Lenses of Change: MIDWEST GOTHIC

What is "Midwest Gothic"? Is it just an abandoned house, with white paint chipping and the shutters falling off? Is it the wind, banging back a wooden door and peering into an empty, dark house? Is it a dirty, white sundress with a mason jar, sitting on one knee and a copy of October Country on the other? The way the rocking chair creaks and a black centipede crawls through the floorboards.The way the sunset bleeds into the back of a decrypted farm, built by the granddaddy of some awful boy, who terrorizes you after school. If an Ethel Cain song doesn't answer the question for you, does church not just on a Sunday, but on Wednesday and Friday nights as well, do? Sharing a pew, but touching a living soul, in between the days?

Well, that could be the beginning of a start. It could be a fun, brief feeling one finds on a road trip, but I know its unsettling air and its way of gossip, piercing your stomach like a knife; Growing up in almost-rural Illinois, and more importantly in a very Lutheran and Christian-fundamentalist environment, I got an interesting look at what made the flat lands and dead, withering fields so "gothic", and if was truthful with you, I had to say that there is indeed some romance in them. The awful feeling of watching every person in your life, whose white/beige teeth smile at you, like the staring page of a used bible, there is still comfort in the dread, lingering down like fog on the roads, and the way it reflects that eerie feeling, born and growing in you, each day. The secrets you've collected, like a garland of fingers, pointing back at each other. How nothing is sacred under the eyes of people who saw that your birth. Who watched your first forced confession of love at communion. The other, underneath bleachers.

Something that really stuck with me from watching films like The Devil All The Time(2020) and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?(1993) is that these sullen-eyed, hate-watching-you-from-their-porch communities are not sustainable. These ecosystems, or rather man-made ponds filled with cow shit and mud, are not meant to stand the test of time, but rather survive well enough to watch the next scandal; a crescendo of screaming mothers and desperate, shaking hands on the wheel. Judging eyes and noses sniffing even the most polluted of airs, reaching up high enough to touch the blinking red on the phone tower, avoiding your invitation to lunch. The youth pastor, who gave you your real, first kiss, discourages your going away to college.

So what of these imploding lives? When the town's prettiest girl, dies from drinking too much on the road, does the town become a handful of cults? Does Children of the Corn(1984) foresee the future for all the neighborhood zealots, or does power ring true in the way that AHS: Roanoke(2016) did, disappearing into the night, and leaving the spoiled to rot on their own, punished for not following the ways of corruption that bubbled beneath the town, long before you were born? That this eruption, this popping-the-zit-of-evil, so to say, feels and is inevitable. Like it was created to die or be mourned in a way that takes up the space in the body once used to store/make nightmares. The fear of it, coming again, rippling. Over and over in the well of the psyche, no matter how far you moved away. Or how white the furniture in your apartment is and how great your boyfriend looks in mauve-brown mock necks; It's here. Still.

In the chaos, swirling deep in the arms of decay, there is only firm resilience. And a relief, of knowing that in a pile of bones, there is still you, refusing to fuse yourself in other's desires to capture the concept of your purity, your child wonder, and the personal's erotic, in mason jars for the window sill: a place of graves and bleached flies. A place of echoed violence in the kitchen. A place of heirloom-ed and generational disappointment. A spot definitely not, nor was it really ever, a place to store you. You were not meant to be shelved, canned, or casseroled for your mother's unfulfilled and lonely ladies' bible study bakesales; You are here, to escape. To sit in the back of a truck, and watch your abuser's lungs break, and fail to grab your ankle, as you pass the town's limit sign. To survive, successfully. To live, stubbornly.