Abstract
Prior to Helen Wheatley’s book Gothic Television, work on televisual manifestations of the Gothic was, as Wheatley observes, ‘virtually non-existent’ (2007: 12). Since then, numerous articles and book chapters on the subject have appeared, but these tend to focus on single programmes. Broader examinations of TV Gothic are still rare outside fairly brief entries in companion-style works—A Companion to American Gothic (Crow, 2014), for example—though a chapter in Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott’s TV Horror (2013) called ‘Revising the Gothic,’ which looks at a small handful of series, is an exception. Wright’s Men with Stakes is thus the first book-length work since Wheatley’s to make a thematic study of Gothic elements across several television texts. Her decision to explore the theme in relation to masculinity is a wise one, not only because it sets her apart from Wheatley, whose discussion of gender is oriented towards the female Gothic, but because the often-damaging effect of patriarchal power is a key preoccupation both of the Gothic mode in general and, as Amanda D Lotz has noted (2014: 106–14), of recent American television fiction, the area on which Wright focuses.
The selection of programmes that Wright analyses is still relatively small; she has around seven case studies. This is also a sensible choice given the complexity and history of the concepts she is dealing with: the Gothic’s critique of realism and the way that its interrogation of masculinity forms part of a wider challenge to ‘the dominance of social institutions…and epistemologies…associated with modernity’ (p. 21) are two of her central concerns. The case study series are not all those that would necessarily spring to mind as prominent examples of recent American Gothic television (especially given that two of them, American Gothic [1995–96] and Millennium [1996–99], are around 20 years old). True Blood [2008–14], for instance, is not focused on, whereas the relatively obscure Point Pleasant (2005) is. Nonetheless, Wright’s choices work well as exemplars of the themes she wishes to examine. In particular, she favours programmes that display a high level of intertextuality and self-reflexivity, since, like many works of classic Gothic literature, these shows highlight ‘the constructedness of [their] representations’ (p. 4), including their representation of masculinity.
Wright’s methodology is largely textual analysis which she carries out comprehensively, not neglecting elements such as performance and sound design. She also draws on a wide range of sources from a variety of media and eras to support her arguments; she cites Edmund Burke one minute and an episode of Community (2009–15) the next, thus, fittingly, like the programmes she is examining, ‘regularly…cross[ing] the imagined “high” and “low” culture divide’ (p. 26). This diversity of references makes Men with Stakes enjoyable to read, as does the division of three of the four chapters into short, snappy subsections, each focusing on a particular series. A more sustained analysis of a single show is undertaken in chapter three, a nuanced discussion of the intersection of masculinity, race and class (the latter a theme that is often overlooked in work on telefantasy) in Supernatural (2005–present). For me, this chapter, which is an updated version of an article Wright published in the journal Genders in 2008, is the book’s highlight. Indeed, the influential nature of the original article is suggested by the fact that it has attracted not only discussion on several fan sites but possibly an allusion in Supernatural itself (Wright, 2016: 118): the episode ‘I Believe the Children Are Our Future’ (2009. 5: 6) features a young boy who has to look after himself because his parents are out at work—like Supernatural’s protagonists, another ‘latchkey kid’ in Wright’s terms (p. 102)—whose mother is called Julia Wright!
Men with Stakes is not always about masculinity per se. Chapter four deals with American Gothic television’s subversion of Enlightenment concepts such as science and progress and its postmodern blurring of the line between the ‘world of signs’—including the televisual medium—and the ‘world of the “real”’ (p. 124). However, as Wright indicates, many of these dynamics can be understood in gendered terms; she makes an especially fascinating contention that the first season of American Horror Story (2011–present) represents the film and television industry ‘as a conventional [patriarchal] gothic villain’ (p. 150). Hence, even when Men with Stakes apparently strays from its theme, Wright is in fact adding weight to her central argument that Gothic TV’s ‘interrogation of masculinity is intertwined with larger examinations of social institutions, cultural assumptions, and established forms of knowledge’ (p. 5).