John Tiedemann

John.Tiedemann@du.edu

WRIT 1133

John Tiedemann

Essay 1

All the World’s a Stage: How a Viral Video for a Gory Horror Flick Is Teaching Us to Live Our

Own Counter-Narratives

Is “human nature” natural, or is it cultural? Historian Lynn Hunt argues that the concept

of “the human” that underlies human rights philosophy is not grounded in a natural human

essence; rather, Hunt contends, in the early 18th century we learned new ways of being human

through exposure to cultural artifacts such as sensationalist journalism, realist portraiture, and,

especially, the epistolary novel (Hunt 2008). Through the use of intimate, first-person narrative,

Hunt contends, novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa granted their middle-

class readers access to the interior worlds of their working-class narrators, thus teaching those

readers a brand new emotion: empathy, i.e., the ability to imaginatively see and feel the world as

seen and felt by others. It was this new emotion, empathy, Hunt argues, that enabled members of

the 18th -century European middle class to perceive, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “that all men

are created equal,” the newly “self-evident” basis of the human rights of liberty, political and

social equality, and self-determination.

If Hunt is right that the highest, most exalted political and moral values of the 18th

century are the unintended consequence of consuming some of that century’s most “lowbrow”

cultural artifacts, then we might ask whether contemporary pop culture artifacts, too, are teaching
us new ways of being human today. Are our psyches being rewired in bold new ways via our

consumption of seemingly silly Instagram stories, schmaltzy reality TV shows, and schlocky

horror flicks? Consider the example of Kimberly Peirce’s recent horror film Carrie, an even

gorier remake of the infamous 1970s splatterfest based on Steven King’s first bloodstained best-

seller, all three tell the story of a teenaged girl who uses her newfound psychic powers to take

deadly revenge on her high school tormentors. On the one hand, the new version of the film

seems, contrary to Hunt, not to teach new ways of being human at all; it seems, rather, to

reinforce old ways of thinking. Drawing upon shopworn clichés that depict women as “more

emotional” than men, the film portrays “excessive” female emotion as a threat to the community,

reinforcing a very old, very sexist idea of humanity. On the other hand, however, a video created

as part of the film’s viral marketing campaign has an altogether different effect on viewers. By

foregrounding the processes whereby the elaborate practical joke depicted in the video are

carefully stage-managed for maximum effect, the Carrie video fosters in viewers a critical self-

consciousness that reveals how their own seemingly natural world and their own seemingly

organic responses to it are in fact artfully constructed, how our own lives are actually roles we

have been cast to play in someone else’s script — and the joke has been on us. This new critical

consciousness is at the heart of some of the most important cultural transformations of our time:

from the Occupy movement to the Black Lives Matter movement to #MeToo, contemporary

activists are changing the world by refusing to play the roles assigned to them in someone else’s

script, instead writing counter-narratives of their own.