Ending Explained (Part 3)
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. His social environment is one of culturally hegemonic, mass-produced, mass-consumerist commercialism which is also tawdry, dysfunctional, and decrepit. In the squalid backstreets dominated by these posters, he chances upon a scene of horrific police brutality. A uniformed cop is savagely beating a helpless figure. Almost more horrible is the way the scene is being watched by a surrounding group of people – all of them apparently unhoused people living on the street. There is no context given for this event. We have no idea what led up to it, triggered it, etc. It is simply a thing that happens in Trent’s world. The cop becomes aware that he is being watched by Trent – the gazes of the street people apparently do not count – and makes a threatening remark, whereupon Trent silently withdraws. Trent says nothing and does nothing. Admittedly, it would be hard for him to physically intervene, especially given that the cop makes it clear he is not intimidated by Trent’s witnessing of his brutality. Even so, Trent’s total silence is remarkable. Not only does he say and do nothing at the time, he clearly does and saying nothing about it afterwards. He simply walks away. He is not happy about it. Indeed, he is portrayed as unnerved, and the incident clearly preys upon his mind because he repeatedly relives it in a ‘dream’ (whatever a dream experienced by Trent could be said to be in the context of the film as a whole). In these dreams he reimagines the cop as a hideous monster in facial features as well as in deed. The cop appears in his apartment in a jump-scare false-awakening. Even so, Trent does nothing about it. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he might do anything about it. To the extent that it troubles him, it is only as a threat to his own safety and peace of mind.
This is the world that Trent refers to in his cynical speech quoted above. It is a world in which everything has been ruined, yet the ruins are in our own minds, as John Lukacs put it. It is a world in which bonds of sympathy have been subsumed in casual cynicism, in which we are surrounded by the noise of a zombie consumer mass culture – absent yet omnipresent, irrational and decrepit yet silently omnipotent through our consent, like Marquez’s autumnal patriarch – and yet wordless in our relations towards our fellow beings, devoid of meaningful sympathy, destitute of resistance to the depredations of power and authority against the powerless.
Even the corporate publishers seem remarkably casual and phlegmatic – only half-interested – about global sales that dwarf those of Stephen King. But there’s the rub. Sutter Cane’s work appears to be the dominant cultural phenomenon in the world, and nobody outside of this fandom seems interested in anything but mundane concerns. In the glimpse we get of Trent’s everyday profession, even those engaged in the commission or detection of malfeasance seem to be going through the motions. Those within the fandom live in an entirely separate and different reality to those without. Those within develop double pupils in their eyes, signifying that they see twice, that they see two worlds, the ‘normal’ one and the Cane one.
The repeated question “Do you read Sutter Cane?” looks like a way for people in this bifurcated world to navigate their way socially, to discover what kind of person they’re talking to in a culture which is now divided between two basic types: those who read Sutter Cane and thus have access to the double sight, the double world, and those who don’t. And the Cane people are the ones who have access to anything beyond that dead, empty, banal, chugging, zombie civilisation of uninteresting late capitalist ‘normality’, i.e. the triumphant liberal bourgeois millennium of the post-Cold War 1990s, also known as the ‘End of History’. The Cane readers are the only ones with access to anything that is beyond that depressingly casual, bland, rote, disconnected, asocial, unsympathetic, silent and helpless world that everyone else lives in.
This era of mass cultural production was replete with such representations of torpid apocalypse, of anticlimactic and contentless un-Revelation. It was as much a trend as the more famous trend towards depicting the world violently smashed to pieces, as in Independence Day, Deep Impact, Armageddon. But the latter settled in and became a staple, a genre of Hollywood movie, still regularly made today, and thus revealing itself to be little more than a hyperbolic inflationary spin on the old warhorse: the disaster movie. The end of the world as whimper rather than bang is a very specific 1990s fin de siècle variant. It shares traits with the pre-existing and continuing ‘zombie apocalypse’ film but is also distinct. One of the most famous movies of the era, The Matrix (1999), is such a film. It is approaching and tailing the same mood as In The Mouth of Madness in a more literal way. Like In The Mouth of Madness, its themes tessellate with the expressions of the prevailing mood found in fashionable social theory (as previously discussed), being so conscious of doing so that it inserts (sort of) a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulations. The Matrix ironically depicts the supposed highpoint of human civilisation, the triumphant and unchallenged Western corporate capitalism of 1999, as a dreary, grey-green, authoritarian yet tedious wilderness of open plan offices. The best of all possible worlds – actually a “desert of the real” hiding savage yet oddly paternalistic exploitation – is mainly bad because its so desperately boring.
But, just as people in The Matrix can escape the boring apocalypse by communing with ‘reality’ (actually a higher realm in which one endures privation in order to manifest as a dream within the dream), so, in In The Mouth of Madness, Cane’s fans can escape the lassitude and passionless routine of the bourgeois millennium in their own counter-Rapture, in which they are transfigured through suffering into the new angels.
Alone in the American 1990s as depicted in In The Mouth of Madness, it is the Cane readers, the Cane fans, who are alive, awake, enthusiastic. They are the ones who have surfaced from the collective torpor, shaken off the malaise, the aimless lassitude of deeply comfortable but deeply uninspiring Western post-democratic consumerism, and media, and shopping, and office buildings, and shiny suits, and and, and and, and and. It is instructive that, as Cane’s agent stalks across the road carrying an axe, he is met with perfunctory panic that seems to subside into gormless, half-amused gawping as soon as the immediate scramble out of his way has been accomplished. The victors in the epochal and civilisational conflict with communism heard about it on the news, let fly a semi-ironic, demi-invested “hooray”, and then settled into being nothing but eternal onlookers. Onlookers is all they are now, be they looking on at an axe murderer, or a police beating, or a series of bizarre riots in book shops. As long as the axe, or night stick, or whatever, is hitting someone else, it’s all nothing but a mild distraction from the amiable amble through nothing and nowhere in particular. It’s even more instructive to note that, once Cane’s agent has been summarily dispatched by the same police force that Trent will see mistreating the unhoused in back alleys, Trent’s response to being nearly axe-murdered by the man is to laugh. It woke him up. That is the contagion of these books. That is the mark of Cane. His instrument is not a rock, but a doorstop made of paper. His crime is that, in a world where nobody is his brother’s keeper any more, he wants to be everyone’s Author.
What we see in this global and ontological Cane mutiny, is teleology rebuilding itself – or rather, as is fitting in this era, re-branding itself. In a world that lives in a grand narrative about the failure and fall of all the grand narratives, the apocalypse of Cane is the teleology of a world that has abandoned all attempts at teleology, good and bad. It is the apathetic slump of an entire civilisation into meaninglessness, absolute self-referentiality; a sealed, neurotic, metatextual tautology. Irony of ironies – but entirely in line with the self-dooming complacency of this self-defined era – it is the doomed last-minute rebellion, last-minute reach for meaning, last-minute attempt to undo the Death of the Author, that completes the snuffing-out of the light of reality.
Trent is the archetype of this world. He moves easily in and out of the corporate office block, the corporate meeting, the corporate lunch with a corporate client in a corporate chain restaurant. He wears the 90s suit and the 90s tie and, out of the office, the 90s jeans. Despite his utter infibulation with corporate money, his preoccupation with corporate priorities via his various jobs for corporations – from insurance monoliths to publishing megaliths – he fools himself that, because he is freelance, because he aesthetically clings to the image of the hired-gun, the private dick of old (Sam Neill astutely plays the role like he’s a P.I. in a ‘40s film noir), that means he’s free, independent, nobody pulling his strings. He boasts about this to his corporate colleague/employer as they discuss their corporate jobs in the corporate 90s city environment. He is quintessential in that the last scrap of old meaning he can cling to is pastiche of both the mass culture of old and, at the same time, the bourgeois ideology of old. He’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. And he’s Robinson Crusoe, the isolated rational individual utility-maximiser of oldskool capitalist economic ideology. Thus he is free, liberated by the self-reliance that a man of the right spirit can achieve thanks to the liberation brought to the world by private enterprise and free markets, etc etc etc. And yet it’s a total illusion. He is corporate to his nasty tie and nastier haircut. He is free to do whatever he likes… and there is nothing to do. He has no friends, no partner, no activities outside work, no identity outside his suit and his collaged pseudo-identity. He makes a half-hearted attempt to flirt with (i.e. sexually harass) the woman supposedly representing Cane’s publishers and editing Cane’s books. But she lazily bats away his clumsy, 40s-style, come-on and he immediately stops trying. After this, his manner towards her becomes one of a juvenile boy towards his older sister. When she eventually tries to jump on him, because she – like him – is Cane’s creation, and Cane is trying to write them a cheesy, rote, sex-scene, he reacts with horror. His only stab at having an identity outside of being one of Cane’s characters is to reject even the tiny scrap of human interaction such a role would afford him. His normal world provides him nothing to do beyond work. In the bountiful land of consumerism, there is nothing to consume – or at least everything he consumes amounts to nothing that we see, or that he feels. Until he is elbowed into the world of Cane’s fiction – at first as the near-victim of Cane’s crazed agent, and then as a reluctant reader of what he finds to be strangely affecting pulp, forced to consume it only so he can understand his corporate assignment – he experiences nothing at all. The only experience exists as the ab-dimension of Cane’s world.
And yet, of course, this is a false revolution. Like many a mass-produced commodity, this corporately distributed revolution packs an opening hit and then reveals itself as empty, malnourishing, and meaningless. Despite the claims of the author, and the obedient feeling of fandom – the captured consumers – that the story, the legend, the owned universe, is revolutionary, it is actually not the activity of the subject but the ultra-objectification, ultra-alienation of the consumer. It seems to offer an escape from meaningless reality into a world of signification, an escape from a world of shops and jobs and TV to a world of gods and monsters, an escape from a society in uninteresting and drab crisis, from a social collapse into callous individualism that is also bloodlessly tedious, from a millennium of liberal capitalism triumphant and thus aimless, from which not even the imagination will have any means of escape (to paraphrase Roper re the planned victorious post-war Nazi Europe). But it is an escape that stems from corporate capitalist mass culture, from storytelling as a commodity. It is a revolution which is actually a total submission to the authority of a God/Author. Cane’s own understanding of himself is as a conduit for Elder Gods or Outer Monstrosities, as in the Weird of Lovecraft and Machen. It looks more like he has, through the ultimate act of brand-building and market-cornering, achieved a hostile takeover of reality via an utterly hegemonic franchise. We are again seeing the expression of commodity fetishism, of our alienation from our own work, and its alienation from us. We are seeing, as always in texts which show fiction ‘coming to life’ and attacking, the expression of capitalist modernity as ruled by what Marx called ‘real abstractions’, i.e. human created things like clock time, value, profit, money, gender, which nonetheless rule over the humans who created them and subject them to inhuman or anti-human imperatives. This is the essence of a society based on the alienation of the producer from their labour and its products via a system of production based on competitive accumulation. We live in that epoch and that’s why we tell these stories.
But, to find the added complication, we need to look to the Weird tradition in which this film is working even as it spoofs it. Cane has created the Old Gods and now bows down before them, as Gods and Masters, as having always existed. “Cthulhu is less a ghost than the arche-fossil-as-predator” according to China Miéville, expressing the way the Weird doesn’t just content itself with the Hauntological revenant, the returning repressed, but invents a new ancient tradition, pretends its repression, and then has the novelty ancient one return from nowhere. This is, on its most basic level, an expression of how capitalist society subjects us to the seemingly traditional, ostensibly venerable, effectively enshrined rule of… its own anarchic innovation.
Cane’s revolution is thus secretly authoritarian with Cane, the alienated producer who also retains control over his own alienated capital, as the ultimate authority. “I think, therefore you are,” says Cane. As cinema, the film expresses this by likening him to the ultimate authorial authority: the director. Cane demonstrates to Trent his total control over the narrative, and thus over Trent, by suddenly putting Trent and his surroundings, his scene, into a blue filter.
Cane is thus a recognisable figure. He is a franchise boss. He is an author-capitalist. He is an owner of a personal – and copyrighted – fictional universe. He’s Stephen King, obviously. But, in an instance of Carpenter not only being intensely of his own moment but also forseeing ours, Cane ultimately looks more like J.K. Rowling.
I have written before about Rowling’s (far from unique but paradigmatic) exercise of something I called ‘authorthority’, her personal and autocratic control of a privately owned reality to which one may buy a subscription as long as one submits to her monarchical dictats as to what is, or is not, ‘real’ within it. Rowling has, of course, graduated from merely demanding such ideological submission from readers with reference to her authorial interpretation of her own/owned fictive universe to demanding it from everyone with reference to her authorial interpretation of exterior reality. This is exactly what Cane does. Like Rowling, Cane re-authors reality and the sets a mandatory critical interpretation of it, to which all readers must acquiesce, publicly assent, and then live by/within.
Like Rowling, Cane expresses his new reality as one of freedom but, for the slightly privileged figure of the ‘character’ (i.e. Trent), it is actually one of total conformity and slavery to his whims and authorial decisions, whereas for the rest of us, it is a reality in which being a consumer means being enclosed by the commodity one consumes, and turned into… well, an NPC. Cane is the expression of capitalism as a vast system of copyrighted – owned – stories, narratives as property, human storytelling alienated from humans and turned into capital, an anti-human enemy that dominates, accumulates, absorbs humans and transforms them into more capital, more of itself. Again, this kind of storytelling in modernity has a long tradition of expressing just this aspect of capitalist society via its endless procession of monsters – from vampires to the Overlook Hotel to the Borg – that accumulate, absorb, transform, and enclose humans. This is that same preoccupation but specifically trained on the issue of narrative as a human production, human labour, alienated by capital.
Cane is also monopoly. As I mentioned above, Cane’s fiction franchise / ab-world / fandom seems to be the biggest cultural phenomenon in the world. It is also seemingly the only cultural phenomenon in the world. Cane has achieved a total monopoly. The only competition mentioned is Stephen King – who was surely the biggest selling writer of uncanny fiction in the world at the time – and we are explicitly told to “forget” him. No other form of cultural production appears to exist outside news reports. He thus expresses the concentration and centralisation of capital, a phenomenon reaching unprecedented levels in the 90s and, in America at that time, seemingly unstoppable by crisis (supposedly solved by neoliberalism) or competition of any kind, economic or imperial.
More crucially, the loop of reality contained in the film implies that actually there is no distinction between the revolution and the ancien regime. They are different manifestations of the same thing. Cane’s revolution is one which takes place in book stores, not as a rebellion against the commodification of fiction but as a scramble to obtain copies, as a war of all consumers against all other consumers. There is no solidarity or shared feeling between the mutual devotees of Cane. This fandom is a sea of totally disconnected selfish individuals. In other words it is a picture of society and consumption which corresponds to the assumptions of bourgeois economics. In line with the dyspepsia that Fukuyama himself felt about his idea of the End of History, this is a picture of consumerism as a dysfunction as seen from an anxious liberal viewpoint.
This period of history was replete with cultural representations of this. As I once argued in another essay, one of the quintessential and most popular cultural representations from this period, the Borg of Star Trek, are actually such a depiction. At first glance they resemble the old bourgeois SF depiction of political collectivism. But this is precisely the era when Western capitalist culture believes it has triumphed over ‘Communism’ and stops constantly throwing up this ideological distortion of its imperial competitor. The Borg are actually a liberal worry about liberalism’s own society at this time, consumerist capitalism. They are a depiction of an all-conquering system – like, it seemed, triumphant Western capitalism – which actually comprises a mass of interchangeable individual consumers. Just as the Borg say “we will add your distinctiveness to our own” to their victims and then simply absorb them, reducing them to their own grey soup, so the Cane readers seem to be coming alive to a new world of sensation, ideas, metaphysics, collective experience, communion… and yet the terminus of the process of being a Cane reader is to either find oneself, like Trent, a character in a pre-written drama, entirely controlled by authorial authority, or a mutation. The mutants do not achieve transmigration and apotheosis. On the contrary, they are reduced – via the selfish individualism of a war of consumers – to a kind of indistinguishable, rampaging, collective mass of meaningless and incoherent flesh. The Borg are, as I once said, a nightmare that liberal capitalism had about itself, about its supposed nature as an unstoppable, ever-expanding monopoly system made up of mindless consumers – a 90s reiteration of the same fear that animated the petty bourgeois heroes of Dracula in the face of vampirism as a potentially neo-feudal total monopoly. As the Borg, so Cane.
Yet the collectivist aspect of the Borg is relevant. It ties liberal fears of monopoly to liberal fears of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, linking them as ‘extreme’ dangers at either end. In the same way that the Borg are, as well as being monopolists are also communists (the liberals are righter than they know in accidentally conceptualising Stalinism as a kind of monopoly capital), so Cane is a kind of revolutionary. As mentioned, his fiction/ideology wakes people up from compliance and agitates unrest. Cane’s world, once located in the spatio-temporal loop that is Hobbs’ End, starts as a kind of rural American Gothic version of a Weird ‘Paris Commune’, an isolated revolutionary fortress city-state in rebellion against reality; self-quarantined but trying to use the domino theory, to use Trent as ideological emissary, to spread the good news of the new flesh and the old gods out into the rest of the world. As my ironic use of the phrase ‘domino theory’ implies, this is not just a picture of agitation but a reactionary view of revolution as infection, as viral, as disgusting, as tincture. And explicitly in In The Mouth of Madness, the revolution is communicable and leads to the inhuman mutation of the infected subject. The upending of social hierarchy and cohesion also turns the revolutionary subject into a monstrous object.
This is the secret inner reason why the place where Cane sets up his revolutionary commune is called Hobb’s End. Hobbs Lane (formerly Hob’s Lane) is the name of the place where Quatermass encounters an ancient, crashed Martian space ship in Nigel Kneale’s ultra-reactionary SF/Horror text Quatermass and the Pit, which also depicts a communicable, mindless, violent, revolutionary frenzy as the expression of the built-in, innate, genetic, xenophobic tribal homicidal hatred that is – according to Kneale – the hardwired wearisome condition of lumpenhumanity.
In one of his letters to Kugelmann about the Paris Commune, Marx rapturously described the proletarian Communards as ‘storming Heaven’. The phrase stuck. And, whether Machen had the Commune in mind or not…
“Then the essence of sin really is—-”
“In the taking of heaven by storm, it seems to me,” said Ambrose. “It appears to me that it is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. You can understand why it is so rare. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it.”
– Arthur Machen, The White People
Sin, in this key text of the Weird – the reactionary literary tradition of the arch-reactionary Lovecraft, and of cosmic Horror, which In The Mouth of Madness puckishly travesties – is the attempt by ‘Man’ to break away from the “amply content” “mass” and to intrude upon realms which are not for him. Wilde, a quixotic kind of socialist, called disobedience “Man’s Original Virtue”. For the reactionary Weird, disobedience, rebellion, transgression, the attempt to escape one’s supposedly proper place, to see and to know that which is not for you to see and know, is – as in the Garden – the essence of evil.
In The Mouth of Madness fits directly into this tradition – not necessarily as ideological comrade, but as an expression of the ingrained ideology of the Weird. It is entirely in keeping with the mood of its era that the text should conceptualise any kind of challenge to the apparently inescapable new eternal reality of comfortable capitalist tedium as not only doomed to fail, not only bad (as capitalist ideology and culture has always represented any revolutionary challenge) but as nothing more than the inescapable new eternal reality of comfortable capitalist tedium restated in a different aesthetic way. Meet the new flesh, same as the old flesh. That is literally the mood of the era, distilled. That is why the cul-de-sacs of Foucault were adopted by the era.
As Jameson observed, the end of the world is now something we imagine in order to imagine the end of capitalism. But capitalism, via its ownership and control of the means by which we do the imagining, turns our imagining of its end into our giggling, despairing, helpless acceptance of its eternal continuance. At the close of In The Mouth of Madness, Trent sits in the cinema and watches the movie we’ve just watched, including himself, and laughs and laughs and laughs. It’s the same wild-eyed, exhilarated laugh he laughed earlier when he nearly died under the axe of Cane’s agent. It’s the same contentless pseudo-revolutionary awareness. It’s a sensation, okay, but a circular and meaningless one. It’s madness sold and consumed. It’s the end of history. He’s the last man. Isolated and atomised, getting a faint hit from consuming popcorn and the movie that is his life, and everyone’s life. It’s the end of the world as he knows it and he feels fine – because, in the worldview, the psycho-ideological moment this film captures so uncannily, its not the end of the world. The world was always like this. And always will be.
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