Red Solo cups lie akimbo, their shallow brackish contents daring any quicker picker upper to accidentally spill them and make things worse. A light, Tchaikovsky, dusting of snowy powdered sugar coats tabletop surfaces creating a sticky gloss. It’s the morning after Hallowe’en and the real trick is cleaning up from all the commotion! But, like any task, with cleaning a critical thinking opportunity awaits.
What’s the least common Hallowe’en getup? Dumpy domestic house-husband (or wife)? Costumes, like academic disciplines, include an array of stigmatized identities – but not ones that hit too close to home. Instead, it’s a night abundant in fantasy, with wizards, warlocks, dragons, and spiders – and no small number of sexy nurses of assorted genders. Any costume to get a laugh and a spooky imaginary sense of being a much more glamorous or edgy Other to one’s normal self. Like activists professing to be joyful and comedic while they denigrate their interlocutor, Hallowe’en most of all conveys a sense of being something that one isn’t, or would prefer to be but cannot be – by the laws of nature, mores, ethos, or all of the above.
Popular culture polices what gains admittance to the acceptable realm of scary costumes each year and what is a little too realistic for taste. Noteworthy here is that in our times the “mad scientist” in the vein of Back to the Future is on the outs – because any whiff of mental health degradation has rightly become problematic. This is Albertan sociologist Erving Goffman’s stigma process at work: at first a stigma is feared and shunned, and then later is it embraced and ghettoized—made special, but shackled to the external and coercive identification society has strapped onto it. Harvard experts describe how “stigma operates at the micro-level, restricting the well-being of stigmatized individuals”. Basically, a person is born and becomes themself only to find, when entering the snake pit of social interaction, that their version of being human is not at all what’s expected of them by society. It’s like: “be yourself, oh but not like that!”. As a result, “stigma reproduces social inequality through the maintenance of group hierarchies.”
In a sense, though, Hallowe’en allows us to glance over our shoulder and, once the shock and horror subsides, realize that each of us carries a proverbial monkey on our back: the stigma of not being quite as adept at being normal and well-adjusted as we’d like to convey. In silent study, or while cleaning up in a Zen like trance, cathartic truths of self and society further emerge. “America, why are your libraries full of tears?” wailed Ginsberg. Well, laughter, fright, and tears are all ways to release repression and pent-up energy. Perhaps without Hallowe’en society would be even scarier in tangible real ways.
Sanitized though costumes tend to be, (can you imagine a school shooter costume? Better stick with that sexy alien suit!) the sociological reason is clear. Much of history and hate is too real, and too near to hand. Too scary. Topics that don’t seem funny and identities in vogue as present-day pariahs don’t generally fit the bill of a good costume either. Goffmam termed these beyond-the-pale people members of “stigmatized identities”. It’s a category that includes the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the ethnically oppressed, and the politically marginalized. And, despite recent progress, those once termed “sexually deviant”. To this end, Hallowe’en can be said to function as an exercise in collectively taking a deep breath and not taking our identities, and their conformity or weirdness, quite so literally. For those unwilling to play along, a trick awaits: those costumed denizens of Otherness who seek to express our deepest essential drive to be accepted for who we are, rather than for how others wish us to be, exact revenge with toilet paper, silly string, and even spray paint.
In some cases, conscience leads families or communities to divest themselves of the Hallowe’en impulse to identity-erasure. My Mennonite neighbours in the Fraser Valley would hold their kids back from attendance at school on October 31st each year even as the terrors of carcass odor and the sight of decapitated chicken beaks and legs carried aloft by intrepid crows emanated from their chicken factory. Business, unlike pleasure, only takes a day off when the powers that be demand it so—one reason why November 1st is marked not only by a lot of garbage barrels stuffed with party refuse but also a lot of haggard, bleary, faces of folks with no statutory holiday to protect them from the realities of their excess.
Stigmatized identities need neither be full victims nor full heroes. The falling away of the masquerade of normalcy can be liberating for anyone who feels like they don’t quite belong (and maybe that’s all of us). Those who already inhabit the margins can find a delicious irony in realizing that the unlabouring beauty of simply being alive feels most authentic and true when in a recovery mode from a nocturnal evening empire of celebration. Allen Ginsberg captured this Fibonacci symmetry with Jack Kerouac late one afternoon:
“Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you, Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So, I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen,
—We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.”
Perhaps only when we awake from the vision of social unity that makes more sense in viral memes and television commercials than it does in how we actually feel, will we realize the humor in the horror that is the present planet. Despite Hallowe’en bestseller costume lists in clickbait articles we might realize that the dressing-up, the dross and pomp and circumstance of All Hallowed Eves, makes the most sense as a play on the everyday fools errand of belonging, of fitting in, of accepting life as it is sold to us rather than how it really feels deep down in our soulful depths, depths too deep for even a Werewolf’s moonlight to penetrate. In glimpses where the charade of play gives way to the morning-after mess we create, we can glean a sense of what many founders of social theory were after when they spoke of alienation (Karl Marx), authoritarian personalities (Theodor Adorno), devastations wrought on art by mechanical reproduction (Walter Benjamin) and abstract nullities masquerading as productive office workers (Max Weber). When we realize that in the daily toll taken by social belonging, by running the asphalt hamster wheel to and fro even as our winter’s hay store of money and goodwill diminishes by inflation and declining living standards, is more stark and scary than any ghoulish True Crime encounter group series, then, perhaps, we will realize our true vocation as distance education students. Our task, behind the mask, is to uncover the meaning of cultural reality beneath the facade and cover-up, beneath the brave faces put forward by our peers as they attend work by day and therapy by night (and credit counselling in between) – and help imagine a saner, less petrifying and stultifying, way forward within these toxic times. After all, there is nothing wrong with us per se – as Ginsberg with his sunflower scepter proclaimed, “the grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives”.
Truthfully, a stigma, even a mental health diagnosis advertising one’s inner malaise, is an “attribute that is deeply discrediting” in the eyes of society (Goffman). Yet, sure as countless parents point with pride to their offspring’s mental health diagnosis, we can foist our social and emotional scars from challenging life moments as part of what makes us special; enlightened, even, in spite of so many forces seeking to Whack-A-Mole us into rigid identity pigeonholes. It is life, after all, that is interdisciplinary—not our fantasies or imaginary worlds!
And in the meantime, we can clean up the party mess and see the whole disaster zone not as work but as symbolic of the Zeitgest of our culture. And what a horrifying scene! I mean, really!
