McLarney and Ruscio Gothic Podcast

Coraline is a gothic movie based on the 2002 book by Neil Gaiman. It follows the story of Coraline who discovers a parallel dimension where her parents are more attentive. However, this dream world turns sinister as her other mother wants to keep her there permanently. Coraline must save her real parents and free the ghost children trapped in the other world. The movie incorporates gothic elements such as the decaying setting, doubles, and the grotesque. It also uses animation to make the characters endearing and relatable. Coraline serves as a cautionary tale for children and explores fears and themes of growing up. Overall, it is a visually captivating and thought-provoking film. Hello, everyone. I'm Victoria. And I'm Julia. And we are doing a podcast on Coraline and the Gothic Convention. Through this assignment, we also decided to interview Professor LeBenter, a Film and New Media Studies professor here at Wheaton College. You will hear from her point of view later on. For some background on Coraline, it is a 2009 movie written and directed by Henry Selick, but it is based on the 2002 book written by Neil Gaiman. Plot synopsis, Coraline and her family move into the Pink Palace. The move is upsetting and she starts to investigate and explore the property. The neighbors are odd and the landlord's grandson gives her a doll that somehow looks just like her. Coraline finds a small door that leads to a seemingly alternate dimension where her parents are more attentive and doting on her. This dream world turns sinister when her other mother wants her to move to this world permanently. And to achieve this, Coraline would have to sew buttons into her eyes. Coraline manages to escape, but not without the other mother stealing her real parents away in the other world. Coraline returns to save her parents and try to free the ghosts of other children who had buttons sewn into their eyes. Coraline challenges the other mother to a game. If Coraline wins, she and everyone gets to go free, but if the other mother wins, Coraline will stay and sew buttons into her eyes. The other world turns and works against Coraline as she tries to find the ghost children and her parents. She ends up tricking the other mother and escaping back to her real world with her real parents and she frees the ghost children. The hand of the other mother makes it through the portal and follows Coraline to the old well that she was planning on dropping the one key to the other world down. Coraline, with help from Rybie, the landlord's grandson, crushes the hand and drops it down the well. The movie ends with the real world seemingly suddenly better, her parents are gardening and paying attention to her, and the neighbors are all together enjoying the afternoon. Apparently, Coraline has beat the other mother and the other world. Why are we focusing on this fantastic movie for our podcast? Well, the film version of Coraline works off specific gothic elements that appear whimsical to children whilst being more horrifying to adults. The movie itself is also extremely gothic and exhibits many gothic conventions throughout its visual storytelling. Now, we'll hear from Professor Leventer on her opinions about the gothic conventions in Coraline. When I think of gothic, I think of like certainly like innocent girl in trouble in a Victorian mansion or Queen Anne style house, like the terrible place, on a hill, right, feels very gothic to me. The horror film, I think they're fairly straightforward, right, like the haunted house, the otherworldly kind of thing. So, but I do see, you know, a lot of those kinds of tropes, the use of the supernatural, certainly like the use of doppelgangers is a big thing in the gothic. Kids have a tendency to find more wonder and mysticism in details that adults will learn to fear later in life. Let's hear again from Professor Leventer. The animation style is made to be endearing. So the use of the big eyes, 3D animation as opposed to 2D animation, which is 2D animation is based on line, 3D animation is like Disney. So like 3D animation is fuller, they look more like the animation is typically designed to be more mimetic of the human form, like of live action. So all of that, I think, and the bigger the eyes of a character, the more we tend to relate to them, and the bigger the dark part of the eye is, right, like the bigger the white part of the eye is rather, the more we tend to infantilize them and think they're relatable. So that they have these giant eyes, I think helps with all of that feeling very endearing to viewers. Now we'll talk about some specific conventions that we think apply well to gothicism. The first one we'll discuss is the decaying setting or the two worlds that exist within the movie Coraline. The film uses bright colors paired with bland and mute ones to convey the difference between the two worlds, and though a child may be more drawn to the bright and seemingly magical other world, an adult knows that with such great beauty and enjoyment comes a great price, and that it is all a ruse. Though Coraline herself figures this out within the premise of the story, and the discovery functions as a sort of cautionary tale to younger viewers, an adult viewer of the film would be much quicker to catch on to the evil undertones of the other world, and would be much more frightened by it as they fully understand the ramifications of a child's kidnapping by false parents. When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about the southern gothic, which is sort of like the American strain of the gothic, and the southern gothic is less tense, it's like Flannery O'Connor writes in that style, William Faulkner sometimes writes in that style, Erskine Caldwell, and for them the gothic is less supernatural, you don't see that quite as often, and you see a lot of the grotesque, where the grotesque is a way of like exaggerating, it's uncanny again, like exaggerating what you think you initially recognize in such a way that you can't distanciate yourself, you can't distance yourself from what you're seeing, and the hope with southern gothicism anyway is that you see a piece of yourself in the work, and so when you think, oh, this is critiquing a part of society that is also induces some kind of self-reflection about like, ooh, I do that, you know, and certainly Coraline uses a lot of the grotesque in its notion of the gothic, I think, to get at like the nature of the bond between mother and daughter, or that notion of like a divided self, I think, you know, we've all seen our parents react lovingly to things we do, and other times react really unpredictably, or, you know, more angrily than we were expecting, or whatever, and for a kid kind of figuring that out, I could imagine a sense of like, oh, maybe I have, maybe my mommy is actually two mommies, or maybe there's either two sides to my mom, just trying to find the language to figure that out. The grotesque and the gothic seem a good vehicle. Within Coraline, many aspects of Freud's The Uncanny are represented. Freud understands The Uncanny as the class of frightening things that lead us back to what is known and familiar. Immediately, this space, Coraline's new home, becomes unfamiliar or unheimlich. As Coraline explores the house and uncovers the secret of the other world, the pink palace becomes a doubled space. The pink palace itself is an antiquated space and represents the trope of the big house featured in many gothic novels. The people in Coraline's life themselves gain doubles in the other versions of themselves. Doubles themselves are scary as they are unheimlich, kind of bringing in Freud's heimlich unheimlich theories. Doubles become frightening as they are unreal versions of something that is real and known to a person. These other characters, seemingly copies of Coraline's parents and neighbors, all have buttons for eyes, which further cements the movie in Freud's theories of The Uncanny. Freud posits that being robbed of one's eyes is inherently tied to The Uncanny and stems from the fear of castration. That's what we expect when we see stop motion, that it's going to be a little bit jerky. It creates this sense of uncanniness I think of like human but not human, the real world but definitely not the real world. At first glance, the seemingly better Other Mother character is more appealing to Coraline, who feels cast aside by her actual parents who are much more concerned with their work. The Other Mother's appearance is catered to by what Coraline believes she wants in a mother. However, in understanding the truth behind this world, Coraline is then able to understand the fact that the Other Mother is not what she believed her to be and is in fact the villain of the story. However, in understanding the truth behind this world, Coraline is able to understand the fact that the Other Mother is not what she believed her to be and is in fact the villain of the story. The Other Mother becomes evil, aiming to trap Coraline in this inescapable world and keep her forever as she did with the other children. Coraline is then able to understand the truth behind her character, that she is not a mother but a monster. As we interviewed Professor Leventer, we asked her to describe the media studies view of children's media. Professor Leventer described the ways in which children's movies can be an excellent mode for children to understand fears they have while growing up. Here is that now. So my immediate thought was things like this, like Coraline or The Nightmare Before Christmas or ParaNorman, stuff like that. It's smaller, I think, because parents, I think that, you know, children's media, people who make children's media are very sensitive to the worries about parents that their kids aren't going to sleep or they don't want to go over the line or whatever. But I actually think, so there is that, but there is a history of it, of like children's horror films, and I think like very often they work through the problems of growing up through like a supernatural setting. After taking Professor Warner's Gothic Lit course, we feel we have learned to understand how Gothic conventions apply to all parts of media. We examined a favorite Gothic movie of ours, Coraline, and found that much of what we study was present in the film. If you enjoyed this podcast, feel free to check out our Visual Companion PowerPoint to see specific examples of what we discussed. Thank you for coming on this journey with us. Once again, we are Julia and Victoria. Thank you and have a good night.