<<TRANSMATHOME

4.0

There are three main areas that need ethical qualification if this book is to stand, not only as an exploratory exercise in transformation through film, but as a valuable addition to feminist, and even post-structural, philosophy. The first is the implications for the transforming subject in being or remaining an accountable, communitarian or at least social self. The second is the potential uses of horror towards transformation in relation to its historical connection to madness and war. Finally a further consideration is how my project utilizes horror towards a different result, that of becoming.

I am not interested primarily in inter-subjective relations, or a prescription for practices that foreground these relations as ‘authentic feminist’ or other supposedly or implicitly ‘good’ modes of behavior and thought. Inter-subjective relations, however, can not be excluded from my research if it is to posit any theories, which are considerable as ethical. My theories stand at a point where a re-figuring of the self is necessary, and therefore a re-figuring of inter-subjective relations will necessarily be altered as a result of new, different and more ‘ethical’ (affirming of difference in space and time) ways of being.

There is a prevalent fiction in Western Americanized culture about watching horror film. It is a fiction in the same way that the law is a fiction, and Lacan’s symbolic is a fiction, because it is a structure that exists arbitrarily, but elicits an outraged response if it is broken, a pact society has amongst itself. There is nothing real or unbreakable about such a fiction, but to properly be in culture, subjects are required to obey the fiction and behave according to it, despite the fact they can break it or disregard it at any point. [1] When analyzed in the lounge room on the couch in front of a horror film, the scenario reads thus: A pubescent boy, not a child but not a man, watches horror films over and over for a ‘thrill’. This thrill has been theorized as a catharsis of castration anxiety of which the adolescent male is still in the throes (Clover [2] ) and the conflation of sex and death (Creed [3] ) among other things. Such a youth is learning at a seminal and vulnerable phase of his development that sex is sexier with (female) death, that castration is nothing to be scared of because women will always be more castrated. Horror in this scenario is usually accompanied by laughter at the ridiculousness of the film scenes. They do not make much sense, they are ‘gross’ and not to be taken very seriously, even such a young boy knows this. And they are silly, especially compared with the moody silent German films and the incomprehensible French films that his parents watch before trundling off to lecture at film school. But this is why horror films are so dangerous. They are infective. The boy laughs and simultaneously incorporates detrimental ideas about horror, sex and death. What if the wrong person watches the films? Mentally awry people? Impressionable people? What if the viewer does not read the film right and goes out to re-perform it? What if a woman watches? She will be offended of course, but may ‘do’ a feminist de-construction of why the film is so bad. The viewer needs to learn how to properly read the horror film so it does not get out of control because horror films always breed violent desire, right?

Why is horror film not read as detrimental to the self first? Why is the idea of rupturing the self always overwritten with desire to rupture an other? How can horror be ethical when it only causes such suffering among others? Conversely why is the horror film silly, ridiculously un-academic unless it is available for deconstruction? Why is horror film, either way, trash? [4] It must be either thrown away as stupid or diligently prohibited as trashy for the self in reference to how the self will interact with others after watching. How can we theorize an ethics of anything when the self can only be figured violently as enforcing upon others? Why is the self so adamantly not a site for violence upon the self? Success in Western culture is how much we can create or build up a self and maintain it as such. But horror films affect the self towards something in consideration of others in the self, a consideration that spreads to others outside the self and completely repudiates any desire to pass as successful subject. Horror’s bad effect is seen as detrimental to the forming boy, who must soon cement as a subject. Any incorporation will, by bouncing off this cemented subject, inflict upon others, presumably violently, so adolescence is the last time enjoying a horror film can be allowed. But even horror film is cemented into a subject.

To the majority of people, both academic and not, horror is either slasher and hence American (Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, US, 1981) and its many offshoots) or arty and (old) European (Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ Robert Weine, Germany, 1919) et al). Any horror outside this binary is ‘specialized’, obscure or in another way unworthy of filmic analysis. [5] Often it is too offensive. As long as violence toward others is the only ethical consideration that comes to mind when considering the television viewer of such films, then the subject itself can never be refigured, and the incredible affective potentials of these films will go untheorized. I have demanded in this book we come to such a theorization, and from it, an ethics can and will, in the following section, be theorized. My work then, is a de-realization of the phantasmatically real effect of the banality of watching a television. It is a de-realization of the power of the fiction of the law of watching horror that takes, despite being a fiction, the real as the produced result of its transgression. But such a banality is the very thing that will allow the seemingly futuristic and sometimes unattainable theories of Deleuze and Guattari to be potentially available to all subjects.

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