Halloween keeps growing. More and more over time, this act of pretending, and of naked greed for candy, has defined who we are. It’s expanded, taken over the entire month. October is Halloween now. It’s a couple of days before the 31st, and here’s a Halloween-themed blog post. Case in point
It’s strange thinking about the rise of Halloween and what it might mean. I’m beginning to feel as though we may, gradually, be coming to be more comfortable in each others’ skins. We’ve all become actors. We play games where we are something else. We become monsters for candy.
We use pretending to be something else to find ourselves.
We learn to play our first part so young, learning to act as children are expected to act – Not very well, at first, but learning very quickly, until our very ideas of what we can be are circumscribed by the roles described to us. Eventually we get to grow out of the extremely narrow role of ‘child’, but often those available to us aren’t much more desirable: Good student, bad student, nerd, jock, thug, boy, girl, worker, wife – further narrowed by our appearance and background, until often we find ourselves typecast into just one identity. Some people actually come to believe those identities accurately represent themselves, are the whole of what they are. Some people become incredibly angry at the suggestion that there might be something beyond these roles.
Being able to transcend that for a day, or a month, is precious. Being able to break out of the skin and become something else, perhaps even something disgusting and terrifying, is what lets us discover new ways of being.
We put on other skins. In games, creating the textures for in-game objects is called, grotesquely, skinning. It’s like we hunted polygons, small game but so satisfying. We skin ourselves and reskin our selves as we learn to do it better, each layer of our identity painted on over the last, and sometimes a bit gets scraped off and you find a version of you that you forgot ever existed.
It gets easier every time, and we start trying out new identities for fun. Mostly games are the simplest version of this, simple badass power fantasies, but they still allow us to express some inkling of identity through them, to pick a hat or a shirt without any risk of looking like a guy wearing a stupid hat or ugly shirt, to bust a sweet move even when we are not comfortable with our bodies in motion, even if that move has the side effect of kicking a demon’s face off. We became heroes in private, defined ourselves by overcoming impossible challenges that were actually easy, took the mantle of a champion without ever winning a real championship.
But isn’t it strange how Halloween’s huge upswing in popularity coincides with the emergence of a medium that is all about Pretending to Be. Isn’t it interesting, and a bit hopeful, that more people than ever are able and content to pretend to be exactly what they are, without fear of repercussion. This kind of creative being and becoming wasn’t just now invented, but it’s spread so far, taken over this entire month, taken over this entire medium, and this wave is so powerful and exciting, even if, in practice, so much of this pretending amounts to playing with murder and power fantasy. It’s all just Halloween. All just red food coloring and corn starch, a way to pretend at monstrosity to define humanity.
These identities grew around us so gradually, we didn’t notice them rise over our heads and put us in their shadows. We grew up making user names and secret passwords, making masks and playing secret roles, became spies, the identities piled up around us, each a tiny shard of who we were.