It's Creepy and It's Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky: Notes on Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (Part 2)

Mark Fisher (1968-2017) author of 

The Weird and the Eerie (2016)

 

 

I. 

Fisher's opening discussion of the eerie is perhaps my favourite section of his book and deserves to be quoted at some length:

"As with the weird, the eerie is worth reckoning with in its own right as a particular kind of aesthetic experience. Although this experience is certainly triggered by particular cultural forms, it does not originate in them. You could say rather that certain tales, certain novels, certain films, evoke the feeling of the eerie, but this sensation is not a literary or filmic invention. As with the weird, we can and often do encounter the sensation of the eerie [...] without the need for specific forms of cultural meditation. For instance, there is no doubt that the sensation of the eerie clings to certain kinds of physical spaces and landscapes." [a] 

 

But the feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird: "The simplest way to get this difference is by thinking about the [...] opposition [...] between presence and absence." [61]

 

The weird is the presence of that which does not belong; "the eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence" [61]. That's a nice definition. It means that the sensation of the eerir occurs "either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something" [61]. 

 

The only way to dispell this sensation is with knowledge; for the eerie concerns the unknown (although that doesn't mean that all mysteries generate the eerie).

 

Finally, Fisher returns to a point made in the introduction to his book. Behind all the manifestations of the eerie lies the question of agency: 

 

 "In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. [...] In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns the particular nature of the agent at work." [63]

 

The key point is: "Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the [often invisible and/or unconscious] forces that govern our lives and the world." [64]

 

 

II. 

 

It makes me happy that Fisher discusses the work of Daphne du Maurier, as I'm a devotee of her work. 

 

(On the other hand, it makes me feel ashamed of my ignorance when he discusses the work of Christopher Priest about whom I know nothing at all.)  

 

'The Birds' (1952) is a tale I wrote about on Torpedo the Ark back in Feb 2019: click here. 

 

Funny enough, I don't remember describing it as eerie - I think I stressed its malevolence, ambiguity, and inhuman brilliance - but that's not to say Fisher isn't right to use this term. Maybe the fact that the birds seem to possess an unnatural degree of agency is eerie.       

 

Fisher also discusses 'Don't Look Now' (1971), another tale I have twice referred to on this blog: click here and here. Whilst on neither occasion did I use the word eerie, again, I understand why Fisher does; because there is definitely something eerie about fate as a form of obscured agency [b].    

 

And as for the unconscious - if it exists - of course it's eerie, full as it is of absences, gaps, and other negativities. 

 

 

III.

 

Mightn't it be that there's a subjective element in what constitutes an eerie landscape? That eeriness, like beauty or any other aesthetic phenomena, is in the eye of the beholder? 

 

Probably. 

 

Though that's not to deny that a landscape - as an object in its own right - will often demand "to be engaged with on its own terms" [76] and if it happens to be "desolate, atmospheric, solitary" [77] well then it's eerie, no matter who happens to perceive it.

 

Insensitivity to the mood of an environment - be it moorland or an inner city wasteland - is a failure of the individual and can be a dangerous failing too. For we underestimate the powerful agency of a terrain at our own peril. 

 

We might, after Lawrence, call this mood-cum-agency the spirit of place and think in terms of "different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity" [c]. This sounds a bit like pseudo-science, but the spirit of place is, insists Lawrence, a great reality, however we choose to describe it.

 

Of course, the spirit of place needn't always be malevolent and openness to it might lead one into an ecstatic encounter with otherness that is "pulsing beyond the confines of the mundane" [81] and is "achingly alluring even as it is disconcertingly alien" [81] [d]. 

 

In other words, sometimes wandering outside the gate brings joy and can help restore a sense of primordial wonder (which is precisely why Nietzsche encourages philosophers to do their thinking in unexplored realms of knowledge).   

 

 

IV.  

 

As someone who has been researching in the field of thanatology for the best part of two decades, a section entitled 'Eerie Thanatos' is bound to attract my interest ...

 

By this term, Fisher refers to "a transpersonal (and transtemporal) death drive, in which the 'psychological' emerges as the product of forces from the outside" [82]. The theme is beautifully explored, says Fisher, in the work of Nigel Kneale, an author best known for writing Quatermass and the Pit [e].

 

For Kneale - as presumably for Fisher (and for me) - "the material world in which we live is more profoundly alien and strange" [83] than most people care to imagine. And rather than "insisting upon the pre-eminence of the human subject who is alleged to be the privileged bearer of reason, Kneale shows that an enquiry into the nature of what the world is like is also inevitably an unraveling of what human beings had taken themselves to be" [83]. 

 

To quote from Fisher at length once more if I may:

 

"At the heart of Kneale's work is the question of agency and intent. According to some philosophers, it is the capacity for intentionality which definitively separates human beings from the natural world. Intentionality includes intent as we ordinarily understand it, but really refers to the capacity to feel a cerain way about things. Rivers may possess agency - they affect changes - but the do not care about what they do; they do not have any sort of attitude towards the world. Kneale's most famous creation, the scientist Bernard Quatermass, could be said to belong to a trajectory of Radical Enlightenment thinking which is troubled  by this distinction. Radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Spinoza, Darwin, and Freud continually pose the question: to what extent can the concept of intentionality be applied to human beings, never mind to the natural world? The question is posed in part because of the thoroughgoing naturalisation that Radical Enlightenment thought had insisted upon: if human beings fully belong to the so-called natural world, then on what grounds can a special case be made for them? The conclusions that Radical Enlightenment thinking draws are the exact opposite of the claims for which so-called new materialists such as Jane Bennett [f] have argued. New materialists such as Bennett accept that the distinction between human beings and the natural world is no longer tenable, but they construe this to mean that many of the features previously ascribed only to human beings are actually distributed throughout nature. Radical Enlightenment goes in the opposite direction, by questioning whether there is any such thing as intentionality at all; and if there is, could human beings be said to possess it?" [83-84] 

 

That's the direction I head in too: a direction that leads to the Nietzschean conclusion that life is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead. A conclusion which Freud, following Nietzsche, also (reluctantly) arrived at in his work on Thanatos and the death drive:

 

"By striking contrast with the new materialist idea of 'vibrant matter', which suggests that all matter is to some extent alive, the conjecture implied Freud's positioning of Thanatos is that nothing is alive: life is a region of death. [...] What is called organic life is actually a kind of folding of the inorganic." [84]

 

But ...

 

"But the inorganic is not the passive, inert counterpart to an allegedly self-propelling life; on the contrary, it possesses its own agency. There is a death drive, which in its most radical formulation is not a drive towards death, but a drive of death." [84-85] 

 

Thus ...

 

"The inorganic is the impersonal pilot of everything, including that which seems to be personal and organic. Seen from the perspective of Thanatos, we ourselves become an exemplary case of the eerie: there is an agency at work in us (the unconscious, the death drive), but it is not where or what we expected it to be." [85] 

 

This argument - which I believe to be correct - is surely the most important in Fisher's book. I'm less convinced, however, by his (somewhat hopeful) suggestion that science - as an equally impersonal process - offers us a way beyond. To paraphrase Quatermass himself: Maybe death is as good as it gets. Perhaps it's a cosmic law.  

 

 

V.

 

Fisher provides an excellent reading of Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing (1972) as a book which, in some respects, "belongs to the same moment as such texts as Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus" [101]. 

 

That is to say, works which "attempt to rise to the challenge of treating discontent, abjection and psychopathology as traces of an as yet unimaginable outside rather than as symptoms of maladjustment" [101]. 

 

Having said that, Fisher thinks that the novel's unnamed narrator at the point of schiophrenic break-rapture is actually more in tune with Ben Woodard's dark vitalism [g], which is an interesting idea, but not one I wish to discuss here, as frankly, I can't quite see how the latter relates to the eerie. This might be shortsightedness, or a sign of my own intellectual limitations; or it could be that Fisher is now hallucinating visions of the eerie and seeing it in places where it really doesn't exist. 

 

So far, I've enjoyed and been impressed by the manner in which Fisher has taken a rather hackneyed idea - the eerie - and given it an original twist as well as a strong degree of conceptual rigour. But I think he should have wrapped things up with the notion of eerie thanatos, having already offered us his central insight; i.e., that the eerie is ultimately the trace of an inhuman (and inorganic) drive. 

For the first time, after a hundred odd pages, I'm starting to get just a wee bit bored and to feel that Fisher is now simply namechecking a few more of his favourite things à la Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965) and flexing his muscles like an intellectual version of Tony Holland [h].

 

Having said that, I don't like to abandon a book before the end once I've begun to read it. And so, let's continue, fast-forwarding past Jonathan Glazer's 2013 film Under the Skin [i] and arriving at the final couple of chapters, 'Alien Traces' and ''The Eeriness Remains' ...

VI.

 

Any consideration of outer space, says Fisher in the first of these chapters, "quickly engenders a sense of the eerie" [110]: is there anybody (anything) out there? Again, I suppose that's true - so obviously true, in fact, that it could have fallen from the mouth of Sybil Fawlty [j].  

 

Fisher also claims that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a "major contribution to the cinema of the eerie" [112]. 

 

But it's also one of the most boring films I have ever had to sit through and I'm not sure I'd agree with this judgement; I mean, I can see that of Kubrick's The Shining (1980) - and enjoyed Fisher's analysis of the latter - but 2001 ... I'm unconvinced.  

 

Let's just say that when it comes to eeriness, ghostly twins always trump aliens ... and if anyone thinks I'm going to discuss the "possibility of an eerie love" [121], well, they've got another think coming; I'm afraid that I do find this suggestion sentimental "as well as emotionally and conceptually excessive" [121]. 

 

VII.

 

I mentioned in section III of this post how the eerie needn't always be malevolent and openness to it might lead one into an ecstatic encounter with otherness; that wandering outside the gate may even bring joy and help restore a sense of primordial wonder.

 

Well, Fisher clearly agrees with this and that is why he closes his study with a discussion of Joan Lindsay's brilliant novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967):   

 

"Not only because Picnic at Hanging Rock is practically a textbook example of an eerie novel - it includes disappearances, amnesia, a geological anomaly, an intensely atmspheric terrain - but also because Lindsay's rendition of the eerie has a positivity, a languorous and delirious allure, that is absent or suppressed in so many other eerie texts." [122]

 

Whereas the outside is usually seen as dangerous and deadly, Picnic at Hanging Rock invokes an outside which involves "a passage beyond the petty repressions and mean confines of common experience into a heightened atmosphere of oneiric lucidity" [122]. 

 

Fisher concludes: "The novel seems to justify the idea that a sense of the eerie is created and sustained simply by withholding information." [126][k]  

 

I could elucidate, but the above note seems to encourage one to recognise that sometimes it's best to say no more ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (Repeater Books, 2016), p. 61. Future page references to this work will be given in the main text.   

[b] Etymologically speaking, it's weird - rather than eerie - that suggests fate; the Old English term wyrd meant having the power to shape the latter and thus control one's destiny. Readers will probably recall that the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, often known as the Weird Sisters, have this ability.     

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Spirit of Place', Studies in Classic America Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambride University Press, 2003), p. 17.  

 

[d] Edward Hunter and Simon Solomon seem to understand this in their short film Room (2010) set on the North Yorkshire Moors. Unfortunately, I can provide no further details of this work or give any links at this time.   

 

[e] Quatermass and the Pit is an influential British science-fiction serial transmitted live by BBC Television in December 1958 and January 1959. A Hammer Films adaptation was released with the same title in 1967, directed by Roy Ward Baker and scripted by Kneale.

      Fisher also discusses the fantasy novel Red Shift (Collins, 1973) by Alan Garner in his chapter on eerie thanatos in relation to the question of human free will, but this is another book and author about which and about whom I again know nothing and so prefer to pass over in silence here (with no disrespect to Garner).       

 

[f] I discussed Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press, 2010) in a post published on 10 April 2015, in which I express my dislike of her material vitalism: click here. 

 

[g] See Woodard's Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life (Zero Boks, 2012). 

 

[h] Tony Holland is a British bodybuilder known for his musical muscle man act. He achieved national fame in the UK after appearing on Opportunity Knocks in 1964 - which, unbelievably, he won six times. 

      Click here to watch him perform (joined by Kenny Lynch) to what became his cha-cha theme tune; 'Wheels', originally recorded (and released as a single which reached number 8 in the UK charts) by the String-A-Longs in 1960. As a very young child, I always found it weirdly disturbing when Holland came on TV and hearing this tune today still makes my skin crawl.     

 

[i] I intend to (i) watch this film and (ii) write a future post on it - and that's why I don't discuss it here. 

      I don't know why I haven't already seen this film; I'm beginning to think I sometimes have blackouts like Rip Van Winkle and when I wake up the world has moved on and certain cultural productions have simply passed me by. The fact that I have been denied an opportunity of seeing Scarlett Johnasson on screen playing an alien young woman stalking human males really irritates.

 

[j] I'm referring here to a famous exchange between Basil and Sybil in the final episode of Fawlty Towers [S2/E6] entitled 'Basil the Rat' (dir. Bob Spiers, written by John Cleese and Connie Booth, 1979): click here. 

 

[k] As Fisher reminds us: 

      "In the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this literally happened: the form in which the novel was published was the result of an act of excision. In her original manuscript, Lindsay provided a solution of sorts to the enigma [at the heart of the novel], in a concluding chapter that her publishers [wisely] encouraged her to remove [...] This 'Chapter Eighteen' was published separately, as The Secret of Hanging Rock [1987]." [126] 

 

 

To read the first part of this post - on Fisher's notion of the weird - click here.  

 

  

Grand Austrian Perverts 1: Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) 

Photo by Ferdinand Schmutzer (c. 1912)

 

Ich schreibe über Liebe und Tod. Welche anderen Fächer gibt es?

 

 

I. 

 

If the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler is known at all today in the English-speaking world, it's as the author of the 1926 work Traumnovelle, which was adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman [1].  

 

But he deserves, as a grand pervert [2] and pessimist, to be better remembered in my view ...

 

 

II.   

 

Schnitzler was born into a wealthy Jewish family in 1862. His father was a famous laryngologist - not something many people can say - originally from Hungary. And his mother was the daughter of a prominent Viennese doctor. 

 

So, no surprises then, that in 1879 young Arthur Schnitzler should begin studying medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1885. Although he took up a job in Vienna's General Hospital, his heart wasn't in it: he wanted, rather, to become a writer and would eventually abandon the medical profession and opt for the life of a man of letters. 

 

In 1903, he married Olga Gussmann, an aspiring young actress and singer half his age, who also came from a Jewish middle-class background. The marriage lasted for eighteen years - and the couple had two children - before separating in 1921, ten years before Schnitzler's death.      

 

 

III.

 

As a member of the Austrian avant-garde, Schnitzler happily played with literary and social convention [3] and his works were regarded as controversial; both for their sexually explicit descriptions - much appreciated by Freud - and for their rebuttal of antisemitism.

 

Following the first public performance, in 1920, of his play Reigen (1909) [4], Schnitzler was not only condemned as a pornographer, but attacked in the vilest manner possible for his Jewishness. When asked by an interviewer why all his works betrayed the same perverse obsessions, he replied: 'I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Hitler was not a fan; describing Schnitzler's work as Jüdischer Dreck and his books were first banned by the Nazis, then burned by the Nazis. 

 

Fortunately, Schnitzler's papers - including manuscripts, letters, and an almost 8,000 page diary in which he recorded full details of his many sexual encounters and experiences - were saved from the flames and eventually ended up in Cambridge University Library.       

IV.

In closing, I'd like to mention Schniztler's philosophical pessimism. 

 

As Byung-Chul Han reminds us, in one famous aphorism, Schnitzler "proposes a relationship between bacilli and the human race" [5] and presents a vision "of an ontological or even a cosmic necessity for the general demise of life" [6]. 

 

It is a vision in which "the secret fate of every individual is to destroy the other" [7], not because of any evil intention to cause harm, but simply because: "Existence as such is already violence." [8]  

 

Notes

 

[1] Kubrick's version of Schnitzler's psycho-sexual fantasy makes significant changes to the original story and its setting; for example, the film takes place in New York in the late 1990s, not in Vienna in the early 1900s. Kubrick also removed all references to the Jewishness of the characters.      

[2] I am borrowing this phrase from D. H. Lawrence, who, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, once described St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust as grand perverts. Click here for my post on this subject.

[3] Schnitzler was a member of Jung-Wien, a society of fin de siècle writers who experimented with the more radical aspects of Modernism, challenging 19th-century realism and moralism, and promoting a politics of desire. Schnitzler was the first writer of German fiction to use stream of consciousness as a narrative mode. He was also a great practitioner of what is now known as microfiction.    

 

[4] Reigen - better known by its French title, La Ronde - was written by Schnitzler in 1897 and privately printed in 1900. It provocatively examines issues to do with class and sexual morality.  

 

[5]  Byung Chul-Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 97. 

      The aphorism in question can be found in Arthur Schnitzler, Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, (S. Fischer Verlag, 1967), pp. 177-78. It is quoted in full (and translated into English) in Han's text, p. 97.

 

[6-8] Ibid., Note 41, p. 146.

 

 

To read the second post in this series on grand Austrian perverts - on Egon Schiele - click here.  

 

To read the third post in this series on grand Austrian perverts - on Freud - click here.

I'm Still Searching for the Ants Invasion: Notes on Phase IV

 I hope that insect doesn't see me / He's not renowned for his courtesy [1]

 

 

I.

 

There are numerous films in the so-called bug genre, some of which involve swarms of killer bees and many of which involve armies of soldier ants on the march. I will always remember Michael Cain battling the former in the The Swarm (1978) and Charlton Heston taking on the latter in The Naked Jungle (1954).

 

Arguably, Hollywood's fascination with insects and the possibility that they might one day threaten human existence, culminates in The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), a strange but fascinating movie which combines elements of documentary, science fiction, and horror, and features a variety of insects, including wasps, locusts, termites, and even butterflies. [2]  

But the film I wish to discuss here, however, is another odd work, which, whilst little-known today, has nevertheless achieved cult status ...

 

 

II.

 

Directed by graphic visual designer Saul Bass, Phase IV (1974) is perhaps the most philosophically-informed and arty of all ant movies. One reviewer described it as "designed more than directed, and edited around principles of color and line, rather than around performance or plot" [3]. 

 

Whilst, essentially, it remains a six-legged sci-fi horror, it's certainly a very different kind of film to Them! (1954); for one thing, the ants aren't giant-sized, even if they are supposed to be super-intelligent, and they are revealed as sophisticated creatures capable of great feats of engineering and heroic acts of self-sacrifice.         

 

When I first saw Phase IV as a child, I found it boring and incomprehensible; second only to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odessey (1968) in that respect. Unfortunately for Paramount Pictures, that was pretty much how everyone else also felt at the time - moviegoers and critics alike - and the film was a box office flop [4].

 

However, 45-odd years later, I now find much to admire about the film; not least its low-key anti-humanism and the luminous screen presence of 20-year-old English beauty Lynne Frederick as Kendra Eldridge, a traumatised survivor of an earlier ant attack whose destiny is to become a kind of human ant queen. [5].

 

The plot is actually fairly straightforward: a mysterious cosmic event causes ants to undergo rapid evolution and develop a collective cross-species intelligence. One of the results of this is that they begin building huge towering nests in the Arizona desert, disconcerting the local human population who decide to vacate the area.

 

A two-man scientific team - Hubbs and Lesko (played by Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy respectively) - arrives to investigate. But they soon find themselves having to battle against the ants for survival. Things, however, take a fascinating turn when it transpires that, far from wishing to simply exterminate humanity, the ants wish to remake us in their own image and absorb mankind into their alien new world order [6]         

 

Some viewers will, obviously, object strongly to such a prospect. But I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords ... [7]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the song 'Ants Invasion', by Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni, on the album Kings of the Wild Frontier, (CBS, 1980). Lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Universal Music Publishing Group. Click here to listen on YouTube. 

[2] Regrettably, I've not had the opportunity to watch this film in its entirety. But it comes highly recommended by Mr. Tim Pendry, whose knowledge and critical judgement in this area - as in many others - I respect and trust. It's interesting to note that Ken Middleham, who shot the insect sequences for The Hellstrom Chronicle, also shot the ant close-ups for Phase IV.

[3] Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, 'Saul Bass directed only one feature - and it's about super-intelligent ants, The A.V. Club (31 Oct 2014): click here.

[4] Unfortunate, too, for Saul Bass, as he was never again invited to direct a feature-length film. 

 

[5] Despite only being twenty years of age, Bass was concerned that Frederick looked too mature for the role she was playing. Thus, he obliged her to wear a specially designed (and extremely uncomfortable) corset to flatten her breasts and attempted to persuade the beautiful starlet to restrict her diet to chicken broth and black coffee for the duration of the production.  

[6] Bass originally shot a surreal montage with which to end the movie, indicating what the future ant-dominated world might look like. Sadly, this was cut by the studio executives at Paramount. However, it has recently been rediscovered and is available to watch on YouTube: click here.

 

[7] This much-loved line was spoken by Springfield news anchor Kent Brockman, in the classic season 5 episode of The Simpsons entitled 'Deep Space Homer' (1994), dir. Carlos Baezer and written by David Mirkin: click here. Despite what some mistakenly believe, it was not originally spoken by Joan Collins in the film Empire of the Ants (1977).  

 

 

Bonus: to watch the official trailer for Phase IV, click here. Or to watch an excellent modernized trailer, edited by Dan McBride, click here. 

 

For a sister post anticipating this one - on ants with artificially enhanced cuticles - click here.