The Pro-Madness Agenda

I can't not link to this:

Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the district's monthly meeting Tuesday.

"Fools!" said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. "We must prepare today's youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods—not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!"

The Assaults of Chaos and The Daemons of Unplumbed Space

The Literacity blog is still obsessing about gore, and while I sympathize with the opinions expressed, I don't think there's much to be learned from it. The issue of violence and how much is too much is a problem for all forms of storytelling: thrillers, war, westerns, action, medical dramas, mysteries, crime stories. What do we see of the murder victim? How realistic is the surgery? What is our visceral response to the gunfire and bombs going off as the soldiers storm the beach?

The violence itself is merely a dramatic device: it is the agon, the struggle, embodying the actions of characters in physical conflict. It is not unique to horror, and shouldn't be classified as such. Instead, it is one way of providing a catalyst and driving a story forward.

Our reactions to violence come down to taste, experience, and story necessity.

If we understand a particular genre's conventions we have a better understanding of how the action serves the story. On the other hand, if we come into a story with a different set of expectations than the author, we're going feel that conflict very keenly. This is either because we haven't developed a taste for the genre, or because our taste level is more developed and looking for something more sophisticated.

Similarly, as we learn, study, and mature, we gain more experience with different storytelling forms. This experience hardens us to some things and teaches us that we've seen enough of others. We are better able to discriminate between what is and is not tolerable.

Finally, and most importantly, taste and experience will help us to know when some things are appropriate to a story and when they are not. We will recognize when something is gratuitous and not contributing to the narrative, and when something (however unpleasant) is really pushing the argument forward and making a larger point.

But either way, this does nothing to teach us about horror or the weird tale. For that we must return to the master: Lovecraft. In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" he draws a clear distinction between weird fiction ("fear-literature") and "the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome":

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

For Lovecraft, horror is more than blood and monsters, ghosts and goblins, it is even more than tentacled, squid headed gods of the deep. It is a profound sense of existential dread.

In a weird tale there is no shock, no sudden scare, but instead a slow accumulation of detail and sensation that upsets the balance of everything we take for granted as certain and good in daily life. We are forced to confront the possibility that we stand on unsafe ground and that there are forces beyond our understanding that will harm us through the brute force of their indifference. As human beings we have no significance and are beyond redemption.

If Lovecraft still speaks to us today it is because he articulated this fear better than any writer before him, and he paved the way for the paranoid style which followed in postmodern literature (Pynchon, DeLillo) and science fiction (Dick, Serling).
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Listening to: The Cure - A Thousand Hours
via FoxyTunes

Aliens vs. Predator: Mayhem

Everyone loves the new trailer for Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. Why? It's all mayhem all the time. In horror, supernatural atmospherics come off as cosplay; madness is a little too close to home for most actors and actresses; and decadent obsessions are just too cerebral. But mayhem! As New York magazine sez:

We’re going to go out on a limb and say that Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is about Aliens and Predators battling each other on earth, creating collateral damage in the form soft, slow-moving humans. We’re not even sure because this trailer pretty much just shows people being punctured, flayed, and just plain tossed around; the ratio of dialogue to repugnant squelching sounds is about one to ten. All in all the movie, directed by a pair of FX producers, looks pretty frickin’ awesome — at least compared to 2004's Alien vs. Predator, which was a bitter disappointment for people who collect Alien and/or Predator action figures.

Personally, I enjoyed the first one just for the Mountains of Madness premise (creepy temple at the south pole and all), but I'm willing to accept the conventional wisdom that it stunk. That being said, why is it that the Sci-Fi channel can't make a single movie that's even that good (er, bad).

Cthulhu Cthursday at Table of Malcontents

Not to be missed! The Table of Malcontents will be going away soon and I will miss awesome stuff like:

• Neil Gaiman on H.P. Lovecraft
• LOLCthulhus

Gaiman says the appeal of Lovecraft is the same as rock and roll. He makes you want to write in the same way that the Velvet Underground and the Clash inspire you to want to start a band. I'll buy that.

Scooby Doo and Skepticism

P.Z. Myers points out something that bothered me about the revival of the Scooby Doo characters:

Way back when I was a young'un, they always ended the same way: the Scooby Doo gang would always discover that the monster/spectre/alien was actually Old Man Cargill, dressed in a costume, trying to keep visitors away so they wouldn't discover his secret uranium mine, and they always led him away in handcuffs at the end, while he muttered, "If it weren't for those darned kids, I would have gotten away with it." I know, the cartoon was cheesily and cheaply animated, the plots were boring and predictable, and the characters were annoyingly trite, but at least they had a consistent message that the supernatural wasn't real.

That changed last time I saw it — the ghosts were "real". It was very strange: it was a badly done cartoon, waning in popularity, and instead of trying to reinvigorate it by, say, coming up with creative plots, or getting better artwork, or making the characters more interesting, they chose to throw away the one novel element of the show. The supernatural resort is often the act of lazy hacks.

The biggest problem with all supernatural fiction is, as Chris Mooney points out, the "conversion fantasy." The idea that it is better to be a true believer than a rational skeptic. It's what's always bothered me about Fox Mulder in The X-Files: that he was somehow morally superior to the other characters because he "believed."

Really good supernatural fiction treads lightly on this subject or views the conversion fantasy as the self-annihilating process it really is. In Lovecraft, the supernatural is a metaphor for the cold heartless universe and man's place in it. The universe is large, amoral, and indifferent to human suffering. Humans are small, mortal, emotionally fragile, and ultimately inconsequential. Anyone who is stupid enough to make a cult out of these elder gods usually ends up going mad or being destroyed.

The old version of Scooby Doo was dumb, but it did at least show that rationality and problem-solving could triumph over fear and chaos. The new Shaggy and Scooby Doo Get A Clue dodges the issue by being a G-rated version of the Venture Brothers, battling adventure story cliches. Still, how would Fred and the gang deal with the Call of Cthulu? Jinkies!