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Ending Explained (Part 4)

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Final part of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994).  The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea.

In The Mouth of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft, Alan Moore’s Providence, metafiction, the ‘fourth wall’, China Miéville’s ‘arche-fossil’, and the Marxian ‘real abstraction’.

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In the graphic novel Providence, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Jacen Burrows, H.P. Lovecraft is bred to be a redeemer or messiah by a secret society or cult whose aim is nothing less than the rupturing of the division between reality and fiction to permit the re-entry into reality of the Old Ones, the Old Gods, the Outer Monstrosities, the presiding cosmic entities of the haute Weird.  In an early twentieth century America which seems to partly be the world in which Robert Chambers sets The Repairer of Reputations (first story in The King in Yellow), closeted gay journalist Robert Black makes a tour of lovecraftian events and characters which represent the activities of the cult – events and characters which directly mirror and reiterate events and characters we know from Lovecraft stories.  He meets H.P. Lovecraft, who listens to his tales and reads the material he has amassed.  Lovecraft then turns this material into his own fiction.  Mirroring the rise of Lovecraft as a massively freighted cultural touchstone in the real world, Lovecraft’s fiction then goes on to reach a critical mass of critical appreciation and cultural belief, which triggers the apocalypse desired and engineered by the cult.  As a result of a concentration of semiotic hegemony and cultural influence, Lovecraft’s fiction comes into being.  Lovecraft’s fiction, and his cultural footprint, thus becomes a conduit for outside entities who take over humanity’s collective consciousness, bringing our nightmares into reality.  The Old One entities are depicted as a kind of corporate cloud of sentience which, via its human representatives among the cultists, wants and engineers this turn of events.  

I am not in a position to engage in responsible criticism of Providence itself, having only read it once – and that a few years ago – but it seems to owe something to John Carpenter’s 1994 movie In The Mouth of Madness, or at least to be mining a startlingly similar seam, albeit with a more dense, literary, and specifically referential (though not reverential) approach to Lovecraft in particular.  

Moore has the advantage of being able to consider the recent extraordinary upsurge of interest in Lovecraft, and the history of Lovecraft’s growing bottom-up success which fed into it, even as he – Moore – contributes to it, enfolding his own consideration into the phenomenon he is thinking about and vice versa.

One of the things about John Carpenter as an artist is that he sometimes seems almost uncannily ‘of his moment’ but also intensely prescient of forthcoming cultural preoccupations.  As with Halloween, The Thing, and They Live!, with In The Mouth of Madness, Carpenter was well ahead of the curve.  …

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Ending Explained (Part 3)

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Part 3 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994).  The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman.  Putting aside the issues I said I would address this time, let’s instead go back to the film and try to start drawing things together a bit.  If previous installments in this series were prefatory, this one gets down to it.

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“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”

– Fredric Jameson

The hostile manifestation in human ‘reality’ of the characters and places of mass-produced mass-cultural mass-fiction is, of course, a textual expression of commodity fetishism.  This is true but is a generality.  This is true of the entire sub-genre of fiction in which fiction itself springs to life and confronts the reader or viewer as something “hostile and alien”.  It is equally true of the entire nest of genres in which artificial human images, human replicants, human created automata, etc, etc, etc, so spring to life.  The era of bourgeois modernity is the era in which humanity is surrounded by the products of their own labour alienated from them, hostile to them, reinforcing their oppression and exploitation.  It is the era in which, as Marx observed, society treats things as people and people as things, makes relations between people into relations between things, and vice versa.  This is precisely why Horror and SF are the quintessential genres of modernity.

To be specific about In The Mouth of Madness we need to go beyond this essential but basic ground assumption, as does In The Mouth of Madness itself.

In the Mouth of Madness is a zombie apocalypse movie, but the zombies are us, normal people living normal life, and the apocalypse is caused by those who wake up from their zombified state and rebel.

The normal world is the apocalypse.  “Nothing surprises me anymore,” says John Trent (Sam Neill), “We…” (he means the human race collectively) “…fucked up the air, the water, we fucked up each other. Why don’t we just finish the job by flushing our brains down the toilet?”  He’s referring to the massive sales, the global cultural phenomenon, of the writing of Sutter Cane.  The books are explicitly pulp trash.  Their covers are designed to look lower-brow than Garth Marenghi.

The film opens with shots of massive printing presses churning out copy after copy after copy of Cane’s newest novel.  The comment on ‘authenticity’ inherent in any summoning of ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ is only emphasised by the music playing: a Carpenter-created pastiche of a track by Metallica (notorious guardians of their intellectual property) to which he couldn’t get the rights.

In a key, early scene, Trent is walking through the city at night.  He looks at urban walls covered in posters for Cane’s books; these posters are tattered yet omnipresent.  …

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Ending Explained (Part 2)

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Part 2 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994), and other things via it.  The ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman.  It also features a little self-plagiarism.

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There’s a documentary, originally aired on British television in 1999, called Pornography: A Secret History of Civilisation.  After a couple of quite decent episodes, the series starts considering the then-present and the then-future.  It’s stuffed with comment from ‘cultural critics’ and ‘social theorists’, who generalise about what ‘we’ are becoming – with ‘we’ supposedly standing for all humanity while actually implicitly referring to the middle classes in the developed world in the era of pre-general crisis neoliberalism.  A little surprisingly even in 1999, the oppression of women, the objectification of female bodies, patriarchy, sexism, etc., are issues barely touched upon.  (I am resolutely Sex Work positive, but there are ways of talking about the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal power relationships instantiated in the pornography business without stigmatising sex workers.)  Alongside the theorists, there are words from entrepreneurs or capitalists, and yet the word or topic ‘capitalism’ is barely properly mentioned.  It is silently present as the ‘civilisation’ of the title.  Despite the profound thinkerizing about porn’s supposed journey into ‘the mainstream’ there is precious little time left for wondering who sets the agenda of the mainstream.  Media ownership is not a topic, except for the times when a handful of porntrepreneurs (presented as pioneers and farseeing cultural trendsetters) get to spout their self-seeking spin.  In the midst of much pontificating about the meaning of things from the perspective of the business owner or the consumer, there is hardly any attention paid to the perspective of the worker, of the (if you’ll pardon me) working stiffs getting screwed.  Porn is, apparently, an industry with consumers but no producers.  To the extent that producers do appear, the emphasis is on the employers rather than the employees.  When sex workers appear, the emphasis is firmly on self-employment, on the sex worker as a petty bourgeois individualist.  You might argue that this turned out to be prescient, what with the rise of OnlyFans and the sexual gig-economy.  And yes, the series manages to notice that the internet will change things.  (There is nothing about the inequalities of internet access, or access to media more generally, in any of the discussion of porn consumption and ‘cybersex’.)  But the series has an entirely mistaken idea of the context in which such changes will play out.  Its idea of the future is an artefact of its own moment.  That by itself is okay.  Every idea of the future is an artefact of its own moment.  The interesting thing about ideas of the future is precisely what they tell us about our own moment.

All the hallmarks of the late-90s intellectual milieu are to be found in this text.  The social and political cynicism masquerading as consumerist utopianism.  Utopianism itself stripped of all noble and liberationist inflections and fused with a kind of gleeful dystopianism, reflecting the way that the post-Cold War intellectual landscape, with its End of History vibe, saw the future horrors and joys of unfettered capitalism as being equally inevitable, and then celebrated this with a knowingly sick grin of elitist torpor and overdosed irony. …

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Ending Explained (Part 1)

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Part 1 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994).  Some of the ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman.

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John Carpenter’s late – and last – classic In the Mouth of Madness (1994) is famously metafictional.  In the final scene of the film, the ‘protagonist’ John Generic Name… sorry, I mean John Trent… goes into a cinema which is showing a film called In the Mouth of Madness, advertised as starring John Trent, and watches himself on the screen, watches the film we’ve just seen, essentially.  He watches himself declaring repeatedly (in alternate cuts of the same scene, featuring Sam Neill’s varying line deliveries) that he is nobody’s puppet and that the surreal things he’s experiencing are “not reality”.  Apparently overcome by the realisation that he is, in fact, a fictional character in a film, John Trent begins laughing.  His laughter gradually goes from being hysterical in the figurative sense to hysterical in the literal sense.  As he starts having a panic attack, the film – the one we are watching – cuts to the credits.

Carpenter does not put ‘Starring Sam Neill’ on the poster.  He does not break the fourth wall directly.  Within the frame of the text, the barriers between reality – the life of John Trent, the world in which Hobb’s End is a fictional town created by author Sutter Cane – and fiction – the world of Hobb’s End and the monstrosities that exist there – breaks down, and the two are shown to be essentially one and the same.  But the text does not breach its own actual limits.  The text does not depict the barriers between itself and us, the viewers, breaking down.  The metafictional apocalypse depicted on screen does not seem to affect us, the viewers.

In the Mouth of Madness landed in 1994.  In 1994 I was in my second year of an English & Philosophy degree.  I was wading through Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Kristeva…  It was the high academic fashion of the moment.

Lacan famously used topology as a source of metaphors and analogies, even if he himself denied that they were metaphors and analogies.  He describes the neurotic subject as a torus or möbius strip – or as a cut on a torus or möbius strip.  Putting aside the question of his actual knowledge of topology or mathematics more generally, we can appreciate the image of the circulating, edgeless, closed-loop shape as a way to visualise neurosis.  At the risk of sounding like Zizek, we can easily apply this image to In the Mouth of Madness, in which a sequence of events plays out which is easily interpreted as the experience of paranoid neurosis on the part of an individual subject – indeed is so interpreted within the frame of the story – and which loops back upon itself at multiple points.  Not only does the framing story provide an exactly symmetrical shape to the story – Trent is put in the lunatic asylum at the start; Trent escapes the lunatic asylum at the end – but the inner story, the picture within the frame, is recursive.  …

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The Hidden Abode

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On The Boy (2016).  Spoilers, and CW for references to psychological and physical abuse.

 

The Boy, a film from 2016, written by Stacey Menear and directed by William Brent Bell, has been largely-forgotten, but deserves better.  It tries to be to patriarchy what Get Out, released the following year, would be to racism.

The film was marketed as a specimen of the creepy haunted doll subgenre of supernatural Horror, which enjoyed a rather half-hearted renaissance in the wake of the massive success of The Conjuring in 2012, and its breakout star (and best actor) Annabelle.  The Boy spends a good part of its first two acts pretending to be just such a creepy haunted doll movie… though precisely how hard its pretending is open to question, as we will see.

It’s a surprise to me that I like this film as much as I do.  Firstly, the director, William Brent Bell, is generally a purveyor of crap.  Misogynistic crap, in one marked instance.  Secondly, The Boy does things which I generally – and ideologically – dislike.  It has a ‘twist’ ending which…

If you’re reading on, I’m assuming you have either seen the movie or don’t care

…which supposedly recontextualizes the entire film, and makes it clear that, while you may have thought you were watching a story about a creepy haunted doll, you were actually watching a story with no supernatural elements whatever, beyond the usual implausibilities built into most movies via the aesthetic ideology of ‘realism’.

I do not like ‘twist’ endings.  I especially do not like ‘twist’ endings which also function as ‘narrative substitution’.  Like fourth wall breaking, I generally find narrative substitution to be a cheap trick which can give the appearance of cleverness while actually saying very little, and generally unravelling the text’s coherence of theme and character development.

I do not like stories which appear to be supernatural but which turn out to have a ‘natural’ explanation.  I do not even particularly like stories which maintain an ambiguity as to whether or not the events of the story are supernatural.  Firstly, such stories tend to cheat.  The ambiguity tends to be a pretence.  In order to manufacture the supposed ambiguity the story must impose an overpowering natural reading, even if it pretends not to.

More importantly, for me, by undermining or eschewing the supernatural, a supernaturally-inflected film cheats itself of the vast and fertile potentialities of polysemy that is the uncanny, the symbolic, and the truly irrational, confining itself instead to the banal personal irrational of the individual disordered psyche.  The great strength of uncanny storytelling is that it deals with the generalised irrational.  Irrationality as society, as history, as life.  It depicts characters experiencing a world that is irrational – and hopelessly so – all around them, and deep in its structure.  I am convinced that this hits closer to a true and visceral expression of the experience of living in modernity.

The Boy does all the stuff I dislike.  Its twist recontextualises the film, substitutes one narrative for another, and removes the supernatural from the story, substituting one disordered psyche for what looked like an irrational universe.  …

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The Crack Down the Spine – Part 1

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Opening a consideration of the Ghost Story, drawing on…

 

…the valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled… *** …a Marxist genealogy fascinated with the irrational aspects of social processes, a genealogy that both investigates how the irrational pervades existing society and dreams of using it to effect social change. Gothic Marxism has often been obscured in the celebrated battles of mainstream Marxism, privileging a conceptual apparatus constructed in narrowly Enlightenment terms. The Enlightenment, however, was always already haunted by its Gothic ghosts… 

Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination

 

Miracles; murders; demons driven out and stones roiled from tombs. The cheap glamour did not taint the sense beneath. It was only, in the natural history of the mind, the bright feathers that drew the species to mate with its secret self.

Clive Barker, The Forbidden

 

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I first encountered ghost stories in the sense I mean the term, the modern Ghost Story, in the spare room of the paternal grandparents’ bungalow.  I used to stay with them for a week or two every summer holiday when I was a kid.  They – and I suppose I mean my grandfather really – used that room to store the books he didn’t want on display.  Alongside all the old issues of Readers Digest, and the condensed novels, and my father’s old football and cricket annuals, there were lots of old books.  I don’t mean old books in the sense of dusty, leather-bound tomes, their pages wormy and crumbling, attached by chains to the shelves.  I don’t mean Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or In Praise of Folly.  I don’t mean the Tractate Middoth or the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred or The King in Yellow.  I mean from the 1950s and 60s.  Cheap little paperbacks, and hardbacks with tatty paper jackets of at most two colours, both usually yellow, bearing artless illustrations and prices in shillings and pence.  There were more recent paperbacks too.  All dogeared and ragged, some losing their yellow pages when opened, their glue binding turning to powder, their spines cracked.  The anthologies of science fiction stories and ghost stories were the ones that grabbed little me.  The numbered Fontana collections with their amazingly eerie covers.  The trashier ones covered in studio staged photos of cobweb-draped skulls.  It was here that I first encountered Lovecraft, the two Jameses (M.R. and Henry), the two Bensons (A.C. and E.F.), Machen, Hodgson, and Blackwood.  Oliver Onions and Saki.  Dickens and Poe and Stoker and Le Fanu.  And lesser lights like Chetwynd-Hayes, and outright inferiors whose names I don’t remember – but which I often liked best at the time, if I’m honest.  And so on.  

Of course, this wasn’t my introduction to stories about ghosts.  But it was my introduction to Ghost Stories.  

 

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If you come to think of it, the one thing which the human mind cannot grasp is the finite, not the infinite, the temporary, not the eternal.

…

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Knock Knock

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Spoilers.

So, my pre-ordered copy of the much-critically-fawned-upon ‘horror’ film The Babadook arrived this morning.  And I’ve just watched it.

What a load of crap.

Look, I get what was being attempted here.  And it was attempted with a lot of sincerity, and some excellent acting.  But, really, what was the point?  Depression is a terrible thing.  Yes, we know.  We all bloody know.  Even those of us lucky enough to have escaped direct experience of depression know that we have escaped something terrible.  Grief is a terrible thing too.  Likewise.  It’s better to connect with and love your kids than to not.  Yes.  I don’t have kids and I know that.  These are trite morals.

Of course, there’s no reason why you couldn’t make a film carefully exploring these issues, delineating the experience of suffering from grief and depression so bad that it paralyses even your ability to love your own child.  But if that’s what you want to talk about, do so.  Make a film about depression.  Make a film about mental illness.  Make a film about a nervous breakdown.  Make it with sensitivity, and with the space and attention these issues deserve.  The Babadook isn’t that film, though it seems to be under the impression that it kind-of might be.

If, on the other hand, you want to make a ghost story, then make a ghost story.  But don’t make a film which uses the aesthetics of the ghost story as obvious and simplistic metaphors for depression and mental illness, especially if you’re going to spend the entire runtime of the film essentially screaming “THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR DEPRESSION!!!!” at the audience, as if you blatantly don’t trust them to twig.

It’s possible that someone who has actually suffered from depression may disagree with me here, and I shall respect that disagreement from my lucky positionality, but it seems to me that all we get in The Babadook are trite morals dressed up in dark cloaks.  ‘DON’T LET HIM IN’ says the book about the monster that will creep into your life through looks and words, attack you in bed, and get under your skin.  Well thanks.  I’m sure people suffering from debilitating depression never thought of that.  The story seems to also imply that, once in, depression is almost certain to lead to murder-suicide if left unchecked… which seems a dubious message to be sending out about the plight of millions of perfectly normal, innocent, non-dangerous people who are suffering from a disease.  Also, depression would appear to be a monster that attacks without much in the way of a social origin.  The monster sneaks into your life because of loss and boredom and family difficulties, not because of wider social problems.  Moreover, the monster must be slain by the lone individual deciding to belt up.  Apparently, according to this film, all you have to do to defeat the monster of depression is to pull yourself together.  Even at the point where you are a slavering, knife-wielding homicidal maniac who is breaking the necks of pets (a cheap, obvious and predictable shot that one, by the way) and attempting to strangle your own kid, all you have to do is summon up the will-power to shout down your inner demons. …

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Skulltopus 10: How Green Was My Death?

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‘The Green Death’ is a ghost story.  Doctor Who itself may actually be best described, from one standpoint, as an anthology of ghost stories.

Okay, let’s go back a bit.

Firstly, let me defend my notion about 70s Doctor Who sprouting Weird tentacles when it notices (and thus needs to evade and/or signify) capitalism.  ‘The Green Death’ is clearly aware of capitalism and, sure enough, shows signs of Weird inflection.  (I’m aware, by the way, that I keep talking about the show as though its alive… a form of commodity fetishism that I’ll address some day.)

Apart from anything else, there’s a dirty great tentacle in ‘The Green Death’.  It’s only in it for a few seconds, during the Doctor’s abortive trip to Metebelis III, but still…

As in ‘Curse of Peladon‘, this is the tentacular riding in on past associations… however, it can’t be said to work quite the same way as previous tentacles in the Pertwee era.  This tentacle is clearly not obscuring any potential thematic convergence upon the subject of capitalism, as in ‘Spearhead from Space‘ and ‘Claws of Axos‘.  Nor is it standing in for implied capitalism, as in ‘Curse of Peladon’.  Capitalism is something that ‘The Green Death’ is aware of openly.  It doesn’t need to be either obscured or implied… especially since the ‘critique’ of capitalism the story offers is actually quite diffident, to the extent of dehumanizing the working class.  And this tentacle is only a momentarily glimpsed feature of a side-trip, taking place literally light years away from Global Chemicals.  However, it’s in ‘The Green Death’ rather than, say, ‘The Time Warrior’.  It’s in a story about an evil corporation rather than one about a feudal warlord.  So, the association is still evident and active.

There is also a distinct Weird inflection to the maggots.  Their multiplicitous tubular wriggliness is hardly a million miles from being tentacular.  They have some of that quintessentially Weird incoherence.  

However, like ‘Spearhead from Space’, ‘The Claws of Axos’ and ‘Curse of Peladon’ before it, ‘Green Death’ retains a hauntological charge.  

The maggots themselves are steeped in gothic, in associations to do with death.  Real maggots breed in corpses or bad meat.  They are of putrefaction.  This suggests skulls and bones and graveyards, and it suggests them in the gothic mode: as signalling extremes and transgressions, and the haunting presence of that which has been denied and repressed.  Biological corruption is here aesthetically linked with the corruption of the environment by big business.  The maggots appear in the mine because they are generated by the toxic waste from the Stevens Process, which is secretly dumped underground.  Eventually, they erupt out of the mine into the world above, like zombies out of graves.  They make a typical gothic move.  They do it almost too literally.  They have been repressed and then they return.  They have been buried out of sight but wriggle out of their subterranean hiding-place.  Moreover, this is gothic very much in the Who mode.…

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Skulltopus 6: Macra Revisited

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According to China Miéville, the classic, early 20th century haute Weird of Lovecraft and Hodgson is the nebulous, meaningless, reactionary scream of incomprehension that greets the onrushing horror of modernity.

I think that, for 70s Doctor Who, a resurrected and processed form of the Weird is what the show draws upon when it finds itself haunted by repressed knowledge that it cannot face: the knowledge that the modern nightmares upon which it dwells are generated by capitalism.  When the themes of a 70s Doctor Who story suggest the possibility that capitalism could be noticed and indicted in systemic terms – particularly in terms of the exploitation of the worker, race and/or imperialism – the show tries to jettison the hauntological (realising that it is itself being haunted… nay, stalked) in favour of the Weird.

I intend to justify these outrageous claims in a forthcoming post.

In my last post – here – I casually asserted that the Weirdish ab-crabs in ‘The Macra Terror’ are a “prelude” to the connection the show will make in the 70s between the tentacle and capitalism.  It occurs to me that I need to expand a bit on my Skulltopus post about the Macra – here – in order to make myself clear on this point.

I think that the Colony in ‘The Macra Terror’ is a picture of mainstream Britain in denial during the radical late 60s, of a prosperous capitalist world that runs on repression, oppression, obedience, media conditioning, hierarchy.  The Colony strongly hints at being capitalist in various ways, not least the Butlins vibe that everyone talks about, the Pilot’s sitcom businessman manner, Barney’s salon and spa, etc.

Most explicitly, the story concentrates on the mining of gas… and Britain in 1967 was right in the middle of switching over to North Sea Gas.  In the story, the gas (a toxic substance that humans don’t need and which actively endangers workers) is mined for the benefit of other, hidden, possibly insane reasons/persons – in this case, the Macra.

The Macra, as I noted elsewhere, are extremely hauntological (in that material/pseudo-materialist way that things are hauntological in Who) in that they actively and literally haunt the Colony while clearly representing something that the characters all know must be denied.  In the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon, I hint that this repressed knowledge is the knowledge that they are exploited – specifically and explicitly as workers – by an irrational tyranny, and that this ties into the way that the radical currents in the late 60s were popularizing a critique of Western consumerist capitalism as tyrannical and alienating.

And so, whether it be cause or effect, we get Weirdish monsters.

They are giant crabs, as in some classic Weird fiction… except that, when you listen to the story (especially since you have to listen to it) they are also categorically indeterminate, big/small, crab/non-crab, insect/spider/bacteria things that people have trouble perceiving clearly, even – especially – when they see them.

Moreover, the Macra’s own mentalities are extremely contradictory, incoherent, self-denying… to the point of bordering on psychosis.…

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Skulltopus 4: Attack of the Plot-Device Monster

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The tentacle was already well established as a staple of monsterology long before Doctor Who was even a glint in Sydney Newman’s eye.  When Who selected the tentacle as its semiotic method of evading/signifying capitalism  – as I’m going to argue that it did in the 70s – it selected it from a pre-existing toolbox full of potential signifiers.  But it didn’t suddenly stumble upon the octopoidal.  It had encountered tentacles before, albeit only occasionally.

On the whole, the show’s early years are pretty thin on tentacles… but there are quasi-tentacular manifestations in ‘The Keys of Marinus’ (the Brains of Morphoton have stubby little almost-tentacles), ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ (the Slyther) and ‘The Web Planet’ (the Animus).  The only proper octopus monster in this era is the Mire Beast from ‘The Chase’.  It lives underground and exists solely to provide a way for our heroes to escape from the Aridians without deliberately sentencing them all to Dalek-death.

Oh look… bar the Animus, those were all written by Terry Nation.  Hmmm…

By this point (the early 60s), the ‘novum’ of the tentacle had passed, but it had entrenched itself in the grammar of Western teratology.  In the process, it had been greatly sheared of its original strategic meaninglessness.  Even so, the Mire Beast doesn’t even try to mean anything.  It’s almost as though a plot device monster so arbitrary and irrelevant had to be an octopus because the octopus still carries the Weird connotations of meaning meaninglessness.  It means nothing, so what do we make it?  An octopus.  They mean nothing.  Perfect.

I’m simplifying.  And I’m making it sound conscious… which it almost certainly wasn’t.  But I’m kind of thinking aloud here.  Give me a break, can’t you?  These things become less conscious and more consistent the more deeply the semiotic connections bury themselves into culture.  They become like syntax.  We don’t usually use syntax consciously.

Of course, ‘meaning nothing’ and ‘having no meaning’ are not necessarily the same thing.  The symbol ‘0’ means nothing… but it doesn’t have no meaning.  Indeed, it’s meaning is nothing.  (This point is hard to get across in text… it’s one of those occasions when, to be absolutely clear, you really need to use vocal inflection.)  This may be the same binary inherent in any sign that is adopted to evade meaning.  It may be inherent in the Weird use of the tentacular.  By trying to use the meaningless to mean meaninglessness, meaning is assigned.  This is as much a dialectic as it is a paradox.  The internal contradiction drives the change from the haute Weird tentacle to the tentacle as a standard monstrous limb-type throughout Western fiction.  The tentacle initially emerges as the perfect way for the Weird to express what it feels to be the incomprehensible and meaningless horror of modernity via its ‘novum’, its unprecedentedness in Western literature, its semiotic emptiness.  However, the meaninglessness of the tentacle becomes its meaning… or rather, it’s most prominent feature.  Its very arbitrariness allows it unfettered entry into almost any context, sometimes even conferring an advantage upon it when someone like Terry Nation is looking for a default monster that will have nothing to do but get the writer out of a plot cul-de-sac, or look cool.…

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