Showing posts with label Nietzsche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nietzsche. Show all posts

Saturday, January 12, 2019

Voyeurism: Playing God

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman, Author


In voyeurism, the keyhole is a symbol of spying. Intended for the introduction of a key by which a door may be locked or unlocked, the keyhole is emblematic of the means by which to ensure privacy. By locking a door, an individual establishes a private space which is supposed to be inviolate. Behind locked doors, in the privacy of one's home, whether “home” is a house, an apartment or a condominium, or a hotel or a motel room, one is supposed to be sequestered; what goes on behind a locked door is supposed to be private.
The key phrase, of course, is “supposed to be.” In reality, little is truly private anymore, especially in an age of surveillance by camera, drone, and Internet spying mechanisms. Nevertheless, we resent the violation of our privacy, and one's peering through a keyhole, into our private space, into our private lives, into our private behavior is not something most people would accept. Voyeurism is a violation of the law because it is a violation of personal privacy.
There is another reason that voyeurism is, and should be, off limits, horror movies suggest. Peering through a keyhole can violate not only the privacy of the person or persons within the room, but also the voyeur's sense of propriety, of rationality, or even of reality itself. As Hamlet cautions Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” or, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warns us all, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

Most horror movies which incorporate an element of voyeurism don't use a literal keyhole as a plot device. Instead, as in Psycho, Peeping Tom, and 13 Cameras, the voyeurism occurs through a hole in the wall or a hidden camera's lens, and the voyeurism as such, like the nudity (when nudity occurs), is incidental; the central part of the story, its theme, deals with the causes or the effects of such an invasion of privacy. The cause, although it may be related, superficially, to the voyeur's sexuality or lack thereof, is, on a deeper level, related to his or her (almost always his) emotional state.

Insecurity, a fear of women or of rejection, or a desire to know all and to be all places, including private ones, is often the basis of the voyeur's spying. In a word, whether the word is “omnipresent,” “omniscient,” or “omnipotent,” the voyeur's sin is a variation upon that of Adam and Eve: he wants to be like God.

However, their desire to be like God is, of course, ludicrous, for human beings are finite, fallible, and mortal; only God can be infinite, infallible, and immortal. Such a desire, the height of arrogance, is also a sin. God suggests as much to Adam and Eve when he warns them, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,” but they, like the voyeur, prefer to believe, as Satan told them, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
The keyhole, the hole in the wall, or the hidden camera's lens allows the voyeur to spy in secret, to know that which he is not supposed to know, to learn that which, ordinarily, would be hidden from him, and it allows him to violate his victims' privacy with impunity (as long as he is not caught). Armed with such secret knowledge, he may blackmail, kidnap, torture, rape, maim, or kill, as he chooses, crime begetting crime, as sin begets sin.

The keyhole is a modern-day equivalent of the Biblical forbidden fruit, allowing secular filmmakers to tap into Judeo-Christian themes from a perspective outside religious faith, transposing the external, supernatural world of Satan and God with the internal, natural (i. e., psychological) environment of the self.
The temptation to be omnipresent, to be ominiscient, to be omnipotent, begins long before one looks through a keyhole, drills a hole through a wall, or hides a camera. In all likelihood, it is a desire that develops over years, slowly, until it becomes an obsession, but it is born of the inclination to know more, to be with, and to be more powerful than one's victim.
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Friday, January 11, 2008

Writing As A Schizophrenic, Part I

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman


“Two heads are better than one,” it’s been said (although, apparently nature or God disagrees). If we can’t each be equipped with a couple of heads at birth, a couple of personalities, residing in the same body, may be a workable alternative, as schizophrenia could allow a person to take a team approach to writing short stories, novels, narrative poems, screenplays, or whatever. Of course, actually developing schizophrenia may not be as easy as desiring it. Therefore, we need to find another work-around.

Rest in pieces. I think I have just the solution: philosophical, as opposed to psychological, schizophrenia.

Here’s how it works.

Start by identifying your story’s theme. In the interest of the soul of wit, I’ll take a shortcut. Using the biography of Ed Gein, the guy who inspired Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs) as an example, one could argue that the indifference of the community toward him is somewhat to blame for his career as a serial killer and grave robber. This would be the theme of such a story, then: the apathy of a community toward its individual members can create a monster.

Next, briefly summarize various views concerning the responsibility, if any, that a community has for its individual members. These differing views provide the perspectives of the extra heads that nature or God denied us at birth. They’re the voices of the personalities that we’re developing as a result of our nascent philosophical schizophrenia.

We might include Hillary Clinton’s idea that “It takes a village to raise a child.” We might remind ourselves of the fate of Kitty Genovese, the woman who was attacked and killed as her neighbors looked on from their apartment windows, afraid to “get involved” by intervening or by calling the police. We might include the faith-based view of Jesus. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” one of the apostles asked, prompting him to tell the parable of the good Samaritan.

According to the first view, a community’s members have a responsibility to act together to benefit its children. Why? Hillary doesn‘t say, but, presumably, it’s because the community’s own future health and welfare depend upon the rearing of children who have been educated, socialized, and otherwise nurtured.

The fate of Kitty Genovese suggests that a society that fails to protects its individual members is not only morally at fault but also may face social, political, and moral dissolution.

Jesus declared that God is love and that those who do his will also will to love their neighbors. Therefore, they should not be selfish.

However, not everyone agrees that the community has a responsibility to act on the behalf of its individual members. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Aleister Crowley, each in his own way, believed that selfishness is a virtue.

Nietzsche believed that life need not have any intrinsic value and that people either affirm or deny it by their deeds, according to their own tendencies; morality, he said, is merely the means by which the powerful control the weak.

Rand believed that the right and proper thing for people to do is to pursue their own values and promote their own lives.

Crowley believed that there is only one law that governs human behavior, which is to “do as thou wilt.”

Our philosophical schizophrenia has enriched our theme. Instead of our writing a simple story with a perhaps-simpleminded moral, we have the opportunity of writing a richer, probably longer narrative that has philosophical height, depth, and breadth. Several characters in the same story, for example, might represent a different view of the topic at hand, as in Twelve Angry Men. The short story that we’d had in mind originally might develop into a novel. Alternatively, it might become several short stories, each of which examines the same theme in a different way, as many writers often do.

Another example? Sure, since we already have one, in another post, “Evil Is As Evil Does.” In that post, we suggest that horror writers in different times and places, often identify as monstrous, or evil, the menaces that seem most to threaten the worlds in which they live, and we suggested that, for the following writers, these were among the chief evils of their respective days:

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne: sin
  • Edgar Allan Poe: passion (especially coupled with madness)
  • H. P. Lovecraft: cosmic indifference to humanity
  • Dean Koontz: humanity’s indifference to humanity
  • Stephen King: anything that threatens one’s local community

Bentley Little: the indifference of bureaucratic organizations to individuals’ needs

This list, which, again, could profitably be expanded, gives us six heads, instead of one, and helps us to see evil in a more complete fashion than we might were we to limit ourselves to our own ideas as to what constitutes wickedness. The results could be a complexitication and enrichment of our own views and of our fiction.

Writing as a schizophrenic has its rewards.

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Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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