On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  12. Freud begins his essay by admitting the unorthodox nature of his crossover into aesthetics:

  The subject of the “uncanny” is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening. (“The Uncanny,” in Studies in Parapsychology, edited by Philip Rieff [Collier Books, 1963])

  13. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills point out that the German word for monster can be deconstructed in a manner similar to Freud’s uncanny: “In the same way that Freud divides the word ‘un-heimlich’ to reveal its literal meaning, ‘un-familiar’ or ‘un-homely,’ so, too, the German word for monster, Ungeheuer, can similarly be split into two semantic units—‘un-geheuer’ likewise means ‘un-familiar’ or ‘un-safe.’ From this it might be argued that monsters are the embodiment of something that is both familiar and foreign, disturbing and reassuring.” “Conceptualizing the Monstrous,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages (University of Wales Press, 2003). Also see Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982), and Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 1993), for discussions of “abjection.” Abjection is a cultural category, with unheimlich overlaps, designating a marginal, liminal being (or beings). Kristeva and Butler appear to be combining the categorical mismatch approach and the psychoanalytical approach to discuss horror and ultimately gender prejudice. I have not found Kristeva’s and Butler’s work very helpful in understanding monsters, or anything else really, but the work certainly has its own devoted following.

  14. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters, introduction.

  15. One of the first forms of repression that Freud details in the developmental sequence is the now classic case of potty training. “The excreta,” Freud says, “arouse no disgust in children. They seem valuable to them as being a part of their own body which has come away from it. Here upbringing insists with special energy on hastening the course of development which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable.” Repression transforms values, but, provided the repressions don’t become neurotic, those transformations are usually healthy for social life. Freud adds the bold claim, “Anal erotism [infant attachment to excreta] succumbs in the first instance to the ‘organic repression’ which paved the way to civilization.” Civilization and Its Discontents (Norton, 1961), chapter 4, note 1.

  16. With regard to a theory of “doubles,” Freud sees himself enlarging on the good start made by his colleague Otto Rank in his 1914 Der Doppelganger.

  17. In early civilizations, Freud points out, kings and people of means often created replicas of themselves; artisans were enlisted to fabricate doubles and triples of the royal personage, often burying the additional selves with the original. One wonders if real identical twins feel anything like a lesser sense of finitude or a stronger sense of existential security. Do they feel as though their sibling is a backup copy of their own self (like a hard-drive backup)? The double was originally a positive demonstration or representation of the universal will-to-live (conatus). But our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of maturing experience. Reality reminds us as we are developing that we will not cheat death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic pleasure principle is impossible given the brute facts of our animal nature.

  18. Zombies, I would argue, are even more disturbing than doppelgangers, and Freud connects them to his psychoanalytic framework. The narcissistic desire for everlasting life is functionally repressed in the healthy adult, but he cannot escape its lure altogether. “Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic,” Freud explains, “it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him” (“The Uncanny,” in Studies in Parapsychology, edited by Philip Rieff [Collier Books, 1963]). These uncanny experiences, often rehearsed in the horror genre, trigger complex paradoxical feelings, desires that were once positive but have transformed into negatives in the course of natural maturation. Undead monsters are particularly uncanny, I would argue, because they embody our narcissistic commitment to extended life, but also our mature commitment (via the reality principle) that no such possibility exists.

  19. Freud writes, “The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone…. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator; he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of that fact.” “Medusa’s Head” (1922, published posthumously in 1940), in The Medusa Reader, edited by Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers (Routledge, 2003). The fear of castration is a root cause, according to Freud, for the general male “horror of women.” One is reminded of the vagina dentata myths that appear in many cultures: women with teeth in their vagina. We encountered this in an earlier chapter, when we looked at Renaissance travelers’ tales (John Mandeville’s Travels). In 2007 an independent film debuted at Sundance Film Festival called Teeth, which attempted to update the old toothed vagina myth. Interestingly, monstrous vaginas don’t really fit Freud’s theory, in which the vagina is the result of castration, rather than the cause of it.

  20. See Lawrence Weschler’s discussion of Masahiro Mori’s work on the uncanny valley in “Why Is This Man Smiling?” Wired magazine, June 2002.

  21. See David Hughes, interview with David Lynch, Empire, November 2001.

  22. David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Back Bay Books, 1998).

  23. Hughes, interview with David Lynch.

  24. “Dream Team: Thyrza Nichols Goodeve Talks with the Brothers Quay,” Artforum, April 1996. Also see Suzanne H. Buchan, “The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime,” Film Quarterly, spring 1998, for a more detailed connection between the Quays and sublime aesthetics. Some recent Japanese horror films and their American remakes, such as Ju-on (2003) and The Grudge (2004), Ringu (1998) and The Ring (2002), are aesthetically creepy in subtle ways that also explore the uncanniness of mundane objects, motions, and lights.

  25. Socrates says, “The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things.” Republic, book IV.

  26. For a wonderful account of a lesser known serial offender, see Jan Bondeson, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale (Da Capo, 2002).

  27. In Shots in the Mirror the criminologist Nicole Rafter draws a distinction between slasher and serial-killer films. She argues that slasher films are closely related to fairy tales and folklore in their celebration of unbelievable supernatural characters (e.g., Freddie from the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Michael from the Halloween series). The serial-killer genre, however, is more for adults. Rafter sees less humor and less supernaturalism in serial-killer films. The two different genres are made for different audiences, despite occasional overlap. See Shots in the Mirror, chapter 3, “Slashers, Serial Killers, and Psycho Movies.”

  28. Warren Kinsella, “Torture Porn’s Dark Waters,” National Post, June 7, 2007.

  29. Mark Olsen, “King of Horror on Horror,” LA Times, June 22, 2007. This defense seems almost hard to believe and disingenuous because it’s unlikely that even the most devoted fans of torture porn would refer to it as “good art.”

  30. Quotes from E. Michael Jones are taken from the concluding chapter of Horror: A Biography (Spence Publishing, 2002).

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nbsp; 31. To make his interpretation work, Jones regularly has to suggest that the explicit accounts of some directors cannot be trusted. Jones describes David Cronenberg (Shivers, Scanners) as unaware of the real meaning of his own films: “As anyone who has read one of his interviews could attest, David Cronenberg simply does not understand his own films or the forces that drive his own characters. This is precisely why Cronenberg is so good at doing horror. He is himself so completely and successfully secularized, that he can only mirror the incomprehension of the society he was describing in his horror films” (“Conclusion: Misreading Horror,” in Horror: A Biography). Discounting artists’ own explanations of their work seems a little strange at first, but Freudians have always made this same point, and perhaps Jones is no worse on this account. Add to this the earlier quote from David Lynch, who admits that he doesn’t really understand his own subject matter, and we might find it more reasonable to discount the conscious intentions of the filmmakers.

  32. For a hilarious analysis of various films from a postmodern psychoanalytic perspective, see Slavoj Zizek’s documentary with Sophie Fiennes, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006).

  33. Aristotle’s theory of cathartic tragedy is as relevant here as Freud’s theory of libidinal release. See chapter 6 of Aristotle’s Poetics.

  34. “Capone and Eli Roth Discuss Horror Movies,” interview, at Ain’t It Cool News Web site, June 3, 2007.

  35. The father continues, “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Vintage Books, 2006).

  36. The unforgettable torture images of cinema are trivial compared to the kinds of inner monsters that veterans have to carry around with them. The debilitating effects of posttraumatic stress disorder are well documented, and we know that long buried or repressed memories can resurface even decades later to wreak havoc on veterans’ mental health. For a relatively sensitive discussion of a veteran whose Vietnam memories reawakened decades later, during the invasion of Iraq, see Kathy Dobie, “The Long Shadow of War,” GQ Magazine, January 2008.

  37. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxieties (Norton, 1977), chapter 7.

  38. I hasten to add that all this technology also gives us better access to previously hidden beauty in nature. But this is not a book about beauty, and so I’ll have to lay emphasis on the more disturbing implications of the new aesthetic of nature.

  39. Typical of the association of dinosaur fossils and monsters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a book by the paleontology popularizer Rev. H. N. Hutchinson, Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life (Chapman and Hall, 1892).

  40. The description of the alien as “fanged, phallic and fetal” is from chapter 10 of David J. Skal, The Monster Show (Norton, 1993). See Skal’s book for more discussion of the links between reproduction anxiety and films like The Brood and Alien.

  CHAPTER 13

  1. Quoted in Rummana Hussain, Lisa Donovan, and Mitch Dudek, “Campus Killer,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 18, 2008.

  2. Quotes taken from the Atlanta television companion Web site My Atlanta TV.com. See Denis O’Hayer, “ ‘Monster’ Caught in Murder of Boy, 7,” posted December 12, 2007, at www.myatltv.com/news/.

  3. The story was reported widely in the British media in 2000 and 2001, when Beart received a life sentence, but these nauseating details are drawn from David Rose, “Crime: ‘At the End of the Day, All of Us Sitting Here Are Monsters,’ ” The Observer Magazine, November 20, 2005.

  4. Quoted in the English news magazine The Week, May 9, 2008.

  5. Nathan Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years (Doubleday, 1958).

  6. See ibid., chapter 1.

  7. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Norton, 2002), section titled “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.”

  8. In the Leopold-Loeb case, “alienists” repeatedly interviewed the murderers, and defense attorney Clarence Darrow incorporated their findings into his ultimate argument for some clemency during the sentencing phase of the case. The Tribune reported that when the killers were spared the noose, the pro-defense alienist had to be accompanied home by police guard in case an irate public should try to exact revenge.

  9. Nietzsche has a way of speaking to the mania in some young men. Darrow was probably fishing for every defense angle he could find, and one hates to put stock in such a weird argument, especially because it has censorship implications. But every philosophy professor knows, and I speak from experience, that it is always the more wild-eyed kids in class who just can’t get enough of the pugnacious German iconoclast. Sad to say that the NIU mass murderer, Steven Kazmierczak, also had a thing for Nietzsche and mailed his girlfriend Jessica Baty a copy of The Antichrist around the time he went on his spree. See the interview with Jessica Baty on CNN, February 17, 2008.

  10. The Heine quote, and Freud’s use of the adage Homo homini lupus, are taken from Civilization and Its Discontents (Norton, 1989), chapter 5.

  11. In this chapter I am focusing on the more influential psychological ideas, but we cannot forget the popularity of post-Darwinian biological determinism. One of the most notable criminology theories was that of the Italian Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), who, through a quirky interpretation of Darwin, argued for “born criminals.” The criminal monsters, said Lombroso, gave themselves away by their “criminaloid” anatomy.

  12. See Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, chapter 7, note 10.

  13. Of course, aggression is not all bad, and when sufficiently channeled it becomes the driving force in healthy ambition. Peter Gay discusses this aspect of aggression as a “will to mastery” and points out that “solving a tantalizing puzzle, climbing an unclimbable mountain, gaining proficiency in an obscure tongue, inventing a labor-saving device, are all in their way aggressive acts.” See Cultivation of Hatred (Norton, 1993), appendix. In these more disguised forms, aggression shows up almost everywhere, and this reminds us that aggression itself may be only a heuristic reification of very different behaviors.

  14. In praise of rage and other energizing emotional forces, Rollo May reminds us that modern life is filled with boredom, alienation, dullness, and safeness: “Violence puts the risk and challenge back, whatever we may think about its destructiveness; and no longer is life empty.” Quoted in Stephen Diamond’s fascinating book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic (State University of New York Press, 1996), chapter 1, “The Angry American: An Epidemic of Rage and Violence.”

  15. Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime (Basic Books, 1988), chapter 1, “Righteous Slaughter.”

  16. The Leopold and Loeb case was often called the “trial of the century,” as was Clarence Darrow’s earlier “Scopes monkey trial” (1925).

  17. I remind readers of the Hobbs case, another case where guilt is arguable, which I discussed in the introduction. Recall that in 2005 Jerry Hobbs was arrested for allegedly killing his eight-year-old daughter, Laura, and her nine-year-old friend, Krystal Tobias. Jerry Hobbs is alleged to have become enraged when his daughter defied his order to come home; he stabbed her twenty times (including once in each eye) and stabbed the Tobias girl eleven times. “This was a slaughter of two little girls,” said chief deputy state’s attorney Jaffrey Pavletic. “You can see the rage that was exhibited.” Quoted in Dan Rozek, “Prosecutor: Girls Punched, Stabbed Many Times,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 12, 2005. Again, I don’t know if Hobbs is really guilty of this crime; a jury will decide. But the state’s attorney and the media clearly use the language of the Freudian rage monster thesis. A New York Daily News article dated May 11, 2005, and written by Sean Hill and Corky Siemaszko blared a headline referring to an earlier Hobbs conviction, “Dad the Monster: Chain-saw Loving Ex-Con Charged in Brutal Slaying of IL Girls.”

  18. Stephen Diamond, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic (State University of New York Press, 1996), chapter 6.

  19. Plato, Republic, book IX.

  20. Thos
e who wish to maintain the parallels between Forbidden Planet and The Tempest might read this monster as an updated Caliban, the mongrel creature servant of Pros-pero. Caliban is severely treated in Shakespeare’s play because he once tried to rape Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, so he requires constant surveillance and domination. In Act 5, Scene 3, Prospero says of Caliban, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

  21. Freud is assuming the dualism in his writings as early as the 1924 “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” but Eros and Thanatos dominate the posthumous Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940).

  22. See the highly entertaining note 7 in chapter 4 of Civilization and Its Discontents.

  23. Like Leopold and Loeb, who were often later characterized as repressed homosexuals, the Columbine High School murderers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were inseparable mates. Harris and Klebold often suffered “faggot” and “homo” epithets at school. Harris’s own suicide note reveals some of the motive for the attack and explicitly indicts his own repressive and abusive society. “By now, it’s over. If you are reading this, my mission is complete,” Harris writes. “Your children who have ridiculed me, who have chosen not to accept me, who have treated me like I am not worth their time are dead. They are fucking dead.” He continues, “I may have taken their lives and my own—but it was your doing. Teachers, parents, let this massacre be on your shoulders until the day you die.”