House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
Recommended by Geoff
Watch this. It’s the first
installment of Marble Hornets.
Found footage and
‘fakelore’ is nothing new in horror films: from Cannibal Holocaust to REC,
badly popping, disordered and scratched visuals tell ambiguous stories of
missing protagonists. What Marble Hornets
did differently, however, was to spin out the story over months, years (it’s
still going); releasing tiny fragments on the internet, often of footage that
made no stand-alone or even contextual sense. Crucially and inventively, Marble Hornets utilised a pre-existing myth
– of the ‘Slenderman’ – that was an internet-created sensation in itself.
I had thought Marble Hornets was influenced by the
usual found footage canon. I now think it is primarily indebted to House Of
Leaves and the film that book is
about, The Navidson Record.
The author of House Of
Leaves – not, in fact, Danielewski, but a mysterious (and deceased) man,
Zampanò – spent years consumed by The
Navidson Record. He has clearly watched the film an unhealthy number of times, studied it frame by frame, read all
of the copious amounts of academic writing on it, and dedicated every available
millimetre of his mental space to its meaning. On one level, House Of
Leaves is the document of one man’s obsession.
The
Navidson Record depicts the rural Virginia house of Will Navidson, photojournalist, and Karen
Green, former model. In summer 1990, the two, along with their children, go to
a wedding in Seattle. When they return, something has changed. Their house defies the laws of physics and sprouts new
closets, rooms, corridors, halls – all the while looking exactly the same from
the outside. The film, originally passed around as a series of shorts before
being pulled together for theatrical release, is about Will Navidson exploring
his new (and as it turns out, rather violent and vindictive) internal property
space.
It sounds like a good film, up my street
in a The Stone Tape-meets-Ring kind of way, but why should Zampanò write this book, full of minutely-detailed
criticism on it? And why should Geoff recommend it to me? Let us deal with the
latter first.
I’ve known Geoff for a good few years;
he’s another Sheffield bud of mine. In the early days of our friendship he did
me a great service (although the general public may not agree) – he helped me fall
for Twitter. While I was all ‘this is a load of shite, what on earth do people
get out of it?’, he convinced me it was worth a decent stab, gave me hints on
how to use it properly, and sent me a big list of people to follow. I’ve been
an addict ever since. If you ‘do’ Twitter, Geoff’s here, and he’s ace.
Like many of my favourite people, he’s
big into music. Our tastes have a few overlap points – he recently loaned me
the Crass back catalogue, which hit the spot, I can tell you – but often
they’re amusingly disparate. A conversation a couple of weeks back:
‘I’m going to see Ghost soon,’ said
Geoff.
‘Wow!
I had no idea they were touring at the moment. Are there tickets left? Can
I come?’
‘You like Ghost?’
‘Yeah, love them!’
‘Really?’
I meant this Ghost:
He meant this Ghost:
What we do have in common music-wise,
however, is a soft spot for lovely packaging. And House Of Leaves, too – subtitled ‘The Remastered Full-Color
Edition’ – is a thing of beauty. It is a huge hardback, with delicious creamy
pages, illustrations, and awash with fonts (plus every incidence of the word ‘house’ is coloured blue)… simply exquisite.
So why should a work of film criticism
be so lavish? And why did this movie grip Zampanò
so? After all, I used to watch Rosemary’s
Baby every day, but I still found time to go to work and enjoy stable
mental health. Zampanò
considers.
In what remains the most controversial aspect of The Haven-Slocum
Theory, the concluding paragraphs claim that people not even directly associated
with the events on Ash Tree Lane have been affected. […] An even greater number
of people dwelling on The Navidson Record
have shown an increase in obsessiveness, insomnia, and incoherence.
By this point you may be thinking, ‘why
haven’t I heard of this film?’
Don’t worry about your cultural capital.
The Navidson Record doesn’t exist. Or
does it?
If you’re my kind of age and you studied
English Literature at university, you almost certainly covered ‘theories of the
text’: semiotics, ideological state apparatuses, death of the author,
poststructuralism etc etc etc. If you’ve ever heard the word ‘panoptican’, well
hello there, fellow traveller. Mark Z. Danielewski, through the mind-melting
fictive structure that is House Of Leaves, creates layers upon layers of
possible authenticity: his own, Navidson, Zampanò,
Johnny Truant (who finds and annotates Zampanò’s
manuscript) and the shadowy, impassive Editors who occasionally interject, too.
He often mocks the plethora of tenuous hypotheses that ‘texts’ are forced
through.
Though
not the first to make the comparison, Eta Ruccalla’s treatment of Will &
Tom as contemporary Esau & Jacob has become the academic standard. […]
Incredible as it may seem, Ruccalla’s nine-hundred page book is not one page
too long.
Also
postmodernist is the look of the book itself. When Zampanò
is considering the architectural and physical make-up of the impossible
labyrinthine house, the page looks like
this:
And when
Will Navidson is exploring his supernatural corridors, and the space is
shrinking around him, the page looks like this:
By no means
is this only authorial clever-cleverness (although there’s definitely a whiff
of it). There’s a truly blood-chilling moment when Danielweski brilliantly uses
this spatial awareness of text and blank page to illustrate how cut-off
Navidson actually is. There is no way this could have been conveyed so
effectively through words alone.
House
Of Leaves explicitly uses semiotic theory to bring together
the style of past structural literary satire – works like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Gogol’s ‘Diary Of A
Madman’ – with a post-internet approach
to how myths are created and fuelled. The book also mirrors a modern flitting
mind; the narratives switching via footnotes and appendices and text body
reflects the current norm of multi-tasking rather than exclusive devotion.
All this,
and still it’s a terrific (and traditional) deep psychological horror story
written with clarity and terror. This book,
like the Navidson house, is unique.
Impossibly, yet possibly, unique.[1]
[1] So says Jeanette Leech’s ‘House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
(2000): Recommended by Geoff’ A Tale Of
Two Readers, April 2013, at http://ataleof2readers.blogspot.co.uk
