Machines in the Garden: De-Gothicizing the American Pastoral in Tales from the Loop

Abstract

The television series Tales from the Loop, released in 2022, launches an ambitious attempt to revise the traditional gothic iconography of the violent intrusion of technology into pastoral spaces. Mapping out a spatially and temporally defamiliarized county in the American Midwest, home to an enigmatic high-tech research facility nicknamed The Loop, the series employs an idiosyncratic visual style and a narrative strategy inspired by high modernist fiction designed to foreclose specific thematic options. To the degree that these options provide the foundation for the polarized political discourses, in which the Rustbelt States of the American Midwest are currently framed in terms of right-wing nostalgia or neoliberal techno-optimism, the series’s uniquely creative illustration of Leo Marx’s evocative metaphor of the “machine in the garden” suggests ways of reframing that larger political discourse.

Keywords:

• American Rustbelt
• the gothic
• “machine in the garden,” the pastoral
• science fiction
• Tales from the Loop

Notes

1 The “machine in the garden” metaphor is more than an incidental nod by Stelenhag, Romanek, and Halpern to Leo Marx’s hallmark study of American literature. This becomes clear in their shared sense that gothic tropes may not be altogether appropriate for showing the intrusions of technology into pastoral spaces. In Marx’s case, this has a historical reason. “The anti-pastoral forces at work in our literature,” Marx points out 1964, “seem indeed to become increasingly violent as we approach our own time” (Marx 26). If Marx’s study still fails to link this increasing violence to the formation of a uniquely American gothic, it may be because the postwar industrialization that provides the backdrop to The Machine in the Garden had not yet seen the downturn that was to come a decade later and bring with it an altogether less conciliatory vision of nature and technology, and the impact of the latter on the former once technological optimism would begin to fail.

2 The fact that, as Frank puts it, “Joyce’s most obvious intention in Ulysses is to give the reader a picture of Dublin seen as a whole, to re-create the sights and sounds, the people and places, of a typical Dublin day, much as Flaubert had re-created his provincial county fair” (Frank 233) puts Tales from the Loop and its intention to map out Mercer, Ohio, into that same high-modernist company. Frank’s use of Dubliners, yet another collection of stories arranged to map out an urban totality (as indicated by the title) is supplemented by a discussion of Proust, in whom Frank sees that method extended to the management of time.

3 Needless to say, the openness of the “fix-up” principle lends itself to television’s unique open-endedness when it comes to serialization.

4 The device had previously been used in Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata (1994), and, as a classic text of science fiction, in Fritz Leiber’s You’re All Alone (1950).

5 Negative critical responses to this aesthetic provide evidence of how far the series dares to depart from the conventional parameters of the medium. Reviewer Matt Fagerholm, remarking on “the show’s somber mood and gloomy color palette [and] the Magritte-like juxtaposition of alien imagery set against a mundane landscape,” comments on the pace and timing, suggesting that “these episodes would’ve been more effective had they run a half-hour” (Fagerholm 2020). Joel Golby praises the series by characterizing it as “artfully slow-moving sci-fi set in a half-world between the weird and our own, a sort of 60s/80s amalgam where creaking and rusted robots and unreal creatures and vworping [sic] floating rocks exist in an insular backwater town somewhere in the Midwest.” Still, Golby keeps complaining that “20 more minutes passed without anything happening,” finally concluding his review with the desperate outcry: “That is the exact sort of TV show I want to watch, like it was made in a lab, especially for me. But nothing happens. Nothing happens!” (Golby 2020).

6 Daniel Fienberg’s review draws attention to this downplaying of genre elements. “All indications are that viewers looking for concrete answers and sci-fi mythologizing are going to be frustrated by Tales, which barely acknowledges the rusted-out futuristic eyesores on the horizon, making the series “almost a polar opposite to the exposition-heavy, laid-bare mechanics of HBO’s Westworld” (Fienberg). The equanimity with which characters respond to technology which should by all rights evoke amazement is actually more reminiscent of magical realism, except that the foregone conclusion in Tales from the Loop is not the defamiliarization of the world by magic but by technology.

7 One notable exception, albeit not in the medium of television, is David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), which imagines a largely rural landscape dotted with high-tech development organizations. Though the film imagines a struggle for market domination among some of these entities, it visualizes them as small startups, corporations of one, if you will, akin to the trope of “three guys in a garage” as the kernel of a vast multinational giant. Hence, the film’s gothic vocabulary is missing the architectural markers dominating the landscape.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steffen Hantke

Steffen Hantke has edited Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet, War Gothic in Literature and Culture (2016). He is author of Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II (2016) and Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema (2023). He teaches in the American Culture Program at Sogang University in Seoul.