One of my projects is to theorize the Spooky. This series explores small pieces of that work, organized around some ephemeral observation from literature, film, (other media), and life. This time we’re looking at the Spooky power present in Strange stylistic allusions. Today we’ll find this Spooky power in… THE CROSSING ZONE.
My basic idea is that the affect I label Spooky is characterized as a zone of possibility. Some locations, structures, or objects hint at the possibility of an otherwise, something unexplored, something displaced from time. Such loci often manifest for me as an allusion with no definite referent, where the feeling comes from the sudden certainty that the locus is pointing to something, despite—or perhaps because—no apparent object of the reference to fill the void the allusion creates. This effect is often triggered in me by literal allusions, such as a tune, meter, phrase, or lyric that seems too vital to have been originally generated in the context it appears in, such as when someone uses archaic diction around the water cooler but the phrase they use is idiomatically unfamiliar, or if the trigger seems stylistically out of place within the dominant modalities of the surrounding medium, such as the frequent parodic visual allusions appearing in pop culture artifacts like The Simpsons.
Even as a child, I felt this, such that my experience of media consumption became an almost spiritual quest to find what lay at the other end of the pointers I’d stumbled across. It carried the same pull as an unexpected and as-of-yet-unexplored turn on a country road: it had to lead somewhere, but all you can see from the main artery is the possibility. That sense of mystery is where I think the Spooky arises.
The example in my own head is the Sesame Street allusion to The Twilight Zone, “The Crossing Zone.” This short contains a competing matrix of signals, some of which produce an experience eerily alien from the vehicle that carries it, while others signal that the production remains very much a part of its vehicle. The irreconcilability of these signals produces an odd sensation, a jarring clash of belongingness and not-belongingness perhaps akin to Mark Fisher’s concept of the Weird, but with a slightly different aspect, one that I might call the Strange. (Fisher would probably still call it the Uncanny).
Note the competing stylistic cues. First, the familiar: we know Gordon. But Gordon is Strange. His face is pointed away from us as the scene begins but as soon as the scene settles he moves his head, as if he’d been frozen, waiting for us (or someone) to yell Action! Contrast this with Sesame Street’s tendency to start the scene in medias res. His hands are clasped in a formal manner that appears awkward in the context of our expectations of his normally genial, familiar person. He leans in an uncharacteristic manner, his lower body blended with shadow. Familiar man does unfamiliar, Strange things. Yet later on in the scene, he does the characteristic Sesame Street head-turn-while-already-looking-at-you as if to emphasize a point being made on screen. Now-strange familiar man does familiar thing. Both are Strange.
Mr. Gordon’s language is likewise odd:
At the end of every street there’s a special place. A place of red lights and green lights. A place where horns honk and cars whiz by. At the stoplight up ahead, you’ve entered The Crossing Zone.
This opening speech by Mr. Gordon always seemed like it had to be highly allusive to me, because it was such a stylistic departure from the normal language of the show. The clues are subtle. The diction isn’t the issue; all of the words are suitably kid-friendly. The difference is in the tense and the voice: “there is a place,” “where horns honk and cars whiz by.” This place is in a somewhat mystical location, because it’s located at the end of “every street”; a concrete location, which must ordinarily have a single, fixed position, is now multiple and every-. Conceptually, this is going to sound odd to a child, and if you think about it, it sounds mystical to an adult too. It is a place of otherness, located in an otherwise; not the place you are now, or the place you can see, but a place of, a place where.
The sentences are also of course fragments, grammatically specious yet free-floating, cumulative modifiers attaching to an as-yet un-specified place that nonetheless must be somewhere. The temporal signals of the utterances are also ambiguous, pointing to some promised habitual-present that isn’t quite here, not quite now, not yet.
Mr. Gordon doesn’t talk like this, but here he is: they are his lips, making his voice, even though the words don’t belong there.
Now for the unfamiliar: the black-and-white format directly contradicts the prevailing visual style of Sesame Street (ordinarily characterized by bright colors), but this new style doesn’t feel accidental or incidental; it contributes directly to the atmosphere that characterizes this not-Sesame Street‘s aesthetic. The visual cues are thus jarring, but jarring for a purpose: the reason that they are intrinsic to what has replaced the expected.
Yet, the soundscape that accompanies this visual mismatch sounds familiar, though deployed toward an end utterly alien. The unmistakable sound of The Twilight Zone’s opening theme is reproduced in Sesame Sound. To someone unfamiliar with The Twilight Zone, this stylistically discordant tune, emotionally connotative of something dark, yet composed of familiar elements, is deeply unsettling. There is a double effect: not only is Sesame Street no longer Sesame Street, but this not-Sesame Street in fact is part of Sesame Street. This something else that has replaced the expected, yet which appears within the frame of the familiar, can only be resolved by the realization that the ruptured aesthetic points to the possibility of an outside-of-Sesame Street.
Indeed, as soon as the segment ends, the expected properties of the frame reassert themselves: bright-red Elmo sings, dances and is bright red again, assuring the viewer that the frame itself has not changed, strengthening the previous unarticulated-yet-felt suspicion that what preceded gave us an unexpected glimpse of an otherwise. The frame becomes a window.
The frame becomes a window
Yet we can’t escape the simultaneous knowledge that the not- is not clearly distinct from the-. The Strange cannot escape the frame entirely. We get a failure of containment; the frame is no longer a window with distinct borders, but a crack through which we can see something that was always already there on the other side, except that the sides have melded into Strangeness, where alien things feel familiar and familiar things are behaving in unfamiliar ways.
Together, these discordances that suggest the presence of allusion, combined with the Strange mixing of the unfamiliar and the familiar in unstable ways, present a scene that leaves us on edge. The affect is anticipatory, but of what we cannot fathom. Now we’re in the vicinity of Fisher’s Eerie.
All of this is to say that Sesame Street is actually a pretty Spooky television show.
See you some other Thursday, everyone. Now go watch some Sesame Street.
