Contemporary Gothic

Catherine Spooner

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781861895585
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Modern Gothic culture alternately fascinates, horrifies, or bewilders many of us. We cringe at pictures of Marilyn Manson, cheer for Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and try not to stare at the pierced and tattooed teens we pass on the streets. But what is it about this dark and morbidly morose aesthetic that fascinates us today? In Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner probes the reasons behind the prevalence of the Gothic in popular culture and how it has inspired innovative new work in film, literature, music, and art.Spooner traces the emergence of the Gothic subculture over the past few decades and examines the various aspects of contemporary society that revolve around the grotesque, abject, and artificial. The Gothic is continually resituated in different spheres of culture, she reveals, as she explores the transplantation of the "street" Goth style to haute couture runway looks by fashion designers. The Gothic also appears in a number of surprisingly diverse representations, and Spoonerconsiders them all, from the artistic excesses of Jake and Dinos Chapman to the fashions of Alexander McQueen, and from the mind-bending films of David Lynch to the abnormal postmodern subjects of Joel-Peter Witkin's photography.In an engaging way, Contemporary Gothic argues that this style ultimately balances a number of contradictions—the grotesque and incorporeal, authentic self-expression and campiness, mass popularity and cult appeal, comfort and outrage—and these contradictions make the Gothic a crucial expression of contemporary cultural currents. Whether seeking to understand the stories behind the TV show Supernatural or to extract deeper meanings from modern literature, Contemporary Gothic is a lively and virtually unparalleled study of the modern Gothic sensibility that pervades popular culture today.

CHAPTER ONE

Mock Gothic

Faking It

The Eerie Pub Co. is a London-based chain of Gothic theme pubs and bars, all of which sport splendidly exaggerated Gothic styling, complete with gargoyles, bubbling test tubes and doors hidden behind fake bookshelves. One can order cocktails themed around the Seven Deadly Sins or chips on coffin-shaped plates, and pre-recorded hollow laughter rings through the toilets. Due to the location of the pubs in the West End, the clientele consists mainly of tourists and office workers, although occasionally Goths and vampire fans can be spotted mingling with the suits. Some of the pubs, such as Ben Crouch’s Tavern off Oxford Circus, have a tenuous relationship with the more sinister side of local history; others, like the Marlborough Head in Marble Arch, are pure decor.

Eerie Pubs can be viewed as part of a trend for stylized leisure that also encompasses Irish theme pubs, and recalls the themed bars found in Las Vegas or Disneyland. One does not really experience the Gothic in these pubs, any more than an Irish theme pub provides the experience of really being in Ireland: one may glut oneself on Gluttony or jump at the crash of thunder when opening the toilet door, but the ultimate effect is one of tongue-in-cheek jollity, and the activities that go on are no different from those taking place in countless other pubs up and down the country. Nevertheless, Eerie Pubs bear a very different relationship with their theme than do, say, Irish pubs. Ireland is, quite obviously, a real place whose inhabitants have a distinct cultural identity invested with social and political significance. Irish theme pubs offer an airbrushed version of that cultural identity, based in stereotyped signs and symbols of Irishness that lack the apparent authenticity of actually being in a genuine pub in Ireland. While it is possible, if perhaps controversial, to question such constructions of ‘authentic’ identity, it is difficult to deny that a having a pint in a themed Irish bar in Slough offers somewhat less than the full experience of drinking Guinness in Galway.

Gothic, on the other hand, possesses no original. As I argued in the Introduction, Gothic takes the form of a series of revivals, each based on a fantasized idea of the previous one. As a form it has always been about fakery. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), often cited as the first Gothic novel, was supposed to be a medieval manuscript, newly discovered and translated by the author. His Twickenham mansion, Strawberry Hill, said to be the inspiration for Otranto, was a fake Gothic castle, its elaborate interiors copied from pictures in books and constructed in parts from papier mâché. Jerrold Hogle has argued that the ‘counterfeit’, or indeed ‘the ghost of the counterfeit’, is integral to the Gothic: the copies of the medieval found in the earliest Gothic texts did not imitate the ‘original’ Middle Ages but rather Renaissance representations of the Middle Ages. As he explains:

Hence, throughout the ‘Gothic revival’ in the eighteenth century, the remnant of ‘obligatory’ or ‘natural’ meaning is replaced as the sign’s point of reference by counterfeits of that remnant: portraits or armour hung on walls, painted landscapes (the ‘picturesque’) rather than eyewitness viewings, illustrations of the medieval ‘Gothic’ in books, performances or editions of Shakespeare’s plays, falsely ‘authentic’ reproductions (from sham Gothic ‘ruins’ on estates to James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ poems), or pieces broken off archaic structures and reassembled quite differently, particularly at Walpole’s Strawberry Hill . . . The neo-Gothic is therefore haunted by the ghost of that already spectral past and hence by its refaking of what is already fake and already an emblem of the nearly empty and dead.¹

Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, in an 18th-century print.

Thus, for Hogle, the ‘ghost of the counterfeit’ mediates between nostalgia for past ideologies and the freeing up or emptying out of symbols of that past for cultural exchange and profit within a capitalist system of commodities. With the shift into industrial and post-industrial modes of production, the process of the ghosting of the counterfeit also shifts along the lines laid out by Jean Baudrillard, through industrial production to simulation, leading to ‘a hyperreality of signs referring to other signs that cannot root itself even in quasi-industrial moulds’.² Hogle notes an early example of this process in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which the vampire

so attempts to consume English life before leaving Transylvania, by reading numerous documents from the ‘London Directory’ to ‘the Law List’, that he sets himself up both for turning the English people he penetrates into ‘un-dead’ evacuated images of their former selves and for being gradually ‘read’ and evacuated himself in ‘the mass of material of which the record [of him] is composed’, at the base of which ‘there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting’ that turns out to be as vampiric as its subject.³

Allan Lloyd-Smith elaborates on this thesis: he suggests that in contemporary Gothic texts the counterfeit, there from the beginning, is mingled with postmodern pastiche to achieve a peculiar emptiness, ‘a ghosting of the original Gothic’.⁴ Eerie Pubs, with their Gothic paraphernalia borrowed from cheap horror movie clichés, represent a ghost of the ghost of the counterfeit. As Lloyd-Smith suggests, ‘The Gothic heritage becomes Heritage Gothic, a use of now conventional tropes that is legitimized simply through previous practice.’⁵

For E. J. Clery, Walpole’s home was a ‘theme park’, and as such we can see it as the direct ancestor of Eerie Pubs.⁶ Walpole’s house formed part of a complex emerging ideology of consumption. He can be regarded as one of the earliest practitioners of a passion for interior design that has become one of contemporary British culture’s biggest market forces, served by programmes like the BBC’s Changing Rooms. Indeed, in his spin-off series, Taste (2002), the flamboyant Changing Rooms designer Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen paid tribute to Walpole in a special programme on Gothic, which also showed how to incorporate Gothic design into your bathroom. Gothic has become one out of many lifestyle choices: Eerie Pub or Irish Pub? Gothic light fittings or Urban Minimalism?

Eerie Pubs, therefore, need not be seen in the same light as their Irish equivalents. They are not ‘selling out’ an (arguably) once true and authentic experience, but are absolutely in keeping with Gothic as fake, as revival, as decor. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which these pubs also function like Disneyland, as described by Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard,

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland . . . Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and the order of simulation.⁷

Eerie Pubs function to create the illusion that the ‘original’ Gothic is authentic; they produce nostalgia for the camp horror films from which they derive their aesthetics, or perhaps even the literary texts on which the films in turn were based. As Smith suggests above, this ‘heritage Gothic’ seems an empty version of the Gothic heritage it imitates. For Baudrillard, however, America is ‘no longer’ real. Gothic was never real in the first place. Gothic offers no resistance, as Romantic or Modernist ideologies might do, to being swallowed up by simulation, since its counterfeit nature pre-empts this move, even welcomes it. The very notion of ‘mock Gothic’ is a kind of oxymoron, because one cannot mock what is always already mocking itself.

The notion of mockery in the sense of parody is also vital here. Gothic and parody have always been close companions. The first phase of Gothic writing quickly elicited overt parodies, including Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (both 1818), but early texts like The Castle of Otranto and The Monk already appear to have a strong sense of their own ludicrousness, and deliberately incorporate comic episodes in imitation of Shakespearean tragedy. More recently, film and TV productions from The Munsters and The Addams Family to Scary Movie (a parody of the already parodic Scream movies), and more or less the entire œuvre of the film director Tim Burton, have continued in this tradition. Sleepy Hollow (1999), for instance, acknowledges the (often unintentionally funny) 1960s horror films of Roger Corman and the Hammer Studios in its deliberately hammy acting, over-exaggerated sets and slightly crumby special effects (the headless horseman becomes, in the later sequences of the film, increasingly ridiculous-looking). This does not work against the film but is part of its appeal – indeed, part of its Gothicity. Its knowingness, its signalling of its place within a particular tradition, permits it to combine humour with horror: the sequence in which the headless horseman pursues the hero Ichabod Crane combines farcical moments (such as Ichabod being knocked off the carriage with a tree branch) with genuine tension. The film never becomes an outright spoof, because its allegiance to the mode it gently parodies is too strong; it works instead to realize the comedy already latent within it. In Gothic and the Comic Turn, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik stress the hybridity of such texts, as well as Gothic’s intrinsically comic nature: ‘Rather than setting up a binary between “serious” and “comic” Gothic texts, it is perhaps best to think of Gothic writing as a spectrum that, at one end, produces horror-writing containing moments of comic hysteria or relief and, at the other, works in which there are clear signals that nothing is to be taken seriously.’⁸ The shifts of tone inherent to the form are enabled, they argue, precisely by its lack of ‘authenticity’ or depth: ‘Indeed, it is the Gothic’s preoccupation with “surface” that enables it so easily to embrace a comic as well as a tragic perspective.’⁹ For Horner and Zlosnik, the comic strain is becoming increasingly evident in Gothic novels written within the era of postmodernity. Certainly authors of the ‘literary’ Gothic, many of whom they discuss, seldom tell ‘straight’ horror stories any longer: Angela Carter, Patrick McGrath, Iain Banks and Alasdair Gray all write in the ‘comic Gothic’ mode, while ‘serious’ horror is left to ‘popular’ authors like Stephen King. The revival of Gothic in children’s fiction, too, from Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1983) to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999–), tends to make extensive use of the comic register.

The hollow laughter playing on an endless loop in the toilets of Eerie Pubs, therefore, is strangely resonant. It is laughter without a joke – the laughter itself is the joke. It does, in itself, provoke laughter – a hysterical response to one’s own reaction of surprise, or because of its incongruity with the room’s function (a new take on toilet humour). It is not laughing at what it copies, however, but with it – it is a joke that we all are in on.

Fake Histories, Fake Texts

Laughter of a more queasy kind is provoked by Jake and Dinos Chapman’s The Chapman Family Collection (2002), an installation composed of a large group of apparently authentic ‘primitive’ masks and fetish objects, which resemble those found in an ethnographic museum. At first glance their verisimilitude is their most striking quality: composed of traditional materials, bristling with raffia and nails, they form a sinister group, evoking Western fears of ‘primitive’ religion, voodoo, idol worship and the colonial ‘heart of darkness’. On closer inspection, however, details come into focus: one has the head of Ronald McDonald, another is shaped like a hamburger, others bear sinister markings that gradually resolve themselves into a repeated double-arched ‘M’. The Chapman Family Collection is exemplary postmodern Gothic. Its tone is hard to ascertain, and the questions it asks are more frightening than any answers it can provide. Does the branding of these ‘ancient’ sculptures with the cheapest and most ubiquitous logo in Western culture diminish their power to frighten, by comically deflating their sinister aura, or does it increase it? Is the notion that our unconscious is globally branded a more chilling thought than that of a barbaric heart of darkness within the Western psyche? Is our authentic experience of trepidation or awe in front of these objects fatally adulterated by the brand? Is the inexorable apparatus of capitalism the chilling element here? The walking hamburgers and clown faces that McDonald’s uses to sell its products to kids are themselves revealed as faintly chilling, Gothicized. The notion of history – that these objects have been collected by the Chapman family over many decades, perhaps centuries – is deflated by blatant anachronism. The apparent weight of history here is an illusion, a carefully orchestrated – and deliberately revealed – fake.

The construction of fake histories is integral to Gothic texts. As already noted, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto proclaimed itself as an ‘authentic’ manuscript from the twelfth century. Soon, the ‘found manuscript’ became a standard Gothic convention: the discovery of a lost or hidden document that reveals dreadful secrets concerning the fate of its author, before crumbling away just before the crucial point is made. This manuscript is often in poor condition, fragmented, missing important information. The narrator may be unreliable or inarticulate. It is often framed by supporting narratives that elaborate on or question the story told inside. Examples are to be found in Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), Charles Maturin’s Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820) and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) among others – and Jane Austen parodies the convention in Northanger Abbey by having her heroine, Catherine Morland, alight breathlessly on a hidden parchment, only to discover it is a laundry list. Contemporary authors have seized on this convention, from Emma Tennant’s feminist rewrite of Hogg, The Bad Sister (1978), to Umberto Eco’s presentation of The Name of the Rose (1980) as a translation of a rare fourteenth-century manuscript, a manoeuvre consonant with the novel’s theme of the textual transmission of knowledge and its fallibilities. Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992), a fabulous comic Gothic rewriting of Hogg, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, uses the convention to satirize the cultural and economic deprivation of Scotland in the 1970s: lacking money to purchase objects for the local history museum, assistant curator Michael Donnelly salvages materials from buildings scheduled for demolition to make way for multi-storey flats, and thus discovers the single surviving copy of the memoirs of Archibald McCandless, MD. Gray’s novel is patch-worked together from letters and documents supposedly written in the nineteenth century and of which no originals exist: like Stoker’s account of Dracula, merely ‘a mass of typewriting’.

The ‘found manuscript’ theme has inevitably been transformed by the growth of information technologies: the labyrinthine intricacies of the World Wide Web creates the potential for all kinds of felicitous discoveries, while sophisticated word-processing programmes permit ever-more elaborate arrangements of texts. The employment of high modern technology in order to construct fake histories unites two of the most innovative and influential Gothic texts of recent years: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and Daniel Myrick’s and Eduardo Sanchez’s film The Blair Witch Project (1998).

The Blair Witch Project infamously used the Internet in order to create a framing narrative for its tale of terror. In 1998 a rumour began to spread around the online community: three students had disappeared in a wood near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a film about a sinister local legend for a college project. They were never found, but a year later their film footage was recovered. Images from this footage and evidence surrounding the case could be viewed on a dedicated website, flagging the eventual release of the re-edited footage in the form of a documentary. A sophisticated and, at the time, innovative form of promotion, the use of the Internet facilitated the growth of a kind of contemporary urban myth that blurred imperceptibly into hype when the entirely fictional film finally reached cinemas. The success of this Gothically inflected marketing strategy – the cultivation of fearful expectation through a kind of viral transmission – led to the film far exceeding its ultra-low-budget expectations, going on to take $150 million at the American box office alone, and becoming one of the most profitable films of all time. By the time it reached Europe the hype machine had taken over and bred a good deal of inevitable disappointment among audiences expecting to see ‘the scariest movie ever made’. When the film was first screened in America, however, many viewers were apparently still unawar...