I live near my city's hospital and I regularly hear the sirens of ambulances, the din of helicopters, and see the flashing lights that give my living room a fairground feel for a second. I have always loved the medical atmosphere; my mother was a nurse and I have fond memories of visiting her workplace as a child. The uniforms, the specific smell of the place, the electronic machinery and its "beeps" that resound in a silence that is no longer found even in church...
My mother began her career in the burn unit. This, however, is something that horrifies me like few things do.
I'm listening to Throbbing Gristle again these days, and in particular, in their live show at the Factory in Manchester, the terrible, terrifying, terrorizing Hamburger Lady, which describes (after a letter Genesis P-Orridge received about a supposedly real woman) the unbearable existence – even for others, even for the one who simply imagines the thing – of a woman completely burned on the whole upper part of her body, faceless, atrociously conscious, to whom morphine brings no relief or unconsciousness, and who does not die, who will remain like that forever, for years and years, suffering without interruption or consolation.
Here is a reality of life next to which horror movies are not worth much.
Just as, in terms of moral and even physical discomfort, TG's piece cheerfully beats most of the horrific production, or, to stay in the musical field, the dark-occult-whatever nonsense, which I won't bother to define more precisely.
The striking thing about TG is this will to ugliness, this work to deliver the most unpleasant and dismaying music (or non-music) possible, a music to which it is, normally – because alas things did not happen that way - impossible to adhere.
As Marcel Duchamp, who didn't imagine to create an artistic school by exhibiting his readymades, had a sadly long descent of fumists – what we call contemporary art, in its entirety – Throbbing Gristle would probably have scuttled themselves from the start if they had been told that their "industrial music" denouncing the absurdities and atrocities of modern life would become the banner of innumerable freaks, glorifying serial killers, the Third Reich or totalitarian systems in general, and transforming the initial radicality, the initial absolute provocation, into a new aesthetic conformism, into a warm and comfortable niche. I discovered Throbbing Gristle when I was about 20, I'm a little over 40 now, and I can only listen to them again if I disregard the whole "industrial scene", if I imagine that they had no posterity, that they were in all things definitive.
The ugliness of TG's music is the only possible aesthetic if we want to denounce the modern world, the world we live in.
I made this reflection recently while listening to the track Laboratories of crime, from the French band (and more precisely from Strasbourg) Stigma, which I consider to be one of the best electro-industrial tracks I've ever heard in my life, and which virulently denounces vivisection and animal experimentation.
This is a recurrent theme in this kind of music (the first name that comes to my mind is obviously Skinny Puppy), as well as the denunciation of authoritarian regimes, of the control society, of the machinization of the world, etc, etc... EXCEPT... except that it is at best contradictory, at worst completely hypocritical, to denounce the machinization of the world while striving to produce cyberpunk, futuristic music, let's call it what you will, by making it as sexy and danceable as possible.
Every aesthetic choice is also a moral choice, a political choice, etc.
Producing nice and danceable electronic music that presents the most machine-like sounds as something cool and exciting is promoting the society that goes with it; and we are starting to see the true and ugly face of that society.
In contrast to that, then, we have Throbbing Gristle and its uncompromising ugliness, shocking, but which teaches us something.
*
Halloween is approaching, the occasion – if one were needed – to take a cure for horror films and to rejoice in the ugliness of the masks and disguises of vampires, werewolves, mummies... that are flourishing in our supermarkets. Bad taste is an aesthetic like any other, and in this case, bad taste applied to monster masks defuses anything initially disturbing about them.
I know that the Catholic Church is not a fan of Halloween, in general, and for good reasons, though not necessarily related to the holiday itself (it is a fact that in Western culture over the decades, the last few, at least, a certain glamorization of death, of the macabre, of violence, of occultism, etc., have only grown, to the detriment of any idea of sanctity) – but I have a soft spot for knife-wielding bogeymen, polymorphous clowns and other creatures of the night, not in spite of their profoundly kitschy character, but because of it; because they are finally representations of Evil that we can at least partly laugh at, whereas it seems to me quite difficult to laugh at pedophilia, the gas chambers or the cancer that is probably killing someone in your family, friend reader, and in mine.
The World is a War Film, says a song by Throbbing Gristle; one could just as easily say The World is a Horror Film. It is, in fact, the ultimate horror film, and the only one that is entirely true; no amount of gothic folklore can compete with the atrocities of the world and of everyday life. The few people I have met in my life who almost considered watching Halloween or good old Freddy as a form of perversion, were also those who refused to face the realities of life – those of society, those of sex, and of course, those of death, which we evacuate by removing the corpse (incineration of the body, desertion of the cemeteries) or by denying – to return to Catholics, at least to some Catholics – death itself, and the legitimate terror it inspires, by seeing only the future Resurrection.
Thus this good lady, recently widowed, whom I had heard, during a friendship drink, laughing heartily and exclaiming "Ah, very much so" while evoking her own death, and condemning, without malice, certainly, but condemning all the same those who whined a little too much when they died.
What does the Bible tell us about this?
32 Mary came to the place where Jesus was. When she saw him, she fell at his feet and said, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."
32 When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
34 “Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
35 Jesus wept.
Jesus is indignant, upset by death, he weeps over it even though he knows very well that he has the power to revive Lazarus, and that he will do so in the next few minutes. Because death is not only the passage to eternal life, it is also, it is still, a scandal, a horror, and that to deny it is certainly not a matter of spiritual maturity, but only of the most crass denial.
In the same way, if one is perfectly entitled not to like horror movies – and there are some that I hate – it seems to me that rejecting any representation of negativity, of Evil, of monsters, etc... in everyday life, public, festive, and so on, is less a rejection of Evil as such, than a reluctance to simply address the issue.
What frightened Christians do not see or do not want to see is that horror films are the only prophetic and apocalyptic genre of our civilization, the last place in culture where the existence of a radical, supernatural Evil is affirmed and represented, with which no negation is possible, which no political measure, no reform, no human discourse can overcome.
Michael Myers is not reinsurable. His existence is not due to social injustice, nor to racism, nor to people who do not sort their garbage properly. Nor to madness. Nor to anything, except the existence of a transcendent Evil, outside this world. The character of Dr. Loomis, in the first Halloween as well as in the following ones, repeats it enough to anyone who wants to hear it: Myers is not a man, he is not a sick person who can be cured, he is an empty bodily envelope, entirely driven by Evil.
"I met this 6 year old child with this blank pale emotionless face, and...the blackest eyes...the devil's eyes."
This is a discourse that currently exists nowhere else in the culture.
Is there any suggestion in family comedies, in politicized thrillers, in historical costume dramas, for decades now, that the catastrophic state of the world might be due to an immemorial, ontological taint from which we cannot free ourselves, at least not alone?
This is the discourse of Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, in which a student, Kathleen, is bitten by a vampire one night and sinks into an orgy of blood, want and despair from which she will only emerge by understanding, with the help of a vampire older than her, and benevolent in his own way, that her condition is only a modality of the generalized Evil on earth.
The film a sentence inconceivable in mainstream cinema:
"We arent't evil because of the evil we do, but we do evil because we are evil."
... and ends with the death of Kathleen, confessed, absolved, having taken communion.
In a commentary, the director himself said :
"Instead of devouring each other, eat the Body of Christ instead."
What about the fate of John Trent, the main character of In the mouth of madness, also by Carpenter, by the way? A cynical character, a professional skeptic, who openly displays his conviction that the world is a joke, that nothing should be believed, and also... that horror novels are entertainment for degenerates. And who ends up crazy after discovering the hard way that the universe is much bigger and stranger than he could or would have imagined; that in fact the ultimate reality is something that grossly violates everything that may seem taken for granted, stable, obvious and "normal" in our daily lives.
I think it must feel strange, arriving in Hell after having been a narrow, mocking rationalist all his life.
*
Songs about burnouts and horror movies tell us the same thing, bring us the same Bad News: yes, the world is a violent and absurd place, a vale of tears, and you will die, perhaps even experiencing unimaginable suffering, and on top of that there is a transcendent, active, personal Evil that wants to harm you, personally, and whose power and dimensions escape all human understanding ; and this Bad News is delivered to you to do you a favor, to reduce to nothing any feeling of obviousness, of normality, of the everydayness of things, because everyday life is only an illusion, and a murderous illusion. Obviously, nobody likes to hear this kind of thing and one may feel like hitting the messenger. But against the Bad News, only the Good News can be effective; banning horror movies and complaining about little girls dressed as witches asking for candy will not make the Evil one step back.
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