Happy Halloween

If it hasn't already, Halloween is becoming the most celebrated event on the calendar. Sales of costumes and spooky paraphernalia are skyrocketing. We can count on the beastess and the ghoulles showing up at the fuel desk and the grocery store, and ordinarily sedate folks are given an invitation to let their inner outlandisher shine. We can be creative with Halloween in ways we cannot with Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Halloween's burgeoning popularity can be explained in several ways, but I think the most compelling is its embrace of the unsettling subtext of our common existence: the evil and chaos and macabre we think so far removed from the routine of our lives is actually with arms reach, much, much too close for comfort. Victor Turner figured this out several years ago with the publication of The Ritual Process: societies and cultures seek equilibrium by controlling this subtext by surfacing it and turning it into a ritual. Trick or treat ...?

Fiction and film are replete with this theme: witness the remarkable insurgency of vampire and werewolf flicks and books in the last five or six years. But of all the brilliant expressions in the media of the close proximity of evil and chaos to our ordinary existences, I think the most compelling was in a film that contained no creator-killing monstrosities, bloodsucking fiends, or alien invaders. I am referring to the final scenes of The Silence of the Lambs.

Agent Starling knocks on the door of an ordinary house in an ordinary town and encounters what seems to be an ordinary guy living an ordinary life. But when the moth flutters into view, Clarice realizes that she is a long, long way from ordinary. What follows will cook your hash, no matter how many times you've seen it. The basement contains horrors that stagger, and our heroine cannot see the malevolent presence though she can hear and feel his breathe.

The bringers of chaos, death and destruction are far closer than we think. Economic collapse and terrorist threats are the larger items dwelling in the basement we can feel and sense but often have difficulty seeing until a disaster occurs or a bottom is hit or a retirement account goes up in flames. But the smaller and subtler players can be just as frightening: the rages that produce words which cannot ever be retracted and leave ruptured relationships in their wakes; the despair and isolation that results in suicide, or, sometimes, homicide; the soulless conflicts of election-year politics that distance us even further from the civil public discourse that once was deemed mandatory.

Clarice had to rely on her instincts to survive the horror in the basement and to emerge alive on the other side of the terror. On what shall we rely?