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What is body horror?
For a week or so now I've been pursued by the editor and writers of a rather dark webzine called Terror Tales. They have apparently set their hearts on a Momus interview for Issue 2. So I'm checking out the Body Horror issue to see if it's the kind of thing I want to do.
'What is body horror?' asks editor Hertzan Chimera on the welcome page, his face a poorly-Photoshopped mess of flesh and skull. In his black polo neck and glasses Mr Chimera looks like a badly-decayed chemistry student. Like Christopher Lee speechifying in front of a row of bound and gagged 'guests', Herzan is asking a rhetorical question. You don't have to answer. In fact, you can't.
'By way of illustration I offer that pain in your raped ass. I offer that tightness in your strangled throat. I offer your poisoned innards.'
Instead of lingering to question Hertzan about his childhood (no doubt missing thereby some interesting anecdotes about summers in Rangoon, luge lessons, meat helmets and a Zoroastrian named Vilma) I penetrate the zine's innards to sample its editorial contents. Articles on Game Surgery and Stray thoughts on the Phenomenon of Japanese Horror are well-written and interesting. The poetry section is a cabinet of curiosities. Like Bizarre Zombie Baby Casket:
My aching stomach
Inflates
With a bizarre baby
Inside squishy embalmed
Naked
Insipid blood baby
Red milk spurts
Deliciously
Like fat blood-filled Mosquitoes!
Some hideous unseen hand compels me to write to the editor:
'I must admit to a certain ambivalence about the genre of body horror. I found Quentin Crisp's article about Japanese horror well-written, but profoundly at odds with my own interest in, and vision of, Japan, which focuses on things like 'cute formalism' and 'children's avant garde' and 'love of nature' and 'girlishness' and 'the Paris of our dreams' and 'the third sex' and so on. If blood red and jet black are the colours of Mr Crisp's Japan, pink and white are the colours of mine. They may possibly be two sides of the same coin, or two faces on the same dice. I associate this 'body horror' thing with:
* Video nasties of the early 80s.
* The Goth movement and its tedious fascination with Christian imagery.
* Anglo-American puritan mind-body problems.
* Creation Press endlessly rehashing Gilles de Rais.
* The sleazy British cable network I used to watch in 1991.
* The films of people like Takashi Miike and Dario Argento, which are, it seems to me, over-hyped.
I don't say I haven't been fascinated by elements of some of these things -- the divine Marquis, for instance -- at certain points in my life. I don't say this interest hasn't been represented in my work. But it seems to me that I've worked through the lurid and the horrible, and come out the other side. I'm in the pink. I'm in clover. I'm over it. So if I'm interviewed, I will probably sound bored if this sort of thing comes up. I don't know if that's what you want or need on the site, but I thought it only fair to warn you.'
Just as I'm writing this an e mail arrives from Robert Duckworth in Tokyo which seems deliciously appropriate. Mr Duckworth draws my attention to a Japanese webpage featuring the adventures of two pretty 3D aputees who meet in a hospital. One of them has four breasts and is machine-milked daily as a sort of human cow. They soon strike up a touching friendship. It is their images which litter this page. Could we say the Japanese otaku who modelled them has 'body horror'? I don't think so. I think he finds some sort of redemptive beauty in mutilation, though clearly his motives are not quite as pure as the driven snow.
But let us awaken now from other people's dreams. I leave you today with the touching image of the cute, snoozing panda at San Diego zoo. You can watch it at any hour of the night or day with their pandacam. But I wouldn't bother. It's always asleep. Perhaps the panda's monumental indifference to life, sex and the world is the ultimate 'body horror'. Perhaps we could see this guzzling of bamboo, this endless sleeping, this patient wait for extinction, as a kind of mellow Buddhist-existentialist form of body horror, refreshingly free of gothy cliche. Will the panda find itself, at the end of its long incarceration, re-incarnated as a pigeon? A couple of scotch terriers? A four-breasted 3D amputee? A chemistry student?
'What is body horror?' asks editor Hertzan Chimera on the welcome page, his face a poorly-Photoshopped mess of flesh and skull. In his black polo neck and glasses Mr Chimera looks like a badly-decayed chemistry student. Like Christopher Lee speechifying in front of a row of bound and gagged 'guests', Herzan is asking a rhetorical question. You don't have to answer. In fact, you can't.
'By way of illustration I offer that pain in your raped ass. I offer that tightness in your strangled throat. I offer your poisoned innards.'
Instead of lingering to question Hertzan about his childhood (no doubt missing thereby some interesting anecdotes about summers in Rangoon, luge lessons, meat helmets and a Zoroastrian named Vilma) I penetrate the zine's innards to sample its editorial contents. Articles on Game Surgery and Stray thoughts on the Phenomenon of Japanese Horror are well-written and interesting. The poetry section is a cabinet of curiosities. Like Bizarre Zombie Baby Casket:
My aching stomach
Inflates
With a bizarre baby
Inside squishy embalmed
Naked
Insipid blood baby
Red milk spurts
Deliciously
Like fat blood-filled Mosquitoes!
Some hideous unseen hand compels me to write to the editor:
'I must admit to a certain ambivalence about the genre of body horror. I found Quentin Crisp's article about Japanese horror well-written, but profoundly at odds with my own interest in, and vision of, Japan, which focuses on things like 'cute formalism' and 'children's avant garde' and 'love of nature' and 'girlishness' and 'the Paris of our dreams' and 'the third sex' and so on. If blood red and jet black are the colours of Mr Crisp's Japan, pink and white are the colours of mine. They may possibly be two sides of the same coin, or two faces on the same dice. I associate this 'body horror' thing with:
* Video nasties of the early 80s.
* The Goth movement and its tedious fascination with Christian imagery.
* Anglo-American puritan mind-body problems.
* Creation Press endlessly rehashing Gilles de Rais.
* The sleazy British cable network I used to watch in 1991.
* The films of people like Takashi Miike and Dario Argento, which are, it seems to me, over-hyped.
I don't say I haven't been fascinated by elements of some of these things -- the divine Marquis, for instance -- at certain points in my life. I don't say this interest hasn't been represented in my work. But it seems to me that I've worked through the lurid and the horrible, and come out the other side. I'm in the pink. I'm in clover. I'm over it. So if I'm interviewed, I will probably sound bored if this sort of thing comes up. I don't know if that's what you want or need on the site, but I thought it only fair to warn you.'
Just as I'm writing this an e mail arrives from Robert Duckworth in Tokyo which seems deliciously appropriate. Mr Duckworth draws my attention to a Japanese webpage featuring the adventures of two pretty 3D aputees who meet in a hospital. One of them has four breasts and is machine-milked daily as a sort of human cow. They soon strike up a touching friendship. It is their images which litter this page. Could we say the Japanese otaku who modelled them has 'body horror'? I don't think so. I think he finds some sort of redemptive beauty in mutilation, though clearly his motives are not quite as pure as the driven snow.
But let us awaken now from other people's dreams. I leave you today with the touching image of the cute, snoozing panda at San Diego zoo. You can watch it at any hour of the night or day with their pandacam. But I wouldn't bother. It's always asleep. Perhaps the panda's monumental indifference to life, sex and the world is the ultimate 'body horror'. Perhaps we could see this guzzling of bamboo, this endless sleeping, this patient wait for extinction, as a kind of mellow Buddhist-existentialist form of body horror, refreshingly free of gothy cliche. Will the panda find itself, at the end of its long incarceration, re-incarnated as a pigeon? A couple of scotch terriers? A four-breasted 3D amputee? A chemistry student?
no subject
no subject
The term "body horror" made me think of two really disturbing sites: this grimacing oddly-shaped doll (http://www.ki.rim.or.jp/~miho/46th.html) and koonago (http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~kobatan03/).
I like the idea of the pink and white Japan, but the rest of the people my age are switching from the image of Japan as a cutesy kitschy place with Hello Kitty and Hamtaro and whatnot to the image of Japan as that fucked-up place where bukkake and tentacle hentai come from.
Most people my parents' age think of the whole "ancient Land of the Rising Sun" with people in kimono and samurai and whatever else when they think of Japan, but people my age completely skip over that idea.
So it either has something to do with the general morbidity of people my age, along with the more modern view of Japan's pop culture over its traditions, or maybe I'm just rambling a bit too much.
But hey! The pandas are cute.
reminds me of..
(Anonymous) 2004-02-10 01:55 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
I think that's an interesting perception, because if you look at the pictures there are no huge meat hooks, there's no violence at all. Sure, at some point we assume both these women must have suffered some sort of ghastly accident, something rather Frida Kahlo-like, because they have had amputations. Then again, they may be virtual creatures, mutated or hybridised to look the way they do. They are quite obviously conjured directly by some need in their creator, and don't need to be constrained by notions like verisimilitude, responsibility or representation.
We could put these amputee girls into the same Japanese tradition of cute helplessness that gave us (speaking of pandas) tarepanda (http://metropolis.japantoday.com/biginjapanarchive349/326/biginjapaninc.htm), the cutely boneless 'floppy panda'. The amputee girls are a sexual version, but depend on the same cute helplessness for their appeal. They dominate, as babies do, by their utter dependence. Their dependence makes a powerful appeal to us, makes them, literally, appealing. Armies could not be as strong as our inward impulse to help (and also possibly abuse) them.
It's interesting that we see violence there, though, just as, when we see a cute floppy baby seal gazing up at us from the snow, the image of clubs and blood is always just a couple of associations away. But it's worth considering that this violence is inside us, and it's in their ability to make us both summon and suppress it that gives the amputee girls their power. If violence is a kind of Beethoven symphony welling inside us, these girls are orchestral conductors guiding and controlling it -- without arms!
Re:
(Anonymous) 2004-02-11 03:44 am (UTC)(link)-----
We could put these amputee girls into the same Japanese tradition of cute helplessness that gave us (speaking of pandas) tarepanda, the cutely boneless 'floppy panda'. The amputee girls are a sexual version, but depend on the same cute helplessness for their appeal. They dominate, as babies do, by their utter dependence. Their dependence makes a powerful appeal to us, makes them, literally, appealing. Armies could not be as strong as our inward impulse to help (and also possibly abuse) them.
-----
...is right on the money. furthermore, what is interesting here is that what nick is saying can be generalized to explain what is happing with japan these days as a COUNTRY
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/asia/04LETT.html?pagewanted=print&position=
and not just socially, sexually or psychologically.
but at the same time we need to keep in mind that the possibility of developing passive-AGGRESSIVE tendencies even on a national/international level are the dark underbelly of all this. the only question would be: how would this manifest itself? i:m not capable of venturing an answer. why don:t we ask nick himself? mr. currie, are you reading this? please let me know...
r. duckworth
http://glitchslaptko.blogspot.com
no subject
http://www.assemblylanguage.com/images/Aida4.html
pandacam
(Anonymous) 2004-02-11 05:26 pm (UTC)(link)perhaps it's a hip panda that sleeps in.
no subject
http://www.megahouse.co.jp/products/panda_z/
This is the latest manga panda to take Japan by storm. I think it's a nice image of a theme I was trying to spell out above, the idea that the small and weak can often dominate or control the large and strong. It's a theme that emerges time and again in Japan... a small country inside the world's head, controlling it?