Scarred (Never After Series)

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The book begins by looking at children’s television dramas, starting with the ITV serial Noah’s Castle, which dealt with food shortages and society breaking down in the face of civil unrest. Though adapted from a 70s novel, this was broadcast in the 80s, as if to mark the idea – at the start of the decade – that the discord in the world was here and not going away. Serials like The Tripods and The Knights of God dealt with young heroes fighting against controlling totalitarian regimes, showing that this has been a theme in young adult fiction for longer than commonly assumed. From the very start Edmondson seems emotionally needy and mentally unstable. Leaders of the Nexium group play on these issues and slowly pull her into the organization's crazy Scientology-like system of self-esteem mixed with abuse. The author calls the group a "cult" but it's not by normal definition--they didn't force her to stay in it and she freely hopped planes regularly to fly across country to attend ridiculous seminars. The leaders would guilt-trip her and she would buy into it. Once or twice might make you feel some sympathy--but all the time over a period of twelve years? She has to shoulder a lot of the blame.

This book was not a particularly easy read, in a large part for me due to how it was written. I found the CBC investigative journal program Uncover: Exposing NXIVM to be a much more entertaining dig into Sarah Edmondson's experience and easier to digest. I have yet to read Oxenberg's book on it all, but I am looking forward to eventually doing so. I have read about different cults before, always wondering how the hell people managed to allow others to so fully control them that they succombed to brainwashing, abuse, and even death. With NXIVM, I can completely understand how it was able to collect so many followers and for so long under the guise of a personal growth and empowerment groups...because what human isn’t constantly seeking that? What started off as hopeful, inspiring, motivating, and life-changing turned into a dark, dominating and gross abuse of power over people, but more specifically over a smaller group of women and their bodies.

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I admit it, this stuff fascinates me. I have always wondered how people can become so brainwashed as to join and live in cults for years. I mean, it has obviously all got to do with the original grooming and promises, the promised enlightenment, and the reading of one's weaknesses and the preying upon them. Let's be honest, if you were told upfront what it is all about, you would run a mile. Can you imagine a first-up, honest introduction to Scientology? The launch of Channel 4 in 1982 provided another sense that boundaries were starting to stretch. The newly launched channel made an effort – not just in the original programming it offered and commissioned, but also in showing foreign language films and unconventional animation. For example, it screened Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (which is possibly the best adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) cut up into six parts over the 1989-1990 New Year. If you look for further information on this, you’ll understand why it may have made an impact on impressionable viewers.

T here’s a terrible habit, when looking at the culture of a decade, to not go into any depth; it’s an easy task to just laugh at the fashions, or assume that referring to a handful of common references will cover it. The 1980s in the UK were a time of unemployment, poverty, social unrest, and political divisions – not just everybody wearing red braces, having fax machines and watching John Hughes movies… Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.” As with everything in culture that hangs around long enough (The Beatles, the Star Wars saga, the concept of the superhero) 1970s nostalgia has darkened and complicated itself as its shelf-life has extended beyond its own meagre ambitions. Because it wasn’t just Bagpuss and Dad’s Army was it? It was the IRA and Pol Pot and the Ayatollah. It was panic about rabies and despair about the Cold War, summers that were too hot and winters that were too cold, and strikes and power-cuts. Margaret Thatcher smashing the glass ceiling and lacerating everyone below her. Open racism, open sexism and people of forty who looked nearer seventy because no one dared tell them how many fags they could smoke or gins they could sink at lunchtime. A book about growing up in the dark side of the 70s with the darkest, most inappropriate pop culture ever.

Overview

As an aside I recently introduced my daughter to 1970's Worzel Gummidge and she LOVED it, but it was strange viewing the show through a modern lens. Worzel's awakening is more akin to a Fulci zombie film, Aunt Sally, the Crowman and other scarecrows are remarkably cruel and barbaric, the children are abandoned by an alcoholic largely absent father, Babs Windsor as Saucy Nancy is remarkably cheeky 70's smut, Worzel's head removing is terrifying and of course Worzel's kindly threatening of Aunt Sally plays domestic abuse for laughs - all this in a hilarious daytime TV show for kids) La voz y fuerza que tuvo Sarah para cuestionar y poder salir de ese agujero fue admirable y su testimonio es resistencia y resiliencia para comprender, cuestionar y aprender. The section Scarred By Public Information Films is a wonderland of innocence and injury: individual ads and films are discussed, and it’s to the authors’ credit that they can demonstrate how the hysterical and laughable nature of many of these mini-horror movies sits happily cheek-by-jowl with a very real, completely unforgettable sense of sweaty unease and existential panic: the title of one sub-chapter, Everything Kills is perfect: in the world of the PIF, a rug on a polished wooden floor could be scarier than any chainsaw. The book is studded throughout with a running roll-call of unsung heroes of British cultural life, and in this section the career of the late, great John Krish (of notorious Nationwide-bothering railway-safety film The Finishing Line, and bleak, brutal fire-prevention short Searching) gets a thorough evaluation. The chapter’s real coup is an interview with Jeff Grant, director of the authentically haunting Lonely Water, the Citizen Kane of Public Information Films. The connections he makes between the grim, fatalistic tone of his 90-second classic and the monochrome dread of Ingmar Bergman is catnip to the ageing PIF-lover. I also learnt that 'Joe Hawkins' from 'The Oppressed' song 'King of the Skins' was based on a book character and have gone out and bought those from the series in print. Suspect I will either love or hate them...Every day is a school day)