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: agel?) 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 agap? in Greek,
John's focus is hypomen?, 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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