Tuesday 31 October 2017

On Horror

The question that every fan of horror has heard -- why do you like it? This is a question horror fans also ask themselves. Why? Why do we like this stuff? What do we get from it?

I can't presume to answer this on behalf of anyone else, but I will venture to offer a response for myself. 

To prepare the ground for posing an answer, I'm going to offer a short account of the horror media that I've enjoyed the most, or with which I've felt the deepest connection. I'm doing this to make it clear what kind of horror it actually is I consume: not all horror is created equal.

I ask the reader to forgive the exercise in autobiography that follows.

Seeings

Slashers generally don't interest me. I've never seen a Saw film, nor any of the Hostel films, and I've no desire to (though I hear the original Saw is decent enough). I don't enjoy watching people suffer -- I'm even a little squeamish with gore; I find damage inflicted upon eyes especially disturbing. This being said, I loved the Hannibal TV series, and The Silence of the Lambs. Their Gothic campness, and the way Mikkelsen and Hopkins inhabit the role with simultaneously obvious and understated glee, was a joy to watch.

Films that prioritise atmosphere are the ones that grab me. I'm willing to forgive poor execution if the aesthetic is right. For example, The Keep; a film butchered beyond repair in post-production, but its visual style creates an air of great age, of the extreme past protruding into the present. Tangerine Dream's never-officially-released score is an eerie treasure. It's a film that can, in the midst of trite dialogue and hammy performances, convey the cosmic. 

The Void is another example of this, though its failings aren't as palpable as those of The Keep. The plot goes off the rails towards the end, but I knew from the opening credits onward that this film could have been made for me personally. There was a shot of a chemical plant or factory at night, illuminated only by bright white arc lights, and it was like seeing my name on the screen. The images that stuck with me more than anything else were the sequences of great, grey/green clouds rolling through an alien sky, out of which bursts a vast, black pyramid. No explanation is given, and none needed. It is pure otherness, implacable and utterly inhuman.  

Gun to the head: my favourite horror film is The Exorcist. Its focus on the interaction between ordinary people and a wholly otherworldly force which cannot be accounted for, let alone contained, by modern science, and how it charts the decay of these people's lives, is perfection. My favourite moment is when Chris offers Father Karras a drink after he's seen Reagan for the first time; he asks if she has any ice, and she tells him she does, but it's in the kitchen. When she goes to get it, he tells her not to worry, and she asks if he's sure. Chris is visibly on the edge of total collapse, and attempts to hold onto the quotidian by offering to get her guest some ice for his drink. It is a tiny moment, but, frankly, it is beautiful.

The Shining is another example of this, ordinary people in destructive contact with the extraordinary. Throughout, we're aware that it is possible, maybe probable, that the strangeness unfolding in The Overlook Hotel is brought about by the disturbances within Jack Torrance's own mind. A struggling writer with a drinking problem who has abused his son and wife, alone for months with only reminders of his guilt and failures around him, coming to terms with the unsaid truth that he will never be a writer, he simply snaps. But that isn't it. Danny possesses clairvoyance and telepathy; Wendy sees sights of perversion and death from decades before; some unseen force opens the door for Jack when he is locked in the cold store; and then, the final shot, of Jack already at the hotel fifty years before. A supernatural force that is never identified targets them for madness and death, a force never seen directly but is palpably present every moment we are in The Overlook Hotel.

True Detective season one is everything I could want from a TV show. Pitch-perfect characterisation, a discomforting atmosphere, and an aesthetic of burning brilliance. The horror element is understated enough that one could be forgiven for thinking that it's just a detective procedural, when it is in fact a rendering of the universes of Lovecraft and Ligotti. I remain convinced that Kenneth Grant's idiosyncratic occultism lurks in the background.

Stranger Things brought together many things I love: 80s nostalgia (despite my being born in the 90s), government conspiracies, autumnal visuals, synthwave, and efficient, well-paced story-telling. At time of writing, I've only seen the first episode of season two, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Briefly, a few other films I've especially enjoyed: the first two Hellraiser films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, Alien, Phase IV, The Wicker ManLifeforce, The VVitch, It Follows. Kill List is one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen, and I felt terrible about everything in general for two days afterwards.

I abhorred The Conjuring.

Readings

I came to H. P. Lovecraft via a peculiar path. In the children's section of my local library, I once found a book which presented summarised versions of three classics of literary horror, along with biographies of their authors. It had illustrations similar in style to the Horrible History books. The stories it included where Frankenstein, Dracula and The Dunwich Horror. I'm not sure I even bothered to read the first two, but the third I read and re-read. The biography it contained of this odd man I'd never heard of, and the brief sketches it included of three of his other creations (Night Gaunts, Deep Ones and, inevitably, Cthulhu) stayed with me for a long time afterwards.

But it was a few years before I actually had a chance to read any Lovecraft. In the meantime, I was satisfied by Stephen King. I've not read King for years, and I've no expectations of returning to his work any time soon, but he will always have a special place in my heart as the one who opened the way. In a charity shop, I found a paperback of Night Shift, a collection of short stories, and read it in the sun lounge of my coastal home during a summer storm. It was the perfect condition to make one's first steps into the realm of horror, even if the contents (including a story about a demonically possessed industrial clothes presser!) were, in retrospect, sub par.

When I was fourteen, the Necronomicon edition of H. P. Lovecraft's 'best weird tales' was published. I bought it on holiday in the New Forest, staying in a wood cabin with my parents. I would spend most of the day on the balcony reading about the cats of Ulthar, Sarnath's doom, and what lies within the nameless city. The smell of that book lingered in my memory for many years. I still have that same edition, ten years old now, and sometimes I bring it up to my nostrils in the hope of catching a whiff of that smell, but it has long since dissipated.

After burning my way through the Necronomicon, I can't quite recall what I read next, but presumably it included more Stephen King. The Stand was a wonderful book to read as a teenager, though I don't remember ever being unsettled by it. In retrospect, Misery is probably the best King book I've read.

I started reading horror seriously again only in the last few years. Nick Land's philosophical science fiction-horror novellas Phyl-Undhu and Chasm were, I think, where I started out from. Encountering Hexus Press via way of my involvement with Project Praeterlimina also played an important part in reacquainting me with the genre. Following my enthralment with True Detective, I bought the recent re-issue of Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. I must admit that Ligotti, despite frequent moments of chilling brilliance, tends to bore me. His prose is so baroque it often borders on the soporific, and it took me over a year to read Songs. Grimscribe remains largely unexplored, though 'Netherscurial' stands among the best horror I've read.

More recently, thanks to my good friend Lucy Brady, I've developed a deep love for the works of Laird Barron. His prose shines like well-polished metal, and he can conjure memorable, enticing, and disturbing imagery with ease. Lucy bought me Barron's collection Swift to Chase, and if you don't read anything else I mention in this post, read that.

Hearings

Music is an excellent medium for exploring horror. Metal is the genre that most readily associates itself with the themes and tropes of horror, especially black metal. But it doesn't have an exclusive claim to it.

Ambient music, to my ear at least, lends itself to the subtleties of horror quite easily. This is perhaps because, using Mark Fisher's concept of it, ambient music is part of the eerie, that is, of failures of presence and absence. Ambient music occupies the edge of hearing. It doesn't intrude into hearing directly, but rather skirts around the outside, issuing echoes of its presence rather than loud announcements.

Burial, especially with Untrue and Subtemple / Beachfires, provides a fine example of this. It is music made up of whispers and hints. Demdike Stare operate in a similar fashion, generating lengthy and complicated soundscapes that conjure images of cold forests, and the winter night-times that allow stars to shine unerringly bright. Their triple album Tryptych is as beautiful as it is unnerving.

SleepResearch_Facility are a wonderful experiment in pure ambience. Their album Stealth begins with ten minutes an almost-ultrasonic whine, underneath which one can discern the broken staccato of voices carried by radio waves. I listened to this obsessively when I first encountered it, especially at night. It is voiceless music that speaks of unseen things in the dark sky above, darting between the stars.

Less ambient and more beat-driven, Pye Corner Audio's album Sleep Games holds sacred status for me. Its deep sound and pure instrumentality combine to create music so perfect that I struggle to convey just how powerful its impact on me has been. It's music for walks along dark streets on the edge of town, for foggy mornings where sky and sea blend together.

Pye Corner Audio lead me onto the topic of the Ghost Box label more broadly. Ghost Box combines nostalgia, a distinct visual style (both books and records can be judged by their covers), and a keen ear for musical elegance, and has published a truly excellent catalogue of music. Although the music doesn't have any overt horror elements, the manner with which it summons up an air of sheer uneasiness, of a haunting, guarantees it a place here. Belbury Poly's albums The Willows and The Belbury Tales, and The Advisory Circle's albums As the Crow Flies and especially From Out Here are the best examples of this.

Answerings

What brings all of the above together?

It should be obvious that the lack of particularly blood-thirsty horror is significant. I've selected media which emphasises atmosphere, aesthetic, ambience, horror that gets into your head through more subtle and nuanced means than butchery and gore.

Why do I like this stuff? 

For me, horror is the implication of a beyond, an outside. It is the implication that there are things that lie beyond seeing and hearing, that there are shapes that lurk outside our familiar and tidy world. Their nature is, by necessity, unknown to us. Noumenal, we know only of their presence, and can perhaps trace their shape by studying their effects. Intrusions, corruptions, perversions announce the presence of these unknowable things, but give us little with which to work.

This need not be taken as a source of horror. The unknown is precisely that: unknown. What draws me to horror is simply this unknowability of the unknown, of a great Otherness that lies outside our reach. In that Otherness lies the possibility not only of horror, but of wonder.



Thursday 12 October 2017

Blade Runner 2049: Cyberpositive Disruption

Spoilers, obviously


Blade Runner 2049 is as good as they say it is. If you've not seen it, go see it, immediately, and don't read further until you have.

This is going to be less a review than a series of meditations on the themes in the film, along with some some broader comments.

Let's get the plot out the way. K (Ryan Gosling) is a blade runner, and a replicant. The newer models, no longer curtailed by the four-year life span of the Nexus 6 (it was never clearly established if that life span was deliberate or not), have been integrated into society, with deeply programmed obedience. He hunts the old models, less advanced than he, more advanced than the Nexus 6. The opening scene will be familiar to anyone who's seen Dangerous Days; he's tracked an old model replicant to a protein farm in the bleak wilds of California, nested among the solar energy plants. He retires the replicant, and discovers the bones of a female replicant who, impossibly, died in child birth. 

Replicants are now produced by the Wallace Coporation; Tyrell is bankrupt. Wallace's pyramid looms over the Tyrell pyramids. Unlike those, which blazed with light in the original, the Wallace pyramid is dark, monolithic, its surface unbroken by windows -- Wallace (Jared Leto) is blind, after all. Frustrated at the slow pace of replicant production, Wallace desires the replicant-child for himself, so as to grant replicants the ability to reproduce among themselves -- auto-production of the bio-engineered slave caste. His reasoning is pure humanist triumphalism, that with an inexhaustible and perfectly obedient slave force at their disposal, humanity might storm the heavens and reclaim Eden. Religious symbolism afoot, dense with Cosmism.

Apparently unbeknown to Wallace, a revolutionary movement among the replicants in fact already posses the child, and shall use her (it is implied for much of the film that K is the replicant-child, but it's revealed that this isn't the case) to raise the consciousness of the replicants into open rebellion -- replicant auto-production transformed into self-determined emancipation -- 'More human than human' indeed.

There's a lot for fans of the original film to enjoy. The references to the original are handled gracefully, respectfully. BR2049 is the logical consequence of what we see in the first film: environmental degradation, militarised policing, collapse of the state/capital distinction, mega-architecture, mass demographic blending, street-level commodity biotech, etc., etc. When it comes to the tech, the advances are in line with the aesthetics of the original (especially the photo analysis scene and the Voight-Kampff test) -- cyberpunk rendered analogue. A data reader has levers, gears; it whirrs and clunks. Lenses audibly flitter. This is justified by an almost-total digital data loss between '19 and '49 (the Blackout), a perfect narrative conceit -- the recent, digitised past is not only another country, it's a lost continent, informational Lemuria. Data has reverted to physicality. 

But this isn't our future, not our 2049. It's the future of the 2019 we saw in the original. It's a future where the early 21st century established off-world colonies; a holographic ballerina is circled by a ring of text, 'Product of CCCP'. Alternative futurism.

Nick Land's 1993 essay 'Machinic Desire' gazes deeply into the eyes of the original replicants and the security apparatus seeking them out.

PODS = Politically Organized Defensive Systems [...] The global human security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history. The macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside. In particular, fusion with the matrix and deletion of the human security system must be subjectivized, personalized, and restored to the macropod's individuated reproducer units as a desire to fuck the mother and kill the father. [p. 320]

The replicants are a threat to the human security system in that they've not been installed with Oedipal control software. They are '[d]eadly orphans from beyond reproduction' [p. 319] that do not pass by way of the inside. Their desires are alien, artificial, products of capital machinery rather than the 'natural' biological processes of reproduction and the transference of social norms and mores -- Oedipal control software. BR2049 takes this and runs with it -- replicant social integration is accomplished by the open implantation of synthetic memory, countering the empathy deficiency that made the Nexus 6 models so volatile.

Land's macropod is a cybernetic negative feedback loop which always reverts to zero -- equilibrium -- homeostasis -- base-line. When K returns from a mission, he is put through a slicked down and hyper-efficient version of the Voight-Kampff test to ensure his emotional state has returned to base-line, i.e. he has been reset to zero, and is thus 'stable'. The macropod relies on negative feedback functions, in that negative feedback maintains the social order, keeps the system in balance, preserves law, order, hierarchy, etc. K's boss instructs him that replicant auto-production is unacceptable; it crumbles the walls, hierarchies, repressive mechanisms that maintain macropod homeostasis.

The integration of the replicants into the macropod is predicated on the macropod still maintaining homeostasis -- replicant auto-production jeopardises this. By gaining the ability to self-direct their reproduction, the replicants seek to jettison themselves from the macropod in a blaze of positive feedback: shattering pre-existing social structures, obliterating the human security system and launching themselves into inhuman sexuality.

'Machinic processes are either cyberpositive-nomadic, with a deterritorializing outcome, or cybernegative-sedentary, with a reterritorializing outcome.' [p. 330] Replicant auto-production still runs the risk of being utilised by the macropod (Wallace's dream of storming the heavens) for the continuation/perpetuation of the prior order; if allowed to spin out of control, however, replicant auto-production would do the opposite of this, a hundred replicant flowers blooming in a creative chaos of runaway processes.

The great question at the heart of the original: is Deckard a replicant? We are not given an answer in BR2049, wisely. It is left ambiguous if the replicant-pregnancy (it was Rachael that fell pregnant with Deckard's child) was human/replicant or replicant/replicant, if it was pure replicant self-production, or the illicit transfer of human genetic material into an inhuman receptor. Either way, the macropod's security algorithms are thrown out of whack, perhaps permanently.

Artificial life finds a way.