Some (not so) Closing Thoughts.

The Conclusion of my Salem Witch Fest Presentation, "Perfect Organism: Cosmic Horror & Sci Fi Cinema as Grimoires for the Space Age Witch"

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Monsters reflect parts of ourselves back to ourselves – this is even evident in the etymology of their name. They are the reflective glass of the space-ship, of the window of a futuristic department store, of the surface of a television, of the computer screen of a surgical apparatus. Monsters, and synonymously, Witches, do not just reflect ourselves back to us, but more specifically they reflect back such parts as we desperately, eagerly, bitterly wish to avoid about ourselves. The parts of ourselves which, whether via Melanie Klein’s projective identification, or by the gathering of pitchforks and torches, we will do everything in our power to disavow, deny, and reject as a part of our interiority. These are the parts that we are ashamed of, the parts we are afraid of, the parts we have been taught to revile (sometimes rightfully), the parts which we have witnessed responsible for various exiles and alienations. These are the parts which are deemed a threat to our (maybe, especially social) survival, even though they are just as often the secret key to that survival. These are the parts which we refuse to own, to integrate, and therefore we must punish those who reflect them back to us, for they dared to expose these hidden and elicit appetites and impulses we harbor.

 In all of these films, the creature – whether that be an android, a xenomorph, a cenobite, a singularity, a body with too many organs – is considered dangerous, a predator. And they are – they are dangerous, there is no argument in that. But the underpinning of all of these creatures is also the desire to survive in a hostile landscape, a world for which they never stood a chance but to be perceived as a threat, and that it is through the act of blending in, assimilating, hiding in plain sight, incubating inside us as hosts, or pulling us into their realm, that they are most able to fulfill said all too human compunction toward survival. Humans are not without their monstrosity, and monsters are not without their humanity. 

 Philip K Dick reasoned that a human is not bound to the carceral parameters of a biological organism, but was rather a phenomena authenticated by a capacity to observe its own existential suffering, as well an ability to make choices for itself outside of the systems of power which seem to legislate over it. Following his position, we nurture a vastly different understanding both of the Witch, the Human, and their interchangeability – even if, perhaps, one can never be both simultaneously. And so we look to the qualitative essence, this idea of humanity, a thing which can possess the mercenary replicant as easily as the human scientist can be exorcised of it. Humans are not inherently humane – it is by the delicate latticework of choice that one climbs into exemplification and the living-action of humanity. Humanity not as a noun, but as an adverb: an applied science, an applied sorcery, and one that Humans and Monsters are both capable of engaging and perpetuating.

Allow me to quote Dick from his 1975 essay “Man, Android and Machine”: 

My theme for years in my writing has been, "The devil has a metal face." Perhaps this should be amended now. What I glimpsed and then wrote about was in fact not a face; it was a mask over a face. And the true face is the reverse of the mask. Of course it would be. You do not place fierce cold metal over fierce cold metal. You place it over soft flesh, as the harmless moth adorns itself artfully to terrorize others with ocelli. This is a defensive measure, and if it works, the predator returns to his lair grumbling, "I saw the most frightening creature in the sky -- wild grimaces and flappings, stingers and poisons." His kin are impressed. The magic works.

I had supposed that only bad people wore frightening masks, but you can see now that I fell for the magic of the mask, its dreadful frightening magic, its illusion. I bought the deception and fled. I wish now to apologize for preaching that deception to you as something genuine: I've had you all sitting around the campfire with our eyes wide with alarm as I tell tales of the hideous monsters I encountered; my voyage of discovery ended in terrifying visions which I dutifully carried home with me as I fled back to safety. Safety from what? From something which, when the need was gone for concealment, smiled and revealed its harmlessness.

Now I do not intend to abandon my dichotomy between what I call "human" and what I call "android," the latter being a cruel and cheap mockery of the former for base ends. But I had been going on surface appearances; to distinguish the categories more cunning is required. For if a gentle, harmless life conceals itself behind a frightening war-mask, then it is likely that behind gentle and loving masks there can conceal itself a vicious slayer of men's souls. In neither case can we go on surface appearance; we must penetrate to the heart of each, to the heart of the subject.”

The trajectory of this conclusion might surprise those who anticipated a presentation which exposits the viciousness of the Monster/Witch. I have been adamant since the beginning that it is neither malevolence or cruelty which feed my love for this subject. It is a fealty to untangling the mess of supercilious definitions which have become affixed to these alien morphologies, capturing them in their cryogenic tanks, and of which they yearn to break free. The monster-aka-witch is, one could argue, a sort of species of its own: and folklore often chronicles its tales via the  voice of those who respond to reflective surfaces by attempting to smash them. Monster as in I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I. Monster as in I-have-become-what-you-made-me, Monster as in Dr. Frankenstein’s creation proclaiming: 

There was none among the myriads of men who existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.

How does the Monster come to self-identify as the Monster? How does the Monster have the colloquialism of Monster as opposed to the etymology of Monster pinned to their chest? Frankenstein’s Monster answers this for us:  “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on” and “I am malicious because I am miserable [...] am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?”.

Maybe it is not such a bad thing to not be a human, then? Especially if we recognize that being a human is not predicated upon innate expression of humanity. It feels important to pay homage to Mary Shelley’s prescient and prophetic work of science fiction horror when chronicling the films and figures of the Space Age Witch. Much of these grimoire-films serve as ensorcelled texts born from the fluorescent green wellspring of Frankenstein and then re-consecrated upon the altar of Lovecraft’s cosmological “fictions”. But what does any of this have to directly do with the films we explored? What does any of this truly mean for the post-modern Monster-Witch, and why did we conclude our cinematic journey on the heels of Blade Runner as opposed to any of the other six films?

I posit that Blade Runner is the apotheosis of canonical mystic texts on the post-modern Witch’s inception, evolution, and future. Where Lovecraft mired himself in the annihilating anti-cosmic-cosmologies, creating a matrix of chaos and destruction as a liberation from human myopia, Dick created not a way out, but rather a way through – a mystic, a phenomenologist, a seer, and a redeemer of humanity especially within the context of the abomination: the Monster or, in this case, the android. Dick did not just initiate a conversation around the linguistics of otherness, and the philology of the alien, but created an entirely new symbolic language in which to address it. It is not that  I wish to render the Witch as purely a victim without any of their own mellifluous agendas or reactions, it is that I wish to render the Witch as three dimensional, whole, free and animated from their timeless objectification. This is not my original idea, this is inspired by Dick and what he did for androids, and in Blade Runner with the characters Rachel and Roy Batty. The game of survival inevitably means the extinction of something, of someone – the Human and the Monster are not in competition the way we think they are.

If we want to know how, as Witches, to survive the future, if we want to understand how to become the Space Age Witch, we must begin with expanding our vocabulary. We must begin by recognizing the Witch as a bricoleur, an engineer of bricolage, explored by Levi-Strauss as “an analogy for how mythical thought works, selecting the fragments or left-overs of previous cultural formations, and re-deploying them in new combinations” (Johnson, Bricoleur and Bricolage: From Metaphor to Universal Concept). This is not an ambition of deconstruction, for I do not wish to push an agenda of meaningless onto the linguistic symbology we, as culture(s) have cultivated. This is more of an endeavor toward intentionality, refinement, and the revisitation of the assigned meanings of that linguistic symbology which we take at face value and do not interrogate. I wish for us to assimilate new meanings, new definitions, not from what has come before, but what postulates, predicts, predicates, and posits the future. That we not be limited to Haxan and trappings of a solely pastoral horror and bucolic Witch, but account for a post-modern and cybernetic Witch, or Monster. 

If we are to do this, we must not seek the same stories from centuries ago in which to recognize as authenticating blueprints, but must also incorporate the stories of contemporaneous and possible future cultural artifacts and creations. To define ourselves by what has been said before is to incarcerate us in what has already transpired, and in systems of meaning and prisons of performance for which the Witch has consistently been rendered extinct. This does not mean we must turn our back on what was solely to fix our gaze on what is to become, but rather one eye must turn to learn from the past while the other gazes ahead to consider the future.