Re-imagining Dragons: Gojira, Kami, and the Kaiju of Unintended Consequences

Godzilla (2014)

It must have been an eerie moment when, half an hour after the sky lit up over Bikini Atoll, the flakes began to fall. The crew of a Japanese fishing boat called the Lucky Dragon had no idea the ashes swirling down around them were from Castle Bravo. The 15 megaton hydrogen bomb dropped on March 1, 1954 was the most powerful weapon ever tested by the US military. The blast exceeded its expected radius, and the dust the crew brushed off their heads and shoulders that day was contaminated. Upon returning to Japan, the whole crew was sick, and, seven months later, Aikichi Kuboyama, the boat’s chief radioman, died from the radiation. Less than a decade after the end of WWII, the Lucky Dragon incident reignited the post-Hiroshima traumatic stress still festering in the Japanese psyche, sparking an idea in the mind of filmmaker Ishiro Honda, an iconic character he described as “the A-bomb made flesh:” Gojira (a mash-up of the Japanese words for gorilla and whale), which in English, of course, became ‘Godzilla.’

Operation Bravo: H-Bomb Test

In its groundbreaking 1954 cinematic debut, this scaly leviathan, roused and swollen by nuclear contamination, emerges from the sea and smashes its way through Tokyo, whipping its gargantuan tail and spitting radioative fire. The original black and white movie alternates between scenes of fatalistic dread and apocalyptic devastation that are so downbeat and dire one wonders why it was such a hit, spawning, not only an ever-growing brood of sequels, but a whole new film genre. What does it say that, so soon after WWII, Japanese moviegoers paid to witness the simulated destruction of Tokyo again and again? One wonders if it was just a mindless diversion—an escapist fantasy where, in a state of titilation and sublime awe, they could feast their eyes on images of mass destruction—or if something deeper, more cathartic was happening. Were audiences subconsciously cleansing the psychic stain of national traumas and tragedies?

Gojira (1954)

During the postwar occupation, the United States prohibited Japanese filmmakers from depicting anything overtly militaristic, so the Kaiju (“strange creature”) genre became an indirect way for Japanese culture to cope with its collective A-bomb PTSD and critique the accelerating Cold War arms race. Behemoths like Gojira, Mothra, and King Ghidorah were perfect symbols not only for contemporary anxieties but also a repressed, pre-industrial past that must have still haunted Japan. Kaiju can be seen as cinematic incarnations of kami, powerful spirits who often represent natural forces. According to Shinto beliefs, countless kami permeate reality, emerging from a hidden, parallel dimension to intervene in human affairs when our polluting ways upset the natural order and flow of energy. The central concern in Shintoism is purity. Ritual cleanliness pleases the kami and thus increases the chances of a successful, fruitful life, hence Japanese culture’s preoccupation with cleanliness. Pollution, impurity, and contamination, however, incur the wrath of the kami.

Ryujin

From this perspective, Gojira is reminiscent of powerful sea kami like Ryūjin (or Ryōjin a.k.a. Ōwatatsumi), a wingless dragon with massive claws who symbolizes the power of the Pacific Ocean. Fishermen performed cleansing rituals to Ryūjin in hopes of bolstering their catch. In East Asian mythologies, dragons tend to represent the vitality and potency of nature, so here we see a clear psychosocial link between radioactive pollution and a scaly, fire-breathing beast bent on utter destruction. Gojira symbolizes natural forces that, once contaminated by modern humanity’s technological hubris and careless disregard for the environment, return in misanthropic forms to lay waste to the source of the pollution. The King of All Monsters represents modernization run amok—the law of unintended consequences writ large.

It will be interesting to see how Japanese audiences respond to post-Fukushima versions of Godzilla. How do you think Gareth Edwards’ reboot will do in Japan three years removed from another nuclear disaster? Will moviegoers turn out in droves to see the latest incarnation of this wrathful kami? Will Hollywood be able to help cleanse the psychic stain of this national tragedy?

Japanese Godzilla (2014) poster

For more discussion see:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050203181104/http://www.pennyblood.com/godzilla2.html

http://www.wnyc.org/story/the-making-of-godzilla-japans-favorite-mon-star/

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/02/308955584/the-making-of-godzilla-japans-favorite-mon-star

Fatal Curiosity: Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the Terror of the Known

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

If you’re a fan, you might think this an excerpt from an H.P. Lovecraft story, one of his twisted tales about erudite, curious men who learn too much about the nature of reality and are either destroyed or deeply damaged by what they discover. But this is actually the opening to Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense” (1873), a biting critique of the epistemological pretentiousness he finds running rampant through Western philosophy. Nietzsche is an iconoclastic philosopher, hammering away at venerated ideas, slashing through sacred assumptions. He gleefully turns traditional theories on their heads, challenging our beliefs, disturbing our values—an intellectual calling that has much in common with H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mission. His favorite theme is what he calls cosmic indifferentism. If Lovecraft has a philosophy, it is this: the universe was not created by a divine intelligence who infused it with an inherent purpose that is compatible with humanity’s most cherished existential desires. The cosmos is utterly indifferent to the human condition, and all of his horrific monsters are metaphors for this indifference.

Nietzsche and Lovecraft are both preoccupied with the crises this conundrum generates.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

“What does man actually know about himself?” Nietzsche asks, “Does nature not conceal most things from him?” With an ironic tone meant to provoke his readers, he waxes prophetic: “And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness.” In Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” (1934) this ‘fatal curiosity’ is personified in the scientist Crawford Tillinghast. “What do we know of the world and the universe about us?” Tillinghast asks his friend, the story’s unnamed narrator. “Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature.” His Promethean quest is to build a machine that lets humans transcend the inherent limitations of our innate perceptual apparatus, see beyond the veil of appearances, and experience reality in the raw. From a Nietzschean perspective, Tillinghast wants to undo the effect of a primitive but deceptively potent technology: language.

In “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense,” Nietzsche says symbolic communication is the means by which we transform vivid, moment-to-moment impressions of reality into “less colorful, cooler concepts” that feel “solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world.” We believe in universal, objective truths because, once filtered through our linguistic schema, the anomalies, exceptions, and border-cases have been marginalized, ignored, and repressed. What is left are generic conceptual properties through which we perceive and describe our experiences. “Truths are illusions,” Nietzsche argues, “which we have forgotten are illusions.” We use concepts to determine whether or not our perceptions, our beliefs, are true, but all concepts, all words, are “metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” [For more analysis of this theory of language, read my essay on the subject.]

Furthermore, this process happens unconsciously: the way our nervous system instinctually works guarantees that what we perceive consciously is a filtered picture, not reality in the raw. As a result, we overlook our own creative input and act as if some natural or supernatural authority ‘out there’ puts these words in our heads and compels us to believe in them. Lovecraft has a similar assessment. In “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), his essay on the nature and merits of Gothic and weird storytelling, he says the kind of metaphoric thinking that leads to supernatural beliefs is “virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned…there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue,” hence our innate propensity to perceive superhuman and supernatural causes when confronting the unknown. Nietzsche puts it like this: “All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them…we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins.” This, of course, applies to religious dogmas and theological speculations, too.

From Beyond (1986 film adaptation)

In “From Beyond,” Crawford Tillinghast wants to see “things which no breathing creature has yet seen…overleap time, space, and dimensions, and…peer to the bottom of creation.” The terror is in what slips through the rift and runs amok in this dimension. His scientific triumph quickly becomes a horrific nightmare, one that echoes Nietzsche’s caveat about attaining transgressive knowledge: “If but for an instant [humans] could escape from the prison walls” of belief, our “‘self consciousness’ would be immediately destroyed.”

Here in lies the source of our conundrum, the existential absurdity, the Scylla and Charybdis created by our inherent curiosity: we need to attain knowledge to better ensure our chances of fitting our ecological conditions and passing our genes along to the next generation, and yet, this very drive can bring about our own destruction. It’s not simply that we can unwittingly discover fatal forces. It’s when the pursuit of knowledge moves beyond seeking the information needed to survive and gets recast in terms of discovering values and laws that supposedly pertain to the nature of the cosmos itself. Nietzsche and Lovercraft agree this inevitably leads to existential despair because either we continue to confuse our anthropomorphic projections with the structure of reality itself, and keep wallowing in delusion and ignorance as a result, or we swallow the nihilistic pill and accept that we live in an indifferent cosmos that always manages to wriggle out of even our most clear-headed attempts to grasp and control it. So it’s a question of what’s worse: the terror of the unknown or the terror of the known?

Nietzsche is optimistic about the existential implications of this dilemma. There is a third option worth pursuing: in a godless, meaningless universe, we have poetic license to become superhuman creatures capable of creating the values and meanings we need and want. I don’t know if Lovecraft is confident enough in human potential to endorse Nietzsche’s remedy, though. If the words of Francis Thurston, the protagonist from his most influential story, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), are any indication of his beliefs, then Lovecraft doesn’t think our epistemological quest will turn out well:

“[S]ome day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality…we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

“Cthulhu Rising” by_Somniturne

The Philosophy of Decomposition: Poe and the Perversity of the Gothic Mind

Whether you think Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are expertly-crafted explorations of the dark side of human nature or morbid, overwrought  melodramas, there is no doubt his work has had a tremendous impact on Western culture. Probably his most important contribution, apart from establishing the contemporary short story format and inventing the detective genre, is revitalizing the Gothic genre and pushing horror fiction in a more philosophically interesting direction. His stories are so enduring and influential because of the conceptual depth he added to generic tropes, redefining literature in the process. He accomplished this feat by perverting the Gothic.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), Master of Gothic literature

By the time Poe arrived on the scene, Gothic fiction had already fossilized and become fodder for self-parody. What started with the fantastic absurdities of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and culminating in the speculative complexity of Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) had eventually led to Northanger Abbey (1817), Jane Austin’s metafictional send up of what had become pretty stale conventions by then: crumbling castles, tormented heroines, supernatural entities, and family curses. Although the external trappings of Gothic plots may have fallen into ruin, its themes remained relevant. According to Joyce Carol Oates, a master of the genre in her own right, Gothic fiction explores the fragmentation of the alienated mind by inscrutable historical and biological forces that can overwhelm one’s ability to rationally understand the world and make intelligent choices, a critical antidote to naïve utopian visions of the future inspired by the Enlightenment and of particular interest to American culture, the intellectual basis of which is rooted in the rational pursuit of happiness. ‘Gothic’ suggests the fear of something primal and regressive that threatens to undermine mental and social stability. In order to be a culturally relevant again, though, Gothic literature needed a writer who could reanimate its tropes. It needed a morbid, hypersensitive, and arrogant genius named Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe’s key twist is turning the tropes inward and starting with the macabre landscape within—“the terror of the soul,” he calls it. By the 1830s, Poe is focused on composing short fiction, crafting tightly-constructed tales, rendered in dense, pompous prose, spewing from the cracked psyches of unreliable narrators. This is the dark heart of many of his best stories: “Ligeia” (1838), “William Wilson” (1839),  “The Black Cat” (1843), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), just to name a few (of course, his most accomplished story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), flips this dynamic: an unnamed and relatively reasonable narrator details the psychic disintegration of Roderick Usher). Poe’s disturbed, epistemologically-challenged protagonists aren’t the true innovation. Marlowe and Shakespeare pioneered that literary territory centuries before. The element that Poe adds—the novelty that both revitalizes and Americanizes the Gothic—is, what Poe himself calls, “the spirit of the perverseness.”

The narrator in “The Black Cat” puts forth this concept to explain his violent deeds. He says perversity is “one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties…which give direction to the character of Man.” What is its function? It is the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself,” the narrator says, “a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment” to commit a “vile or a silly action” precisely because we believe it to be ‘vile’ or ‘silly.’ In “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), the narrator claims that perversity is “a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment,” so deep and pervasive, that it is ultimately immune to the prescriptions of the analytical mind. In other words, Poe identified the disruptive and neurotic effects of ‘the Unconscious’ half a century before Freud burst onto the scene.

While these narrators claim that philosophers have ignored man’s irrational inclinations, we shouldn’t assume Poe, himself a well-read scholar, wasn’t influenced by obvious precursors to ‘the spirit of perverseness,’ namely Aristotle and St. Augustine. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle posits his theory of akrasia, the vice of incontinence, i.e. the inability to control oneself and do the virtuous thing even when one knows it is the right choice. This is his corrective to the Socratic-Platonic dictum that to know the good is to do the good: no one willingly does evil. To Aristotle, this is a distorted view of the human condition. We can know theoretically what the virtuous choice is—wisdom Aristotle calls sophia—but that doesn’t automatically compel us to have phronesis, or practical wisdom, which is the ability to do the good. In other words, there is a gap between knowledge and action, a notion that surfaces again in Aristotle’s Poetics. In his analysis of drama, Aristotle identifies hamartia as a key characteristic of the tragic hero, referring to the flaws in judgment that lead to a character’s ultimate downfall. An archery metaphor that means “to miss the mark,” hamartia becomes the main word New Testament writers use to translate the Jewish concept of sin into Greek (they weren’t the first to do this: writers of the Septuagint, the 2C BCE Greek translation of Hebrew scripture, had already made this move). By the fifth century CE, St. Augustine, the most influential Christian theologian of late-antiquity, formulates his doctrine of original sin, describing humanity’s lack of self-control as innate, embodied depravity. For Augustine, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they condemned their progeny to bondage, chaining the human spirit to this corrupt, uncontrollable, and ultimately decaying flesh. Only Christ’s sacrifice and God’s loving grace, Augustine assures us, can liberate the spirit from this prison.

This is part of the philosophical lineage behind perverseness, despite his narrators’ claims to the contrary. There is, however, some truth to the critique if seen from a mid-19C perspective. From Descartes right through to Locke, ‘Reason‘ is heralded as humanity’s salvation (of course, Hume and Rousseau poke skeptical holes in 18C Europeans’ over-inflated, self-aggrandizing mythology. Kant manages to salvage some of the optimism, but has to sacrifice key epistemic conceits in the process). But enlightened humanistic confidence looks like hubris to Romantic writers and artists, especially in the wake of the French Revolution and the international traumas it spawned. This is the mindset Poe resonates with: one that is highly skeptical of the ‘Man-is-the-rational-animal’ mythos. Anyone familiar with his biography can see why he gravitates toward a dark worldview. As a critic, he loves savaging fellow writers whose dispositions strike him as too sunny, and as a storyteller, his characters often confront—sometimes ironically, sometimes tragically—the limits of reason, a capacity Poe calls (I think with a tongue-in-cheek ambivalence) ‘ratiocination.’

Dark reflections of a perverse mind

The ‘spirit of perverseness’ implies that neither divine ‘Grace’ nor humanistic ‘Reason’ can save us from a life of terror and suffering, especially when we ignore and repress our essential sinfulness. Whether you view history through a biblical or Darwinian lens, one thing is clear: humans aren’t naturally inclined to seek rational knowledge anymore than we are given to loving and respecting each other universally. Modern cognitive science and psychology have shown us that the mind evolved to assist in feeding, procreation, and, of course, to protect the body from danger—not to seek objective truths. It evolved to help us band together in small tribal circles, fearing and even hating those who exist outside that circle. Over time we’ve been able to grasp how much better life would be if only we could rationally control ourselves and universally respect each other—and yet “in the teeth of our best judgment” we still can’t stop ourselves from committing vile and silly actions. Self-sabotage, Poe seems to argue, is our default setting.

Poe shifts Gothic terror from foggy graveyards and dark abbeys to broken brains and twisted minds. The true threats aren’t really lurking ‘out there.’ They’re stirring and bubbling from within, perturbing and overwhelming the soul, often with horrifying results. A Gothic mind lives in a Gothicized world—personifying its surroundings in terms of its own anxious and alienated disposition. ‘Evil’ only appears to be ‘out there.’ As literary and ecological theorist Timothy Morton points out, evil isn’t in the eye of the beholder. Evil is the eye of beholder who frets over the corruption of the world without considering the perverseness generated by his own perceptual apparatus. It’s an Uroboric feedback loop that, left to its own devices, will spin out of control and crumble to pieces. The most disturbing implication of Poe-etic perversity is the sense of helplessness it evokes. Even when his characters are perceptive enough to diagnose their own disorders, they are incapable of stopping the Gothic effect. This is how I interpret the narrator’s ruminations in “The Fall of the House of Usher:”

 What was it…that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression…There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition…served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy…so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued…

Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Reflections on The Walking Dead

WARNING: SPOILERS. The Walking Dead’s violent, post-apocalyptic setting always makes me wonder: what kind of person would I be under circumstances like that? Given what one has to do in order to survive, could I still look at myself in the mirror and recognize the person gazing back at me? Would I even want to?

Critics sometimes complain about the show’s pacing and quieter, more reflective scenarios, but the writers should be applauded for slowing the story down, developing the characters, and exploring the thematic implications of their struggles. The Walking Dead knows how to alternate between terror—the dreaded threat of the unseen, the lurking menace yet to be revealed—and horror, the moment when the monster lunges from the bushes and takes a bite. Utilizing this key dynamic means including lots of slower, quieter scenes. Setting up psychological conflicts and tweaking character arcs enhances the terror because we are more invested in the outcomes—we care about what is lurking around the corner, and, when the horror is finally unleashed, the gore is all the more terrifying because we know more about the victims. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the hyperactivity you get in shows like American Horror Story, a series that flows like a sugar rush—sleek, Gothic concoctions for the Ritalin Generation.

The slow-burn approach also allows viewers to reflect on the shows themes, like the existential and moral status of the Walkers themselves. During Season Two, Herschel didn’t share the kill ’em all approach that Rick and company had pretty much taken for granted—and who could blame them? After what happened in Atlanta in Season One, there was little reason to contemplate the possible personhood of the Walkers chomping at the bit to eat them. But, when farm life slowed things down and gave characters more time to reflect on their situation, the issue slowly but surely lumbered out into the open and became the turning point of the season.

Rick and Herschel’s Moral Debate

When Rick confronted Herschel about hiding his zombified relatives in the barn, the conviction in Herschel’s moral reasoning was hard to dismiss. From his perspective, a zombie was just a sick human being: behind the blank eyes and pale, rotting skin, Herschel saw a human being waiting to be saved. After all, what if zombiehood could be cured? If that’s your philosophy, then killing a zombie when you don’t have to would be murder. By the end of Season Two, of course, we learn that everybody is infected and thus destined to be a zombie. We’re all the Walking Dead, so to speak. In Season Three, even the duplicitous, devious Governor struggles with the issue. As much as we grow to hate him as a brutal tyrant, he’s also a loving father who can’t let go of his daughter. She’s not just a zombie to him. In the Season Four opener, the issue resurfaced again with Tyreese’s ambivalence about having to kill Walkers all day at the prison fence and then later when Carl rebuked the other kids for naming them. “They’re not people, and they’re not pets,” he tells them. “Don’t name them.” This is after Rick warned him about getting too attached to the pig, which he’d named Violet. To Carl, animals are more like people than Walkers are.

‘Personhood’ is a sticky philosophical issue. We all walk around assuming other people also have a subjective awareness of the world—have feelings and memories and intelligence, can make decisions and be held responsible for them. This assumption, which philosophers call ‘theory of mind,’ frames our experience of reality. But, some philosophers are quick to ask: how do you know others really have feelings and intelligent intentions? Sure, they have the body language and can speak about their inner states, but couldn’t that be mere appearance? After all, that’s just behavior. It could be a simulation of consciousness, a simulacrum of selfhood. You can’t get ‘inside’ somebody’s head and experience the world from their point of view. We don’t have Being John Malkovich portals into the subjectivity of others (yet). Philosophically and scientifically speaking, the only state of consciousness you can be sure of is your own.

That was what Rene Descartes, the highly influential 17th century philosopher, meant when he said cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. He was trying to establish a foundation for modern philosophy and science by basing it on the one thing in the world everyone can be absolutely certain of, i.e. one’s own consciousness, which in turn has the rational capacities to understand the clock-like machinations of the physical world. Descartes, therefore, posits a dualistic metaphysics with physical stuff on side of the ontological divide and mental stuff on the other. Minds can use brains and bodies to get around and know a world made up of mindless stuff. Only humans and God have souls and can ‘know’ what is happening, can understand what is going on.  

The problem with Descartes’ cogito is that—unless you assume the same things Descartes did about God and math—you can’t really be sure about the existence of other cogitos or even the world outside your own head. You could be dreaming or in a fake reality conjured up by a Matrix-style evil genius. ‘I think, therefore I am’ opens up a Pandora’s jar of radical skepticism and solipsism. How do you really know that others aren’t ‘philosophical zombies,’ i.e. beings that behave like they’re conscious but are really only organic machines without subjective experiences and free-will? This is what some philosophers call the ‘hard problem:’ how do brain states generated by the synaptic mesh of neurons and the electrochemical flow inside the skull—purely physical processes that can be observed objectively with an fMRI machine—cause or correlate to subjective awareness—to feelings, images, and ideas that can’t be seen in an fMRI?

This theory was dramatized during Season One by Dr. Jenner when he showed an fMRI rendered transformation from human to Walker. He said the brain holds the sum total of the memories and dreams, the hopes and fears that make you who you are—and the death of the brain is the irrevocable end of that identity. What is revived through zombification is not that person—it’s not even human. In other words, you are your brain. The zombie that emerges may resemble you in some uncanny way—but it’s not really you. That’s of course most characters’ default theory until we meet Herschel and get an alternative perspective. He’s not interested in scientifically or philosophically ‘proving’ the personhood of Walkers. They’re family members and neighbors who happen to be sick and might someday be cured. He can’t kill them. What’s intriguing is how his response bypasses the metaphysical problem and goes right to the ethical question. If you can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that zombies aren’t conscious—that there isn’t some sliver of humanity swirling around inside those rotting skulls—then isn’t Herschel’s theory a more appropriate moral response, a more humane approach?

What matters most, from this perspective, is how you treat the other, the stranger. It’s no accident that Herschel is a veterinarian and not a ‘human ‘doctor, which would’ve served his initial plot function—saving Carl—just as well, if not better. As a vet, Herschel has to care about the pain and suffering of creatures whose states of mind he can’t know or prove. What matters isn’t testing and determining the degree to which a creature is conscious and then scaling your moral obligations in proportion to that measurement—after all, such a measurement may be in principle impossible—what matters is how you treat others in the absence of such evidence. In short, it depends on a kind of faith, a default assumption that necessitates hospitality, not hostility. The perspective one adopts, the stance one assumes, defines how we relate to animals and the planet as a whole—to other human beings and ultimately oneself.

The Walking Dead

I think this is one of the most relevant and potent themes in The Walking Dead, and I was glad to see it re-emerge in the Season Four opener. In future episodes, it will be interesting to see how they explore it, especially through Carl and Tyreese. I’ll be focused on how they react to the Walkers: how they manage their feelings and control themselves in the crises to come. Walkers are like uncanny mirrors in which characters can glimpse otherwise hidden aspects of their own minds. What do Tyreese and Carl see when they look into the seemingly-soulless eyes of a Walker, and what does that say about the state of their souls? Will they lose themselves? If they do, can they come back?

Sublimity and the Brightside of Being Terrorized

Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

We live in a terrorized age. At the dawn of the 21st century, the world is not only coping with the constant threat of violent extremism, we face global warming, potential pandemic diseases, economic uncertainty, Middle Eastern conflicts, the debilitating consequences of partisan politics, and so on. The list grows each time you click on the news. Fear seems to be infecting the collective consciousness like a virus, resulting in a culture of anxiety and a rising tide of helplessness, despair, and anger. In the U.S.,  symptoms of this chronic unease can be seen in the proliferation of apocalyptic paranoia and conspiracy theories coupled with the record sales of both weapons and tickets for Hollywood’s superhero blockbusters, fables that reflect post-9/11 fears and the desire for a hero to sweep in and save us.

That’s why I want to take the time to analyze some complex but important concepts like the sublime, the Gothic, and the uncanny, ideas which, I believe, can help people get a rational grip on the forces that terrorize the soul. Let’s begin with the sublime.

18C Philosopher Immanuel Kant

The word is Latin in origin and means rising up to meet a threshold. To Enlightenment thinkers, it referred to those experiences that challenged or transcended the limits of thought, to overwhelming forces that left humans feeling vulnerable and in need of paternal protection. Edmund Burke, one of the great theorists of the sublime, distinguished this feeling from the experience of beauty. The beautiful is tame, pleasant. It comes from the recognition of order, the harmony of symmetrical form, as in the appreciation of a flower or a healthy human body. You can behold them without being unnerved, without feeling subtly terrorized. Beautiful things speak of a universe with intrinsic meaning, tucking the mind into a world that is hospitable to human endeavors. Contrast this with the awe and astonishment one feels when contemplating the dimensions of a starry sky or a rugged, mist-wreathed mountain. From a distance, of course, they can appear ‘beautiful,’ but, as Immanuel Kant points out in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, it is a different kind of pleasure because it contains a “certain dread, or melancholy, in some cases merely the quiet wonder; and in still others with a beauty completely pervading a sublime plan.”

This description captures the ambivalence in sublime experiences, moments where we are at once paradoxically terrified and fascinated by the same thing. It is important here to distinguish ‘terror’ from ‘horror.’ Terror is the experience of danger at a safe distance, the potential of a threat, as opposed to horror, which refers to imminent dangers that actually threaten our existence. If I’m standing on the shore, staring out across a vast, breathtaking sea, entranced by the hissing surf, terror is the goose-pimply, weirded-out feeling I get while contemplating the dimensions and unfathomable power before me. Horror would be what I feel if a tsunami reared up and came crashing in. There’s nothing sublime in horror. It’s too intense to allow for the odd mix of pleasure and fear, no gap in the feeling for some kind of deeper revelation to emerge.

Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea

While Burke located the power of the sublime in the external world, in the recognition of an authority ‘out there,’ Kant has a more sophisticated take. Without digging too deeply into the jargon-laden minutia of his critique, suffice it to say that Kant ‘subjectivizes’ the concept, locating the sublime in the mind itself. I interpret Kant as pointing to a recursive, self-referential quality in the heart of the sublime, an openness that stimulates our imagination in profound ways. When contemplating stormy seas and dark skies, we experience our both nervous system’s anxious reaction to the environment along with a weird sense of wonder and awe. Beneath this thrill, however, is a humbling sense of futility and isolation in the face of the Infinite, in the awesome cycles that evaporate seas, crush mountains, and dissolve stars without a care in the cosmos as to any ‘meaning’ they may have to us. Rising up to the threshold of consciousness is the haunting suspicion that the universe is a harsh place devoid of a predetermined purpose that validates its existence. These contradictory feelings give rise to a self-awareness of the ambivalence itself, allowing ‘meta-cognitive’ processes to emerge. This is the mind’s means of understanding the fissure and trying to close the gap in a meaningful way.

Furthermore, by experiencing forms and magnitudes that stagger and disturb the imagination, the mind can actually grasp its own liberation from the deterministic workings of nature, from the blind mechanisms of a clockwork universe. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant says “the irresistibility of [nature’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature…whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion.” One is now thinking about their own thinking, after all, reflecting upon the complexity of the subject-object feedback loop, which, I assert, is the very dynamic that makes self-consciousness and freedom possible in the first place. We can’t feel terrorized by life’s machinations if we aren’t somehow psychologically distant from them, and this gap entails our ability to think intelligently and make decisions about how best to react to our feelings.

Van Gogh’s Starry Night

I think this is in line with Kant’s claim that the sublime is symbolic of our moral freedom—an aesthetic validation of our ethical intentions and existential purposes over and above our biological inclinations and physical limitations. We are autonomous creatures who can trust our capacity to understand the cosmos and govern ourselves precisely because we are also capable of being terrorized by a universe that appears indifferent to our hopes and dreams. Seen in this light, the sublime is like a secularized burning bush, an enlightened version of God coming out of the whirlwind and parting seas. It is a more mature way of getting in touch with and listening to the divine, a reasonable basis for faith.

My faith is in the dawn of a post-Terrorized Age. What Kant’s critique of the sublime teaches me is that, paradoxically, we need to be terrorized in order to get there. The concept of the sublime allows us to reflect on our fears in order to resist their potentially debilitating, destructive effects. The antidote is in the poison, so to speak. The sublime elevates these feelings: the more sublime the terror, the freer you are, the more moral you can be. So, may you live in terrifying times.

Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

2003’s Hulk Revisited: Time for a Fresh Look.

It’s a notorious film in the Marvel cannon—so vilified that a decade removed and we’re already two regenerations—from Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo—away from it. But it’s time to re-think this weird and wonderful take on the ultimate embodiment of unleashed id.

Ang Lee’s Hulk: Worth another look?

I’ll up the ante: it’s the most thought-provoking movie to come from the Marvel Universe yet (though, I’ll grant you, not as entertaining as Iron Man). It’s the closest Marvel has come, in terms of literary depth and psychological complexity, to Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Yeah, I just said that. Indulge my ‘apology’ for this heretical position. First, Ang Lee and his screenwriters, two years before Nolan went there, were the first to build a psychoanalytical foundation for their origin story. Second, Lee understood, with gamma-ray-like precision, that Hulk is not only a Freudian tale, but a Frankensteinian one two.

The key here is ‘regeneration.’ Plastered over and over in the title sequence, Hulk milks the term for all its Freudian implications. If you’ll recall, (the oversimplified version of) Freud’s argument about human nature is that a child’s aggressive instincts are invariably repressed by his or her parents, who shape and mold the child in their own image. They imprint their preoccupations and anxieties onto the child’s psyche, creating a neurotic version of themselves. We are haunted, Freud argues, by the hangups are parents instilled in us. Whether we like it or not, we are just as much their psychological replicants as we are their genetic ones, and the more we deny this, the more we make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bruce Banner, Freudian timebomb

The connections to Hulk are clear. Bruce’s father, a passionate geneticist with something of a temper, is obsessed with the power of biological regeneration, so much so he’s willing to experiment on himself. David Banner alters his own DNA in the process and passes the mutation onto his son. But that’s only part of the equation: the really trauma was when David, while in the throes of a murderous rage toward his son, killed his wife. Young Bruce saw it all—a memory too traumatic for his consciousness to bear. As an adult, Bruce is a beaker full of scientific passion mixed with repressed trauma. The sins of the father are visited on the son, a thousand-fold. Freud’s argument is echoed here: repression always regenerates, and, left unchecked, the tragic cycle kicks into high gear. Bruce has an extraordinary mind, his father tells him. His thirst for knowledge assures he’ll overstep his bounds and unleash the beast within. Bruce’s fate is to Hulk-out.

Like Father, Like Son

Which feeds into the second point, Lee’s other stroke of genius is making Hulk a thoroughly Frankensteinian story. By invoking Shelley’s 19C masterpiece, Lee forgoes the usual Jekyll-Hyde spin and goes right back to the original sci-fi template. The key ingredient is the father-son dynamic. Frankenstein is essentially a story of strained familial relationships played against a science fiction/gothic horror backdrop. In the novel, Victor initially blames his fascination with reanimation science on his father. Apparently, Frankenstein Sr. didn’t properly steer Young Victor away from the alchemical texts which galvanized his imagination and led him astray. So much for home-schooling.

Victor turns out to be an even worse paternal figure to his artificial offspring, the Creature/Monster. Victor’s refusal to accept responsibility for his creation not only costs him his life, it leads to the violent deaths of everyone he loves. A slight oversight on the part of the father feeds the self-absorption of an insensitive son, who in turn fathers a wretched, demonic being. The cycle evokes Greek tragedy, the logistics are the birth of science fiction.

Betty, Beauty calms the Beast

Hulk expands this dynamic to superheroic proportions and adds a twist. “A physical wound is finite,” Betty tells Bruce, “but with emotions, what’s to say it won’t go on and on and start a chain reaction.” The Hulk is a reaction to the buried rage implanted by Bruce’s father, the child of his mind. Bruce is not Mr. Hyde, who is what humans become when our socialization is stripped away. He’s the outcome of his father’s Faustian desire to harness and manipulate ‘the essence of things.’ Frankenstein’s Creature suffers because his father wants nothing to do with him. Bruce’s problem is that his father won’t leave him alone. He wants to ‘harvest’ the results of his experiment. The truly disturbing part, the really horrific sin visited upon this son, is, in Bruce’s own words, “When it happens, when it comes over me and I totally lose control…I like it.” Frankenstein’s Monster never takes pleasure in his rage, but something in Bruce wants to become the Monster—wants to Hulk-out and wreak havoc on the forces that seek to control him, on those who want to exploit his monstrosity for their own gain. Ultimately this creature wants to kill his creator—to absorb his father’s destructive energy and try to tame it—and the tragic cycle goes on.

I’m just scraping the tip of the thematic iceberg here. The point is that there’s real intellectual depth to Ang Lee’s vision. I’ve heard rumors that, given the positive reaction to Ruffalo’s performance, a post-Avengers regeneration of the Hulk is in the works. My hope is that Marvel will stop leaping away from this version, and fans will stop treating it like a bastard offspring. Sure there are are plenty of reasons to rip on it: 1) The CGI gets cheesy in parts, 2) Josh Lucas’ performance is distracting, 3) there’s always the issue with Hulk’s pants, and 4) I still can’t quite figure out what happens during the climactic battle (I think you have to be high to follow it). In the end, the film’s symbolic reach perhaps exceeds its cinematic grasp. But is that a reason to bury it and pretend it never happened (‘paging Dr. Freud’)? I only wish the comic book crowd will give this flawed masterpiece a second look. It’s my hunch that, given the blockbuster success of Nolan’s erudite interpretation of Batman, we’re finally ready for a more psychoanalytic, literary take on the Hulk.

Isn’t Lee’s film worthy of a fresh look?

Frankenstein: Forbidden Fruit and the Promethean Mirror

Prometheus Bound

Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein ‘A Modern Prometheus,’ invoking the mythic archetype of the titanic transgressor, the rebellious figure who pursues forbidden knowledge and power and has to pay for his hubris. Prometheus steals fire from Zeus and gives it to man. His punishment is to bound to a mountaintop for all eternity. Each day, an eagle eats his liver. Each night, the wounds heals, and the next day the torture begins again.

The Modern Prometheus, as envisioned by Shelley, pursues nature’s greatest secret. Victor Frankenstein wants to grasp “the principle of life” so he can “infuse a spark of life into [a] lifeless thing.” He says, “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should break through.” The idea of breaking through boundaries is, of course, key to the enduring power of the Promethean myth.

Through Victor’s grand ambitions, Shelley explores the power humans have to imagine possibilities beyond what our senses reveal about the world. We perceive unseen forces at work in the cosmos; we infer law-like principles at play in nature. Humans are uniquely skilled at imagining everything from spirits and gods to mathematical abstractions and geometric forms. We can’t help but be curious about what’s really ‘out there’ beyond the veil of appearance—can’t help being tempted by the fruit of knowledge that grows there and the power it bestows.

When we part the veil and peer into the other side, though, are we gazing at something we were meant to see, or at a realm that is beyond human capacities and thus dangerous even to behold? Quite often, people think ‘God’ is on the other side—that ‘He’ has drawn the line, and it is out of pride that we want to trespass and set up camp in ‘His’ space. As sinful, broken creatures, we simply don’t know when to quit. A human is, by definition, the kind of being who won’t, or possibly can’t, accept limitations on its nature. Since we were made in God’s image, we are invariably tempted to become what we behold that mirror image to be, ignoring the fact that the same scripture which tells us we’re made in ‘His’ image also says we see through a looking glass, darkly.

Modern Prometheus at work

A survey of human history reveals that, despite our reservations, we have been playing ‘God’ right from the beginning. Restless creatures that we are, humans have always been asking questions, testing possibilities, and putting answers into practice. Victor Frankenstein articulates this ambivalence when he says a “human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility,” the pursuit of knowledge being no exception. But, he adds, if “this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit to interfere with the tranquility,” great advances and historical accomplishments would’ve never happened. In other words, if we didn’t continually test the bounds and explore ‘God’s territory,’ we’d still be hunting and gathering—we’d still be following and praying to animals.

Because we’ve indulged our Promethean urge, however, most humans don’t worship animals anymore. We keep them as pets. We clone them. We’ve pursued the principle of life down to its fundamental molecular formula and are beginning to re-write the code. With the power of genetic knowledge, we’re remaking life itself in our image. Modern civilization has re-framed the boundaries of its looking glass and is both enamored and terrified by what it sees. Undeniably, science and technology have enriched our lives—enhancing our ability to alleviate suffering, to travel previously unthinkable distances and communicate with each other on a global scale—but we can also annihilate ourselves with the push of a button. Global temperatures and sea levels are rising—the whole planet could be doomed.

Are we already trapped on the mountaintop?

If popular culture is a mirror, it certainly casts an anxious image. Over the last decade or so, there’s been an explosion of dark conspiracy theories festering in Internet chat rooms. There are countless apocalyptic movies and dystopian novels, as well as TV shows about zombie hordes and viral pandemics and alien invasions. Superhero epics now get two hundred million dollar budgets because Hollywood knows it’s a relatively safe investment. Why? More than ever the public enjoys the archetypal fantasy these modern myths tap into: the collective dream that a determined individual will rise up or sweep in and set the world right—reorder a culture that has gone too far, that has crossed an important but imperceptible boundary and can’t find its way back.

Mary Shelley

The prophetic genius of Shelley’s 200 year old novel is that it asks us to contemplate the  motivations and emotions that drive us to such extremes in the first place. Victor is a brilliant, ambitious medical student who sees what he’s doing and why he’s doing it in a highly distorted way. His intentions are complex to the point of contradiction and self-delusion. He wants to “banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death,” which sounds like a noble Promethean motivation. However, his research and experiments eventually fuel a desire that sounds less altruistic and more about his own vanity: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” This is the essence of hubris: crossing the taboo boundary in search of personal glory. This isn’t tempting fate in order to provide warmth and comfort for humanity. It’s wanting people to praise you because you had the gall and ingenuity to pull a fast one on Zeus.

If Victor would have been more Promethean, he would’ve been willing to accept the full consequences of his actions. And that’s the real tragedy in  the novel. He’s able to master the principle of life and bring a new being into existence, but he is unwilling to take care of the Creature—to be its parent and nurture its potential humanity. Victor is too immature. He   rejects his artificial son because, well, it’s ugly. More than anything Victor wants to ‘play’ God. He fantasizes and courts the idea, but when it comes   to dealing with the long-term responsibilities, Victor’s performance is a   one night stand. He’s God, the Creator, but not God, the Father.

By the time he realizes it, though, it’s too late. The Creature has become The Monster, and the horror plays out with a chilling, law-like precision. The Latin root of the word ‘monster’ means ‘warning.’ The message is clear: selfish creation begets absolute destruction. And all of it could have been avoided, Shelly suggests, if Victor could have looked into the Promethean mirror clearly and been more critical, more honest, about his true intentions.

Monster means 'warning'

Frankenstein holds the same mirror up to its readers. And as we push deeper into this undiscovered country opened up by modern science and technology, are we going to make the same mistakes as Victor? Shelly’s novel implies that it’s not the Promethean urge itself that’s problematic. The sin isn’t in wanting to explore hitherto forbidden territories. It’s in running away from the implications of what you find. It’s in disowning what you create in the process. Humanity does have to accept at least one limitation: we can’t have the fruit of forbidden knowledge and eat it to.

In Praise of the Greatest Goth Chick Ever!

She was the daughter of the controversial philosopher and novelist, William Godwin, and the even edgier social critic and feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her. Her famous lineage garnered the attention of the notorious Romantic poet and original emo-bad boy, Percy Shelley, who, although already married, had to have her.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly (1797-1851)

She was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. When it came out in 1818, readers were disturbed by the story of a brilliant science student who is determined to engineer a living creature, but emotionally unable to handle the consequences. Most readers didn’t have a clue that this Gothic shocker was penned by an eighteen year old young woman. But if you get to know Mary’s biography, you can see why she was capable of writing not only one of the greatest horror novels of all time, but the first work of science fiction ever. It’s one of the great stories in modern literature: the inventor of the greatest myth of the modern age was a teenage goth girl.Why so gloomy? First, Mary couldn’t help but feel like she had caused her famous mother’s passing. It haunted her. She used to visit her mother’s grave where she read the late woman’s works and tried to commune with her spirit. Percy, her equally gloomy soul-mate, used to meet her there and, well, let’s just say they probably did more than recite poetry on those graves. Darkness and going to extremes really seemed to turn them on.

Their elopement was, of course, a scandal and their (open) relationship brought her relentless heartache, starting in 1815 with her first child by Percy: born two months premature, Clara died within two weeks. (She would lose two more children, William in 1819 and another girl named Clara, and eventually her husband Percy 1822 to a boating accident.)

In 1816, she and Percy spent the summer in Switzerland with the infamous poet and playboy, Lord Byron. It was a stormy, gray summer and the rebellious young gang reveled in the dark vibe. They stayed up all night, getting high and telling ghost stories. Legend has it Byron offered a challenge, a contest for the creepiest, most chilling tale. Soon after, the image of Victor Frankenstein came to Mary, supposedly in a dream: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

I think we can safely say, she won the Bryon Horror Challenge. Two hundred years later we are still reading her hideous literary progeny, not because it reflects her times, but because it still prefigures and haunts our own. If you want to talk about technology running amok and destroying its creator, you can use the term ‘Frankenstein’ and people will know exactly what you mean, even if they’ve never read the novel, which, if you haven’t, you should. If and when you do, always keep in mind the novel’s creator, a feisty young lady who knew how to turn personal pain into fodder for public debate—knew how to turn tragedy into timeless art. Don’t forget that this masterpiece was written by Mary Shelley…

Greatest Goth Chick EVER!