5-28-08, 1:00 pm

I often wonder if our popular-culture addiction to violence derives less from a desire to slake some inward void, or from the so-called “CSI effect” that primes us to expect pseudo-scientific explanations for all manners of cruelty, than from the logic of the market. This year, Bush referred to war as “romantic,” a characterization (mildly) disputed even by überhawk John McCain, but I wonder if the Chimp-in-Chief may have unwittingly hit upon a truism.

When I write fiction, which I do in strange, spasmodic, and often multi-year intervals, I invariably find myself trafficking in the supernatural: ghosts, resurrections, even a satirical vampire or two. Partly due to a species of adolescent angst still not outgrown in middle age, and partly due to the inevitable losses that come with lived experience, I recognize that like many a hack and many a genius, I find in the supernatural ways to explore that great theme of death. And I suppose I’m drawn to the supernatural, too, partly because it’s an element of my favorite kind of reading, whether Stephen King’s Pet Sematary or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Yet in writing and thinking about the horror genre, I find myself ironically confronting another, unanticipated marker of my own mortality in the vast generational divide between my own sensibilities and those of friends in their '20s and early '30s as to what counts as scary. For much of the younger half of that key 18-49 demographic, the genre “horror” in both text and film denotes what has come to be called “torture porn” and “splatter-punk,” often as not devoid of any supernatural soliciting.

Although this “joie de gore” is not unique to our cultural moment – ever read Jacobean tragedy – I struggle to historicize it. After all, it’s either historicize or admit to myself I may be an out-of-touch old fogy still listening to the Cure while the young and tragically hip are embracing Vampire Weekend. The simplistic explanation, which might indeed horrify the radical right that rails against “secular humanism,” is that for the popular imagination the ladder is gone; lip-service is paid to religious orthodoxies about souls and the afterlife but despite the unseemly dominance of religion in the American public sphere, ours is nonetheless a post-theological era. Or perhaps the old conventions of horror – yes, those ghosts, walking dead folks, and vampires – are too damn tame compared with the graphically violent images disseminated by the 24-hour news cycle and viral video of real-life beheadings, massacre victims, even Princess Diana dying in her mangled car. Yet I must allow that the supernatural still claims an avid following, evidenced by the eponymous CW series on TV, by Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road, and countless, interchangeable Hollywood popcorn movies.

Zombies in particular seem to be enjoying something of a revival, if the bad pun may be pardoned, those walking cadavers animated only by their corporeal appetites and thus, at least since George Romero, apt metaphors for our own mindless consumerism and conventionality. But when I ask my younger friends about their favorite “horror” fiction or film, they generally cite what used to be called “thrillers” such as the Hannibal Lecter novels of Thomas Harris, grisly movies from Scream to Saw, narratives in which savage but definitively earthly madmen incite festivals of dismemberment and death. Stephen King hasn’t had a blockbuster novel this century; Anne Rice has moved from fetishizing vampires to “Christ the Lord”; and I know of no one, myself included, who watches such mainstream horror fare as The Ghost Whisperer or Medium. But even if we grant a possible (and, I hope, temporary) exhaustion of the old bogeymen of goblins and ghouls in our popular fictions, I remain unnerved by their replacement by narratives offering sadistic and graphic violence as the source of that uniquely pleasurable frisson of make-believe horror.

I must grant, too, that I’m the most squeamish person on the planet when it comes to gore, cursed with a brain incapable of viscerally differentiating between imaginary and actual threat when the former is rendered with extreme verisimilitude. Old fogy. But I often wonder if our popular-culture addiction to violence derives less from a desire to slake some inward void, or from the so-called “CSI effect” that primes us to expect pseudo-scientific explanations for all manners of cruelty, than from the logic of the market. That is, a market strategy similar to that employed by the English to hook the Chinese on opium for trade leverage, and in the last century by Big Oil and Big Tobacco to confound want and need for their destructive products. (Full disclosure: I smoke, I love to smoke, and I will probably die from it, but that’s for another rant.) Feed us enough violence and of course, we’ll get hooked; far from inured to sadistic gore, we thrill to it. And just as my psyche can’t distinguish between Frederic Forrest’s severed head in Apocalypse, Now (one of my favorite movies) and grainy images of Daniel Pearl I can’t and won’t look at, it seems that something of the collective American consciousness, nurtured on torture and death as entertainment, cannot separate imaginary from actual, indeed, privileges the simulation over the event, to follow Baudrillard, to the extent that the latter seems both too fantastical and too mundane to fear or believe.

For years, my sister and I have been saying that if Columbine wasn’t sufficient to sway public sentiment in favor of restricting guns, nothing would ever be. Last year’s Virginia Tech massacre received breathless media coverage but even Senator Edward M. Kennedy demurred from raising the topic of gun control, and both remaining Democratic candidates, as well as my initial choice, John Edwards, have proudly proclaimed their belief in the constitutional right to bear arms. The realities of thousands of disfigured, dismembered, and desecrated bodies, living and dead, Iraqi and American, not only don’t provoke a mass demand, not mere request, for the immediate withdrawal of US forces from Bush’s illegal and immoral war, they serve as fodder to transform the American aggressors into saviors. Inconveniently the occupied Iraqis failed to fulfill the Bush administration’s candy-and-flowers scenario, but soon enough, triumphalist, self-congratulatory reports appeared about American benevolence in providing prosthetics and reconstructive surgery to children maimed by our forces.

This year, Bush referred to war as “romantic,” a characterization (mildly) disputed even by überhawk John McCain, but I wonder if the Chimp-in-Chief may have unwittingly hit upon a truism. For modern horror fiction developed largely the from late-18th and early-19th century “Gothic” romance novel, and the supernatural sublime became a hallmark of the Romantic movement. Today, in the post-Columbine, post- 9/11 United States, the sublime has been evacuated while the gross substance of horror has been literalized, commodified; those pleasurable chills once roused by apparitions and succubi are now evoked by a grisly imaginary no longer situated in the imagination.

The supernatural that once teased us as an uncontainable excess flitting just beyond the boundaries of bourgeois scientism is now all but subsumed by the efficient production of the “hyper-natural,” to again paraphrase Baudrillard, a hyperviolence so intoxicating as to render literal violence a banal imitation of life. Brecht’s bold critique of mimetic naturalism still resonates as a reminder of the complicity of conventional realist aesthetics in the production of false consciousness. The desacralization, if you will, of the horror genre speaks less of a cultural taste for realism than of our devaluation of our own violent realities, a devaluation that numbs us to the potential for resistance to those who literally traffic in – and profit from – torture, dismemberment, and death. Why attend to what’s happening at Gitmo when you can happily watch the Hostel movies?

Call me anachronistic, but as a reader and writer, I prefer to seek comfort as well as thrills in an imaginary that, however quaintly, revels in death’s mysteries rather than in its grisly, hyperreal mechanics.

--Karin Coddon frequently contributes to Political Affairs.