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Less concerned with who’s first up against the wall than with how to decorate it

Jack Graham

About Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

Posts by Jack Graham:

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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The Trump Trap

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The GOP, MAGA, the past, and the future…

Trump might leave the US as a three party system.  America would have three parties - a centrist liberal party, a far-right party, and a fascist party. 

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The classic pattern of a fascist takeover of government goes something like this…

The fascist party grows to the point where it is big enough to be a kind of kingmaker in a deadlocked representative democratic system, and the conservative elites of that system, threatened by chaos and/or growing left political feeling and workers’ struggle, adopt the fascists as the (to them) lesser evil, and help them into power.  The conservative elites expect to be able to control the fascists and use them as a bulwark, discarding them when they have outlived their usefulness, only to find that the fascist party out-manoeuvres them and assimilates or ejects them.  This has not yet happened in the United States, but it seems to have happened – on a micro level, as it were – within the Republican Party.  

The MAGA conquest of the Republican Party may not be absolutely complete, however.  MAGA might still split away.  

A lot depends on whether Trump once again secures the Republican nomination.

Front-runners don’t necessarily get nominations.  Many people now considered political jokes have, at one time or another, been front-runners.  Donald Trump isn’t even always the front-runner in the polls these days.  Even so, the likelihood is that, all else being equal, he will get the Republican nomination again.  

The movers-and-shakers within the GOP want rid of him.  So do most of the mid-level people.  They talk openly about how he was great but it’s not 2016 anymore, we need someone new, etc.  They are hoping to nudge the feeling in the party.  But the feeling in the party stays with Trump.  The insiders are reduced, as some of them have recently confessed, to waiting for Trump to die.

We all know the paradox.  We saw it played out in instance after instance in the midterms.  Republican hopefuls can’t be candidates without Trump’s approval; Republican candidates can’t get elected by the public with Trump’s approval.  This paradox runs right the way through the Republican Party, from top to bottom.  It is soon to be enacted on the national stage in the 2024 presidential election.

This is the trap the present-day Republican Party is in.  A trap entirely of its own creation and long in the making. 

I’ll have to go back a bit.

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Neoliberalism, ‘Creeping Fascism’, and The Cosby Show

In the late twentieth century, the post-war ‘long boom’ crumbled as a result of the secular tendency towards decline in the profit rate, which is – as Marx showed – innate to capitalism.  By the 1970s, even the vast and ongoing government stimulus of Cold War arms spending was failing to pump up the burst tyre.  The neoliberal strategy was an attempt by capitalism – unsuccessful in overall, real terms – to restore the profit rate, and the GOP was at the forefront of it with Reaganism, as were the British Tories with Thatcherism.  

The neoliberal revolution was not just economic.  It was also – in an almost too on-the-nose demonstration of Marx’s ‘base and superstructure’ model – political and cultural. …

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Jack / IDSG Roundup

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Hey all, Jack here with some catch-up. Sorry I haven’t been posting here. Pure forgetfulness. Plus I’ve had a bit of a rough time these last few months. Thanks to El for helping me get through it.

So, since we last spoke, IDSG has released:

A bonus in which we hang out and chat with our friend Eiynah from Polite Conversations

An episode about Daryl Brooks and the ways the Right have weaponised him

A bonus in which Daniel and I chat about the death of the Queen

An episode in which Daniel tells me about the various ways the Right have reacted to the Ye situation

An episode in which Holly comes on to tell me and Daniel all about Ye

An episode in which I chat with journalist Annika Brockschmidt about the Reichsburger Coup attempt in Germany

An episode in which guest Sophie from Mars of YouTube comes on to talk about Caleb Maupin and the ‘Conspiracy Left’

A backer-only bonus episode in which Daniel and I chat about the Basic Instinct movies

And an episode in which Eric from ESG Hound talks with Daniel about Elon Musk and Twitter

In other news, I have started a Substack in order to curate tweaked versions of some of my old stuff that I like.

Oh, and IDSG is now on YouTube. I’m gradually uploading the back catalogue. Please like and subscribe, etc.

Love to you all.

J.

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