"The sort of story that has you covering your mirrors": The Case of Slender Man
Abstract: As a monster, Slender Man epitomizes the simultaneous alienness and familiarity that characterizes the uncanny. Created by users on the Something Awful forums, the Slender Man's most common depiction is as a preternaturally tall, skinny humanoid with a white, faceless head, dressed incongruously—given his tendency to lurk in forests—in a black business suit and tie. A potent symbol of fear, Slender Man simultaneously serves as a flexible rhetorical tool, used variously to critique popular trends, instill fear in its audiences, and as a self-referential "in-joke" whose significance is only intelligible to those already familiar with the phenomenon itself. Thus the figure of the Slender Man indexes at least two separate intellectual strands, two distinct but related conceptual frameworks: first, Slender Man is a sign of abject fear—the ultimate Other, the final evolution of radical alterity. Secondly, Slender Man subtly references the self-conscious communicative processes that gave rise to the tradition itself and are, in fact, the reason for its continued existence as an internet icon. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how, as an iconic figure produced through a collective effort and deliberately modeled after an existing and familiar folklore genre, Slender Man represents what might be thought of as reverse ostension. Building on folkloristic work on the concept of ostension, the Slender Man mythos is shown to encapsulate important semiotic processes that are self-consciously employed by its creators to make a new narrative tradition that deliberately mimics established ones.
Keywords: Legends; ostension; Internet memes; fan culture; horror; Slender Man
Introduction
In keeping with the theme of this issue—the monster as sign of radical, insurmountable, and terrifying Otherness—this article considers one contemporary permutation of monstrousness, the Internet phenomenon known as the Slender Man. As a monster, Slender Man epitomizes the simultaneous alienness and familiarity that characterizes the uncanny. [...] He kills, he causes insanity; his presence never bodes well for those who see him. As a self-conscious Internet construct whose backstory has been built up over several years by a massive community of online participants, Slender Man functions metadiscursively to reveal precisely those elements that are popularly conceived of as constituting monstrousness.[...]Slender Man is a sign of abject fear—the ultimate Other, the final evolution of radical alterity. Second, Slender Man subtly references the self-conscious communicative processes that gave rise to the tradition itself and are, in fact, the reason for its continued existence as an internet icon.
[...]
Making a Monster
To make my argument—that Slender Man offers critical commentary on the legend genre by enabling individuals to participate in the creation of a legend through reverse ostension—I draw on semiotic theory as filtered through the lens of folkloristics. Since the genre being invoked and imitated by Slender Man's users is legend, it is necessary to turn first to that genre and the way it has been conceptualized by scholars.
Scholars differ as to what constitutes a legend, but an influential definition has been that offered by William Bascom, who saw legends as prose narratives taken as true by their tellers and audiences (1984:9). The issue of belief, however, is a contentious one. Discussing the ostensive dimensions of legend narratives—that is, their potential to influence reality—Bill Ellis has suggested a more cautious approach: "[I]t seems more accurate to describe legends as normative definitions of reality, maps by which one can determine what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen" (Ellis 1989:202). Similarly, Michael Kinsella, in his study of legend-tripping on the Internet, argues, "Through legends—both supernatural and otherwise—the synergies between narrative and performance can sometimes result in the legend coming to life" (2011:11).
Regardless of scholarly understandings, the Slender Man mythos is composed of a number of narratives which, while avowedly fictional, are framed within the narrative tradition as "true" experiences—and the "truth" of the tradition is established in various ways, including by likening it to "real" legends. Peck notes that the Slender Man mythos "drew upon an existing matrix of belief ... This demonstrates that the Slender Man was not an entirely new creation and was influenced by the vast network of performances that had directly and indirectly preceded it" (13).
[...]
User Soakie, in a post dated June 20, 2009, wrote,
[Slender Man] is a satisfactory booger [sic] man, pressing all the right buttons. Even if we don't really believe in the supernatural, even if our rational minds laugh at such an absurdity...we are cutting him out and sewing him together. We're stuffing him with nightmares and unspoken fears.
And what happens when the pictures are no longer photoshops? (Soakie 2009)
These posts offer explicit commentary on users' conceptions of monsters and the monstrous. But as a consciously-constructed sign, Slender Man also reflects important semiotic processes at work among members of the various internet communities in which his legend has appeared. The most significant of these processes, and perhaps the area that has seen the most fruitful overlap of folkloristic and literary semiotic investigation, is ostension. Perhaps the form of ostension most studied by folklorists has been the process of legend-tripping, the self-conscious appropriation and enactment of existing legend texts (Koven 2008:154; Kinsella 2011:x). Legend-tripping is well represented in contemporary Internet culture, and the Slender Man mythos is no exception; however, rather than taking an existing legend text and acting it out through legend-tripping, the countless individuals who have contributed to the Slender Man mythos have taken a wide array of disparate raw materials—often created from scratch and usually of a purportedly experiential nature (e.g., stories of encounters with supernatural beings, etc.)—and combined them to form a new narrative tradition that resembles the existing, familiar legend genre.[...]
"Real" versus "Fake"
Ostension, in our sense, involves the intrusion of narrative into reality. Dégh and Vázsonyi give the example of staged haunted houses at Halloween, which rely to some extent on prior knowledge on the part of their audience about the legends being referenced (1983:25). They go on to note that even in the absence of an actual legendary background, the resemblance of haunted-house imagery to known legends can be enough to imbue them with a sense of fear:
Paradoxical as it sounds, there are also legends which do not exist but still have a similar effect as the existing ones. Dracula, the most popular among all monsters, has no real folklore. ... The public seems convinced, nonetheless, of the existence of a lush legend realm. The term fictitious legend best describes the case of Dracula. Fictitious, not because the story is untrue and the hero of the legend nonexistent, but because the legend itself does not exist (Dégh and Vázsonyi 1983:25, original emphasis)
What Dégh and Vázsonyi term a "fictitious legend" is precisely what has been constructed in the case of Slender Man. It is worth pausing here to address the issue of "real" versus "fictional" legends, however. By "real" I simply mean narratives which arise within a community and are accepted as parts of that community's culture (in their connection to places, events, and characters of special significance), regardless of whether they are literally believed. This is in contradistinction to those legends, such as Slender Man, which are consciously crafted as fictions. It is important to note, too, that the fictional status of Slender Man is an emic distinction, arising from within the group of individuals who originally constructed the Slender Man mythos. For example, in a post dated October 5, 2009, user rinski observed,
The SM is fascinating to me, because he's such an ideal horror figure for so many different reasons. I mean, there's the whole "fear of the unknown" thing, and the "twisting the familiar into something unfamiliar" thing. There's also the genius of his subtlety: we've trained ourselves to see his general shape in every photoshop, so now we see him everywehre [sic].
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Experiencing the Legend
One of the earliest offshoots of the original Something Awful thread was the YouTube series entitled Marble Hornets. The first video of the series, "Introduction" (DeLage, Wagner, and Sutton 2009b), was uploaded to YouTube on June 20, 2009, just ten days after Victor Surge's original images were posted to the Something Awful forum. Presented as found footage, the introduction (in common with the rest of the series) features text captions inserted by protagonist Jay. Jay's narration explains that the footage was shot by his college friend Alex as part of a film project entitled Marble Hornets. During filming, Alex's behavior became strange, and he abandoned the project, but eventually agreed to give the tapes to Jay, who explains to the audience through captions that he intends to go through the tapes to determine what may have caused Alex's unusual behavior. Over the course of the series, Jay is pulled into a deepening mystery involving his friend Alex and the monstrous Slender Man (who is never identified as such in the series, but clearly represents the figure created in the Something Awful forum).
Emic Perspectives on Slender Man
[...] I also asked forum members what they thought made Slender Man seem "real." User awkwardraptor responded,
I think it's mostly because, there are just so many pieces of "evidence" in the Mythos (The numerus vlogs/blogs, the woodcuttings, photos, etc.) that makes it seem that Slender Man actually exists, when of course, in real life, Slender Man does not exist. The people who created Slender Man, and the people who continue to add to the legend of The Slender Man, and even a good majority (In my opinion anyway.) of the people who watch the vlogs/read the vlogs, know that Slender Man, in reality at least, does not exist.
But for the people who do not know that The Slender Man is just a creation of somebody's mind, and actually take the "evidence" as fact, that's what makes it real.
In my opinion at least. (awkwardraptor 2013)
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Conclusion
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Nowhere is this more evident than in the Slender Man mythos' tendency to invite discussion, interaction and direct participation. As Andrew Peck has demonstrated, Slender Man constitutes a digital legend. Legends, in turn, offer opportunities to engage in "metatextual debate about whether such events are possible" (Koven 2008:156, original emphasis). It is interesting that this metatextual function is not diminished even though the process I outline here is the reverse of "ordinary" ostension. In the case of the Slender Man, the metatextual function of the text is not to enable debate about the legend's veracity as experience or historical fact—never in question here, since Slender Man was self-consciously created as a fiction—but its plausibility as a representative of the legend genre. To put it more succinctly, belief in the literal content of the legend is nonexistent and unproblematic; the issue is making the legend seem like a legend. This process, what I'm calling reverse ostension, must be participatory, because, as Peck and others have noted, the end result depends on the consensus of the community. The sign that is ultimately produced must live up to a set of shared expectations.
[...] Slender Man became, as Peck demonstrates, an entire legend cycle, complete with variants detailing widely different individual "experiences" of the creature, precisely because of the efforts of numerous individuals to create a cohesive-but-flexible system of signs based on shared understandings of what such a system should look like.
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Through the complex and ongoing process of reverse ostension, members of the various internet communities who have staked a claim to the Slender Man mythos have created a fearful symbol, a monster that, according to their own emic standards, is frightening in virtually any context. The appearance of figures like Slender Man is of interest not only because it demonstrates the communicative immediacy of the Internet, which by now is old hat, but also because it demonstrates that the Internet—and indeed, any popular communicative venue—can serve as a vehicle for critical metacommentary from unexpected corners, on unexpected topics. As fan culture emerges around a popular media text, entirely new "standalone" texts are created by individuals to respond to changing social trends and the immediacies of everyday life. But even such "new" texts may be carefully placed alongside established ones, wrapped up in the skins of familiar genres and imbued with an air of "traditionality," of continuity, of realness. The interest to scholars should be apparent, and is only increased when these metacommunicative practices are turned towards the areas we regard as part of our disciplinary jurisdictions. Slender Man not only reveals what his creators find frightening; he also demonstrates current trends in popular thinking about the nature of folklore, about how it can be used to achieve specific social ends in uniquely contemporary contexts, and about the kinds of representational strategies and communicative systems that give rise to monsters in the first place.
𓆩♱𓆪 A/N:Read the full article here https://semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/download/19/19?inline=1
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