Artist's Statement

I did a project in which I taught a theory unit to my advanced class.  I had to write an artists statement to explain my purpose.  So here it is.

It is a foolish endeavor to try and teach children without morality.  Often, in academic settings we eschew morality in favor of objectivity.  Seen as incompatible with the academic nature of the educational system, morality is relegated to the family and the religious institutions.  It is well documented that morals were taught in school for hundreds of years and modern separation of morals and education is just that: modern.    When morality was given over to the religious types and parents, education robbed itself of its most powerful weapon.  That weapon, Morality is closely connected with the very human sense of justice.  What is right and wrong is the same as what is just and what is unjust.  By divorcing morality from education we have also severed ties with a sense of justice.  Many have spent the last century chasing after what is just.  Materialists like Marx are just as guilty as any.  By identifying inconsistencies and injustices in the market, Marx is making a value judgement.  The exploitation of the worker by the bourgeoisie is unjust.  This making of the value judgement is found in almost all theories.  The critical theorists, political economist, cultural theorists, Gender studies, Post-colonialism, postmodernism; they are all looking at injustice.  Whether it is the oppression of the colonized people, or misogyny, or coercing people into a hyperreality, various theorists are identifying a universal definition of justice: that exerting one’s will over another is unjust.  It is wrong.  It is not Moral. It is, though this is anathema to say so, a sin.

Unfortunately, in public education we have fallen off of both sides of the boat.  We refuse to teach morality because of the perceived religious implications and we avoid teaching gender theory, post-colonialism, etc. because of their political association.  So what to we teach?  We teach the bare facts (so-called, as it is virtually impossible in a history course).   We teach purely academics.  In math there are no moral implications.  There is no justice in physics.  English classes sap the sense of justice from any text by focusing on grammar, syntax, personification, metaphor, and the 5-paragraph-essay.  In music it is about vocal support, rhythm, dynamic, and pitch.  In dance it is about steps, technique, and movement.  Even in theatre we focus on vocal production, diction, objectives, tactics, motivations, tableaux, blocking, and any other thing but avoid the truth that is in any discipline, the justice, the morality.

As one who teaches. I find that there must be a balance.  I cannot change the world, I likely cannot even change the school culture.  But I can change what I do.  I can look for ways to teach justice and injustice to my students, and thereby teach morality.  In public school I am forbidden to teach from religious sources (ill-defined) but I can look to academic sources.  I can look to those men and women who have defined and responded to the various injustices of life.  I can teach from Mulvey, Irigaray, Sartre, Marx, Bhaba, and Baudrillard.  I can look at the way that these women and men faced the oppression of their era and devised a means of identifying and navigating that injustice.

In that sense I am interested in teaching students about these theories and how to apply them in their own individual lives.  Many of my students are hooked and signed it at all times.  These are kids who go to the movies several times a month, watch TV several times a year, and view videos on the internet several times a day.  Media is woven into the fabric of their lives.  It is their lives.  So I look at these critical theories and I look at the media and I try to make the two converge in a way that with have a moral outcome with my students, so that they can identify and navigate the oppressive forces that they come to.  I believe that much of media, and particularly narrative media (films, TV shows, etc.) are teaching tools.  They can, when approached with the proper mindset, open visions of the world as is and as it could be.  When asked if life imitates art or art imitates life, I say both.  That is verily true.  

So I have by way of the adjoined lessons created a plan to teach these moral principles to my students.  I want them to be able to identify injustice in the world through media and injustice in media.  I have found in my study of Roland Barthes’ work that there are Myths; second order semiological systems that co-opt  the familiar and use it to promulgate false or oppressive ideology.  When Barthes discusses myth, he uses static visual signs.  While I certainly don’t disagree that those signs are effective, I find them inadequate in the media saturated world of my students.  In narrative media, thousands of images are played and as a result, there exists a plethora of potential second order semiological systems.  If a picture is worth a thousand words a film is worth millions.  So I have determined there are certain aspects of the form of film that are worth discussing in association with Myth.

In Mulvey’s groundbreaking work Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema she identifies a nearly universal mode of representation that promotes an oppressive ideology.  She identifies what she calls the Gaze that is the way in which spectator’s view the film.  Through a simple editing technique called “shot/reverse shot” a single character shows their power over another character.  The eye moves from left to right across the screen and the character whose eyes look in that direction has power over the character(s) whose eyes look contrary.  This is called the “look”.  He who possesses the look is the subject, the active driver of the plot, he who holds the power.  This represents a form of oppression, an injustice.  Since film is a man’s medium, the look is given to men.  Man is the subject and woman is by default the object.  The object is to be taken or destroyed by the subject.  The man is oppressive by his look to the woman.  

This then connects with the audience.  The audience can interact with the film in two ways.  They can posses the look themselves by gazing at the characters on screen directly.  In this sense the woman becomes a fetish, whose body is looked at with scopophilic desire.  Since she cannot be taken or destroyed by the audience in this way, she becomes part of the spectacle.  Her body is to be looked at.  She is object to the audience’s subject.  The second means is when the audience looks with the subject.  The subject becomes proxy for the audience and the spectator’s see themselves in the film as the subject.  This way the audience is able to look with, and be active, and have the opportunity to take or destroy the object.

This all works to create a myth.  Instead of the sign simply representing two people talking, and maybe one having power, it tells us an ought.  Myths define values, the values of a false ideology.  So this use of the form of shot/reverse shot supports the look which then connects to the myth that men ought to take or destroy a woman.  That women are by definition passive and fetish.  This is powerful because the film, as a sequence of millions of images; as a collection of hundreds of narcissistic and fetishised experiences, builds a wall of myth that is difficult to overcome.  Students can, however be taught to recognize the form and the myth it represents and therefore learn to combat that myth.

Edward Buscombe discusses in his work The Idea of Genre in American Cinema the concept of inner and outer form.  He argues that genres are defined by the outer form i.e. setting, costumes, tools.  I would add that certain cinematic elements are necessary as well e.g. framing, movement, angle, lighting, etc.  This outer form reveals the inner form.  The inner form is the message, theme, ideology of the film.  Genres, because of the unique outer form, talk about the same inner form.  I believe that the inner and out form can be a sort of myth.  The lighting of horror is often dark and mysterious ostensibly to convey the fear of the unknown.  But that sign can be transformed into a myth.  That myth is that death is a dark and mysterious thing that should be feared.  In this sense, genres then become a sort of repository for the mythology of our culture.  If we want to study certain myths then we look to the genres that have become their home through the outer form.

There are certain myths that become trans-generic.  These myths are often those that most strongly associate with oppression.  The myth that the nature of the woman as passive and as an object to be taken or destroyed seems to cross genre boundaries due to its being best conveyed through the form of the shot/reverse shot and the Gaze.  Since this form shows up in virtually any genre it is a myth that is trans-generic.  There are subtle novelties in the myth from genre to genre but ultimately it remains fairly stolid.  Whether it is in Star Wars (1977) when Luke saves Leia (Leia lying on the bench/Luke’s face/Leia on the bench again) or Dracula (1931) when the Count kills the poor flower girl (Dracula’s face/Flower girl/Dracula consuming the girl) the myth is the same.  Women are to be acted upon by men.  Though one is to save and the other is to destroy, the genres hold the myth, and then share it.

As a teacher I believe that I have the moral obligation to teach students to recognize this oppression, this injustice , this sin.  I cannot merely look at techniques, or skills, or analyze objectively trying to figure out what a play or film ‘means’.  I must show them that there are institutions that have a certain stake in maintaining the hegemonic structure.  These institutions use the form of film, like the shot/reverse shot, to share the mythology that maintains that structure.  The have developed genres as holding places to create the illusion of novelty so that the myth appears to be distinct, occluding it from view.  Though there be myriad myths the one that I have focussed on in my unit is related to the role of women.  Women have been oppressed by the hegemony for thousands of years.  Film has been used to maintain that by way of its myths.  

I believe that my students can understand this system of oppression.  They can once they are made aware of the system identify and navigate the myths that they face every day of their lives.  Will they stop watching? No.  I haven’t.  But they can defend themselves and perhaps even combat the myths that they see.  No child should be sent out into the world without the tools to deal with the challenges to face them.  They need to speak the language and recognize threats.  They need to know the truth and fight the lies.  They need to stand in the face of injustice and say, “I know you.  And you won’t get away with this.”  To abandon this responsibility is more than negligent.  It is unethical.  It is immoral.  It is sin.

I am a teacher of truth. I teach morality in public school.

At the end of the project they made a film representing what they had learned.  Here it is:

A Shift in Focus

Now that my two semesters of theory and history are over I am adding content to this blog relative to some of my other writings for my other courses.  First off will be my responses to films in my beloved Horror class.  So enjoy!

Me+Horror=?

I have been an avid lover of the dark and the macabre most of my life.  For as long as I can remember I have had a perhaps unnerving fascination with death, monsters, ghosts, and things phantasmagorical.  It would be no lie to say that my mother encouraged this in me.  I have a picture at home of myself at age 5 holding up a drawing I had just done of the grim reaper in his cloak moving through a forest with glowing hands.  This photograph has a caption in my mother’s hand: “Bobby is an artist!”  This was indicative of my interest.  I would often sit on my mother’s lap in church and she would show me how to draw spooky or gruesome things on the program.  My favorite is a disembodied eye-ball with the trailing retinal nerve pierced through with a nail.  I am sure that my school teacher’s worried looks came as a result of my copying my mother’s work in the margins of my worksheets.  

This fascination followed me as I grew.  I am sure that my lack of playmates at recess was due at least in part to my wandering about the schoolyard as a slobbering beast of my own design, the which had long sharp nails that folded back on hinges and stored his dagger by stabbing it into his own leg as he had no sheath.  Clearly horror would be my friend when no one else would.  I loved the old universal monster films.  My favorite was The Mummy.  I watched it over and over.  I loved it and so did my Mom.  She would tell me about going to the movies as a child and see the latest horror flick.  She often would tell me of the one movie that really scared her The Crawling Eye.  One Halloween my grandmother came to visit and had a copy of that movie that she had found in a bargain bin at Walgreen’s .  I however thought that it was cooler than scary.  

And so my love affair with horror continued until death came to visit at the age of 13.  My mother had been sick for some time and finally succumbed to cancer at the age of 40.  She left 6 boys from 4 to 16.  Horror in film took a back seat as the horror of my real life took charge.  I don’t remember watching a lot of horror through high school, though the horror in my mind did occasionally surface in macabre poetry and journal entries that garnered more worried looks from teachers.  I didn’t need to watch horror.  It was inside of me every day.  It was in that empty seat at the dinner table. It was in every coo-coo lady that tried to replace my mom. It was in the awkward silence from my peers.  I didn’t need to take it in.  I needed to get it out.

So I drew more pictures.  I drew death.  I drew violence.  I drew upon the grotesque that my mother had taught me.  My monsters became more sophisticated but had essentially the same aesthetic that was found in that crude drawing from my 5-year old self.  I took art and used that as an outlet for my internal horror.  Instead of drawing the girl lying on the bench for figure drawing, I drew her impaled with her tortured spirit  fleeing the corpse.  Instead of drawing the forced 2 point perspective of our school building, I drew it collapsing and burning with the flaming corpses of the students lying in a heap.  I drew decapitation, evisceration, dismemberment, combustion, disintegration.  The common theme was death.  I was less interested in monsters and more in the horror of the end.

Gradually I left that behind.  I became interested in Theatre.  Death followed me there.  No longer were monsters present, nor was death a gory splatter; it was the quiet real death of Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables or Eugene’s older brother in Look Homeward, Angel.  It became more like the real death that I saw and less like  the horror I felt inside.  This also gave me the opportunity for real friends.  Drama students are great that way.  They accept you precisely because you are kind of freaky instead of in spite of being so.  So they helped fill that void in my life.  Eventually, time faded the sharp pangs of death and horror that I felt and I became a successful, contributing member of society.  I became a drama teacher and dove into the myriad possibilities of my career.  I bought a home.  I had a family.  But time, I learned, does not cure the pain, I just covers it with more stuff, more life, more busy-ness.

Around age 30 I found that I still had problems.  The beast had slumbered long enough and was ready to come out.  I became afraid again.  The funny thing about the monsters and horror of my childhood was that I loved it and I was scared.  I loved it until I woke up at 3:00 am thinking that a giant tongue was going to come out of my closet and suck me in.  Then I was afraid.  In my thirties I became afraid in the day.  Death took my mom.  He could also take me.  I was scared of that.  So, I had horror in my life.  I didn’t need horror movies.  I was scared enough.

There were a few exceptions.  I loved zombies.  I was fascinated by the things that they could represent.  I was intrigued by connections between the work of George A. Romero and the likes of Brecht or Marx.  I was fascinated by how people trapped in a mall with zombies could have so much in common with two men waiting by a tree for some guy named Godot.  Maybe the distance between the Undead and    Hamlet was far less then I thought.  This was a ticket in.  If there was a place for zombies in my theatrical study and praxis, then maybe there was room for something else.  I was given a Film class to teach at the high school and once semester I had a few weeks left for a unit so I taught horror.  I went back to my childhood.  We watched Dracula and Frankenstein.  We watched King Kong and the delightful House of Wax.  I realized something as I took my students through those films: there was a catharsis for me.  Not only did it connect me with my memories of my mom, but it helped me to accept death, to see it as something that happens to all.

So I became a lay student of horror.  I would read about it when I could, to see what other writers were saying about the genre.  I watched what I could (which wasn’t much as my family are no fans of the genre).  I found that it was a rich genre of meaning for me.  I still liked scary movies, and monsters, and, honestly, death.  How could I?  I hated death.  Death stole my mother and would eventually steal me.  What could he possibly have to offer me?

So I wrote a play.  It was about a youngish married man whose best friend is death.  Only he sees death and it is unclear if death is real or imaginary (which doesn’t really matter anyway).  The mostly sit and chat about movies and music, but they never talk about why death is really there, why he took the protagonists mom. These scenes are interspersed with classic poems about death and scenes that ape portrayals of death in the media (zombie films, police procedurals, Tarantino, etc.)  The play ends with a replaying of the death of the protagonists mother and the protagonist taking out his revenge on death.  The play helped me to understand my experience with death and by extension, horror.  The fictional portrayal of death is a way of coping but not really dealing with death.  Or perhaps better, it is a bridge to healing.  Sometimes the horror of death is too real for the mind to deal with.  Sometimes the terror of loneliness cause by death is too hard.  Horror helps to cross that gap by giving us a false representation to grab onto until we can reach the real fear.  I think that is why my mom liked it too.  She also lost her father to cancer at a young age.  Her fascination with horror and the macabre was her bridge to healing.  I think that it has been mine.

Five years ago, I would not have been able to handle a class that focused on horror, and not just the campy B-film stuff.  But my experiences of creating, writing, reading, and viewing helped me come to a place where the horror on screen connected me to reality, bridged the gap of pain to catharsis.  The films that I have viewed in my horror class have not destroyed me.  They have not numbed me to reality.  They have taken me to a place of healing and provided a connecting piece to my childhood, to my fears, to death, to my mom.  That little boy with the picture of Death never knew that his childhood fascination would end up being a doorway to survival, but sometimes the surest path to change is what looks the most dangerous and destructive.  The fear and dread of horror can lead us to seek for connection and love; for hope and healing; for eternity.

Personal Narrative and Personal Experience: The Nexus of Reflection

As I read Brahm Stoker’s Dracula, I was struck by many things.  First of all is its perspective of the first person.  The reflective nature of the text as a collection of letters, journal entries, transcriptions of recordings, memoranda, and minutes from meetings lends a particularly personal sense to the entire piece.  The reflective nature of the individual articulations give the reader a sense of how the characters pieced together the events of their experience.  Then, of course, each character’s experience is pieced together with the others.  This mosaic of experience lends a sense of reality to the text, or  at least, believability.  This is a similar approach used by Max Brooks (a historian by trade) in his novel World War Z.  The oral history approach to horror makes the danger more present and more personal.  The limited view of the events gives greater threat to the villain and we as readers know no more than the protagonist(s).  This highlights the power of the unknown in the text and heightens the fear.

Fear that is personal is far more moving and motivating than that with the protective distance of the 3rd person.  I found that I became very involved in the events that effected Mina Harker. The remarkable terror of her experience with Dracula, the which is one of the most arresting moments in the book, conveys the sense of horror of the loved ones of the attacked.  This case is not told from Mina’s perspective, but by those men that love her and want to protect her.  This is akin to catching a man in the act of rape, and the victim is one’s own wife.  The horror of this moment is so resplendently described by Stoker that it is difficult to get through.  When my wife an I were first married we lived in a very unsafe apartment complex in a very unsafe part of town.  We often heard men running after each other down the hall swearing and threatening.  A man was found bloodied on the doorstep.  A woman stopped us before entering our apartment to warn us that a rapist was going around and had already raped 3 girls.  Also, on one occasion we locked ourselves out of our apartment and the neighbors were more than willing to show us the ‘tricks’ to get into any of the apartments in the building.  Needless to say, I was terrified of any time I had to leave my wife alone, even if it was only to take out the trash.  I would often have horrifying visions of opening the door to my apartment only to find someone attacking my beloved. The clear description of Dracula grasping Mina’s wrists and forcing her lips to his bleeding chest hearkens so clearly to rape and my own fears that I found myself leaping through the pages to the rescue.  I continue to have these fears as I now have children, 3 of which are girls.  Knowing that a man in a grey Grand Prix was recently driving through my neighborhood after school trying to pick up kids doesn’t make things any easier.

Aside from the very personal fear of these vampires coming after those I love, I found the final chapters of the book, that describe in languid detail the travel to the castle of Dracula, personal and destructive.  Mina’s slow transformation into a Vampire reminded me of the slow and unstoppable consumption of cancer.  My mother was diagnosed with a fairly aggressive cancer at age 38.  I was 11 at the time.  Over the next two years she underwent surgery which removed 2/3 of her colon, part of her stomach, and her uterus and ovaries.  She reported for chemotherapy every 2 weeks.  The first few days after chemo were the worst and she could hardly get out of bed. Gradually she would feel better until she had to go back again.  This experience seemed like unto what is described with Mina.  She grows pale and ill and the men worry over her, then one day she seems cheerful and back to normal.  The cheer is always with the dread of what is to come.  As they draw closer to the mountains Mina grows worse.  She sleeps most of the time and when she is awake is not entirely herself.  The treatments that they perform on her (hypnosis) grow more and more ineffective.  As my mother drew towards the end of her life she spent more of her life asleep.  The chemo was deemed ineffective and she was taken off and put on hospice care.  It seemed to me that she was away more than she was here.    When she was awake she did not entirely seem herself.  She grew pale and thin and rarely talked and when she did, she did so in a far away voice like from a television in another part of the house.  

The difference between Mina and my Mother is that for Mina there was hope.  It was just a matter of time.  But for my mother, eventually there was no hope.  It was just a matter of time.  So in this case the reflective, personal nature of the narrative combined with the personal experience of mine reflected in the text.  This made for a powerful cathartic experience, yet also incredibly difficult.  So, in a sense, Mina never was in danger of becoming a vampire, she always had a reflection.

Castrated Form and Anxiety in Woyczek

I was first introduced to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck as an undergraduate.  I read it for my Theatre History class and again in my Dramatic Literature class.  For the second class, I had the opportunity to perform a severely truncated version of the script, looking at the text through psychoanalysis.  This performance emphasized the use of the phallus.  Also, during my undergraduate studies I was asked by a friend to be in his Mask Club production of Woyzeck to replace an actor who quit.  His production, his own translation, emphasized the terror and anxiety of mental illness.  As I was reading this play again for this course, I was struck by the anxious state of the text.  Since the play is a cobbling together of remnants found among Büchner’s notes and papers it has a decidedly non-linear structure.  The scenes are fragments pieced together in whatever way the translator deems fit.  This non-linear structure hearkens to both previous incarnations of the production in which I was involved.  The two types of anxiety represented in those productions, castration anxiety and mental illness (most likely schizophrenia), become one in the chaotic non-linear structure of the play.

Linear narratives are the mediated form of the phallus.  The structured form, indicated by a clear beginning middle and end, or more accurately exposition-inciting incident-rising action-climax-resolution, that moves in one direction, are indicative of patriarchy, the hegemonic system of oppression of women.  So the traditional structure of the narrative is an extension of the patriarchy in its rules and organization and in its very form, as a phallus.  The structure of Büchner’s piece is far from linear.  Even when translators foolishly attempt to force it into a linear structure by “ordering” the scenes, it is full of gaps, spaces, and jumps.  This irregular structure could be viewed as representing our titular Woyzeck’s own madness. In another way it represents a subversion of the patriarchy and, thereby, a castration of the male form. 

With regards to the patriarchy, the play has no numbered scenes (though the translation I read had numbers) and many scenes seem to start in the middle somewhere.  Even in the order that I read, the scenes did not seem to follow a narrative.  If anything, they were episodic, like theatrical Expressionism, being a collection of scenes as incidents in a characters life, but lacking the cause and effect relationship of “one thing led to another” necessary for linear structure.  The canon of theatrical literature, particularly from the 1830’s, does not include narratives of this type.  It is subverting the system, creating a mania that cannot be resolved, only accepted.  This system is often associated with the patriarchy.  Helene Cixous called for an “écriture femenine” in response to the maculinized theatrical form, which includes the linear structure.  This approach appropriates non-linear forms under the umbrella of feminized writing and in that way, Woyzeck is structurally a feminine piece.  It tears down the patriarchal demand for linear structure and replaces it with this hysterical

 form.  This subverting of the Hegemonic system is a source of anxiety for those in power.  The entire purpose of creating a codified system is to maintain power.  This de-masculinization of the linear structure attacks that power and strikes fear into the hearts of men.

Freud speaks of much of the anxiety (if not all) as being related to the fear of castration.  Men fear the loss of the phallus and approach the threat of castration by either destroying the threat, oppressing it, or subsuming it.  A woman represents the threat of castration since the phallus is replaced by what Mulvey in her 1975 work Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema calls “the bloody wound”.  In the case of Woyzeck, the phallic form of linear structure is castrated and we are left with the bloody wound of its chaotic episodic structure.  This absence reminds the man of the castrated phallus and fills him with anxiety.  The play makes him afraid, less-so for the content (albeit terrifying) but for the form which becomes a sign marking absence, absence of the phallus.

Ultimately Woyzeck is a truly terrifying work.  It taps into that anxiety of loss of the phallus and also the loss of the power structure in the patriarchy by way of its hysterical and emasculated form.  Perhaps there is something to be learned from this.  Perhaps modern horror would be more successful with our desensitized audiences by castrating the form instead of upping the gore or skin (which Mulvey would argue perpetuates the male gaze, what with the fetishism and all).  The gore of the castrated form might however be too much to be profitable and would alienate male clientele.  Needless to say, there is much to be learned about the nature of horror from a mass of shuffled papers discovered in a desk drawer in the early 1800s.

We Made this Monster: Colonialism in Frankenstein

It is no surprise that Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein  begins with an expedition into a dangerous and unknown place.  The concept of the enlightened white man conquering the dangerous wild was a commonplace idea around the turn of the 18th century.  The notion that we are to conquer the other is a theme that plays itself out in Shelley’s novel.  More specifically, in this colonialist system other nations and cultures outside of the western european culture are deemed inferior and in dire need of colonization.  Indeed they want to be colonized.  Also prevalent at this time, is the romantic notion of the noble savage, that those cultures that are less civilized and closer to nature represent a higher ideal.  The monster represents both the noble savage who should be left on his own and the inferior culture that must be colonized and civilized.  Equally the duality of his character is represented as both good and evil.  This duality of character makes him more reflective of our own selves than if he had been homogenized.

The novel is constructed of three narratives.  Walton the sea captain bookends the majority of the story with a series of letters.  Within that bookend are contained the two narratives that I will discuss here.  There exists the narrative of Frankenstein who represents the colonizer.  Within his narrative is the monster’s narrative who represents the colonized/noble savage.  In this way Shelley allows us two perspectives.  We hear Victor’s story of the creation of the monster, which is to mirror the colonization of the native people.  The monster is initially imagined to be a thing of beauty as the naive European imagines the native culture to be.  Only upon life arriving in the body of the creature does Frankenstein see horror in his creation as the European recoils from the harsh realities of difference in the new colonized culture.  Victor abandons his creation leaving it in a space that is not efficacious, a space of neither fitting in the world of the living or the dead.  This is akin to the european nations colonizing the African Continent and then after creating their monster, abandoning them to govern themselves.  Colonization changes the very nature of a culture and creates a dependency on the colonizer.  When the colonizer leaves the native culture is left changed from its origin and dependent with no one upon which to depend.

This leads us to the monster’s narrative.  When we hear his voice, we are meeting the noble savage.  His intentions are pure and his desires are honestly saintly.  He tells us of his experiences as he tries to navigate this new world, a world made ever alien by the colonizer’s presence.  His experience with the expatriates in the cottage represents a common experience for many colonized nations.  The natives see the colonizers as a source of power and attempt to adopt the ways of the colonizer.  The monster learns the language, reads the books, and learns to empathize with the french expatriates.  He looks up to them, admires them, and decides to be like them and befriend them.  In much of post-colonial literature this is called a mimic-man (some could compare it to an Uncle Tom).  The monster’s experience turns south and follows the pattern of colonialism when he makes his move to join the cottage family.  They reject him, beat him, and abandon him and their home.  Mimic-men can never truly join with the colonizers they will always be an other.

The monster cannot go back.  He has learned the language, learned the culture, and yet is still an other.  He abandons his desires to be like the colonizer and instead adapts the culture to his own use.  He uses his language to persuade Frankenstein to serve him and also to get his revenge.  Many colonized nations rebel against the colonizer, using their own tactics against them.  But this is where the monster transgresses the noble savage.  He has abandoned his pure nature and ceases to be good.  He murders and pillages.  But he is also psychologically destructive and manipulative.  His relationship to the colonizer is based upon revenge and destruction, but upon the death of his creator/colonizer he is not jubilant but mournful.  The colonized wanted to be colonized all along, and now has nostalgia for his oppression.

The duality of the creature creates an apt mirror for ourselves.  Instead of simply showing that we humans are capable of great evil, instead of saying that we are the monster, who the monster is changes.  The colonizer is the monster, the destroyer, and we are that monster, not the corrupted noble savage.  However, the narrative is ultimately told through the voice of the colonizer.  We hear the monster’s story but only as told by the colonizer to the succeeding colonizer (Walton).  So ultimately the noble savage is the vilified and the colonizer is exonerated.  So we shake our heads and cluck our tongues about the horrors of colonization, but distance ourselves by emphasizing the atrocities of retribution perpetrated by that noble savage and that is the true horror of it all.

The Horror of Survival

There is a sense of horror that comes from being left alone.  When I was in the first grade  there was a fire drill near the end of the day.  Our fire alarm sound exactly to same in my mind as the bell for the end of school.  The bell sounded and I began gathering my things.  I put on my backpack and looked up.  I saw my peers gathering at the back of the room and heading out the back door.  I thought that it was odd, but I knew what I was doing even if they were crazy.  I walked down the hall toward the front of the school and noticed that there was no one in the hall with me.  This I marked as being even more odd than that which my peers were doing when they were exiting the back of the room.  When I walked out the front door all of the busses were there but no students were anywhere to be seen, instead all of the drivers were standing in the doorways of their respective busses.  They looked at me strangely.  The world changed.  I realized that I was alone and no one was there with me.  I ran back into the school and I saw my principal.  I ran to him, wrapped my arms around his legs and buried my sobs in his ample belly.  He patted me on the head and escorted me back to my class.  The students we back in their seats and my teachers smiled at me.  “Did you think it was the end of school?” No, I thought it was the end of the world.

I felt much the same way as I watched the BBC production Threads.  There is something to being left behind.  When we live while others die, we feel a sense of loneliness and guilt.  This is often rendered horror or terror.  In Threads this is played to dramatic effect.  While the film seems to focus on many different people, Two families plus the leaders of the town in which they all live, it ends on one.  The relationships of the families are rich and unique and the end is empty as our survivor is alone.  This is the horror of survival.

Immediately after the bombing of the town, we see many of these people struggling to survive.  Ruth and her family hole up in their basement trying to subsist on what they have stored.  Jimmy is assumed dead as he was outside when the bombs struck.  His parents are trying to survive in the lean-to that they have constructed in their flat.  His mother is severely burned on one side of her body and suffering greatly.  As they try to find water and food they have a sense of hopelessness.  It is clear that they do not know why they are bothering to try to live.  Eventually she dies and he goes out in search of food and water.  Ruth leaves the shelter of her basement in search of Jimmy.  She does not find him and upon returning to her house hears the buzzing of flies in the basement and concludes that her family is dead.  

From here the film focuses on Ruth.  We see others briefly but they soon succumb.  It is clear that the only reason Ruth has for survival is for her baby.  Society has collapsed and their only purpose is to go on living.  They farm, but struggle to make it last.   We see Ruth stealing and working the black market for food.  Eventually the baby comes.  But it is not a moment of joy. It is a time filled with terror and loneliness.  She delivers alone and holds her baby as she sobs.  They are not sobs of joy, but of sorrow.  She cries because life goes on, not because it ends.

She eats rats. she labors in the fields. she steals, but it is all for naught.  Eventually she collapses in the field.  Her daughter seems unsure of what to think of her mother’s imminent death.  She only can say few words.  Notably she calls her Ruth, not Mum, and tells her that it is time to work.  Their language has degraded to mere practicality.  Ruth reaches up and grabs her daughter’s hand.  A sign of affection.  A sign that her daughter does not understand.  She dies and her daughter rummages her bedclothes for necessities and moves on.  

So Ruth survived the holocaust, but for what?  She was alone and though her daughter was with her, survival held no joy, no relationship.  Her daughter lives on and subsists without culture or family.  She makes ‘friends’ who help her steal but one is killed (whose death is hardly regarded) and then she is raped by her other ‘friend’.  She is left alone.  She lives and then feels the pains of labor.  She goes to the hospital and says, “Babby. Coming.”  She is rejected.  She is expected to deliver alone, even as her mother did.  This is a horrible prospect for her.  She does deliver in the hospital, but the silence accompanying the child's birth belies the truth of still-birth.  The child is wrapped and handed to her.  She looks on the child in horror and the shot freezes and ends.

This final shot portrays the horror of survival.  She lives but she is ultimately left alone.  There is no child to carry on.  But is that even to be desired?  Humanity lives, but all is lost.  TO what end do they survive?  For what purpose is it to live, when all hope for meaningful relationship is lost.  The humans are together, but they are alone.  The nuclear holocaust destroys individual live and the life of society.  Without society, we are all alone.  The film portrays this as the final horror of survival and they are right.  Without love, what does it mean to live?