachel notes that Borne may have appeared differently to anyone else, an interesting statement that I felt I had no choice but to believe.
I say that Mord's destruction is "acceptable" for the following reasons. When Rachel describes her first time seeing Mord, it made me realize something about Borne’s worldbuilding. It raises so many questions; the universe of Borne, but I don’t feel I need the answers. I don’t feel confused to the point of being lost, I don’t even desire to know the origins of Mord or the motivations behind the Company. I just want to keep reading; to continue having this odd, Daliesque world described to me so I can have the purest mental image of it. To imagine an unimaginable universe. It is as if Vandermeer doesn’t make any attempt to explain the political details, he just assumes you will agree with the universe’s basic conditions and characters then move on. That is my take on it anyway, and why Mord, a gigantic biological abomination; was generally easy for me to accept in this novel.

Rachel's character is revealed to have a complicated past at the end of the novel. And I can say that it didn't make a difference to how I viewed her as a character. Rachel felt like a vessel to deliver Borne's story, however that is to say that Rachel, and Wick, were not boring. Rachel clearly has a mother-like attachment to Borne that Wick refuses to recognize. Their relationship is oddly loving, especially with the end reveal, and it is complicated. But what else would they have in this hellish landscape if not each other? More so, Rachel delivered descriptions about the outside world aptly, and her descriptions assisted with the general atmosphere, the thick tension, of the novel.

Though vaguely described, Rachel’s assault from the bio-tech children was painful to read because of Vandermeer’s descriptive words and imagery. In this instance, Vandermeer chooses to describe feelings rather than images to evoke feelings, at least I think. After this, Rachel references “the city” as one entity, trying to kill her if it could. It's as if every being in the city operates by the city’s wishes; one singular entity made to destroy Rachel and Wick. This is a really disturbing, but fitting, attitude that is summed up in the following quote: "The city had visited me, to remind me that I meant less than nothing to it, that even the Balcony Cliffs wasn’t safe. That every wire in my head connected to our defenses could be snapped, just like that."
And then Rachel completely dissociates in the third arc of the novel and begins referring to herself as "the ghost" and the reader cannot help but to feel a heavy dread for her fate.

So let's talk about Borne, in Borne. To set the stage, I'd like to admit that I read every line of Borne's dialogue in the voice of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This, in no way, helped the mental stress I experience reading this novel and I have no idea why I did it. Therefore everything Borne said was already creepy, but in my head, it was met with a robotic (but child-like) cadence that I couldn't shake. Borne's acquisition of language was distantly "similar" to Frankenstein's monster, however the process in which Borne absorbs knowledge is more barbaric. This aspect of Borne, his unrelenting intelligence, was his most alarming characteristic. It's fitting that in the end, he was reduced to a house plant that could not speak.
We almost begin to trust Borne as he grows into a "teenager", but then his true nature is revealed when he is caught mimicking Rachel’s appearance. (This revelation gave me chills and I had to look away from the book.) This incident then called back to when Borne said he talks to Wick, he may really mean he speaks with Wick as Rachel. And when Wick speaks with Rachel, is it always really Wick? This distrust is not only felt by Rachel, but also by the reader. Borne later wrestles with his existence (vaguely like Frankenstein's monster) and what he's meant to do. He doesn't want to abandon Rachel and disappoint her. But later, in the field, before he fights Mord, he admits that this is his existence. It's kind of an odd commentary, really. 
   
Overall, Borne has some things to say about humanity, specifically the death aspect, but I don't believe it's the novel's main focus. Rachel says, "To him, on some level I’d never understand...in the end we stood on opposite sides of a vast gulf of incomprehension. Because what was a human being without death?" Borne says this about a dream he had, I feel this is where he began to achieve full sentience, "Because I am dead, I do not know what is on the other side of the door." 

On Under the Skin & Weird Media

We watched Under the Skin, a film I have seen before and feel it is a great example of an unnerving alien-like horror. The visuals it presents are still and voyeuristic, undoubtedly contributing to the overall subtle terror felt while watching it. (I mean... she peels her skin off at the end of the film to reveal a black body before she is burned alive, terrifying.) The main character is detached in any scene where she does not interact with humans, she appears to be observing humanity as she preys on men. Often, she seems interrupted in thought when her prey don't act how she may predict, like a computer she resets and continues.

The imagery presented when the woman has "sex" with her prey is unrelentingly creepy, and leaves the viewer questioning what the moment is meant to truly represent. It feels as though she's gathering something, data or otherwise, and this imagery is used to suggest an alternate space where she absorbs her prey and takes them away from their present universe. This may be further supported by how she responds to the swimmer trying to save the husband and wife, she merely observes. This woman is not meant to function on humanity's rules, and that in itself is unnerving but understandable because she is an alien. She is not expected to follow humanity's expectations or motivations.

Overall, though, the film's preference of style over a supplementary cohesive story left me feeling lost after I watched it. Another film I suggest watching is Enemy in 2013 by Dennis Villenueve which uses dopplegangers to discusses themes of sexuality and psychology torture. It is very uncanny and I feel it covers some of where "weird media" could be heading. Another weird film is Mother! by Darren Aronofsky in 2017. Really, it's just a retelling of some bible stories using heavy allegories and intense horrific imagery. But beyond the plot, the actors and cinematography feels "off" and disturbed.

I think overall, media is moving towards using more unsettling, psychological themes to discuss issues of voyeurism, religion, and racism to focus on making audiences uncomfortable in their current state of existence, which is one of acceptance. We're currently in the process of just accepting that it's okay to be watched 24/7, that it's okay that racism is still happy and alive, etcetera. Black Mirror is a great collection of media that points this out without villainizing all technology and blaming certain generations. I think we're juggling what kind of future we want to have; one where we have freedom but some inconveniences (I'm in this camp) or one where everything is convenient and we're told what to do.

A Wild Sheep Chase: Temporal Themes

I like to listen to Japanese albums while I read, during Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase I listened primarily to the 70's Jazz albums from Ryo Fukui and this album from 1978, how fitting. Murakami uses unsettling, descriptive imagery; like cells being replaced or thoughts being momentary, to drive his core temporal themes. For example, the main character's wife was preoccupied with the concept of cell turnover to explain that the person you were a week ago is technically not the same person you are now and thus you should only focus on people in the now. People you remember have already gone because they are in your memories. More so, no one has a name but they do have titles or attributes that become their "names" such as the woman with the ears or the Sheep Professor or The Chauffeur or the Secretary. Everyone is essentially objectified and I wonder if this is meant to suggest that no one exists. Not to say this story is taking place in a dream or anything, but that the theme of existence vs. not is also represented in the lack of naming characters. There's a commitment when people have names and this surreal theme is supported when Murakami chose not to assign names to characters.

In Japanese media, there are common themes about good vs. evil, or rather lack thereof. Forces with roots in folklore are simply accepted by the general public: benign. Murakami raises some questions about this moral confusion in A Wild Sheep Chase. Through the Secretary, he chooses to put people into two categories: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. It is here where we may imply the sheep's motivations to inhabit the boss and other like-minded people; people who are not mediocre. 
Murakami supports this theme by describing seemingly mundane aspects of life in a stream-of-conscious way through the main character, but with purpose. When the main character drinks or shaves, he tells the reader, as if he's just recording his thoughts in a logbook. But slowly, these mundane aspects of the main character's life become unusual; such as his courtship with the ear woman or his life on the mountain. In each sequence, we become aware that something is not-quite-right through Murakami's alarming, subtle description of the main character's descent into "madness" within these mundane details. Mundanity is supposed to be safe; benign, but Murakami clearly finds something disconcerting to pull from our mundane experiences, and this is why it terrifies us so (or me.) 

To contribute to this benign terror, we, the audience, are always bounced around to the middle of a story or going-ons. We are provided with just enough information, like the dialogue with the main character and his ex wife in the kitchen. Most information is gained from dialogue between characters. There is just enough information given to us to gather who these people are and how they came to be. In other words, the audience is not given enough information to be omniscient, and it bothers readers.

The Junitaki-cho mountain sequence was a series of chapters that disturbed me the most. The anxiety began on the train ride through the historical retelling that the main character read. However, most of this sequence was facilitated by the character of The Sheep Man; I found I was anxious throughout the last half of the novel because of this character. I felt something was deeply wrong. Either The Sheep Man did not exist or this whole chase was in fact, a setup. Then it is revealed, through the mirror, that he is some sort of a hallucination or ghost. Absolutely terrifying. Again, it was terrifying because The Sheep Man was truly benign. Did he ever harm the main character? No. He just spoke and walked funny. He never gave the audience a reason to feel threatened. He just showed up one day at the estate's door, but my god was his existence disturbing and his transition into the Rat even more so.

Sequences and characters; such as the boss' mansion or The Sheep Man, are eerie because they are benign. Sure, there are veiled threats from the Secretary, "It is still the same. For you and for me, there is only whether you find the sheep or not. There are no in-betweens. I am sorry to have to put it this way, but as I have already said, we are taking you up on your proposition. You hold the ball, you had better run for the goal. Even if there turns out not to have been any goal," and that entire discussion became increasingly unsettling and left me hypnotized. But I believe for that reason, because the Secretary is right: there is no goal, but the implication of that was very disconcerting. Characters' motivations are never really known, it's beyond mystery, it's a maze of psychological manipulation that makes this experience terrifying. Everyone, except the audience, runs on this creepy intuition about the main character's actions. Seemingly harmless and meaningless conversations later compound into deeper concepts. The story plays in the landscape of the reader's mind.