1.
After the apology, their brains melted. In Junji Ito’s Dissolving series, a boy, Azawa, goes about apologizing profusely to anyone over anything, especially over the mischief wrought by his little sister. Such obsequies earn him the scorn of his classmates and the gentle amusement of adults. Because this is an horror manga, these apologies are neither sincere nor benign, but a form of demon worship. Azawa has pledged himself to a demon which has granted him this power: that whomever he apologizes to should have their brain melt.
As the authors of “The Implications of Apology: Law and Culture in Japan and the United States” (1986), Hiroshi Wagatsuma and Arthur Rosett, point out, apology plays a particularly central role in Japanese life and jurisprudence. Should you run afoul of the law in Japan, innocent or guilty, the most prudent path forward is to admit guilt, to apologize insistently and throw yourself on the mercy of the law and the party you are alleged to have wronged. This is just a special application of a rule of social life: since you are enmeshed in a web of interdependence with the rest of your society, it is best to paper over any ruptures in this web with a quick apology and a resolve to make things right. It is not in this regard, Wagatsuma and Rosett claim, especially important that the apology is sincerely felt, that it arises from genuine remorse — indeed, sincerity or at least blunt honesty are to be discouraged as potential sources of interpersonal conflict, best to maintain an agreeable public persona and leave one’s true opinions to oneself and the occasional intimate — what matters is that one affirms a commitment to the social web.
And yet, questions of intention and interiority cannot be laid entirely to one side. While an apology can certainly be given in the absence of remorse and can even be a meaningful sign, of pacification, of surrender to a social order, when entirely unfelt, it is always and ever an ambiguous sign. While the conventional drama of the apology has its power dynamic — the one giving the apology laid low before the one receiving it — an undercurrent pushes in the other direction. The one giving the apology is also demanding something, an acknowledgment, an acceptance, forgiveness, from the receiver. Sometimes this demand approaches the force of law: in the Jewish tradition, teshuvah, or repentance, the offender must make three attempts to present their apology to the wronged party, but after the third refusal it is, in fact, the apologizer who has been wronged for having their apology rebuked.
Before even placing a normative demand on the object of the apology — find some path towards forgiving the sorry party — acts of apology place an interpretive demand: acknowledge that a wrong was done. In the ordinary course of things, such demands are easily accepted. One person bumps into another. “Pardon.” “No worries.” Among reasonable people in ordinary situations, apologizing takes on a casual, ritualized character. In more serious cases, the practice can degenerate. Martha Nussbaum, in Anger and Forgiveness, discussing teshuvah, argues that this formalized practice becomes a platform for aggressive narcissism — typically on the part of the aggrieved, for whom demanding an apology becomes a means for punishing the perceived wrongdoer, “Apologize! Grovel before me,” and a way of centering oneself in the narrative of wrongdoing, “I, in particular, have been wronged by you,” and rarely on the part of the apologizer, who is likewise centering themselves and demanding something from the apology. The Japanese practice of apology, being less individualized, might promise to avoid these dangers, and yet perhaps merely masks them, buries them into the realm of the demonic.
As a practice, apologies and forgiveness occur in the informal legal world, in the antechambers and side-offices of the law. Typically, an apology has little formal legal role: at most, Stateside, it can constitute an admission of guilt; in Japan, an unofficial ground for lenience. When the stakes of an encounter exceed the thin boundaries of etiquette, when our social power seems flimsy in the face of real violation or true irrationality, we appeal to the power of the law. In the end, it is this power that undoes Azawa. In the final story, a journalist, aided by an early victim of Azawa’s black magic, a rare survivor with a brain only half-melted, tracks down the siblings and snaps a photograph. The shield of anonymity broken, the pair surrender themselves to the police.
2.
A few nights ago, a man flipped me off walking home from a theater. One can only imagine what indignity I must have caused him, passing silently in the other direction. I had just seen Sweeney Todd. A brief synopsis: Sweeney Todd, nee Benjamin Barker, returns to Victorian London having escaped a life sentence in Botany Bay, seeking revenge on the evil judge who falsely imprisoned him for the sake of carrying off his wife and daughter. This being what we in the industry call a dick move, Todd contrives to encounter and dispatch the Judge Turpin. Rescuing his daughter, whom the judge has taken as his ward and wife-to-be, makes up a decidedly secondary priority. By a stroke of bad luck, the first attempt fails and the mission becomes sidetracked into general serial murder and cannibalism, until eventually this train gets rolling again and crashes in spectacular fashion: Todd slits the throat of the Judge and his toady, the beadle, but not before murdering a crazed, beggar-woman who turns out to have been his wife, made mad by a botched suicide attempt brought on by the judge’s violation, in turn murdering his co-conspirator who had lied to him about his wife’s death and in turn murdered by a random boy the pair had adopted after Todd murdered his prior father-figure in the first act for having recognized Todd as Benjamin Barker and blackmailed him. The only survivors of this carnage, Todd’s daughter and the sailor who rescued him and brought him to London, emerge from the wretched kitchen/sewer, let’s call it traumatized.
As this precis suggests, Sweeney Todd plays in a grisly camp. The story, ripped from the pages of penny dreadfuls, tears through a series of coincidences and contrivances to deliver some bloody spectacle and an album’s worth of clever, memorable songs. The musical is madcap but also just mad. We have Todd’s wife, Lucy, brain half-melted by poison, his daughter, Joanna, not mad herself but consigned to Bedlam by the evil judge, his business partner, Mrs. Lovett, madly in love with him, and Todd himself, who lives more in fantasies of revenge and grief than on Earth. Violence and madness revolve in some great, industrial wheel: Turpin’s violence drove Todd mad and, in turn, Todd’s madness drives Toby mad. In both cases, violence redounds to its dealer, the only facsimile of justice permitted in this mad world. In true, Romantic fashion, this madness extends out of the skulls of the characters into London as a whole. The musical is bookended and punctuated by ensemble pieces from unnamed citizens of London, singing about Sweeney Todd as if his obsessions were also theirs. The set design, in the original Broadway staging and in the recent revival I attended, is sparse, industrial, abstract, expressionistic, all garish reds overcoming metal riggings.
The categories of apology, regret, and forgiveness find no purchase on this world. The crimes committed are so heinous, the criminals so warped, so vicious, that we cannot imagine an apology commensurate to them nor can we imagine that any would be forthcoming. Exceeding the bounds of our ordinary moral relations, recourse to a higher power is needed. Since the institutions of the law have become completely corrupted, Sweeny Todd’s “dark and hungry god” will have to do. Or, at least, so a vision of justice as karmic physics leads us, according to which each violation demands an equal and opposite punishment. It is from this moral standpoint that we hallucinate Hell as that place where accounts, so clipped and fragmented and disordered on Earth, will at last be settled and set out to remake the Earth in the image of Hell. Hence, all the infernal imagery in Sweeney Todd, whose subtitle has the title character as The Demon Barber of Fleet Streeet, the gnashing and wailing of Bedlam, the black smoke and ever-burning fire of the bakery’s ovens, blood running red in the streets.
Yet Sweeney Todd also sketches an alternative vision. Anthony, the sailor who saved Sweeney Todd’s life, falls suddenly in love with Joanna, kept under lock and key by the Judge, and hatches his own schemes to rescue her. Their love is inchoate, mad, ludicrously so, on Anthony’s side a chivalric, bolt-from-the-blue attraction and on Joanna’s a feeling clearly born of desperation, the needful love of a fairy-tale princess. Yet it forms the basis of a much more reasonable course of action: forget taking up bloody and ultimately doomed revenge on the world, just reclaim and protect whatever scant treasure you can find. Sweeney Todd is at his most monstruous when he risks everything for the sake of his revenge: after assisting Anthony in rescuing Joanna from an insane asylum, he turns around and uses her as bait to lure the judge to his layer. It is not merely that, driven by anger, one prioritizes punishment, revenge, over other values, but that overcome by a righteous fury, one’s sense of value itself becomes corrupted. And yet, and yet, such bright spots are overshadowed by the sturm und drang of the main revenge plot, not only in terms of narrative priority but simply aesthetically: Sweeney Todd’s murder ballads are much more inventive and captivating than its love songs.
3.
Seattle is dark at night, much more so than one might expect from a city of its size. Blame the pandemic and the local response thereto; businesses cut their hours and have been slow to extend them back. Blame crime or the American drug crisis; where I live at least, in the penumbra of downtown, streets have grown not exactly unsafe, but discomfiting, sketchy, unkempt. Blame urban planning for the blocks of office buildings that blackout after five, blame whatever. The buildings line the street as so many alien monoliths, the odd street lamp just about limning the outlines of windows, those voids which we might have looked to for signs of life. Aristotle Roufanis captured this effect in his Alone Together series. In these works, Roufanis captures and then stitches together thousands of photographs of a cityscape at night. He selects, almost exclusively, dark frames, so that in a vast, high-resolution composition of hillside apartment blocks only a dozen lights will be on. Otherwise, the gloom permits only the forms of the building and the impression of detail to show. Since the compositing provides a vastness to the image, we can focus in on one clearly defined silhouette against a blank ocean. These images evoke a devouring loneliness, as if one was just a krill clinging for a moment to the baleen of the city. Lovely as they are, Roufanis might have saved himself a lot of time in the editing booth; he could have just come to Seattle.
Well, except that the darkness of these photographs is not quite a real darkness. Although the sources of light have been edited out, the light itself, “light pollution,” has not been removed. There are no stars in the sky. Yet this artifact of the process only enhances the hyperreality of the images. Had Roufanis put the stars back, cleaned his streets of all traces of manmade light, as Thierry Cohen does in his Darkened Cities series, the spectrality, the feeling of human presence at once everywhere and nowhere, would have been lost. These skyscrapers are not cenotaphs but ghosthouses, still crackling with unexplained light.
And the human brain, with its tray of images
Seems a sorcerer’s magic lantern, projecting black and orange cellophane shadows
On the distance of my hand.— John Ashbery, “The Skaters.”
The formlessness of this general darkness permits the spirit to carve out its own, private sensorium. This luminous bubble is interrupted, and then only partially, as the world reaches its fingers in: one goes to work, one encounters an unwanted hunger, ague, sickness, a man flips you off as you pass by. For my own part, I like to watch films late at night. The theater’s seats offer a minimal, minimally demanding communion. Recently, I saw Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid.
We start with a therapy session. Beau, a middle aged man, expresses anxiety, an anxiety so general and mutable as to encompass every waking and most sleeping moments of his life, here concentrated in an upcoming trip to see his mother. Beau’s anxiety is understandable given his living conditions: the shittiest apartment in the third circle of Hell, a darkly comic exaggeration of a Republican’s picture of urban decay, gaping poverty, lunatics and naked murderers roaming the streets. A spate of ludicrous bad luck prevents him from making his flight back home. From the depths of his misery, news of his mother’s sudden death necessitates making the return. His absence from the funeral, his mother’s lawyer insists, is deeply humiliating.
Beau’s odyssey is, for the most part, an event which happens around and to him. His attempts at exerting control, assuming agency, pass only fitfully and half-heartedly, and then never successfully. This passivity, evidently, has been true of the entire course of his life; all of it traces back to his mother. Beau lives with a constant and crushing guilt, which is substantially the guilt of a faithless son, one who has never once, by his mother’s standards, returned the love and devotion she gave to him unconditionally. Beau is paranoid, convinced that a grand conspiracy guides events around him and that he, in particular, is chased by some Fury which will destroy him for his sins; this turns out to be entirely correct, with his mother as conspirator and Allecto. One of Beau’s crippling neuroses, his belief that he inherited a congenital condition which would trigger a heart failure should he ever orgasm, a condition which killed his father in the moment of his conception, was simply a lie his mother told him.
It is not surprising then that Beau dreams of a life apart from his mother. In an extended fantasia, Beau reimagines himself as an orphan who creates a peaceful and satisfying life for himself, finding a community, practicing a profession, and starting a family. Even this idle turns dark. Anxieties intrude: a storm destroys his life, separates him from his family, he is again lost, guilty, pursued by a spirit of vengeance, a hungry god. It is not only that anxieties destroy the fantasy but that they consume them, feed off fantasy; what kind of son fantasizes about being without his mother? Surely the same kind of son who would fantasize about offing his mother, which is then surely the same, morally speaking, as actually murdering one’s own mother, whose only crime had been to birth you and to love you too dearly. In teshuvah, all apologies are to be addressed in the first instance to God, who is both victim, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. All wrongs are wrongs against God, whose only crime had been to create you and to love you too dearly. Tonight, in Beau Is Afraid, the role of God will be played by mother. The film culminates with a trial in which his mother indicts and sentences Beau. It ends with his drowning.
4.
Apologies form a strict, narrative schema. A wrongdoing has transpired, a perpetrator has wronged a victim. For whatever reason, the perpetrator comes to recognize their wrongdoing and becomes flushed with emotions, shame, guilt, self-incrimination, remorse. This motivates them to action: they apologize to the victim and, in more serious cases, offer to “make things right” somehow. The ball is now in the victim’s court, assuming the apology is sincere, the offered reparation reasonable, they should accept the apology and, contingent on the continued sincerity and efforts to render recompense, forgive the perpetrator, wiping the ledger clean between them. The details might vary between cultures, as we have seen, the scorekeeping might be between perpetrator and God or perpetrator and society as a whole, for whom the victim acts as an agent, but the basic story holds near universally.
In the case of Sweeney Todd, I claimed that sufficiently grave violations break this model. One can rack up an outstanding moral debt of such magnitude that a hundred lifetimes of penance will not suffice for its service. In such cases, we must bring in a higher power to make up the difference or, with Purgatory, to give the sinner an extended repayment plan. Or else the perpetrator, an odious creature, no longer human, must be destroyed bodily in bloody revenge or, if we are feeling generous, to suffer a spiritual death and rebirth. This last possibility of spiritual reincarnation promises to extend the system of apologies to handle infinite wrongs. If we can be reborn, then, in an act of spiritual Sovereign Citizenry, an application of the strawman theory to matters of the soul, we can partition ourselves into a past and future selves and assign our debts to a dead person we are no longer.
So by this shell game and a bit of luck, we can take on ever larger debts, which is good as they are incredibly easy to rack up. Assessing the amount of restitution due is a matter beyond any public accountant. We might start with a vague notion of equality, “an eye for an eye,” which incidentally in Hammurabi’s Code was a significant softening of prior practice, “your life for my eye.” Yet the loss can take any form soever, reputational damage, physical injury, bereavement, most of which cannot be paid back in kind and between which no easy conversion formula exists. Then there are questions of interest and indeed the question of equality again. For surely the victim, infinitely blameless, and the perpetrator, dirt, worse than dirt, cannot be equal in value. There must be some exchange rate between their lives, and as we reflect on the crime, well, remember what happened to Zimbabwe in the oughts? Furthermore, now that we think of it, shouldn’t we say all crimes are equally heinous? The stealer of pears, no less than the serial murderer, disrespects the laws of God and man, things of infinite worth. If one is more jubilant in his expression of that disregard, we should prefer that over the cowardice of the minor crook. These are questions both perpetrator and victim must answer, brain-melting in their weight.
Now, with repo men surely after our very souls, we must consider organizing a jubilee. Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom, but instead offer a blanket amnesty, if not from consequences then from blame and reprisal. This is the path in Sweeney Todd that we see Anthony and Joanna follow: the fantasy of escape can tempt more than that of revenge. At least, as long as you keep running. Pause for a moment, achieve if only a partial and temporary safety, and the old categories return, pressing again against the skull. Being what we are, coming from our own homes, we will not surrender anger and resentment and self-loathing easily, all-at-once, or fully. Unconditional forgiveness in practice involves strictures and disciplines of its own. I forgave the man for flipping me off, of course — he was clearly deranged — but did that come naturally? or was there even in that moment a subdued glimmer of revenge? Quell your hate, kindly ones, that fucker isn’t worth it. (That this is the third mention of this trivial incident in this essay certainly suggests a hardness of heart.)
You’d let me be lonely?
I thought I was dead.— Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.
One already feels the grey matter leaking from one’s nostrils. Thankfully, history has contrived to solve this problem for us. Indeed, our disintegrating neurons are part of the solution. The name of which is atomization, the breakdown of thick or meaningful social relations. By thick, I mean normatively thick, taken to be capable of grounding special demands or privileges. If Timmy Bradshaw in Montana falls into a well, you might watch a news segment and feel a bit sad and maybe pitch five bucks to the “Pull Timmy Bradshaw Out of the Well” GoFundMe campaign. If your grandmother falls into a well, you better be there rigging up a system of pulleys stat. Atomization, then, is not the same as increasing social isolation, though both are occurring and are linked; social networks can become both broader and more atomized, supposing the links as a whole are increasingly casualized.
Why is atomization occurring? We can point to both deep and proximal political-economic causes. At their core, atomization greases free markets. Thick relationships give rise to anti-competitive behavior: collusion, special treatment, nepotism, discrimination (subjugation is a thick normative relation, just a negative one, granting the oppressor special privileges over the oppressed). Down the line, market competition forces labor fluidity. Moving states to get a job, as I have been recently reminded, is a great way to damage one’s existing relationships.
This thinning of one’s relationships has as its further consequence the reduction of cases which demand one to give or to receive apologies. If we will only leave one another alone, sign the equivalent of a society-wide non-aggression pact, we will have no cause for resentment, nothing to feel wounded about. And even if the odd deviant behaves obnoxiously, we can simply not deal with it. Walk along, nothing to see here. Should the misbehavior become intolerable, that’s what we have laws and police and jails for. It is not that discipline disappears, but that it diffuses and hides itself. As a first line of defense, it becomes everyone’s responsibility to monitor themselves. Should that fail, the institutions of the law will silently fill in the gaps. Ideally, the law itself is impersonal, not retributive but simply utilitarian.
5.
In a rather round-about way, many of the artists have provided a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness. The “blackout” that covered the Northeastern states recently, may be seen as a preview of such a future. Far from creating a mood of dread, the power failure created a mood of euphoria. An almost cosmic joy swept over all the darkened cities. Why people felt that way may never be answered.
— Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments.”
Apology has its own architecture: the court room, and especially the Athenian court, which confronts the apologizer with the aggrieved. Beau is Afraid presents the ideal such configuration. The defendant is in a cylindrical pit surrounded by a high-up audience. Given special pride of place is the victim who, chiefly, must be satisfied, though the community too is present and surrounds the defendant on all sides. As he cannot see all of them at once, he must satisfy them not as individuals but as a body. As in a sport’s arena, giant scenes show the moment of transgression, which the prosecutor narrates. He stands, not steadily, but in a boat on troubled waters. The gods will sink him if he answers poorly.
This scene, with all of its drama, if it promises redemption or justice, also threatens failure. We might encounter a Socrates who scatters the plot in a haze of dialectic. Beau’s screens offer an improvement here: if the scene is filmed, if it has already happened, then there is no possibility of its going wrong. Indeed, we can at this point dispense with the physical space altogether and the courtroom can recede into the virtual, a fourth-dimensional object puncturing individual screens in individual apartments. And even then it is encountered as a kind of residual energy. The small voice speaks only through the spirit box: a radio flitting through stations.
The dark glass boxes that house these apartments are, as Smithson calls them, “new monuments” which “cause us to forget the future” rather than “to remember the past.” These monuments exist if not outside of time then at the end of history. To historicize this end of history, we may point out that the Atomic Age sculpture and architecture that concerns Smithson (the essay was published in 1966) is one limned by oblivion of the atom bomb. In the face of such existential stakes, where the central moral question is who will end the world first, to retreat into the unliving, the motionless, the lightless is to retreat into a kind of safety.
To take another observation from Smithson, these new monuments are sourced from science-fiction while having nothing to do with science or fiction. To give an example, consider the Last Redoubt from William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. This novel pioneered the “Dying Earth” subgenre in which far future civilizations decayed before an exhausted sun. These civilizations are reduced to living in a few, far flung pyramids, redoubts, immense megastructures of glass and steel housing entire cities against a hostile outer world of mutants. Against this physical, spatial megastructure, Hodgson sets a spiritual, temporal megastructure: that of metempsychosis. The protagonist of the novel is the reincarnation of a 17th century nobleman and his quest is to save from oblivion the reincarnation of that nobleman’s dead wife. Further, the novel is framed as the vision of that 17th century noble. In this slipstream, woozy sense of time, in the slim archetypes of its plot (a simple, save-the-damsel quest), in its exhaustive length, this science-fiction novel has little to do with fiction. Similarly, in its worldbuilding, keyed off of mistaken speculations by Lord Kelvin on the longevity of the Sun and filled to bursting with psychic powers and abhuman monsters, it has nothing to do with science.
The Night Land, being published in 1912, is in fact more optimistic and more humanist than the mid-century work Smithson is reacting to. It is therefore a useful intermediary point in charting the change in moral life we are describing. As Emily Adler in Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle notes (211f), Hodgson is riffing off neo-Darwinist theories of evolution as aiming towards a higher being. Although the material universe as a whole tends towards entropy and decay, the human being is further and further perfected. The far-future society, facing extinction, has achieved a kind of spiritual perfection (cached out in the narrative mostly as magic powers, which is true of most hagiographies). Far from an atomized, isolated world, The Night Land is fundamentally a romance. (This too is mostly expressed in terms of magic powers; the hero and heroine are linked by a psychic connection.) The night of The Night Land is tragic and heroic, the sputtering out of all that is good and noble.
Nevertheless, as an example of the pulp decadance of fin-de-siècle weird fiction, this moralized element of The Night Land seems vestigial in the face of the horror-poetry of its monsters, its cosmic glumness. And the novel is shot through with atomization and loneliness: the hero and heroine carry out what can only optimistically be described as a “long distance relationship” (and their psychic connection does not even permit video calls), and, even when they (re)unite, the characters are such cardboard cutouts that their love itself feels thin. While these effects arise from what is shoddy and tedious in the novel’s construction, they are real and have a certain power.
The force of suns had waned beyond recall.
Chaos was re-established over all,
Where lifeless atoms through forgetful deeps
Fled unrelated, cold, immusical.— Clark Ashton Smith, “The Abyss Triumphant”
If The Night Land represents an early moment in a culture becoming unmoored from a thick, moral life, we can follow this movement to its conclusion in our present moment. In this connection, I would like to return to Japanese horror with two quick examples from the filmography of Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
2001’s Pulse presents the Internet as an infinite, Gothic space, a medium for ghosts. (Ghosts are always talking to us through radios and telephones and wires; the subtle pulsing of electricity evidently more amenable to their influence.) The heroine enters a coworker’s apartment after he has missed several days of work and for a moment seems to speak with him, only for the apparition to fade into the image of her coworker’s corpse. He has hanged himself after encountering a series of haunted images online. The hero’s web browser glitches out, jumping to a website showing images of people alone and mad in dark rooms. There is a great deal of being alone and mad in dark rooms. Or worse, being not alone in dark rooms.
The central insight of Pulse, what powers the desperate melancholy of its horror, is the realization that the depths of loneliness consists not merely in a painful distance from others but a profound fear of and a resentment almost a hatred for those, for their power to reject him, the fact that they have already, in his mind, rejected him or, at the least, have not intervened to save him from loneliness. It is this that makes deep loneliness such a persistent, disordered position: the sufferer rejects precisely what might cure them. The hero asks a colleague for advice on his poltergeist of a browser and discovers the screen of their computer is covered in moving dots, which occasionally flit out of existence. They explain the images this way.
“If two dots get too close, they die, but if they get too far apart, they’re drawn closer.”
“What is it for?”
“A miniature model of our world. I wouldn’t suggest staring at it too long.”
The ghosts themselves are not merely representatives of this pathological loneliness; they are fellow sufferers. In the climax, a ghost tells the protagonists that “death was eternal loneliness.” It would be tedious here to dwell too long on the causes of loneliness as Pulse presents them — an early “social” media that sates its users with a thin substitute for human connection, an economic system that dislocates worker, that, and Japan is an extreme case here, captures their time in long hours (the characters in Pulse are mostly colleagues and strangers, not family or friends) — what interests us here is the Gothic core of the film: the temptation the lingers around the horror, the sense that it might be what we most deeply desire. To be alive is to be vulnerable to death; ghosts alone are invulnerable.
This sense of horrible vulnerability present in Pulse is a development on the director’s earlier film Cure (1997). In this noir-horror, a detective investigates a series of killings with a common method of murder but random perpetrators. Eventually, he discovers and encounters the man responsible, a hypnotist who implants uncontrollable, homicidal urges in his victims. Of clear note here is that the victims were all kind to the villain and it was their very kindness that makes them vulnerable. The first victim we see, for instance, takes the hypnotist into his house after finding the man apparently lost and confused on a beach. (As a feint, the hypnotist pretends to have extreme amnesia.) Even with thin social relations, the kind that can exist even between strangers, there is no real safety. Silly as the concept of such hypnotic suggestions is, the distant, almost journalistic filming and mesmerizing (sorry) performances sell their reality and open a deeper anxiety, the instability and vulnerabilities of our own minds.
It is clear that the killers were, given the hypnotism, outside of the moral universe in their killings. They are agents of a natural evil and not themselves blameworthy. The Japanese often attribute wrongdoing to a mushi or “worm,” attributing evil to something outside of the agent. (This makes apology something more of a purification ritual than a moralized drama: a cleansing of the worm.) In Cure, the worm is literalized — there just is an external agent bypassing people’s will and causing them to do evil — but this simply shifts the question of responsibility. What of the hypnotist; does he too have a worm?
Well, yes, actually. In the climax, the detective tracks down and shoots the hypnotist. He discovers a phonograph recording the voice of another, earlier hypnotist, of whom our villain is clearly a disciple. This voice delivers a speech somewhere between a sermon and an act of hypnotism, prescribing the killings we have seen throughout the film as a kind of healing, a cure. In the inevitable horror twist, this recording has its effects and the detective is corrupted into being the next hypnotist.
In this deracinated world, in which evil is something more natural than moral, our response to evil becomes one of anxiety and frustration. Cure is full of malfunctioning machines — a dryer clinking on with nothing inside is a recurring motif — and adopts the language of psychology to portray the evils and madnesses of the world as so many disorders. Of course, just because we have a professionalized, medicalized vocabulary to discuss such things, we do not thereby have the cure for such conditions. The dryer is left on by the detective’s wife, who frequently suffers from memory loss or confusion. He cannot blame her of course; in some sense this is not her doing but her worm’s. This doesn’t help; in some ways it makes it harder.
6.
Prior: I’m a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionnaire’s disease.
Louis: Stop.
Prior: My troubles are lesion.
Louis: Will you stop.
Prior: Don’t you think I’m handling this well? I’m going to die.
Louis: Bullshit.
— Tony Kushner, Angels in America.
In an odd stretch of “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Robert Smithson raises the idea, attributing it to an anonymous scientist, that the fourth dimension is laughter. It is not a serious idea and it is not presented seriously. And yet the idea has a certain undeniable power. Here is the use I want to make of it.
All of the disparate media I have raised here are in the realm of horror and yet they are not so far from comedy. Some, like Beau is Afraid and Sweeney Todd have as much comedy as they have horror in them. The rest are close enough to camp that one might imagine laughing at them; this is broadly true of horror. (This is often observed; the converse is less commonly commented but no less true. Most comedy films would be deeply horrible to experience in real life.) Let’s suggest the following explanation.
Horror, totalizing horror, is a form of myopia. The comedy, say, of Sweeney Todd in large part consists on playing on that myopia. Todd is so unrelentingly dour and hateful, so extreme in his expression of that hatred, that one cannot help but laugh. Even in the more straightforward cases of horror, the audience can find a source of comedy in how artificially narrow the world has been made, how contrived its pessimism. The comedy arises in leaping between perspectives, in dissolving the horror against gentleness. Which is not to say that the horror disappears, but simply that it exists, as all things exist, as part of a ludicrous manifold.