Some Thoughts on Halloween

Last night I went out to the North End of Boston dressed as Stuff White People Like.  I wore a sweater (#103), a scarf (#97), and an Arcade Fire T-Shirt (#’s 84 and 41).  I had a Whole Foods bag (#48) sticking out of my back pocket.

Some people I ran into thought this was  a really creative idea.  I’m sure plenty of others didn’t get it.  I chose it mostly because I could still dress in relatively normal clothes, and choosing a “clever” or “witty” costume is much more inline with my personality and body type than choosing something “sexy.”  At least at this point in my life, I’m not pulling off a sexy doctor or Aladdin or Kimbo Slice or any other costume designed for big biceps and washboard abs.  Maybe next year I’ll dress up as Ben Gibbard and be a sexy intellect.  That’s probably as sexy as I’m getting.  They don’t have an entry yet, but white people like Death Cab.

Anyways, being out and about in Boston last night meant witnessing a lot of people in costume.  After all, Halloween is Stuff White People Like # 113.

I’ll admit it:  I like Halloween, and have for a long time.  I’ve liked Halloween since long before SWPL was a blog, and since long before “blog” was the acceptably bastardized word that it is now.  But I’ve never liked Halloween for the costumes, which is what the SWPL entry seems to indicate.  The costume is always the stupid/stressful part, in my humble opinion.  It never seems like it’s worth all the trouble.  For me, it’s always been about the imagery, the atmosphere, and the reactions that these things engender.  I like the ghouls and goblins, and I like finding out how people react to them; finding out what people do in the face of them.

I think it comes down to the fact that I’m kind of eternally, fundamentally interested in answering two questions:

1.  What makes me break?

2.  What can people do for and with each other in the face of frightening, unknown situations?

Granted, scary movies, haunted houses, and ghost stories are hardly ideal methods for answering these questions.  Nevertheless, I don’t see Halloween as appealing because I think actually answers these questions; I just think it provides some fun, romanticized discourse on what people are made of, when it comes down to it.  The best films of the horror genre are about relationships deteriorating or strengthening in the face of gore, not about the gore itself; the best haunted houses frighten us not because of whatever unspeakable act actually took place there, but because of the motivations that leave behind the shimmering remnants that haunt them.

What I’m trying to get at is that – while these questions are certainly distinct – they are also both fundamentally about relationships  - the two most important classes of relationships we have:  those with ourselves, and those with others.

All of that said, none of those high-concept ideas really seem to characterize Halloween as we know it in America today.  Today’s Halloween is really just the biggest costume party of the year, and a bunch of idiots dressing up doesn’t seem to count for much.  That is, unless you concede that every costume anyone wears has some kind of underlying psychology.  And if you don’t concede that, you’re the idiot.

The underlying idea here, I suppose, is that costumes are all about getting to be something that you’re not.  Everyone accepts this premise – but it’s not really the point.  Because everyone accepts it, it becomes part of the canvas.  And that allows it to become nothing more than a trope, which in turn plays into the fact that Halloween costumes are never about being something you’re not; they’re always about revealing something about who you are.

By dressing up as Stuff White People Like, I was implying that I was not one of the people that the blog satirizes.  I was making the point that I’m not an affluent, white, educated, Whole-Foods shopping hipster.  Except that on the surface, I am.  All of those descriptors apply to me to some extent, though I’d say that my mindset is pretty damn far from the hipster mindset.  But even that was part of my point in choosing the costume:  it was my attempt to say, “Look, I know this is how I appear.  But this is not me.”

Of course, my attempt to make this point with this particular costume only played into the SWPL stereotype, given that #50 is irony. But not to worry:  I pointed this out on my costume so that all the sexy nurses, sexy policewomen, sexy crime scenes, etc., could see how self-aware and smart I was.

Anyways, I simply want to make the point that there is some kind of underlying thought process behind every costume people choose.  The kind-of-nerdy guy who wears glasses with tape on the bridge wants to make the point that he knows he’s nerdy, which theoretically makes him cool.  The actual nurse who dresses up as a sexy nurse wants to make the point that while she may be smart and successful, she can still get down.  Last night, I saw a guy dressed up as Luigi, but without his brother Mario in sight.  He was repeatedly singing the Super Mario Bros. song like a funeral dirge.  Maybe he’s a post-modern, video-game era Holden Caulfield, except with a green hat.  I even saw one guy dressed up as a cow, and his costume allowed him to shoot liquid out of the anatomically-correct udders.  I’m not totally sure what that one means, but I think it’s sexual in nature.

This is all good fun.  It’s usually really good fun when there is alcohol involved.  But it’s interesting to me because it seems to be contradictory to the fact that in general, given the opportunity, people always choose to hide. The social story of the Internet thus far, for example,  has been that people, given anonymity, will do and say horrible things.  That behavior is certainly revelatory, perhaps in much the same way that a costume choice might be.

There remain, however, two fundamental differences:  firstly, in the case of costumes, the choice of a hiding place is the revelatory action (whereas in the Internet example, all of the revelatory actions are done behind the fascia of the hiding place).  Secondly, choosing a costume and deciding what to reveal about yourself is very much a conscious decision.  When someone says or does something morally murky behind the anonymity of an avatar, I’d argue that it’s often with a mindset that is transfigured by said anonymity, not through any particularly conscious thought (other than “this Youtube video blows”).

There’s a lot of weight in that distinction, because it means that Halloween is a case where people consciously  choose to both acknowledge that we so often wear masks, and allow those masks to mean something, and these are two things that we consciously choose not to do the vast majority of the time.

The reason we typically avoid doing these things is because they tend to show our hand in regards to two questions:

1.  What makes us break?

2.  What can people do for and with each other in the face of frightening, unknown situations?

So there it is.  We’ve come full circle.  I’m not totally sure what it means, though.  It probably means that Halloween really is as cool as I’ve always wanted it to be, even if the reasons are subtle and psychological.  It might mean that fear and anonymity are in some ways intrinsically the same.

I think the one tenable conclusion is that, in some ironic – or perhaps entirely un-ironic – way, the one night a year designated to be about fear gives us a system, comical or contrived though it might be, for answering the questions we usually avoid about relationships – perhaps the most frightening and unknown things we experience.