Hello, dear readers. My apologies for not updating more consistently. Updates will be coming in the next few days, especially since Part 1 has wrapped. As a side note, since I really do love the show and love thinking about it, if you have the means, please consider donating to them so we can find out more of this strange, amazing universe Jasika Nicole narrates sooner rather than later. Sorry, my darlings, for not updating more regularly. Talk soon. In the mean time, take good care.
Thoughts on violence, what affords safety, and being unable to turn away.
Note: Discussion of violence, particularly gendered violence, and state violence. The trigger warning for the episode applies to this review.
“Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.” - Slavoj Zizek, Violence
I will admit to being a little bit more reluctant to get to this review than to others. Although I think quite a bit about violence, I will say that this episode still managed to shock me. It is uncomfortable to listen to. And that’s the point. While it is hard to discuss this episode, the fact that the violence is both overt and insidious, subtle and shocking, but never spectacular, never makes us a voyeur to our narrator’s encounter, makes this a remarkable depiction.
I’ll say more at a later date about violence. At the moment I’m working from a variety of sources, although most recently it has been the discussion that popped up on the PBS Idea Channel’s episode “What Is Violence?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyitF-6tBu4&feature=em-subs_digest) which draws specifically from Zizek’s Violence in arguing that what violence is, is the removal of choice (of agency). There’s a lot more to be said, and I need to do more reading before I expand more upon it, but suffice to say that what I find to be so remarkable about this depiction is that our narrator is, well, the figurative chicken crossing the road. She’s a chicken. She’s scared, and her agency is removed. We have a triumphant, of sorts, ending in the fact that she finds the strength to fight back, but otherwise she is not equal to the Thistle Man. And she does not have the means to compel authority (the police, masculine authority versus a male antagonist) to work on her behalf to gain power over the Thistle Man. But still she fights, and her fight and the violence done to her is not for the sake of anyone else. It is not to make anyone else feel pain, it is not to galvanize someone else to action. It is not spectacular, not entertaining. And this distinguishes it from a lot of media, not the least of which is Supernatural which I mentioned in the introductory post as being part of this horror/road-trip/fantasy genre. The women, here, will not be fridged. Do not bury your gays.
We start with a double negative. “I’m not not in Kansas, anymore.” Again, not admission of where one is or what one is. A definition in negative, of what one is not. Although this time around it means, “I’m in Kansas, is what I mean.” The definitiveness of the double negative meaning a positive is undone during the Thistle Man’s attack: his teeth are not teeth. They are not fangs. But they are not not fangs. We know what they are not, but not what they are. We know what the Thistle Man is not — he is not human — but we do not know what he is. For the moment, we are not not in Kansas. Which is to say, we’re in Kansas, but we’re traveling, we’re in-between, going from here to there. In Kansas, but not.
Kansas, our narrator says, looks exactly like she thinks it ought to. It is picture perfectly matched to expectation and definition — a stable item within the cultural imagination. There is nothing to see in the grasslands, and there’s a relief in that. A relief when things exactly are what we expect them to be. Unlike the things that are not not, or things that are but also aren’t. Like the foreboding of having someone who is but also isn’t pacing at the back of the truck. And a discovery of nothing, twice, that does not lead to comfort, merely menace.
Menace and anxiety are the main atmospheres of the episode, and as with the depiction of violence, I find the depiction of anxiety within Alice to be particularly good. I’ll have more to say about that in later episodes, but for the moment I’ll say that while the most fantastical elements of Alice draw out the menace of the landscape of the US, the less fantastical draw our attention to the quotidian tensions, sadness, loneliness, and anxieties that may accompany us: “You know that I get scared. It doesn’t stop me from doing what I need to get done, but I’m scared pretty much all the time, just of living, of life, of going on with the day to day.” This also tells so much about the narrator: she is scared almost all the time, so how much fear is left for a vaguely humanoid monster pacing about in the back trailer? She knows fear, she knows about death, she knows about sorrow and waiting and anxiety. It explains why she confronts him. Because she has to — getting up and living is a form of confrontation. So of course she pulls over, of course she confronts him.
The attack itself is visceral, happens “off-screen,” but we hear it. We hear a certain kind of narration of it — shouts, thumps, screams, a siren. We form a narrative before our narrator does. And when language does return, when narrative returns with our narrator’s voice and her words, she promises to “Just tell like it happened.” But already we, as audience, have started to form our own notions about what happened, and her words will be another version of it. There is no way to present it just like it happened because narrative and language are always a kind of choice. A kind of truthfulness without necessarily being objective truth.
To try to prevent the violence she knows is coming, our narrator tries to leverage things that should afford safety — lights, people/crowds (society), and authority. But the Thistle Man is antithetical to life, pure decay in his mouth and his smell, and lacking even the most basic physical attributes of life (even lacking genitalia, the basest means thereby of generating/generation).
But beyond his antithesis to life, what makes the Thistle Man so terrifying is how deeply embedded he is with the authority of the state, how the state enables his violence, and how gendered that structure of power and that violence is. The Thistle Man is not an agent of exceptional violence, but, in fact, an expression of the systematic violence of state structure. Our narrator tries to leverage the authority of the state within the figure of the police officer to try to get the Thistle Man to cease. But, it turns out, as so many women, or just simply non-cis-straight-white-men have discovered, the power of the state is not there to protect them. It is not there to protect her. It protects itself. If the Thistle Man is after her, if some kind of male violence is targeting her, it is because she is asking the wrong questions, it is because she has put herself in danger. The officer cannot help, will not help — the only help she receives is a message: stop asking the wrong questions. Go home. And that, I think, is the true horror of Alice. That while the elements are fantastical, this is the violence and the lack of agency so many have. We, again, are not so far from reality. The nothing-to-seeness of the landscape becomes the willful desire of authority not to see violence. Move along, now, there’s nothing to see here. The policeman doing nothing becomes a compounded violence.
The Thistle Man leaves after delivering his message. His message is both admission and menace — he seems concerned and worried for our narrator when he tells her to go home. It is as if, for a moment, there might be some kind of empathy to appeal to, some kind of emotional foothold that could be exploited. But that is instantly undone when he bares his not-not fangs at her. Whatever you think you might have figured out, or what might have been a moment of emotion cannot be confirmed, and is violently upended. The Thistle Man disappears into the grasslands. Imminent violence becomes the menace of the landscape once again, fading but insistently present, following her out of town, a hovering presence of a police car, and the howls and stomps of the monster in the trailer.
Of course, our narrator, like the chicken crossing the road, like she tells us when she says she’s afraid of most of life, she can’t turn away from what she knows, she can’t go home. Because of who she is but also, because home isn’t a place, it’s a person. It’s Alice. And the Thistle Man knows about Alice. (What it is he knows, or what it is Alice knows is still frustratingly enigmatic, but we’ll let this play out.) And so she keeps going, she keeps chasing: “I’m not going to stop. I can’t go home, Alice. I can only go. I can only go on. And on, and on, and on, until not.” Like the grasses from earlier. Our narrator, too, is a kind of force of nature.
The joke: the summation of the episode. Someone like you, like our narrator, would never cross the road, should never cross the road. Someone like you would never confront a monster in the shadows armed only with a flashlight. And yet, you did. But for the chicken, there’s not a difference between his life before and his life on the other side. He crossed to prove he was the kind of person who could. The fear isn’t gone, you’ve just proven that you can confront it. When you cross the road, cross a line, does what you were all fall away, or are there things, habits, we carry with us? Because you warned her off, now she has to continue. So fuck the Thistle Man. Fuck: a great, crude and guttural Saxon/Germanic originating word, possibly coming from a root meaning “to strike.” Fuck the Thistle Man and keep driving.
Stray observation: I couldn’t figure out how to work the McDonalds’ bit into this recap, but suffice to say I find it to be brilliant and really funny. Considering how the last episode dealt with towns seemingly left behind by time and history, a “historical” McDonalds, when next to nothing in the US feels all that old or historical, and small towns that appear and recede within the distance seemingly just as ahistorical and just as anonymous dovetails with and recalls in interesting ways Charlatan and the last episode.
Next re-cap coming soon. New episode out tonight. Playing catch-up as fast as I can, but since the 3rd episode deals so much and so deeply with violence, I found myself unable to finish up yesterday and today.
I hope everyone is doing okay. Back to spooky, creepy Americana soon. Love in the mean time.
“I think love is cooking together. I think it’s making something with each other, that’s what I think, Alice. I don’t know what you think. Turns out that I didn’t know what you were thinking at all.”
Alice Isn’t Dead spoilers ahead. you have been warned.
I honestly haven’t given it more thought than the spark that hit me as I was listening to the recent chapter, but I have a wild theory about the “Why did the chicken cross the road?” endings. Take it all with a grain of salt since I haven’t looked much into it and have only heard each episode once as it came out.
What if Alice is the chicken? What if these answers are more insight into why she did what she did? Are the answers to the question more messages she left for our Narrator?Is she calling herself a coward (chicken) that knew/saw things she couldn’t return home (one side of the road) from? The chicken seems to always be referred to as female and was I the only one who imagined something along the lines of the Eiffel Tower during the “Imagine a spire. No, bigger.”?
Forgive me if it sounds dumb, but I need to relisten to all the answers we have so far…
The name of the town in the second episode of “Alice isn’t Dead” is Charlatan.
The word is defined by Sadlier Vocab Workshop is
Charlatan: (n.) one who feigns knowledge or ability; a pretender, imposter, or quack
This means the town is obviously fake, not real, not actually their. Its not some place that is only for her like a Nightvale. Its in the her imagination.
Also, it could hint that she thinks Alice is something that she didn’t originally think she was and a completely different person all together
Musings on small towns lost in time, (not) wanting to be found, and cataclysms big and small
“You just are, and you need, and you must, and so you do.” William Faulkner, The Town
The first episode, “Omelet,” introduced us to the inversion of reality as being like a nightmare. The nightmare is, in fact, the reality. Reality is not like it, it is it. Our narrator insists on the validity of her memory of the events, and we believe her. I believe her.
But here comes Charlatan. A con, a charade, a place passed through four times before finally letting go its grasp on the narrator and the narrative. A place frozen in time. A memory. And like a memory revisited at different temporal points, as our narrator encounters Charlatan at different geographical points, the memory, the place, shifts. Time and memory are mapped onto and into space, and what was once innocuous becomes an abject, muddy deluge, then an inferno, then a place of nothing but weeping, before finally, we can leave it. In someways, it loosely calls to mind the process of not just memory, but of grieving.
The word charlatan etymologically comes from a word meaning “to chatter.” It holds connotations of creating (albeit for more nefarious ends), and used to hold more direct associations with swindlers and confidence men and, notably, mediums who would promise communion with the dead. Our narrator “chatters” — chats, really — as she drives, and in doing so reaches out to commune with us, the listener, and connect to the one who isn’t, in fact, dead.
We begin this episode, though, with our driver singing Weezer’s Say It Ain’t So. The emphatic way she sings along gives us more of an image of who she is — it dates her, too, to be of a certain age, to know that song and to belt it out in such a way. It’s so very charming, too, the pleasure of belting out a song on the radio you know intimately well, that you love, or you loved, and you love that you loved it. And Weezer is a fun choice, as they are perceived as having sold out, as somehow being frauds to their own music and genre — charlatans in their own right.
The tone, of course, crackles and shifts, and our narrator tells us, tells Alice, she never loved anyone so much. “From my goddamn gut.” If violence in the last episode was visceral, so, too, here, is love. And Alice shares more than just this visceral connection with the Thistle Man. She, too, lurks in the background of places, just out of the corner of the eye, or the camera lens, but present and asking to be seen. I think she wants to be seen. She wants the narrator to know, even as she wants to keep the narrator safe. Alice leaves traces — enough to form a map and just enough concrete things to cling to. Just enough to build a story around.
And what, exactly, is storytelling? “We describe the shape of the monster that is devouring us. We hope, like a talisman, that our description will provide some shelter against it.” But we aren’t left with answers, only more questions, driven by conspiracies real and imagined, and human beings’ knack for pattern recognition, even when there isn’t a pattern. But there is a pattern here. All of the random, quotidian (in the sense of happening every day), awful, violent events (murders, landslides fires), become somehow part of a larger picture. But one that doesn’t provide security in its growing wholeness — only more mystery. And where the grief group counseling the narrator went to was contained and promised healing, it is only within the uncontained, vastness of the road and continent, sending out shortwave signals into the lonely landscape, that, actually, something might be found and described, if not understood.
This episode introduces the notion that not only does Alice know something (which is why she disappeared), she may be something herself, or hold power over something. Our narrator is shaken, wondering if Charlatan is Alice’s gift to her. Alice is leaving a trail, explaining as best she can. But the only explanation is this: Now you know. Or, no, now you do not know. You no longer have the luxury of being able to contain these excesses, to say that you understand.
We are told three key names: The Cumberland Project, Vector H, and Bay & Creek Shipping. In the midst of the inexplicable, something to hold onto. So let’s enumerate that which clings to them:
Cumberland:
• Cumberland Road: “the first federal road in the United States” according to Merriam-Webster. In other words, the first major highway of the United States in 1811. Now, Route 40 traces it through the northeast.
• The Cumberland Gap: a pass in the Cumberland Mountains (part of the Appalachian Mountains, a section stretching from West Virginia and Virginia to Kentucky and Tennessee ) narrow, near the meeting of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. On the border, and in-between. The pass was of particular import, like the city below, for the movement of settlers in the 19th century westward. Route 25E passed over it, and now goes under it via the Cumberland Gap Tunnel.
• Cumberland, MD: a at one time staging ground for immigration across the United States. Movement of masses, Manifest Destiny, the conquering of a continent.
Vector:
• in epidemiology, the means by which a pathogen spreads. More broadly, just the means by which something happens. In physics, something with magnitude and direction. A force.
• H: A stand-in. A variable. A signifier that connotes but does not transmit meaning.
• h-vector: a mathematical concept. I will freely admit it’s been far, far too long since I last properly studied mathematics (and only through Calculus BC mind you, more than a decade ago) to properly grasp to significance of what an h-vector is. But what I can still glean from a short study, it is a quality a simple geometric object possesses which is invariant. Fundamental invariant. An inherent quality which allows for the simplest expression of the complexity of the object. (Those with more mathematical inclinations are welcome to correct my understanding here.)
Bay & Creek: water, flowing, movement. Water — the means by which we first transported things long distances, besides on foot or by animal labor. Creeks, of course, do not involve shipping, but they flow to larger bodies of water, to rivers, lakes, and bays. Baying — the calling and cries of hounds. Creek — creaking, old, a signal of a weight, of a presence.
But at the moment, these are just words, and connotations, and hopes at making sense of something where we are refused sense.
We are left, then, with the final iteration of the weeping, frozen town of Charlatan. The old man tries to leave with our narrator, points the way out, and she drives, but he does not make it out with her. There is very old grief in this strange, nowhere town. It is the profound grief of the cataclysm. A cataclysm that seems to have already happened, and yet keeps happening — a deluge, an inferno, lurking just below the surface. And who are we to try to make sense of it? We, and our narrator, are beyond it, are excess to it, “not necessary to it.” It is someone else’s, some place else’s, and yet we have been asked to witness.
We end with freedom. And what is the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one (or what we knew of that loved one) if not a freedom that is its own small cataclysm? “You freed me, and I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t want you to. I am more free now than I have ever been, and I am spiraling. I am spiraling across the country.” Our narrator grieves her freedom, and ultimately, refuses it. “I want our lines to cross, even one more time. … You owe me an explanation, and I am going to see that you make good on that. I’m going to hear whatever story you’ve got to tell, and I’m going to hear it from you direct.” But what I think Alice has done with Charlatan is set up the stakes for us — we are spiraling alongside our narrator, but if we think it means we will know the truth of everything by the end, we will have been fooled. A pat explanation would be a charade. Life is more complicated than logical answers — the life our narrator is spiraling in especially so.
What I see between these two, Alice and “I”, is both profound love and profound betrayal. No explanation will set it right, but perhaps in seeking answers, something may happen. Whatever greater cataclysm is coming, perhaps that may be averted. Perhaps.
The week’s chicken joke: I’m firmly in the camp of understanding that reads our narrator as the chicken. A kind of chicken. And in later episodes we’ll get to her narrated lack of confidence, which is belied by the bravery of her actions. After all, it is not a cowardly person who tells her missing wife the promise/threat of “You are not free of me.” We can be chickens, but still, we’re going to cross the road. Because, as Faulkner put it, “you just are, and you need, and you must, and so you do.” So you do.
how dare you give me something unbelievably pointless and road trip related to puzzle out and obsess over and be disappointed by my own inability to complete
This is going to be ‘googling every Ralph’s location that crosses into the range of Joshua Trees in California within a six hour drive of King City and then writing four pages on it’ all over again
There’s a lot more I’m planning to say about the boundary of realism in the show, but suffice to say, as I said in the Part 1, Chapter 1 recap, we aren’t so far from reality as we might want to tell ourselves. An uncomfortable thought (and the origin of horror).
I just realized that the whole concept and literal title of Alice Isn’t Dead is just flat out stating “Our Lesbians are Very Much Alive Look at How Not Dead They Are!” and I honestly trust nightvale productions to keep to that premise and honestly I love it even more now.
A brief note: For the moment, the format of these is not set, and they are more likely to be rambles and re-caps, and have less of an argument than I’d like. This is definitely subject to change as the story and universe of Alice Isn’t Dead expand, and as I figure out what it is, exactly, I want to do with these. In the meantime: a meditation on form, Alice and “I”, and the first encounter with the Thistle Man.
“Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.”
-Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow
So we begin. We begin with “Alice, I…” Alice and I- without whom, there would be no story. And we are told immediately what this story is — it is not a story, it is a road trip. Language and narrative traced onto a map, mapped onto the road.
We are in the space of movement. A movement which will become moving, become momentum, a catapulting forward into a world that exists only in-between, when one is closer to the night sky than to other people, as our narrator remarks.
Here is where we first encounter the Thistle Man. Our narrator is very precisely imprecise about where she meets him: she is at a gas station, which has a diner, but, precisely, she is on the diner side. Imprecisely, she is somewhere around Spokane. She is nowhere, and yet it is all happening now and here.
The Pacific northwest is a particularly significant spot in which to meet a humanoid monster who has already left a trail of bodies. While this is a fictional story, a quick Google search will tell you two things: a) the northwest seems to have a disproportionate number of serial murderers, and b) many of these serial murders (in the northwest and elsewhere) can be tracked along the highway. We are not as far from reality as we may seem. This is the violence that may inhabit these spaces.
The Thistle Man is an uncanny creature of visceral, pathological consumption (both of the omelet and of Earl). He is an upsetting riot of yellowness — nails, filthy shirt, face, and teeth. He calls to mind two other figures in yellow: the low men in yellow coats Ted Brautigan warns Bobby Garfield to be wary of in Stephen King’s novella Low Men in Yellow Coats, and the figure/play of the King in Yellow from Robert W. Chambers’ collection of short stories titled The King in Yellow. (This figure of the King in Yellow was later taken up by H. P. Lovecraft in the figure of Hastur. But that’s slightly getting away from the point.) I trace this image of men in yellow briefly to show, purposefully or not, our Thistle Man has good company in and calls to mind other strange, uncanny, malevolent men in yellow.
As the narrator moves to disclose the nightmare reality she witnessed, she interrupts herself. “Alice, I…” and we are back on the road. The narrator is speaking, still, though, of unnatural things. the uncanny height of the truck, a tower rising from the landscape. “Creepy. Gut creepy,” she says.
It is the road at night, where anything is possible, but upon her decision to chase Alice, she has given up the luxury of imagining strange things are only figments of the nighttime wanderings of the mind on a backroad: “Hm, I guess that’s where myths come from, when the real world looks like something out of a myth.” When the real world has an excess, we ascribe it to myth and the supernatural. The real world, though, such as it is, has its own banal excesses, too. She speaks about her cargo — travel size deodorant. No need for it to exist, except that people will pay for it.
She segues into telling us, well, telling Alice, “I don’t have to explain myself to you. But I will.” Another excess. Why speak — why Alice, why “I”? Because we will listen. And in this space of the backroad at night, what is memory and what is present becomes increasingly indistinct, discontiguous, and the interruptions grow increasingly frenetic. What is real and what is myth becomes blurred, if not the same.
The Thistle Man has come to explain death. He is an embodiment of violence and decomposition — his breath is rotten, “like fruit turning to soil.” He is indifferent to life, and in that antithetical indifference and violence, he is malevolent, and, yes, evil. But to think him as purely, chaotically evil would miss the fact that his murder of Earl is not done for the pleasure of the kill, but to send a message. The Thistle Man’s motivations remain obscured, other than his aim to menace. Without a doubt his story is tied up with Alice’s disappearance, but he is only a part of it. He is a fragment. Like the trees blotting out the indifferent, emptiness of the night sky on the road in the present, in this memory, his and Earl’s bodies blot out the light of the diner. He is a force of indifferent, violent nature. Human, and yet so much more beyond it. An emptiness, like the night sky, becoming a mirror of… something.
And so we are introduced to him, and these forces, perhaps indifferent, perhaps malevolent in their indifference, perhaps, indeed, evil. These forces in the borderlands, in the in-between, “behind the bathrooms at rest stops, in the snack aisle at gas stations, sitting alone at the biggest booths of the smallest roadside bars…”
Why go chasing after any of this? Because, the joke tells us, the dead return. The dead return. The dead return. And through the looking glass, darkly (and chasing after an entirely different Alice), we can begin to see the terrifyingness of the edges and the emptiness, and perhaps find our way through it and account for the return of the dead.
“I will try to tell it in every way I can as I have in all the writing that I have ever done. I am always trying to tell this thing that a space of time is a natural thing for an American to always have inside them as something in which they are continuously moving. Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving and my first real effort to express this thing which is an American thing began in writing The Making of Americans.” - Gertrude Stein
...
“you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving”
That’s where we begin. With moving. Movement.
The roadtrip always seemed to me a peculiarly American genre. The railroad connected one side of the country to the other, but outside of the northeast and major metro areas, no one really travels by rail. Not anymore. It’s by bus, by car, by road. And it doesn’t take very long to end up in the middle of nowhere.
It’s meditative. And it’s terrifying. Less so now with cellphones and well-maintained rest stops, but even with technology and infrastructure that tethers us, a certain kind of otherness, strangeness, queerness, calls out from the horizon. From the border.
What happens when we cross the border? What is it that exists at those edges, and who are we, to find ourselves at them?
This is how I enter Alice Isn’t Dead. The title begins it. It is not telling us what is -- only what is not. There is little to ground us. Only a truck, a radio, a voice. A story.
I plan to write about each episode, and will try to catch up quickly, posting at least once a week. It seems a tad presumptuous to write about it, and write about it in the way I want to write about it, but... that’s what fandom is for.
There’s a comfort in the long roadtrip, and a terror. Finding yourself somewhere and nowhere, and realizing how little you know and how far you’ve come. At least, that’s what rings true to me about Alice.
And, what I love about Alice in particular is the subversion of the genre -- that so often the roadtrip is something undertaken by men. “Straight” men (with their very best male friends), conquering the landscape in some (unintentionally?) farcical re-enactment of manifest destiny. It is violence and search for authenticity and survival. On The Road. The Road. Supernatural. (Perhaps it’s not fair to lump The Road in there, but I think the point stands.) And what Alice does is lay bare in particular the gendered violence of the genre, while also subverting it. It’s a Supernatural without the queer baiting, and without the dead women (Alice isn’t, after all). It’s about movement and travel and searching and, yes, very much so, violence. It is not a spectacular violence. It is a visceral violence that is not worked out on female bodies, but exposed, grappled with, and, perhaps, worked through.
So, that’s where I begin. I hope you find it interesting.
