Here There Be Monsters:
The Grotesque,
the Perverse
& the Sublime

In western mythology, monsters are perversions of God's creation. They represent the extreme state of a fallen and corrupted material world, that thing that comes into being the further it strays from the light of God. When we first meet Beowulf's nemesis Grendel, the monster curses the heaven that holds no place for him (much like the monster in Mary Shelley's novel will curse Dr. Frankenstein, its creator).

But in eastern mythology, monsters are expressions of the contrary natures of the gods and the universe in which they operate. While the western god dominates the universe He has created--and must therefore control--the gods of the East participate in, not above, the universe, themselves pitted against a veritable orchestra of monsters and beings. The differing philosophies reflect opposing views of nature, the western mind seeing it as a a creation of god (who could instruct Adam to subdue the earth and all its beings), while the eastern mind sees god as a part of nature, as part of the gods themselves.

But the folk roots of all mythologies explain monsters as challenges to the hero, tests that must be surmounted. For the glory of the hero (as in Greek culture), his adventure (as in the Native American figure of the coyote or the raven), or the saving of a community (as in many Asian tales), the monster was the means by which the hero established his credentials. In Medieval Europe, the monster would take on its more current form as an abomination, that which must be defeated because it is an offense to God. Hence, it is later Europe that will give us Beowulf and Grendel, St. George and the dragon, and a slew of vampires that cannot stand the uplifting of a cross.

Thus, as with all mythologies, our tales of the monster say more about us than they do the monster. His evolution is ours, and understanding his alterations over the centuries is a way of looking into the mirror, where we sometimes see a hero and other times see the reflection of another monster. As all cultures moved from folk to urban societies, the monster moved with us, altering its behavior and its role in our daytime fears and nighttime dreams. And how we view him now is perhaps more frightening than anything our ancestors kept away with bonfires.

Stage One: Over There: Before the Medieval era when Europe became a major power, China began to lose its technological lead, and Africa and the Americas saw their growth arrested by colonialism, monsters were simple fare. They convened in caves, harbored themselves in mountains, hid deep in the forest, or slithered beneath the waters. They rarely visited the village, did not arrive to interrupt communal civilities. They were "over there," menacing but waiting for the hero to arrive and vanquish them. Once demolished, they were not reborn, did not return from the dead. They stayed dead, and the hero kept his honor. Those were wonderful times.

 

Stage Two: Into Your Bedroom: Dracula was not the first of the second-stage monsters, but he became the most emblematic of that creation so intent on our destruction that he would journey from the wilderness of Transylvania itself to visit us in our bedrooms, where we least expected him and were most vulnerable. Like other monsters of the nineteenth century (when the cities burst forth and the interior world of romanticism revealed the nightmares that Coleridge wrote about and Goya painted), monsters became more perverse, more wise, and more insidious. They were harder to kill and more likely to thwart our first attempts. But far worse, they did not engage in battles with folk heroes; their victims were often women, and occasionally children, true innocents who had no power against such fiendishness (except God Himself, the ultimate resort in western culture). Like the wars of the modern world that began to kill more citizens than soldiers, the new monster was not about heroic combat; it was about unmitigated destruction, seemingly purposeless in its evil. These are increasingly monsters of the psyche, reflections of a time (urbanization) and a vision (romanticism) that revealed man to be as destructive as any creation he ascribed to the devil. If the stage one monster was a trophy for the hero, the second stage was the revelation of the interior fraility of us all.

 

Stage Three: Making Love to the Monster: Around the turn of the twentieth century, the monster began to shift again. Modernism, that heady belief in the rational and positive aspects of science, produced World War I, wherein most casualties came at the hands of disease, poison, and rats, a refutation of the belief that war (echoing the stage one monster) was a means of glory. Stephen Crane anticipated this shift in his sardonic recreation of Civil War fighting in The Red Badge of Courage, Thomas Hardy presaged it in the nihilism of his poetry, and Wilfred Owen firmly trumpeted it in such anti-war poems as "Dulce et Decorum Est." And the bombings of World War II made World War I look like a fireworks show. Not only was the modern world failing in its promises of peace (WWI was declared "the war to end all wars"), it was careening farther into a future of nuclear nightmare as two super-powers eyed each other for half the century. Amidst such an atmosphere, curious cultural happenings occurred. At the same time that fears of nuclear annihilation spurred the Ban the Bomb movement and a spate of protest songs, music and language revealed perverse fascinations with the bomb, as in such 50s and 60s songs as "Atomic Love," "Atomic Cocktail," "When They Drop the Atomic Bomb," "Atom Bomb Baby," "Old Man Atom," and "Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb." A new expression for getting drunk entered the lexicon--"getting bombed''--and the drug culture utilized the metaphor to describe the euphoric feeling of a high as blowing one's mind. When the protest culture of the 60s gave way to the indulgence of the 70s and 80s, the fear metamorphosed into a variety of sub cultures, including punk and goth, wherein fear and death were openly embraced and, on occasion, celebrated. When Prince released "1999," the mix of lyrical despair ("They say two thousand, zero, zero, party over--Oops, out of time") mixed very naturally with the euphoria of dance ("'cause tonight we're gonna party like it's 1999"). If the irony eluded listeners of the single, Prince underscored it on the record, wherein the song finished with a detached, childlike voice repeatedly asking, "Mommy, why does everbody have a bomb?"

From another part of the culture, psychiatrists noted a phenomenon they didn't know quite how to address: female patients who began reporting pleasure-based rape fantasies. Margaret Atwood explored the idea in a story of the same name, featuring a narrator who explains to a friend all the ways she envisions her rapist will perform and, ultimately, how she will tame him. As essayist Ron Rosenbaum explained in "The Subterranean World of the Bomb," the culture was handling its fears of the nuclear world--of the postmodern monster in all its forms--by making peace with it, no longer fighting it, but yielding to it. Like the child protagonist of Maurice's Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, we no longer sought to destroy the monster, we sought to befriend it. It's an unusual psychological strategy, but not uncommon to prisoners, soldiers in war, battered wives, or abused children: when you are convinced of your own destruction, the last stage is to stop struggling and to submit, and nothing made this heretofore repugnant behavior more palatable than to pretend the submission was self-willed (not forced). In this way, the inevitability of the nightmare was transformed into the pleasure of merging with a superior force.

Postmodern culture revealed this altered stance toward the monster in a variety of icons, most particularly vampires. Anne Rice's Lestat--a thug in the original Interview with the Vampire--became a model of the new vampire as lover in subsequent books that only Hollywood hunk Tom Cruise could play on film (Rice had originally wanted Sting, who reciprocated the interest when he wrote "Moon Over Bourbon Street," a quintessential vampire-as-victim piece). Rice's vampires led to a slew of imitators, but they'd all been presaged by the 1979 Film Dracula, wherein the Transylvanian terror was played by the sensual Frank Langella, and the "attack" scenes depicted as erotic escapades (indeed, as readers of Bram Stoker's novel know, the vampire as sexual has been around for over a century, but in the nineteenth century he was a rapist; in the postmodern world he was one door away from your mystery date). The ultimate form of the monster-as-lover appeared in Andrew Lloyd Weber's Phantom of the Opera, wherein Gaston Leroux's hideously deformed creature (check out the early silent film versions of this French novel) became an enticingly intoxicating mystery lover who could woo women with such lines as

Softly, deftly, music shall caress you . . .
Feel it, hear it, secretly possess you. . .
Open up your mind, let your fantasies unwind,
In this darkness which you know you cannot fight:
The darkness of the music of the night . .

 

Similarly, horror films first captured the essence of postmodern terror (Freddie in the original Nightmare on Elm Street epitomized the inability of the victim to escape when Freddie visited his victims in their sleep; and we all have to sleep sometime) began to take on comic overtones as sequels became serials. If Freddie was frightening at first, he was comical later on, and if Jason terrorized us in Halloween, his subsequent incarnations were more watched for their ingenuity than their terror.

Meanwhile, house, dance and trance music made living in the dark a lifestyle, and from Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson concerts to raves, audiences began to participate in the culture as they had never before. When Garth and Wayne bow down before Alice Cooper in Wayne's World, it's a tongue-in-check gesture, as Cooper, the original ghoul-as-hero performer, has come to seem tame by today's standards. Cooper's concerts were entertainment, something meant to be watched. By contrast, the goth, rave, trance, and house music concerts of today are meant to be participated in. There are no spectators, only performers. Giving in to primal urges, no matter how far over the social and psychological border, is the hallmark of rave culture. One can't imagine such trancelike behavior in a venue such as Disneyland, by contrast. The Happiest Place on Earth denies the monster even exists; rave culture allows one to explore the monster within.

Ultimately, then, the difference between stage three monsters and their progenitors is found in the nature of the victims. The perception of the monster in our culture attributes such inevitable power to it that we feel unable to withstand its assault. To fight is to encourage annihilation; to capitulate, therefore, is to survive. In this way, the monster and the world he embodies has done what his ancestors fighting St. George, Odysseus, Aeneas and Bao-Chu could not: he has won.

In short, when we study the monster, we study ourselves.