medialog

In Defense Of Johnny Truant. Kinda

When I finished House Of Leaves, it left me with a lot of ideas on the text buzzing in my head and wanted to look up reviews to see if I was alone in some of my takeaways and to seek perspectives I hadn't considered on my own read. For... some... reason, something possessed me to turn first to Reddit comment sections. Don't do this, lmfao.

HoL is at times barely penetrable. Though I warmed up to him as the book went on, I also had The Johnny Problem early on in the book-- finding his meandering, seemingly(!!!!!) pointless tangents dominating full pages worth of footnotes in the middle of The Navidson Record super grating and unlikable.

But I am of the opinion that Johnny's story is the real story, and that it is impossible to make sense of what is presented in Zampano's book without his narration. I eventually had my 'you will be ashamed of your words and deeds' moment with him, where he became... maybe not likable, but deeply sympathetic and honestly more interesting than the events of The Navidson Record.

So it boggled my mind seeing how many people were (along with calling the book pointless, pretentious for pretentiousness' sake, a waste of paper and time) arguing that one should skip Johnny's parts altogether. Hello? Where the fuck am I???

I took notes while reading this book, and spent quite a bit of time pausing mid-read to just think about what it was trying to say. Which... I don't say that to brag or think that's an extraordinary feat, but it's pretty startling realizing how many people seem to totally lack the impulse to ask themselves questions about what they are reading/watching/etc, who feel deep discomfort and frustration with not having immediate answers. I'm not saying it's anti-intellectual to dislike his parts (I especially have a bone to pick with how misogynistic his tangents frequently are) but seeing so many people say they didn't get the point of their inclusion at all is like... you're so close! You're almost there!!!

When he started to annoy me, I also started to question what the point of his asides were. Assuming the author doesn't just think him scoring with women is super cool and noteworthy, there has to be a reason Johnny keeps going on these tangents about his scummy personal life. Pretty early on, there's a bit where he admits that he changed the 'original' text as an excuse to talk about something bugging him in real life, and mocks the reader for their imagined frustration at this. I feel like this sets the tone for everything else he says, or doesn't say, or (in my opinion) has 'Zampano' and the figures mentioned in the Record say for him.

A, you're being very directly clued in (not for the last time) that he can and does lie to the reader, and B, if you read HoL believing that Johnny truly is adapting some other writer's body of work, you're being given a hint that his experiences will continue to color the contents of the Record.

I think that Johnny uses sex (or, arguably, stories he is making up about his sex life) to self-soothe and distract himself from the things that are really bothering him. I think that he keeps focusing on that in the text in the beginning because he is avoiding talking about other things that he reveals later.

This ties into my interpretation of what the house is that I won't really get into here, but I don't think it's a coincidence that Johnny's keeps talking about sex rather than the disturbing things he's experienced recently and in his past, while at the same time in the main text, the family is struggling to acknowledge the anomaly in the house and making tiny explorations into the mysterious space while trying to maintain some level of normalcy.

The more the story goes on and Johnny begins to lose himself, the more that details he divulges about himself begin to seem similar to what the Navidson Record allegedly reports on the family in the film. The Navidson Record is about Johnny, or at least has been appropriated by him to be about himself in some way. This may be a crazy take, but I'd say one of the strongest pieces of evidence for my interpretation of this is one of the possible explanations for Karen's claustrophobia.

It feels implied that Johnny was taken somewhere isolated and sexually abused by his stepfather in their final encounter, in a sort of blink-and-you'll-miss-it way, and he quickly changes the subject and ends that footnote. (The same language used to describe this event is echoed later on when Johnny possibly threatens to rape Kyrie.)

Later on, The Navidson Record includes a supposed testimony from Kate's sister that her fear of enclosed spaces comes from a childhood sexual assault that took place somewhere isolated and without witnesses as a young child, just like Johnny's.

Continuing to ask myself why certain details are included and assuming all content must be deliberate, it stood out to me that a few extra sentences of emphasis were given to the veracity of this anecdote when plenty of other stories aren't really verified. The text makes a point to point out that this particular claim could not be verified, as there were no witnesses. Letters from Johnny's mother and some of his own narration reveals that nobody believed or directly witnessed the visible signs of his stepfather's physical abuse.

Just as the house as the supposed physical landmark seems to change in response to its inhabitants, seems to be unremarkable and only anomalous when people inhabit it and change it with their internal struggles, the house as the text is changed by Johnny's touch as an editor. The house as a book in real life, too, is changed and colored by my own experiences and interpretations personal to me. I don't think there is one 'answer' to this book, because it cannot be the same for everyone who reads it.

As Johnny says in his final footnote:

"Just as you have swept through me. Just as I now sweep through you."