Yeo, Dennis Kah Sin

The Gothic and the Postmodern both encourage an attitude of scepticism and pluralism that produce indeterminacy and irresolution. This dissertation studies filmic texts at the turn of the last millennium to suggest a zeitgeist of Gothic horror and paranoia brought about by postmodern relativity. Anchoring its argument on the themes of the monster, the spectacle and the simulacra, it explores how the hesitation of the Gothic evokes an epistemological and ontological vertigo that interrogates our notions of reality, identity and narrative. At the core of the Gothic is an examination of our humanness – our being, becoming and the inevitability of non-being. The arbitrary constructedness of normalcy hides the protean multiplicity of ideology and perspective. The anxiety is that the façade of carnivalised surfaces hides the chaos and entropy of existential emptiness. By the distortion and defamiliarisation of perception, the hyperreality of film presents alternate worlds and selves while self-reflexively displaying its artifice. The proliferation of signs and the slippage of meaning indicate that the quest for any monologic closure is futile.

The thesis of the dissertation is that, like a ghost, the proliferation of signification in the Gothic alludes to the existence of some objective meaning but this promise reveals itself to be a mirage as the spectrality of textuality defers any referential certainty or interpretative closure. In its production of the simulacra of reality and identity, film presents a heterotopia of virtual replication. Beyond the aesthetics and semantics of the Gothic text is the relativity of perspective and representation. The unreliability of memory influences the authenticity of history and narrative. The surface of performance and simulation further encourages a suspicion of knowledge and a scepticism of the narrator and the narrative. Reading is rendered paranoid and schizophrenic, characterized by an over determination of semiotics and a playful self-referentiality.

Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque explains the Gothic preoccupation with alienation, excess and the subversion of the constructedness of ideology. Transgression is mandatory in overcoming predictability and mediocrity and to penetrate the inexplicable nature of the random logic of life. The absent presence of the ghost is thus symbolic of the nullity of postmodern meaninglessness.