Monsters

Some quick thoughts on monsters, sparked early in the morning by a reading of a post on another blog. 

The idea in that post is that the existence of monsters is evidence of something going wrong in the world - the example given is British Colonialism in India, particularly the tradition of trophy hunting, which in the instance quoted results in a tiger having its teeth shot out and developing man-hunting predation, going on to kill 436 people.

This is a neat equation, and a pleasingly moral/critical one: colonialism is the real monstrosity, the killer tiger is merely symptomatic. If a tiger were to damage its teeth in some other way and kill 400 people, the critical logic would break down - it would, presumably, not be evidence of monstrous wrong in the world. 

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Horror films are electric and vital before their tropes become commonplace; before critique and analysis become possible. There has to be something unrecognisable and untranslatable in them. You can taste this in early examples of genre films: Halloween is noticeable nasty, lean, stripped down, even watching it now, knowing everything about how the slasher genre would turn out. I can only imagine how it must have felt to have watched it in 1979, without that context; to see something obviously without precedent being birthed into the world.

Something like Scream can only be made after the tropes are all metabolised and understood, to the extent that they can be reverse engineered by professionals; this is a different type of media, in which causal breakdowns are viable and critique possible. Scream depends on feints, red herrings, and manoeuvres inside the plot (like an Agatha Christy novel) to function. Halloween and films like it are not (initially) interested in misdirection; they have a pure propulsive energy, they trust that the monster carries the unease and ambiguity inside itself. The Giallo films that prefigured slashers were often without any internal sense or logic - the barest frame of a situation or set before you find yourself crawling through a window in a ballet school and falling into a pit of barbed wire. You escape but the man with the black gloves is already behind you, already killing you, cutting away your eyelids, carving up your face. There is some residue of this oddly structural horror (the protags are making all the correct moves and they are still just butchered) in the off-screen teleportation beloved by slasher villains. The edit in the text itself conspires against the characters, conspires to torture and mutilate them. Even the worst excesses of the torture porn of the 2000s never quite accessed that type of frenzied nastiness, not for lack of trying. It can go too far in the other direction too: the formal horror of the remote in Funny Games; arch and self-congratulatory.  

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Moby Dick infamously defies any attempt to explain his existence using causal relations. It arrives like God arrives, and is explicitly and implicitly compared to God. Its monstrousness is in this total-ness, the impossibility of reducing and understanding it. Its horror is that it introduces a strange and difficult-to-locate evil into the image of the face of God, which ought to be separate, impossible to contaminate. It is evidence of something wrong in the world in the broadest possible sense - the intelligible world is wrong, your relation to knowing it as such is infected, and this strange, religious, awe-inspiring contamination is not something locatable historically, or vulnerable to critique. It is also not only experienced as terror. 

I suppose the thrust of this post is that images arrive before critique, and are often truer descriptors of otherness, violence, fear, degradation, uncleanness, parasitism, the restlessness of the dead, the truth that God is evil, etc. 

Critique is a useful method for banishing a monster, for metabolising what in it is impossible to countenance. Exorcism and the invocation of the rights of the host, or of holy ground, function on a similar logic - you can define a set of parameters wherein the unknowable and resolutely inhumane powers of the monster are nullified - using these you might even destroy them, bring them back into causal, proportional relation.

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I occasionally see things in the sky - it has to be a particularly bright shade of blue, with puffy white clouds at a particular height, moving across it at a particular speed. Something in this configuration triggers a set of visual distortions and hallucinations of enormous shapes moving somewhere 'between' the two layers: of parallax scrolling clouds, and the vivid 'ground' of the sky. They are living things, of a scale that the mind cannot really process, and they thrust forward out of the blueness. If they make contact with the earth they will destroy the entire planet by virtue of their scale. I get intense vertigo when I see them, and they sometimes stop me from going outside, or from driving.