The gothic in contemporary literature and popular culture : pop goth [First issued in paperback.] 9780415806763, 0415806763, 9781138016507, 1138016500

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The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

1 Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century Edited by Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner 2 Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore 3 Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry Bryan Walpert 4 Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature The Alchemical Literary Imagination Kathleen J. Renk 5 The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art Performing Identity Caroline A. Brown 6 Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature Danny Méndez 7 The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism Andrew Shail 8 The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture Pop Goth Edited by Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture Pop Goth Edited by Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The gothic in contemporary literature and popular culture : pop goth / edited by Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet. p. cm. — (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Gothic revival (Literature) I. Edwards, Justin D., 1970– II. Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik. PN3435.G666 2012 809.3'8729—dc23 2011044876 ISBN13: 978-0-415-80676-3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-12323-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: From Goth/ic to Pop Goth

vii ix 1

JUSTIN D. EDWARDS AND AGNIESZKA SOLTYSIK MONNET

1

Love Your Zombie: Horror, Ethics, Excess

19

FRED BOTTING

2

Vampires, Mad Scientists and the Unquiet Dead: Gothic Ubiquity in Post-9/11 US Television

37

LINNIE BLAKE

3

Being Human? Twenty-First-Century Monsters

57

MONICA GERMANÀ

4

Gothic, Grabbit and Run: Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the Gothic Marketplace

71

GLENNIS BYRON

5

Bella’s Promises: Adolescence and (Re)capitulation in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series

84

RACHAEL MCLENNAN

6

“I’ll Be Whatever Gotham Needs Me to Be”: Batman, the Gothic and Popular Culture

96

AGNIESZKA SOLTYSIK MONNET

7

The Monstrous House of Gaga KAREN E. MACFARLANE

114

vi

Contents

8

Spectral Liturgy: Transgression, Ritual and Music in Gothic

135

ISABELLA VAN ELFEREN

9

Under Their Own Steam: Magic, Science and Steampunk

148

GAIL ASHURST AND ANNA POWELL

10 “‘Boo!’ to Taboo”: Gothic Performance at British Festivals

165

EMMA MCEVOY

11 “Forget Nu Rave, We’re into Nu Grave!”: Styling Gothic in the Twenty-First Century

182

CATHERINE SPOONER

Contributors Index

195 199

Figures

0.1 0.2 2.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5

Poster of Otto; or, Up with Dead People. Cover of The History Press’s Haunted Birmingham (2006). Walter Bishop, Fringe’s mad scientist. Advertisement in Sears’ zombie campaign. HarperCollins 1999 edition of Wuthering Heights. Visiting Calle Santa Ana today. Batman is often illustrated as a sculpted giant. Bruce Wayne’s haunting eyes from the second origin story in 1948. “Night of The Reaper” (Batman 237, Dec. 1971). Wayne’s inspiration for the bat disguise (Batman 47, 1948) Time Machine. Clockwork Heart. Simeon Marsh in the Gothic milieu of a Victorian prison cell at Lincoln Castle. History as Gothic Spectacle: “Museums at Night.” Bert Eke as Futter in Stuff and Things’ walkabout act “Futter’s Child.” Sideshow Illusions’ restoration of Jon Gresham’s original 1950s Headless Lady Side-show. Copperdollar’s “The Back of Beyond.” Photograph from the Glastonbury Festival website. Festival-goers at Glastonbury’s “futuristic and dystopian wonderland.” Shangri-La. Photograph from the Glastonbury Festival website.

7 11 47 72 73 80 100 102 104 108 149 156 158 167 169 172 176

177

Acknowledgments

We thank our contributors for their keen insights and unwavering commitments to this book. Thanks must also go to Elizabeth Levine and Catherine Tung at Routledge, and Michael Watters, at Integrated Book Technology, who steered us so effectively through the publication process. We are grateful to DC Comics for allowing the reprint of the Batman images in Chapter 6, and to Bryce Avary for permission to quote his lyrics. And we pay tribute to the members of the International Gothic Association who offered constructive feedback and enthusiastic support on the early versions of those chapters presented at the IGA 2011 conference in Heidelberg.

Introduction From Goth/ic to Pop Goth Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet pop goth: A particular group of people that only dress and act gothic when it’s popular to do so. Hot Topic goes through certain “phases” in their merchandising. Sometimes they cater to the punk kids. Sometimes they cater to the emo kids. Sometimes they cater to the goth kids. But the goth kids I make reference to are not bona-fide goth kids. They are only goth kids when its their turn at Hot Topic. But when their turn ends and Hot Topic turns emo once again . . . they may in fact be normal kids, dressing in normal clothes and acting like normal kids act. The Urban Dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com (3/2/2011)

At the end of the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century, the expression “pop goth” has entered the lexicon of popular culture. It is most commonly used in reference to contemporary forms of fashion and music, but it is increasingly employed in reference to a strand of cultural production that appears in cinema, television, young adult fiction, visual culture and even dark tourism. The above quotation from The Urban Dictionary, an online user-generated compilation of contemporary street slang, offers several insights into how the expression “pop goth” is used. Most notable is, for instance, the way it blurs the relationship between performance and performativity. For in this passage the collective—a group of people—“act gothic” through self-presentation and dress, indicating that the fluid subject decides to take up and perform a Goth/ic identity while it is in fashion. This performance, then, presupposes the idea of a pre-linguistic inner core of the “normal kids” who put on the Goth/ic performance. Likewise, it assumes a real Goth/ic identity to which pop goth artificially replicates, represents and even aspires. Yet this defi nition also suggests that pop goth includes a performativity that is based on the textual and visual language of merchandising, marketing and promotion. For pop goth acts are not only performed by the subject but performatively constitute the subject in that s/he is the effect of discourse rather than the cause of it. Here, pop goth performativity contests the very notion of subjectivity—our inner Goth—by rejecting the very presupposition of a pre-existing subject. According to The Urban Dictionary, then, “pop goth” is the performance of a Goth/ic performance. It is not bona fide Goth/ic; it lacks the subculture’s street cred; it is a byproduct of a mass-merchandised style that is sold to “normal” kids who

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Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

usually dress “normal” and act “normal.” In this, pop goth is a manifestation of Goth/ic style and aesthetics in mainstream popular culture. But this defi nition also marks out its difference from Goth/ic: the “real” Goth does not drift from one identificatory fashion to another (one scene to another); instead, s/he lives the Goth/ic life, remains loyal and true to it. In response to such reductive views of “pop goth,” this volume explores what we are branding Pop Goth, a popular form of contemporary cultural production that fluidly moves both inside and outside of Goth/ic. Thus, in Pop Goth: Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture, we are not necessarily proclaiming the death of Goth/ic—or, for that matter, any other subculture that is threatened to be killed off by mainstream appropriation—rather, we seek to examine how a strand of Goth/ ic aesthetics has become increasingly fashionable and has been woven into the very fabric of twenty-fi rst-century popular culture. From the teen fictions of the seemingly endless Twilight saga to fi lms like Zombieland (2009) and from album such as Lady Gaga’s Fame Monster (2009) to BBC television shows like Being Human (2010), the tropes, politics and aesthetics of Goth/ic are omnipresent. Yet defi nitions of Pop Goth are varied and illusive, even at times spectral. For some, Pop Goth is one more manifestation of Goth/ic’s staying power—its ability to live on in various forms and guises from the 1780s to the 1980s to what we see on our contemporary screens and texts (and purchase in our shopping malls or High Streets). For others, though, Goth/ic popular culture is not really Gothic at all; rather, it is—along with expressions like “Goth Lite” and “Black Dresser”—a commercialised aesthetic and commodified style that is associated with dressing dark and whiting-up. In this, “Pop Goth” is consistent with other “pops”: pop psychology, pop philosophy, pop music, even a fashion boutique called Pop Life. Here, the prefi x “pop” refers to a popular form that is accessible to the general public and that is seen to, by extension, lack authenticity—it is pseudo and derivative, not bona fide and certainly not the “real thing.” This raises several questions we seek to address in this volume: Is popular Goth/ic an inferior copy of a more sophisticated original? Might we conceptualise Gothic popular culture as a counterfeit form of Goth/ic? Or should we simply dismiss Pop Goth as something tainted by poseurs and wannabes? As a starting point, we propose that one way to address these questions is by regarding Pop Goth as an offshoot of Goth/ic and, as a result, arising out of a form of cultural production that has always been concerned with blurring the boundaries between the real and unreal, authentic and inauthentic, copy and counterfeit (Hogle 295; Spooner 37).1 From this perspective, the cultural phenomenon of contemporary Gothic pop culture is, among other things, the revenant of the counterfeited medieval narrative of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) or the fake translations and forged bills of exchange in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1800). For the presence of Goth/ ic in contemporary popular culture bears an uncanny resemblance to other

Introduction 3 periods of Goth/ic production and proliferation; our use of the expression “Pop Goth” thus highlights a slippery signification that is simultaneously inside and outside of Goth/ic. And there is an ambiguity here (a doubleness?) whereby Pop Goth moves fluidly between trends in popular culture—a series of “pops”—and an aesthetic (a lifestyle?) associated with Goth/ic. In recent Gothic popular culture, then, we find both continuity and rupture, a form of popular cultural production that reaches beyond binaries (either/or) as simultaneously Goth/ic and not Goth/ic. Pop Goth: Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture is not interested in Goth/ic subcultures per se. Instead, we examine how aspects of the various waves of Goth/ic (from, for instance, the 1790s, 1890s and 1990s) have become translated into the ubiquitous Goth/ic stylings of popular culture from 2000 to 2010. Over the last decade, the mainstreaming of a Goth/ic aesthetic has been unprecedented; however, we also recognise that Goth/ic has always been profitable and lucrative. In the 1790s, for instance, Ann Radcliffe received the unprecedented sums of £500 for the copyright of her hugely popular gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and £800 for The Italian (1797); likewise, popular Goth bands such as The Cure sold out large venues in the 1980s, and Marilyn Manson packed arenas in the 1990s. Yet Pop Goth marks out a new stage in the genealogy of Goth/ic, for its influential stylings have moved well beyond the publishing and music industries, infecting all of the cultural industries: the fi lm versions of Twilight (2008) and Eclipse (2010) have gross revenues of over $392 million and $693 million respectively, television programs like Buff y the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) have attracted massive international audiences, the shopping-mall clothing chains Hot Topic, Le Chateau (in North America) and Marks and Spencer (in the UK) continue to market Gothic fashions, and some of the most popular video games include zombies (Burn, Zombie, Burn!, 2009), ghosts (Ghost Master, 2003) and vampires (Blade, 2000). Thus, the aesthetics of what Goodlad and Biddy call “death chic” of the 1980s and 1990s—emaciated whiteness, black clothing, melancholy and imagery associated with death, dying and the undead—had by the start of the new millennium moved from the dark shadows of a subculture into the limelight of mainstream popular culture (23). Goth/ic sold. And one reason for its mass appeal is its ability to capitalise on the rebellion, alienation and melancholy of Goth/ic while also distilling it: pop Goth/ic successfully packages a whiff of the subculture’s subversive, creative and “auratic potential” by selling Goth/ic’s profound aestheticism of everyday life and packaging the world’s destructiveness stylistically to appropriate Goth/ic’s signification of difference through stylistic innovation (Goodlad and Biddy 11–13). If, as we suggest, the waves of Goth/ic from the 1980s and 1990s disseminated a discourse of anti-commercialism while also being driven by commodification and market-oriented consumption, then Pop Goth is the return of that which has been repressed: it is a high-profi le manifestation

4

Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

of the Goth/ic participation in the market and the recognition that Goth/ic cannot deny its ties to commodification and consumption.

ENGENDERING POP GOTH Goth/ic has often challenged conventional gender performance by resisting normative masculinity and rupturing the foundations of straight masculinity. If the literary Gothic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries opened up new spaces for female readers and writers, then the Goth subcultures of the late twentieth century offered a place for male sensitivity through theatricality, creativity, aestheticism, stylised fashion, queer desire and melancholic affection. The man of feeling was not simply conflated with the effeminate male. This raises significant questions about the ubiquity of Goth/ic in popular culture from 2000 to 2010: how does Goth/ic’s transgressive sexuality and gender fluidity manifest itself in recent Pop Goth? Or, to pose this slightly differently, does Pop Goth diff use the androgyny of Goth and adapt Goth/ ic aesthetics to popular culture’s demand for gender and sexual difference? Any response to these questions must acknowledge a doubleness: Pop Goth helped to popularise Goth/ic’s stylised androgyny and sexual ambiguity in the mid- to late-1990s popular culture, but by 2000 Pop Goth had also become part of a more general normalising of queer desire in mainstream media. On the one hand, box-office hits like Neil Jordan’s star-studded Interview with a Vampire (1994) have been identified by cultural critics as popularising the queerness and bisexuality of a Goth subculture (Goodlad and Biddy 29). On the other hand, though, the resistance to sexual binaries found in Pop Goth was also fuelled by the appropriation of queerness within popular cultural productions such as the “Lesbian Kiss” episode of the US sitcom Roseanne (1994), the successful worldwide release of the Australian fi lm Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and the popular British TV series Queer as Folk (1999). 2 Yet we maintain that while Pop Goth is the most lucrative strand of Goth/ ic thus far, it also has the potential to retain Goth’s resistance to gender and sexual norms. A compelling example of this arises out of the character of Spike in Buff y the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), a TV show that for the cultural critic Elena Levine includes a feminist agenda in which Buff y—“a truly New Woman”—turns “her power into our power” (185). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Spike—Buff y’s vampire nemesis/ally/sometime lover— offers an alternative form of masculinity: his performance is highly aestheticised while remaining coded as recognisably masculine and, as such, he has been characterised by Buff y scholars as existing at “the nexus of camp and queer” (Masson and Stanley 5). Spike’s canny ability to renegotiate traditional gender definitions is clear from his most infamous assertion: “I may be love’s bitch but at least I’m man enough to admit it!” (“Lover’s Walk,”

Introduction 5 season 3, episode 8). The combination of loss of control (being love’s bitch) and courage to take responsibility for that loss, figured in exaggerated gender tropes which destabilise conventional gender codes, is typical of the playful but powerful social revisions performed by the show’s scriptwriters. Furthermore, the subtext of queer desire evoked through Spike in the overt text of queer desire—the relationship between Willow and Tara—in which the “Wiccy” lovers merge “lesbian” identities with Sapphic delight and magical power. The most prevalent critical reading of the Willow/Tara relationship is one wherein their queer desire is conflated with their attraction to a femalegendered form of magic (Winslade). This conflation underscores the show’s commitment to an interpretive space of questioning rather than fi xing gender and sexuality, for both characters continue to inhabit various subjectivities that enable a queer construction of same-sex desire by resisting binaries and destabilising normative sexual identities.3

POP GOTH VAMPIRES SUCK This reading of Buff y is consistent with the fluid conceptions of sexuality and anti-heteronormativity—the acceptance of bisexuality and fetish desires—in recent Goth/ic cultural production. Pop Goth continues to push the limits: “If contemporary popular culture is anything to go by,” writes the literary critic Dale Townsend, “the Gothic is more in need of a straightening out than a queering up” (11). Citing fi lms such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Gods and Monsters (1998) as two salient examples, Townsend’s assertion might fi nd its Pop Goth culmination in the recent HBO series True Blood (2008–present) in which the hyper-sexualised vampires are neither gay- nor straight-identified, and who are threatened by humans who seek to drain vampire blood and sell it as “V”—a black-market drug that increases desire and heightens sexual performance.4 In the third episode, titled “Mine,” for instance, the vampire Bill Compton takes “possession” of the “mortal” Sookie Stackhouse in front of the “nesting” vampires who threaten her. Directly following this declaration, though, Bill is offered Jerry, a gay-identified human who is possessed by the oldest vampire in the clandestine nest. Bill cannot resist. But just as he is about to penetrate Jerry’s flesh, Sookie yells for Bill to stop, saving him from Hep D (the vampire equivalent of HIV). In this scene, as elsewhere in the programme, the vampire fluidly moves from the enactment of patriarchal possession—“she’s mine!” yells Bill—to an overwhelming homosexual desire that is marked by the threat of infection. This rapid movement undermines the fi xed position of heteronormative sexuality and conventional genders, gesturing towards nonbinaristic social relations between the sexes. In this, Pop Goth sometimes foregrounds “queercore” politics and aesthetics, and in True Blood, these are furthered through the human character Lafayette. A short-order cook, road-crew worker, drug dealer, gay

6

Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

prostitute and occasional pornographer, Lafayette is the “campy vamp” whose hard pecs are often loosely covered in luxurious silks or gold lamé. As a significant representation of Pop Goth queerness, Lafayette is also the linchpin for the show’s complex politics; as a queer-identified AfricanAmerican man, he embodies the history of the civil rights movement (racial and sexual) in the US and, more specifically, in the American South. His presence—along with the opening credits, which splice together images of the KKK, race riots and the Confederate Flag—reminds us of the history of racial and sexual demonisation and locates the plot within a specific context: the series is, among other things, Pop Goth’s answer to the Southern Gothic. 5 Set in the near future, though, the politics of the day revolve around the VRM (Vampire Rights Movement), debates over the VRA (Vampire Rights Act) and the influential “Vampire Lobby,” which champions “equal citizenship” now that vampires have “come out of the coffi n” (series 1; episode 1). Love your vampire; or, at the very least, don’t be a vampist. On the one hand, this aspect of the show’s premise suggests a progressive political teleology of post-human civil rights whereby the not-human— the undead—demand full citizenship under the law, thus implying that debates over human racial and sexual equality are in the past: we have seen the future, so to speak, and it is post-race, post-sexuality, post-gender. On the other hand, though, the past haunts the future. For the programme’s very title signifies the historical discourses of racial authenticity and white supremacy, a process whereby the fi xing of a true bloodline was vital for maintaining racial division (in the institutionalisation of slavery and segregation). Pure blood morphs into true blood, just as the fear of the corrupted bloodline is projected onto the vampire’s appetite for real blood over synthetic reproductions. The fictional narratives of racial authenticity that haunt True Blood might also be read into the mask of whiteness that characterises the pallor and pale skin of a Pop Goth aesthetic. In the fi lm version of Twilight (2008), for instance, the white skin of the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) not only signals his status as undead, but it also stages the translation of a Goth/ic fashion into a Pop Goth cultural production. Here, the white man who is made up in whiteface is an inscription of Otherness but it is also, as in so many vampire narratives, a source of attraction and desire. The teenage protagonist Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is drawn in by the mysterious and pallid Edward, who is the subject of her desirefilled gaze but who also refuses Bella’s request to make her a vampire. He is, in the end, an object of desire that remains a feast for the eyes. In this contemporised minstrel performance, Edward’s whiteness legitimates his authenticity as a popular Gothic icon, while simultaneously calling attention to the artifice of racialism. Still, such a performance also highlights the cultural (and racial) currency of whiteness: white skin is needed as the basis for whiting-up—thus, it is the white performer who can express that

Introduction 7 which is authentically Pop Goth.6 At the heart of this minstrel-like show is a revealing of the markers of whiteness and the performative nature of race, oscillating between authenticity and artifice. In Pop Goth, as in Goth/ ic, racial authenticity is produced through counterfeit, for it depends on the movement between an acknowledgement of its performative nature and an acceptance of its unmediated authenticity. By appearing as the real thing, then, a character like Edward Cullen engages in a form of masquerade that reveals race as an illusion that is best exemplified in his mask of whiting-up, while concurrently showing how the mask makes race very real. The Twilight series stages issues of race and ethnic identity in yet another way: Edward’s rival is a Native American character, Jacob Black. His very name signals his nonwhiteness, his Otherness. In stark contrast to Edward’s cold and cadaverous body, Jacob is visibly, even ostentatiously, hot-blooded and his physical features are constantly displayed (in the fi lm versions Jacob

Figure 0.1

Poster of Otto; or, Up with Dead People.

8

Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

does not need to wear a shirt, even in winter). The animalistic vitality of his muscular semi-nakedness combines with his ability to turn into an ultra-powerful wolf (particularly in moments of rage). Gesturing to a long tradition of the “racialised gothic,” Jacob’s Otherness is also a source of exoticised attraction and desire.7 The sexiness of vampires (and even werewolves) has existed throughout the history of the Gothic mode. But the humanisation of the Gothic monster has, over the last ten years, inspired representations of the desirable and sexy zombie. In Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010) (both directed by Bruce LaBruce), the zombies titillate the viewer in graphic scenes of queer zombie sex, parodying Romero’s use of the zombie to interrogate the ideologies of consumerism and consumption. Film-maker Bruce LaBruce describes Otto as a film “about the loneliness, emptiness, and alienation that results from rampant consumerism and materialism under advanced capitalism,” making the silent and enigmatic Otto a figure of disaffected youth.8 In both films, the zombie blurs with the homeless psychotic to raise questions about poverty, mental illness and human rights. But the narratives also suggest that the postmodern condition is itself a form of madness that disseminates cultural trauma and erases historical memory; the ironic tone of the fi lms, though, produce a darkly funny and carnivalesque representation of sex and waste under late capitalism (with an appropriately aggressive post-punk soundtrack and virtually no dialogue).

VOCALISING POP GOTH Over the last decade, the expression “pop goth” has sometimes been associated with “goth pop,” a mainstream form of Goth/ic music fashioned by bands like The Gothic Archies, The 69 Eyes, Eisblume, Yousei Teikoku and even the German winner of the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest, Lena. Goth pop popularises Goth/ic music, which generally includes, but is not limited to, lyrics about pain, suffering, death, drugs, despair, darkness, rebellion, existential angst, social isolation, gender blurring and irony. Songs by goth pop bands are often self-consciously morose (sometimes to comic effect) and vocalise the subjects of hopelessness, loss and depression (sometimes parodically), as well as Goth/ic figures (as in “Vampires” by The LoveCrave) and tropes (as in “Haunted” by Stream of Passion). In “This Abyss,” a song by The Gothic Archies (a self-described gothbubblegum band), the haunting voice of Stephin Merritt drones the lyrics, “This abyss, this lightless void / This abyss, of world destroyed . . . This abyss, of night unbound / This abyss, without a sound.” Drawing on a fashionable Goth/ic aesthetic, this song attempts to convey a symbolic and psychological state of darkness through the spatial terms of an abyss, an endless chasm. “This abyss, of black increased / This abyss, without

Introduction 9 surcease,” the song continues, gesturing towards the literary defi nition of the term: a bottomless or unfathomed depth or gulf, a bottomless pit. Here, Merritt draws on the Goth/ic trope of the abyss to convey the figurative meaning of a catastrophic situation seen as likely to occur whereby the individual will sink to immeasurable intellectual, ethical or moral depths. “This Abyss,” then, illustrates how Pop Goth music is part of a Goth/ic genealogy. For the image of the abyss has been diff used throughout the Gothic novel and is central to, among many others, Ann Radcliffe’s 1797 novel The Italian (where the abyss conveys a Gothic setting and reflects the psychological distress of the characters) and Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 text Wieland (where anxieties about incest arise in Clara’s “dark dream” about her brother tempting her to the edge of an abyss, enticing her towards her own destruction). The Goth/ic trope of the abyss inspires, as Merritt’s song suggests, anxiety, terror and awe. After all, the song’s lyrics focus on an overwhelming darkness that engulfs the individual, driving him into a void of utter silence. There is, in other words, an ominous and irresistible force associated with the immense power and inexpressibility of this physical presence or psychological state. And the song expresses a sense of danger and even apocalypse—a “world destroyed”—that is repulsive, but it also includes an attraction to destruction that gestures towards an ambiguity that is central to Goth/ic. For the abyss compels to destruction—it is a reminder of death—and yet it also draws one towards it, attracting one to peer down into the darkness. It is this tension that puts the “pop” in Pop Goth: its popularity is based on the frisson of selling a simultaneous aversion from and attraction to self-destruction and cultural taboo. In this, Pop Goth packages a hint of transgression—the cannibalism of the vampire, the savagery of the werewolf—for a mass audience by gesturing towards a void of life or the symbolic fall into an indulgent passion or ruthless acts (physical or sexual violence) whereby an unethical world lays waste to potential victims. In Pop Goth, though, we might not take this too seriously; after all, its representations of “perversion” are not secretly hidden behind a threatening veil of darkness, but are broadcast to millions of fans through the bright lights of the celluloid screen, the electric hearth or the digital monitor. In fact, the ubiquity of Goth/ic in popular culture has led to a series of ironic songs about the staging of Goth/ic teen stylings. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in “The Goth Pop Song” by The Rocket Summer’s singer-songwriter Bryce Avary (written when he was still in high school), which became a You Tube hit in 2008. The second and forth stanzas of the song go like this: Did you see his shirt today? It said “I’m a vampire” Hey, Why don’t you come to my house? We’ll play cards and watch a good movie [ . . . ]

10

Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet When you see them all inside, You’ll fi nd their lives are fi ne Vampires and gothic rings are nothing more than looks So just ignore

The upbeat folk-rock acoustics of this song complement the sarcastic tone of the lyrics, offering a straight-up and down-to-earth parody of Pop Goth performance. As in the mock Goth/ics of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) or the Scream film series (1996, 1997, 2000, 2011), Bryce Avary’s tune caricatures the superficial façade and conventions of Goth/ic cultural production. In particular, his reference to the “I’m a Vampire” t-shirt is a send-up of the teen fashion for black-and-white t-shirts with logos like “KISS ME, I’m a Vampire” or “I’m in love with a Vampire” or even “I’m so Goth,” labels that broadcast an affiliation with Pop Goth and attempt to project a Goth/ic identificatory position. Avary, then, pokes fun at a Pop Goth branding that appeals to middle-class, suburban teens (“I bet his parents bought him that black hair dye / those 32-eye black boots”); kids who are, in language that echoes the The Urban Dictionary’s pop goth defi nition, all normal on the inside. “The Goth Pop Song” is not without humour. Indeed, there is a spectre of parody here, not because the song parodies a particular text but because it more generally pokes fun at Goth/ic tropes and style. Thus, our reading of “The Goth Pop Song” is consistent with Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik’s assertion that “parody can function as a key aspect of comic Gothic, not in the traditional sense of being parasitic upon an ‘original’ text, but because, through ‘repetition with critical difference,’ it foregrounds the production of the modern subject through discourse.” And, they conclude, this “frequently allows a fresh perspective on a changing world, one of accommodation rather than terrified apprehension” (12).

EVERYDAY HAUNTINGS Perhaps a bit more serious—though nonetheless entertaining—is the massive increase in local histories and guidebooks documenting haunted sites and ghostly sightings. Paralleling the popular reality TV series Ghost Hunters (2004–present) and Ghost Adventures (2008–present) in the US and Most Haunted (2002–2010) in the UK, the demand for texts about haunted urban locations and haunted walking tours has been a key driver of profit in the twenty-fi rst-century publishing industry. In the UK, for instance, The History Press (based in Gloucestershire) has developed a lucrative Haunted book series that includes titles like Haunted Bristol (2004), Haunted Leeds (2006), Haunted Oxford (2006) and Haunted Birmingham (2006)—thus far, the press has published over eighty of these ghostly histories. Committed to revealing accounts of apparitions and spectral presences in towns and

Introduction 11

Figure 0.2 (2006).

Cover of The History Press’s Haunted Birmingham

cities throughout the UK, the texts offer information for local historians, tourists and “ghost hunters” who seek out “encounters with ghosts, ghouls and spirits.” In Haunted Guildford (2006), for example, the author, Phillip Hutchinson, draws on historical and contemporary accounts of the pianoplaying spirit of the Guildford Museum and the poltergeist who haunts The Three Pigeons public house by swinging from the hanging lights, pushing glasses along the bar and picking up barstools. Somewhat more unique is Haunted Whitby (2009), in which the author, Alan Brooke, relates the area’s haunted lighthouses and ghost animals to the setting of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and the site for the weekend Goth festival that started in 1994. “Whitby has a particularly unique atmosphere and it is no coincidence that Bram Stoker chose it as the location for Dracula’s arrival in England,” writes Brooke. “It is largely for this reason that Whitby became the choice for the Goth weekend festival . . . [which] has grown to be one of the most popular Goth events in the world” (6). In addition, the penultimate

12 Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and fi nal chapters offer the Goth visitor (or anyone else) a “Ghost Walk Itinerary” that is complete with maps and photographs, as well as an “A–Z of Haunted Sites Around Whitby” which chronicles some of the “most entertaining ghost walks in England” (61). Haunted sites and local (ghoulish) histories, then, provide a basis for haunting tourism. But such texts also signal the appearance of the spectre in mainstream popular culture not just in works of fantasy or self-identified fiction but also in sources that attempt to provide documentary and historical evidence of ghostly presences. In this, we witness the increasing commercialisation of the “real” ghost as a commodity, something that has mass appeal and commercial viability. Haunting is big business. And this aspect of Pop Goth is hinted at in the Introduction to Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010) in which Blanco and Peeren observe that the twenty-fi rst-century re-envisions the conjuring, chasing, and contacting of ghosts, and the living’s communication with them . . . [to question] how ghosts lead us to interrogate various categories that govern our everyday lives, such as reality, authenticity and knowledge. In the spectral contemporary these questions aspire to a self-consciously sensationalist exploration of our enjoyment of the terror and uncertainty provoked by ghostly appearances or their simulacra (xx). “Real” ghosts have, in other words, materialised as part of the mainstream and, by extension, they reveal the “ineluctable link between the popular and consumerism” (xii). The popularity of the real ghost stories arises, in part, out of a recognition that the modern city—the haunted spaces are the urban places where many of us live—is always marked by the spectre of its past. Thus, the wide-selling Walking Haunted London (2009) by Richard Jones offers the walker “25 original walks exploring London’s ghostly past” and covers a wealth of detail on ghostly people and presences (both past and present) alongside detailed maps, transport information as well as dates and times when ghosts are most likely to appear.

NO FUTURE, INC. If the Gothic is haunted by the past, then Pop Goth makes the future its particular obsession. Or, to be more precise, it is consumed by a lack of future. Possibly in response to the real terror of everyday life (twenty-fi rstcentury terrorism, torture and violence on our news screens), popular culture rehearses apocalyptic scenarios. In Buff y, for instance, the teenage heroine saves the world in many episodes, often through dramatic acts of self-sacrifice. (In fact, saving the world “again!” became a running joke on the series.) Indeed, Pop Goth offers many examples of an apocalypse that is not averted—a world that is lost, beyond saving. Scientific hubris, corrupt

Introduction 13 businesses practices, environmental disasters, covert military operations and medical experimentation all figure in Pop Goth, from Resident Evil and 28 Days Later to The Zombie Diaries and Survival of the Dead. Joss Whedon—creator of the Buff y series—also weaves apocalyptical narratives into two of his other projects: the fi lm Serenity and the series Dollhouse. The former is set in the future and depicts the destruction of an entire planet (with millions of people) by a chemical agent developed by a corrupt interplanetary Alliance in order to pacify a population and suppress dissent. The few survivors on the affected planet become maniacal cannibals as the planet transforms into a “ghost-town” and the Alliance covers up its crimes by erasing information—“disappearing” it. Dollhouse revisits the Gothic tropes of corrupt power, mind-control, terror/ism and violence, but does so in the context of a realistic setting: Los Angeles. Within this contemporary context, an elite business has brainwashed employees and programmes them to enact fantasies, carrying out every request of their wealthy clients. In the last episode of season 1, we see the dire consequences of Dollhouse’s technology: anarchy and brutal violence has spread through the city as memories are “wiped out” and people are “imprinted” with the mind of another person. As in Serenity, some characters become violent killers, while others become helpless prey. Los Angeles smoulders in ruins and, the narrative suggests, the rest of the world is in a similar condition. The heroine of the series, Caroline (normally played by Eliza Dushku), is “imprinted” into a child’s body and surveys the devastation: “Children playing with matches,” she observes, “and they burned the house down.” A grim vision of an all too near future. Apocalyptic narratives on fi lm and television are just two examples of Gothic modes of destruction and death being invoked for mass-market entertainment. From skulls on babywear to Gothic cuisine, Pop Goth images of death and the macabre are everywhere.9 The following chapters delve into the complexities of Goth/ic popularity in a variety of texts, products and cultural practices. Fred Botting’s chapter on the zombie in popular Gothic texts addresses tropes that are present in many of the other contributions, particularly the anxiety about what it means to live in a late-capitalist economy. Botting examines the currency and power of the zombie as sign of postmodern amnesia and mindless consumerism: “Love Your Zombie” decorticates the power of this rhetorical figure and highlights its profound shift—in line with other monsters in the Pop Goth marketplace—towards sympathy, even love. If we’ve loved our vampires for a long time now, even zombies have become more lovable in recent manifestations of Pop Goth culture. Continuing debates about ethical responsibility in a socio-political-economic context of popular Gothic texts, Linnie Blake situates the current trend of supernatural television series within the political fallout of post 9/11 America. In “Vampires, Mad Scientists and the Unquiet Dead: Gothic Ubiquity in Post-9/11 US Television,” Blake sets her reading against the backdrop of anxieties about national identity, political power, military

14

Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

campaigns and new forms of US imperialism. Blake demonstrates how these television series about the threats posed by Gothic monsters interrogate the terms and implications of US foreign policies and “preemptive wars.” More broadly, Gothic television invokes the meaning and status of foundational American myths, tacitly critiquing the militarism and insularity that underpin recent US uses of national mythologies. Similarly, Monica Germanà’s chapter on the British television programme Being Human examines the blurred territory between humanity and monstrosity, provoking vital questions about the ethical relations of self and other in the twenty-fi rst century. Germanà’s contribution focuses on the anxieties surrounding medical technologies and “scientific” experimentation as it is staged in Being Human—themes that resonate with the discussion of technology and war instigated by Linnie Blake. The marketing of popular Gothic television has had a profound impact on the publishing industry, and Glennis Byron discusses the cachet of the Gothic as product placement and how Gothic discourses have been used in the promotion of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s bestselling novel The Shadow of the Wind (2004). Byron points to the fact that Zafón’s text was initially sold (and reviewed) as a thriller, a love story or a historical novel; later, though, it was re-branded as “Gothic”—a term that has come to dominate the publicity surrounding the book. Among other things, Byron’s insights show how the word “Gothic” (self-conscious, stylised, artificial and highly desirable) is woven into the publisher’s marketing strategy and how Pop Goth works to position products in the marketplace. Perhaps the most fi nancially successful manifestation of the Pop Goth publishing industry is explored by Rachael McLennan, who discusses Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling youngadult fiction series, the Twilight saga, with reference to the work of the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall (widely credited for formulating adolescence as we understand it today). Building on Steven Bruhm’s work on the contemporary Gothic, McLennan draws on ideas about recapitulation, growth and the adolescent (relating to characters and audiences) in order to analyse Twilight through the prism of personal formation— bildung—and recapitulation. The ideologies of evolution and development are, then, central to the literary tropes invoked in the saga, and the acts of beginning or narrating “again” are foregrounded throughout the Gothic trajectories of these popular novels and fi lms. Batman as a contemporary Pop Goth icon is the subject of Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s chapter. Examining the particularities of the product placement, intertextuality and continuity of comic book characters, Monnet argues that Batman oscillates between Gothic and comic modes to engender a source of politics and pleasure in the Pop Goth text; after all, Batman morphs into various identities in order to reflect contemporary political agendas and appeal to mass audiences. If the Gothic mode provides a set of perimeters and codes, then the pleasures of Pop Goth pushes those perimeters to their limits and experiments with a range of creative

Introduction 15 repetitions, parodies and unruly combinations to support and subvert the codes. The iconicity and intertextual dimensions to Pop Goth are highlighted in Karen E. Macfarlane’s chapter on Lady Gaga. Here, Macfarlane deconstructs the Fame Monster’s unique style of popular cultural allusions and intertextuality in the dissemination of a Pop Goth style that playfully gestures to a new level of hyper-mediation and meta-reflexivity. Lady Gaga, then, mixes the familiar and unfamiliar—creating uncanny ripples and unsettling effects—to generate massive profits from her fans. Gothic technology is present in Gail Ashurst and Anna Powell’s chapter on Steampunk, which offers a unique response to the condition of late modernity. Here, Steampunk’s answer to the problem of obsolescence, alienation and consumerism is to fetishise the Victorian machine, to challenge the soullessness of technology, and to investigate the borders separating science and magic. If the zombie’s body is the corpse of rotting and reanimated flesh, then Steampunk dreams of bodies that incorporate machinery, gadgetry and prostheses. Covering texts, festivals and interviews with participants, Ashurst and Powell reveal how Steampunk replaces vampires, demons and ghosts with pistons, cogs and gears as a way of responding to the deadening influence of capital and consumerism on communities and interpersonal relationships. Steampunk, they suggest, includes the traditional Goth/ic modes of alienation, technologised humanity and monstrosity, as well as a neo-Victorian aesthetic that recycles notions of hybridity for the twenty-fi rst century. Inspired in part by the commercial success of popular fiction and fi lm, Steampunk relies on elaborate costumes and performances that combine retro notions of technology and science with fantastic images of magic and the supernatural. Isabella van Elferen’s chapter addresses a phenomenon that exists in a productive tension with Pop Goth: the relatively exclusive gatherings in Goth clubs and parties. In “Spectral Liturgy: Transgression, Ritual and Music in Gothic,” she analyses the ceremonies and embodied experiences offered in Goth nightclubs, where guests are invited and appear (in often handmade costumes) to partake in a highly sensual experience. Sparing no expense, Goth nightclubbing is a rarefied nucleus of self-dissolution and immersion into a Goth/ic experience, community and altered/enhanced consciousness. Music, dance, absinthe, clove cigarettes, elaborate costumes, special lighting and decoration all serve to create a subjective experience of complete dislocation from the commodified and banal routines of everyday life. Van Elferen argues that Goth music plays a significant role here, for it offers an intensity that echoes the religious or spiritual rituals and ceremonies. The Goth club is, then, a complex locus of consumption, secular ritual, and subcultural community that revolves around the contemporary Goth/ic aesthetics of visual culture, fashion, dance and music. Emma McEvoy’s chapter explores less exclusive sites of Pop Goth: family-oriented arts fairs, public events and music festivals. Here she documents how Goth/ic performance influences a wide range of cultural

16

Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

phenomena, from high cultural/historical heritage to accessibility/fun to council-funded events. Addressing some of the reasons for the rise of Goth/ ic in circus-related performances, this chapter points to Glastonbury acts (and others) that transform old-time spectacles—freak shows, museums of curiosity, burlesques—into Pop Goth productions of the twenty-fi rst century. Drawing on several case studies, McEvoy’s contribution speaks to the cultural and economic underpinnings of a new Goth/ic that puts the “fun” back into “funeral” and says “Boo!” to taboo. Sartorial recycling, recoding and resignification are also addressed in Catherine Spooner’s piece on Goth/ic in popular high-street fashions. From the Goth/ic collection of Marks and Spencers’ “Per Una” label to the Gothic chic styles found in mainstream British clothing stores such as Miss Selfridge and Topshop, the market for “Pretty Goth” and “Glam Gothic” has proliferated throughout Pop Goth cultural production. Spooner places this phenomenon in the context of the 2007 murder of self-identified Goth Sophie Lancaster in the UK and the defence of Goth in the mainstream media and the subcultural community in response to this horrific crime. This defence, Spooner suggests, minimised Goth/ic otherness and paved the way for its appropriation by the mainstream on an unprecedented scale; the chapter then analyses the language and iconography that has been disseminated in mainstream Gothic fashion, suggesting that in its evocation of fantasy and romance, it permits the mediation of other, more troubling qualities. Pop Goth is a mainstream consumerist spin-off of Goth/ic, which is both a consumerist and commodity-oriented culture as well as a subculture that resists gender and sexual norms. If Goth/ic is perceived to deviate from the normative standards and roles of mainstream communities, then Pop Goth is a popular manifestation of elements of that perceived deviance. Pop Goth diff uses Goth/ic style and aesthetics into mainstream popular cultural production: this is tantamount to a recuperation. But it is not the death of Goth—it is only one strand of it—because Goth/ic has always been at home in the world of consumerism, commodification and consumption. So Pop Goth is a branch of Goth/ic; not its killing off. NOTES 1. Jerrold Hogle argues that Gothic has always been haunted by the ghost of the counterfeit: in texts like Otranto and buildings such as Strawberry Hill, Hogle suggests, “the remnant of ‘obligatory’ or ‘natural’ meaning is replaced as the sign’s point of reference by counterfeits of that remnant” (298). Building on Hogle is Catherine Spooner’s chapter “Mock Gothic” in Contemporary Gothic in which she argues that contemporary Gothic manifestations are “in keeping with Gothic as fake, as revival, as décor” (35). 2. Best known as the “Lesbian Kiss” episode, the title of the broadcast in which Rosanne Connor (Rosanne Barr) goes to a gay bar and is kissed by Sharon (Mariel Hemmingway) is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (season 6, episode 18).

Introduction 17

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

Similar episodes featuring “lesbian kisses” (in which a straight-identifying character is kissed by a lesbian character) appeared on the US television series LA Law in 1991, Picket Fences in 1993, Ally McBeal in 1998 and Party of Five in 1999. In some of these series, the queer kiss was a ploy to improve ratings, but by 2002 Marti Noxon, the writer of Buff y the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) had spoken about the television executives who objected to developing a long-term sexual relationship between the characters Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara Maclay (Amber Benson). “You can show girls kissing once,” he said in an interview, “but you can’t show them kissing twice . . . because the second time, it means that they liked it” (“Analysis”). The TV series of Buff y the Vampire Slayer is arguably the Pop Goth phenomenon that has attracted the most scholarly attention. With its own academic conference and peer-reviewed journal, Buff y is also the subject of several academic books, including Why Buff y Matters, Buff y Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons and Undead TV: Essays on Buff y the Vampire Slayer. Rigorous chapters on Buff y also appear in the books Televising Queer Women: A Reader and Postfeminist Gothic. True Blood is based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels (2001–present) by Charlaine Harris, and details the co-existence of vampires and humans in Bon Temps, a fictional small town in Louisiana. For an insightful analysis of the complex meanings (and transformations) of the “Southern Gothic” and how setting “gothic texts set in the South” relates to the marketing of Goth/ic writing in popular culture, see Jason K. Friedman’s “‘Ah am witness to its authenticity’: Goth Style in Postmodern Southern Writing” (191). A significant corollary to this is the popular Japanese fashion phenomenon, Gothic Lolita, which was popularised by the Hiroshima-based musician and fashion designer Mana, whose clothing label Moi-même-Moitié featured two extremely popular lines, Elegant Gothic Lolita and Elegant Gothic Aristocrat. In Gothic Lolita style, the Japanese participant accentuates her paleskinned, dark-haired Asian phenotype by applying black eyeliner and dark clothing to capture the “authentic” look of the mode. Interestingly, though, the Goth/ic make-up of the white powdered face is usually considered bad taste in Gothic Lolita fashion. For more on the racial dimensions of the Gothic, see H. L. Melchow, Gothic Images of Race in the Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996); Justin D. Edwards’s Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (Iowa UP, 2003); R. Bienstock Anolik, and D. L. Howard, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004); and Joshua David Bellin, Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Southern Illinois University, 2005). http://www.brucelabruce.com/news.html (accessed 13 February 2012). Influential literary and cultural critics such as Steven Bruhm have theorised the profi leration of Gothic in popular culture; Bruhm convincingly argues that contemporary audiences are drawn to the Gothic as a response to the postmodern destabilisation of stable conceptions of identity: we are “caught in what Freud called a repetition-compulsion”; we use the Gothic to reaffi rm life in the midst of death (“Contemporary Gothic” 272, 274). Alexandra Warwick suggests we crave Gothic because we have not been annihilated enough, and that Gothic popularity speaks to a desire for trauma, for the cachet and wholeness that the traumatised victim signifies within a traumaoriented culture.

18 Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet WORK CITED AND CONSULTED “Analysis: Portrayals of Gays on Mainstream TV and the Future of Gay Cable Channels.” National Public Radio (US). Talk of the Nation. 24 January 2002. Becker, Ron. Gay TV and Straight America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Beirne, Rebecca. Ed. Televising Queer Women: A Reader. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Blanco, Maria del Pilar and Esther Peeren. Introduction. Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. Edited by Blanco and Peeren. London: Continuum, 2010. ix–xxiv. Botting, Fred. Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Brabon, Benjamin A. and Stéphanie Genz. Eds. Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Brooke, Alan. Haunted Whitby. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2009. Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland. 1798. Oxford: Oxford Classics, 1994. Bruhm, Steven. “Michael Jackson’s Queer Funk.” In Queering the Gothic. Edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 158–175. . “Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Friedman, Jason K. “‘Ah am witness to its authenticity’: Goth Style in Postmodern Southern Writing.” In Goth: Undead Subcultures. Edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Biddy Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 190–216. Goodlad, Lauren M. E. and Michael Biddy. “Introduction.” Goth: Undead Subcultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 1–37. Gross, Larry P. Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Hogle, Jerrold. “The Gothic Ghost of Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection.” A Companion to the Gothic. Edited by David Punter. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 293–304. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. Gothic and the Comic Turn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. Hutchinson, Philip. Haunted Guildford. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2006. Jones, Richard. Walking Haunted London: 25 Original Walks Exploring London’s Ghostly Past. London: New Holland, 2009. Levine, Elena and Lisa Parks. Eds. Undead TV: Essays on Buff y the Vampire Slayer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Masson, Cynthia, and Marni Stanley. “Queer Eye of that Vampire Guy: Spike and the Aesthetics of Camp.” Slayage 22: The Online International Journal of Buff y Studies 6.2 (2006). Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. 1797. Oxford: Oxford Classics, 1998. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Townsend, Dale. “‘Love in a convent’: or, Gothic and the Perverse Father of Queer Enjoyment.” In Queering the Gothic. Edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 11–35. Warwick, Alexandra. “Feeling Gothicky?” Gothic Studies (9/1; 2007): 5–15. Winslade, Lawton J. “Teen Witches, Wiccans and ‘Wanna-Blessed-Be’s’.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buff y Studies 1: http://www.slayage.tv/ essays/slayage1/winslade.htm. “This Abyss.” The Gothic Archies “The Goth Pop Song.” The Rocket Summer (Bryce Avary)

1

Love Your Zombie Horror, Ethics, Excess Fred Botting

PARADISE IN ZOMBIE EYES Love your zombie is not an injunction to find some good-looking walking corpse and form a deep emotional and physical attachment. Love, though rare in popular zombie fictions and films, is found in the mindless intoxications of romance, mixed with Vodun potion and ritual, in White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943). More recently, in Breathers, intense feelings and physical passions are evoked—and vigorously enjoyed—by a couple of zombies; in Way of the Barefoot Zombie, love is sealed, in sickening sentimental and visual terms, through reference to Zombie Flesh Eaters: “yours are the hands that pulled my eye onto the splinter of love and embedded it in my brain. Yours are the teeth that gnaw on my guts every time I think about life without you” (40). Elsewhere, love’s tragic dimensions have been explored in unusual uses of the zombie trope as figure for the persistence of love after death, embodied returns manifesting spiritual loss (Keene 171; Lindqvist 90–5). Erotic attachments are rare too: zombies are not the most prepossessing objects of desire, passion and sexual gratification: the film Zombie Diaries offers a strong and disturbing hint of sex slavery; zombie prostitution shows the sexual service industry as literally draining bodies of sentience and feeling, numbed to repeated use, devoid of consciousness or emotion (Martin 282). Zombie eroticism is given a more perverse and pathetic twist in Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie. It remains hard to love your zombie: “eating brains, my friend, is not sexy” (Golden vii). Love your vampire, however, is impossible to avoid. For several decades, vampires have promoted safely appealing erotic, aesthetic and emotional characteristics; they have evoked desire, love and admiration for their decadent rebellion and fi nely tuned sensibilities. Thoroughly romanticised— even to the point of being able to charm a Southern Grandma—they offer general identificatory fulfi lment (especially adolescent) across classes, races, and object-choices, in acceptable defiance of norms and limits and homogenising any residual frisson of otherness. Posthuman becomings deploy the vampire as a metaphor for new social, species and sexual affi nities (Haraway 56–70); for new, networked and machinic connections dissolving human identity in fluid and liminal interrelations (Stone 46–51;

20 Fred Botting Deleuze and Guattari 249). Vampiric characteristics coordinate well with the imperatives of the new economic order: consuming, self-transforming, supernaturally skilled, physically and mortally free, they incarnate the flexibility, performance optimisation and impermanence of new modes of labour, corporate employment and creative industry (Latham 15–19). In this (fantasy) framework of new times and global economic restructurings, zombies—occluded, outcast, overlooked—constitute the other side of the new global economy. For they are the dead weight of industrial society made redundant by outsourcing, consumer services and fi nancial speculation, the dejecta and leftovers of a productive system turned into a useless, unserviceable lumpenproletariat (Beard 30; Shaviro 285). One loves one’s vampire at the expense of one’s zombie. Love your zombie is a paradoxical injunction, lumbering against the pace of the times. Yet it questions simple, even facile, forms of identification, eschewing recognition or imitation and refusing easy outlets for narcissism, fantasy or self-discovery. Closer to the love that evokes (self-)hatred, shatters mirrors and mutilates, through excess, any basis of imagined plenitude, zombie identification still draws out some kind of recognition: “they’re us.” Suppurating with signs of vile humanity, their proximity is hard to disavow. Yet—almost as an incantation in every fiction or film—disavowal is repeatedly called for in every encounter: “forget that the walking corpse before you was once a brother, husband, friend,” the warnings declaim, because to remember or sympathise, even for a second, is to be vulnerable to the same bloody reduction. The very proximity of the zombie to the humanity that it simultaneously is and is not remains a most disarming feature, an intimacy founded and foundering on recognition-repulsion, on abject inevitability, visibly human yet palpably not. Zombies are the most human of fiction’s monsters: without (super)heroic features or capabilities, undeath aside, they are neither individuals nor living beings, possess little conversation, have severely limited table manners or witty repartee, little fashion sense, no personal hygiene or intelligent opinions on matters of culture. Without higher brain functions, speech, self-consciousness or sensitivity, they rot, chew, stink, occasionally groan, and lumber en masse towards their next meal of flesh and innards. Decomposing, often broken bodies, ripped grey skin, a stench of decay and vile-smelling rags, they offer inescapable reminders of the fate of all human flesh, thrusting death’s corruption in the face of a species that, contemporarily, does its best to look away. Most human of monsters, zombies are also least, foregrounding how low self-consuming humanity can—and will—sink. This zombie—repulsive, inhuman, abject—is the thing one is asked to love, provoking negative and nauseating horror beyond any image humanity might hold up to itself, life’s unbearable excess and intolerable deficiency, death-in-life living on. Zombie excess, more and less than life, body, person, forms the obscure object around which questions of ethics can be asked, questions of otherness, expenditure and love, questions of self, destruction and desire.

Love Your Zombie

21

EAT YOUR NEIGHBOUR Love your zombie. Parodying the form of a commandment, this injunction looks to ethics and morality. Love your zombie, love yourself: live well, know oneself. To love one’s zombie pushes ethics beyond the bounds of self, materialising an otherness in excess of its goods. If morality entails an adherence to prescribed norms and rules, ethics offers protocols for the necessary adjustments required in specific situations where judgements are difficult, suspended, unavailable or uncertain. With Emmanuel Levinas, however, ethics assumes a more heterological dimension: it subsists prior to moral prescription, knowledge and ontology, and it introduces an obscure and fundamental relationship—determining but traumatic—to the Other who is “otherwise and better than being” (Reader 179). The relation to the other—and the commandments it makes known—has ultimate priority, even if their origin remains unclear. What strikes the subject most forcefully is the face of the Other, not a visible person, but a movement from a realm outside self: face “destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me,” discloses an “obscure light beyond the face” (Otherwise 50–51; Totality 254–5). Beyond the grasp of reason, representation, knowledge or being, this powerful intimation of alterity serves as the obscure foundation of ethical commands, as mysterious as it is enlightening, as binding as it is unlocatable. Face, however, also acknowledges precariousness. In Judith Butler’s reading of the obligations evoked by the Other, ethics itself—and the face in particular—is threatened by images and violence circulating in an age of media forms and global terror. Already vulnerable, already afraid of violence, face falls prey to forces of representation, its humanising capacity curtailed. In giving form to fears, the evil faces of media’s normative powers eclipse any humanising otherness in two ways: they “produc[e] a symbolic identification of the face with the inhuman, foreclosing our apprehension of the human” or they disseminate a “radical effacement, so that there never was a human, there never was a life, and no murder has therefore ever taken place” (147). This obliteration of face through face manifests a tendency to enjoin rather than counteract violence against the Other; there is an excision of the (possibility) of recognising or identifying with humanity in any positive or prospective fashion, and a devastating negation of life that legitimates, in advance, violence and murder. The situation discussed by Butler is posthumanist to the extent that it dispenses with humanity (extrapolated and dehumanised as the image of face) and abstracts itself onto the plane dominated by new biopolitical and media imperatives where wars are fought on screens and in the interests of statistical and demographic accounts of life. The sense of humanity— produced in the mysterious and exalted gap of proximity and difference announced by the face of the Levinasian Other—is eclipsed in the reduction of other to simple inhumanity. At work, it seems, is the differentiation, noted by Alain Badiou, grounding contemporary ethics in strict delineations

22

Fred Botting

of good and evil (to which Levinasian alterity is eminently prey). To appeal to the “infi nite distance of the other” involves either a transcendence of fi nite experience (the situatedness of ethics in respect of the particularity of the event) or leaves the way open for a legitimation of contemporary ethics that—in the name of respecting difference and otherness—offers “a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent government, and a cultural sociology preached, in line with new-style sermons” (Badiou 21–22). It appeals to differences consistent with “the identity of a wealthy—albeit visibly declining—‘West’” (23–4). Otherness and difference are assimilated or occluded by the cultural forms they ought to disturb and question. Badiou’s excoriating account of contemporary ethics (from discourses of human rights to medical, bio- and media ethics) notes the vicious delimitation and separation of good and evil, the latter derived from the former. Human rights are the “right to non-evil,” rights not to be offended or mistreated in respect of one’s life, or rights to maintain the integrity of body or cultural identity. The overwhelming obviousness of ethical consensus splits the subject into a passive, pathetic being or an active subject of judgement, both dependent on universal recognition of suffering and the defi nition of the subject “as a victim” (9–10). Living being is reduced to a suffering substrate of life, being “held in contempt” by the liberal gaze of a benefactor on “a haggard animal exposed on TV screens” that duplicates the position of the Western and developing worlds, victims mirrored by good white men, the former kept in their subaltern, subhuman and subordinate place (12). Similar procedures and positions shape ethical committees as they sacrifice singularity to an abstraction called rights; the sick, for example, are measured statistically and normatively as an “indistinct crowd of victims—the ‘human’ totality of subhuman entities” (14). Rather than singular questions of ethical concern, medical ethics work on cases, treatments, prognoses and cost-effectiveness; everything is bottomlined according to economic models of optimisation and generalisation. Contemporary ethics forms another arm of globalised capitalism, for it is bound to its consensus on the “obviousness” of rights and “the universality of unbridled competition” (10). In mirroring and managing some of the excesses and side-effects of capitalism, contemporary ethics manifests the incorporation and reduction of life, subjectivity and multiplicity; questions are posed, Badiou notes, by psychoanalysis in respect of jouissance, death, and the real. Love your zombie stretches ethical limits. For Sigmund Freud, the commandment to “love thy neighbour as yourself” was horrifying. Jacques Lacan’s discussion of Freud’s horror in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is examined in terms of the excessive energies that burst in and beyond circuits of pleasure: intensities are read in relation to a form of subjectivity that fi nds itself briefly and paradoxically in moments of extreme loss. Pleasure that is equated with equilibrium, entropy and goodness in this energetic model then begins to operate according to a “least-suffering principle”

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where the notion of the good (“our” good) “keeps us a long way from our jouissance” (1992: 185). This excess lies at the root of the horror of loving your neighbour; it sparks a burst of explosive-destructive energies that upset comfort, contentment and security. For Freud, the neighbour presents a “fundamental evil” and evokes that evil “within me”: “what is more of a neighbour to me than this heart within which is that of my jouissance and which I don’t go near?” It is “an unfathomable aggressivity from which I flee”; this is, then, a recurrent problem for how one deals with one’s own jouissance. As long as the neighbour stays in the place and form expected of him/her, circuits of pleasure, desire, law and good remain intact: “what I want is the good of others provided it remain in the image of my own” (Lacan, Ethics 186–7). Yet jouissance can neither be reliably contained nor fully excluded. Lacan’s Sado-Kantian ethics equates morality and desire, with the Thing—an interior excess and emptiness—marking the cause and stumbling block of law’s subjective and symbolic frames and thus the locus where ethics—What do I do? What do I want?—comes into play. Beyond the image of the other that is no longer the reflection of the subject, some Other Thing, discloses the underlying imbalance, disequilibrium and asymmetry in the constitution of subjects, structures and systems. Love your zombie: the question of (neighbourly) jouissance (which is of course never particularly “neighbourly”) returns ethics to love in a different, nonnarcissistic dimension, and to death, in the shape of a drive at the limits of organic being. John Rajchman notes that psychoanalytic ethics deal with “a form of love that is not based on those ideal parts of ourselves that would allow us to master our fate or obtain salvation; on the contrary, such an ethical paradigm would necessarily open up even our fi rst love, our love of ourselves, to a traumatic and fateful cause.” Beyond mirror, beyond fantasy, the imbalance manifested in the relation between ethics and love, discloses a strangeness that is never resolved: “our eros is at odds with our ethos; its occurrence in our lives is always unheimlich” (43). Disturbing, it can also be a site of unpalatable relish or a locus of threatening, uncontained intensity: “the other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality” (Lacan, Ethics 236). This cannot be grasped by the subject who remains jealous of it, fears it, wishes to destroy it. Or even by one who is threatened by it: the other—as in racism—works too hard or too little, sponges on social security, spends too much in “our” shops or on wining and dining “our” women (Miller 125). Not only do “they” enjoy in mysterious or secret ways, “they” also threaten the customs and habits in which an indigenous culture fi nds and fi lters out its own jouissance. Withheld and inscrutable, the other’s jouissance is also too close-by and disturbing. It is an “excessive enjoyment” capable of “ruining our way of life,” the very “Thing” that, imaginarily and practically indefinably, holds together a specific sense of culture (Zizek 203). The imperative to exceed—in work, consumption, life, on screens—becomes dominant, no longer curtailed by a system of limits and prohibitions;

24 Fred Botting the drive becomes a constant pressure that abjects as much as it upholds, causing dissatisfaction, devaluation, disappointment. Shopping is, for example, impelled by a demand for more and more consumption on commodities that promise fulfi lment but never quite succeed in delivering it (Lieberman 247). In the absence or, as Kristeva calls it, the “collapse” of the Other (the loosening of social, sacred and communal bonds), the rise of abjection is calibrated to the decline of prohibition and foregrounds those wastes—often bodily—that disrupt and maintain social and subjective borders (18). The waste of consumer capitalism becomes an overriding principle built into its patterns of useless spending and the exploitation of desire beyond moral or rational restraints (Goux 210). If, as it was for Lacan, the surplus value of industrial capitalism was “an imitation surplus jouissance,” then consumer capitalism is predicated on the endless production of excesses and intensities: contemporary consumer economies, in which the imagined freedom of the market and the self appears as the only imperative, elicit jouissance at the expense of regulation (Other 81). The call for more and more (jouissance, performance, expenditure) is evident in the “bombardments” of advertising, the slogans directed at consumers, in advice columns in magazines and self-help books and lifestyle glossies: “the imperative is to have a bigger, better, more ecstatic orgasm, body, career, sense of motherhood, relationship etc.” This is a pressure for the “excess of jouissance”—a pressure that becomes articulated as choice itself and is taken to excess in the absence of restraint; after all, the “lack of social prohibitions with regard to what kind of jouissance is socially acceptable” (Salecl, Anxiety 146). Yet the excess of choice also produces anxiety: what do I really desire? Is this the right thing? Am I living up to my full potential? Given the absence of any structure, boundaries or limits against which desire can be plotted, it is impossible to distinguish one’s true desire or complete jouissance from all the others on display shelves or on screens. This absence of an external framework, a big Other, makes any decision traumatic (Salecl, “Society” 168). The multiple calls for choice have contradictory effects and feed pathological consumption such as ‘addictions’ to shopping, sex, alcohol—and lead to the consumption of more therapeutic services like counselling, support groups, self-help manuals: “it looks as if free consumers end by consuming themselves” (160). The implosion of consumption on itself manifests the repetition of jouissance to disturbing extremes (obesity, substance abuse) so that intense pleasure-pain is sought out beyond the measures of good health and longevity, a path toward (self)destruction enjoined by and in excess of the very excesses embedded in consumption. It is as if, along with the impossible freedoms of consumption, the subject internalises the inconsistencies and contradictions of capitalism, manifesting pathologies not of privation but overabundance: stress, eating disorders, self-harming, and a range of anxieties (Anxiety 160). Where psychoanalytic ethics traces the ambivalence and disequilibrium of excess, contemporary forms of ethics are part

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of the management strategy of a generalised excess controlling the specificities and unpredictabilities of individuals, situated within the “self-satisfied egoism of the affluent West, with advertising, and with service rendered to the powers that be” (Badiou 7). It manages vainly, either encouraging more (albeit kinder and fairer) trade in the same system of competition or it negates forms of enjoyment perceived as inimical to “life,” “optimisation,” “good(s)”: it cannot deal with differences that are too different and institutes a “resignation in the face of necessity,” a nihilistic, death driven, “purely negative” will entirely compliant with economy (“the modern name for necessity, as everyone knows, is economics” ) (30). This will to nothingness is the death drive, the condition of being consumed by (inescapable) economic criteria with no alternative or other possibility for thought, judgement, action (33); it is a will in which will is effaced, in which death equals complete symbolic absorption and paralysis. Death-driven in this way, the subject abandons desire, and cedes to a specific excess. In this, Badiou is right to note the strength of Lacan’s ethical statement (“do not give up on your desire”), for he locates it in relation to that “excess beyond oneself which enables the passing through of truth (and superhumanity)” (47–49). Evil—in the conservatism and materialism of a Western capitalist ethos—is “that which it does not own or enjoy” (14): in seeking out evil and rendering its victims or perpetrators subhuman, the West can enjoy its own mastery and reaffi rm its assumed superiority. If this enjoyment parallels consumer jouissance to the point of charting an implosive spiral towards self-destruction, then it is also an excessive affirmation (of rights, life) that is paradoxically an intensification of the hold of a systematic paralysis and resignation to a nihilistic line of capitalism. But that other mode of excess—a death drive evident in Lacan’s Ethics—suggests a more radical negativity that through destruction raises the possibility of recreation. Industrial and postindustrial, the zombie metaphor encompasses capitalism’s inherent and systemic cannibalism and its effects on individual beings, turning them into rabid, mindless consumers, embodiments of its own excess (Jameson 258; Fisher 15). Love your zombie does not only make monstrous the system that dehumanises its worker-consumers, it confronts subjectivity with an excess that is both other and not quite other enough; it opens up the self to something outside its own grasp and simultaneously to an interiority too intimate to be avowed, asking for identification in the face of disgust and repulsion, moving beyond oneself, one’s home, one’s images, and the very system that polices the limits of existence.

WALKING DEAD Zombie fictions, along with many returns on screens, in games and graphic fictions, are on the rise. Although they have, unsurprisingly, an excessive dimension, usually associated with capitalist consumption, this is not

26 Fred Botting obviously or necessarily ethical. Two strands of ethics—the contemporary media-managerial form that polarises good and evil, reinforcing the parameters of Western capitalism, and a more troubling ethics of excess and horror—are evident in presentations of infection, consumption, dehumanisation and destruction. In some cases, the excesses of contemporary culture are rendered revolting and obscene, in others pathetic and laughable. But loving one’s zombie, whether it be a monster that disturbs or reinforces differences between life and death, that parodies or critiques monstrous systems of control, or offers an uncomplicated object of destruction, is an injunction that will always remain at issue in terms of excesses of pleasure, violence and consumption. While humans can be zombified, zombies—despite their recent assumption of reflective consciousness, speech and wit—rarely fi nd themselves humanised. As its title suggests, World War Z imagines excess on a global scale. Written as an addendum to a UN report documenting the economic, social and political consequences of a decades-long struggle with a world-wide zombie epidemic, the book takes the form of fragments: short interview statements from protagonists in different roles and from different countries are offered as a supplement—the “human factor”—to an official report comprised of statistics, facts and tables. Through these interviews, anecdotes and witness statements, the peculiar and particular events and personal experiences are detailed. The context is clearly biopolitical: texts made up of factual accounts, statistics, demographics and strategic policies do not leave enough room for the details of human struggle, heroism and suffering. A supplement, the text completes an official (inhuman) report with emotions and experiences that are inadmissible to an order of facts and figures and, in adding human sentiment, it then begins to exceed official requirements. The “human factor” is supplementary, an afterthought, in the global order which is the setting in and against which the rise of the zombie infection is plotted. Economic migrations, flows of goods and bodies, organ trafficking and viral infection are the dead excesses, while capitalism is the obscenity that is mirrored by zombie masses: its entrepreneurial exploitation of the virus and the fear it evokes (Brooks 54–5); its cultivation of celebrity arrogance; its overreliance on technological gadgets in business and war (94)—all of these things are shown to be callous, useless or ineffective. The roads out of urban centres are littered with “hair dryers, GameCubes, laptops by the dozen” (123). These objects—now utterly useless—are taken not for reasons of consumer stupidity but from fear that these precious Things will be stolen, a clinging to a way of life they cannot imagine relinquishing. Still, ways of life are more radically overturned as survivors redefi ne the values necessary to survive: white-collar managerial classes are reclassified as useless and are retrained (in carpentry, building, metalwork) by the servants (often immigrants) who they once employed on low wages. If the ethos and material support of comfortable Western life is—rather enjoyably—inverted in the novel’s portrayal of global capitalism’s

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excesses, its ethics—though turning on excess—is more suspect. No identification, sympathy, recognition or understanding can be admitted; there is no humanisation of the other that was once human. What is left is just vigilance, discipline and violence, like the wars waged on terror with a total and omnipresent threat that legitimates any extreme force and mobilises an entire population (Hardt and Negri 13; Virilio 160–61). Identification is fatal: the other must remain utterly other—it is an “enemy” who is “actively waging total war”: “every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth” (Brooks 273). The tireless inhuman multiplicity of capitalist consumption is agglomerated and expelled, while excess is countered by greater excess, and consumption consumed in global jouissance: the ethics it demands is one of evil, of an object to be sacrificed as immense as the value one imagines recovering. The excesses mobilised in the war are extremely pleasurable and distinctly unpalatable—human, even humanising, but far from humane. One survivor describes the crude but highly effective weapon designed for use against zombies; it is a metal spike called a “lobo,” which is cheap, practical and effective, but which is also used more often than necessary because “it just felt good . . . personal, empowering. You could feel the skull split. A real rush, like you were taking back your life, you know?” The intensity of emotional energy—moving the subject beyond practicality or utility—signals a recovery of one’s stolen way of life. It is beyond morality, too: another witness discounts any claim to legitimacy on the grounds that zombies are already dead: “Horseshit; it’s murder, and it’s a rush like nothing else” (Brooks 331). Offering satisfaction in consumption-destruction beyond global commodificaiton, this murderous expenditure enables a recuperation of self and community, but at the expense of huge numbers of humans, if not humanity itself. Towards the end of the novel, for instance, Joe Muhammed, a wheelchair-bound Pakistani-American artist, notes that the war has united humans in a “powerful shared experience.” And his observations have shocking implications that are readily acknowledged in his denial: “I’m not going to say the war was a good thing. I’m not that much of a sick fuck, but you’ve got to admit that it did bring people together” (Brooks 336). Not that much of a sick fuck: not quite, but close. Although he stops short of affi rming global devastation worthwhile, the suggestion remains that such an apocalyptic fantasy feeds on the zombie threat. Immense suffering and slaughter become a condition of human renewal: a monstrous, excessive, inhuman idea. Other engagements with capital’s unbearable and intimate excesses offer a closer, if critical, identification between fi nanciers, consumers and zombies. These texts enact an old logic of monstrosity that, through hyperbolic and obscene images, seems to recoil from extremes. Way of the Barefoot Zombie, for instance, presents a bifurcated identification with the zombie image of capitalism—both its systemic and subjective forms—that seems ethical in its denunciation of inhuman excesses. Written after the credit crunch, the cold satire of the text foregrounds the obscenity of wealth creation and

28

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the people who enjoy it; in one section, a group of super-rich, self-obsessed, indulgent, greedy, and viciously arrogant characters attend a luxurious and exclusive corporate-consultancy training programme on an isolated islet off the coast of Haiti. Their lack of morality and human empathy is echoed by the fact that they are learning a specialist technique to become even wealthier: this technique involves, in a parody of management training seminars (an idea-gimmick; a guru-guide; successful motivational speakers; expensive facilities), becoming single-minded and focused with the aim of literally shedding their humanity. They want, in line with advertising slogans and corporate mottoes, to “fi nd that extra something,” “success beyond success,” and the “path to wealth beyond reason and power beyond excess” (Bark 19). To exceed humanity—“that enfeebling impediment”—is to jettison it, dispensing with compassion, altruism, sympathy, self-reflection and conscience in order to accumulate more effectively. And zombies have a “single-minded sense of purpose”: they “want it more” and they are driven by a hunger that is “raw and real” (Bark 30). Moving with and acting like zombies, the participants in the training programme are forced to kill and eat the innards of union activists, an act they enthusiastically enjoy. Not only is capital shown to be inhuman and cannibalistic, but its subjects are willing to discard any (human) values that delimit its expansion. Zombies are no longer repulsive (that is, after all, a weak human response), but they are embraced and imitated as their horror transforms into an object of aspiration on the path to inhuman excess. The novel offers another identification with the zombie through a powerful idealisation: the walking corpses are “noble monsters, death defiers, graveyard rebels,” “magnificent” “awesome creatures.” Passive-aggressive antagonists of consumer culture, zombies are admired and imitated (through dress and zombie walks) by a group of teenage kids from the same class as the voracious entrepreneurs who aspire to consuming single-mindedness. A complicit alternative, an equivalent and antithetical identification, the sacralisation of the zombie as anti-capitalist rebel requires protest and action: the teenagers form the “ZLF” (Zombie Liberation Front) and plan to free captive zombies. This parody of animal rights activism—ZLF being equivalent to the animal liberation front (ALF)—and the social position of the teenagers align their humanism with a sanctification of the outcast and the subhuman status of the traumatised victim: their abjection and self-loathing is magnified in their idealisation of zombies. At the end, there is a discussion of the significance of zombies for Western audiences and this draws out a clear moral (a moral that is updated, in the main, from Romero’s films and supplemented by further animal-eco-sentimental platitudes about consumer culture): zombies are the (not-so) “secret” image of “ourselves and society”; they are figures of the way we go about “mindlessly consuming material things” and “devouring the world’s resources” (Bark 307). Monstrosity is turned to a good and moral purpose—it is a warning

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about the fate of a world in crisis. But its recognition of the imminence of global economic and ecological disaster is dampened as the teenagers simply readjust and become better persons, more at ease with themselves, their families and the—unchanged—world. One returns home, determined to patch up his relationship with his mother and foster father, the other remains on the island to continue the healing spiritual journey offered by Vodun, open to that “invisible world” previously lacking in her spoilt, materialistic lifestyle: “having a faith allows me to be the person I really am” (315). Leaving behind disaffection and political-economic critique, the novel, closing with self-discovery and spiritual fulfilment, performs its own (ironic) ethical-managerial programme.

TALKING DEAD Identification with the zombie takes on multiple variations: the abject figure, the sacred creature, the pitiful monster, the victim. All manifestations, though, shadow the contemporary ethics surrounding the maintenance of, albeit inverted, distinctions between master and slave, self and other. “Wound culture,” “traumaculture” or “victim culture” are the names sometimes given to discourses that display the “conformism of abjection” (Foster 166). Otherness is rendered attractive in that it delivers a curious specialness: pain and trauma mark out the individual’s irreducible uniqueness, and authorise its rights to speak against normative social pressures. But this is not an ethics of care or otherness in which difference is respected or acknowledged; rather, it is a cry for recognition and love from a cold and absent Other (institutions, parents, other people, the world) and from a self whose narcissism is without support. When that cry—in fictions where corpses speak—comes from a zombie, the intimate and inextricable entanglements of abjection and otherness pathetically and comically display a world of helpless selves in a monstrous system of prejudice and exclusion. The pseudo-sacralisation of abjection, of an otherness so other it must be unique, is laid out in fictions of the talking corpse. When the world is presented from the position of the zombie, questions that should not arise—of self-consciousness, speech, subjectivity—become pressing, pathetic and comic. Reversals of perspective engender genre satire (romzomcom), social satire, or, less clearly marked, open a gentle traumatisation correlated to the absence of a governing framework in the outside-less-ness of hypercapital that implodes on the zombified individual. Difference and sameness elide without strangeness: to be undead is neither homely nor unhomely, neither same nor other; it is a kind of “non-state” where the subject is automated through a series of repetitions and habituations. A focus on the oxymoronic “zombie self” enables the implosions of zombie-making capital to be expounded in (comic) detail

30 Fred Botting and banal monstrosity; here, the daily mechanisms whereby beings are individuated, alienated and excluded are itemised in terms of a pervasive but barely detectable sense of social monstrosity. Otherness becomes harder to place because the “other”—the zombie—speaks with practically the same voice, reflecting on an existence that is neither living nor dead. And this speaking subject articulates itself from a position of familiar anxiety, a position identified with so many subjects of Western capitalism as they ask poignant questions about identity and seek out resolutions for feelings of loss, inadequacy and alienation. Curiously, the gamut of emotions and anxieties evinced by zombies in the romzomcom Breathers is barely removed from those commonly displayed in adolescence, or by sufferers of addiction, abuse or trauma. The condition of “spontaneous resurrection” is quite common in the novel’s contemporary setting (the US west coast) and this “condition” is the subject of popular talk shows and liberationist political slogans. Written from the perspective of a recently dead man who now lives—due to social stigma—in his parents’ cellar, the plot seems to revolve around the familiar stories of adolescent familial tensions. He drinks a lot, goes to therapy and attends a support group (“Undead Anonymous”) where “survivors” (ironically reversing usual movie distinctions between humans and zombies) utter numerous self-help mantras like “I am not a victim,” “believe in yourself” and “help yourself” (46). Counselling addresses the pressures of undeath and the victimisation suffered at the hands of the living (these include curfews, being caged in the animal pound, vigilante attacks, theft of limbs). They have no civil rights, no vote, no driver’s licences, no credit cards; they cannot run for office, enter shops, eat in restaurants, go to the movies, receive welfare support or employment benefits. Crassly, their social position is compared with African-Americans in pre-Civil Rights America.Yet these zombies have feelings and needs. Offering a refuge from prejudice and hostility, the self-help group allows personal growth and provides companionship; it even enables a very fulfi lling and intense romance to develop between the protagonist and another—extremely attractive—walking corpse. The path back to physical and mental wellbeing does not come through counselling’s management of expectations or the adjustment of self to the demands of a hostile set of norms. Ironically, though, it does fulfi l some therapeutic mantras: they learn to accept—even love—who they are. They are zombies. And being zombies means doing what zombies—for all their emotions, passions and sensitivities—do best. At fi rst, they enjoy jars of preserved “venison meat,” preferring the fl avour of this homemade and rougher food to the tasteless fare they are offered at home. Their enjoyment of this foodstuff correlates with its nutritional value: it stimulates regeneration. Eating human flesh is delicious; it is so tasty it overrides any residually human moral qualms. Quickly moving to fresh meat, they discover that human flesh is very

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much their Thing: “only a higher intelligence could make breathers taste so good” (Browne 191, 194). The intensity is overwhelming: “once you eat part of your mother during a candlelight dinner with your undead girlfriend, you pretty much know you’ve chosen a path most people aren’t going to understand” (Browne 220). Nothing is quite as tasty as freshly cooked mother. The passive-aggressive complaint of the uniquely misunderstood—a parodic refrain of personal attachment to one’s singular suffering running throughout the novel—assumes a less defensive tone as the hero embraces his condition in an ironic endorsement and affi rmation of standard counselling advice: he has clearly learned to “help himself”! In a truly and disturbingly ethical manner he does not give up on himself or his desire, but unapologetically recognises who he is: “after all,” he utters, “I am a zombie” (206). This acceptance is made precisely in terms of acknowledging—against all reason, custom, habit—the nature of the jouissance that defi nes him, horrible and cannibalistic though it is. The novel does not end with a happy zomb-discovery or a fulfi lling romance or an end to abuse and discrimination; instead, vigilante attacks and vindictive reprisals reassert social animosities in the public sphere. In the end, differences remain unbridgeable: “we are zombies; we eat breathers” (Browne 305). The double-edged comedy of Breathers pushes the logic of the romzomcom to its reversible limit. Not only does the use of the zombie fi rst-person narrative play with the standard tropes of the genre (zombies are no longer will-less, speech-less, non-conscious objects) and refl exively debunk popular media and movie myths. But it only undermines generic expectations up to a specific point: for all the therapy, irony, and identifications, zombies are quite happy being flesh-eating walking corpses. They enjoy it. The counter-generic satirical humanisation that is developed throughout the novel eventually inverts itself and, in so doing, reasserts the primary feature of zombie mythology. Once these lines are redrawn and clarified, the society can breathe—and destroy—again. The novel’s reversals are, then, reversed again; the sympathy induced in its satire on social customs and monstrosity—a critique that apparently exposes the hypocrisies, de-humanisations, abuse and exclusion of contemporary “liberal” society—turns again on itself; it ultimately targets the “monsters” themselves, and their pathetic adoption of an otherness supported by ethical and therapeutic paraphernalia sustaining the position of the victim, the wounded, the wretched. Beneath its ironies, Breathers, it seems, is not a particularly tolerant or liberal novel. Affi rmations of otherness as sites for self-recognition no longer seem valid or effective positions for securing identity or selfhood, for these sites are eventually attacked in a reassertion of irreconcilable differences and conventional hierarchies. In the conjunction of generic and anti-social satire, the main object of criticism becomes visible: the ongoing process of cultural-critical de-monstering

32 Fred Botting in which various figures of alterity and repugnance become emblematic of marginal and excluded social positions and sustain a waning critique aimed at displaying a resistant or progressive political posture. Thankfully, zombies—even thinking, feeling, loving ones—are not so compliant when it comes to accepting their designated place as others or victims; they remain destructive and negative, yet ethically, they are true to their flesh-eating nature. The inevitability of absolute division. This form of otherness is utterly opposed to categories of self that it nonetheless constitutes and dissolves at the same time, and this is, of course, one of the ironic consolations of zombie fictions in a world in which uncertainty in respect to the Other is omnipresent. If the price paid for the return of antithesis and opposition is violence and destruction, then so much the better: zombie excess sustains human excess, for it perpetuates an apocalyptic, satisfying, sacrificial expenditure and sublime enjoyment-unto-death in which self—indeed all selves—escape the paralysis of life-in-death and zombie repetition. The fi rst-person zombie protagonist of Warm Bodies offers ironic reflections on the similarities of life before and after his kind have overrun the planet. Now they are resigned and tired, but capable of wit: perhaps the muteness of the dead signals that “they have nothing left to say,” as if worn out by the pressures, banalities and low-level anxieties besetting contemporary existence (Marion 11). Or perhaps they are just exhausted by the omnipresent crises, threats and disasters that constantly plague them: “when the entire world is built on death and horror, when existence is a constant state of panic, it’s hard to get worked up about any one thing, specific fears have become irrelevant” (36). Little difference is apparent between a zombie speaking in the aftermath of global devastation and consumers at the start of the twenty-fi rst century. Zombie self-consciousness, world-weary and worn-out, maintains the link between ambivalent identifi cation and contemporary cultural commentary: the collapsing near future from which the zombie narrator speaks addresses a present that has already collapsed. Present anomie and excess and future devastation are linked spatially: zombies congregate in a city airport, some enjoying, when the power fl ickers on, the same old pleasures of riding escalators just for the sake of something to do. Non-people now, they are habituated to the non-places defi ning the late twentieth-century. Zombie life still involves old habits. They wander aimlessly around non-places, groaning, fucking, falling in love, marrying, and even practicing religion—in a diminished, hollow fashion. Where love used to be “an exercise in agony,” it has been reduced to wandering hand-in-hand without saying much. And sex too: they are described as “naked [and] awkwardly slamming their bodies together, grunting and groping each other’s pale flesh. He was limp. She was dry” (Marion 58). If the difference

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appears minimal, it is felt to be—at least by the protagonist—an immense gulf. Religion is similarly emptied of all but semblance: ‘a gathering in the middle of a circle of mobile airplane steps waves and groans at the behest of a zombie preacher. The narrator laments one particular loss: the forgotten names of self and other, and the subsequent severance from continuity, connection, history and futurity. Still, he recalls “effort” and “targets and deadlines, goals and ambitions,” his former life as corporate and managerial as his current zombified surroundings. Death, from this perspective, “is not so bad”; it offers a “distilled” world that is emptied out of all the extraneous, yet once essential, trappings of Western life. Thus, a “chasm” remains between the zombie self and its environment, an experience that is, in an existential way, a fear of open spaces: For it forces one to be in a space without hard lines, roofs or horizons, an experience that is “strangely horrific” as one stares “at the gaping maw of the sky,” at its “emptiness vast and absolute,” an image, it seems, of the vacuum within (Marion 4). Feeding remains a powerful and fulfi lling imperative. It provides a rush that is intensely anticipated: “electricity in limbs,” “visions of blood,” “mesmerizing red flowing through bright pink tissues in intricate webs and Pollock fractals pulsating and vibrating with life” (14). Zombie jouissance, death encountering and gorging on life, is intense, full and vibrant, with fl ashes of a victim’s memory and the pain. As a result, the zombie hero fi nds his own feeding unpleasant, appalled by the victims’ screams, agony and suffering (7). Yet human food, rather than humans as food, is relatively unpalatable, for it is devoid of living substance: a “lifeless waste” of “empty calories.” “En . . . joy!” parodies the zombie as he delivers a frozen meal to a human captive (Marion 41). Lifeless human food; lifeless human life: the “warm bodies” of the title play out a similarly diminished existence, in which the body is driven by survival alone. They have retreated to a reinforced city sports stadium, “gaudy monument to an era of excess, a world of waste and want and misguided dreams that is now profoundly over” (Marion 113). The “card house of civilisation” has collapsed, the “big picture is gone,” any vision of the future has vanished (119; 70). In a world dominated by the need to survive, the daily diet is a meagre ration of synthetic carbohydrates supplemented by a few spindly greens. Days are spent scavenging for useful supplies. Militarised—as though the war on terror has become routine—the remaining citizens are marshalled to prepare against imminent attack: it is a “posthuman, posthumous age” stripped of meaning and higher purpose, it is another form of joyless living death after the end of the world. Neither side—humans nor zombies—are inclined to relinquish the life-in-death that defi nes them and to which they are bound by repetition, habit and fear. Both groups are fully conditioned to living out the end of the world in as limited and desperate a fashion

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as possible. Paralysis before extinction takes the death drive to a global level: all are living an end that has already happened; every one and thing is exhausted and resigned within a horizon-less land where life-in-death and death-in-life are a sorry encore. Yet the zombie protagonist and a young human woman are impelled to challenge the implosion of consumption upon itself by refusing stasis and indifference. He leaves the mass of undead and refuses to feed; he also cares for his counterpart, and is stirred by an impulse for some other way of life, neither zombie nor human, that can release them from the confi nes of oppositional (non)living. Like his female counterpart, he has not given up on desire, the world, or its future: without any particular plan they try to transform existing patterns. By refusing mirrored paralysis and inevitable extinction, they follow the death drive’s ethical excess, seeking some “Other thing,” that might lead to a new idea of existence that goes beyond the prevailing orders (Lacan, Ethics 212). Negative and romantic, the transformation is ushered in with a transgressively joyous act: a kiss-bite that shatters the ultimate zombie-human taboo—the sharing of bodily fluids. In ecstasy and agony, life and anti-life struggle in monstrous viral confl ict before reaching a crisis point. In the face of individual and global extinction, this act serves to reinvigorate life as something more than survival or feeding; it is unpredictable, risky and unknown. Their act stems from an ethics of excess; in the face of a situation that reduces everything, they refuse to give up on their desire, and they will not give in to a living death that was not their own. Their break with their respective groups moves them beyond themselves. In this, they remain true to an indefi nable pressure shaping their actions—to “what’s squirming in our bones when everything else is stripped” (Marion 148). Beyond the end of the world, their drive seeks something other than an exhausted rapacious condition of equivalently consumptive zombie-humanity gone beyond its historical destiny: “I think we crushed ourselves down over centuries. Buried ourselves under greed and hate and whatever other sins we could fi nd until our souls finally hit rock bottom of the universe. And then they scraped a hole through it, into some . . . dark place” (221). Buried in death, beyond death, in a darkness deeper than the bottom of the universe, the image of consumptiondestruction is more—and less—than total. Becoming less than death, there is no transcendence, no idealist fantasy. But the strangely ethical romance between human and zombie (ridiculous though the sublimity of the plot may seem) refuses un-death through an act of sovereignty, gesturing to an impossible form of insubordination and resurrection, of un-undeath: “We will exhume ourselves” (239). Already dead, already zombie, already in a dark hole beyond the end of the world, the excess they acknowledge (ethical, other, immortal) is internal to and outside of humanity. Thus, they are beyond the parameters marked out by life and death, a desire sustained rather than ceded. Love your zombie: it may change the world.

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WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Badiou, Alain. Ethics. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001. Bark, Jasper. Way of the Barefoot Zombie. Oxford: Abaddon Books, 2009. Beard, Steve. “No particular place to go.” Sight and Sound (1993): 30–31 Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004. Brooks, Max. World War Z. London: Duckworth, 2006. Browne, S. G. Breathers. New York: Broadway Books, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1988. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Winchester: Zero Books, 2009. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real. Ann Arbor: MIT Press, 1996. Golden, Christopher. Ed. Zombie. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2010. Goux, Jean-Joseph. “General Economics and Postmodern Polemics.” Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 206–24. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Multitude. London: Penguin, 2006. Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. New York: Routledge, 1997. Jameson, Fred. “Culture and Finance Capital.” In The Jameson Reader. Edited by Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 255–74. Keene, Brian. “The Wind Cries Mary.” In Zombie. Edited by C. Golden. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2010. 171–6. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: an Essay in Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2007. Latham, Rob. Consuming Youth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. Edited by Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. . Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publications, 1991. . Totality and Infi nity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. Lieberman, Rhonda. “Shopping disorders.” In The Politics of Everyday Fear. Edited by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 245–65. Lindqvist, J. A. Handling the Undead. Trans. Ebba Segerberg, London: Querus, 2009. Luckhurst, Roger. “Traumaculture.” new formations 50 (2003): 28–57. Marion, Isaac. Warm Bodies, London: Vintage, 2010. Martin, George R. R. “Meathouse Man.” In The Living Dead. Edited by John Joseph Adams. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2008. 277–98. Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Extimité.” Prose Studies 11.3 (1988): 121–31 Oates, Joyce Carol. Zombie, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. Rajchman, John. Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics. London: Routledge, 1991. Salecl, Renata. On Anxiety, London: Routledge, 2004. . “Society of Choice,” differences 20.1 (2009): 157–80 Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers. London: Routledge, 1998. Shaviro, Steve. “Capitalist Monsters.” Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002): 281–90.

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Stone, A. R. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Virilio, Paul. Negative Horizon. Trans. Michael Degener. London: Continuum, 2008. Źiźek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

2

Vampires, Mad Scientists and the Unquiet Dead Gothic Ubiquity in Post-9/11 US Television Linnie Blake The trail of blood is endless: from the subjugation of the Philippines and Central America, to the greatest terrorist acts of all, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; from the devastation of Indochina, such as the murder of 600,000 peasants in neutral Cambodia, and the use of chemicals and starvation against civilian populations, to the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane and the bombing of prisoners-ofwar in a mud fort in Afghanistan. The documentation of American terrorism is voluminous, and because such truths cannot be rationally rebutted, those who mention them, drawing the obvious connections between them, are often abused as “anti-American,” regardless of whether or not they themselves are American. (Pilger 141)

The opening years of the twenty-fi rst century have seen the US “peering into the abyss of the future” in a manner unprecedented since the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York Times 21 September 2001). With a National Security Strategy that affirms the American right to conduct “preventive war,” or “anticipatory self-defence” on nations deemed to be a threat (a strategy that has led to an outright rejection of both the UN Security Council ruling on Iraq and the UN Charter’s rules on the use of force) the US has, in recent years, set out to represent said nations not only as “an imminent threat to our survival” but as “the ultimate evil” (Chomsky, Hegemony 12). Such gothicization of political discourse is clearly no coincidence, the Bush regime setting out to induce “a fear of just about everything” (20) in its citizenry as a means of justifying legislation like the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, which set out to redefi ne the very nature of American selfhood by granting the government the right to rescind citizenship. Lurking in the shadows of the nation-as-bedroom, it seemed, was the demonic terrorist threat—a threat so potent that in February 2002 the “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the American Sciences had been advanced by two minutes, this being reckoned the most dangerous point in time since the nuclear standoff of 1962. And the American people had good reason to be afraid, theirs being a world in which some tens of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons were known to be stored in poorly controlled conditions, making accidental launch more likely than ever, whilst the build-up of nuclear arsenals in China, Pakistan and India added to the danger of

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nuclear capability being sold-on to countries such as North Korea, Iran and Syria, nations themselves consistently demonised in the American media. Yet if the spectre of terroristic outrage and nuclear annihilation were not terrifying enough, the prospect of cataclysmic environmental degradation has been repeatedly foregrounded by in the media in recent years, with Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning fi lm An Inconvenient Truth (2006) documenting former Vice President Al Gore’s longstanding and high-profi le exposure of the links between American consumerism and global warming and highlighting, in turn, the potentially suicidal nature of the Republican stance against the Kyoto Protocol. In this decidedly eschatological climate, where terrorism, nuclear weapons and environmental degradation ostensibly have vied against each other to end the world, popular culture has become overrun by monsters. The Harry Potter books (and their film franchise) have brought ghosts and witches, ancient castles, curses, questing heroes and secrets from the dark past to a contemporary mass youth-oriented audience.1 The Underworld franchise has done much the same for vampires and werewolves, 2 and the Resident Evil series has revivified the ambulant dead for a new generation of cinemagoers.3 The world of computer gaming is haunted by a plethora of ghosts and demons,4 werewolves and shapeshifters, 5 revenants and vampires.6 Online gaming offers participants the chance to act out their gothic fantasies within a virtual community of likeminded role-players,7 whilst numerous online fora have enabled members to live a virtual existence, becoming the dark creature that takes their fancy. As teenage romance has become entirely gothicised,8 even cutting edge designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Stefano Pilati have brought the goth aesthetic to the highfashion catwalk (Spooner 125–54). Never slow to exploit a trend, the world of advertising has increasingly used the vampire as a means of selling everything from Ray-Ban sunglasses to Mazda cars and Revlon lipstick: the latter having recently launched a “Just Bitten” range that includes a shade called “Twilight,” in profitable homage to Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling series of vampire romances. For as Alexandra Warwick has quite rightly affi rmed, the gothic is everywhere (5). And what is at stake, I argue, is the very meaning of America in the modern world, specifically the philosophy of freedom, equality and opportunity that putatively underpins the nation’s self-image. In her provocative article “Feeling Gothicky,” Alexandra Warwick explores the omnipresent relocation of the gothic from the margins to the centre of cultural production and critical debate. In the process, she argues, the thematic concerns, character types, plot devices and symbolic machinery of the gothic have been reduced to little more than “dead metaphors” that “no longer serve the purpose” of the mode as she conceives it—this being the articulation of the otherwise socially, culturally and psychologically unspeakable (9). For although the gothic continues to deploy a familiar range of constantly shifting encoded modal devices, Warwick argues,

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the meanings these once illuminated (or uncovered) have been hollowed out; they now signify little beyond their own characteristics, evoking little more than a “gothicky” feeling for consumers. The upshot is a proliferation of texts that bespeak little more than a consumer desire for an otherwise absent trauma which, in a post-psychoanalytic world, “is almost not permissible to be without” (11). Warwick offers valuable insights into the current state of gothic studies (particularly the tendency of critics to colonise a range of generic forms for the gothic). But her argument is predicated on an implicit denial of the traumatic effects of the events of recent years that I would like to address here— specifically, the seismic shifts that have been wrought to available models of American national identity in the wake of 9/11. As such, this chapter takes as its subject many of Warwick’s key concerns: the ostensible omnipresence of gothic texts in recent years, the implications of this for gothic studies and whether, in the face of the ostensible ubiquity of the form, the gothic can serve any psycho-socially illuminative function whatsoever. Focusing on the medium of TV drama series (which has witnessed the most startling proliferation of gothic plots, themes, characters and devices over the course of the past ten years), I explore how the gothic has become the means par excellence for addressing the national zeitgeist; after all, this is a period in which “[t]he most powerful state in history has proclaimed that it intends to control the world by force, the dimension in which it reigns supreme” (Chomsky, Interventions 13). Writing in a context in which “America cherishes her enemies” for “without enemies, she is a nation without purpose and direction” (Blum 15), I explore how the vampires, demons, mad scientists, psychics, shapeshifters and serial killers of television dramas like Supernatural (2005–), Medium (2005–2010), Fringe (2008–), The Ghost Whisperer (2005–2010) and True Blood (2008–) fulfi l a significant range of cultural functions. They offer, of course, a set of readymade exempla of the dark forces against which the nation must struggle. But they do so in a world in which “President Bush and his cohorts evidently believe that the means of violence in their hands are so extraordinary that they can dismiss with contempt anyone who stands in their way” (Chomsky, Interventions 13). In this, the monsters of contemporary TV gothic fulfi l an additional, metatextual function. For in their deployment of gothic tropes, these series expose the will to power in American foreign and domestic policy. This, then, allows for an otherwise unspoken articulation of the models of gendered, ethnic and class-bound identities available to Americans in a post9/11 world, and hence, what it now means to call oneself “an American.” This is not without precedent, however. Gothic series drama initially emerged on American television in the 1990s against a backdrop of three historic events that had a profound effect on contemporary American selfimage. The fi rst was the siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which the Weaver family clashed with the US Marshals Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—resulting in deaths on both sides. The second was the Waco

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massacre of 1993 in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and then the FBI attacked a Branch Davidian community living outside Waco, Texas—killing eighty-two members, including twenty children and two pregnant women. The third was the 1995 revenge bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. This act was carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in retaliation for the events at Waco and Ruby Ridge; 168 people were killed, including nineteen children under the age of six. Such events, of course, marked a division between the state’s will to regulate citizens (through legislation and force) and certain citizens’ refusal to be so regulated. In response to the perceived loss of civil liberties, the mid-1990s saw a massive upswing in membership of essentially right-wing militias; by 1996, 858 such groups existed across the US (“Militias in retreat” BBC News May 11, 2001). Each was engaged “in a variety of anti-government rhetoric [ranging] from the protesting of government policies to the advocating of violence and/or the overthrow of the federal government” (FBI Project Megiddo Report [http://permanent.access. gpo.gov/lps3578/www.fbi.gov/library/megiddo/ megiddo.pdf. 21; accessed 1 June 2011]). In 1990 and 1991, Twin Peaks made an outstanding contribution to gothic TV’s visual and conceptual lexicon. In its wake, a range of gothic programmes addressed themselves to the climate of conspiratorial secrecy and social malaise that dominated popular perceptions of both the government and home-grown terrorist movements. Most notable, perhaps, was The X Files (1993–2002), in which inexplicable (and often supernaturally inflected) events unfold against the background of government intrigue. With its southern setting, ghostly visitations and supernatural forces, American Gothic (1995–1996) counterpoised the evil machinations of the town sheriff and the welfare of the people he purported to serve. Millennium (1996–1999) and Profiler (1996–2000) depicted protagonists Frank Black and Sam Waters using supernatural powers to serve the greater good. As antithetical conceptions of national identity fought it out for primacy throughout the 1990s, television gothic took “fear” as “its sustaining emotion,” and was “translated to the viewer through the creation of a certain ‘mood’ (melancholy, dread, the uncanny) as well as an emphasis on impressionistic renditions of (troubled) subjectivities” (Wheatley 163). Operating within the mode of the American Romance and pioneering a set of visual codes suited to the televisual medium, these programmes offered “heightened levels of fantasy, constructing a narrative universe in which social reality itself is continually set against subjective, individual and multiple perspectives” (Creeber 14). Such stylistic tendencies encapsulated a public sense that monologic governance had cut itself loose from the diversity of popular opinion. The gothic, then as now, offered a means of potentially seeing otherwise. Contemporary programmes that use such multi-perspectival cinematography include Medium and The Ghost Whisperer (2005–10), which draw

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upon the conventional links between women, children and the supernatural. Here, the dead are separated from the rational world of the living, but they are also able to intervene in its affairs to redress a past wrong or undo a previous repression. This is only possible, however, through living intermediaries who incorporate the investigative paradigm of the female gothic into the narrative; they piece together clues in order to bring about a resolution. In Medium, this figure is Allison Dubois, mother of three daughters and psychic consultant for the Phoenix District Attorney. In The Ghost Whisperer, she is Melinda Gordon, antique shop owner and at the show’s inception, loved-up newlywed. The subjectivity of these women is consistently rendered through point-of-view shots, specifically during hallucinatory or dream sequences in which access to the supernatural realm is granted. But this is also conveyed through rapid and nonsequential editing that also captures the protagonists’ point of view, often in a state of traumatised disorientation. Indeed, Allison tends to dream her psychic experiences and Melinda sees the dead walking about the everyday world; both scenarios insistent on an alignment of audience perspective and psychic point of view that naturalises the supernatural, locating it within the heart of the American family home and associating it with an ethic of restorative justice (the failings of the criminal justice system are addressed as our psychic detectives ensure that crimes are detected, criminals punished, secrets uncovered and families reunited). A slightly different territory is covered in Dead Like Me (2003–4), an American-Canadian coproduction set in Seattle and filmed in Vancouver. Here, a seventeen-year-old Georgia Lass (“expert at not giving a shit”) is killed in a freak space station toilet accident; she then becomes a Reaper who is charged with taking the souls of fellow accident victims minutes before they die (thus relieving the trauma of their often surreally violent demise). This, again, naturalises the afterlife and points to a model of cosmic justice that supersedes the earthbound judiciary; yet Dead like Me is also self-consciously funny, for even its opening credits playfully depict hooded and scythed reapers engaging in a range of ordinary, everyday activities from walking the dog and jogging, clocking in at work and going to the laundrette. For George, “death was just a wakeup call” that has enabled her to reassess the value of life. And so the series affirms the importance of taking responsibility for one’s actions, cherishing life and resigning oneself to its transitory nature. “You can’t save any of them,” says her supervisor Rube, “all you can hope to do is make it easier” (1:1). The similarities between Medium, The Ghost Whisperer and Dead Like Me do not erase the rather different perspectives on the themes of American-style justice and redemption. This is significant at a time when the US reasserts its foundational doctrine of redeeming the world. For just as American foreign policy identifies new “rogue states”—depending on the needs of the present—so does the series format of TV gothic allow for a “new and evil enemy” to be battled each week (Blum 16). This is, of course, highly reminiscent of the ways in which numerous nations—from North

42 Linnie Blake Korea to Libya, China to Iraq, Iran to Sudan, Afghanistan to Cuba—have been identified by American foreign policy as “each led by a Hitler-of-themonth, or at least a madman or mad dog, a degree of demonizing fit more for a theocratic society than a democratic one” (16). Supernatural insight, then, allows for identification of the criminals that in the everyday world are in danger of being missed or misidentified by the judiciary. In branding these enemies of order, though, it is notable that Alison Dubois and Melinda Gordon appeal to an authority higher than American law: this is a timely reminder that the natural order of things and the imperatives of the US government machine are not necessarily one and the same. George Lass, for instance, embodies a radically individualistic corporation-hating antiauthoritarianism that spurns conformity and sneers sarcastically at hierarchies in true militia style. In so doing, she suggests that for all the resources spent by the US “in alleged ‘democracy-building’ adventures around the world [it] desperately needs to revitalize the democratic process at home” (Chomsky, Interventions 93). This is, for Noam Chomsky, because “Americans can choose between major-party candidates who were born to wealth and political power, attended the same elite university, joined the same secret society that instructs members in the style and manners of the rulers, and are able to run because they are funded by much the same corporate powers” (Interventions 93). In a world in which the US claims divine sanction for its actions and evokes as its own a model of cosmic justice, it is the historically abject (the psychic, the witch, the undead woman) who enable audiences to see otherwise. And this alternative perspective remains a consistent feature of contemporary gothic TV. The creature who has made the most extraordinary leap in mass popularity in recent years is the vampire, which dominates True Blood and Vampire Diaries (2009–) and makes regular guest appearances in Supernatural. Having evolved beyond the folkloric nosferatu, the vampire appears in these series as the nineteenth-century seducer and the perverse twentieth-century sensualist. Phallic and yet oral totems of undead liminality, these vampires continue to possess a range of supernatural abilities: they can fly, “glamour” humans and resist mortality. Thus adhering to and refining several stock characteristics (in Vampire Diaries vampires are day-walkers, in True Blood and Supernatural they are not) the TV vampire of contemporary popular culture has become a significant figure for exploring the confl icts and tensions that underscore American subjectivity after 9/11. Based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels by Charlaine Harris, True Blood is set in a highly gothic American South—realistically evoked but populated, it transpires, by a range of supernatural creatures. Thus locating itself (in typical Romance mode) between real world and fairyland, the series undertakes a potent critique of American hypocrisy— specifically, the gap between the nation’s democratic and egalitarian selfimage and the realities of American social life. This is, after all, a very inward-looking community. For it is suspicious of strangers, particularly

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the shapeshifting bar owner Sam Merlotte and the vampire Bill Compton. The community tolerates but fears difference—those who stand out—and this has an impact on the human-fairy hybrid and telepath Sookie Stackhouse. Intolerance is part of this more generally bigoted culture—with more than its fair share of racism and homophobia—and these divisions and confl icts contribute to the influence of fundamentalist religiosity and Republican politics: “humans are shockingly susceptible,” Bill Compton laconically observes, “to every kind of thought manipulation.” True Blood is premised on the discovery (by Japanese scientists, two years prior to the narrative’s inception) of a commercially viable synthetic substitute for human blood. With access to this, the world’s substantial vampire population has come out of the shadows, demanding civil rights and equal participation in political and cultural life. In an atmosphere of heightened ethnic tensions engendered by 9/11, it is notable that True Blood draws significant parallels between earlier Afro-American and gay civil rights struggles with contemporary vampire rights. And the programme condemns state-sanctioned Islamophobia, asserting unequivocally that “judging a whole group of people based on the actions of a number of people within that group is morally wrong.” Embodying the horrors of the Iraq War (in the psychologically damaged figure of Terry the short-order cook) and peppering everyday speech with talk of government surveillance and waterboarding, the series is an insistently post-9/11 gothic subversion of some of the nation’s foundational myths and what it means to be an American. Most notable, perhaps, is the dysfunctional nature of that bastion of conservative self-image: the family. Sookie and Jason Stackhouse are orphans raised by a loving grandmother who, in time, will be murdered by the serial killer—tearing the family apart. Tara, Sookie’s best friend, has a mother who combines abusive alcoholism and Jesus-crazed fundamentalism. Tara’s cousin, Lafayette, the flamboyantly dressed gay man, shortorder chef and part-time dealer of vampire blood, works several jobs in order to keep his abusively schizophrenic mother in a comfortable hospital facility. Sam Merlotte is abandoned by his shape-shifting redneck mother and, later, by his adoptive parents who are horrified when they discover he can transform into a dog. Single parent Arlette, hitherto unsuccessful in love, plans to marry the fake-Cajun serial-killer Rene (believing she has fi nally found a man she can trust), and Bill Compton’s family has been fragmented by war, disease and, fi nally, his vampirism. The ignorant introspective intolerance of the community is most amusingly embodied in Hoyt’s overbearing mother who despises (amongst others) all Methodists (“I got my reasons”), Catholics (“Just priests. And nuns”), and African Americans (“Hush! That’s a secret!”). Like her community, she is “full of hate.” Season 2 elaborates on these themes. The introduction of the Fellowship of the Sun—a group of murderous vampire-hating evangelicals with a penchant for sexual hypocrisy, polyester and proselytising on TV—disseminate hate and violence. Ironically linked to jihadist groups of the Middle

44 Linnie Blake East (one of their members undertakes a suicide bombing mission on a vampire community) these “scared little boys with Bibles and crossbows” cannot be underestimated or discounted. For as the Viking Eric observes, their training camps are “overflowing with self-righteous extremists willing and ready to die for their cause.” Blurring the boundaries between “civilized” American humans and the savage, ethnically diverse, vampire other, True Blood engages with contemporary political agendas. It exposes, for instance, the unspeakable truth that “much of the world regards Washington as a terrorist regime” (Chomsky, Interventions 2) and that “there are few, if any, nations that harbor more terrorists than the United States” (Blum xv). Nan Flanagan, the public relations face of the vampire nation, states that organisations like the Fellowship of the Sun are so much a part of the nation’s social and economic fabric that they are able to “use their tax-exempt religious institution as a terrorist enclave” in a world where “the official defi nitions of terrorism are virtually the same as the defi nitions of counterterror” (Chomsky, Hegemony 188–9; his emphasis). And so, if the humans are aligned with Islamic extremists in True Blood, the vampires mimic sinister Republicans. This confi rmed by Stan—the swaggering black-clad leader of the Texas vampires—who echoes the American policy of preventive war: “You have pushed us too far. You expect us to sit on our thumbs while you round up your men to come and lynch us. We’ll kill you fi rst.” Preventive war is, as Chomsky reminds us “very simply, the ‘supreme crime’ condemned by Nuremberg” (Interventions 36). But the second season of True Blood does not only undermine any easy alignment of the vampire and the terrorist or the Republican and the forces of light. It is also an extended meditation on the invidious effects of dogmatic belief and the manipulability of the believer: the Queen of Louisiana warns that faith can “bend the laws of physics, or break them entirely.” Certainly, the depiction of the macro-politics of the human-vampire conflict engenders an extended exploration of the ways in which spirituality is deployed and debased in the pursuit of power. Organised religions and the nationalist agendas that deploy religious discourse are exposed as being motivated by a power-hungry force—an evil—that seeks out a pseudo-transcendent justification for perpetuating hatred, violence, murder and greed. At work here is not only a will to power, but also a will to destroy competing belief systems, a sentiment that is echoed in Maryanne-the-maenad’s control over the citizens of Bon Temps whom she describes, in a telling post-9/11 simile, as “little, remote control airplanes.” Maryanne believes that an ancient entity devoted to lust, anger and excess has been resident in the garden of the New World from the time of the early European settlements. Echoing the seventeenth-century belief in supernatural forces depicted in Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century gothic texts,9 Maryanne infuses neo-Puritanism with a distinctly Southern flair: she exposes the tensions at the heart of the community and the self-serving hypocrisy of its members. Slathered in what she terms “fake civilization bullshit,” the people of Bon Temps are

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so convinced of their inherent superiority over all-comers they are unable to see their own shortcomings, repeatedly intoning “we never done anything” as the town collapses around them.10 It’s an assertion, of course, that echoes the protests of bewildered innocence that followed the attacks on the Twin Towers. Only a people ignorant of the 1985 CIA bombing in Beiruit, the US’s facilitation of Shimon Peres’ bombing in Tunis and his Iron Fist operations in occupied Lebanon or its facilitation of Ariel Sharon’s offensives in the refugee camps of Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah could deem itself blameless. Only a nation that refused to take responsibility for the actions of its elected representatives could agree with George W Bush’s assertion that “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world” (George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, 11 September 2001 [http://www.americanrhetoric.com/ speeches/ gwbush911addresstothenation.htm; accessed 1 June 2011]). As the crisis in Bon Temps develops into acts of destruction, excess and brutal violence, the superpower that is Maryanne feeds off the energy generated; by setting mother against daughter, lovers against families, she gains strength. It is the Christ-like figure of Godric—said to be “older than your Jesus”—who stands in opposition to the power-mongering characters. He promotes peaceful coexistence and shows mercy when confronted with the traitorous human Hugo. It is Godric alone who recognises that terrorist organisations like Fellowship of the Sun exist because vampires have never considered their subject races as equals. Only by refusing to exercise their physical superiority, Godric affirms, can vampires bring about peace. It is an observation that underscores the economic superiority of the US that “through an elite of fewer than a billion people controls 80 per cent of the world’s riches.” Far from bringing about peace, of course, “the agencies of Washington-run institutions’ [ . . . ] secured an indebted imperium greater than the British Empire at its height” (Pilger 119–20). As he dies with Sookie beside him, Godric, who has grown weary of exploitation, conflict and hate, exemplifies the self-sacrificial spirit of love that underpins Christian doctrine, and that is hypocritically espoused by the Fellowship of the Sun. In this, he shows a far more attractive face of the divine; he is an affi rmation of peace, equality and love, as well as a transcendent reconciliation of difference: “A human with me at the end; and human tears,” says Godric, “in this I see God.” Far from being a hollowed-out simulacrum, the gothic continues to be a highly effective way to articulate the unspeakable truths of American culture. This is not, of course, to argue that there is anything generically pure about the gothic form, which has always been a magpie mode, shifting between influences and inflections and appropriating for itself whatever may prove useful to the telling of its tales. But TV drama series have become, in recent years, “the ultimate medium of gothic enquiry” (Ledwon 262). And what is notable about contemporary TV gothic is its generic hybridization, particularly its incorporation of modes and devices from

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film noir, science fiction and the Western to depict monsters and madmen, psychics and serial killers. Significant in this context is the work of Susan Faludi, whose book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America (2007) argues that since 9/11 the American creative industries have produced a massive resurgence of the historically “masculine” genres of the past; these have emerged in what she terms “Neanderthal TV”— the self-consciously macho productions exemplified in programmes such as The Shield (2002–08), 24 (2001–10) and Prison Break (2005–09). These, she asserts, attempt to reaffi rm traditional American masculinity that is imagined to have been damaged by, in the words of the televangelist Jerry Falwell, “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” so that God himself no longer protects the nation (qtd in Faludi 22). Faludi does not address the extraordinary rise of the gothic over the course of the last decade (beyond quoting columnist Ann Coulter who darkly asserts that American men have been somehow “defang[ed]” by the liberal left) (qtd in Faludi 26). Nonetheless, she does point to some interesting generic shifts that signal a range of cultural anxieties about the gendered dimensions of American identity; she also offers us a highly relevant explanation as to why the gothic texts I will now address are self-conscious hybrids of science fiction, film noir and the Western. The scientist, in varying degrees of delusional or psychotic megalomania, is a significant gothic character. This figure has been translated readily into contemporary popular culture through various shows such as Fringe, Dexter (2006–present), A Town Called Eureka (2006–present) and the Canadian collaboration Sanctuary (2007–10). Standing at the interstices of God (to whose status he aspires), and man (whom he often destroys through his efforts), the mad scientist is associated—at least since Drs Heidegger, Frankenstein and Moreau—with acts of violence against the corporeal integrity of the subject and the transcendent primacy of the divine. This destruction, though, also allows for wider public debates, which the mad scientist simultaneously stands above and preys upon; hence, the very question of integrated subjectivity in the contemporary world is invoked by this figure. The sci-fi-gothic series Fringe hinges on the motivations and actions of Dr. Walter Bishop. He works on fringe sciences—the subject matter of much TV gothic since The X Files—and which include mind control, teleportation, astral projection, invisibility, genetic mutation and the reanimation of the dead. Walter’s originary subversion of the space-time continuum opens up a fissure between two alternate universes, threatening to destroy one or both of them. But this cataclysmic transgression was not the crime for which Walter served seventeen years in a high-security psychiatric hospital; rather, it was for the death of a lab assistant during the course of a dubious medical experimentation, for which his estranged son deems him “Dr. Frankenstein.” Released in order to support the work of the Homeland Security Department in our own post-9/11 dimension, the institutionalised, insomniac (and occasionally incontinent) Walter returns to his laboratory in the basement of

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a Harvard University building—a highly gothic space complete with stone arches, blowing light bulbs and bubbling equipment. Prone to exclamations like “let’s make some LSD,” and “there’s only room for one God in this laboratory,” Walter once collaborated with William Bell (the founder of Massive Dynamic, a company that imports superior technology from the other dimension) who is now a wealthy man. The company is now run by Nina Sharpe, herself in possession of a cybernetic arm that aligns her to Robot Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and heightens the sinister aura of the corporation as interdimensional entity . Unsurprisingly, then, Massive Dynamic has a mise en scene of futuristic architecture with Expressionist lines and high, high windows; it also hides a range of dark secrets, very much in keeping with the brooding paranoia that infects the outside world. For “something more dangerous than simple terrorism” has led to several mysterious disappearances, freak weather patterns and ostensibly inexplicable mass deaths. Marshalling available research into all areas of fringe science, the lab workers are tasked to explain these phenomena—more specifically, they try to account for “the pattern” that underpins them and to curb sinister developments. During the often Pynchonesque process, though, Walter falls foul of his own doppelganger; he moves into states of altered consciousness (and induces others to do the same) and has conversations with several spectral beings; he also peers into screens and mirrors that, like the gothic portrait, enable the perception of another (usually hidden) reality. All of this will leads

Figure 2.1

Walter Bishop, Fringe’s mad scientist.

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to the repeated affirmation of Oppenheimer’s assertion that “knowledge cannot be pursued without morality.” The gothic world of Fringe—its haunted characters and multi-dimensional spaces—depicts everyday life as underpinned by an unspeakable, secret reality. But in contrast to much post-9/11 gothic, Fringe is scientific in its exploration and broadly realist in its representation of science. Set in everyday environments like office buildings, trains, planes and diners, the episodes often adopt a common post-9/11 trope: innocent Americans are killed en-masse by unknown forces or agents. In Fringe, however, there is no “evil other” (outside the self), no inexplicably supernatural force. If Walter Bishop’s world is attacked by “the other side,” then these strikes are retaliatory, for Walter has caused the gradual dissolution of that dimension. Mad scientists like Professor Peck of the episode “White Tulip” (season 1) asserts that “God is science. God is polio and flu vaccines and MRI machines and artificial hearts and that is the only faith we need”; however, Fringe is keen to warn against such a presumption. In a world where the US acts “as if it is the sole superpower to be obeyed,” Walter’s journey into madness reminds us that, in classic gothic fashion, “it is not our place to adjust the universe” (Harvey 31). Here, terrible truths cross dimensions in the forms of monsters and ghosts, revealing that which is otherwise unspeakable: the American is the aggressor and must take responsibility for what follows. This is a fitting, if oblique, reminder that because “Americans have needed to imagine themselves as the most virtuous people on Earth [ . . . ] they remain largely in denial of their own genocidal history. This denial continues to structure U.S. foreign policy and use of force in ways that at worst, are straightforwardly murderous and, at best, subvert the principle and institutions of international humanitarian law established to restrain the use of violence between and within states” (Ray 57). Drawing heavily on the key subgenres of 1950s US science fiction, Fringe includes the classic terror of invasion, new technologies and the depersonalisation of the self. But this is couched in a wonderfully gothic mise-enscene—the sinister mental hospital, the antiquated scientific laboratory, the subterranean and labyrinthine passages—which is a backdrop to the gothic doubling of characters across the dimensions: Olivia and “Fauxlivia,” Walter and “Walternate.” This engenders the highly gothic revelation of past secrets, including the paternity of Peter and the abusive scientific experiments Walter has conducted on children, including Olivia. Even in Fringe’s ostensibly explicable universe (where rational enquiry trumps blind faith), the gothic continues to explore that which cannot be explained, and reveals hidden secrets—the return of the repressed—and the utterance of the unspoken. Depictions of the “mad scientist” are also present in the gothic-noir hybrid Dexter. Working as a blood-splatter analyst for the Miami Metropolitan Police Department, Dexter Morgan is the romantic individualist who sees through and goes beyond the quotidian realities of his (scientific) profession and his personal life (as son, adoptive son, adoptive brother, boyfriend, stepfather,

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father and friend). This arises out of the transformative personal crisis that creates him. For having witnessed his drug-dealing police-informant mother chainsawed to death, the infant Dexter is trapped in a shipping container for several days alongside her body. With him is his older brother Brian, a character who returns as the Ice Truck Killer in the fi rst season. Raised by the cop who found him (and gaining an adoptive sister, Debs, in the process), Dexter is schooled by his adoptive father to deal with “the isolation, the otherness, the hunger that is never satisfied” by killing only killers who have evaded judicial detection and punishment. This motif, which echoes Medium, highlights the cosmic justice and the mechanical workings of the judiciary and the state. As such, Dexter’s science involves hunting transgressors and evading capture—giving him access to police investigations and enabling him to manipulate police data for his brand of justice. Fulfilling a certain fetishistic function, his preferred way of despatching victims has a scientific edge: the plastic-lined room where the killings take place is designed to erase any trace evidence. Throughout the episodes, from season to season, Dexter straps his victims with cling film to an autopsy-style table; he takes a sample of their blood (with a scalpel) and kills them with a sharp implement; he then cleanly dismembers the bodies, wraps them in black plastic and dumps them in the Gulf of Mexico. All of this is done as he conducts an endearing romance with Rita, a blonde and frequently helpless single mother who is repeatedly raped and beaten by her crack-addict ex-husband, Paul, and is later murdered by Trinity, a serial killer. Dexter takes on—in the course of five seasons—several familial adversaries: the Ice Truck Killer (his brother Brian), Dokes and Quinn (coworkers who suspect him of being the Bay Harbour Butcher and Kyle Butler, respectively), Assistant District Attorney Miguel Prado (Dexter’s friend and mentee in murder) and the Trinity Killer (the surrogate father who murders Dexter’s wife). And throughout he is shadowed by his adoptive sister, Debs. Repeatedly doubled by the killers he befriends, those he hunts and those who hunt him, Dexter is a bifurcated character inhabiting an ethically divided world. This begins, of course, with the playful credit sequence, in which the everyday activities of shaving, flossing, dressing and eating breakfast are shot in extreme close-up; so much so that the viewer becomes disorientated and convinced of a menacing presence. The drops of blood from his shaving cut appear sinister in the sink. The dental floss becomes a garrotte; the coffee-grinder becomes an instrument of torture and a T-shirt, stretched across our hero’s face becomes a means of suffocation. This disjunction—the everyday and the monstrous—is part of the will to vengeance, for the demanding need for justice lies at the centre of the programme: it comes in the Bay Harbour Butcher case (season 2) when the Miami citizenry supports the unknown vigilante “cleaning of the streets”; it is also foreshadowed in an extended point-of-view fantasy sequence in which, having killed his brother the Ice Truck Killer, Dexter imagines the public thanking him for his action: ““We Love Dexter,” “Protecting Our

50 Linnie Blake Children,” and “I’m Your Number One Fan” the banners proclaim as Dexter walks in slow-motion through swirling red, white and blue confetti. He is hailed as a saviour by the law enforcement and the media. A wink at US flag-waving, the family-evoking will to vengeance gestures to the events of 9/11, and the sequence parodically links Dexter’s highly illegal activities with those of the President who has, like Dexter, pledged to “rid the world of evildoers” by any means necessary.11 The literary critic Richard Slotkin argues that it is not uncommon in American history for the President to adopt a persona that bespeaks “a higher and more perfect sense of the nation’s mission and necessity than any popular majority could possess.” Such a President, he continues, helps “his race or nation to realize its latent destiny by leading it forward in directions it might not have been chosen by or for itself” (Slotkin 502). This is what George W. Bush attempts to do when he adopts his persona of the Texan sheriff who brings justice to the black-hatted wrongdoers throughout the world. But as Bush’s approval ratings plummeted—a by-product of how he handled the second Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, NSA warrantless surveillance—the massive disjunction between transcendent justice and a self-serving agenda became apparent. Enter Dexter. Or, as Dexter’s brother Brian puts it: “You can’t be a hero and a killer. It doesn’t work that way.” In this, the gothic mode can simultaneously remind us of Dexter’s dark double and the American political administration under George W. Bush. The noir inflection of Dexter’s gothic speaks to Susan Faludi’s observation that highly “masculine” genres have become more visible on television in recent years. Certainly, Dexter is an extremely urban tale, set in the melting pot of Miami, a city divided between its Anglo-American citizens and its large Latino community. This division is mirrored in Dexter’s consciousness, for he is a mixture of scientific rationality and irresistible hedonistic perversity. He thus moves between binary oppositions: he goes from the city’s professional spaces (its streets, bars, restaurants, pastel-painted suburbs and playgrounds) to its urban underbelly (its docks, crack houses, NA meetings and drug infested ghettos). In true noir style, the city’s interior spaces are the backdrops for the action: its cars, boats, offices, bars, elevators, corridors, interrogation suites, killing rooms, bachelor apartments and suburban living rooms. Within the domestic and urban-professional spaces, the lighting invokes classic TV realism, while the scenes of Dexter’s hunting and killing shift to chiaroscuro, as our divided hero is frequently side lit (or lit from below) during the highly atmospheric slaughter scenes. Tensions between the quotidian and the dark depths of American life (with its connotations of ethnic and cultural alterity) are also undercut through a sense of continuity and flow conveyed in the voiceovers. As such, it is Dexter’s perspective that comments on the action and influences our responses: this offers insight into Dexter’s emotional life and his denial of the very existence of and the current state of the nation. For instance, when he

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breaks into the shipyard to trace the container in which “dearly disturbed Dexter was born,” he wryly remarks that there are “no cameras, no patrols, no dogs . . . with billions spent on homeland security it can’t be as easy as a couple of snips . . . so much for the war terror.” Dexter may choose to live in the shadows, but the voiceover sheds light on him and comments on the politics of the well-lit everyday world. For all its noir proclivities, Dexter is driven by a range of tropes inherent to the gothic mode: the long-buried family secret of Dexter’s cominginto-being (“born free of all that’s human”), the existence of his bloody brother Brian (“a killer without reason or regret”), his adoptive father’s (earlier) affair with his biological mother (throwing his paternity into question) and Harry’s formulation of “the code” (in which only the guilty are punished). This background and cumulative information account for the complexity of Dexter’s actions. The same can be said of Rita—a gothic heroine who has been damaged in an abusive marriage—and who is temporarily saved by Dexter (but ultimately destroyed by the powerplay between Dexter and Trinity). Her delicate blond features, domestic proclivities and her penchant for feminine florals suggest that Rita is the perpetual victim; but she is also doubled by Dexter’s adoptive sister Debs, whose fi lthy language, suited-and-booted style of dress, sexual aggression and tough-cop persona provide a marked contrast until she too becomes a victim of the Ice Truck Killer. Most significant, though, is the insistent filtering of the narrative through Dexter’s point-of-view. This is achieved naturalistically (in the social life of contemporary Miami) and highly impressionistically (in the flashbacks that provide a context for understanding Dexter’s troubled subjectivity). In the fi rst season, for instance, the narrative continually flashes back to the primal scene in the container truck. Hyperactively edited in a nonlinear fashion that echoes the disorientated amnesia of Dexter-as-adult, the densely layered images of chainsaws, blood, maternal terror and the abandoned child form an abject montage; these are shot in a de-saturated colour that contrasts with the highly saturated colours of daytime Miami. Thus giving a thematic continuity to the narrative—even as it disrupts its linearity—these flashbacks reveal the primal trauma of the family secret. And this culminates in an extended sequence in which the adult Dexter stands on Miami’s docks and “watches” his now-dead adoptive father carry his infant self, in sepia, from the container and into a new life. Here, Dexter meets the gaze of his child-self; in three moments the camera captures his reaction, now tempered by the realisation that he was not alone in the container. He now knows that his brother, abandoned by the not-so-good father Harry, was raised by “doctors, therapists, groups leaders” until his vengeance erupted, unleashed upon the world. Here, the vision of masculine identity is nothing if not complex and nuanced. Dexter is victim and perpetrator, scientist and madman, professional and parent, nurturer and serial killer, and he fi lters his actions through a range of discourses. These begin with posttraumatic

52 Linnie Blake psychological predispositions and end with vengeance-driven ethical necessities. Such is the complexity of the post-9/11 American self. The gothic television programme that best exemplifies these debates over identity is Supernatural. Depicting vampires, ghosts, demons, shapeshifters, tricksters, mad scientists, zombies and monsters from urban legends, the gothic mode of the show also incorporates elements of the Western and the Road Movie, but it revolves around the gothic narrative of two brothers who are on a quest to fi nd the demon who killed their mother. As the tale develops, the characters become embroiled in an apocalyptic struggle between angels and demons—a struggle in which the categories of “good” and “evil” lose all meaning. In many ways, this is a classic “buddy fl ick” (for each brother manifests different aspects of the national psyche). Sam is the “thinker”; he is a sensitive and poetic pre-law student who craves stability and normalcy (though as it turns out he has been infected, since infancy, with demon blood and, for a period, he loses his soul). Dean is the uneducated young man who drives fast cars and is a sexually rapacious “doer” (he is a descendant of Frederick Jackson Turner’s quintessential American Frontiersman). In this, Dean embodies, coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to fi nd expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism working for good and evil. (17) Throughout the seven series, the brothers repeatedly drive across the US. Crossing “frontiers,” their very name evokes the Winchester rifle that helped to tame the West and the allegedly haunted Winchester Mystery House (built in expiation by the gun-making family). As in other Road Movies, the car is a haven—a refuge and an intimate space—that also transforms into a weapon and projects an image of potent virility. The landscape through which they travel is insignificant in and of itself: it is not the terrain of the Western-style analogue of the freedom-loving, democratic, individualist or the morally upstanding hero who symbolises Americaness. Instead, the cities, small towns, suburban communities, rural outposts and the wilderness offer a dark representation of the American citizenry and social life in the US. For example, in “Croatoan” (2006; season 2) the lost seventeenth-century colony of Roanoke is evoked; this is an extremely violent community, which is also plagued by a demonic illness. Likewise, in “Sin City” (2007; season 3) the demonic forces infect a sleepy town, turning it into a den of gambling, drinking and prostitution. This continues in “Death Takes a Holiday” (2009; season 4) when another small town is gripped by an orgy of violence when the townspeople discover that they can no longer die. And in “99 Problems,” (2010; season 5) the Whore of Babylon (in Salem Witch Trial mode) incites the townspeople to murder each other, hastening the

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imminent apocalypse. In each case, the programme paints a terrifying picture of a country that has lost liberty, justice and “human dignity: the rule of law . . . limits on the power of the state . . . respect for women . . . private property . . . free speech . . . equal justice . . . and religious tolerance.”12 In each episode, the brothers encounter a series of monsters. They most destroy them in order to disavow contemporary fears while, as in Medium, The Ghost Whisperer, True Blood and Dexter, highlighting the disjunction between cosmic and judicial justice. Beyond the injunctions of judicial law, the Winchester brothers live by the code they have inherited from their father: there are “some things a man just can’t run away from” (shades of the Ringo Kid in the 1939 Stagecoach). With ethical righteousness, the heroes commit acts of violence to secure good over evil, but Supernatural also includes a self-reflexive irony, parody and pastiche that problematizes the “truth” of clear-cut categories. A salient example of this arises in the monochrome 2008 homage to Universal horror fi lms, “Monster Movie,” which playfully references to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man and Boris Karloff ’s Mummy. Asserting that “The X Files is a TV show, this is real,” and with speculations that the monster may just be a “satan-worshipping-Anne Rice-reading-gothic-psycho-vampire-wannabe,” the episode humorously celebrates US screen culture’s longstanding love affair with the gothic. The high-turreted castle with its billowing curtains; the basement laboratory (complete with bubbling test tubes); the dark figures of monstrosity—all of this reminds us that while “life is small, meagre, messy” and the screen appears “grand, simple, elegant” one cannot simply choose to live in the simulacrum. “They aren’t real. You cannot make them real.” The same is true of contemporary political rhetoric. For as much as George W. Bush asserts that “America will lead by defending liberty and justice” the nation does not embody these virtues; the nation fails to uphold “the rule of law” or to place appropriate limits on “the power of the state.”13 The popularity of contemporary gothic television speaks to this problematic political and social condition. Despite its increasing ubiquity over the past decade, television dramas offer much more than a collection of “gothicky” signifiers denoting an absent collective trauma. Rather, the vampires, werewolves, mad scientists and psychics of contemporary popular culture highlight a disjunction between the grandiose post-9/11 rhetoric of the Republican party and the material conditions of life in the US. The bifurcated, doubled heroes and heroines (as well as the mad scientists and monsters) complicate and challenge the simplistic discourses of American identity disseminated by the conservative Christian establishment, even as the hybridised generic forms of the programmes point to new gender codes and relations in the twenty-fi rst century. Such narratives—characterised by traumatic dislocation, abject return and spectral revelation—dismantle the popular confl ation of American self-interest and transcendental truth. In a period when the “War on Terror” purports to defend American interests and promote

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global democracy, television gothic reminds us that, in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, “all those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.”14 Gothic television in the US might not be an antidote to the “War on Terror” but, at its best, it offers a creative and often subversive response to dominant political discourses and ideologies, encouraging audiences to see beyond reductive binaristic agendas and the foundational myths of national selfhood that underpin them. NOTES 1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001); Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005); Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007); Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009); Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010); Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011). 2. Underworld (2003); Underworld: Evolution (2006); Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009), Underworld: New Dawn (2012) . 3. Resident Evil (2002); Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004); Resident Evil: Extinction (2007); Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010). 4. Amber: Journeys Beyond (1996); Avenging Spirit (1991); Calling (2010); Clive Barker’s Jericho (2007); Clive Barker’s Undying (2001); Clock Tower 3 (2003); Cursed Mountain (2009); Echo Night: Beyond (2004); Fatal Frame (2001); F.E.A.R. (2005); Geist (2005); Ghost Master (2003); Ghosthunter (2004); Ju-on: The Grudge (2009); Luigi’s Mansion (2001); Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004). 5. Altered Beast (2005); The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery; Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness; Sonic Unleashed; The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon; Underworld: The Eternal War; Werewolves of London Wolfchild; Wolfman. 6. A Vampyre Story (2008); Blood Rayne series (2002, 2004); Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993); Buff y series (2000–2009); Dark Angel: Vampire Apocalypse (2001); Darkwatch (2005); Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon (2008); Dracula: Origin (2008); Fortune Arteria (2008); From Dusk Till Dawn (2001); NecroVisioN (2009); Night of the Raving Dead (2008); Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi (2003); Vampire Rain (2007); Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines (2004); Van Helsing (2004). 7. Alonia Slayers School; Darkness Falls; The Paris Vampire Chronicles; Transylvania: The Dark Vampire; The Dark Ages York 1304. 8. The most popular series including Stephanie Meyer, Twilight (NY: Little Brown, 2005), New Moon (NY: Little Brown, 2006), Eclipse (NY: Little Brown, 2007), Breaking Dawn (NY: Little Brown, 2008), Richelle Mead, Vampire Academy (NY: Razorbill, 2007), Frostbite (NY: Razorbill, 2008), Shadow Kiss (NY: Razorbill, 2008), Blood Promise (NY: Razorbill, 2009), Spirit Bound (NY: Razorbill, 2010), Last Sacrifice (NY: Razorbill, 2010) and Ellen Schreiber, Vampire Kisses (NY: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2003), Kissing Coffi ns (NY: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2005), Vampireville (NY: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2006); Dance with a Vampire (NY: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2007); The Coffi n Club (NY: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2008); Royal Blood (NY: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2009); Love Bites (NY:

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9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

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Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2010); Cryptic Cravings (NY: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins, 2011). See Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851), The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Anyone, of course, who knows anything about US involvement in the Middle East, will be familiar with precisely the points at which the US has either behaved terroristically or refused to condemn the terroristic activities of its allies: the 1985 CIA bombing in Beirut, the US’s facilitation of Shimon Peres’ bombing in Tunis and his Iron Fist operations in occupied Lebanon, the facilitation of Ariel Sharon’s offensives in the refugee camps of Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah being cases in point. George W Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (29 January 2002), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=29644#ixzz1SUOGu0nq (accessed 1 June 2011). George W Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (29 January 2002), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=29644#ixzz1SUOGu0nq (accessed 1 June 2011). Ibid. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (NY: 1835). Chapter XXII: “Why Democratic Nations Naturally Desire Peace, and Democratic Armies War,” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch3_22.htm (accessed 2 June 2011).

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Blum, William. Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. London: Zed Books, 2002. Bush, George W. “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (29 January 2002). http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=29644#ixzz1SUOGu0nq (accessed 1 June 2011). . “Address to the Nation” (11 September 2001). http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911addresstothenation.htm (accessed 1 June 2011). Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. . Interventions. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007. Creeber, Glenn. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: BFI, 2004. Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. FBI Project Megiddo Report. http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/lps3578/www.fbi. gov/library/megiddo/megiddo.pdf: 21 (accessed 1 June 2011). Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ledwon, Leona. “Twin Peaks and the Television Gothic,” Literature/Film Quarterly 21.4: 260–70. “Militias ‘in retreat’” BBC News. May 11, 2001. New York Times, 21 September, 2001. Pilger, John. The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso, 2002. Ray, Gene. Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: the Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

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Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Dover Publications, 1996 Warwick, Alexandra. “Feeling Gothicky?” Gothic Studies 9.1 (2007): 5–15. Wheatley, H. Gothic Television. Manchester University Press, 2006.

3

Being Human? Twenty-First-Century Monsters Monica Germanà The beast in us wants to be lied to; morality is a white lie, to keep it from tearing us apart. Without the errors inherent in the postulates of morality, man would have remained an animal. But as it is he has taken himself to be something higher and has imposed stricter laws upon himself. He therefore has a hatred of those stages of man that remain closer to the animal state [ . . . ]. - Friedrich Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human, 45

Distinctively characterised by excess, the Gothic is often concerned with the limits of humanity and its transgression: Frankenstein (and his creature), Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all defy the laws of nature and sit on the cusp of abnormal behaviour, monstrosity and transgression. Gothic narratives by Shelley, Stoker and Stevenson self-consciously draw attention to the fi ne line that separates human qualities such as genius, ambition and desire from madness, obsession and aberration. This chapter explores the TV drama Being Human (BBC, 2008–) in the context of Gothic discourses of the category “human,” particularly in relation to the boundaries separating self and other. The drama, which revolves around three modern-day Gothic monsters—a ghost (Annie, played by Leonora Crichlow), a vampire (Mitchell, played by Aidan Turner) and a werewolf (George, played by Russell Tovey)—challenges conceptions of humanity and blurs conventional categories of otherness, pointing to dehumanisation, alienation and broken relationships as central to twenty-first-century human experience. The monsters of the series, for instance, desire strong bonds with human beings—echoing the creature of Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—and this desire questions the limits of human nature, for the excessive nature of the human begins to undermine humanity’s identificatory link to the humane and empathy. In this, the programme highlights the constructed nature of the twenty-first-century monster and, in turn, points to the conventional Gothic dichotomies—good and evil, science and nature, reason and madness—by drawing attention to the uncanny duality that ultimately defines the human condition. In fact, the interlocking stories of the main characters, and their “human” quest for compassion and contentment, combine with the contemporary and recognisable “real” settings of the series to blur the boundaries between “real” and “fantastic,” while, at the same time, making its inquiry into the human condition poignantly relevant to the collective consciousness of the twenty-first century.

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As an entry point into Being Human, it is helpful to draw on the film critic Darryl Jones, who refers to the polarised politics of horror. He writes: In left-wing horror narratives, the source of the threat is within. That is, it posits an internal agency of horror: that which we have to fear is located within ourselves, in the human mind and its potential for creation or destruction, and in the human body and its potential for metamorphosis or mutilation. [ . . . ] Conversely, in “right-wing” horror, the threat comes from without, something other, alien and external to humanity, which is coming to get “us” remorselessly, and against which we must guard if we can. (146) As key examples of these two kinds of horror, Jones refers to Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula (1897)—two narratives that, arguably, point to such internal/external sources of horror. Admittedly, the distinction is, as Jones observes, too polarised, but his comments are still useful for theorising the ways in which horror questions the defi nitions surrounding the human, humanity and the inhuman. For although Being Human engages with dark monsters in a supernatural world, the programme also exposes the permeability of boundaries that separate inside/outside, human/monster, natural/supernatural. These monsters are certainly horrific in the supernatural sense, but they populate the very recognisable and very real world of twenty-fi rst-century Britain: the fi rst two seasons are set in Bristol, England’s sixth largest city, and the third season is set in Wales. Within these recognisable contexts, the show explores humanity from the point of view of three types of Gothicized characters who struggle to embrace, protect and participate in humanity. Following Jones’s argument, I suggest that Being Human poses two threats to the category of the “human”: the fi rst arises out of the supernatural dynamics that are clearly portrayed in the actions, conflicts and dilemmas experienced by the “natures” of the three main characters; the second includes sources of cultural, scientific and religious aberration, which, though human in origin, defy the moral boundaries of the human condition.

SUPERNATURAL INSIGHTS First, the supernatural. As an ethereal, good-natured spirit, Annie does not seem to pose a threat to human beings. In fact, her condition only really has an impact on herself, but it still makes her long for what she sees as the ordinary richness of human experience—“never aging, never kissing, never having a family, all the things that make you human” (2:8). Indeed, Annie is marginalized from humanity, set apart, because she is constantly “overlooked and forgotten” (1:1); her grey and white outfit—the only clothes she wears in all three seasons—accentuates her invisibility, while her

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incorporeality negates the physical sphere of human emotions—“That feel of skin against skin. That physical contact that says it’s OK” (1:1). Death has taken away her ability to taste, drink or eat and, as a result, Annie’s compulsive tea-making is symbolic of the ghost’s attempt to cling to an ordinary human life. The mundane gesture, however, conceals the paradox intrinsic to Annie’s bodiless existence—“I’m not here. I’m past tense”; “here but not here forever” (1:2)—and foregrounds her desire to remain in the material world. Later, when she admits to her duality, Annie is ready to accept the two facets of her condition: “The two bits of me overlap” (1:6). Indeed, Annie’s temporary visibility offers her partial reintegration within the community that she would have had as Owen’s wife: the house she occupies, for instance, belongs to her ex-fiancé, who is, it is later revealed, responsible for her fatal fall down the stairs. Her job serving drinks at the local, semi-deserted pub reminds her of the liquid pleasure she can no longer taste and, most importantly, offers access to the inconsequential banter that connects her to other people. What emerges from Annie’s experience is a reversal of ontological categories: “I was dead before I even met Owen. I’ve never felt more alive” (1:4). The strength of such a statement—articulated by a ghost—lies in the meaningless vacuity of Annie’s pre-mortal condition; her life lacked strong emotion or meaningful relationships and she lived in a state of alienation. Significantly, it is the knowledge of Owen’s betrayal (and his responsibility in her death) that motivates Annie, for as a poltergeist her rage manifests itself in the subversion of domestic bliss produced by her haunting visits (her previous role as Owen’s dutiful wife). Her supernatural powers—uncontrolled at fi rst—restore her to a position of power; she can control Owen, who becomes consumed by paranoia and then confesses to his crimes. Significantly, it is not her apparition that forces Owen’s confession; rather, it is the monstrous tone of her fi nal speech that strikes terror in Owen’s heart, for Annie’s disembodied voice suggests unimaginable horrors—the knowledge of which she secretly whispers to Owen—and states that this is just the “tip of the iceberg” (1:4). Echoing Hélène Cixous’s influential reading of the Freudian uncanny, Annie suggests that “what is intolerable is that the Ghost erases the limit which exists between states, neither alive nor dead” (Cixous 543). Indeed, in Being Human it is the ghost’s embodiment of the dark chaos underlying the human condition that has an impact on Owen’s psyche; the ghost’s liminal position is, in the end, an unbearable reminder of the world beyond the threshold of the visible, the reasonably acceptable. The two other housemates in the corner house of Windsor Terrace have eventful lives, even though George (the werewolf) sees his role as “a parttime thing” (1:5). Part animal and part human, the lycanthrope incarnates the notion of “the beast within”: in the fi rst season, for instance, Lee Tully (who is later revealed to be the werewolf responsible for George’s curse), claims that “sometimes I’m my worst enemy” (1:2). Indeed, the wolf-man

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gestures to the unsettling closeness of the “civilised” and “savage” aspects of mankind and, as Darryl Jones reminds us, the first modern classification of living species by the Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus juxtaposed homo sapiens to homo ferus in his 1735 study Systema Naturae (167). Such a binary opposition—pitting between “thinking man” against “wild man”—is particularly significant, for it suggests a continuum between superstition and scientific discourse at the threshold of modernity and points to the limits of a humanist logocentrism in Enlightenment thought. This is confi rmed by Joseph D. Andriano, who observes that in modern monsters, “[s]ince Darwin and Mendel, [ . . . ], the mark has changed from a supernatural to a natural phenomenon: no God, no Circe or Comus, but a scientist or mutation—indeed the process of evolution itself—now creates the Beast” (xi). In Being Human, when George’s girlfriend, Nina, becomes a werewolf, she claims to be “radioactive” (2:2), suggesting a modern understanding of the dangers humanity poses to itself. Yet the fundamental question that the beastly monster raises is, for Andriano, “to what extent is being human a function of being nonanimal?” (xi). The werewolf is, in this respect, the archetype of the hybrid creature who merges the civilised qualities of homo sapiens and the bestial aspects of homo ferus. Throughout the series, lycanthropy spreads like an infectious disease—the mere scratch of the werewolf turns the victim into a beast—but once the victim gets used to becoming werewolf he or she can more easily control its onslaught (George even talks about “managing” his “condition”) (1:1). Bearing the wolf’s “mark” on human skin, the lycanthrope’s body is that of a scarred monster, thus highlighting the relevance of the wound—the trauma—in the technology of monsters. The fact that this condition exceeds the boundaries of logos is made clear when George refers to the attacker as “the thing”—the inanimate “essence” that evokes “inorganic” Gothic monsters (from Frankenstein’s creature to Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde). But the supernatural remains present, as it does with other fantastic creatures, in the werewolf’s superhuman strength and power: George’s sense of smell is enhanced even between transformations; and Tully describes the condition in sublime terms: “The fi re in your gut. The hunger”, “a gift”, “a glorious thing” (1:2). Ethical paradigms surround this depiction of monstrosity. The first werewolf assault is described as a form of abuse—it is “offensive” and “so wrong” (1:1)—and the cyclic metamorphosis brings with it a loss of human contact, a nomadic way of life. George also tells Nina that there are no human words to describe “becoming werewolf” (1:6), for it is beyond human communication—a nonhuman experience—that exists in the terra incognita beyond the symbolic. Significantly, too, George’s initial use of the third-person pronoun when referring to the wolf exposes his awareness of alterity, his dual self: “That wasn’t me,” he claims after his fi rst transformation on screen (1:1). In spite of his attempts to repress his “wicked side,” the realisation that the wolf must be let out makes George’s inner beast

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akin to other irrepressible monsters (such as Stevenson’s Hyde), and like them, a metaphorical projection of the deepest recesses of the unconscious. Although George claims he still has “a chance” (1:6) of leading a normal life (as opposed to the undead/dead friends with whom he shares his home), his struggle with the monthly metamorphosis opens a wider vacuum, displacing him from the human condition he seeks. As he explains to Daisy, the vampire woman who later seduces him, “I don’t like this. It happens to me. Every day, my life before gets more and more distant, like it happened to somebody else” (2:1). Paradoxically, George’s condition changes when the “savage tendency” is, unknown to him, passed to Nina, whose life is mysteriously spared by the wolf, as the result of “[a] connection that stopped me wanting to hurt her” (1:6). This crucial moment links the wolf’s primitivism to George’s human emotions, and this is followed by a narrative shift in which George uses the fi rst person in relation to his wolf-self, an acknowledgement of the lycanthrope’s animal/human symbiotic bond (1:6). Despite its monstrous appearance—unlike the vampire, the hairy wolf holds little appeal—the lycanthrope maintains a sense of empathy and clear conscience throughout the series. George, for example, saves Tully, who has hanged himself, displaying human empathy over a desire for revenge. It also justifies, in spite of the narrative’s rivalry between vampires and wolves, the friendship that has developed between Mitchell and George: George’s Star of David does not affect Mitchell precisely because of their human bond (1:6). This friendship also inspires Mitchell to “go against his kind” by rescuing George from a vampire attack as George, in wolf form, confronts and (apparently) kills the vampire Herrick. And in the climax of season one, it is the question of humanity that underpins Herrick’s attempt to provoke George, for although the vampire dismisses George’s emotions as “too human” he also exposes the closeness of George’s aggressiveness to that of a different order of creatures, be they hybrid monsters or vampires: “There is no difference between you and me. Your ridiculous naïve morality, your last shred of humanity . . . You lose it tonight”. Unfazed by the vampire’s rhetoric, George’s attack reiterates his commitment to the humanity of “love and sacrifice”: “[t]his doesn’t rob me of my humanity. It proves it” (1:6). In this, murder is justified in the name of love, and the wolf kills to save Mitchell from his curse. The vampire remains sexy: the chiselled features of Aidan Turner (who plays Mitchell) offer the viewer a chance to understand his seductive lure and empathise with the victims of his predatory sexuality. Referencing Stoker’s Dracula, Ann Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and the US television series True Blood, the figure of Mitchell presents the dark appeal of vampire sex or, as Nina Auerbach notes, the attractive nature of the vampire appeals to “our most intimate relationships; they are [ . . . ] hideous invaders of the normal” (6). Perhaps this is why, in its multifarious reincarnations, the vampire (though also, at times, the subject of caricature and parody) is the most frightening of Gothic monsters: the vampire’s immortal body—unlike

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the disembodied spirit of a ghost—is defined by sensual pleasure. And the “foreign” charm of the vampire (Mitchell is Irish and Ivan and Daisy, the iconic vampires in the pack, are Scottish) is synonymous with the most human of weaknesses, a consuming desire. In the fi rst episode, Annie states that “a vampire death is not the end but the beginning” (1:1), thus foreshadowing, in a circular fashion, Herrick’s statement at the end of the series: “I am the beginning” (1:6). Linked to a post-Darwinian reading of evolution, the vampire’s immortality is not an aberration; it is the next step in the evolutionary chain. Indeed, the fi rst season is dominated by the vampires’ plot to control the world of humanity—through a political coup—and reveal themselves from the marginal peripheries. In a flashback scene, for instance, Herrick discusses marginalization and liberation: becoming vampire is a liberation of the soul, he claims, “Being a vampire . . . liberates the personality. [ . . . ] The only limit is his imagination. [ . . . ] These children of Darwin, will tell you that you’re wrong, that you’re a monster. Because they’re jealous. Because they’re in chains” (2:5). From an ontological perspective, the vampire disrupts the androcentric view of the world and its rigid hierarchical structure. This is consistent with the claims of the critic J. D. Andriano, who observes that the vampire subverts androcentrism through “[a] subtext that often appears [ . . . ], subverting this ideology, dismantling the Ladder of Being and restoring the bushy Tree of Life, on which we are all related” (xiii). Hierarchical relations will be, for the vampires of Being Human, instituted in their new world order; they are not interested in democratic institutions, but “vampires go where power is” (Auerbach 6). Politically, therefore, the vampire utopia conceived by Herrick is, by definition, based on the systematic exploitation of human bodies left “pure” in order to feed the vampires: the human is meat. Although Herrick’s revolution includes veiled references to Karl Marx’s vampire metaphor for capitalist consumption (233), Herrick’s movement also points to the corruption and greed that are major threats to the human world: the relevance of such dangers to the “real” twenty-first-century late-capitalist/globalised economic and political structures remain poignant. If, as Being Human suggests, the ghost and the werewolf are solitary figures, then the series also depicts the vampire as a communal figure who is part of a “pack.” In this, the vampires shadow organised crime syndicates— groups driven by an insatiable thirst for power. Yet the pack also mirrors the human desire for belonging; or, as Mitchell puts it, “We all choose our tribe. We need our boundaries” (1:4). Freedom of choice—a recurrent theme in the drama—is significant here, for it is combined with one’s “needs” and sets up an ethical confl ict between conscious decision-making and the stronger need for something that might influence one’s choice a priori: “Every time I do it, the gap between me and humanity becomes wider” (1:6). Mitchell is haunted by this conflict: his conscience and his body pull him in different directions, leading him to ask the question “Where do I

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belong?” (1:4). After a century of killing, this leads Mitchell to go “on the wagon” (1:1), for he recognises that, as a vampire, he can lapse into the blood-habit—a habit he struggles to control. But the vampire’s dependency on blood makes the figure the most recognisably human of monstrous others: addiction is the real enemy within and the links between the vampire’s blood-drinking and the more distinctly human addictive consumption of alcohol is made clear throughout the series. After Herrick’s apparent death, for instance, Mitchell’s determination to stop the vampire killings inspires a kind of AA-style meeting where vampires can discuss their “problem” and receive support from peers. Mitchell’s temptation to kill again is resisted by a conscious choice: “I chose them [humans],” he says when Herrick asks him to return to the vampire family (1:1). But the freedom of choice is also frequently interrogated, pointing to two important issues raised by the depiction of the vampire in Being Human. On several occasions, Mitchell contradicts the notion of “free will,” claiming that he has no choice: his potential killing of Josie (in the 1960s narrative) and his possible consumption of Professor Lucy Jaggat (in the present-day narrative) are justified by an overwhelming need. Here, Mitchell’s claim suggests an essentialist view of evil—and the genetics of evil is foregrounded in the drama’s treatment of science—and yet something prevails (his human conscience?) and the women are spared. Perhaps this highlights Mitchell’s development—consciously or otherwise—and his emotional attachment to these women. “I need someone to change my life for” (2:5), he says. Amor Vincit Omnia. Rather than love, however, it is the idea of love that motivates Mitchell to sever—albeit temporarily—his links to the vampire pack. And it is his self-consciousness about his emotions and questions of ethical responsibility that construct him as a “moral animal,” to use Christian Smith’s defi nition (9).

FROM SUPERNATURE TO NATURE Ethical paradigms play a fundamental role in conceptions of humanity. Deviations from certain ethical codes provoke a range of human reactions and it is here, I suggest, that the socially constructed monster emerges as a subspecies of the human. This is helpfully articulated by Christian Smith, who argues the following: We label them as sick, as abnormal, as repulsive deviants. When their remorselessly destructive ways become publicly known, we feel deep revulsion for them and lock them behind bars. We know that something has gone very deeply wrong with their humanity, that even though they are genetically human, they have become in a sense somehow something less than human. Thus while individual persons without any shared moral compass or conscience occasionally can and do surface

64 Monica Germanà in society, we experience them as somehow inhuman, as outside the bounds of humanity. (14) By portraying how the struggles of supernatural “monsters” belong to the human world, Being Human foregrounds human aberrations that transgress borders between “us” and “them.” The supernatural characteristics of the three protagonists are not the only threat to human beings; humanity also threatens itself. In his essay “On Cannibals” (1580), Michel de Montaigne reversed the European ethnocentric attitudes toward the colonised other by elevating “cannibals” to a higher ethical plain than European conquerors: I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs (as we have not only read about but seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among our fellowcitizens and neighbours—and, what is worse, in the name of duty and religion) than in roasting him and eating him after his death. (235–6) Montaigne’s concern over the corruption of European ethics is relevant here. After all, he highlights the inhuman horrors brought on by a Eurocentric fear of otherness: the combined forces of religious intolerance, racial hatred and patriarchy have fuelled colonization, violence and oppression. And the historical persecution of witchcraft, which led to the executions of thousands of innocent people (mostly women), is woven into the historical flashbacks that appear in Being Human (2:3). These scenes point to the inhuman acts of the seventeenth-century witch-hunts and the twenty-fi rstcentury construction of (and persecutions of) contemporary social pariahs: Mitchell and George are, for instance, persecuted after they are falsely accused of paedophilia. Furthermore, by referring to “cannibals,” Montaigne reflects on a taboo that is linked to vampire lore. This point is highlighted by Marina Warner, who comments on the ambivalent associations between cannibalism and the vampire’s consumption of human blood: Vampires and the undead progeny of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), who walk abroad in the shadows of our culture, form part of the larger family of fatal monsters who cannibalize humans. Food—procuring it, preparing it, cooking it, eating it—dominates the material as the overriding image of survival; consuming it offers contradictory metaphors of life and civilization as well as barbarity and extinction. (13) The discourses of consumption are, in traditional fairytales and folklore, part of the unsettling erasure of the boundaries between pleasure and

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torture, authority and oppression, love and death. In vampire lore, David Gilmore confi rms this and suggests that, The monster narrative, in which one is attacked by a cannibal beast, can then be said to incorporate both a projection of primary aggressive impulse onto an external object, and, at the same time, a demonstration of guilt or atonement—that is, of victimization: the fantasist is both subject (eater) and (object) eaten (that is, physically punished, torn apart, mutilated). (184) The dynamics of a vampire attack—with its sexual connotations—accentuate the complexity of the relationship in which the attacked victim becomes part of the attacking vampire. The ambiguous aspects of vampire desire are exposed throughout Being Human by representing an intense desire to consume alongside the desire to be consumed. Some of the characters, including Daisy, choose the pleasure of the vampire instead of the staid and ordinary life of a middle-class woman in post-war Europe. By contrast, Josie is Mitchell’s lover in the 1960s (after he spares her life) and when she returns, forty years later as a cancer sufferer, she does not accept Mitchell’s offer of eternal life on the grounds that “being human means being mortal” (1:5). What she is prepared to do, though, is to have Mitchell feed off her (a form of sacrificially assisted suicide), which saves Mitchell’s life after a vampire attack. Other vampire lovers, such as Lauren, eventually choose human death in order to end a life they no longer recognise as their own. Significantly, it is Mitchell who gives Lauren the fatal stab, an act of love that foreshadows his death by George, who says, “I’m doing this because I love you” (3:6). Warner’s discussion of the recurring cannibal trope in popular culture poses an important question: “do our appetites make us monstrous?” The “songs and tales” that include “ogres and cannibal devils and other monstrous eaters,” she explains, “raise questions about the very nature of desire and our ways of expressing it” (135). Undoubtedly, Being Human suggests that humans are—even more than vampires—driven by complex patterns of desire and fantasy, which frequently include the pain, torture and death of the other. In the programme, Reverend Kemp and Professor Lucy Jaggat’s attempts to annihilate the gene of evil expose the irrationality of both religious and scientific discourses. Evil may exist as an innate feature of certain (abnormal) human beings, they suggest, and this reveals the very human drive to control and exercise power by way of oppressing deviance. On evil essentialism, Darryl Jones suggests that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson (the seemingly possessed bodies of the child-killers) legitimate the social construction of inhumanity: “the killers are Evil Incarnate” (4). While this view is also purported by some of the vampires in Being Human—“a shark can only ever be a shark,” says Daisy (2:3)—this tenet largely justifies those humans beings who torture (with or without

66 Monica Germanà exorcism) other humans, echoing Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion: “He who fights monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster” (102). Social, religious and pathological approaches to monstrosity point to the fluctuating boundaries of the human (intended as an ethical category) but they also highlight the relevance of metaphors as figures of speech in our view of the world: “The monster is more than an odious creature of the imagination,” Stephen Asma writes, “it is a kind of cultural category, employed in domains as diverse as religion, biology, literature, and politics” (13). Significantly, when Lucy is threatened by Mitchell, she expresses herself in highly metaphoric language—“You are wearing other people’s clothes. You are not human”—and this then prompts Mitchell to chastise her for having a “reductive view of the world.” Countering Lucy’s religiosity, Mitchell states, “[i]f man is made in God’s own image,” the human may reflect “His rage,” “spite” and “indifference” (2:8). Like inscrutable divinity, the human is exposed as unfathomable and complex. The genetic project includes the disturbingly brutal experimentations in the basement of a disused bank. Werewolves are told that treatment in a decompression chamber could offer a “cure” for their condition; but all of them die (with the exception of Nina, who successfully transforms while unconscious in the chamber) due to hypertension that causes their bodies to explode. “The application of faith to science,” says Kemp, soon shifts dangerously toward what George calls “vivisection” (2:7). Ethically, the experiments do not only sacrifice human life; they also include a coldblooded awareness that death is inevitable and, in fact, the desired result of the treatment. Such experimentations resonate with other kinds of “bad” science, both real (Nazi experiments in concentration camps) and simulated (Milgram experiments). The unethical sadism of science—a feature of many Gothic/horror narratives, from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) to Alan Moore’s From Hell (1991–1996)—returns in season three of Being Human, which exposes the horror of medical experimentation undertaken on the living bodies of Type-4 (zombies) (3:3). This link between scientific ambition and gratuitous cruelty perpetrated in the name of knowledge disrupts the empathy of humanity and subverts conventional readings of monstrosity: the rotting corpse of the zombie is no longer the brain-eating predator, but the bleeding, tortured body of the abused victim. Being Human depicts a human desire to control—even destroy—the other. But the programme also suggests that the existence of monstrosity ensures social order: the police involvement in the concealing the vampires, for example, arises out of an agreement whereby vampires will consume repeat offenders, and Mitchell observes that “[t]here’s people out there who don’t believe we can change. They want to make us savage again. They want the chaos” (2:5). The human response to the threat of the other is more than a mere strategy of control; Michel Foucault writes that the monster provokes a much more perverse reaction:

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The monster’s power and its capacity to create anxiety are due to the fact that it violates the law [both civil and “natural”] while leaving it with nothing to say. It traps the law while breaching it. When the monster violates the law by its very existence, it triggers the response of something quite different from the law itself. It provokes wither violence, the will for pure and simple suppression, or medical care and pity. (56) Building on Foucault’s text, we can identify the violence of humanity as an immanent force that requires an outlet. The monster begets a “law” that punishes deviant action and engenders anarchic disorder that is embedded in society. This is why Ivan opposes any disclosure of monstrosity, for he cannot imagine a peaceful coexistence with humans—the other will, Ivan implies, never gain access to the centre of social and political power. Toleration and existence on the margins is all that can be hoped for. Disclosure, Ivan exclaims, would mean, Chaos! Worldwide panic. It’s good news for religion, mind. Especially Christianity. There’d be standing room only in the churches all of a sudden. And as soon as they knew about vampires, they’d know about werewolves, they’d know about ghosts. They’d be next. And when humanity had fi nally fi nished with us, it would turn on itself. First, the other religions, [ . . . ], then the homosexuals, the disabled. (2:2) Ivan’s dystopian description suggests that humanity and society rest upon the fragile balance between the construction and repression of otherness. The insurgence of monstrosity engenders unmanageable anarchy and releases a degenerative drive rooted in humanity. The human/self exploits the monster/other to defi ne and assert power; or, as Richard Kearney argues, otherness offers the possibility for a “sacrificial strategy [and] furnishes communities with a binding identity, that is, with the basic sense of who is included (us) and who is excluded (them)” (26). The twenty-fi rst-century discourses of monstrosity are central to Being Human. References to popular culture, TV and music support the drama’s contemporary mise-en-scène: intertextual references to programmes such as Buff y, The Apprentice and The Real Hustle and music-scores by Amy Winehouse, Florence and The Machine, and Duff y help to recreate scenes of twenty-fi rst-century British normality. This façade also relates to the locations where the series is recorded, including the Gothic architecture of Bristol General Hospital, where George, Mitchell and Nina work. This set alongside the ordinary shabbiness of their house on Windsor Terrace, Totterdown (Bristol) and the converted public house on Barry Island (Wales). The hospital is the perfect postmodern nonplace, for it erases identity and individualism (Mitchell, who works as a hospital porter, says that the place offers him anonymity). Here, the location shots include little natural light, suggesting that the hospital is the contemporary reincarnation of

68 Monica Germanà the archetypal (mad) doctor’s laboratory—a place where dark recesses host vampire gatherings, lycanthropic transformations and the horrific experiments of maniacal scientists and power-crazy surgeons. The hospital is, then, an uncanny space where the familiar meets the unfamiliar and provides liminal dimensions. Likewise, the two houses of the series destabilise the notion of domestic space: he house on Windsor Terrace is haunted by Annie’s murder, and the converted pub is the scene of Mitchell’s sacrificial death. Here, we are reminded of Julia Kristeva’s reading of Freud’s uncanny in which the past/present dichotomy is implicit in its ontological status: “that which is strangely uncanny would be that which was (the past tense is important) familiar and, under certain conditions (which ones?), emerges” (183). Blurring natural/supernatural, normal/abnormal distinctions, the uncanny dwellings erode binary logic, and as Annie says, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned about this world, is that it doesn’t follow logic. We’re talking about magic . . . and curses. We’re off the map here” (2:1). Yet the programme’s locus of “real” horror is the facility used by Kemp and Lucy to experiment on werewolves. Situated in the basement of an old bank, the dark corridors—the “archaic wiring” produces the uncanny flickering of electric lights—and barred windows represent the confi ned and mysterious space of a Gothic fortress. “I Like the symbolism,” Lucy says, “commerce was a religion of the twentieth century. Banks were the churches. Now we’re reclaiming the land” (2:8). The body bags and coffi ns concealed in the polarised recesses—the lab and the chapel—point to the duality of an evil that is perpetuated in the institutions of “truth.” Religion and science—albeit with different methodologies—ultimately offer the believer or advocate an access route to truth, and in the series the excesses of science and religion converge in the facility’s inner sanctum (the decompression chamber) that invokes the image of the torture chamber. Significantly, torture is not performed by perpetrators but mediated and monitored via CCTV cameras, which also facilitate the scientist’s voyeurism and expose the sadistic desire behind the façade of medical scrutiny in the name of science. Technology may, in a sense, stretch the boundaries of human existence: “I might be dead,” Annie playfully says upon receiving junkmail, “but I am still on the database” (2:5). Throughout the series, though, malicious and uncontrollable technologies are juxtaposed with the human values espoused by Annie, George and Mitchell. Bad technology, for example, underscores Kemp’s campaign to eradicate all supernatural manifestations: he uses bugging devices to record incriminating evidence from Windsor Terrace and, in so doing, updates the transposition of written evidence used against the victims of witch trials. Pornographic video footage of one of Lauren’s victims is also used to tempt Mitchell into consuming blood and this, in turn, leads people to believe that Mitchell and George are paedophiles. Conversely, CCTV allows George and Nina to see Kemp forcing Annie through the door (2:8), and a TV screen facilitates communication between Annie

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and her former housemates from the other side (2:8). Technology, it would appear, shares with its human makers a kind of duality, or multiplicity, of ethical embodiments; what becomes increasingly troubling, however, is the human inability to acknowledge or reflect on these issues. In Being Human, the twenty-fi rst-century Gothic monster also arises out of the notion of simulation, particularly in relation to “virtual” living and performative identities. In an attempt to manage his condition, George has a cage in his home and takes tranquilisers (stolen from the hospital); both situations reveal the thin boundary separating the human from the beast, while the cage, George understands from its maker, is most commonly used in s&m practices (2:4). The complex relationship between human desire and performance is also hinted by other references to Gothic subcultures; for instance, when Carl’s body—declared dead by Lucy—“disappears” from the hospital, Mitchell states that fetishistic rituals have never been more popular among ordinary people: you know those people. They work in IT, but at the week-ends, they put on frilly shirts and make out they’re in a Gothic novel. The fellas pretend to be Dracula and the women all have heaving breasts under their nighties. Then they get changed and it’s back in the Ford Focus. (2:2) This emphasis on the cultural practices of simulated identity is facilitated by technology: internet websites and social networking sites encourage the proliferative consumption of fantasy and virtual identities. Simultaneously, though, the deployment of such technologies exposes the dangerous permeability of the real/virtual threshold: Ivan uses Twitter to communicate with the vampire community (2:6), and a young Goth is lured from a webbased networking site—consensually, it is claimed—only to be consumed (2:4). The complexity of human desire here unveils the ambiguous concept of choice—so frequently used by Mitchell to justify his crimes—in a contemporary cultural context which increasingly questions choice through technological displacement. Exposing the relevance of fantasy in the human longing for authentic relationship, Being Human also interrogates the effect of the pervasive deployment of technology as a medium to negotiate desire. The tragic climax of season three includes Mitchell’s self-sacrifice as an act of love; Annie, George and Nina are then united over the pain and the inevitable grief at losing their friend. Fulfi lling the prophesy that Mitchell would die from a wolf-shaped bullet, the act also reflects George’s conscious choice of good over evil, for he realises that Mitchell would, sooner or later, return to the degenerate pack of vampires. Here, we are reminded of the critic Stephen Asma’s statement that “[m]onster derives from the Latin word monstrum, which in turn derives from the root monere (to warn)” (13) and, in this sense, Being Human uses monsters to warn us about the destructive side (and points to the complex ethical paradigms) of humanity. Concealed behind an obsession with monstrosity is an intense

70 Monica Germanà anxiety about what it means to be human. After all, the three monsters of the series are confronted with distinctly human concerns: the fear of disappearing (Annie), the uncontrollable power of our appetites (Mitchell), and the repression of our animal instincts (George). In displaying the “natural” limits of humanity through the skewed perspective of the monster, the series conveys a warning against the excesses of ethical dogmas; any attempt to destroy them makes monsters of us. Ultimately, though, Being Human offers an affi rmative depiction of the strange appeal of the other, that uncanny longing to exceed the boundaries of the self that is, for better and for worse, part of humanity.

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Andriano, J. D., Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Asma, S. T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Bienstock Anolik, R. and D. L. Howard. The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004. Cixous, Helene. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”).” New Literary History 7 (1976): 525–48. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Transl. G. Burchell. Ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana. New York: Picador, 2004. Gilmore, D. D. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Jones, D. J., Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Hodder Arnold, 2002. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves [1988] London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. De Montaigne, M. The Complete Essays. Transl. M. A. Screech. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane (Penguin), 1991. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [1867], vol. 1. Transl. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970. Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil. Transl. by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 2003. . Human, All Too Human [1878]. London: Penguin, 2004. Smith, C. Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture [1886]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Warner, Marina. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998. Whithouse, T. Being Human. Series 1,2,3. BBC, 2008–present.

4

Gothic, Grabbit and Run Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the Gothic Marketplace Glennis Byron

The idea that gothic sells has become something of a critical commonplace over the last decade, although in itself, as E. J. Clery fi rst demonstrated in The Rise of Supernatural Fiction (1995), this is really nothing new: from the late eighteenth century onwards, the ghost is caught up in, and endlessly recycled through, the capitalist machines of the entertainment industry. There is, however, something rather different about the intensified spread and commodification of the gothic in recent years, and while it is easy to observe that gothic sells and that gothic has become pervasive in our culture, it is not so easy to explain why. The idea that gothic sells because it is particularly suited to the representation of contemporary concerns is something often claimed, but not especially helpful, partly because critics are often hesitant to be specific about what these concerns might be, and partly because this way of thinking constricts and confi nes the gothic to a mimetic, representational imperative in a not entirely useful way. In “Feeling Gothicky” (2007), Alexandra Warwick offered one influential explanation when she argued that the apparent ubiquity of gothic may have something to do with the way critical practice itself—she takes particular issue with hauntology—produces what we see as gothic fictions: it is critics, she suggests, who are feeling “gothicky.” While this certainly goes some way towards explaining the pervasiveness of gothic in the academy, it does not really account for the pervasiveness of gothic in popular culture, where academic critical practice, in spite of the admirably inventive stories spun for funding applications, rarely has quite this amount of impact. While Warwick makes an important point in focusing on how gothic is something produced, by focusing on its academic production, she elides consideration of the world of publishing and the media, and, without looking at the ways in which academic critics themselves are often prompted by marketing strategies, perhaps accounts for only half the picture. In this chapter, I want to begin with a general consideration of gothic as a marketing product and then move on to the discussion of one specific text, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento (2001; translated as The Shadow of the Wind, 2004) in order to consider one example of the way marketing and branding function in producing what we understand as a gothic text.

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MARKETING THE GOTHIC The contemporary prevalence of gothic is, at least in part, the product of marketing. Since the 1980s, we have moved from seeing Gothic as a genre to Gothic as a mode or discourse and from there to Gothic as commodity; perhaps now it is time to consider whether, at least in western popular culture, Gothic may well have begun to function very much like a brand. Gothic seems to be increasingly pervasive in contemporary culture, partly because once it becomes clear that gothic sells, that gothic is a lucrative business, then an increasing number of things get marketed as gothic, get gothicked up. Whether they are or are not gothic is not particularly the point: the point is that they are represented to us as gothic by promotional strategies and the media. The issue is no longer that gothic sells, but that, as the advertisement for the US department store Sears (Figure 4.1) rather neatly suggests, the gothic increasingly sells things. Even more importantly, however (and what distinguishes current marketing practices from earlier ones), because gothic sells things, then things are increasingly produced as gothic. It is a proven way to move product. Robert Mighall’s suggestion that the “Gothic is a process, not an essence; a rhetoric rather than a store of universal symbols” may have some relevance here. “Epochs, institutions, places, and people are Gothicized, have the Gothic thrust upon them” (xxv), Mighall continues, and so, one might add,

Figure 4.1

Advertisement in Sears’ zombie campaign.

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do texts. Indeed, almost anything can be, and today has been, stamped by a Gothic brand. Branding is a cultural form that functions primarily as a commercial version of storytelling; it is a form of communication that tells stories in the context of products and services. With brands, we buy not the product but the story that is offered with the product. For example, we might buy Sainsbury’s Woodland brand eggs rather than generic eggs because Sainsbury’s brand tells us that “hens love trees,” or Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference chicken thighs because their “Taste the Difference free range chickens reared in the Woodland free range system have 20% tree cover in a large outdoor paddock, with access to indoor space [and there is] evidence of a nine-fold reduction in feather pecking among woodland hens” (J. Sainsbury). The narrative is what sells the product, a narrative that makes us feel just that little bit more comfortable about our pot pies and cacciatores.

Figure 4.2

HarperCollins 1999 edition of Wuthering Heights.

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A particularly interesting case of branding can be seen in the now notorious Harper Collins’ reissuing of a number of classic texts to capitalise on the popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. As well as being branded by the Twilight colours, the books are given their celebrity endorsement. Wuthering Heights, for example, is promoted as “Bella and Edward’s favourite book.” There is quite a fascinating process of framing going on here as a result of branding. Wuthering Heights, first appropriated by Meyers in her Twilight series, is then retrospectively reframed by that to which it gave issue, and constituted in a different way, for a different (and particular) readership. Intertextual relations far exceed any simple notion of “influence” here, and are instead inscribed in a circular and backward looking loop. Paratextual elements are further used to brand the book as part of a Twilight franchise. The tag line for this edition of Wuthering Heights is “Love Never Dies,” the tag line fi rst used for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The connection is of course appropriate, given the way in which Coppola rewrote Dracula as a love story, but it also points to the distortion produced by this branding. As Fred Botting notes in his discussion of Coppola’s fi lm, “Romance, as it frames gothic, seems to clean up its darker counterpart, sanitizing its depravations” (Botting 1). This is even more notable in the publisher’s description of Wuthering Heights in the promotion of this edition; it becomes a book I barely recognize: “Love the Twilight books? Then you’ll adore Wuthering Heights, one of the greatest love stories ever told. Cathy and Heathcliff, childhood friends, are cruelly separated by class, fate, and the actions of others. But uniting them is something even stronger: an all-consuming passion that sweeps away everything that comes between them. Even death!” Despite serving as a description of Wuthering Heights, this is, more accurately perhaps, a paraphrase of the plot of Romeo and Juliet, another of the texts that the Twilight franchise brands via Harper Collins. The branding sells the book by imposing upon it the narrative of Twilight. All the horrors and complexities of Wuthering Heights are smoothed away for a new audience as the more recent fiction is imbued with the power to brand the original, thus shifting the readerly “horizon of expectations” in which it is read and interpreted. And because sales of Wuthering Heights in the UK apparently did go from 8,500 to 34,000 a year after this reissue, it is clear the branding works. We really do judge a book by its cover. Gothic sells, gothic is a lucrative business. But because it sells, because it is such a lucrative business, it increasingly seems to be the global publishing industries and the media that construct and categorize the forms of gothic found in contemporary culture. Academics are increasingly not in control of the categories. New interpretive communities are being constituted, defi ned and called into being by the term gothic and its related visual images, and it is a term deliberately manipulated by the publishing industry. While the thought of defi ning and fi xing the gothic makes many academic writers uneasy, publishers and their fiction writers rarely have such

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qualms. Take, for example, the Australian writer Kate Morton, who has recently received excellent reviews for her third “gothic” novel, The Distant Hours (2010). Morton defi nes contemporary gothic as “combining romance and mystery with period atmosphere” (Sorenson), and her view of what constitutes gothic seems to be quite widely accepted: as one reviewer puts it, “Like tea and toast in the morning the elements of a satisfying gothic novel are reliably present in every one of Kate Morton’s books” (Weissman). Tea and toast in the morning: it is difficult to imagine anything more cozy, more domestic, more homely. As the reviewer herself notes, this is “Comfort Fiction” (Weissman). One might wonder what has happened to the unhomely, to the disturbances of the uncanny. Her “brand” of gothic fiction, Morton further explains, is built upon a set of key gothic tropes: “a secret and a house in which that secret lies hidden, waiting to be called forth by someone haunted by memory and nostalgia” (Sorenson). Even here, gothic is domesticated, rendered innocuous, bourgeois, homely: being haunted by memory and nostalgia is not precisely the same thing as being haunted by ghosts. Morton is nevertheless pointing to a particular set of tropes that, while always linked to gothic, has been increasingly central to popular manifestations of the form in the last decade: secrets, the past, and, most importantly, a sense of place. Character, a “someone,” seems to function primarily to “call forth” that past into the present. This central focus is frequently conveyed through the book covers of recent “gothic” texts, many of which feature an old house, imposing mansion, or gloomy castle. Losing much of its complex concerns with textuality—a central feature of the form since Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was published in 1764—in this particular current manifestation, gothic again becomes reduced, and reducible, to an easily identified set of visual codes with an implicit associated narrative based on simple and predictable repetition. Is this genre or mode, then, or a branding strategy?

MARKETING SHADOW OF THE WIND This concern with a sense of place, and with the emphasis on the visual, leads to the main focus of this chapter: the marketing and production of gothic in the case of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which now often appears as a set text on university courses on the gothic. It is, as the promotional material repeatedly emphasizes, an international bestseller: it has been translated from the original Castellano into more than forty languages and published in over fi fty countries. If Barcelona gothic previously conjured up little more than the Barrio Gótico, or a few gothic buildings like Santa María del Mar—it has now become fi rmly identified, at least for an English speaking readership, with Zafón and his international bestsellers.

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And yet, when fi rst translated into English as The Shadow of the Wind in 2004, the book was described primarily as a thriller. The Observer is typical of early assessments, describing the book as a “mildly supernatural thriller, against-the-odds love story and period coming-of-age saga” (Colvile). In terms of influences, the New York Times spoke of Borges, Eco and García Márquez (Eder). In the author notes for the 2005 paperback edition, the book was said to be the fi rst in a “planned set of four based in [Barcelona]” (508), and the discussion notes at the end of the book conclude with this question: “The Shadow of the Wind has been described as “thriller, historical fiction, occasional farce, existential mystery and passionate love story.” How would you describe it?” (510). Significantly, “gothic” is not even an option. But the word did creep in, with, for example, The Times concluding that it was “at heart an old-fashioned adventure yarn, thoroughly marinated in gothic romanticism” (Lively 2004). The publishers declared the book a gothic masterpiece and Zafón himself began referring to his gothic Barcelona quartet in interviews. By 2007, it had been on bestseller lists in numerous countries and the status of the book as gothic had been fi rmly established, something emphatically confi rmed by none other than Stephen King in his monthly column for Entertainment Weekly: “If you thought the true gothic novel died with the 19th century, this will change your mind. Shadow is the real deal, a novel full of cheesy splendor and creaking trapdoors, a novel where even the subplots have subplots. There’s a haunted house (ah, but by what?) called the Angel of Mist, and the only horror greater than the thing rotting in its bricked-up crypt is (but of course, senor [sic]) the horror of doomed love” (King). Whether the book is gothic or not, it has certainly been thoroughly branded as gothic. Zafón’s English language website now actively promotes him as a writer of gothic fiction. The website introduction to the subsequent The Angel’s Game (which, perhaps significantly, focuses on a writer driven to accommodate market demand) welcomes us in decidedly gothic text, “back to the gothic and mysterious world of the cemetery of forgotten books, where this time things take a devilish turn and the shadows get deeper and deeper” (Zafón, website). Just in case there is any room for doubt, as one moves through certain pages, candles almost subliminally fl icker and fade across the bottom of the screen. So what constructs, or brands, The Shadow of the Wind as gothic—even before it is read—is, to a large extent, the marketing campaign. And, once more, there is a sense of a gothic that is detextualised, reduced to a set of easily recognized and decoded images. Branding again becomes more a visual than a textual affair. Zafón, beginning as a writer of children’s fiction, moves to being a producer of thrillers, and eventually comes to be popularly acknowledged as an authority on the gothic, with the Guardian even choosing him to pronounce on the top ten gothic novels of the twentieth century (Zafón “gothic novels”).

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I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing gothic about the book; my point is simply that as a notably cross-generic form, it could just as easily have been marketed as “thriller, historical fiction, or passionate love story.” In recognising that gothic sells, and therefore focusing in their marketing strategies on the book as a gothic fiction, it is the publisher in collaboration with the media that constructs, categorizes and in a sense even comes to defi ne what is understood by the gothic in contemporary culture.

FOGGY BARCELONA There is, however, also a level of authorial self-consciousness about the production of gothic in the case of Shadow of the Wind. That gothic today is something that may be imposed upon a text is also suggested, although in a rather different way, by a reading of the book itself, and so, in the last section of this essay, I want to move to an examination of the internal mechanisms by which this text produces itself as gothic. Shadow of the Wind, as various critics have noted, forms part of a well-established Hispanic tradition of books about books, a tradition moving from Cervantes through Borges to Pérez-Reverte. It is full of references to other books, other stories, from The Odyssey to Le fantôme de l’opéra. It is a book that is, quite self-consciously, produced from other books, and about books; even its title is the title of a book in the textual world. The main character, Daniel, is the son of a bookseller, and the story opens in 1945 when Daniel is taken by his father to the cemetery of forgotten books and chooses a novel by a Julian Carax called The Shadow of the Wind. Daniel and Julian’s lives begin to intertwine as Daniel tries to solve the mystery of Julian’s life, and his own existence becomes threatened by a romance with many similarities to that which drove Julian into exile. Other books haunt this book in much the same way as Julian Carax’s narrative in the past haunts and almost comes to define Daniel’s narrative in the present. So to some extent, there is a return here to a concern with textuality. It is, however, a textuality based on little more than knowing reference, something which helps construct, to appropriate a phrase from the book itself, “the gothic spin of this whole saga” (306). For those inclined to indulge in digging for gothic tropes, there is a rich mine of possibilities: to name just the most obvious, Zafón exploits secrets, doubles, madness, incarceration, live burial and incest; the opening records the death of the mother and the narrative is primarily concerned with father/child relationships. The representation of Julian, with his “mask of black scarred skin, consumed by fi re” (55), echoes Erik from Le fantôme de l’opéra, and indeed, the word “fantasma” is repeatedly used in describing the appearances of his mysterious form. The fate of Julian’s lover (and unknownst to Julian also his sister), Penelope Aldaya, could be said to echo anti-Catholic stories of bricked up pregnant nuns, and, more specifically her fate recalls that of Agnes in Lewis’s The Monk.

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Locked in a room by her father, Penelope dies in giving birth to her still born child and is subsequently buried and bricked up in the crypt in the depths of the Aldaya house. But what produces this text as gothic is not just the simple appropriation of such tropes and figures. Rather, it is the particular way in which the text articulates historical time and space. The Shadow of the Wind is set in Franco’s Spain and specifically in Barcelona, a city which has been particularly wounded by the divisions and the horrors of the civil war. According to Robert Ellis, if the text “seems to float through a sea of intertexts,” it nevertheless “moors itself, figuratively speaking, within the concretely Iberian context of Barcelona” (854). But the degree to which Zafón’s representation of Barcelona is “concretely Iberian” is debatable. Zafón’s website suggests a “Shadow of the Wind” walking tour around the city to see the places he describes, and a very profitable industry has arisen in Barcelona with various walks and scooter tours offering to show the tourist Zafón’s Barcelona. Iconos tours, for example, claims: “You can read any book, but just with few it’s possible to live and breathe them. We present this walking tour as a unique opportunity to wander around the amazing Barcelona depicted in ‘The Shadow of the Wind,’ a novel that has captivated thousands of readers all around the world. From letters to words, from imagination to reality.” This is, however, hardly a book you can “live and breathe.” Despite various references to specific places in the city, to landmarks familiar to any tourist, such as the Ramblas or Santa Maria del Mar, The Shadow of the Wind does not represent a Barcelona that anyone would recognise on any walking tour. The leap from “imagination to reality” can only disappoint. One of the points that repeatedly puzzles readers is why Zafón’s Barcelona always seems to be misty and wet. The novel begins with Daniel recollecting the day in 1945 when his father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the fi rst time. It is early summer, and yet Barcelona is “trapped beneath ashen skies” (1). The choice of the word trapped in itself is possibly telling, because what follows is a representation of a Barcelona trapped as much by the writing, by fictions, as by anything else. The only thing that the child Daniel remembers of the death of his mother is that “it rained all day and all night” (1). After Daniel fi rst encounters the man who will turn out to be Julian Carax, a storm erupts and “a reef of clouds and lightening” (55) race across the sky, clouds blot out the moon and cover the city in darkness; amidst thunder and lightening, the night becomes “opaque, impenetrable, as the rain fold[s] the city in its shroud” (56). Later, the “desolate streets seemed to bleed in the rain” (434). This is just a sample of what is found throughout the novel: Barcelona as a misty wet and darkly threatening city seems strangely reminiscent of Victorian London. Rather than being “concretely Iberian,” this Barcelona has more in common with the London of Dickens’s Bleak House: fog everywhere. The doom laden atmosphere may function as a metaphor for the repressed and censored

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police state, but the metaphor is produced through the imposition of an imported gothic past. Zafón’s defence when queried about his wet and misty world has usually been that he wanted to get past the touristic façade of Barcelona. This excerpt from an interview with Steve Porter is typical: “TMO: That atmosphere is the antithesis of how many people see Barcelona. . . . did you wonder if readers would get this dark representation of the Catalan capital? What do you think of the sunny Mediterranean image many people have of your native city?”; “CRZ: Well, that is mostly a touristic view rather removed from the realities of the city and its history. Many visitors come to Barcelona, spend four or five days walking the streets of the old town— which is more or less a theme park in itself—and then leave, which is fi ne, of course. What they see and experience is not different from what people going to, say, San Francisco, and spending their time at the Fisherman’s Wharf or North Beach . . . My Barcelona anyway is a purely literary one, not a faithful representation of the city itself” (Porter). Zafón’s initial rationale sidesteps the issue a little too neatly. Of course tourists see only a particular side of Barcelona, but that does not mean that his Barcelona of mist and rain is any more of an accurate representation, any closer to the “realities of the city and its history.” Consequently, it is not surprising he somewhat hastily goes on to dismiss the issue with “My Barcelona anyway is purely literary one.” This does, of course, somewhat cancel the point of those walking tours. Then again, the walking tour he constructs does as much as possible to possible to foreground a fabricated imported tradition of Victorian gothic and to marginalise what Barcelona is best known for: to repress and occlude rather than show off the city’s true architectural inheritance, Gaudi and art nouveau architecture. If you follow Zafón’s walking tour, you will certainly never see the Sagrada Família, but you will get to see the dingy Calle Arco del Teatro, setting for the cemetery of forgotten books. Unfortunately, the real Barcelona is not as malleable as Zafón’s imagined city, and the more mundane present repeatedly intrudes. The reader following Zafón’s walking tour must be braced for disappointment. You can visit El Quatre Gats where Daniel’s parents fi rst meet, and the venue for Gustavo Barceló’s literary meetings. The staff, however, will look blankly at any mention of Carlos Ruiz Zafón or La sombra del viento, while charging you seventeen euros for a gin and tonic since, after all, this café is renowned as the haunt of Picasso and Dalí. You can visit Calle Santa Ana, setting for the bookshop where Daniel and his father live, but the shops you will encounter now belong to quite a different world (Figure 4.3). More useful to an understanding of Zafón’s strategies in his representation of Barcelona are his comments on writing in the Borders bookshop interview. Here, rather than attempting to defend his Barcelona as a more “real” world than that encountered by tourists, he admits that he sees cities like characters, and, as with characters, he says, “you put costumes on them, and makeup . . .

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they perform.” You take the “physicality of the place” and “then you do a huge stylisation.” This, he says, allows him to get “to the bone, the soul of the city, which . . . is much darker” (Fahle). Fakery has of course been endemic to gothic from the start, and in this sense, Zafón could actually be said to be producing something quintessentially gothic in his fictionalised and stylized Barcelona. This is a city saturated with the historical past, where there are still, as Daniel says, “many places . . . where the nineteenth century has not yet been served its eviction notice” (14), and the echoes of Victorian London found in the repeated dreary misty and wet landscapes serve the function of fusing that past with the Barcelona of Franco’s Spain, where “the mute sadness that seeped from the walls of the wounded city “ (33) testifies to the trauma produced by the civil war and by fascism.3 The idea that gothic is something self-consciously produced through the manipulation of time and space in this text is clear in the Cemetery of Forgotten books. It is a “place of echoes and shadows” (3): an “ancient place,” “Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it” (4). But in this gothic space, the past is not dead and buried, but somehow still alive, still influencing, even concurrent with, the events of the present. Each person who goes to the place chooses one book to adopt and must ensure that book survives forever, and each person in selecting that book feels the

Figure 4.3

Visiting Calle Santa Ana today.

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choice has been made long ago. Choosing Julian Carax’s The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel feels that it “had been waiting there for me for years, probably since before I was born” (5). The labyrinthine library, like the city itself, is a gothic space that repeatedly compels the cohabitation of past and present, even while that past is, in many ways, both imported and imposed. The idea that some gothic past has been imported into this text and onto this Barcelona is best demonstrated by the gothic centrepiece of the novel, the old Aldaya mansion. Daniel’s fi rst sight of the house establishes it as an easily recognizable and visually coded gothic trope: “The storm’s icy blast blurred the ghostly outline of mansions and large rambling houses veiled in the mist. Among them rose the dark and solitary tower of the Aldaya mansion, anchored among the swaying trees” (236). The mansion could have been imported from almost any traditional horror film, not surprisingly given that Zafón worked in Los Angeles as a scriptwriter for many years. As a gothic space it is both an import and a fake: Zafón seems to be almost winking at the reader with his self-conscious references to the ways in which the gothic is superimposed, and indeed to the basically counterfeit nature of the imposition. The Aldaya mansion is an architectural import. The Catalan fi nancier who has the place built in 1899 is said to have rejected the Catalan modernism fashionable at the time. He sends his architects to New York in order to study and reproduce the “neo-gothic extravagances” erected on Fifth Avenue’s Mansion Row; the aim is to “assimilate the style and techniques” into the home he has built far from the city (240–41), in the isolated Avenida del Tibidabo, much like Zafón assimilates the style and techniques of earlier gothic fictions. The Catalan fi nancier who builds the mansion metaphorically rejects the supposedly enlightened present for a superstitious and barbaric past by rejecting modernism for gothic space. And he literally enacts this rejection by bringing to his home not only his wife but also his Creole mistress, assumed to be a witch and sorceress (239). They move in during July 1900 and by August the wife and mistress are dead, blood smeared over the walls throughout the house and the fi nancier himself rendered deaf, speechless and paralysed. The counterfeit nature of the gothic that is produced within the text is made even clearer when the financier becomes obsessed with the idea of the ghosts of the women and commissions a cinematographer to shoot yards and yards of fi lm in an attempt to make these spirits visible. Significantly, it is only when some sparkling wine is “accidentally” poured into the developing tray that strange shapes begin to appear on the exposed fi lm (243). While what actually happened in the house remains a mystery, it becomes known as cursed: stories begin to circulate about books in the library being mysteriously rearranged, a room in which flowers wilt in minutes, where damp stains show up on walls and form blurry faces (245). The Shadow of the Wind concludes by simultaneously exorcising and restoring/re-storying the gothic past. The Aldaya mansion itself is restored,

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and used (most appropriately) as an advertising agency; the stone angels in the garden are ground down to make gravel for a car park. When Daniel returns the house and asks to be shown around, he fi nds the old library where he nearly died is “now a boardroom decorated with posters eulogizing deodorants and detergents with magical powers” (504), and the room where he and Beatrice conceived their son converted into a bathroom for the chief executive. The past seems to have been erased, the modern world found to be inimical to mystery and romance, hostile to the gothic. As contemporary time invades gothic space, magic is lost, or undergoes a transformation into the banal. But the text is unwilling to end on that note, and returning from visiting the old house, Daniel fi nds a parcel containing a book called The Angel of Mist, a novel by a “Boris Laurent.” Gothic is revived; Julian Carax has started writing again. Gothic in The Shadow of the Wind brings with it both the commencement and re-commencement of writing: the cycle starts over. In a brief afterword the mundane present is rejected for the “intoxication” of gothic fictions as we are taken into the future but more importantly, simultaneously back to the past. In an almost word by word reproduction of the opening, a moment that is both a recollection and a re-enaction, Daniel walks once again “through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies” (506), holding the hand of his son, named Julian, on his way to introduce him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The banality of the present vanishes in a return to gothic fictions, now embodied in the figures of the father and son. Merging into the city, becoming like the city, “figures made of mist” (506), they “disappear into the crowd of the Ramblas, their steps lost forever in the shadow of the wind” (506).

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Botting, Fred. Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Print. Clery, E.J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print. Colvile, Robert. “Barça loner.” The Guardian. 6 June 2004. Web. January 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/06/fiction.features Eder, Richard. “In the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.” New York Times. 25 April 2004. Web. 30 March 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/25/books/inthe-cemetery-of-forgotten-books.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm Ellis, Robert Richmond. “Reading the Spanish Past: Library Fantasies in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83.6 (2006): 839–54. Print. Fahle, Rich. Borders Presents: “Carlos Ruiz Zafón: The Angel’s Game.” Part 2. 2009. Web. 18 January 2011. http://www.bordersmedia.com/borderspresents/ zafon King, Stephen. “It’s Alive! Alive!” Entertainment Weekly. 1 February 2007. Web. 15 March 2011. Lively, Adam. “Fiction.” The Sunday Times. 1 August 2004. Web. 10 January 2011.

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http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article462282.ece Minzesheimer, Bob and Anthony DeBarros. “Sellers basked in Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” in 2008.” USA Today, 16 January 2009. Web. 10 March 2010. http:// www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009–01–14-top-sellers-main_N.htm Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Porter, Steve. “Books hold no passport—Carlos Ruiz Zafón discusses The Shadow of the Wind.” Three Monkeys Online. October 2008. Web. 20 June 2010. http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/als/carlos_ruiz_zafon_shadow_of_the_ wind.html J. Sainsbury plc. “Company News: Natural Life for Woodland Chicken.” 16 January 2009. Web. 20 November 2010. http://www.jsainsbury.co.uk/index.asp?Pa geID=424§ion=&Year=2009&NewsID=1085 Sorenson, Rosemary. “Gothic Delight.” The Australian. 30 October 2010. Web. 20 November 2010. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/gothic-delight/ story-e6frg8n6–1225943628385 Warwick, Alexandra. “Feeling Gothicky?” Gothic Studies, 9.1 (2007): 5–15. Print. Weissman, Kathy. Review of The Distant Hours by Kate Morton. Bookreporter. No date.Web.10March2011.http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/9781439152782. asp Zafón, Carlos Ruiz. “Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s top 10 20th-century gothic novels.” Guardian. 2 June 2010. Web. 15 March 2010.http://www.guardian.co.uk/ books/booksblog/2010/jun/02/carlos-ruiz-zafon-gothic-novels Zafón, Carlos Ruiz. The Shadow of the Wind. Trans. Lucia Graves. London: Phoenix, 2005. Print.

5

Bella’s Promises Adolescence and (Re)capitulation in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series Rachael McLennan

The literary critic Steven Bruhm argues that one difference between contemporary Gothic texts and late-eighteenth-century Gothic novels is that contemporary Gothic texts can no longer sustain the narrative project of returning the societies they portray to a “logic of historical progression.” For Bruhm, it is the psychological complexity of characters in the contemporary Gothic that renders this return impossible. He writes: History has made a promise—that one will grow from a fragile, vulnerable child to an autonomous, rational adult—but it is unable to keep this promise in the twentieth century. It can only offer a future that is already suspended between present and past. While the Gothic may ostensibly plot the movement of chronological time, it really devastates any sense of linear progression that we might use to put together our “personal history.” (267–8) Missing from Bruhm’s analysis here is any mention of “adolescence.” This absence is striking, for it could be argued that the concept of adolescence compromises the ability of “history” to keep its promise: one will grow from vulnerable child to rational adult. In this, Bruhm might have invoked adolescence in support of his argument. Of course, this would be to accept Bruhm’s assertion, when his apparent acceptance of a monolithic “history” which offers the same promise to all (and how can history make a promise, anyway?) is questionable. This chapter considers the concept of adolescence in relation to Bruhm’s argument and explores the concept of adolescence in relation to the contemporary Gothic (Bruhm’s argument is contained within an article attempting to account for the popularity of the Gothic in novels and fi lms since the Second World War). To this end, I fi rst explore the work of the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who is widely credited with formulating the concept of adolescence as it is conventionally understood today. Hall’s work, I suggest, sheds new light on Bruhm’s argument, revealing why it is useful to consider adolescence in relation to the Gothic—particularly in readings of popular fiction such as Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling young-adult series, Twilight.

Bella’s Promises 85 G. Stanley Hall’s two-volume interdisciplinary study Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904) is often cited as the fi rst text to provide a comprehensive account of adolescence. From the early twentieth century to the present, adolescence has been understood as a liminal period of identity formation, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, but incorporating both stages of development. This liminal quality means that adolescence provides an illustration of what Bruhm describes as “a future that is already suspended between present and past,” but to focus on adolescence would complicate Bruhm’s claims. To say that adolescence has been understood in the same way since the early twentieth century is a huge oversimplification. It is, after all, Hall’s understanding of adolescence as a physiological and as a social construction (physiological changes in puberty together with social and cultural factors intersect in complex ways to construct adolescence) that remains his most insightful contribution. To put this another way, adolescence may be consistently understood as a period between childhood and adulthood, but what is meant by childhood and adulthood (and, perhaps even more importantly, how and when an individual is understood to have passed from one category to another), varies according to historical period and cultural context, and has consequences for the ways in which adolescence is constructed and conceived. Hall’s own construction of adolescence can be used to illustrate this. Unpacking Hall’s theories, Christine Griffin notes that, “Adolescence” was not simply a product of Hall’s idiosyncratic ideas as an influential North American psychologist, nor did this represent an essential truth about “youth” which was discovered by Hall via the techniques of scientific psychology. Hall’s work reflects a particular combination of discourses around “race,” sexuality, gender, class, nation and age which were very much rooted in a specific historical moment. (12) The shifts in American society engendering the changes in lives of young people and their visibility can be traced back to post-Civil War culture. Many scholars (including Nancy Lesko, Anita Harris and Catherine Driscoll) argue that the construction of adolescence is inextricably bound up in the conditions of modernity.1 Lesko, for instance, argues that “adolescence became a social space in which to talk about the characteristics of people in modernity, to worry about the possibilities of these social changes, and to establish policies and programs that would help create the modern social order and citizenry” (5–6). Adolescence, then, enables people to worry about changing cultural conditions in modernity, and Lesko cites three areas in particular that generates these anxieties: racial progress, the dominance of masculinity, and nation-building (6). For Lesko, the widespread influence of the scientific theory of recapitulation in the late

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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflects these worries and reveals attempts to allay them. This too is illustrated in the Hall’s theoretical work on adolescence, which is indebted to that theory of recapitulation. Recapitulation theory posits that, in a person’s growth from youth to maturity, the individual repeats the evolution and development of humankind. For Hall, adulthood is the endpoint and goal of human advance; it is the highest stage of development and the ideal subject position to which young people should aspire. It is clear from his work that only certain types of people will attain this highest level of achievement—the white, middleclass, heterosexual male. Anyone diverging from these subject positions will, he implies, occupy a lower position in a hierarchy of maturity and development. In several texts, for example, Hall argues that women are more closely affiliated with the childlike and the “primitive”—a word he also uses to describe designate nonwhite races and ethnicities. His thoughts on race and gender, and his privileging of the identity category “adult,” underscore how nineteenth-century assumptions and ideologies have influenced his construction of adolescence. In Hall’s work, then, it is the white, male adolescent who holds promise, both in the sense that recapitulation theory promises adult development to white males only, and that white males are constructed as those who will ideally represent the highest stage of mankind’s development—its promise. Reading recapitulation in Hall’s work offers a conception of adolescence that helps us to re-examine aspects of the Gothic mode (and build on Bruhm’s argument). Lesko’s observations about how adolescence functions as a means of exploring the anxieties of modernity may go some way towards explaining Catherine Spooner’s claim that “The body at the centre of many contemporary Gothic narratives is defi nitively an adolescent one” (87). Subject to physiological change and occupying a liminal space between past and future, adolescence would seem a particularly viable subject position in which to explore anxieties about the return of the past, and the preoccupations with excess, limits and transgression which Alan Lloyd-Smith identifies as central to Gothic texts (5). But the relationship between adolescence and the Gothic is subtle and complex. For adolescence is, according to most conceptions, a stage of development the individual goes through prior to adulthood; it should, in other words, demonstrate “the logic of linear progression.” But adolescence, a category not widely recognised prior to the mid- to late-nineteenth century (and yet often read as a “universal” or “natural” stage of development), reveals the instability of constructions of past and future and the difficulty of differentiating between them. Such a category challenges the notion of a straightforward progression from childhood to adulthood, rendering history’s promise impossible—broken, or nonexistent. The centrality of recapitulation theory in Hall’s conception of adolescence further suggests why adolescence and its relation to the Gothic can be usefully explored. For although it is discredited as a “scientific” theory,

Bella’s Promises 87 Hall’s use of recapitulation nonetheless haunts contemporary discussions of adolescence, suggesting that adulthood has been constructed as an ideal subject position, one to which not everyone has been granted access. Rather than saying that history has made a promise of growth to adulthood which has been broken in the twentieth century (something which can be both confi rmed and critiqued via consideration of adolescence), it would be more accurate to assert that the construction of adolescence in the early twentieth century has helped to expose that promise as false, nonexistent, or applicable only to certain people. In one case, for instance, Lesko cites a scholar who claims that adolescence has been reformulated in psychological and sociological terms as “the promise of individual or collective regeneration” (110). It is therefore not surprising that adolescence would become, as Lesko describes, the repository for adult fears about the future progress of society in modernity (fears about how and whether white males will grow up, and fears about the lack of development in “others”). Recapitulation theory allows Hall to predict what will happen to modernity’s young people in the future; the white male will continue to have “promise.” Hall therefore alleviates any (adult) concerns about young people in modernity while affi rming his culture’s dominant ideologies of race and gender. However—and this point is crucial—there is a tendency, in contemporary discussions of adolescence, to overlook those ideologies of gender and race that underpin Hall’s work. In this, contemporary notions of adolescence are haunted by Hall’s model (presumed as a universal theory), particularly the exclusionary process which “others” those who are constructed, in various times and places, as unable to achieve the goal of adulthood. Is the promise of growth to adulthood broken in the twentieth century? Any response to this question would of course need to acknowledge the postmodern challenge to the metanarrative (the breakdown of grand narratives) and critique of teleological paradigms (the tale of “linear progression”) which has often defi ned conceptions of growth. Yet when we examine adolescence in the contemporary Gothic we are confronted with a paradox: on the one hand, contemporary tales of adolescence (particularly in fiction and fi lm) are marked by the search for an untroubled narrative of development (in Bruhm’s terms, a search to keep, or re-make, history’s promise); on the other hand, they also acknowledge the impossibility of achieving that promise. Recapitulation is, then, still vital to narrative constructions of adolescence. After all, it always involves repetition with a difference, and contemporary narratives of adolescence recapitulate that linear historical narrative of development; they repeat it with a difference, and they do so in various ways. Moreover, acts of recapitulation include some qualities of the promise, for the promise can be defi ned as “A declaration or assurance made to another person (usually with respect to the future), stating a commitment to give, do, or refrain from doing a specified thing or act, or guaranteeing that a specified thing will or will not happen.”2

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Recapitulation is, from this perspective, the promise of repetition with a difference—or the promise of repetition, with a difference (it is the difference that always breaks the promise). Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels are key texts for exploring these ideas in detail. Indeed, the Twilight series charts the “personal history” of its protagonist, Bella Swan (whose name may be an example of recapitulation in action if read as an allusion to the heroine of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto). Twilight (2005), the fi rst novel in the series, opens with Bella’s removal from hot, sunlit, dry, Phoenix, Arizona (where she lives with her mother) to the rain-sodden, dark, small town of Forks, Washington (to live with her father). Bella is portrayed as an outsider who ventures into a new community—a typical opening sequence in Gothic texts (Hogle 12)—but Bella’s move to Forks is also a return. For Bella’s mother left Forks when Bella was “a few months old,” implying that Bella was born in this small town. Additionally, Bella explains that “It was in this town that I’d been compelled to spend a month every summer until I was fourteen” (3). While her return to Forks is an act of recapitulation, a return to a conceptualized place of origin, it is difficult to know whether or not this is a regression—a mirroring of the desire to return to the mother which Jerrold E. Hogle sees as central to Gothic texts (5)—or whether Bella’s separation from her mother (and her decision to live with her father) signals the onset of a pattern of development consistent with Freudian notions of psychosexual development, leaving some readers to identify the conservative gender politics of the Twilight series.3 This ambiguity suggests that Bella’s progression to adulthood will be problematic—as female, she is one of the “others” who have not historically been granted that promise of growth to adulthood. In this, the Twilight series echoes (recapitulates?) the ambivalent gender politics of the Gothic mode, an ambivalence that Hogle calls the “perpetual question of whether [the Gothic] is primarily a conservative or a revolutionary genre composed from other genres” (12). If Bella resists adulthood, then her stance might be read as radical (a move away from her culture’s narratives of female development, and a deliberate breaking of the promise of history). Or it might be read as reactionary: she refuses or is unable to grow up (which also involves breaking the promise), and she must be recuperated by bringing her in line with those dominant scripts (to ensure that her development keeps history’s promise). At her new school in Forks, Bella is intrigued by the unusual appearance of four fellow students: they have extremely white skin. All seemingly from the Cullen family, they are, for Bella, strikingly beautiful, and she is attracted to the youngest male in the group, Edward. Twilight explores the growing attraction between Bella and Edward, but Bella is alrmed when she discovers that the Cullens are vampires (and additionally, not members of the same family). Edward tries to calm Bella’s anxieties by explaining that the Cullens are “vegetarians” (i.e., vampires who

Bella’s Promises 89 refrain from drinking human blood; 164). As a result, Bella soon realises that Edward must exert self-discipline when he is in her presence: he must not act on his desire to consume her blood, and he knows that physical contact between them might result in Bella’s death. Analogies between vampire urges and human sexual desire have been duly noted by many critics; what remains insufficiently examined is how Bella’s adolescent development, the major plot device and narrative structuring principle, includes the making and breaking of various promises and on the gesture of recapitulation. Lucy Mangan points out that, despite Meyer’s claims that her series is about choice, “the only choice Bella gets to make is to sacrifi ce herself in ever-larger increments” (12). It is, though, more productive to think of Bella’s development as determined by a series of promises—made and broken—and by her shifting thoughts on the nature of these promises. The verbal contract is, of course, the defi ning mode of Bella and Edward’s relationship; when Edward saves Bella from an out-of-control car, she demands that he “promise” to explain his superhuman speed and strength (49). Through the text, in fact, her relationship to Edward is defi ned by the maintenance of many promises, thus foregrounding two aspects of the verbal contract outlined above and J. L. Austin’s claim that, In the particular case of promising, as with so many other performatives, it is appropriate that the person uttering the promise should have a certain intention, viz. here to keep his word: and perhaps of all concomitants this looks to be the most suitable to be that which “I promise” does describe or record. (10) The promise, then, is notable for its capacity to place the speaker under a particular obligation. This contract might comprise an attempt to determine the future—to carry out an action specifi ed in the promise—or it could be a promise not to act in the present or future. Indeed, making and keeping promises may be, for Bella, a means of countering the loss felt by the absence of history’s “promise,” a way of enabling Bella to uncover, and narrate, her personal history. For the promises she demands of Edward reveal her insecurities about his commitment to her—“Do you promise to be there tomorrow?”—and it is precisely his presence in her life, in the future, that she wants him to guarantee (167; emphasis in original). The promises Edward demands of Bella focus on her safety; he wants her, for instance, to promise not to go into the woods alone (168). The forms of obligation in these promises are complex. When Bella and Edward make a promise, they are bound to keep their word and show their good faith. Yet the making and breaking of promises also allow Bella and

90 Rachael McLennan Edward to attempt to impose their respective wills on one another. By forcing the other to promise, they exert power, even dominance, within their relationship: the other must change according to the promise made. In this, it is perhaps not surprising that Twilight concludes with what the fi nal chapter calls an “impasse”; Bella insists that Edward promises two things: he must never leave her, and he must one day make her into a vampire. Edward is reluctant to commit to either request and, although he pledges to stay, he refuses to use the performative word “promise” and is reluctant to use the word “forever” (433–434). This “impasse” is invoked in the opening scene of the sequel, New Moon, when Bella’s worst fears are realised: Edward leaves her. In fact, her behaviour in the second novel is dictated by her decision to break the promises she has made to Edward in order to protect her physical safety: So many promises I kept . . . It clicked together for me then. I wanted to be stupid and reckless, and I wanted to break promises. Why stop at one? (127) The plot of New Moon is, in fact, predicated on the consequences of Bella’s broken promises (keeping promises would mean no conflict, no narrative drive). Breaking verbal contracts, though, also underscores her connection to him, despite his absence. When engaging in dangerous acts (such as cliff diving), for example, Bella hears Edward’s voice in her mind—he urges her to remain safe (in an echo of the moment when Jane Eyre hears Mr. Rochester’s voice in his absence), signifying his presence and power in her life (359). But the source of the voice remains ambiguous: Is Edward’s voice simply Bella’s projection? Or does Edward’s voice reveal a telepathic connection (indicating their closeness)? Bella, then, continues to court danger in order to create a sense of connection to Edward. But when promises signal the intention to carry out a future act (a recapitulation of act of promising), then her breaking of these promises suggests that her sense of responsibility has changed. Indeed, her efforts to force Edward to make promises signals her desire to control the future and, as such, her broken promises are a denial of the future; or, more specifically, she is unable to imagine a life without Edward, something with disturbing consequences. In this sense, it is not surprising that Bella’s cliff-diving is perceived by several characters as a sign of possible suicide, a negated future (384). And when he interprets her act as suicidal, Edward initiates a complicated series of plot developments that engenders the process of what Alice Cullen describes as a “conversion” (361), anticipating Bella’s vampiric transformation in Breaking Dawn (book four). This “conversion” is bound up in various negotiations—further promiseeliciting between herself and Edward—that would lead to a future sexual relationship and marriage.

Bella’s Promises 91 It is, I want to suggest, Bella’s “conversion” that reveals how Meyer’s texts can be read in relation to the ideologies of recapitulation. While the question of choice is prominent in Eclipse (book three), which concludes with Bella’s decision to pursue a relationship with Edward over Jacob (the Native American boy who transforms into a werewolf), there is still a sense that Bella is acting on forces beyond her control. She describes being drawn by irresistible forces—the metaphor of the magnetic pull is often invoked—and, as a result, her agency is called into question. By the end of Eclipse, she states the following: And I realised that I’d been wrong all along about the magnets. It had not been Edward and Jacob that I’d been trying to force together, it was the two parts of myself, Edward’s Bella and Jacob’s Bella. But they could not exist together; and I never should have tried. I’d done so much damage. (539) Here, Bella’s enigma is articulated in the language of recapitulation and the disturbing gender and racial politics that inform Hall’s theory of adolescence and human development. In fact, the film version of Eclipse foregrounds the recapitulation inscribed into the novel when Bella concludes that she was never meant to decide between Edward and Jacob, but between “who I should be and who I am.” The novel and film adaptation make it clear that Jacob offers Bella a ‘human’ existence (the warmth and closeness which arguably Edward cannot provide, and which Bella might lose on transforming into a vampire). Edward offers her the possibility to become a vampire, and a place in the Cullens’ world, which Bella says is not only Edward’s world but hers, where she belongs. Bella’s sense that her future is with Edward, as a vampire, fits with her sense of herself as not ‘normal’ (this discussion paraphrases an argument she makes explicitly in the film). But Bella’s language—“who I should be and who I am”—suggests that by aligning herself with Edward, by becoming vampire, she is conceptualized as more mature and in an “advanced” stage of development—someone whose maturity and advancement are defined by divisions of race and class. Edward is, after all, represented as being aristocratic, wealthy, powerful, controlling and white; Jacob is, by contrast, depicted as immature, primitive, animalistic and emotional (indeed, he “phases”—another evolutionary term—into a werewolf when he is angry and “out of control,” losing power over himself).4 The novel version of Eclipse expresses Bella’s commitment to Edward in the language of self-sacrifice. The union is not articulated in terms of her fulfilment or sense of completion; rather, it engenders a sense of loss, dispossession and pain—namely, she loses her intimacy with Jacob and suffers from the pain she feels she has caused both Jacob and Edward. This is consistent with the rest of the book series: Bella’s promises are not about choice or development, for her commitments are always at the behest of, or dependent upon, other characters to whom she feels a sense of responsibility. The

92 Rachael McLennan needs of others are privileged above her desires so that perhaps breaking promises becomes one of the few means she has of asserting agency. The narrative of Bella’s promises moves far beyond her individual commitments and has social and political consequences. In one of the storylines of the series, the narrator describes a treaty between the Quileute tribe of Native Americans, to which Jacob belongs, and the coven of vampires to which the Cullens belong. The treaty was negotiated by Jacob’s greatgrandfather and the leader of the coven, Carlisle. The treaty defines the Quileute territory—a reservation—by excluding the “cold ones” (the vampires) from the area; in return, the Quileutes are committed to concealing the vampires’ existence; that is, to retain the secret by not exposing the vampires. This is significant for the love triangle the lies at the heart of the narrative: the confl icting emotions and tensions between human, vampire and werewolf threaten to destabilise the treaty. This has particular consequences in the fi nal book of the series, Breaking Dawn. In this novel a great danger, threatening vampires, werewolves and humans alike, necessitates that a truce be forged in order to entail the survival of all. It is a truce ultimately only achievable because of the great affection held towards Bella by members from all three groups. That danger takes the form of a threat from the Volturi (based in the city of Volterra, Italy), and who are “the closest thing” to a vampire “royal family” (NM 19). Indeed, the Volturi make the “vampire rules,” including “conversion” and, unlike the Cullens, they consume human blood. They also destroy that which threatens their authority or community (it is the Volturi who force Bella to become a vampire—a human who knows about the existence of vampires is a threat to be contained) (NM 478–81). In Breaking Dawn, the Volturi seek to destroy Bella and Edward’s child, Renesmee, whom they wrongly believe to be an immortal child—a vampire in the form of a child. The Cullens defend Renesmee and unite other covens to “bear witness,” stating that Renesmee is half-human, half vampire. But even when the Volturi realise Renesmee’s lineage, they still seek to destroy her and those who protect her, including the werewolves who are prepared to break the treaty to protect Renesmee and themselves. Ultimately, the truce is only achievable because of Bella’s strong bonds to all three groups. The plot, though, gestures to more than the political complications of the present; it also points to the future. This is articulated by one of the Volturi, Aro, when he proclaims the following: “This amazing child”—he lifted his hand palm down as if to rest it on Renesmee, though he was forty yards from her now, almost within the Volturi formation again—“if we could but know her potential—know with absolute certainty that she could always remain shrouded within the obscurity that protects us. But we know nothing of what she will become! Her own parents are plagued by fears of her future. We cannot know what she will grow to be.” (716)

Bella’s Promises 93 The central problem of the Twilight series is, following Steven Bruhm’s theory, the lack of promise regarding the metanarrative of human development in the twentieth- and twenty-fi rst centuries. For the confounding figure of the child who is human and vampire disturbs the coherence of stable (narrative) identity in the present and generates anxiety about the future. This problem is addressed in the series by the revelation that Renesmee is not, as Aro says, “unknown” and or dangerous (although she is still othered): “There appears to be no danger,” Aro states, “this is an unusual development, but I see no threat. These half-vampire children are much like us, it appears” (738). This judgement neutralizes the threat and Bella celebrates the fact that they can remain as they are; she joyfully asserts that “in a hundred and fi fty years [Renesmee] would still be young. And we would all be together” (741). This is presented as a happy ending, for Bella attains the “forever” she has sought since book one (754). But Bella’s desire—her longing for “forever”—is highly problematic. For her conception of “forever” reveals a conservative gender politics that aligns her with the patriarchal, insular and self-serving Volturi. “Forever” is, for Bella, about stasis, not change, and her conception of this state of being is founded on always remaining young—never aging. Beautiful and strong, Bella and the Cullen vampires would seem to present a stage of evolutionary progression that has surpassed humanity. Yet becoming vampire means that Bella will remain eternally suspended in adolescence—she will always be eighteen. This is consistent with Bella’s fear of aging; throughout the series, she expresses horror that, in her human form, she will age while Edward will remain seventeen (this disgust at aging is far more intense than her response to the acts of brutal violence which she witnesses in New Moon). Becoming vampire, then, releases her from a fear of aging and evades the future in a continual present. In this, it is significant that the young Cullen vampires (Edward, Alice, Jasper, Rosalie and Emmett) also undergo their “conversion” during their teenage years and in a period— the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—when adolescence was fi rst recognised and studied as a discrete stage of development. In fact, the Cullens become vampires when, in each individual’s case, history does not fulfil its promise of growth to adulthood (because they are confronted with near-death situations). Edward is, for instance, born in 1901 and nearly succumbs to Spanish flu of 1918 (T, 291); Rosalie is raped and nearly killed in 1933 when she is eighteen (E, 138); Jasper is a seventeen-year-old Confederate army recruit from 1861 (E, 259), and Alice is forced to undergo shock treatment in an asylum in the 1920s (T, 390–1).5 For Bella, becoming vampire also offers the promise of a community and clear sense of belonging. Yet this invokes a conservative—even reactionary—gender politics that links Bella’s sense of belonging to Edward’s paternalistic world-view and his increasingly controlling behaviour. Bella will never grow up. In this, the Twilight saga concludes with precisely what Steven Bruhm identifies as the hallmark of the contemporary Gothic—a

94 Rachael McLennan future suspended between present and past—with no narrative of personal history as linear progression. But it is important to note that Bella’s personal history ends with a promise—the promise of continuing sameness—and this revises and recapitulates a narrative of linear development to restore history’s promise (not a promise taking the form of a logic of linear progression, but a promise which ensures that the future is known, certain). Sameness means that the boundaries between conclusions and beginnings, and between past, present, and future, are not easily drawn. And the prefaces of each Twilight book constitute useful ways of considering connections between adolescence, promises, recapitulation and the Gothic. Each novel starts with a brief preface, narrated by Bella in the present tense, in which she is in the throes of life-threatening peril. These are, in fact, the dramatic conflicts that foreground the climaxes of each novel; the remaining narratives recount the events that have led up to the conflict before relating the resolution. As a result, the narrative structure of each text performs the act of recapitulation, for Bella’s narration repeats, with a difference, the past in order to narrate it. Moreover, the repetition of a familiar narrative structure in each novel means that the prefaces take on the quality of a promise, one modified (broken?) in Breaking Dawn, when Jacob narrates the Preface. This repetitive structure promises that the text will explain what has happened— what has led to the conflict of the Preface—and how it is resolved.6 Bella’s story ends as her interior monologue is made public. She lets down the shield—her special gift—that prevents others (the Volturi and Edward) from accessing her innermost thoughts. At the end of Breaking Dawn, Edward is given access to her mind (revealing thoughts that the reader has always had privileged access to) so her story concludes with the circumstances that make its articulation and dissemination a possibility. On this note, Michael Cart states that although Meyers is “a natural storyteller with a thorough understanding of her readers’ interests,” she is not a stylist and, as a result, “her four-volume saga shows little promise of ever becoming part of any literary canon. This is as much the genre’s fault as it is hers, however” (100). Still, it is the enabling of Bella’s personal history to recapitulate what Bruhm calls “history’s promise,” something that echoes an earlier Gothic mode, where Meyer excels. What is disturbing is not the genre itself, but the politics of gender and race which seem necessary for that promise to be kept. NOTES 1. See for instance Anita Harris’s Future Girl: Young Women in the TwentyFirst Century (New York: Routledge, 2004) and Catherine Driscoll’s Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 2. Oxford English Dictionary (online; accessed 19 May 2011). 3. See, for example, Leonard Sax, “‘Twilight’ Sinks Its Teeth Into Feminism,” Washington Post, 17 August 2008.

Bella’s Promises 95 4. Eventually, the series resolves the tensions surrounding Jacob’s single status by pairing him up with Bella’s daughter, Renesmee. 5. Interestingly, Bella notes that the Cullens have “the kinds of names grandparents had” (T, 18) and alludes to “Anne of Green Gables flashbacks” (E, 246) invoked by Edward’s marriage proposals and his insistence they wait until they marry before having sex. While this suggests that he signals, to her, an anachronistic worldview, it is also clear that she is attracted to Edward’s paternalism. 6. The serial form of the novel (and in the way it is marketed) is also premised upon the fulfi lment of promise, suggesting that the pleasures of repetition with a difference constitute a significant part of the popularity of Meyer’s series. Each novel is appendiced by the fi rst chapter of the following novel in the series—a marketing strategy common to the serial form; the new chapter is meant to hold the reader’s interest and serve as persuasion to purchase the next title in the series.

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Austin, J. L. How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 266–78. Cart, Michael. Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. Chicago: American Library Association, 2010. Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Eclipse. Dir. David Slade. Summit Entertainment, 2010. Griffi n, Christine. Representations of Youth: The Study of Adolescence and Youth in Britain and America. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1904. Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hogle, J. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1–19. Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. London: Routledge, 2001. Mangan, Lucy. “Dangerous Liaisons,” Rev. of Twilight (fi lm), The Guardian, 4 Dec 2008: 12. Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn. London: Atom, 2008. . Eclipse. London: Atom, 2007. . New Moon. London: Atom, 2006. . Twilight. London: Atom, 2005. Sax, Leonard. “‘Twilight’ Sinks Its Teeth Into Feminism,” Washington Post, August 17 2008. Smith, Allan Lloyd. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London, Reaktion Books, 2007.

6

“I’ll Be Whatever Gotham Needs Me to Be” Batman, the Gothic and Popular Culture Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Batman fi rst appeared in 1939, close on the heels of the recently created and hugely successful Superman. The young comic book industry, just emerging as a separate medium from the newspaper comic strip, and hitherto mainly defi ned by men in suits, now demanded more visually appealing (i.e. costumed) characters. Batman was born as a darker and more complex variation on the red-caped superhero: he is Superman’s Gothic double.1 Although many superheroes were created in the 1940s and since then, Batman has remained the darkest and most problematic, not least because his powers come not from a magical source but from the brooding intensity of a childhood trauma. Over seventy years later, Batman has grown to become bigger than ever, eclipsing even Superman in recent decades. Why has this been the case? And how did this happen? In addressing these questions, I want to suggest that the main reason for the success of Batman in the twenty-fi rst century—a multi-billion dollar Batman industry—has been Christopher Nolan’s return to the darker roots of the Batman story. Like any enduring Gothic figure, Batman’s regenerative cultural power depends on his ambivalence, his ethical complexity and moral ambiguity. On a formal level, this ambivalence plays itself out in the tension between Batman’s camp aesthetics and the Gothic characteristics of the figure; that is, between the campy smirk of the “Caped Crusader” and the furrowed brow of the brooding “Dark Knight.” Historically, whenever Batman is camped to its limit, the Gothic is used to return the character to a darker and more complicated figure within the narrative. Batman, though, is not a single character—not even a complex or evolving one. He does evolve, certainly, but more importantly, he multiplies. For the figure of Batman appears in a wide range of texts and media: concurrent comic book titles (up to six different series running simultaneously in the 1970s), a television show (1966–1968), an animated television series (1992–1995), several animated fi lms (in the 2000s), graphic novels (so called one-shots, most of which are aimed primarily at adult readers), and at least seven feature films. The Batman franchise now also includes over two dozen electronic and video games, including the highly acclaimed recent Arkham Asylum and Arkham City for Playstation, Xbox and PC.

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In all its multiple variations and forms, we must pause and ask what the phenomenon of Batman can teach us about popular culture. And, to pose a slightly different question, what can the Gothic tell us about Batman? Here, I focus on the recent fi lms directed by Christopher Nolan, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). 2 The success of these two films is based, I suggest, on Nolan’s thoughtful use of the Gothic mode and also relates to the political ambiguities of these popular cinematic texts (another reason for its significant mass audience appeal). Batman is, fi rst and foremost, a commodity. He is nobody’s disinterested brainchild, but a product to satisfy the demand for caped superheroes within a sometimes struggling comic book industry. Consequently, his relationship to the marketplace and to his audience is direct; however, the interpretive implications of this relationship are neither simple nor transparent. In the fi rst Batman stories, for instance, Batman is a character who has no qualms about killing villains; he even displays a decidedly hard-boiled attitude towards their death. In one story, he snaps a villain’s neck with his foot (DC Comics n. 30). In another, Batman “socks” a scheming businessman into a tank of acid, and comments drily, “A fitting end for his kind” (Batman in the Forties 15). Such scenes inspired a public morality campaign against the excessive violence of comic book characters and resulted in a “code of practice” within the industry (similar to the Hays code in US cinema) that “banned” superheroes from killing villains or carrying guns (Brooker, Batman Unmasked 60–63). These restrictions—initially adopted due to outside pressure on the industry— had a profound impact on Batman, and most writers and editors have respected this “code” even after such restrictions were no longer necessary. The writer most closely associated with Batman’s Gothic turn in the late 1960s and 1970s, Dennis O’Neil, fi rmly asserts that “Batman never kills” and he even includes this injunction in his Bat-Bible, a guidebook for DC writers (Brooker, Batman Unmasked 277). By contrast, Tim Burton has Jack Napier fall into a chemical tank in the 1989 Batman fi lm, referencing the fi rst Batman comic strip of 1939, while also making disturbingly clear that Batman does this deliberately. Comic books are, like fi lms, collaborative works created by teams of writers, illustrators, artists and editors.3 The complex negotiation between the producers-fi nanciers, the distributors, the market, and an aggregate creative and technical team moves the comic book from its most basic level—script-writer, illustrator, colour artist and series editor—into a form of cultural production that highlights the complexities of artistry, authorship and market-forces in late capitalism. Likewise with cinema. For even if an auteur film foregrounds the artistic vision of the director, the label cannot simply erase the complex team of collaborators that have contributed to the fi nal product and, in many respects, the director is irrelevant in studio films in which the production company authorizes its own postproduction editors to create a defi nitive version. In order to remain sensitive to these

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complexly collaborative forms of cultural production, the following discussion will focus on several artists, writers and directors, particularly Dennis O’Neil, the script-writer for the 1970s DC Batman, Frank Miller (one of O’Neil’s protégés), Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic book writer who has written several notable Batman graphic novels since the 1980s, and the Nolan brothers, who cowrote the screenplays for the two recent Batman films, and especially, Christopher Nolan, who directed them. Any discussion of Batman as a cultural phenomenon must take into account the fact that the figure exists in a variety of texts and media. As such, we cannot identify character coherence, but we can speak of “continuity,” a word that is paradoxically intended to account for its exact opposite, the lack of continuity between texts featuring a character with the same name. Although editors can defi ne the parameters of a character, there are no rules for writers of one-shot graphic novels or film versions. In 1989, for instance, Grant Morrison’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum, the Tim Burton film and the DC Batman comic book series all depicted very different visions of the Batman figure. Moreover, some texts, such as the 1960s Batman TV series, are never meant to become part of the Batman continuity, and they exist in their own separate sphere (Reynolds, Super Heroes 43). Cultural analyses of a phenomenon like Batman run the risk of ignoring—or even eliding—the question of continuity and, instead, shoehorning one theory onto a select group of accommodating texts while also asserting ahistorical or noncontextual generalizations. Cultural critiques of popular culture have ranged from viewing popular culture as a mirror of capitalist ideology to seeing it as a mirror of popular desire.4 In contrast, commentators from within the industry tend to see the content and power of comic books as drawing on deep cultural wells, something like Joseph Campbell’s argument in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell proposed that the hero narrative is an archetype, a “monomyth” universal to human culture and grounded in universal human psychic structures. Similarly, Shirrel Rhoades, former executive vice president of Marvel Comics, argues that comic book figures reflect universal archetypes (Comic Books 102–110), explicitly citing Campbell as well as Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment to assert his point. Along the same lines, comic book writer Grant Morrison asserts that people consciously or unconsciously “respond to deep mythical patterns” in comic books (Arkham Asylum 51). Frank Miller unabashedly refers to Batman as a “folk hero” (Sharett, “Batman and the Twilight of the Idols” 41). Industry workers, in other words, see the comic book as disseminating mythological archetypes or folk culture rather than just commercial entertainment. This may, in part, arise out of a semantic slippage surrounding the word “mythology,” which is the term used to refer to the rules of the fictional world of comic book series (now used for television series), and which evokes an association with mythology in the anthropological sense of the term; but this does not entirely

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explain the consistent claim that comic books express deep cultural and psychological structures. At stake here are questions of mimesis and representation within a cultural industry. Do comic books—and by extension, popular culture— reflect the values and interests of the “culture industry” and the economic system behind it? Or does it reflect the values and interests of the audiences who buy the products? And/or the artists and craftsmen who make them? In the case of Batman—all of the above. Audiences vote with their dollars and cents, but they also express their opinions, desires and preferences in letters, at conventions and, more recently, on websites. 5 Artists and writers have a certain amount of creative leeway, though they are ultimately accountable to series editors. Finally, there is no denying that the business aspect of the Batman franchise is huge, and in a very real sense, the bottom line. Batman was created to meet market demand; it has grossed huge profits for his parent company DC Comics, and since 1989, Time Warner. The 1989 Tim Burton fi lm version was a great success, but how much of this was due to the massive marketing campaign launched by Warner Bros. before its release? It is possible to argue that the success of this fi lm was a by-product of the Time Warner merger—making it the world’s largest media communications company in the world—and its economic power to mobilize mass publicity, distribution, franchising and global product placement.6 Costing $185 million to make, the 1989 fi lm version has generated over a billion dollars in domestic and foreign revenue and is one of the top ten highest earning fi lms of all time .7 Yet how does that huge fi nancial investment and potential revenue translate into what goes into the content?” Mass appeal and accessibility are imperatives. Indeed, the “blockbuster” movie genre is the apotheosis of this strategy, and Tim Burton’s and Christopher Nolan’s fi lm versions of Batman conform to this model. In fact, the 1989 Batman fi lm can be read as a mixed bag of disparate elements; so much so that early audiences were not entirely certain how to react (Bacon-Smith, “Batman: The Ethnography” 98). According to Bacon-Smith and Yarbrough, the early viewing audiences did not know if they were meant to fi nd the Joker fearful or funny, and many people reacted with hesitation during the observed screening. Likewise, Christopher Nolan’s fi lm versions strive to balance character-driven dramatic narratives with action-packed scenes of car chases, visual effects, cool gadgets and humourous gag lines. Nolan also invokes the formula of the romantic subplot, and a family in peril (or at least a woman and child) in the climactic action scenes. In short, studio fi lms with such high budgets are characterized by a carefully choreographed eclecticism. Generally speaking, the Batman franchise is defined by several structuring principles that revolve around a series of tensions and paradoxes. Batman is a masked vigilante, but he often works alongside the police and he usually

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does not intentionally kill any villains.8 He is also a brilliant detective as well as a muscular behemoth of a man. He is often drawn as an ultra-masculine figure—a veritable square-jawed titan– but has also been dogged by questions about his sexuality (often because of Robin).9 The 1950s and 1960s TV

Figure 6.1 Batman is often illustrated as a sculpted giant. BATMAN is [trademark] and [copyright] DC Comics.

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and film versions were certainly very camp. Most important, though, is that Batman often oscillates between dark and light versions, intensely alone and sometimes slightly mad (dark version), or playful and energetic as he dance/ fights alongside his young sidekick (light version). These two sides to Batman have coexisted since he fi rst pulled on his gray tights and black cowl and took on the “Chemical Syndicate” in 1939. According to his creator, Bob Kane, the two main inspirations for the Batman figure were the 1920 fi lm The Mark of Zorro and a 1931 fi lm (based on an even earlier film and successful play) called The Bat Whispers (Brooker, Batman Unmasked 43). In the former, Zorro is a masked vigilante who fights for the rights of poor farmers who are exploited by rich landowners and the corrupt colonial government of nineteenth-century Spanish California. Like Bruce Wayne, Zorro is a wealthy landowner who conceals his heroic activities by pretending to be a foppish and effete dandy (offering a potential source for the camp versions of Batman). In The Bat Whispers, the figure who dresses as a bat is a villain: a jewel thief and a madman who also poses as a detective looking for the Bat. He is brilliant and cunning, but his maniacal laugh at the end of the fi lm confi rms his madness. Aesthetically, the film echoes German Expressionism—particularly Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)—through its striking use of shadows, silhouettes and Gothic visual effects. The Gothic has, then, been present in Batman since the earliest DC stories written by Bob Kane. The simple fact that Batman wears a gray costume and has a bat for a mascot makes him a grim figure, particularly when placed alongside the colorful Superman. In his early stories, Batman battles business crooks; but by the fi fth story (which is told over two installments and two months), “Batman versus the Vampire,” the hero is pitted against a character with the classically Gothic name “the Monk” who turns out to be a vampire with the powers of a werewolf. The following month, on the heels of this Gothic adventure, the back-story of Bruce Wayne is fi nally revealed for the fi rst time: he had seen his parents murdered; he swears to revenge them and says that he will spend “the rest of [his] life warring on all criminals” (Batman in the Forties 17). Years of self-training in science and “athletic feats” lead Bruce Wayne to adopt a disguise that will “strike terror” in the hearts of criminals; he will become “a creature of the night, black, terrible.” But which? At this moment, “as if in answer,” a “huge bat” flies into his open window (shades of Poe’s raven) and the last caption sums up and foreshadows the future: “thus was born this weird figure of the dark, this avenger of evil, the ‘Batman.’” Nine years later, illustrator Bill Finger and Bob Kane revisited the origin story, slightly changing several elements; the most significant change they made was to tease out the Gothic dimensions of the narrative, suggesting an obsessive and pathological dimension to the characterization of Bruce Wayne. “Something about young Bruce’s eyes made the killer retreat,” this later text states. “They were accusing eyes that memorized his every feature

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. . . eyes that would never forget” (Batman in the Forties 46). Here, the illustration draws on the imagery of cinematic horror: it juxtaposes Joe Chill’s terrified and darkened face with the disembodied, floating eyes of the ever-present Bruce. Years later Batman fi nds Joe Chill and recklessly reveals his identity, proving that he is waiting for Chill to make a mistake for which he will be arrested. Obsessive, self-absorbed and compulsive— Batman risks everything to get his revenge. The Gothic mode has also been, from Batman’s beginning, particularly present in the recurring villains of the series, most of whom are physically deformed and mentally deranged. The Joker, Clayface, Two-Face and the Penguin are, among other things, grotesque figures with marked faces (linking them to Batman’s masked face) and this process of facing and effacing foregrounds the ethical ambiguities of the villain-hero dyad, inviting haunting and uncanny effects. Gothic characterization is also developed over the backdrop of the city of Gotham.10 The city is rarely depicted in the fi rst years of the series; but when it is, Gotham is a place of crime and corruption. The early Gotham emerges out of the contexts of the Depression and Prohibition: the fi rst created widespread despair; the second created a powerful criminal subculture through networks of organized crime. The film versions of Batman have, more often than not, rendered Gotham in a Gothic style; it is usually filmed at night, lit by neon lights, fi lled with urban decadence, crime and homeless people. Tim Burton’s fi lm versions, for instance, utilize tilting buildings (shades of Caligari) to invoke a claustrophobic atmosphere, and Christopher Nolan’s fi rst Batman movie was filmed almost entirely at night. Even one of the few day-light scenes is set on Gotham’s dark side: Rachel and Bruce drive back from the parole hearing where Joe Chill is murdered, and Bruce’s self-righteous anger inspires

Figure 6.2 Bruce Wayne’s haunting eyes from the second origin story in 1948. BATMAN is ™ and © DC Comics.

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Rachel to drive down a ramp that instantly transforms the sun-lit day into a dark night-time scene of urban decay, homeless citizens and disenfranchised pedestrians. Crime and poverty lurks under the surface of Gotham’s glittering and shiny skyscraper-lined streets. The DC writer and editor Dennis O’Neil points out that Batman has transformed and changed since his appearance in 1939 (“Introduction” 6). Indeed, far from being Gothic, the 1940s comic book versions featured a parental Batman accompanied by his cheerful ward, Robin, battling petty criminals, crooks and schemers. By the 1950s, the texts were infused with science fiction and, by the 1960s, the DC comic series attempted to mimic the humour and ironic playfulness of the television show. By 1968, in the wake of political assassinations (Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King) and the increasing death-toll of the Vietnam War, Batman once again got serious. Here, the work of Dennis O’Neil and Neil Adams returned Batman to a Gothic aesthetic that included a sober and grim backdrop to reflect the characters’ ethical complexities. And in the 1980s, O’Neil’s protégé Frank Miller drew Batman in even darker tones and achieved enough success to encourage Warner Bros. to bankroll Tim Burton’s Batman. Tim Burton’s two films were generic hybrids, successful largely thanks to their compelling representations of the complex and troublingly attractive Joker (Jack Nicholson) and Penguin (Danny De Vito). When Joel Schumacher took over from Tim Burton, Batman became much lighter and quite camp, which unfortunately killed off Batman’s Hollywood career for nearly ten years. While Schumacher’s Batman Forever found some success with the deliciously ambivalent figure of Catwoman, his Batman and Robin deteriorated into self-caricature, completely erasing the dark figure of the comic books and graphic novels. The planned fi fth Batman fi lm never went into production, a symptom of the bad reviews and poor box office returns of Batman and Robin. This is why Christopher Nolan’s film version of Batman had to be a “reboot”—the comic industry’s term for a complete reorientation of style and content—and why Nolan returned to the Gothic Batman stories created by Dennis O’Neil’s in 1970s and 80s.11 Arguably, the 1970s might be viewed as the Golden Age of Batman Gothic. Under the editorship of Julius Schwartz (and often written by Dennis O’Neil and illustrated by Neal Adams and/or Dick Giordiano), Batman became grimmer, more driven, more ethically ambiguous and socially engaged. A bicentennial story, for instance, features the ghost of Benedict Arnold; the specter captures Batgirl and Robin and tries to play them off against each other, thus anticipating the Joker’s “social experiment” in Dark Knight when he urges the passengers on two packed ferries to blow the other up in order to save themselves (“The Invader from Hell” 76). The inclusion of a historical figure was a unique turn for the comic book industry. In another story, “A Vow From the Grave,” O’Neil develops a sympathetic depiction of an ersatz family of carnival freaks, including a boy with flippers for hands and feet. In an earlier era, this character would

104 Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet have become a villain (like Penguin) but in what is otherwise a grim story, the marginalized people of the carnival’s sideshow are humanized and helpful to Batman. This link between outcast and hero—or hero as outcast—is further developed in the 1970s with the inclusion of the villain Ra’s al Ghul. Here, the villain offers Batman a “darker mirror image of himself”: “a foe of equal intellect and drive to his own” (O’Neil, Batman in the 1970s 115). Although Ra’s al Ghul says he is driven by the benign objective of “restoring harmony to our sad planet,” achieving this goal involves the annihilation of the entire human population; echoing Nazi ideologies, Ra’s al Ghul dreams of purity, cleansing and apocalyptic rebirth. From this early period, we also find the Gothic mode in the narrative “Night of the Reaper.” It begins with a Halloween parade featuring a faux Batman and other superhero doubles riding on gaudy floats; the text ends with a purple-cloaked Reaper who spills out of every picture panel in which he appears. He is, in the conclusion, unmasked and identified as a concentration camp victim; now a respected physician, he is out to exact vengeance on the murderer of his family who has unexpectedly appeared in America.

Figure 6.3 “Night of The Reaper” (Batman 237, Dec. 1971). BATMAN is ™ and © DC Comics.

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The Reaper eventually realizes, with horror, that he has become a monster, but interestingly, the Batman figure senses a kinship with the Reaper’s mad fury and thirst for revenge: “He’s strong,” Batman thinks, “with the strength of madness! Something in me wants to let him go! In him, I see some of myself!” And later he continues: “Like him, I lost parents to evil . . . No! His way is wrong!” (“Night of the Reaper” 61). The Gothic elements of this story revolve about the ethical ambiguity of victimization turned to vengeance (including Batman’s self-doubt) but Gothicism is also present in the strikingly visual style of the story. One particularly horrific panel depicts the doctor’s remembrance of the concentration camp; emaciated victims stand by barbed wire fences, as a Nazi officer, who uncannily resembles the “death-head” disguise worn by the doctor himself, screams at the prisoners. The officer’s whip also mirrors the reaper’s scythe; the overall effect is deeply unsettling, both terrifying and ambiguous in its odd doubling of victim and villian. During the 1980s, Batman continued to be represented as a dark figure, but his characterization lacked the ethical complexity and sharp intelligence of the O’Neil titles. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) is credited with reviving wide public interest in Batman (his own special kind of reboot). Miller kept Batman continuity but he also created a unique figure, who is far more pessimistic than in previous versions. Here, Batman has decided to retire and, spending his time as Bruce Wayne, he participates in death-defying car races in order to recapture the adrenaline rushes of his working life. The desire to resume his Bat-identity is depicted as a repressed beast that re-emerges from within. Becoming bat is a kind of addiction, and when he returns to it he feels high, pain-free and “born again.” The plot of the book is similarly dark: the threat of an apocalyptic bomb blast, Batman stages his own death and descends into an underground world after fi nding all heads of state, including America’s, corrupt and violent (a figure drawn to look like Ronald Reagan takes advantage of a global blackout to blow Cuba “from the face of the earth”). Indeed, the Batman universe created by Miller is saturated with mass media proliferation and corrupt political institutions; as a result, his characterization of Batman gestures back to the “violent vet” and “Dirty Harry,” and bears little resemblance to Dennis O’Neil’s urban protector. In 1989, the Scottish comic book writer Grant Morrison produced a major graphic novel, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (illustrated by Dave McKean). The artwork in this one-shot text leaves the world of comic books far behind, and is disturbing in content and experimental in form (Morrison includes references to cultural figures such as Wagner, Marat-Sade, the Fisher King, Hitchcock, David Lynch, Lewis Carroll and even Frederick Wertham—the doctor who denounced Batman comics for subtly promoting homosexuality in the 1950s.) The story has Batman lured into Arkham Asylum by the Joker, who controls the hospital and has taken the staff hostage; once inside, Batman enters a topsy-turvy world where he faces his worst nightmares and inner demons. The book

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ends enigmatically with the insane Harvey Dent, now Two-Face, lying to the Joker about which side of his coin fell face-up in order to set Batman free. A note accompanying the script version of the text reveals that the narrative has been a nightmare from which Bruce Wayne “wakes up in his bed at 3 p.m., bruised, blinking and shaking his head . . . but feeling somehow cleansed and invigorated by this bizarre insight into his own drives” (66). With this, Morrison writes that “the 1980s Batman” has been “purified and purged of negative elements” and can now be returned to Gotham City to become “the super-confident zen warrior of my subsequent JLA [Justice League of America] stories” (AA 66). The theme of Batman’s inner journey—facing his deepest fears—returns in Christopher Nolan’s film, Batman Begins, which also depicts Batman as a kind of “zen warrior.” But the groundwork for this version of Batman had already been laid by Dennis O’Neil. Fans of the comic book series hailed Batman Begins as the most accurate film adaptation of the Batman universe to date. This is largely thanks to Nolan relying heavily on O’Neil’s distinctive and influential vision of the character. For insance, Nolan takes the background story of Bruce Wayne’s years-long travel around the world from O’Neil’s 1989 story, “The Man Who Falls” (illustrated by Dick Giordiano). Here, as in the fi lm, Bruce falls into a bat cave and is rescued by his father. Later he trains at a Korean monastery, then travels on a spiritual journey to France before undergoing an initiation ritual with a Native American shaman.12 Unlike earlier versions of the back-story (in which Batman trains himself in athletics and science at home), this version has him gain key skills and, more importantly, his ethics, by travelling the world. This character development is enhanced when Nolan depicts the young Bruce Wayne as angry and vengeful—he is embittered by his failed attempts to avenge his parents’ death—before he sets off on his journey. His travels force him to confront poverty and desperation, thus influencing his ethical view and, once again, Batman is not a killer—he is “no Rambo”—another feature that Nolan takes from the pages of O’Neil. The doubling that O’Neil explored in the 1970s is also central to Batman Begins: Nolan foregrounds the mirroring of Ra’s al Ghul and Bruce Wayne, for the former is the mentor who helps Wayne perfect his skills at fighting crime. At the end of Nolan’s fi rst fi lm version, Batman is depicted as confident, intelligent and sane: he seems to have mastered his two, or really three, personas—the clueless playboy, the Batman, and the serious man who loves Rachel Dawes. Here, the Gothic Batman is not grounded in the character’s troubled psyche or ethical ambivalence; rather, the Gothic arises out of the mise-en-scene: its sober style, grim atmosphere, its setting for the themes of madness, anarchy and terror. Using a dark and somber color palette, the film references Tim Burton’s depiction of Gotham as a Gothic space, and the urban scenes are fi lmed almost exclusively at night or at dusk. There is also an extended sequence in Arkham Asylum (the creepy Gotham

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psychiatric hospital), but the most disturbing scene occurs when we see the effects of the “weaponized hallucinogen” that Ra’s al Ghul intends to release into Gotham’s atmosphere. Mimicking the substance Bruce Wayne was given in the fi nal stages of his initiation, the hallucinogen turns ordinary people into violent psychopaths, distorting perceptions so that monsters are seen everywhere. The point-of-view shots allow the audience to see through “hallucinogenic” eyes as we witness the dark prospect of Gotham violently tearing itself to pieces. Following the commercial and critical successes of Batman Returns, Time Warner commissioned the Nolan brothers to do a sequel. But in between the two projects, the British-American duo directed another fi lm, The Prestige (2006), which powerfully resonates with the themes of the Batman story. Set in late nineteenth-century London, the fi lm revolves around a rivalry between two magicians—both of whom are driven by ambition and a desire to outwit the other. Acted by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, the two magicians sacrifice love and happiness as they ruthlessly compete with one other. In the end, it is revealed that one of the characters is actually two people—they are twin brothers who have spent their lives pretending to be one person, and that the other character has knowingly created and murdered a hundred clones of himself while performing a magic trick. With this grim ending, the film brings into focus a theme raised at the end of Batman Begins but which remains relatively unexplored until the conclusion of Dark Knight, namely, Bruce Wayne’s extreme self-sacrifice in adopting the identity of Batman. There is a hint of this in Batman Begins, particularly when Rachel Dawes tells him, as they wander through the rubble of his mansion, that the man she loved has never returned from his world travels. Batman, in other words, leaves no space for Bruce to live as himself. The Gothic mode has long been associated with men who are driven by forces or ambitions that they cannot entirely control (Manfred in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk; Falkland in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams; Doctor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and Dr. Jekyll in Robert Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Riding the wave of Gothic popularity over the last decade or so, Nolan takes these long-standing Gothic tropes and, in Dark Knight, filters them through a horror-fi lm lens. Horror is particularly present in the Joker who, like so many Batman villains, combines sadistic tendencies, intelligence and early-life trauma (shades of what Batman could become).13 Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker highlights the character’s evil; he has an overwhelming need for mindless destruction and chaos. Writers have occasionally given the Joker a back-story to explain his fi xed smile and dementia, but this Joker’s proliferation of back-stories—all of which include victimization and suffering—parodies the current tendency to explain abusive behaviour as a by-product of trauma. Ledger’s Joker remains mysterious, irrational, indifferent to wealth (he burns his share of the money he’s stolen), complex and uncanny. Only the Batman comes

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close to understanding him: “Nothing is simple with the Joker,” he says, as Gordon aims at the Joker clones (who are, in fact, the Joker’s hostages). The plot in Dark Knight is resolved with the arrest of the Joker and the death of Two-Face. But this conclusion also engenders a darker and more Gothic persona for Batman. Here, Batman takes on the identity of the “dark knight”: he assumes responsibility for the murders committed by Harvey Dent in his revenge spree as Two-Face. If Knighthood is associated with medieval history and folklore (crusading Christian warriors), the US context for knighthood includes a different, though equally dark, connotation. The Reconstruction-era novels of Tom Dixon and the Southern cult of the Lost Cause linked American knighthood to the white supremacy of the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was just one of several vigilante organizations in the postwar South, but virtually all of them drew on the language and imagery of chivalry: the “Knights of the White Camelia,” the “Alabama White Knights,” and the “True Knights” of the KKK. Andrew Ross explores this context in relation to Tim Burton’s Batman film, analysing some of the more troubling racial politics of the Batman franchise. For instance, according to Bill Finger, the name “Wayne” was taken from a general of the American Revolution, and it was intended to connote “colonialism,” which Finger thought was appropriate for a member of the US “gentry.” Moreover, the name “Bruce” comes from the fourteenth-century Scottish warrior and patriot, Robert the Bruce; therefore, Bruce Wayne’s etymological origins refer back to a patriot warrior, creating a discursive bridge between the chivalric feudal world and a modern democracy. Batman’s ambivalent relationship to the forces of law and order mirror these historical roots. Although he is a vigilante, Batman

Figure 6.4 Wayne’s inspiration for the bat disguise (Batman 47, 1948) BATMAN is ™ and © DC Comics.

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usually puts criminals before the law—he does not allocate punishment. Or at least not all the time. The Nolan film versions of Batman play to mass audiences by simultaneously glamorizing Batman’s autocratic persona and celebrating the ethos of democracy, particularly in The Dark Knight, where the two ferry loads of people vote to not blow each other up. Yet this duplicity is consistent with the complex and equally ambivalent racial politics of the franchise. We must remember that Bruce Wayne choosing to use a bat costume because criminals are a “superstitious cowardly lot” (as presented in the 1939 “Origin” and again in the 1948 “The Origin of Batman”) is an uncanny echo of the scene in W.B. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation when the Southern founder of the KKK dons white robes after watching a group of AfricanAmerican children frightened by white kids disguised as ghosts. Likewise, ambivalence arises out of Batman’s mythopoetic drive to create Batman only to replace him with Harvey Dent as “White Knight of Gotham.” The need to become a symbol and legend—“more than a man”—is suggested to him by Ra’s al Ghul, a troubling source, to say the least. In Batman Begins, this villain inspires Batman to use the bat as an emblem (becoming a lucrative brand); and in Dark Knight Wayne’s conviction that Gotham needs a symbol of heroism, a “White Knight,” drives Gordon and Batman to protect Dent’s reputation by any means necessary. Such ambivalence inevitably leads to opposed interpretations and reinterpretations of the fi lm’s textual politics. The philosopher Brett Chandler Patterson, for instance, argues that Batman represents social order, and that his enemy is anarchy; by contrast, Tony Spanakos asserts that Batman represents a progressive challenge to the status quo by questioning the nation-state’s “monopoly over the legitimate use of violence” (“No Man’s Land” 42, 53; “Governing Gotham” 68). Writing on the two Nolan fi lms, the critic Marc Edward DiPaolo describes Christian Bales’ Batman as a technocrat and a “feudal lord” who runs Gotham like his own fiefdom; however, DiPaolo concludes that the appeal of Batman lies ultimately in his “nobility” and “his desire to protect and improve his home city” (“Terrorist, Technocrat, and Feudal Lord” 215). Following DiPaolo, it is clear that the political ideologies and potential readings disseminated by Batman are, like so many blockbuster movies, mixed and contradictory.14 On the one hand, the two Nolan films portray Wayne’s class status and extreme wealth sympathetically. A millionaire of the “Harvard trust fund set,” Wayne and his friends are benevolent and generous: they flock to a fundraising event in Harvey Dent’s honor. In this, Batman Begins gestures back to the comic strip of the Depression-era, particularly those scenes that depict Bruce Wayne’s father as a philanthropist who sets an example for Gotham’s wealthy elite. The crime-fighting millionaire hero was, initially, a by-product of 1930s economic conditions, and he returns in the 2005 Batman fi lm version and performs a similar function of ethical redemption. For example, the happy ending of the first Nolan film has Lucius Fox

110 Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (Morgan Freeman) stepping into the role of CEO of Wayne Enterprises, thus suggesting that this multi-national corporation will serve the public good. On the other hand, representations of poverty and crime are politically charged: the Nolan fi lms represent poor, small-time crooks as victims of their circumstances. Even Joe Chill, the Wayne’s murderer, is an object of pity (for the audience, if not for Bruce Wayne). The real criminals are, the films suggest, engaged in networks of organized crime or simply madmen (Joker and Two-Face). Furthermore, in these versions, the manufacture and distribution of arms is condemned even while they put on display a wide range of military equipment: from the black body armor and night vision goggles to the Batmobile (a military vehicle called The Tumbler, possibly the real star of the fi rst fi lm). In a clear reference to the post-9/11 “homeland security” policies, Lucius Fox is highly critical of intrusive surveillance and questions the technology Wayne uses to trap the Joker (transforming the mobile phones of Gotham into microphones). Still, Batman does use the device to track his nemesis, and he also employs enhanced 3-D X-ray vision to see through walls and darkness (going beyond the night-vision goggles of Batman Begins). The scene is visually arresting and beautiful, thus making the destruction of the machine seem almost regrettable. Anticipating the release of The Dark Knight Rises (which will be after this book has gone to press), we know that the new version will feature a more recent villain, Bane. A victim, like Batman, of debilitating childhood trauma, Bane is raised in prison on a Caribbean island to serve out his father’s life sentence. In adulthood, Bane becomes a subject of medical experimentation, and is transformed into a mercenary juggernaut, the only villain to almost kill Batman (by breaking his spine in Batman # 497). Bane fi rst appeared in 1993, a year after the fi rst Gulf War launched the US into a new era of neo-colonialist warfare. His postcolonial as well as prison origins made him the ideal villain for the post-Reagan era. Like many popular culture fi rgures, Bane is the uncanny reflection of the most charged and politically sensitive issues of his time. Representing Third-World resentment of the colonial past (and present) as well as the current policy of domestic colonialism in the form of the largest penitentiary system in the world, Bane is the return of a historical repressed. He is also one of Batman’s most disturbing doubles. Like the Bat, he is both super-intelligent, a self-taught forensics genius, as well as incredibly strong and muscular. Like Batman, his power is not magical but based on will-power, martial arts and science. The Nolan fi lm may not use all the details of Bane’s comic book backstory, but many aspects of the character are visual and therefore easily transferable to screen. Like Batman, he wears a mask meant to both protect his identity and intimidate others. In previews of the film, Bane appears like a cross between a gladiator and a s&m fantasy gone wrong. The blurb describes him as a “terrorist” and the trailer makes it clear that the line between war and peace in post 9/11 America will be one of the issues explored. Whether the Nolan brothers stick to their hitherto

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relatively pacifist agenda or whether they allow the film to shift registers into a more Frank Miller-esque fl irtation with proto-fascism remains to be seen. By virtue of narrative and sequel logic, this installment of the Nolan trilogy promises to be the darkest and most violent, the one in which Batman comes closest to being broken (as he was in the comic book). It is also very likely that the politics of the fi lm will end up striking both progressive and reactionary—anti-war and militaristic—chords. In his book-length study of Batman, Will Brooker concludes that Batman is no longer a mere product of consumer culture; instead, Batman could live on, outside of commercial media, as a form of folkloric culture (Batman Unmasked 333). In 2003, two years before Nolan’s reboot, and in the wake of Schumacher’s disappointing Batman and Robin, Brooker’s musings made sense; Batman seemed to have lost his profit-driven prowess. But after the financial success of The Dark Knight, and with a third Nolan Batman film on the way, it is impossible to test Brooker’s theory. For now at least, Batman is riding high on the highly profitable wave of contemporary Gothic popular culture. The themes of childhood trauma and haunting, the dark city of Gotham, ethical ambiguity and the two sides of justice and revenge—all of these themes keep Batman flying in the twenty-first century. NOTES 1. The point about the visual appeal of costumed crime-fighters comes from Bill Shelly’s “Introduction” to Batman in the Forties (5). Regarding the relationship between Batman and Superman as light and dark variations on the superhero, Scott Bukatman compares Batman’s appearance in Superman’s wake to Terry Castle’s description of the Gothic as “the toxic side effect” of the Enlightenment (Matters of Gravity 205). 2. The third chapter in Nolan’s Batman trilogy will be released around the time of this book’s publication. 3. It must be noted that the comic book industry has produced some well-known artists who have become “stars,” but it has also relied on large numbers of artists working invisibly in sweatshop conditions. 4. Early studies of popular culture often defined it sociologically, i.e., as the “culture of the urban, industrial bourgeoisie” (McCormack, “Folk Culture and the Mass Media” 4). Popular culture was in this guise synonymous with “mass culture” (commercial, tacitly alienated and alienating) and always contrasted to “folk” or traditional culture, as well as legitimate (“high”) art. After the 1970s, cultural critics began to examine popular culture in a less explicitly critical way, looking for resistant readings, semiotic complexity, and the inscription of subversive, progressive or radical energies in commercial cultural texts. 5. See Patrick Parsons, “Batman and his Audience: The Dialectic of Culture,” and Camille Bacon-Smith and Tyrone Yarbrough, “Batman: The Ethnography,” The Many Lives of Batman, eds. Robert E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: London, 1991), and Will Brooker, “Fandom and Authorship,” Batman Unmasked, 279–294. 6. For example, the merged company’s ability to draw on its music division, especially the talent of Prince, who wrote several songs for the fi lm, created an unprecedented “synergy” and profit boost.

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7. http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/ 8. This principle doesn’t apply across the board, of course, and Frank Miller’s work is a notable exception. There, Batman is violent and even sadistic, pursued by the forces of law for his vigilantism. 9. Most notably in Dr. Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954). For a useful dicussion of the queer readings of Batman, see Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked, 101–170. 10. Bill Finger apparently found the name randomly in a phone book, from the listing for a company called Gotham Jewelers, and liked it enough to use for his thinly veiled fictional New York (Brooker, Batman Unmasked 48). 11. It is worth pointing out that Nolan’s Gothic Batman is not inspired by the dark vision either of Frank Miller’s political fables nor Grant Morrison’s psychological horror story, Arkham Asylum. This is a reboot of specifically O’Neil’s Batman only. 12. There is also another O’Neil story from this period that explores Wayne’s shamanistic initiation: “Shaman,” Legends of the Dark Knight # 1 (New York: DC Comics, 1989). 13. Here, the Joker is played by Heath Ledger, whose death just before the release of the movie morbidly helped to promote it. 14. The reception of a movie’s meaning is further complicated by the unpredictable dynamics of spectatorship, as reception studies scholarship has demonstrated See, for example, Janet Staiger’s Media Reception Studies (New York: NYU Press, 2005) and Will Brooker and Deborah Germyn’s The Audience Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003).

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Batman in the Forties. “Introduction” by Bill Schelly. New York: DC Comics, 2004. Batman in the Seventies. “Introduction” by Dennis O’Neil. New York: DC Comics, 1999. Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. New York: Continuum, 2001. Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20 th Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949. DiPaolo, Marc Edward. “Terrorist, Technocrat, and Feudal Lord: Batman in Comic Book and Film Adaptations.” Heroes of Film, Comics and American Culture: Essays on Real and Fictional Defenders of Home. Ed. Lisa M. DeTora. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Finger, Bill (story), and Bon Kane (art). “Case of the Chemical Syndicate.” Detective Comics # 37 (1939). Reprinted in Batman in the Forties. New York: DC Comics, 2004. Gibson, James Wlliam. Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. Kellner, Douglas. “Hollywood Film and Society.” American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches. Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 128–136. McCormack, Thelma. “Folk Culture and the Mass Media.” Originally published in 1969. Popular Culture Vol. III. Ed. Michael Pickering. London: Sage, 2010. 3–20.

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Miller, Frank, with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics, 1986. . “Batman and the Twilight of the Idols: An Interview with Frank Miller.” The Many Lives of the Batman. New York: Routledge, 1991. Morrison, Grant (story), with Dave McKean (art). Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. New York: DC Comics, 1989, 2004. O’Neil, Dennis. “The Man Who Falls.” Secret Origins. New York: DC Comics, 1990. . “Shaman.” Legends of the Dark Knight 1. New York: DC Comics, 1989. . “Night of the Reaper.” Batman in the Seventies. New York: DC Comics, 1999. . “Introduction.” Batman in the Seventies. New York: DC Comics, 1999. Patterson, Brett Chandler. “No Man’s Land: Social Order in Gotham City and New Orleans.” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Eds. Mark D. White and Robert Arp. New Jersey: John Wiliey & Sons, 2008. Pearson, Roberta E. and William Uricchio. “Notes from the Batcave: An Interview with Dennis O’Neil.” The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media. Eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. BFI Publishing. London: Routledge, 1991. Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992. Rhoades, Shirrel. A Complete History of Comic Books. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. . Comic Books: How the Industry Works. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Ross, Andrew. “Ballots, Bullets, or Batman: Can Cultural Studies Do the Right Thing?” Screen 31.1 (Spring 1990): 26–44. Schelly, Bill. “Introduction” to Batman in the Forties. New York: DC Comics, 2004. Schudsen, Michael. “The New Validation of Popular Culture: Sense and Sentimentality in Academia.” Popular Culture Vol. IV: Aesthetics, Ethics, Values. Ed. Michael Pickering. London: Sage, 2010. Spanakos, Tony. “Governing Gotham.” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Eds. Mark D. White and Robert Arp. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2008.

FILMOGRAPHY Batman: The Movie. 1966. Dir. Leslie H. Martinson. Batman. 1989. Dir. Tim Burton. Batman Returns. 1992. Dir. Tim Burton. Batman Forever. 1995. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Batman and Robin. 1997. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Batman Begins. 2005. Dir. Christopher Nolan. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 1920. Dir. Robert Wiene. The Dark Knight. 2008. Dir. Christopher Nolan. The Prestige. 2006. Dir. Christopher Nolan.

7

The Monstrous House of Gaga Karen E. Macfarlane “I’m Frankenstein, I’m Avatar” “Weird Al” Yankovic “Perform This Way” (2011)

“Take her away! She’s a monster! She’s a monster! And she’s turning all of you into monsters!” shouts the “Boss” of the “Fame Factory” during Lady Gaga’s 2010 performance at the Grammy Awards. The singer is thrown into a metal vat labeled “rejected” while the actor continues to repeat “she’s a monster!” The audience goes wild. Clearly the rejection that the business-suit wearing actor represents is, for this audience and Lady Gaga’s fans generally, what made her 2011’s most influential person in the world (Forbes). She has declared herself “Mother Monster” and her fans “Little Monsters” in a series of performative gestures that are, for Gaga, ways of positioning herself with “all of the misfits . . . all of the weird kids, the artistic kids, all the bad ones” (Vena). The figure of the monster spirals through Gaga’s performance art, inscribed as a kind of alternative form of community and acceptance while also drawing on traditional representations of monsters as liminal figures, and the embodiment of cultural anxieties. The monster is, paradoxically, both essence and incoherence in Gaga’s world. Her evocation of monstrosity as recuperable, as potentially familiar and domesticated is part of a larger trend in contemporary popular culture to “de-monster” the monster.1 That is, monsters in pop culture at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries are still recognizably linked to their previous, horrific and liminal incarnations but their symbolic resonances have shifted. Monsters in contemporary culture embody difference differently from their predecessors. Historically, monsters were irretrievably “other,” they were “embodied horror” (Halberstam Skin 2) and threatened the culture from which they arose. Their difference was the corporeal sign of the potential for that culture’s dissolution. The “difference” that characterizes the contemporary monster, on the other hand, is couched in terms that echo those of equal rights advocacy. The monster is generally only a monster as the result of a traumatic history (bad choices about life and death in the case of some vampires, for example). These figures still contain some of the symbolic significance of their earlier representations—vampires still, horrifically, need blood to survive and can still become inhumanly violent—but overall, their position in contemporary narratives is as a misunderstood outsider who is, after all, not that different from those “non-monsters” around them.

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Lady Gaga’s monster gets its sparkle through its blending with another, metonymic figure in popular culture: the gay icon. Both the gay icon and the monster are associated with bodies that are overdetermined spectacle, “excessively on display” (Bruhm Gothic Bodies xvii). In this context, the moment that Gaga emerges from a swimming pool in “Poker Face,” an uncanny blend of glamorous femininity and monstrous predation, 2 marks a moment (perhaps not the originary moment, but a pivotal one) that demonstrates the ways in which she pulls the referentiality and the corporeality of these figures together. Her performance of the glamorous body distorted by monstrous movements and associations plays on and with the position of the celebrity body in Gaga’s world. Beauty and monstrosity overlay each other to create a monstrous iconicity. Gaga’s evocation of the power of the Icon through comments, performances and unambiguous troping of iconic figures from gay culture are a transformation/mutation of previous relationships between gay icons and their audiences. Pre-Stonewall icons like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe owed much of their status in the gay community to the ways in which closeted gay men identified with their troubled lives.3 Later iconic figures like Bette Midler, Cher and Madonna related to their fans through performances of explicit connections with gay culture. Lady Gaga is, I would suggest, the next incarnation of this relationship. She enacts and incorporates her position as gay icon by simultaneously evoking their emphasis on hyper-feminine performances and plays on desire blended with the Gothic’s preoccupation with the “grotesque, diseased or modified body” (Spooner “Contemporary” 8). Lady Gaga’s performances focus on the Gothicized body as object of desire by playing on and around the way that constructions of fame and beauty are working together to create something monstrous: ex-centric and disturbing of categorizations. Iconicity in her performance involves an unsettling taking on and blending of images of previous icons and other elements of popular culture to create a monstrous amalgam that distorts and disturbs the stability of its originary narratives. Lady Gaga’s performance has been the topic of virtually endless internet discussions, in which she is either lauded as an original visionary or accused of being everything from derivative to a plagiarist to a “copy paste” of iconic figures.4 I would suggest, though, that Gaga’s focus on the body as a shifting signifier of identity (in spite of the essentialist position taken in the lyrics of “Born This Way”) and her evocation of the Gothic body, in particular, encourages us to think differently about her relation to icons and iconicity. The act of remaking images—both of and in her own performances and of the performances of others—is central to Gaga’s use of iconicity. Her emphasis on referentiality is a fundamental part of her self-conscious construction of her iconic status but her references are not as straightforward as a copy, not as simple as troping and not as explicitly referential as pastiche. Gaga’s Gothicized rendering of iconicity shifts the gaze away from the icon herself and onto the iconic performance. The act of uncoupling the performance

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from the icon turns Lady Gaga’s persona into something both queer and monstrous: that is, queer because it is discursively positioned in a “sideways” relation to heteronormative sexuality and monstrous through its focus on corporeal incoherence. Her monstrous (di)version of the Icon is an articulation of a twenty-first century relation to and awareness of (by both audience and performer) the constructed/monstrous nature of the iconic feminine. Lady Gaga’s hyper-conscious performances of monstrosity and her focus on the instability of the image of the iconic feminine are strategically refracted through multiple, and, I suggest, largely citationless, references that render them uncanny and unsettling. Gaga doesn’t only perform the monster, her performances are themselves monstrous—a series of recombinations and blendings that create something not altogether stable; something incoherent that refuses easy categorization. In this sense, her evocation of the monster cannot be likened to the teratological monster but is, like Frankenstein’s creature, a kind of amalgam. She is a “creature” in exactly the way that Victor Frankenstein used the term in reference to his creation: something that was deliberately, strategically patched together out of bits and pieces of previously existing material. Indeed, Lady Gaga is the creation of the “Haus of Gaga,” “a collective . . . who collaborate with their muse on clothing, stage sets and sounds. ‘In this industry [Gaga notes], you get a lot of stylists and producers thrown at you, but this is my own creative team, modeled on Warhol’s Factory. Everyone is under 26 and we do everything together’” (Collins). The “Haus” is perhaps more accurately, a Gothic version of Warhol’s factory whose product is the result of the elaborate processing of disparate pieces of popular culture in order to create a performance whose substance is spectral, haunted by its referents: a series of shifting “apparition[s] . . . in the mirror of images” (Baudrillard 5). I will argue here that the scattered digital remnants of previous iconic performances that make “Lady Gaga” aren’t stable enough for the kind of amalgum one normally associates with the monster. Her performance is made up of a series of scattered, blended, modified, quotations with no unambiguous reference; many of her sources are themselves quotations, performative tropes and allusive references. In this sense, the (seemingly endless) claims to Lady Gaga’s inspired originality or, on the other hand, to her inability to be original, are missing the point. Lady Gaga is the inevitable product of the twenty-fi rst century. She is an accumulation of pop cultural references and a postmodern repetition of images and sounds: Her performance is a monster of the digital age which disturbs precisely because it demonstrates that there is no escape from this repetition.

QUEER ICONICITY The grotesque, tortured Gothic body and the glamorous, idealized body of the gay icon are connected through their perverse and obsessive emphasis on

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excess, spectacle and deferral. Gothic narratives are notoriously referential and derivative and the place of the Gothic body in them is as a “melodramatic spectacle” (Bruhm Gothic Bodies 93) that is “partly based on performative notions of identity” (Spooner “Contemporary” 29). Similarly, the performances of gay icons allude to a kind of idealized femininity that is always on display, always about reflecting and deflecting desire through familiar, stylized performance. But where the two diverge, of course, is that the Gothic body provokes fear and unease and the iconic body elicits desire, veneration and identification. Icons are about desire; not desire for the icon itself, but a desire for what it represents. Religious icons, for example, are not themselves worshipped, but are always understood to be a representation—a deferral—of the ideal that elicits that worship (Weitzmann 7–8). Icons, then, function as metaphoric referentiality. Within the context of the gay vernacular, the figure of the icon functioned historically as a marker within a series of coded readings that signified and reflected meaning within the culture even though the icon herself stood outside of that culture and her performances were not explicitly connected with it. Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, for example, reportedly had rather ambivalent reactions to their status as gay icons. The glamorous, tragic performances of the icons of the 1950s and 1960s reflected a confl ict between inside and outside, public and private that, according to Jack Babuscio, resonated with their gay audiences. Ultimately, figures like Garland became a kind of shorthand that entered into the gay vernacular in order to signify something about gay men to other gay men. As Douglas Crimp notes of Vito Russo’s love for Garland, “his identification with her made him queer, not her” (qtd. in Maddison 11).5 Contemporary gay icons, on the other hand, self-reflexively play on and with being the object of masculine desire in a series of postmodern appropriations and (re)inscriptions of stock figures in the gay pantheon: the campy performer, the screen siren, the fag hag, and the pre-Stonewall icon.6 Exploiting the fundamentally textual nature of gender construction and heteronormative desire, contemporary icons draw on the poststructuralist potential of textuality to infi nitely (and in this case strategically) defer stable meaning. The contemporary icons’ play, then, is on and with the very notion of iconography. Their connections with their audiences are focused on a reciprocity that positions them not outside of gay culture as an inaccessible object to be admired, emulated and incorporated into gay iconography but as a participant in that culture through the repetition of gestures and tropes and performative strategies drawn from gay vernacular. These icons actively perform the construction of their personae by drawing attention to the process of the production of their shifting images. In this sense, the contemporary icon doesn’t simplistically mirror the gay community back to itself, she camps for the mirror that the audience is holding up to her. Her self-reflexive performances draw attention away from any stable referent and insist on the strategic deployment of the power of the image itself. It is

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performance that foregrounds the complex reciprocal desire that is played out between the gay man and the contemporary icon. The masquerade, performance, the play of signs that the contemporary icon encodes/embodies in her performance constructs her beyond the relative stability of the earlier icons whose “reality,” was part of her allure: the knowledge and knowability (that is, the understanding that her story is real and the intention is that it be read as real) of her struggles, failures and triumphs gesture toward a “knowable” identity—an essence—beyond the image on the stage or screen. Babuscio has argued that the popularity of gay icons owes much “to the fact that many of us seem able equate our own strongly felt sense of oppression . . . with the suffering/loneliness/misfortunes of the star both on and off the screen” (26). The layers of performativity that characterize figures like Madonna and Christina Aguilera, on the other hand, don’t invite investigations into their stories for a “knowable,” or “real” woman behind the icon. There is an understanding that the “truth” in these cases is probably itself a deferral and a fiction. Their position as icons focuses on their performances which, themselves, gesture toward a series of very postmodern narratives of (re) presentation (of previous icons, of gay culture) that makes stable knowledge or identification if not impossible, at least unnecessary. The contemporary icon, while participating in playful reciprocity and a resistant reinscription of heteronormative codes within the gay vernacular, is the icon because “she,” that is her iconic self, is hyperreal: “not real, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (Baudrillard 6). Madonna’s and Cher’s seemly endless series of transformations enact a sort of hyperreality that draws attention to the sense that “Madonna” and “Cher” are performance; are construction. That there is—or even that there could be—a signified behind the signifier isn’t part of their position within this discourse. The contemporary icon’s hyperreality shatters distinctions between the performance of the figure on the stage and her position in the “real” world. In this sense, contemporary icons perform their iconic status—just as religious icons do—in an endless series of deferrals of stable meaning or referential identity. Madonna’s constantly shifting character, her taking on, casting off, lyrical and performative troping of iconic figures from popular culture is more than appropriation, more than simple copy: it is a postmodern layering of references and citations. In this sense, Madonna’s strategic troping of Marilyn Monroe in the 1985 video for “Material Girl” is simultaneously an homage to Monroe’s performance, a parody of hyperbolized femininity and a play on and with representations of stardom and iconicity. Madonna’s play with Monroe’s image foregrounds the power of the Image in contemporary culture. She plays with the metonymic nature of the Icon as sign, insisting on its legibility not as a reference to a stable point in the real word, but on its position as and only as sign. As Cathy Schwichtenberg

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has noted “’Material Girl’ refers to the cinematic construction of Marilyn Monroe, deconstructed by Madonna’s feminine double play as a construction of a construction” (134).7

MONSTROUS ICONICITY Lady Gaga is arguably the next incarnation of this emphasis on “double play,” performance and deferral. She is the “Cher, [the] Madonna, the nextgeneration diva” (Zak) for her fans. She has connected herself explicitly with the gay community, most famously dedicating her 2009 Video Music Award to “God and the gays,” and stating in an interview “I’m gay. My music is gay. My show is gay” (Stein and Michelson). Identifying herself, her audience and her performances as “gay” positions her connections with the hyper-feminine image of earlier icons in the context of contemporary iconicity. Like the icons that she cites in her songs8 and layers through her performances, the focus in the construction of Lady Gaga’s persona foregrounds her relation to the idea of the Image and specifically to the Image as a marker of a position that focuses on enacting a destabilized relation to normative culture. Her performance foregrounds the ways in which that image is read, distorted and deployed within and through popular culture even as it inscribes that distorted image onto her body. Like Madonna and Cher, then, the “image” for Gaga is a shifting, unstable signifier that both reflects the desires of her audience and creates those desires through her explicit connections with LGBTI politics and causes. So if Madonna and Bette Midler, as contemporary icons, hold a mirror up to their audience, the mirror that Lady Gaga is holding up to her audience and to iconic performances themselves is a funhouse mirror that reflects a distorted, exaggerated version not only of her audience but also of “Lady Gaga,” of her explicit challenges to the “fame factory” and of her reflections on/of iconicity itself. That is, the iconicity that Gaga embodies is a monstrous one that draws on the emphasis on spectatorship that characterizes Gothic performances and the boundary-breaking, disturbing potential for shifting corporeality that defi nes the monster. The unsettling potential of shifting, metamorphosing bodies is performed through and within Gaga’s glamorized evocations of the Gothic monster. Defined as pure corporeality, the monster’s body is paradoxically “more than an object, it is a shifter, a vehicle that constructs a web of interconnected and yet potentially contradictory discourses about his or her embodied self . . . [it] is a process without a stable object” (Briadotti 300). As pure corporeality, the monster is also a Gothic body, “always-already in a state of indifferentiation, or undergoing metamorphoses” (Hurley 10), “plural in form and in a constant state of refashioning” (Spooner Fashioning 201). The body of the monster, like other Gothic bodies, is paradoxically indecipherable and overdetermined. It is that which needs to be

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hidden, abjected; a contradictorily central, but decentering, signifier of/in culture. The monster “is itself a kind of limit case, and extreme version of marginalization, an abjecting epistemological device basic to the mechanics of deviance construction and identity formation. [It] unsettles what has been constructed to be received as natural, as human” (Cohen ix). By blending the monstrous and the iconic in her performances, Lady Gaga’s monstrous iconicity is an active foregrounding of the iconic body as an unstable, illegible, heteroglossic image that can be reproduced, altered and performed “otherwise.” Refracted through Gaga’s funhouse mirror, the icon functions less as an extension of queer performances of iconicity, and instead resembles a kind of “‘post-queer’ incoherence that marks the way that gender and sex are now so permanently ruptured that one can no longer be a guarantee or conveyor of the other” (Noble “Making it” 80). As David Ruffolo points out, the post-queer and the queer are not mutually exclusive categories. Rather, the “post” in post-queer signals an emphasis on “the state of becoming that is never fully detached from queer or attached to a completely inhabitable space that exists after queer”(8). “Post-queer,” then, signals a strategic foregrounding of the potential for the subject to remake itself within and beyond the already unstable parameters of “queer,” to refuse identificatory coherence and to draw on the instability of process.9 Gaga’s monstrous iconicity harnesses the instability of the post-queer while playing on the focus on the conflation of body and image that characterizes the hyperreality of gay icons. The blending of reference, image and the apparent “reality” of the performer creates a kind of bodily incoherence that is more monstrous than iconic, more post-queer than queer. The emphasis on display and excess that characterizes the Gothic body connects it with the excess that George E. Haggerty identifies as also part of the aesthetics of queer discourse (2). Gaga’s (post)queer Gothic “is both performance and style [that exists] in the tense space between referential association with the normative and absolute separation from its morals and aesthetics” (Hughes and Smith 3). Lady Gaga’s use of the iconic, the glamorous and the hyper-feminine, though, is less the “absolute separation” that Hughes and Smith suggest than it is a monstrous re-vision of those images as they circulate and collide in popular culture. The unsettling, abjected and contradictory characteristics of monstrosity are both incorporated into and reworked in 2009’s The Fame Monster and the responses that it elicited in Gaga’s fans and in the media. In an interview with the Daily Star just before The Fame Monster was released, Lady Gaga explained that she “has an obsession with death and sex. Those two things are also the nexus of horror films, which I’ve been obsessing over lately. I’ve been watching horror movies and 1950s science fiction movies” (Dawson). Out Magazine published a series of “’50s B Horror Movie Themed” photos the same year in which Gaga exploits the potential for incoherent and unsettling referentiality in the figures of the monster and the Icon. Each

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of the photographs in this series takes on and plays with layers of earlier images that reflect the collision between femininity, sexuality and death. In two photos, Gaga is sitting on a couch, nude except for two pieces of black tape crossed over her nipples (evocative of the classic cartoon “X” over a character’s eyes to signify death) with her arm around a skeleton that is wearing a Fedora. In one photograph, the skeleton has its arm draped casually (and proprietarily) over Gaga’s thigh. The two images evoke and rework similar photos of silent fi lm star Theda Barra (1885–1955), arguably one of the fi rst pop culture icons to draw on the Gothic for the construction of her public persona.10 These photos are also “channeling” (to use Gaga’s term) Marina Abromovic’s performance “Nude with Skeleton” (2002, 2005, 2010).11 Performance art, celebrity and Gothic intersections of sex/death are transformed into a mock-pin-up, a campy send-up of the ways in which the death drive underpins the desire for (the) celebrity. In other photos from this issue, Gaga is dressed as a Mummy: in one, she has her bandaged hands perched on her head in a Gothicized evocation of the Playboy Bunny symbol and in the other, her face and body are almost completely covered in bandages. In the latter photo, she leans against a reflective wall in a classic pinup girl pose, the only parts of her costume that identify her as Gaga are her trademark sunglasses and monstrously high platform shoes. But, as with the other images here, the referentiality spins outwards beyond a single origin; the costume signals not only the mummy as dead/undead monster, but the sunglasses and the pose suggest celebrity/ Gaga and that other classic bandaged monster, the fi lm incarnation of The Invisible Man (1933). In other photos in this series, Gaga is both the vampire and its victim: neck, mouth and hands smeared with blood, mouth opening pain and/or orgasmic passion. Pop cultural references to beauty, glamour, spectacle, sex and death overlay each other in these photographs to create what Ben Trott calls a “fabulous monstrosity.” Lady Gaga’s video performances are constructed around similar moments of Gothic excess, display and referentiality. Tavia Nyong’o has noted that his initial response to Gaga’s videos was that they “were simply a series of disconnected fashion shoots set to music.” Thinking about Gaga’s performances as a series of still photographs rather than as linear, connected filmic narratives is perhaps useful for considering her monstrous reworking of iconic femininity. Madonna’s admonition that we “strike a pose” in 1990’s “Vogue” speaks to the icon’s role in queer and popular culture as conveyed not so much by a coherent narrative as it is by a series of recognizable, repeatable moments. Think, for example, of Cher’s signature limp hand and hair flip, and Celine Dion’s fierce gaze beyond her audience accompanied by an empowered double thump of her chest. The monster in popular culture is signaled by similarly replicable moments: the outstretched arms of the reanimated mummy of 1930s films or Lugosi’s Dracula with his eyes peering over the top of his cape. These moments can be repeated by the performer and beyond (in the case of the icon, for example, in endless drag shows) in a

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recognizable way that doesn’t necessarily signal a single moment of origin. Moments, poses, signature gestures are the stock-in-trade of the Icon and of the monster in the texts that circulate in popular culture. In this sense, Nyong’o’s observation is particularly useful for the ways in which I consider how Lady Gaga sets up and renders iconic moments monstrous—such as the use and repetition of the claw-like “monster hands”—in her performances. The choreography in her videos resembles, as Nyong’o suggests, a series of high fashion photographs and runway poses played in rapid succession. But that resemblance is distorted through the introduction of the monstrous. The dancers’ movements are jerky and repetitive, more like a series of muscle retractions under electric impulses or glamorized versions of the appearance of the monster in horror movies than they are like movements that suggest any kind of fluidity, beauty or volition. In the video for “Bad Romance” (2009), for example, moments during which iconic femininity is blended with the monster are enacted through a series of stylized poses: as diamonds fall around Gaga’s character, excessively on display, in 3-D still motion; the silhouetted figure of the “monster” in what appears to be a shower; the exaggerated, animé-like close-up of Gaga’s face; as she walks, dragging a polar bear skin coat behind her and poses as the bed in the background bursts into flames; and the fi nal pose in a parodic fulfi llment of the death drive as she lies on the scorched bed, bra sparking, smoking a post-coital cigarette next to a blackened skeleton. The use of this sort of Gothic movement is particularly evident in “Paparazzi” (2009), in which the return of the icon is a monstrous one: after being jettisoned from the balcony, she has been transformed from the ideal of the Image to an unsettling evocation of a body in pain. Incorporating prosthesis into Paparazzi’s dance performance refashions the relation between bodies in motion and on display. The prostheses foreground the ways in which the “indefi nableness of the Other and the flagrancy of Beauty brush up against one another.”12 “Brushing” the paradoxically fragile and resiliant disabled body up against the glamour of the Icon through her use of bejeweled, glittering prostheses foregrounds the body on display as mutable and incoherent. It has been extended, augmented, modified and damaged in the name of celebrity, art and idealized femininity. The twentyfi rst century icon in “Paparazzi” is a cyborgic re-imagining of the “real” women who were the focus of iconography in the 1950s and 1960s connected through a process of their self-conscious and perhaps debilitating construction. More than being distorted versions of previous iconic performances, Gaga’s monstrous iconicity simultaneously signals the stability of the ideal even as it refashions it—as “Paparazzi” demonstrates—in a series of shifting, interlayered moments that emphasize the disturbing corporeality that underlies the image of the Icon at the same moment that it draws attention (as does cross-dressing) to the artifice that is the ideal feminine in the iconic performance.

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Refracted through the lenses of paparazzi, social media and video and image-sharing websites, Gaga’s monstrous iconicity positions her own body as an unstable, indeterminate referent within the discourse of her celebrity. That is, the “real” is always deferred in favour of the performance that is, itself, a blending of modified moments in and from popular culture. Initially, at least, there was no “real” figure behind Lady Gaga—and even now that her biography has become well known, she never appears in public except as Lady Gaga. So while the Icons whose images are echoed and splintered in her performances are, as I argued earlier, hyperreal, “hyperreality” necessarily refers to something specific and stable—if not real, at least always already defi ned—that precedes the Icon. The Icon’s body—at least the image of the Icon’s body signals an essence of stable femininity within the heteronormative framework of celebrity and popular culture. That stability, though, is troubled by Lady Gaga’s use of the monster as the symbolic centre of her performances and her relations with her fans. Perhaps this troubling is why Christina Aguilera noted in a 2009 interview that she didn’t know whether Lady Gaga was a man or a woman (Collins) and Gaga herself has stated that she sees her look as closer to that of a drag queen than of a sex symbol. These ambiguities eventually culminated in what is still an ongoing question in some circles: whether or not Lady Gaga has a penis. Some commentators have focused on the political implications of this question: a woman whose performances resist the stable relation between subject and object must, on some level, be outside of traditionally “feminized” signification. While both critiques and defences of Gaga’s performances and persona inevitably focus on the tantalizing potential of her indeterminite body, discussions of her physiology seem to approach the question in order to pin down the “problem” that her persona presents in and for a discourse of feminine performativity.13 But rather than letting the issue determine the terms of her place in pop culture, the Haus of Gaga made sure that it instead pushed Gaga further into the territory of the indeterminate. At one point it released photographs of Lady Gaga crossdressed as male model “Joe Calderone.”14 The “question,” though, seemed about to be answered in the opening scene of the video for “Telephone” (2010) when two heavily muscled prison guards (played by bodybuilders/ actors Dallas Malloy and Jayne Trcka), strip Gaga of her stylized costume and one asserts “I told you she doesn’t have a dick.” As if to provide evidence of the guards’ statement, Gaga throws herself, spread-eagled, against the bars of her cell to display her genitals. But nothing is revealed: her crotch, with its answer seemingly on defi nitive display, is obscured by strategically placed pixilation. This moment evokes the significance of the body itself, and the penis in particular, as an inherently insignificant signifier in the context of the Gothic logic of the Fame Factory. The “revelation” in “Telephone” is an explicit reference to an earlier, similarly ambiguous moment in August 2009 when Lady Gaga was performing at the Glastonbury Festival. During the performance, an “unauthorized”

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camera situated just off and below the level of the stage, looking up at the performer, recorded what seems to be a penis peeping out—briefly— from under Lady Gaga’s mini dress. “Verified” by the camera, this moment seemed to “prove” what “Telephone” later left undetermined: the existence of a “small penis” under the glam feminine clothing. It also seems to belie Gaga’s defi nitive statement to Barbara Walters in 2010 that the rumours that she “is part man, part woman” are “not true” (abcnews.go.com). In spite of Gaga’s statements, the performances themselves continue to foreground her continued deployment of her body as unstable and indecipherable. As Nyong’o suggests, “in rendering the question of her penis simultaneously undecideable (because we still don’t see it) and moot (because now that she is in on the joke [about whether the penis exists or not] too she spoils it), Gaga takes that ostensible ‘failed’ body between normative heterosexual male and female, and gifts it with the absent presence of a lesbian phallus.” In this case, the “failed” body is a body that refuses to be categorized. It is one that is paradoxically, gothically, excessively on display even as it hides its “reality” coyly behind a pixilated screen. The “slip” in Glastonbury reveals, fleetingly, a phallus (if not a penis) that is there but officially denied, while “Telephone” gestures in the opposite direction—denying but never revealing the central object. Nonetheless, the viral life of the Glastonbury video, posted and reposted so that its existence and the commentary it generates seems to defy linear chronology, continues and perpetuates what is at the heart, I would suggest, of Lady Gaga’s monstrous iconicity: slippage, deferral and the blending of the distinction between statement (narrative), image (body/performance) and coherent referentiality. This moment locates the cause of the unease and questions around Gaga’s performances in the unstable space of a body that refuses to signify clearly. In this sense, it is not the possibility that Gaga is intersex that makes this moment unsettling; after all “intersex” is a classification. It is the refusal or the deferral of any clear answer to the question of her body’s relation to physiological/sexual categorization that makes it uncanny, unsettling, disturbing. The kind of bodily incoherence evident in the question of Lady Gaga’s penis draws attention to her performance of the iconic body as the object of narrativized, excessive spectacle and precarious meaning which draws it into a conversation with the (post)queer and the Gothic. Ultimately and fundamentally, then, whether Lady Gaga’s penis is real or not doesn’t matter: it will always already signify as a kind of digitially produced and disseminated piece of “evidence” of her bodily, performative, representational incoherence. In the opening scene of the video for 2011’s “Born This Way” the viewers’ focus is drawn to the central figure’s (Lady Gaga) genitals and again, raises the question of a stable biological referent. Even in the overwrought performance of maternal monstrosity, one can assume vagina and womb as the midwives’ hands disappear “into” Mother Monster. But this “disappearance” is the most simple of tricks that can be accomplished with

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mirrors and again, the central object that should be reflected in these mirrors is instead distorted and obscured. Similarly, the place of Gaga’s genitals is marked on her costumes, but not signaled clearly by her body: by an inverted cross in “Alejandro” and by a long slit on her flesh coloured body suit in “Born This Way,” but the “revelations,” like the nipple tape in so many of her performances, obscure, even as they purport to display, the “answer” the question of her unrepresentable body. Once again playing with mainstream culture’s fi xation with unambiguous sexual classification, “Born This Way’s” affirmation that “I’m beautiful in my way/’Cause God makes no mistakes/I’m on the right track, baby/I was born this way” articulates a belief in a stable, “core” identity even as the video’s images performatively undermine the possibility (or desirability) of such stability. The “Manifesto of Mother Monster”, that begins the seven minute (plus) video for the song, opens with the promise of “a race within the race of humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom.” The Manifesto quickly shifts to an insistence on the imaginary necessity of binaries, labels and absolutes: “as the eternal mother hovered in the multiverse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil. And as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance. It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate instantly and unwaveringly towards good. But she wondered, ‘How can I protect something so perfect without evil?’” (Gagapedia). Splitting Mother Monster “in two” and dividing her between “two ultimate forces” takes away the possibility of metonymic slippage that characterizes the monster in Gothic discourses. It is no longer “a kind of fantasy screen were a multiplicity of meanings can appear and fight for hegemony” (Źiźek 63). It has become the sign of an essence that participates in a clear oppositional relation to other essences. Costumes, makeup, body modification, digital manipulation and explicit references to earlier performances of monsters in popular culture all combine to reinforce the indecipherability of corporeal display. Perhaps the most telling example of this occurs toward the end of the video as Lady Gaga dances with “Zombie Boy” (Rick Genest); a scene that is, and is not, a monstrous re-vision of Madonna’s “Express Yourself” (1989) video. His head and body tattooed to look like a skeleton, he is recognizable as both popular cultural reference and a display of anatomical detail: Day of the Dead meets Dawn of the Dead meets Gray’s Anatomy. In the video, Genest stands, mannequinlike and immovable next to a gyrating, singing Lady Gaga whose clothes and make up turn her into his female double. Perhaps, as Gaga suggests in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Genest (who she calls Ricco) “was born that way. Although he wasn’t born with tattoos, it was his ultimate destiny to become the man he is today” but Gaga’s performance suggests that his “real” identity is replicable. That is, she takes the external manifestation of his “core” identity and reflects it in a distorted mirror of Deitrich/Madonna/ Goth hyper-femininity. Neither Genest’s body, then, nor any anxieties that

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it may enact about death or the disturbing inscribability of the body are so unique that they cannot be rendered, duplicated and reworked through Gaga’s lens of shifting, layered referential performances. The monster that overlays the human body is, in Gaga’s incorporation of Genest’s inscription of it into her performance and her message to her fans, always a thrillingly, tantalizingly familiar defamiliarization of the threat posed by the ex-centric corporeality of the monster: like watching a horror film rather than encountering the horrific in real life. The physical manifestation of Genest’s core is one that owes much to artifice, creation and gothic repetition. In her discussion of Gothic bodies in the culture of the last fin-de-siècle Kelly Hurley argues that “bodies are without integrity or stability; they are instead composite and changeful” (9). So, ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, it wasn’t enough for Lady Gaga to simply rework the texts of the monster that circulate in culture and in her stage performances. She needed to become the monster. The monstrous potential of prosthetics and digital manipulation have become a fundamental part of her performance of “Mother Monster” on and off stage. Lady Gaga’s body— and the narratives that circulate around that body—continue to be without integrity or stability. In February 2011, Lady Gaga appeared with horny protrusions on her forehead, cheeks and shoulders. When asked about them, she denied that they are prostheses or any form of body modification. She insisted “they’re not prosthetics. They’re my bones. . . . They’ve always been inside of me, but I have been waiting for the right time to reveal to the universe who I truly am. . . . They come out when I’m inspired” (Whitworth). That Stephanie Germanotta was “born [that] way” is, perhaps, going a bit too far (in spite of her belief that the inner essence should and will be ultimately manifest on the body) but that Lady Gaga was, is not. As the product of the Haus of Gaga, a figure created, as it were, by a committee and disseminated as much through social media and the web as through live performances and celebrity appearances, Lady Gaga is a “process without stable object” (Briadotti 300), a “postmodern heteroglossia, an effect of multiple boundary crossings” (Heller 29) that characterizes the monstrous. But while the monster necessarily signals corporeal instability and incoherence in this case, the true nature of its monstrosity is that it is never understood to be a body but a kind of “field of interconnective flows” (Goriss-Hunter 545) generated not through clear referentiality but through the opposite: a series of uncannily familiar but citationless references.

CREATURE OF THE INTERNET Lady Gaga makes no secret that referentiality is a central part of her performances. She has said “you’re only as great as your best references” (Stein and Michelson). But when she acknowledges her influences, she uses a string of references without citing a specific text: “I’m inspired by friends in New

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York City, the arts scene on the lower east side, the seventies, David Bowie, Studio 54.”15 Commentators similarly provide lists of references: “Her look draws almost exclusively from drag—whether it’s referencing the freakdrag legacy of Leigh Bowery, the fantasy glam of David Bowie, or literally donning the couture drag of Alexander McQueen,”16 and “Grace Jones . . . Isabella Blow, Leigh Bowery, Freddie Mercury, Daphne Guinness, Klaus Nomi, Led Zepplin, Patti Smith, Boy George, Carole King . . .” (Robinson 282). Referring to drag is particularly important here: drag is itself a referential performance that depends not so much on an authentic replication of the performer, but of her performance. Drag performance “transcends the function of sybmology to the act of creating something different from the reality on which it is based” (Senelick 7). Drag is unsettling. It “confuses the signifier with the signified in its belief that the clothes which betoken gender also constitute it” (Senelick 1). The repeated references to drag that surround Lady Gaga both on and off stage reinforce the ways in which the performative body both refracts and signals meaning. The desire for clear citation, though, is played out in the innumerable blogs, web pages and wikis that have been devoted to tracing references in Gaga’s videos, especially “Telephone,” “Alejandro” and “Born this Way.” MTV’s James Montgomery has written “pop-culture cheat sheets” for each of these videos.17 The influences and references that he cites span historical periods, artistic genres, media, mythology (ancient and modern) and public figures. And as with the notion of the monster, chronological coherence is lost in the confluence of “interconnective flows” of references posted, shared, re-posted and viewed in random order on the web. In this sense, the excessive referentiality of Gaga’s videos is a dizzying series of allusions within/to allusions, tropes of tropes and performative tributes to and reinscriptions of earlier moments and images in popular culture. Her performances accumulate references, repetitively, obsessively arranging and rearranging them—processing them—in different relations to each other, disregarding and, indeed, erasing their contexts so that their citations become both irrelevant and irretrievable. I’m not suggesting here that Gaga or the Haus of Gaga have consciously and deliberately set out to resist or elide the authority of chronology or authoritative citations. What I am arguing is that she—that is, this accumulative relation to reference that is her persona and performance—is the inevitable product of the digital age. She is a creature of the internet. Gaga’s performance is the embodiment of the destabilized, fragmented, radically juxtaposed and, most importantly, citationless18, circulation of texts on the internet. More like a digitally generated Frankenstein’s monster than a teratalogical one, Lady Gaga draws on and pulls in elements of previous performances without citation and without a clear sense of provenance. Her performances are not evolutionary or organic allusions to or re-presentations of previous figures and moments. They are the creatures of the Haus of Gaga that has created its monster not out of parts of bodies

128 Karen E. Macfarlane dug up from cemeteries and stolen from the dissecting table but from the swirl of referents and texts that circulate unchecked and uncited on the web and in social media. Like monsters which, as Cohen suggests, “haunt; [they] do not simply bring past and present together, but destroy the boundary that demanded their twinned foreclosure” (ix), references in Gaga’s work are spectral. In spite, then, of her explicit play on and with the corporeality of the monster and the Icon, Gaga is a creature of the internet that “destroys the boundary” that privileges or even gestures toward the notion of clear sources for the Image. In the video for “Material Girl,” Madonna is clearly and unambiguously troping Marilyn Monroe’s performance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). She recontextualizes Monroe’s performance, turning the object of desire into a comment on the desire for the Icon. Her video sustains a clear reference to the original image and it is from that reference that the irony and its use of the pastiche functions. Monroe’s performance may have been drawing on earlier performances (Lana Turner, Mae West) but Madonna’s reference to this scene in this fi lm is a clear citation. When Lady Gaga “channels” Madonna in her videos the reference is neither quite so clear nor quite so unambiguous. Indeed, I would suggest that while there is clearly a reference being made, there is no clear citation. That is, Gaga is making reference to Madonna/Marilyn/Lana/Mae West/Theda Barra/Gibson Girl all of which are the source of her performance and the substance of it. Like the monster, the performances that allow each of these figures to be enacted simultaneously are “field[s] or plane[s] of interconnective flows of gender, race, flesh, and paradox” (Goriss-Hunter 545) and, in this case, one could add, performances, costumes, references and texts rather than a reference to a single original source. Jacques Derrida asks whether the “performative . . . can succeed . . . if its foundation did not repeat a coded or iterable utterance . . . if it were not identifiable in some ways as a ‘citation’” (Derrida 18). Lady Gaga’s monstrous blending of influences seems to suggest that the answer is, provisionally, yes. Pulling references to gay icons into her performance, in particular, allows Lady Gaga to tap into the metonymic slippage of coded utterances. The monstrously iconic does “repeat a coded or iterable utterance” but its blending with the monster transforms the cited reference to the icon and her place in the context of the gay vernacular into the metonymic instability—the incoherence—of citationless, monstrously (dis)/(re)integrated, references. Drawing explicitly on the referentiality, repetition and excess of the Gothic body, her focus on the instability of the monstrous body signals and allows for a reading of her performances as themselves a monstrous emphasis on “process without stable object” (Briadotti 300). What I mean by this is that the act of identifying the patches and fragments that make up Gaga’s performances is like trying to trace a plagiarized essay through the internet: each source replicates and slightly changes another source, sometimes citing, but more frequently providing no citation at all until

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ultimately it becomes clear that the original text—wherever and whichever it is—has lost its claim to authority. References in Lady Gaga’s videos are similarly unstable and strategically all too/un-traceable. In this sense, the fact that three (at least) of Gaga’s most explicit references to the Fame Factory’s Gothic project involve an explicit casting away of the “original” celebrity in order that she re-appear, freshly—but monstrously—remade is important. In the 2010 Grammy performance that opens my discussion, Lady Gaga is thrown into a vat marked “Rejected” and reappears, besmirched with ash, at adjoining pianos with Elton John. Similarly, in “Paparazzi” when Gaga re-appears after being thrown off of a balcony by her lover, it is as a monstrous reinvention of the original: one that eventually, as with the similar stripping down, throwing away and liberation in “Telephone” results in murder. In each of these cases the idea of being abjected and remade is an important part of the sense of (re)constructed iconicity that Gaga is performing. The original is shattered and, through a “process of fragmentation and recombination” (Cohen 11) is replaced by a monstrous amalgam: not a copy/paste, not series of mirrorlike refractions, but a recombination and merging akin to the process of digital image blending “which depict[s] the transformation of objects in streams” (Whitaker) rather than in sections or blocks or fragments. The processed image blends together multiple originals to create something other than any of those originals but which nonetheless continues to refer to them and incorporate them (or their residue) into the final image. The new image itself thus becomes “original” in the sense that none of the images that are used to make it are unambiguously identifiable or discrete in this manifestation. But they are—and the references from which they draw— nonetheless present as a kind of spectral residue. The figures of the icon and the monster, as discussed earlier, both stand for something beyond themselves in popular culture. In the case of Lady Gaga’s monstrous performances though, it is the image—already unstable, already purely referential—that is being refracted in her Gothic funhouse mirror. Looking at her performance is like “look[ing] into a triptych of mirrors in which the image of origin continually recedes into a disappearing arc” (Bruhm “Contemporary” 259).19 In this case, the “image of the origin” is, itself a kind of paradox. What is looking into the mirror—and therefore the “image of origin” that should be reflected back—is not itself an easily identifiable object that could reflect a coherent image. It is already a blend of the images that it is looking in the mirror and that is being/has been refracted, distorted, shattered and reassembled in it. So while referent and referentiality are central to the performance of the Icon, those referents become a less coherent form of pastiche than its pre-digital incarnation. Michael R. Real has noted that “pastiche is the combining together in one work of the disparate styles and content characteristic of what would normally be presented as quite different artistic eras and messages . . . No period or style of art is too sacred or too remote to be borrowed from and

130 Karen E. Macfarlane quoted” (239). The significant element here is the sense that for pastiche to work, the original text is quoted, cited, that the allusions can be traced. 20 The quotation contains the referent in quotation marks, clearly separating it off from the text in which it is found and signaling its transplantation into the existing text. What makes Gaga’s incoherent referentiality Gothic is this sense of uncanniness of the citationless references; the feeling of knowing them, recognizing them but never being able to identify them defi nitively or clearly. What’s being disturbed here is the feeling that there should be, or that there needs to be (or even that there can be) an “original” text. The uncanniness is even more in evidence as the references become overlaid, exaggerated, indecipherable, grotesque versions of their original selves. This is what I mean by accumulation and monstrous, queered referentiality. It is a space of intersection between the post-queer rupture of meaning, the extravagant performance of gothic excess and the Gothic potential in repetition that makes this possible. It is the queer/post-queer harnessing of the metonyic potential of iconicity and the monster’s emphasis on the uncanniness of the image that makes this blending inherently, strategically referential and unstable. Ultimately, then, the uncannily citationless (or maybe too full of citations) references are like Gaga’s pixilated genitals, that post-queer “corporeal destabilization” (Noble “Sons”132) whose “truth” is ultimately irrelevant in the face of its interlayered performance. The desire for citation is, like Gaga’s penis “a phantasmatic object” (Nyong’o), a monstrous image that destroys the boundaries it is purported to transcend. NOTES 1. The trend to which I refer here includes (but didn’t necessarily begin with) Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) in which the figure of Dracula is given a background story that makes him a sympathetic, tragic character and provides motivation for his predatory impulses; Angel and, later, Spike, in Buff y the Vampire Slayer, Fido (2006), the Twilight saga and other texts in popular culture that, like Coppola’s fi lm, provide monsters with background stories and sympathetic, human motivations. 2. I would suggest that her movements at the beginning of “Poker Face” echo those of the creature in 1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon as it emerges from the Lagoon’s murky waters, a monster “unknown to science” and “from the depths of time” that evokes fear and anxiety about other worlds and Other bodily figurations. 3. These icons embody a combination of “vulnerability and strength, sincerity and duplicity, self-consciousness and abandon” (Gross). 4. Fresh Pics blogspot, “Lady Gaga is Copy-Paste,” 22 February 2011 (http:// freshpics.blogspot.com/2011/02/lady-gaga-is-copy-paste.html; accessed 12 May 2011). 5. Jack Babuscio has argued that Judy Garland’s iconic status “owes much to the fact that she is always, and most intensely, herself. Allied to this is the fact that many of us seem able to equate our own strongly felt sense of oppression . . . with the suffering/loneliness/misfortunes of the star both on and off the

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

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screen.” (26) The confl ict between inside and outside that these icons enacted reflected, as another commentator suggests, “the lives of oppressed, closeted men in the 1950s and 1960s. They identified with [the Icon’s] ‘paradox and duplicity’” (askyahoo.com). There is fluidity in contemporary gay iconography. Some would argue that Madonna, Cher and Bette Midler are icons for earlier generations (not for the twenty-fi rst century) but it seems that they have come to function as a kind of shorthand for queer culture and that they have that position because of their longevity. In this sense, like Judy Garland, these figures continue to be accorded “iconic” status. More recently, Christina Aguilera enacted a similarly dizzying pastiche that tropes figures who themselves are troping figures from popular culture and gay iconography in the videos for her 2006 CD, Back to Basics. Her metatextual evocation of Bette Midler’s reinscription of the Andrews Sisters in “Candy Man” and of Madonna’s performative reinscriptions of Jean Harlow, Betty Grable and Lana Turner refracts beyond Hollywood and cultural constructions of music and movie stars to incorporate the self-reflexive and self-constructive performances of earlier queer icons. “Dance in the Dark” includes specific references to “Marilyn, Judy, Sylvia” as well as to Liberace, Diana, Princess of Wales and the murdered child pageant queen Jean Benet Ramsey. Fame Monster 2009. Bobby Noble talks about this emphasis on process and incoherence fi rst in terms of “texts, discourses and dialogic languaging processes”(12) as a way of distinguishing the “queer” from the “post-queer” in terms of identity, politics and activism. Barra “was the fi rst studio-made sex-symbol superstar and the very fi rst ‘vamp’.” The term “vamp” was coined because the characters she portrayed in her fi lms were said to be predatory. Barra’s iconic status was, as Gaga’s photos reflect, connected with very Gothic emphasis on fear and repulsion in relation to the feminine body on display. http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/190/2016 (accessed 06 Month 2011). This quotation describes choreographer Marie Chouinard’s 2005 “bODY remix/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS,” which uses “fantastical props, prosthetic devices and other distorting manipulations of the human body that make her dancers appear simultaneously in an animal-like creaturely condition and as ultra-human, machine-like mutations.” (Jaeger) http://www. modemay.com/index.php?option=com_modemay&task=moreinfo&video= 478&Itemid=2 Countercritic’s article “How do you solve a problem like Lady Gaga? Give her a penis, apparently” (http://countercritic.com/2009/12/16/how-do-you-solvea-problem-like-lady-gaga-give-her-a-penis-apparently/) articulates this idea of Lady Gaga’s connection with drag and the gay community as a “problem” in both mainstream and queer culture. http://www.celebuzz.com/lady-gaga-cross-dresser-s220051/ (accessed November 2010). Interview with Paris Hilton http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWF3GhS_ WQA (accessed 10 March 2011). “Counter Critic,” 16 December 2009 (http://countercritic.com/2009/12/16/ how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-lady-gaga-give-her-a-penis-apparently/; accessed February 2011). “Born This Way”: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1658903/lady-gaga-bornthis-way.jhtml, “Alejandro”: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1641026/ladygagas-alejandro-video-german-expressionism-with-beat.jhtmlm and “Telephone”

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(with Eric Ditzian): http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1633858/lady-gagastelephone-video-popculture-cheat-sheet.jhtml (accessed 10 March 2011). 18. Judith Butler’s discussion of citation, performativity and “citational legacies” (225) forms the jumping off point for my conceptualization of “citationless” references in Lady Gaga’s work. 19. Vanessa Place has argued that “Gaga is a concept, and as such, may be conceived any number of ways by those who choose to tarry with whatever portion of her fragmentary All. But then there is the Object, an object very much of design (a design, naturally, both equal parts designer and DIY: her ‘white Birkin bag covered with fan-created graffiti,’ The disco bra from the ‘Just Dance’ video I made with my own two hands) and, while iterable, this site is neither fungible nor Fluxus. Gaga’s subjectivist project is not fully Warholian because Warhol was opaque—a screen having been something for you, darling, to reflect on to—to story off of. Contrarily, Gaga is a mirror, the image of Image itself.” 20. Similarly, Lyotard defi nes bricolage as “the high frequency of quotations of elements from previous styles or periods” (171) in postmodern art. Frederic Jameson defi nes “pastiche” as “the random cannibalization of all of the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion.” (18)

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 169–187. Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Briadotti, Rosi. “Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences.” Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Edited by Jane Price and Margaret Shildrick. New York: Routledge, 1999. 290–301. Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston: South End Press, 1984. Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 259–76. . Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Cho, Alexander. “Lady Gaga, Balls Out: Recuperating Queer Performativity.” FlowTV.org 07 August 2009. Web. 01 May 2010. Cohen, Jeff rey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996. Collins, Hattie. “Lady Gaga: The Future of Pop?” Timesonline. 14 December 2008. Web 04 June 2011. Countercritic. “How do You Solve a Problem Like Lady Gaga? Give her a Penis, Apparently.” 16 December 2009. Web 03 March 2011. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited, Inc. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1977. 1–24. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. Gagapedia. Fame Monster. Web 19 February 2011.

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Gorris-Hunter, Antia. “Slippery Mutants Perform and Wink at Material Insurrections: Patricia Piccinini’s Monstrous Cute.” Continuum: A Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 18.4 (2004): 541–53. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. “Haus of Gaga.” Gagapedia. Web. 20 May 2011. Heller, Dana. Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Hepburn, Allan. “Monstrous Bodies: Freakish Forms and Strange Conceptions in The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.” Ariel 33.3–4 (2002): 133–57. Hughes, William and Andrew Smith. Eds. “Introduction.” Queering the Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991. Lady Gaga. Born This Way. Streamline Records. 2011. CD. . The Fame Monster. Streamline Records. 2009. CD. . “Interview with Paris Hilton.” 27 January 2009. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web 10 May 2010. . “On the Record with Fuse.” 2009. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web 10 May 201 . “Poker Face.” Video. February 2009. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web. . “Paparazzi.” Video. May 2009. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web. . “Bad Romance.” Video. November 2009. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web. . “Telephone.” Video. January 2010. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web. . “Alejandro.” Video. June 2010. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web. . “Born This Way.” Video. February 2011. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web . “Lady Gaga Barbara Walters: 10 Most Famous People of 2009.” Full Interview. December 2009. Youtube/Vevo.com. Web. 10 May 2010. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Defi ning the Postmodern.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Edited by Vincent B. Leitch. New York: WWW Norton, 2001. Madonna. “Material Girl.” January 1985. Video. Youtube. Web. . “Express Yourself.” May 1989. Video. Youtube. Web. Maddison, Stephen. Fags, Hags, and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent and Heterosexual Bonds in Gay Culture. London: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Noble, Jean Bobby. Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a PostQueer Cultural Landscape. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2009. . “Making it Like a Drag King: Female to Male Masculinities and the Trans Cultures of Boyhood.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory. Edited by Noreen Giff ney and Michael O’Rourke. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. 79–94. Nyong’o Tavia. “Lady Gaga’s Lesbian Phallus.” Bully Bloggers. 16 March 2010. Web. 23 April 2011. Patton, Cindy. “Embodying Subaltern Memory Kinesthesia and the Problematics of Gender and Race.” The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. Edited by Cathy Schwichtenberg. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. 81–106. Place, Vanessa. “Wat is Gaga?” Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art about Lady Gaga. 20 September 2010. Web. 10 June 2011. Powers, Ann. “Frank Talk with Lady Gaga.” LA Times. 13 December 2009. Web. 23 April 2011. Real, Michael R. Exploring Media Culture: A Guide. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1996.

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Robinson, Lisa. “Lady Gaga’s Cultural Revolution.” Vanity Fair 601. (Sepember 2010): 280–6, 329–31. Ruffolo, David. Post-Queer Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Schwichtenberg, Cathy. “Madonna’s Postmodern Feminism: Bringing the Margins to Center.” In The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. Edited by Cathy Schwichtenberg. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. 129–45. Senelick, Laurence. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2000. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London, Reaktion Books, 2007. . Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Stein, Joshua David and Noah Michelson. “The Lady as Vamp.” Out Magazine. 07 August 2009. Web. 19 February 2011. Trott, Ben. “Lady Gaga’s ‘Gay’ Confusion.” Guardian.co.uk. 14 February 2011. Web. 12 May 2011. Vena, Jocelyn. “Lady Gaga on Success: ‘The Turning Point for me was the Gay Community’.” MTV.com News. 7 May 2009. Web. 1 May 2010. Weitzmann, Kurt. The Icon: Holy Images, 6th to 14th Century. London: Chatto and Windus, 1978. Whitaker, R. T. “A Level-Set Approach to Image Blending.” Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. 9.11 (2000): 1849–1861. Web. IEEE Explore Digital Library. 02 May 2011. Whitworth, Melissa. “Explaining Lady Gaga’s Prosthetic Horns.” Telegraph. co.uk. 14 April 2011. Web. 02 May 2011. Zak, Dan. “For Gay Activists, the Lady is a Champ.” Washington Post. 12 October 2009. Web. 01 May 2010. Źiźek, Slavoj. “Grimaces of the Real, or, When the Phallus Appears.” October. 58 (1991): 44–68.

8

Spectral Liturgy Transgression, Ritual and Music in Gothic Isabella van Elferen

GOTHIC TRANSGRESSION AND MUSIC Gothic is a transgressive gesture. It explores limits and exceeds boundaries such as those between life and death, fantasy and reality, or good and evil. The act of crossing limits occupies an important place in Gothic productions: transgressions are depicted so vividly that audiences almost viscerally see, feel and experience them. Gothic transgression becomes imaginable in descriptions of the vampire’s bite leading to an opening of the senses and a gradual letting go of the borders between life and death. In Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Lestat’s bite makes all the colours in the room merge into one, the vampires seemingly radiating with preternatural light; after that there is only sound “louder and louder until it seemed to fi ll not just my hearing but all my senses, to be throbbing in my lips and fi ngers, in the flesh of my temples, in my veins” (23). Gothic transgression becomes visible when Neo takes the red pill in The Matrix (“and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”) and feels the body detach itself from one, allegedly virtual, reality and sliding into the other, allegedly real, reality. Gothic actively draws audiences into the twilight zones it sketches, leaving readers, viewers and listeners destabilised, as haunted by the ghosts of the repressed as the characters they read, see, hear. Transgression in Gothic is often signalled by sound or music. Whether in Gothic literature, cinema, television, or computer games, music is insistently represented as the herald of other realities. It is considered able to vocalise or conjure up ghosts and to exorcise vampires; it can draw listeners into its flow and take them across borders of reality or spirituality. Music is particularly associated with transcendence, a type of transgression that leads to the dissolution of the boundaries between the worldly and the divine, or the mundane and the supernatural. Ann Radcliffe, for instance, describes the transcendent qualities of musical experience in The Mysteries of Udolpho: It was a still and beautiful night, the sky was unobscured by any cloud, and scarce a leaf of the woods beneath trembled in the air. As [Emily]

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Isabella van Elferen listened, the mid-night hymn of the monks rose softly from a chapel, that stood on one of the lower cliffs, an holy strain, that seems to ascend through the silence of the night to heaven, and her thoughts ascended with it. (48)

Edgar Allen Poe remarks in a curious, short manuscript that music offers listeners a glimpse of the supernatural: When music affects us to tears, seemingly causeless, we weep not, as Gravina supposes, from “excess of pleasure”; but through excess of an impatient, petulant sorrow that, as mere mortals, we are as yet in no condition to banquet upon those supernatural ecstasies of which the music affords us merely a suggestive and indefi nite glimpse. (433) Poe further elaborates on musical transcendence in an essay on songwriting, arguing that music is the only art form that aspires to a an “atmosphere of the mystic,” even a “breath of faëry” because of its “indefinitiveness” (493). The border-crossing potential of musical immersion is employed extensively in Gothic cinema and television. The enigmatic mantra that resounds through Twin Peaks (David Lynch, 1990–91) alludes to music: “One chants out between two worlds: Fire, walk with me”.1 It is said to evoke Killer Bob’s transgressions, and therefore arouses deep fear as well as morbid curiosity. An example of musical transcendence occurs in Tony Scott’s vampire fi lm The Hunger (1983). The poignant counterpoint of Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere (ca. 1630) accompanies the moment when the vampire Miriam Blaylock lays her dying victim-husband John to rest with her other past loves. As she climbs up the stairs to the attic and the high descant rises to almost impossible heights, and the dust-speckled rays of light in the shots of the attic seem to open up the full radiance of the polyphonic texture. Through the overlay of this scene with such evidently sacred music and a careful audiovisual editing a double border-crossing is established. The plot gradually transcends from worldly to heavenly realms, and with that John’s death acquires a sacred dimension. Because of that the vampiric hubris of undeath gradually becomes undone, and moves into the more “natural” order of given life and death. Professor Van Helsing in Dracula needs a ritual to do what music here does all of its own: it moves the narrative, and with it the spectator/listener, over the borders between the vampiric, the human and the divine. Scott’s choice for such evidently religious music is no coincidence: this is sacred music, and it will not fail to stir religious or divine connotations. As Kevin Donnelly has pointed out, fi lm music can “haunt” visual narratives because hearing music involuntarily stirs memories, emotions, connotations (8–24). Because these meanings are absently present in the disembodied melodies floating around the film or television screen, soundtracks offer outstanding vehicles for Gothic uncanny, spectrality and transgression.

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The fact that film and television music are often only subconsciously heard, positioned as they are in the background of narrative and visual events, only adds to this effect. Exactly this seemingly subservient position enables it to exert great influence on the ways in which foregrounded events are experienced—watching a horror movie is much less scary when the volume is muted. A sonic imp, this music enters perception through the back door, and there does its destabilising work. Its spectrally, unconsciously present connotations make this part of The Hunger’s score even more effective than the visual rituality of the scene: it generates a crossing of borders that is as unavoidable as musical connotations themselves are.

MUSIC ACROSS LIMITS Transgressive or transcendent uses of music partly operate through the spectrality of musical experience, which leads to perceptual conflations of various realities and temporalities. Such musical boundary-crossings are aided, moreover, by the medium’s phenomenological relationship with time. Music exists in and through time: the sound of music necessarily involves the passing of time. Through this, musical experience can also influence listeners’ experience of time itself: listening to music can make time pass by faster, more slowly, or can even make it seem to stop altogether. Music engenders a timeline that is simultaneously parallel to, within and without the present. Based on similar observations Jonathan Kramer argues that music creates its own temporality: Does music exist in time or does time exist in music? [ . . . ] If we believe in the time that exists uniquely in music, then we begin to glimpse the power of music to create, alter, distort, or even destroy time itself, not simply our experience of it. (5) Jean-Luc Nancy attributes a similar creative power to music, but extends it beyond temporality only. He argues that music engenders a space and time of its own, a space-time that has its own phenomenological laws. This musical universe represents not stasis but movement, not being but becoming. Musical experience can be conceived as a constant de- and recontextualisation, a constant fading of one reality into another: [The presence of music] is fi rst of all presence in the sense of a present that is not a being (at least not in the intransitive, stable, consistent sense of the word) but rather a coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating. [ . . . ] The sonorous present is the result of space-time: it spreads through space, or rather it opens up a space that is its own, the very spreading out of its resonance, its expansion and its reverberation. This space is immediately omni-dimensional and transversate through

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Isabella van Elferen all spaces: the expansion of sound through obstacles, its property of penetration and ubiquity, has always been noted. (13)

This “musical line of fl ight” has consequences for the listener: along with its movements and changes, the listener’s reminiscences, her emotions and identifications also move and change. 2 The groundbreaking flow induced by the laws of melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre thereby enables transgressions not only of time and space, but also of subjectivity. Because it is very hard—if not impossible—not to hear music when it sounds, this movement through musical space-time and musical subjectivity is almost inevitable, involuntary. Musical immersion can be so all-encompassing that the ordinary world disappears. All ears, only the boundlessness of the musical journey exist. In listening, nothing is a priori, nothing a posteriori: there is only an infi nite chain of ephemeral moments that undo themselves the very moment they come into sound. The listener is taken along with its vectors of harmony and melody, memory and emotion, relocated into an unknown state of being. Among many theorists, Simon Frith has pointed out music’s ability to transgress the borders of time, space and subjectivity: Music [ . . . ] defi nes a space without boundaries (a game without frontiers). Music is thus the cultural form best able both to cross borders. [ . . . ] We are only where the music takes us. (125) T.S. Eliot described the temporary dissolution of subjectivity through music in similarly transgressive and disruptive terms: “ . . . music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts” (44). Experiencing the universe created by music means entering that very universe, leaving behind the here and now as well as the self. The potentially transgressive forces of musical immersion are often evaluated as magical or transcendent. For this reason music functions as a gateway to other dimensions in culturally disparate ceremonies. The ritual setting of the scene from The Hunger described above is no coincidence, as this type of musically enhanced border-crossing is characteristic of various types of rituality. Rituals, series of actions with symbolic value, are often performed in ceremonial gatherings—from Catholic transubstantiation to the summoning of pagan deities—in order to invoke a dissolution of boundaries such as those between worldly and divine, word and flesh, life and death. In all these types of ritual, music plays an important role in the liturgy, which encompasses the spoken and/or chanted words that accompany the ceremony and reinforce its working. Buddhist mantras, Gregorian chant, and Satanist rites alike are based on the same metaphysical assessments of musical immersion—the “supernatural ecstasies” of listening to music that Poe mentions. Liturgical music has the express purpose of making listeners transcend the here and now, and enter an unknown—often

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metaphysical—then and there. Liturgy, thus, literally “chants out between two worlds.” It is music’s liturgical performativity that is connoted in the scenes from Udolpho, Twin Peaks and The Hunger. The Gothic genre eagerly exploits this dimension of musical experience. Music’s capacities to stretch time and space, to dissolute subjectivity, and explore the limits of imagination are used to enhance Gothic’s distortions of reality, self, and the knowable. Through an often strikingly liturgical use of music in literary, visual and interactive manifestations of Gothic, audiences are able to experience viscerally the border-crossings it describes. Music sets the transgressions of Gothic in motion: whether or not the listener wants to, she gets dragged along in the musical movement from the mundane to the divine, the occult, or any other plane of reality. While music thus enhances the immersion in Gothic literature, fi lm, television or video games, its transgressive potential becomes most evident in Goth nightlife. At Goth club nights the twilight zones of Gothic become corpo-real: while visitors’ costumes embody the ghosts of Gothic the taste of absinthe and the smell of clove cigarettes increase the sensation of having entered another world. Dancing to neoromantic, pagan or Cybergoth music, Goths partake physically of this world and complete the Gothic trajectory across boundaries. Electro-medieval band Tanzwut’s song “Tanzwut” (Labyrinth der Sinne, 2000) succinctly characterises these musical powers: “Inter Deum et Diabolum / Semper musica est” (“Between God and devil / There is always music”). The immersion in Gothic music can move listeners into the liminal spaces of Gothic, between past and present, between God and the devil.

GOTH’S EMBODIED RITUALS While literary, cinematic and televisual Gothic describe or visualise the transgressions into liminal spaces, Goths embody the ghosts that appear in such twilight zones. Valerie Steele has noted that “Gothic fashion, like the Gothic novel, tends to be obsessed with the past, often a theatrical, highly artificial version of the past that contrasts dramatically with the perceived banality of contemporary life” (104–5). Besides these embodiments of former ages, which give Goths the quality of ghosts of Gothic past, they also take on the guise of other Gothic ghosts. They may present themselves in a variety of ways, ranging from modern vampires, Byronic heroes, Victorian courtesans, and decadent dandies to horror movie stars, futuristic cyborgs, fetish imps, and so on. In this practice of symbolic selfrepresentation clothes acquire an interesting role. The detailed outfits in Goth milieus, which include jewellery, hair extensions, handbags, gloves, hats and fans, are put onto a Self and displayed for the observing gaze of an Other. Goth fashion is part of the performative self through the channels

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of exhibitionism and voyeurism: this performativity should not be understood as a semiotic encoding, but as an intrinsic part of Gothic “writing of excess” (Botting, 1). Goth clothing is comparable to but arguably more complex than other types of Gothic writing: the Goth body takes on the role of the medium through which Gothic enactment takes place. This has far-reaching implications for the Goth self, which becomes the lived and embodied destabilized Self that other Gothic media can only produce as a result of reading, viewing or gaming. Catherine Spooner has traced the importance of clothing in Gothic history from the veils and masks in the 18th-century ghost story to the costumes of horror film and the dressing up in Goth milieus. She argues that Gothic clothing is a form of self-fashioning that covers and uncovers “a complex and ever-evolving sense of self [ . . . ]: one in which surface and depth continually are articulated through and played off against one another” (203). The Goth self expressed through the subcultural capital of Gothic history and fashion is melancholic and nostalgic, frequently dark and brooding, and sometimes verging on the sentimental, just like the Gothic heritage with which it feels close affi nity. This Goth self-perception is enacted in social practices that could be considered transgressive outside the scene: like historical and cinematic Gothic ghosts, Goths explore the liminal borderlands between socially established binaries. Nostalgia, for instance, is paired with futurism in anachronistic overlaps of past and present: this is notable in the artificiality that Steele observes in Goth Victorian outfits as well as in the combination of absinthe rituals and cyberbeats at Goth club nights. Goth liminality is also expressed in terms of gender, as the loosening of boundaries of femininity and masculinity results in extensive cross-dressing, androgyny and freedom of sexual preference (Brill 29). The boundaries of sexual and erotic normativity are furthermore tested in explicit references to and public performances of SM, bondage and fetish practices (Weinstock 275). The limits of religious confi nement are crossed in explorations of Christian, pagan, and occult religions alike, which leads Anna Powell to characterise Goth as “parareligious” (Powell 357). As liminality and ambivalence are among the foremost Gothic paradigms, these transgressive social practices in Goth do not necessarily result in choices: Goth, like Gothic, involves dwelling in the twilight zone enabled by the transgression of binaries, and making one-sided choices would un-Goth the process. Therefore Goths are not suicidal, Satanist or nihilist. If these widely circulating prejudices regarding Goth reveal anything, it is the fact that the anxieties and desires surrounding such extremes signal social figurations of the uncanny. At festivals like the Whitby Gothic Weekend and the Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig or club nights like the Bal du Masque in Amsterdam, Goths perform their Gothness in a variety of social practices: here they can show off their outfit, listen to poetry, watch Gothic fi lms, witness cabaret or fetish performances, drink absinthe, smoke clove cigarettes, dance to Goth music.

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With their lush settings and Victorian figures dancing in slow-motion to darkly romantic music, Goth club nights offer a world outside the dayto-day, a twilight zone in which boundaries of gender, history and sexual normativity are not obstacles but opportunities. All of this is accompanied by the sounds of a carefully construed soundtrack, which typically starts off with old school Goth evoking past times, then changes to the drones of electronic body music (EBM) whose melancholy vocals mix machinic and human desires, and ends with the martial stomp of Cybergoth music (Combichrist). Goth clubbers dance the night away, and with it go the here and now. Only when the night is over they feel their feet, and the bleak lights outside the club return them to twenty-fi rst-century reality. In constituting a temporary way out of, or a parallel universe to, everyday reality which is physically as well as mentally experienced, these nights offer participants a form of secularised ritual. Powell argues that the Goth club experience is “synchronised by shared rituals of entry, dance, and intoxicant consumption,” which makes the club a “sacred or parareligious space” (359). While these characteristics apply also to disco, trance, or any other musical style or club, the sacred dimension of such gatherings and experiences is made more explicit in Goth clubs. The Bal du Masque, for instance, is organised as an exclusive club night requiring special preparations. As masks are obligatory and appropriate costumes highly appreciated, visitors spend a lot of time and money creating the most fantastically elaborate outfits. The party takes place in a deserted industrial complex hidden in the heart of Amsterdam: with the help of velvet draperies, chandeliers and an open fi replace this venue is transformed into an otherworldly capsule in the midst of busy city life. A personal password is needed to enter this space, so that the visitor feels privileged to be allowed in on a secret. When she is fi nally inside after the rituals of getting dressed and laced up, putting on makeup and a mask, exchanging passwords and entrance fees, the preparation of absinthe with sugar, water and fi re, she fi nds herself “in full fantasy,” another person in another time and place. Dancing, in this context, means physically partaking in the “free space,” the “colourful, shining, magic veil” that is Goth nightlife.3 It not difficult to see the ritual, almost sacramental dimensions of such club nights: not only do visitors feel privileged to be a part of such exclusive gatherings, the careful rituals of preparing, entering, and participating surround them with an aura of mystery. In this context David Punter’s notion of “ceremonial Gothic” acquires special relevance. The ceremony always points past and beyond, behind itself; it signifies, even in its superflux of meaning, the absence of whatever it was that preceded the ceremonial. Similarly, ceremonial speaks of repetition: a repetition without which the ceremony is not ceremony, a repetition which also serves through the very force of its stability to invoke a past which has always already vanished. Ceremonial as reminder, as a

142 Isabella van Elferen gesture towards what is absent, as a site that is perennially haunted by all that it is not. (38) For these reasons, Punter asserts, ceremonials invite or, conversely, drive away revenants (52)—vampire exorcisms are a paramount example, but in the case of Goth club nights the revenants of Gothic past, present and future are warmly invited in through setting, music, and the various performative practices. Punter emphasises that the ceremony or ritual signifies a space and time that exists beyond transgression: participation in the ritual may require a transgression of certain boundaries, but within its temporary timespace these limits no longer exist. As an embodied form of ceremonial Gothic, then, Goth rituality comes very close to what Victor Turner has identified as liminality: a betwixt and between, a transient state between two established poles (234).

SPECTRAL LITURGY The importance of music for the ceremonial and transgressive aspects of Goth can hardly be overestimated. Like in other scenes music is a vital part of the individual and collective identification patterns in the Goth milieu. Goth music and its reflection of identity may be enjoyed in melancholy solitude or celebrated at festivals and club nights. There is a vast array of Goth sub-genres rather than one Goth musical style. These subgenres do share a number of characteristics, starting with the thematic design of Goth song lyrics, which, with varying concrete focal points, also are geared towards the transgression of boundaries: they may involve nostalgia and gloom, ghostly appearances, sexual perversion or pagan rituals. A second shared characteristic is the musical exploration of boundaries: those between musical pasts, presents and futures, those between music and noise, and those between man- and machine-made sounds. Many Goth musical genres build on the collision of past and present, illustrated most eminently by Bauhaus’ 1979 single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” which is regarded as the unofficial beginning of the genre. The song creates an eerie atmosphere through the use of echoes and dubs that make Peter Murphy’s voice resonate as if from the abyss between Lugosi’s cinematic appearances as Dracula, the pop cultural present, and the timeless space of the undead. Bauhaus’ approach sparked a whole genre of neoromantic Goth music, in which operatic voices and bombastic lyrics endorse a musical widening of chronological boundaries. Medieval, pagan and neofolk Goth bands create twilight zones between the present and even further pasts. A popular track in this Goth sub-scene is Faith and the Muse’s “Cantus” (Annwyn, Beneath the Waves, 1995): [She is] a savage and serpiform creature, flying over the aether on her wings, exhausting one and all,

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let him have her, let him possess her, in her embrace of love he will stay forever.4 The musical setting of this curious text shows an eclectic accumulation of Christian, pagan and occult connotations. The lyrics are chanted in slow, homophonous chords by a choir of female voices—but it is a fantasy choir, consisting of singer Monica Richards’ multiply dubbed and reverbed voice. A low string bourdon, heavy on-beat drums and vigorously rising string motifs create a rich basic texture into which the chant fits seamlessly. Meandering vocal glissandos are woven into the descant part of the musical tapestry, adding a touch of Orientalism to the chanting vocals and the pagan instruments and rhythms. Faith and the Muse’s Celtic heterotopia is eclectic, excessive, and thoroughly liminal. Cybergoth subgenres, by contrast, explore the Frankensteinian overlap between human and machinic agencies through a focus on futuristic noise. In Combichrist’s “This S*it Will Fcuk You Up” (Everybody Hates You, 2005) a drum computer, music software and digitally manipulated voices foreground the creative agency of music technology: what we perceive are voices from the borderland between biological and technocultural musical realities. The song speaks of a very human activity (however mechanical), but this story is told by mechanical voices (however human): “I am a bitch / How do you want me?” All of these—and more—Goth styles are part of the soundtrack of a Goth club night. During these gatherings the participatory cultural practice dance endorses a musical experience that is embodied as well as mental. As a direct physical reaction to music, it reflects a corporeal dialogue between music and listener. The choreographic dialogue with Goth music happens in a number of dancing styles, which vary according to the relevant Goth sub-genre. While neoromantic music calls for what is sometimes imaginatively referred to as “wiping the cobwebs,” old school Goths move their Doc Martens in seemingly random directions, and Cybergoths stomp the dance floor like seductive robots. One characteristic is consistent through these various Goth dance styles. Goths relatively move twice as slowly as disco, house, or trance dancers; rather than accentuating every beat in four-to-the-floor manner, their movements tend to emphasise only the fi rst and third beats in every bar. The result is spectacular: seeing or being a part of an entire dance floor heaving in slow-motion has the dislocating effect of a collective slowing down of time. Here the dialogue with Goth music transgresses the expressive, resulting in a tangible contribution to the outof-joint temporality of Gothic through dance. When compared to other forms of Gothic music and their relationship to media and audience, participants’ immersion in Goth club nights through music is extremely high. Naturally the phenomenon of musical immersion in the club atmosphere is not exclusive to the Goth genre: the space and time of any kind of clubbing are determined by music rather than by walls

144 Isabella van Elferen or opening hours. Musical flow and connotations establish in the club an alternate reality that is neither strictly virtual nor entirely real in the ordinary, day-to-day sense.5 As club music can be felt as well as heard, moreover, the tactile component in this musically created reality is strong6. The embodied musical experience of dance and the visceral pounding of drums and basses ensure a deep corporeal immersion in the temporary reality of a club night. At Goth club nights, this physicality is underlined through genre-specific corporeal practices such as wearing a tightly laced corset, drinking absinthe, and smelling incense. The physicality of the events curiously contrasts with the spectral themes that Goth music often relates, and for whose expression, as in Gothic soundtracks to film, TV and games, precisely the immaterial—the ghostly and the hauntological—aspects of music are employed. The cultural practice of Goth dance thus paradoxically unites the most physical experience of music with its most intangible qualities, and the Goth body that is in dialogue with it cannot but move into a liminal in-between, partaking physically in spectrality. Steven Connor connects the tangibility of sound with the corporeality at its origin, with its pre-sonic body: [H]earing strikes us at once intensely corporeal—sound literally moves, shakes, and touches us—and mysteriously immaterial. [ . . . ] Perhaps the tactility of sound depends in part in this immaterial corporeality, because of the fact that all sound is disembodied, a residue or production rather than a property of objects. (157) In Goth music this disembodied body, the absent presence that haunts all sound, is part of the music that voices Gothic ghosts in eerily high or uncannily low vocal lines. It is these ghosts with whom Goths dance in the virtual reality of a Goth night. These club nights are a form of ceremonial Gothic which is not only verbal, but also performal through the embodiment of subcultural capital. If the ceremony, as Punter asserts, “always points past and beyond, behind itself,” then the play with Goth identity at club nights and festivals is a ceremony pointing beyond subjectivity. The Goth club night can be described as a ceremonial enactment of Gothic heritage that seeks to playfully explore and transgress the limits of self, here and now. As in other sacred or parareligious ceremonies, ritual acts are part of the setting, and music is the operative factor of the liturgy. Visitors’ bodies move to the music and, as the flow of dance joins that of the music and of its connotations, gradually also move into music, leaving the exchange between music and body the sole indicator of temporality and location. Ordinary time and space dissolve in a participatory musical reality that traverses the borders between present and (Gothic) past, secular and sacred, self and other. Again, the phenomenon itself is not limited to Goth only—Faithless testified in 1998 that in club culture “God is a DJ / This is my church / My

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pilgrimage is to the dancefloor” (Sunday 8PM). Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson have assessed the ways in which dance “problematizes [ . . . ] the distinction between internal and external experience” (60), arguing that the physical and affective immersion in dance leads to Lacanian, “the ecstatic dissolution of self on the dancefloor” (107). Timothy Taylor describes goa/ psy trance in similar ways, but adds that there is a distinctly religious aspect to the collective rites of dancing and trancing. Like Powell in her assessment of Goth club culture, Taylor fi nds in goa/psy trance experiences the “collective effervescence” of Durkheimean religiosity (177–200). Bearing similar characteristics of dance and goa/psy trance, Goth explicates the ritual play with subjectivity in these scenes in two ways: on the one hand, its rituality is more obviously present through its elaborate masquerade, while on the other hand, this milieu is more explicitly ceremonial through its extensive use of Christian, pagan and occult imagery. The accumulation of its components—embodiment, musicality, dissolution of self, explicated rituality—gives ceremonial Goth a close kinship to Dionysian rites. The darkly overwhelming, destructively alluring and utterly limitless nature of Dionysian ecstasy was celebrated also by Romantic philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who saw in music the return of mythical impulses towards wild self-forgetfulness.7 Nietzsche describes the drunkenness of Dionysian ecstasy as music-induced and radically transgressive: In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak; he is about to take a dancing flight into the air. His very gestures speak bespeak enchantment. [ . . . ] from him emanate supernatural sounds. He feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like to the gods whom he saw walking in his dreams.8 Recontextualised in Goth club rituals these ideas acquire a renewed significance, as both the combination of their nineteenth-century European roots and their emphasis on the transgressive potential of music as a “Dionysian mirror of the world”9 fits seamlessly into Goth subcultural capital. The review describes listeners’ immersion in the transgressive nostalgia expressed in any Goth music. Through its lyrics, its musical allusions to other times and spaces, through the dislodged temporalities of repetition, sustained chords, syncopations, and through the phantom bodies that become tangible in its exploration of timbre, Goth music unremittingly presents the listener with the possibility of alternative realities. An immersive listening experience can therefore result in a wilful participation in the music’s transgressive drive, into a past or future time, pagan or industrial spaces. Singer Monica Richard’s voice chants out between two worlds. In conclusion, Goth can be understood as an enacted form of ceremonial Gothic. One aspect of the ceremony, Punter asserts, is that it “always points

146 Isabella van Elferen past and beyond, behind itself”; ceremonial Gothic points to the spectres, the revenants, the premonitions that exist beyond its own ghost stories. The soundtrack to a Goth club night, therefore, has a distinctly liturgical function: it is music accompanying the parareligious rituals of ceremonial Goth. Having this function Goth music is the inducer of the Dionysian transcendence that Nietzsche described as part of the sublime musical experience. Dancing, as a corporeal interaction with Goth music, enables physical participation in this transcendence, allowing the Goth Self to enter the “Twilight Gardens” presented in the evening’s soundtrack (from The Cure “This Twilight Garden,” b-side to “High”; Wish, 1992). It is through this embodied transgression of subjectivity that Goth music stands out from other types of Gothic music. Like the music described in Gothic literature, it makes spectral voices audible. Like Gothic fi lm and television music it immerses its listeners in ghostly and transgressive narratives. Different from other types of Gothic music, however, Goth music directly and vocally addresses listeners. In the multiply embodied context of Goth club nights and festivals, moreover, it endorses a Dionysian transgression of self through the ritual enactments of ceremonial Gothic. As in other forms of Gothic fiction, subjectivity becomes unhinged at Goth club nights: unlike readers, viewers or gamers, these destabilised selves are embodied, and they dance to spectral liturgies. This s*it does fcuk you up. NOTES 1. See Isabella van Elferen, ‘Haunted by a melody: Ghosts, transgression, and music in Twin Peaks’, in María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (ed.), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 286–90. 2. Deleuze and Guattari’s description of musical becoming. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 11–12, 299–300. 2. Quote from Bal du Masque website: www.baldumasque.nl. 3. Translation Monica Richards, http://www.mercyground.com/annwyn.htm. 4. See Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures (90–110). 5. See Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson’s Discographies (44–51, 57–60). 6. See this review at https://www.metalstorm.ee/pub/review.php?review_id=1924. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1995), 55–60, 67–73. 8. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 4. 9. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 71.

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Brill, Dunja. Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style. Oxford: Berg, 2008. Botting, Fred. Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996).

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Connor, Steven. “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing.” In Veit Erlmann (ed.). Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sounds, Listening, and Modernity. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Donnelly, Kevin J. The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: British Film Institute, 2005. Elferen, Isabella van. “Haunted by a Melody: Ghosts, Transgression, and Music in Twin Peaks.” In María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds.). Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. New York: Continuum, 2010. 286–90. Eliot, T. S. “The Dry Salvages.” Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber, 1959. 44. Frith, Simon. “Music and Identity.” In Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1996. Gilbert, Jeremy and Ewan Pearson. Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. London: Routledge, 1999. Kramer, Jonathan. The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. New York: Schirmer, 1988. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1995. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Music.” In David Galloway (ed.). Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. 433. . “Song-writing.” In Galloway (ed.). Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. 493. Powell, Anna. “God’s Own Medicine: Religion and Parareligion in UK Goth Culture.” In Goodlad and Bibby. Goth: Undead Subculture. 357–374. Punter, David. “Ceremonial Gothic.” In Glennis Byron and David Punter (eds.). Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999. 38–52. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. London: Time Warner Books, 2006. Spooner, Catherine. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Steele, Valerie. “Gothic: Dark Glamour.” In Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park (eds.). Gothic: Dark Glamour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. 104–105. Taylor, Timothy D. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2001. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Turner, Victor. “Body, Brain and Culture.” In Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 18/3 (1983): 234. Weinstock, Jeff rey Andrew. “Gothic Fetishism.” In Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (eds.). Goth: Undead Subculture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 375–97.

9

Under Their Own Steam Magic, Science and Steampunk Gail Ashurst and Anna Powell

Steampunk is a deviant avatar of Gothic. No longer morbid or melancholy, Steampunk’s industrial and diurnal concerns might appear to be entirely secular. The Gothic interest in vampires and demons, ghosts and graveyards has been replaced by a maker-culture of pistons, cogs and gears. Yet significant congruencies between Gothic and Steampunk persist. Although Steampunk’s brass goggles have overtaken the silver pentagrams and crucifi xes of Goth, they share flamboyant, retro styles and social gatherings. Moreover, both cultures project a selective version of history via vintage nostalgia for the Victorian/Edwardian eras. These shared cultural and aesthetic preferences reflect even more fundamental commonalities that emanate from the crucial Gothic archetype of the Mad Scientist, the obsessive savant whose desire for knowledge and power defies natural law. This chapter explores Steampunk’s link to a Gothic heritage that is simultaneously secular and sacred, scientific and magical. The desire and dread found in the Gothic uncanny fi nds its corollary in Steampunk’s notions of the aether (sometimes spelled aethyr) and aetheric forces. Both modes operate a type of modern animism by which supplementary powers invest or possess that which has no life. For Gothic, this exists in domestic objects such as mirrors, portraits—even entire houses— but in Steampunk it is the inanimate object of the machine (and mechanical devices) that are invested with special powers. Gothic and Steampunk, then, explore forms of animation that depend on human investments. But Steampunk’s magical imaginary does not manifest itself in the spectral undead; rather, it is concerned with the intimate relationships between “living” machines and their creators. In keeping with the trope of the machine, we combine several methodologies. Our working assemblage of theory and practice joins animism with psychology and philosophy; but we also draw on ethnographic fieldwork to generate a multivalent picture of the machinic in Steampunk. We read the anomalous devices, engines and gadgets of the movement through the concept of machinic desire in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reworking of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of élan vital (Bergson 1983; Deleuze and Guattari 1984). For Deleuze and Guattari, the machine figures

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new ways of conjoining human with non-human as a machinic assemblage to offer a profound critique of patriarchal capitalism. To provide a sense of how Steampunks perceive themselves and to map broader tendencies in the field, we draw on input from representative members of the community. Our field research with the autopoetic processes of Steampunk includes comments from designers and practitioners on their aims and artefacts. Our empirical sources include interviews at the Asylum Steampunk Convention and follow-up questions and discussions over email.1 We also draw on respondents’ discussion threads and answers to our questions posted on Brass Goggles, the most high-profi le international Steampunk forum. Like the literary and cinematic engagement of Goth/ic communities, Steampunks reference and produce fiction and film as aesthetic resources, representing their machinic magic. If microchip technology has been reduced

Figure 9.1 Time Machine.

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to the point of imperceptibility, the Steampunk-themed cultural production foregrounds spectacular and elaborate machines based on clunky Victorian and Edwardian prototypes: the pioneer Steampunk movie The City of Lost Children (Jeunet and Carot 1994) represents archaic laboratory equipment made of wood, brass and glass (with a brain in a tank); these are used by the villainous Krank—an evil and mad scientist—to steal the imaginative energy of children and fuel his defunct dreams through psychic vampirism. Steampunk blends Gothic and sci-fi modes. But it also draws on historical literary sources, incorporating late Victorian occultism with the early science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to endorse a steam-driven magic. Other popular cultural sources are here too. And these include the original fictions of the “Steampunk era,” which mixes Gothic with scientific paradigms: Wells’s Time Machine is a central text, which features a flying machine that flouts the laws of space and time; so is Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which includes an obsessive, mad scientist leader (Professor Leidenbrock); and also influential is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, depicting a brooding “fatal man”—Captain Nemo—who builds a futuristic submarine, the Nautilus. Significantly, Steampunk draws on the stories of H P. Lovecraft: these texts combine Gothic modes with the occult and unique scientific exploits. Science, like magic, is ambivalent, for the danger of chaos is a potential byproduct of success or failure. In Lovecraft’s “From Beyond,” for instance, the scientist Crawford Tillinghast creates an electronic device that emits a wave of resonance to stimulate the pineal gland and open metaphysical planes to perception. Here, the author grafts contemporary relativistic science onto the American Gothic tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “witch-haunted” Arkham; this produces a distinct fictional universe that is evoked by his hypnotic prose. In this, Lovecraft realigns the Gothic tradition with non-Euclidean geometry and relocates demons—“the Great Old Ones”—to an “outer space” of incongruous dimensions and non-linear time. From this dubious locale the characters send their servitors to reclaim earth from human usurpation. The alien monsters from “beyond” and the occult rituals found in Lovecraft are translated into contemporary Steampunk form in Hellboy, which combines “Science and Black Magic.” In the opening scene, for instance, Grigori Rasputin, the undead magus, performs a ritual in a ruined abbey during a midnight storm. Using beams from a Tesla-style generator and a Steampunk-style hand made of heavy metal and glass tubes, he aims to open a portal for the Ogdru Jahad. These are the Seven Gods of Chaos who can help the Axis powers win the war. Science, like magic, is ambivalent: it causes the dangerous, yet necessary, condition of chaos and safely returns the Ogdru Jahad to outer space in the film’s conclusion. In Steampunk, the creator’s will to power engenders machines with engines that use steam, electricity or oil derivatives (the latter in Dieselpunk). These fuels are “avatars” for further, less tangible, forces. This

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implies a ubiquitous, elemental power in potentia that can be harnessed by the maker. This idea is, of course, the modification of earlier texts that include elemental forces such as Galvanism in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein whereby the lightening animates the creature’s corpse and infuses “a spark of being into the life-less thing” (Shelley 1993 38). Steampunk draws on Frankenstein for the prototype of the mad scientist and references “early horror films that glorified machines with big switches and chaotic electrical discharges” (Hendley). In this, science and magic combine to create a mysterious force that is grounded in ontological hybridity.

HYBRIDITIES: GOTHIC AND STEAMPUNK, SCIENCE AND MAGIC

‘Basically, the things that exist in physics are just done better by magic’ (Torrent).

Statements such as this encapsulate much of the thinking about magic in contemporary Steampunk discourse and derive, in part, from the influential English magus Aleister Crowley, who defined his version of “magick” as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” (Crowley 1976 xii [sic]). Crowley’s public persona has shaped figures in Gothic-inflected literature and film ranging from the sinister Satanist Moccata in The Devil Rides Out (Fisher 1968; based on Dennis Wheatley’s 1934 novel) to the portrait of Lord Blackwood in Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie: 2009), whose use of science masquerades as magic so effectively that the detective is inspired to practice occult rituals (after taking opium). Throughout his writing, Crowley sought to use scientific methodology to study what his contemporaries regarded as “spiritual experiences”; he even made “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion” the motto of his magazine The Equinox (1909–1918). Here, he asserts that religious experiences should be critically analysed in order to determine underlying influences and functions. Crowley’s devotion to aligning magic with science is summed up in his assertion that “spiritual progress did not depend on religious or moral codes, but was like any other science” (Crowley, 1979 583). The skills necessary to the Magician are, he writes “of the same order as those which make a successful chemist,” and he goes on to suggest that “in one sense Magick may be defi ned as the name given to Science by the vulgar” (Crowley 1976, 583; xiii). At the fi n de siècle, the intersections of stage magic and science provided mysterious and spectacular productions that had a profound impact on the popular imagination. Such an alignment (and deception) is explored in the Steampunk fi lm The Prestige (Nolan 2006) in which Nicholas Tesla’s electronic teleportation devices are used to underpin staged magical illusions.

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In Steampunk, the hybridity of science and magic is often discussed on the “Metaphysics” thread of Brass Goggles. Here, occultism is articulated as a retro blend of various forms of cultural production: it draws on images from fin de siècle popular culture, particularly the magical/scientific discourses surrounding “spirit catchers, séances,” “spirit collectors” and “ghost hunters’ gear.” On this site, the Steampunk named Maurautius describes the retro blend of the paranormal and Steampunk technology, which include, machines for communicating with spirits, contraptions for raising zombies (Frankenstein, anyone?), witches flying around in “enhanced” airships, fortune tellers in steamed out gypsy caravans, Tesla-augmented séances, human chronovisors, steam/æther powered scrying machines only operable by a medium. (Maurautius) The fi n de siècle integration of invisible technological forces (electricity) and spiritualism (the occult) is also discussed by Professor Postrophe, who speculates that these “newly minted concepts were ascribed qualities that verge upon this spectral realm—hence the use of terms like ‘Vibrations’, ‘Animal Magnetism’, ‘Electric Fluid’ and ‘Flux Condenser’ in the spiritualist and magical literature of the era” (Professor Postrophe). Here, the gothic discourses of spectrality and haunting presences (the uncanny) creep into descriptions of Steampunk sources, imbuing nineteenthcentury technological devices—fictional and actual—with occult powers that enhance the laws of physics. But whereas the Gothic invokes fear, terror and horror through the “scary and supernatural” forces of “ancient ruins, old cultures, and exploration of the weird”, Steampunk celebrates and even fetishizes the ghost in the machine: “Magic on the boilers creates the steam. Magic on the Airships creates the lift” and magic “steel is stronger, black powder is more explosive, lifting balloons are more efficient. So magic becomes an intensifier and an enabler for the steam tech” (Torrent). Still, the self-reflective awareness of “using physical principles” to “appear magical” is combined with the Steampunk interest in the “spooky” Gothic aspect of magic that “comes with a terrible price” (The Traveller). One author of Steampunk fiction, for instance, draws on a traditionally Gothic repertoire of “charms, hexes, relics of power, crystal-magic”; but his character, Noah, also uses a form of magic that is “more of a telekinetic type thing, manipulating matter with a complex string of thoughts/actions” (Sacha Gears). All of these devices, whether traditional, scientific or psychic, seek to invoke and deploy special types of power.

AETHER; OR, THE POWER OF STEAM In Steampunk culture, the magical and occult forces are often given the name of aether, seemingly more scientific and empirically valid. This

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classical element (the word derives from the Greek “to burn” and “shine”) is ubiquitous and, within Steampunk ontology, permeates all spaces and transmits energy from and invisible medium for forces such as light. In this, the retro context of the movement gestures back to those Victorian scientists who developed the earlier theory of luminiferous (light-bearing) aether, leading to Albert Einstein who, in 1920, integrated a modified “new aether” into his theory of general relativity. The archaic term has particular appeal to Steampunk culture: it is, at times, used to describe aspects of the internet—including instant messaging—whereby thought waves are transmitted through the medium of aether. Others in the community (at least those respondents to our questions) use the term more within a more scientific framework, referring specifically to what Tesla calls “electromagnetic energy” (Bass of Spades). The fiction of Steampunk frequently invokes this term; it is, for instance, central to Ian R. Macleod’s novel The Light Ages (2004) in which aether is depicted as the driving force behind the industrial revolution. Macleod describes its mysterious power: “aether is like no other element, and it shuns all physical rules [ . . . ] purified, its wyreglow fi lls the darkness, but spills shadows in bright light [it] responds to the will of the human spirit” (30). Here, Gothic images are also used to convey the monstrous, vampiric properties of aether. “The darkmaster was aether’, the narrator continues, ‘and it was aether which conspired, though the chain of our lives [ . . . ] to remake itself and become fully powerful once again [so that] the dark white wyreglow of aether stalks everywhere, and I see it in the darkest corners of the night. It prowls my memories” (444). The Gothic modes of secret guilds, magical spells, changelings, shape-shifters and bale-hounds are linked, in Macleod’s version of aether, to the material conditions of machinery and its social consequences for Victorian Britain. And yet this aether is imbued with more contemporary relevance, for it is also used for genetic engineering and a plague of radiation sickness. Aether is also used in Steampunk fan fiction. Here, it is often used to power super-weapons: technomancers use aether to fuel “innate magical talent” and control their surroundings (Smaggers); one character, Nate, invents a gun using “liquefied Aetheric Ether”—“a one ounce vial of the strange blue glowing liquid will power the gun for several thousand shots” (Smaggers). Another author deploys aether as a “clean technology” power source—“hazily amber in color”—which, when mixed with water, can power “turbines, engines, guns, etc for a very long time” (Archibald Broce). Other Steampunks (exemplified by our respondents) deploy gothicallyinflected forms of the supernatural and magical practices. For instance, Roving Jack incorporates “Alchemy, Sacred Geometry, and mystical symbolism” into his crafting (of both sorts). And Khem Caigan links traditional occultism with Steampunk science in the Esoteric Order of the Brazen Dawn, a web-based society for Steampunks with an interest in “conjunction.”

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Why do Steampunks use magic? What are the motives and the potential results? For Roving Jack, his work seeks to harmonize “a combination of Von Reichenbach’s Odic Force, Sigil magic and a Victorian understanding of Galvanism, [and] to develop equipment for the Royal Anomalographic Society” (Roving Jack). For him, the Odic force is an arcane vitalist theory of electromagnetic force that “could be seen by ‘sensitives’ in darkened rooms, emanating from crystals and magnets. Various experiments were done to show it working” (Roving Jack). In another interview, we found that one respondent plans to build an Odic Force laser-gun device. This will be done by, he claims, “putting a crystal in a sealed box, and then applying a ‘magical’ method of extracting and using the energy produced [via] a set of Occult Symbols to concentrate the energy, amplify it with input from the operator’s ‘Vital Energy’” (Lord Nicholas Horsethorn). He intends to exhibit this artefact at Steampunk conventions after designing “a vaguely electronic-looking occultish circuit diagram [that looks] sufficiently Esoteric” (Lord Nicholas Horsethorn). Clearly, imaginative conceptions of creativity and the concrete material properties of these artefacts underline a complex assemblage of science and magic.

ANIMISM AND STEAMPUNK For some, Steampunk culture involves a conception of the machine as animistic, thus linking a Steampunk ontology to aspects of the uncanny. Animism (which attributes consciousness to inanimate objects) is discernable in the creative processes at the very heart of Steampunks’ machinic becomings, from the workings of the imagination to the conceptualisation of animated mechanization to the bodily displays of Steampunk artefacts. Indeed, Steampunks often express a view that animism is an antidote to the alienation of modern technology; this is illustrated in the following examples: ‘I think that Abram said that humans made objects have spirits too, sometimes they’re just not as interesting because they are made purely for function. I think that Steampunk gets around this and fi nds the spirit in the machine again’. (New Orangutang) And, ‘I want to take today’s technology and give it a soul by using materials such as brass and wood’. (Marsh 2010) Related to the anti-alienation sentiment is an emphasis on the imaginative investment and physical labour involved in creating Steampunk artefacts. The following example illustrates this:

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The concept of “Steampunk” as an Artisan is to take raw materials and produce not only a working item but give it a certain beauty. Take Copper, Brass, and Wood—Cogs, Gears and Steam, and let the imagination run wild with these materials. Working manually instead of each piece being mass produced is a must—over coming design problems and inadvertently leaving that trace of risk or imagination on each piece. Metal brought to life in the Artisan’s hands with colours and hues to delight the eye. Wood—once a living organism—is brought back to life, its colour and grain again adding beauty. Tool markings that enhance the look as well show processes used to create the item. (Marsh 2010) Freud’s widely cited essay on the uncanny is, among other things, a response to Otto Jentsch’s 1906 theory on animism (exemplified though E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1815 “The Sand-Man”) in which a young man falls in love with an automaton. Jentsch’s approach offers unique insights into Steampunk culture, for he theorizes the mechanics of locomotives and steamboats in relation to a hypothetical “wild man” who experiences an animistic response— ‘trepidation’—in the face of “the enigmatic autonomous movement and the regular noises of the machine, reminding him of human breath, the giant apparatus can easily impress the completely ignorant person as a living mass” (8). Jentsch’s theory corresponds to contemporary ideas found in Steampunk; in both cases, forms of machinic animism reflect an uncanniness as they seek to “reinterpret some kind of lifeless thing as part of an organic creature, especially in anthropomorphic terms” in a poetic or fantastic way (12). Freud, of course, dismisses animism as a mode of infantile (or archaic) perception which the subject outgrows as he develops into a normative stage of adulthood. Here, the return of an infantile/archaic unconscious would involve, for the adult, the phantasmatic repudiation of reality. But instead of viewing animism as a narcissistic fantasy, it can also be understood as an attempt to recapture a vital connection that is been lost in human experience. In The Re-enchantment of the World (1981), for instance, Morris Berman recounts the gradual erosion of an animistic worldview (over four hundred years of European history); the unrelenting move towards a scientific ontology has impacted human consciousness and led to a condition of “disenchantment”. Berman’s neo-animistic concept of “participating consciousness” is pertinent here. For this “involves a merger, or identification, with one’s surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed”, thus a participating consciousness bridges the experiential void of “disenchantment” (16). Steampunk animism includes an anthropomorphic gaze. For if animism involves a numinous encounter with the natural world, then anthropomorphism revolves around the remaking of the world in the individual’s image. In this, Steampunks’ anthropomorphic tendency is highlighted in the Catastrophone Orchestra’s manifesto:

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Figure 9.2

Clockwork Heart.

Steampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears, and delusions. The technology of Steampunk is natural; it moves, lives, ages, and even dies. (Onion 2008 145). Here, animism and anthropomorphism are central to the retro mode of perception that envisions Victorian mechanical innovation and advanced technology. This is explained further by Herbert Sussman, who states that “the sense that machines were somehow alive grew through the nineteenth century”, so that Victorian machinery “appeared to manifest the self-regulation and intelligence of a human body endowed with a soul” (2009 39). A charming example of this is captured in Sussman’s account of a journal entry written by Dorothy Wordsworth (about fi rst seeing a steam-powered engine). While on a tour of Scotland with her brother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, she recounts the following: It heaved upwards once in half a minute with a slow motion, and seemed to rest to take breath at the bottom, its motion being accompanied with a sound between a groan and “jike” [ . . . ] It was impossible not to invest the machine with some faculty of intellect; it seemed to have made the first step from brute matter to life and purpose. (Wordsworth 26).

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The anthropomorphism captured in this passage is later woven into Victorian philosophical speculation about automatic machinery. In The Philosophy of Manufacturers (1835), for instance, Andrew Ure claims that within the industry of mechanized production, “the elemental powers have been made to animate millions of complex organs, infusing into forms of wood, iron, and brass an intelligent agency” (Sussman 39). Likewise, the Victorian mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage (an iconic figure within the Steampunk movement) also records a perceptual spirit in his attempt to “mechanize the mental processes” through his celebrated prototype of the Difference Engine—a “thinking” machine which could “calculate by steam”—that he developed with Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter) (Sussman 40). In an era of depersonalised technology and mass production, Steampunk resuscitates the Victorian concept of the living, breathing machine and, in so doing, it inspires the creation of imitative objects within an aesthetic and imaginative space to express a perceived sense of loss. In Gothic fantasies, the mad scientist often uses the machine for horrific ends. In this, the uncanny psychoanalytic view of animism offers an access route into this cultural phenomenon; for although Steampunk machines rarely produce fear or terror, Gothic sublimity arises in the affects of awe at the creativity of the maker and wonder at the intricate quality of the materials. Here, Bergson’s philosophical paradigms—concepts that came to prominence near the close of the “Steampunk era”—built on élan vital (translated as vital force or impulse) and arose out of his post-Darwinian speculative work Creative Evolution (1911). The “age of steam”, Bergson asserts, had a vital impact on the significance of machinery and, as such, he makes a clearcut distinction between mechanism (the soulless computation of parts added together but remaining distinct) and the potential of the living machine, which is driven by the intuitive energy of human consciousness: “a machine which would triumph over mechanism” (Deleuze 1988 107; Bergson 278). Deleuze and Guattari rework élan vital to theorize their own figures of machinic energy and the desire of psychic forces to impact on art as an event (1984). For Deleuze, Bergson’s élan vital “uses matter to create an instrument of freedom’ and will to power; in such machines, he continues, Bergson’s ‘science is never reductionist, but, on the contrary, demands a metaphysics without which it would remain abstract, deprived of meaning or intuition” (Deleuze 1988 107, 116). This, we suggest, speaks to the vitality of Steampunk, for within the culture physics is elided with metaphysics through the creators and the machines they produce. In Frankensteinesque forms, the creator imbues the machinic device with life, and it is here that the Gothic mode creeps into Steampunk’s modern artisanal reaction to the perceived soullessness of contemporary information technology. In William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s influential Steampunk novel The Difference Engine (1992), for instance, the narrator speculates on the cultural impact of the suppression of the artisanal Luddites in an era when the British Empire rules by the force of the steam-driven “difference” engine.

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Steampunk figures express distrust of the sterile sameness and the inherent obsolescence of digital technology. They often repudiate the microchip electronics that conceal the marks of the creator (and its processes) by hiding the inner mechanisms from users. By contrast, Steampunk seeks to expose mechanization and make it tangible; it embraces an artisanal ideal that, in part, echoes the late Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. These producerly cultures operate an autopoetic way of fashioning metal and wood; the recycling of discarded materials are used to make new machinery with hands-on methods. The “modding” (modification) and elaboration of existing devices (such as clocks) are altered to make hybrid objects that subvert the original use-value. Thus, Steampunk machines are, among other things, kinetic works of art, not just products of a market-oriented work ethic.

Figure 9.3 Simeon Marsh in the Gothic milieu of a Victorian prison cell at Lincoln Castle.

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The Steampunk creator sees the artefact as having animistic elements. This is exemplified in the creations of Prof. Simeon Marsh (his Steampunk persona), who is a maker of various machines and devices. He sells his customised artefacts, which are described as “Steampunk, neo-Gothic and urban survival creations” of metal, leather and glass at Steampunk conventions. Steampunk opposes the soulless homogeneity of late corporate capitalist production in which workers are alienated from the products of their labour. Hands-on creativity is used to challenge the Victorian image of “hands” as mere adjuncts to the machine. As a result, the Steampunk artisan produces objects that are customised and marked by the direct touch of the hand: “working manually,” says Marsh, “creates an item instead of mass production, individuality counts, as does the slight imperfections that might occur” (Marsh 2010). Artisan customisation thus counters the homogenised methods of mass production; imperfections are not corrected, but the traces of living labour and intimate assemblages are left by the maker. “Tool markings,” continues Marsh, “enhance the look and show processes used to create the item” as signs of the living meld of creator and machine (Marsh 2010). For Simeon, a maker uses his/her hands intuitively by “overcoming design problems and inadvertently leaving that trace of risk or imagination on each piece” (2010). Simeon’s artefacts are inspired by the “soaring imagination” and inventiveness of the Victorian and Edwardian period—alternatives to the conformity and homogeneity of technology in contemporary culture. “Computers, Cars and other mass produced items”, he asks, “where’s the difference? [ . . . ] Where’s the soul?” (2011). Steampunk modding sometimes involves “adding a soul” to inanimate microchip technology: “Computer data stick—boring, but encase it in a rose wood surround with watch cogs inset and a brass trim, truly something else” (Marsh 2011). Discussing his work as a maker, Simon identifies the existence of a kind of animus as his creative brings out the inherent life of objects. His watches, for example, are made “using discarded items”, “giving them life and soul” (Marsh 2011). Simeon evokes the intuitive psychic intensity produced by intimate experiential knowledge. Traditional craft methods and materials are carefully selected, and the Victorian craftsman is celebrated as the ideal. Preferred substances (brass and wood) are crucial for the uncanny metamorphosis of “adding a soul” and, as such, the maker is a catalyst of energies and properties that are already inherent in the special materials. Drawing out their full living potential and setting their mechanical parts in motion, “the hard unyielding metal is turned to almost sculptural form [then the] cogs turning, connected together to produce an action” (Marsh 2010). “I feel”, Marsh continues, “that I’m putting something of myself into everything that I produce, as I’m sure artisans of the Victorian period may well have done the same” (2010).

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The objects Simeon makes are often reflected in (and inspired by) fictional texts. The Steampunk modes, images and themes found in texts such as Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age: A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995) and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) has led members of the community to produce fan-based textuality: short stories, novels, journals and weblogs (Steampunkfiction.com) reflect the Steampunk aesthetic and creative visions of technology. Texts such as Simeon’s “Time Travelling Emitter Harness” have, for example, had a profound influence on the community, and has been described as “a total fl ight of fancy [which] took various skills with Leather work and electronics as well as lots and lots of Cogs to create it”; the work was inspired by a short piece Simeon read about Victorian Time Travellers (Marsh 2010). The animistic qualities envisioned in Simeon’s creations are echoed by James Harrison. He is particularly interested in the Victorian steam engine, and the complex relationship between the engineer and the piece of technology produced and maintained. He writes that they almost have, a soul, whereas modern machinery is soulless. A steam locomotive for instance-you have to spend hours heating the boiler, care for it almost like a child, coax and cajole it to achieve locomotion and then continue caring for it, lubricating it, stoking it, keeping it full of water to perpetuate that state. A diesel locomotive—you step inside and push a button. There is no comparison. (Harrison) What are the ideological and political implications of Steampunk machines? The broad political spectrum of Steampunk includes imperialist nostalgia; however, a self-reflexive irony often questions the neo-conservative potential of this position (as seen in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Moore 2000), for example). Moreover, the Arts and Crafts legacy of the movement integrates the idealized socialist ideologies espoused by William Morris, an advocate for worker’s rights and national trade unions. Flynn MacCalister, for instance, asserts that the age of steam was “built by the working class” and, at the same time, “the union movement was born and the workers began to get due recognition (incidentally, I’m for the old form of the unions, but not fond of the modern version” (MacCallister 2010). 2

CONCLUSION It would be misleading to simply fi x the magical machines of Steampunk within the reductive psychoanalytic (and ideological) aegis of a childlike (or “primitive”) repudiation of “reality”. Instead, it is much more productive to conceive of a more expansive notion of its unconscious implications, particularly in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal theories of rhizomes and part-objects. Such a reconception—even repudiation—of the

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Freudian egoic Oedipal structure is then replaced by the machinic libido by which desire might be invested in the social sphere. It was “a mistake”, write Deleuze and Guattari, “to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines” (1984 1). In this theoretical paradigm, the “part–object” plays a pivotal role in the new molecular machine of the unconscious. For here “every structure [is] dislodged, every memory abolished, every organism set aside, every link undone, [and] they function as raw partial objects, dispersed working parts of a machine that is itself dispersed. In short, partial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious” (356). Partial libidinal objects, then, work together in an assemblage to comprise a schizophrenic desiringmachine: the libido is freed from the Oedipal fi xations and engages in a “molecular desiring–production”, for its investments have entered the pre– personal regime “of partial objects, of singularities, of intensities, of gears and parts of machines of desire” (358). What are the psychological and cultural significances of Steampunk machines? Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of the book, intended as a general model of machinic assemblages, is applicable to the specifics of Steampunk’s literal machines. All machines are, they suggest, crossed by “lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification” (1988, 4). The machine is stretched in many directions by the dynamic forces of majoritarian organisation and minoritarian chaos. In this, magical transformations occur when “an intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, synaesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenges the hegemony of the signifier” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 16). Steampunk machines are non-productive; they recycle discarded consumer items (such as clock-parts) not to make for surplus value, but to do for use-value. In this context, the mind of the creator is an assemblage with the machine, and the pleasurable experience of technology, mobility and motion are not defined by capitalist modes of signification. After all, these magical machines are not designed for corporate production or for a top-down imposition of hegemonic discourse. These heterogeneous machines do not produce economic reification. Rather, they engender aesthetic delight and are, as a result, linked and mobilised by being “composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion”; they are compelled to change their nature as signs. From being a discrete unit in capitalist signifying systems to becoming an assemblage of shifting plateaus, the rhizome is always “in the middle.” By dint of having “neither beginning nor end” it continuously “grows and which it overspills” as its living forces are set in motion (Deleuze and Guattari 1988 23–4). Steampunk machines are powered by an aetheric (and Gothic) blend of science and magic. They do not remain distant objects of aesthetic contemplation, but seek to incorporate us into their dynamic multiplicity. Despite

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elements of reification that depend on the small scale flows of capital and the danger of retro nostalgia, the magical machines of Steampunk are artisanal part-objects of creative playfulness. Replicating and parodying historical models, they modify and recycle unwanted waste, creating new objects. These objects, then, challenge the hegemony of technologized corporate capitalism by exposing hidden mechanisms and revealing “invisible” forces through physical materialisation and exposure. As part of a Gothic milieu, these engines and gadgets arrest flows and acts and, as the generators of desire, these modes seek to re-enchant the world. NOTES 1. Our research was informed by fi ndings from a Steampunk questionnaire circulated between October 2010 and May 2011. 2. The politics of Steampunk is highly complex and moves beyond the limits of this chapter. Here, our focus is the fantasy and desire at play in these machinic operations within popular Gothic fantasy (which grafts material from the past onto contemporary cultural productions to create new hybrids).

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. 1911. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 1983. Print. Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. New York: Cornell University Press. 1981. Print. Crowley, Aleister, John Symonds, Kenneth Grant. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Print. Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. New York: Dover, 1976. Print. Deleuze Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brain Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. Print. Deleuze Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone, 1984. Print. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari Félix. What is Philosophy? Trans. G. Burchill and H. Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1991. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1919. The Penguin Freud Library Volume 14: Art and Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Print. Gibson William and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York, Bantam, 1992. Print. Lovecraft, H.P. “From Beyond.” 1920. in Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, London: Gollancz, 2008, 387–393. Print. Macleod Ian R. The Light Ages. London and Sidney: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Print. Miéville China. Perdido Street Station. London, Macmillan, 2000. Print. Moor Alan. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, America’s Best Comics: La Jolla Ca., 2000. Print. Shelley Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Print.

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Stephenson Neal. The Diamond Age: A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York, Bantam Spectra, 1996. Print. Sussman, H.L. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine. California: Greenwood Publishing Group. 2009. Print. Verne Jules, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 1874. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 2007. Print. Verne, Jules, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 1870. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 2007. Print. Welles H.G. The Time Machine. 1895. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 2005. Print. Wheatley Dennis, The Devil Rides Out. 1934. London: Wordsworth. 2007. Print. Wordsworth, Dorothy, Recollections of a Tour of Scotland A.D. 1803. Ed. J. C. Shairp. New York: Putnam. 1974. Print.

Filmography Hellboy (Guillermo Del Toro, 2004). Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009). The City of Lost Children (Pierre Jeunet and Marc Carot, 1994). The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968). The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)

E-mails Hendley, Simon “Re: Steampunk Questionnaire,” message to the authors, 24 Oct, 2010, E-mail. Marsh, Simeon, “Re: Steampunk Questionnaire,” message to the authors, 30 Sept, 2010. E-mail. Marsh, Simeon, “Re: Steampunk Questionnaire,” message to the authors, 20 April, 2011. E-mail.

Web Publications Archibald Broce, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” Brass Goggles, 29 April, 2011. Bass of Spades, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” Brass Goggles, 26 April, 2011. Crowley, Aleister, The Equinox vol. 1 (1909), Web. 5 July, 2011. Einstein, Albert, “Aether and Relativity,” Address, University of Leiden, May 5, 1920, Web. 3 June, 2011. Flynn MacCallister, “Re: Steampunk Questionnaire,” Brass Goggles, 18 October, 2010. Hoff mann E T A, “The Sandman” (1815), Web. 9 December, 2010. James Harrison, “Re: Steampunk Questionnaire,” Brass Goggles, 21 October, 2010. Jentsch Otto, “The Uncanny” (1906), Web. 4 March, 2011. Khem Caigan, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” Brass Goggles, 30 April, 2011. Lord Nicholas Horsethorn, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” Brass Goggles, 24 April, 2011. Maurautius, “Re: Steampunk and Magic” Brass Goggles, 1 Sept, 2007. Onion, Rebecca, “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice,” Neo-Victorian Studies 1:1, Autumn 2008. pp. 138–163. Web, 30 March, 2011. Professor Postrophe, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” Brass Goggles, 24 April, 2011.

164 Gail Ashurst and Anna Powell Roving Jack, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” Brass Goggles, 25 April, 2011. Sacha Gears, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” Brass Goggles, 16 May, 2011. Smaggers, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” Brass Goggles, 23 April, 2011. The Traveller, “Re: Aether, magic, machines,” BrassGoggles 23 May, 2011. Torrent, “Re: Steampunk and Magic” Brass Goggles, 31 Aug, 2007. www.Brassgoggles.org/ www.steampunk.com/fiction/

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10 “‘Boo!’ to Taboo”

Gothic Performance at British Festivals Emma McEvoy

Since the late 1980s, when the French company Archaos brought their New Circus over to the British Isles, circus genres and, more recently, fairground genres have become a significant part of the contemporary live performance scene. The last few years have seen a proliferation of cabaret and circus-related genres (new circus, new burlesque, cruel cabaret) a revification of old fair-ground performance (freak shows, museums of curiosities, side shows) and the invention of new quasi-fairground genres (walkabouts and installations). The popularity of these genres is indicated by the fact that the Circus Development Agency was set up in 1999, and in 2010 the Roundhouse in Camden instituted its annual CircusFest. In the world of live performance, the glory days of early twentieth-century circus and fairground are frequently revisited. In terms of the performers themselves the age is a significant one in which live performance thrived in fairground and circus and was economically viable—even in the face of the increasing popularity of cinema. Revisiting burlesque, carnival and fairground is thus a way of validating the concept of live performance in a contemporary age not only of cinema but also of electronic media. Increasingly, such performances feature Gothic content or else sit easily beside other performances which have a Gothic element. This is not only because Gothic has been such a significant part of twentieth-century popular entertainment (in the forms of, for example, the freak show, the museum of curiosity and many other fairground acts as well as in cinema) but also because Gothic has become a dominant way of looking at the past and at the history of twentieth-century popular culture itself. In addition to this, the circus and the fairground have often featured as Gothic sites both within fiction and on the big and small screens. In films from Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) to Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, from Ray Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked this Way Comes (1962) to its film adaptation (directed by Jack Clayton, 1983) and to American TV series Carnivale (2003–5) the fairground or travelling carnival is a potent Gothic locale. Indeed the interest shown by fi lm in circus and fairground performance could be said to indicate that medium’s fascination with its own origins. The fairground is part of the entertainment history which lies behind

166 Emma McEvoy the begetting of fi lm and which is able to cast a disconcerting perspective on cinema’s mastery of illusion and its focus on star performance. In this chapter, I examine Gothic content in some of these fairground and circus-related acts as performed on the British Festival Circuit. In particular, I will be focussing through three Arts Festivals: Norfolk and Norwich, Showzam! (“Blackpool’s Annual Festival of Circus, Magic and New Variety”2) and Glastonbury Festival (“of Contemporary Performing Arts”3). The British festival season runs from Easter to September and it sustains or is integral to a lively economy: from street performers and small theatre companies to stall holders, food outlets and health and safety inspectors, from security companies and toilet providers to festival managers and curators. Some British festivals are solely commercial affairs, some largely funded by public money (though often with business sponsorship). Although historically many of these festivals have been “music festivals,” more and more of them, both commercial and non-commercial, now bill themselves as Arts festivals or festivals of performance. As Festival Republic’s banner for Latitude 2011 (when the English National Ballet played) puts it: “It’s more than just a music festival . . .”4 My interest, in this essay, lies primarily with the not-for-profit festivals, amongst which Glastonbury, though a commercial event, may be counted. These are potentially most interesting because (in the case of festivals funded by public bodies particularly) they act as a good indicator for the place of Gothic in a wider public psyche, in the cultural politics of contemporary Britain. In particular, looking at these festivals can tell us much about the status of certain kinds of Gothic and its use by the great and the good: educators, arts funders, councils and other spenders of public money. In the three following sections, I consider the phenomena of family-friendly Gothic at the Norfolk and Norwich, of municipal Gothic at Blackpool’s Showzam! and of Gothic as a mode of consumption at Glastonbury.

NORFOLK AND NORWICH FESTIVAL: FAMILY-FRIENDLY GOTHIC The Norfolk and Norwich Festival is a two-week long affair in May which hosts a “world-class programme”5 of theatre, dance, music, theatre, literature and the visual arts. Its principal funders are Arts Council England, Norfolk County Council and Norwich City Council. Acts at the NNF 2010 and 2011 included (in no particular order) the Kronos Quartet, rock and classical musician John Cale, folk musician Liza Carthy, the Spanish National Ballet and poet Wendy Cope. Publicity for the festival focuses on the language of positivity, growth and personal development: “Norfolk and Norwich Festival aims to use the transformational nature of the arts, culture and creativity to bring about positive change for individuals, communities and the spaces in which they live.”6 It is not particularly surprising to fi nd that amongst its many and varied acts there is little that could be

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described as Gothic. There is, however, some Gothic content and, significantly, what Gothic content there is can almost entirely be found under the “Family” listings. At the NNF in 2010 and 2011 Gothic content was to be found at “Museums at Night” events (2011); in some of the night-time out-door theatre spectaculars (Basque company Deabru Beltzak’s The Wolves 2011); and, in some of the walk-about acts based at Chapelfield Gardens (2010). Gothic is an obvious choice for site-responsive outdoor theatre—especially in those shows designed to be played at night. The spiel for the NNF performance in the official programme is couched in terms of Gothic affect: “The Wolves promises to set your pulses racing and send a shiver down your spine as it weaves its way through the city centre’s streets and lanes. Night-time in Norwich may never be the same again.”7 Outdoor promenade shows like The Wolves or Arquiem or Crowley (from UK-based Periplum) make the town itself perform; they gravitate towards Cathedrals and fi lter through narrow lanes, playing with both the sense of the town’s temporality and its topography as well as the spectator’s own vulnerabilities and sensibility to various kinds of shock or orchestrated obscurity, whether (as Periplum have it) “detailing the delirium of a fevered mind or the vast workings of a social revolution.”8 Gothic in outdoor promenade performance is one thing, the deployment of Gothic in entertainment in museums a rather different kettle of fish. “Museums at Night” events were not confi ned to Norwich but were part of a nation-wide drive to increase attendance at and interest in museums and other “heritage venues.”9 At NNF 2011 the main venue was Norwich

Figure 10.1 History as Gothic Spectacle: “Museums at Night.” Used with permission of Sky Arts.

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Castle Museum and Art Gallery, which became “the spectacular setting for a night of entertainment and discovery.”10 As the sales pitch for this (free) event ran: “From chilling tales in the dungeons to tours of the battlements by twilight, this is a chance to explore the nooks and crannies of this fascinating building.”11 The experience promised to present Gothic thrills grounded in Norwich’s real history: its selling point was “ambience.”12 The personnel involved included performers (actors and musicians) but this was also to be an educational experience—an opportunity to try out “creative crafts,” talk to curators and handle some of the museum’s artefacts.13 Increasingly, those involved in the marketing of museums have enlisted the Gothic as a mode of mediating history. Like the presence of Gothic in outdoor promenade, this is in some respects an obvious move—after all, many museums are situated in the kind of antiquated location-bound spaces where Gothic narratives have traditionally been set (Norwich Museum, for example, is an old Norman Castle). Yet it is a move that annoys and alienates many historians and educators, not only because of the fictitiousness of Gothic and the particular kind of template it applies to the stuff of history but because of the assumptions about history which underlie Gothic narratives.14 Gothicization (particularly Gothic inflected as time travel) has become a dominant approach in the “edutainment” project of selling history to a young audience. A trailer for a film created by Sky Arts for 2011’s “Museums at Night” project makes this particularly apparent.15 Throughout the trailer a Gothic approach is privileged—even at the expense of other content. There is a Gothic sci-fi soundtrack in the style favoured by Murray Gold for BBC’s Doctor Who. The first shots are of the outside of the Old Operating Theatre (Southwark, London) and they are followed by a shot of a skull and the superimposed words “Museums are the closest we will ever get to time travel . . .”16 At this point, passing mention is made to Renaissance painting—still to the Gothic sci-fi soundtrack. Having nodded to the Renaissance, the trailer returns to its Gothic trajectory and subtitles pose the question “But what happens. . . . when the museums shut their doors . . . ? And the galleries turn off their lights?” (These words are rather incongruously placed over shots of the inside of the National Gallery). This approach to purveying history to the young is similar to that shown by the CBBC programme Relic: Guardians of the Museum, which employs a game-show format together with strong elements both of fantasy and Gothic. The last on the list of the Gothic fare at the NNF is the Gothic walkabout. The company Stuff and Things presented two of their Walkabout Acts at NNF 2010: “Futter’s Child” (a “Walkabout Mime Act With Soundtrack”17) and “The Lost Funeral.” Walkabouts are a particularly curious phenomenon in terms of Gothic performance precisely because, unlike site-specific theatre or a Museum event, they are usually performed in daylight and are divorced from a particular place. Indeed, they transfer between locations with impressive ease. At NNF2010 ‘Futter’s Child and

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The Lost Funeral’ appeared in Chapelfield Gardens; they have also played on Queen Street, Cardiff (at the Cardiff Street Festival); in the theatre field at Glastonbury Festival; in Chelmsford’s Shopping Centre and a multitude of other places. (There is a picture on the Stuff and Things website of Futter with child in perambulator walking the Great Wall of China.) “The Lost Funeral” is Stuff and Things’ “head-turning comedy walkabout show” which features “Ernest Potts & Reginald Fowler—two incompetent, irreverent and yet excessively charming undertakers.”18 In “Futter’s Child,” the Igor-like Futter is “doing his best to look after a rather challenging baby” (“Horrace, the anatomically-accurate noisy infant . . . animated with jiggling arms and beautiful eyes that can be remotely triggered to glow red”) with “a small arsenal of unorthodox paraphernalia . . . soft toys impaled on a kebab skewer, a “medieval” rattle and disconcertingly similar bottles of gripe water and embalming fluid!” In both acts, Gothic imagery and content are re-fashioned into familyfriendly comedy. Even though the narrative of “The Lost Funeral” is revealed ultimately to be one of attempted murder and live burial, the act, as the website has it, puts the “‘fun’ back into ‘funeral’ and says “Boo!” to taboo.” The blurb for “Futter’s Child” notes: “While there’s a subtle dark undercurrent to the performance (would you employ him as your nanny?) the emphasis is firmly

Figure 10.2 Bert Eke as Futter in Stuff and Things’ walkabout act “Futter’s Child.”

170 Emma McEvoy on comedy, and laughs are plentiful.” Despite the on-line review of “Futter’s Child” from a “Teenage Goth” “Now that’s what I call REAL Goth!”19 this is not “Goth” as many would have it but a “unique world of love and horror— the quirky world of a misunderstood lovable misfit . . . Connecting with both the parent and the child within us all.” An internet image search for “Futter’s Child” brings up a wealth of photographs of delighted punters. This is Gothic that is very largely devoid of traditional Gothic affect: the racing pulse and shivers down the spine as promised by Deabru Beltzak. The blurb for “Futter’s Child” on the Stuff and Things website points up the popular cultural ancestry for “Gothic slaphead Futter” who appears “to have evolved from the same gene pool as Uncle Fester from the Addams Family” and whose miming is in itself reminiscent of the age of silent movies. Contemporary Gothic performance interpolates an audience that has a strong sense not just of the history of the entertainment that they are watching but of its treatment on the big and small screens. For these walkabout acts, and for contemporary culture more generally, I suggest, the imagery of old-fashioned horror in early twentieth-century film has become a useful common language. Gothic imagery embeds us, children and adults alike, into a shared history of popular culture. Family-friendly Gothic (the walkabouts, the Museums at Night events and the BBC’s Relic) appropriate a Gothic which has become the mark of a particular kind of cultural literacy—for the history of twentieth-century popular culture has achieved a level of respectability. This respectability chimes in well with the kind of performance that publicly-funded Arts festivals want to host: performances which are not only entertaining but assume or impart a certain level of education. The cultural positioning of Gothic at these events is in some respects elitist and its very status as popular culture has, paradoxically, gained it more than a veneer of respectability. As opposed to contemporary Gothic in cinema, whether terror or horror, which continues to stimulate the required Gothic affects at ever increasing levels, 20 early twentieth-century Gothic has, as it were, become downgraded in terms of the fear factor. The imagery associated with it has thus come to occupy an interesting cultural niche. It can signify fear without the sting of it still being effective/affective. Thus much live performance that draws on this content and imagery has come to be seen as suitable for family viewing. This is even so in the case of content that might in other circumstances be considered unsuitable for children. The London Dungeons are a popular family attraction. The Circus of Horrors, despite the sexual content and freak show aspects, always has a number of children in its audience and was recently (May 2011) featured on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent (making their way to the semi-fi nals). A contributory factor in such antiquated Gothic being considered to be family-friendly is the phenomenon of live performance. It is as if the content is redeemed by the fact of live performance; the genre (Gothic live performance) acts as a safety-case, something which in today’s cultural logic, confers “classic” status.

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SHOWZAM! REGENERATION AND THE GOTHIC As the blurb for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival points out, one of the given reasons for a town or a city holding a festival is “increasing its national and international profi le.”21 Furthermore, the nature of the festival reflects back onto the identity of the place. Thus, the Norfolk and Norwich (less than keen to play up to Norwich’s “white city” cliché) with its many international acts highlights the city’s historic openness to the rest of the Continent. The case is somewhat different for Blackpool, a town with a history as a capital of popular entertainment and an even more recent history of decline. As the Kate Burt wrote of public perceptions of Blackpool in The Independent in 2008 “the seaside town had an image problem: people were more likely to think of it as a tacky playground for hen and stag parties than a centre of culture.” She also noted that Blackpool “has a staggering 23,000 theatre seats to fill each day, and was failing to do so.”22 Showzam! is part of Blackpool’s solution to the problem of the town’s decline. It takes place outside of festival season, in cold and rainy February and its date seems to mirror the town’s sense of being outside of the mainstream when it comes to the viable modern entertainment industry. However, the Visit Blackpool website, (as might be expected of the town’s official tourism website) is optimistic about the positive effects of Showzam! announcing in March 2011: “Blackpool’s Showzam! Proves To Be Tourism Tonic For Resort.”23 The words of Councillor Maxine Callow (Cabinet Member for Tourism and Regeneration at Blackpool Council) allude to the thinking behind Showzam! She comments that the success of the festival “demonstrates that it is possible for Blackpool to attract new audiences without losing touch with it’s [sic] much loved cultural traditions for which we are famous the world over.”24 Showzam! is Blackpool’s attempt to raise its present-day profile in terms of its past. It is not only Blackpool’s attempt at regeneration but, to use a more Gothic metaphor, revivification. Showzam! features a variety of acts in genres associated with Blackpool’s glory days—it is a “Festival of Circus, Magic and New Variety.”25 As might be expected, it has a Gothic component. Not only did Circus of Horrors play Blackpool’s Grand Theatre at Showzam! 2011 but there was also at “Showzam Central” a range of fairground attractions, some of which were very Gothic in themselves, but all of which, I argue, by their very context had become, to an extent, Gothicized. “Showzam Central” was situated in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens (officially opened in 1878, bought by Blackpool Council in 2010). In February 2011, it hosted Pinball Geoff ’s collection of slot and pinball machines (“some dating back from the true inception of pinball, through to its golden age in the 50s, 60s and 70s”26), Mike Diamond’s museum of curiosities (the gruesome contents included a shrunken human head), Al Stencell’s collection of sideshow banners from American Carnival, the Insect Circus Museum, a contemporary version of Tom Norman’s Travelling Palladium Show, 27 and a collection of sideshow

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acts: “The Living Half Lady,” “The Mummy” “Electra—One Thousand Volts” and “The Butterfly Girl.” The sideshow acts were originally created in the 1950s by Jon Gresham, and have been recreated by Jon Marshall of Sideshow Illusions from photographs and in consultation with Pat Gresham (Jon Gresham’s widow). “The Mummy” is a rip-roaring show which has its audience placed in a mock-up of an Egyptian archaeological dig, subjected to over-powering sound and watching a beautiful dancing Egyptian girl—soon to change into a Karloff /Chaney-type frenzied Mummy. “The Butterfly Girl” chases the lighter side of exotica with another lovely lady situated in a strange land and stranger situation. “The Living Half-Lady” marries illusion and soap opera comedy. “Electra” stages the meeting of yet another lovely girl with the “greatest energy on Earth.” The side show performances occupy a multiply-framed cultural niche. “The Mummy” sits, generically-speaking, in a frame established by the Universal Studio’s Mummy fi lms. “Electra” sits within the science-fiction/ Gothic crux of 50s cinema. (The spiel for “Yvette—The Headless Lady” (seen at Showzam! 09) emphasizes this context “Twilight Time Thrills and Chills! . . . Yvette is kept alive by the miracles of modern medicine. Well, modern as in all those glorious 50s Sci Fi B movies”28). They are all part of the science/fiction of illusion and the technology of lights, mirrors and van der Graaff generators. Inevitably for modern audiences, the side-shows are also situated within a cinematic understanding of the Gothic nature of

Figure 10.3 Sideshow Illusions’ restoration of Jon Gresham’s original 1950s Headless Lady Side-show. Jon Marshall (right) and Tim Cockerill.

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the fairground itself and in particular the 50s fairground. The context of Blackpool’s Winter Gardens provided a third frame. Originally designed for the fairground, to be played to paying audiences, outside, these side-shows were now playing inside, for free. This was not just any “inside” either but Olympia in the once-fabulous Winter Gardens which had through this process been transformed into a museum of entertainment. Curiously this had the effect of Gothicizing the Winter Gardens themselves, giving them a Carnival of Souls atmosphere of the fairground trapped in time. The carpet, where no carpet should have been, managed to feel slightly damp and musty; where winds should have blown there was a ceiling. As well as being spectators of the illusions before them the audience was partaking in another illusion. Watching what was a resurrection of an act that had once taken place in a commercial environment, many audience members, watching this free family-entertainment, also found themselves acting. They were acting being the kind of 1950s audience who paid money to see the show. Showzam! knowingly plays on the interchange with Gothic when it comes to presenting not only the Winter Gardens but the town itself as a showcase for a history of twentieth-century popular live entertainment. There is of course a sense in which Gothic texts over a variety of media/ genres have often acted as a kind of showcase of old genres and this is something that makes Gothicization of Blackpool particularly appropriate. What is happening at Blackpool, however, is not a wholesale Gothicization (which in comparison seems to be happening to much of Southwark). Rather at Showzam Central and throughout the festival more generally it is possible to see how Gothic has become an entertainment choice, a mode, which has become part of our sense of history rather than a discrete mode of viewing history. Freak shows sit comfortably with pin-ball machines, comedy and science fiction. Gothic has inextricably become linked to our sense of the history of twentieth-century entertainment not only in terms of content but also in the way that the whole decline of the fairground and the circus is seen as a narrative with a Gothic trajectory. The far side of this Gothic trajectory is, however, the current resurrection of and fascination with circus and fairground genres. And it is this fact which enables “entertainment Gothic” to lend to our sense of the past a glittering dark patina of Gothic stylishness. The Gothic history of live entertainment has become subject to a degree of nostalgia. Showzam! is the brainchild of Professor Vanessa, aka Dr Vanessa Toulmin, the Director of the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield. In contrast to the NNF, much of the funding coming into the festival is not specially-designated Arts Money but regeneration funding. 29 Showzam! is or has been hosted and funded by Blackpool Council, the Northwest Redevelopment Agency, by Blackpool Theatres, various other commercial sponsors and the University of Sheffield. In fact, Showzam! itself is the product of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project—Toulmin’s Admission All Classes—set up to “revitalise the

174 Emma McEvoy entertainment and cultural industry quarter”30 of Blackpool. Since Admission All Classes was fi rst set up it has also been commissioned by Sheffield and Rotherham. Blackpool has co-opted the Gothic in its attempts at constructing its new civic identity. Not only have its formerly vibrant entertainment centres been turned into (still vibrant) museums of entertainment but Professor Vanessa devised a Halloween Ball in the Spanish Hall in the Winter Gardens in 2008 (with cabaret, burlesque and Jon Marshall’s Illusions).31 And now, after being brought back for the third year by popular demand, Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train “part ride, part visual theatre and part scare attraction which cleverly combines contemporary attraction technology with age old theatrical illusions” has been acquired by Blackpool Council. Carnesky’s Ghost Train is now, according to the website, “permanently located in it’s [sic] true spiritual home in the heartland of the British seaside—Blackpool, situated opposite Sandcastle Waterpark on South Promenade.”32 Thus is Blackpool, in partnership with Professor Vanessa, innovatively inventing an Academy-funded Municipal Gothic.

GLASTONBURY: GOTHIC CONSUMPTION Glastonbury and Gothic seem almost mutually contradictory terms. Glastonbury Festival, the world’s biggest music festival, is associated in the popular imagination with its hippie past, with the summer solstice, with mud baths, with vast crowds gathered in front of the Pyramid Stage, and seems to have little do with the Gothic. Indeed the idea of Gothic at Glastonbury has been for many years inherently problematic: at a festival where mindaltering drugs are prevalent, Gothic can mean a very bad trip. There has, however, been a fair sprinkling of Gothic at Glastonbury in the theatre and cabaret fields. There has been Gothic-themed Circus, Gothic walkabout acts (Futter’s Child played in 2008), museums of curiosities (the ubiquitous Insect Circus Museum) and Gothic-inspired dance (most notably the Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs with their Dancing on your Grave performed in the Astrolabe in 2008). This year (2011) however, Gothic was thin on the ground in these areas. None of the walkabouts was remotely Gothic (though arguably there were Gothic overtones to the Masked Venetian Beauties) and the sole survivor of these earlier acts was the Insect Circus Museum. Arguably this is because certain kinds of Gothic have increasingly been colonized/adopted by the middle ground and the middlebrow. As Catherine Spooner points out: “In the twenty-fi rst century, the prevalence of Gothic-themed products make it easy to select Gothic as a lifestyle choice, with or without the commitment entailed by participating in Goth subculture” (Spooner 127). Those performers who up to a few years ago still felt they could still legitimately associate Gothic with sub-cultural Goth (despite the incursions of the advertising industry,

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theme pubs etc.) have more of a problem exploiting sub-cultural cachet in a world full to repletion of teen-romance-Gothic and where Andrew Lloyd Webber has included a Goth number in his latest West End spectacular (Love Never Dies). Gothic has not, however, been evicted from Glastonbury; rather, it has been moved and the festival has acquired its own Gothic geography. Somewhat disturbingly, Glastonbury Gothic is responsible for the festival’s fi rst one-way system. Glastonbury Gothic in 2011 was played out in the after-hours areas which come into their own after the main music stages close for the night: The Common, Arcadia, Block9, Shangri-La and The Unfairground. These are themed and curated areas designed for partying between 11pm and 4am. As the Glastonbury 2011 Official programme states: “Shangri-La is the after-hours pleasure city of the festival. A futuristic and dystopian wonderland, a Blade Runner-inspired urban fi lm-set, it has its own unique rolling narrative evolved over three years, creating a brilliant and bizarre alternative world for you to get lost in.”33 Block9 harks back to the urban nightmares of the more recent past, and, in a field in Somerset, creates amongst other installations “A sinister, decaying 50ft tower block with a life-size, blazing Tube train,”34 and a dilapidated diner, as well as a “lifesize ruin of an NYC tenement building.” The massive Arcadia field (chronically underpopulated apart from at the times of its spectaculars) is the stage for Arcadia “an experimental company who take military scrap and transform it to create positive environments for the purpose of celebrating life by incorporating circus acts, special effects and cutting-edge technologies to create a huge, unforgettable 360o show.”35 The Unfairground is “the latest disaster zone from the mad minds of Joe Rush and some of the UK’s bestloved art hooligans. Now in its second year at Glastonbury, The Unfairground invites you over to the dark side of the world: where plane wrecks, mutants and freaks all groove to Bez’s Acid House.” Shangri-La, Block9, Arcadia and The Unfairground all share a cyber-punk/Mad Max aesthetic of the glamour of the nonglamour of urban ruin. The Common is rather different. It is billed as “Un Fabuloso Espectaculo.” “Somewhere between Mexico City and Salvador, the mystical world of The Common has been awakened . . . A sumptuous Latino playground filled with the delights of a vibrant planet of decadence. It’s home to twisted voodoo parlours, debauched bordellos and criminal party houses.”36 The Common hosted “Los Artistas Behemios” (a mock nineteenth-century life-drawing class), the circus/club Zona Bassline, the bull-fight-arena dance area “Campo Pequeno,”37 “The Lost Picture Show” (a cinema, serving cocktails and popcorn, swathed in red velvet), Ken Fox’s uninsurable motor-bike spectacular—the Wall of Death, “La Arcada de Adavinos” (a museum of mechanical fortune-telling with some very funny live performance), Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes performing, in the daytime and for a family audience, “Yaga’s Fire,” another themed venue “The Photo Booth” and “The Back of Beyond” where the company Copperdollar presented “a visual feast of art, music and

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Figure 10.4 Copperdollar’s “The Back of Beyond.” Photograph from the Glastonbury Festival website.

interactive performance by a bizarre bonanza of ghostly carnie folk who’ll transport you to places that are in the dark side of your mind with irresistible sounds that will make your bones want to dance.”38 The performance crew at this last venue were dressed and made up as glamorous ghosts whether serving at the bar or dancing with customers. Like the side-shows at Showzam Central, The Common mixed and mingled different kinds of past and perspectives on the twentieth-century past. Gothic (most properly seen in the Arcada de Adavinos) was one mode available, sitting beside tattered glamour (Lost Cinema), circus-fun (Zona Bassline) and nostalgia for the pre-health and safety days of the 50s (Wall of Death). Apart from at The Common, Glastonbury’s performed Gothic was in some respects, despite its lavish dressing, pretty denuded. Although some of it purported to be Gothic with narrative—“[I]n 2011 the storyline becomes pre-apocalyptic. The population of Shangri-La is preparing to flee the end of the world in 2012”39 —the narrative aspects of Shangri-La, Block9, Arcadia and The Unfairground were practically nil. Much of it was not even performed. The main performance aspect seemed to be the installation but many of the spaces were no more than surfaces and many of the venues that seemed to promise labyrinthine exploration, merely a large dark room. There was a dominant aesthetic of gigantism—associated with the technological feats involved in erecting massive concrete tower blocks or moving army tanks around the site—but little left to obscurity. Even in Shangri-La, an “interactive environment” with soundtrack, which was set up as a series of seedy side-streets in a sci-fi city, exhibits (including some of Pinball Geoff ’s collection) were rarely more than one room deep. Very little was to be explored and significantly, the one installation in Shangri-La which did require exploration and journeying round was the Wellcome Trust’s mock de-contamination unit.

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Figure 10.5 Festival-goers at Glastonbury’s “futuristic and dystopian wonderland.” Shangri-La. Photograph from the Glastonbury Festival website.

Like the Gothic walkabouts, without being quite as family friendly, this was Gothic without traditional Gothic affect. Glastonbury Gothic rather than a performance mode, is an entertainment mode, a Gothic of consumption. It has been designed for the enjoyable consumption of drink, dance and drugs and even, in the case of one of the installations in Block9, a meal (one serving a day). Despite appearances often what was being consumed was singularly innocuous—the “Hotel Slumbarave Metropolis” in Shangri-La offered foot massage. Although the spin for The Unfairground noted of the wrecked plane as a venue: “Theme pubs will never seem the same again,” they will.40 After all, the wrecked plane is only a theme pub. Glastonbury’s after-hours Gothic is anything but thorough-going, shorn of narrative, affect and hybridized to the point of generic melt-down. It is Gothic as style and Gothic as the excess of consumption. The very choice of Gothic signifies the luxury of abandon and indicates the prevalence of new types of drugs—recreational rather than mind-bending. Glastonbury Gothic is based on the premise that its consumers are not going to commit themselves to anything imaginatively. I have quoted at length from the copy-writers’ descriptions of these areas because they play a key part in the construction of these Glastonbury Gothic experiences. As regards these after-hours fields, there is a mutually-beneficial collaboration between the language of consumerism and the language of installation. The experience of this place has been copy-written beforehand. In fields where fi lm set has replaced performance it is necessary for spin to supplement experience.

178 Emma McEvoy CONCLUSION When considering these examples of contemporary Gothic live performance, what I have found most surprising is the ability of Gothic to be discontiguated: for motifs, discourse, narrative, affect to be dismantled. Not only may Gothic motifs be shorn from Gothic narratives, but so may the traditional affects associated with Gothic. Gothic cachet as regards any of these aspects is drawn on without necessarily producing a thoroughgoing Gothic text, in fact hybridization is often the norm, whether it be the Gothic/sci-fi gameshow, or, for me the most incongruous, the reggae sets in Block9. Perhaps the most surprising aspect is the prevalence of virtually affect-less Gothic (in terms of the affects traditionally associated with Gothic). In the case of Glastonbury Gothic, the whole “package” is not required and it is perfectly possible, even desirable, to have an affect-less, narrative-less Gothic. Gothic as accessory might be said to have replaced Gothic as discourse. Embracing Gothic imagery but ignoring Gothic affect becomes an expression of consumer decadence for the music-festival-going public. A recurrent phenomenon has been the recourse to early twentieth-century Gothic in live performance. Rather than commenting merely on the significance of this material for those drawing upon it, it’s worth turning the enquiry round and asking “what happens to out-moded Gothic”? What is involved in this habitual recourse to the early twentieth-century Gothic of fairground, circus and film? Outmoded Gothic it seems is a useful cultural tool, providing a common language. Gothic imagery and tropes cemented by their prevalence in early twentieth-century fi lm have become a kind of common currency. Outmoded Gothic can act as a useful signifier and perform a number of significant paradoxes. It can signify scary without actually being scary. To use Chris Baldick’s concept of the “homeopathic principle” (Baldick xiii) at work in Gothic writing, what the use of antiquated Gothic protects against is not the horrors of the past but the ability of Gothic itself to shock: the use of antiquated Gothic sees Gothic inoculating against itself, as it were. Antiquated Gothic can also signify popular whether it has retained its original popularity or not. This is one of the reasons for its attraction both for those involved in selling us something and for those wanting to educate. Because Gothic has its desirable “popular culture” cachet, it is seen as possessing the requisite qualities for those engaged in selling what is perceived as less popular: museums and art galleries. For those involved in providing edifying entertainment to the British public, outmoded Gothic has the added advantage of being understood as popular whilst remaining in some ways satisfyingly elitist. Gothic itself might be said to have become part of a popular sense of our history, certainly it has influenced an understanding of the nature of the history of popular entertainment. The use of Gothic performance in the Museum at Night events and at Blackpool is a sign of an understanding of history that is not placed in opposition to the fictionality of Gothic but

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comprehends Gothic. Gothic, particularly outmoded Gothic, can come to “constitute a kind of heritage” in itself (McEvoy 149). Instead of Gothic being an attitude towards history, Gothic has become both a part of history and, for many, a style choice in relation to the presentation of history. To return to the question of economics. Glastonbury in 1990 featured the cyberpunk spectaculars of Archaos the French new circus company whose spectacles of horror and the decay of civilizations, went hand in hand with their chaotic, and ultimately disastrous, fi nancial arrangements.41 Much of the Gothic performance that I have been considering in this essays is founded on a different kind of economy, benefitting from direct or indirect (eg. through the public funding of festivals) Arts funding—and sometimes both—from regeneration funding and even, in the case of Showzam!, from University funding. Carnesky’s Ghost Train is a particularly interesting example that manages to tick all the boxes. As Marisa Carnesky’s website tells us, the ghost train was funded, commissioned and invested in by Blackpool Council, Arts Council of England Nesta, Hellhound, European Cultural Foundation, Warwick Arts Centre, Fierce, Mama Cash, Creative Lewisham Agency, Creative London, London Artists Projects.”42 Carnesky herself is currently AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow at the National Fairground Archive at The University of Sheffield. This is curiously at odds with what could be termed an economic aesthetic underlying much of this Gothic live performance. Part of the attraction of Gothicized quasi-early twentieth-century entertainment is our sense of the direct economic transactions (and hardships) of the period. In the Gothicized takes on earlier Gothic that I’ve been looking at, the transfer of hard cash from punter to performer has in many cases been replaced by the economy of funding mechanisms. The fortunes of Gothic performance at some of these contemporary Arts festivals tell us much about the circulation of Gothic in contemporary British society. One of the most surprising aspects is its respectability—born out of the perception of it as formerly disreputable, even risqué. It is courted by educationalists in children’s television, by Culture24, by towns eager to present their past so as to secure their future. Gothic has been been funded by regional councils, by the Arts Council, by the AHRC, by the University of Sheffield, by aid organizations (Medecins sans Frontieres involved in Zona Bassline in The Common at Glastonbury) and by the public face of medical research—the Wellcome Trust. All are happy to bed down with the Gothic. NOTES 1. I’ve taken the phrase from Robert Eke’s description of the walkabout act “The Lost Funeral” on Stuff and Things’ website (www.stuffandthings. co.uk/funeral.htm). 2. http://www.showzam.co.uk/ accessed 14.36 (accessed 22 July 2011).

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3. http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/ accessed 14.37 (accessed 22 July 2011). 4. http://www.latitudefestival.co.uk/2011/ accessed 14.38 (accessed 22 July 2011). 5. http://www.nnfestival.org.uk/UserData/root/Files/2010AnnualReportlowres. pdf page 3 accessed 14.42 (accessed 22 July 2011). 6. Annual Report for 2010 festival (http://www.nnfestival.org.uk/UserData/ root/Files/2010AnnualReportlowres.pdf; accessed 22 July 2011). 7. http://nnf11.nnfestival.org.uk/programme/detail/the_wolves (accessed 22 July 2011). 8. http://www.periplum.co.uk/company/index.php (accessed 22 July 2011). 9. http://www.heritagecity.org/projects/museums-at-night.htm (accessed 22 July 2011). 10. http://nnf11.nnfestival.org.uk /programme/detail /museums_ at_night (accessed 22 July 2011). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Chris Baldick notes the Gothic’s preoccupation with “despotisms buried by the modern age” (Baldick: xxi). Robert Mighall notes that Gothic in literary texts always entails “an attitude to the past and the present” (xxv). Characteristics pertaining to the past are those of being “unreasonable, uncivilized . . . unprogressive” (xviii). 15. The trailer may be seen at http://www.culture24.org.uk/places+to+go/ museums+at+night/art354814 (accessed 8 July 2011). All subsequent references to the trailer refer to this site. 16. All the ellipses in the quotations from this trailer derive from the trailer itself. 17. This quote and all further quotes relating to Futter’s Child from http://www. stuffandthings.co.uk/futter.htm (accessed 22 July 2011). 18. This quote and all further quotes relating to “The Lost Funeral” from http:// www.stuffandthings.co.uk/funeral.htm (accessed 22 July 2011). 19. http://www.stuffandthings.co.uk/futter.htm (accessed 22 July 2011). 20. For Fred Botting, however, Gothic in contemporary culture does not include a “charge intense enough to renew the pulse of expenditure that staves off the black hole within and without. An object large enough to fi ll horror’s black hole is wanted” (Botting 84). 21. Annual Report for 2010 festival (http://www.nnfestival.org.uk/UserData/ root/Files/2010AnnualReportlowres.pdf; accessed 22 July 2011). 22. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/ride-of-a-lifetimefrom-the-fairground-to-a-university-career-850595.html (accessed 22 July 2011). 23. http://www.visitblackpool.com/site/home/latest-news/2011/3/14/blackpools-showzam-proves-to-be-tourism-tonic-for-resort-a385 (accessed 22 July 2011). 24. http://www.visitblackpool.com/site/home/latest-news/2011/3/14/blackpools-showzam-proves-to-be-tourism-tonic-for-resort-a385 (accessed 22 July 2011). 25. http://www.showzam.co.uk/ (accessed 22 July 2011). 26. http://www.showzam.co.uk/latest/newfoshowzamcentral (accessed 22 July 2011). 27. For information on the original Tom Norman and the performances with which he was associated, see “‘It was not the show it was the tale that you told’: The Life and Legend of Tom Norman, the Silver King” on the

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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University of Sheffield’s National Fairground Archive website (http://www. nfa.dept.shef.ac.uk/history/shows/norman.html). http://www.philandgarth.com/jon/shows.html (accessed 28 July 2011). It should be noted though that NNF’s Museums at Night events also had regeneration funding. http://www.admissionallclasses.com/about.php (accessed 22 July 2011). For more, see the AHRC document (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/admissionallclasses.pdf). http://www.carneskysghosttrain.com/ (accessed 22 July 2011). http://www.carneskysghosttrain.com/ (accessed 22 July 2011). See the Glastonbury 2011 Official programme (page 60). Much of the material from the official programme can also be found on Glastonbury’s official website (http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk). Ibid. (page 66). Ibid. Ibid. (68). This came with the following health warning: “We also wish to state that Glastonbury Festival does NOT condone bullfighting; in fact we are totally OPPOSED to bullfighting in all its various guises” (68). Glastonbury 2011 Official programme (69) Ibid. (60). For more on the story of Archaos, see http://archaos.info/pages/?id=14. http://www.carnesky.com/productions.html (accessed 22 July 2011).

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Botting, Fred. Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. McEvoy, Emma. “‘West End Ghosts and Southwark Horrors’: London’s Gothic Tourism.” In London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. Edited by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard. London: Continuum, 2010. Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

11 “Forget Nu Rave, We’re into Nu Grave!” Styling Gothic in the Twenty-First Century Catherine Spooner

DEFINING GOTHIC FASHION “Gothic” style has become one of the most instantly recognisable looks of the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst century, its distinctive combination of black and jewel colours with motifs taken from Victorian mourning wear, Punk, fetish, and other period or vintage sources repeatedly featured in subcultural blogs, broadsheet style pages and mainstream fashion magazines. A scholarly defi nition of Gothic fashion that transcends a list of its features and style references, however, has proved more elusive. From September 2008 to February 2009, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, mounted a major exhibition entitled Gothic: Dark Glamour that attempted to remedy this lack through an extensive exploration of the resonance of Gothic in fashion. Catwalk ensembles by Alexander McQueen and John Galliano were juxtaposed with Victorian mourning wear, Winona Ryder’s costume from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Goth street style from the UK, North America and Japan. The curator, Valerie Steele, suggested in the accompanying book that “Gothic fashion is [ . . . ] a rejection of ‘normal,’ ‘natural’ beauty in favor of an alternative vision of horrific, excessive, artificial and (sometimes) sexually fetishistic beauty” (79), and her choices in the exhibition, from h. Naoto’s Gothic Lolita outfit to Rei Kawakubo’s celebrated “bump” dress for Comme des Garçons, bore this out. Among the highly nuanced range of meanings associated with Gothic fashion in the exhibition, Gothic as transgressive and resistant to mainstream norms was repeatedly foregrounded. Visiting the exhibition, however, one of the things that struck me most was the way that it was pitched between two extremes—designer fashion, and subcultural style. In much fashion discourse, both of these are implicitly regarded as more significant, more creative and artistic, even more “real” and “authentic” (in that their creative vision is less mediated through the apparatus of mass consumption), than the ordinary clothes the majority of the population wear every day. Even the subcultural outfits in the exhibition were, in general, beautifully crafted one-off pieces by underground and alternative designers rather than the sort of things worn by the teenagers that hang out

“Forget Nu Rave, We’re into Nu Grave!” 183 in the market square in provincial British towns on Saturday afternoons. On one level this is completely justifiable—the business of a museum is, arguably, to collect together the most precious and exceptional artefacts of a given culture. Gothic: Dark Glamour was an unqualified success in artistic, critical and commercial terms. By its very nature, however, it could not encompass the full range of associations between Gothic and clothes. Clothes are often Gothicised by context: by what happens when they are worn. They are also Gothicised by the discourses that spring up around them: by their description on websites and in magazines; by the way they are marketed to consumers. Gothic: Dark Glamour acknowledged this by featuring a number of designer dresses that had been “styled” as Gothic in Vogue while not necessarily possessing any inherently Gothic features. Steele explained that Gothic could also reside in the story told about a dress (Spooner, “Dark Looks,” 155). But these beautifully made, expensive items (in this case by Chanel) were still beyond the reach of the majority of consumers. The exhibition got me thinking about the kind of Gothic fashion featured in mid-ranking, mainstream fashion magazines like Marie Claire and Grazia, and the kind of clothes available to buy in Miss Selfridge or Topshop— the kind of clothes I could see people around me wearing every day, and might even consider buying myself. High street1 or mainstream fashion is less frequently the subject of academic research than either designer fashion or subcultural style, and is often constructed in parasitic terms as producing weak copies of designer originals or diluting subcultural innovations, but its relationship to both is more complex than this. Are these clothes Gothic? Why would retailers and the fashion media use the word Gothic to describe them, and what would they mean by it? Could a piece of clothing bought in H&M or Gap be transgressive and resistant to normative standards of beauty? What might it tell us about the state of twenty-fi rst-century Gothic, that the middle-class, quintessentially “English” department store Marks and Spencer named one of their collections “Gothic Chic”? In this chapter, I hope to explore some of these questions, while demonstrating that Gothic is a mobile set of discourses, in fashion as elsewhere, constantly positioned and repositioned in different ways across the contemporary popular sphere.

THE RETURN OF “GOTHIC CHIC” The title of this chapter derives from a fashion headline in Grazia magazine from 30 July 2007. 2 According to the accompanying article, Gothic is back, yet again. Only this time round, it’s different. Labelling the look “Nu Grave,” in response to the so-called “Nu Rave” scene of circa 2006, the article cites club-goer and editor of i-D magazine Fran Burns as saying “It’s extreme glamour, very catwalk . . . It’s glossy not gothy” (“Forget Nu Rave, We’re Into Nu Grave!” 17). Over the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century, the Gothic fashion revival gathered force in mainstream culture,

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culminating in the Autumn/Winter season 2008, in which “Gothic chic” comprehensively permeated the British high street. Symptoms of this ubiquity included celebrity stylist Gok Wan offering tips on how to achieve designer Gothic style on a budget on his Channel 4 show Fashion Fix, and stores including Topshop, Marks and Spencer and Miss Selfridge presenting Gothic-inspired collections. Gothic has been coming back for approximately two hundred and fifty years, in one form or another—the notion of revival has always been crucial to its definition. As I have argued elsewhere (Fashioning Gothic Bodies 186–97, “Undead Fashion” 143–54), these revivals took on increasing urgency within the fashion milieu in the 1990s, with fashion magazines proclaiming “Gothic is back” at regular intervals. Some critics, notably Christoph Grunenberg and Richard Davenport-Hines, sought to link a resurgence of interest in Gothic across media in the 1990s to fin-de-siecle decadence or pre-millennial tension. Yet these revivals have shown no signs of stopping in the twenty-first century; if anything they have gathered pace. Nevertheless, as Grazia and Fran Burns suggest, Gothic is, inevitably, different this time round. It always is: not only does commercial fashion constantly update and renovate “retro” looks so that new purchases are always necessary, but manifestations of Gothic are necessarily historically and culturally specific, their relationship with the past always determined by present concerns. The 2007–8 Gothic revival in mainstream fashion performed a particular kind of cultural work that positioned it as specifically post-millennial, as what we might think of (troping literary postmodernism) as a simultaneous and paradoxical continuation of, and self-conscious break from, the supposed pre-millennial mood. Accounts of twenty-fi rst century Gothic style signal a new sensibility. It is not necessarily more glamorous, as Grazia claims— Goth subculture has always had a glamorous element—but it is more celebratory. The collision of Nu Rave and Nu Grave in Grazia’s headline is more than a facetious turn of phrase. The darkness and high glamour of the look celebrated by Burns may be a reaction to the self-conscious inanities of Nu Rave3, but as the echo of “rave” in “grave” implies, the one also implicates the other. Twenty-first century Gothic does not define itself in opposition to the pursuit of ecstasy, it has incorporated it. Goth’s longevity as a subculture, anthropologist Ted Polhemus has argued, derives from its inherent opposition to mainstream consumer ideology: “To a majority that fetishises happiness, Goth is by its very nature off-putting” (97). Even when individual designers have appropriated Goth style—Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier are prominent examples from the 1990s—it has failed to become a major trend, as it supposedly remains antithetical to pleasure-seeking Western culture. In the twenty-first century, however, Goth is a subculture increasingly stripped of its darkness and ripe for incorporation, as this chapter will go on to demonstrate. At the same time, it seems that Western culture increasingly may be in search of more complex forms of gratification than mere hedonism. In a recent article in Gothic Studies,

“Forget Nu Rave, We’re into Nu Grave!” 185 Alexandra Warwick argues that rather than an attempt to exorcise trauma, “contemporary cultural Gothic is a staging of the desire for trauma, the desire to be haunted, because we do not feel complete without it” (12). Examining the explosion of Gothic in contemporary culture and academic criticism, she concludes that “Gothic can no longer proceed from the margins, because there is no marginality, it is where everybody wants to live” (14). For Warwick, “feeling Gothicky” (the title of her article) is no longer the pretension of a disaffected few, but a mainstream concern. And indeed, Warwick’s thesis seems to be reflected in what has happened to Gothic style in the years leading up to Autumn/Winter 2008. Goth subcultural style has always had a performative element, but over the last few years, this has been increasingly emphasised in accounts authored by members of the subcultures themselves. Accusations of negatively defi ned behaviour—whether violence, blood-drinking, self-harm, suicidal impulses, or Satanism—are typically resisted with protestations that the subculture is about creative self-expression, and that Goths are more interested in dressing up, listening to music and enjoying the social benefits of belonging to a subculture than in fulfi lling stereotypes of being miserable loners. Sociological and audience-based research has repeatedly emphasised that a propensity for Gothic style cannot be read as an index of the wearer’s personality. Paul Hodkinson’s extensive research into the British Goth scene, for example, observes that “there was a particular tendency for hostility toward the suggestion that their dark hair or clothes said anything about their character, outlook or behaviour,” although many participants associated their shared style with “general qualities . . . including individuality, creativity, open-mindedness and commitment” (62). Similarly, Maria Mellins’ research into the London vampire community identifies a trend for self-identified vampires to dissociate themselves from blood-drinking practices and emphasise their enjoyment of wearing vampire costumes. It is impossible to assess whether the behaviour of Goths has changed or whether this has been a continuous feature of Goth. It is nevertheless clear that the way the subculture is constructed, both by the mainstream media and by Goths themselves, has shifted significantly over the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century. This has been triggered by two occasions when Goth received unprecedented mainstream media coverage: the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado on 20 April 1999, and the murder of Sophie Lancaster in Bacup, Lancashire, on 11 August 2007. The defence of Goth mounted in response to these events has in turn enabled the appropriation of Goth by the mainstream on an unprecedented scale.

GOTH IN THE MEDIA Initial media reportage of the Columbine shootings, in which twelve high school students and a teacher were murdered by two of their classmates,

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labelled the killers as Goths. This part of the story was eventually discredited as inaccurate—the boys were loners rather than part of a subcultural scene, and their musical and sartorial taste had marginal correspondences with Goth, if at all. Nevertheless, the moral panic that ensued meant that many Goths, particularly in the United States, felt impelled to engage in very public defence of the subculture. A community that until that point had managed more or less to preserve its underground status was suddenly forced to deal with the scrutiny of the global media. Sam Rosenthal on Projekt Darkwave, for example, posted five days after the shootings to allege that, Goth grew up this week. “Goth” has been thrown in the faces of the general public. People who never heard of this music and lifestyle are seeing it on the news and seeing it in the paper. People in our genre have talked for years about Goth being buried in the underground; we have wondered if it would ever “break.” As a subject, Goth is now reality. It’s unfortunate that a tragedy has brought it out into the open, and I don’t think that anybody relishes the way that this has unfolded . . . however we cannot hide from the subject, or suggest that it is not worthy of discussion, now that it has happened. The media moves at lightning speed in this last year of the century, and we cannot let them defi ne us. (www.projekt.com) Numerous articles appeared online, in fanzines and in the mainstream media arguing that Goths were by-and-large harmless, peaceable figures, often with a high degree of creativity and intelligence, and expressing alarm in that Goths are more conventionally the persecuted and not the persecutors in the American high school milieu. Alicia Porter Smith posted a statement the day after the shootings on her well-known site, “A Study of Gothic Subculture,” to assert: “Goths are stereotypically nonviolent people. [ . . . ] There are no set of over-arching beliefs or values, no simple defi nitions, and no generalizations that are universally true within the Gothic subculture. I can’t emphasize that point enough. [ . . . ] The gothic subculture does not condone violence, much less mass slaughter and suicide” (online). As the initial shock turned into reflection, the positive repositioning gathered pace: Nancy Kilpatrick’s The Goth Bible is typical when it states, “Despite the dark current that carries Goths along, and maybe because of it, goth is also about fun. [ . . . ] About flapping your latex bat wings in the face of convention and secretly giggling at the notion that your very existence upsets the mainstream. [ . . . ] most of them do not consider themselves dismal. Goths, in fact, are some of the most vibrantly alive individuals walking the planet” (2–8). Academic research also reflected this trend: Dunja Brill’s Ph.D arguing that Goths “aspire to middle-class values and will end up in respectable professions” (Byrne, online) received widespread press attention in 2006, with pieces in all the major broadsheets as well as on Goth blogs.

“Forget Nu Rave, We’re into Nu Grave!” 187 The process of repositioning Goth as peaceable, creative and essentially performative in its embrace of darkness continued throughout the early years of the twenty-fi rst century, culminating in the response to Sophie Lancaster’s murder in 2007. This case was very widely reported in the UK but did not receive the same level of international media exposure as Columbine, although accounts spread quickly online through the global alternative community. Lancaster and her boyfriend Robert Maltby, both of whom self-identified as Goths, were attacked by a group of teenagers while walking home late at night, and Lancaster later died in hospital from the injuries she sustained. This occurred less than two weeks after Grazia’s “Nu Grave” article hit the newsstands: as the latest Gothic revival was being championed in the fashion press, subcultural Goths were encountering persecution on the streets. Lancaster’s murder, of course, was the reverse situation to Columbine in that individuals labelled as Goths were the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators. In addition, the event occurred in the UK rather than America, where subcultures have a rather different status in the mainstream media, with a greater tendency to be incorporated through comedy or domesticisation. In contrast to the demonisation of Goth by the American media after Columbine, the British press tended to displace moral panic away from Goth subculture onto other social problems. For the tabloid press, this tended to settle on the debate over “bad” parenting, so that Sophie’s mum emerged as tragic heroine and the killers’ parents as the true villains of the piece. Typical headlines in Britain’s bestselling tabloid The Sun, for example, include, “Sophie mum’s plea for peace,” “Goth kill: mums in hiding,” “Tearful mum flees murder trial” and even “Sophie’s dad in tattoo tribute.” This strategy displaced any residual anxiety about subcultures onto a more specific one about working-class parents unable to control their children—or even, in this case, passing on their own anti-social behaviour to their children. It also fell back on a characteristic tabloid response to subcultures, fi rst identified by Dick Hebdige in his seminal Subculture: The Meaning of Style, whereby members of subcultures are restored to the family. Hebdige argues that features such as “Punks and Mothers” from the 15 October 1977 issue of Woman’s Own, depicting punks “with smiling mothers” in idyllic family scenes, “minimize the Otherness so stridently proclaimed in punk style” (98). In the sequence of articles published by The Sun, Sophie’s Goth identity is minimised in favour of her familial identity and her loss articulated not, for example, through her boyfriend or peers but rather through the universalised spectacle of her grieving parents. The Daily Mail, a conservative mid-market publication with the largest circulation of any newspaper in the UK, took a slightly different approach. The paper positioned Sophie and Robert as “good” children in order to tap into another current moral panic: binge-drinking and “yob” culture. Typical headlines include, “Guilty: The teenage binge-drinkers who kicked a girl to death for being a Goth,” “Mother of Goth student kicked to death

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by binge-drinking teens attacks rise of ‘skunk’ cannabis” and “A mother’s grief and a generation without morals.” Interestingly, the Mail emphasises the fact Sophie was a student, with one headline actually referring to Sophie as a “female college student” rather than a Goth. For the Mail, Sophie and her killers become representatives of two sides in a class war, between well-educated, aspirational, middle-class kids and unruly, criminal, binge-drinking lower-class teenagers. The Daily Mail also follows Hebdige’s account of ideological incorporation by minimising the otherness of subcultures—here by displacement, emphasising the otherness of other kinds of unruly youth. In this variation on a Gothic narrative, Sophie is the heroine/victim, while her killers are positioned as monstrous. The horrific and excessive is associated not with Goth style and culture, but with a demonised working-class youth culture of “hoodies.” Crucially, however, distinguishing the case from earlier models of subcultural incorporation, both papers’ reporting strategies anticipate reactions to the murder from within the subculture itself. What marks the difference in the reporting of Sophie Lancaster’s murder was that in the weeks following Sophie’s death, it was not only the mainstream media which sought to minimise the otherness of Goths, but Goths themselves, in a series of campaigns to promote awareness and tolerance of alternative lifestyle choices. The most prominent of these campaigns were the pre-existing but newly revitalised Gothic Liberation Front, with chapters world-wide; The Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity set up by Sophie’s mother, initially titled “Stamp Out Prejudice, Hatred and Intolerance Everywhere” (acronym SOPHIE); and the 7,000-signatory petition to the British government calling for the legal defi nition of hate crime to be changed to include crimes against subcultures. Of these, the Sophie Lancaster Foundation has had the most lasting impact, developing an educational programme to develop tolerance among young people and taking up the campaign to redefi ne hate crime in British law. The initial petition was rejected by the government on the basis that “appearance and sub-cultural interests . . . are not intrinsic characteristics of a person and could be potentially be very wide ranging, including for example allegiance to football teams—which makes this a very difficult category to legislate for” (http://www.pm.gov.uk). Such campaigns are not universally endorsed by Goth subculture but nevertheless remain a significant new development. The notion of subcultures enacting symbolic resistance to the parent culture, as identified by Clarke, Hall, Jefferson and Roberts in landmark collection Resistance Through Rituals, is profoundly complicated by the fact that this form of resistance is not symbolic but literalised, self-conscious and articulate. Resistance, moreover, is not directed at the parent culture in any straightforward way, as no significant portion of that culture could be said to support hate crime, whether against Goths or anyone else. Resistance centres around perceived intolerant groups within that culture, most significantly “delinquent” working-class youth, and a state that is presented as offering insufficient

“Forget Nu Rave, We’re into Nu Grave!” 189 protection from those groups. The irony of such movements is that while wholly admirable in intention, they inadvertently function to undermine as subcultures the subcultures they seek to protect: the notion of legislating to protect lifestyle choice effectively “authorises” subculture and brings it within the disciplinary networks of the legal system. Subcultures thrive on the concept of resistance, whether real or imagined; to become entirely tolerated by mainstream culture would also be to be fully assimilated by mainstream culture, youthful rebellion reduced to a style option. The positive construction of Goth in the media was reinforced by representations of Sophie herself. Significantly, stories throughout the media repeat Sophie’s mother’s comments about missing her daughter’s smile, and the two most common pictures of Sophie circulated in all the press reports again show Sophie smiling. This is a conventional practice when releasing photographs of crime victims to the press, but in the circumstances, gains additional resonance. The version of Goth that Sophie came to represent was not depressive, miserable or Satanic, but rather the creative impulse of a normal girl with a zest for life and a love of alternative fashion: what in subcultural taxonomies is often playfully referred to as “Perky Goth.” Initially inspired by the character “Gilly Woods the Perky Goth” in The Dork Tower comic, Perky Goths, according to one online defi nition, “try not to take themselves too seriously and don’t brood” (Porter Smith, “Terms and Defi nitions”). Perky Goth began as a joke, but is fast becoming a dominant paradigm.

“PRETTY GOTH” As the drama of Lancaster’s killers’ apprehension and trial played out, the Gothic revival continued apace in the fashion press. To take another example from Grazia magazine, the 3 March 2008 issue—again, fortuitously timed exactly one week before the trial of Sophie Lancaster’s assailants opened—featured a news story entitled “Pretty Fierce,” centring on a photograph of pop star Lily Allen wearing Luella Bartley. The timing of the article was both ironic in its distance from the realities of being a (persecuted) Goth in the UK, and reflective of Goths’ own move to position themselves as harmless. It explained, “We’re calling it Pretty Goth and we think it’s the hippest look in fashion now. [ . . . ] Mixing fierce-looking, slightly bondage-inspired accessories and goth make-up with a romantic dress is a perfect solution for those of us who don’t want to go the whole way with this season’s floral trend” (29). There are many interesting things about this description—the bathos of “slightly” bondage-inspired accessories, for example. Perhaps the most striking, however, is the way it suggests mixing two incongruous looks—romantic florals and Goth make-up. This is a staple practice of high fashion and also of subcultural bricolage—but here, Goth is seen as ameliorating a trend that is even more difficult to

190 Catherine Spooner wear: florals. Goth is positioned not only as a style to be embraced, but as a means of mediating other even more “difficult” styles. Fred Botting suggests in his book Gothic Romanced that, “in conjuring up terrors and intense effects, gothic seems to offer curious substance to an almost empty form” (7–8). “Pretty Fierce” visibly enacts this process: Gothic is being used to provide edge and substance to the frivolities of romance. This partial embrace of Goth style developed into a full-blown celebration as 2008 progressed, following influential designer collections by Chanel, Givenchy and Alexander McQueen among others. The deluge of Gothic on the high street come the Autumn/Winter season presented Goth packaged as romantic nostalgia. High street store Miss Selfridge’s website was representative in its blurb: “Gothic Romance: In our AW08 trend preview we said this was set to be one of the biggest trends this season. We’ve updated the look with new key must-haves—black lace is the focal point of this darkly seductive look.” (www.missselfridge.com). Marks and Spencer’s Per Una had a similar strap-line: “Gothic Chic: A dramatic collection with a nod to historical costume, in sophisticated smokey grey, seagreen, black and dove-white” (www.marksandspencer.com). The collection also featured several pieces in orange. Per Una is marketed towards comfy, middle-class middle England: it is a moderately priced brand aimed at women in their forties and fi fties who do not want to relinquish their style but are not interested in looking cutting edge. For Per Una to promote a Gothic Chic collection is for Gothic style to have well and truly achieved saturation. The collection was, at basis, about smart coats and little black dresses with some period trimmings. Nothing sells like little black dresses, even in a recession. There are revealing emphases in the language used to describe these clothes. A key feature is the evocation of the past: adjectives such as “Victorian,” “romantic” and “historical” are combined with the reassurance that the look has been updated and is therefore new, making it necessary to purchase. If you are a fortysomething customer coming to this look for the second time around, there can be no recycling of your 1980s Goth clothes. Secondly, Gothic is aligned with drama, costume and romance. The property of Gothic that is presented as appealing is its potential for fantasy dress-up—a form of sartorial escapism. What is Gothic fashion here? It cannot be, as in the quote from Valerie Steele I cited above, “a rejection of ‘normal,’ ‘natural’ beauty in favor of an alternative vision of horrific, excessive, artificial and (sometimes) sexually fetishistic beauty” (79). This may be what haute designers are doing (Steele is particularly thinking of Alexander McQueen), but this is not what the high street is doing. The customers interpolated by the Marks and Spencer brand have little truck with the horrific and excessive, and their interest in the sexually fetishistic is unlikely to trespass beyond the safe limits of push-up bras and control underwear. The emphasis in the language used to sell these clothes is on femininity, glamour and romance.

“Forget Nu Rave, We’re into Nu Grave!” 191 None of these traits are particularly different from those always valorised by mainstream fashion. Neither are they horrific, excessive or threatening in any way. Ultimately, all of these versions of Goth style resemble Allan Lloyd Smith’s description of postmodern Gothic as “ransacking an imaginary museum of pastness” (11). They are vaguely Victorian, but not specifically so—a variety of period styles are merged into one overall look. Enjoyment of these clothes seems to be linked to what Brigid Cherry’s research on female horror fans reveals as an investment in an “imagined past,” described by one respondent as “a stylish image of dark beauty . . . The classically Gothic full-length dresses and cloaks . . . are . . . for me synonymous with grace and charm” (172). Cherry’s respondent’s comments are highly revealing: there is no specificity in the style of the clothes described, it is simply an approximation of a nostalgic vision of dark romance. Fred Botting’s observations on the relationship between Gothic and romance again seem pertinent here: “Romance, as it frames Gothic, seems to clean up its darker counterpart, sanitising its depravations; it tries to transform, even ennoble, violent Gothic energies as a quest for love in the face of death; it recuperates Gothic excesses in the name of the heterosexual couple . . . repulsion cedes to attraction as horror gives way to romance” (1–2). “Repulsion cedes to attraction as horror gives way to romance”: it could be a strap-line for Miss Selfridge’s Gothic collection. There are, arguably, two things going on here. Firstly, as Botting suggests, romance mirrors the endless deferral of satisfaction intrinsic to the working of desire: “in never being able to satisfy or kill off desire, romance reproduces the incompletion required for more” (25). The perennial revival of Gothic as romance mimics or feeds into the imperative to consume on which the fashion industry is based. Gothic romance presents a dark image of insatiable consumer desire, an image which replays in an uncanny form the themes of credit culture and its incipient collapse. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, Gothic Chic 2008 collapses the themes of romance and mourning. Goth style has long drawn on Victorian mourning costume, as Gothic: Dark Glamour documented. In her book Romance Writing, Lynne Pearce describes how in the Gothic romance, there is a similarity “between the states of heightened consciousness experienced during the fi rst spell-binding moment of falling in love and those associated with mourning” (90). She explains how in the romance narrative, the separation from one’s beloved is a period of grief but also one of perverse pleasure, as it enables an endless repetition of the moment of romantic discovery. For Pearce, this is most vividly illustrated by Cathy and Heathcliff ’s passion in Wuthering Heights, but a contemporary text like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight quartet (which contains explicit intertextual references to Wuthering Heights) fits the model equally well, indicating that the model of love-as-mourning is all too current. If these clothes evoke mourning wear, then mourning for what? The answer is, perhaps, nothing in particular—it

192 Catherine Spooner is merely a staging of that desire for trauma without which, as Warwick suggests, we feel incomplete. The notion of Gothic romance as mourning wear might seem at odds with the celebratory tone I identified earlier in twenty-first century Gothic style. But this is part of the paradox that I am attempting to unpack. Of course individual Goths may have a myriad of reasons for adopting their chosen style— creativity and self-expression, after all, are the touchstones of contemporary Goth identity. Perhaps all Western consumers might say the same thing of their own style choices. But as a mass market phenomenon, post-millennial Gothic style is freed up from those individual identity markers and instead gathers generalised meanings from its cultural context. Because Western culture as a whole is not mourning anything in particular, is staging a desire for trauma, Gothic style becomes more about seeking that state of heightened consciousness identified by Pearce, that merging of ecstasy and loss. To return to my title quotation, and the notion of “rave” nestled within “grave”: contemporary Gothic style does not repudiate celebration, glamour or even prettiness: it incorporates them all in its relentless striving towards the new. As such, it offers insight into the wider resonances of pop Gothic: Gothic meanings are never stable, but rather constantly fluid and on the move. NOTES 1. The British high street is usually understood to refer to the range of shops found in town centres and out-of-town shopping malls throughout the country, and is composed of chain boutiques (e.g., Topshop, Miss Selfridge, River Island) and department stores (e.g., Debenhams, Marks and Spencer). These stores produce numerous collections throughout the year, often directly inspired by catwalk trends. Although the high street encompasses European and American chains (e.g., H&M, Zara, Urban Outfitters, Gap), the variety of clothes on offer and the rapid turnover produces a mainstream fashion culture that is closer to both designer fashion and subcultural style than the equivalent in the US or Europe (with the possible exception of New York). 2. Grazia is the UK’s bestselling premium fashion glossy, with combined monthly sales around 100,000. It is issued weekly, enabling it to respond rapidly to emerging trends. For these reasons it provides a useful source in tracking mainstream fashion stories as they develop. 3. Nu Rave, fashionable in the UK and especially London circa 2006, reworked the music and fashion styles of the late 1980s rave scene, with Mercury-prize winning band The Klaxons the most well-known proponents.

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED “A mother’s grief and a generation without morals.” Mail Online. 30 Mar. 2008. Online. Ashford, Ben. “Goth kill: mums in hiding.” The Sun 29 Mar. 2008. Online. “AW08—Gothic Romance—Miss Selfridge.” www.missselfridge.com. Accessed 10 Nov. 2008. Online.

“Forget Nu Rave, We’re into Nu Grave!” 193 Botting, Fred. Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. “Boy, 16, pleads guilty to beating to death female college student in park attack.” Mail Online. 10 Mar. 2008. Online. Byrne, Ciar, “Don’t mock Goths: future’s bright for the men and women in black.” Independent 21 Mar. 2006. Online. Cherry, Brigid. “Refusing to Refuse to Look: Female Viewers of the Horror Film.” The Horror Film Reader. Ed. Mark Jancovich. London: Routledge 2002. 169–78. Print. Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts. “Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview.” Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. Eds. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. 1975. London: Routledge 2003. 9–74. Print. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. London: Fourth Estate, 1998. Print. “Forget Nu Rave, We’re Into Nu Grave!.” Grazia 30 Jul. 2007. 17. Print. “Gothic Chic/ Per Una/ Womenswear/ Marks & Spencer.” www.marksandspencer.com. Accessed 10 Nov. 2008. Online. Grunenberg, Christoph. Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Print. “Guilty: The teenage binge drinkers who kicked a girl to death for being a Goth.” Mail Online. 27 Mar. 2008. Online. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. 1979. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. Hodkinson, Paul. Goth, Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg, 2002. Print. http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page15282.asp Accessed 18. Apr. 2008. Online. Hull, Liz. “Mother of goth student kicked to death by binge-drinking teens attacks rise of ‘skunk’ cannabis.” Mail Online. 29 Apr. 2008. Online. Kilpatrick, Nancy. The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined. London: Plexus, 2005. Print. Lloyd Smith, Allan. “Postmodernism/Gothicism.” Modern Gothic: A Reader. Eds. Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Print. Mellins, Maria. “Fashioning the Vampire: A qualitative study investigating issues of dress and performance within the female vampire fan community in both online and face-to-face social contexts.” PhD. St. Mary’s University College. 2009. Print. Patrick, Guy. “Sophie’s dad in tattoo tribute.” The Sun. 28 May 2008. Online. . “Sophie mum’s plea for peace.” The Sun. 28 Mar. 2008. Online. Pearce, Lynne. Romance Writing. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Print. Polhemus, Ted. Street Style: From Sidewalk to Catwalk. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Print. Porter Smith, Alicia. “Statement Regarding Columbine.” A Study of Gothic Subculture. http://www.gothicsubculture.com/statement.php. 21 Apr 1999. Accessed 15 Aug. 2011. Online. . “Terms and Phrases.” A Study of Gothic Subculture. http://www.gothicsubculture.com/defi nition.php.Accessed 15 Aug. 2011. Online. “Pretty Fierce.” Grazia 3 Mar. 2008. 29. Print. Rosenthal, Sam. “The Goth Phenomenon: A Comment on the Media.” Projekt Darkwave. http://www.projekt.com/newsarticles/gotharticle.asp. 28 Apr. 1999. Accessed 15 Aug. 2011. Online. Spooner, Catherine. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Print.

194 Catherine Spooner . “Undead Fashion: Nineties Style and the Perennial Return of Goth.” Goth: Undead Subculture. Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 143–54. Print. . “Dark Looks: An Interview with Valerie Steele.” Horror Studies 1.1. (2010). 143–160. Print. Steele, Valerie and Jennifer Park. Gothic: Dark Glamour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Print. “Tearful mum flees murder trial.” The Sun. 17 Mar. 2008. Online. Warwick, Alexandra. “Feeling Gothicky?” Gothic Studies 9.1 (2007). 5–15. Print.

Contributors

Gail Ashurst recently completed a doctoral dissertation at Manchester Metropolitan University titled “Mythopoesis and Enduring Fandom: Towards an Holistic Model of the Cult(ural) Experience of Film.” Her research explores cult-fi lm fandom and documents the significance of personal mythopoesis in both determining and sustaining the passionate and prolonged attachment that characterizes the “cult” category. She has published on Robin Hardy’s film The Wicker Man and presented research papers on mythopoesis, fandom and the cult film experience. Linnie Blake is Principal Lecturer in Film in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She works predominantly on horror cinema and has contributed a range of papers to national and international conferences in the areas of film and gothic studies. Her book Screening the Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, National Identity was published by Manchester University Press in 2008. Fred Botting is Professor in the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London. He has written on Gothic writing, contemporary and science fiction, and cultural theory, and his two most recent books are Limits of Horror (2008) and Gothic Romanced (2008). He is also the author of Making Monstrous (1991), Gothic (1996), Sex, Machines and Navels (1999) and, with Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics (2001) and Bataille (2001). Glennis Byron is Professor of English Studies and director of the MLitt in The Gothic Imagination at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She is the author of Gothic (with David Punter, Blackwell, 2004) and the editor of Dracula: New Casebook (Macmillan, 1999), Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (with David Punter, Macmillan, 1999). Recent publications include articles and essays on Stoker and various contemporary gothic texts, including Malaysian horror fiction, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Meyer’s Twilight. She was the principal investigator for the AHRC funded Global Gothic network.

196 Contributors Justin D. Edwards is Research Professor of English at the University of Surrey, UK. He has held research fellowships at Churchill College, Cambridge (2005–6) and Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in 2010. He is the author of several books, including Mobility at Large (2012), Postcolonial Literature (2008), Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005), Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (2003) and Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature (2001). He is also the coeditor of Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (2006), Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (2005) and Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations (2010). Isabella van Elferen is Assistant Professor of Music and Media at Utrecht University. Isabella has published widely on baroque sacred music, fi lm and TV music, videogame music, and Gothic theory and subcultures. She is the author of Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (2012), Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology—Poetry—Music (2009), and the editor of Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day (2007). Monica Germanà is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, UK. She has published articles and chapters on Emma Tennant, Ali Smith, Alasdair Gray, as well as Emily and Charlotte Brontë. She has edited a special issue of Gothic Studies (November 2010) on “Contemporary Scottish Gothic,” a collection of papers on interdisciplinary aspects of contemporary manifestation of Gothic (sub) cultures in Scotland. She is also the author of a monograph on contemporary Scottish women’s gothic and fantastic fiction, Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing: Fiction since 1978 (EUP, 2010). Karen E. Macfarlane is Associate Professor and Head of English at Mount St. Vincent University, Canada. She has published on various aspects of Canadian and postcolonial writing and theory, as well as horror fiction and the queer body. Her current research projects focus on the relation between the monstrous body and knowledge in turn-of-the-century popular horror fiction, as well as on the intersections of queer and feminist theory in the representation of the “fag hag” in popular culture. Emma McEvoy lectures in the department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, UK. She has published various articles on Gothic and Romantic topics, including essays on Radcliffe, Chesterton, J. Meade Falkner and Mary Shelley. She is coeditor, with Catherine Spooner, of The Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007).

Contributors 197 Rachael McLennan is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her research interests include adolescence in American fiction, American autobiographies, and representations of Anne Frank in American culture. She has published articles in all of these areas. She is also author of the book Developing Figures: Adolescence, America and Postwar Fiction (Palgrave, 2009), and the forthcoming American Autobiography (Edinburgh University Press). Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her publications include The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic, Writing American Women (coedited), and articles on the American combat fi lm, melodrama, Edgar Allan Poe, queer and gender theory and the history of Gothic criticism. Anna Powell is Reader in Film and English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She directs A/V, edits for Deleuze Studies and has published work on the links between Deleuze and the Gothic. She is the author of Deleuze and the Horror Film (2005), Psychoanalysis and Sovereignty in Popular Vampire Fictions (2003), and is editor (with Andrew Smith) of Teaching the Gothic (2006). Catherine Spooner is Senior Lecturer in English at Lancaster University, UK. Her research focuses on the relationships between Gothic literature and fashion and popular culture. She is the author of Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2004), Contemporary Gothic (2006) and articles on Gothic literature, fashion, fi lm, TV and subculture. She co-edited, with Emma McEvoy, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007). A monograph on Gothic in twenty-fi rst century popular culture, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, is forthcoming in 2013.

Index

28 Days Later, 13 9/11, 13, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 53, 110

A aether, 142, 152, 153, 161 Aguilera, Christina, 118, 123, 131 An Inconvenient Truth, 38 animism, 148, 154–156, 157 Arquiem, 167 Ashurst, Gail, 15, 148–164 Asma, Stephen, 66, 69 Asylum Steampunk Convention, 149 Austen, Jane, 10 Austen J. L. 89 Avary, Bryce, 9–10

B Babuscio, Jack, 117, 118, 130 Badiou, Alain, 21, 22, 25 Baldick, Chris, 178, 180 Batman, 14, 96–113 Baudrillard, Jean, 116, 118 Bauhaus, 142 Being Human, 2, 14, 57–70 Bergson, Henri, 148, 157 Berman, Morris, 155 Biddy, Michael, 3, 4 Blade (Video Game), 3 Blade Runner, 175 Blanco, Maria de Pilar, 12 Blake, Linnie, 13, 14, 37–56 Blum, William, 39, 41, 44 Botting, Fred, 13, 19–36, 74, 180, 190, 191 Bradbury, Raymond, 165 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 11, 54n6, 64, 74, 130, 182 Breathers, 19, 30, 31

Brill, Dunja, 140, 186 Brontë, Charlotte, 90 Brontë, Emily, 73, 74, 191 Brooke, Alan, 11 Brooks, Max, 26, 27 Brown, Charles Brockden, 2, 9 Browne, S. G., 19, 30, 31 Bruhm, Steven, 14, 17, 84–87, 92, 93, 115, 117, 129 Buff y the Vampire Slayer (TV series), 3, 4, 12, 13, 17, 17n2, 17n3, 54n6, 130n1 Burn, Zombie, Burn (Video Game), 3 Burns, Fran, 183, 184 Burton, Tim, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108 Bush, George W., 37, 39, 45, 50, 53, 55 Butler, Judith, 21, 132n18 Byron, Glennis, 14, 71–83

C Campbell, Joseph, 98 Carnival of Souls, 165, 173 Carnivale, 165 Castle, Terry, 111n1 Celine, Dion, 121 Chanel, 183, 190 Cher, 115, 118, 119, 121, 131n6 Cherry, Brigid, 191 Chomsky, Noam, 37, 39, 42, 44 Circus of Horrors, 170 City of Lost Children, 150 Cixous, Hélène, 59 Clery, E. J., 71 Cohen, Jeff rey, 120, 128, 129 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 156 Columbine shootings, 185, 187 Combichrist, 143 Connor, Steven, 144

200 Index

Edwards, Justin D., 1–18 Einstein, Albert, 153 Eisblume, 8 Eke, Bert, 169, 179 Elferen, Isabella van, 15, 135–147, 146n1 Eliot, T. S., 138 Ellis, Robert, 78 ethics, 21–26, 29–34, 52–53, 62–69

Ghost Master (Video Game), 3, 54n4 Ghost Whisperer, 39, 40, 41, 53 ghosts, 3, 10, 11, 12, 15, 38, 40, 48, 52, 59, 62, 67, 75, 81, 109, 135, 139, 140, 144, 146, 148, 174, 176, 179 Gibson, William, 157 Gilbert, Jeremy, 145, 146n5 Gilmore, David, 65 Glastonbury Festival, 16, 123, 124, 166, 169, 174–179, 181 Gods and Monsters, 5 Godwin, William, 107 Goodlad, Lauren, 3, 4 Goth, 1–16, 38, 69, 141, 139–146, 148, 149, 170, 174, 175, 184–191, 192 Gothic: Dark Glamour, 182, 183, 191 Gothic Archies, The, 8 Gothic Chic, 183–184, 190, 191 Gothic Liberation Front, 188 Gothic Lolita, 17, 182 Gothic fashion, 182–194 Gothic Performance, 165–181 Grazia, 183, 184, 187, 189, 192n2 Griffi n, Christine, 85 Grunenberg, Christoph, 184 Guattari, Felix, 20, 138, 146n2, 148, 157, 160, 161

F

H

Faith and the Muse, 142–143 Faludi, Susan, 46, 50 Foucault, Michel, 66, 67 Frankenstein, 46, 57, 107, 114, 116, 127, 143, 151, 152, 157 Freaks, 165 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 22, 23, 59, 68, 88, 155, 161 Friedman, Jason K., 17n5 Fringe, 39, 46, 47, 48 Frith, Simon, 138 From Hell, 66 Futter’s Child, 168–170, 174, 180n17

H&M, 183, 192 Haggerty, George E., 120 Halberstam, J. 114 Hall, G. Stanley, 14, 84–87, 91 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 27 Haraway, Donna, 19 Harris, Anita, 85, 94 Harris, Charlaine 17n3, 42 Haunted Birmingham, 10–11 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 44, 150 Hebdige, Dick, 187, 188 Hodkinson, Paul, 185 Hoff mann, E. T. A., 155 Hogle, Jerrold E., 2, 16, 88 Horner, Avril, 10 Hughes, William, 120 Hunger, The, 136, 137, 138, 139 Hurley, Kelly, 119, 126

Crimp, Douglas, 117 Crowley, 167 Crowley, Aleister, 151 Cure, The, 3, 146 Cybergoth, 141, 143

D dark tourism, 1, 10–12 Davenport-Hines, Richard, 184 Dead Like Me, 41 Deleuze, Gilles, 20, 146n2, 148, 157, 160, 161 Derrida, Jacques, 128 Dexter, 46, 48–51, 53 Dickens, Charles, 78 Doctor Who, 168 Dollhouse, 13 Driscoll, Catherine, 85, 94n1

E

G Gap, The, 183, 192n1 Garland, Judy, 115, 117, 130, 131 Gaultier, Jean Paul, 38, 184 gender, 5, 6, 8, 16, 53, 85–94, 117, 120, 127, 128, 140, 141 Germanà, Monica, 14, 57–70 Ghost Adventures, 10 Ghost Hunters, 11

I I Walked with the Zombie, 19 Interview with a Vampire (novel), 61, 135

Index Interview with a Vampire (fi lm), 4

J Jentsch, Otto, 155 Jones, Darryl, 58, 60, 65 Jordan, Neil, 4 jouissance, 22–27, 31

K Kearney, Richard, 67 Kilpatrick, Nancy, 186 King, Stephen, 76 Kramer, Jonathan, 137 Kristeva, Julia, 24, 68

L L. A. Zombie, 8 Lacan, Jacques, 22–25, 34, 145 Lady Gaga, 2, 15, 114–134 Lancaster, Sophie, 16, 185, 187, 188, 189 Lesko, Nancy, 85, 86, 87 Latham, Robert, 20 Levinas, Emmanuel, 21, 22 Levine, Elena, 4 Lewis, Matthew, 77, 107 Lovecraft, H. P., 150 Lugosi, Bella, 53, 121, 142

M Macfarlane, Karen E., 15, 114–134 Macleod, Ian R., 153 Madonna, 115, 118, 119, 121, 125, 128, 131 Mangan, Lucy, 89 Manson, Marilyn, 3 Marie Claire, 183 Marion, Isaac, 32–34 Marks and Spencer, 16, 183, 184, 190, 192 Marshall, Jon, 172, 174 Marx, Karl, 62 Matrix, The, 135 McEvoy, Emma, 15, 16, 165–181 McLennan, Rachael, 14, 84–95 Medium, 39, 40, 41, 49, 53 Melchow, H. L., 17 Mellins, Maria, 185 Merritt, Stephin, 8–9 Meyer, Stephenie, 7, 14, 38, 54, 74, 84–95, 191 Miéville, China, 160 Midler, Bette, 115, 119, 131n6 Mighall, Robert, 72, 180n14

201

Miller, Frank, 98, 98, 103, 105, 111, 112n1 Miss Selfridge, 16, 183, 184, 190, 191, 192n1 Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik, 1–18, 96–113 Montaigne, Michel de, 64 Monroe, Marilyn, 115, 118, 119, 128 Morrison, Grant, 98, 105, 106, 112n11 Morton, Kate, 75 Most Haunted, 10 Mugler, Thierry, 184 Muhammed, Joe, 27

N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 137 Nietzsche, Fredrich, 57, 66, 145, 146 Nolan, Christopher, 96–99, 102, 103, 107–111, 151 Nyong’o, Tavia, 121, 122, 124, 130

O O’Neil, Dennis, 97, 98, 103–106, 112n11, 112n12 Oates, Joyce Carol, 19 Otto; or, Up with Dead People, 7–8

P Pearce, Lynne, 191, 192 Pearson, Ewan, 145, 146 Peeren, Esther, 12 Pilger, John, 37, 45 Poe, Edgar Allan, 101, 136, 138 Pop Goth, 1–18 Powell, Anna, 15, 140, 141, 145, 148–164 Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, 4 Punter, David, 141, 142, 144, 145

Q Queer, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17, 112n10, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 130, 131 Queer as Folk, 4

R Radcliffe, Ann, 3, 9, 135, 139 Rajchman, John, 23 Real, Michael R., 129 Relic: Guardians of the Museum, 168, 170 Resident Evil, 38, 54n3 Rice, Ann, 61, 135 Rocky Horror Picture Show, 5

202 Index Romero, George, 8, 125 Roseanne, 4, 16n2 Rosenthal, Sam, 186 Ruffolo, David, 120

S Sax, Leonard, 94n3 Senelick, Laurence, 127 Scream, 10 Serenity, 13 Shelley, Mary, 57, 58, 60, 107, 116, 127, 151 Slotkin, Richard, 50 Smith, Alicia Porter, 186 Smith, Allan Lloyd, 86, 191 Smith, Andrew, 120 Southern Gothic 6, 17, 42, 44 Spooner, Catherine, 2, 16, 38, 86, 115, 117, 119, 140, 174, 182–194 Steampunk, 15, 148–164 Steele, Valerie, 139, 140, 182, 183, 190 Sterling, Bruce, 157 Stephenson, Neal, 160 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 57, 60, 61, 107 Stoker, Bram, 11, 57, 58, 61, 64, 136 Summer, Rocket, 9 Survival of the Dead, 13

T Taylor, Timothy, 145 terrorism, 12, 13, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48 Thornton, Sarah, 146n4 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 54, 55 Topshop, 16, 183, 184, 192n1 True Blood, 5, 6, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 53, 61, 174n4 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 52 Twilight (fi lm series), 3, 6, 7, 14, 84–95 Twilight (book series), 14, 54, 74, 84–95, 130, 191

U Urban Dictionary, 1, 10 Ure, Andrew, 157

V Vampire Diaries, 42, 61 vampires, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17n4, 19, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 52, 53, 54, 61–69, 88, 89, 91–93, 101, 114, 135, 136, 139, 142, 148, 185 Verne, Jules, 150 Virilio, Paul, 27 Vodun (Voodoo), 19, 29, 175

W Walpole, Horace, 2, 75, 88, 107 Warhol, Andy, 116, 132 Warm Bodies, 32–34 Warner, Marina, 64, 65 Warwick, Alexandra, 17, 38, 39, 71, 185, 192 Way of the Barefoot Zombie, 19, 27 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 175 Wells, H. G., 66, 150 werewolves, 8, 38, 53, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 68, 91, 92, 101 Whedon, Joss, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 67, 130 Whitby Gothic Weekend, 11, 140 White Zombie 19 Wolves, The, 167 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 156

Z Zafón, Carlos Ruiz, 14, 71–83 Zizek, Slavoj, 23, 125 Zlosnik, Sue, 10 zombies, 2, 3, 7, 8, 13, 15, 19–35, 52, 66, 72, 125 Zombie Diaries, 13, 19 Zombie Flesh Eaters, 19 Zombieland, 2