Three Images

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: This discussion is based on Tzvetan Todorov's analysis of the fantastic, which is detailed in “The Tzvetan Todorov Plot.”

In solving crimes, Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and other consulting or amateur detectives often look for singularities—things that were out of place, things that didn't “belong,” things that stood out.

Why do things stand out from everything else? Why, in a myriad of other objects, does this one physical entity catch the eye (or the ear or the nose or the tongue or the finger)? What makes it different and, therefore, visible?

A bell rope attached to nothing: how singular!

Abnormal things stand out. According to Oxford Dictionaries, “abnormal” means “deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.” Something abnormal deviates, or departs from, the normal or the usual. A beautiful woman, in this sense, is “abnormal,” but she is neither “undesirable” nor “worrying,” so she doesn't fill the bill.

What about a nude? Even if she (or he) were unusually attractive and naked, it's likely that a nude's presence, among clothed people, would be regarded as at least “undesirable” by some—perhaps many. Such a person's presence might also be seen as “worrying.” However, in a nudist camp, a clothed person would stand out, perhaps as “undesirable” or even “worrying,” even if he or she were attractive. In either case, the person, nude or clothed, has violated the norms, or “rules,” of the greater group. Abnormality, like beauty, is, it appears, in the eyes of the beholder, at least to some extent.

Fortunately, we do not need to be philosophers to recognize things that many, if not all, people regard as abnormal. We can start with a good image browser (I prefer Bing; you may favor Google.) All we need to do is to select our filters and type in our search term: “abnormal.” The server will return lots of images that have been labeled “abnormal.” We can then select those that we also view as abnormal and ask ourselves why these particular images seem abnormal to us.

Something uncanny!

Here is an image in which placement and shape conspire to create an abnormal effect. A glass of wine is positioned directly in front of a woman in a simple white dress. At the level of her crotch, the glass of wine, at first glance, appears to be her pubic hair. However, the woman is fully dressed, the dark triangular shape cannot be her pubic hair—unless, perhaps, her dress is cut out to reveal this feature. We look again, more closely. No. The dress does not have a cutout, and the dark triangle is not hair, but wine in a glass. A sight which had seemed to be fantastic turns out to be uncanny. At first, the sight appeared to deviate from the norms or propriety in a manner which some would find “undesirable or worrying.” Closer inspection shows that such is not the case.

Something marvelous!

This image shows a spoon lying on a white surface. It casts a shadow, part of which is visible below the bowl of the spoon. The spoon itself looks quite normal. There is nothing in the least unusual about the utensil itself. However, the image is slightly “worrying” because the spoon casts the shadow of a different implement altogether—that of a fork. The shapes of the fork's tines, rather than the rounded edge of the spoon's bowl, contradict our interpretation of the object as a spoon. The shadow under the spoon defies our experience, wherein a fork, not a spoon, would cast such a shadow. All we know about spoons and forks, about shadows, and about the science of optic is contravened.

The first image, although seemingly abnormal, can be explained as normal. What we see is an illusion caused by placement and shape. The effect is uncanny, but not fantastic. However, neither science nor reason can account for the shadow of the fork cast by the spoon. This image, therefore, is marvelous, and the marvelous is, or can be, the source of the horrific. In this image, we are confronted by a refutation of reason, a denial of the validity of empiricism, a denunciation of science itself. This image suggests that we neither know anything for certain nor are able to know anything with certainty.

Something fantastic!

A third possibility exists: the fantastic consists of things that could be either marvelous (for example, supernatural) or uncanny (extremely unusual but explainable through science or reason) and for which the jury remains undecided. Such a thing might be the cyclops of ancient Greek mythology. Some scientists suggest that the apparently fantastic creature is explained by ancient people's mistaking the skull of Deinotherium giganteum for that of a gigantic, one-eyed human:

The large hole in the center of the skull of Deinotherium giganteum, representing the animal's extremely large nasal opening, could well be the foundation for their tales of the fearsome one-eyed Cyclops.

The fantastic and the uncanny are variation on Holmes's singularity. Holmes's singularity is strange; it is displaced; it does not “belong” in its present environment; therefore, for the detective, it is a possible clue regarding the mystery he seeks to solve. However, that it is solvable is never in doubt, either to Holmes himself or to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legion of readers. Likewise, the fantastic is potentially solvable, while the uncanny is completely solvable.

Holmes' singularity is at first fantastic, but it is always, in the end, found to be uncanny. The marvelous is inexplicable; that is precisely why it is and remains marvelous. As such, it has no place in the detective story as it is practiced by Holmes.

Scott Derrickson: A Christian Horror Director on Cross-Genre Horror

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Known for such movies as The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Deliver Us from Evil, and Dr. Strange, Scott Derrickson is an unusual filmmaker. A Christian, he is also a horror movie director and himself a fan of the genre. Exorcists and demonologists are featured players in his movies, as are, indeed, demons. In a National Catholic Register interview with Steven D. Greydanus, Derrickson says, horror “is the perfect genre for a person of faith to work in. You can think about good and evil pretty openly. I always talk about it being the genre of non-denial. I like the fact that it’s a genre about confronting evil, confronting what’s frightening in the world.”

He sees horror films as a way of reclaiming the mystery of life. Human institutions and enterprises, he suggests, cut people off from the mysterious, limiting them to specific, pre-established ends and means: “Corporate America limits the world to consumerism. Science can limit it to the material world. Even religion limits it to a lot of theories that can explain everything.”

Horror not only “breaks that apart” but also reminds humanity “that we're not in control . . . and we don't understand as much as we think we do.” However, he agrees that horror that merely goes for the throat, without exploring significant themes in the process, is vapid and jejune: Horror, he implies, should invite “depth, . . . moral passion, [and] ideas that are to be taken seriously.”

For Derrickson, horror movies are “not about putting something evil in the world. It’s about reckoning with evil.”

His movies tend to use established conventions as ways to introduce mystery and religious faith. “Emily Rose was a courtroom demon-possession film. It kind of classically follows the structures of both of those [genres] at the same time,” he explains, while Deliver Us from Evil is “a police procedural.” 

It's important, the director says, not to impose one's own beliefs or perspective on the audience. Instead, a moviemaker should seek to get “the audience to accept the character’s point of view as the character’s point of view.” The movie shows how the protagonist feels, believes, thinks, and interprets the world. The audience may agree or disagree with the character's world view, but they should also accept it as that of the character. It is not necessarily the director's own point of view. “I’m never trying to propagate that,” Derrickson observes.

Derrickson cites, as authors who have influenced him, G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. For those new to horror, who may want to “test the waters,” he recommends, besides The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Deliver Us from Evil, The Sixth Sense, The Exorcist, and the Spanish-language film The Orphanage.

Science fiction and horror have often been combined to produce hybrid films such as Alien, The Fly, Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, and, more recently, A Quiet Place (2018), Annihilation (2018), and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018). Derrickson's use of courtroom drama and the police procedural suggest two other genres that can be combined with that of horror to produce new types of hybrid films, half-horror, half-other. Like other serious filmmakers, he also believes that, to be worthy of an audience's time, attention, and money, horror films must be about more than blood and guts; they must address themes that transcend mere gore.

G. K. Chesterton‘s “The Angry Street”: An Analysis

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

What is an altar but a table made sacred by convention and design?

The first-person narrator begins his story with a surprising statement: he is unable, he says, to recall “whether this tale is true or not”; he follows it with an even more remarkable declaration, stating that he believes that the incidents that he is about to commit to paper “happened to me before I was born.”

Having captured his readers’ attention with these statements, he next begins to relate the narrative proper, hinting at the fact that it involves “atmosphere.” A number of men, all of whom are in a hurry, are seated at lunch, each with one eye upon the clock. The narrator is among them, and, into their company enters another who is dressed as they are, in gentleman’s attire, but who, unlike the others, shows a reverence for the things about him, including his “long frock coat,” his top hat, the peg upon which he hangs his hat, “the wooden chair” in which he sits and the table at which he sits. As soon as he is seated across from the narrator, he begins a “monologue.” At first, the narrator considers him “ordinary,” but is soon disturbed by the other’s gaze, which he describes as that “of a maniac.”

The odd man’s odd manner and the odd thing that he next says continue to intrigue readers. “I thought,” he says, “that another of them had gone wrong,” by which, he clarifies, he means another street. For over forty years, he explains, he has traveled the same street, walking it in the same manner. It is not a long street, he observes; walking it takes him no more than “four and a half minutes.” However, he recently took his usual stroll and found it to be not only tiring but also to have taken him longer. The street also climbed a hill, which it had never done before. The curious gentleman guessed that he had perhaps “turned down the wrong” street, despite the many years during which he has made the same journey “like clockwork.” However, as he continued his walk, it became clear to him, by the landmarks he passed, that the street was, in fact, the one that he customarily traveled. As he continued his walk, the street, instead of turning, as it had always done before, veered steeply, “straight in front of” his “face,” ascending a sharp, long upward slope that caused him to nearly fall “on the pavement.” The street, he found, had “lifted itself like a single wave, and yet every speck and detail of it was the same.” At the very summit of the street, he was able to see the “name over” his “paper shop,” as if the sign were atop “an Alpine pass.”

Quite perplexed and more than a little frightened, the pedestrian was even more astonished when, peering through “the iron trap of a coal-hole” in the street, which had now assumed the aspect of “a long iron bridge into empty space,” he “saw empty space and the stars.” When he looked up again, he saw another man, who was “leaning over the railings,” staring at the hiker, to whom the man seemed to be “not of this world,” despite his “dark and ordinary” attire and the pedestrian’s sense that he had just come out of one of the “grey row of private houses” along the “nightmare road.” The sense of the stranger’s otherworldliness is intensified by the “stars behind his head,” which appear “larger and fiercer than ought to be endured by the eyes of men.”

Calling upon the stranger, whom the traveler supposes may be either an “kind angel” of a “wise devil,” to tell him what has become of the street, which, he identifies as “Bumpton Street, which “goes to Oldgate Station.” The stranger’s reply is bizarre (and, therefore, intriguing to the story’s readers): “It goes there sometimes, Just now, however, it is going to heaven” to seek justice for the traveler’s mistreatment of it. The neglect, the stranger informs the pedestrian, lies in the traveler’s ignoring of the street that he has used (and taken for granted) for over forty years: the street, he says, “has grown tired” of the traveler’s “insolence, and it is bucking and rearing its head toward heaven.”

The pedestrian expresses his opinion that the stranger’s talk is mad; it is “nonsense,” he argues, to imagine that a street should be offended or that it should go anywhere other than where it has always led before. To the stranger’s question as to whether the traveler has ever wondered whether the street has taken him for granted, supposing him to be a non-living thing among things, the traveler has no answer. However, he confides to the story’s narrator that he has “since. . . respected the things called inanimate!” and he bows “slightly to the mustard-pot” as he takes his leave of the restaurant.

This is a short-short story. It is an odd one, certainly, as well. Among younger readers, it is apt to seem not only strange but also absurd. Some older readers, however, will comprehend the story’s theme. Because they are created by men and women, objects of art and craft are, as artifacts of design and manufacture, each with an aesthetic or a utilitarian purpose, are invested with a significance beyond their importance as mere products of technology; they are imbued with the spirit of their manufacturers. They are humanized by virtue of the fact that they are made by men and women. In that sense, they have “souls,” a point that Chesterton makes in his essay “A Piece of Chalk” as well as in this story.

If one considers a coat, a hat, a chair, a table, a mustard-pot, or a street not as a simple coat or hat, table or chair, or mustard-pot, but as an artifact designed for service or aesthetic enrichment and as a work into which a man or a woman has poured not only his or her art and craft, knowledge and skill, experience and passion, as if he or she were fashioning a gift to others as well as an expression of his or her own heart, such seemingly commonplace objects would be regarded with the respect--indeed, the reverence--that the “kind angel” or “;wise demon” suggests that they should be accorded, rather than being taken for granted and ignored.

Were the things that people make for themselves and others rightly regarded, Chesterton suggests, in “A Piece of Chalk,” it would be possible to write a book of poetry, of epic length and grandeur, about the things that one finds in his pocket or her purse. This story, absurd on its face, uses the absurdity that it generates to skew everyday reality, as represented by the street and by the restaurant and the things that each contains, so that these ordinary, everyday places and objects take on strange appearances and become, as it were, visible to readers who, in the course of their own everyday lives, are apt to dismiss their surroundings and to take things for granted much as the pedestrian in “The Angry Street” does.

By making the ordinary appear, for a moment, extraordinary, Chesterton helps his readers to see the extraordinary quality and value of the ordinary and the remarkable nature of the commonplace. Such is no mean feat, and Chesterton’s accomplishment of it in “The Mean Street” makes this story remarkable, indeed.