Episode 163: Transcript
Episode: 163: Ten Years After “Over the Garden Wall”
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:00] This episode is coming to you on Halloween, which is one of our hometown of San Francisco's high holy days with an emphasis on high.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:11] Yeah, I'm actually really pleased that they're once again having some Halloween festivities in the Castro, the sort of like ritzy gay neighborhood…
Annalee: [00:00:19] The fancy gay neighborhood.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:21] The fancy, the sort of upscale gay neighborhood where I live. You know, there used to be like an amazing street party on Halloween in the Castro every year. And then some people from out of town came and started shooting people. It got really bad, but the last few years we started doing it again and it's been really nice. It's been nice to have that again. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited for the day after Halloween where you could get cheap candy and also very cheap black nail polish.
Annalee: [00:00:47] Yes, and also just like awesome cheap clothes that other people think of as costumes and we might just think of as normal clothes.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:55] Really good point.
Annalee: [00:00:57] So Charlie Jane, why is Halloween so queer?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:00] You know, I have a complicated feeling about Halloween. I actually wrote an essay for my newsletter about how much I hate Halloween, partly because, you know, people think I'm wearing a costume when I'm just dressed like I normally am.
Annalee: [00:01:11] Yeah, same.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] Partly because I got hit by a minivan on Halloween some years ago and it's just an unpleasant memory. You should read the essay, but I do feel that Halloween is, for a lot of people, a time of liberation. You can dress up. You know, Lord knows that the first time I ever wear women's clothes in public was on Halloween, back in North Carolina when I was living there, there was the one time I felt safe going out of the house and women's clothes in North Carolina was on Halloween night.
Annalee: [00:01:39] I think a lot of trans folks, that's their story, is that they first experimented on Halloween.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:44] Yeah, it's so real. And I do think that like the spookiness and the kind of like, whoo, there's witches and stuff. Witches are super queer. A lot of monsters are very queer coded.
Annalee: [00:01:54] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:55] You know, I feel like that whole scary, cute thing that Halloween often has is a very queer coded thing for a lot of folks. I get it. I don't entirely hate Halloween, I guess.
Annalee: [00:02:07] I think for a lot of us in the queer community, every day is kind of dress up day in a way. So it's like Halloween is the one time when the whole country acknowledges what we're doing every day. Because especially when you aren't cisgender, at least in my case - as a non-binary person - I kind of feel like I'm just putting on gender all the time as like an outfit, you know? And I don't mean like, oh, one day I'll wear a dress and one day I'll wear a suit, which I know for a lot of non-binary people, that is kind of how they do it. I just mean that like, I honestly feel like gender itself is some kind of costume. And I'm always amused when people try to label me in terms of my gender, like, and sometimes try to figure out my gender or like misgender me and then kind of laugh uneasily. And so I always feel like I'm in a Halloween party where people are trying to guess what my costume is, you know?
[00:03:03] And so it just means that I have more awareness that like everything I wear is a costume, you know, including like a business suit or a casual outfit or, you know, formal wear. I mean, especially formal wear, like that's always a costume. So I think that that's part of what makes it so queer, is it's just like knowing that everything you're putting on is a put on, and not everybody gets to be aware of that for better or for worse, except on Halloween.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:34] Yeah. And you know, real talk, you're listening to this. It's like five days before the election. I'm going to be eating like my entire body weight in chocolate. I just guarantee by the time you listen to this, I will have a pile of chocolate in front of me and it's just going to be going straight into my face.
Annalee: [00:03:49] I mean, I think that's the absolute correct thing to do, which reminds me, you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. This is the podcast where we put on our meat suits so you don't have to. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. And I have a book coming out next year that's called Automatic Noodle. And you can preorder it now. It's about robots making noodles in San Francisco.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:17] I love Automatic Noodle so much. It's so great. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My latest book that comes out in August is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about a young woman who teaches her heartbroken mother how to become a witch while also uncovering the secrets of a magical queer book from 1749.
Annalee: [00:04:39] It's so good. And it is so Halloweeny. I never thought about how Halloweeny that book is.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:44] It's a very witchy book.
Annalee: [00:04:45] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:46] Super witchy.
Annalee: [00:04:47] I'm glad that you're like letting us know on Halloween about that book. So in this episode, we are going to be talking about all things spooky and delightful. So first, we're going to talk about the dark autumnal magic that is the animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall, which is having its 10 year anniversary. So we're going to get to like think about 10 years of Over the Garden Wall. And then we are so lucky to have horror author and humanities professor Michele Tracy Berger coming in to talk to us about a popular horror trope where people are terrifyingly experimented on by shady doctors, shadowy corporations, or government agencies. The point is, it's scary to be the subject to somebody's dissertation, and we're going to talk about it.
[00:05:33] Also, on our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about what happens when we use fantasy stories to imagine the future instead of using science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:43] Which reminds me, this is an independent podcast. We don't have any advertising. You didn't have to listen to Cialis or CBD ads.
Annalee: [00:05:53] Or mattress ads.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:54] You know, we tried to get CBD ads. We were like, send us some free samples and we'll talk about how much we like them, and it just didn’t... But the point is, we have a Patreon. The way that we do this podcast is you support us. We're just like community funded and community supported. And we love our community. So if you want to be part of that community, please join us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And then you can hang out in our Discord server with us. You get like mini episodes every other week. And it's just like a super lovely, we just hunker down in the autumnal season and just, you know, listen to banjo music together and like watch the scarecrows walk by. It's so lovely. So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Okay. Let's eat some potatoes and molasses.
[00:06:41] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:07:17] So we first watched this show pretty recently, thanks to Niah Harmon, our producer, who told us how great it was. And they were like, “Hey, it's the 10 year anniversary.” And we were like, “Okay, let's try it out.”
Charlie Jane: [00:07:29] Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:07:30] So Charlie Jane, tell us a little bit about what this show is, who created it, all that good stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:36] So Over the Garden Wall is about two brothers, Greg and Wirt, who are trapped in a kind of weird fantasy land, trying to find a way out. They team up with a bluebird named Beatrice, you know, and they're stalked by so this terrible creature called The Beast. And there's a guy named The Woodsman - who has some kind of ambiguous relationship with The Beast - who's supposedly a good guy, but it's not entirely clear. And I don't want to give too many spoilers, but it's a beautiful, spooky, gorgeously rendered animated show.
[00:08:06] And it was created by a guy named Patrick McHale, who was one of the original creators behind Adventure Time, and who was one of the showrunners of Adventure Time for its first five seasons. And in an interview I read, McHale compared it to classic portal fantasies like Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. So it's got that kind of vibe.
[00:08:23] It started out as a nine minute short that you can watch on YouTube called Tome of the Unknown, which actually played in a bunch of film festivals and got a lot of acclaim. It's similar, but it has a different story. I highly recommend hunting that down. So you know, Annalee, why do we love this show?
Annalee: [00:08:38] Well, I think I can speak for you in saying that part of what we loved about it is, you know, what lots of people loved about Adventure Time and also Steven Universe, which is another animated series that came out around this time, which is that it's extremely absurd and whimsical, but it's emotionally very intense and coherent, I would say. And it's funny because this is a show with like a frog who later becomes a singer. It has talking vegetables. It has a fish who goes fishing. It's a world where everything could possibly be a person, basically.
[00:09:20] And yet the characters' relationships with each other, their relationship to growing up feels so real and so well observed. The two brothers interactions with each other, the way they try to solve problems or run away from their problems. It's just a really great kind of alchemy. It really conjures up what it's like to grow up, you know, to live in a world that is kind of half fantasy, half real. You know, and maybe that's actually the world we live in as adults too, which is, you know, kind of the subtext of a lot of this stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:56] Yeah. And it's interesting what you said about the characters being kind of emotionally complex, because, you know, I watched the featurettes about the pitching of it that are on YouTube. And I also read the art book: The Art of Over the Garden Wall, where they talk about, like, the making of the show a lot. And there's this idea that they keep bringing up that, like, Wirt, the older brother, like, he's the guy who over-thinks everything. He's the over-thinker. Gregory is just like this carefree kind of weirdo who, as the actor who plays Gregory, Colin Dean, puts it, I'm the funny one or whatever.
Annalee: [00:10:27] Yeah, he says, I'm the funny part of the show.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:30] I'm the funny part of the show. And like, yes. But they're actually, I feel like there are more layers to these characters and like, to be clear, this is a show that's like 10, 11-minute episodes. It's basically the length of, like, a movie. It's the length of a regular movie.
Annalee: [00:10:44] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:45] And these characters get so much, like, I feel like there's so many sides to these characters that we see over that period of that time, partly because they're reacting to lots of weird situations, but also, like, they're not constrained by these, just like these archetypes that they're put into at all.
Annalee: [00:10:59] Well, and they change and they grow. And also, one of the things that I really like about this show, which I didn't see as much in something like Adventure Time or Steven Universe, is stylistically, it's really complicated. It's basically a historical pastiche of art and music, because there's a lot of music in this, just like in Adventure Time. And, you know, there's little bits of 19th century imagery. There's a lot of cartoon design that is right out of the 1930s. A lot of the musical numbers look like they could have been from Steamboat Willie, the original Disney short.
[00:11:42] Also, like, bits of the 1950s. Then there's, like, moments that feel very 90s. And it's this weird kind of collapsing of history into just lost things. And that's one of the things that Patrick McHale has said about the show, is that it's really about loss and, like, going to a world that's full of lost stories. And part of that lost story is the story of history. You know, the story of, like, what kinds of artistic styles and what kinds of concerns we had 100 years ago, 50 years ago. And they all come to life around our characters and who are very modern characters in a lot of ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:23] Yeah. If you look at the nine-minute short that they made originally before they made Over the Garden Wall, which is called Tome of the Unknown, it's about, like, searching for a magical book that contains everything that's ever been forgotten. It's well worth watching the short, if you love Over the Garden Wall, because it is basically more of Over the Garden Wall.
[00:12:41] But yeah, I read in the art book, Patrick McHale talks about, like, how he created a reference file full of, and I quote, Victorian chromolithography, vintage Halloween postcards, magic lantern slides, and photographs of New England foliage.” And there's a thing in animation called a mouth chart, which is, like, just a chart of all the ways that a character's mouth can move. And for this show, the mouth chart was entirely based on 1930s animation by Disney and Max Fleischer Studios. They're very intentional about picking, like, bits and pieces of the past to kind of mash together in this very bizarro thing.
Annalee: [00:13:19] Yeah. And it goes with the music because all of the music is old time music.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:22] There's a lot of ragtime.
Annalee: [00:13:23] Yeah, it's old time. And I think my favorite episode - there's no spoilers for this show. It's 10 years old. And there's one episode kind of toward the middle. It's kind of the moment where, like, things turn. And the frog - Greg's frog friend has just been making frog noises the entire time and then winds up singing this beautiful song and this old time song that's, you know, invented for the show. And the way his mouth moves is a hundred percent like a 1930s, like, singing character. And I just, like, I loved it so much.
[00:13:57] That scene is incredible because they're trying to hide the fact that there's any humans because they're on a steamboat, like an 1880s style steamboat that's entirely populated by frogs in fancy outfits who want to dance and they're afraid they'll be caught because they're not supposed to be on the boat. So all of the humans and the bird hide inside of a coat and only their frog's head is sticking out the top, but they're all playing instruments and the frog is singing and then they're revealed. The coat opens up and suddenly the frogs realize that a human is, like, playing…
Charlie Jane: [00:14:28] The bassoon.
Annalee: [00:14:28] He's playing the bassoon, which the frogs love, which makes sense because, like, frogs are very bass.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:33] They are.
Annalee: [00:14:33] And it's just... The image is like it’s taken out of, like, my most peaceful dream. It's like a frog singing, a boy playing his bassoon, a bird hanging out with them, and then all the frogs are dancing and kissing as they listen to this great music.
[Music Clip from Over the Garden Wall ] [00:14:52] And over the garden wall to me…
Charlie Jane: [00:15:03] Yeah, one thing that jumped out at me when we watched it for the second time is a lot of emphasis is put on the idea that Beatrice is a human who was turned into a bird and that's why she's a talking bird. But then, oh, there's a talking horse and oh, there's like a talking frog or a singing frog and oh, all these other animals and objects are talking as well. And it's just like, well, some talking animals used to be human and some just are talking animals.
Annalee: [00:15:28] Yeah, and there's also, like, living skeletons.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:32] It's like dream logic.
Annalee: [00:15:33] Yeah, it is very much dream logic. Although, as we were saying earlier, there is a kind of coherent narrative to it.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:39] So, I mean, part of what's interesting to think about here is how it's different from Adventure Time, which basically they were making at the same time, like they were, like, doing Adventure Time and then they went and did this as, like, a side project, I guess. And Adventure Time, I mean, Patrick McHale was still working on Adventure Time. Pendleton Ward came and worked on Over the Garden Wall a little bit. Like, I feel like there's a lot of crossover. And, you know, Adventure Time has this very, also very silly, eclectic aesthetic, but it borrows more from a lot of, like, anime and video game stuff. There's even a video game console as, like, a character in Adventure Time.
Annalee: [00:16:14] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:14] The music is very video game music. And, you know, everything is very kind of crisp in a weird way in Adventure Time, I want to say.
Annalee: [00:16:23] Adventure Time is... it's also very psychedelic.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:25] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:16:26] Like, it feels very, like, post-1960s.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:29] Psychedelic, but in a very 21st century way. It's not, like, 60s psychedelic, I'm going to say.
Annalee: [00:16:35] It has Yellow Submarine.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:37] A little bit. A little bit. Yeah, I could see that. But, I mean, I feel like there's a very kind of 2010s cute overload aesthetic in Adventure Time.
Annalee: [00:16:45] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:46] It reminds me of this store that we used to go to, this clothing store called Loyal Army, where you could buy all these, like, shirts that had, like, smiling clouds and, like, stars and things on it. And, like, that's the aesthetic of Adventure Time.
Annalee: [00:16:57] Totally.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:59] It's, like, the cute overload style. And, like, Over the Garden Wall is a more melancholy style. It's still cute. It's creepy cute.
Annalee: [00:17:05] Mm-hmm.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:05] One of the things I read is, like, you know, most of the time in Adventure Time, the backgrounds are fairly simple. There's a lot going on, but the backgrounds are fairly clean and simple. And apparently, one of the huge problems in making Over the Garden Wall is that they had to switch animation studios because they were trying to do backgrounds that were so dense and elaborate. You know, I feel like there was a little bit of a Miyazaki vibe going on in places. The backgrounds, just, like, the environments the characters are walking through are so densely rendered that it was so much more labor intensive than the other animated shows that they were making at the time.
Annalee: [00:17:38] Interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:39] And so you can kind of see that, and that is a huge part of the aesthetic, is just the incredibly, like, dense and intensive. And it does kind of play into that feeling of melancholy.
Annalee: [00:17:49] That's interesting. It kind of, when you said that, it made me think about Tuca & Bertie, which is a later animated series that actually has some of these same kinds of sensibilities. You know, the kind of absurdism, the idea that, you know, animals and plants and humans are all kind of intermingling everywhere. But in Tuca & Bertie, the background is so detailed. And, like, I would often watch it and pause it at various points to, like, read all the text in the background. There's, like, silly signs. There's, like, just weird crap happening in pretty much every frame. And you'll miss a lot of jokes, like, if you just let it flow by, you know. Again, Tuca & Bertie is much more contemporary. And I wonder if there's something that we lost between Adventure Time and Tuca & Bertie, that, like, Over the Garden Wall is, like, a bridge between them or something like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:44] That's interesting. I mean, I do feel like there's a moment that is now clearly over. Like, you know, 10 years ago, we were kind of at the start of or at the heyday of, where there was a lot of animation that was, like, ostensibly for kids. But, like, actually, in the art book that I read, Patrick McHale talks about wanting things to be, like, something that kids won't get bored but adults are also being kind of spoken to. Or, like, something that, like, is working on different levels so that it's for kids and also for adults.
[00:19:14] I forget exactly how he phrases it. But, you know, really challenging. Like, Adventure Time is also, at times, very challenging and complicated and has, like, a dense mythos. And, like, Steven Universe, obviously, deals with some very grown-up themes around trauma, especially eventually. There's this moment where there's so much kids' animation and so much, like, all ages' animation being made for Cartoon Network, for Nickelodeon, for, you know, various other places, including YouTube at the time, that's just, like, huge and influential.
[00:19:44] And this thing that Adventure Time pioneers of having 11-minute episodes with no commercial breaks, just, like, 11 minutes of, like, shoot it into your veins, tell a complete story, beginning, middle, and end in 11 minutes. And it's just, it's really insane. It's really incredible. And, like, the fact that we had that for so long. And I feel like I'm not sure what happened. I think that Cartoon Network isn't really as much of a thing anymore. Streaming came and ate these cable companies' lunch.
[00:20:12] I think that our attitude to kids and kids' entertainment has also changed. And also, obviously, you could point to the rise of TikTok and the rise of other stuff that if kids want to have 11 minutes of, like, concentrated stuff, they could just sit and watch TikToks or whatever. But I do feel like, I mean, I'm maybe reaching a little bit more in the middle of all these moral panics about, like, kids and, like, whether kids are okay. And basically wanting kids to have appropriate entertainment.
[00:20:36] And I feel like what was great about Over the Garden Wall and Adventure Time is that it was really not appropriate entertainment at all. It was, like, very inappropriate. And Steven Universe is gay as heck and just, like, goes there. And, like, I feel like now we're in this moment of, like, “Somebody think of the children” and, like, satanic panics are just springing up everywhere. And so just kind of throwing out, like, a mishmash of ideas about, like, what the heck happened to that beautiful moment we were having.
Annalee: [00:21:03] Yeah, that's so interesting. I was also thinking about the battle over appropriate content for kids and how Over the Garden Wall, I mean, it is appropriate for kids. It's a fairy tale. It has scary stuff. It doesn't have any themes that I think would be outlawed in Florida, but it's still, it's so moody and, like, weird that I could just see people thinking that it was satanic just because it has spooky monsters. And that makes me think about Owl House, actually, which is another example of this kind of animation, which is straight up satanic. I mean, they're witches.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:41] I mean, they're witches.
Annalee: [00:21:42] Heroes.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:43] They're living on the corpse of a dead Titan, you know, who's kind of demonic looking, especially when you just see his skeleton.
Annalee: [00:21:51] I mean, it's totally not satanic FYI.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:55] It’s a very sweet, gentle show.
Annalee: [00:21:56] Like, it's actually a very bouncy, happy show. But it is true that, like, it's very witchy. I mean, it's witchy in the same way that, like, you know, The Magicians is witchy or, like, there's a school for witchery and, like, you know, it's very mundane in a lot of ways. And it's also very queer. So I could see that show never being made now, or at least not for a while.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:18] Yeah. I mean, I feel like that show was the tail end of what we're talking about.
Annalee: [00:22:22] For sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:22] There was a show I loved on Max that I think might have been originally on Cartoon Network called Summer Camp Island, which I really loved. And they've removed it from Max. You can't even watch it anymore. And I feel like Netflix was doing some kid-friendly animation for a while there. You know, like, that show The Dragon Prince, which I liked it. It wasn't, like, my favorite. But I feel like there's just been a decision to kind of stop doing that at this point. And I've actually read interviews with, like, decision makers where they're like, “Yeah, we decided kid-friendly animation, especially that kind of, like, slightly skewing older, slightly more mature kid animation. It's not where the money is.” And so now there's animation like Blue Eye Samurai, which is very violent and for adults.
Annalee: [00:23:06] Yeah, it's 100% for adults. It's more like anime. I mean, it is anime. It's in the style of anime and in the tradition of anime.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:13] Yeah. Actually, our producer sent us a note saying that part of what's going on is that there's a lot of workplace issues in animation.
Annalee: [00:23:19] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:19] The Animation Guild is in the middle of its own collective bargaining agreement negotiations as animation workers were left out of all the recent wins in the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. So that's part of what's going on is that just like with video game workers, just like with VFX workers, people working in animation have been treated horribly. And we could do a whole other episode about what's been going on with Pixar.
Annalee: [00:23:40] So, Charlie Jane, to finish up, what do you think is going to happen when kids don't have access to this kind of stuff? Are the kids going to be all right if they can't see stuff that's like dark and weird and absurd?
Charlie Jane: [00:23:53] I mean, I worry about that. I feel like something really wonderful has been lost with the loss of this kind of animation. Yeah, I do feel like, you know, there was this beautiful moment and what I think actually will happen is that there's people who grew up watching Adventure Time and Over the Garden Wall and Steven Universe who are going to be like they're going to be in a position to make stuff happen in like 10, 15 years. And they're going to be like demanding more of this stuff because it's what they remember from their childhood. So I don't think it's ever going to be gone.
Annalee: [00:24:24] And they're going to show it to their kids, you know, like they're going to and kids are going to find this stuff because it's out there, you know, it's either out there officially or out there unofficially.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:34] Yeah, actually. And I want to close by saying that like hearing the Castro, where they're doing that Halloween block party we just talked about, there is an organization called Lyric, which is for LGBTQ youth, like teenagers and younger. And they are hosting a showing of Over the Garden Wall for queer youth, like now, basically. So, you know, it is still finding new fans and especially queer fans, I think, are probably going to glom onto it. So it is definitely going to keep having a wonderful life.
Annalee: [00:25:05] Yeah, it's queer fans. It's also just like weirdo artist fans. You know, people are going to find it. I feel like there's this sort of turn of the century generation that's left all these breadcrumbs behind from the before times. And just to remind people like, “You know, before fascism, like we could do all this weird stuff. And like we acknowledged that childhood was complicated back then. And like you could do that again. Just FYI, we left you a little story behind to tell you about that.”
Charlie Jane: [00:25:33] Hell yeah. So we're going to take a real quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk to Michele Tracy Berger about her new short story collection called Doll Seed.
[00:25:43] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:25:46] Michele Tracy Berger writes horror fiction and is the author of the short story collection Doll Seed, which just came out, as well as the novella Renew You. She's also an academic who has written about intersectionality in the classroom, as well as black women's health. She's currently director of the Baker North Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Welcome to the show, Michele.
Michele: [00:26:08] Oh, thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I feel like it just intertwines so many areas of interest and you all do such a great job of bringing all those areas of interest out. So super excited to be here.
Annalee: [00:26:21] Well, cool. We're so glad to have you. And I just finished reading Doll Seed, your short story collection, which is so amazing and creepy and I highly recommend it. There's definitely images in there that I will be carrying around with me for a while. So I wanted to talk to you about a theme which comes up in a few of these stories, which is the horror of being experimented on, whether that's for science or for social science.
[00:26:49] And the story that opens the anthology, it's set in the 1970s and it's about a black family who were chosen to be the first humans on earth to host what's, you know, basically a foreign exchange student from another planet. And it ends up being this big social experiment to see whether an alien can live with humans. And the family is thrust into the spotlight and they're basically turned into celebrities who have to represent black people in this super uncomfortable way. And that turns out to be a big part of the nightmare that unfolds in the story. And so I wanted to ask you, like, what is it about being a social experiment that's so scary? Why did you want to tell this as a horror story?
Michele: [00:27:28] So you are such a perceptive reader. Thank you for that. Let me just say a little bit about how the story came to be. So I'm going to take you way back. 1990s, late 90s, a comic name, African-American comic name, Paul Mooney. And he was doing this bit, a very biting, sarcastic bit about E.T. And so take some listeners back, back to E.T. I often think about this story as E.T. meets Fatal Attraction.
Annalee: [00:27:59] I definitely got the E.T. vibes from it. So yeah.
Michele: [00:28:01] Kind of a, you know, non idealistic first contact. And so he he basically was doing this bit saying, you know, if E.T. had landed in a black community, E.T. might have landed up in a pot of green somewhere with some neck bones, like just really kind of out there. But he also said, which is the part that I thought about, he said, you know, it's so interesting that we had a film where an extraterrestrial could come and live in a primarily white neighborhood. And yet we still struggle with areas of integration. And I just never forgot that. And it was like I said, it was a very biting, intense bit. He was sort of known for being a little bit on the edge.
[00:28:39] And so that kind of stirred in my mind. And so I wasn't necessarily consciously trying to write an anti E.T. story, but I was really trying to play with this. OK, here's a family, an upwardly mobile aspirational family right at the precipice of, you know, all these great things. And then their daughter, who, you know, I think one of the themes of the collection is longing and belonging, really wants a best friend. So she kind of goes about this in a bit of a unique way. She enters this contest. They have they host Nucia, the extraterrestrial, and things go completely awry. And so part of it is this idea of perfectionism, you know, how when we're under a microscope and we're under stress, how that then kind of can exacerbate perfectionism. And so all of the characters in many ways, the family is dealing with being, quote unquote, the first black family.
[00:29:33] And this was, you know, part of my emotional territory that I like to write in is the 1970s and 80s, because that's when I was growing up. And I just got to play with those themes, which wouldn't necessarily resonate in the same way now. I mean, some of them would, but like I could really play with that sense of, you know, what it was like to be the first of something. And I would say in the editorial process, so this story had been published before, but in going through the editorial process, the editors at Outlook Books, shout out to them. They're amazing. Feminist, intersectional press. We basically kind of talked about levels of empathy between the two characters. So Lindsay, the human, and Nussia, because Nussia is there somewhat under duress. And so it actually feels a little bit, it's horrific, but it's less of a blood and guts horror story than it might have been in its original form. But I am interested in how do we under duress just everyday humans deal with kind of these extraordinary situations.
Annalee: [00:30:38] That's so interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:39] That actually makes me think, especially what you said about E.T. and like first contact and kind of imagining a version of that involving black people. And the 80s also makes me think of The Space Traders by Derrick Bell, which is this super influential science fiction story where aliens show up and say, we'll give you all the answer to all the Earth's problems if you just give us all of your black people. It's a super famous short story.
Michele: [00:31:01] Yes. Thank you for making that connection. Yes. And legal, like critical race theory, and legal jurisprudence.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:08] Derrick Bell was one of the creators of critical race theory. Absolutely.
Michele: [00:31:11] Yes. Thank you for that. Like, that's another layer. And I think, you know, Nussia, the story evolved over a long period of time and like, and I reworked it. And so I'm sure I had some of these pieces kind of rolling around back there. And I thought, oh, also, where can I talk about roller skating and girlhood and, you know, some other things that happened. The 70s and 80s, kind of a great place also to explore some of those other dynamics.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:38] Oh, for sure.
Annalee: [00:31:39] And it was an era when a lot of social experiments were kind of playing out on television and in the media. Like you had the documentary about the Louds, the Loud family from the early 70s who were like this suburban white family, and they are supposed to just be this average family. And then they wind up kind of, you know, falling apart on camera. And I kept thinking about that and wondering, like, about the horror of that. Like this moment in American culture when suddenly all of our private problems start becoming public and get dissected by the media and by scientists, too.
Michele: [00:32:16] Absolutely. And also at roughly the same time, the culture's movement toward more and more disclosure, right? In terms of the rise, like I think about Phil Donahue show, like that also that kind of going in this kind of parallel track, both of like the expose documentary or people falling apart under these social experiments, but then also the culture being more receptive to being a kind of a confessional culture, right? Right. It's almost like I think, oh, if there was a part two, maybe Lindsay would end up in a, you know, being on the Phil Donahue show, which would be kind of interesting.
Annalee: [00:32:58] She would be an influencer or Nussia, the alien.
Michele: [00:33:03] Oh, really?
Annalee: [00:33:04] Because she already kind of is in the story. So I'll let, I'll let listeners read the story because it really is rich and full of so many just interesting details that I just loved. So…
Charlie Jane: [00:33:16] Well, I was just going to ask about another story, which sort of deals with people, turning people into experiments. The title story Doll Seed, which is sort of a horror kind of dark fantasy recreation of like a real life set of experiments, which are these, you know, doll tests conducted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1930s and 1940s. Can you tell us about those experiments and why you wanted to turn them into this sort of fictionalized version?
Michele: [00:33:40] Yeah. So I, I have been, been interested in dolls and all culture and human relationships with dolls for a long time. I had the, one of my cherished possessions is the Bionic Woman doll, which again, I'm taking people way, way back. So there's something already that I was interested in dolls. And I just, for people who may not know, so the legal decision that dismantled legal segregation, Brown vs. Board of Education, which comes out in 1954, part of that decision was based on psychological work, psychological research done by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, who African-American researchers, who basically did what's known as the doll test, where they took four identical looking dolls, two male, two female and black and white, and then asked black and white children to talk about these dolls, like which one is the cuter doll, which one is the nicer doll, and then wrote up those results.
[00:34:45] And that was something that Thurgood Marshall was very excited about. Like, you know, there's a whole history of the NAACP kind of bringing that research in and then using it as part of this case. So we have that as a, as a history. And my mind went to, what happened to those dolls? What, what is the inner life? What, what was the inner life of those dolls? We have this self-aware doll, Chevella, who's in this brown body and she gets kind of caught up through trying to find a human who loves her, which is what all dolls do. And she becomes part of the larger experiment. And it's interesting from her perspective, she keeps trying to choose like the right child, but she gets from her, the person who owns her, quote unquote, at the time, they don't really want that. They don't really want the sort of appropriate match, we might say, right?
[00:35:35] So I just was trying to play with that idea of dolls and the doll test and the experiments, because I think today, when we think about questions of self-esteem, when we think about questions of prejudice, would we use dolls as kind of the arbiter for that? You know, that some of the, I guess, recently I was looking up, there has been a redoing of the doll test, but more watching children play with dolls, not asking them direct questions and looking at how Cuban kids from different communities interact with different kinds of dolls. And that kind of shows us some of the, some dynamics that we might feel are unfortunately still from the 1950s, right? But also new dynamics.
[00:36:19] So I think there's something to me just really interesting, but you know, obviously we're happy that legal segregation with, you know, that Brown vs. Board of Education, you know, turned out the way that it did. But I always thought, oh, this is so interesting. It was so much of some parts of the argument were based on the social science research at the time.
Annalee: [00:36:39] Yeah. One of the things that was super interesting to me, just as a social science nerd, was that in the original experiments, like you said, they kind of asked the kids, you know, what do you feel about these dolls? And oftentimes like the black kids would say that the white doll was prettier or nicer and reject the black dolls. And of course that was used to prove that Jim Crow laws and segregation were undermining, you know, black achievement and undermining black kids' self-esteem.
[00:37:06] But then in the story, you have this great moment where the doll watches the researchers kind of encouraging the black kids to choose the white doll. And like when they choose the black doll, they kind of make a face to like discourage it. And it's very subtle. Like it feels like the feels like the kind of thing that you would notice as a researcher, like that you would be like, “Oh yeah, that's a problematic way that you set this experiment up because you're sending these kids like facial signals that they shouldn't choose the black doll.” And I wondered, is that based on your feeling about how these kinds of psychology tests are flawed or was that more just something that you wanted to put in the story to make the dolls inner life even more screwed up?
Michele: [00:37:53] Not to throw any shade on the original doll test, but in the story, the dolls, they can't speak or move during the day, right? It's only at night that they can, they kind of have this other more kind of human life, but they notice. So that kind of, they're so connected. And I don't even, I don't think that the researchers in the story - they're not conscious that they're trying to influence the kids. But, you know, the dolls are tuned in that, you know, for the research purposes, they're happier when both children choose the white doll. And I just thought like, yeah, I just thought kind of playing with that, hopefully making us not necessarily uncomfortable, but just thinking about those other, those layers, right? Those layers of research.
Annalee: [00:38:40] Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah. Cause I think there is a sense in which if those experiments had gone a different way, they wouldn't have been able to use them in their court case, right? So if the black, if the black kids had been like, I love black dolls, then they would be like, “Oh, okay. Well, how do you feel about a black truck versus a white truck? Let's try that.”
Michele: [00:39:03] Right. Can I just add too, right? You know, we're dealing with such complex phenomena, just generally prejudice, discrimination, racism, all the -isms. So, you know, so much credit to Kenneth and Mamie Clark and others who were trying to find a straightforward way to just say, “Okay, here's some of the ways in which we see these self-esteem showing up.” But when we think about the phenomena, like I was, I was saying, you know, these things are symbolic and material, right? You know, they, they work on multiple levels. So like, I feel like we're trying to deal with this, this very concrete material, legal segregation level. And so like, here's something, but dolls themselves are symbolic. You know, they, they kind of work on our imaginations.
Annalee: [00:39:50] Yeah, that's super interesting. One of the things that Charlie, Jane and I were talking about was that the fear of being turned into a scientific experiment comes up a lot in horror stories featuring black people and women, created by black people and women. And I wonder, why do you think that is? Why is it that these marginalized groups have more terror around being turned into a scientific or social science experiment?
Michele: [00:40:15] Well, I would just say that one of my observations is, when people feel perpendicular to culture – and perpendicular to culture, I will say, is not my term. I read this in somewhat – a literary agent, actually, and African-American woman was talking about this a long time ago. So I collect all the things from an old Essence magazine. But it stuck with me. And she said, you know, black women – she was talking about black women specifically – are positioned as perpendicular to culture, not that they believe they are inherently, but when you have people who are positioned that way, then the, the threat is very real that you might going in for, you know, an everyday kind of procedure, somehow get like, you know, your cells or something get used for something much more nefarious.
[00:41:03] So, I think there's, there's that, just that possibility, but also I think connected to issues of, you know, access and class and resources, the fact that, you know, people have been under resourced. And so that leaves you much more vulnerable to systems of power that often flow through, you know, hospitals, laboratories, educational institutions that have hospitals. So I think that's also partly why there's been a theme as well as everything from obviously Tuskegee and before Tuskegee to, you know, just we can think in the contemporary moment, people being - asking a lot of questions around a whole variety of kind of medical issues because that, that concern.
[00:41:51] And I saw that even in, you know, my own academic work, just with kind of working with African-American mothers and their teenage daughters, different ways that played out, like people wanting to do wellness, but also wellness and prevention work, but also being much more careful if they had a procedure, getting like second and third and fourth opinions, because a little bit of the threat of, and these were, you know, I mostly talked to women who were well resourced, not under resourced, but that can, you know, that kind of legacy, that history.
[00:42:23] So I think, you know, horror is about, it's about an atmosphere. It's about emotion. And so, you know, anytime you can bring in feeling trapped, feeling exploited and doing that through the vehicle of experimentation kind of like leads itself to good horror fodder, I think.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:41] So, you know, in general, how does, how do people go about doing research on human subjects without it turning into a horror story? Like, what would you like to see researchers think about more as they approach, like, especially marginalized communities?
Michele: [00:42:56] That is such an amazing question. And so in the academic context, my, you know, my background is women's and gender studies and political science. And when I was able and had such a lovely experience, often teaching students about principles of inquiry. I was at an institution where, you know, if you wanted to do human subjects research, you went about learning all the ethical issues and you did training. And I would really stress, we should be doing and thinking about ethical research when we're doing, quote unquote, archival work, whether we're doing social science research, qualitative research.
[00:43:36] So kind of building the questions in, building the process in the beginning is important. I stress a lot of reading some of the history of where experimentation and science has gone wrong, because I think we sometimes we assume people already know those stories and a lot of people, particularly young people, don't know that. So there's that process. I think grounding oneself in the history around what has gone wrong in science, but also doing, you know, every university to do human subjects research, you have ethical training modules that you do.
[00:44:09] But then also I think it's really important to have a little bit of self-reflexivity to cultivate, you know, who am I? What are the things that when I, whether I'm doing textual work, that the kind of mental landscape I'm coming from, but definitely interrogating what are the assumptions I'm making about who I want to talk to?
[00:44:31] So just that, that sense of, you know, what in qualitative research is called, you know, self-reflexivity, but thinking about the assumptions and biases, you know, who we are. And also, why are you doing human subjects research, right? And understanding, particularly if you're going in, if you're working with vulnerable communities, you have an even heightened sense of - you need to have a heightened sense of awareness about that community. And ideally, I think, to be honest, I think where many research communities are moving to is actually to do work in part partnerships. So you're not doing work about people, but you're doing work in partnership. And ideally, you're working with people, if you can, interlocutors, participants, collaborators that are part of the community that you are hoping to learn from and learn about.
[00:45:24] So those are high standards, but I do feel like in anthropology and sociology, women's and gender studies, I think many fields are trying to move more toward that direction. And what’s interesting, the last thing I'll say about this, my students who had been training over a number of years, they get it. Like, they're coming from a different politic, a different aesthetic, you know, so they're all about inclusivity, social justice in research. They don't see that as intention. So I've also taken great cues from them, which I'm really have been really happy to do.
Annalee: [00:45:56] Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us and for talking to us about both your fiction and nonfiction lives. That's always exciting for me. So tell us where folks can find your work online, in reality…
Michele: [00:46:08] So this was amazing. I'm just so grateful to be here. People can find me on Instagram, Berger, B-E-R-G-E-R, Michele, M-I-C-H-E-L-E. Yes, I'm a 1L, Michele, 2-0-0-5. And also I have a brand new website, which I'm super excited about. I help to resource writers and readers. And that's the creativetickle.com. And “Creative Tickle” is the name of my coaching practice. You all know how it takes, like, such an effort to redo a website. And so, like, mine now does not look like it was made in 2006. So come join me over there. I've got lots of fun stuff.
Annalee: [00:46:43] Awesome. And people can find your book, Doll Seed, everywhere now. It's out. It's in the world. So order that.
All: [00:46:49] Yay!
Michele: [00:46:50] Yes, it is.
Annalee: [00:46:51] Order it in your local indie bookstore. Order it online from Aunt Lute. Awesome. And thanks again.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:55] Thank you so much. It was so great to meet you, Michele.
Michele: [00:46:57] Thank you.
[00:46:58] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:47:00] Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you're having a spooky, spooky day or a cute spooky day or a spoopy day, whatever makes you happy, or just totally avoid it and go have a day that is free of spookiness. Remember that you can always find us on Spooky Mastodon, on Instagram, on Bluesky. We would, of course, appreciate your support on Patreon. Patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:47:26] Thanks to our amazing spooky producer and engineer, Niah Harmon, who hooked us up with learning about Over the Garden Wall. Thank you so much to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. And if you are a patron, we will talk to you later. We'll see you on Discord. If you just stumbled on this podcast out of nowhere from the ether, if you found it while you fell over the garden wall, you can subscribe. You can like us on all of the places where podcasts can be liked and reviewed. And we will be in your ears in two weeks with another episode. Or if you're a patron, you'll be getting a mini episode next week. Alright, bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:48:09] Bye!
[00:48:11] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]