I recently looked at the 1955
documentary Night
and Fog for a project that I was working on concerning fascism in the
twentieth century. Alain Resnais’s watershed documentary opens with an
interesting, terrifying juxtaposition. The first shot frames a beautiful
landscape—a lush view of the European countryside—before panning down to a
stark fence post strung with barbed wire.
As the narrator paints a haunting
picture of the close proximity between life and death—between captivity and
freedom that was the hallmark of the Nazi concentration camps—the flesh bunched
on the back of my neck.
This was the very essence of
horror—a hell on earth just a few inches away, on the other side of a fence.
As Michel Bouquet chronicles the
construction of the camps, which took place while millions of men, women, and
children went about their daily lives—working, attending school, playing in the
park—one experiences a mounting sense of dread. These things happened, and one can’t discount them.
One can’t look away, and one shouldn’t look away. Resnais’s film was
instrumental in depicting what happened in the camps, and it remains one of the
most important artifacts in cinematic history.
Fiction can have a similar
effect. I think one of the reasons that dystopian narratives are so popular in
mainstream culture is that audiences demand access to the fictional forms of
oppression and suppression that Night and
Fog makes so abundantly clear. Fiction is, after all, a safe form of
access. It’s a portal on the nightmare—a quick glimpse beyond the veil.
And, in most cases, fiction doesn't tread into territories populated by films like Night and Fog, which documents the atrocities of the Holocaust so
thoroughly that I repeatedly cringed through the film’s final third. The simple
fact is, the terrible things that man actually does (or did) to his fellow man represent the truest aspect of horror. Those
of us who write speculative fiction are merely holding up tiny mirrors, and
twisting them at different angles to catch a peek at the monster from the
safety of our keyboards.
I wrote The Reset with these principles in mind, though I didn't understand
that at the time that I was writing it. That’s the nature of fiction—it means
nothing to the author in the course of its gestation, and its meaning is
dictated in large part by how audiences receive it. Once it’s out there, it’s
up to others to make sense of it.
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