Terrie Waddell (ed.) ,
Cultural Expressions of Evil and Wickedness: Wrath, Sex, Crime.
Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2003.
ISBN: 9 042 01015 0
226pp
US$50.00 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Rodopi publishers)
Starting with the tabloid maxim that “if it bleeds it leads” (p.ix), this book sets out to explore the representation of evil in popular culture and Western history.
Composed of chapters derived from papers given at the “3rd Global Conference of Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness” held in Prague in 2002, it covers a very broad spectrum and offers some interesting analyses on diverse topics, ranging from the 13th century crusade against the Cathars to contemporary second-wave feminism and pornography. Other chapters address such matters as capital punishment, prisons, paganism, goths, horror movies, rape, book-burning, and the novels of Patricia Highsmith. It is not possible to claim that all the chapters are of an equally high quality, and some more easily find a natural home in this collection than others. Nevertheless, it is an interesting attempt to place the analysis of evil within a broad approach to the study of popular culture.
Some papers are notable for their attention to previously ignored topics. Darren Oldridge offers a chapter on such prominent “video nasties”, as I Spit on Your Grave (USA, 1978); while Paul Davies explores sin and redemption in the films of Abel Ferrara, although he betrays a proclivity for cliche with phrases like “powerfully intense and brutal portraits of New York’s mean streets” (209), and “searingly honest attempt” (209), appearing even before we get out of the first paragraph. Nevertheless, Davies does review both Ferrara’s films and recent secondary literature on the director in order to highlight the extent to which characters in Ferrara’s movies “face quasi-religious moral dilemmas revolving around questions of sin and redemption” (210). Of course, such a preoccupation doesn’t distinguish Ferrara and many other directors have effectively explored these themes without making The Driller Killer (USA, 1979), Angel of Vengeance (USA, 1981) or Bad Lieutenant (USA, 1992). Davies concludes by suggesting that Ferrara may be seen as “an anarchist and Catholic [who is] an advocate of a form of critical mysticism” (219), and whose works emphasize the possibility of universal salvation in the face of what the author sees as an unrelenting Calvinist determinism towards damnation found in such films as Angel Heart (USA/Canada/UK, 1987) and Se7en(USA, 1995).
A number of the other papers in this collection also deal with religion, but fail to make the hermeneutic use of religion that Davies does. This is because they present themselves as historical analyses, but actually serve as case studies of a particular paradigm of scholarship in this field, where revisionist historical readings are selectively drawn upon in cultural studies to support problematic but predictable interpretations of the material being dealt with. For example, it is hard to see how one can regard very highly the “historical” discussion offered by William A. Cook, comparing the Crusade against the Cathars with the war against the Pequot Indians. It does not communicate a sense that the author has attended adequately to the mass of material on the Crusade, or has fully comprehended the differences between 13th century French Catholicism and 17th century North American Puritanism. Moreover, the typology provided for this analysis is simplistic, proposing, for example that “an elite group designed myths for purposes of determining human behaviour.” (26) Such a voluntarist view of myth as an ideology deliberately imposed by an elite runs counter to every significant development in the study of myth from Durkheim, to Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Structuralism and Post-structuralism. In theoretical terms it offers a methodological individualist approach to the analysis of myth, where all the scholarly advances over the past century in this field have been methodologically collectivist in nature, seeing myth as a world-constituting symbolic order that precedes individuals and groups.
Similar observations about scholarship could be made about Michael F. Strmiska’s paper claiming to offer a “pagan perspective” on the “evils of Christianization”. He suggests, for example, that “we can view the various raiding and military activities of the Vikings as progressively large-scale and highly organized Pagan counterattacks against Christian … expansion and imperialism.” (66) The great period of the Viking raids, which shaped the cultural and genetic history of Europe is therefore portrayed as a mere reaction to Christian “aggression” – the Vikings themselves are denied agency and initiative and simply become representative “Pagans” driven by the actions of others. It is difficult to take this simplistic account seriously. Is the author seriously proposing that the Viking communities of Scandinavia would have remained peacefully in their homelands if not for the “provocations” of Christianity? Are we also really meant to believe that the Norse religions would have evolved like Hinduism from human and animal sacrifice into vegetarianism, as the author suggests? (68) (Incidentally, how does the author justify the implicit value judgement that such an evolution from bloodthirsty rapacity to vegetarian placidity would be a “good thing”? Is not this argument an implicit condemnation of the very traditions he claims to be defending? If one is going to be a “Pagan” then shouldn’t one have the courage of one’s convictions?)
Turning to an essay that deals with aspects of contemporary culture, we find the same tendency to radically simplify and misrepresent (in predictable directions) the complexity of history. Terrie Waddell’s discussion of the “female/feline morph” in contemporary media raises some interesting issues, but like other papers it also wants to indict “the archaic traditions of the ‘Religious West'” (75), as if that particular target has not been under continuous, devastating attack for 250 years since Voltaire, Reimarus, Lessing and other Enlightenment philosophers began systematically to deconstruct its truth claims, to say nothing of the onslaught Christianity has faced over the past half-century. It is difficult not to feel that the reactionary “Christianity” presented here is a straw man, a screening device onto which various representations may be projected.
However, if one leaves this issue aside for the present, then it is possible to appreciate Waddell’s efforts to explore the significance of the “female/feline combo” (76) in cinema, television and advertising. Unfortunately, the argument is drawn in broad strokes with the selection of examples appearing to be impressionistic rather than systematic, and one notes that she does not address some important relevant works. For example, one might mention the various film versions of H.G.Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau, especially The Island of Lost Souls (USA, 1933), with Charles Laughton as Moreau raging – as a beautiful “woman” that he had “created” from a panther cowers semi-naked before him – that he would “burn the animal out of her”. Waddell mentions Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (USA, 1942), which explores important elements of fantasy and reality involving the cat as an erotic but predatory beast, but she doesn’t go into it (or into the other films she cites) in any depth. Even more surprisingly, she doesn’t discuss Spider-Man (USA, 2002), X-Men (USA, 2000) and X-Men 2 (USA, 2003), popular movies that make the morphing of humans into creatures with strange and dangerous powers central to their narratives. The representation of males and females in these films (while not explicitly human/feline) yields readily to the type of analysis that Waddell employs. It is notable also that she doesn’t explore the tremendous contemporary significance of the Vampire and its relationship to the female/feline. She also doesn’t take the opportunity to explore the historical transformation of the representations she does discuss, preferring instead to seek to contextualize the “female/feline” figure in her reading of religious and cultural history – with limited success. Overall however, this is an interesting topic and Waddell is to be commended for opening it up in the manner that she does. One looks forward to a more lengthy work where she can fully develop her insights and update her reading, viewing and research.
At one level, what these “historical” papers are offering are familiar anti-Christian polemics and New Age longings disguised as historical essays. Ultimately, while one might endorse the need for revisionist approaches to history and also lament the disappearance of non-Christian religious traditions, the need is for better and more inclusive historical scholarship, not moralizing speculation and the mythologization of history. Indeed, these latter tendencies are themselves major forms of contemporary evil. After all, Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Houston Stewart Chamberlain developed the mythology of the European Pagan past to a high level of sophistication and made it the core of the Nazi propaganda and education system. It was the Nazis who most spectacularly embraced a Pagan mythology of the Norse gods, and devoted themselves to the cosmic mission of the Pagan “Aryan peoples” to defeat the Jews and communists in a final apocalyptic Wagnerian ‘Twilight of the Gods’, as Hitler himself made perfectly clear in Mein Kampf, in his “Table Talk”, and speeches. It is therefore odd that “Paganism” is not itself interrogated as a major source of contemporary evil, rather than uncritically endorsed as a “warm and fuzzy” spiritual option.
At another level, what the authors are raging at in their polemics is what Lacanians call “the big Other”, that is, the symbolic order within which the subject is constituted and knows itself as subject. Like so many before them, these authors identify the Western Christian tradition as the core of this symbolic order and project onto it all the values and practices that they themselves fear and despise and that they experience as threatening to themselves as subjects. For them this tradition is the realm of unfreedom, of violence, and of evil, but they also apparently believe that it is external to themselves and that they are not implicated in it. Lacking this self-reflexivity, they fail to see that the tendentious representations of this tradition that characterize their works may be projections of the fearfulness, unacknowledged desire and ethical nihilism that has increasingly come to characterize the liberal intelligentsia of the West. In this sense they fundamentally fail to come to grips with the locus of modern evil in the crisis of modernity.
Mervyn F. Bendle,
James Cook University, Australia.
Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: Friday, 28 May 2004