The 20th century, characterized by perhaps the greatest blood-letting in human history, has shaped our reality in ways we do not understand. It was period defined by what Matthew White calls the Hemoclysm, a blood convulsion, bookended by atrocities in the Congo. Our last century was not about freedom, love and optimism: It was shaped by the willful killing by people from almost every faith and nationality of some 180 million other human beings in the world. This megadeath era constituted the hellish endgame of 18th and 19th century agendas. The Cold War was never an argument about war versus peace but about their paradoxical co-existence.
Our understanding of the Hemoclysm finds initial expression not in journalism, nor in social scientific analyses, nor in the writing of history—but in art and popular culture. In 2000, New York Times writer Shaila Dewan asked whether horror films filter the horrors of history. She found that they do. Just as those who had witnessed the carnage of the Vietnam War returned to make the slasher flicks of the 1970s, those who remained at home portrayed the increasingly post-Modern domestic mindset in Catholic-themed horror films. Subsequent decades saw the two lines of experience—of military personnel who have participated in war during the Pax Americana and of civilians whose lives have become relativistic, solipsistic and counter-intuitive—merge together in a fusion of gore and the occult.
A good example of this fusion is the ’80s classic horror film, Hellraiser, based on a 1986 novella, “The Hellbound Heart,” by British horror writer Clive Barker; the remake was due out October 2009, until the release date got pushed forward two years because of development problems. The film’s memorable invitation, “What’s your pleasure Sir?” only superficially refers to modern primitive sadomasochism. Really, the line reminds us that recent history is still being digested and strained through the popular imagination.
The core symbol of the Hellraiser mythology is the “Lament Configuration,” a demonic Rubik’s cube created by the fictional engineer Philip LeMarchand in 1784. Basically, the story is Faustian: the box symbolizes the Enlightenment on the verge of Revolution; monarchy on the verge of republic; and rationality on the verge of maddened Romantic subjectivity. What the box actually represents is revealed by merchants who peddle copies of the film prop as a novelty. One of these, the Pyramid Gallery in New York, continually blurs fact and fiction. The gallery itself appears in Hellraiser 3 (1992). Now closed (was it ever really open?), it continues to operate through its website, which presents LeMarchand as a “real” historical figure and sells “replicas” of his “designs.” The main horror that this Pandora’s box opens is the paradox of post-Postmodernism. During the current Technological Revolution, certainty and uncertainty violently and relentlessly co-exist without any hope of resolution.
The back story of Pinhead, the central antagonist in the Hellraiser series, is a symbolic snapshot of 20th century history. He was originally a British army captain whose soul was destroyed by World War I. Deadened by the extremes of war, he pushes further and further into the realms of violent experience to regain some feeling—or even lost empathy—until he becomes a monster, then a demon, driven by the credo, “there are no limits.” This torturously back-ended morality is another suggestion from Barker that we all now occupy two worlds—the hell of war and the rot of peace. One brings the horror of beheadings, raped refugees and white phosphorus to our home computers. The other brings the infinite vanity of personal branding to the online global marketplace: for some, self-promotion is the new badge of conspicuous consumption.
Those who are trying to find ironic stability by referring to a revived Cold War model of contending East-West or left-right opposites find that we all straddle a more catastrophic fault line: a fault line of perception. Even as it gets harder psychologically to reconcile global security and global capitalism, that reconciliation becomes indispensable. The only bridging factor between liberty and decadence is arguably the fact that everyone experiences more and more, and feels less and less.
