Roger Luckhurst

If you are a male between the ages of 40 and 50 who was raised on movies, you have probably seen The Shining dozens of times. I’ve met so many people like me who have and can recite whole passages from it. As I said to my son a few weeks ago, I could probably watch it, start to finish, at any time. And yet it’s not one of my favorite movies. I love it, I’ve memorized it, but it’s not up there with Raging Bull and Notorious and The Searchers—and it can’t hit the heights hit by show more 2001. But it does exert some kind of strange compelling force on people who love it. As Luckhurst argues, we are pulled into the maze again and again.

The film Room 237 is a complete waste of time; the five conspiracy theorists aren’t crazy enough, and their ideas are as dull as that kid sophomore year who say in your dorm room and asked if the color green he was seeing as the same color green you were seeing. But this BFI essay about The Shining never steers into such boring territory. It’s readable, intelligent, and done with just the right touch. Like the film itself, however, it is never definitive: each section deals with a trope or theme but never goes all the way. For example, Luckhurst argues that the Room 237 sequence is the “navel” of the film and points put some interesting things about how it’s constructed—only to conclude by praising Kubrick for “detaching point of view from any secure ground of identity.” But perhaps this is as far as anyone can go when talking about a film as slippery as this one.

Luckhurst spends the early pages placing The Shining in the context of 1970s and early 1980s horror films. Figures such as the haunted house and the psychic child have a history of their own, a history that Luckhurst traces for the reader. This pays off when he later examines the ways in which the Room 237 sequence reflects the most famous horror scene of all: the shower in Psycho. Now that’s pretty interesting. He also treats the opening shots of the VW bug (followed as if by a demon), Shelly Duvall’s terrific performance (Jack Nicholson gets all the nods but she is just as incredible), and the film’s soundscape. He is very good on the film’s indeterminacies: the “fact” (which I’ve never quite understood) that there could be no window in Ullman’s office, the two Grady girls appearing as twins despite our being told they were two years apart, or that Ullman tells Jack about Charles Grady’s cabin fever but that Jack meets Delbert Grady in the bathroom scene. To Luckhurst, these items contribute the dream landscape of the film, just like the ending photograph of Jack on July 4, 1921. Luckhurst gives the ending its due and notes that it took a week (a week!) for Kubrick to complete that tracking shot into the photograph. Dream or not, the house always wins. show less

Roger Luckhurst, an academic specialising in the subject, has produced a lush coffee table book exploring all aspects of the Gothic genre in a thematic way. I found it immensely useful in helping me to find a few new sources and allowing me to define what it all meant to me.

It is not a chronological history by any means (there are plenty of those on the market) but something that weaves its way between trying to recreate the mood of the Gothic in all its forms and (in a rather contradictory show more way) reveal something of the current academic approach to the subject.

If I have a criticism it is that, by the end, it seems to have become something of a catalogue or an unconventional cultural encyclopedia. The definition of Gothic becomes stretched to its limits to encompass all that the academic imperialism of cultural studies can possibly seize for itself.

Luckhurst strains at times to be inclusive as is the current fashion and to claim as much as possible for the genre. He spreads himself widely (and usefully) to introduce not just literary manifestations but alleged cinematic, folklore, historical and intellectual ones. There is little restraint.

Gothic gets stretched far into Horror. Although Horror's roots are certainly in the genre, it is hard to consider something like John Halkin's 'Slither' or the Godzilla movies as truly Gothic. After all, you would not include all Science Fiction on the basis of its origins in 'Frankenstein'.

Similarly, the current sly academic appropriation of almost any issue into the genre and the moonlighting of academic minds as 'writers' gives us cultural studies and politics masquerading as the Gothic, appropriating the form to provide what is often an anti-Gothic substance.

The whole point of the Gothic is that it derives from the Burkean sublime and from the psychic handling of the irrational (which is why the uncanny is very much part of it). Thinking it out and creating reasoned counter-rationalities to meet current ideological needs is not Gothic.

Anti-colonialism, environmentalism, feminism, transgenderism and so on and so forth use the Gothic but are not Gothic which only stands as an expression of actual primal fears rather than stand-offish implicitly outraged commentary on the problems of social existence.

I took the time to explore the academic world of Gothic studies and found a cottage industry busy applying the Gothic to anything within reach like arms traders looking for small wars and hoping for the big one. Who pays for all this in the age of food banks is worth asking.

So, while a very useful, entertaining and interesting book, a bit of a health warning is due. By trying to be encyclopedic about as much of what the term Gothic can take, Luckhurst has taken us into the expanding territories of academic imperialism and even contemporary ideology.

Having said that, it is sumptuously illustrated. It will give a great deal of dark pleasure. Notwithstanding criticisms, it is a great place to get a grounding in the subject and then go down the highways and byways that may interest you. All in all, good value. show less

The British Library has long since turned entrepreneurial with extensive and relatively cheap collections of classic British crime novels and collections of weird tales. Its science fiction efforts have not paid off so well, possibly because the genre ages far too fast for the general reader.

The cosy mystery set in a nostalgic English past and the frisson of the weird and the occult still appeal, as we know from re-runs of tales of Hercule Poirot and the fashion for folk horror, but the show more dystopianism and clunky technologies of British golden age science fiction much less so.

If the Science Fiction Classics series seems to have died a death (I am glad now that I snapped up three of them), the experiment left behind Luckhurst's literary history of the genre (2017) which is very much above the average for this sort of general guide.

Eight relatively short yet full and well written essays take us chronologically from the precursors of the genre through to the current century in an orderly way that is surprisingly seamless albeit with somewhat eclectic further reading suggestions.

The first half of the story through to the American-dominated Golden Age is well known although there are insights that make the tale fresh. It is the second half that adds most value - the curious dialectic between 'conservative' and 'new wave' forms of science fiction and its unfolding.

Luckhurst's own contribution on the late Victorian and Edwardian era manages to introduce H. Rider Haggard without patronising him which is a rare pleasure nowadays. He succinctly contextualises H. G. Wells and explains why he is important.

Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck also gives us a solid presentation of utopianism and dystopianism in the first half of the twentieth century including pre-Soviet and Soviet Russian attempts to imagine the future under communist ideological conditions.

The following chapter on pulp science fiction, mostly in the US, by Mark Bould is precisely how such history should be done, dealing with issues of war, politics, race, feminism and the market on terms that respect the world of the work rather than imposing anything on that world from today.

If there is a fault to the book it is that editorial direction enabled the subsequent story of ideological wars within post war science fiction to be told well but failed to stop those wars infecting some of the contributions, especially towards the end. Some contributors edged into implied polemic.

Given that the worst offenders are American-based contributors (two of them female academics) then, as a British reader, I came away a little depressed at the insistent over-egging of diversity and the obvious preference for progressive examples of science fiction at the expense of its complexity.

Ideology could be seen triumphing over objectivity. Of course, the final contribution must have the completely unnecessary to us (but necessary to our anxious and troubled university elite) reference to Brexit and 2016 as well as the usual over-excitable references to climate change.

We just have to live with this now, much as older wise heads once had to live with the hegemony of the nonsense of Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century and a pig-headed Marxism in the middle of the last century. But it does become tiresome after a while.

Nevertheless, if Luckhurst is a little lazy in not weeding out these inherent prejudices, and the propensity of one contributor just to list diversity-friendly story lines, he still manages to produce an excellent guide which teaches a lot even while we grit our teeth in places.

Where the book scores is in linking the genre to modes of production - turn of the century periodicals, the fan magazines of the post-war period, the rise of the book and then the blockbuster - as well as to events outside the often closed world of the creators.

Gerry Canavan, who comes under my general definition of 'cause of gritted teeth', nevertheless makes an excellent point in his opening to his contribution that little predicted by science fiction ever actually happened as proposed. Perhaps he should have taken this on board in the rest of his essay.

Science fiction, heavily anglophone in its historical orientation despite attempts to globalise or 'indigenise' it by the diversity crowd, cannot be divorced from its environment. It does not dictate to society but reflects its rebellions, fears and anxieties (liberal) or aspirations (right wing or socialist).

It is also dynamic. Even if it rarely tells us what the world is actually like or going to be like, its attempt to do so can make people behave as if they may have the power to reshape the world on its lines. The cash-fuelled fantasies of Elon Musk can be linked directly to his reading of Heinlein.

Science fiction is thus very important culturally even if it quickly becomes redundant having left behind only a few canonical examples. It is not the truth of the matter but its noble lies and fantasy are culture-shaping. Hence the concern to capture it for any currently prevailing ideology.

The struggles (well explained in this book) between the American version of the 'New Wave' (culturally progressive) and the determined traditionalism of the American Right, economically libertarian and yet militaristic and progressive in a very different sense, are indicative of this.

The British 'New Wave' was more introvert and literary and much less interested in politics but, proportionately, unable to build a large mass base. Here was a common situation where a short period of intense innovation influenced much of what followed but could not sustain itself for long.

At a certain point, we have a synthesis. The passions subside but the struggle meant that, instead of science fiction reflecting a social consensus of reader requirements, it became a matter of self-conscious 'auteurs' and then of attempts to impose an implicit world view that spoke to anxieties.

This has always been a part of science fiction - although Wells became duller the more he became didactic - but the threat of nuclear war and the experience of the individual (which writers tend to accentuate as type) in an age of conformity created the seeds of dissent that became sixties rebellion.

As the decades have rolled on, the politics of identity, especially feminism, and fear of what is now called techno-feudalism and the machines (leading to the hysteria around the coming 'singularity') have driven tales of science fantasy. Eco-fears have now added to the mix.

Cyberpunk remains an excellent case study of a writer with little practical knowledge of what he was writing about (William Gibson) using a fertile imagination to extrapolate reality into a science fantasy that came to define what many people would think was reality or a coming reality.

Still (although you might not know it from this book), not everything is about ideology and anxiety. There are still solid old-fashioned space operas out there as well as thrillers with a strong science fiction coating (Michael Crichton is not mentioned which is odd and yet in character with the book).

We must not make the mistake (as some contributors in this book seem to do) of thinking what science fiction should be and then reading back its story in order to make it what we think it ought to have been. A literary history is useful but science fiction is sociology as much as literature.

Nevertheless this is a worthy and useful addition to the mounting numbers of popular academic books on the genre since Amis and Alldiss had attempted to create the first definitions and canons. There are discoveries and ideas in here. The book is also an easy and relaxed read. show less

An excellent, if slightly peculiar, volume of the series. It improves by leaps and bounds once Luckhurst gets beyond his initial few pages, which detail the literal development of the film and the inspiration for its story. After that, what seems like a straightforward narrative goes a little weird, breaking into segments to examine the Nostromo itself and each member of its crew (counting them down in order of their deaths). This results in a lopsided but remarkably interesting series of show more semi-tangents, from a look at the (potentially meaningless) references to Joseph Conrad, to the uselessness of the presumed masculine protagonist, to a theory that the film is really about Jonesy. Along the way, there are lashings of Kristeva, Freudian symbolism, "corridor anxiety," and a poem.

It's a heady brew, but it's worth it for a number of sideways looks at an already well-documented film. show less