Andrew Tatusko
Seton Hall University

Abstract

The grotesque is often viewed as a subversive element injected into the fabric of social and religious structures for subversive and offensive purposes intended to garner increased market share and media exposure.  As such it has been seen as barbaric or even demonic.  However, other theories of the grotesque show that it is often a combination of social and aesthetic criticism that disrupts the ordered structure of experience in terms of boundaries and categories that compose that structure often in terms of explicit traditions, but also in terms of hidden assumptions and values that compose this structure.  To this end, there is a connection of the grotesque to the sublime and the ambiguous.  There is thus an element of the grotesque that lays claim to mystery and so, can act as a vehicle for understanding crucial concepts in studying divinity.  Examples of religious ambiguity and the grotesque in popular culture disclose both aspects of the grotesque and also offer a fructuous medium from which the critical engagement of tradition, boundaries, and the grotesque itself can emerge.  The grotesque aesthetic and explicitly religious quoting of the Nine Inch Nails provides a clear medium through which the tentative structure of boundaries is expressed creating creative space for the mystery of the sacred to emerge.

Introduction

[1] In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas (2002) describes that which pollutes in terms of power.  Pollution and impurity are elicited by disorder and run as a counter discourse to social order, reinforcing that order and sometimes destroying it.  Either way, order is reified if impurity is either disposed of or introduced into a defined context.  The issue here has less to do with impure elements in society per se than with the drawing and blurring of boundaries that maintain a coherent and ordered experience.  The dualism of order and disorder is inscribed on the relationship between pure and impure.  In between the two polarities is an ambiguous region that is neither disordered nor structured.  In this “formless” region the greatest danger exists where power can be harnessed to reinforce order, or act as an agent to destroy it.  It is this untamed power that reinforces boundaries by those who would draw them and can simultaneously destroy these boundaries if left unchecked. 

[2] Douglas notes that power is often described in terms of witchcraft or sorcery in some instances or as an animus in others.  Power along these lines is relegated to the boundaries of the disclosed and accepted order of experience.  There is thus a risk involved in allowing the ambiguous to maintain its formless character.  When ambiguity gains momentum, it threatens ordered experience, and threatens the boundaries that shape identity socially, psychologically and spiritually.  Ambiguity is then marginalized by the accepted order.

[3] Douglas’s work deals specifically with the relationship between primitive and modern culture in an effort to restore the currency of that distinction in anthropology.  Her argument in concert with current thought about the notion of boundaries is a rich description that would greatly assist the current climate about what is acceptable and decent versus what is unacceptable and indecent in the terms stipulated by the FCC and Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004 (H.R. 3717).  Moreover, the current debate regarding same-sex marriage, and the grotesque portrayal of the crucifixion of Jesus and the debate of how the Jews were portrayed in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ (2004) are each speaking to the issue of boundaries in their own way.  The issue is where these boundaries have been drawn, how they were drawn, and how they are maintained.  The challenge leveled against boundaries such as these is a normal re-negotiation of cultural language and norms.  The problem seems to be in the response of actors who level protective and often exclusionary responses to any threat to established order and interpretation.

[4] Ambiguity in the midst of such boundaries is revealed in the debate and in so doing discloses the conditions and powers that create them.  In theological rather than anthropological terms, ambiguity can be both a power that distorts the relationship between the human and sacred and a power that clarifies the difference between the human and sacred.  What I argue in what follows is that an intentional blurring of boundaries, while offensive to an ordered experience, and while it distorts the boundary between the human and the sacred, can also be used to clarify the difference between the human and the sacred and allow for the sublime mystery of the sacred to flourish in less bounded conditions.  In Mark C. Taylor’s terms this would seem to be an “a/theological” task “where fixed boundaries disintegrate” and remain “undeniably ambiguous” (1984, 12-13).  Indeed this task does call into question and critically engage existing boundary conditions and so, the inquiry into the grotesque and its relation knowledge of the sacred is a task that is in itself “erring.”  However, I do not merely “seek to solicit the inherent instability and covert contradictions” in modern discourse and thereby deconstruct and reconstruct them in a postmodern cast (Taylor, 13).  Indeed engaging the grotesque is an exercise in erring as such, but it explores how the sacred can be engaged through the disruption of boundary conditions by the grotesque.  The disruption of boundaries such as the human and sacred, among others, can be seen in the work of popular industrial musician Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.  The offensive and grotesque images in his work can be used to reveal and critically engage assumptions about experience in order to disclose the sacred as that which transcends the boundaries of human experience and reinscribes them as sublime mystery. 

Borders, the Structure of Experience, and the Grotesque

[5] The notion of boundary is as closely tied to social structuring as it is to the structure of personal experience.  Boundary, in this sense, is not so much a static and reified structure as it is a negotiation of limits and categories. At the heart of the behaviour is the inclusion of elements into categories that order and define experience–a behaviour that also requires an act of exclusion.  Exemplifying such a boundary are the categories of tradition which are normative to what is acceptable and deemed as “good” for a social structure.  But what may be overlooked in even the hardest reification of traditional boundaries is the renegotiation of those traditional boundaries and categories.  In this sense, as we will see below in the work of Delwin Brown, the categories and boundaries of tradition are not completely static, but undergo a constant renegotiation from internal and external elements that call into question the entire structure of experience in terms of established borders that define it.  The definition of terms either in support of or in contradiction to a given order is given in relation to that structure.  The structure of experience ordered through a system of differentiated borders thus creates opposing terms, as these terms reinforce and sustain the structure.

[6] The grotesque proceeds from an ordered structure of experience when opposing or differentiated terms are combined in a way that unifies terms that ought to be differentiated, and differentiates terms that ought to remain unified.  In short, the grotesque is an often radical disturbance of an ordered structure of experience.  Often popular usage of the term implies “gore” in film such as the “living dead,” or the insane killer who reappears in a strange circle of life, death and rebirth, or in the nightmares of his would-be next victim as in the cases of Leatherface, Jason and Freddy Krueger.  But the work of Salvador Dali in works such as “Autumn Cannibalism” (1936) or “Young Auto-Virgin Sodomized by her Own Chastity” (1954), the re-animations of cadavers in the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin, or the current “Bodyworlds” exhibit that seem to ride the border between science and death certainly retain this quality of a disturbance of an ordered structure of experience.  But it is not enough to address that such disorder is categorized as something grotesque as it is to address why this is so.

[7] Mary Douglas’s understanding of dirt “as matter out of place … implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” (44).  Dirt as an inappropriate element only exists in relation to a system that classifies this or that as dirt.  The behaviour of rejecting an object or idea flows from the experience that the order of experience is disturbed.  This she calls “pollution behavior” (45).  In this sense eliminating dirt is “a positive effort to organize the environment” (2).  Organizing behaviour in this way limits experience, makes it manageable and helps one to focus and discern reality.  “Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefineable” (120).  Danger is an idea or expression that is ambiguous in relation to a given structure that can neither be classified as a pollutant, nor included in any prescribed boundaries.  Lack of definition results in lack of classification and so, the ambiguous is suspended somewhere outside or along the lines of the system.  Fredrik Barth (2000) notes three characteristics of boundaries along these lines.  Boundaries “divide territories ‘on the ground’ … set limits that mark social groups off from each other … and … provide(s) a template for that which separates distinct categories of the mind” (17).  It is a faculty of human cognition and social order to draw boundaries and develop a structure in which experience is ordered and predictable, and the division between human and sacred powers is clearly demarcated.  This division has been made quite clear in the very design of the Jewish Temple where the Holy of Holies remained inscrutable and inaccessible to all but the High Priest or even more clearly in the absolute distinction between Allah and humankind for Muslims.  However, there is a more fluid understanding of boundary formation that is rather inclusive of oppositional voices and a spate of different elements.  This becomes part of the Christian understanding of Jesus as God incarnate as we shall see below.  While Douglas would perhaps characterize these sorts of arrangements in terms of primitive culture, Delwin Brown argues that this fluidity of boundaries lies in the negotiation of active participants in a tradition.

[8] Delwin Brown (1994) offers a reinterpretation of “tradition” in order “to seek an adequate understanding of tradition after the advent of modernism” (4).  While modernism may have heightened “the destructive capabilities of inherited ideas, actions, and structures … humans are inescapably traditioned and traditional beings” (2).  Brown’s strategy is to redefine tradition in terms of its consistently renegotiated boundaries and limits and the inherent multiplicity of voices that give tradition its shape.  This more fluid structure not only makes room for other voices, but actually generates these voices.  Tradition, so conceived, is of a very different character than the criticism leveled against its “special character” as “an act of faith at odds with the evidence” (Brown 1994, 68).  “That is why tradition must be understood as the negotiation between chaos and order, order and chaos.  The dynamic of tradition requires both.  Either alone is impossible, and either in excess is dangerous” (Brown 1994, 87).  The canon that forms the “galaxy of meaning” for a tradition should not be deconstructed to an endless play of meaning, nor should it reify itself into a dogmatic and static hegemony of this or that meaning.  The boundedness of the canon establishes a limitation on the conditions for the tradition and in so doing; those within the tradition negotiate meaning and identity in relation to the canon (Brown 1994, 78).  Yet the canon is also curatorial in the midst of “multiple and conflictual” meaning, and contestable in that it is a “negotiation or play” (Brown 1994, 80).  A similar view suggests that the individuals within the boundaries of tradition may use their own schemas in order to construct their identities relative to those boundaries (Barth 2000, 33).  What is at stake is a more flexible and adaptive view of tradition that allows space for the subversive to co-exist within its bounds.  Moreover, because there are still boundaries that establish identity, the spaces outside of the bounds of the tradition are available for inhabitation by the grotesque.  Indeed, “the provocation for change seems most frequently to come from outside the tradition” (Brown 1994, 87).  The grotesque, as we shall see, is liminally related to constructed boundaries.  In itself, the grotesque is a concept that challenges boundaries and calls for them to err and be errant.  What is the character of the grotesque that can be so challenging, repugnant, subversive and destructive of boundary limitations that establish identity, and order experience?

[9] The word grotesque derives from grottesca which is the feminine form of grotto, meaning cave.  The word became associated with an ornamental style of painting in Italy from fifteenth-century excavations.  However, through time, the meaning would take on a new meaning more closely associated with its contemporary usage.  Wilhelm Kayser (1963) traces the complex history of the term and notes that Vitruvius, a contemporary of Augustus condemned the style characterizing it as “barbaric.”  Kayser quotes Vitruvius from De architectura, “For our contemporary artists decorate the walls with monstrous forms rather than reproducing clear images of the familiar world” (20).  The work he describes seems to take aspects of different classifications in the order of the world and combines them in an unnatural or unfamiliar way.  Thus he asks, “For how can the stem of a flower support a roof, or a candelabrum pedimental structure?  How can a tender shoot carry a human figure, and how can bastard forms composed of flowers and human bodies grow out of roots and tendrils?”  Kayser’s connection between the barbaric and the grotesque is an interesting one because it inscribes a social category on the meaning of grotesque.  The grotesque, in these terms, connotes a lack of civility.  Here the notion is that the very structure of rationally-based civil order is threatened by these grotesque representations.  “Civilized” is often seen in contradiction to “barbaric.”  According to Brown “[t]o civilize was to bring humans into a social organization, and to be civil was to behave in a way appropriate to that organization, to be orderly, educated, polite” (59).  This meaning was dovetailed with the meaning of culture through the Eighteenth century.

[10] Freud echoes this sentiment with his less than inclusive view of taboo.  Freud draws a parallel between restrictive taboos in primitive culture and “obsessional neurosis” (1950, 45 ff.) more akin to the view of the savages in Huxley’s Brave New World than in the way we have been looking at the notion of boundary so far.  The fascinating piece of Brave New World for this discussion is that what is deemed barbaric or savage in the context is finally revealed as a relative category in keeping with social control and order that is disrupted by The Visiting Savage (John) who finds himself among the technocracy of the Brave New World leading ultimately to his suicide.  Nonconformity to the social order is simply unthinkable and must be eliminated–even in the paradoxical free act of taking one’s own life as John does following an act of conformity to a dancing crowd crying “orgy porgy.”  Thus, in the end, the Brave New World appears to be as much or more savage than the culture of savagery that was sequestered from the technocratic order.  The very notions of savagery and barbarity are hence called into question.

[11] For Leszek Kolakowski (1990), barbarity, as relative to Eurocentrism, is a result of the loss of tradition through fanatical skepticism or cultural universalism.  Either of these options contradicts a fundamental European characteristic which is self-criticism that exists within boundaries (25).  Hence tradition can be preserved without morphing into totalitarianism.  Radical acceptance of all elements on an equal plane ultimately reduces a culture’s identity into such fanatical regimes.  Further, Kolakowski argues the notion of complete and utter sameness under the umbrella of the word utopia is a contradictory notion:  “A feasible utopian world must presuppose that people have lost their creativity and freedom, that the variety of human life forms and thus personal life have been destroyed, and that all people have achieved perfect satisfaction of their needs and accepted a perpetual deadly stagnation as their normal condition” (Kolakowski 1990, 138).  Difference must run parallel to and intersect with what seems to be normalized and defined within boundaries.  Resting not within boundary conditions but on the margins of social, aesthetic and epistemological conditions is precisely how Geoffrey Harpham understands the grotesque.  Viewing the ambiguous and non-defined character of that which is called grotesque is his way of splitting the difference between Kayser’s negative cast on the grotesque as barbaric and demonic and Bakhtin’s more optimistic view of the grotesque as a potential for liberation (Yates 1997, 31).  The homogeneity structured through technocracy in Brave New World seems to be an apt illustration of these concepts.

[12] Bakhtin (1981) argues that “the disunification of what had traditionally been linked, and the bringing-together of that which had traditionally been kept distant and disunified, is achieved in Rabelais via the construction of series [rjady] of the most varied types, which are at times parallel to each other and at times intersect each other”  (Bakhtin 1981, 170).  In Rabelais’ use of the body, exaggerations run parallel and intersect with precise anatomical descriptions.  It is thus a strategy to renegotiate the boundaries of tradition in the sense that Brown defines it, but through that which escapes category because it has blurred the boundaries that construct these categories.  However, this negotiation first must re-establish where cultural boundaries are, who is responsible for upholding them, and the assumptions that govern their existence.  Re-negotiation from this view is not without its significant challenges and re-establishes what is profane and indecent.  For Bakhtin, the concept is the carnival in which those in authority are mocked and parodied.  A similar play is wrought by Monty Python who take liberties with their notions of authority and God, portraying priests and kings as buffoons, the laws of the land as absurdities, and the incapacity of high-order philosophical thought to deal with real-world problems, as in a soccer match between Greek and German philosophers who can’t seem to get out of the individual mode of reflection until Archimedes has a moment of “eureka” in order to set up a play at the end.  The issue is what is left after these boundaries become blurred and seemingly relative.

[13] One angle of understanding the profanity of blurred boundaries is through the relationship of the subversive to cultural norms.  What is subversive runs against norms to reveal oppressive regimes of power, and discloses assumptions in order to generate a more authentic notion of self.  However, the prevailing cultural structure can assimilate this level of the grotesque and package it in a likeness to consumers in the guise of “cutting-edge style.” This movement provides fertile ground for a new subversive element to replace the former counter or subculture that becomes the mainstream.  One example of this is so-called “alternative” music.  The moment Nirvana struck the chord of American youth in 1991, the alternative was repackaged in dozens of look-alike and sound-alike forms to mimic Nirvana and the “Seattle sound” of so-called “grunge.”  This “feedback loop” is documented in the Frontline program “Merchants of Cool.”  As Douglas Rushkoff (Dretzin and Goodman 2001) notes, “The media watches kids and then sells them an image of themselves. Then kids watch those images and aspire to be that mook or midriff in the TV set. And the media is there watching them do that in order to craft new images for them, and so on.”  Even those who believe that they have escaped this cycle through the grotesque (e.g., the band the Insane Clown Posse and others) are soon sold the grotesque as a part of the mainstream.  It is perhaps this re-imaging of the grotesque that no longer seems grotesque in the sense we have seen thus far.  Art can here be seen as a confusion with perversity–the grotesque without any referent or boundary other than its own unboundedness and disruptiveness to traditional forms.

[14] Without a vigorous tradition to oppose, the avant-garde declines into a series of narcissistic soliloquies, raging against an illusory enemy that is only too happy to subsidize its tantrums. In fact, we are living today in the aftermath of the avant-garde, a time when its gestures have become ubiquitous but also aesthetically impotent. The obsession with novelty, the addiction to extreme gestures, the desire to marry art and radical politics: These common features of avant-garde culture live on now as a species of caricature (Kimball 1997). 

[15] The grotesque and the avant-garde become simulacra (Baudrillard 1994), and cease to mean nothing more than shock value in order to increase market share.  The issue here brings us back to recent controversy over decency and order in society with regard to FCC regulations, same-sex marriage, The Passion and even ClearChannel’s removal of Howard Stern’s radio show from six markets in order to protect its “listeners from indecent content” (ClearChannel 2004).  What is clear from these current debates is that, whether perceived or real, the grotesque has a dangerous element to it.  In terms of boundary formation, identity and tradition, these debates are part of a larger complex of behaviour in which boundaries are constantly renegotiated and redefined by those from within the tradition and from the outside of the tradition.  In this way those within the tradition and its galaxy of meaning redefine who they are and legitimate or refigure the canon that shapes their galaxy of shared meaning.

The Grotesque as a Medium for the Sublime

[16] The other side of formlessness points to another set of categories that have little to do with corporeal restructuring and repackaging.  This is more in tune with the idea of the holy or with mystery–the sublime.  As Connelly (2003) notes, “The boundlessness of the sublime, dynamical or numerical, overwhelms reason and exceeds its powers to contain and define” (4).  For her, this is an important distinction with the grotesque.  The grotesque rather, “is in constant struggle with the boundaries of the known, the conventional, the understood” (5).  For Chaouli, it is a question of scale.  The sublime, is “absolutely–that is to say, beyond any comparison–exceed[s] the human scale.  For only then will our power of imagination feel its own limits, leading to a momentary sense of failure that in turn becomes the negative pleasure we feel when we realize the even greater extension of our reason.  In order to experience the infinite range of our reason we need to confront something that is not finite, something beyond the human scale” (Chaouli, 55).  The grotesque is also a refiguration of categories that are the material of the middle-class worldview, but are radically recombined and altered in a way that challenges that worldview (Kayser).  In one sense, this perspective leads to a freeing notion of the grotesque since structure is viewed as tentative and a less structured and bounded notion of self and the sublime is possible.  The formless has been slipped into two categories, “the loathsome disgusting” and the “sublime sublime.”  The grotesque as that which is formless can thus take two directions–both of which subvert boundaries: that which is rejected as foul or Douglas’s “dirt,” and a sublime disruption of existing categories.  The former falls into the category of “profane,” while the latter is “holy”– both are potent sources that disrupt existing boundaries, structure and categories.

[17] In contrast to Chaouli’s affirmation of how far reason can extend to comprehend the sublime, Christian spiritual writings have stressed the idea of God’s unbounded nature that escapes any formative categories that human reason is able to construct in order to comprehend it.  This seems to be in concert with Connelly’s understanding of the sublime in relation to the grotesque.  The basis for the Cloud of Unknowing, for example is knowledge of God via negativa, that is, knowing God by rejecting all positive statements about the divine due to the inability of the senses to conceive thereof.  That the finitude of the senses and the mind to perceive and conceive of God are likened to “a cloud of darkness” reinforces that the being of God is ultimately a mystery:  “The darkness we enter is the other side of what is known.  It is not an unqualified darkness of unknowing, but the other side of what can be spoken of” (Allen 1998, 30).  The holy and the sublime, in this sense, is something that escapes human categorization and is unbounded by human reason and the ability to accurately articulate the habitual presence of the sacred.

[18] Sacred presence is that which human categories can at best partially understand.  The beauty of the world or “the book of nature” can give one only a partial reflection of the beauty of God.  Moreover, in Christianity, Jesus as God incarnate upholds the mystery of God for, according to Barth (1955), Jesus only reflects God through an analogy of relationship rather than an analogy of being (Barth 1955, III/2, 220-221, 323-324).  Since the being of God escapes all categories, including “being” itself (Marion 1991), the closest category to which we can ascribe to God is that God escapes all categories.  However, this way of looking at the holy as a sublime, unbounded formlessness does not adequately pinpoint the issue of the grotesque as such.  In contrast, the subject of the grotesque is the corporeal and the material and has form, even as a form that destabilizes structure as such.  But even if we locate the grotesque here, there is room for the grotesque to open a space for the sacred precisely because it challenges boundaries and the categories that structure experience.  This challenge reveals the limitedness of human cognition to grasp all of reality from not only a transcendent, numinous level, but even on a material, observable level.  Such is the challenge of mystery.  As Roger Hazelton writes, “Theology and grotesque art, … find a certain affinity in a common persuasion that mystery remains a real and radical feature of our existing in the world–something not reducible to the aims and methods of technical expertise and control, and thus compelling other kinds of human response and acknowledgement” (1997, 76).  Such “other human response” in the renegotiation of errant boundaries in order to experience the knowledge of the sacred.

[19] Douglas also offers a very brief proposal that leaves space for the grotesque to be a creative rather than a destructive force and hence as a possible medium to experience the mystery of the sacred.  The category of the profane behaves in a cycle from formlessness to form and a return to formlessness.  “Dirt was created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order.  So it started from a state of non-differentiation; all through the process of differentiating its role was to threaten the distinctions made; finally it returns to its true indiscriminable character” (Douglas 2002 198).  This is certainly the case in Genesis where “the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Gen 2:7, NRSV).  This verse itself is an indication of the Yahwist tradition in which the experience of God is not limited to the cult of the Temple, but is also outside of those boundaries:  “In a word the chief importance of God’s activity suddenly lies outside the sacred institutions.  It is thereby perhaps more concealed from the natural eye because the entire profane sphere is also the domain of God’s activity; but it is nevertheless looked at more inclusively, not intermittently, but much more continually” (von Rad 1972, 30).  This perspective echoes the notion of via positiva through the book of nature.  Dirt is not only formless and a way of understanding the grotesque, but dirt is also the potential for order and can disclose beauty and even the likeness of God!  Here, dirt offers a creative rather than destructive quality, or a “creative formlessness” (Douglas 2002 199).  This is part of the constructive side of what the grotesque as formlessness can offer–insofar as it exists outside or tangential to normative or traditional structures.  Note that formlessness in the grotesque’s relationship to the sacred is somewhat loose.  Here I would not go so far as so say that the grotesque as a form is formless.  Rather, the calling into question of traditional boundaries–both cognitive and social–renders the structures in which the sacred can be revealed to be more open to renegotiation and even a radical restructuring rendering a certain formless character to those structures once they are revealed as tentative and not final structures to comprehend the sacred. The issue is that the grotesque can be a creative medium for boundary renegotiation among participants in a traditional dialogue inasmuch as dirt was a creative medium for God.

[20] In sum, the grotesque offers us a fructuous concept to understand the conditions under which human boundary formation exists from the social, cognitive and spiritual dimensions.  With uncategorized formlessness and ambiguity there is a power that can be subversive or disclose the nature of the sacred.  In the grotesque there is a creative energy and power through which identity and tradition in relation to the sacred can be renegotiated and more richly understood.  Can that which is profane and subversive also act as an agent to reveal the sacred?  That is to say, is it possible to combine the grotesque with the ordered and pure in a way that the nature of the sacred is revealed?  If the grotesque is that which knocks order and structured experience out of balance, there is a piece of it that forces experience to renegotiate structure and order.  In short, it sends boundary structures of experience erring in a way that they must be renegotiated.  In the midst of this renegotiation of boundaries there is a ripe moment in which human limitedness to know the sacred is disclosed thus reinforcing the mystery and the ineffable nature of the sacred.  An understanding of why this or that is grotesque or offensive can thus disclose the otherness of God.  A critical appropriation of the grotesque in its varied forms yields a constructive medium into apprehending the mystery of the sacred and its quality of unboundedness.  As Carl Skrade writes, “By speaking to us fiercely of the reality of the non-rational and of unavoidable death, the grotesque becomes a call to life and hope” (Skrade 1974, 157).  Hence, there is an analogy of relationship between boundary formation and the grotesque, and boundary formation and the experience of God.  This point is what we turn to now in Trent Reznor’s own employment of the grotesque as a refiguration of his own view of religion and God which then acts as a piece for the consumer to reveal those boundaries that go unquestioned in the midst of assumed traditional order that is often not up for renegotiation in Brown’s sense.

Grotesque Images and Boundary Transgressions in the Nine Inch Nails

[20] In a 1994 interview, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails says, “What I am trying to do is challenge the accepted … I’m fully aware that Nine Inch Nails works within the context of writing songs with choruses and hooks.  This gives it a certain degree of commerciality and I think that’s a good platform to slip in some messages that are a bit subversive” (Sprague).  The music and art of the Nine Inch Nails can be characterized as subversive not just because of the hostile and dark images and language, but because of how mutually oppositional elements are grotesquely conjoined.  This includes the collusion of food, sex, death, and religion in the award winning music video for the song “Closer.”  But this instance is part of a wider pattern for the prominent position that is given to the grotesque in Nine Inch Nails music and video.

[21] In the film-noir video for “Happiness in Slavery” (1992), a stream of images pulsates in a calculated flood of the grotesque.  The video begins with Trent Reznor, lead singer, writer, instrumentalist, label owner and performer for over half of all Nine Inch Nails music belting out the words “Slave screams” from the inside of a cage.  When he reaches the fourth verse (“don’t open your eyes you won’t like what you see”) we are brought inside a dim room with an early 40s white gentleman in a suit carefully lighting a candle, and methodically removing his clothing.  In the middle of the room is what looks like a reclined dentist’s chair or a massage table with gadgetry and a hint of machinery all around it.  Weeds grow at the base of this chair/table.  The man walks over to a sink, and while he engages in a ritualistic washing of his body, the camera pays special attention to his genitalia.  He slowly walks over to the benign looking chair and lies back in it.  The chair swiftly comes to life, twisting itself to a position suitable for an examination and his hands and feet are locked in place by restraining devices.  The chair becomes more “alive” than the supposed initiate as an active participant and leader in a ritualistic transformation as he becomes a passive object that the machine body of the chair restrains.  At this point he undergoes horrific torture–his hands are pierced by probes, his chest is prodded and impaled by claws, his abdomen ripped open by spinning blades, and his genitalia crushed.  At the end, his body is ground and fed to worms that writhe in the midst of the weeds at the base of this examination chair or masochistic altar.  His torturous pleasure lubricates the cogs of the machine and his torture and death sustains the machine and the weeds.  There is thus a disturbing subtext in which the grotesque combination of machine, man, pleasure, pain and ritual form a matrix of slavery as a means to freedom.  After the gruesome mutilation and excretion of the man by the machine, Trent Reznor enters the room and begins the same ritual as the camera fades to black.

[22] While these images conjure up nightmarish gore and visions of pain at the whim of technology, the most disturbing aspect is the intense and even orgasmic pleasure the supposed initiate to this “happiness” derives from the captivity and torture of his willful submission to techno-masochistic slavery.  The boundaries between man and machine, life and death, freedom and captivity, pleasure and pain, sacrificial cleansing and profane mutilation are all simultaneously breached in a matter of minutes.  This video offers a framework that illustrates in stark relief the Nine Inch Nails’ thematic–control, pain, pleasure and embodiment.

[23] Technical control through modernity and the determinism that masks itself as a condition of liberation is at the fore of the Nine Inch Nails aesthetic.  Reznor transports the viewer through a blurred boundary or a simulacrum of boundedness in order to face the possibility of annihilation; and rather than run away or turn from it, look at it with the perverted gaze of a rush hour commuter attending to the carnage of a car crash with the unspoken urge to see the frailty of the human body encased in a steel automobile body that is at once an extension of and an amputation of the self and embodied animus.  “Embodied” here means a mechanical layer on top of the flesh rendering the flesh irrelevant (as in Marshall McLuhan’s sense of the tool amputating functions of the body by extending bodily functions–here the automobile amputates the function of the legs for walking and running).

[24] This marks a grotesque theme that runs through Reznor’s art–the union of the technological and the biological.  At the end of “Happiness in Slavery” Reznor invites our attention to the illusion of freedom that the images of the video represent “i don’t know what I am i don’t know where i’ve been / human junk just words and so much skin / stick my hands thru / the cage of this endless routine / just some flesh caught in this big broken machine.”  The body is thus devoid of an “I” that can be free or happy.  Liberation from the machine and the hope it requires is an illusion and escape is impossible.  We must somehow be content even if we are not happy with this knowledge.  Much like Adam and Eve, perhaps we would be better off not having this knowledge of good and evil at all, even as Reznor sings “the blind have been blessed with security.”

[25] These images and themes bring to stark relief the chord that runs through the Nine Inch Nails’ EP Broken (1992) and its follow up LP The Downward Spiral (1994).  Broken is a diatribe against corporate influence and how corporate culture kills art in order to sustain the market, but communicates this in terms of perverse and grotesque boundary breaches and identity confusion.  It is as much of an exploration of subversive elements as it is a declaration that the grotesque can shatter what is acceptable in an industry driven by certain norms and expectations.  This is as true for Reznor’s skyrocketing success following the Broken EP as it is for other examples in the music industry at the time (2 Live Crew and NWA provide industry success that disrupted market norms from the hip-hop side at right around the same time).  While this could be drawn into the feedback loop mentioned above, it never was due to its exaggerated subversive quality.  It can be argued that the over-the-top use of the grotesque is a just a tool used to subvert corporate influence.  However, there is a more important theme that has to do with what subversive means rather than why Reznor may or may not have used what is subversive in this or that instance.  Where the latter album differs is in its inclusion of God in the errant conundrum presented to the beholder.  It does so through an introspective glance rather than an outward gaze.  It is also here that we find the track “Closer” (1994).

[26] What “Closer” and The Downward Spiral do is take the entrails spat out from Broken and melancholically gaze at them with existential passion rather than make a concerted effort to personal liberation.  We are rather faced with the question of whether or not liberation is indeed possible given the human condition and the conditions that the modern technical social structure exact upon embodiment.  What Reznor also brings to the audience is a more critical tone that at least asks a question of possibility and so, offers the listener with a degree of openness that his previous work seemed to destroy.  It seems to end as tragically as the fate of Oedipus who destroys his ability to see, lancing the gaze from possibility leading ultimately to death.  Here it is a bullet that discloses the frailty of the self and reveals the anguish of choosing between unsatisfying alternatives.

[27] A more exact look at “Closer” in this framework lends its images to a more faceted interpretation ripe with possibility to explore the aspects of religion that it intentionally blurs.  The video is rife with images of death, sadomasochism, sideshow misfits, animal flesh, seraphim and the crucifix.  In the lyrics there is an oscillation between subject and object–between the “I” who acts at the permission of an object, “you,” with desire, control and release all working in a very uneasy tension.  Certainly the pounding chorus of Reznor oscillating his voice between a whisper and a scream with the lyric “I wanna f*** you like an animal/ I wanna feel you from the inside/…/you get me closer to God” reveals this inherent tension and release.  This production is colorful, but given a sepia treatment that gives it an aged quality from the early twentieth century.  Despite its ability to be internally coherent, “Closer” is the result of a grotesque combination of equally grotesque art from the twentieth century.

[28] The images in the video are heavily indebted to photographer Joel-Peter Witkin who is unique not only due to his careful crafting and composition, but perhaps more so due to his favorite subject matter–the corpse:  “Witkin, in photographing the dead, takes what we would ordinarily dismiss as the past, and enlivens it” (Mann).  Witkin’s photography collapses the boundary between life and death through its reanimation of the corpse into poses that are surreal images of death that border on something more timeless and “alive.”  The image seems to suspend the death of the subject and his sepia and black and white tones and scratched film give the imaged a timeless character.  The boundary between death and life is blurred rendering the images grotesque.

[29] Witkin thus destabilizes a fundamental boundary at the foundation of his photography (Schwenger 2000).  Looking at the issue from another side can simply recall the discussion of the grotesque above.  Witkin could be doing all of this for a reaction–to be subversive for the sake of being subversive, or even perverted (Wilson 2000).  Certainly, Witkin would describe his art of the former, deeper character.  The issue at stake for what I am arguing is that the sources for the images in the “Closer” video are a compendium of pre-existent grotesque elements that are brought together for a subversive end and in the process reveal boundaries of pleasure, pain, death and God by subverting them.  As director of the video Mark Romanek writes, the video “was merely a compendium of original and re-contextualized images from the last Century of Art and Photography–images that I felt would resonate with the song’s themes, images that ‘felt’ right” (Romanek, personal communication, 2003).  The entire video is layer on layer of internally grotesque images brought together in a grotesque chorus where Reznor proclaims “I want to f*** you like an animal,” while images of a monkey on a cross, a crucifix attached to the head of an androgynous masked person dressed in SandM clothing, and what appear to be angel’s wings behind Reznor but on further analysis is a hollowed out animal corpse split open and suspended to form a cherubic background for him.  To put the piece in the context of the rest of The Downward Spiral, Reznor says, “Thematically I wanted to explore the idea of somebody who systematically throws or uncovers every layer of what he’s surrounded with, comfort-wise, from personal relationships to religion to questioning the whole situation.  Someone dissecting his own ability to relate to other people or have anything to believe in” (Hammerschmidt 1994).  The question here is, what is left after all of these layers or structures are stripped away? Bakhtin is similar regarding the liberatory potential of the grotesque, although his conception is in a very different sense.  There is a sense of creative destruction in which existing structures and regimes of knowledge that are taken for granted are blurred to a “formless” character in order to liberate creative passion and a more authentic identity unbound and unmediated by boundary conditions.  One can become composed of habitual matrices of experience and become subject to regimes of knowledge/power.  A source of power is found in the reversal of the accepted order, the bringing-together of conventionally separate objects and deconstructing these existing structures and relationships (Bakhtin 1981).  Boundaries are stripped away in order to disclose a more authentic self, or at least the hope that a self exists that can transcend the normative boundaries of its existence.  That is to say, there is a hope for some kind of liberation that can confirm that there is more to the self than a product of traditional influences and experiences–a self that can self-transcend its own boundaries.  The sublime, or a category of the sublime, is brought into the boundary of the corporeal rendering it a grotesque manipulation of religious symbolism.  But even the grotesque manipulation of traditional religious symbols such as the crucifix reveal that these symbols have a tentative character as referents to something sacred that ultimately cannot be held by the boundaries that traditional expressions of religion hold dear in the symbolic expression of the sacred.  While Reznor certainly does not go this far, it is also clear that his expression creates a space and a possibility for liberation even if it is also clear that he comes down not seeing this or even caring for it.

[30] In the Johnny Cash re-make of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” (2003) we return to the possibility that grotesque disruption of boundaries may not be a complete deconstruction of the boundaries that structure and regulate experience–in short, complete nihilism.  It is here that the end may indeed be a beginning, but Reznor leaves us with that question unanswered.  Johnny Cash clothed the song in intense introspection and retrospection when he re-recorded it and Mark Romanek produced a video for the song in 2003.  With one change of the song’s lyrics, Cash turns something corporeal to something somewhat sacred.  In one line, Reznor sings “I wear this crown of shit,” but Cash turns the lyric into “I wear this crown of thorns.”  The video echoes the past career of Cash and weaves in scenes of the crucifixion of Jesus.  When Nine Inch Nails perform this song live, Reznor sings these lines as a silhouette in front of a massive movie screen that shows scenes of death, decay and torture.  As the chorus goes in both versions, “You can have it all/ my empire of dirt/ I will let you down/ I will make you hurt.”  But the conclusion of the song, that also concludes the album, is “If I could start again/ a million miles away/ I would keep myself/ I would find a way.”  It is in this line that Cash shows scenes of the crucified Christ.

[31] In the biblical account of the crucifixion in Mark, the grotesque body of Christ and the holiness of God are blurred in the cry of dereliction which is an echo of Psalm 22:2, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”  As Jürgen Moltmann (1993) interprets this passage, “The abandonment on the cross which separates the Son from the Father is something that takes place within God himself; it is stasis within God–’God against God’ –particularly if we are to maintain that Jesus bore witness to and lived out the truth of God” (151-52).  Jesus’ transgression of established boundaries is revealed in his person as fully human and fully God, in his work that cut against the grain of accepted traditions, in his speeches that proclaimed the kingdom of God, and his unique relationship to God as Father, and in his final crucifixion and death.  The crucifixion becomes a restatement and reification of the boundaries Jesus transgressed leading to his execution.  In this way the crucifixion is a profoundly grotesque event.  It is the resurrection which renders the grotesque into something sublime and beautiful in its unity of previously unharmonious combinations and separations in the person and work of Jesus.

[32] There is thus something of a resolution, however depressing for Reznor, at the bottom of The Downward Spiral that Broken did not have.  At the end of deconstruction of all boundaries, there is a new space created for rebirth and recreation of self in which boundaries constructed to relate the sacred to humankind are expressed as tentative and inherently flawed in their complete rendering of the sacred.  In relation to social and spiritual boundaries, God seems to live in the blur that exists between erring boundaries, as seen from this view.  Even death cannot fully define, inscribe, and so contain the inscrutable mystery of sacred presence.  The moment a boundary is erected between what is deemed as a sacred mystery and human living, the character of the sacred as something, in Chaouli’s (2003) terms of defining the sublime as that which, “absolutely –that is to say, beyond any comparison–exceed(s) the human scale” (55).  The ultimate problem is when these very boundaries become the essence of the sacred reality they are constructed to comprehend.  Hence the boundary and the structure are no longer tentative structures erected to refer to sacred reality, but become sacred reality itself.  What the grotesque does, as through Reznor’s expressions, is expose the tentative nature of those structures again expressing the fundamental flaws and limitedness in human expressions of sacred reality.  While this disruption does not solve the problem of how to reconstruct those boundaries, it does leave open the possibility that they can be reconstructed with the understanding that they are tentative.  Hence, the sublime mystery of the sacred can retain the quality of mystery in human understanding and the grotesque can act as a foil against reified structure that can stunt and subsume the power of the sacred to transform a structured understanding of it.

[33] What I am arguing is that the encounter with grotesque art that has captured something of the religious also has the potential to disclose a more authentic understanding of the sacred even as it strips away boundaries of that structure.  It creates a forum in which convictions of the observer for or against the image are extracted and the potential for a restructuring of belief and identity emerges

[34] So understood, the grotesque ought not to be limited to an expression that is a simulacrum of shock with no possibility to enhance the depth of knowledge and personal conviction in relation to the sacred.  Nor ought it to be seen as that which simply devalues high culture and art in favour of corporate gain by mocking sacred cultural values in the service of capitalism at the expense of decency.  A deeper analysis discloses the grotesque as that which forces us to take a hard look at our unchecked assumptions that often govern but always condition our understanding of the sacred.

[35] The assumption that has been at work in the overall construction of this argument is that there are inherent problems when a structured understanding of sacred reality becomes so reified that the very essence of sacred reality as such loses its sense of mystery as that which lies ultimately outside of the bounds of human comprehension and exceeds the human scale.  When this occurs, the sacred loses its distinctive character as that which is other and becomes an image of the structures that exist to understand it– however limited they may be.  Once those limitations are pushed to an infinite and absolute degree, the sacred and the structure become one.  No doubt this is true of any image of the grotesque and I would imagine this is true of Reznor and his employment of the grotesque leading to ultimate nihilism.  If the grotesque exists as a subversion and disruption of existing norms and boundaries, once that subversion is complete, and if there is nothing left for that grotesque expression to refer to, then the grotesque becomes all that is left–an empty relic of subversion with seemingly no real purpose left.  In one direction reification of structures to access sacred reality leads to radical absolutism as expressed in radical sectarian, orthodox and fundamentalist systems where any breach of the system is viewed as simply outside of the purview of God’s commands and the “Truth.”  In the other direction, reification of the grotesque boils from a sense of revolutionary tumult to relative meaninglessness and nihilism bypassing even notions that truth is relative or socially constructed.  However, when both sides are placed in tension, enough critical mass can be achieved so that dissolution to either extreme is at least complicated and made very difficult to achieve.  This is precisely why religious systems ought not to ignore grotesque expressions of its norms that reveal the tentative nature of their structures of belief in order to penetrate the mystery that is sacred reality.  Immediate dismissal and exclusion of the grotesque–no matter what the degree of that disruption and destabilization is be it Nine Inch Nails, Monty Python, The Simpsons, The Daily Show–already reveals the tendency to reify the system and limit the power of the sacred to transform it.

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