Reading through the first chapter of Carrol's book, I was particularly intrigued by his idea that the Enlightenment provided a conception of nature that the horror genre could thrive in and rebel against. His account of the mechanistic view of the universe echoes with that of some feminist scholars, especially Carolyn Merchant and her view of the "death of nature." Essentially, the enlightenment was in a time in which nature was seen as subordinate to mankind's powers of reason. Through science, we could understand the workings of nature much like we could analyze the parts of a clock. Thus, a rational, logical worldview is promulgated. Horror would definitely have been much more threatening in an atmosphere like this. The average Joe who buys into the ideas made popular by enlightenment thinkers would confront the objects of art horror in extreme and tense ways. Carrol is definitely on to something here, I think. The violation of nature by horror is made possible by its ontology and cosmological contents. This seems to make sense with Carroll's earlier suggestion that horrific monsters are horrible in virtue of their violating the ontologies of the filmed worlds they inhabit. So, a troll in the Lord of the Rings isn't seen as art-horrific because it's a part of the world naturally. That seems to be the crucial distinction.
Of course, I have to ask, is it possible for something to be more terrifying in virtue of its being a natural part of the world? For example, take Annie Wilkes in the novel (and film) Misery. She's a normal human who just happens to be crazy. She doesn't violate any norms of ontology or nature. She doesn't seem to contradict any cultural categories, nor is she a product of fusion, fission, massification or magnification. She's just a regular person who happens to be very threatening. One may argue that her qualities are stretched to the point of the supernatural to make her more like a monster. I would tend to argue that her natural qualities are what make her terrifying. That is, because she is a part of the world that we know and are comfortable with, (and because she represents a violation that is all too possible in that world, a violation that takes place on real terms in real spatio-temporal limits) we find her horrifying. Lots of horror aficionados talk about this type of horror - the darkness inside of us. John Carpenter believed that horror could be digested into two types: it was either "out there" in the world or inside of us. Perhaps that horror can be a part of us is more terrifying than something that violates nature ontologically or categorically.
Despite this, I find Carroll's criteria for the identification of art horror objects fairly interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment