A sample from my latest book sample, on my website: https://vanderwaardart.com/2024/04/book-sample-the-fun-palace-medieval-expression-part-two
It critiques Red Scare in media, including seemingly left-leaning stuff tinged with war allegories; i.e., James Cameron riffing off Lucas to become the follow-up Marxist billionaire commodifying centrist antiwar platitudes. This exhibit examines the "danger disco" from The Terminator (1984) as a site for potential sex-positive, Gothic-Communist rebellion:
Per Capitalist Realism, Terminatorâs in-house music (âPhotoplayâ and âBurning in the Third Degree,â 1984)âin true hauntological/mise-en-abyme fashionâhas a female voice (the Gothic heroine formulaic) singing about being trapped: in a photograph story where theyâre overwhelmed with conflicting emotions of survival (fight or fight, freeze or fawn, protection and provision, etc) while being hunted; itâs very postpunk (âdisco in disguiseâ) and Gothicâi.e., trapped in the dance hall with Dracula the impostor/infiltrator (âhey, that guy didnât pay!â). Such a haze might seem bizarre, butâper the Gothicâs big emotionsâis doing a trick similar to T.S. Eliotâs âThe Waste Landâ (1921): describing modern life (city life) as a rising new existence out of war with new technologies: that of womenâs perspective in the city when threatened by bad-faith men standing impatiently on ceremony (âthe gentleman carbuncularâ).
Except The Terminator is, in equal hauntological fashion, evolvingâregressing under neoliberal Capitalismâs shadow of nuclear war romanced through technophobic cyberpunk superimposed, shadow-like, over a quotidian L.A. nightlife/city space; i.e., as haunted by vague imitations of life and death coming from internal/external sources and conflicts. As such, the heroine (Sarah and the audience to varying degrees) holds out for a hero but feels creeped out by everything and everyoneâfight or fight, in short (a criminal hauntology that weâll explore more in Volume Three). All occur on a shared stage where women go and put on similar clothes (adopt similar hairstyles) while watched by panoptic/myopic state eyes on the hunterâs map: calculated risk as, in a pre-Internet age, coming with pre-Internet concerns for sex workers (women)ââimitationâ (assassination) by physical contact, once visually acquired as the target.
In turn, the affect is puts âterrorâ and horrorâ in quotes, but also inside a Russian doll: the dark copy of L.A. disassociates per a mental exercise common to female Gothic readership; i.e., regressing into a Gothic chronotope where the medieval-grade class of power abuse (âdynastic primacy and hereditary ritesâ) is accurately expressed through abstraction that points to the ghost of the counterfeit as updated but oscillating between different legends and true crimes morphing horribly through a shared shadow zone. Per Gothic experience as something to view outside itself (âphenomenologyâ), Sarah is the stand-in woman (âthe double,â in theatre terms) for the audience wanting to be the good girl but haunted by the trauma of other dead (thus past) women* tied to settler-colonial issues linked to profit (the casualties of the privileged relative to that system, pointing to dead white indentured servants; re: Howard Zinn). All raise a curious paradox: impostor syndrome and internalized bigotry, aka mirror syndrome. Sarah is our Catherine Moorland, essentially finding herself in a liminal space indicative of her own wide consumption habits: the Western, horror movies, spy dramas/romances, and a 24-hour news cycle (that she doesnât want or like to watch: âYouâre dead, honey!â).
*The imaginary/fictional nature of fiction doesnât matter if it points to non-fiction (doesnât require âray gunsâ for proof, Dr. Silbermann). In turn, biography threatens auto-biography regarding genocide as normally experienced by âthe other sideâ; i.e., the Global South being the Northâs vision of Hell-on-Earth brought to them during the Imperial Boomerangâs return homeâan apocalypse/revelationâs fatal vision: a death-omen skeleton both trapped inside us, wanting to scream, and pulled out of us, rubber-hose-style, to belt out an orgasmic âdeathâ wail. It might seem odd, except it speaks to our universal alienation, fetishizing and sexualization under capital, which all but require the monstrous-feminine to protect themselves from rape by dressing it up as deathly jouissance; i.e., âHelp, help, Iâm being ârapedâ and Iâm âdeadâ at the same time!â It constitutes a kind of perverse rape prevention theatre which others will be fearful of and fascinated towards (re: C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain and investigating tigers and spirits in the other room, whichâper the Gothicâis using the bloodcurdling screams of âdyingâ women). Such a palliative Numinous maximizes investigation unto self-interest regarding psychosexual theatre (and just sex in general, if weâre all honest) as highly entertaining (thus persuasive) education; i.e., the testament of the Bleeding Nun, which Sarahâs bones sing to and from in turn (our bad game of telephone): âThe little bombs we drop all lead back to the Big One [the spectre of Caesar stabbed to death] when the fat lady sings!â Itâs less Red Scare (see any Russians here?) and more (admittedly white-savior) anti-nuke propaganda targeting the middle-class as most able to impact things; i.e., as the usual gatekeepers of capital being selfishly incentivized through rape fantasy to avoid ignominious death. Well played, Cameron. âNot great, not terrible.â But good job, home slice.Â
This begs an important question: If youâre trying to change but still figuring things out on a half-real (thus half-false) stage filled with potential bad actors, are you being honest with yourself? The liarâs paradox states that the sentence isnât true while being true; so Cameronâs disco is equally true while being false, fabricated. So is the Gothic, hence castle-narrative, hence ludo-Gothic BDSM. Sarah is torn between different sides of a divided self that may or may not describe herâbut also faced with possible futures (what happens if she takes one guy home versus another) indicative of past atrocities at home and abroad relative to American police abuse across space and time: the terminator is our animal man both stinking and primal (âmade with real panther partsâ), foreign (a disguised version of the âRussian spyâ Cold War trope, the German spy), and made metal like a posthuman robocop armed to the teeth; i.e., the walking castle-in-a-castle, wolf-in-âwolfâsâ-clothing threatening foreign rape (the foreign plot) at home, scapegoating systemic police issues in a current police state projected onto the screen as much by the audience as the other way around!
All of it regresses to a false, bad childhood that speaks truth through paradox, one where the kidsâappearing to have grown upâare seemingly up to no good/not behaving as they should; i.e., playing with dead things (and guns) during moral panic/witch hunts. The reality, here, is these feelings are exactly how capital wants people to feel/behave; i.e., off-balance, trapped in a canceled future, âhighâ with a menticidal fear from waves of terror conditioning them to become Amazons and damsels for the state: of displaced, disguised police forces they pay to deal with during canonical calculated risk. In turn, itâs addictive because we feel out of control in a world operated by cruel puppet masters (the bourgeoisie) using us for their own greedy ends, all but requiring us to liberate ourselves (and our monstrous threatres) from their spurious (false) monopoly of terror by seizing control of the nightmare while inside it; i.e., a lucid dream while awake that changes the external socio-material conditions that lead to its tell-tale feelings on all fronts: ludo-Gothic BDSM developing Gothic Communism as a similarly ergodic form of motion inside the chronotope (no outside of the text): liminal, concentric, anisotropic, mise-en-abyme, et alâall through magical assembly, confusion of the senses, selective absorption during a Song of Infinity!
Such rebellious dreamingâs reclamation of the Amazon (I mean, just look at Sarahâs queenly lion mane, contemplating armed resistance before taking a shower, only to make up her mind after fucking cute-boy Reese to humanize him and toughen her [mind and pussy] up), as The Terminator shows us, becomes something to endlessly revisit (fan videos, sequels, remakes, adaptations, etc) through dreams that speak to the cyclical nature of history as historical-material, influencing our literal dreams (âTheir defense grid was smashed! Weâd won! Taking out Connor then would make no difference! Skynet had to wipe out* his entire existence!â) that play with the taboo social (feelings: kill cops being a guilty but valid desire; i.e., kill our jailors presenting as false protectors actually serving the state as robots-in-the-flesh) and material factors that children are classically taught to doâwith dolls (tea time for the girls and action figures for the boys, and GNC variants of emergent gameplay for the fags)âexcept weâre the dolls on a half-real, chessboard-esque stage (avatars, in videoludic parlance, the magic circle a half-real one). Per the pedagogy of the oppressed, similarity occurs amid difference, straight people experiencing fatal nostalgia, too; they just feel it differently than queer people as alien and fetish, hunted themselves (with cis-het women classically being monstrous-feminine [âwoman is otherâ] enemies to the state; i.e., like Sarah is to Skynet).
*Killing rebellion by killing the mother of his enemy; i.e., killing Medusa as antithetical to state continuation/daily operations. The idea had to die, except killing Medusa is impossible (the state needs a scapegoat to exist and workers/natures to exploit), demanding a forever retro-future war inside the minds of the public that cannot be stopped, only able to cancel Communist futures by keeping potential actors lying in state, fighting forever during an admittedly white-savior plot. Again, just like Lucas, Cameron does thisâand Radcliffe did thisâwhile illustrating the problem (Capitalism) as a playground (a Gothic castle) to pacify curious and fearful workers with. We gotta take the war to the streets of imagination in ways they couldnât: by threatening profit through iconoclasm to alter the Superstructure (thus the Base) in a proletarian direction; i.e., praxial synthesis as protective of workers, nature and the environment and liberatory towards sex work relative to the dialectic of the alien. Targeting the minds of the future youth through Gothic play is the simplest solution to an incredibly complex, hypermassive (normal, real, etc) problem. Targeting the minds of the future youth through Gothic play is the simplest solution to an incredibly complex, hypermassive (normal, real, etc) problem: by teaching future players (usually boys) to play nice in emergent, de facto (extracurricular) forms of good praxis synthesized (creative success); i.e., donât rape and kill everything you see, you stupid little fucks!
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