horror – Page 4 – Correlated Contents

The Host Family

At the beginning of 2010 I spent a few months studying abroad in London. I lived in North London in the Hampstead area, with a roommate, in the home of a host family. I’ll call my host parents Clarence and Emma. They were both semiretired doctors in their early 70s; their three daughters had long ago moved out, gotten married, and had their own children. Their (Clarence and Emma’s) home was the sort of sandwiched townhouse you see all over London. Of course, C&E being semiretired doctors and this being Hampstead, within spitting distance of the Heath, it was actually a nice place and, as you might imagine, really, really old.

It was a Victorian building, but had been remodeled several times, with electricity and phone lines and everything. Clarence and Emma bought the house in the 60s, just after it had been refurbished — the right side of it was damaged in the Blitz, and in fact the next three or four houses in the row had been entirely demolished and replaced with ugly, utilitarian flats.

Of course nothing strange happened right off the bat. I arrived at the beginning of January, and the weirdest thing at the time was that London was going through its first snowstorm in 30 years. Being from the rural American Midwest, it was endearing to me to see Londoners struggle with like two inches of snowfall, but that’s beside the point.

I’d never been outside of the country up until then, and never been away from home for more than a few weeks at a time (I’m astonishingly sheltered), so I spent a while adjusting to my new surroundings. Clarence and Emma had been hosting college students from the US for a few decades by then, and I found a bunch of papers a past student (a girl from Arizona, I gathered) had left in one of my desk drawers. One of the papers was a sort of strange checklist of reminders. I ended up taping it to the wall where I could always see it, since it seemed like an odd bit of found poetry. I still have it, actually — here’s what it says:

– notify bank of leave
– passport copies, extra pictures
– Friday!!! arrive at 5:35
– Saturday sightseeing
– Sunday sightseeing
– Monday classes begin
– toilets = restrooms
– plaster = bandaid
– servillette = napkin
– do not tip, considered an insult
– stay with friends when going out
– do not forget things — they will be gone

So yeah I am pretty much a melancholy jackass. But after a while I began to come around, I got used to my classes, to taking the tube in the mornings, I got used to the rhythms of the city. It happened that I had a cousin who was studying in Stratford-upon-Avon, and she’d met a guy there and they were heading over to America soon to get married. I was invited up to Stratford for their sort of pre-wedding reception for all their UK friends, as the sole representative of her side of the family.

About two weeks after arriving in London, the weekend of this reception comes and I head off from Marylebone, have a high time with Stratford, make new friends, be a Shakespeare geek, and so on. It was a cold, rainy day — and remember, it’s snowed in London for the first time in 30 years. Ice all over the damn place is the obvious result. My train out of Stratford was supposed to leave at 9:30, but it ended up delaying until 10:30. Then, while on the train, the rain turned into full-on sleet, and we halted for good at, I believe, Banbury.

The railway people apologized profusely but said we didn’t have a choice for safety reasons. So here I was, stuck at an unfamiliar station in an unfamiliar country in freezing cold rain with about half a dozen drunk metalheads from Birmingham whose train had been stopped going in the other direction. However, the railway actually came through and scheduled cabs to take us to our destinations — but I got paired with the drunk Brummeys, so I ended up going quite a bit in the wrong direction before spending a very long, awkward ride with just me and the driver, all the way back to London. (Not that I don’t appreciate the ride or anything, since it was damn awesome for the railway to do this for me.) The cab dropped me off at Marylebone, since that was my original return destination, and I had to figure out a bus route back to Hampstead.

But remember I just came from a wedding reception, where I had a lot of wine. And also it’s like 2:00 am and I had a really stressful moment where I was stranded in the West Midlands. And also I still hadn’t figured out the damn London bus system.

So I don’t get home until four in the morning, extremely tired and cranky. The house, when I unlock the doors and step in, is completely silent, of course. Now, to give you an idea of the set-up, directly in front of the door and to the left was the stairway leading up to the room my roommate and I shared, which was just off the landing there, along with our bath and loo. The sitting room was another floor up, and Clarence and Emma’s room was above that. On the ground floor, to the right, were doorways to Clarence and Emma’s in-home offices. Meanwhile, in between the stairs and the office doors, heading to the very back of the house, was another doorway: to the kitchen.

The kitchen, of course, was dark and empty.

Wanting very much to go to bed, I kicked off my shoes on the mat by the door and went to the kitchen to drop the sandwiches (now quite smashed and gross) I’d taken from the reception in the fridge. Then I went back and trudged upstairs, intent on going to goddamn bed.

And someone followed me out of the kitchen.

Recall, the stairs are running parallel to the little hall into the kitchen, I could see over the railing out of the corner of my eye, and for one surreal fatigued moment I was absolutely sure that someone had walked out of the kitchen and was looking up at me.

I froze on the landing, soaked and miserable in my heavy black overcoat, trying to get over the sudden adrenaline spike, and looked down at the empty hallway. I chalked it up to being completely exhausted, shrugged it off, and went to bed.

I didn’t think about what had happened over the next few weeks because I managed to successfully rationalize it. When the next thing happened, at the end of February, the events were so distinct and the former incident so distant in my mind that I didn’t really make a connection between them until after the fact.

My roommate talked in his sleep sometimes, you see. Not unusual, and most of the time it was pretty funny. He’s musically inclined, my roommate, and he actually beat-boxed in his sleep at least twice. But near the end of February, after a weekend trip to Edinburgh with some friends, we both got outrageously sick. I got over it before he did, so he ended up spending a few days extra in a medicated haze, sniveling on his bed and popping cough drops. One night he went to bed earlier than I did, and as I was just about nodding off he began to talk in his sleep.

“Where are you going?” he said from the other side of the room.

Imagine an American dude with a head full of mucus speaking. Now imagine that he’s not just talking, but trying to mimic an English accent, and he’s one of those Americans who literally just cannot do an English accent to save his life, but he’s trying anyway and it’s terrible. That’s how my roommate was speaking.

“Where are you going?” he said. “Wait, wait, no. Please, don’t.”

My reaction goes something like surprised to amused to annoyed, since I’m hoping he’ll shut up soon so I can sleep.

“Don’t go,” my roommate says, practically pleading now. “No, please don’t leave.” Then, suddenly, without warning he sits up in bed and turns to me: “It’s really bright,” he says, in his normal if congested voice. “Don’t you think, Michael,” he asks, “it’s really bright?”

It’s almost like midnight so of course it’s not bright, but I go ahead and agree with him since it’s just sleeptalk. “You should close the curtains,” he says to me.

The window in the room is closer to him, so I don’t know why I should be the one to do anything about it, but again, I agree. “Are you closing the curtains?” he asks.

Yes, I tell him, I’m doing it right now. (There were, by the way, no curtains in the room, only blinds.) “Good,” my roommate says, satisfied. “That’s good. Now we can sleep. They won’t find us now.” He giggled as he lay down, as if this were somehow amusing in and of itself.

We went to sleep. Again, I didn’t connect any of this with the overall arc of events until much later. I’ll explain in the end, and even then I might be wrong. This might have just been crazy flu sleep talk.

Anyway, time passed, I had classes, adventures in a new contry and so on. The housing situation was pretty good, and I didn’t have much to complain about. There was one thing that sometimes got on my nerves, though: I’m a light sleeper naturally, and sometimes my host-mom Emma would stay up late watching TV in the sitting room just one floor up.

Normally this wasn’t a problem, but sometimes the sound would get kind of inexplicably intense and it would sound like the TV was right outside of our room, just outside the door. I’d roll over in bed and wake up for a second because like late-night reruns of The Simpsons were suddenly audible, and on at least one occasion I heard Irish folk music, clear as day. More than once, however, I heard the sound of children. You know how kids sound when they’re trying not to be heard — whispering to each other, laughing, walking very low to the ground, almost crawling. I could hear them, almost as if they were right out there on the landing.

This happened often enough that I wondered what sort of crazy late night TV show in the UK would always sound like children playing, but unless there’s something I missed while there, I don’t actually think such a program exists.

I started an internship at a certain arts organization in Covent Garden at the beginning of March. My classload was halved so I had time to work three days out of five, and I had to dress business casual and carry around paperwork, and I was part of the morning commute into work and the evening commute back home, and it was all quite exhilarating and professional. I was miserable, of course, because it was work and work sucks, but really I had a very chill environment. A lot of the time I was just transcribing poems for digital archival, and sometimes if I finished a bit early my supervisor would tell me to head on home.

One day I got out early, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. “So you’re finally home?” Emma called from the kitchen.

Normally she just said hello, so I was understandably a bit confused. “Hello,” I called back. “Did you need me for something?”

Emma didn’t say anything in response.

I walked to the kitchen and found it empty. I checked the offices — also empty. The sitting room, the upper floors, all empty. My roommate wasn’t in, since I was off early. I was alone in the house, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that the voice I had heard — though undoubtedly a woman’s — hadn’t sounded like Emma at all.

Thinking about this, I remembered the incident upon my return from Stratford when something had seemed to follow me out of the kitchen. I began to wonder if the events were somehow related. I’ve maintained, time and time again, that I am not a superstitious man, but when things happen, or seem to happen in certain ways, I am inclined to entertain possibilities. I decided, at the risk of sounding like a doofus, to ask my roommate if he’d noticed anything strange.

I did this by asking him what he thought about the kitchen, which he interpreted as me asking what I thought about the facilities Clarence and Emma provided us. I clarified: no, I mean, what did he think about the kitchen in a more abstract way, like, was he comfortable there?

Well actually, my roommate admitted with some hesitation, he was kind of weirded out by the closet.

Honestly, I had never paid attention to the closet in the kitchen before. It was just beyond the stove, a little alcove beneath the stairs, all Harry Potter-style. What was it about the closet, I asked him.

He asked me if I was serious and said he couldn’t believe that Clarence hadn’t shown me.

Shown me what?

So my roommate showed me.

And now I’ll show you.

This is the closet in the kitchen. The doorway to the left leads to the little entry hallway, the stairs up to our room, and so on.

Graffiti inside the closet, written perhaps in charcoal. The date to the upper right says “30 Aug 40.” The poem, though cramped, runs thus:

Here we sit in comparative comfort
Waiting for Jerry to do his worst
We pray each night for our lads over Frankfurt
And hope our bombs do damage wherever they burst

“Heil Hitler — the rotter.”

The Führer has been thoroughly humiliated — he has a black eye, bandages, and “R.A.F.” tattooed on his forehead. Winston Churchill looks smugly on, puffing his cigar.

Obviously this is a neat little bit of history, something Clarence and Emma had discovered after purchasing the house and immediately lacquered over to preserve it. They’d shown it to my roommate one day while I was out.

Notably, the graffiti is dated a little over a week before the London Blitz actually began — so I guess it was made during the drills in the lead-up, which would have happened probably every night and lasted for a while. You’d need to keep yourself entertained if you spent the whole time in a cramped closet underneath the stairs. So maybe you’d bring along a charcoal pencil.

The handwriting on the poem seems to indicate an adult woman — the second bit of writing, over the cartoons, seems to be a different hand, though not as feminine. It might belong to a younger man, perhaps a teenager, a little angry that he couldn’t be the one to give Hitler those bruises.

I don’t think there was an adult man in this closet when these drawings were made — and this makes sense, to a degree, at a time when most able men were enlisting. However, something that I think is particularly notable are the bits that aren’t poems or doodles, the random lines and scribbles in between the drawings. The kinds of things children make.

There are no further doodles in the closet. When the Blitz properly began a week after the poem was written and the danger the Luftwaffe presented was fully understood, the children, both young and teenaged, were probably evacuated for safety, staying in rural abbeys or the country homes of the gentry. The adult woman — their mother, I imagine — went with them.

But later on, I remembered that one whole side of the townhouse had been wrecked by German bombs. I remembered that all the neighboring houses were long gone, and the ugly building of flats next door had, like sediment, settled into the cracks of history.

Clarence did not mention to me that their house was haunted until a few weeks before I left. I’d seen two ghost-centered plays (The Woman in Black, an old standard, and Ghost Stories, a new play that I saw in Hammersmith, but it’s recently got a West End transfer). Clarence, being a bit of a theatre aficionado, wanted to know how I’d like them. At some point during the conversation he said to me “You know, we had our own ghost here when we moved in.”

I certainly had not expected him to say this — he and Emma were, I thought, fervent atheists and were constantly railing about the government paying for the Pope to visit — but I was also further confused by his remark — had a ghost. I asked him what sort of ghost this was.

“A man,” he said. “A man in a black overcoat. He would stand on the stairs, actually, just on the landing outside of your room.” Clarence had seen this man several times, and so had their daughters, when they were young girls. Emma, for her part, had never glimpsed it, but Clarence swore he’d always caught this man just out of the corner of his eye, or just as he walked into the house. A tall, lonesome figure in a black coat, standing on the stairs and, as Clarence described it, seeming incredibly sad.

I asked what had happened with this ghost. Nothing much, Clarence told me. He (the man) had just stood there. Personally Clarence had never had a problem with him, but it bothered the girls terribly — they didn’t like how sad he seemed.

So, again, what happened?

“Well,” Clarence said rather matter-of-factly, “we had him exorcised.”

Again, Clarence had told me time and again he was an atheist, but in retrospect I knew he was also really into that James Lovelock Gaia thing, so maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me so much.

The exorcism had apparently broken down like this: Clarence knew some people who knew some people. A psychic investigator had been hired and confirmed the presence of an entity on the stairs, a man in black whose primary aura seemed to be one of sadness. As Clarence explained it, the man in black felt like he had left something behind. The investigator had then walked up the stairs and began to speak to the thin air. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can leave. It’s not here anymore, whatever you left. There’s nothing here for you now.” There were, apparently, a few minutes of stuff like that.

And I guess, somehow, it worked.

“We never saw him again,” Clarence said.

And I never saw him at all.

I never told anyone expressly about what I thought I had seen, and especially the things I thought I’d heard. The things I sometimes still heard, or thought I heard, when I woke up in the middle of the night; the sensation I always had when, alone in the kitchen, I felt as if someone were standing very, very close to me.

It wasn’t until the end of my stay in London that I started to put things together.

I thought about the man in black, and his loss. The things Clarence told me the investigator had said. There was nothing here anymore.

I thought of all the able men, all the men of age, enlisting to fight the encroaching might of Germany, leaving behind their children and families, not knowing that soon the Axis would be at their very door.

Surely some of the soldiers lived, but returned home to find their houses and their neighborhoods decimated, family members missing. How sad they must have been, how alone.

And I thought of the families left alone, hiding in closets, waiting for the inevitable, passing their time in the dark. England had, after all, been under a blackout to make the cities harder to spot from the air. I remembered what my roommate had said in his sleep, about it being too bright, that we should close the curtains. I had assumed he meant bright outside, but what if he meant the opposite? And I remembered his pitiful pleas for someone to come back — not to leave.

It occurred to me, in time, what I had looked like on that January night, seemingly forever ago, when I’d stumbled into the house at four in the morning, rooted through the kitchen, and started up to my room.

I had stood there on the stairs, and I was sad and scared but I was also glad to be someplace that felt like home. And someone or something, seeing me in my black overcoat I got on sale at Kohl’s three years ago, had mistaken me for someone else, and come out to welcome me back.

The Slasher in the Rye

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, and what deformities I had, and how my parents didn’t help when the townspeople burned me alive in our house after what I did to those two little girls, and where I got my mask, and all that Jason Vorhees kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my fans would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything that made my backstory even more complicated and nonsensical than it already is. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially the fat ones. They’re nice and all — fans generally don’t run away when they see me, at least until it’s too late — but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around that summer camp just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and lay low. I mean that’s all I told J.C. about, and he’s my producer and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every weekend. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Hummer. One of those retired army jobs that has chains and everything in the back for holding back bombs and junk, but I bet I could break them. It cost him damn near an arm and a leg. At least that’s what I would’ve paid. He’s got a lot of dough, now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer/director, he used to be small-time. He made this terrific film, Dark Star, in case you never heard of him. The best scene in it is with the alien. It has this alien that looks like a beachball with feet and claws, it’s like a mascot, and the main character chases it around the spaceship and slaps it with a broom. It killed me, which most things can’t really do, considering the number of sequels. Now he’s out in Hollywood, J.C., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.

My coffee warned me about this blog.

First, we know by now I like literary mashups. I also like Bret Easton Ellis. I therefore direct your attention here.

Read it? Good, good. Now, switching tracks, play the music below while you read the rest of this post.

Let’s talk about Deadly Premonition. It’s old news, yeah, but I’m always behind on games anyway. This saves me the trouble of recapping a lot of stuff about it, since it’s been covered extensively elsewhere. Basically what you need to know is that this game looks horrible, sounds horrible, and plays horribly.

It’s also probably the best game that will come out this year. It’s my pick for GOTY, anyway.

Now of course there’s a lot of people going on about just HOW DAMN TERRIBLE this game is (I’m looking at you, Giant Bomb) and it’s pretty cool currently to play this game and be entirely ironic about it. Hipster gaming, if you will. And I’ll admit, when I bought the game I expected to be counted in this camp — the camp camp, if you will, the so-bad-it’s-good camp. And I will also admit that this approach got me through the first hour or two of the game, with its clunky controls and awkward animation and basically excruciating gameplay.

Except at some point, some mysterious juncture, the game stopped being so-bad-it’s-good and became actually good. I want to say that it’s due to the quality of the writing — which is odd, since the writing is usually pretty bizarre and awkward and the dialogue needs trimming. But the characters are so vivid and, if you play long enough to get oriented, the storyline becomes unbelievably compelling. The ridiculous elements of the game (the fact that the main character is talking constantly to an imaginary friend no one else can see, demonic dogs drop out of the sky at midnight, etc) together achieve some sort of weird gestalt where your disbelief is suspended almost indefinitely. When the narrative actually picks up and that for all its peculiarities the game is internally logically consistent to a remarkable degree, you know you have something special on your hands.

It’s a mystery. This is notable, because it’s hard to write good mysteries, and a lot of games that try to be mysteries (most things that try to be mysteries, even) tend to fall back on last-second details that basically tell you everything you need to know to solve a case. DP is a good mystery; not only is it a good mystery, however, but it also gives you everything you need to solve it almost from the beginning.

And it’s not only a mystery, but a mystery populated with oddball yet recognizably human characters. There’s a frustrated young aesthete stuck running a small-town diner, an old woman named Sigourney who is deathly afraid that the casserole dish she carries at all times will get cold, and a doctor named “Usha” who is obsessed with chess. There’s no gruff space marine or evil dictator here; all of the stock-elements of modern gaming are pretty much completely absent. One might think that the quirkiness of the characters might ring hollow, like Suda51’s takes often do, but it doesn’t.

You see, Deadly Premonition is probably the most sincere game to come out in a long, long time. Irony is the completely wrong stance to take with it. There’s more heart and feeling and humanity in this thing than the entirety of Gears of War 1 and 2; it is an example of what games can and should be, something not at all reproducible in another medium, and contains the sort of wild, nonsensical creativity that characterized games of another generation. A plumber travels through giant green pipes to a subterranean kingdom of mushrooms and fights turtles to save a princess from a particularly nasty, fire-breathing turtle; an FBI agent with an imaginary friend travels to rural Washington to solve a murder case, but takes time out of his busy schedule to fish farm utensils out of a lake, predict the future with his coffee, check the Weather Channel 50 times a day, have tea with a crazy gas mask-wearing old man in a wheelchair and his manservant who speaks only in rhyme, peep through townspeople’s windows while they sleep, and discuss the Tremors movie franchise with the player/his imaginary friend. And that’s only a fraction of the stuff that can happen.

Is the game fun to play? Most of the time, no. Does it look like ass? Most of the time, yes. But somehow it is more engrossing and compelling than any game I’ve played since Portal. As gaming becomes more profitable and more homogeneous, more cinematic and more predictable, more focused on multiplayer capability and achievments than on storytelling, we need games like Deadly Premonition to remind us what we can do with the form. It may not be the best it could, but it’s certainly better than nothing. Hopefully its legacy is a rich one.

No good news this chapter.

Daniel Lau finished up Hellstar Remina a few weeks ago, and while the finished product does a mad tapdance between hysterically funny/cheesy and a lackluster execution of intriguing ideas, the volume’s bonus story is pretty damn cool. You may remember that I have highfalutin ideas about Ito, and I think here we see him approaching something like Uzumaki‘s levels of subtle commentary after Remina‘s madcap frenzy of cultural pseudocriticism. (An aside: it occurs to me that it might be more profitable to read Remina as Ito’s rebuttal to the sort of glamorous, humanistic futurism hypothesized by Osamu Tezuka, but that would require more research on my part.)

Anyway, “Army of One” is doing some interesting things with the idea of hikikomori and the competing individual/collective social demands currently playing out in postmodern Japan. I don’t think the story is as good as Uzumaki but it strikes the right balance of creeping despair and ridiculous, almost comic grotesquery, the sort of metaphysical unease that I like the best about Ito’s work and about horror and/or art in general.

Hey speaking of metaphysical unease, my friend Ross wrote some words about Haruki Murakami, the most widely read Japanese novelist in the West since probably Mishima. They are good words! You should read them. And if you haven’t read Murakami, you should read him too.

Back when I was a lowly scrub who knew he liked English but didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself, I considered going into Japanese and doing some comparative lit stuff, mostly on the strength of what Murakami I’d read. This was foolish for a couple reasons, the most obvious one being that Murakami plays with Western writers a lot more (and a lot more openly) than other Japanese writers. This was also before I decided that he somewhat infuriates me with his method — which is to say, that he makes it all up as he goes along.

This is something Stephen King recommends. I don’t truck with it, personally, but it has the ability to turn out some good work. However, you see the same sort of problems in both King and Murakami’s work, namely, that the motherfuckers can’t end a book in any reasonable fashion. The difference is that King makes up monsters and spooks that dramatize or abstract certain American middle class malaises, the sort of things you’d get in John Updike; Murakami does this to some degree, but he also plays more subtly and loosely with his (technical literary term incoming) weird-ass shit, so you can read in a veneer of literary pretension (ie, magical realism) and often skew it as speaking more broadly about Japanese society in a very profound way.

What a day

So shortly after I posted that last entry about Uzumaki, there was a tornado. (This is intensely ironic if you’ve read the manga.) Anyway, don’t worry, I’m okay!

But I also just got word that the first short story I’ve sold to the fine folks at Dark Recesses has gone live! Yes, I sold a story, that was the big news I mentioned a few weeks back. It is called “Empty Houses” and you can read it here. It is a story about a robot, and some other things.

Anyone who’s wandered this way from Dark Recesses — hello! Uh. If this were me welcoming you into my house, at this point I’d offer tea or lemonade or something, but as it is I’ll just say feel free to poke around and see what sort of inane stuff I ramble about. If this were me welcoming you into my house, this would be like you going into all the rooms and digging through my stuff — that would be bad, but since this is the internet it’s the way we have to do things. Read some of my essays I’ve written or follow me on Twitter or something. Okay? Cool.

A Vicious Spiral: Enchanted Commodities and Cultural Narcissism in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki

I missed last week’s blog because I was out of town for a graduation, and I might miss this week’s because I’ll be working on my current Shakespeare paper (it’s gonna be really cool, I promise). However, I’ve been trawling through my archives and I’ve found a paper I wrote three whole years ago on the horror manga of one Junji Ito. I’ve mentioned this before, back when I was singing the praises of Daniel Lau, renegade translator of many an Ito story otherwise unreadable by my paynim eyes. Incidentally, Lau is currently translating the long overdue Hellstar Remina, Ito’s saga of a Lovecraftian sci-fi apocalypse, and it’s silly as all get-out but very fun to read. It also makes very, very blatant some of the themes I teased out of Ito’s Uzumaki, which I still hold to be the current purest expression of his style and concerns.

So in case you haven’t read Uzumaki and you really want to, turn away now — go buy the books or borrow them or something. Read it, it’s worth it. If you have read it, then I’ve reproduced for you below my paper on the manga, which I think holds up surprisingly well. There are a few things I want to point out, though. One is that I read Uzumaki back in the day when our manga (if it was officially imported and translated at all) was flipped to read left to right, so all of my references to the comic are to these older editions — as I understand it, non-mirrored editions have since been released. The second point I’d like to make is that if this paper seems a bit weird and childish and very, very quotey, well, I was a college freshman when I wrote it. I’ve learned a thing or two since then.

So without further ado I give you…

A Vicious Spiral:

Enchanted Commodities and Cultural Narcissism in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki

Early in the first volume of Junji Ito’s horror manga Uzumaki, its protagonist Kirie Goshima, a high school girl, remarks, “I don’t think it’s that weird to be into spirals. I mean, there are people who collect much stranger things” (21). She is referring to Mr. Sato, the father of her boyfriend Shuichi. By this point the reader is well aware that Mr. Sato has recently become obsessed with collecting anything evoking a spiral pattern — sometimes spending hours staring at snail shells lying on the ground — and Shuichi is very unsettled. Both Kirie and the Sato family live in Kurozu-cho, a typical seaside community in Japan — a nation where “having a hobby or two is a big deal” (Kelts 158).

Fan culture in Japan is a unique beast; for example, until the term was appropriated by American fans of Japanese culture, Japan was the only nation that had otaku, or “people who live for their hobbies or interests” (Kelts 160). The closest equivalents were the American Star Trek fans, or Trekkies, but in Japan the idea was expanded: to be an otaku you do not have to be a fan of a particular television series, you simply have to be a fan. Certainly it may seem strange that Mr. Sato has become a spiral otaku, but in a country where people may develop intense fascinations with anthropomorphic personifications of computer operating systems, is liking a particular pattern or shape really that odd? Yet Kirie soon learns that Shuichi has every right to be upset. Not only is Mr. Sato’s spiral obsession dangerous, it’s contagious.

The choice of the Japanese word uzumaki is important. Despite being translated as “spiral” for the English release of the film based on the manga (and the manga’s English tagline, “Spiral into Horror”) a closer translation of uzumaki is ‘whirlpool’ (“Uzumaki”). Though whirlpools are often associated with the spiral shape, they have the unique property of actively drawing someone in; they are forces that pull people or things inexorably toward their center to sink or drown. This is integral to what may be seen as Ito’s critique of (to borrow a term from Anne Allison) “enchanted commodities,” a system where “play creatures … are packaged to feed a consumer fetishism that … penetrates the texture of ordinary life in ever more polymorphous ways” (Allison 16). This could easily describe the spiral obsession of Mr. Sato. Allison explains in Millennial Monsters that the polymorphous perverse pleasure “extends over multiple territories” and “can be triggered by any number of stimuli” (10).

This is plainly displayed in the manga’s first volume: when Shuichi explains the extent of his father’s hobby, we see a panel showing Mr. Sato sitting in a room filled with spiral-shaped objects and objects adorned with spiral patterns (22). Mr. Sato’s consumer fetishism is focused on the shape (the spiral), while its actual form (incense coil, kimono fabric pattern, etc.) is irrelevant. The spiral could stand in for any possible quality that makes a commodity “enchanted” in the eyes of the consumer, be it a brand name or association with a particular character or mascot. Reading the manga this way, we see that these enchanted qualities can (drawing on the spiral’s iconographic connotations) disorient, confuse, and enthrall, inexorably drawing the consumer deeper into a frenzy of collection.

In Roland Kelts’ book Japanamerica, he claims that one of the reasons Japanese pop culture is so successful both in its native country and abroad is that “fandom is participatory, and communal” — what Kelts calls “the do-it-yourself (DIY) factor” (147). Fans of a particular anime or manga, for example, will fashion their own costumes after the outfits of their favorite characters (‘costume play’ or cosplay), while other fans may write and draw their own doujinshi — fan-made manga using characters from the amateur artist’s own favorite series.

The fans that make the most accurate costumes or most entertaining doujinshi gain a favorable reputation among other fans and garner interest in the original anime or manga, expanding the consumer base and at the same time producing more fans, who will create their own content and continue the cycle. Uzumaki has its own sardonic take on this DIY factor in the first volume: when Shuichi’s mother, concerned because her husband has stopped going to work, throws away the entire spiral collection, Mr. Sato is at first furious, then smug. “I don’t care,” he utters, before screaming: “I don’t need to collect spirals anymore! I finally realized that you can make spirals yourself! You’ll see! You can express the spiral through your own body!” (29, my italics in both cases).

Almost immediately after this outburst Mr. Sato removes his glasses and begins to roll his eyes — each moving in opposite directions. The body horror escalates: in a second encounter, Mr. Sato shows Kirie that he can now extend his tongue inhumanly far and curl it into a spiral shape and, following the man’s death, Shuichi reveals that his father committed suicide by crawling into a round barrel and contorting himself into a spiral, breaking every bone in his body. In a darkly humorous fashion, Mr. Sato’s death might be considered the ultimate form of cosplay: he truly becomes his obsession, rather than simply dressing up as it. Even when his body is cremated, the smoke of Mr. Sato’s ashes forms a spiral cloud in the sky.

But, as Kelts says, Japanese fandom is communal — and so is Ito’s analogue for it, the spiral obsession. Shuichi’s mother, following her husband’s death, develops an intense fear of spirals; every time she sees one, she only sees her husband’s grotesque body and hears his voice begging her to “join [him] in the spiral” (Ito, Volume One 53). She removes all spirals from her body by shaving off her hair, cutting off the tips of her fingers to remove the prints, and finally stabbing herself to remove the spiral-shaped cochlea of her inner ear. She dies soon thereafter, having destroyed her sense of balance and, for the short remainder of her life, experiencing a permanent sense of spinning vertigo — “I don’t want to become a spiral!” she protests (Volume One 74). Following cremation, her body’s ashes also form a spiral cloud. With her death it seems the floodgates are thrown open and the spiral obsession is loosed upon Kurozu-cho in full force. Soon, Kirie and Shuichi are forced to deal with multiple bizarre situations where people “become” spirals or “express” the spiral through their bodies.

The strange way in which the spirals themselves seem to be alive and in which people seem to become spirals is informed by two particular facets of the Japanese mindset. The first, drawing on a history of Shintoist animism, is “a tendency to see the world as animated by a variety of beings, both worldly and otherworldly, that are complex, (inter)changeable, and not graspable by so-called rational (or visible) means alone” (Allison 12). In Ito’s world, the spirals are an ancient, incomprehensible force; roughly halfway through the third volume, Kirie finds an ancient map in an equally old Japanese-style row house. Drawn in the place of Kurozu-cho is an immense spiral, implying that the spiral obsession has its roots in the distant past and is, in fact, part of the city’s very foundation or the environment itself.

Similarly, the act of “becoming” a spiral reflects a Japanese predilection for morphing and transformation in media, fostered in the wake of the country’s defeat in World War II and the appearance of “unstable and shifting worlds where characters, monstrously wounded by violence and collapse of authority, reemerge with reconstituted selves” (Allison 12). In recent times this morphing has become a positive attribute with such franchises as the Super Sentai series, but in Uzumaki Ito utilizes transformation in a much more negative way, reminiscent of the post-war Gojira: the people of Kurozu-cho appear to mutate into destructive, mindless beasts. These concepts of animism and mutability come together in Uzumaki’s gloomy finale.

Kurozu-cho has been decimated, leaving the old row houses as the only shelters, and in visuals the landscape mimics a war zone. In the wake of this pseudo-atomic bomb blast, the people of the city begin rebuilding their lives, just as the Japanese attempted to rebuild following WWII. However, the survivors have begun a process of expansion, linking the old buildings as one superstructure in — of course — the form of a giant spiral, beginning at the edge of town and stopping at a pond in Kurozu-cho’s center. As Kirie and Shuichi soon discover, the people living in these row houses are no longer human in the strictest sense of the word: they still speak like human beings, yes, but a combination of living in close quarters and malign supernatural influences have transformed them into slimy, genderless, boneless creatures whose limbs have twined and looped together in a seemingly infinite mass.

When Kurozu-cho’s pond drains (in a clear echo of the uzumaki or whirlpool of the title), it reveals a strange spiral staircase leading down into the earth, and the massive interconnected swirl of former humans gleefully slides out of their row house en masse. Kirie and Shuichi follow and discover, miles beneath Kurozu-cho, an eldritch city of stone spiral towers. Shuichi remarks that it feels as if the ruins are alive and watching him: “It’s like it’s cursing us for being underground, hidden from all the eyes up there” (Volume Three 214).

The countless people from Kurozu-cho who litter the ground stare blankly into the spiral city, and Kirie notes that they seem to be turning to stone. Shuichi continues: “I don’t know who… or what built it here, or why… but every so often, every few hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousand years, it can reach the people above ground. And even though its builders are gone… maybe it’s still building itself” (Volume Three 214). The petrified half-humans with their distended, looping, spiraling bodies appear to be the living city’s latest additions, new building blocks to fuel its infinite growth. Shuichi, who has been injured in a fall, orders Kirie to leave him and escape to the surface. She refuses, choosing instead to embrace Shuichi, and as they lay together on the stones that used to be their neighbors, the couple’s arms and legs begin to twist together. The animate stone city draws people to it and morphs them into an extension of itself: every citizen of Kurozu-cho has had his or her obsession satisfied and has finally become part of the spiral.

But in Japan, where it is not at all uncommon to see in fiction “a universe where the borders between thing and life continually cross and intermesh” (Allison 13), why is Uzumaki horrifying? Why is its morphing scary and unsettling, while the morphing of the Super Sentai series is one of the largest parts of the program’s appeal? I believe the answer may lie in the horrific themes of narcissism. The old horror story is generally a tale of punishment for unexpiated sin, but as American critic John G. Parks observed in 1978, “Nearly all characters [of the modern horror story] are narcissistic.” In 1979, cultural historian Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism, in which he argued that late-capitalist society had bred a generation of Americans suffering from pathological narcissism.

Contrary to egotistical narcissists, pathological narcissists have a weak sense of self and attempt to establish it in any way possible (thus appearing, in many ways, akin to typical narcissists); Lasch insists that this type of narcissism “has more in common with self-hatred than with self-admiration” (31). He also lists the signs indicating a pathologically narcissistic personality; of particular importance for this paper is his tenth: “fascination with celebrity.” Though both Parks and Lasch are Americans writing about American issues, their observations may ring true for Japanese society, as well.

Currently the Japanese people are becoming increasingly individualistic, increasingly atomized; as Allison says, when describing what she calls “solitarism” and its relation to enchanted commodities, “people seek out companionship, but ironically (or not), the form this often takes is …. a machine or toy purchased with money that is wired into the (individual) self” (14). By the end of Uzumaki, the people of Kurozu-cho are glad to become part of the spiral, something larger than themselves, even though the thing they have become a part of is monstrous. Lasch draws links between pathological narcissism and extremist cult activity in the US (98); one may compare this with the 1995 Sarin gas subway attacks carried out by the sizeable Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo.

Japan is also a culture of celebrities, with music idols and seiyuu becoming objects of fixation for thousands of fans. A criticism of this culture is palpable in almost all of Ito’s work, and we find it reflected slyly in Uzumaki: in the first volume, a girl’s hair becomes animate and demands attention from those around her, hypnotizing them and displaying its curls for hours, but it also drains her strength and kills her, becoming more or less an independent entity. In the second volume, a black lighthouse with a strange spiraling beacon entrances all those who look see it; in the third volume, the reason Shuichi hypothesizes for the spiral city’s evil is its anger at being hidden away from all those who would see it. The spirals (that is, the enchanted commodities) are living creatures that demand attention; the pathologically narcissistic people of Kurozu-cho can provide this attention, but also crave it for themselves. Collecting is no longer enough, so they sacrifice themselves to the spirals — they become the spirals — in the maximum display of devotion and in hopes of receiving attention from others.

Even though Parks and Lasch are Americans, they both managed to describe certain cultural facets that fit almost perfectly into Uzumaki, leading me to believe that, in the era of globalization, our horror stories are also becoming globalized. A lot can be deduced about a culture from its monsters, and the fact that American and Japanese monsters are becoming more similar (the influence of Japanese horror cinema is notable in today’s American film market) implies a greater closeness of culture than ever before, perhaps brought about by both countries’ late-stage capitalism and aided, as Kelts fancies, by a similar sense of tragedy felt by the Japanese over the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and by Americans over the September 11 attacks (37).

However, despite its growing numbers of “otaku,” despite its own enchanted commodities, despite its acceptance of morphing characters, the US apparently lacks the animist context of Japanese culture that helps completely decipher Ito’s bizarre plot. Americans are also, perhaps, still too insistent on happy endings and solid resolution; the mono no aware of Ito’s ending is definitely not suited to American tastes. Uzumaki isdefinitely a Japanese work, made from a Japanese viewpoint and with Japanese readers in mind; nevertheless, its warning against the possible dangers of asserting one’s own weak personality by consuming supposed enchanted commodities, or by becoming the center of attention, or by becoming something bigger than oneself, rings true in a way that may speak to both Japanese and American readers.

In our current climates of aging capitalism, both nations travel on increasingly similar paths: paths of consumerism and narcissism that, as Ito might have it, curve inexorably inward toward a center, toward a single point — a dead end.

List of Works Cited

Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

Ito, Junji. Uzumaki, Volume One. Trans. Yuji Oniki. 2001. San Francisco: Viz Communications, Inc, 2003.

—. Uzumaki, Volume Two. Trans. Yuji Onki. San Francisco: Viz Communications, Inc, 2002.

—. Uzumaki, Volume Three. Trans. Yuji Onki. San Francisco: Viz Communications, Inc, 2002.

Kelts, Roland. Japanamerica: How Japanese Culture Has Invaded the US. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Experience. 1979. New York: Norton, 1991.

Parks, John G. “Waiting for the End: Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial.” Critique, Vol. XIX, No. 3, 1978.

“Uzumaki.” Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary. 1995. New York: Random House. 1997.

dark deeds, darkly answered

The Measure for Measure research project has begun and continues apace. It’s shaping up to be interesting. In my readings I’ve learned some interesting facts, like that outside of the great tragedies, M4M is Harold Bloom’s favorite Shakespeare play. What.

I suppose I can afford to link a few things I’ve found that I think are cool or noteworthy. First, Neil Gaiman has a wonderful piece on Ray Bradbury in the Times Online, one with which I agree wholeheartedly. I tend to think of myself pretty strongly as a Midwestern writer — so in a more canonical sense my lineage would consist of people like Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson and their stories of small-town grotesqueries. And while I’ve read those writers and they’re indeed good, none of them has affected me more than Bradbury — also their literary child, but in addition to petty rural politics, he also wrote about monsters and spaceships.

And with that, my second link. Jeffrey Anderson, a blogger over at Cinematical, asks if sci-fi as a genre has surpassed horror. Of particular interest is this bit:

At its best, horror is capable of — and even expert at — taking the temperature of a time and mood in very subtle ways. But, like comedies and erotic films, it will always be an embarrassment, something one enjoys inwardly but does not celebrate outwardly (at awards ceremonies). But there’s also no denying that science fiction has struck a chord with audiences.

Now, this is a film site talking about films and blah blah blah. You know what I’m going to say: he’s wrong, at least partly. Yes, horror does its best during times of social and economic duress (the sf/horror boom in the 50s, the satanic horror boom in the 70s leading to the general horror explosion in the 80s, the post 9-11 J-horror boom, and so on). But to say that a piece of horror fiction is always going to be an embarrassment because it is the product of a certain time — well, absolutely not.

I’ll hedge my bets to begin with. Let’s look at Dracula: now, this book absolutely takes “the temperature” of Victorian Britain. Vampires operate entirely by means of metaphors for (repressed) sexual activity. Quite titillating! And is it dated? Yes. Do people seem to care? Not particularly — the architecture Stoker established for his vampires is still in use today. I mean, Twilight, goddamn.

I could also talk about a film that’s both sf and horror — Alien. It’s a bit harder to make this one relate to its time-period — perhaps you could say it relates to fears of increasing corporate control of society at the end of the 70s. Anderson seems to assume that a film cannot be tense and foreboding (horror) but also quiet and thoughtful (sf). Well, Alien is both, and it’s damn good.

Now for straight horror fiction, I could talk about The Shining — the book and the movie. The book is probably one of the best things King has written, and the film is Kubrick, so you know it’s good. Unless you want to tie both of them to a particular social event (eg, an increasing number of divorces in the 70s) then they’re both very thoughtful (in their respective ways) and also very tense and frightening. King’s novel is a meditation on fatherhood, family, abuse, and self-determination; Kubrick’s film is… well, take your pick.

But Anderson does raise a valid point in that horror is simply not as popular as sf (or even fantasy) these days. Part of this is Peter Jackson’s LotR films being so damn good — fantasy is suddenly respectable, and sf is closer aesthetically to fantasy and therefore easier to digest. Not to mention sf has a cultural pedigree already in Star Wars and similar things. Horror’s cultural icons — the old Universal monsters, which aren’t so scary anymore, or Kubrick’s The Shining — are plenty respectable, too, but, as Anderson points out, the ‘modern classics’ of Shaun of the Dead and Let the Right One In haven’t had as great an impact on the culture as either of those.

Well, I guess two reasons as to why, the first being that those films weren’t American. Before you call me xenophobic, understand: I loved them both. But that’s because I’m a horror fan and I’m willing to search for good horror. I’m willing to read the subtitles for LtROI. The American films Anderson cites (Drag Me to Hell and The House of the Devil) are, mutually, absolutely goddamn terrible and uninteresting. The second reason is that horror isn’t attuned to zeitgeist at the moment — we’re looking for feel-good escapism, which is what something like Avatar offers, and horror (usually at its best and even sometimes at its worst) is noble for not allowing that. Horror can have a happy ending, but it exists only to remind us of the dangers and uncertainties of existence, and at the moment, we’d rather fawn over sparkling non-horrific vampires or pretend to be peaceful blue catpeople living on a planet with a ridiculously impractical and unbelievable ecosystem. I’ll leave it to someone smarter than me to figure out why that is.

In other news: I might have exciting news about something or I might not. It depends on when I get confirmation of details. Watch this here space.

The Proscenium and the Percipient

As Stephen King once wrote:

Let’s talk about fear, you and I. Let’s talk about fear.

But not just any fear. King already beat me to talking about fear in written fiction (though that doesn’t stop me from going at it every so often, of course) and King already beat me to talking about fear on film (again, something I occasionally have made a foray into). But I want to talk about a type of fear — a variety of what Noel Carroll calls “art-horror” — that King doesn’t take into account in his Danse Macabre, and which Caroll (as I recollect) does not even mention in his own treatment of the genre.

I want to talk about theatric horror.

There are two ways you might respond to the idea of theatric horror. The first is that it is ridiculous: a man wearing a bedsheet onstage is an actor playing the ghost of Old Hamlet, and nothing more; it is (this line of thinking implies) silly to be scared by anything onstage because, quite paradoxically, all of it is illusory, so anything that appears unnatural (like a ghost) is, in fact, naturally explicable (a man in a bedsheet). The other way to think about it is that theatric horror should be about the same as cinematic horror, that if you can be scared of Jason Voorhees on a screen then you damn sure can be frightened by a man wearing a bedsheet.

The key thing to take from both of these examples is that both make the assumption that horror is participatory. This is no big revelation; all fiction is participatory in varying capacities. This mostly takes the form of making the viewer/reader/audience’s desires the same as one or some of the characters’ desires. It’s about interest, and it’s about sympathy. You want to know why Old Hamlet’s ghost is stalking the battlements, if it’s telling the truth or not; you want Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to get together; you want to figure out what the fuck is going on with that island and the polar bear and the time-travel and you hope to god it all makes sense in the end.

But horror is special.

You don’t want the zombie apocalypse to happen — and listen, I know it’s fashionable to be excited about zombies and the end of the world, but trust me, almost everyone who insists on proclaiming they’ll have a good time when the shit hits the fan will be among the first to either die or become a quivering, sobbing mess. This is what Noel Carroll calls the paradox of horror: it is a genre set up specifically to show us things we hate or despise, things designed to make us unhappy, and we flock to it. So yes, horror is participatory, but it is participatory in a way that is distinct from the way other genres are. The closest thing to it is tragedy, which generally focuses on a handful of repulsive things, but by definition there is a catharsis, a final release of tension; horror, on the other hand, has no such obligation. At the end of, say, The Blair Witch Project, the story doesn’t actually end. It just stops; the monster is still on the loose, there is no return to order.

The idea is that horrific things do not end, terror does not end, and above all, you are subject to the same fears and forces that govern the lives of the characters. The toys and props of horror aren’t put neatly back into the box and hidden away at the end of the game; they continue to litter floor, and you step on them in the middle of the night when you least expect it.

So horror, despite its paradoxes, is quite a participatory thing indeed. And it should be noted that of the modes of storytelling I’ve brought up — fiction, film, television, theater — it is the latter that is the most participatory. After all, it’s not words on a page and it’s not an interplay of light from a projector — things are happening there in front of you, and it’s the closest you can get to it actually happening. Given the participatory nature of horror and the participatory nature of theater, the two ought to be a match made in heaven.

So how do you make a play scary?

I’ve recently seen two horror plays, and the remainder of this blog entry will be me outlining the way each production attempts to develop an atmosphere and, above all, a feeling of terror in the audience — the percipients. A percipient being, of course, one who perceives; it’s also a pseudotechnical term tossed around by some parapsychologists to describe those who ‘perceive’ themselves as having had supernatural experiences. Added to that, it sounds fortuitously similar to participant, and in case you couldn’t tell, that’s going to be a cornerstone of my discourse.

Now: Play number one. The Woman in Black, currently running at the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden, a few blocks from where I work. This thing has been on forever — for me, almost literally, since it’s been going nonstop since 1989, when I was barely a year old. It’s been through its share of actors, too — the cast in that trailer the website is running is a completely different cast from the one I saw. That’s a notable, if tertiary, facet of the play: it has a cast of two. Three, maybe, but then things get a little complicated. I’ll explain that in a bit.

WiB is obviously a pretty successful venture, having run for 21 years, and I personally think it mostly succeeds as a play and as a piece of horror fiction. I’m not going to say it frightened me — it didn’t, I don’t frighten easily — but the people in the audience who kept screaming seemed pretty scared. Of course, the people who were screaming were mostly teenaged schoolgirls — the curse of the matinee showing, from what I hear — and they were screaming at the ‘jump-scare’ bits, things like doors slamming and so on. I’m not going to fault the play for that. I tend to look down on jump scares in film only when they are predictable and when they are the only mechanism used (or overused); suffice it to say that WiB‘s jump scares are very often unpredictable and they only become grating if, like me, you have to listen to a few dozen sixteen year old girls shouting every time.

Where the play succeeds most admirably, I think, is the more insidious horror it attempts to instill through use of atmosphere and two or three wonderfully executed images. My favorite was the titular woman in black, lying corpse-still in a madly careening rocking chair which then threw her forward with such force that she seemed to fly and, without any misstep, landed on her feet (assuming she has feet, below her tattered skirts) to glide soundlessly across the stage.

The plot is often billed as being an MR Jamesian ghost story, which is half a truth and half a lie. James’s ghost stories have a very particular pattern and a particular way of presenting the supernatural that is wholly absent in the play; where the two more happily coincidence, however, is in the manner of narration. I have a love-hate relationship with Jamesian narration; it seems like sometimes he just decided to be as fucking roundabout as he could in getting to the story he had to tell.

In order to create what he called a “pretense of truth” he often sets up webs of narrators to tell a single story.

A typical James story will be narrated by the first-person-I, a scholar or antiquarian who is presumably James himself; this narrative voice will do such wonderful things as tell us, rather blatantly, that he is not telling us everything he can so that he may explain details more chillingly later, or he may off-handedly dismiss a secondary character as nameless because he’s just not important to the story. Below the James-narrator there is often a second voice belonging, supposedly, to one of his friends or acquaintances, to whom the events of the story occurred; though James will talk about the character in third person, his narrative voice occasionally gives way to the other character’s first person narration of the events in question. The secondary narrator, for his (and it’s almost always his) part will often find an old manuscript — a court transcription, a diary, whatever — that also relates events in the first-person voice of someone who is long dead, often providing a clue as to the nature of the hauntings. The text-within-the-narration, with its archaic syntax and occasional rambling passages in Latin, will often consume a large portion of the narrative structure.

If this all sounds a bit complicated, trust me when I say that it is. Sometimes James gets so caught up with himself it’s impossible to tell who is narrating what and when and how. If you’re also thinking this all sounds awfully postmodern, keep in mind that James was writing in the 1900s, and had no real reason to be this damn complicated. His narrators are like nightmarish Russian nesting dolls, each one trapped inside the other and more removed from the reader than the last.

Now, The Woman in Black very admirably follows up on this tradition of being obfuscating as fuck by having the same narrative confusion, but on stage.

It works something like this: an older man, sort of bumbling, wants to tell a story to lay his conscience to rest. He consults an actor, the other main character, to help him work on his public speaking skills for this purpose. The older guy, Arthur Kipps, is a terrible speaker, though, and so the actor (who finds the story interesting and has designs on making it a play) takes over Arthur’s role for the purposes of flashback. So right there on stage, one character literally becomes the other, a lighting change telling you that you’ve entered a flashback. The real Arthur, for his part, becomes every other character in the play, changing his outfit or glasses slightly and affecting multiple accents to fill various roles. So then suddenly you’re not watching these two guys put on a play about Arthur’s experience, you’re actually watching the memory — until, for one reason or another, we jump back and Arthur turns into the actor and the other actor turns back into Arthur.

It all gets very confusing, as you might imagine; you never know if the people on stage are people “on stage” practicing their play in an empty theater or people in a haunted house, and the fact that they can go from one to the other at any time doesn’t help. When the ghost, the woman in black, finally shows up, is she actually there? Is she on the stage with Arthur and the actor, or is she part of a flashback, a memory? The implication, quite horrible indeed, is that if she is in fact on the stage in the play’s “present” then she is also there on stage in front of you. And since she operates sort of like Kiyoko from the Ju-On films — she passes on from person to person, seeking vengeance for the wrongs done to her in life — there’s the equally unsettling implication that the woman in black, if she is there, is now after you.

This is underscored by the play’s curtain call. As the audience applauds, the two actors you know quite well by now come out and bow, try to run back stage, come back to the continued applause, bow, and leave. Just them. Only those two.

And, after they have gone, the woman in black appears at the very back of the stage, just visible, staring out at you. She does not smile, she does not bow; she only stares. For her, it seems, the play is not over.

Then she disappears, and you’re free to go. Or so you think, anyway, but the play has already taught you that the woman in black can show up where you least expect her, be it an ancient house in the marshlands or a London park on a sunny afternoon.

We should also take time to consider the other play I saw, Ghost Stories at the Lyric Hammersmith. There are a few things to note about this play, the first being that it is new and has a modern day setting, unlike The Woman in Black, which was written in the 80s but takes place in the early 20th century. The second is that it is co-written and directed by Jeremy Dyson, one of the writers for a black comedy television program that is very near and dear to me, The League of Gentlemen. What this means is that the story is very consciously influenced by horror films and at certain points it becomes as bizarre as all get-out.

Ghost Stories is also the better of the two plays. I’m wary to talk much about it for fear of spoiling it — not that I expect anyone reading this to see it, really, but I am loath to give away the play’s secrets. In structure the plot works something like this: you are part of an audience watching a Dr. Goodman present a short seminar on ghost stories, which he collects from various people. As he replays recordings of these experiences to you, the audience, the action on the stage takes over and we “see” what is happening in flashback. There are in total three vignettes of this type, linked by Goodman’s lectures on them, giving the entire thing a sort of classic anthology movie feel — think Creepshow or something of that variety.

The play’s resolution held no surprises for me, but it was well executed; I will not discuss it further, except to say that if The Woman in Black is an MR James story, then Ghost Stories follows, appropriately enough given Dyson’s own apparent interest, in the footsteps of Robert Aickman. Aickman is woefully under-read, I think, and this is not helped by the fact that his work is almost entirely out of print and very hard to find in any other way — in my travels through used bookstores here I found a shop that had two of his early collections (first editions, about £95 each) and both volumes of his collected ghost stories (£400). At any rate, there’s a quote from Neil Gaiman on that Wikipedia page that I feel gives a very accurate description of what it is like to read an Aickman story: as a reader, you are slowly overcome with a sense that something is horribly, terrifyingly wrong, and by the end you know it is, and yet afterward you can never figure out exactly what went wrong, where it went wrong, and how.

Ghost Stories is less coy about the why and how parts of the equation, but it does indeed do an admirable job of slowly breaking down the audience’s complacency. In other words, while watching Ghost Stories, you think you’re seeing one thing, but you slowly begin to understand that you’re really witnessing something else entirely.

I’m sure that’s vague to the point of being useless, but it’s the way the play goes, and I really don’t want to say any more about it. They even ask you kindly after the show not to tell anyone! And, anyway, I hear John Landis was in the audience a few nights ago, which (if his career weren’t dead) might bode favorably for a film adaptation.

Except.

This isn’t a post about horror films. It’s a post about horror theater, and I sincerely believe that Ghost Stories could not work as a film. Neither could, I think, The Woman in Black, though the BBC apparently tried.

I have come to understand that the way theatric horror works — and the reason it is unique — is that the audience participates in a way completely unlike their participation with other genres and other forms. The common trend in both plays I’ve described is that the barrier between the audience, the percipient/participant, and the action on stage is broken down — the proscenium, the fourth-wall, is presented as permeable. You leave the Woman in Black thinking you might be her next victim, but you don’t leave a production of Oedipus Rex thinking you’re going to murder your dad and bone your mom. (At least I hope not.)

Likewise Ghost Stories, with its wraparound frame of a parapsychologist’s lecture, makes you personally a part of what is happening. It’s simpler than WiB‘s layering of narration, and while I actually think WiB is very clever and successful in that regard, it’s also a bit cold. Ghost Stories‘s technique is simpler, perhaps cruder, but far more effective in bringing the audience into the world of the play. In other words, while the former is a technical success, I believe the latter is a general success.

To go back to MR James, when writing on his ghost stories, he claimed his multiple narrators and pretense of truth were required to make the reader think, “If I’m not careful, this could happen to me!” This is the point of theatric horror, I think — even more so than a horror story or a horror film.

I also think this is why horror theater is not a widely considered part of the spectrum: it’s really easy to do it badly, so there’s not much of it. The percipients have to be participants in the fullest sense; they have to feel what is going on, they have to be sympathetic, because you (the writer/actor/director/whatever) are essentially asking them to make themselves feel intensely uncomfortable. It’s not a request many people are inclined to comply with, and if this sort of thing were to fail, it would do so spectacularly.

This may be a lot to base on only two plays, but it’s all I have to go on, so it’s the best I’ve got. It’s an allegation supported, I think, by the rather famous and experimental Punchdrunk company, who stage their plays in actual buildings, having the actors go about their business while the audience wanders around, observing and ignored. In other words, they do away with the proscenium entirely. From what I hear, Punchdrunk’s Faust was absolutely fucking terrifying.

Punchdrunk’s approach also underscores another observation I’ve made about theatric horror, and perhaps theater in general. You’ll recall that in The Woman in Black, part of the action takes place in an empty theater — the characters refer to the theater multiple times, talking about how empty it is. Of course this garners a few laughs, because the theater is not empty at all.

But it’s a rather uncanny notion, nonetheless — to be outright ignored by another human being, for him to pretend you don’t exist. There’s a similar sort of dynamic in Ghost Stories and — hell — I feel like the same sort of thing goes on in almost any play.

When theater works well, there’s always that uncanny feeling that you are in a place you shouldn’t be, that you have somehow become unseen or insubstantial. Horror plays tend to involve the audience more directly perhaps because the actors need your consent to make the monsters real, and so you’re invited, in a sense, to become part of the play.

In other words, in good theater, the audience should feel that they are real ghosts.

American Psycho Part 4: THERE IS, IN FACT, AN EXIT

Hello to anyone who’s stumbled this way from Professor Brainworm’s blog! I hope you’ll bear with me, since I can be pretty longwinded. Anyway.

Our journey through the wonderful world of Bret Ellis’s novel American Psycho thus far could be summed up in the following way if it were a game of Clue: Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Dante’s Inferno with Reagan’s Manhattan. Today on the ominously dubbed Black Friday, I’ll finish up my little ramble. I plan to for a rebuttal to the issue that, after the explicit pornography and violence, is the most challenged aspect of the novel: its nihilism.

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I encountered something like this when I first read the book when I was 14. You’ll recall I took it as a straight satire, and so in the end I didn’t feel like it had accomplished the actual goal of satire: I didn’t know what better lifestyle was possible, because in the novel if you are not Patrick Bateman then you are one of his shallow friends or a homeless person, and none of these options are very good. But as I’ve said, Psycho is not a satire. It has satiric elements, certainly, in a similar way the recent film version of New Moon inexplicably has a scene that satirizes modern Hollywood action films. Bret Ellis’s satire is much more deft, of course, and much more regularly implemented; it’s not a one-off scene, but a large part of the text. Yet it is not, as we may be tempted to think, the heart of the text.

The heart is salvation.

Rewritings of Dante are always about salvation in the same way sonnets are always about love. A traditional if boring sonnet is one that lists, without irony, the traditional values that make a loved one, well, loved. An exciting sonnet is one that talks about how love is impossible, a lie, fake, a delusion — but even when it tries to negate those things, it is still a poem about love. Similarly, a traditional rewriting of Dante is going to be about a dude going through some hardship, suffering, and becoming a better person in the end. An exciting rewriting of Dante, like American Psycho, is going to pull the same trick as the not-about-love sonnet: it will try say that salvation does not exist, is impossible. But the idea of salvation is still there, lurking behind every venomous negation, and sometimes — sometimes — it manages to glitter through.

The pattern is pretty straightforward in Dante. Dante and Virgil travel through Hell in Inferno, where they see the consequences of sin, and then move onward to the Mountain of Purgatory in Purgatorio. Purgatory, of course, being the place where sins are purged from the soul prior to entering Heaven. To enter Purgatory, however, they have to pass by a robed angel who guards the gate; Virgil urges Dante to beg the angel to let him enter, and the following transactions occur:

Devoutly prostrate at his holy feet,
I begged in mercy’s name to be let in,
but first three times upon my breast I beat.

Seven P‘s, the scars of sin,
his sword point cut into my brow. He said:
“Scrub off these wounds when you have passed within.”

Canto IX, 109-114

Each of the seven P‘s on Dante’s forehead represents one of the seven cardinal sins that Purgatory is supposed to rid him of; after passing through each circle one disappears and Dante feels lighter.

miquel-barcelo-purgatorio If you’re in any way religious — particularly if you are Catholic — this may have echos of Ash Wednesday. If you’re a godless heathen, then the short of it is that Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the period of penitence and fasting leading up to Easter. On Ash Wednesday, the penitents are marked by the priest with a cross of ashes on the forehead, a reminder that human beings come from dust and, but for the grace of God, they’ll someday be to the dust returned. In other words, it’s a humbling process, just as the journey through Dante’s Purgatory is meant to humble those souls that were sinful in life but not beyond hope.

Now that’s all well and good, you’re saying, but what in the hell does Ash Wednesday have to do with American Psycho?

Since there’s nothing I like more than tossing away conclusions I’ve already made, think back on our initial reading of the Inferno influence on Psycho in Part 2. We mapped out a set of relationships between the characters to mirror that of the Comedy’s Dante-Virgil-Beatrice triad, and our best Virgil candidate was a sort-of-friend of Patrick Bateman’s named Timothy Price. He’s like Virgil, I said, because he’s the most interesting person Bateman knows, someone he seems to admire in a really odd but genuine way, the closest thing Bateman has to a friend, and he leaves Patrick before the end of the novel.

But Tim Price is unlike Virgil in one very important way: he comes back.

….[F]or the sake of form, Tim Price resurfaces, or at least, I’m pretty sure he does. While I’m at my desk simultaneously crossing out the days in my calendar that have already passed and reading a new best seller about office management called Why It Works to Be a Jerk, Jean buzzes in, announcing that Tim Price wants to talk, and I fearfully say, “Send him… in.” Price strolls into the office wearing a wool suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Blass, cap-toed leather lace-ups from Brooks Brothers. I’m pretending to be on the phone. He sits down, across from me, on the other side of the Palazetti glass-top desk. There’s a smudge on his forehead or at least that’s what I think I see.

…

“You’ve been gone, like, forever, Tim. What’s the story?” I ask, again noticing the smudge on his forehead, though I get the feeling that if I asked someone else if it was truly there he (or she) would just say no. (p.383-384)

Price disappears within the first 60 pages of the novel and returns in the last 20. After he ran off into the fake train tunnel in the club, he has not been mentioned at all — but suddenly here he is, with a peculiar smudge on his forehead. The chapter he reappears in is called Valentine’s Day, which is on February 14th, and it so happens that this part of the novel takes place in 1989, when Ash Wednesday fell on February 8th.

I’m sure you see what I’m driving at. ash

So Price, when he returns, comes in the form of someone penitent — or at least that’s how Bateman feels. We know he’s prone to hallucinating, and here he openly questions whether or not he actually sees the smudge. Nevertheless, we know that Price is someone Bateman admires — “I’m wondering and not wondering what happens in the world of Tim Price, which is really the world of most of us: big ideas, guy stuff, boy meets world, boy gets it” (384). There is something about Price, some spirit or personality or agency, that Patrick sees as lacking in himself; suddenly it makes a whole lot of sense why the opening paragraph I quoted in Part 2 almost makes it seem like the novel is going to be a third-person narration about Tim Price, but is actually just Patrick thinking about Tim Price.

So what is it Price has that Bateman doesn’t? In Part 3 I said Bateman’s chief sin is that of despair — he does not think the world can be made better, and his only attempts to even try are simply gross, violent parodies of the shallowness and greed he sees all around him. Price, it would seem, is not a victim of this despair. He’s just as rich and shallow as Patrick, just as obnoxious, but in the scene at Tunnel when he becomes fed up with the empty life he leads he doesn’t just lapse into a murderous frenzy (or fantasy) like Patrick seems to have done. Instead, he actually tries to get out, something Patrick has never attempted — something that he is, in fact, probably afraid to do.

Is Price actually on his way to salvation? After all, he left, but he came back. His first conversation with Bateman may — just possibly may — imply that he is looking for girls to hook up with, since he asks Patrick for the number of a woman they both know who is in a relationship with a mutual acquaintance. Like Patrick, we can’t be sure if Price is really penitent, and we don’t see much of him at all until the very last chapter, the one that ends with Patrick reading the NO EXIT sign.

Bateman and some of his friends, including Price, go out to a club.

On the [TV] screen now are scenes from President Bush’s inauguration early this year, then a speech from former President Reagan, while Patty [the talk show host] delivers commentary. Soon a tiresome debate forms over whether he is lying or not, even though we don’t, can’t, hear the words. The first and really only one to complain is Price, who, though I think he’s bothered by something else, uses the opportunity to vent his frustration, looks inappropriately stunned, and asks, “How can he lie like that? How can he pull that shit?”

“Oh Christ,” I moan. “What shit? Now where do we have reservations at? I mean I’m not really hungry but I’d like to have reservations somewhere.” (p. 396)

nancy-ron And from that, the conversation devolves into everyone arguing about where to eat, Price’s concerns left unaddressed. Even if something else seems to be bothering Price, he does seem to have a bone to pick with Reagan — what was he lying about? What sort of shit is he getting away with? I wasn’t watching much TV back then, but one possibility is that Reagan is speaking about the 1989 IRS investigation of him and his wife Nancy for unpaid taxes on various gifts they received while in the White House. It was eventually determined that the Reagans owed three million dollars on “fashion items” (to quote Wikipedia) that had been given to Nancy.

Reagan here represents the freewheeling economic attitude and casual greed that characterize Ellis’s portrait of the decade, the broad symbol of the lives that all of the horrible characters in the novel lead, and it is only Price who questions him. And it’s Patrick, bored and uninterested, who changes the subject.

Price looks away from the television screen, then at Craig, and he tries to hide his displeasure by asking me, waving at the TV, “I don’t believe it. He looks so… normal. He seems so… out of it. So… undangerous.”

“Bimbo, bimbo,” someone says. “Bypass, bypass.”

“He is totally harmless, you geek. Was totally harmless. Just like you are totally harmless. But he did do all that shit and you have failed to get us into 150, so, you know, what can I say?” McDermott shrugs.

“I just don’t get how someone, anyone, can appear that way and yet be involved in such total shit,” Price says, ignoring Craig, averting his eyes from Farrell. He takes out a cigar and studies it sadly. To me it still looks like there’s a smudge on Price’s forehead.

“Because Nancy was right behind him?” Farrell guesses, looking up from the Quotrek. “Because Nancy did it?”

“How can you be, I don’t know, so fucking cool about it?” Price, to whom something really eerie has obviously happened, sounds genuinely perplexed. Rumor has it he was in rehab.

…

“Oh brother.” Price won’t let it die. “Look,” he starts, trying for a rational appraisal of the situation. “He presents himself as a harmless old codger. But inside…” He stops. My interest picks up, flickers briefly. “But inside…” Price can’t finish the sentence, can’t add the last two words he needs: doesn’t matter. I’m both disappointed and relieved for him. (p. 397)

Here we see that the sort of will Bateman perceives in Price is not a delusion — it’s real. Price has the ability to change, he has the desire; only he is offended that a person in power lies, cheats, and steals. Only he’s been to rehab, only he wears the phantasmagorical smudge of the penitent. His description of Reagan as a harmless-looking man never seems to finish, perhaps because it frightens him: Reagan can look like an old movie star, an aw shucks nice guy, but within him dwells the capacity for cruel and casual evil. Bateman is the same way: he looks normal, but there is something terrible inside of him, something he has decided to stop fighting, and that is why he finishes the sentence in a way Price probably wouldn’t agree with: he claims that what’s inside doesn’t matter. Price’s gradual realization seems to be moving in the opposite direction, the idea that the inside does matter. Success has a greater dimension than economics, than wealth and power and being physically attractive; it is a moral and spiritual matter.

Remember that the beginning of the story makes it seem like Price will be the main character — we are told what he is doing, who he is, we are told that he notices the words ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. And now here we see him beginning to understand how life should be lived — with honesty and compassion. Timothy Price is the Dante figure here, and he’s traveled through Hell and seen the results of a sinful life; now he’s penitent, the ash is on his brow, and it is his responsibility to cleanse himself, to work toward a more honest and compassionate life.

We don’t know for sure if he does — he’s a little afraid, as Patrick notes — but the fact that he can do this makes all the difference. There is an exit, but it’s not easy to get to and even more difficult to pass through. It’s a path Bateman doesn’t want to acknowledge, and thus he is damned. He’s not Dante, and he’s not Virgil; he’s one of the screaming shades, tortured for eternity in Hell, punished in accordance to the decisions he’s made in life.

dantes-hell1

In a purely aesthetic sense, this is why I think American Psycho is a great novel: it is well written — extremely well written, in fact, and though Patrick Bateman’s endless recitation of brands and clothing lines may get grating, it’s also an inextricable part of his character, a fundamental element of his voice and his psychology. The novel is also, I think, in meaningful dialogue with other works of literature that have come before it — it shows us how Macbeth may play out in the modern day, the unassuming madman, and it turns Dante on his head by showing us how one can so easily despair into Hell, or Hell on Earth.

In a more personal and moral sense, this is why I think American Psycho is a great novel: It tells us something very profound and very important about human existence — not how to live in an obvious, satirical way, but more in the sense of what it is like to live. We are surrounded on all sides by greed, cruelty, injustice, and horror; in such an environment it may seem like there’s nothing to do but give up, to become greedy and cruel and unjust and horrific in our own turn, and while that is always a possibility it is never the only choice. There is a moral way to live, a good way to live, a better way to live; the trick is to remember that it exists, even when so many people around you don’t believe it. saturn

And this is why I think that American Psycho is a great horror novel: Obviously the reasons above apply, horror should not be above the requirements for something to be a piece of literature, it should be well written and canonically articulate. But it actually adds another criterion: a horror novel has to be scary.

There are two types of scary, as far as I am concerned. One is the splatterpunk approach, graphic violence for violence’s sake, gallons of gore that gross you out, make you feel like barfing. The thing about this type of horror is that it doesn’t last, it’s too physical, too visceral; it’s also, unfortunately, the more popularized part of American Psycho. Yes, splatterpunk is here — loads of it, in fact, and yeah, it’s gross as hell and effective for what it is. But there’s something more clever than that at work, too: the second type of horror, what you might call metaphysical horror or philosophical horror, the sense of fear and unease resulting from the sudden realization that the world does not function according to whatever rules you take for granted and the universe might be, in fact, a much more dangerous and inhospitable place than you believed.

Bret Ellis combines both splatterpunk and philosophical horror by making Patrick Bateman so unreliable. Whether or not he commits the murders is unimportant in the splatterpunk sense, because the descriptions of them are just as graphic and gut-churning. But the fact that these may all be fantasies — that Patrick is just some hopeless, repressed guy living out psychotic daydreams behind an ordinary exterior — takes it to another level. Suddenly everything is thrown into question. I’m thinking of a part near the end of the novel, where Patrick mentions his housekeeper coming into his apartment and cleaning bloodsplatter off the walls and floor — as if it didn’t matter, as if it weren’t a problem for her at all. If the blood is really there, is the maid keeping her mouth shut just to save herself, or does she simply not care enough to report Bateman? If Bateman is making it all up, how many people do you meet every day are just like him? How many repressed psychotics walk among us? If Patrick isn’t lying, if he does some or all of the things he claims to, then how believable is it? Do we live in a society so disconnected, so unfeeling, that we would just allow this stuff to happen so long as we didn’t have to deal with it?

The cannibalism and rape make you queasy, and the implications make you uneasy. You can forget about all of the murders in time, but can you get rid of the nagging question: How does the world work?

To answer that is to overcome or make peace with the philosophical horror the novel instigates. The easiest way to read the book is to say that yes, the world is cruel and senseless and evil and no one cares, the world is terrible and we are all trapped in it and THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. But I hope that over the past few weeks I’ve shown that there is another answer. Sure, it’s small and difficult to find, requiring a careful and thoughtful reading of the text, but it’s there.

There is hope; there is possibility; there is salvation; there is, in fact, an exit.

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American Psycho Part 3: “Is this a dagger which I see before me”

So far I’ve given a brief overview of Dante’s Divine Comedy with a special emphasis on Inferno and how the Dante-Virgil-Beatrice relationship works. From this we were able to conclude that 1) American Psycho is a rewriting of Inferno, and 2) it is not just any rewriting of Inferno but one from the perspective of the damned, ie the narrator, successful 80s investment banker and serial killer Patrick Bateman. But this raises plenty of questions, like: why is Bateman damned? What did he (or does he) do wrong? More complicatedly, what do we get by retelling the Inferno from the view of someone who can never escape it when Dante’s story originally is, by nature, about the actual change Hell puts the traveler through, eventually allowing him to evade its punishments?

I’m going to answer these questions, or at least try to. To start, though, we have to step away from Dante and skip over a few hundred years and a couple city-states until we find ourselves in England with William Shakespeare. Why is Shakespeare important? Because, silly, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, and while Bret Easton Ellis has his own special rewriting of Inferno in American Psycho, it’s a very particular rewriting of the Bard’s Scottish Play.

macbeth_cat — Macbeth, ladies and gentlemen.

So if you’re unfamiliar with Macbeth here’s the rundown: Macbeth and his pal Banquo are thanes to the Scottish king Duncan. They bump into three witches, who make some prophecies about Macbeth being king and Banquo being the father of kings; Banquo shrugs it off but the prophecy upsets Macbeth, who we begin to suspect is pretty insecure about things. I think — I am probably wrong because I’ve never bothered to count and haven’t even read every play, but it strikes me this way — that old Mickey-B speaks in asides more often than any other Shakespeare character. He’s constantly bopping off to mutter to himself about the witches, their prophecy, whether they were good or evil, who suspects him, who doesn’t, and on and on and on. In modern cinema this would be conveyed by having a character almost constantly being heard in voice over, stressing over whether or not everyone around him thinks he’s cool or a dweeb.

As is so aptly illustrated by the kitties above, eventually Macbeth tells his wife about the prophecy, which turns out to be something of a mistake. She goads him into murdering Duncan by essentially telling him that a Real Man would totally kill the king if it meant he could have the throne. This convinces Macbeth pretty quickly, which only further proves how weirdly neurotic this guy is. But it gets worse, of course, because soon Macbeth goes from “sort of pitiable henpecked regicide” to “completely fucking bonkers (but also still really insecure and a murderer).” The bonkers part is hinted at early on, when Macbeth prepares to enter Duncan’s bedchambers and murder him, pausing to remark to the empty air, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee” (II.ii, my copy of the play ludicrously doesn’t have line numbers so screw you I’m not counting these things for my citations).

Now, it’s completely possible Macbeth has decided to be extra contemplative and poetic in this momentous time prior to coldblooded murder, but the other explanation is that Macbeth is hallucinating. During the murder itself, as he tells his wife, he also thinks he hears phantom voices decrying his misdeed, in response to which she tells him to sack up goddammit. But Macbeth’s mental state only declines further; due to an unfortunate confluence of events, he decides he must also have his old friend Banquo murdered — which happens, with more or less no complication. Things get hairy, though, when the ghost of Banquo appears during a banquet, sending Macbeth into a babbling tizzy and leaving Lady Macbeth scrambling to explain to her guests what’s wrong with her husband. You see, though there are stage directions for the ghost and Macbeth is very strongly responding to it, absolutely no one else can see it, meaning that it’s entirely possible that Macbeth is imagining the whole thing.

For me, this idea that a lot of the crazy stuff happening is all in Macbeth’s head is what makes the play so damn cool, and it’s a big part of how Macbeth ties in with American Psycho. My linking of Inferno to Psycho relied a lot on narrative arc and inter-character relationships; this isn’t true for Macbeth, because the links here are not about the little clues Ellis scattered around the novel. He quotes Dante directly, but unless I missed it, he never quotes Macbeth; if you comb through Psycho looking for an analogue for the witches or Lady Macbeth you’re not going to find them. The connections between the play and the novel are much more subtle, in that there is really only one big link: a character type.

bateman To put it quickly and simply, Pat Bateman is Macbeth. It’s so cleverly updated, I think, that it’s pretty easy macbeth to miss: one of Macbeth’s defining early characteristics is his insecurity, so Bateman constantly obsesses over what he is wearing in comparison to what everyone else is wearing, which stereo system is the best or most expensive and can he get one, and in one scene practically has a panic attack when he sees that a colleague has a more stylish business card. And just as Macbeth is prone to seeing things, so is Bateman, who imagines that Satan is speaking to him through Bono at a U2 concert, an anthropomorphic Cheerio is being interviewed on his favorite sensationalist talk show, a park bench is stalking him, and, in a scene launched into the general pop culture by the film version, an ATM wants him to feed it a stray cat.

And even though I said that the main connection is the character type, there is actually a tiny little Macbeth/Banquo parallel for Patrick and another banker at his firm, a guy named Paul Owen. Bateman mostly resents Owen, with the implicit reason being that Owen is marginally more successful — he’s handling a very high-profile account but is being stingy on the details, something that annoys the other Wall Street guys but seems to drive Bateman up the wall. So, of course, Bateman kills him, stages it to look like Owen took off for London without any advance notice, and starts mutilating prostitutes in Owen’s vacant apartment.

A detective shows up for a chapter or so to investigate Owen’s disappearance, and for a moment it seems like Bateman will be caught. But, no, that doesn’t happen — because even though Bateman completely made up the story about Owen going to London, it holds water. Other people claim to have seen him there, to have had lunch with him. This is made entirely questionable because a recurring situation in the novel is Bateman and/or his friends trying to remember the name of someone they’ve seen in a club or, even more frequently, Bateman calling guys he meets by the wrong name only to find out later they are someone else, or Bateman himself being mistaken for another person. There’s a lot of stuff there about how disconnected these guys are from each other and from their own identities, but in more practical terms it means that someone in London from the New York circle could have easily mistaken someone else for Owen.

Except it gets trickier. A dozen or so chapters after Bateman defaces Owen’s apartment, he drops by again — only the entire place is clean, spotless, and a real estate agent is showing a young couple around. Bateman is shocked and tries to figure out what happened to all the viscera he left behind, asking the agent how long the apartment has been for rent and who lived there last, but she seems oddly guarded. Patrick notices the place smells especially clean, as if a lot of disinfectant or deodorizer has been used recently to get rid of a stench. There are then two possibilities for what’s happened: the agent is complicit in a conspiracy to cover up the murders in the apartment, which were never reported, or Bateman has imagined the whole thing, even the excess of deodorizer. The strange looks the agent gives him could either be hints that she knows that he knows she knows — or they could be because some random guy just barged in on her appointment and started asking questions. Is Owen alive or dead? It doesn’t matter, really, because either way, like the ghost of Banquo only Macbeth can see, Owen’s status is something that only Bateman has cause to doubt, and it threatens to overturn his entire life.

SA/TELLER10 — I can't tell if that dagger's been photoshopped in or if it's the ugliest prop ever. Either way, fantastic.

And this is where Ellis turns the volume way, way up on my favorite part of Macbeth: not only are the floating daggers and phantom voices and ghosts possible hallucinations, the murders themselves are also of questionable authenticity. We can’t trust a thing Bateman says, and as he comes to realize, he can’t trust himself. Both Macbeth and Bateman suffer from this same self-doubt — they’re both neurotic as hell, after all — and though Macbeth and everyone around him eventually knows and understands what he has done, for Patrick this never happens. No one ever catches him, no one ever even comes close to suspecting him, and to top it all off, maybe he’s actually never done anything to make himself suspect. Say what you want about Macbeth, he at least managed to kill a king, but for all we know Bateman is simply a delusional psychotic, a man who can only assert himself — murderously or otherwise — in daydreams and fantasies.

The end result for both characters, though, is pretty similar. When Macbeth sees where his choices have gotten him — his wife has committed suicide and he’s facing an insurgency of other thanes who think that king-and-Banquo-killing are not proper traits for a ruler to have — he has this famous, nihilistic little ditty:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. (V.v)

This is the point where Macbeth basically loses it. He decides that nothing means anything — not even his choices, whether he chooses to murder people or not, because no matter what you do life is going to be a bitch and then you are going to die. I’ll say it again: it’s nihilism, a complete and utter lack of faith in anything.

Here’s what Pat Bateman has to say on the subject:

…where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so real and clear and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This is what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality is no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire — meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in… this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged… (p. 375)

Wow, okay, so a lot less pithy than Shakespeare, but it’s much the same sentiment. It’s still similar in tone and tenor to Macbeth’s little outburst. This is something a guy today — or a guy in 1980s Manhattan — would actually say, this is how he would articulate a revelation of nihilism. This is the modern description of despair.

And despair brings us back, believe it or not, to Dante.

dante-and-virgil-in-hell

Despair, by definition, is a state of losing hope or hopelessness. And remember those words over the gate to Hell, those words Bateman reads in graffiti in the very first line of Psycho: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. In Dante the inscription is meant to be read only by the damned themselves — they have nothing to hope for, obviously, because they’re already in a situation where there’s no recourse. Dante-the-Character is simply a special case, a living man traveling through Hell; he’s not meant to lose hope but regain it. And when you think about it, that’s a pretty strange thing to happen, especially when he sees the following things going down in Hell:

1) Dudes running around in circles for all eternity, being chased and stung by giant hellwasps, the stings on their back blistering and producing pus which runs to the floor on which they are running
2) Dudes encased in eternal flames
3) Dudes being bitten and transformed and burnt up by a never-ending series of snake bites from the pit of serpents in which they are rolling around for all eternity
4) Dudes turned into trees and torn apart eternally by bird women
5) Dudes submerged in lakes of fire or boiling shit, as the case may be

And that’s just some of the punishments — Hell is a big, violent place. And that’s another way Ellis rewrites Inferno: the violence of Hell’s punishments is turned into the graphic violence of Pat Bateman’s murders (or murderous fantasies, as the case may be). This was, as you probably know, the most controversial element of the novel, and yeah, it would probably make any reader laugh queasily when Patrick decides he is going to eat a woman he’s killed but, since he’s lived a privileged life and doesn’t know how to cook, he instead eats a bit of her raw and weeps at the absurdity of it. But come on, Dante is just as bad — I mean, rivers of boiling shit and running around on a mixture of your own blood and pus? Jeez.

But there’s a snag. In Inferno all of the punishments are justly deserved and justly dispensed according to God’s love and infinite wisdom (or that’s the way things are set up in the moral universe of the poem). In American Psycho many of the people Patrick kills are just as shallow and pettily cruel as he is, but Patrick is not an omniscient and loving God, he’s just some yuppie asshole, and some of his victims are actually innocents (even children).

This is crux of what Bateman is and what he has done: in his rant about the meaninglessness of existence, of how horrible society is, he almost sounds like he’s a guy who wanted to hope in the opposite direction but never quite grasped it. And true, earlier in the novel he gets a little offended when his friends make anti-Semitic remarks, but otherwise he takes just as much delight in teasing bums as they do. But maybe that’s because of Patrick’s neuroses — he doesn’t have to work, for instance, but he says he does because he wants to “fit in.” He wants to be what everyone else is, he wants to make sure he is in good standing, he is attracted to a society that he on some level knows is despicable. And since he knows it’s despicable, what does he do?

He murders people, or thinks about it. And he constantly talks about it in conversations, slipping Ted Bundy trivia into debates on fashion, he calls his lawyer and confesses his real-or-imagined murders, everything. Bateman, in fact, wants to be caught. He wants to shatter the smug, superficial complacency of everyone around him, and apparently the only way he can think to do it is by being a psychopathic killer. And it doesn’t work, nothing changes, nothing happens, he’s never caught, and he loses hope — what little he had. But is murder the best way to change the world?

My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world now. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this — and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed — and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge of myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing… (p.377)

No. And Bateman, deep down, perhaps never believed otherwise, as he tells us earlier: “it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness.”

So the final despair is actually the endpoint of a much larger and more encompassing despair that Patrick’s been dealing with for a while. He began with the assumption that the world was stupid and depraved, and he tried to change it by being very obviously stupid and depraved himself. When it didn’t work he despaired in his despair.

In the seventh and eighth cantos of Inferno, Dante and Virgil come to the fifth circle of Hell, which is a rancid swamp surrounding the River Styx. This is where the wrathful and sullen are punished — the wrathful run through the swamp, rolling around in the muck, clawing and tearing and biting at one another. The sullen reside below the swamp itself, lying beneath the muck and visible only because their breathing causes bubbles to float to the surface, saying over and over again:

‘Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;
in the glory of his shining our hearts poured
a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun;

Sullen we lie forever in this ditch.’
This litany they gargle in their throats
as if they sang, but lacked the words and pitch.

So what are the sullen guilty of? Of seeing the world, made for them and made beautiful by God, and saying, “Ugh, so what?” Their punishment is to stay forever in one place, drowned, because they felt it was useless to act or care about anything in life. They had no hope for anything — they despaired. And so it is interesting to note that Patrick Bateman, regardless of what he has done, belongs there in the fifth circle of Hell: he is in pain and wants others to feel it, so he is wrathful, but if he never manages to actually go through with his desires, if he only fantasizes but maintains his hopelessness, then he is one of the sullen.

We have the THIS IS NOT AN EXIT episode because Patrick’s done his best to avoid every saving grace afforded him: he let his Virgil sleep with his girlfriend, he killed and dismembered his Beatrice. He never believed he could do otherwise; Bateman’s despair is what damns him. Macbeth at least gets to die fighting but Patrick is condemned, like the damned in Dante’s Hell, to live on in his sullen (perhaps murderous) stasis.

That does it for this installment. I have to give props here to The Acquaintance Who Says Bret Ellis Is the Best Novelist for mentioning the probable Macbeth connection offhandedly once, since I obviously followed through on it for a lot of helpful stuff.

Next time: I’ll explain how there is, in fact, room for hope and redemption in the world of American Psycho, and how we see it play out. There will also, I think, be a short wrap-up where I explain why this book isn’t simply a great novel, but a great horror novel, and that should be it for this series. See you then.

6a00d83452412b69e2011168981d2a970c-250wi — Significance to be explained in Part 4: THERE IS, IN FACT, AN EXIT