Trauma For Nothing, Chucks For Free: Good Chucky and Transactional Trauma
The Kubrick method of sanitizing your trauma.
Warnings: The following blog post contains spoilers for the first two seasons of Chucky. It also contains descriptions of PTSD symptoms.
It’s only natural to want to make friends with your personal monsters. That’s why it’s so easy to sympathize with Jake Wheeler, the teenage protagonist of SyFy’s tragically canceled horror comedy series Chucky. The infamous haunted doll, possessed by serial killer Charles Lee Ray, spent the show’s first season murdering Jake’s entire family—starting with his dad, then his aunt, his uncle, and cousin who he lived with after being orphaned. And Chucky doesn’t stop there. He fucks up Jake’s foster situations too, resulting in Wheeler’s confinement to the Catholic School of the Incarnate Lord, where he’s trapped along with his boyfriend Devon (also orphaned by Chucky) and bully-turned-bestie Lexy (not fully orphaned… yet). It’s under that boarding school’s roof that, in a suspiciously fortunate turn of circumstances, the kids manage to capture Chucky and set to brainwashing the little slasher.
In the horror sequel tradition of Aliens and Rings, the second season of Chucky has Charles’ soul split between multiple Chuckies. Jake and friends perform A Clockwork Orange-style exposure therapy on their hostage in order to find out how many other animated Good Guy dolls are out in the world wreaking havoc. But instead of washing Chucky’s brain, they bleach it, and the result is a gentle little buddy who barfs when he sees violence and loves eating apples. Good Chucky is cute, protective, and speaks in actor Brad Dourif’s soft spoken ASMR voice. Jake immediately befriends his former nemesis, insisting he’s truly reformed, even going as far as baptizing the red haired terror with his new school chum Nadine, who’s attending the correctional school to treat her kleptomania.
It makes sense that Jake would desire a Good Chucky. The doll has come to fully define his life through unthinkable violence and the obsession inevitably born of survival. Everything—from the conversations he has with friends to the school uniform he’s forced to wear—is tainted by the evil toy. After so much torture, Good Chucky feels like a just reward. But of course, that’s not how trauma works. It’s a trap.
Trauma For Nothing
The mainstream narrative arc in popular entertainment rewards heroic action. In most stories, trauma leads to growth. But to be traumatized in the real world is to find your life perpetually falling short of that box office expectation. Personally, I feel like I am always rediscovering that fact the hard way, despite writing about it on a near constant basis.
If this is your first time on this blog, let me give you the short version. When I was a 19 year old theatre student, my family went on a holiday cruise, during which my dad and I were accosted on a pier in Costa Rica by a man with a gun. The stranger shot dad and ran. I had to carry the bleeding body of my father back to the ship, where he was saved by a medical officer. Everything turned out fine except my PTSD, which I’ve lived with for nearly half of my life. My condition causes debilitating spikes of anxiety, nightmares, psychedelic flashbacks, and the sensation that my bones are bending into knots. I am obsessed with the sounds and images of that day, haunted by the gunman's angry eyes and the texture of dad’s blood, which soaked through my clothes as I carried him. Every time I express my trauma through art, I take the pain I live with and put it outside of me, secretly hoping against the laws of nature for two things: this will be the last expression I have to perform in order to feel better permanently; this time I will be rewarded for what I’ve lived through.
My most recent effort to eliminate my anguish seemed like the most likely to succeed. I wrote a book. It’s called How to Restore a Timeline and it’s easily the best thing I’ve ever created. With Timeline, I finally took all the pain I experienced since I was 19, writhing alone in the throes of post-traumatic flair-ups, and bound it to a physical object. The ritual was intense and taxing, but cathartic.
As I wrote, mining memory and emotion and culture for the language to communicate what had previously seemed inexpressible, a memory kept slipping into my daydreams. I remembered my initial screaming as I carried my semiconscious father through those humid streets, begging bystanders for help only to see them look at me with confused faces, or worse, ignore me completely. When I finally held the book in my hand, I was filled with confidence. This time they’ll hear me. This time it’s clear. I won’t be ignored. I made my Chucky good.
The reviews were positive. Readers with their own post-traumatic struggles reached out and thanked me for making them feel less isolated. It was perfect. People were noticing. This would finally be my reward. But in a short time, as inevitably happens with all books, the feedback slowed to a trickle. Unobscured by praise and attention, I looked at my creation and I felt the familiar post-traumatic pang. Instead of the perfect ally, I saw another aftershock from the shooting. My trauma lived on as a haunted book, and I felt robbed.
Chucks For Free
Good Chucky is something only the Chucky TV series could make work. Showrun by Chucky’s original creator Don Mancini, the show continues the story started with the 1988 film Child’s Play and accepts each subsequent entry in the franchise as canon (with the exception of the 2019 reboot starring Mark Hamill). As a result, the Chucky on TV in 2023 when Jake brainwashes him is the same one that terrified millennials like me when we encountered is angry face peering out from VHS cassette cases in the Blockbuster horror sections of our childhoods. Chucky is such an icon that he stands as a collective symbol of enduring trauma for all of us—albeit an entertaining one—and that makes it very easy to stand with Jake as he desperately rallies behind Good Chucky.
There is a sense of surprise when the brain bleaching works, but also a sense of survivor’s entitlement. Jake was traumatized by Chucky before he had a chance to grow into his adult identity. He is an expert in Chucky in the same way I am an expert in remembering my dad’s shooting—it’s a morbid specialty. Shouldn’t that expertise count for something? Don’t we all deserve a Good Chucky, who can keep us safe from other Chuckies, as a treat? The answer is no. Just ask the doll’s other survivors like Nica Pierce from Curse and Cult of Chucky, and Andy from the Child's Play movies. The only thing a PhD in Chuckiology leads to is pain, obsession, and an exclusion from a normative life.
Right after the fantasy of a Good Chucky has successfully wormed its way past plausible skepticism and into our hearts, the seemingly gentle doll defenestrates Nadine. She lands, lifeless, in the arms of a statue and Jake is forced to see the error of his thinking. Trauma is not transactional. As much as we desire a Good Chucky, he cannot exist for long. Happy endings don’t fit in this world. This is horror.
Dire Straits
One of the reasons horror is so great for telling emotionally authentic stories about trauma has to do with the bad ending. The third act of a scary tale requires acceptance, either of failure or a world in which human order can no longer be taken for granted. Chaos reigns. The only constant in Chucky is Chucky. The only sure thing for the traumatized is that trauma that cannot be undone. When monsters become good and fight to maintain or restore order, that is the stuff of fairytales. Dark fantasy. It can be horror adjacent, but hope works against the core premise of the darkest genre, which asks us to remove consumerist ideas of pain for gain from our vocabulary.
I recently observed the first anniversary of How to Restore a Timeline’s launch, and instead of a jubilant book birthday, I felt as if I’d simply tainted another square on the calendar with the poison of my mental illness. A second traumaversary where I’d hoped for a celebration. Flashbacks. That sensation of bones warping. The urge to scream. Bouts of depression and survivor’s guilt. Fireworks still fuck me up. So do balloon pops. In the end, every final girl must accept her destiny.
None of this is to say I regret writing about my trauma. I am proud of my book. I love my book. And I love every single person who helped me bring it into this world and spread its message. But I do feel embarrassed that I expected publishing my PTSD experience in book form to shift the genre of my life from horror to dramedy, an expectation underlined by readers and critics who expressed disappointment with Timeline’s pessimistic tone. There were folks who told me it was too bleak to be good, and who expressed a desire for me to “get better” with the implication it would improve my writing. Less critiques of my work than rejections of my disability. I tried to ignore them, but their insults got their hooks in me because part of me I wanted them to be right.
Like it or not, trauma is a burden, and survival comes with responsibilities, primary of which is to dodge the stigma of “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” As we see in Chucky, the truth is, whatever doesn’t kill you simply hasn’t fuckin’ killed you yet. Chucky proliferates, mutates, and mutilates, embedded in the culture and empowered by our same-day delivery system that has proven itself way too vulnerable to haunted dolls. Thanks to Mancini’s show, and whatever comes next for the red haired terror of Hackensack, New Jersey, I’m comfortable with something I’ve known deep down for a very long time, even if I was eager to deny it—my monsters are following me to the grave as fiends, not friends.