Mutants and Zombies: Who Would You Be in the Everyday Apocalypse?

Part 1 the coming of the mutants

THEY CAME FROM THE FRINGES.

The mutant and the zombie exert a powerful influence over the popular imagination of the 21st century. The mutant, whose early life was always as the aberration, the monster, and the creeping menace, is now most commonly recognised as a hero, thanks to an initially low-key invention of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the early sixties: the Uncanny X-Men. For the zombie, there have been shades of ambiguity, perhaps even sympathy, but no such rehabilitation: a lumbering vampire without the Old World charm and considerable sex appeal, the zombie will always be a creeping, life-threatening nuisance. He is, however, our creeping, life-threatening nuisance.

Both the mutant and the zombie have made fascinating journeys from the fringes of post-war culture into the mainstream of the 21st century. The X-Men were by no means shining stars in the Marvel renaissance of the early sixties. Among comic book readers, their popularity ranked well below that of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, Hulk, and a variety of others. It wasn’t really until the early eighties that the X-Men acquired a massive readership among the then hermetic sub-culture of comic book fandom. There followed a further two decades before the general culture would have an inkling of their existence: first in the nineties, a lot of kids were turned on to the X-Men by a poorly animated, but surprisingly faithful daytime cartoon; then in 2000, Bryan Singer made the movie that cemented the Strangest Superheroes of All as cultural icons. (A large proportion of the movie’s success was down to the break-out performance of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. At some point, the virility of the American male became a thing of the past, probably due to a failure to heed the dire warnings of Norman Mailer during his heavy pot days. Since then, the US has been exporting masculinity from Australia.)

Similarly, if you go back about twenty years, nobody really gave a damn about zombies. You could rent out Night of the Living Dead (in Ghoulish Colour!) from a video store, but beyond everybody’s communal recollection of being inexplicably terrified by Thriller, the zombie had no real cultural foothold. Zombies were strictly a sub-culture thing; the only people who cared about zombies were gore-hounds (then a virtually invisible minority) and cineastes who were adventurous enough to admire George Romero pictures. If you had asked anybody in the eighties or early nineties what three objects they would most like to have in the advent of the zombie apocalypse, you would probably have been sent away to the comedy farm pronto. Nowadays, people talk about the zombie apocalypse as though it were a matter of when rather than if – indeed, if it hasn’t already been and gone. Zombies are literally everywhere now – the kind of global domination coup that their erstwhile z-grade budgets would never allow. Mutants, and their close cousins the super heroes, threaten to outnumber ordinary homo sapiens in the cultural sphere. What gives?

CHILDREN OF THE ATOM: THE BIRTH OF THE SUB-CULTURE.

Hush now child,

and don’t you cry

Your folks might understand you,

by and by.

Move on Up, Curtis Mayfield.

The Atom Bomb blew like a tornado through the twentieth century, ushering America and the world out of its familiar, monochrome Kansas, into a teeming, Technicolor elsewhere – a difficult to navigate new world of high-technology, high-anxiety, and rapid cultural mutation. The most revelatory and subjectively accurate maps of this new topography were realized at the far fringes of respectable culture, in the fever-dreams spun by pulp magazines, comic-books, and Hollywood b-pictures. In this pulp landscape, uncensored and unfettered by good taste or any cosy sense of rationality and realism, an idea developed that the Atomic Age might abruptly cause evolution to take a disastrous leap into the future – as though geologic time were a spool of film hurtling in fast forward to the monstrous shapes of distant tomorrows. In Japan, the shockwaves of the Atomic explosion had already awoken Gojira (Godzilla) from his slumber in the depths of the ocean. In the US, the advent of Atomic Power had stirred up something distinctly more futuristic in the skies, and in the mysterious outer reaches of space – the curiosity of the UFO. In early Atomic Age pop culture, the mutant invariably reflected the primordial onslaught of Gojira, as opposed to the sleek futurism of the UFO. The mutation was regressive rather than progressive – it embodied the old Victorian fears of degeneration, and a return to the barbarous, animal roots of culture and civilisation. Painted into this corner, the Hollywood mutant generally went about doing what foreign menaces, both terrestrial and cosmic, did best in the pulps – essentially the menacing, and attempted abduction, of beautiful white women.

It would have been a strange notion, then, to imagine that the mutant was in fact not so different from ourselves. To imagine a whole generation of mutants quietly emerging in the suburbs, the cities, and the small towns, many of whom looked and behaved exactly like normal, healthy children. Stranger still would be the notion that an Ivy League professor, himself a mutant, might establish a school specifically to cater for these premature monsters of tomorrow. And yet this was the underlying concept, more or less, behind Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men: the surreptitious invasion of the present by the future, and of normalcy by the exotic and the different.

It was this strictly latent quality, this potential underlying sophistication, which insured that the X-Men were a sleeper hit, awaiting a much later decade to begin to flourish. In appearance, the early X-Men lacked the instant iconic kick of Spiderman and the Fantastic Four. Their costume design was weirdly minimalist, and their facial expressions bore that strange, almost otherworldly blankness that often characterised Kirby’s faces. (Paradoxically, this early look now feels cooler and more contemporary than many of the later muscle-bound, spandex incarnations.) Though naturally possessing a certain degree of the Lee/Kirby magic, the title felt rushed, and never had the energy and realistic characterisation that was lavished on Peter Parker and the Richards brood. However, by inverting the traditional depiction of the mutant, by making them the hero rather than the aberration, Lee and Kirby’s creation reflected, however unconsciously, the emerging liberal narrative of pluralism and diversity: the idea that difference, after all, might actually be a good thing; that our women might actually be safe in the presence of people (and Atomic mutations) who didn’t look like us. In the late seventies, the revamped and revitalised New Giant Sized X-Men became a globalized melting pot, a fully–fledged strike force for multiculturalism. (Okay, the various ethnicities differentiated themselves by means of boilerplate stereotypes, and Thunderbird, the Native American character, was killed off in like a couple of issues, but the intentions were still noble.)

This particular allegorical aspect of the X-Men, however, has been done to death. The Marvel myth of the heroic mutant can also be viewed as an interesting parable for the idea of cultural mutation: for the emergence of counter-cultures, and the sudden appearance of a generation so wildly divergent in outlook and appearance from its predecessors as to conceive itself a new evolutionary strain. This, in essence, would happen to the generation that grew up reading Marvel comics. Ken Kesey, for example, was an avid reader of super-hero comics, as Jay Stevens observes in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream:

“He was a weird kid with large dreams and a rich fantasy life nourished mainly by comic books and pulp adventures. Kesey devoured the entire oeuvres of Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs; he kept monthly tabs on the surreal exploits of Plasticman and Captain Marvel. Later, at Stanford, he would confound his better-read peers with witty and trenchant defences of the comic book as a legitimate source of national myth, maintaining that a ‘single Batman comic is more honest than a whole volume of Time magazines.’ But the allure of these modern illuminated manuscripts went deeper than simply being a pretext for an amusing bit of pedagogy. What most considered cheap proletarian entertainment, Kesey interpreted as Nietzschean parable. At a gut level he identified with the concept of the superhero. In a sense this was the same teleological yearning for a transformed man that Huxley indulged in; only the symbols were different. Whereas Huxley might close his eyes and imagine the Buddha, Kesey interposed Billy Batson, orphan newsboy, who, deep in the bowels of an urban subway system, had met an ancient Egyptian wizard and – shazam! – became Captain Marvel.”

The super hero, and notions of mutation and transformation, struck a particular cord with the emerging hippie generation. The hippies wanted both to transform reality, and yet at the same time to depart from that reality into an absolute elsewhere of mystical/chemical weirdness. In a sense, the superhero mythos combined these contrary impulses towards social reform, surrealism, and the supernatural in a seamless fashion. The superhero genre, particularly during the Marvel renaissance, was almost casually surreal; it played out like the Western, America’s greatest previous moral mythology, on psychotropic drugs. But crucially, the superhero comic wasn’t simply a healthy ingestion of primary colours and high strangeness: it posited an assertive individual, with an unyielding moral compass, who wanted to transform society, to change the world. One of the primary characteristics of the cultural mutation of the sixties was a sense that the newly emergent mutants possessed a clarity of moral vision, like an extra sense, which was completely lacking in the previous generation. Of all the superhero comics, however, none presented a more apt metaphor for the social revolution of the sixties than the X-Men. In the X-Men universe, the presence of the X-gene reveals itself in adolescence; it is at this point that the mutants realize that they are a novel entity, a new species, fundamentally estranged from the world of everyday normalcy. Alienated from the whole of the straight community, even their own families, they gravitate towards an elder-statesman figure, an expert in navigating the new worlds opened by the altered genome, and form what is essentially a clandestine commune. Then they set about saving the world.

Professor X: Charles Xavier and Tim Leary.

The point of this slightly strained analogy is: the mutant hero archetype reflects a positive, assertive fantasy of our ability to change, to evolve; to transform ourselves and in the process change and renew the world around us. The idea of a sudden explosion of mutant super-powers, directed towards noble ends, evokes an idea of social change, of a generation rebelling against its elders, and suddenly, brilliantly, sweeping away generations of corrosive habit, of ailing social mores and outmoded survival strategies. In the later part of the sixties, another new archetype emerged from the shadows which suggested exactly the opposite: a vision of humanity stripped down to pure habit, pure repetitive instinct and impulse; a cultural heat-death in the place of cultural mutation. This was the zombie.

Continued shortly.

Hauntology Rising: Folk Horror and Atavistic Resurgence Part 1.

Uses of the Past.

We tend to conceptualize the past in extreme terms of an either positive or negative character. Traditionally, the prevailing tendency was towards the positive – and the myth of the Golden Age and its correlates all emphasised the idealization of the past, and the denigration of the present. Why there has always been such a pervasive tendency to idealize the past is a mysterious subject in itself. It may be that things are always getting progressively shittier, and every past really is a Golden Age, comparatively speaking. Or it may be that all times are equally shitty, and hence all past times equally beatified by the imagination. For whatever reason, the principle of entropy had its pre-scientific equivalent in the ubiquitous notion of history as a perpetual falling away from better, nobler times. The idealized past was frequently used as a means of critiquing the inequities and imperfections of the present. In a similar manner, when the past was viewed in a negative light, it was largely as a means of glorifying the present, and such people (ourselves) as are in it. This is the contrary view of the past – that it was essentially stupider than us.

This negative view of the past didn’t really come to predominate until the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and an era where the arrow of time began to be conceived as synonymous with the upward arc of progress. Suddenly, the Golden Age looped across time’s horizon into the future, the present became its noble incubator, and the past was downgraded to the status of a skid-row slum. The more we glorified the present, and the notion of progress, the more the past began to acquire a creeping, palpable sense of horror. In perfect antithesis to the idea of the Golden Age, the past became a place we desperately didn’t want to revisit. 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 that returns after several generations of absence. In the Victorian era, a confluence of racist and colonialist ideologies, combined with an incomplete understanding of evolution, made the idea of the atavism a cultural icon, and extended the concept into the realm of culture and society. Max Nordau’s influential 1892 work Degeneration articulated an increasingly pervasive anxiety – the idea that Western culture was entering a degenerate phase, returning slowly to its savage, uncivilised roots.

The 1800s also witnessed the development of genre that seemed tailor-made to express the terror of the past. The works of Edgar Alan Poe, combined with the urban gothic tales of Richard Marsh, RL Stevenson, and others, formed the basis of what we now call horror. The past is weirdly intrinsic to the horror genre; it is as essential to horror as outer space is to science fiction. In so far as we can generalize, there can be no underlying motif more intrinsic to horror than that of something from the recent or distant past that refuses to stay buried; no idea more common than that of a metaphysical force which has been prematurely consigned to the past, yet refuses to stay there. An ancient evil is always on the brink of being resurrected; the monster invariably refuses to stay dead.

The affinity of horror with the past, and the idea of atavistic resurgence, is complex and multifaceted. On one level, horror necessitates a regression into our own personal history. The world of the horror genre is not that of rational adulthood, where the greatest fears are either of a practical nature, or those imposed by the neurotically brittle edifice of our ego-based self-image. The horror genre instead is infused with the child’s irrational terror of the dark, and the adolescent’s perpetual sense of unease and discomfort in the world, in their own skin. In this sense, horror presents a sensory experience whereby these aspects of our personal development refuse to remain buried in the past. On a more fundamental level, however, taken in the context of rational, scientific modernity, horror is itself very much a cultural atavism. Virtually everything horror thrives on is a brazen anathema to the values of the Enlightenment and the scientific era: ghosts, the supernatural, demonic possession, and so on. The logic of horror is far closer to animism than linear causality; its environment is always defined more in terms of heightened, subjective atmosphere than objectified physical geography. The most quintessential assertion horror can make is: all the rational assumptions that give you a sense of security in this world are actually apt to crumble in the blinking of an eyelid; every iota of confidence and conviction you have acquired as an adult is null and void in the face of the unknown. Horror, then, reactivates instincts, beliefs, and ways of viewing the world that our mainstream societal norms have consigned into the past.

Golden Age of the Fantastic.

Folk horror is a relatively recent coinage, and yet another instance of our seemingly incorrigible tendency to invent new generic categories for old cultural artefacts. The term is sometimes taken simply to encompass a short-lived sub-genre of British horror cinema which drew on the British Isles’ rich legacy of folk and pagan tradition: essentially, the loosely grouped trilogy of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). Others trace the literary pedigree of the folk horror sensibility back through a variety of supernatural authors including M.R. James, Algernon Blackwell, and the occult pot-boilers of Dennis Wheatley. Fascinating though this may be, it is probably best to envision folk horror as a phenomenon that flourished in British cinema and television in the sixties and seventies. Folk horror typically is concerned with the uncanny and often unsettling vitality of folk/pagan traditions and beliefs – with witchcraft, black magic, fertility rites and festivals; in essence, with the idea that the Old Ways, the Old Religions, and the Old Gods never really die out. They remain hidden under the surface of the modern world, preserved in secluded rural enclaves, or waiting to be rediscovered in ancient manuscripts, artefacts, and monuments. The greatest iconic signifier of folk horror is the endlessly mysterious and suggestive form of the Neolithic stone circle – with their eerie mixture of nature and artifice, primitivism and a sense of elusive technology, these Neolithic monuments are the emblem par excellence of the uncanny return of the antiquated.

The 60s and the 70s were a Golden Age of the fantastic in British popular culture. Like ghosts or UFOs, strikingly surreal and numinous images and concepts appeared in the most incongruous of contexts – folk horror, for example, really flourished in children’s television. Britain excelled at a certain type of surreal fantasy in this period – the type exemplified by The Wicker Man in the movies, and The Prisoner, Children of the Stones, Sapphire and Steel, and many others, on television. What factors produced this Renaissance of British weirdness in precisely that period? Arguably, it was a fortuitous mixture of technological and social factors. We are looking, first and foremost, at a time when popular culture wasn’t so intensely interconnected, and so intimately aware of every other node in the cultural spectrum, as it is today. Culture could thus still feel parochial and hidden, not unlike the archetypal folk horror setting. The global village had villages, enclaves, nooks and crannies, places where surprizing things could emerge while nobody seemed to be watching. (To some degree, I think the current vogue for second-hand stores and flea-markets reflects a certain nostalgia for a less networked, less self-conscious culture.) There was something in the prevailing aesthetics and technological constraints of film and television in the 60s and 70s that was particularly conducive to the production of uncanny, dreamlike escapism; something in the types of film stock, in the soundtracks, and in the often cheap and crudely effective special effects, that produced a particular ambience, a particular tonal quality. And, of course, there was the culture of the period itself: the Old Gods and folk traditions were themselves re-emerging from the mists of time, through the bustling energy of the youth culture, and the aptly new/ancient prism of psychedelic drugs.

Continued shortly.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

Adam Curtis's new documentary serial is brilliant, unmissable television:

Lattice of Coincidence.

Comic writer Doug Moench tells the following mind-boggling-if-true story of a coincidence he experienced while working on a comic book version of Planet of the Apes:

The Byrne Curse.

Moench isn't the only comic book writer struck by weird coincidences. John Byrne's work in the superhero genre seemed to predict catastrophes so frequently that he took to referring to these incidents as "the Byrne Curse":

“It began in the late 1970s. While working on a Spider-Man series titled "Marvel Team-Up" I did a story about a blackout in New York. There was a blackout the month the issue went on sale (six months after I drew it.)

While working on "Uncanny X-Men" I hit Japan with a major earthquake, and again the real thing happened the month the issue hit the stands.

Now, those things are fairly easy to "predict," but consider these: When working on the relaunch of Superman, for DC Comics, I had the Man of Steel fly to the rescue when disaster beset the NASA space shuttle. The Challenger tragedy happened almost immediately thereafter, with time, fortunately, for the issue in question to be redrawn, substituting a "space plane" for the shuttle.

“Most recent, and chilling, came when I was writing and drawing "Wonder Woman," and did a story in which the title character was killed, as a prelude to her becoming a goddess. The cover for that issue was done as a newspaper front page, with the headline "Princess Diana Dies." (Diana is Wonder Woman's real name). That issue went on sale on a Thursday. The following Saturday ... I don't have to tell you, do I?"


The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

In 1838, Edgar Allen Poe published his one full length novel, the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The novel featured an incident in which a whaling ship gets lost at sea, with four crew members remaining. Starved of food and becoming increasingly desperate, the men resolve to resort to cannibalism, and draw lots to see who gets to be dinner. A 16 year old cabin boy named Richard Parker draws the fatal short straw.

On July 25, 1884, a seventeen year old cabin boy embarked on his first voyage on the high seas, boarding the Mignonette in Southhampton, bound for Australia. Somewhere in the South Atlantic, the ship was struck by a hurricane, and sank. A handful of survivors scrambled to a life-boat. After 19 days at sea, provisions ran out, and the crew considered drawing lots to resolve who they might eat. In the end, they decided to kill and eat the cabin boy, who had become delirious from drinking salt-water. They survived on his carcass for 35 days, and his name, needless to say, was Richard Parker.

The Girl from Tomorrow: Delia Derbyshire.