2.
Civilisation and its Discontents.
Something in all men
profoundly rejoices at seeing a car burn.
Jean Baudrillard.
When considering this
possibility, we come up against a contention that is so astonishing
that we will dwell on it for awhile. It is contended that much of
the blame for our misery lies with what we call our civilisation, and
that we should be far happier if we were to abandon it and revert to
primitive conditions.
Sigmund Freud,
Civilisation and its Discontents.
In the previous part of
this essay, we looked at how influential modernist architects like Le
Corbusier believed that a radical new architecture and urban design
could produce a stable, happy community of people whose behaviour
ultimately emulates the harmonious mathematical order of the
buildings in which they live. In Shivers and High-Rise,
however, we find the opposite happening. The residents of
Starliner apartments (in Cronenberg's film) and Anthony Royal's
high-rise (in Ballard novel) do not replicate the mathematical
balance of their environments; rather they surrender to the inherent
disorder and chaos of their deepest instincts and most primal
impulses. There is a double irony at work here: we observe not only
anarchy breaking out in a built environment of idealized mathematical
simplicity, but also a kind of atavistic reversion taking place in an
architecture which was designed to embody the modern, and act
as the incubator of the individual and community of the utopian
future. Here is the ultimate riposte to the modernist utopia:
instead of going boldly into the idealized tomorrow, the residents of
the high-rise are regressing back, to the infantile stages of human
identity and civilisation. With a vengeance.
We also argued in the
previous section that modernity signalled a radical new juncture in
how we perceive time. Previous epochs were often enthralled by the
myth of the Golden Age – the belief that the past was infinitely
better – nobler, more elevated in manner and wisdom – than the
present. The present, in this view, was a failing away or
degeneration from a prior, more exalted civilisation, destined either
to be lost forever or to come back again according to some grand
historical cycle. The return of the past is thus something to be
welcomed. In the modern era, all this was reversed. Once we
conceive of the present as the pinnacle of civilisation, and the
future as the potential Golden Age, the return of the past becomes a
danger, a creeping menace. We begin to conceive of modern
civilisation as a grand albeit precarious achievement, constantly
imperilled by the threat of some kind of reversion back to its
well-springs in the primitive and barbaric. This attitude developed
from a variety of sources: not only the modernist utopianism which we
discussed in the previous chapter, but also from a climate of fierce
chauvinism and belief in the superiority of western civilisation
which flourished in the Victorian period.
The Victorian period in
particular was characterised by a widespread anxiety regarding the
stability and permanence of civilisation and the hard-won fruits of
progress – a fear of the ‘resurgent atavism’ in cultural terms.
In biology, an atavism is a throwback, an ancestral trait or
characteristic which returns in individual cases after it has been
lost for several generations by the species. It is the anomalous
return of some characteristic of a prior stage of evolution and form
of existence. The concept of the atavism has enjoyed a rich life in
the cultural sphere as a metaphor for the sudden resurgence of
primitive forms of thought and behaviour in the context of modern
civilisation. In its inception, this concept was often aligned with
ideologies of social Darwinism and racism; in time though, it has
also come to express ambiguous attitudes towards the value and
validity of rationalistic modern civilisation. In Shivers and
High-Rise, we find a breakout of resurgent primitivism in the
modern apartment complex: in Shivers, a return to a greedy,
unbounded infantile sexuality, and in High-Rise to both the
prior infantile forms of the individual and of human society in
general. To contextualise both works, we will look at the theories
of Sigmund Freud, a considerable influence on both artists, and in
particular his 1929 essay Civilisation and its Discontents.
Das Unbehagen in Der
Kultur (“The Uneasiness in Civilisation”) was written in the
aftermath of World War I, which had been to many a profound blow to
the notion of human progress and rational civilisation. What is
interesting about the particular unease with civilisation which Freud
posits in this essay is that it was not – as in the case of
traditional fears of the resurgent atavism – something extrinsic to
civilisation. It was not something which civilisation had progressed
beyond, something external and alien which might still be observed in
the customs of the “less developed” cultures. Rather, Freud
argued that a conflict between the primitive and the civilised might
be an intrinsic part of the very relationship between the individual
and civilisation itself. For Freud, civilisation offered the
individual something like a Faustian bargain in reverse. The
traditional Faustian bargain offers its recipient the capacity to
indulge themselves to the maximal degree – to have no limits placed
on their capacity for self-indulgence and self-expression.
Civilisation, on the
other hand, offers the following bargain. You will enjoy ever
greater levels of security, comfort, hygiene and health. The bounty
of intellectual and aesthetic “high” culture – art, philosophy,
the sciences – will be yours to enjoy. Your home will be warm and
the provision of your food require no foraging, hunting, or sowing.
For the greater part of your life, you will be shielded from physical
privation, violence and mortal threats. These are the fruits of
civilisation. However, in order to maintain them, we have to give
something in return: a great measure of our freedom and individuality
must be sacrificed. Most crucially for Freud, our instinctual being
– our naturally unbounded desires for the gratification of our
sexuality and our individual will – must be repressed:
“Thirdly – and this seems the most important point – it is
impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built up
on renunciation, how much it presupposes the non-satisfaction of
powerful drives – ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large
sphere of inter-personal relations; as we already know, it is the
cause of the hostility that all civilisations have to contend with.”
To understand Freud’s
view of this tension between the individual and his society, we need
to briefly sketch out his well-known structural model of the psyche.
Freud saw the outward social individual as the mediation between two
conflicting forces: the Id and the superego. In this instance, the
Id is the atavism: it is the throwback to our infantile stage
as an individual, and pre-civilized state as a species. A confluence
of our instinctual desires and urges, the Id desires only instant
pleasure and gratification, and recognises no law, no limit, no
reason or compromise:
“It is the dark, inaccessible part of your personality, what
little we know of it we have learned from our study of Dreamwork and
of course the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is
of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to
the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a
cauldron full of seething excitations…It is filled with energy
reaching it from the instincts, but has no organization, produces no
collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction
of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure
principal.”
The
id is held in check by the superego which is the voice of conscience,
the authority of the father, the police force of the individual
psyche. Out of some kind of compromise between the clamour of our
instinctual desires, and the authoritarian stop-brake of our
superego, our public, social persona, or ego, emerges.
However, as Freud saw it, this compromise, particularly under the
demands of advanced civilisation, is rarely satisfactory for the
individual. Inside every humble, self-effacing bourgeois lies a
violent, priapic barbarian waiting to claw its way out. Inside each
of us, like a buried archaeological stratum of private and
evolutionary history, resides an infant and a primitive, a creature
of unfettered appetite that swells and seethes with every compromise
and accommodation to the adult, civilized world.
In
this regard, we can see that there is a neat parallelism between
Freud's conception of the individual psyche and civilisation as
whole. In terms of mass civilisation, the superego corresponds to
the coercive forces by which a society maintains its ideological
equilibrium and order – not only the physical force represented by
military and police, but also the more crucial invisible forms of
psychological coercion and conformism which lead individuals to
police their own behaviour. The ego corresponds to the outward
appearance of society as a smoothly functioning, cohesive whole whose
various parts are content with their societal roles and the overall
moral structure of their society. Under the surface, however, there
remains the society's id – the seething cauldron of individual
discontent, of repressed but unvanquished instinctual drives, which
constantly threatens the stability of the society from within.
The marvelous lithographic illustrations for Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature) - via Wikipedia.
Freud's
ideas in this regard were influenced by the recapitulation theory
of the German biologist and polymath Ernst Haeckel. This theory,
roughly stated, holds that the embryonic development of the
individual contains within it and repeats in its individual growth
the various evolutionary developmental stages of the species –
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, ontogeny referring the
development of the individual, and phylogeny the collective evolution
of the species. In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud
argues for a similar conception of the psyche, using the metaphor of
an imaginary Rome whose entire history remains permanently present in
its current form:
“Now let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome is not a place
where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich
past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in
which all previous phases of development exist alongside the most
recent.”
Though
discredited as biology, the recapitulation theory has as a certain
elegant, resonant quality: the individual organisation becomes a
fractal of the species as a whole, and a living museum of its own
vast evolutionary history. The idea clearly fascinated Ballard; in
The Drowned World he utilized as a “literary device” the
notion of the spinal column as a vessel containing “the details of
the entire evolutionary development of the human race”:
“I tell how human beings likewise regress into the past. In a
certain sense, they climb down their own spinal column. They
traverse down the thoracic vertebrae, from the point at which they
are air-breathing mammals, to the lumbar region, to the point at
which they are they are amphibious reptiles. Finally they reach the
absolute past, which on one hand represents the birth of life itself
in the hot womb of the primeval jungle, and which in another sense
represents their own origins and birthplace in the mother's womb.”
Whether
strictly accurate or no, Freud's conjoined notion of the psyche and
society as a placid veneer or facade, perpetually threatened by
atavistic impulses and instincts that remain perfectly preserved
below the surface, was perhaps the most enduring and influential of
his ideas throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. It is
certainly this central idea informs the narratives of both Shivers
and High Rise. Partially funded by the Canadian Film Board
and apparently shot in just 15 days, Shivers remains the most
extreme, forceful – and “Cronenbergian” - of all Cronenberg
flicks. Its first five minutes, in fact, are so gruellingly warped
and unsettling that it was almost as though the auteur was trying to
instantly jettison any viewers who weren't in it for keeps. The rest
of the film is a sustained assault on every orifice the film's bodies
and the viewer's mind has to offer – it isn't every film that
features a faecal-phallic parasite as its antagonist – perhaps for
the best.
Cronenberg's
early films have a unique atmosphere which derive partially from the
imperfections and artefacts of their production milieu. Shot cheaply
with actors of variable ability, and shot through with a chilly,
insular Canadian quality, they have a kind of sinister sterility
which is increased rather than off-set by soundtracks of gentle,
lullaby-like library music. They feel like mutant public information
films. It is interesting that Cronenberg's early cinema often
focuses on medical scientists whose well-intentioned experiments
produce horrifying consequences. In the 50s and 60s, the
well-intentioned monster D. Ewen Cameron carried out a series of
appalling experiments in psychological conditioning (under the
auspices of the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme) in Montreal's Allen
Memorial Institute. Some years before, an estimated 20,000 orphaned
children (the Duplessis Orphans) had been falsely certified as
mentally ill as part of a scheme in Quebec and confined to
psychiatric units. Whether a conscious influence or otherwise, these
events make Canada an apt location for the emergence of a chilly,
medical variety of horror.
The
first of Cronenberg's messianic dabblers is Dr Emil Hobbes in
Shivers. Like Freud, Hobbes believes that civilisation
creates a fundamental cleavage between humans and their natural and
instinctual being; he describes man as “an animal who thinks too
much” and “an over-rational animal that's lost touch with its
body and its instincts.” However, whereas Freud believed that the
repression of the instinctual drives was a worthwhile and necessary
sacrifice to make in order to maintain civilisation, Hobbes is a
libidinal anarchist who believes that western civilisation is itself
a mass neurosis that must be cured at all costs. To this end, he
develops an artificial parasite which is a combination of aphrodisiac
and venereal disease. This parasite, he hopes, will unleash the
libidinal id on a mass scale, and transform the world into “one
beautiful mindless orgy.” In this sense, Hobbes follows in a
strain of sexual anarchism which developed out of conventional
Freudian theory. The first of these outlaws was the equal parts
brilliant and demented Wilhelm Reich, whose championing of orgiastic
potency as a cure for neurosis lead to him being labelled the
“prophet of the better orgasm” and the “founder of a genital
utopia.”
Since
Cronenberg is making a horror film, Hobbes' plan to initiate a
genital utopia goes Horribly Wrong – as plans which involve
the creation of artificial venereal parasites are wont to. On the
surface, it might appear that Cronenberg's film expresses an
essentially conservative viewpoint: unleash the id, and you open a
Pandora's Box of uncontrollable violence and chaos. This was how
Robin Wood, a trenchant early critic of Cronenberg, interpreted the
film when he saw it at the Edinburgh film festival: “It's
derivation is from Invasion of the Body Snatchers via Night
of the Living Dead, but the source of its intensity is quite
distinct: all the horror is based on extreme sexual disgust.” To
take such a view, however, is to misread the very ambiguous nature of
Cronenberg's sexual apocalypse in Shivers. The director has
often said that he identifies more with the characters after
they have been infected – which is to say that a world of sexual
anarchy, violence and wanton destruction is somehow preferable to the
dull, routinised existence of the middle-class professional.
Although
our modern connotative sense of the word apocalypse is a
negative image of total destruction, the literal meaning of the word
is a disclosure, an unveiling; a revelation of the true nature of the
world. “Something in all men,” Jean Baudrillard wrote,
“profoundly rejoices at seeing a car burn.” Cronenberg is
by intellectual temperament very much a modernist, but he rejoices in
seeing the orderly and antiseptic world of the urban bourgeois thorn
asunder. For him, the parasite simply unveils the true animal nature
of the high-rise dwellers; like the car crash in Ballard's fictions,
it reconnects them to their bodies, to the rich, precarious corporeal
existence from which they have become disengaged. In Crash
and Shivers, disgust in an intrinsic part of the body and
sexuality. This idea is expressed in Shivers by Nurse
Forsythe (played by ethereal exploitation movie queen Lynn Lowry):
Roger, I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I
found myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble
you see, because he's old... and dying... and he smells bad, and I
find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic,
that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that
even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien
kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of
eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That
even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make
love beautifully.
Continued shortly.
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