The Fantasy of Orderly Grief: GRIS and The Haunting of Hill House

[justira]

Grief warps our world. The curvature of our private universe must now bend around an absence, the sudden removal of a body that leaves some gravitational well behind: a ghost, a memory, a role unfilled. It's no surprise that speculative fiction has long been a site for processing grief. Whether it is through the creative process or through consuming and interpreting its output, the overwhelming pain and confusion of grief calls for equally reality-bending expressions and interpretations in fiction. And there is an urge, an all too human urge, to make it all make sense somehow. Merely fictional or downright fantastical, we want it to make sense, to find meaning and order in a state and process that is by nature disruptive.

The Haunting of Hill House and GRIS are both speculative stories about grief that engage with the popular model of the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. In GRIS — a platforming game — the young female protagonist is grieving for another woman; statues of the dead woman are scattered about the beautiful, often desolate landscape in attitudes of agony and despair, and at certain places near such statues the protagonist can perform mourning actions that garner achievements named after the stages. In The Haunting of Hill House, five siblings struggle to come to terms with their mother's mysterious death twenty years prior, with the memories of their strange, deadly summer at the house continuing to haunt them just as much as the ghosts of the place do. A common and ambiguously canonical interpretation ties each sibling, in birth order, to one of the five stages of grief. Both of these stories frame the perturbed, lonesome landscape of grief as a legible thing, with a narrative arc, known trajectory, and anticipated conclusion, all of which are explored through the lens of the fantastical premise.

But the five stages model of grief is itself a fantasy. The enduring appeal of the model lies in its illusory production of order in a time of chaos. But as the study of grief has evolved across both time and cultures, research has confirmed that there is no orderly progression of stages of grief. The five stages model, formally the Kübler-Ross model, was initially a way to describe the experience of terminally ill patients — rather than those around them or those peoples' experience after death — and is rooted in and the product of a particular culture at a particular time.



And the grief in Hill House is very much oriented towards a specific white, western conceptualization and experience of the nuclear family, property ownership, and illness and addiction. The Crain family experiences this haunting because they buy the titular house with the goal of flipping it and building their "forever home" where they will live as a nuclear family -- an ambition and approach to property that is itself rooted in a class structure and set of values that is not merely a fantasy in aspiration, but in fact. As the ability to own property and live in isolated nuclear family units grows farther out of reach for most Americans, Hill House positions the Crains firmly in this fantasy and their grief in an isolationist nuclear model. While most of the relationships on the show are interracial, and while the children go to live with their aunt after their mother's death, the narrative and grief framework remains firmly fixed in white upper-middle class mores. It is not until the Crains are brought together again with their father as adult siblings that the narrative of their grief truly progresses. Their grief is frozen in time until the nuclear family can experience it as a unit. In the first half of the series, each sibling gets a showcase episode, intercutting between their time as a family in the house and the present day, where each sibling, in their adult occupations and lives, is in some way tied to death and trauma. While the siblings' characterization and narratives are complex and varied, a popular interpretation works to organize and order their stories and the story of their family unit into something familiar by pegging each sibling to one of the five stages of grief,.

Steve, the oldest, is a true-horror writer chronicling others' ghost stories; he made his name and money writing about his family's experience in Hill House, but remains skeptical (Denial) of the supernatural. Shirley, the oldest daughter, is a mortician, attempting to control both the fact of death and those around her (Anger). Theo is a child psychologist dealing with others' trauma, but she wears gloves and keeps others at arms' length to avoid activating her psychometric abilities and truly connecting with anyone (Bargaining). Luke, the older twin, is a heroin addict cycling endlessly through self-harm and aborted recovery (Depression), and Nell, the younger twin, is haunted by sleep paralysis and the spectre of the Bent-Neck Lady until she returns to the house (Acceptance), only to die in mysterious circumstances like her mother. Each sibling is, as an adult, stuck in a certain static and unhealthy relationship with grief, death, and trauma.



Frozen in attitudes as contorted and painful as the statues of the weeping woman in GRIS, the siblings in Hill House cannot grow past their assigned grief stage until they are reunited. There is no narrative for the siblings between the death of their mother and Nell's death, which together form the beginning of the syuzhet of Hill House. Only Nell's story, as the final stage of grief and a pivot point in the narrative, has any progression or narrative between the death of the siblings' mother and where the narrative takes up twenty years later. Even Hugh, the father, is stuck in his grief, imagining his dead wife Olivia as forever at his side, frozen as she was at the time of her death. There is no progression through grief in solitude.

GRIS, on the other hand, presents a journey through grief that is deeply solitary but does not admit stasis. The game had an explicit goal of depicting loneliness and features no dialogue or other verbal narrative. But as solitary as the protagonist's journey is, it is also inevitable. There is no way to truly fail in GRIS, no way for the protagonist to die or even take damage. She will survive; there is no other option. It's both a deeply optimistic view of the process and a ruthless one.



While it is impossible, ultimately, to fail in GRIS, the game is also explicitly about setbacks and trial and error. The poetic narrative and imagery of the game convey grief not just through visual metaphor in the design and scenery, but also in the mechanics of the game and the motions and actions done by and experienced by the player. The protagonist's motion through space represents her movements through her own process of grief: the debilitating lows, the obdurate lateral motion, the floaty surreal highs. And the joy and genius of the metaphor is that that motion is not linear or constant, but rather, by the nature of the human player, perturbed and imperfect. The human, fallible nature of the player intentionally introduces ambiguity and chaos into what, on the surface, seems orderly and straightforward.




On the surface though, the game does provide a stable, almost rigid framework for the story of grief it delivers and guides the player through. The protagonist goes on a journey whose overall trajectory and sequence is set. There is room at every point to explore, wander, wait, but the poetry of the piece progresses with an implacable inevitability. One verse, and then another. At the start of the journey, literally any action on the part of the player that isn't a slow forward movement will cause Gris to collapse: she in unable, in her grief, to do anything else. But with time comes progress, and Gris gains abilities that help her navigate the tortured, lovely world she finds herself in: the strength to shield herself against the elements, to navigate the underwater darkness, to soar and sing. She must go out of her way to name the things she is experiencing: the player must take her to specific places and perform small rituals to garner the achievement that names Gris's grief. These rituals give shape to an otherwise wordless journey through an unnamed land. But whether she can name it or not, whether her journey coheres, for her and for the audience, into a narrative or is simply a set of passing storms of colour and desolation, she will come out the other side.




This acting out of survival and mourning through fantasy is in itself a powerful ritual. Speculative fiction in particular gives us incredible tools to imagine ourselves as powerful, to name our journeys and our ghosts, to confront spectres and fears with a sense of safety, purpose, and control.

Even if the stages of grief are a fantasy, we can use this fantasy within a fantasy as a way to comfort ourselves that grief is something that can be understood, explored, and progressed through. This model remains a powerful tool for organizing our experiences of fiction and hanging interpretations on. Both The Haunting of Hill House and GRIS manage to take advantage of the comforting and organizing aspects of the Kübler-Ross model while retaining the ambiguity and perturbation that makes depictions of grief not only realistic, but compelling as both narrative and balm. Whatever else fiction is, it is the reaching out of a soul -- to others, to some inner truth, to an imagined world that can be understood and named, ordered and orderly. The fantasy of orderly grief may be a fiction, but its power, and the power of speculative media that uses it with intelligence and compassion, is undeniable.


See Also: My twitter thread when I initially conceptualized this piece

Others' Thoughts:

The Haunting of Hill House

• Vulture: The Haunting of Hill House Director on the Biggest Changes From Shirley Jackson’s Novel
• Vulture: The Profound Grief of The Haunting of Hill House
• The New Yorker: Netflix’s Soul-Dead Version of “The Haunting of Hill House”

GRIS

• Engadget: 'Gris' is a gorgeous 2D platformer about personal loss
• Epilogue Gaming: ‘Gris’: A Meditation on Parents, Life and Death – Part One and Part Two
• The Verge: The Art Behind the Gorgeous Indie Game Gris
• Rock paper Shotgun: Wot I Think: Gris
• MCV: 50 shades of Gris: How Nomada Studio created ‘a game that evolves visually, not only mechanically’