Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare,
Ph.D. Candidate
St. Michael's College
Toronto School of Theology
Abstract
The popular sectors of society have often been represented as embodying
a monstrous curse that promotes passivity with respect to dominant
ideological structures. This paper will examine filmic horror and
popular religion as perceived locations of ideological manipulation
among the subaltern sectors of society. This perceived manipulation
has generated moral panics and collective fears about the possibility
of people turning into hideous creatures who wreak havoc on themselves
and others. Through a critical appraisal of the 1941 horror movie The
Wolf Man, this paper will utilize the theme of lycanthropy as
a starting-point for probing the "low-end" traditions of
popular religion and filmic horror within the writings of theologians,
scholars and critics who fear that they promote alienation and re-inscribe
hegemony. But is the curse of hegemony as totalizing as it is often
described?
"Most people have a certain understanding of what a horror film
is, namely, that it is emotionally juvenile, ignorant, supremely
non-intellectual and dumb. Basically stupid. But I think of horror
films as art, as films of confrontation." — David
Cronenberg
"Contemporary popular Catholicism cannot be misread as a bastardized,
insufficient, or superstitious version of the so-called normative
Catholicism… Popular Catholicism… [however] may be
understood in theological terms as potentially a prophetic sign of
rebellion against many attempts to equate the ecclesiastically 'normative,'
'orthodox,' or 'canonical,' with the hegemonic." — Orlando
Espín
[1] The popular sectors of society have often been represented as
embodying a monstrous curse that promotes passivity with respect
to dominant ideological structures. In Volume One of Karl Marx's Das
Kapital, written in 1867, we are confronted by the horrifying
personification of capital accumulation in a classic image drawn
from European peasant folklore: the werewolf. This creature stops
at nothing in its insatiable hunger for surplus-labour, endlessly
feeding on its workers through the extension of the work-day,
… the were-wolf's hunger for surplus-labour in a department
where the monstrous exactions, not surpassed … by the
cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins, caused
capital at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulation
(Marx 1972b: 367).
For Marx, this creature's hideous capacity to extract life from its
workers is so shocking that not even the cruelties of the Spanish
conquistadors visited upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas
rival its horror. But how does capital both sustain its monstrous
propensity to exact life from labour and simultaneously expand its
own life (growth)? An ever-expanding capitalist system characterized
by an insatiable werewolf hunger for surplus-labour reproduces itself
by feeding off the living labour of its workers and thereby transforming
them into creatures of the night. In fact, the work-day is extended
to a point where workers never see the light of day. The werewolf
of capital accumulation is most dangerous in its capacity to extend
its curse throughout society and transform its workers into creatures
whose instincts are reduced to survival.
[2] This paper will explore some specific responses to the spectral
threat of ideological manipulation, especially the manipulation of
marginalized or subaltern groups, in relation to popular cinematic
horror texts and popular religion.1 This
theological inquiry will examine representations of filmic monsters
and monstrous religion, both dismissed as alienating ideologies thought
to undermine societal values and uphold the status quo. As Marx clearly
demonstrates, the werewolf of modernity no longer prowls the dark
forests of old; it now lurks in the corridors of churches and banks,
in the boardrooms of corporations, and in the other holy sanctums
of Mammon that buttress the expansion of capitalism. How do
these institutions impart their ideas onto the "masses," who
in Marx's time, were filing into the cities to supply the capital
that labour is dependent upon? It is this very modern lycanthropic
curse, embodied in the form of ideological manipulation and hegemonic
consent, which will be the focus of this paper. Marx assertively
believed that the chains of legal regulation, while limiting somewhat
this excessive hunger for surplus-labour, could never completely
limit the werewolf's capacity to spread its curse far and wide.
[3] But is the curse of hegemonic consent as pervasive among the "masses" as
Marx and his disciples envisioned? Or is consent more unstable, ambiguous,
and harbouring hidden suspicions? Drawing on several key moments
in the history of horror cinema, I will be posing these questions
as I examine the ways in which popular religious practices have been
perceived among the elite. As hideously hyperbolic and theologically
unorthodox as most cinematic monsters appear to us, this inquiry
will show, or exhibit (from the Latin monstrare, the root
word for monster, or monstrum) a preferential option for two
sites especially maligned in theological discourses: popular religion
and cinematic horror.
"Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his
prayers by night
May become a wolf when
the wolf bane blooms
And the
autumn moon is bright."
[4] These immortal lines from the 1941 Universal horror film, The
Wolf Man (directed by Jack Waggner), frames my questioning
about the purported power of ideological manipulation, and the
fear that monstrous hegemony is being sustained in a world marked
by asymmetrical power relations. The shape-shifting central character
encapsulates the central themes of this paper. The film's famous
lines tell us much about U.S./British anxieties during World War
II. On one level, The Wolf Man reflects the personal history
of its writer, Curt Siodmak,2 a
German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, and spent several
years in transitional situations throughout Europe. The depiction
of the Roma and the plight of the hunted werewolf (Lon Chaney
Jr.), branded with a pentagram on his chest, to reveal his lycanthropic
curse, draws on the scriptwriter's own experience and the experience
of thousands of European Jews, Roma, and anti-Fascist partisans
at that time. On another level, The Wolf Man reflects anxieties
plaguing modernity: the fear of its own shadow-side taking over,
particularly in the form of superstitious or ideological manipulation.
During the war, the threat of mounting Nazi supremacy in Europe
was implicitly linked to these fears. In the context of Hitler's
well documented fascination with wolves and werewolf legends, The
Wolf Man depicts the fear that Fascist propaganda threatened
to transform the conformist "masses" into werewolves
who preyed on the vulnerable, a threat that was a terrifying reality
at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and many other death camps.
[5] The Wolf Man is a fascinating film text of the horror
genre, because its creature's otherness, like Universal Studio's
other famous monsters from the pre-war period, such as Boris Karloff's
portrayal of the Frankenstein creature, expresses competing, and
at times contradictory societal anxieties. Is the werewolf a metaphor
for the persecuted Jews and Roma of Europe, hunted down because of
their otherness? Or is it the menace of Fascism facing Europe, terrifying
in its capacity to transform the human being into a creature on the
prowl for its victims? If, for Marx, the answer is unambiguous, the
film proposes a more complex, and ultimately, more interesting perspective.
Monsters in Film, Theology, and the Bible
[6] I approach the material of cinematic horror from a critical liberationist
theological perspective: one that is inspired by the themes of justice
and solidarity in the biblical narratives, in Christian traditions,
and in communities and movements that attempt to follow Jesus in
proclaiming G*d's3 loving bias
for those cursed as "other." My theological method is critical
insofar as it draws from the social sciences in order to read the "signs
of the times," and liberationist insofar as my starting point
for reflecting about G*d is shaped by an ethical option of solidarity
for peoples, communities, and cultures that have been excluded, marginalized,
and made vulnerable. In this way, my theological reading of film
texts tends to diverge from the more descriptive method of locating
the Christ-figure or religious symbol in a film.4 Horror
is among the most acutely symbolic and subtextually rich of all film
genres.5 Thus, it easily lends
itself to a descriptive style of analysis. I will argue that horror
helps us to locate social anxieties that are often overtly theological
in their relevance and import. Moreover, with respect to the history
of cinema more generally, theologians (more so than scholars of religion)
tend to interact with the so-called "high-end" of cinema
and shun "low-end" genres, such as horror. One is bound
to find a reading of, for example, The Mission (1986) and Babette's
Feast (1987) in theological readings of cinema.6 Yet
will the cult horror tale, The Addiction (1995), a brilliant
meditation on vampirism as sin, ever figure prominently in books
by theologians? It is quite probable that most theologians have never
heard of this film, or care to engage with its gritty and controversial
Catholic director/writer team, Abel Ferrara and Nicholas St. John
(Nicodemo Oliverio). However, its theological reading of vampirism
is highly relevant to our contemporary capitalist culture, especially
in a time when systemic consumerism does in fact constitute an important
site for political intervention and struggle.7
[7] The offshoot of the "high-end" currents in theological
readings of films further limits the scope of analysis to a film
studies approach that is anti-popular and narrowly auteurist.8 Feminist
and cultural studies approaches to film texts have long ago critiqued
the patriarchal and elitist currents that underlie some auteur theories.9 Yet
much feminist film theory, and especially feminist approaches to
horror, tends to be deeply invested in a psychoanalytic framework
that narrowly focuses on films as individual/isolated texts rather
that on the production and consumption of film in a socio-historical
context. Carol Clover's brilliant study of modern horror, Men
Women and Chainsaws (1992), is an impressive refutation of the
often reductionistic presupposition that horror fans are driven by
sadistic impulses. Her psychoanalytic inquiry into the masochistic
moment in male reception of horror, especially in relation to the
female victim-hero character (the "Final Girl"), is an
exceptional contribution to the study of horror, but it also runs
the risk of universalizing phenomena that are historically and culturally
contextual. I also share the critique of other feminist theorists
who argue that psychoanalytic theories can at times be reductive
and ahistorical.10 Cynthia Freeland
argues that the prominence of the psychoanalytic in film theory to
be "disproportionate to their general importance in feminist
theorizing" (Freeland 2000, 4). Horror texts are not static,
generating one-time readings. For example, Paul O'Flinn's insightful
article on the shifting resonances of Frankenstein in British society—ranging
from a bourgeois fear of the marginalized "creature" (fear
of Luddite revolts) in Mary Shelly's novel (1818) to an anxiety surrounding
the "creator" (fear of atomic science) in the 1957 Hammer
version, The Curse of Frankenstein—exemplifies a historical
method that is sensitive to the "signs of the times" and
ripe for theological investigation.11 Hence,
I seek to bring to theology and film criticism disparate historical
analyses and theories in order to unmask discourses and practices,
which contribute to valorizing hegemony by excluding the contributions
of subaltern peoples. My analysis attempts to be in solidarity with
the perspectives of the excluded of history, or in the words of Catholic
theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, the threatened humanum.12
[8] I approach the material of popular religion as an heir to immigrant
Southern Italian Catholic experiences. Popular religious practices
often enabled Catholic migrants the capacity to express a rebellious
hope within an alien world, and tools to negotiate and secure a religious
identity in an insecure place. My theological commitments have been
deeply inspired by the rich symbolic universe of popular religion,
especially the often syncretic practices created as survival strategies
in the face of conquest, genocide, and dehumanization. By "popular" here,
I do not only mean widespread, as in a popular television show, even
if popular religion is very widespread in places like Latin America.
In fact, according to Chilean theologian, Diego Irarrázaval, "in
the expression 'I'm Catholic,' many [Latin American] people implicitly
mean that they take part in the feast days of the people" (Irarrázaval
2000, 109). Philip Berryman writes, "the Catholic church [in
Latin America] could draw on great strengths such as popular religiosity
[sic],13 the form of
Catholicism practiced by 80 or 90 percent of those identifying themselves
as Catholics" (Berryman 1996, 148). The notion of "popular" that
interests me is linked to the development of the notion "the
people" (from the German term Volk: first developed by
J.G. Herder) in Europe and Latin America. In North America, its derivation "folk
religion" is often used to describe popular religion, but I
avoid this term because it has been used to characterize these religious
practices as quaint rural religious systems on the verge of extinction
under the impact of modernity.14 The
recent growth of popular religious systems in the ever-expanding
megacities of the South reveals just the opposite. As Mike Davis
insists, "for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical
stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of
the industrial revolution, he [sic] has risen again in the
postindustrial cities of the developing world" (Davis 2004,
30). Popular religion remains on the margins of theological discourses,
but its distinctiveness can be distinguished in a variety of ways:
it is characterized by a predominantly lay emphasis; it is located
at the crossroads of the home and public square as the locus of
its creativity; it is also distinguished by its frequently women-centered
leadership; it has shown a potential for protest and contestation;
it is tightly related to an ethos of feast and celebration; it promotes
a sapiential knowledge system that favours intuition and affect;
it derives from oral traditions where images predominate; and it
is overwhelmingly hybrid.15 Many
of these elements, especially its hybrid character, have secured
its classification as unorthodox, impure, and backward. And this,
of course, has been quite suitable for its appropriation as exotic
rituals for tourist consumption.
[9] I have come to understand that the horror genre and the priorities
of my Christian faith have much to do with each other. Yet, the horror
genre is considered the most offensive genre, after pornography,
to Christian values and sensibilities.16 But
what do we mean by Christian values? From the standpoint of this
author, Christian values are rooted in a committed solidarity of
the cross, a cross that leads toward hopeful resistance to those
terrifying powers that negate the dignity of human beings in this
world and destroy our fragile ecosystems. For example, the present
widespread incursions of neoliberal globalization, especially in
how they impact the South through privatization schemes, structural
adjustments programs, the slashing of social programs, and debt slavery,
are without a doubt among the most pressing concerns facing the global
community today. These structures have contributed to a world, in
both the North and South, where the vulnerable are forced to the
margins of our societies and easily disposed of. These conditions
should urge Christians toward a contestational stance in solidarity
with subaltern peoples. Following the prophetic voice of U.S. theologian
Mark Lewis Taylor, "[t]he way of the cross in today's theatrics
of terror, in lockdown America, is a way through the terrorizing
powers toward a restored humanity" (Taylor 2001, xvi). In this
respect, specific horror texts have helped instill in me what liberation
theologians have come to call "the preferential option for the
poor." When it comes to the horror genre, however, one should
perhaps speak of a preferential option for the outsider, the abnormal,
the unclean, and the impure—those liminal creatures
that tend to transgress socially constructed boundaries and borders.
[10] The business of horror texts has often been to overturn dominant
definitions and conventions, and to offer a vision of radical discontinuity
with the institutions and discourses that shape our everyday realities.
But I would argue that the horror genre is also very slippery and
resistant to definitions that seek to find a common essence.17 Jonathan
Crane argues that watching a horror film is a "reality check" with
respect to the everyday world in which we live (Crane 1994, 8). This "reality
check" is revealed through the horror genre's depiction of anxieties
that plague the twentieth century (in North America) and their potentially
terrifying consequences: the devastating impact of WWI and the suspicion
of scientific and technological progress in 1920s-30s horror; the
Great Crash and Depression in '30s horror; WWII and European Fascism
in '40s horror; the "Atomic Age" and the "Red Threat" of
'50s horror; the suspicion of institutions and authority in '60s
and '70s horror; the social slashing of the Reagan/Thatcher years
in '80s horror; and the fear of "virtual" realities in
the 1990s and beyond. Horror texts are strongly linked to social
anxieties, which are generated by the threat of evil in the world.
While the horror film attempts to confront its audience with how
characters resist and survive these threats—or are ultimately
engulfed by them—it is often difficult to ascertain how audiences
will position themselves in relation to these threats and with whom
they will identify. Monsters are not static entities; their liminal
status makes them difficult to pin-down. The meaning of monsters
as social portents, namely as signs of societal anxieties, is dependent
on historical context and the social location of both the film and
the audience in question.
[11] Monsters and the Christian tradition are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, the Bible is full of monsters and creatures. Both the Hebrew
Bible and the Christian Testament depict the presence of monsters
in creation. In the Hebrew Bible we find both Leviathan and Behemoth,
each described paradoxically, on the one hand, as being a part of
G*d's design for creation, and on the other, as threats to the cosmos
and social order.18 In the Christian
Testament, John's Revelation depicts a Great Red Dragon, inspired
by these chaos monsters of the Hebrew Bible. However, unlike the
Book of Job, where Leviathan and Behemoth are more sublime than diabolic,
most of the prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible, that depict monsters
employ the figure of the chaos monster to demonize their enemies.19 Deeply
inspired by the prophetic canon, John's Revelation also engages in
monstrous demonization in order to depict his oppressive enemy: the
Roman empire. This has informed a religious history in which enemies
from within and without, such as "heretics" and "heathen," "pagans" and "barbarians," have
been persecuted, tortured, and often eliminated. This history of
demonization within the Christian churches must not be sanitized;
it is a history that can be traced throughout the early persecution
of "pagans" under the tutelage of Christian emperors after
the conversion of Constantine, the Medieval witch-hunts and Inquisitions,
and the conquest of the Americas, to more contemporary attacks on
bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgendered peoples. The demonized "other" is
always feared as a threat to the fabric of society, a threat that
has been purged from within repeatedly in the history of Christendom.
In his fascinating study, Religion and Its Monsters (2002),
Timothy K. Beal maintains that the Bible does not have a uniform
understanding of the monstrous. This is what he calls "the paradox
of the monstrous" (Beal 2002, 4). Some monsters represent what
he calls the "monstrous-diabolic," such as the Red Dragon.
They are a threat to G*d and used to demonize enemies and strangers. But
other creatures, such as Leviathan, represent what he calls "the
monstrous-sublime," in other words, semi-divine creatures who
are a part of G*d's created order (Beal 2002, 118). Beal suggests
that in the Book of Job we find a G*d who identifies with chaos-monsters
and participates in the chaos they are creating in the world. Hence,
Beal argues that the presence of the "monstrous-sublime" is
a challenge to the common belief that religion is fundamentally about
the establishment of order against chaos. As Job's chaos-monsters
show, Biblical monsters are not simply threats to the established
or sacred order, they also reveal a G*d who revels in chaos-creation.
[12] In the scriptural traditions, monsters and demons tend to derive
from the brutal impact of imperial domination. One can witness
this reality in the ministry of Jesus, who made the transgression
of thresholds and boundaries constitutive of his reign-centered practice.
This Jesus, born in the marginal area of Galilee in Palestine, was
a Jewish peasant who lived under Roman occupation and whose experience
as a colonial subject is considered by Christians to be G*d's revelation
in history. In other words, the specific context of Jesus' life and
his partisan option for the margins of society is not incidental
to a Christian understanding of revelation; it constitutes what Edward
Schillebeeckx has termed a "datum of revelation" (Schillebeeckx
1989, 186). Jesus' radical healing ministry through commensal practices
among the poor and outcast brought him in touch with the demons and
spectres created within the context of colonial oppression. The healing
of the Gerasene demoniac, for example (Mark 5:1-17), is a vivid example
of the spiritual, psychological, and somatic impact of Roman occupation
on marginalized individuals.20 The
possessed man who lived day and night "among the tombs" (5:5),
a place of impurity according to Jewish Law, can be understood as
a symbol for the plight of the Jewish people. When Jesus calls on
the demon (a word that usually means "power" in the gospel
accounts) to name itself, it tells him: "My name is Legion:
for we are many" (Mark 5:9). Legion had only one meaning in
Mark's time: a division of soldiers.
[13] According to Ched Myers, "alerted to this clue, we discover
that the rest of the story is filled with military imagery" (Myers
1988, 191). Confronted with Jesus, the demon begs to be sent into
a "herd of swine" (5:11), which drowns itself in the sea.
While the pig constitutes an impure animal according to Jewish Law,
Myers reminds us of the fact that swine do not in fact travel in
herds. However, herd (Greek: agelē) was also a word often
used for a band of military recruits. Hence, the image of occupying
soldiers drowning in the sea invokes the liberation of Israel from
Egypt in the Exodus story, a memory of resistance that is constitutive
of Jewish identity (Exod 14:27). In the account of Jesus' healing
the Gerasene demoniac, we witness the process by which a demonized
person, who has retreated "among the tombs," is healed
of the death dealing impact of Roman military occupation. Mark's
gospel account of the Gerasene demoniac captures the concerns of
my theological inquiry. While not all monsters are cut from the same
cloth, I am interested in bringing out from "among the tombs" those
monsters whose monstrosity is the result of historical subjugation.
Monsters cannot be properly understood without a critique of systems
of domination in the world; they can show (monstrare) us how
these systems disfigure whole peoples and negate life.
[14] Although biblical monsters are sometimes depicted as part of
G*d's creation, constituting an uncanny otherness with respect to
the rest of creation,21 monsters
in the Bible are usually linked to monstrous oppression, either in
the form of a demonized victim or a demonized oppressor. It is no
accident that the Book of Revelation (from the Greek apokalypsis,
meaning unveiling), is very popular in marginalized communities in
the South, while it is considered an embarrassment for the liberal
middle-class churches of the North, for it reveals in fantastic imagery
a reality that is all too familiar to Southern peoples. John's vision
of the Red Dragon is an unveiling of systems that perpetuate persecution,
captivity, exile and oppression. The monsters depicted therein are
the very monstrosities of oppression inflicted on the vulnerable.
Thus, despite contemporary fundamentalist discourses, the terrors
depicted by John, are terrors defeated, not terrors inflicted on
creation.
[15] John begins his account by relating his captivity on the island
of Patmos. Unlike Paul's letters, which are focused on the meaning
of Christian love, or agapē in Greek, John's focus is hypomenē,
steadfast resistance to domination (Rev 1:9). John speaks of a reality
of chaos and misery, but also of ultimate release from it: a New
Jerusalem in history where the beasts of Babylon/Rome can no longer
continue to extract subservience from the voiceless (Rev 21).22 The
G*d of Revelation is a G*d who gives voice to the voiceless, and
visions to the visionless. In these visions, the world is revealed
to be topsy-turvy, making the last first and the first last. In this
sense, the demons of Revelation are not the oppressed as in the Gerasene
demoniac, but those who inflict fear through domination. Times of
persecution are times of stark dualisms. But in the New Jerusalem,
the heavens and the earth will be transformed into a place in history
where these dualisms cannot thrive. According to John, this is G*d's
plan for creation. When one is attempting to survive a time of persecution,
to learn that death and victimization do not have the last word in
history is like receiving manna in the wilderness.
The Horrifying Cross
[16] Horror films, with their vivid and hyperbolic representations
of negativity and chaos, remind us of Thomas Aquinas' basic principle
about the apophatic dimension, or the via negativa,
of theology: "De Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid
non sit."23 The horror
genre reminds us that the basileia, or Reign of G*d, is certainly "not
yet," and that the horrific crosses of history continue to be
erected by empire, especially for the poor and outcast. Following
Jon Sobrino, the task of Christians in this context, in a world of
crucified peoples, is to help bring people down from their crosses.
With Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, I understand horror texts
as "films of confrontation," which confront us with our
own societal anxieties and with the reality of victims and/or survivors
in our world (Rodley 1992, 59). In light of this pressing reality,
theology should be done, in the words of Sobrino, as "intellectus
amoris," the work of solidarity with victims and survivors
of empire (Sobrino 2001, 8). The historical reality of death dealing
crosses in our world, what Marc Taylor calls in his U.S. context, "lockdown
America," is thus a starting point for an emancipatory vision
of Christian praxis. This theological vision should also include
the work of solidarity with our crucified and wounded earth, an important
theme in many films within the horror genre.
[17] As a young boy, the horror films that I watched on late-night
television reminded me that sin was very real in the world that I
lived. So many of the early horror films which sparked my curiosity
were imagined and created during turbulent times in the 1920s and
1930s: Germany healing from World War I and anticipating Nazism,
the U.S. reeling from the Great Crash and surviving the Great Depression,
and a world contending with the spectres of Fascism, Stalinism and
mounting U.S. military supremacy. These were times of crisis, especially
a crisis of optimism generated by both religious and secular liberalism.
Yet U.S. and Canadian citizens in the 1930s, especially from the
working classes, went out to view these films in droves. They were
the same classes of people who had visited in previous decades what
some consider to be the prototypes to cinematic horror spectacles:
fairgrounds, carnivals, "freak" shows, and the infamous
Grand-Guignol theatre in Paris.24 The
carnival and the Grand-Guignol were places of working-class entertainment
and spectacle, marginal places shunned by the "good taste" of
cultured elites. Without romanticizing the more exploitative aspects
of "freak" shows, Elizabeth Grosz argues that carnival "freaks" are
limit beings "who exist outside and in defiance of the structures
of binary oppositions that govern our basics concepts and modes of
self-definition" (Grosz 1996, 57). In other words, they are liminal beings,
who like the monsters of the horror genre, transgress strict societal
boundaries about normalcy, identity, selfhood and alterity. The popularity
of silver screens monsters in the Depression era resided in part
in their impure and contaminated status as boundary crossers. Because
of this, silver screen monsters were often marginalized as the "other," targeted
as different, scapegoated as the cause of evil in the world, and
finally eliminated for being a threat to normality (at least until
the sequel!). Those who made up the breadlines of the Depression
era, who had experienced a perilous laissez-faire economy of the
1920s that they could not control, strongly identified with these
marginal/limit creatures. More often than not, the "other" to
be eliminated was a lot less terrifying than those forces engaging
in its destruction. Those forces seeking to eliminate the monster
could not be abated by good upstanding behaviour; the forces were
systematic, organized, and deeply rooted in the fabric of society.
Like the creature in The Wolf Man, these monsters were at
once frightening and frightened because of their "otherness." Their
bodies were cursed with liminal alterity. And this was a status with
which Depression-era audiences could easily identify
[18] As I discussed regarding to John's account of persecution in
Revelation, the boundaries between revealed spectres and spectral
realities have never been very firm. The same can be said with respect
to filmic spectres and the spectral realities of the 1930s. The first
half of the 30s saw a dramatic increase in the lynching of black
men in the South of the U.S., and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was very active in lobbying
for a national anti-lynching bill (Young 1996, 321). A spectral figure
resonant within this context is Frankenstein's monster, in James
Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, released in 1935, the same
year the NAACP anti-lynching bill was defeated in Washington, D.C.
The film depicts a harrowing scene of a frightened monster being
chased by a lynch mob, captured and bound like the crucified Jesus.
There are very few films produced in Hollywood from that period that
capture the terror of the lynch mob so thoroughly. In another scene
of mob violence in the film, the original script had the frightened
creature stop before a large statue of a crucified Jesus in a cemetery.
Recognizing in the crucified messiah his own terrible suffering,
the creature attempts to free Jesus from the cross. Notified by the
censors—who at that time oversaw productions from start too
finish—that such a scene risked comparing the hideous creature
to G*d, Whale modified the scene. Instead, he had the creature overturn
a statue of a bishop, while a large crucified Jesus dominates in
the background. In a sense, the censors' intervention made the scene
more openly confrontational with the institutional church. It is
the Christian institutions, the film asserts, which continue to water
down and domesticate the central symbol of Christianity, what in
the words of Paul, is a scandal to the powerful and foolishness to
the haughty: the crucified Christ (1Cor 1: 23). Living as an openly
gay man in 1935, Whale was deeply alert and responsive to the plight
of persecuted minorities because of their difference, particularly
when persecution was justified by the teachings of religious institutions
(Skal 2001, 184).
[19] In the tradition of Universal Studios, monsters were always
facing the threat of being stoned by gentry and commoners alike.
Lon Chaney Sr., in his now famous portrayal of the skull-faced Erik
in Universal's The Phantom of the Opera (1925), personifies
this theme. Erik is a monster who haunts the Paris Opera House and
ultimately abducts the young prima donna, Christine Daae (Mary Philbin),
and holds her captive in his subterranean abode. In a famous scene,
Christine unmasks Erik's monstrosity to a horrified audience. Yet
this monster, in the eyes of the viewing audience, becomes a victim
of a much more terrifying mob that chases him, beats him and hurls
him to his death into the Seine. To the moviegoer of the 1920s, Lon
Chaney Sr.'s monstrous make-up and contortions, in such films as
Tod Browning's lurid Grand-Guignol tale, The Unknown (1927),
where he portrayed a circus attraction named Alonzo the Armless with
his arms bound behind his back, were not only perceived as great
showmanship, but as a Christ-like martyrdom on their behalf (Skal
2001, 71). Post-World War I anxiety about bodily dismemberment and
disfigurement was very real in the U.S. and Europe of the 1920s.
Many lives were saved during the war because of new surgical procedures,
but this breakthrough also saw an increase in visibly disfigured
and disabled people in mainstream society. David Skal points out
that the Man of a Thousand Faces could easily have included one of
his famous cinematic personas in l'Union des Gueules Cassées,
a group of 5,000 disfigured and disabled veterans who traditionally
led the Armistice parades in France (Skal 2001, 66). Against the
grain of picture-perfect Hollywood looks and fashions, Chaney Sr.
was transforming himself into the likeness of those who had endured
the horrors of trench warfare, and whose presence in society was
a reminder of the immense tragedy the Great War had been for the
young men of Europe.
[20] Chaney demonstrated to the movie-going public of the Roaring
'Twenties that economic miracles were reserved for the elite classes
and that ordinary people were required (literally) to bind their
bodies to a strict asceticism dependent on a Christian ethic of self-sacrifice.
Max Weber25 has linked the Protestant
ethic of self-discipline to worldly achievement in the development
of Western capitalism. But in a time of economic liberalism that
favoured a small elite class, unwieldy body harnesses worn by Chaney
(one of the most popular screen actors of that time) represented
a kind of somatic solidarity with the ways ordinary people
were constricted by an un-harnessed capitalist economy on the brink
of spiraling out of control in the Great Crash of 1929. The back
of movie magazines from that period reveal advertisements that sold
weird contraptions in conjunction with Chaney's name that claimed
to alter men and women's bodies (Skal 2001, 72). It might be argued
that such bodily transformations were simply the necessary illusions
of the early Hollywood propaganda machine. But within the framework
of a somatic solidarity, it can also be argued that Chaney's
Phantom for example, while being the object of a horrified gaze,
was also constructed as a sacrificial victim, a scapegoat, who, like
Isaiah's Suffering Servant is disfigured by sin: "he had no
form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance
that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity …" (Isa
53:2-3). Thus, in such onscreen personas as the Phantom, Chaney portrayed
marginalized characters who were scapegoated and suffered on account
of the sins and misdeeds of others. As an actor, he endured
the hardships of his roles for an audience with whom he identified,
and was revered as a man who suffered for others, especially
in times of dizzying economic prosperity that favoured the few.
[21] Just as the post-WWI context of the 1920s brought about conditions
that allowed audiences to identify with the disfigured personas created
by Lon Chaney, the poor and outcast have historically identified
with the bodily suffering of Jesus on the cross. No theological movement
has evoked the horror of sinful oppression more profoundly than theologies
of liberation, represented by movements, collectives, communities,
and individuals who seek to shoulder the burdens of those relegated
to the underside of history. And no theological current has represented
the horror of the cross more radically than the rich and varied traditions
of the theologia crucis within the Christian tradition. Salvadoran
liberationist, Jon Sobrino, is an important representative of recent
Catholic contributions to the theologia crucis, or theology
of the cross. As another liberationist, Sri Lankan theologian Aloysius
Pieris, remarked, "[l]iberation theology has restored the theology
of the cross to the post-Vatican II church" (Pieris 1988: 10).
While Sobrino can be seen as an important contributor to this theology
in the Catholic tradition, all liberation theologies (from every
part of the world) have focused their method on the plight of the
crucified poor, those marginalized majorities who are forced to carry
the sins of the world on their backs. Pieris has rightly recognized
the importance of liberation theology for restoring the scandalous
cross to the post-Vatican II Catholic church, because the theology
of the cross was, at least in the writings of Martin Luther, a critique
of the triumphalistic theology (theologia gloriae) of Christendom.
In the rich traditions of Protestant theology, the theologia crucis reclaimed
the cross-centred theologies of the early Christian communities,
especially from the letters of Paul, who lived as a prophetic witness
in the shadow of empire.26 In
the second half of the twentieth century, it is the base Christian
communities (CEBs) associated with the many faces of liberation theology
in places like Latin America, who have reclaimed this theology as
a critique of empire and as a theological posture in solidarity with
suffering and marginalized peoples. 27
[22] Following Gustavo Gutiérrez' work, Jon Sobrino's theologia
crucis is not concerned with the question of the existence
of G*d after the horrors of Auschwitz (the concern of many political
theologians in Europe), but with the question of where does one
find G*d in the midst of Auschwitz, namely, the terrible history
of oppression that continues to enslave the peoples of Latin America
in destitution and poverty (Sobrino 1993,195).28 For
Gutiérrez, the definition of poverty, like the cross, is
scandalous: "poverty means death … unjust death, the
premature death of the poor, physical death" (Gutiérrez
1997, 71). The poor are those people that our societies do not
want to see; they are unsightly because they have been disfigured
by structures of sin in the world. In the words of Sobrino, the
poor are the "crucified people," who like the Suffering
Servant, bear the sins of oppression on their shoulders. As a
result, Sobrino maintains, the poor must survive the "ugliness
of daily poverty" and other conditions of the crucified people: "hunger,
sickness, slums, illiteracy, frustration through lack of education
and employment, pain and suffering of all kinds" (Sobrino
1993, 256). When the poor work for justice and become subjects
of their own emancipation, which they have done at all times throughout
history, their claims are either dismissed or met with ferocious
violence. Like the Servant, the presence of the crucified people
in history arouses fear and disgust, for "we accounted
him stricken, struck down by G*d, and afflicted" (Isa 53:3).
[23] It is for this reason that many representations of the crucified
Jesus in some parts of Latin America depict the horror of his agony
in graphic detail.29 Octavio
Paz once wrote that "one of the most notable traits of the Mexican's
character is his willingness to contemplate horror … The bloody
Christs in our village churches, the macabre humor in some of our
newspaper headlines, our wakes, the custom of eating skull-shaped
cakes and candies on the Day of the Dead…" (Paz 1961,
23). The gory depictions of Jesus' Passion are considered horrific,
especially to liberal bourgeois sensibilities, and frowned upon because
some believe that they speak of a medieval colonizing Catholicism
obsessed with masochism and violence. However, these depictions reveal
much more than the often abstract and ahistorical meditations on
Jesus' suffering that are rampant in theologies of Christendom. This
abstract sacrificial Jesus who dies for the sins of the world was
recently depicted in Mel Gibson's religious splatter flick, The
Passion of the Christ (2004).30 Unlike
the theologies of the cross mentioned above, Gibson highlights a
Medieval notion of expiatory satisfaction, which is based on a feudal
juridical notions of corporal punishment as a means of reconciliation
with a dishonoured lord. Hence, if G*d is dishonoured by the sin
of Adam, the second Adam (Jesus) can only make satisfaction for this
dishonour through corporal suffering. This is a theology that presupposes
corporal punishment as the proper means of reconciliation within
a feudal system. In theological terms, the idea of suffering as
submissive endurance becomes salvific, which can translate to
the more vulnerable of the world as a call to carry their crosses
like Jesus in hopeful resignation. In some of its forms, expiatory
satisfaction is a theology of empire that seeks to teach the oppressed
to accept their suffering in this world as a means toward happiness
in the next world. The framework of this theology is dictated by
a feudal world with very few possibilities for those at the bottom
of its hierarchical structure. Thus, the lowly of feudal times were
called upon to prepare a better place in another world: heaven. But
for the oppressed and marginalized in places such as Latin America,
the horrific depictions of Jesus' suffering are resonant depictions
of a crucified people suffering in the work of liberation because
of the many systemic crucifixions that occur everyday in the world.
Moreover, these depictions stem out of a profound theology—and
a concrete historical experience—about where G*d is found in
the world: on the crosses of history. Such a crucified G*d is thus
understood to share the fate of victims, in solidarity with
their plight, shouldering their burdens, and in compassionate (from
the Latin: to suffer with) resistance to the systems that thrive
off their suffering. This is not a sadistic G*d who revels in submissive
suffering, as in the theology of expiatory satisfaction mentioned
above, but a G*d who willfully partakes in the sufferings of the
world out of solidarity with crucified peoples.
[24] The horror of oppression is the context in which liberation
theologies have been conceived and continue to develop. And the cross
is the central symbol for a people living in the parched desert of
systemic poverty and exclusion. While Pieris is right to claim that
liberationists have made the theologia crucis central again
in post-Vatican II Catholic theology, his statement nonetheless overlooks
the theologies of the cross that have always existed and continue
to flourish within the popular religious practices of the poor. The
cross (with Mary and the Saints) is a locus theologicus of
popular Catholicism. In Perú for example, especially among
the Quechuan and Aymaran peoples of the Andes, the cross is a symbol
with rich multiplicities of meaning shifting according to context.
The cross can stand for fertility and protect the crops in one context,
in another context, it can protect a community that has "illegally" taken
over a piece of land because of forced migrations. If the cross stands
for protection, it is because the man of sorrows stands with those
who need protection from hostile forces that threaten to engulf them.
Hence, the crucified Jesus, the man of sorrows, usually represented
in horrible pain, is also the divine Christ, whose innocent suffering
at the hands of his oppressors is imbued with dramatic ultimacy.
[25] And drama has much to do with the way Jesus' passion is experienced
by the people in popular religious practices. The entire passion
is celebrated through sculptures, paintings, processions, pageantry,
flagellations, theatre, dance, and other forms of embodied representations.
While the theologia crucis has been reclaimed as central in
post-Vatican II theologies, these dramatic practices around the cross
have often been reviled by theologians—especially urban liberal
theologians—who have looked upon them with horror and fright.
Yet these practices offer a tangible experience and a historical
embodiment of what Rudolf Otto has called the mysterium tremendum,
the awe-ful majesty of a G*d who is radically other, producing a
paradoxical combination of wonder and dread in the religious person.
The centrality of El Viernes Santo (Good Friday) celebrations
in Latin America suggests that the experience of dread, or the feeling
of religious uncanniness, is revealed in G*d's affinity with suffering
humanity through the symbol of the cross. According to Otto, the
presence of G*d as totally other produces a "shudder" (numinous
tremor) in the human subject who stands before G*d's uncanny
and awe-inspiring majesty. In continuity with this definition of
G*d as totally other, Sobrino's most recent christological work defines
G*d's transcendent distance as the deus maior, G*d as liberating
otherness. Yet the cross of the poor also reveals the deus minor, G*d
as crucified affinity, who is the visible manifestation of G*d's
scandalous (and kenotic) participation in terrors of the world. G*d
as deus maior/minor reciprocity, according to Sobrino, thereby
dissolves the dichotomy between G*d's transcendence and immanence.
On the cross, Jesus reveals the otherness/proximity aspects of G*d's
awe-ful presence among the lowly in a world where the disquieting
absence of justice moves people to work for liberation. Sobrino writes
that
[the poor] clearly understand that if the cross expresses closeness,
then there is also "something good" in the cross. It is
very important to insist on this. The good they find in the cross
is not due in these cases to the fact that this is how salvation
is proclaimed in the kerygma, or the possibility of the cross leading
to resurrection, which, in general, they accept as Christians and
hope for in their work and struggles, but it is due to something
more fundamental. This is that the cross, in itself already speaks
of closeness to their own situation. And as they, besides being poor
and oppressed, are those who are distanced and marginalized, anything
that means closeness already brings something of salvation with it
(Sobrino 2001, 272).
[26] In the popular religious practices of the poor, distance and
closeness do not constitute an essential dichotomy. Rather the popular
religious fiestas of the poor, like those liminal border-crossing
monsters of the horror genre, often dissolve these dualisms, especially
between life and death, old and new, good and evil, local and global,
the upper and lower classes, the normal and abnormal, order and chaos,
ugliness and beauty, the sacred and profane, and ultimately, the
cross and the resurrection. In fiesta, dichotomies merge into
creative entities that re-create the cosmos anew. As Octavio Paz
suggests, fiestas are not simply recreation time, or holiday
time, but, re-creation of the cosmic order (Paz 1961, 52). For Paz,
the Días de Muertos (Days of the Dead) celebrations
in Mexico, during the feasts of All Saints and All Souls at the beginning
of November, do not exemplify a morbid fascination with death, but
a vibrant engagement with life. Paz writes, "[l]ife and death
are inseparable, and when the former lacks meaning, the latter becomes
equally meaningless" (Paz 1961, 58). In a world that constantly
seeks to deny death and decay, and fetishistically clings to insipid
representations of youthful dynamism, such celebrations can also
be understood as contestational. With respect to Jesus' cross, death
and resurrection are also inseparable in popular religious practices
of the poor. The cross reveals much more than the horror of oppression,
nor is it, as Sobrino suggests, a symbol that simply points to the
resurrection. It is a symbol that reveals the awe-ful closeness of
a transcendent G*d who stands with that which is shunned, outcast,
and ultimately kept at a distance. In the tortured face of Jesus,
the poor celebrate the closeness of G*d's Reign within a reality
that constantly seeks to conceal faces distorted by human misery.
Popular Horrors
[27] The horror genre remains a maligned cinematic genre among the
arbiters of "low" and "high" culture. And while
the genre is not monolithic and encompasses a multiplicity of texts
shaped by historical circumstances, and with subgenres that inform
and critique each other, for some, it continues to be dismissed as
a frivolous form of cinematic expression. However, a new body of
film theory has also recently surfaced specifically focused on horror,
giving it a central place in the discussion of cinematic genre theory.31 For
some others, horror is implicitly classified one small step above
pornography, particularly those perceived to occupy the "low
end" of the genre, i.e., the notorious "slasher" and
other forms of "body horror." On the "high end" of
the horror value system resides the classics, usually made by the
respected auteurs, such as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922),
Carl Theodore Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), Georges Franju's Les
yeux sans visage (1959),32 Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's
Baby (1968). For others, the classification of horror texts depends
upon its oppositional position vis-à-vis the "bottom
line" philosophy of Hollywood productions. More than any other
film genre, horror has shown itself to be consistently rebellious
with respect to the Hollywood system. Many of the genres most respected
films were made on shoestring budgets and on the margins of Hollywood.
George Romero's politically subversive nightmare of the Civil Rights
era, Night of the Living Dead (1968), shot in Pittsburgh with
unknown actors and on a shoestring budget, is one example. Tobe Hooper's The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), an assault on the false optimism
of the hippy/peace movement, and Sam Raimi's all out gore-fest, Evil
Dead (1983), shot in 16mm in the woods of Michigan, are good
examples of films that are cherished in part because they were successfully
produced outside of the major studio system. Fans of these films
pride themselves on the commercially unviable X-rating (now NC-17
in the U.S.) some films have received, insisting that trimming the
film in order to receive the studio desired R-rating is capitulating
to the demands of a system regulated by the capitalist market.
[28] Some of today's most respected film auteurs, such as Martin
Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and John Sayles, began their careers
directing and writing low budget independently produced horror, under
the tutelage of exploitation king Roger Corman. David Cronenberg
began his career making independent horror films in Canada, often
anticipating social anxieties about the human body, and disease with Shivers (1975)
and Rabid (1977). Cronenberg also anticipated the dysfunctions
of the "pop psychology" movement in The Brood (1979),
a nightmarish version of marital separation that highlights the underside
of this painful process—unlike the more domesticated Kramer
vs. Kramer of the same year. While he has also directed more "conventional" Hollywood
productions, Cronenberg continues to make provocative films on the
margins of Hollywood that often challenge dominant social norms.
In an earlier incarnation, I was particularly invested in the consistently
confrontational position independent horror assumed in the face of
mass-produced Hollywood films and considered low-budget horror to
embody the genre's vocational authenticity. However, while I continue
to highlight the adversarial nature of horror, I now understand this
too to be a part of a value system that positions a whole body of
texts at the "high end" of the horror genre, while other
popular forms continue to be dismissed.
[29] For some, the horror of Val Lewton's RKO classics, such as The
Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur in 1942, represent
the horror film text at its best, because it suggests rather
than represents horror through mood and shadow. For Lewton
and Tourneur, their method was in direct opposition to the monstrosities
of Universal Studios, from the time of Lon Chaney Sr. up to Lon
Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man (1941) and beyond. Many critics
similarly welcomed the recent Blair Witch Project (1999)
because it represented a return to the suggestive, and to allusive
horror over the gore effects that predominated the "slasher" films
of the Reagan/Thatcher era (Wells 2000, 108). Yet arguably, no
other subgenre depicted the impact of the Reagan/Thatcher years
on vulnerable bodies as dramatically as the "slasher." Feminist
film theorist, Tania Modleski focuses on the "slasher" to
refute both modernist and postmodernist tendencies to define "high
art" as oppositional to the pleasures constructed within
mass culture understood as conformist in relation to dominant
ideologies. Modleski, reminds us that some of these "slasher" films,
are "as hostile to meaning, form, pleasure, and the specious
good as many types of high art" (Modleski 2000, 291). Commenting
on the changing landscape of horror in the late-1980s and early-1990s,
feminist theorist Carol Clover, remarks that the so-called "low
traditions" of horror, such as the "slasher," were
subsumed into mainstream Hollywood productions and turned into
domesticated, safe, middle-class films. For example, Clover
refers to the Oscar-winning film, The Silence of the Lambs as
a "slasher movie for yuppies" (Clover 1992, 232). Clover
writes, "[d]eprived of the creative wellspring of the low
tradition, I suspect, larger studios are more likely than before
to imitate their own tried-and-true formulas, and less likely
to take a flier on the kind of bizarre and brilliant themes that
can bubble up from the bottom" (Clover 1992, 236). Even when
they are trivialized and condemned as alienating, Clover insists
that the so-called "low traditions" are often the unacknowledged
inspirations for so-called "high art."
[30] Modleski's and Clover's claims are important because horror,
especially that which constitutes the "low end" of the
genre, has been the frequent target of moral panics and censorship.
Some key instances include the panic that engulfed EC horror comics
(Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The
Haunt of Fear) in the U.S. of the mid-1950s and the "video
nasties" debates that occurred in the U.K. in the 1980s. In
both instances, the horror was perceived as a threat to children.
Horror comics were singled out as damaging to the morals of children
who read them in droves, while the new video technology of the 1980s
made horror films more accessible than in previous times. The visual
arts have long constituted an important site of moral and religious
unease. Christian religious art has also repeatedly been the target
of moral panics and censorship. Within the development of the Christian
tradition in the East and West, the potentially explosive nature
of images has long been recognized. The history of Christianity has
shown the important role images have played in its theological development.
The iconoclastic controversies of the eighthand ninth centuries,
as well as during the Protestant Reformation, not to mention the
contested place of images in both Judaism and Islam, constitute an
important link between cinematic horror and religious imagery. There
is no question that the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth
and ninth centuries were a continuation of the varied and complex
christological controversies of the fifth - seventh centuries, especially
in relation to the orthodox defense of the full humanity of Jesus.
What was at stake in the defense of images was a defense of Jesus
as fully human (a humanity that is not subsumed by his divinity),
who could be represented visually and venerated by the faithful,
particularly the poor illiterate faithful for whom images and frescos
constituted a necessary pedagogical tool for understanding scripture.
Similarly, those subgenres within horror that have been banned, censored
and scorned have been those "low-end" categories of "body-horror" that
depict visual threats to vulnerable bodies. As mentioned earlier,
it is the representations of the very human and the agonizing bodily
sufferings of Jesus, that constitute the locus of many popular
religious practices of the poor, and which also provoke a sense of
unease to those who fear to gaze at these images. The centrality
of the human body in both cinematic horror and popular religious
expressions registers much anxiety among cultured elites, for whom
whitewashing and censorship continues to be the preferred method
of state and religiously sanctioned interventions.
[31] Like cinematic horror, popular religion is a maligned form of
expression; it is not monolithic, but refers to a multiplicity of
symbolic forms and practices that are shaped by historical contexts.
All religious phenomena operate in the midst of concrete social conflicts
shaped by asymmetrical power relations. On the one hand, popular
religion is often reduced to quaint folkloric practices on the verge
of extinction, on the other, they are perceived as a dangerous (syncretic)
distortion of "official," or orthodox, church teachings.
If conservative and Corporatist33 Catholics
have historically betrayed some anxiety about its potentially explosive
and radical character, and have tried to harness it for their own
purposes, liberal34 Catholics
have dismissed it outright as a fatalistic and backward form of superstition.
All have sought to instrumentalize its potential power in some contexts,
often due to its numerical strength in some parts of the world, such
a Latin America, in order to buttress their own agendas and priorities.
Few have attempted to integrate this profound form of lay theology
with its rich symbolic universe into the theological traditions that
form the Christian canons. Until the advent of liberation theologies,
feminist theologies, indigenous theologies, and especially Latino/a
theologies, popular religion was relegated to the "low end" of
Catholic expressions of the faith—a "low end" in
desperate need of proper evangelization and education. Yet it has
proved to be a lasting phenomenon, resilient and stubborn in the
eyes of those who seek to manipulate its symbolic power.
[32] Influenced by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, I approach
popular religion through a critical subaltern method, which seeks
to understand the strategies of the dominated usually in terms of
how dominant discourses are re-formulated into potential forms of
resistance or protest. Gramsci's work has been very influential in
the study of religion in Italy, as well as in Latin America, because
it distanced itself from orthodox Marxist (and other functionalist
theories) perspectives that reduce religion to a form of alienation
that serves but one function in society: namely, the maintenance
and cohesion of the status quo. Because he was born in Sardinia and
because of his related interest in the "southern question" (la
questione meridionale), Gramsci was particularly sensitive to
popular religion, to folklore, and to common sense philosophy. For
Gramsci, the subaltern classes produce their own forms of religion,
which are relatively autonomous in relation to the religious
worldview of the elite. Gramsci distinguished between different levels
of the social formation with respect to religion, calling on his
Marxist peers to take seriously the ideological framework and worldviews
of the subaltern classes.
[33] The subaltern method is well articulated in the work of anthropologist
James C. Scott, when he writes, "it is no simple matter to determine
just where compliance ends and resistance begins, as [dangerous]
circumstances lead many of the poor to clothe their resistance in
the public language of conformity" (Scott 1985, 289). The symbolic
universe of the poor is not easily decipherable, and the subaltern
method attempts to understand this indecipherability on its own terms
and as a potential strategy of resistance among people for whom the
only tools available are those imparted within dominant discourses.
Black liberation theology in the U.S. has employed this method in
order to examine the strategies devised by slaves based on elements
drawn from the religion of the slave-masters. Black liberationist
James Cone echoes the subaltern method in analyzing the development
of spirituals and blues within a context of slavery. In thinking
about the otherworldly sense of resignation imposed on slaves by
their slave-masters, Cone writes, "[t]here were doubtless some
black slaves who literally waited on God, expecting on God to effect
their liberation in response to their faithful passivity, but there
is another side of the black experience to be weighed" (Cone
1972, 36).35 The subaltern approach
is concerned with this "other side" of cultural and symbolic
production, which tends to be dismissed by more orthodox Marxist
analyses that understand these elements to be solely determined by
the material base.
Ideological Horrors
[34] Few horrors match the terror registered by Prince Myshkin, in
Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1869), when gazing upon a reproduction
of Holbein's Dead Christ. Having just been asked by his rival,
Rogozhin, if he still believes in G*d, Myshkin responds to this theological
query by addressing Holbein's bleak vision of death: "Why that
picture might make some people lose their faith" (Dostoevsky
1948, 212). The focus in many of Dostoevsky's novels, such as in The
Devils (1871), was that of a spectre emanating from Europe, infecting
the Russian people with new ideas, making them lose their faith,
thereby bringing about, Dostoevsky believed, the spiritual death
of Russia. Not unlike the moral panics mentioned in the previous
section, Dostoevsky directs his anxiety toward an image—a European
religious image from the Protestant world - which he believed represented
the spiritual bankruptcy of Western Europe. "A spectre is haunting
Europe – that spectre is Communism" (Marx/Engels 1972b:
473). The opening lines of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848)
reads like a provocation, a sign of things to come. The spectre of
evil they contended, was no longer otherworldly; it was appearing
through those who make-up the revolutionary underside of history.
Marx and Engels understood the processes through which the "masses" were
to become demonized spectres from the underside. In his novels, Dostoevsky
argued that this European spectre was very real in Russia, for it
was creating spiritual havoc among his people.
[35] Holbein's Dead Christ, painted amidst a crisis of heightening
Protestant iconoclasm in Basel between 1521-1523, depicts the forsakenness
of Jesus' death with most terrifying intensity. For Dostoevsky's
Myshkin, it is a vision of death without hope; a vision of the world
closed in on itself; a bleak isolated image that robs Christian faith
of the resurrection. Mathias Grünewald's Crucifixion (from
his Isenheim Altarpiece, circa 1515), an image used to heal the sick,
similarly depicts a decaying and lacerated dead body in stark detail.
The body of Jesus on the cross weighs down to the earth, away from
an otherworldly escape from the reality of suffering in the world,
particularly with respect to pestilence and disease. But Grünewald's Dead
Christ, from the same altarpiece, does not depict the bleak isolation
of the tomb in the manner of Holbein's vision. Grünewald surrounds
his dead Christ with three disciples, pointing to the new community
of the resurrection, which is encapsulated in the words from Matthew's
gospel: "when two or three are gathered in my name, I am there
among them" (18:20). Some scholars have speculated that Holbein's Dead
Christ must belong to an altarpiece where the other aspects of
Christ's life are also represented, such as in the Isenheim altarpiece
(Kristeva 1989, 242). How could such an image stand alone, it is
conjectured, eschewing the promise of resurrection? Whether or not
this is in fact the case is still being debated by art historians.
Yet the fact that it is raised at all in such a manner points to
an anxiety about the Christian story. It is the same anxiety experienced
by Prince Myshkin: namely, the fear that people will succumb to the
despair and negativity that Christ's agonizing death can provoke.
This is an anxiety that has plagued many progressive activists, including
Catholic theologians,36 particularly
since Vatican II, who have been inspired by critical Marxist theories
of the Frankfurt School and other forms of emancipatory knowledge
in the face of a history of Christian triumphalism and ideological
oppression.
[36] If Marx foresaw the ways in which the "masses" would
become the new historical spectres haunting Europe, religion in his
writings occupied a place no less monstrous in its capacity to obfuscate
the real causes of oppression and poverty in the world. Even if Marx
also understood religion as a form of protest for the wretched of
the earth (which would always ultimately be ineffective), the ideology
of religion nonetheless demonstrated a werewolf hunger in its ability
to extract subservience from the "masses." The Latin American
historian, Eduardo Galeano, portrays religious ideological manipulation
in stark detail in his important study of the effects of colonialism
on Latin American peoples, entitled Open Veins of Latin America.
Galeano's distress was shared by many theologians who rightly critiqued
the Catholic church in Latin America, prior to the important shift
that occurred at the Medellín bishops' conference (1968),
which historically blessed a social order characterized by systemic
poverty, racial discrimination, and a dependence on populist and
other forms of totalitarian regimes. Galeano describes the effects
of conquest on the indigenous poor in their appropriation of Christian
ritual practices. He writes:
[t]he effects of the Conquest and the long ensuing period of humiliation
left the cultural and social identity the Indians had achieved
in fragments. Yet in Guatemala this pulverized identity is the
only one that persists. It persists in tragedy. During Holy Week,
processions of the heirs of the Mayas produce frightful exhibitions
of collective masochism. They drag heavy crosses and participate
in the flagellation of Jesus step by step along the interminable
ascent to Golgotha; with howls of pain they turn His death and
His burial into the cult of their own death and their own burial,
the annihilation of the beautiful life long ago. Only there is
no Resurrection at the end of Holy Week (Galeano 1973, 62).
Galeano's evocative and powerful description of the effects of conquest
on indigenous peoples is intended to reveal the explicit responsibility
of the Catholic church in maintaining the interests of the conquistadors.
There is no denying this terrifying reality. In Galeano's view, the
ideology of conquest is powerfully maintained in the religion of
indigenous peoples through the re-enactment of the sufferings and
death of Jesus. Internalized oppression is externalized in the ritualistic
re-enactment of Jesus' passion. For Galeano, this re-enactment reinscribes
the interest ideology of the powerful within the practices of the
poor.
[37] Galeano is quite right to critique a triumphalist church that
manipulates, or obfuscates, the powerfully transformative reality
of the resurrection in the lives of communities that have experienced
genocide and oppression for many generations. However, is Galeano
correct in simply asserting that "there is no Resurrection at
the end of Holy Week"? Like Prince Myshkin's reaction to Holbein's Dead
Christ, Galeano's depiction of collective religious masochism
is such to make some "lose their faith," not only in G*d,
but also in those frightful "masses" who continue to passively
accept their oppression in this world. Here again, the poor masses
are reduced to the living dead, zombies devouring the life around
them.37 Is ideological manipulation
as pervasive and inescapable as Galeano insists, never allowing for
cracks and gaps in its veiling of the world? Does a focus on images
of death, such as the Christian cross or Holbein's Dead Christ constitute
only a partial understanding of the Christian message?
[38] The fear registered on the face of Prince Myshkin, as he looks
at an image of death without the resurrection, confined, isolated
and bleak, is the fear registered by critical theologians and theorists
with respect to the cross of the poor, a cross that, in the history
of a triumphal church, has been used as an instrument of subjugation
rather than liberation. Yet, the cross remains a privileged symbol
in popular religious practices among the poor and marginalized. However,
for some authors, the implied identification between the suffering
of Jesus on the cross with a person's own suffering is not perceived
as liberating, but as an alienated obsession with one's own suffering
that offers no vision of the resurrection. This position is also
held among some pastoral agents in Latin America, who argue that
the cross-centred devotions of the "masses" encompass an "incomplete" understanding
of the Christian story.38 With
no vision of a future, radically open to the new presence of the
resurrection, the "masses" are seen to be terrifying in
their capacity to frustrate social change. There is no question that
some religious practices do support and legitimize both church and
state hegemonic control, as Galeano has cogently argued. Yet such
a totalizing appraisal of popular religion does not seek to understand
these practices as tools of survival in a hostile wilderness. According
to Catholic theologian Orlando Espín, these tools can also be a crucial
form of doubt, a "hermeneutic of suspicion," with respect
to hegemonic practices. Because oppression is very real and very
frightening to those who experience it, these tools help navigate
a situation that is at times too terrifying to confront by means
other than the "mainly symbolic" (Espín 1997, 92). Are
these practices simply alienating, or do they embody a potential
for protest? As I have argued, the world of popular religion and fiesta,
and the world of "low-end" horror, tend to blur these distinctions.
I want to conclude this paper by returning to The Wolf Man,
a film that encompasses competing and complex meanings, as well as
fluid and often ambiguous readings of monstrous "otherness." A
contextual reading of The Wolf Man also tends to blur often
held distinctions between monsters and their (female) victims.
Shape-Shifting Horrors
[39] While horror films do not have the same social and religious
role as popular religion, they nonetheless constitute an important
popular genre in our society, a genre that has been historically
popular with people on the margins: the working classes, youth, and
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered peoples. Film is an important
site of cultural contestation that nourishes political struggles.
Popular films and popular religion carry different and even contradictory
definitions of the contested word "popular." However, the
practitioners of popular religion and audiences viewing popular films
must contend with a similar critique: the charge that they tend to
passively accept the manufacturing of ideological consent produced
by powerful institutions and industries. Due to this ascribed passivity,
the production of meaning developed within these distinct universes
is quite often understood to be "primitive" or "adolescent." With
popular religion, the manufacturing of consent is regulated by the
church, the state, and the family. These institutions can re-inscribe
conservative values and promote passivity in the political sphere.
With cinematic horror, the popular is shaped by a capitalist market
system that tends to buttress the status quo of economic, racial,
sexual, and gender oppression.
[40] The "popular" does not only stand in opposition to
these forces, but is shaped by them as well. By highlighting the
potentially rebellious dimensions of the popular and its inconsistent,
but resilient, oppositional form vis-à-vis hegemonic systems
and discourses, I do not intend to romanticize its role in society,
or to negate the historical reality of ideological manipulation.
However, the current of criticism against popular practices, particularly
in the religious realm, is very strong, and often one-dimensional.
Yet engaged Christian faith should propel those who follow Jesus
to risk entering those areas that are deemed shadowy and illegitimate
within dominant discourses. The Wolf Man, a film that examines
how the lycanthropic curse threatens the fabric of a world shaped
by male privilege, can be understood as counter-cultural. But it
encompasses also much more than this. The werewolf's shape-shifting
body also tells us much about the powerful forces of ideology and
its ability to turns humans into violent beasts. Yet like the women
with whom he is identified, the film's werewolf also transgresses
boundaries, both socially and somatically, and cannot be simply reduced
to a dichotomous position with respect to hegemonic consent.
"Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his
prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms
And the autumn moon is
bright."
[41] The Wolf Man offers a different image of ideology's monstrous
transformations, particularly when examined in light of gender. The
horror genre has always been preoccupied with issues of sexual difference
and gender; no reading of horror can easily bypass its marked emphasis
on these issues. Like Chaney Sr.'s Phantom of the Opera, Lon
Chaney Jr., who portrays The Wolf Man, is both horrifying
and horrified by his own monstrosity. Wracked by guilt for the crimes
he cannot control, he seeks only to die (a trope that will be repeated
in Universal's several sequels to The Wolf Man), so that he
may be rid of his moonlit curse, a curse that is symbolized by a
pentagram shape on his left breast. The pentagram is the symbol of
the werewolf curse; it is also, as I mentioned earlier, a very real
curse inflicted on Jews and Roma at that time in Europe. Moreover,
the symbol of the curse points to the confining role required of
Larry Talbot in his role as the son of an elite land owner, Sir John
Talbot (Claude Rains), when he is required to return to Wales after
18 years in the United States. Larry Talbot's werewolf curse also
represents his sexual difference from the normal male within the
rigidly patriarchal household to which he must return in order to
fulfill his filial responsibilities as the only remaining son of
the Talbot estate. Though infused with machismo, Talbot's aggressive
courting of Gwen (Evelyn Ankers), who is engaged to be married, is
nonetheless an affront to the rigid conventions of heterosexual courtship
and marriage structures among the elite in the Anglo-Saxon world.
It is typical of horror films of this period that sexual interest
is embodied in the monster (Bela Lugosi's Dracula for example)
than with the normal man, personified in The Wolf Man by Frank
(Patric Knowles), who is (not accidentally) Sir John Talbot's gamekeeper
and fiancé to Gwen.
[42] Feminist film theorist Linda Williams has worked to forge a
theoretical trajectory that moves beyond Laura Mulvey's influential
thesis of the gaze in narrative cinema: the notion that women exist
to only be looked at through the male gaze (Mulvey 1989, 14-26).
The horror genre, writes Williams, offers "a surprising (and
at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman, in the sense
in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status
within patriarchal structures of seeing" (Williams 1996, 18).
During World War II, this affinity was often expressed through the
transgression of social boundaries. The war was a time when women
became much more visible in the public sphere. Women became particularly
visible in the U.S. work-force replacing servicemen who had been
shipped off to the war. While this was understood as a patriotic
and necessary intervention in a time of war and crisis, such a change
provoked severe anxieties about gender roles, especially about the
role of women in the social construction of private and public spheres.
Like our shape-shifting werewolf, women in 1941 were also crossing
boundaries. Women had become shape-shifters, exchanging the location
of the private home for the public factory, the vacuum cleaner for
the assembly line. Of course, immigrant women, women of colour, and
poor women were always forced to occupy both spaces. But as Hobsbawm
reminds us: "Mass war required mass production," which
is why "modern mass wars both strengthened the powers of organized
labour and produced a revolution in the employment of women outside
the household: temporarily in the First World War, and permanently
in the Second World War" (Hobsbawm 1994: 44, 45). The massive
bread lines of the 1930s had now disappeared; WWII had resolved the
pressing unemployment problem in the U.S., and the threat of revolt
in the 1930s by the working classes had subsided. The role of women
in society became the site of a new anxiety. Women never abandoned
the home, of course, but took on shifting personas between private
and public spheres. The shape-shifting werewolf tapped into many
fears concerning the breach of firmly held boundaries. Thus for some
members of the viewing audience, this creature evoked a sympathetic
response, while for others, the werewolf was a threat to established
norms.
[43] In The Wolf Man, Gwen is first observed by Larry Talbot
in a public place: running her father's store. Gwen is subjected
to the aggressive gaze of Larry Talbot prior to his first transformation,
when he accidentally spots her while attempting to fix his father's
telescope. This gaze, portrayed as invasively masculine and aggressive
in the film, is reciprocated in a differently gendered form near
the end of the film, when Gwen goes out to find Larry, fearful that
something dreadful has happened to him. In the midst of the beautiful
dead tree forest of Universal Studios, Gwen encounters Larry transformed
into a werewolf. Her terrified gaze, here, reveals a link between
her vulnerability and his monstrosity. Following Williams, what Gwen
sees is "the mutilation of her own body displaced onto that
of the monster" (Williams 1996, 22). The monster's shifting
body will soon be punished through the strict confines of patriarchal
control. Upon apprehending Gwen, the werewolf instinctively releases
her and attacks Sir John instead, who finally kills the werewolf
with Larry's silver handled cane (at least until the sequel). If
as Carol Clover maintains, "abject terror is … gendered feminine," the
werewolf, in his affinity to Gwen, is revealed as a potential threat
to the elite patriarchal ownership structures that seek to suppress
sexual excess and bodies that transgress social norms (Clover 1996,
96). Yet even under the monstrous curse, Larry is ultimately able
to correctly identify the cause of his oppression and attack it.
Hegemonic control is presented as unstable. Larry's monstrous identification
with Gwen underlies the autonomy he seeks to attain under his father's
control. While his protest may be read as self-defeating, and though
patriarchal norms are restored at the end of the film, his active
resistance signals a confrontation with hegemonic structures—even
under the curse.
[44] The Wolf Man develops a complex set of formations that
encompass class, ethnic, sexual, and gender dynamics. Does the werewolf's
curse represent a potential for a shape-shifting monstrosity so abnormal
that it must be punished by patriarchal structures? Does the curse
represent the marginalized and hunted European Jew? Or does it represent
an anxiety about the role of women in the public sphere during the
war? What about the wolf-like terror of the Nazis? Is not The
Wolf Man a horror film, created above all, to frighten its audience?
Where does a spectator's affinity and/or revulsion fall? Is the werewolf
the object of compassionate empathy or the object of fearful loathing?
The answer is much more complex, multifaceted and unexpected than
what may meet the eye. As Carol Clover has demonstrated with respect
to the "slasher" sub-genre, audience positioning and identification
in horror films tends to be very complex, and ultimately very fluid.39 Like
the transgressing shape-shifting body of John Talbot, audience engagement
with the horror genre encompasses complex shifting boundaries with
respect to the anxieties and fears represented on the screen. How,
or with whom, a person will identify in horror is not easily fixed
or predictable; it is dependent on social context. Among the most
participatory of all film genres, the horror genre shows how an engaged
audience's response to the threat of evil cannot easily be reduced
to passive acceptance of hegemonic consent. The singularity of many
horror texts resides in its ability to capture societal anxieties
embedded in a culture of a specific time, as well as to represent
a complex "other" that challenges hegemonic definitions
of what is normal/abnormal, real/unreal, and just/unjust, especially
with respect to race, ethnic, gender, class, and sexuality issues.
This is why I concur with David Cronenberg's definition of the horror
genre as a genre of "confrontation." Horror confronts us
with the "other" who challenges rigid hegemonic constructs,
imposed boundaries, and easy Manichean perspectives. Yet horror as
a genre also confronts us as an "other" filmic text, maligned
and discredited by the elite, yet immensely popular among those on
the margins of society, who often respond to the spectral "other" in
complex and multi-dimensional ways.
[45] The Wolf Man offers a portrayal of the monstrous curse
of ideology as unstable. Like Larry's lycanthropic curse, popular
religious practices also offer a suspicion, a doubt, with respect
to dominant discourses and practices (and theologies) that crush
hope in history. I have argued that popular religion can embody a
suspicion, especially with respect to an "official" church
that seeks to harness its potentially explosive character. Similarly,
the horror genre confronts us with social anxieties on the one hand,
and on the other, offers a space of hesitation with respect to hegemony.
The fear that popular images, especially horrific ones, can make
us lose our faith, or turn us into werewolves, should not be dismissed.
But even under the curse of the full moon, the werewolf can still
identify the concrete cause of his suffering. Even if a man who is
pure in heart becomes a werewolf, his monstrous veiling is never
totalizing; it is also illuminated by an autumn moon that is bright.
For Manjushri (1992-2005)
I wish to thank Tamara Vukov and Allan Brown for their comments
and support in preparing this manuscript. A shorter version of
this paper was presented at the Canadian Theological Society's
Annual meeting in Toronto (2002). It was part of a panel entitled, "With
and Without Boundaries: Film and Religious Narratives in the Postmodern
World."
Notes
1 Due to length considerations,
I will not attempt to engage with the different definitions of the
word popular. Like other contested terms, such as culture and ideology,
the term popular encapsulates a variety of definitions and presuppositions.
My usage of the term is not only limited to its common-sense meaning:
popular in the sense of widespread. With respect to popular religion,
I do use popular to mean "of the people," yet I do not
wish to ascribe to a romanticized understanding of the term that
seeks to highlight its "real" or "authentic" aspects.
I use popular to convey the social location of particular religious
practices, as well as those people who participate in them. Hence,
the popular of popular Catholicism and popular cinema is understood
here in terms of its often shifting relations to hegemony (the "official"'
church, the Hollywood system) where relations of domination (consent)
and resistance (doubt) are articulated, asserted, and re-defined
depending on its social location. For a good summery of the debates
on the uses of the term popular, see Hall 1981, 227-40.
2 Curt Siodmak also wrote the
poetic RKO/Val Lewton release, I Walked with a Zombie, directed
by Jacques Tourneur in 1943. This film explores the effects of colonial
subjugation on the inhabitants of a Caribbean island—especially
on those inhabitants who have profited from colonial structures.
As in The Wolf Man, non-Christian religious practices, usually
referred to as superstitions, wreck havoc on dominant values of elite
Christians.
3 I write G*d in this way to point towards G*d's ineffability and
unnameability (Exod 3:14). It is not intended to denote the absolute
transcendence of G*d, but to veer away from gendered presuppositions
of the word.
4 See for example, Baugh 1997.
5 For a thoughtful study about
the uses of religious symbols in contemporary horror films, see Stone
2001. And for an examination of the uses and portrayals of the Bible
in the horror genre, see Beavis 2003.
6 See for example, Marsh, Ortiz and Oritz, eds. 1998)and Miles 1996.
7 The other side of this situation is also prevalent. Genre
enthusiasts often do backflips trying to downplay the role of Catholicism
in Ferrara's films—or ascribe his theology solely to Nick St-John's
influence. Discussing the last scene of The Addiction, Brad
Stevens writes, "despite the fact that this scene takes place
in daylight, there is no reason to believe that Kathleen [Lili Taylor]
is still a vampire, and we are forced to wonder if there is any real
difference between eternal life posited as a Christian ideal, and
the endless suffering which characterizes the protagonist's undead
existence" (Stevens 2004, 213). The scene in question depicts
Kathleen at peace with herself and released from the grips of vampirism,
which was brought about by a voluntary participation in the sacrament
of Reconciliation (Confession) and the Eucharist (a sacramental celebration
of Christ's dying and rising for humankind). The final image shows
Kathleen setting down a flower by her own grave on which is written, "I
am the resurrection—John XI.25." As she walks out of the
cemetery, the camera pans up to a stone crucifix and in voice-over
Kathleen says this: "To face what we are in the end we stand
before the light and our true nature is revealed. Self-revelation
is annihilation of self." Hence, to read this scene as meaning
that Kathleen is still a vampire is to entirely overlook the religious
significance of her redemption.
8 The classic study in the area of theology/religion and film that
frames its analysis to an auteurist framework is Schrader (1972).
The emphasis on auteur theory continues to be popular among theologians.
For a more recent work, see Gervais (1999). It is important to note,
however, that the young French filmmakers of the New Wave who embraced
and developed auteur theory attempted to retrieve singular cinematic
visions from what was regarded in Europe as the popular conformist
movie-making machine of the Hollywood studios. See Truffaut
(1967) for an important text within the auteurist framework.
9 Baugh's chapter (1997, 130-58) that examines "the woman as
Christ-figure" only refers to films made by male directors:
Federico Fellini, Gabriel Axel, Percy Adlon and Tim Robbins.
10 For example, Elizabeth Young creatively argues that the most terrifying
horror depicted in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
is the horror of invasive psychoanalytical methods as represented
by the character of Hannibal Lecter, a psychoanalyst and serial killer,
who ceaselessly attempts to enter into the head of FBI agent, Clarice
Starling (Jodie Foster). For Young, the Freudian Dr. Lecter as serial
killer offers "a purposeful unmasking of the authority of the
Freudian master" (Young 1991, 24). His invasive strategies correspond
to the place of psychoanalytic theory in reading horror films as
it masterfully attempts to crack open the psyche of the people who
enjoy them; see Young (1991). For an insider's view of the debates
surrounding the psychoanalytic framework within feminist film theory,
see Rich 1998, 286-98.
11 See O'Flinn 2000, 114-27.
12 I am aware that Schillebeeckx's term tends to erase ecological concerns
by positioning humans at the centre of his methodology. However,
places where humans are threatened almost always involve the destruction
of the fragile ecosystem. Native American activist, Winona La Duke
(Anishinaabeg) reminds us that more species have been wiped out in
the last 150 years than in the preceding time since the Ice Age.
But in that time, "over 2000 nations of indigenous peoples have
gone extinct in the Western atmosphere" (1999, 1). Latin American
liberationist, Leonardo Boff, thus argues for a "social ecology" which
links ecological devastation to the root cause of poverty and human
exploitation in the South. See his essay, "Social Ecology: Poverty
and Misery" (Hallman 1994).
13 I avoid the use of the term "religiosity," because historically
it has been used in discourses that dismiss it as superstition or
as a corruption of church teachings. The French dictionary, Le
lexis (1988), still defines religiosité as: "Attitude
religieuse fondée sur la sensibilité, au detriment
de la foi véritable" [a religious attitude based on emotion,
which is detrimental to true faith].
14 After Herder, there emerged
a whole school of thinking on folklore in England, culminating in
the Folk-Lore Society, in 1878. Raymond Williams writes that in this
period folk "had the effect of backdating all elements of popular
culture, and was often offered as a contrast with modern popular
forms" (Williams 1976, 137).
15 For an important study on
Latin American popular religion, see Parker 1996. Parker argues that
popular religion can be characterized by its own otra logíca (an
other logic): a hybrid and sapiential knowledge system that appropriates
and resists modernity in the same breath. Parker calls this process hemidernal (from
hemi + modern: half or semi-modern), which "coexists and profits
from the modern, but resists and criticizes the modern as well" (Parker
1996, 115).
16 See Stone 2001, ¶3.
17 See Carroll (1990) for an
insightful attempt at finding a definition for horror.
18 See among other passages, Ps 104:29, for an example of Leviathan
as part of G*d's wondrous creation. See Ps 74:14 for Leviathan as
a monster crushed by G*d.
19 See Jeremiah 51:34, for an example of the oppressive Babylonian
King, Nebuchadnezzar, described as a monster. This form of demonization
of oppressive regimes will later be taken up by John in Revelation.
20 See Fanon (1967), original French version published in 1952, for
an important account of the psychological disorders that he encountered
among colonized peoples.
21 I use uncanny here in line with Freud's use, which predominates
horror theory, especially psychoanalytic feminist theory: namely,
from the German unheimlich, or outside of the house. The uncanny
is that which threatens one's at-homeness. Rudolf Otto's The Idea
of the Holy (1917), originally written two years before Freud's
essay, "The Uncanny," defines the religious experience
as an encounter with the mysterium trememdum, or wholly other,
which is associated with this feeling of uncanniness and dread (14).
22 For an excellent feminist liberationist reading of John's Revelation,
see Schüssler Fiorenza (1991). For a Latin America reading,
see Richard (1995). For a liberal feminist reading, see Keller (1996).
23 Summa Theologiae, I, 9.3: "we cannot know what God is
but only what God is not."
24 For a fascinating history of the Grand-Guignol, see Agnès
Pierron's "Préface," in Le Grand-Guignol: Le
théâtre des peurs de la Belle Époque (1995).
In English, see Gordon (1997).
25 See Weber (1976), originally published in 1903.
26 For an important recent contribution to the theology of the cross
by a Protestant theologian, see Moltmann (1992), originally written
in 1973. See also Moltmann (1990).
27 See Peterson (1997) for an important discussion on the popular manifestations
of the theology of the cross in El Salvador.
28 See Gutiérrez (1987). He writes: "How are we to do theology while
Ayacucho lasts? How are we to speak of the God of life when
cruel murder on a massive scale goes on in the 'corner of death?'" (102).
29 See the cover photograph of the English translation of Gutiérrez' A
Theology of Liberation (1988) for a good example of a "horrible" Latin
American crucifix. The sculptor in question is Edilberto Merida,
a sculptor engaged with issues that are of concern to the indigenous
peoples of Perú. Merida works in the Andean city of Cusco.
30 For my review of The Passion of the Christ, see DeGiglio-Bellemare
(2004).
31 Recent critical scholarship
on these films is indebted to the pioneering work of film critic
Robin Wood (York University). He was among the first to consider
the radical implications of the horror genre as a site of hegemonic
contest. See Wood's essay "American Nightmare: Horror in the
1970s" (originally published in 1979) in Hollywood: From
Vietnam to Reagan (1986). For more recent scholarly anthologies
seeGelder (2000) and Grant (1996).
32 On the box of Kino's VHS release of Franju's Les yeux sans visage (The
Eyes Without A Face, aka The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus)
a film critic writes: "'Eyes Without A Face' is a perfect
example of how cinematic poetry can transform a seemingly disreputable
movie genre" (Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Tribune).
33 Corporatism evolved out of Catholic social teachings from the turn
of the century as a response to both socialism and liberal individualism.
Corporatism developed a nostalgic theory of feudalism for the modern
world, which saw society as an organic whole where all classes and
social groups shared a place and were recognized: workers, managers,
husband, and wife, etc. Corporatists feared class struggle and developed
a theory that uplifted the working classes as playing an integral
role in the organic composition of society. These Roman Catholic
teachings inspired the Fascism of Benito Mussolini in Italy, and
the Peronism of Argentina. While they share similar roots, there
are important differences between these movements: European Fascism
attempted to destroy the working classes, Latin American corporatism
paternalistically inspired and protected them. See Hobsbawm (1994),
135.
34 For a good description of the liberal critique of popular religious
practices in the U.S., see Espín (1997), 111-55. Espín
argues that under the pressure of Protestant liberalism, U.S. minority
Catholic elites attempted to portray Latino popular Catholicism as
a marginal anachronism in need of proper education. Hence, some of
the public forms of popular Catholicism were transformed into private
individual family expressions of the faith.
35 It should be noted here that Black liberation theology has influenced
the work of Eugene Genovese on antebellum slave religion. See his Roll,
Jordan, Roll (1974), whose work is regarded as very influential
in this area.
36 For of an example of a theological critique of popular religion
as ideology, in the critical Marxist sense, see Schillebeeckx (1980).
Schillebeeckx argues that when Marx criticized religion, he was really
offering a critique of the potential fatalism of popular religion.
Schillebeeckx writes, "Marx simply criticized [all religions]
for having sought a false solution, namely in a fictitious world
above and beyond (historically this is incorrect; however, all popular
religion moves in this direction)" (712). Following the Frankfurt
School (whose experience of ideological domination stems out of Nazi
Germany), Schillebeeckx defines ideology in the "critical" sense
in his writings, namely, as a totalizing element that conflates its
interests, usually dominant interests, with the whole of reality.
The Frankfurt School's "critical" understanding of ideology
finds its roots in the work of Marx and Engels' The German Ideology (1846),
where ideas do not simply reflect reality, they are related to material
conditions by veiling or distorting them: "the ideas of the
ruling classes are in every epoch the ruling ideas" (Marx/Engels
1972a, 172). Some Marxists, such as Antonio Gramsci, defined ideology
in a neutral manner. In other words, ideology was not simply a distortion
of thought or, what early Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno
famously called "a socially necessary illusion," but a
place of struggle where competing worldviews fight it out for hegemony.
37 In an interesting portrayal
of mass consumption in the rich countries of the "North," George
Romero's zombies, in his film Dawn
of the Dead (1979), are instinctively driven to shop and browse
in a suburban mall. Here the living dead are the middle-classes fixated
on material acquisition in a society driven by fetishistic consumerism.
While Romero's film can be understood to uphold the same definition
of ideology that I am evaluating, his zombies also serve as a critique
of the safeguarding of capitalism within the U.S., a system propped
up by the living dead. Here, it is not the poor masses who are zombified,
but the rich North, which is in a state of near collapse. In Romero's
zombie trilogy, Night (1968), Dawn (1979), and Day
of the Dead (1985), the living dead take on different social
anxieties. Thus, he does not only position his zombies as bearers
of ideological manipulation. In the latter, the zombies are chained
like animals, treated like lab rats, and used in military experiments
that seek to make them subservient to human needs. But the zombies
revolt against the military apparatus in the film allowing the only
woman, and two possibly gay men (an Irish Catholic and a Caribbean
black man) to escape the oppressive underground facility. The survivors
represent subaltern groups historically oppressed within the history
of U.S. military expansion and its accompanying capitalist growth.
In his fourth installment, Land of the Dead (2005), the zombies
are portrayed as the lumpen proletariat class coming to historical
consciousness. The zombies are portrayed as leading a new resistance
against the gated city of Fiddler's Green. Is this Romero's hope
for a new social movement, or a new anti-war movement, in the post-9/11
context of the U.S.?
38 While doing research in Perú a few years ago, I was invited into
an amazingly vibrant and engaged ecclesial base community (CEB) in
the northern part of the country. At a meeting of the community leaders,
the pastoral agents revealed to me that while organizing the Stations
of the Cross in previous years, they had decided to append an extra
Station to the traditional 14 Stations: the Resurrection. They explained
to me that they felt the people of their barrio had an "incomplete" understanding
of the Christian message, because they tended to focus only on the
Passion of Jesus.
39 For example, Clover writes, "[c]ertainly I will never again
take for granted that audience males identify solely or even mainly
with screen males and audience females with screen females." See
Clover
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