FILM / The White Face of Michael Myers / Jason McCall
Image © Universal Pictures | Blumhouse Productions
When I watched Ahmaud Arbery die, other names kept getting in the way of his name. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jordan Davis. I couldn’t stop thinking about Trayvon Martin. I couldn’t stop thinking about Renisha McBride. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Nick Berg execution video I watched in college and all the other deaths I watched that I probably shouldn’t have watched.
These names come into my head whenever I see the newest act of deadly violence against black bodies appear as a hashtag and a video on my social media timelines. I expect Ahmaud Arbery’s name to be added to the lists of black lives taken too soon. I expect to see his name and face on murals and graphics and T-shirts.
The worst part of contextualizing this type of black death is that the rhythm of this type of black death is familiar. There’s an initial shock that this could happen in the year ____ and the counterargument of people being shocked that anyone is really shocked about this type of black death in the United States. There’s the law enforcement officials and lawyers promising a fair and thorough investigation. There’s the interrogation, looting, and smearing of the dead black body. There’s the day in the future when I’ll be in a conversation with someone and we’ll have to struggle a bit to remember if Ahmaud Arbery is the black man who was killed because he was jogging or if Ahmaud Arbery is the black man who was killed because he was doing something else.
None of these thoughts surprised me. I knew all of these names would rise up again, along with the anger, helplessness, and the timelines that connect Ahmaud Arbery to Emmett Till and to myself.
After I saw Ahmaud Arbery killed on camera, the only surprise this time was that I couldn’t stop thinking about Michael Myers.
The Halloween movies never meant much to me. Growing up, I watched the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies countless times. I suspect I had love for those movies because my older siblings and cousins had love for those movies. Or it might’ve been because one of cousins had a Freddy Krueger Halloween set with the mask and the glove. It might’ve been because I thought it was cool to see a character that shared my name on the screen, even if Jason Voorhees was the bad guy. It might’ve been because of the Friday the 13th NES game that no one in the neighborhood could beat. The Halloween movies even trailed behind cult films like Pumpkinhead and Candyman. I knew about Michael Myers. I knew he wore a mask and killed people and spent most of the movies chasing Jamie Lee Curtis’ character, Laurie. Up until the 2018 sequel, I didn’t know that Laurie and Michael Myers’ sister were two different people. I didn’t care enough to sort out the details.
Horror movies, for all their gore and jump scares, are satisfying entertainment because the gore and the scares are contained in the screen and in the tropes of the genre. We want to be surprised when the villain reappears behind an unsuspecting teenager, but we don’t want to be so surprised that we’re taken out of the realm of a horror movie. In the fourth edition of his Rambler series, Samuel Johnson describes modern fiction as a genre where writers are “engaged with portraits of which everyone knows the original” and where audiences call for “curiosity without the help of wonder.” This predictability that comes from film ran counter to the reality of my childhood. It ran counter to the unpredictable scenes of Rodney King being beaten on film and the cops suffering no consequences. It ran counter to the unpredictable reality that killed Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. within six months of each other. Horror movies, like rom coms or superhero movies, are appreciated, in part, because of we know what we’re watching before the story really begins to tell us what we’re watching.
Until a few weeks ago, the only thing I really knew about Michael Myers and the Halloween movies was that Michael Myers didn’t really have a backstory, and that might be why I could never invest the 90 minutes it takes to watch a Halloween movie. He didn’t have a reason to be a monster like so many of the other horror villains. Horny camp counselors didn’t let him drown in a lake. His mother wasn’t a nurse who was raped in a psych ward. There were no ghosts or evil spirits possessing him.I could relate to those monsters. As black son of Alabama, I could relate to people who wanted to slice open a world that had wronged them. However, Michael Myers was different. All we know is that Michael Myers started killing people one day, and he didn’t stop.
The lack of a “why” is what made Michael Myers stick in my brain when I tried to process the Ahmaud Arbery video. There are reports of alleged burglaries in the area and reports of potential mistaken identities. There are reports of connections between the killers and government and law enforcement officials. But none of these reports explain why the last moments of Ahmaud Arbery’s life had to be the last moments of Ahmaud Arbery’s life. The only real explanation for why Ahmaud Arbery died is his skin color and the skin color of his killers.
When I watched Ahmaud Arbery die, I saw his body and the body of his killers, but I also saw Whiteness killing Ahmaud Arbery just as much as I saw men killing Ahmaud Arbery. Whiteness is the reason private citizens decided to stalk and kill a man in the middle of the day. Whiteness is the connective thread in so many patterns of death in the country, and in many ways, Whiteness is no different than the blank mask of Michael Myers. A few weeks ago, I finally watched the original Halloween movie. There’s nothing special about Michael Myers. He could be any boy who decides to pick up a knife and murder his sister. Even in the opening, there’s no inciting incident. Viewers can make assumptions about what it means for the young Michael Myers to watch his sister kissing a boy on the couch. Viewers can assume that Michael Myers had an unnatural attraction to his sister, and that attraction drove him to murder. Viewers can assume he killed her because he witnessed her lack of chastity, and that would align him with the other horror villains who either spare the virgin or are conquered by the virgin/Final Girl at the end of the film.
However, these are connections that have no grounding in the film. In the same way, the United States continually tries to find legitimate reasons for deaths like the death of Ahmaud Arbery. The myth of this country can’t accept that someone in 2020 would see a black person and decide that person was not fit to live. The myth of America has to see that type of racial violence as a flaw in a young country, a mean streak the country grew out of when it matured into the country that outlawed slavery, defeated Nazis, and elected an African-American president. The reasoning will lead some to the conclusion that this is just an example of a few bad actors, and this tragedy shouldn’t cast a shadow over centuries of progress. The reasoning will lead others to hold on to the theory that a couple of minutes of video can’t give anyone the entire story behind the incident because there must be some justification behind the prolonged pursuit and confrontation that led to Ahmaud Arbery’s death.
However, the more I think about the video of Ahmaud Arbery’s death, the more I feel like there’s no reasoning that can explain his death because there is no way to reason with Whiteness. Sometimes, Whiteness decides to act, and there’s no logic to the action other than recognizing the action as an act of Whiteness. However, those who recognize Whiteness as a monster that can hide behind any corner are labeled as paranoid.In the 1978 original, Laurie’s friends laugh when she tells them that Michael Myers is watching them from behind the bushes as they walk home from school. In the 2018 sequel, Laurie’s a grandmother whose relationships with her daughter and granddaughter are ruined by her obsession with being ready for Michael Myers and her family’s insistence that her vigilance is a sign of mental illness.
Of course, Laurie is right, and Michael Myers returns to kill her again, and he stalks her daughter and granddaughter the same way that he stalked her 40 years ago. However, in the end, it doesn’t matter that Laurie is right, and it doesn’t matter that Laurie has spent her adult life preparing for a confrontation with Michael Myers because of what makes Michael Myers and other horror villains so terrifying: There’s no way to kill Michael Myers. In the original, he’s stabbed and shot, and the force of the gunshots send him falling out of a second-floor window. Viewers see his motionless body only for that motionless body to disappear once the camera moves back to Laurie and Dr. Loomis, the psychiatrist who shows up in time to save Laurie.
Comparing a real man’s death to a fake movie monster is disgusting. But black suffering has a long cinematic history in this country. In schools, we teach the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs in hopes that the graphic scenes will move students from seeing the suffering of slaves to seeing the suffering of humans. In cinema, we champion images like Silas Ship’s single tear in Glory or Kunta Kinte’s defiant attempt to hold on to his given name in Roots. On the news and social media, we share videos and pictures of black pain and black death because often these pictures and videos are the only thing that can make black pain and black death tangible to this country.
In the battle against Whiteness, most of us who recognize the face of Whiteness and the dangers of Whiteness are either Laurie or Dr. Loomis, the psychiatrist who’s spent over a decade trying to rehabilitate Michael Myers. I’ve been Laurie when I worked a summer job as a door-to-door salesman selling educational books in Louisville, Ohio. Some days, I discredited my own observations. I told myself that I was from Alabama and that I knew what real racism looked like. Other times, I tried to explain the lawn jockeys and police stops to my co-workers and bosses. I tried to explain the warnings I got from customers about being black and being out after sundown in Louisville. I tried to explain that all the sales tricks in the world couldn’t counter Whiteness, but they only really listened to me when I told them that I was going home. They listened long enough to tell me that an invoice for what I owed the company would be on the way.
I see the face of Whiteness when I sit through faculty meetings dedicated to diversity initiatives. I see the face of Whiteness when I’ve been praised for being one of the good ones who come from a good family. I see the face of Whiteness when a worker in a store asks, “Can I help you?”
If I let the world know every time I see it wearing the face of Whiteness, the world would accuse me of madness. The world would tell me that boogeyman is my grandfather’s boogeyman and maybe my father’s, but not mine. My friends and colleagues would swear they weren’t wearing a mask. My in-laws would swear they weren’t wearing a mask. They would swear that I don’t have anything to worry about because of my upbringing, my vocabulary, my academic CV.
The myths and movies teach us that every monster has a weakness. And if Whiteness is a monster, then there should be some counter to that monster. However, in Halloween, Dr. Loomis serves as another voice that, like Laurie’s, is constantly ignored in the movie. Dr. Loomis is mostly ignored by the town sheriff Leigh Brackett. When Sheriff Brackett accuses Dr. Loomis of overreacting to Michael Myers’ escape from the asylum, Dr. Loomis gives his reply that has characterized the psyche of Michael Myers for the last 40 years:
“I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child with a blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes—the Devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply . . . evil.”
We’re often led to believe that evil is a child of ignorance. There’s a certain comfort in believing that monsters don’t know any better, and, if they did, they would choose to be something better than monsters. There’s a comfort in believing that the line between Ahmaud Arbery’s life and Ahmaud Arbery’s death is a race studies course in college, an online infographic describing the different levels of white supremacy, a Tim Wise quotation, or a Twitter thread from a white person who learned about privilege when they were pulled over by the police while driving with a black friend in the passenger’s seat. But that comfort exists to avoid the uncomfortable alternative. The alternative reality is that some monsters will always be monsters, and, no matter how many times we kill them, we know they could be waiting for us behind any corner or behind any face. That alternative leaves us watching Ahmaud Arbery’s death with the same detached hope we carry into horror movies. Every time, we hope the victims will escape, but we know the movie we’re watching, and, too often, we can guess the ending by the time we’ve finished with the opening scene.
Jason McCall is an Alabama native. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami. He currently teaches at the University of North Alabama. His poetry collections include Two-Face God; Dear Hero,; Silver; I Can Explain; and Mother, Less Child. He and P.J. Williams are the editors of It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop.
