Giallo Gothic
My potted week - web subcultures, Japanese short fiction, neo-Victorian gialli, BRITNEY!
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
I half-enjoyed this short exploration of online communities, which has previously garnered criticism for devoting far more intellectual space to analysis of the Pepe-right than of the Tumblr left. This weighting is justifiable in that the socialist audience of this book are less likely to be seasoned 4chan users than leftist activists.
Nagle’s basic thesis (that the combative nature of early-tens social justice activism helped to fuel the alt-right) is worth serious contemplation from the left - who isn’t secretly sick of crunchy contrarianism, workplace bias training and the click-farming ‘take economy’?
However, this book’s theoretical potential is hampered by a range of impossible-to-ignore editorial issues, from typos to serious factual errors (Camille Paglia’s PhD supervisor was not Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind). Despite the work’s accessibility, sentences are consistently difficult to navigate, and content is organised with seemingly no guiding principle. Kill All Normies deserves a rewrite.
Insects by Yuichi Serai (short story)
I haven’t finished reading through the whole short story collection this figures in, a disarming and literary inconclusive portrait of the last century in Japan. My favourite sections up to this point have been the final two (‘Dread’, ‘Disasters, Natural and Man-Made’) and my favourite story by far is Insects, narrated by a Catholic survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki. Wavering throughout are historico-religious solemnity, human sensitivity, and tinges of beastly erotica, the sort Hokusai was more-than hinting at with his woodblock print of a woman and her octopus lover. I thought the whole thing was masterful.
A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)
Lucio Fulci’s giallo is a Gothic film. ‘Gothic’ is an arguably apt descriptor for most of the giallo genre - virginal women, Satanic women, predators, prey, amulets, high drama, dreams, and - most strikingly - large, old buildings. Here, the culprits are apartment blocks, experimental facilities, law offices, Catholic churches with bat infestations. Other films take creaky lifts or underpasses or autumn Tube stations and imbue them with magic, murderous potential. In every building there is a new secret, always paralleling the protagonist’s psyche. The set decorators hired on gialli tend to decorate lived-in apartments as if the tenant is half-Dracula, half-Carnaby Street mod - black candelabra, trendy armchair in oxblood leather.
A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin works wonderfully well for about 45 minutes, then starts to flag, its build-up of tension ruined by a boring script. But what a 45 minutes it is! A symbolic pattern starts to form: an animated goose with a hole through the heart, three stabs in the human breast, disembowelled animals, murder in a fur coat. The viewer becomes a psychoanalyst - Jung or Sacher-Masoch. Roeg’s Performance, with its psychedelic montage party, is echoed. The film is an excellent time capsule - psychedelic purple, hippies, Biba as a location.
Along with Gothic fiction, I mostly thought of the first two years of the LOONA K-pop project, a lifeworld of imagery with no conclusion, a metaphor keyed-in so the background goes black.
Blackout by Britney Spears
An album made fifteen years before its time. Piece of Me sounds too harmonically advanced to be anything but an early attempt at hyperpop, Why Should I Be Sad is acrobatic, and Heaven on Earth (my favourite song) feigns a sweet exterior but still sounds awfully Nine Inch Nails (Closer on mood enhancers?). It is disheartening that someone could release such an album and still be driven to mental breakdown. Our society is poisoned by the blockbuster-masculinity of the 80s and hates all art adjacent to women.