It's easy to complain, but what are we complaining about? Of all the major genres, horror is the least popular and the least successful, so you can't really say that corners are being cut in the name of quick profit. If people are making money on this stuff it's not on a Disney scale. No, this is a genre created by fans for fans, dominated by zines and small presses, b-movies and foreign DVDs, and the worst aspects of the genre represent the most potent desires of the intended audience. Torture and gore is what they want, yet I can find no one who can clearly articulate this fact and explain it. Condemn it, yes, but explain it, no.
So instead I've turned to postmodern literary criticism, that great explainer and problematizer, to help me. Here's the late Elizabeth Young writing on Dennis Cooper's repellent novel Frisk:
It might be asked in what way do Cooper's most gruesome passages differ from the so-called "Splatterpunk" writers in the horror genre, authors like Wayne Allen Sallee or J.S. Russell? The answer is probably very little in the case of the best writers and as, [Susan] Sontag points out, there are always a few first-rate books in any sub-genre. Much of this type of horror is concerned with transgressing that ultimate taboo, the interior of the body.In truth, the events described in Frisk (and similar works like American Psycho) are far worse than Splatterpunk because they are so firmly grounded in the realist literary tradition and offer none of the psychological distance that even the most sensitive reader can level against pulpy genre fiction. She continues,
Films of this type, "Splatter" films - one of Alex's interests in "Closer" - are sometimes repulsively referred to as "moist" films, and indeed Baudrillard talks of the "excessive wetness" of the obscene, the "spectral lubricity" of the obscene simulation which is always too visceral, too sticky, too wet. Cooper's work however has many other intentions beyond this transgression of basic bodily taboos. He wishes to chart the postmodern sensibility as it engages with extreme taboo and thus conjoin the mediatized personality and erotic literary history (Shopping In Space, pg. 259)In postmodern terms, the problem in transgressive literature is not its awful subject matter, or even the presence of extreme gore and violence in general, but its representation. The violent acts presented on the page and on the screen are not actual events, but simulations of events (even within the framework of the story). They attempt to bring to life that which cannot and should not be expressed. These are things that however horrific are presented, for better and for worse as fantasy. At one level, such nightmares serve as commodities to be consumed and integrated into our mediated sense of self identity. With transgressive literature these fictions ca also operate as ruptures in the fabric of consumer desire, and provide ways of breaking and resisting the control of simulated experience. Mediated desires give way to fragmented flashes of attraction and repulsion as a source of political inspiration. Postmodern transgression exists to alert us to and destabilize power relationships.
The genre version on the other hand is far less powerful, and can only panic when confronted with the fragments of modern life. Indeed, the gore and violence of modern horror are meaningless and obscene precisely for their lack of imagination. They (image and author) are at a very deep psychotic level unable to imagine not being able to see everything. The body is violated, invaded, and dismembered not by action but by the mind (and the eye) and the viewer is compelled to objectify the flesh of the body with the mad insistence that at least we are not that. It is a sort of reverse narcissism expressed as alienation and entitlement; a means of protecting our subjective selves, floating disembodied somewhere behind our eyes, from the truth of our soulless, dying bodies.
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Listening to: Modest Mouse - Blame It On The Tetons
via FoxyTunes
