King Kong, if we are to believe Carl Denham, seems to represent the bestial component not of humanity as such, but of the male of the species, whom only female Beauty can tame. What is the giant ape but the uncivilized and the undomesticated, and, therefore, the hyper-masculine, male? He is masculinity unrestrained, a rampage of testosterone that has not, as yet, met its match in the humanizing effects of estrogen. Too large, to be sure, to be a rapist, Kong is nevertheless an abductor who, quite literally, carries Ann Darrow back to nature, a primitive world in which there is no law other than that of the survival of the fittest. It is only when, tempted, as it were, by Ann, that Kong is captured (emasculated) and taken to the concrete jungle that he is subdued, however temporarily, and, at last, killed. As Denham laments, “’Tis Beauty killed the Beast.” The lesson of this masterful cautionary tale is as simple as it is profound: The undomesticated male is a threat not only to the female but to society--indeed, to civilization--itself, and, if it cannot be tamed, it must be destroyed by the tribe.
Beowulf’s monster, Grendel, was an outcast. A descendent of Cain, who was sent into exile by God himself, Grendel envied the fellowship displayed by the Danish warriors who met over mead in their great hall, Heorot, for which reason he attacked and killed as many of their number as he could, until, at last, he himself was dispatched by the Geatish hero. Critics see him as representing the feuding principle which, like that among today’s street gangs, requires that an outrage, real or perceived, by one tribe against another, be avenged. The act of vengeance itself, of course, requires, in turn, another act of vengeance, ad infinitum, thereby threatening the social order that is the foundation of civilization. By defeating this principle, Beowulf introduced social stability and ended the threat to the status quo that continuous intertribal warfare, in the guise of the monster, represented.
In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero overcomes the monster of his own--and of the rest of humanity’s--mortality. He does not defeat death itself, but the fear of it that immobilized his will and made life seem hardly worth the living. In other words, he learns to live with death, establishing the pagan alternative to Christian immortality: the name of the man of accomplishment, if not the man himself, will be remembered forever. To be forgotten is to be annihilated. However, the man of great accomplishment is apt to be memorialized both in stone monuments and in such poems as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, so his memory is assured, and he need not fear being forgotten; in this sense, he will live forever.
Epic narratives, by definition, deal with civilizations, nations, or societies. Other types of fiction may, also, but they need not do so. Often, other genres do not. Sometimes, the focus is finer. The group is more select, and the context is more contracted. For example, according to its creator, Joss Whedon, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is based upon the simple premise that high school is hell. It is a place that one is compelled to attend. The day progresses according to a predetermined structure that is imposed upon one by others. The setting is a more-or-less self-contained, self-sufficient environment--in sociological terms, a total institution. One is forced to participate in activities, such as physical education and geometry and English class assignments, that are abhorrent and painful, emotionally if not always physically. One is made to keep company with others whose presence one finds undesirable or even repulsive. Certain behaviors that one enjoys, whether chewing gum or making out with a member of the opposite sex, are discouraged or even forbidden, and the manner in which one would dress may be restricted or dictated by adults with no fashion sense. Pretty much everything one does is controlled by one’s keepers--the teachers and administrators--and even a visit to the rest room must be approved by someone else. High school students suffer not only a loss of freedom, but they also experience losses of autonomy, dignity, and individuality. Moreover, attempts are made to “socialize” them and to make them think in certain ways about certain things--in a sense, to brainwash them. Maybe, in many ways, high school is hell, as Whedon and others (Carrie’s director, Brian De Palma, for example) have suggested.
Buffy offers a convenient way of examining hell on earth, because it confines itself pretty much (for the first three of its seasons, anyway) to the microcosm of high school (and thereafter to the microcosm of college); because it ran for seven seasons before its demise; and because it frequently features a monster of the week, which supplies quite a bestiary of monsters, beastly, demonic, and otherwise, which suggests how horror writers are always Dante, creating hells, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment.
In “The Witch,” the third episode of season one, a high school cheerleader’s mother, who is also a witch, uses her magic to eliminate her daughter’s rivals so that she, the mother, can relive her glory days as a head cheerleader through her daughter, once the latter gains a spot on the squad. Although this plot may seem ludicrous, it has a real-life precedent in which a woman murdered the rivals of her daughter to ensure her win. The hell of high school, it seems, is home to abusive parents who, seeking to live vicariously through their children, represent real dangers to their offspring’s health and welfare.
“The Pack,” the sixth episode of the same season, examines the threats of peer pressure and mindless conformity to individuals’ personal integrity. Buffy Summers’ friend, Xander Harris, bitten by a hyena, becomes more and more feral and predatory, both socially and sexually, turning against his best friend Willow Rosenberg and his romantic interest, the Slayer herself. High school’s hell includes the demons of groupthink and the lockstep behavior that attends it.
The eighth episode of this season, “I Robot, You Jane,” takes on the dangers of the anonymous predators of Internet chat rooms: Willow meets a seemingly sweet suitor who is actually a demon that was released from the book in which its spirit was magically bound when the school’s librarian, Rupert Giles, orders the text to be scanned into the library’s electronic database and the demon escapes into cyberspace.
“Out of Sight, Out of Mind” shows the psychologically destructive effects of cliques who ignore all others but their own members: a girl who is ignored by students and teachers alike gradually becomes invisible and seeks to avenge herself upon her passive-aggressive tormentors before, defeated by Buffy, she finds a home, of sorts, with a covert government organization (most likely the Central Intelligence Agency) that performs espionage activities.
Other episodes in this and other seasons of the show provide plenty of other examples of the types of loss that high school students face and the types of monsters that threaten them with these losses. Many have to do with matters of identity, multiculturalism and cultural assimilation, sexism and chauvinism, attempts to avoid personal responsibility and duty, the effects of past deeds upon one’s present life, the consequences of refusing or being unable to repress instincts and primitive impulses, the emotional manipulation of others, unrestrained passion, child abuse, unresolved guilt, misogyny, adolescent behavior, social ostracism, service to others, and autonomy. In other words, high school hell, as it is depicted in this series for teens and young adults, is layered with personal, social, and political strata, much like the world of adults. The difference is that many of the concerns are adolescent. Adults, for the most part, have survived the losses associated with adolescence and have moved on to face other dragons. The new monsters are not necessarily bigger and more terrible (although some may be), but they’re different, for different ages, whether with respect to the individual or his or her society, nation, or culture, differ over time. In every age, however, the rejected and the exiled, the repressed and the banished, become the condemned, or the damned, and new hells are created, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment. The demons are the threats of loss; the effects that follow such losses make up the atmosphere of hell. In the hell that is high school, the blessed are the ones who, surviving these losses, ascend to new levels of knowledge and wisdom.
Of course, that’s just the hell of high school. Once writers realized that there is not one world, but worlds within worlds, the numbers and kinds of hell, like the number and types of demons, multiplied significantly. There is the hell of school, of the workplace, of the home, of the place of worship, of places of leisure, and some hells are not places at all, but states of existence, such as illness, or situations, such as a loveless marriage, or events, such as the death of a loved one. Truly, as Edgar Allan Poe observed, “misery is manifold.” Hell is on earth because, as Jean Paul Sartre points out, in No Exit, hell is other people. It is also ourselves. As John Milton observes, Satan carries hell within himself, for it is a state of mind in which he has alienated himself from God. The same is true of us as well.
One might say of this post what some critics said of Milton’s poem. Much has been said of hell, but little of heaven. That’s because, too often, we count our curses, so to speak, rather than our blessings, seeing the bad and ignoring the good. By identifying the hellish, we have, by implication, also identified its opposite, the heavenly, which is why, as we have argued in a previous post, horror fiction is a guide to the good life as well as a body of cautionary tales. Whatever we fear to lose, we value, and heaven is the realm wherein we have stored up the things we deem to be valuable beyond all else, very little of which, as it turns out, is comprised of physical or material objects.