This is a great time for scholars, or scholars in training, to be involved in studies in various aspects of popular culture. Here’s a recent educational opportunity I came across that involves field study at Comic-Con. This is my kind of study program:
Earn academic credit while studying the dynamics of marketing and fan culture at the largest comic arts event on the continent, July 20-24, 2011.
Over 125,000 attendees and hundreds of vendors, celebrities, and professionals descend on San Diego each summer to participate in the five-day Comic-Con. In addition to a 525,000 square foot exhibit hall filled with the wares of producers, the Con features continuous programming showcasing experts in the following industries and many more:
Anime and Manga
Comic Books and Graphic Novels
Gaming and Trading Cards
Film and Television
Toys and Collectibles
Video Gaming
Plan to join us this summer to experience Con firsthand!
Please contact the program director, Dr. Matthew J. Smith, with your inquiries or to request an application. You can e-mail him at: msmith@wittenberg.edu. Deadline for application is March 1, 2011. An application can be downloaded at the PowerofComics.com website.
Not long ago I was given the opportunity by JaSunni Productions to watch a review/screener copy of the new documentary Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone‘s Magic Man. The film tells the story of Beaumont who was a part of an elite group of science fiction writers that helped put the genre on the map, and who made possible the plethora of science fiction stories, books, television programs, and films fans often take for granted. This documentary describes the life of a brilliant and gifted writer who, like many of his contemporaries and colleagues, including Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Bloch, struggled initially to survive financially as a writer, but who persevered until receiving due recognition. For Beaumont his first break came through the publication of one of his stories in Playboy magazine. He would later go on to write for television and film including some of the best known and loved Twilight Zone episodes (writing 22 in all), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, Thriller, Roger Corman’s adaptations of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death and Premature Burial, Burn, Witch Burn!, and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao among many others. A listing can be found at the Internet Movie Dabase.
Sadly, Beaumont’s life was cut tragically short at the age of 38 by a mysterious illness. Friends in the documentary speculate that this may have been due to a combination of factors, beginning with his childhood spinal meningitis, which may have led to a combination of early onset Alzheimer’s and Pick’s Disease as an adult.
I found the documentary informative, and obviously a labor of love not only for those associated with JaSunni Productions, but also for Beaumont’s friends and colleagues who reflect fondly on his talent. On the downside, and I can comment self-critically here as a fellow documentary format video producer, this documentary suffers visually from a lack of a unified or coordinated background for the various interviews, and the sound quality varies, at times being very difficult to hear which can provide an unfortunate distraction from the content. In addition, my review copy had some video problems as well, a situation that I hope will be rectified as the film is released.
You can order a copy of Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone‘s Magic Man at the JaSunni Productions website.
I recently came across a magazine that devoted its cover to their assertion that AMC’s The Walking Dead is “The Best New Show on TV.” Surprisingly, this claim and appreciation for a zombie horror show was not found on the cover of Fangoria, Horror Hound, or Famous Monsters of Filmland, but instead on Entertainment Weekly in Issue #1131 (December 3, 2010). This was somewhat surprising given my assumptions about the demographics of EW readers, but on the other hand it was a pleasant indicator of not only the popularity of this specific television show, but also another sign that horror has found a niche for television viewing audiences. The cover story feature notes that while other networks passed on The Walking Dead, AMC was quick to scoop it up, and that it has twice the regular viewing audience of AMC’s other hit, Mad Men, now number two behind the hit zombie program. When we consider that HBO’s True Blood was recently on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine (through a controversial photo featuring its stars nude and splattered in blood), this tells us that not only is horror popular in television entertainment, but also that this is taking place through horror entertainment’s reigning monstrous icons of the zombie as well as the vampire.
This issue of EW also includes another item of interest. Earlier this year the film Splice generated some controversy with individuals on the one hand arguing that it was an intelligent piece of science fiction, and on the other hand those arguing that while the film had some good elements it ultimately fizzled in the end with a turn into a predictable horror film. In this issue of EW Stephen King’s column includes his picks of the best films of 2010, and Splice makes his list. I agree with those who found Splice a good and intelligent piece of science fiction and was pleased to find King on my side of the fence. Genre pictures Inception and Monsters also made the list.
I recently came across a portion of a lecture given by science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer divided into three installments on YouTube. The lecture is titled “‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….’ my ass!”. Each of the installments can be viewed at the bottom of this post. In the lecture Sawyer takes issue with George Lucas, claiming that the introductory phrase that launched the Star Wars phenomenon, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….”, functions as a disclaimer by Lucas in terms of science fiction’s connection to reality. As Sawyer understands Lucas, he is saying that because science fiction, or at least the form in Star Wars, has no connection reality, it therefore cannot be understood as including social commentary. Below are my thoughts as I interact with Sawyer’s thesis.
At the outset I must say that there is much to commend in Sawyer’s presentation. It is clear that he takes science fiction seriously, not merely as entertainment in its literary, cinematic, and televised forms, but also as a genre that addresses key issues in culture, many times controversial ones. Science fiction is ideally suited to addressing controversial issues as it presents them in veiled form , which then creates distance between the difficult issues and the individual reflecting on them, enabling a look at issues that might be too uncomfortable to consider without the prism of science fiction.
Sawyer has also correctly identified 1968 as a watershed year for science fiction, with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes setting new standards for intelligent science fiction. This has been noted by other commentators such as Marco Lanzagorta of PopMatters’ Dread Reckonings, who has argued that not only was 1968 well represented through these science fiction films, but that year also saw the release of Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead, thus providing horror with significant expressions for that genre as well. Lanzagorta goes further in echoing Sawyer’s observation that the impetus for such novel expressions of social issues in these genres can be traced to the significant cultural upheavals that came with the late 1960s and the rise of the counterculture.
After further discussion of significant forms of science fiction in the late 1960s that touched on social issues, including the original Star Trek television series, mention of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel and one that incorporated social commentary, and a contrast of the work of Jules Verne with H. G. Wells, Sawyer returns in his conclusion to his critique of Lucas. Having noted the strengths of Sawyer’s presentation I now turn to critical interaction.
In my view Sawyer has misinterpreted Lucas, as well as the function of the introductory phrase of Star Wars (“A long time ago….”), and thus has incorrectly identified the film as science fiction. Although many consider Star Wars a work of science fiction it is best understood as fantasy, or more specifically as Lucas himself categorized it, a space fantasy or space opera. In the 1999 CD ROM production Star Wars: Behind the Magic produced by LucasArts, Lucas stated:
“Basically I was saying, you know, ‘A long time ago in a kingdom far away.’ That was my way of saying this is really more like a fairy tale than it is a piece of science fiction. And I really thought you needed to do that, to say ‘Don’t worry about the scientific part of this, cause there isn’t any.’ In this world, it’s a world I’ve made up, and in this world spaceships can have noise and you can do anything you want.”
Lucas has identified Star Wars as fantasy rather than science fiction on more than one occasion. Although viewers’ interpretations of the film may be different, understanding it as science fiction rather than fantasy, it is important to consider the perspective of the creator of the mythology. Beyond this, writers like Thomas Sipos define science fiction as “a story about a problem, or a solution to a problem, that originates from an as yet unrealized, but plausible, scientific discovery.” It is clear that Star Wars does not meet this definition, so it is best understood as fantasy, even if it incorporates outer space, space ships, and blasters as the backdrop for its fantasy story. So my first area of disagreement with Sawyer is that he has incorrectly categorized Star Wars. In addition, if we consider Lucas’ statements regarding Star Wars as fantasy rather than science fiction, he seems to have argued that the film cannot be held to scientific standards of reality, rather than claiming no connection to the real world and immunity from critique in social commentary.
But perhaps regardless of how to classify Star Wars, Sawyer’s argument may be understood as saying that whether science fiction or fantasy, particular elements of Star Wars set back the cutting edge aspects of science fiction set forth in the decade previous to its debut. Sawyer’s states that the opening “disclaimer” of Star Wars means that it attempted to isolate itself from incorporating social commentary, and the fact that it includes troubling social elements, such as slavery and racism, sets back science fiction which had previously tackled these subjects and critiqued these aspects of culture in the late 1960s.
In response it must be acknowledged that Star Wars does include troubling aspects in its storyline, even if it is a contemporary fairy tale. As Sawyer argues the way the droids are treated in the film must be understood as forms of slavery, paralleling the experience of blacks in America. Granted, Star Wars is dealing with robotic entities, and human beings are still grappling with how to understand and relate to robots and artificial intelligence, a problem that is much more pronounced now than in the late 1970s when Star Wars premiered. Even so, beyond taking the droids literally in application to robotic entities, they certainly can be interpreted as mirroring the social problems of racism and slavery, and doing so in unflattering ways that endorses these issues rather than making them the focus of critique as in certain examples of late 1960s science fiction.
In addition, although fantasy films are often interpreted by audiences as escapist entertainment with no connection to reality, this is not the case. Scholars like Joshua Bellin have argued that fantasy films are rightly the objects of critique for their problematic elements, and the fact that they are fantasy films only deepens the problems associated with their objectionable elements. As Bellin has stated:
“But of course, that’s what makes these films particularly powerful vehicles of social alienation, the phrase I use to suggest the whole range of processes by which marginalized groups are stereotyped, victimized, and scapegoated: fantasy films’ resistance to critical scrutiny enables them to perpetuate loathsome social ideologies under the guise of ‘harmless entertainment.’”
Examples of this social alienation, disturbing to both Bellin and Sawyer, include racism, and this is exhibited in everything from King Kong to Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. When these elements surface in films or television, whether science fiction or fantasy, they must be recognized for what they are and critiqued appropriately. Sawyer is to be commended for taking a sacred cow in the universe of the fantastic and drawing critical attention to aspects of it.
But what about the main thrust of Sawyer’s argument? Have the problematic elements of Star Wars, prefaced by the fairy tale introduction “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….”, really set back the cause of science fiction with its biting social commentary as evidenced by films like Planet of the Apes? Planet of the Apes set the bar pretty high, and we should not expect many films to provide not only great entertainment, but also significant cultural interaction as well. After all, films are designed to entertain and make money first, and if possible, engage our deeper reflection as a distant second. Even so, over the years there have been intelligent science fiction films that have engaged key social issues, including race and class. Here I would include Blade Runner, Altered States, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element, The Final Cut, The Matrix, District 9, Surrogates, Avatar, and Splice. Certainly the quality of these films differs, as does the type of social issues and degree into which they engage them, and the reader may not consider them on the level of 2001 or Planet of the Apes, but the point is that there are plenty of examples of science fiction engaging in social commentary despite Star Wars and “A long time ago….”. District 9 is perhaps the best example of a recent science fiction film that critiques race, and while there are a number of years between 1977 and 2009, it is an assumption that science fiction films would have critiqued race more readily had it not been for Star Wars.
Readers may wonder whether my disagreements with Sawyer come as the result of being a fan of Star Wars and my offering a biased critique as a result. True, I am a Star Wars fan (at least of the original trilogy), but I have long been a fan of intelligent science fiction incorporating social commentary in the vein of Star Trek and Planet of the Apes, and would rank these higher in my appreciation as a fan and scholar of the fantastic than Star Wars. So while I am aware of my biases (we all have them), they cannot account for my critique of Sawyer.
Despite my disagreements with Sawyer’s analysis, I hope critical interaction with science fiction, fantasy, and horror continues by Sawyer and others, as well as the debates over their social significance.
In times past the vampire was discussed largely in folklore, and later horror magazines for monster kids and teens, as well as the cinema, largely for the same audience, including adults who enjoyed the horror genre. While the vampire is still found in these sources, and has appeal for these segments of its audience, the vampire and horror are also increasingly the focus of the academic community.
This exhaustive encyclopedia covers the full range of topics relating to vampires, including literature, film and television, and folklore.
As the astounding popularity of the Twilight series has proven once again, the terror and romance of the vampire legend continue to cast a supernatural spell over mere mortals. From Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula to F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu to the most recent Hollywood blockbusters, vampires haunt our folklore, bookshelves, and movie theaters.
Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture is a comprehensive encyclopedia relating to all phases of vampirism—in literature, film, and television; in folklore; and in world culture. Although previous encyclopedias have attempted to chart this terrain, no prior work contains the depth of information, the breadth of scope, and the up-to-date coverage of this volume.
With contributions from many leading critics of horror and supernatural literature and media, the encyclopedia offers entries on leading authors of vampire literature (Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer), on important individual literary works (Dracula and Interview with the Vampire), on celebrated vampire films (the many different adaptations of Dracula, the Twilight series, Love at First Bite), and on television shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel). It also covers other significant topics pertaining to vampires, such as vampires in world folklore, humorous vampire films, and vampire lifestyle.
Features
• Nearly 240 A-Z entries on all aspects of vampirism
• Photographs and illustrations of vampire films, television shows, and other matters relating to vampires
• Brief bibliographies referring the reader to secondary sources on individual entries
• A general bibliography of scholarship on vampires
Highlights
• Provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date encyclopedia on vampires ever assembled, including books, films, and other material coming out in 2009 and 2010
• Covers vampires in folklore and world culture, as well as in literature, film, and television
• Compiles the work of 41 contributors, including many of the leading authorities on supernatural literature, film, and folklore
• Engages readers with entries written in a lively, accessible manner
One of the contributors to this volume is Matt Cardin, a friend of TheoFantastique who has been interviewed here previously regarding his work in horror and religion. Matt is the author of a few entries in this new encyclopedia, including one titled “Religion and Vampires.” Matt returns to discuss this topic.
TheoFantastique: Matt, thanks for coming back again to discuss another of your recent projects. Can you tell us a little about the book in which your essay on “Religion and Vampires” appears, your other essays in this volume and how the Encyclopedia of the Vampire makes a contribution beyond works like Gordon Melton’s The Vampire Book and the growing body of academic literature on the vampire?
Matt Cardin: I think one of the most important things that distinguishes this new book from some of the others in the field is the breadth and nature of its authorship, and also the number of extended essays that accompany and amplify the shorter entries on specific topics. It has more than 40 contributors, and quite a few of them are, like me, not just scholars of horror and the fantastic but practitioners in the field — authors, editors, sometimes both. So that imparts a unique perspective to the whole project.
As for the extended entries, the book features quite a few essays, running to several thousand words each, about everything from vampires in world folklore to the vampire lifestyle to and more.
There’s also the fact that it’s published by Greenwood, an imprint of reference heavyweight ABC-CLIO, which means it’ll end up in pretty much every academic library in the English-speaking world. So this is a point in its favor.
I hasten to add that I don’t personally see it as something that supplants, say, Melton’s book, which is the most obvious one to compare it to, and which is just a brilliant piece of work. I see them all as complementary.
TheoFantastique: What would you say to those who would be either surprised or completely opposed to the legitimacy of the idea of the connection between religion and the vampire?
Matt Cardin: I would say such people haven’t really looked at or thought about the subject very much. Vampires, to put it boldly, are intrinsically religious monsters. They’re bound up with fundamental human questions and fears about personal identity, bodily safety, the fate of the body and soul after death, and so on. This means they entered human culture through the channel of our religious sensibility, broadly defined, and so they automatically carry with them a religious or quasi-religious ambiance.
Basically, the vampire is a nexus for an important realm of religious thought and sentiment. It can be read as a kind of “lens” through which the human spiritual impulse has learned to focus itself. Again, if we define religion broadly, then this is all true even when we’re talking about vampires of the particularly nasty and feral sort, like Orlok in Nosferatu or the ones in 30 Days of Night. The very depth of the organic horror they induce throws us up against the limits of what we feel, on a primal and visceral level, is real and acceptable in the universe. And this is pure religious territory.
TheoFantastique: As I read your piece I was intrigued by your discussion of the major figures of religion who have specialized in the study of the vampire. Can you mention a few of these folks from the past as well as the present?
Matt Cardin: Sure. One of the major points I make in my essay is about the close connection between religion scholarship and vampirology. Basically, the study of vampires came out of the study of religion. The field was pioneered by religion scholars, and has been dominated by them. The earliest was Augustin Calmet, the renowned French Benedictine abbot and theologian who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries and may have been the period’s greatest Catholic biblical scholar. He’s best remembered for writing a book in response to the vampire hysteria that swept across Europe in the 1720s and ’30s. It was published in English as The Phantom World, and was intended to discredit fears about vampires by offering a rational examination of the claims about them. In the process of writing it, Calmet cataloged the entire spectrum of vampiric beliefs that existed at the time.
Another major figure was, of course, Montague Summers, whose The Vampire: His Kith and Kin and The Vampire in Europe, both published in the early 20th century, earned him the reputation as the world’s greatest vampire scholar. He was an ordained deacon in the Church of England, and he adopted the pose of a Roman Catholic priest.
Later in the 20th century, the eminent French scholar of religion and esotericism Antoine Faivre basically invented the modern field of vampire studies as an independent academic discipline. Not incidentally, this was emphasized in a 2001 essay about him — titled “Antoine Faivre: Father of Contemporary Vampire Studies” — by Massimo Introvigne, the Italian sociologist of religion who is himself a major figure in the vampire field.
This whole line of thought leads me, not incidentally, to a major mea culpa. One of the names you’ve just got to include in a list like this is the aforementioned Gordon Melton, who in addition to being a major American scholar of religion is a major figure in contemporary vampire studies. And I did indeed include him in my essay — but then it came in past the allotted word count, and in the process of editing it down I accidentally removed the reference to him, and failed to notice the mistake until after the book was too far into production to make changes. I know Gordon is a colleague of yours, so I’ll gladly take whatever scolding you want to give me. I just hate that I did that, because he’s one of the guys whose presence reinforces the point that the field of vampires studies has been created and developed by religion scholars.
TheoFantastique: How has the vampire intersected differing religious traditions?
Matt Cardin: A significant portion of our modern-day idea of the vampire was created by Christian institutional religious pressures and practices. Vampires originally had a purely folk-level existence, but then the Church co-opted them and reinterpreted them as minions of the devil. Medieval theologians referred to folk beliefs about vampires to help make the doctrine of transubstantiation — the idea that the eucharistic wine becomes Christ’s blood, and that a believer takes Christ’s spirit into himself by drinking it — comprehensible to a popular audience. When the Roman Catholic Church was trying to expand eastward through the Balkans, it manipulated popular fears for political gain when it warned the local residents that anybody buried on ground that it hadn’t officially consecrated would return as a vampire. The Eastern Orthodox church, for its part, turned into a veritable vampire factory when it overused the punishment of excommunication. This ritually denied burial to a person, and was accompanied by the curse “and the earth will not receive your body,” which playing right into Eastern European fears about incorruptible corpses and the probability that they would become vampires.
Before all of this happened, vampires followed the logic of folklore more than the logic of religion, even though, like I already pointed out, they were inherently entangled with spiritual and religious-type issues. It was institutional Christianity that gave them the decisive shove toward becoming a formally religious monster. When they crossed over into being a literary monster, too, in the 19th century, thanks to the work of authors like Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker, this Christian religious aspect came with them, and was even intensified and codified more than before. The result is that today we don’t even question any of the stock religious iconography and themes and devices that populate most vampire stories: gloomy churchyards, the use of crosses and holy water as weapons and protection, the framing of vampires as servants of the devil, and so on.
TheoFantastique: Although the vampire certainly has its connections to the dark side of religion, particularly from the Christian tradition, you note that it also has connections to the divine. Can you describe how this is the case?
Matt Cardin: When you’re dealing with the demonic, you’re automatically dealing with the divine. The ingrained, knee-jerk dualism of what’s come to pass for popular theology, its automatic Manichean conceptual division of supernatural reality into mutually exclusive camps of light and darkness, tends to block a lot of people’s recognition of this. The modern-day Christian and pseudo-Christian concepts of angels and demons both descended to us culturally, conceptually, and psychologically/spiritually from what was originally a unitary figure, as seen in — to name one of its most famous cultural incarnations — the Greek daimons, conceived as spirits that existed in the mid-world between the humans and the gods.
Even further back than that, at the dawn of recorded history the very concept of the divinity itself was expressed in images and intimations of the monstrous, as seen in the famous cosmology of the ancient Sumerians, whose creation story told of the world being formed out of a primal chaos that they personified as Tiamat, a hideous dragon whose children killed her and then created the cosmos from her gutted body. This story was encoded and incorporated into Judaism and Christianity via the various references to “the deep,” the ancient primal sea that was analogous to the chaos dragon, in the Hebrew scriptures, and also the references to “the dragon” in the Apocalypse of John. And the same pattern is seen, again, in the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, who — like pretty much all peoples everywhere, throughout history — told themselves stories about the world having been created from primal sources that were monstrous from the human perspective, and that grew progressively more anthropomorphic over time.
So the category of the divine in general was originally conceived and experienced by the human race as something that enfolded both good and evil, gods and monsters. And this is what’s involved, via a direct line of cultural and spiritual descent, in the recognition that the vampire is in some sense a divine monster, and in fact a bona fide theophany, a manifestation of the divine itself. You can see this in action in, for example, the novel Dracula, where — as religion scholar Timothy Beal points out in his simply wonderful book Religion and Its Monsters — Stoker used distinctly biblical language at several points in describing the Count. Ronald Foust wrote a really absorbing paper titled “Rite of Passage: The Vampire Tale as Cosmogonic Myth,” in which he argued that the archetypal battle between the dragon and the hero — whose earliest expression is the aforementioned Tiamat story — lies at the heart of all Gothic fiction, and is directly expressed in the stock elements and attributes of the literary vampire, so that anybody who reads these stories and encounters the numinosity that’s concentrated in the figure of the vampire experiences “crypto-religious emotions.”
TheoFantastique: Matt, thanks again for shedding light on this topic. Best of luck in the sales for Encyclopedia of the Vampire and your other projects.
This last Saturday I went with my family to the theater to see the latest installment in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows – Part 1. It may come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog who are familiar with my passion for the fantastic, but I have never been a fan of the Harry Potter phenomenon. I have nothing against the books or the movies, it just never caught my fancy. I suppose it’s because in general I prefer more dark fantasies like Pan’s Labyrinth, but this is certainly an entertaining fantasy phenomenon.
As I sat in the theater and watched the film I did find one segment of it of particular interest. It is the telling of “The Tale of the Three Brothers” which was of interest to me because it reminds me of classic fairy tales, and a dark one at that just as many of our childhood fairy tales are far darker than we’d like to remember. But this tale was also interesting in the way in which it was depicted visually. Rather than using narration and live action the visual elements of the film are presented largely in silhouette, either through articulated shadow puppetry or animation (it is difficult to tell how the effect was achieved, which adds to the beauty of the piece). The result is an intriguing fairy tale that I understand is a significant part of the two-part deathly hallows concluding films.
According to a post on this topic by Cartoon Brew, “It was directed and designed by Ben Hibon who produced it in association with Framestore. Hibon recently signed with Nexus Productions for repping.” FXStore includes a lengthy interview with sequence supervisor Dale Newton on how he produced this sequence. For another, earlier example of Hibon’s animation work see the his film Codehunters.
For now a video clip of this story can be found on YouTube at this link, but it cannot be embedded here.
War and Social Upheaval Cause Spikes in Zombie Movie Production
io9.com
There’s been a huge spike in the production of zombie movies lately, and many of them seem to be inspired by war. Everything from 28 Days Later to Zombie Strippers make explicit reference to wartime, as did seminal 1968 zombie flick Night of the Living Dead.
A history of zombies in America
io9.com
The early success of AMC series Walking Dead confirms it: Though zombies have been hot for a while, they are now officially the new vampires. Why do Americans love zombies, and what does it say about us?
SciFi 101: Science-Fiction: A Genre In Decline? | AirlockAlpha.com
airlockalpha.com
The cancellation of Caprica, though it came as no surprise given the poor ratings, has prompted a number of interesting columns, blogs and analyses that tried to make sense of the situation.
I recently heard from Adam Possamai, editor of the Handbook of Hyper-Real Spiritualities (Brill, forthcoming), that my essay on Matrixism was accepted. It is titled “’A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries’: Matrixism, New Mythologies, and Symbolic Pilgrimages.”
I am privileged to be a part of a number of top-notch contributors on new and minority religions, and hyper-real spiritualities (or fiction-based religions), those religions that draw upon aspects of the fantastic in popular culture. Other topics include chapters on things like Jediism, vampirism, Heaven’s Gate, Satanism, Otherkin, and the Raelian Movement.
A summary of my essay in this volume:
In this essay I draw upon the proposal of Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe regarding the significance of myth in understanding new religions, coupled with the work of other scholars who suggest that science fiction is an especially significant source of mythic inspiration for our time. Then I consider how science fiction mythic narratives provide new religions like Matrixism with the imaginative tools necessary to engage in practices similar to more traditional religions. By drawing upon Jennifer Porter’s exploration of fan participation at Star Trek conventions as a form of pilgrimage in fulfillment of an embodied ideal, combined with the thesis of Roger Aden on participation in imaginative narratives of alternative worlds that allow adherents to transcend and critique the habitus of daily life as well as grand narratives of culture, I suggest that the symbolic pilgrimage of Matrixism parallels pilgrimage as found in more traditional religions, yet also differs in that they take place primarily in the realm of the sacred imagination.
“THIS BOOK CONTAINS: MURDER! MAYHEM! ROBBERY! RAPE! CANNIBALISM! CARNAGE! NECROPHILIA! SEX! SADISM! MASOCHISM … and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality, and horror!”
The words above appear in a report from the mid-1950s titled “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency” from the Committee on the Judiciary’s investigation of juvenile delinquency in the United States. It serves as a reminder that more recent concerns about certain forms of music, violence in film, and other forms of popular culture, are part of a long and ongoing series of debates about entertainment and youth. In this instance those in positions of cultural leadership in 1950s America were concerned about horror comics, a story that is detailed in the fine book The Horror! The Horror! Comics Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read! (Abrams ComicArts, 2010) by Jim Trombetta.
For some reason 1950s horror comics have received a lot of attention lately in various horror magazines and books, and The Horror! The Horror! is an important part of this mix. But while much of the focus is often on the important contribution of EC Comics, this volume moves beyond that to remind the reader of a broad section of horror comics that fascinated and frightened young people during the post-war period. This book reproduces cover art, and at times the inner content, of long-forgotten horror comics such as Marvel Tales, Spellbound, Spook, Strange Terrors, Horrific, Strange Fantasy, and a host of others. Although modern generations of young people are used to plenty of on screen blood and gore in their horror in film and television, there is still plenty in these comics that contemporary readers may find appropriately revolting and worthy of horrific respect.
The Horror! The Horror! not only features color reproductions of 1950s horror comics, but also helpful introductory material where Trombetta sets the cultural stage for the rise of these pop-culture artifacts. Produced as a way of dealing with the national trauma’s of the Great Depression and World War II, Trombetta writes:
“These comics conveyed the unspeakable, and maybe even unthinkable, trauma of a whole society, but in a streetwise, urban-legend way. On one hand, they could be more reactionary, racist, and brutal than the surrounding culture, as if to rub the reader’s nose in a deliberate caricature. On the other hand, their radicalism could be startling. They kicked ove the biggest triumph in history just to see what might crawl out.”
From this cultural matrix Trombetta not only traces the rise of horror comics from crime comics, and discusses the government’s reaction to horror comics among youth, but also includes discussion of various common horror elements found in these materials, such as the werewolf, magic, skeletons, decapitated heads, and various forms of the undead.
One of the main features of this book is not only a fresh consideration of 1950s horror comics, but also the furor they caused as government officials feared they had the potential to corrupt youth. As Trombetta describes on the inside cover of the book, ‘[t]hese outrageous comic book images, [were] censored by Congress in an infamous televised U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in 1954 investigating juvenile delinquency”. Although this may seem outrageous to us in the 21st century, we might recall that in 2007 Congress held hearings on gangsta rap lyrics, a repeat of similar hearings in the 1990s spearheaded by Tipper Gore. Another interesting feature of this book is its inclusion of a DVD with a documentary television show Confidential File that makes the case for the dangers of horror comics on youth through drama and interviews. As one individual in the documentary pleads with viewers:
“The final responsibility for the control of crime and horror comics rests with you. A few cities have already done something about them, not too many, but a few. Legislation against unfit comic books is possible. Legislation that won’t interfere with the rights of a free press. Contact your city officials. Let them know how you feel about the crime and horror comics. And remember this: America is the richest country in the world. We’re the world’s biggest producer of goods. But our most important commodity, the one commodity we can’t put a price tag on, is our children.”
The Horror! The Horror! is a fine addition to any collection on comic books, art, and horror in general. It can be purchased through the TheoFantastique Store.
Being a person on a lifelong journey with the fantastic I am always interested in the similar journeys of others. One day while following the book promotion of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf I was pleased to hear of another writer who chronicled a similar journey. Tony Pacitti describes his story in the book My Best Friend is a Wookie: One Boy’s Journey to Find His Place in the Galaxy (Adams Media, 2010). The book is best summarized on its back cover:
So begins the real-life hero’s journey of Jedi Knight wannabe Tony Pacitti. In this hilarious coming-of-age memoir, our hapless hero sees Star Wars for the first time at the age of seven — and is never the same again. The epic film becomes little Tony’s moral compass, mentor, even psychologist, helping him battle the Evil Empire wherever he finds it. He uses the Force to navigate the perils and pitfalls of childhood — from the bullies who badger him at the bus stop to the beautiful girl who mocks Obi-Wan and breaks Tony’s heart. Then George Lucas releases The Phantom Menace, and a disappointed Tony turns to the Dark Side of adolescence, falling in with stoners and goths and nu-metalheads so lame even Jar Jar Binks would shun them. However, armed with the sense of human of Han Solo, the will power of Luke Skywalker, and the wise attitude of a [much younger] Yoda, Tony grows into a man worthy of riding shotgun with a Wookie.
I resonated strongly with Tony’s story. Earlier in life I too wrestled with feeling out of place during my adolescent years, and found solace through my exploration of the fantastic. Although my brother and a small handful of friends were able to understand this attraction, most of my peers did not, contributing further to feelings of isolation and being an outcast. Like Tony, Star Wars was an important part of my universe of the fantastic. But in Tony’s situation Star Wars becomes the primary frame of reference for some form of escapism, as well as a powerful myth and metaphor by which he could navigate the difficulties of childhood and especially adolescence.
The writing style is very entertaining, and it is difficult not to sympathize with this story, whether one identifies with the fantastic and geek culture or not. Even so, for me the book was somewhat uneven in terms of the place that Star Wars holds in the overall narrative. It is pivotal in the first few chapters, but when Tony enters adolescence it seems to move to the background, only to move back to a place of prominence as Tony gets older and makes a more concerted effort to reclaim Star Wars as something of a guiding force in his life. I did not find this book as engaging, and ultimately heartbreaking as Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, but it is a good read, and a contribution to our understanding of geek culture and the significance of fantastic narratives to peoples lives. Purchase your copy of My Best Friend is a Wookie at the TheoFantastique Store.
This is a great time for scholars, or scholars in training, to be involved in studies in various aspects of popular culture. Here’s a recent educational opportunity I came across that involves field study at Comic-Con. This is my kind of study program:
