Let’s talk friction.
In physics, friction is the force that inhibits the sliding of one object over or against another. It doesn’t necessarily prevent movement, but it slows things down. In mobility studies, the term gets used to denote pretty much the same thing: it refers to the practical limitation of mobility through possibly minor but continual acts of inconvenience, knowledge hoarding, and humiliation.
Friction might come in the form of individual harassment and violence of the kind that might make a marginalized person afraid to travel to certain locations. But it also might come in the form of laws or policies that inhibit mobility disproportionately among certain groups – consider stop and frisk policies, which, in their execution, show a proven racial bias in Nova Scotia and elsewhere.
For a recent example of the experience of friction, watch this interview of Harper Steele to promote the documentary she and Will Ferrell filmed together (the film has been bought by Netflix, with no release date announced). In the interview, she specifically mentions that her gender transition left her afraid to take the road trips she had long been so fond of. At the same time as she embraced her most complete self, she faced the dehumanizing fear that that self would not be welcome in the same places it once was.
That dehumanization is a central effect and, in some instances, a central aim of friction. I’ve mentioned before that, in the wake of the invention of the automobile in the US, a narrative emerged that emphasized the American promise of free movement. A marker of America’s democratic foundations, the doctrine of free movement quickly became emblematic of the spirit of equality and individualism the nation prided itself on. The car was heralded as the culmination of that spirit. And yet, the right to free movement has consistently been administered unevenly. Jim Crow laws in the south, barrio clearances in California, and a long history of the displacement of Indigenous peoples ultimately betray the ways US policy makers have historically not counted racialized citizens as full humans with humans’ rights to liberty and agency.
Some recent horror fiction has called attention to the realities of the failed promise of free movement in the US, especially for African Americans. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out, his depiction of the Sunken Place – a metaphor for the experience of anti-Black racism in the US – involves literal paralysis, symbolic of the ways white supremacy attacks physical and social mobility. But the film doesn’t wait for this scene to depict the structural limitations to Black mobility. As Chris and Rose travel to her family’s home, they hit a deer. They call the police to resolve it, only for the officer to ask for Chris’s ID even though he was not the driver. With Chris’s patient and studied reaction, the film folds this into its plot (deceptively so) as an example of the friction Chris experiences daily.
An example that calls more attention to itself is in Misha Green’s series Lovecraft Country, an adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel. In a scene in the first episode, three Black travellers are accosted by police while they have stopped at the side of the road for a break. After being verbally harassed and directed to leave the county before sundown, the travellers are forced into a low-speed chase – they must get to the county border, but they cannot exceed the speed limit without being pulled over by the police officer who follows them. Caught between two incompatible and equally implacable forces, the driver seems at the mercy of chance for his success, underscoring the arbitrariness of the sheriff’s enforcement of the law, while simultaneously excluding the average Black American driver from the speed and exhilaration promised by the American highway. When the chase is closely followed by an attack by blob-like monsters covered in eyes, the question remains which scene is more horrifying.
What both these texts do is juxtapose non-real horrors with everyday ones as a way of calling attention to the lived experience of racialized people under white supremacy. Both scenes lend truth to Robin R. Means Coleman’s statement that “Black history is Black horror.” The dehumanizing experience of having one’s movement – and, in turn, one’s agency – inhibited lies at the heart of many gothic and horror stories, and not all of them feature supernatural monsters.
Photo by chmyphotography on Unsplash
