it sounded like a man's voice, and it was deep and agonizing.
But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness. They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be a habitation of dragons, and a court for owls. The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate. Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read: no one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate: for my mouth it hath commanded, and his spirit it hath gathered them. Isaiah 34:11-16
I just really feel like I'm on to something here. Oscar Mendoza, Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch
My mother retells a story from college every so often. One of her first times becoming miserably drunk, she got very sick. Crawling to the bathroom, she lay on the floor crying. She was thinking of her grandfather.
Her grandfather had passed away ten years ago. On that day, my mother, a child, refused to wear the party dress my grandmother bought her. It was not cheap, and her family was very poor. I imagine it must have been extraordinarily ugly. The birthday was at the local barbeque restaurant where the women in my family worked. My mother was in a sour mood the entire night. After the party, her grandfather went home and suffered a myocardial infarction, killing him in his sleep. My mother remembers this day bitterly and doesn't bring it up much. He was the only man my great-grandmother ever loved and who treated her tenderly. After Grandpa Vonzo died, my great-grandmother married a slew of abusive men, one of which died in a house fire due to a lit cigarette.
On this night in college, though, my mother was heaving over the toilet, eyes watering into the bowl, crying and remembering. She lifted her head and saw an array of stars. The stars moved in spirals. Slowly, they formed the face of her grandfather. The face firmed into a transparent human shape, and looked at her deeply in the eyes. She pushed herself back towards the wall, closed her eyes, and repeated, "Okay, you're scaring me, you're scaring me now." When she opened her eyes, it was gone. My mother swears complete lucidity.
Dutch Marich's Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch is part of a broader thesis on this primitive human intuition, a sometimes sight-seen confirmation. Building from a story of a man who disappears after spending several days in the Nevada desert looking for a structure from a video, the trio of films evolves an obscured horror story into lore endlessly multiplying and dividing, trails ending when the trees crowd in, only to reveal tunnels.
The first film concerns the disappearance of Gary Hinge. A highly skilled outdoorsman, he disappears after coming upon a structure in the middle of the desert. Its presence alone gives Gary the impression he is being watched. He is, in fact, being watched by something: humanoid, skin-peeled and moaning-mouthed ghouls, shuffling and vacant. It's the most intimate glimpse of horror in the series, but curiously, this "reveal" (god forbid) is nowhere near the weird and the eerie shrouding the greater mystery.
Firewatch concerns a would-be vlogger, Oscar Mendoza, who is bent on searching for the structure Gary found in the first film. He is partially a foil to Gary, less skilled and more concerned with uncovering the structure's true nature, perhaps exploiting Gary’s experience. While Gary happens upon the structure by mistake, Oscar goes after it selfishly. He’s a recovering alcoholic and, like Gary, has strong family ties and high ambition. You could call both characters “good.” So are the other key characters in the series that have disappeared: a mother and a student. As presented, they do not deserve the pain they endure. Karmically, they are owed, and the universe owes the pendulum to swing in the other direction.
But this leveling swing is not promised in a life full of ambivalence, grotesquery, and joy unevenly heaped upon us. To cope, we create humanity where it is absent. We burrow closer to the “why” of suffering to comfort ourselves. We make meanings out of good and bad to prove we’re on a specific, promised path. Our living is in vain, and we have to keep rolling the wheel up the hill with the hope of seeing a new view or a new face. Firewatch is a part of a series challenging this edict visually and formally.
The Power of Suggestion
Pareidolia is the human instinct to identify human images in mundane objects, the way a power socket or a home's facade can resemble a surprised face. Take, for example, a few questionable glimpses from Firewatch. In the finale sequence, when Oscar enters a rundown church in Edna, a Gold Rush ghost town, his camera and flashlight scan the interior. In an understated action, he trains his beam on a strange item in a doorway. My friend mentioned it first: it looks like a face, perhaps made of mud, resembling a monkfish. This may have been Marich's intentional production design to manipulate the viewer into seeing these eldritch peripheral figures. Or my friends and I made it up ourselves. I personally believe I saw the crumpled figure of a man lying on the floor in the same room as the mud-face. Whether this was intentionally fabricated or my friends and I projected it, the effect remains. Whether or not it is "truth” –intentional–is irrelevant. It is scary.
Pareidolia Pareidolia Pareidolia
Another story from my mother: as a teen, she came home in the morning after sneaking out of the house and saw something unexplainable. My grandmother was on the couch asleep. Rounding the corner over to the staircase, she saw it: my youngest uncle's beloved teddy bear, dangling from the attic door chain, swinging like a hanged man. With plausible deniability that my grandmother must have done it (at the time, she was an unrecovered alcoholic, and her latent psychosis began to show), she brushed it off. Still, she brought it up to her parents later. My grandfather mentioned that just before my mother came home, he was leaving and saw my grandmother asleep and didn’t notice a toy hanging in the hallway. He did not think she woke up and did this at 9 in the morning, but the bear was swinging like it had only just been tied up.
My mother always believed there was a presence in this home. Her stories vary from benign (albeit menacing) occurrences like the former to unexplainable guardian-like activity. One time, as a teen, she borrowed money from my grandmother to go roller skating with her friends. My grandmother gave her $20 and said not to spend it all and to return the change to her purse by morning. My mother did just that, and in the morning, the change was back in her own wallet. My mother thinks a misguided spirit had given her the money back because she needed it. Perhaps it was her Grandpa Vonzo playing a trick.
We attach values to the unexplained to explain it. While my grandmother very well may have been performing this poltergeist activity, my mother firmly believes that these were really spirits, multiples, living in her home and watching her grow up. Whether they were good or bad was not determined. Thus, the ambivalence of the unexplained. But they were real to her.
“Real” only means a confirmation. Humans register information through sensations and perceptions, like the less-tangible intellect and the least-tangible intuition. When the eyes meet the unexplainable, it becomes explained. Left unexplained, we experience a break and a hunger to understand. Our individual intellect limits our scope of understanding. Ascribing a human value or quality to that which is not human is, in fact, human. We look for familiar patterns to find comfort and make sense of the world. Incongruencies like change reappearing in your wallet or seeing your grandfather after he died must be explained as either human intervention or the work of a dead human. A ghost is still a human. It's an idea we’ve made up to feel better about expiring. But what if the incongruence isn’t human at all? What if it’s a monkfish, inorganic matter, or a wholly new species? What if it’s a demon? Or a tree?
Well, we're uncomfortable. It's cosmic and makes us question our station in life, shatters our ego, and shows us the ambivalence of the world: nothing is either good or evil if a third possibility exists.
In Firewatch, seeing is not enough for Oscar or Gary–they want to experience and feel the fear and confusion first-hand instead of mediated through a screen. As a viewer, we long for the same, which is where the found footage format collapses this desire into what feels like our own experience. Chasing, or the act of the chase is the eros of the unknown. That very moment between inception and conclusion is what we yearn for but it is completely untouchable. When faced with the monkfish, the skinned zombie, or the teddy bear, we face the consequence of conclusion: fear, death, or, still, confusion.
The greater High Desert series finds its life in this eros. More footage = more questions than answers, leaving us uncomfortable until we know more. Some argue it’s a failure of the film to open these worm-cans one after the other without closing the ones from before. Firewatch’s unfortunately delayed distribution even represented that same eros. What is the benefit of knowing in place of anxiety? Once the moment’s passed, the first viewing, you will never access it again. Fear, death, or confusion.
Still, a feeling is an easier sensation to quiet than the palpable. But what if we see and know at the same time? Surprisingly, in our American culture, there is no longer a concern with categorical truth; a feeling and an observation cannot equal fact. Don't trust what's in the corner of your eye until you can shine a flashlight on it and see the face in the wood grain. Stare at yourself for so long in the mirror until you look like George Washington. Then, shut your eyes so hard that you can see stars. Blame the seer; blame the victim. Do I have to smell it to know it? In the end, it was scary, harmful, painful. I saw the mud-face and reacted. Is that not real?
My best friend calls this image "The Party"
Veil Pierced
“Thin places” are where Heaven and Earth are three feet apart. You cannot look for places where this veil is thinned, but they are normally sacred spaces or places devoid of distraction (similar to the sensation of meditating). This energetic barrier is considered its thinnest on Halloween/Samhain, but certain people experience a more surrounding, constant thinness.
Oscar illustrates this: he is living through a debilitating addiction and, after learning of Gary’s story, believes searching for the structure will fulfill him in some way. The absolute peak and absolute bottom of human existence, pain, suffering, addiction, trauma, assault, motherhood, true and pure love, good sex, good drugs, bad drugs, companionship with animals, it all gets you closer to the source of life and energy and the reason we're all here. It’s eerie and despairing to consider a world adjacent to our own that we cannot physically interact with. Many know this barrier exists and have laid eyes through the corridor. For most of us, the veil is a velvet drape, not only spiritually but psychologically. Without living through the shit, you can barely sympathize with the shit. The veil drops with empathy. And that’s what Oscar is longing to find.
A place of personal meditation.
Cormorants & Bitterns
The bellowing of owls courts the viewer throughout Firewatch. The first sound of the film is an owl hooting. Alone at night, hooting swirls above Oscar as he tends to his campfire. To humanity, owls have always represented wisdom, insight, and awareness. By the same token, they represent what’s to come, the knowledge of what lies ahead. A warning or universal truth. It’s what God knows and can’t tell us. Ever since I was a child, I always wished to speak to God and ask him the number of opportunities I missed, how many times I’ve sneezed, or who truly won an argument–my “stats.” I bet I could ask an owl.
Crows also figure prominently in the High Desert series’ soundtrack. Naturally and biblically, owls and crows are sworn enemies, as the former preys upon the latter. Still, they’re close symbolically, nearly eclipsing each other. Crows are bad luck. Crows are true evil. Crows mean death. All negativity is balanced by positivity or, worse, ambivalence. The third thing. Where the owl stands for wisdom, a crow sighting means death. Antithetical, but death is the one true fortune: it extinguishes desire and rewards your being with ultimate knowledge. When it’s over, it’s only just begun.
I can’t mention owls without mentioning their presence in Twin Peaks. They are vessels of the True Evil and Neutral Good of the Black and White Lodges. Ambivalent. Any being of any alignment can access the eyes of the owl. They rest on the boughs of the Tree of Life, the knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps owls are so eerie to us as viewers and people because we don’t know what energy is peering at us in the forest. Or because we’re closer to the owls than we think. Good and evil peer through our eyes every day as we’re faced with that karmic swing. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and sometimes that reaction beholds both. To be watched is to be perceived is to be known, and if we believe humans are the only ones with perception, we feel the uncanny urge to define what is around us. Hence, the symbolism of the owl and crow: two sides of the same coin, two flying on the same plane.
Lucas Cranach’s “Adam and Eve - Paradise” depicts the fall of man and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
Fire-Watched
In Firewatch, we learn the beam of a flashlight wards off the entities but doesn’t exactly stop their pursuit. Oscar discovers this during his journey to the church in Edna and swings his flashlight room to room searching for anything he can find. The light reveals but also obfuscates. In a final attempt to entice a sighting, Oscar sets down his flashlight (only after he comically draws a gun). He begins taking flash photos of a corridor where he senses the entities are moving near. A series of camera flashes uncover nothing until a split second reveals something neither the viewer nor Oscar suspects. A fully-grown tree appears in the hallway. The branches are clipping through the ground, and with every other camera snap, the tree disappears and reappears closer. The camera flashes a final time, and, you may have guessed, the tree is just before Oscar, which is what we in the community call a “Jump Scare.” We’re distanciated back into the documentary format and the credits roll, back into the light.
In darkness there is truth, yes, because the darkness hides truth. Meaning-making and the intersection of human intelligence with the otherworldly make finding “truth” hopeless. If there is no meaning to be made, no context to grapple, no symbols to define, the world will cast it aside until it disappears. This religion of the self is a spiritual pareidolia that helps us rest easy and believe we can interpret our dreams. It’s the only way to live comfortably, but that truth hiding in our self-created darkness will always remain obfuscated. We’re a fundamentally inadequate species cursed with cognition. Trusting the unintelligible intuition or instincts we all possess, and even superstition, are the last lines of meaning-making, and sometimes that’s the only tool at our disposal. This trust makes us small or even disappear to the eyes of the world. There is right or wrong if we say so, and that should be enough. It rarely is.
While writing this, I got up to open the blinds, and a group of crows began cawing just outside my window. One of my editors shared that while reading this draft, crows descended on the sidewalk outside their workplace. Just like with Oscar or Gary, the cormorants and the bitterns will guide the search for truth, but I will close my drapes for now.