I have been noticing an emergence of a particular aesthetic in pieces of media, something that is almost 1950’s gothic. Examples of this are The Shape of Water (the well-known Guillermo del Toro film), We Happy Few (an indie survival and exploration game released early access in 2016, and looking to be fully released this year), and in American Horror Story: Freak Show (the fourth season of a television horror anthology). The plotlines and themes all vary wildly (1. saving a fishman from the Russians, and from government testing, 2. trying to escape an island filled with violent, traumatized residences with everyone is in a drug-induced hallucinogenic haze, and 3. trying to keep open one of the last remaining freak shows while there are multiple murderers on the loose). With such marked differences, the question should be asked: why do they share a similar aesthetic and how would it be characterized?
All of these pieces are set in the 1950’s/1960’s, and with that setting comes the suburban jauntiness that was characteristic of the time. However, these pieces combine that aesthetic with horror or darkness, turning the jauntiness sickly sweet. In the intro for We Happy Few, a character exclaims in a charming British accent that they’re having a party with a piñata. A few moments later, the narrator has a flash of lucidity from his drug haze and realizes that his coworkers are eating the entrails of a large rat, instead of candy from a piñata. Similarly, The Shape of Water mixes scenes of pie-eating in a diner with scenes in a grey and gloomy government facility. So why the emergence of this particular aesthetic?
Part of the reason for this may be that the time that we are currently living in is, in some ways, the antithesis to the 1950’s. That time period favored homogenized domesticity. We are now at a time where we are trying to renegotiate the social structures that were popularized back then. Increasingly more emphasis is placed on intersections of identity, both within the individual and on a community level. With so much attention being placed on the intricacies of identity, there is no longer a one-size fits all version of the domestic. Maggie Nelson writes about this in her book The Argonauts, about the queering of the domestic and how a greater acceptance of the queer community is now allowing them a space to figure outhow to fit into a domestic world that was once reserved solely for heterosexual couples.
This renegotiation of the domestic reveals some toxic dynamics that were at play in its previous versions. Ultimately, it is likely that the 1950’s gothic aesthetic is being used to highlight this toxicity and the ways that it was lurking under the surface. For example, in The Shape of Water, the pie-eating diner quickly changes from pleasant to hostile when the man behind the counter displays aggressive homophobia towards Giles.
Now that we are in a time where we are reexamining this version of the domestic, the media that we are creating is reexamining portrayals of the 1950's from this new light, and using it to expose things that must be changed from the old domestic.
