The Witness of the Martyrs (Spoilers Ahead)

Even the most jaded of horror aficionados may find Pascal Laughier's "Martyrs" difficult to endure. Many critics have jumped on the bandwagon, lauding the film as a truly revolutionary piece of work that transcends the genre. It's true, this one cannot be relegated to the same torture trash-heap as such notable shockers as "Saw," or Eli Roth's alarminginly brainless "Hostel" films. If anything, these features prove that you can make a franchise out of other people's misery. But we already knew that. Ever watch an episode of Survivor or Mtv's the Real World (which is about as in touch with reality as "Puppet Master")?
"Martyrs" opens with a young girl escaping from captivity and follows her subsequent recovery. While at an orphanage she bonds deeply with another young girl, whose love stretches somewhat beyond the merely platonic. Hell-bent on revenge, the former-captive locates the perpetrators of the crimes from which she has been recovering her whole life. After she systematically slaughters an entire family, their house turns out to be an intricate maze of torture. The film is a slow and harrowing experience to watch. There's not a shred of humor to soften any of the atrocities that fill each frame, and if you're anything like me, you'll find yourself hitting the fast-forward button more than once. . .
But what makes "Martyrs" compelling is the conclusion, which I'm guessing, you will not see coming. You see, the organization responsible for the systematic torture of women is not seeking titillation of any kind. The torture runs the gamut of the cruelty spectrum, incorporating nearly every feasible assault on the nerves, excepting rape or any form of sexual torture. This organization is harvesting women for systematic torture in order to conclude whether there is an after-life. According to the head of this sect, women are more likely to give themselves up to martyrdom.
Amid the nihilism of the film, this striving for the transcendent is both tragic and perverse. On the one hand, the film seems to be a pastiche of the world's moral bankruptcy. But this reaching for heaven through brutal torture seems to hit on a number of existential themes that have recently become all too real. In the wake of atrocities carried out in the name of religion, and of acts of voluntary martyrdom, Laughier's bleak vision carries more weight than I'm comfortable with.
Moreover, violence takes on a sacramental role here. Grace seems to be imparted in the ever-reddening episodes of the film, transporting the characters beyond their dire circumstances to something that just might save them. One wonders if the executioner's of the past ever caught a glimpse of something heavenly in the eyes of those that have died for a cause they deem to be sacred. The character's suffering becomes a right of passage, making them superior according to their tormentors.
Finally, they are seen as witnesses of the after-life. This agency is hungry for whatever vision has given them solace in the midst of such suffering. In stages, all shelter is torn from the victim, even their skin.
Consider yourself warned. By the end of the film, the character's face is the only skin remaining on her body, and though I find the ideas of the film compelling, they are not enough to outweigh the intense cruelty therein.

A Modest Plea to Publishers

Steven Millhauser's first novel, "Portrait of a Romantic," is now out of print; a fact that should have literary scholars hammering their fists against the doors of publishers nation-wide. I can't illustrate with enough gravity what a tragedy this is.
Set in Millhauser's native Connecticut, we follow the life of Arthur Grumm, a self-professed, disenchanted romantic. For Arthur, the world is a perpetual bore, rarely yielding more than a passing, or mysterious glimpse of the ecstasy and exaltation he so fervently craves. He is not a particularly compelling character. In fact, he does very little throughout the course of the book. Yearning seems to constitute his sole enterprise. But what drives the novel is a mysterious sense of nostalgia and the inevitable promise of tragedy. Nostalgia because Arthur vividly evokes the immense desires of childhood and the disproportionately small world that he inhabits. The theme of suicide emerges immediately, and the entire novel is pervaded by a sepulchral sense of death and decay.
The few friends that Arthur manages to make throughout the narrative are as strange as the story itself. All three share a peculiar morbidity and Arthur never manages to escape the shadow that this casts over his life.
The prose is filled with Millhauser's trademark precision and acute attention to detail. The scenes of the book are so vivid that they come across as vignettes rather than paragraphs, images on a screen, rather than a collection of words assembled for the laborious task of reading from left to right . Some now-familiar themes emerge in the story: uncanny, life-like toys, board games, the enchanting night and the spell of the moon.
Again, not too much happens throughout the story. "Portrait of a Romantic" is not so much about events as it is about the passage of youth itself. Moreover, moments become more important than events. Millhauser seems to truly relish all of the smallest details that would commonly be consigned to the mundane by most. But like the stories of the late John Updike, one of the unspoken themes of this little gem seems to be that there is no such thing as the mundane. Personally, I found myself rushing home after work every night to return to Millhauser's sad and delicate world, turning the pages rapidly, always awaiting some revelation that would fix this sad Werther of the 1970s.
That said, we need to see this in print again. It is one of those few books that occupies a position of unquestionable importance, without providing an immediate answer as to why.

The Gift of Protestantism

The following provides an explanation for my sustained absence on this blog.
I recently wrote a paper dealing with the place of aesthetics within the Protestant sect, or, to put it more succinctly, whether beauty should occupy any position in our theology. Since the paper comprises approximately forty pages, this will be an admittedly threadbare presentation of its basic content.
I begin with the sentence: "At present, regarding the arts, the Protestant church has taught us to proceed with caution, but it has not taught us how to proceed." Thus begins my basic contention, and this is in no way an original grievance. Donald Williams, the head of the humanities department at my college, has long decried the absence of any formal definition or approximation of a definition, in virtually all Protestant systematic theologies.
First, we must note that this has not been the case historically. Sir Philip Sidney's "Defense of Poecy" set out to appropriate the arts and to cast them in a peculiarly Protestant light, within the confines and the context of the church no less! We may note the illustrious litany of poets and writers that fall beneath the reformed umbrella: Milton, Spenser, Herbert, Buechner, Marilyn Robinson, John Updike, Madeleine L'Engle etc. But the fact remains that the current aesthetic anxiety is a contemporary phenomenon.
Having outlined, or at least adumbrated the problem, I go on to note that Protestantism, because of Luther's explicitly text-centered (in hindsight, one is tempted to say logocentric) approach, was left particularly susceptible to the hyper-rational subversion of modernism. The reader became textually transfixed and after the Barthian flight from natural theology, nothing remained but the text. Of course, these are generalization, but they are developed at greater length in the paper. To add to the list of grievances, I have hijacked the work of greater men and put it to use in my peculiar program. Specifically, George Steiner's notion of "real presences." At the hight of our textual criticism, the criticism itself becomes the endeavor; commentaries beget commentaries, and unfortunately, scholars beget scholars, and the true author, the "real presence" becomes peripheral, little more than a footnote. This unrestrained reductionism culminates with Bultmann's explicit statement that "beauty occupies no place in theology." This is because Bultmann has discerned that beauty resists reduction. In fact, beauty cannot be tortured into any metaphysical scheme or any recondite system. Its objectivity is unquestionable, but it remains outside of our ideological scaffolding. For a brilliant treatment of this issue, see David Bentley Hart's "The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth."
Because Protestantism has been infiltrated by this logocentrism, aesthetic asceticism abounds. We abstain--indeed we starve ourselves--and make a virtue of it, delineate the contours of our theology through suffering.
I argue in the conclusion that the specific gift of Protestantism is an art that offers a glimpse into creation that does not ignore its falleness. I argue that we must wed the callous catalog of depravity that is Ivan Karamazov with Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith. What emerges is a bruised art that portrays a relentless reconciliation whose vigor and ferocity knows no bounds. Sometimes the only proper reaction to this reconciliation is to remain disconsolate, but there is an undeniable futurity in Protestant art. We will not grasp true beauty until Christ returns to make all things new.
Admittedly, I have omitted some of my more original findings in fear of hijackers like myself, with programs of their own.

"Where are they now?"

But they keep coming back... Fiedler's ego-centric, forensic foray into freakdom is not the only instance of an individual identifying with sideshow performers. This is the other extreme that characterizes our reaction to these "extraordinary bodies."
On the one hand, there is an outright rejection and on the other, a sort of whimsical self-identification. The line between the spectator and the spectacle has completely collapsed in this age of the self. Rachel Adams is quick to point out that we must not view Freaks in symbolic terms. To do so is to relegate them to a conceptual prison in which their actual personhood and humanity will remain encumbered.
We may delude ourselves and think that tolerance has finally won out. True, there are no longer any Ota Bengas languishing behind the bars of the Bronx zoo. Those who were formerly called Freaks now refer to their craft affectionately as "performance art." It's how Jennifer Miller makes her living. She has freely chosen to make a spectacle of herself and to use the stage as a platform for feminism and education. We no longer learn from Freaks; Freaks teach us.
However, our ambivalence still gets the best of us. Deformed people are simply consigned to a different category: the handicapped, the disabled, the challenged. We often have similar views of older people who are now invalids. They are left by family members to the care of strangers in "convalescent" homes--a euphemism if ever there was one. In fact, we have specialized programs, institutions, terminology, and conduct for nearly every kind of biological and mental deviancy, and all of them are ingeniously designed and conceived to keep them out of sight and out of mind, or at least to keep them in their place. . .
We have yet to relinquish our symbols.

Freaks Part 1: Myths or Monsters?

There are a handful of scholars that would situate the freakshow at the apex of American culture. Some cogent objections may be raised, but I think it safe to say that anyone happening upon this blog will have some sense of what both a freak and a freakshow is. It's a word that seems intrinsic to our language. As Rachel Adams has said, "freaks keep coming back." But just what is it that makes this malformed and marginalized group so fascinating? They haunt our fiction. Writers as diverse as Carson McCullers (The Member of the Wedding) and Charles Dickens (The Old Curiosity Shop) made room for them in their prose. And who could forget Katherine Dunn's infamous love letter to miscreants, "Geek Love." Famously, they have emerged in our cinema, most notably and infamously in Tod Browning's nakedly titled "Freaks."
Freak, an undeniably pejorative title, may initially appear somewhat anachronistic. But, as the inimitable Leslie Fiedler has noted, only the word freak carries with it the whole mythology built around these, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls them, "extraordinary bodies." What mythology? For Fiedler, Freaks are the culmination of humanity, an abundance and an excess of organs, flesh and tissue that leave us with both a sense of longing and exaltation. Here we see that Fiedler has a peculiar conflict of interest that frequently interferes with his analysis. Invariably Freaks lead him down the road of introspection. It is Rachel Adams with her book Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, that presents an analysis that is both fair and balanced.
In Sideshow U.S.A., Rachel Adams notes "With its heterogeneous assemblage of bodies, the sideshow platform is both a source of entertainment and a stage for playing out many of the century's most charged social and political controversies, such as debates about race and empire, immigration, relations among the sexes, tastes, and community standards of decency." Such a sweeping statement covers considerable sociological territory. But here we catch a glimpse of the freakshow's role in mediating between those who establish and conform to the social mores of the times and those that stand distinctly outside of those standards. Initially, it was necessary to emphasize the "otherness" of the performers to assure the audience that it in no way resembled the travesties before it. But interaction between the audience and freaks often ensues and this inevitably serves to collapse the boundary set between the two. Acknowledging the performer is, after all, a form of affirmation. At the very least, it demonstrates that you think the freak capable of entering into discourse with you.
Perhaps a big reason why the history of freaks flies under the radar is that it constitutes another piece of the nation's "dirty laundry." As late as 1906, an african pygmy named Ota Benga was presented as the missing link between man and ape and was housed in a cage with an orangutan in the Bronx zoo (Adams 31-32). Certainly, this is one among many such sordid tales. Tragically, Ota Benga's life ended in suicide. Exploitation plays one of the most integral roles in the history of freaks in general.
Freakshows certainly play a pivotal role in illustrating our ambivalence towards "otherness" and ambiguity. Yet, it is the spectacle of the whole affair that has resonated throughout the various mediums of our culture. On television we are confronted with shows that bear a close resemblance to their circus counterparts. But for the heartbroken Fiedler they represent an irreversible schism, "But the loss of the old confrontation in the flesh implies a trauma as irreparable as the one caused by the passage of the dialog between king and fool from the court to the stage."
But have they really gone?
More to follow. . .

Millhauser's Latest

There is a remarkable consistency to Steven Millhauser's short stories. Critics seem unanimous on the fact that the thread running through these manifold missives is a phenomenal clarity. Indeed, Millhauser's world is rendered with such acute precision that at times, he seems more scientist than author. Look no further than "A Game of Clue." The story is an elaborate parallel between two worlds. The one involves the group gathered around the board game, and the other, the characters within the game. Throughout the story, the narrator transports the reader seamlessly from world to world, the focal point of the story being the board game itself, for it is the gateway that allows access to both worlds, and it is no surprise that Millhauser describes the game as if it were an organism, noting its many cracks, those portions that are now attached with adhesive, and the cards that have been lost and replaced with those of a poker deck. In a sense, the game is one of the characters; it is the mediator between the two worlds. Adding to these layers are the inner worlds of each of the characters, which play out respectively throughout the story. So, the line between object and observer becomes blurred and what emerges is a world where everything is potentially animate.
And this is so in "The Invasion from Outer Space," Millhauser's latest story to appear in the Feb. 9 & 16 edition of the New Yorker. The name itself is a cliche, and it is ideal for Millhauser's purposes. Because this title carries certain connotations, namely vignettes of poorly executed scifi films like "It, the Terror from Outer Space," or "Attack of the Saucer-Men," it allows the author to pull the rug out from under our feet. No green men enter the picture, no flying saucers descend from the heavens, no sinister plan to enslave the human race, no communist undertones, just a purposeless yellow substance, with the consistency of dust, that covers everything and reproduces rapidly through binary fission.
We feel somewhat disappointed and this is the point. And here we come upon a theme quite dear to Millhauser's heart. Namely, the demand for spectacle. We've seen it before, most notably in the "Knife Thrower," and "Paradise Park." Consider the following lines from the present tale: "We had wanted blood, crushed bones, howls of agony. We had wanted buildings crumbling onto streets, cars bursting into flame." But all that has happened is the arrival of an anonymous empty specimen; "We have been invaded by nothing, by emptiness, by inanimate dust." And somehow, even mass-murder and carnage is preferable to this mysterious lifeless powder.
If you've ever read Millhauser you'll no doubt recall his rather ominous invocation of the plural pronoun, his use of "we." In a fascinating interview the author shared a few thoughts on the matter, "What interests me is the way moral indecisiveness or questioning may be given more weight or significance by attaching itself to a multiple being. A single narrator might have multiple interpretations of an event, or might try to evade moral choice in numerous ways, but the same kind of uncertainty in an entire community becomes public, societal, even political, and carries a different weight." In other words, "we" are all indicted. These stories remind us of our own all-too-human bloodlust. This hunger permeates Hollywood and even primetime. From Jerry Springer to Nip Tuck, our insatiable appetite for spectacle seems to be rivaled only by our need to placate this desire by adding to it ourselves, to throw ourselves to the dramatic wolves.
"Invasion from Outer Space" may not frighten on a visceral level, but it will leave a definite sense of foreboding in the heart of anyone who's ever slowed down at the scene of an accident.. .

On the Efficacy of this Blog

I fit the description of Flannery O' Connor's "displaced person" with one qualification, I'm Austrian. My family moved to America in the summer of 1998. This fact has afforded me, as is the case with most immigrants, a peculiar vantage point into American culture. To be sure, I'm not exempt from the many human social conventions that commonly pull the wool over our eyes, but I move amidst a people with whom I share very little in the way of values. True, if pressed we will all answer to the same needs: love, acceptance, personal freedom etc. But my private life, my inner world, those thoughts and compulsions that shape my endeavors most deeply, I guard as though they had immeasurable value. This, my intangible property—a pastiche of ideas, values, and tastes that are, on a graded scale of utility, useless—still has the quality of being irrevocably mine, and I like that.
But here people seem to flaunt whatever runs through their fevered psyches as though it were some strange currency. We all trade confessions and thus validate our existence. Whatever earns the most pronounced reaction is of highest value. If you've got a skeleton in your closet, put a hat on it and hurl it at an audience. It seems strange that this kind of narcissism masquerades as honesty. As if proclaiming to the world through a loudspeaker that you have syphilis, enjoy child pornography, and like to "rip the legs off of spiders" somehow elevates you to a seat of moral grandeur.
My initial posts will concern what I believe to be at the root of this phenomenon. These are the thoughts of a layman and I do not claim the credence of an expert. Little of what you see here will be original and I will try as best I can to render credit where credit is due, though it is of little interest to me whether my thoughts overlap those of greater men. Suffice it to say, the thinkers that have exercised the greatest influence on me are, in order of ascending social deviancy: Soren Kierkegaard, Hans Urs von Balthasar,Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Flannery O' Connor, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and Leslie Fiedler.
More to follow...