A Head Full of Ghosts

by Paul Tremblay

Father Wanderly said, “You’re a very brave, remarkable little girl, Merry. I bet you give all the boys trouble on the playground.” “I don’t give anybody trouble.”

If weird old men could just stfu for eternity, kthxbai

Marjorie is our doomed hero. John Barrett was and is the wicked father, the wickedest of fathers. The show did succeed in one aspect: John was indeed a symbol of decaying patriarchy.

Meredith sees the camera and stares into it. The camera stares back, filling its frame with her face, which is smeared with tears. Her hair is tangled and greasy. She’s not wearing her glasses. It’s the only time in the show that we see her without her glasses and she looks like someone else to us. She could be Marjorie’s misunderstood spirit; broken, mistakenly exorcised/expelled, and doomed. Meredith could be our own collective subconscious silently judging us, chiding us for our shameless complicity, for our doing nothing but watching the terrible and systematic torture of a mentally ill teenage girl under the guise of entertainment. Meredith doesn’t blink and neither do we.