thinking about hill house, “no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed by some to dream,” and the way this became the foundation of every mike flanagan series since. these characters exist under conditions of grief in all its forms. that’s their reality. grief for the dead, grief for the living, grief for themselves, for the dreams laid to rest, the hopes never realized… in hill house, every sibling dreams of something better. they dream of a life — or a death — in which they are unburdened. the shape of this wish is different for each of them, but the wish itself is omnipresent. as kids it manifested in each variation of the red room, something they could “live” in. as adults it manifested as the ghosts they choose to ignore, the ghosts that heal them once they’re seen.
then you have bly manor, where the dream remains the same but the angle and approach are new. hannah dreams just so she can be seen in death. she dreams of the life she could have had with owen, of the love that life left unfulfilled so she plays it out as a ghost. and this tethers her to the physical realm until her ghost, her wish, is acknowledged. rebecca regrets. rebecca is an outlier. she regrets the nature of her death and the life that was stolen from her, but in her death she dreams for those she can push away from her own fate. dani and jamie dream of a life in which they are together, unharmed, and they get to revel in this for a while, and it’s good and it’s peaceful until fate rears its head. but the wish was seen, and so the regret doesn’t exist. hill house says “you have to live / there is no without, i am not gone.” and bly manor says “here is how to live again, even though our roads will meet at the same place.”
and then in the midnight club, this theme persists. and it persists. these kids all exist with the knowledge that they soon won’t. so they dream, they tell stories every night and live out their hopes, put pieces of themselves into the world just so that these pieces can stick around after they’re gone. hill house says “a ghost is a wish / we are all stories in the end,” and the midnight club responds with “a story never dies.” and that’s just how these shows are now. hill house laid the foundations, and every show of mike’s now stands on them. these narratives all haunt each other. if one character starts a thought, a character in a different story will finish it. if one character can’t remain within a dream, a character in another story will live and die in it. the dreams are always different, the grief is always different, but the foundations are the same and the end result is, too: live — choose love and live until your soul is taken. despite, despite, despite.
nobody can exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality, so they dream instead,
vaporwave
prguitarman
pixelskylines
turnnoffyourmind
jimmyeatworldofficial
blakekathryn
