I did see Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape on its first run - unlike other faves of the hauntology crowd like Whistle and I'll Come To You and Children of the Stones. I think everyone who saw this back on Christmas Day, 1972 is hah hah hah hah haunted by it - particularly those of us who were kids - so it's good to have it brought up by later watchers and discussed.
For those who haven't seen it, it is about a division of a company which is trying to develop a hi-fi, long lasting recording medium. They are relocated to a research facility in an old house. They encounter a ghost and eventually realize that one way to describe the ghost is as a recording that is held in the very stones of the house and played back not on instruments (which do not detect it) but directly inside the minds of sensitive people. This gives them an idea for a device-free playback - the Killer App! They study the phenomenon but accidentally 'wipe' the recording. But the stone tape is a palimpsest. Under the very traditional ghost is another recording, of a very ancient thing indeed.
I rewatched The Stone Tape before writing this, and some other points came to mind, both about the program and the podcast. In no particular order:
A number of reviewers, including this podcast team, find the recording research division of the company to be unredeemed bastards who are racist, sexist and not very sympathetic protagonists. However, I think it's obvious that they are written this way on purpose. It's not that Nigel Kneale thought they were nice guys. The men are supposed to be bastards, and Peter, the boss, is a complete c*nt. It isn't "the way things were in the seventies" so much as a study in company politics. That's one reason why the language is so racist (and boy is it racist). They are quite as nasty about their absent colleague, the washing machine researcher, after all.
The sole woman in the team, Jill, is a bit willochy but the initial set up is designed to show that she is 'sensitive' both emotionally and psychically, and almost all the men are, literally, 'insensitive' - racist, sexist, out to win one for their team whatever collateral damage may ensue. It may be overdone but I don't think it is done as unconscious sexism on Kneale's part.
The boss, Peter, is having an affair with Jill, the company computer programmer. He talks to his wife back home while Jill is on in earshot his bed at the research facility, and forget's his kid's horse's name and has to be reminded. Later, when he's rejected Jill as too emotional, he sends her away on a month's leave, and Jill can see, as she leaves, that his secretary is waiting in the background with drinks - he next affair starting up already. He's an unpleasant man, and played perfectly.
Some reviewers also mention a lot of shouting. There is a lot of shouting. Some of it is because it's filmed in an actual stone house before there were good mics for this sort of thing, and some of it is because the actors are trying to shout over the sound of actual working teletype terminals, for no adequately explored reason. And a major reason is that the stone tape is activated by vibration, so there has to be a lot of noise before the ghost appears each time. (Also the cast is a bit shouty.)
Nigel Kneale's pet subjects abound. Like Quatermass and the Pit, the premise is that something in the very ground beneath our feet is throwing up a memory that we are forced to observe and ultimately to relive. It's easy to see why Stone Tape is a fave of the Psychogeographers and their flaneur friends.
It had never occurred to me before that their rival for the company's research money is a washing machine developer, i.e. someone whose job it is to get the traces of past use OUT of things. He's always shown with dyed hands, because he hasn't yet succeeded. One imagines that his job description, devising a machine to keep the colors that are wanted without also keeping the stains that are unwanted remnants of the past, is the same as Peter's job description.
Kneale keeps to storytelling basics here with some twinning and opposites. There are two ghosts, two affairs, two programmers (with opposite sensitivities), a death and a premonition of death.
One thing that I wouldn't have picked up on in 1972 is that the barmaid, who had spoken to a 'colored boy' (an American GI) about the house during war said that he'd complained there was a 'guppy - or was it a duppy?' 'Duppy' is a West Indian word for a malevolent spirit and I'm surprised Nigel Kneale knew the word then - the Bob Marley song was not released until next year.
The Wyrd Signal podcast team (in their very first podcast!) give a good recap and then go on to discuss several things I hadn't thought of in regards to how the film is put together and the concept of deep time. Mark (for it is he) Fisher's name turns up again, along with Derrida, and the word 'hegemony' is repeated several times.
The following is an observation, not a criticism of the podcast: One of the weirdest things about time (not sure if Derrida covered this one) is that quite a lot of it has happened to me. A great deal less of it has happened to the podcasters, who are Generation Z (i.e. younger than millennials). At first, hearing them describe the 70s made me feel as though I had lived through an aberration, and I was complicit in an excursion from normal human behavior, and as though I had to re-examine mine and everyone else's behavior in the light of the podcasters' withering criticism of the 70s.
Then one of the podcasters said this remarkable thing: "And there have been some parapsychological experiments of asking the spirits to make an imprint on to a blank, erm, er, reel of magnetic tape or blank, erm an...er, a phot - er, a photo tape I want to say? A photo reel, the tape one would put into an old camera before we had digital cameras."
And at that point I realized that no MP3s, stone tapes, nor any recording medium could adequately capture a previous time in a way that makes it accessible to someone who wasn't there. I 'know' the 70s in a way these podcasters never will, but they can think they do because they have access to the tapes.
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